Nature has given to us two genii as companions in our life in this lower
world. The one, amiable and of good companionship, shortens the troubles
of the journey by the gayety of its plays. It makes the chains of
necessity light to us, and leads us amidst joy and laughter, to the most
perilous spots, where we must act as pure spirits and strip ourselves of
all that is body, on the knowledge of the true and the practice of duty.
Once when we are there, it abandons us, for its realm is limited to the
world of sense; its earthly wings could not carry it beyond. But at this
moment the other companion steps upon the stage, silent and grave, and
with his powerful arm carries us beyond the precipice that made us giddy.
In the former of these genii we recognize the feeling of the beautiful,
in the other the feeling of the sublime. No doubt the beautiful itself
is already an expression of liberty. This liberty is not the kind that
raises us above the power of nature, and that sets us free from all
bodily influence, but it is only the liberty which we enjoy as men,
without issuing from the limits of nature. In the presence of beauty we
feel ourselves free, because the sensuous instincts are in harmony with
the laws of reason. In presence of the sublime we feel ourselves
sublime, because the sensuous instincts have no influence over the
jurisdiction of reason, because it is then the pure spirit that acts in
us as if it were not absolutely subject to any other laws than its own.
The feeling of the sublime is a mixed feeling. It is at once a painful
state, which in its paroxysm is manifested by a kind of shudder, and a
joyous state, that may rise to rapture, and which, without being properly
a pleasure, is greatly preferred to every kind of pleasure by delicate
souls. This union of two contrary sensations in one and the same feeling
proves in a peremptory manner our moral independence. For as it is
absolutely impossible that the same object should be with us in two
opposite relations, it follows that it is we ourselves who sustain two
different relations with the object. It follows that these two opposed
natures should be united in us, which, on the idea of this object, are
brought into play in two perfectly opposite ways. Thus we experience by
the feeling of the beautiful that the state of our spiritual nature is
not necessarily determined by the state of our sensuous nature; that the
laws of nature are not necessarily our laws; and that there is in us an
autonomous principle independent of all sensuous impressions.
The sublime object may be considered in two lights. We either represent
it to our comprehension, and we try in vain to make an image or idea of
it, or we refer it to our vital force, and we consider it as a power
before which ours is nothing. But though in both cases we experience in
connection with this object the painful feeling of our limits, yet we do
not seek to avoid it; on the contrary we are attracted to it by an
irresistible force. Could this be the case if the limits of our
imagination were at the same time those of our comprehension? Should we
be willingly called back to the feeling of the omnipotence of the forces
of nature if we had not in us something that cannot be a prey of these
forces. We are pleased with the spectacle of the sensuous infinite,
because we are able to attain by thought what the senses can no longer
embrace and what the understanding cannot grasp. The sight of a terrible
object transports us with enthusiasm, because we are capable of willing
what the instincts reject with horror, and of rejecting what they desire.
We willingly allow our imagination to find something in the world of
phenomena that passes beyond it; because, after all, it is only one
sensuous force that triumphs over another sensuous force, but nature,
notwithstanding all her infinity, cannot attain to the absolute grandeur
which is in ourselves. We submit willingly to physical necessity both
our well-being and our existence. This is because the very power reminds
us that there are in us principles that escape its empire. Man is in the
hands of nature, but the will of man is in his own hands.
Nature herself has actually used a sensuous means to teach us that we are
something more than mere sensuous natures. She has even known how to
make use of our sensations to put us on the track of this discovery--that
we are by no means subject as slaves to the violence of the sensations.
And this is quite a different effect from that which can be produced by
the beautiful; I mean the beautiful of the real world, for the sublime
itself is surpassed by the ideal. In the presence of beauty, reason and
sense are in harmony, and it is only on account of this harmony that the
beautiful has attraction for us. Consequently, beauty alone could never
teach us that our destination is to act as pure intelligences, and that
we are capable of showing ourselves such. In the presence of the
sublime, on the contrary, reason and the sensuous are not in harmony, and
it is precisely this contradiction between the two which makes the charm
of the sublime--its irresistible action on our minds. Here the physical
man and the moral man separate in the most marked manner; for it is
exactly in the presence of objects that make us feel at once how limited
the former is that the other makes the experience of its force. The very
thing that lowers one to the earth is precisely that which raises the
other to the infinite.
Let us imagine a man endowed with all the virtues of which the union
constitutes a fine character. Let us suppose a man who finds his delight
in practising justice, beneficence, moderation, constancy, and good
faith. All the duties whose accomplishment is prescribed to him by
circumstances are only a play to him, and I admit that fortune favors him
in such wise that none of the actions which his good heart may demand of
him will be hard to him. Who would not be charmed with such a delightful
harmony between the instincts of nature and the prescriptions of reason?
and who could help admiring such a man? Nevertheless, though he may
inspire us with affection, are we quite sure that he is really virtuous?
Or in general that he has anything that corresponds to the idea of
virtue? If this man had only in view to obtain agreeable sensations,
unless he were mad he could not act in any other possible way; and he
would have to be his own enemy to wish to be vicious. Perhaps the
principle of his actions is pure, but this is a question to be discussed
between himself and his conscience. For our part, we see nothing of it;
we do not see him do anything more than a simply clever man would do who
had no other god than pleasure. Thus all his virtue is a phenomenon that
is explained by reasons derived from the sensuous order, and we are by no
means driven to seek for reasons beyond the world of sense.
