There are moments in life when nature inspires us with a sort of love
and respectful emotion, not because she is pleasing to our senses, or
because she satisfies our mind or our taste (it is often the very
opposite that happens), but merely because she is nature. This feeling
is often elicited when nature is considered in her plants, in her
mineral kingdom, in rural districts; also in the case of human nature,
in the case of children, and in the manners of country people and of the
primitive races. Every man of refined feeling, provided he has a soul,
experiences this feeling when he walks out under the open sky, when he
lives in the country, or when he stops to contemplate the monuments of
early ages; in short, when escaping from factitious situations and
relations, he finds himself suddenly face to face with nature. This
interest, which is often exalted in us so as to become a want, is the
explanation of many of our fancies for flowers and for animals, our
preference for gardens laid out in the natural style, our love of walks,
of the country and those who live there, of a great number of objects
proceeding from a remote antiquity, etc. It is taken for granted that no
affectation exists in the matter, and moreover that no accidental
interest comes into play. But this sort of interest which we take in
nature is only possible under two conditions. First the object that
inspires us with this feeling must be really _nature_, or something we
take for nature; secondly this object must be in the full sense of the
word _simple_, that is, presenting the entire contrast of nature with
art, all the advantage remaining on the side of nature. Directly this
second condition is united to the first, but no sooner, nature assumes
the character of simplicity.
Considered thus, nature is for us nothing but existence in all its
freedom; it is the constitution of things taken in themselves; it is
existence itself according to its proper and immutable laws.
It is strictly necessary that we should have this idea of nature to take
an interest in phenomena of this kind. If we conceive an artificial
flower so perfectly imitated that it has all the appearance of nature
and would produce the most complete illusion, or if we imagine the
imitation of simplicity carried out to the extremest degree, the instant
we discover it is only an imitation, the feeling of which I have been
speaking is completely destroyed. It is, therefore, quite evident that
this kind of satisfaction which nature causes us to feel is not a
satisfaction of the æsthetical taste, but a satisfaction of the moral
sense; for it is produced by means of a conception and not immediately
by the single fact of intuition: accordingly it is by no means
determined by the different degrees of beauty in forms. For, after all,
is there anything so specially charming in a flower of common
appearance, in a spring, a moss-covered stone, the warbling of birds, or
the buzzing of bees, etc.? What is that can give these objects a claim
to our love? It is not these objects in themselves; it is an idea
represented by them that we love in them. We love in them life and its
latent action, the effects peacefully produced by beings of themselves,
existence under its proper laws, the inmost necessity of things, the
eternal unity of their nature.
These objects which captivate us _are_ what we _were_, what we _must be_
again some day. We were nature as they are; and culture, following the
way of reason and of liberty, must bring us back to nature. Accordingly,
these objects are an image of our infancy irrevocably past—of our
infancy which will remain eternally very dear to us, and thus they
infuse a certain melancholy into us; they are also the image of our
highest perfection in the ideal world, whence they excite a sublime
emotion in us.
But the perfection of these objects is not a merit that belongs to them,
because it is not the effect of their free choice. Accordingly they
procure quite a peculiar pleasure for us, by being our models without
having any thing humiliating for us. It is like a constant manifestation
of the divinity surrounding us, which refreshes without dazzling us. The
very feature that constitutes their character is precisely what is
lacking in ours to make it complete; and what distinguishes us from them
is precisely what they lack to be divine. We are free and they are
necessary; we change and they remain identical. Now it is only when
these two conditions are united, when the will submits freely to the
laws of necessity, and when, in the midst of all the changes of which
the imagination is susceptible, reason maintains its rule—it is only
then that the divine or the ideal is manifested. Thus we perceive
eternally _in them_ that which we have not, but which we are continually
forced to strive after; that which we can never reach, but which we can
hope to approach by continual progress. And we perceive _in ourselves_
an advantage which they lack, but in which some of them—the beings
deprived of reason—cannot absolutely share, and in which the others,
such as children, can only one day have a share by following _our_ way.
Accordingly, they procure us the most delicious feeling of our human
nature, as an idea, though in relation to each _determinate_ state of
our nature they cannot fail to humble us.
As this interest in nature is based on an idea, it can only manifest
itself in a soul capable of ideas, that is, in a moral soul. For the
immense majority it is nothing more than pure affectation; and this
taste of _sentimentality_ so widely diffused in our day, manifesting
itself, especially since the appearance of certain books, by sentimental
excursions and journeys, by sentimental gardens, and other fancies akin
to these—this taste by no means proves that true refinement of sense has
become general. Nevertheless, it is certain that nature will always
produce something of this impression, even on the most insensible
hearts, because all that is required for this is the moral disposition
or aptitude, which is common to all men. For all men, however contrary
their acts may be to simplicity and to the truth of nature, are brought
back to it in their ideas. This sensibility in connection with nature is
specially and most strongly manifested, in the greater part of persons,
in connection with those sorts of objects which are closely related to
us, and which, causing us to look closer into ourselves, show us more
clearly what in us departs from nature; for example, in connection with
children, or with nations in a state of infancy. It is an error to
suppose that it is only the idea of their weakness that, in certain
moments, makes us dwell with our eyes on children with so much emotion.
