When the poet opposes nature to art, and the ideal to the real, so that
nature and the ideal form the principal object of his pictures, and that
the pleasure we take in them is the dominant impression, I call him an
_elegiac_ poet. In this kind, as well as in satire, I distinguish two
classes. Either nature and the ideal are objects of sadness, when one is
represented as lost to man and the other as unattained; or both are
objects of joy, being represented to us as reality. In the first case it
is _elegy_ in the narrower sense of the term; in the second case it is
the idyl in its most extended acceptation.
Indignation in the pathetic and ridicule in mirthful satire are
occasioned by an enthusiasm which the ideal has excited; and thus also
sadness should issue from the same source in elegy. It is this, and this
only, that gives poetic value to elegy, and any other origin for this
description of poetical effusion is entirely beneath the dignity of
poetry. The elegiac poet seeks after nature, but he strives to find her
in her beauty, and not only in her mirth; in her agreement with
conception, and not merely in her facile disposition towards the
requirements and demands of sense. Melancholy at the privation of joys,
complaints at the disappearance of the world’s golden age, or at the
vanished happiness of youth, affection, etc., can only become the proper
themes for elegiac poetry if those conditions implying peace and calm in
the sphere of the senses can moreover be portrayed as states of moral
harmony. On this account I cannot bring myself to regard as poetry the
complaints of Ovid, which he transmitted from his place of exile by the
Black Sea; nor would they appear so to me however touching and however
full of passages of the highest poetry they might be. His suffering is
too devoid of spirit, and nobleness. His lamentations display a want of
strength and enthusiasm; though they may not reflect the traces of a
vulgar soul, they display a low and sensuous condition of a noble spirit
that has been trampled into the dust by its hard destiny. If, indeed, we
call to mind that his regrets are directed to Rome, in the Augustan age,
we forgive him the pain he suffers; but even Rome in all its splendor,
except it be transfigured by the imagination, is a limited greatness,
and therefore a subject unworthy of poetry, which, raised above every
trace of the actual, ought only to mourn over what is infinite.
Thus the object of poetic complaint ought never to be an external
object, but only an internal and ideal object; even when it deplores a
real loss, it must begin by making it an ideal loss. The proper work of
the poet consists in bringing back the finite object to the proportions
of the infinite. Consequently the external matter of elegy, considered
in itself, is always indifferent, since poetry can never employ it as it
finds it, and because it is only by what it makes of it that it confers
on it a poetic dignity. The elegiac poet seeks nature, but nature as an
idea, and in a degree of perfection that it has never reached in
reality, although he weeps over this perfection as something that has
existed and is now lost. When Ossian speaks to us of the days that are
no more, and of the heroes that have disappeared, his imagination has
long since transformed these pictures represented to him by his memory
into a pure ideal, and changed these heroes into gods. The different
experiences of such or such a life in particular have become extended
and confounded in the universal idea of transitoriness, and the bard,
deeply moved, pursued by the increase of ruin everywhere present, takes
his flight towards heaven, to find there in the course of the sun an
emblem of what does not pass away.
I turn now to the elegiac poets of modern times. Rousseau, whether
considered as a poet or a philosopher, always obeys the same tendency;
to seek nature or to avenge it by art. According to the state of his
heart, whether he prefers to seek nature or to avenge it, we see him at
one time roused by elegiac feelings, at others showing the tone of the
satire of Juneval; and again, as in his Julia, delighting in the sphere
of the idyl. His compositions have undoubtedly a poetic value, since
their object is ideal; only he does not know how to treat it in a poetic
fashion. No doubt his serious character prevents him from falling into
frivolity; but this seriousness also does not allow him to rise to
poetic play. Sometimes absorbed by passion, at others by abstractions,
he seldom if ever reaches æsthetic freedom, which the poet ought to
maintain in spite of his material before his object, and in which he
ought to make the reader share. Either he is governed by his sickly
sensibility and his impressions become a torture, or the force of
thought chains down his imagination and destroys by its strictness of
reasoning all the grace of his pictures. These two faculties, whose
reciprocal influence and intimate union are what properly make the poet,
are found in this writer in an uncommon degree, and he only lacks one
thing—it is that the two qualities should manifest themselves actually
united; it is that the proper activity of thought should show itself
mixed more with feeling, and the sensuous more with thought.