Let us suppose that this same man falls suddenly under misfortune. He is
deprived of his possessions; his reputation is destroyed; he is chained
to his bed by sickness and suffering; he is robbed by death of all those
he loves; he is forsaken in his distress by all in whom he had trusted.
Let us under these circumstances again seek him, and demand the practice
of the same virtues under trial as he formerly had practised during the
period of his prosperity. If he is found to be absolutely the same as
before, if his poverty has not deteriorated his benevolence, or
ingratitude his kindly offices of good-will, or bodily suffering his
equanimity, or adversity his joy in the happiness of others; if his
change of fortune is perceptible in externals, but not in his habits, in
the matter, but not in the form of his conduct; then, doubtless, his
virtue could not be explained by any reason drawn from the physical
order; the idea of nature--which always necessarily supposes that actual
phenomena rest upon some anterior phenomenon, as effects upon cause--this
idea no longer suffices to enable us to comprehend this man; because
there is nothing more contradictory than to admit that effect can remain
the same when the cause has changed to its contrary. We must then give
up all natural explanation or thought of finding the reason of his acts
in his condition; we must of necessity go beyond the physical order, and
seek the principle of his conduct in quite another world, to which the
reason can indeed raise itself with its ideas, but which the
understanding cannot grasp by its conceptions. It is this revelation of
the absolute moral power which is subjected to no condition of nature, it
is this which gives to the melancholy feeling that seizes our heart at
the sight of such a man that peculiar, inexpressible charm, which no
delight of the senses, however refined, could arouse in us to the same
extent as the sublime.
Thus the sublime opens to us a road to overstep the limits of the world
of sense, in which the feeling of the beautiful would forever imprison
us. It is not little by little (for between absolute dependence and
absolute liberty there is no possible transition), it is suddenly and by
a shock that the sublime wrenches our spiritual and independent nature
away from the net which feeling has spun round us, and which enchains the
soul the more tightly because of its subtle texture. Whatever may be the
extent to which feeling has gained a mastery over men by the latent
influence of a softening taste, when even it should have succeeded in
penetrating into the most secret recesses of moral jurisdiction under the
deceptive envelope of spiritual beauty, and there poisoning the holiness
of principle at its source--one single sublime emotion often suffices to
break all this tissue of imposture, at one blow to give freedom to the
fettered elasticity of spiritual nature, to reveal its true destination,
and to oblige it to conceive, for one instant at least, the feeling of
its liberty. Beauty, under the shape of the divine Calypso, bewitched
the virtuous son of Ulysses, and the power of her charms held him long a
prisoner in her island. For long he believed he was obeying an immortal
divinity, whilst he was only the slave of sense; but suddenly an
impression of the sublime in the form of Mentor seizes him; he remembers
that he is called to a higher destiny--he throws himself into the waves,
and is free.
The sublime, like the beautiful, is spread profusely throughout nature,
and the faculty to feel both one and the other has been given to all men;
but the germ does not develop equally; it is necessary that art should
lend its aid. The aim of nature supposes already that we ought
spontaneously to advance towards the beautiful, although we still avoid
the sublime: for the beautiful is like the nurse of our childhood, and it
is for her to refine our soul in withdrawing it from the rude state of
nature. But though she is our first affection, and our faculty of
feeling is first developed for her, nature has so provided, nevertheless,
that this faculty ripens slowly and awaits its full development until the
understanding and the heart are formed. If taste attains its full
maturity before truth and morality have been established in our heart by
a better road than that which taste would take, the sensuous world would
remain the limit of our aspirations. We should not know, either in our
ideas or in our feelings, how to pass beyond the world of sense, and all
that imagination failed to represent would be without reality to us. But
happily it enters into the plan of nature, that taste, although it first
comes into bloom, is the last to ripen of all the faculties of the mind.
During this interval, man has time to store up in his mind a provision of
ideas, a treasure of principles in his heart, and then to develop
especially, in drawing from reason, his feeling for the great and the
sublime.
As long as man was only the slave of physical necessity, while he had
found no issue to escape from the narrow circle of his appetites, and
while he as yet felt none of that superior liberty which connects him
with the angels, nature, so far as she is incomprehensible, could not
fail to impress him with the insufficiency of his imagination, and again,
as far as she is a destructive force, to recall his physical
powerlessness. He is forced then to pass timidly towards one, and to
turn away with affright from the other. But scarcely has free
contemplation assured him against the blind oppression of the forces of
nature--scarcely has he recognized amidst the tide of phenomena something
permanent in his own being--than at once the coarse agglomeration of
nature that surrounds him begins to speak in another language to his
heart, and the relative grandeur which is without becomes for him a
mirror in which he contemplates the absolute greatness which is within
himself. He approaches without fear, and with a thrill of pleasure,
those pictures which terrified his imagination, and intentionally makes
an appeal to the whole strength of that faculty by which we represent the
infinite perceived by the senses, in order if she fails in this attempt,
to feel all the more vividly how much these ideas are superior to all
that the highest sensuous faculty can give. The sight of a distant
infinity--of heights beyond vision, this vast ocean which is at his feet,
that other ocean still more vast which stretches above his head,
transport and ravish his mind beyond the narrow circle of the real,
beyond this narrow and oppressive prison of physical life. The simple
majesty of nature offers him a less circumscribed measure for estimating
its grandeur, and, surrounded by the grand outlines which it presents to
him, he can no longer bear anything mean in his way of thinking. Who can
tell how many luminous ideas, how many heroic resolutions, which would
never have been conceived in the dark study of the imprisoned man of
science, nor in the saloons where the people of society elbow each other,
have been inspired on a sudden during a walk, only by the contact and the
generous struggle of the soul with the great spirit of nature? Who knows
if it is not owing to a less frequent intercourse with this sublime
spirit that we must partially attribute the narrowness of mind so common
to the dwellers in towns, always bent under the minutiae which dwarf and
wither their soul, whilst the soul of the nomad remains open and free as
the firmament beneath which he pitches his tent?