This may be true with those who, in the presence of a feeble being, are
used to feel nothing but their own superiority. But the feeling of which
I speak is only experienced in a very peculiar moral disposition, nor
must it be confounded with the feeling awakened in us by the joyous
activity of children. The feeling of which I speak is calculated rather
to humble than to flatter our self-love; and if it gives us the idea of
some advantage, this advantage is at all events not on our side.
We are moved in the presence of childhood, but it is not because from
the height of our strength and of our perfection we drop a look of pity
on it; it is, on the contrary, because from the depths of our impotence,
of which the feeling is inseparable from that of the real and
determinate state to which we have arrived, we raise our eyes to the
child’s determinableness and pure innocence. The feeling we then
experience is too evidently mingled with sadness for us to mistake its
source. In the child, all is _disposition_ and _destination_; in us, all
is in the state of a _completed_, _finished_ thing, and the completion
always remains infinitely below the destination. It follows that the
child is to us like the representation of the ideal; not, indeed, of the
ideal as we have realized it, but such as our destination admitted; and,
consequently, it is not at all the idea of its indigence, of its
hinderances, that makes us experience emotion in the child’s presence;
it is, on the contrary, the idea of its pure and free force, of the
integrity, the infinity of its being. This is the reason why, in the
sight of every moral and sensible man, the child will always be a
_sacred_ thing; I mean an object which, by the grandeur of an idea,
reduces to nothingness all grandeur realized by experience; an object
which, in spite of all it may lose in the judgment of the understanding,
regains largely the advantage before the judgment of reason.
Now it is precisely this contradiction between the judgment of reason
and that of the understanding which produces in us this quite special
phenomenon, this mixed feeling, called forth in us by the sight of the
simple—I mean the simple in the manner of thinking. It is at once the
idea of a childlike simplicity and of a childish simplicity. By what it
has of childish simplicity it exposes a weak side to the understanding,
and provokes in us that smile by which we testify our superiority (an
entirely speculative superiority). But directly we have reason to think
that childish simplicity is at the same time a childlike simplicity—that
it is not consequently a want of intelligence, an infirmity in a
theoretical point of view, but a superior force (practically), a
heart-full of truth and innocence, which is its source, a heart that has
despised the help of art because it was conscious of its real and
internal greatness—directly this is understood, the understanding no
longer seeks to triumph. Then raillery, which was directed against
simpleness, makes way for the admiration inspired by noble simplicity.
We feel ourselves obliged to esteem this object, which at first made us
smile, and directing our eyes to ourselves, to feel ourselves unhappy in
not resembling it. Thus is produced that very special phenomenon of a
feeling in which good-natured raillery, respect, and sadness are
confounded. It is the condition of the simple that nature should triumph
over art, either unconsciously to the individual and against his
inclination, or with his full and entire cognizance. In the former case
it is _simplicity_ as a _surprise_, and the impression resulting from it
is one of gayety; in the second case, it is simplicity of _feeling_, and
we are moved.
With regard to simplicity as a surprise, the person must be _morally_
capable of denying nature. In simplicity of feeling the person may be
morally incapable of this, but we must not think him physically
incapable, in order that it may make upon us the impression of the
simple. This is the reason why the acts and words of children only
produce the impression of simplicity upon us when we forget that they
are physically incapable of artifice, and in general only when we are
exclusively impressed by the contrast between their natural character
and what is artificial in us. Simplicity is a _childlike ingenuousness_
which is encountered when it is not _expected_; and it is for this very
reason that, taking the word in its strictest sense, simplicity could
not be attributed to childhood properly speaking.
But in both cases, in simplicity as a surprise and simplicity as a
feeling, nature must always have the upper hand, and art succumb to her.
Until we have established this distinction we can only form an
incomplete idea of simplicity. The affections are also something
natural, and the rules of decency are artificial; yet the triumph of the
affections over decency is anything but simple. But when affection
triumphs over artifice, over false decency, over dissimulation, we shall
have no difficulty in applying the word simple to this. Nature must
therefore triumph over art, not by its blind and brutal force as a
_dynamical power_, but in virtue of its form as a _moral magnitude_; in
a word, not as a want, but as an _internal necessity_. It must not be
_insufficiency_, but the inopportune character of the latter that gives
nature her victory; for insufficiency is only a want and a defect, and
nothing that results from a want or defect could produce esteem. No
doubt in the simplicity resulting from surprise, it is always the
predominance of affection and a want of reflection that causes us to
appear natural. But this want and this predominance do not by any means
suffice to constitute simplicity; they merely give occasion to nature to
_obey without let or hinderance_ her _moral constitution_, that is, the
_law of harmony_.