Accordingly, even in the ideal which he has made of human nature, he is
too much taken up with the limits of this nature, and not enough with
its capabilities; he always betrays a want of physical _repose_ rather
than want of moral _harmony_. His passionate sensuousness must be blamed
when, to finish as quickly as possible that struggle in humanity which
offends him, he prefers to carry man back to the unintelligent
uniformity of his primitive condition, rather than see that struggle
carried out in the intellectual harmony of perfect cultivation, when,
rather than await the fulfilment of art he prefers not to let it begin;
in short, when he prefers to place the aim nearer the earth, and to
lower the ideal in order to reach it the sooner and the safer.
Among the poets of Germany who belong to this class, I shall only
mention here Haller, Kleist, and Klopstock. The character of their
poetry is sentimental; it is by the ideal that they touch us, not by
sensuous reality; and that not so much because they are themselves
nature, as because they know how to fill us with enthusiasm for nature.
However, what is true _in general_, as well of these three poets as of
every sentimental poet, does not evidently exclude the faculty of moving
us, _in particular_, by beauties of the simple genus; without this they
would not be poets. I only mean that it is not their proper and dominant
characteristic to receive the impression of objects with a calm feeling,
simple, easy, and to give forth in like manner the impression received.
Involuntarily the imagination in them anticipates intuition, and
reflection is in play before the sensuous nature has done its function;
they shut their eyes and stop their ears to plunge into internal
meditations. Their souls could not be touched by any impression without
observing immediately their own movements, without placing before their
eyes and outside themselves what takes place in them. It follows from
this that we never see the object itself, but what the intelligence and
reflection of the poet have made of the object; and even if this object
be the person itself of the poet, even when he wishes to represent to us
his own feelings, we are not informed of his state immediately or at
first hand; we only see how this state is reflected in his mind and what
he has thought of it in the capacity of spectator of himself. When
Haller deplores the death of his wife—every one knows this beautiful
elegy—and begins in the following manner:—
“If I must needs sing of thy death,
O Marian, what a song it would be!
When sighs strive against words,
And idea follows fast on idea,” etc.,
we feel that this description is strictly true, but we feel also that
the poet does not communicate to us, properly speaking, his feelings,
but the thoughts that they suggest to him. Accordingly, the emotion we
feel on hearing him is much less vivid! people remark that the poet’s
mind must have been singularly cooled down to become thus a spectator of
his own emotion.
Haller scarcely treated any subjects but the super-sensuous, and part of
the poems of Klopstock are also of this nature: this choice itself
excludes them from the simple kind. Accordingly, in order to treat these
super-sensuous themes in a poetic fashion, as no body could be given to
them, and they could not be made the objects of sensuous intuition, it
was necessary to make them pass from the finite to the infinite, and
raise them to the state of objects of spiritual intuition. In general,
it may be said, that it is only in this sense that a didactic poetry can
be conceived without involving contradiction; for, repeating again what
has been so often said, poetry has only two fields, the world of sense
and the ideal world, since in the sphere of conceptions, in the world of
the understanding, it cannot absolutely thrive. I confess that I do not
know as yet any didactic poem, either among the ancients or among the
moderns, where the subject is completely brought down to the individual,
or purely and completely raised to the ideal. The most common case, in
the most happy essays, is where the two principles are used together;
the abstract idea predominates, and the imagination, which ought to
reign over the whole domain of poetry, has merely the permission to
serve the understanding. A didactic poem in which thought itself would
be poetic, and would remain so, is a thing which we must still wait to
see.
What we say here of didactic poems in general is true in particular of
the poems of Haller. The thought itself of these poems is not poetical,
but the execution becomes so sometimes, occasionally by the use of
images, at other times by a flight towards the ideal. It is from this
last quality only that the poems of Haller belong to this class. Energy,
depth, a pathetic earnestness—these are the traits that distinguish this
poet. He has in his soul an ideal that enkindles it, and his ardent love
of truth seeks in the peaceful valleys of the Alps that innocence of the
first ages that the world no longer knows. His complaint is deeply
touching; he retraces in an energetic and almost bitter satire the
wanderings of the mind and of the heart, and he lovingly portrays the
beautiful simplicity of nature. Only, in his pictures as well as in his
soul, abstraction prevails too much, and the sensuous is overweighted by
the intellectual. He constantly _teaches_ rather than _paints_; and even
in his paintings his brush is more energetic than lovable. He is great,
bold, full of fire, sublime; but he rarely and perhaps never attains to
beauty.
