Consequently, by the aesthetic disposition of the soul the proper

activity of reason is already revealed in the sphere of sensuousness, the

power of sense is already broken within its own boundaries, and the

ennobling of physical man carried far enough, for spiritual man has only

to develop himself according to the laws of liberty. The transition from

an aesthetic state to a logical and moral state (from the beautiful to

truth and duty) is then infinitely more easy than the transition from the

physical state to the aesthetic state (from life pure and blind to form).

This transition man can effectuate alone by his liberty, whilst he has

only to enter into possession of himself not to give it himself; but to

separate the elements of his nature, and not to enlarge it. Having

attained to the aesthetic disposition, man will give to his judgments and

to his actions a universal value as soon as he desires it. This passage

from brute nature to beauty, in which an entirely new faculty would

awaken in him, nature would render easier, and his will has no power over

a disposition which, we know, itself gives birth to the will. To bring

the aesthetic man to profound views, to elevated sentiments, he requires

nothing more than important occasions: to obtain the same thing from the

sensuous man, his nature must at first be changed. To make of the former

a hero, a sage, it is often only necessary to meet with a sublime

situation, which exercises upon the faculty of the will the more

immediate action; for the second, it must first be transplanted under

another sky.

One of the most important tasks of culture, then, is to submit man to

form, even in a purely physical life, and to render it aesthetic as far

as the domain of the beautiful can be extended, for it is alone in the

aesthetic state, and not in the physical state, that the moral state can

be developed. If in each particular case man ought to possess the power

to make his judgment and his will the judgment of the entire species; if

he ought to find in each limited existence the transition to an infinite

existence; if, lastly, he ought from every dependent situation to take

his flight to rise to autonomy and to liberty, it must be observed that

at no moment he is only individual and solely obeys the laws of nature.

To be apt and ready to raise himself from the narrow circle of the ends

of nature, to rational ends, in the sphere of the former he must already

have exercised himself in the second; he must already have realized his

physical destiny with a certain liberty that belongs only to spiritual

nature, that is to say according to the laws of the beautiful.

And that he can effect without thwarting in the least degree his physical

aim. The exigencies of nature with regard to him turn only upon what he

does--upon the substance of his acts; but the ends of nature in no degree

determine the way in which he acts, the form of his actions. On the

contrary, the exigencies of reason have rigorously the form of his

activity for its object. Thus, so much as it is necessary for the moral

destination of man, that he be purely moral, that he shows an absolute

personal activity, so much is he indifferent that his physical

destination be entirely physical, that he acts in a manner entirely

passive. Henceforth with regard to this last destination, it entirely

depends on him to fulfil it solely as a sensuous being and natural force

(as a force which acts only as it diminishes) or, at the same time, as

absolute force, as a rational being. To which of these does his dignity

best respond? Of this there can be no question. It is as disgraceful

and contemptible for him to do under sensuous impulsion that which he

ought to have determined merely by the motive of duty, as it is noble and

honorable for him to incline towards conformity with laws, harmony,

independence; there even where the vulgar man only satisfies a legitimate

want. In a word, in the domain of truth and morality, sensuousness must

have nothing to determine; but in the sphere of happiness, form may find

a place, and the instinct of play prevail.

Thus then, in the indifferent sphere of physical life, man ought to

already commence his moral life; his own proper activity ought already to

make way in passivity, and his rational liberty beyond the limits of

sense; he ought already to impose the law of his will upon his

inclinations; he ought--if you will permit me the expression--to carry

into the domain of matter the war against matter, in order to be

dispensed from combating this redoubtable enemy upon the sacred field of

liberty; he ought to learn to have nobler desires, not to be forced to

have sublime volitions. This is the fruit of aesthetic culture, which

submits to the laws of the beautiful, in which neither the laws of nature

nor those of reason suffer, which does not force the will of man, and

which by the form it gives to exterior life already opens internal life.

LETTER XXIV.

Accordingly three different moments or stages of development can be

distinguished, which the individual man, as well as the whole race, must

of necessity traverse in a determinate order if they are to fulfil the

circle of their determination. No doubt, the separate periods can be

lengthened or shortened, through accidental causes which are inherent

either in the influence of external things or under the free caprice of

men: but neither of them can be overstepped, and the order of their

sequence cannot be inverted either by nature or by the will. Man, in his

physical condition, suffers only the power of nature; he gets rid of this

power in the aesthetical condition, and he rules them in the moral state.