But it is not only the unimaginable or the sublime in quantity, it is
also the incomprehensible, that which escapes the understanding and
that which troubles it, which can serve to give us an idea of the
super-sensuous infinity. As soon as this element attains the grandiose
and announces itself to us as the work of nature (for otherwise it is
only despicable), it then aids the soul to represent to itself the ideal,
and imprints upon it a noble development. Who does not love the eloquent
disorder of natural scenery to the insipid regularity of a French garden?
Who does not admire in the plains of Sicily the marvellous combat of
nature with herself--of her creative force and her destructive power?
Who does not prefer to feast his eyes upon the wild streams and
waterfalls of Scotland, upon its misty mountains, upon that romantic
nature from which Ossian drew his inspiration--rather than to grow
enthusiastic in this stiff Holland, before the laborious triumph of
patience over the most stubborn of elements? No one will deny that in
the rich grazing-grounds of Holland, things are not better ordered
for the wants of physical man than upon the perfid crater of Vesuvius,
and that the understanding which likes to comprehend and arrange all
things, does not find its requirements rather in the regularly planted
farm-garden than in the uncultivated beauty of natural scenery. But
man has requirements which go beyond those of natural life and comfort
or well-being; he has another destiny than merely to comprehend the
phenomena which surround him.
In the same manner as for the observant traveller, the strange wildness
of nature is so attractive in physical nature--thus, and for the same
reason, every soul capable of enthusiasm finds even in the regrettable
anarchy found in the moral world a source of singular pleasure. Without
doubt he who sees the grand economy of nature only from the impoverished
light of the understanding; he who has never any other thought than to
reform its defiant disorder and to substitute harmony, such a one could
not find pleasure in a world which seems given up to the caprice of
chance rather than governed according to a wise ordination, and where
merit and fortune are for the most part in opposition. He desires that
the whole world throughout its vast space should be ruled like a house
well regulated; and when this much-desired regularity is not found, he
has no other resource than to defer to a future life, and to another and
better nature, the satisfaction which is his due, but which neither the
present nor the past afford him. On the contrary, he renounces willingly
the pretension of restoring this chaos of phenomena to one single notion;
he regains on another side, and with interest, what he loses on this
side. Just this want of connection, this anarchy, in the phenomena,
making them useless to the understanding, is what makes them valuable to
reason. The more they are disorderly the more they represent the freedom
of nature. In a sense, if you suppress all connection, you have
independence. Thus, under the idea of liberty, reason brings back to
unity of thought that which the understanding could not bring to unity of
notion. It thus shows its superiority over the understanding, as a
faculty subject to the conditions of a sensuous order. When we consider
of what value it is to a rational being to be independent of natural
laws, we see how much man finds in the liberty of sublime objects as a
set-off against the checks of his cognitive faculty. Liberty, with all
its drawbacks, is everywhere vastly more attractive to a noble soul than
good social order without it--than society like a flock of sheep, or a
machine working like a watch. This mechanism makes of man only a
product; liberty makes him the citizen of a better world.
It is only thus viewed that history is sublime to me. The world, as a
historic object, is only the strife of natural forces; with one another
and with man's freedom. History registers more actions referable to
nature than to free will; it is only in a few cases, like Cato and
Phocion, that reason has made its power felt. If we expect a treasury of
knowledge in history how we are deceived! All attempts of philosophy to
reconcile what the moral world demands with what the real world gives is
belied by experience, and nature seems as illogical in history as she is
logical in the organic kingdoms.
But if we give up explanation it is different. Nature, in being
capricious and defying logic, in pulling down great and little, in
crushing the noblest works of man, taking centuries to form--nature, by
deviating from intellectual laws, proves that you cannot explain nature
by nature's laws themselves, and this sight drives the mind to the world
of ideas, to the absolute.
But though nature as a sensuous activity drives us to the ideal, it
throws us still more into the world of ideas by the terrible. Our
highest aspiration is to be in good relations with physical nature,
without violating morality. But it is not always convenient to serve two
masters; and though duty and the appetites should never be at strife,
physical necessity is peremptory, and nothing can save men from evil
destiny. Happy is he who learns to bear what he cannot change! There
are cases where fate overpowers all ramparts, and where the only
resistance is, like a pure spirit, to throw freely off all interest of
sense, and strip yourself of your body. Now this force comes from
sublime emotions, and a frequent commerce with destructive nature.
Pathos is a sort of artificial misfortune, and brings us to the spiritual
law that commands our soul. Real misfortune does not always choose its
time opportunely, while pathos finds us armed at all points. By
frequently renewing this exercise of its own activity the mind controls
the sensuous, so that when real misfortune comes, it can treat it as an
artificial suffering, and make it a sublime emotion. Thus pathos takes
away some of the malignity of destiny, and wards off its blows.