For the solidity and depth of ideas, Kleist is far inferior to Haller;
in point of grace, perhaps, he would have the advantage—if, as happens
occasionally, we did not impute to him as a merit, on the one side, that
which really is a want on the other. The sensuous soul of Kleist takes
especial delight at the sight of country scenes and manners; he
withdraws gladly from the vain jingle and rattle of society, and finds
in the heart of inanimate nature the harmony and peace that are not
offered to him by the moral world. How touching is his “Aspiration after
Repose”! how much truth and feeling there is in these verses!—
“O world, thou art the tomb of true life!
Often a generous instinct attracts me to virtue;
My heart is sad, a torrent of tears bathes my cheeks
But example conquers, and thou, O fire of youth!
Soon you dry these noble tears.
A true man must live far from men!”
But if the poetic instinct of Kleist leads him thus far away from the
narrow circle of social relations, in solitude and among the fruitful
inspirations of nature, the image of social life and of its anguish
pursues him, and also, alas! its chains. What he flees from he carries
in himself, and what he seeks remains entirely outside him: never can he
triumph over the fatal influence of his time. In vain does he find
sufficient flame in his heart and enough energy in his imagination to
animate by painting the cold conceptions of the understanding; cold
thought each time kills the living creations of fancy, and reflection
destroys the secret work of the sensuous nature. His poetry, it must be
admitted, is of as brilliant color and as variegated as the spring he
celebrated in verse; his imagination is vivid and active; but it might
be said that it is more variable than rich, that it sports rather than
creates, that it always goes forward with a changeful gait, rather than
stops to accumulate and mould things into shape. Traits succeed each
other rapidly, with exuberance, but without concentrating to form an
individual, without completing each other to make a living whole,
without rounding to a form, a figure. Whilst he remains in purely
lyrical poetry, and pauses amidst his landscapes of country life, on the
one hand the greater freedom of the lyrical form, and on the other the
more arbitrary nature of the subject, prevent us from being struck with
this defect; in these sorts of works it is in general rather the
feelings of the poet, than the object in itself, of which we expect the
portraiture. But this defect becomes too apparent when he undertakes, as
in Cisseis and Paches, or in his Seneca, to represent men and human
actions; because here the imagination sees itself kept in within certain
fixed and necessary limits, and because here the effect can only be
derived from the _object_ itself. Kleist becomes poor, tiresome, jejune,
and insupportably frigid; an example full of lessons for those who,
without having an inner vocation, aspire to issue from _musical_ poetry,
to rise to the regions of _plastic_ poetry. A spirit of this family,
Thomson, has paid the same penalty to human infirmity.