What is man before beauty liberates him from free pleasure, and the

serenity of form tames down the savageness of life? Eternally uniform in

his aims, eternally changing in his judgments, self-seeking without being

himself, unfettered without being free, a slave without serving any rule.

At this period, the world is to him only destiny, not yet an object; all

has existence for him only in as far as it procures existence to him; a

thing that neither seeks from nor gives to him is non-existent. Every

phenomenon stands out before him separate and cut off, as he finds

himself in the series of beings. All that is, is to him through the bias

of the moment; every change is to him an entirely fresh creation, because

with the necessary in him, the necessary out of him is wanting, which

binds together all the changing forms in the universe, and which holds

fast the law on the theatre of his action, while the individual departs.

It is in vain that nature lets the rich variety of her forms pass before

him; he sees in her glorious fulness nothing but his prey, in her power

and greatness nothing but his enemy. Either he encounters objects, and

wishes to draw them to himself in desire, or the objects press in a

destructive manner upon him, and he thrusts them away in dismay and

terror. In both cases his relation to the world of sense is immediate

contact; and perpetually anxious through its pressure, restless and

plagued by imperious wants, he nowhere finds rest except in enervation,

and nowhere limits save in exhausted desire.

"True, his is the powerful breast, and the mighty hand

of the Titans. . . .

A certain inheritance; yet the god welded

Round his forehead a brazen band;

Advice, moderation, wisdom, and patience,--

Hid it from his shy, sinister look.

Every desire is with him a rage,

And his rage prowls around limitless."--Iphigenia in Tauris.

Ignorant of his own human dignity, he is far removed from honoring it in

others, and conscious of his own savage greed, he fears it in every

creature that he sees like himself. He never sees others in himself,

only himself in others, and human society, instead of enlarging him to

the race, only shuts him up continually closer in his individuality.

Thus limited, he wanders through his sunless life, till favoring nature

rolls away the load of matter from his darkened senses, reflection

separates him from things, and objects show themselves at length in the

afterglow of the consciousness.

It is true we cannot point out this state of rude nature as we have here

portrayed it in any definite people and age. It is only an idea, but an

idea with which experience agrees most closely in special features. It

may be said that man was never in this animal condition, but he has not,

on the other hand, ever entirely escaped from it. Even in the rudest

subjects, unmistakable traces of rational freedom can be found, and even

in the most cultivated, features are not wanting that remind us of that

dismal natural condition. It is possible for man, at one and the same

time, to unite the highest and the lowest in his nature; and if his

dignity depends on a strict separation of one from the other, his

happiness depends on a skilful removal of this separation. The culture

which is to bring his dignity into agreement with his happiness will

therefore have to provide for the greatest purity of these two principles

in their most intimate combination.

Consequently the first appearance of reason in man is not the beginning

of humanity. This is first decided by his freedom, and reason begins

first by making his sensuous dependence boundless; a phenomenon that does

not appear to me to have been sufficiently elucidated, considering its

importance and universality. We know that the reason makes itself known

to man by the demand for the absolute--the self-dependent and necessary.

But as this want of the reason cannot be satisfied in any separate or

single state of his physical life, he is obliged to leave the physical

entirely and to rise from a limited reality to ideas. But although the

true meaning of that demand of the reason is to withdraw him from the

limits of time and to lead him from the world of sense to an ideal world,

yet this same demand of reason, by misapplication--scarcely to be avoided

in this life, prone to sensuousness--can direct him to physical life,

and, instead of making man free, plunge him in the most terrible slavery.

Facts verify this supposition. Man raised on the wings of imagination

leaves the narrow limits of the present, in which mere animality is

enclosed, in order to strive on to an unlimited future. But while the

limitless is unfolded to his dazed imagination, his heart has not ceased

to live in the separate, and to serve the moment. The impulse towards

the absolute seizes him suddenly in the midst of his animality, and as in

this cloddish condition all his efforts aim only at the material and

temporal, and are limited by his individuality, he is only led by that

demand of the reason to extend his individuality into the infinite,

instead of to abstract from it. He will be led to seek instead of form

an inexhaustible matter, instead of the unchangeable an everlasting

change and an absolute securing of his temporal existence. The same

impulse which, directed to his thought and action, ought to lead to truth

and morality, now directed to his passion and emotional state, produces

nothing but an unlimited desire and an absolute want. The first fruits,

therefore, that he reaps in the world of spirits are cares and fear--both

operations of the reason; not of sensuousness, but of a reason that

mistakes its object and applies its categorical imperative to matter.