Away then with that false theory which supposes falsely a harmony binding
well being and well doing. Let evil destiny show its face. Our safety
is not in blindness, but in facing our dangers. What can do so better
than familiarity with the splendid and terrible evolution of events, or
than pictures showing man in conflict with chance; evil triumphant,
security deceived--pictures shown us throughout history, and placed
before us by tragedy? Whoever passes in review the terrible fate of
Mithridates, of Syracuse, and Carthage, cannot help keeping his appetite
in check, at least for a time, and, seeing the vanity of things, strive
after that which is permanent. The capacity of the sublime is one of the
noblest aptitudes of man. Beauty is useful, but does not go beyond man.
The sublime applies to the pure spirit. The sublime must be joined to
the beautiful to complete the aesthetic education, and to enlarge man's
heart beyond the sensuous world.
Without the beautiful there would be an eternal strife between our
natural and rational destiny. If we only thought of our vocation as
spirits we should be strangers to this sphere of life. Without the
sublime, beauty would make us forget our dignity. Enervated--wedded to
this transient state, we should lose sight of our true country. We are
only perfect citizens of nature when the sublime is wedded to the
beautiful.
Many things in nature offer man the beautiful and sublime. But here
again he is better served at second-hand. He prefers to have them
ready-made in art rather than seek them painfully in nature. This
instinct for imitation in art has the advantage of being able to make
those points essential that nature has made secondary. While nature
suffers violence in the organic world, or exercises violence, working
with power upon man, though she can only be aesthetical as an object of
pure contemplation, art, plastic art, is fully free, because it throws
off all accidental restrictions and leaves the mind free, because it
imitates the appearance, not the reality of objects. As all sublimity
and beauty consists in the appearance, and not in the value of the object,
it follows that art has all the advantages of nature without her shackles.
THE PATHETIC.
The depicting of suffering, in the shape of simple suffering, is never
the end of art, but it is of the greatest importance as a means of
attaining its end. The highest aim of art is to represent the
super-sensuous, and this is effected in particular by tragic art,
because it represents by sensible marks the moral man, maintaining
himself in a state of passion, independently of the laws of nature.
The principle of freedom in man becomes conscious of itself only by
the resistance it offers to the violence of the feelings. Now the
resistance can only be measured by the strength of the attack. In
order, therefore, that the intelligence may reveal itself in man as a
force independent of nature, it is necessary that nature should have
first displayed all her power before our eyes. The sensuous being must
be profoundly and strongly affected, passion must be in play, that the
reasonable being may be able to testify his independence and manifest
himself in action.
It is impossible to know if the empire which man has over his affections
is the effect of a moral force, till we have acquired the certainty that
it is not an effect of insensibility. There is no merit in mastering the
feelings which only lightly and transitorily skim over the surface of the
soul. But to resist a tempest which stirs up the whole of sensuous
nature, and to preserve in it the freedom of the soul, a faculty of
resistance is required infinitely superior to the act of natural force.
Accordingly it will not be possible to represent moral freedom, except by
expressing passion, or suffering nature, with the greatest vividness; and
the hero of tragedy must first have justified his claim to be a sensuous
being before aspiring to our homage as a reasonable being, and making us
believe in his strength of mind.
Therefore the pathetic is the first condition required most strictly in a
tragic author, and he is allowed to carry his description of suffering as
far as possible, without prejudice to the highest end of his art, that
is, without moral freedom being oppressed by it. He must give in some
sort to his hero, as to his reader, their full load of suffering, without
which the question will always be put whether the resistance opposed to
suffering is an act of the soul, something positive, or whether it is not
rather a purely negative thing, a simple deficiency.
The latter case is offered in the purer French tragedy, where it is very
rare, or perhaps unexampled, for the author to place before the reader
suffering nature, and where generally, on the contrary, it is only the
poet who warms up and declaims, or the comedian who struts about on
stilts. The icy tone of declamation extinguishes all nature here, and
the French tragedians, with their superstitious worship of decorum, make
it quite impossible for them to paint human nature truly. Decorum,
wherever it is, even in its proper place, always falsifies the expression
of nature, and yet this expression is rigorously required by art. In a
French tragedy, it is difficult for us to believe that the hero ever
suffers, for he explains the state of his soul, as the coolest man would
do, and always thinking of the effect he is making on others, he never
lets nature pour forth freely. The kings, the princesses, and the heroes
of Corneille or Voltaire never forget their rank even in the most violent
excess of passion; and they part with their humanity much sooner than
with their dignity. They are like those kings and emperors of our old
picture-books, who go to bed with their crowns on.
What a difference from the Greeks and those of the moderns who have been
inspired with their spirit in poetry! Never does the Greek poet blush at
nature; he leaves to the sensuous all its rights, and yet he is quite
certain never to be subdued by it. He has too much depth and too much
rectitude in his mind not to distinguish the accidental, which is the
principal point with false taste, from the really necessary; but all that
is not humanity itself is accidental in man. The Greek artist who has to
represent a Laocoon, a Niobe, and a Philoctetes, does not care for the
king, the princess, or the king's son; he keeps to the man. Accordingly
the skilful statuary sets aside the drapery, and shows us nude figures,
though he knows quite well it is not so in real life. This is because
drapery is to him an accidental thing, and because the necessary ought
never to be sacrificed to the accidental. It is also because, if decency
and physical necessities have their laws, these laws are not those of
art. The statuary ought to show us, and wishes to show us, the man
himself; drapery conceals him, therefore he sets that aside, and with
reason.