In the sentimental kind, and especially in that part of the sentimental
kind which we name elegiac, there are but few modern poets, and still
fewer ancient ones, who can be compared to our Klopstock. Musical poetry
has produced in this poet all that can be attained out of the limits of
the living form, and out of the sphere of individuality, in the region
of ideas. It would, no doubt, be doing him a great injustice to dispute
entirely in his case that individual truth and that feeling of life with
which the simple poet describes his pictures. Many of his odes, many
separate traits in his dramas, and in his “Messiah,” represent the
object with a striking truth, and mark the outline admirably;
especially, when the object is his own heart, he has given evidence on
many occasions of a great natural disposition and of a charming
simplicity. I mean only that it is not in this that the _proper_ force
of Klopstock consists, and that it would not perhaps be right to seek
for this throughout his work. Viewed as a production of musical poetry,
the “Messiah” is a magnificent work; but in the light of _plastic_
poetry, where we look for determined forms and forms _determined_ for
the _intuition_, the “Messiah” leaves much to be desired. Perhaps in
this poem the figures are sufficiently determined, but they are not so
with intuition in view. It is abstraction alone that created them, and
abstraction alone can discern them. They are excellent _types_ to
express ideas, but they are not individuals nor living figures. With
regard to the imagination, which the poet ought to address, and which he
ought to command by putting before it always perfectly determinate
forms, it is left here much too free to represent as it wishes these men
and these angels, these divinities and demons, this paradise and this
hell. We see quite well the vague outlines in which the understanding
must be kept to conceive these personages; but we do not find the limit
clearly traced in which the imagination must be enclosed to represent
them. And what I say here of characters must apply to all that in this
poem is, or ought to be, action and life, and not only in this epopœia,
but also in the dramatic poetry of Klopstock. For the understanding all
is perfectly determined and bounded in them—I need only here recall his
Judas, his Pilate, his Philo, his Solomon in the tragedy that bears that
name—but for the imagination all this wants form too much, and I must
readily confess I do not find that our poet is at all in his sphere
here. His sphere is always the realm of ideas; and he knows how to raise
all he touches to the infinite. It might be said that he strips away
their bodily envelope, to spiritualize them from all the objects with
which he is occupied, in the same way that other poets clothe all that
is spiritual with a body. The pleasure occasioned by his poems must
almost always be obtained by an exercise of the faculty of reflection;
the feelings he awakens in us, and that so deeply and energetically,
flow always from super-sensuous sources. Hence the earnestness, the
strength, the elasticity, the depth, that characterize all that comes
from him; but from that also issues that perpetual tension of mind in
which we are kept when reading him. No poet—except perhaps Young, who in
this respect exacts even more than Klopstock, without giving us so much
compensation—no poet could be less adapted than Klopstock to play the
part of favorite author and guide in life, because he never does
anything else than lead us out of life, because he never calls to arms
anything save spirit, without giving recreation and refreshment to
sensuous nature by the calm presence of any object. His muse is chaste,
it has nothing of the earthly, it is immaterial and holy as his
religion; and we are forced to admit with admiration that if he wanders
sometimes on these high places, it never happened to him to fall from
them. But precisely for this reason, I confess in all ingenuousness,
that I am not free from anxiety for the common sense of those who quite
seriously and unaffectedly make Klopstock the favorite book, the book in
which we find sentiments fitting all situations, or to which we may
revert at all times: perhaps even—and I suspect it—Germany has seen
enough results of his dangerous influence. It is only in certain
dispositions of the mind, and in hours of exaltation, that recourse can
be had to Klopstock, and that he can be felt. It is for this reason that
he is the idol of youth, without, however, being by any means the
happiest choice that they could make. Youth, which always aspires to
something beyond real life, which avoids all stiffness of form, and
finds all limits too narrow, lets itself be carried away with love, with
delight, into the infinite spaces opened up to them by this poet. But
wait till the youth has become a man, and till, from the domain of
ideas, he comes back to the world of experience, then you will see this
enthusiastic love of Klopstock decrease greatly, without, however, a
riper age changing at all the esteem due to this unique phenomenon, to
this so extraordinary genius, to these noble sentiments—the esteem that
Germany in particular owes to his high merit.
I have said that this poet was great specially in the elegiac style, and
it is scarcely necessary to confirm this judgment by entering into
particulars. Capable of exercising all kinds of action on the heart, and
having graduated as master in all that relates to sentimental poetry, he
can sometimes shake the soul by the most sublime pathos, at others
cradle it with sweet and heavenly sensations. Yet his heart prefers to
follow the direction of a lofty spiritual melancholy; and, however
sublime be the tones of his harp and of his lyre, they are always the
tender notes of his lute that resound with most truth and the deepest
emotion. I take as witnesses all those whose nature is pure and
sensuous: would they not be ready to give all the passages where
Klopstock is strong, and bold; all those fictions, all the magnificent
descriptions, all the models of eloquence which abound in the “Messiah,”
all those dazzling comparisons in which our poet excels,—would they not
exchange them for the pages breathing tenderness, the “Elegy to Ebert”
for example, or that admirable poem entitled “Bardalus,” or again, the
“Tombs Opened before the Hour,” the “Summer’s Night,” the “Lake of
Zurich,” and many other pieces of this kind? In the same way the
“Messiah” is dear to me as a treasure of elegiac feelings and of ideal
paintings, though I am not much satisfied with it as the recital of an
action and as an epic.