All unconditional systems of happiness are fruits of this tree, whether

they have for their object the present day or the whole of life, or what

does not make them any more respectable, the whole of eternity, for their

object. An unlimited duration of existence and of well-being is only an

ideal of the desires; hence a demand which can only be put forth by an

animality striving up to the absolute. Man, therefore, without gaining

anything for his humanity by a rational expression of this sort, loses

the happy limitation of the animal, over which he now only possesses the

unenviable superiority of losing the present for an endeavor after what

is remote, yet without seeking in the limitless future anything but the

present.

But even if the reason does not go astray in its object, or err in the

question, sensuousness will continue to falsify the answer for a long

time. As soon as man has begun to use his understanding and to knit

together phenomena in cause and effect, the reason, according to its

conception, presses on to an absolute knitting together and to an

unconditional basis. In order, merely, to be able to put forward this

demand, man must already have stepped beyond the sensuous, but the

sensuous uses this very demand to bring back the fugitive.

In fact, it is now that he ought to abandon entirely the world of sense

in order to take his flight into the realm of ideas; for the intelligence

remains eternally shut up in the finite and in the contingent, and does

not cease putting questions without reaching the last link of the chain.

But as the man with whom we are engaged is not yet capable of such an

abstraction, and does not find it in the sphere of sensuous knowledge,

and because he does not look for it in pure reason, he will seek for it

below in the region of sentiment, and will appear to find it. No doubt

the sensuous shows him nothing that has its foundation in itself, and

that legislates for itself, but it shows him something that does not care

for foundation or law; therefore, thus not being able to quiet the

intelligence by showing it a final cause, he reduces it to silence by the

conception which desires no cause; and being incapable of understanding

the sublime necessity of reason, he keeps to the blind constraint of

matter. As sensuousness knows no other end than its interest, and is

determined by nothing except blind chance, it makes the former the motive

of its actions, and the latter the master of the world.

Even the divine part in man, the moral law, in its first manifestation in

the sensuous cannot avoid this perversion. As this moral law is only

prohibited, and combats in man the interest of sensuous egotism, it must

appear to him as something strange until he has come to consider this

self-love as the stranger, and the voice of reason as his true self.

Therefore he confines himself to feeling the fetters which the latter

imposes on him, without having the consciousness of the infinite

emancipation which it procures for him. Without suspecting in himself

the dignity of lawgiver, he only experiences the constraint and the

impotent revolt of a subject fretting under the yoke, because in this

experience the sensuous impulsion precedes the moral impulsion, he gives

to the law of necessity a beginning in him, a positive origin, and by the

most unfortunate of all mistakes he converts the immutable and the

eternal in himself into a transitory accident. He makes up his mind to

consider the notions of the just and the unjust as statutes which have

been introduced by a will, and not as having in themselves an eternal

value. Just as in the explanation of certain natural phenomena he goes

beyond nature and seeks out of her what can only be found in her, in her

own laws; so also in the explanation of moral phenomena he goes beyond

reason and makes light of his humanity, seeking a god in this way. It is

not wonderful that a religion which he has purchased at the cost of his

humanity shows itself worthy of this origin, and that he only considers

as absolute and eternally binding laws that have never been binding from

all eternity. He has placed himself in relation with, not a holy being,

but a powerful. Therefore the spirit of his religion, of the homage that

he gives to God, is a fear that abases him, and not a veneration that

elevates him in his own esteem.