The Greek sculptor rejects drapery as a useless and embarrassing load, to
make way for human nature; and in like manner the Greek poet emancipates
the human personages he brings forward from the equally useless
constraint of decorum, and all those icy laws of propriety, which put
nothing but what is artificial in man, and conceal nature in it. Take
Homer and the tragedians; suffering nature speaks the language of truth
and ingenuousness in their pages, and in a way to penetrate to the depths
of our hearts. All the passions play their part freely, nor do the rules
of propriety compress any feeling with the Greeks. The heroes are just
as much under the influence of suffering as other men, and what makes
them heroes is the very fact that they feel suffering strongly and
deeply, without suffering overcoming them. They love life as ardently as
others; but they are not so ruled by this feeling as to be unable to give
up life when the duties of honor or humanity call on them to do so.
Philoctetes filled the Greek stage with his lamentations; Hercules
himself, when in fury, does not keep under his grief. Iphigenia, on the
point of being sacrificed, confesses with a touching ingenuousness that
she grieves to part with the light of the sun. Never does the Greek
place his glory in being insensible or indifferent to suffering, but
rather in supporting it, though feeling it in its fulness. The very gods
of the Greeks must pay their tribute to nature, when the poet wishes to
make them approximate to humanity. Mars, when wounded, roars like ten
thousand men together, and Venus, scratched by an iron lance, mounts
again to Olympus, weeping, and cursing all battles.
This lively susceptibility on the score of suffering, this warm,
ingenuous nature, showing itself uncovered and in all truth in the
monuments of Greek art, and filling us with such deep and lively
emotions--this is a model presented for the imitation of all artists; it
is a law which Greek genius has laid down for the fine arts. It is
always and eternally nature which has the first rights over man; she
ought never to be fettered, because man, before being anything else, is a
sensuous creature. After the rights of nature come those of reason,
because man is a rational, sensuous being, a moral person, and because it
is a duty for this person not to let himself be ruled by nature, but to
rule her. It is only after satisfaction has been given in the first
place to nature, and after reason in the second place has made its rights
acknowledged, that it is permitted for decorum in the third place to make
good its claims, to impose on man, in the expression of his moral
feelings and of his sensations, considerations towards society, and to
show in it the social being, the civilized man. The first law of the
tragic art was to represent suffering nature. The second law is to
represent the resistance of morality opposed to suffering.
Affection, as affection, is an unimportant thing; and the portraiture of
affection, considered in itself, would be without any aesthetic value;
for, I repeat it, nothing that only interests sensuous nature is worthy
of being represented by art. Thus not only the affections that do
nothing but enervate and soften man, but in general all affections, even
those that are exalted, ecstatic, whatever may be their nature, are
beneath the dignity of tragic art.
The soft emotions, only producing tenderness, are of the nature of the
agreeable, with which the fine arts are not concerned. They only caress
the senses, while relaxing and creating languidness, and only relate to
external nature, not at all to the inner nature of man. A good number of
our romances and of our tragedies, particularly those that bear the name
of dramas--a sort of compromise between tragedy and comedy--a good number
also of those highly-appreciated family portraits, belong to this class.
The only effect of these works is to empty the lachrymal duct, and soothe
the overflowing feelings; but the mind comes back from them empty, and
the moral being, the noblest part of our nature, gathers no new strength
whatever from them. "It is thus," says Kant, "that many persons feel
themselves edified by a sermon that has nothing edifying in it." It
seems also that modern music only aims at interesting the sensuous, and
in this it flatters the taste of the day, which seeks to be agreeably
tickled, but not to be startled, nor strongly moved and elevated.
Accordingly we see music prefer all that is tender; and whatever be the
noise in a concert-room, silence is immediately restored, and every one
is all ears directly a sentimental passage is performed. Then an
expression of sensibility common to animalism shows itself commonly on
all faces; the eyes are swimming with intoxication, the open mouth is all
desire, a voluptuous trembling takes hold of the entire body, the breath
is quick and full, in short, all the symptoms of intoxication appear.
This is an evident proof that the senses swim in delight, but that the
mind or the principle of freedom in man has become a prey to the violence
of the sensuous impression. Real taste, that of noble and manly minds,
rejects all these emotions as unworthy of art, because they only please
the senses, with which art has nothing in common.
But, on the other hand, real taste excludes all extreme affections, which
only put sensuousness to the torture, without giving the mind any
compensation. These affections oppress moral liberty by pain, as the
others by voluptuousness; consequently they can excite aversion, and not
the emotion that would alone be worthy of art. Art ought to charm the
mind and give satisfaction to the feeling of moral freedom. This man who
is a prey to his pain is to me simply a tortured animate being, and not a
man tried by suffering. For a moral resistance to painful affections is
already required of man--a resistance which can alone allow the principle
of moral freedom, the intelligence, to make itself known in it.
If it is so, the poets and the artists are poor adepts in their art when
they seek to reach the pathetic only by the sensuous force of affection
and by representing suffering in the most vivid manner. They forget that
suffering in itself can never be the last end of imitation, nor the
immediate source of the pleasure we experience in tragedy. The pathetic
only has aesthetic value in as far as it is sublime. Now, effects that
only allow us to infer a purely sensuous cause, and that are founded only
on the affection experienced by the faculty of sense, are never sublime,
whatever energy they may display, for everything sublime proceeds
exclusively from the reason.