The simplicity resulting from surprise can only be encountered in man
and that only in as far as at the moment he ceases to be a pure and
innocent nature. This sort of simplicity implies a will that is not in
harmony with that which nature does of her own accord. A person simple
after this fashion, when recalled to himself, will be the first to be
alarmed at what he is; on the other hand, a person in whom simplicity is
found as a _feeling_, will only wonder at one thing, that is, at the way
in which men feel astonishment. As it is not the moral subject as a
person, but only his natural character set free by affection, that
confesses the truth, it follows from this that we shall not attribute
this sincerity to man as a merit, and that we shall be entitled to laugh
at it, our raillery not being held in check by any personal esteem for
his character. Nevertheless, as it is still the sincerity of nature
which, even in the simplicity caused by surprise, pierces suddenly
through the veil of dissimulation, a satisfaction of a superior order is
mixed with the mischievous joy we feel in having caught any one in the
act. This is because nature, opposed to affectation, and truth, opposed
to deception, must in every case inspire us with esteem. Thus we
experience, even in the presence of simplicity originating in surprise,
a really moral pleasure, though it be not in connection with a moral
object.
I admit that in simplicity proceeding from surprise we always experience
a feeling of esteem for _nature_, because we must esteem truth; whereas
in the simplicity of feeling we esteem the _person_ himself, enjoying in
this way not only a moral satisfaction, but also a satisfaction of which
the object is moral. In both cases nature is _right_, since she speaks
the truth; but in the second case not only is nature right, but there is
also an act that does _honor_ to the person. In the first case the
sincerity of nature always puts the person to the blush, because it is
involuntary; in the second it is always a merit which must be placed to
the credit of the person, even when what he confesses is of a nature to
cause a blush.
We attribute simplicity of feeling to a man, when, in the judgments he
pronounces on things, he passes, without seeing them, over all the
factitious and artificial sides of an object, to keep exclusively to
simple nature. We require of him all the judgments that can be formed of
things without departing from a sound nature; and we only hold him
entirely free in what presupposes a departure from nature in his mode of
thinking or feeling.
If a father relates to his son that such and such a person is dying of
hunger, and if the child goes and carries the purse of his father to
this unfortunate being, this is a simple action. It is in fact a healthy
nature that acts in the child; and in a world where healthy nature would
be the law, he would be perfectly right to act so. He only sees the
misery of his neighbor and the speediest means of relieving him. The
extension given to the right of property, in consequence of which part
of the human race might perish, is not based on mere nature. Thus the
act of this child puts to shame real society, and this is acknowledged
by our heart in the pleasure it experiences from this action.
If a good-hearted man, inexperienced in the ways of the world, confides
his secrets to another, who deceives him, but who is skilful in
disguising his perfidy, and if by his very sincerity he furnishes him
with the means of doing him injury, we find his conduct simple. We laugh
at him, yet we cannot avoid esteeming him, precisely on account of his
simplicity. This is because his trust in others proceeds from the
rectitude of his own heart; at all events, there is simplicity here only
as far as this is the case.
Simplicity in the mode of thinking cannot then ever be the act of a
depraved man; this quality only belongs to children, and to men who are
children in heart. It often happens to these in the midst of the
artificial relations of the great world to act or to think in a simple
manner. Being themselves of a truly good and humane nature, they forget
that they have to do with a depraved world; and they act, even in the
courts of kings, with an ingenuousness and an innocence that are only
found in the world of pastoral idyls.
Nor is it always such an easy matter to distinguish exactly childish
candor from childlike candor, for there are actions that are on the
skirts of both. Is a certain act foolishly simple, and must we laugh at
it? or is it nobly simple, and must we esteem the actors the higher on
that account? It is difficult to know which side to take in some cases.
A very remarkable example of this is found in the history of the
government of Pope Adrian VI., related by Mr. Schröckh with all the
solidity and the spirit of practical truth which distinguish him.