Though these different aberrations by which man departs from the ideal of

his destination cannot all take place at the same time, because several

degrees have to be passed over in the transition from the obscure of

thought to error, and from the obscure of will to the corruption of the

will; these degrees are all, without exception, the consequence of his

physical state, because in all the vital impulsion sways the formal

impulsion. Now, two cases may happen: either reason may not yet have

spoken in man, and the physical may reign over him with a blind

necessity, or reason may not be sufficiently purified from sensuous

impressions, and the moral may still be subject to the physical; in both

cases the only principle that has a real power over him is a material

principle, and man, at least as regards his ultimate tendency, is a

sensuous being. The only difference is, that in the former case he is an

animal without reason, and in the second case a rational animal. But he

ought to be neither one nor the other: he ought to be a man. Nature

ought not to rule him exclusively; nor reason conditionally. The two

legislations ought to be completely independent, and yet mutually

complementary.

LETTER XXV.

Whilst man, in his first physical condition, is only passively affected

by the world of sense, he is still entirely identified with it; and for

this reason the external world, as yet, has no objective existence for

him. When he begins in his aesthetic state of mind to regard the world

objectively, then only is his personality severed from it, and the world

appears to him an objective reality, for the simple reason that he has

ceased to form an identical portion of it.

That which first connects man with the surrounding universe is the power

of reflective contemplation. Whereas desire seizes at once its object,

reflection removes it to a distance and renders it inalienably her own by

saving it from the greed of passion. The necessity of sense which he

obeyed during the period of mere sensations, lessens during the period of

reflection; the senses are for the time in abeyance; even ever-fleeting

time stands still whilst the scattered rays of consciousness are

gathering and shape themselves; an image of the infinite is reflected

upon the perishable ground. As soon as light dawns in man, there is no,

longer night outside of him; as soon as there is peace within him the

storm lulls throughout the universe, and the contending forces of nature

find rest within prescribed limits. Hence we cannot wonder if ancient

traditions allude to these great changes in the inner man as to a

revolution in surrounding nature, and symbolize thought triumphing over

the laws of time, by the figure of Zeus, which terminates the reign of

Saturn.

As long as man derives sensations from a contact with nature, he is her

slave; but as soon as he begins to reflect upon her objects and laws he

becomes her lawgiver. Nature, which previously ruled him as a power, now

expands before him as an object. What is objective to him can have no

power over him, for in order to become objective it has to experience his

own power. As far and as long as he impresses a form upon matter, he

cannot be injured by its effect; for a spirit can only be injured by that

which deprives it of its freedom. Whereas he proves his own freedom by

giving a form to the formless; where the mass rules heavily and without

shape, and its undefined outlines are for ever fluctuating between

uncertain boundaries, fear takes up its abode; but man rises above any

natural terror as soon as he knows how to mould it, and transform it into

an object of his art. As soon as he upholds his independence towards

phenomenal natures he maintains his dignity toward her as a thing of

power, and with a noble freedom he rises against his gods. They throw

aside the mask with which they had kept him in awe during his infancy,

and to his surprise his mind perceives the reflection of his own image.

The divine monster of the Oriental, which roams about changing the world

with the blind force of a beast of prey, dwindles to the charming outline

of humanity in Greek fable; the empire of the Titans is crushed, and

boundless force is tamed by infinite form.

But whilst I have been merely searching for an issue from the material

world, and a passage into the world of mind, the bold flight of my

imagination has already taken me into the very midst of the latter world.

The beauty of which we are in search we have left behind by passing from

the life of mere sensations to the pure form and to the pure object.

Such a leap exceeds the condition of human nature; in order to keep pace

with the latter we must return to the world of sense.

Beauty is indeed the sphere of unfettered contemplation and reflection;

beauty conducts us into the world of ideas, without however taking us

from the world of sense, as occurs when a truth is perceived and

acknowledged. This is the pure product of a process of abstraction from

everything material and accidental, a pure object free from every

subjective barrier, a pure state of self-activity without any admixture

of passive sensations. There is indeed a way back to sensation from the

highest abstraction; for thought teaches the inner sensation, and the

idea of logical or moral unity passes into a sensation of sensual accord.