I imply by passion the affections of pleasure as well as the painful
affections, and to represent passion only, without coupling with it the
expression of the super-sensuous faculty which resists it, is to fall
into what is properly called vulgarity; and the opposite is called
nobility. Vulgarity and nobility are two ideas which, wherever they are
applied, have more or less relation with the super-sensuous share a man
takes in a work. There is nothing noble but what has its source in the
reason; all that issues from sensuousness alone is vulgar or common. We
say of a man that he acts in a vulgar manner when he is satisfied with
obeying the suggestions of his sensuous instinct; that he acts suitably
when he only obeys his instinct in conformity with the laws; that he acts
nobly when he obeys reason only, without having regard to his instincts.
We say of a physiognomy that it is common when it does not show any trace
of the spiritual man, the intelligence; we say it has expression when it
is the mind which has determined its features: and that it is noble when
a pure spirit has determined them. If an architectural work is in
question we qualify it as common if it aims at nothing but a physical
end; we name it noble if, independently of all physical aim, we find in
it at the same time the expression of a conception.
Accordingly, I repeat it, correct taste disallows all painting of the
affections, however energetic, which rests satisfied with expressing
physical suffering and the physical resistance opposed to it by the
subject, without making visible at the same time the superior principle
of the nature of man, the presence of a super-sensuous faculty. It does
this in virtue of the principle developed farther back, namely, that it
is not suffering in itself, but only the resistance opposed to suffering,
that is pathetic and deserving of being represented. It is for this
reason that all the absolutely extreme degrees of the affections are
forbidden to the artist as well as to the poet. All of these, in fact,
oppress the force that resists from within or rather, all betray of
themselves, and without any necessity of other symptoms, the oppression
of this force, because no affection can reach this last degree of
intensity as long as the intelligence in man makes any resistance.
Then another question presents itself. How is this principle of
resistance, this super-sensuous force, manifested in the phenomenon of
the affections? Only in one way, by mastering or, more commonly, by
combating affection. I say affection, for sensuousness can also fight,
but this combat of sensuousness is not carried on with the affection, but
with the cause that produces it; a contest which has no moral character,
but is all physical, the same combat that the earthworm, trodden under
foot, and the wounded bull engage in, without thereby exciting the
pathetic. When suffering man seeks to give an expression to his
feelings, to remove his enemy, to shelter the suffering limb, he does all
this in common with the animals, and instinct alone takes the initiative
here, without the will being applied to. Therefore, this is not an act
that emanates from the man himself, nor does it show him as an
intelligence. Sensuous nature will always fight the enemy that makes it
suffer, but it will never fight against itself.
On the other hand, the contest with affection is a contest with
sensuousness, and consequently presupposes something that is distinct
from sensuous nature. Man can defend himself with the help of common
sense and his muscular strength against the object that makes him suffer;
against suffering itself he has no other arms than those of reason.
These ideas must present themselves to the eye in the portraiture of the
affections, or be awakened by this portraiture in order that the pathetic
may exist. But it is impossible to represent ideas, in the proper sense
of the word, and positively, as nothing corresponds to pure ideas in the
world of sense. But they can be always represented negatively and in an
indirect way if the sensuous phenomenon by which they are manifested
has some character of which you would seek in vain the conditions in
physical nature. All phenomena of which the ultimate principle cannot
be derived from the world of sense are an indirect representation of
the upper-sensuous element.
And how does one succeed in representing something that is above nature
without having recourse to supernatural means? What can this phenomenon
be which is accomplished by natural forces--otherwise it would not be a
phenomenon--and yet which cannot be derived from physical causes without
a contradiction? This is the problem; how can the artist solve it?
It must be remembered that the phenomena observable in a man in a state
of passion are of two kinds. They are either phenomena connected simply
with animal nature, and which, therefore, only obey the physical law,
without the will being able to master them, or the independent force in
him being able to exercise an immediate influence over them. It is the
instinct which immediately produces these phenomena, and they obey
blindly the laws of instinct. To this kind belong, for example, the
organs of the circulation of the blood, of respiration, and all the
surface of the skin. But, moreover, the other organs, and those subject
to the will, do not always await the decision of the will; and often
instinct itself sets them immediately in play, especially when the
physical state is threatened with pain or with danger. Thus, the
movements of my arm depend, it is true, on my will; but if I place my
hand, without knowing it, on a burning body, the movement by which I draw
it back is certainly not a voluntary act, but a purely instinctive
phenomenon. Nay more, speech is assuredly subject to the empire of the
will, and yet instinct can also dispose of this organ according to its
whim, and even of this and of the mind, without consulting beforehand the
will, directly a sharp pain, or even an energetic affection, takes us by
surprise. Take the most impassible stoic and make him see suddenly
something very wonderful, or a terrible and unexpected object. Fancy
him, for example, present when a man slips and falls to the bottom of an
abyss. A shout, a resounding cry, and not only inarticulate, but a
distinct word will escape his lips, and nature will have acted in him
before the will: a certain proof that there are in man phenomena which
cannot be referred to his person as an intelligence, but only to his
instinct as a natural force.