Adrian, a Netherlander by birth, exerted the pontifical sway at one of
the most critical moments for the hierarchy—at a time when an
exasperated party laid bare without any scruple all the weak sides of
the Roman Church, while the opposite party was interested in the highest
degree in covering them over. I do not entertain the question how a man
of a truly simple character ought to act in such a case, if such a
character were placed in the papal chair. But, we ask, how could this
simplicity of feeling be compatible with the part of a pope? This
question gave indeed very little embarrassment to the predecessors and
successors of Adrian. They followed uniformly the system adopted once
for all by the court of Rome, not to make any concessions anywhere. But
Adrian had preserved the upright character of his nation and the
innocence of his previous condition. Issuing from the humble sphere of
literary men to rise to this eminent position, he did not belie at that
elevation the primitive simplicity of his character. He was moved by the
abuses of the Roman Church, and he was much too sincere to dissimulate
publicly what he confessed privately. It was in consequence of this
manner of thinking that, in his instruction to his legate in Germany, he
allowed himself to be drawn into avowals hitherto unheard of in a
sovereign pontiff, and diametrically contrary to the principles of that
court: “We know well,” he said, among other things, “that for many years
many abominable things have taken place in this holy chair; it is not
therefore astonishing that the evil has been propagated from the head to
the members, from the pope to the prelates. We have all gone astray from
the good road, and for a long time there is none of us, not one, who has
done anything good.” Elsewhere he orders his legate to declare in his
name “that he, Adrian, cannot be blamed for what other popes have done
before him; that he himself, when he occupied a comparatively mediocre
position, had always condemned these excesses.” It may easily be
conceived how such simplicity in a pope must have been received by the
Roman clergy. The smallest crime of which he was accused was that of
betraying the church and delivering it over to heretics. Now this
proceeding, supremely imprudent in a pope, would yet deserve our esteem
and admiration if we could believe it was real simplicity; that is, that
Adrian, without fear of consequences, had made such an avowal, moved by
his natural sincerity, and that he would have persisted in acting thus,
though he had understood all the drift of his clumsiness. Unhappily we
have some reason to believe that he did not consider his conduct as
altogether impolitic, and that in his candor he went so far as to
flatter himself that he had served very usefully the interests of his
church by his indulgence to his adversaries. He did not even imagine
that he ought to act thus in his quality as an honest man; he thought
also as a pope to be able to justify himself, and forgetting that the
most artificial of structures could only be supported by continuing to
deny the truth, he committed the unpardonable fault of having recourse
to means of safety, excellent perhaps, in a natural situation, but here
applied to entirely contrary circumstances. This necessarily modifies
our judgment very much, and although we cannot refuse our esteem for the
honesty of heart in which the act originates, this esteem is greatly
lessened when we reflect that nature on this occasion was too easily
mistress of art, and that the heart too easily overruled the head.
True genius is of necessity simple, or it is not genius. Simplicity
alone gives it this character, and it cannot belie in the moral order
what it is in the intellectual and æsthetical order. It does not know
those rules, the crutches of feebleness, those pedagogues which prop up
slippery spirits; it is only guided by nature and instinct, its guardian
angel; it walks with a firm, calm step across all the snares of false
taste, snares in which the man without genius, if he have not the
prudence to avoid them the moment he detects them, remains infallibly
imbedded. It is therefore the part only of genius to issue from the
known without ceasing to be at home, or to enlarge the circle of nature
without _overstepping_ it. It does indeed sometimes happen that a great
genius oversteps it; but only because geniuses have their moments of
frenzy, when nature, their protector, abandons them, because the force
of example impels them, or because the corrupt taste of their age leads
them astray.
The most intricate problems must be solved by genius with simplicity,
without pretension, with ease; the egg of Christopher Columbus is the
emblem of all the discoveries of genius. It only justifies its character
as genius by triumphing through simplicity over all the complications of
art. It does not proceed according to known principles, but by feelings
and inspiration; the sallies of genius are the inspirations of a God
(all that healthy nature produces is divine); its feelings are law’s for
all time, for all human generations.
This childlike character imprinted by genius on its works is also shown
by it in its private life and manners. It is _modest_, because nature is
always so; but it is not _decent_, because corruption alone is decent.
It is _intelligent_, because nature cannot lack intelligence; but it is
not _cunning_, because art only can be cunning. It is _faithful_ to its
character and inclinations, but this is not so much because it has
principles as because nature, notwithstanding all its oscillations,
always returns to its equilibrium, and brings back the same wants. It is
_modest_ and even timid, because genius remains always a secret to
itself; but it is not anxious, because it does not know the dangers of
the road in which it walks. We know little of the private life of the
greatest geniuses; but the little that we know of it—what tradition has
preserved, for example, of Sophocles, of Archimedes, of Hippocrates, and
in modern times of Ariosto, of Dante, of Tasso, of Raphael, of Albert
Dürer, of Cervantes, of Shakespeare, of Fielding, of Sterne,
etc.—confirms this assertion.
Nay, more; though this admission seems more difficult to support, even
the greatest philosophers and great commanders, if great by their
genius, have simplicity in their character. Among the ancients I need
only name Julius Cæsar and Epaminondas; among the moderns Henry IV. in
France, Gustavus Adolphus in Sweden, and the Czar Peter the Great. The
Duke of Marlborough, Turenne, and Vendôme all present this character.
With regard to the other sex, nature proposes to it _simplicity_ of
character as the supreme perfection to which it should reach.
Accordingly, the love of pleasing in women strives after nothing so much
as the appearance of simplicity; a sufficient proof, if it were the only
one, that the greatest power of the sex reposes in this quality. But, as
the principles that prevail in the education of women are perpetually
struggling with this character, it is as difficult for them in the moral
order to reconcile this magnificent gift of nature with the advantages
of a good education as it is difficult for men to preserve them
unchanged in the intellectual order: and the woman who knows how to join
a knowledge of the world to this sort of simplicity in manners is as
deserving of respect as a scholar who joins to the strictness of
scholastic rules the freedom and originality of thought.