But if we delight in knowledge we separate very accurately our own

conceptions from our sensations; we look upon the latter as something

accidental, which might have been omitted without the knowledge being

impaired thereby, without truth being less true. It would, however, be a

vain attempt to suppress this connection of the faculty of feeling with

the idea of beauty, consequently, we shall not succeed in representing to

ourselves one as the effect of the other, but we must look upon them both

together and reciprocally as cause and effect. In the pleasure which we

derive from knowledge we readily distinguish the passage from the active

to the passive state, and we clearly perceive that the first ends when

the second begins. On the contrary, from the pleasure which we take in

beauty, this transition from the active to the passive is not

perceivable, and reflection is so intimately blended with feeling that we

believe we feel the form immediately. Beauty is then an object to us, it

is true, because reflection is the condition of the feeling which we have

of it; but it is also a state of our personality (our Ego) because the

feeling is the condition of the idea we conceive of it: beauty is

therefore doubtless form, because we contemplate it, but it is equally

life because we feel it. In a word, it is at once our state and our act.

And precisely because it is at the same time both a state and an act, it

triumphantly proves to us that the passive does not exclude the active,

neither matter nor form, neither the finite nor the infinite; and that

consequently the physical dependence to which man is necessarily devoted

does not in any way destroy his moral liberty. This is the proof of

beauty, and I ought to add that this alone can prove it. In fact, as in

the possession of truth or of logical unity, feeling is not necessarily

one with the thought, but follows it accidentally; it is a fact which

only proves that a sensitive nature can succeed a rational nature, and

vice versa; not that they co-exist, that they exercise a reciprocal

action one over the other; and, lastly, that they ought to be united in

an absolute and necessary manner. From this exclusion of feeling as long

as there is thought, and of thought so long as there is feeling, we

should on the contrary conclude that the two natures are incompatible, so

that in order to demonstrate that pure reason is to be realized in

humanity, the best proof given by the analysis is that this realization

is demanded. But, as in the realization of beauty or of aesthetic unity,

there is a real union, mutual substitution of matter and of form, of

passive and of active, by this alone is proved the compatibility of the

two natures, the possible realization of the infinite in the finite, and

consequently also the possibility of the most sublime humanity.

Henceforth we need no longer be embarrassed to find a transition from

dependent feeling to moral liberty, because beauty reveals to us the fact

that they can perfectly coexist, and that to show himself a spirit, man

need not escape from matter. But if on one side he is free, even in his

relation with a visible world, as the fact of beauty teaches, and if on

the other side freedom is something absolute and supersensuous, as its

idea necessarily implies, the question is no longer how man succeeds in

raising himself from the finite to the absolute, and opposing himself in

his thought and will to sensuality, as this has already been produced in

the fact of beauty. In a word, we have no longer to ask how he passes

from virtue to truth which is already included in the former, but how he

opens a way for himself from vulgar reality to aesthetic reality, and

from the ordinary feelings of life to the perception of the beautiful.

LETTER XXVI.

I have shown in the previous letters that it is only the aesthetic

disposition of the soul that gives birth to liberty, it cannot therefore

be derived from liberty nor have a moral origin. It must be a gift of

nature; the favor of chance alone can break the bonds of the physical

state and bring the savage to duty. The germ of the beautiful will find

an equal difficulty in developing itself in countries where a severe

nature forbids man to enjoy himself, and in those where a prodigal nature

dispenses him from all effort; where the blunted senses experience no

want, and where violent desire can never be satisfied. The delightful

flower of the beautiful will never unfold itself in the case of the

Troglodyte hid in his cavern always alone, and never finding humanity

outside himself; nor among nomads, who, travelling in great troops, only

consist of a multitude, and have no individual humanity. It will only

flourish in places where man converses peacefully with himself in his

cottage, and with the whole race when he issues from it. In those

climates where a limpid ether opens the senses to the lightest

impression, whilst a life-giving warmth develops a luxuriant nature,

where even in the inanimate creation the sway of inert matter is

overthrown, and the victorious form ennobles even the most abject

natures; in this joyful state and fortunate zone, where activity alone

leads to enjoyment, and enjoyment to activity, from life itself issues a

holy harmony, and the laws of order develop life, a different result

takes place. When imagination incessantly escapes from reality, and does

not abandon the simplicity of nature in its wanderings: then and there

only the mind and the senses, the receptive force and the plastic force,

are developed in that happy equilibrium which is the soul of the

beautiful and the condition of humanity.

What phenomenon accompanies the initiation of the savage into humanity?

However far we look back into history the phenomenon is identical among

all people who have shaken off the slavery of the animal state: the love

of appearance, the inclination for dress and for games.