But there is also in man a second order of phenomena, which are subject
to the influence and empire of the will, or which may be considered at
all events as being of such a kind that will might always have prevented
them, consequently phenomena for which the person and not instinct is
responsible. It is the office of instinct to watch with a blind zeal
over the interests of the senses; but it is the office of the person to
hold instinct in proper bounds, out of respect for the moral law.
Instinct in itself does not hold account of any law; but the person ought
to watch that instinct may not infringe in any way on the decrees of
reason. It is therefore evident that it is not for instinct alone to
determine unconditionally all the phenomena that take place in man in the
state of affection, and that on the contrary the will of man can place
limits to instinct. When instinct only determines all phenomena in man,
there is nothing more that can recall the person; there is only a
physical creature before you, and consequently an animal; for every
physical creature subject to the sway of instinct is nothing else.
Therefore, if you wish to represent the person itself, you must propose
to yourself in man certain phenomena that have been determined in
opposition to instinct, or at least that have not been determined by
instinct. That they have not been determined by instinct is sufficient
to refer them to a higher source, the moment we see that instinct would
no doubt have determined them in another way if its force had not been
broken by some obstacle.
We are now in a position to point out in what way the super-sensuous
element, the moral and independent force of man, his Ego in short, can be
represented in the phenomena of the affections. I understand that this
is possible if the parts which only obey physical nature, those where
will either disposes nothing at all, or only under certain circumstances,
betray the presence of suffering; and if those, on the contrary, that
escape the blind sway of instinct, that only obey physical nature, show
no trace, or only a very feeble trace, of suffering, and consequently
appear to have a certain degree of freedom. Now this want of harmony
between the features imprinted on animal nature in virtue of the laws of
physical necessity, and those determined with the spiritual and
independent faculty of man, is precisely the point by which that
super-sensuous principle is discovered in man capable of placing limits
to the effects produced by physical nature, and therefore distinct from
the latter. The purely animal part of man obeys the physical law, and
consequently may show itself oppressed by the affection. It is,
therefore, in this part that all the strength of passion shows itself,
and it answers in some degree as a measure to estimate the resistance--
that is to say, of the energy of the moral faculty in man--which can only
be judged according to the force of the attack. Thus in proportion as
the affection manifests itself with decision and violence in the field of
animal nature, without being able to exercise the same power in the field
of human nature, so in proportion the latter makes itself manifestly
known--in the same proportion the moral independence of man shows itself
gloriously: the portraiture becomes pathetic and the pathetic sublime.
The statues of the ancients make this principle of aesthetics sensible to
us; but it is difficult to reduce to conceptions and express in words
what the very inspection of ancient statues makes the senses feel in so
lively a manner. The group of Laocoon and his children can give to a
great extent the measure of what the plastic art of the ancients was
capable of producing in the matter of pathos. Winckelmann, in his
"History of Art,", says: "Laocoon is nature seized in the highest degree
of suffering, under the features of a man who seeks to gather up against
pain all the strength of which the mind is conscious. Hence while his
suffering swells his muscles and stretches his nerves, the mind, armed
with an interior force shows itself on his contracted brow, and the
breast rises, because the breathing is broken, and because there is an
internal struggle to keep in the expression of pain, and press it back
into his heart. The sigh of anguish he wishes to keep in, his very
breath which he smothers, exhaust the lower part of his trunk, and works
into his flanks, which make us judge in some degree of the palpitations
of his visceral organs. But his own suffering appears to occasion less
anguish than the pain of his children, who turn their faces toward their
father, and implore him, crying for help. His father's heart shows
itself in his eyes, full of sadness, and where pity seems to swim in a
troubled cloud. His face expresses lament, but he does not cry; his eyes
are turned to heaven, and implore help from on high. His mouth also
marks a supreme sadness, which depresses the lower lip and seems to weigh
upon it, while the upper lip, contracted from the top to the bottom,
expresses at once both physical suffering and that of the soul. Under
the mouth there is an expression of indignation that seems to protest
against an undeserved suffering, and is revealed in the nostrils, which
swell out and enlarge and draw upwards. Under the forehead, the struggle
between pain and moral strength, united as it were in a single point, is
represented with great truth, for, while pain contracts and raises the
eyebrows, the effort opposed to it by the will draws down towards the
upper eyelid all the muscles above it, so that the eyelid is almost
covered by them. The artist, not being able to embellish nature, has
sought at least to develop its means, to increase its effect and power.
Where is the greatest amount of pain is also the highest beauty. The
left side, which the serpent besets with his furious bites, and where he
instils his poison, is that which appears to suffer the most intensely,
because sensation is there nearest to the heart. The legs strive to
raise themselves as if to shun the evil; the whole body is nothing but
movement, and even the traces of the chisel contribute to the illusion;
we seem to see the shuddering and icy-cold skin."
How great is the truth and acuteness of this analysis! In what a
superior style is this struggle between spirit and the suffering of
nature developed! How correctly the author has seized each of the
phenomena in which the animal element and the human element manifest
themselves, the constraint of nature and the independence of reason! It
is well known that Virgil has described this same scene in his "Aeneid,"
but it did not enter into the plan of the epic poet to pause as the
sculptor did, and describe the moral nature of Laocoon; for this recital
is in Virgil only an episode; and the object he proposes is sufficiently
attained by the simple description of the physical phenomenon, without
the necessity on his part of looking into the soul of the unhappy
sufferer, as his aim is less to inspire us with pity than to fill us with
terror. The duty of the poet from this point of view was purely
negative; I mean he had only to avoid carrying the picture of physical
suffering to such a degree that all expression of human dignity or of
moral resistance would cease, for if he had done this indignation and
disgust would certainly be felt. He, therefore, preferred to confine
himself to the representation of the least of the suffering, and he found
it advisable to dwell at length on the formidable nature of the two
serpents, and on the rage with which they attack their victims, rather
than on the feelings of Laocoon. He only skims over those feelings,
because his first object was to represent a chastisement sent by the
gods, and to produce an impression of terror that nothing could diminish.