Simplicity in our mode of thinking brings with it of necessity
simplicity in our mode of expression, simplicity in terms as well as
movement; and it is in this that grace especially consists. Genius
expresses its most sublime and its deepest thoughts with this simple
grace; they are the divine oracles that issue from the lips of a child;
while the scholastic spirit, always anxious to avoid error, tortures all
its words, all its ideas, and makes them pass through the crucible of
grammar and logic, hard and rigid, in order to keep from vagueness, and
uses few words in order not to say too much, enervates and blunts
thought in order not to wound the reader who is not on his guard—genius
gives to its expression, with a single and happy stroke of the brush, a
precise, firm, and yet perfectly free form. In the case of grammar and
logic, the sign and the thing signified are always heterogeneous and
strangers to each other: with genius, on the contrary, the expression
gushes forth spontaneously from the idea, the language and the thought
are one and the same; so that even though the expression thus gives it a
body the spirit appears as if disclosed in a nude state. This fashion of
expression, when the sign disappears entirely in the thing signified,
when the tongue, so to speak, leaves the thought it translates naked,
whilst the other mode of expression cannot represent thought without
veiling it at the same time: this is what is called originality and
inspiration in style.
This freedom, this natural mode by which genius expresses itself in
works of intellect, is also the expression of the innocence of heart in
the intercourse of life. Every one knows that in the world men have
departed from simplicity, from the rigorous veracity of language, in the
same proportion as they have lost the simplicity of feelings. The guilty
conscience easily wounded, the imagination easily seduced, made an
anxious decency necessary. Without telling what is false, people often
speak differently from what they think; we are obliged to make
circumlocutions to say certain things, which however, can never afflict
any but a sickly self-love, and that have no danger except for a
depraved imagination. The ignorance of these laws of propriety
(conventional laws), coupled with a natural sincerity which despises all
kinds of bias and all appearance of falsity (sincerity I mean, not
coarseness, for coarseness dispenses with forms because it is hampered),
gives rise in the intercourse of life to a simplicity of expression that
consists in naming things by their proper name without circumlocution.
This is done because we do not venture to designate them as they are, or
only to do so by artificial means. The ordinary expressions of children
are of this kind. They make us smile because they are in opposition to
received manners; but men would always agree in the bottom of their
hearts that the child is right.
It is true that simplicity of feeling cannot properly be attributed to
the child any more than to the man,—that is, to a being not absolutely
subject to nature, though there is still no simplicity, except on the
condition that it is pure nature that acts through him. But by an effort
of the imagination, which likes to poetise things, we often carry over
these attributes of a rational being to beings destitute of reason. It
is thus that, on seeing an animal, a landscape, a building, and nature
in general, from opposition to what is arbitrary and fantastic in the
conceptions of man, we often attribute to them a simple character. But
that implies always that in our thought we attribute a will to these
things that have none, and that we are struck to see it directed
rigorously according to the laws of necessity. Discontented as we are
that we have ill employed our own moral freedom, and that we no longer
find moral harmony in our conduct, we are easily led to a certain
disposition of mind, in which we willingly address ourselves to a being
destitute of reason, as if it were a person. And we readily view it as
if it had really had to struggle against the temptation of acting
otherwise, and proceed to make a merit of its eternal uniformity, and to
envy its peaceable constancy. We are quite disposed to consider in those
moments reason, this prerogative of the human race, as a pernicious gift
and as an evil; we feel so vividly all that is imperfect in our conduct
that we forget to be just to our destiny and to our aptitudes.
We see, then, in nature, destitute of reason, only a sister who, more
fortunate than ourselves, has remained under the maternal roof, while in
the intoxication of our freedom we have fled from it to throw ourselves
into a stranger world. We regret this place of safety, we earnestly long
to come back to it as soon as we have begun to feel the bitter side of
civilization, and in the totally artificial life in which we are exiled
we hear in deep emotion the voice of our mother. While we were still
only children of nature we were happy, we were perfect: we have become
free, and we have lost both advantages. Hence a twofold and very unequal
longing for nature: the longing for happiness and the longing for the
perfection that prevails there. Man, as a sensuous being, deplores
sensibly the loss of the former of these goods; it is only the moral man
who can be afflicted at the loss of the other.