Extreme stupidity and extreme intelligence have a certain affinity in

only seeking the real and being completely insensible to mere appearance.

The former is only drawn forth by the immediate presence of an object in

the senses, and the second is reduced to a quiescent state only by

referring conceptions to the facts of experience. In short, stupidity

cannot rise above reality, nor the intelligence descend below truth.

Thus, in as far as the want of reality and attachment to the real are

only the consequence of a want and a defect, indifference to the real and

an interest taken in appearances are a real enlargement of humanity and a

decisive step towards culture. In the first place it is the proof of an

exterior liberty, for as long as necessity commands and want solicits,

the fancy is strictly chained down to the real: it is only when want is

satisfied that it develops without hinderance. But it is also the proof

of an internal liberty, because it reveals to us a force which,

independent of an external substratum, sets itself in motion, and has

sufficient energy to remove from itself the solicitations of nature. The

reality of things is effected by things, the appearance of things is the

work of man, and a soul that takes pleasure in appearance does not take

pleasure in what it receives but in what it makes.

It is self-evident that I am speaking of aesthetical evidence different

from reality and truth, and not of logical appearance identical with

them. Therefore if it is liked it is because it is an appearance, and

not because it is held to be something better than it is: the first

principle alone is a play, whilst the second is a deception. To give a

value to the appearance of the first kind can never injure truth, because

it is never to be feared that it will supplant it--the only way in which

truth can be injured. To despise this appearance is to despise in

general all the fine arts of which it is the essence. Nevertheless, it

happens sometimes that the understanding carries its zeal for reality as

far as this intolerance, and strikes with a sentence of ostracism all the

arts relating to beauty in appearance, because it is only an appearance.

However, the intelligence only shows this vigorous spirit when it calls

to mind the affinity pointed out further back. I shall find some day the

occasion to treat specially of the limits of beauty in its appearance.

It is nature herself which raises man from reality to appearance by

endowing him with two senses which only lead him to the knowledge of the

real through appearance. In the eye and the ear the organs of the senses

are already freed from the persecutions of nature, and the object with

which we are immediately in contact through the animal senses is remoter

from us. What we see by the eye differs from what we feel; for the

understanding to reach objects overleaps the light which separates us

from them. In truth, we are passive to an object: in sight and hearing

the object is a form we create. While still a savage, man only enjoys

through touch merely aided by sight and sound. He either does not rise

to perception through sight, or does not rest there. As soon as he

begins to enjoy through sight, vision has an independent value, he is

aesthetically free, and the instinct of play is developed.

The instinct of play likes appearance, and directly it is awakened it is

followed by the formal imitative instinct which treats appearance as an

independent thing. Directly man has come to distinguish the appearance

from the reality, the form from the body, he can separate, in fact he has

already done so. Thus the faculty of the art of imitation is given with

the faculty of form in general. The inclination that draws us to it

reposes on another tendency I have not to notice here. The exact period

when the aesthetic instinct, or that of art, develops, depends entirely

on the attraction that mere appearance has for men.

As every real existence proceeds from nature as a foreign power, whilst

every appearance comes in the first place from man as a percipient

subject, he only uses his absolute sight in separating semblance from

essence, and arranging according to subjective law. With an unbridled

liberty he can unite what nature has severed, provided he can imagine his

union, and he can separate what nature has united, provided this

separation can take place in his intelligence. Here nothing can be

sacred to him but his own law: the only condition imposed upon him is to

respect the border which separates his own sphere from the existence of

things or from the realm of nature.

This human right of ruling is exercised by man in the art of appearance;

and his success in extending the empire of the beautiful, and guarding

the frontiers of truth, will be in proportion with the strictness with

which he separates form from substance: for if he frees appearance from

reality, he must also do the converse.

But man possesses sovereign power only in the world of appearance, in the

unsubstantial realm of imagination, only by abstaining from giving being

to appearance in theory, and by giving it being in practice. It follows

that the poet transgresses his proper limits when he attributes being to

his ideal, and when he gives this ideal aim as a determined existence.

For he can only reach this result by exceeding his right as a poet, that

of encroaching by the ideal on the field of experience, and by pretending

to determine real existence in virtue of a simple possibility, or else he

renounces his right as a poet by letting experience encroach on the

sphere of the ideal, and by restricting possibility to the conditions of

reality.