I ought, perhaps, before quitting this department, to recall the merits
in this style of Uz, Denis, Gessner—in the “Death of Abel”—Jacobi,
Gerstenberg, Hölty, De Göckingk, and several others, who all knew how to
touch by ideas, and whose poems belong to the sentimental kind in the
sense in which we have agreed to understand the word. But my object is
not here to write a history of German poetry; I only wished to clear up
what I said further back by some examples from our literature. I wished
to show that the ancient and the modern poets, the authors of simple
poetry and of sentimental poetry, follow essentially different paths to
arrive at the same end: that the former move by nature, individuality, a
very vivid _sensuous_ element; while the latter do it by means of ideas
and a high _spirituality_, exercising over our minds an equally powerful
though less extensive influence.
It has been seen, by the examples which precede, how sentimental poetry
conceives and treats subjects taken from nature; perhaps the reader may
be curious to know how also simple poetry treats a subject of the
sentimental order. This is, as it seems, an entirely new question, and
one of special difficulty; for, in the first place, has a _subject of
the sentimental order_ ever been presented in primitive and simple
periods? And in modern times, where is the _simple poet_ with whom we
could make this experiment? This has not, however, prevented genius from
setting this problem, and solving it in a wonderfully happy way. A poet
in whose mind nature works with a purer and more faithful activity than
in any other, and who is perhaps of all modern poets the one who departs
the least from the sensuous truth of things, has proposed this problem
to himself in his conception of a mind, and of the dangerous extreme of
the sentimental character. This mind and this character have been
portrayed by the modern poet we speak of, a character which with a
burning sensuousness embraces the ideal and flies the real, to soar up
to an infinite devoid of being, always occupied in seeking out of
himself what he incessantly destroys in himself; a mind that only finds
reality in his dreams, and to whom the realities of life are only limits
and obstacles; in short, a mind that sees only in its own existence a
barrier, and goes on, as it were, logically to break down this barrier
in order to penetrate to true reality.
It is interesting to see with what a happy instinct all that is of a
nature to feed the sentimental mind is gathered together in Werther: a
dreamy and unhappy love, a very vivid feeling for nature, the religious
sense coupled with the spirit of philosophic contemplation, and lastly,
to omit nothing, the world of Ossian, dark, formless, melancholy. Add to
this the aspect under which reality is presented, all is depicted which
is least adapted to make it lovable, or rather all that is most fit to
make it hated; see how all external circumstances unite to drive back
the unhappy man into his ideal world; and now we understand that it was
quite impossible for a character thus constituted to save itself, and
issue from the circle in which it was enclosed. The same contrast
reappears in the “Torquato Tasso” of the same poet, though the
characters are very different. Even his last romance presents, like his
first, this opposition between the poetic mind and the common sense of
practical men, between the ideal and the real, between the subjective
mode and the objective mode of seeing and representing things; it is the
same opposition, I say, but with what a diversity! Even in “Faust” we
still find this contrast, rendered, I admit—as the subject required—much
more coarsely on both hands, and materialized. It would be quite worth
while if a psychological explanation were attempted of this character,
personified and specified in four such different ways.
It has been observed further back that a mere disposition to frivolity
of mind, to a merry humor, if a certain fund of the ideal is not joined
to it, does not suffice to constitute the vocation of a satirical poet,
though this mistake is frequently made. In the same way a mere
disposition for tender sentiments, softness of heart, and melancholy do
not suffice to constitute a vocation for elegy. I cannot detect the true
poetical talent, either on one side or the other; it wants the
essential, I mean the energetic and fruitful principle that ought to
enliven the subject, and produce true beauty. Accordingly the
productions of this latter nature, of the tender nature, do nothing but
enervate us; and without refreshing the heart, without occupying the
mind, they are only able to flatter in us the sensuous nature. A
constant disposition to this mode of feeling ends necessarily, in the
long run, by weakening the character, and makes it fall into a state of
passivity from which nothing real can issue, either for external or for
internal life. People have, therefore, been quite right to persecute by
pitiless raillery this fatal mania of _sentimentality_ and of _tearful
melancholy_ which possessed Germany eighteen years since, in consequence
of certain excellent works that were ill understood and indiscreetly
imitated. People have been right, I say, to combat this perversity,
though the indulgence with which men are disposed to receive the
parodies of these elegiac caricatures—that are very little better
themselves—the complaisance shown to bad wit, to heartless satire and
spiritless mirth, show clearly enough that this zeal against false
sentimentalism does not issue from quite a pure source. In the balance
of true taste one cannot weigh more than the other, considering that
both here and there is wanting that which forms the æsthetic value of a
work of art, the intimate union of spirit with matter, and the twofold
relation of the work with the faculty of perception as well as with the
faculty of the ideal.