Therefore, let the man with a sensible heart and a loving nature
question himself closely. Is it your indolence that longs for its
repose, or your wounded moral sense that longs for its harmony? Ask
yourself well, when, disgusted with the artifices, offended by the
abuses that you discover in social life, you feel yourself attracted
towards inanimate nature, in the midst of solitude ask yourself what
impels you to fly the world. Is it the privation from which you suffer,
its loads, its troubles? or is it the moral anarchy, the caprice, the
disorder that prevail there? Your heart ought to plunge into these
troubles with joy, and to find in them the compensation in the liberty
of which they are the consequence. You can, I admit, propose as your
aim, in a distant future, the calm and the happiness of nature; but only
that sort of happiness which is the reward of your dignity. Thus, then,
let there be no more complaint about the loads of life, the inequality
of conditions, or the hampering of social relations, or the uncertainty
of possession, ingratitude, oppression, and persecution. You must submit
to all these _evils_ of civilization with a free resignation; it is the
natural condition of good, _par excellence_, of the only good, and you
ought to respect it under this head. In all these _evils_ you ought only
to deplore what is _morally evil_ in them, and you must do so not with
cowardly tears only. Rather watch to remain pure yourself in the midst
of these impurities, free amidst this slavery, constant with yourself in
the midst of these capricious changes, a faithful observer of the law
amidst this anarchy. Be not frightened at the disorder that is without
you, but at the disorder which is within; aspire after unity, but seek
it not in uniformity; aspire after repose, but through equilibrium, and
not by suspending the action of your faculties. This nature which you
envy in the being destitute of reason deserves no esteem: it is not
worth a wish. You have passed beyond it; it ought to remain for ever
behind you. The ladder that carried you having given way under your
foot, the only thing for you to do is to seize again on the moral law
freely, with a free consciousness, a free will, or else to roll down,
hopeless of safety, into a bottomless abyss.
But when you have consoled yourself for having lost the _happiness_ of
nature, let its _perfection_ be a model to your heart. If you can issue
from the circle in which art keeps you enclosed and find nature again,
if it shows itself to you in its greatness and in its calm, in its
simple beauty, in its childlike innocence and simplicity, oh! then pause
before its image, cultivate this feeling lovingly. It is worthy of you,
and of what is noblest in man. Let it no more come into your mind to
_change_ with it; rather embrace it, absorb it into your being, and try
to associate the infinite advantage it has over you with that infinite
prerogative that is peculiar to you, and let the divine issue from this
sublime union. Let nature breathe around you like a lovely _idyl_, where
far from artifice and its wanderings you may always find yourself again,
where you may go to draw fresh courage, a new confidence, to resume your
course, and kindle again in your heart the flame of the _ideal_, so
readily extinguished amidst the tempests of life.
If we think of that beautiful nature which surrounded the ancient
Greeks, if we remember how intimately that people, under its blessed
sky, could live with that free nature; how their mode of imagining, and
of feeling, and their manners, approached far nearer than ours to the
simplicity of nature, how faithfully the works of their poets express
this; we must necessarily remark, as a strange fact, that so few traces
are met among them of that _sentimental_ interest that we moderns ever
take in the scenes of nature and in natural characters. I admit that the
Greeks are superiorly exact and faithful in their descriptions of
nature. They reproduce their details with care, but we see that they
take no more interest in them and more heart in them than in describing
a vestment, a shield, armor, a piece of furniture, or any production of
the mechanical arts. In their love for the object it seems that they
make no difference between what exists in itself and what owes its
existence to art, to the human will. It seems that nature interests
their minds and their curiosity more than moral feeling. They do not
attach themselves to it with that depth of feeling, with that gentle
melancholy, that characterize the moderns. Nay, more, by personifying
nature in its particular phenomena, by deifying it, by representing its
effects as the acts of free being, they take from it that character of
calm necessity which is precisely what makes it so attractive to us.
Their impatient imagination only traverses nature to pass beyond it to
the drama of human life. It only takes pleasure in the spectacle of what
is living and free; it requires characters, acts, the accidents of
fortune and of manners; and whilst it happens with us, at least in
certain moral dispositions, to curse our prerogative, this free will,
which exposes us to so many combats with ourselves, to so many anxieties
and errors, and to wish to exchange it for the condition of beings
destitute of reason, for that fatal existence that no longer admits of
any choice, but which is so calm in its uniformity;—while we do this,
the Greeks, on the contrary, only have their imagination occupied in
retracing human nature in the inanimate world, and in giving to the will
an influence where blind necessity rules.
Whence can arise this difference between the spirit of the ancients and
the modern spirit? How comes it that, being, for all that relates to
nature, incomparably below the ancients, we are superior to them
precisely on this point, that we render a more complete homage to
nature; that we have a closer attachment to it; and that we are capable
of embracing even the inanimate world with the most ardent sensibility.
It is because nature, in our time, is no longer in man, and that we no
longer encounter it in its primitive truth, except out of humanity, in
the inanimate world. It is not because we are more _conformable to
nature_—quite the contrary; it is because in our social relations, in
our mode of existence, in our manners, we are in _opposition with
nature_. This is what leads us, when the instinct of truth and of
simplicity is awakened—this instinct which, like the moral aptitude from
which it proceeds, lives incorruptible and indelible in every human
heart—to procure for it in the physical world the satisfaction which
there is no hope of finding in the moral order. This is the reason why
the feeling that attaches us to nature is connected so closely with that
which makes us regret our infancy, forever flown, and our primitive
innocence. Our childhood is all that remains of nature in humanity, such
as civilization has made it, of untouched, unmutilated nature. It is,
therefore, not wonderful, when we meet out of us the impress of nature,
that we are always brought back to the idea of our childhood.