If he had, on the contrary, detained our looks on the person of Laocoon
himself with as much perseverance as the statuary, instead of on the
chastizing deity, the suffering man would have become the hero of the
scene, and the episode would have lost its propriety in connection with
the whole piece.
The narrative of Virgil is well known through the excellent commentary of
Lessing. But Lessing only proposed to make evident by this example the
limits that separate partial description from painting, and not to make
the notion of the pathetic issue from it. Yet the passage of Virgil does
not appear to me less valuable for this latter object, and I crave
permission to bring it forward again under this point of view:--
Ecce autem gemini Tenedo tranquilla per alta
(Horresco referens) immensis orbibus angues
Incumbunt pelago, pariterque ad litora tendunt;
Pectora quorum inter fluctus arrecta jubaeque
Sanguineae exsuperant undas; pars caetera pontum
Pone legit, sinuatque immensa volumine terga.
Fit sonitus spumante salo, jamque arva tenebant,
Ardentes oculos suffecti sanguine et igni,
Sibila lambebant linguis vibrantibus ora!
Aeneid, ii. 203-211.
We find here realized the first of the three conditions of the sublime
that have been mentioned further back,--a very powerful natural force,
armed for destruction, and ridiculing all resistance. But that this
strong element may at the same time be terrible, and thereby sublime, two
distinct operations of the mind are wanted; I mean two representations
that we produce in ourselves by our own activity. First, we recognize
this irresistible natural force as terrible by comparing it with the
weakness of the faculty of resistance that the physical man can oppose to
it; and, secondly, it is by referring it to our will, and recalling to
our consciousness that the will is absolutely independent of all
influence of physical nature, that this force becomes to us a sublime
object. But it is we ourselves who represent these two relations; the
poet has only given us an object armed with a great force seeking to
manifest itself. If this object makes us tremble, it is only because we
in thought suppose ourselves, or some one like us, engaged with this
force. And if trembling in this way, we experience the feeling of the
sublime, it is because our consciousness tells us that, if we are the
victims of this force, we should have nothing to fear, from the freedom
of our Ego, for the autonomy of the determinations of our will. In short
the description up to here is sublime, but quite a contemplative,
intuitive sublimity:--
Diffugimus visu exsangues, illi agmine certo
Laocoonta petunt . . .--Aeneid, ii. 212-213.
Here the force is presented to us as terrible also; and contemplative
sublimity passes into the pathetic. We see that force enter really into
strife with man's impotence. Whether it concerns Laocoon or ourselves is
only a question of degree. The instinct of sympathy excites and
frightens in us the instinct of preservation: there are the monsters,
they are darting--on ourselves; there is no more safety, flight is vain.
It is no more in our power to measure this force with ours, and to refer
it or not to our own existence. This happens without our co-operation,
and is given us by the object itself. Accordingly our fear has not, as
in the preceding moment, a purely subjective ground, residing in our
soul; it has an objective ground, residing in the object. For, even if
we recognize in this entire scene a simple fiction of the imagination, we
nevertheless distinguish in this fiction a conception communicated to us
from without, from another conception that we produce spontaneously in
ourselves.
Thus the mind loses a part of her freedom, inasmuch as she receives now
from without that which she produced before her own activity. The idea
of danger puts on an appearance of objective reality, and affection
becomes now a serious affair.
If we were only sensuous creatures, obeying no other instinct than that
of self-preservation, we should stop here, and we should remain in a
state of mere and pure affection. But there is something in us which
takes no part in the affections of sensuous nature, and whose activity is
not directed according to physical conditions. According, then, as this
independently acting principle (the disposition, the moral faculty) has
become to a degree developed in the soul, there is left more or less
space for passive nature, and there remains more or less of the
independent principle in the affection.
In the truly moral soul the terrible trial (of the imagination) passes
quickly and readily into the sublime. In proportion as imagination loses
its liberty, reason makes its own prevail, and the soul ceases not to
enlarge within when it thus finds outward limits. Driven from all the
intrenchments which would give physical protection to sensuous creatures,
we seek refuge in the stronghold of our moral liberty, and we arrive by
that means at an absolute and unlimited safety, at the very moment when
we seem to be deprived in the world of phenomena of a relative and
precarious rampart. But precisely because it was necessary to have
arrived at the physical oppression before having recourse to the
assistance of our moral nature, we can only buy this high sentiment of
our liberty through suffering. An ordinary soul confines itself entirely
to this suffering, and never comprehends in the sublime or the pathetic
anything beyond the terrible. An independent soul, on the contrary,
precisely seizes this occasion to rise to the feeling of his moral force,
in all that is most magnificent in this force, and from every terrible
object knows how to draw out the sublime.
The moral man (the father) [see Aeneid, ii. 213-215] is here attacked
before the physical man, and that has a grand effect. All the affections
become more aesthetic when we receive them second-hand; there is no
stronger sympathy than that we feel for sympathy. |
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