People have turned Siegwart[17] and his convent story into ridicule, and
yet the “Travels into the South of France” are admired; yet both works
have an equal claim to be esteemed in certain respects, and as little to
be unreservedly praised in others. A true, though excessive,
sensuousness gives value to the former of these two romances; a lively
and sportive humor, a fine wit, recommends the other: but one totally
lacks all sobriety of mind that would befit it, the other lacks all
æsthetic dignity. If you consult experience, one is rather ridiculous;
if you think of the ideal, the other is almost contemptible. Now, as
true beauty must of necessity accord both with nature and with the
ideal, it is clear that neither the one nor the other of these two
romances could pretend to pass for a fine work. And notwithstanding all
this, it is natural, as I know it by my own experience, that the romance
of Thummel should be read with much pleasure. As a fact it only wounds
those requirements which have their principle in the ideal, and which
consequently do not exist for the greater part of readers; requirements
that, even in persons of most delicate feeling, do not make themselves
felt at the moments when we read romances. With regard to the other
needs of the mind, and especially to those of the senses, this book, on
the other hand, affords unusual satisfaction. Accordingly, it must be,
and will be so, that this book will remain justly one of the favorite
works of our age, and of all epochs when men only write æsthetic works
to please, and people only read to get pleasure.
But does not poetical literature also offer, even in its classical
monuments, some analogous examples of injuries inflicted or attempted
against the ideal and its superior purity? Are there not some who, by
the gross, sensuous nature of their subject, seem to depart strangely
from the spiritualism I here demand of all works of art? If this is
permitted to the poet, the chaste nursling of the muses, ought it not to
be conceded to the novelist, who is only the half-brother of the poet,
and who still touches by so many points? I can the less avoid this
question because there are masterpieces, both in the elegiac and in the
satirical kind, where the authors seek and preach up a nature quite
different from that I am discussing in this essay, and where they seem
to defend it, not so much against bad as against good morals. The
natural conclusion would be either that this sort of poem ought to be
rejected, or that, in tracing here the idea of elegiac poetry, we have
granted far too much to what is arbitrary.
The question I asked was, whether what was permitted by the poet might
not be tolerated in a prose narrator too? The answer is contained in the
question. What is allowed in the poet proves nothing about what must be
allowed in one who is not a poet. This tolerancy in fact reposes on the
very idea which we ought to make to ourselves of the poet, and only on
this idea; what in his case is legitimate freedom, is only a license
worthy of contempt as soon as it no longer takes its source in the
ideal, in those high and noble inspirations which make the poet.
The laws of decency are strangers to innocent nature; the experience of
corruption alone has given birth to them. But when once this experience
has been made, and natural innocence has disappeared from manners, these
laws are henceforth sacred laws that man, who has a moral sense, ought
not to infringe upon. They reign in an artificial world with the same
right that the laws of nature reign in the innocence of primitive ages.
But by what characteristic is the poet recognized? Precisely by his
silencing in his soul all that recalls an artificial world, and by
causing nature herself to revive in him with her primitive simplicity.
The moment he has done this he is emancipated by this alone from all the
laws by which a depraved heart secures itself against itself. He is
pure, he is innocent, and all that is permitted to innocent nature is
equally permitted to him. But you who read him or listen to him, if you
have lost your innocence, and if you are incapable of finding it again,
even for a moment, in a purifying contact with the poet, it is _your
own_ fault, and not his: why do not you leave him alone? it is not for
you that he has sung!
Here follows, therefore, in what relates to these kinds of freedoms, the
rules that we can lay down.