It was quite different with the Greeks in antiquity. Civilization with
them did not degenerate, nor was it carried to such an excess that it
was necessary to break with nature. The entire structure of their social
life reposed on feelings, and not on a factitious conception, on a work
of art. Their very theology was the inspiration of a simple spirit, the
fruit of a joyous imagination, and not like the ecclesiastical dogmas of
modern nations, subtle combinations of the understanding. Since,
therefore, the Greeks had not lost sight of nature in humanity, they had
no reason, when meeting it out of man, to be surprised at their
discovery, and they would not feel very imperiously the need of objects
in which nature could be retraced. In accord with themselves, happy in
feeling themselves men, they would of necessity keep to humanity as to
what was greatest to them, and they must needs try to make all the rest
approach it; while we, who are not in accord with ourselves—we who are
discontented with the experience we have made of our humanity—have no
more pressing interest than to fly out of it and to remove from our
sight a so ill-fashioned form. The feeling of which we are treating here
is, therefore, not that which was known by the ancients; it approaches
far more nearly that _which we ourselves experience for the ancients_.
The ancients felt naturally; we, on our part, feel what is natural. It
was certainly a very different inspiration that filled the soul of
Homer, when he depicted his divine cowherd[12] giving hospitality to
Ulysses, from that which agitated the soul of the young Werther at the
moment when he read the “Odyssey”[13] on issuing from an assembly in
which he had only found tedium. The feeling we experience for nature
resembles that of a sick man for health.
As soon as nature gradually vanishes from human life—that is, in
proportion as it ceases to be _experienced_ as a _subject_ (active and
passive)—we see it dawn and increase in the poetical world in the guise
of an _idea_ and as an _object_. The people who have carried farthest
the want of nature, and at the same time the reflections on that matter,
must needs have been the people who at the same time were most struck
with this phenomenon of the _simple_, and gave it a name. If I am not
mistaken, this people was the French. But the feeling of the simple, and
the interest we take in it, must naturally go much farther back, and it
dates from the time when the moral sense and the æsthetical sense began
to be corrupt. This modification in the manner of feeling is exceedingly
striking in Euripides, for example, if compared with his predecessors,
especially Æschylus; and yet Euripides was the favorite poet of his
time. The same revolution is perceptible in the ancient historians.
Horace, the poet of a cultivated and corrupt epoch, praises, under the
shady groves of Tibur, the calm and happiness of the country, and he
might be termed the true founder of this sentimental poetry, of which he
has remained the unsurpassed model. In Propertius, Virgil, and others,
we find also traces of this mode of feeling; less of it is found in
Ovid, who would have required for that more abundance of heart, and who
in his exile at Tomes sorrowfully regrets the happiness that Horace so
readily dispensed with in his villa at Tibur.
It is in the fundamental idea of poetry that the poet is everywhere the
_guardian_ of nature. When he can no longer entirely fill this part, and
has already in himself suffered the deleterious influence of arbitrary
and factitious forms, or has had to struggle against this influence, he
presents himself as the _witness_ of nature and as its avenger. The poet
will, therefore, be the _expression_ of nature itself, or his part will
be to _seek_ it, if men have lost sight of it. Hence arise two kinds of
poetry, which embrace and exhaust the entire field of poetry. All
poets—I mean those who are really so—will belong, according to the time
when they flourish, according to the accidental circumstances that have
influenced their education generally, and the different dispositions of
mind through which they pass, will belong, I say, to the order of the
_sentimental_ poetry or to _simple_ poetry.
The poet of a young world, simple and inspired, as also the poet who at
an epoch of artificial civilization approaches nearest to the primitive
bards, is austere and prudish, like the virginal Diana in her forests.
Wholly unconfiding, he hides himself from the heart that seeks him, from
the desire that wishes to embrace him. It is not rare for the dry truth
with which he treats his subject to resemble insensibility. The whole
object possesses him, and to reach his heart it does not suffice, as
with metals of little value, to stir up the surface; as with pure gold,
you must go down to the lowest depths. Like the Deity behind this
universe, the simple poet hides himself behind his work; he is _himself_
his work, and his work is _himself_. A man must be no longer worthy of
the work, nor understand it, or be tired of it, to be even anxious to
learn who is its author.
Such appears to us, for instance, Homer in antiquity, and Shakespeare
among moderns: two natures infinitely different and separated in time by
an abyss, but perfectly identical as to this trait of character. When,
at a very youthful age, I became first acquainted with Shakespeare, I
was displeased with his coldness, with his insensibility, which allows
him to jest even in the most pathetic moments, to disturb the impression
of the most harrowing scenes in “Hamlet,” in “King Lear,” and in
“Macbeth,” etc., by mixing with them the buffooneries of a madman. I was
revolted by his insensibility, which allowed him to pause sometimes at
places where my sensibility would bid me hasten and bear me along, and
which sometimes carried him away with indifference when my heart would
be so happy to pause. Though I was accustomed, by the practice of modern
poets, to seek at once the poet in his works, to meet his heart, to
reflect with him in his theme—in a word, to see the object in the
subject—I could not bear that the poet could in Shakespeare never be
seized, that he would never give me an account of himself. For some
years Shakespeare had been the object of my study and of all my respect
before I had learned to love his personality. I was not yet able to
comprehend nature at first hand. All that my eyes could bear was its
image only, reflected by the understanding and arranged by rules: and on
this score the sentimental poetry of the French, or that of the Germans
of 1750 to 1780, was what suited me best. For the rest, I do not blush
at this childish judgment: adult critics pronounced in that day in the
same way, and carried their simplicity so far as to publish their
decisions to the world.
The same thing happened to me in the case of Homer, with whom I made
acquaintance at a later date. I remember now that remarkable passage of
the sixth book of the “Iliad,” where Glaucus and Diomed meet each other
in the strife, and then, recognizing each other as host and guest,
exchange presents. With this touching picture of the piety with which
the laws of _hospitality_ were observed even in war, may be compared a
picture of chivalrous generosity in Ariosto. The knights, rivals in
love, Ferragus and Rinaldo—the former a Saracen, the latter a
Christian—after having fought to extremity, all covered with wounds,
make peace together, and mount the same horse to go and seek the
fugitive Angelica. These two examples, however different in other
respects, are very similar with regard to the impression produced on our
heart: both represent the noble victory of moral feeling over passion,
and touch us by the simplicity of feeling displayed in them. But what a
difference in the way in which the two poets go to work to describe two
such analogous scenes! Ariosto, who belongs to an advanced epoch, to a
world where simplicity of manners no longer existed, in relating this
trait, cannot conceal the astonishment, the admiration, he feels at it.
He measures the distance from those manners to the manners of his own
age, and this feeling of astonishment is too strong for him. He abandons
suddenly the painting of the object, and comes himself on the scene in
person. This beautiful stanza is well known, and has been always
specially admired at all times:—
“Oh nobleness, oh generosity of the ancient manners of chivalry! These
were rivals, separated by their faith, suffering bitter pain throughout
their frames in consequence of a desperate combat; and, without any
suspicion, behold them riding in company along dark and winding paths.
Stimulated by four spurs, the horse hastens his pace till they arrive at
the place where the road divides.”[14]
Now let us turn to old Homer. Scarcely has Diomed learned by the story
of Glaucus, his adversary, that the latter has been, from the time of
their fathers, the host and friend of his family, when he drives his
lance into the and friend of his family, when he drives his lance into
the ground, converses familiarly with him, and both agree henceforth to
avoid each other in the strife. But let us hear Homer himself:—
“Thus, then, I am for thee a faithful host in Argos, and thou to me in
Lycia, when I shall visit that country. We shall, therefore, avoid our
lances meeting in the strife. Are there not for me other Trojans or
brave allies to kill when a god shall offer them to me and my steps
shall reach them? And for thee, Glaucus, are there not enough Achæans,
that thou mayest immolate whom thou wishest? But let us exchange our
arms, in order that others may also see that we boast of having been
hosts and guests at the time of our fathers.” Thus they spoke, and,
rushing from their chariots, they seized each other’s hands, and swore
friendship the one to the other.[15]
It would have been difficult for a _modern_ poet (at least to one who
would be modern in the moral sense of the term) even to wait as long as
this before expressing his joy in the presence of such an action. We
should pardon this in him the more easily, because we also, in reading
it, feel that our heart makes a pause here, and readily turns aside from
the object to bring back its thoughts on itself. But there is not the
least trace of this in Homer. As if he had been relating something that
is seen every day—nay, more, as if he had no heart beating in his
breast—he continues, with his dry truthfulness:—
“Then the son of Saturn blinded Glaucus, who, exchanging his armor with
Diomed, gave him golden arms of the value of one hecatomb, for brass
arms only worth nine beeves.”[16]
The poets of this order,—the genuinely simple poets, are scarcely any
longer in their place in this artificial age. Accordingly they are
scarcely possible in it, or at least they are only possible on the
condition of _traversing_ their age, like _scared persons_, at a
_running_ pace, and of being preserved by a happy star from the
influence of their age, which would mutilate their genius. Never, for ay
and forever, will society produce these poets; but out of society they
still appear sometimes at intervals, rather, I admit, as strangers, who
excite wonder, or as ill-trained children of nature, who give offence.
These apparitions, so very comforting for the artist who studies them,
and for the real connoisseur, who knows how to appreciate them, are, as
a general conclusion, in the age when they are begotten, to a very small
degree preposterous. The seal of empire is stamped on their brow, and
we,—we ask the Muses to cradle us, to carry us in their arms. The
critics, as regular constables of art, detest these poets as _disturbers
of rules or of limits_. Homer himself may have been only indebted to the
testimony of ten centuries for the reward these aristarchs are kindly
willing to concede him. Moreover, they find it a hard matter to maintain
their rules against his example, or his authority against their rules.