Let us remark in the first place that nature only can justify these
licenses; whence it follows that you could not legitimately take them up
of your own choice, nor with a determination of imitating them; the
will, in fact, ought always to be directed according to the laws of
morality, and on its part all condescending to the sensuous is
absolutely unpardonable. These licenses must, therefore, above all, be
_simplicity_. But how can we be convinced that they are actually simple?
We shall hold them to be so if we see them accompanied and supported by
all the other circumstances which also have their spring of action in
nature; for nature can only be recognized by the close and strict
consistency, by the unity and uniformity of its effects. It is only a
soul that has on all occasions a horror of all kinds of artifice, and
which consequently rejects them even where they would be useful—it is
only that soul which we permit to be emancipated from them when the
artificial conventionalities hamper and hinder it. A heart that submits
to all the obligations of nature has alone the right to profit also by
the liberties which it authorizes. All the other feelings of that heart
ought consequently to bear the stamp of nature: it will be true, simple,
free, frank, sensible, and straightforward; all disguise, all cunning,
all arbitrary fancy, all egotistical pettiness, will be banished from
his character, and you will see no trace of them in his writings.
Second rule: _beautiful_ nature alone can justify freedoms of this kind;
whence it follows that they ought not to be a mere outbreak of the
appetites; for all that proceeds exclusively from the wants of sensuous
nature is contemptible. It is, therefore, from the totality and the
fullness of human nature that these vivid manifestations must also
issue. We must find _humanity_ in them. But how can we judge that they
proceed in fact from our whole nature, and not only from an exclusive
and vulgar want of the sensuous nature? For this purpose it is necessary
that we should see—that they should represent to us—this whole of which
they form a particular feature. This disposition of the mind to
experience the impressions of the sensuous is in itself an innocent and
an indifferent thing. It does not sit well on a man only because of its
being common to animals with him; it augurs in him the lack of true and
perfect humanity. It only shocks us in the poem because such a work
having the pretension to please us, the author consequently seems to
think us capable, _us also_, of this moral infirmity. But when we see in
the man who has let himself be drawn into it by surprise all the other
characteristics that human nature in general embraces; when we find in
the work where these liberties have been taken the expression of all the
realities of human nature, this motive of discontent disappears, and we
can enjoy, without anything changing our joy, this simple expression of
a true and beautiful nature. Consequently this same poet who ventures to
allow himself to associate us with feelings so basely human, ought to
know, on the other hand, how to raise us to all that is grand,
beautiful, and sublime in our nature.
We should, therefore, have found there a measure to which we could
subject the poet with confidence, when he trespasses on the ground of
decency, and when he does not fear to penetrate as far as that in order
freely to paint nature. His work is common, base, absolutely
inexcusable, from the moment it is frigid, and from the moment it is
_empty_, because that shows a prejudice, a vulgar necessity, an
unhealthy appeal to our appetites. His work, on the other hand, is
beautiful and noble, and we ought to applaud it without any
consideration for all the objections of frigid decency, as soon as we
recognize in it simplicity, the alliance of spiritual nature and of the
heart.
Perhaps I shall be told that if we adopt this criterion, most of the
recitals of this kind composed by the French, and the best imitations
made of them in Germany, would not perhaps find their interest in it;
and that it might be the same, at least in part, with many of the
productions of our most intellectual and amiable poets, without even
excepting his masterpieces. I should have nothing to reply to this. The
sentence after all is anything but new, and I am only justifying the
judgment pronounced long since on this matter by all men of delicate
perceptions. But these same principles which, applied to the works of
which I have just spoken, seem perhaps in too strict a spirit, might
also be found too indulgent when applied to some other works. I do not
deny, in fact, that the same reasons which make me hold to be quite
inexcusable the dangerous pictures drawn by the Roman Ovid and the
German Ovid, those of Crebillon, of Voltaire, of Marmontel, who pretends
to write _moral_ tales!—of Lacroix, and of many others—that these same
reasons, I say, reconcile me with the elegies of the Roman Propertius
and of the German Propertius, and even with some of the decried
productions of Diderot. This is because the former of those works are
only witty, prosaic, and voluptuous, while the others are poetic, human,
and simple.