It is only by being frank or disclaiming all reality, and by being

independent or doing without reality, that the appearance is aesthetical.

Directly it apes reality or needs reality for effect, it is nothing more

than a vile instrument for material ends, and can prove nothing for the

freedom of the mind. Moreover, the object in which we find beauty need

not be unreal if our judgment disregards this reality; for if it regards

this the judgment is no longer aesthetical. A beautiful woman, if

living, would no doubt please us as much and rather more than an equally

beautiful woman seen in painting; but what makes the former please men is

not her being an independent appearance; she no longer pleases the pure

aesthetic feeling. In the painting, life must only attract as an

appearance, and reality as an idea. But it is certain that to feel in a

living object only the pure appearance requires a greatly higher

aesthetic culture than to do without life in the appearance.

When the frank and independent appearance is found in man separately, or

in a whole people, it may be inferred they have mind, taste, and all

prerogatives connected with them. In this case the ideal will be seen to

govern real life, honor triumphing over fortune, thought over enjoyment,

the dream of immortality over a transitory existence.

In this case public opinion will no longer be feared, and an olive crown

will be more valued than a purple mantle. Impotence and perversity alone

have recourse to false and paltry semblance, and individuals as well as

nations who lend to reality the support of appearance, or to the

aesthetic appearance the support of reality, show their moral

unworthiness and their aesthetical impotence. Therefore, a short and

conclusive answer can be given to this question--how far will appearance

be permitted in the moral world? It will run thus in proportion as this

appearance will be aesthetical, that is, an appearance that does not try

to make up for reality, nor requires to be made up for by it. The

aesthetical appearance can never endanger the truth of morals: wherever

it seems to do so the appearance is not aesthetical. Only a stranger to

the fashionable world can take the polite assurances, which are only a

form, for proofs of affection, and say he has been deceived; but only a

clumsy fellow in good society calls in the aid of duplicity and flatters

to become amiable. The former lacks the pure sense for independent

appearance; therefore he can only give a value to appearance by truth.

The second lacks reality, and wishes to replace it by appearance.

Nothing is more common than to hear depreciators of the times utter these

paltry complaints--that all solidity has disappeared from the world, and

that essence is neglected for semblance. Though I feel by no means

called upon to defend this age against these reproaches, I must say that

the wide application of these criticisms shows that they attach blame to

the age, not only on the score of the false, but also of the frank

appearance. And even the exceptions they admit in favor of the beautiful

have for their object less the independent appearance than the needy

appearance. Not only do they attack the artificial coloring that hides

truth and replaces reality, but also the beneficent appearance that fills

a vacuum and clothes poverty; and they even attack the ideal appearance

that ennobles a vulgar reality. Their strict sense of truth is rightly

offended by the falsity of manners; unfortunately, they class politeness

in this category. It displeases them that the noisy and showy so often

eclipse true merit, but they are no less shocked that appearance is also

demanded from merit, and that a real substance does not dispense with an

agreeable form. They regret the cordiality, the energy, and solidity of

ancient times; they would restore with them ancient coarseness,

heaviness, and the old Gothic profusion. By judgments of this kind they

show an esteem for the matter itself unworthy of humanity, which ought

only to value the matter inasmuch as it can receive a form and enlarge

the empire of ideas. Accordingly, the taste of the age need not much

fear these criticisms if it can clear itself before better judges. Our

defect is not to grant a value to aesthetic appearance (we do not do this

enough): a severe judge of the beautiful might rather reproach us with

not having arrived at pure appearance, with not having separated clearly

enough existence from the phenomenon, and thus established their limits.

We shall deserve this reproach so long as we cannot enjoy the beautiful

in living nature without desiring it; as long as we cannot admire the

beautiful in the imitative arts without having an end in view; as long as

we do not grant to imagination an absolute legislation of its own; and as

long as we do not inspire it with care for its dignity by the esteem we

testify for its works.

LETTER XXVII.

Do not fear for reality and truth. Even if the elevated idea of

aesthetic appearance become general, it would not become so, as long as

man remains so little cultivated as to abuse it; and if it became

general, this would result from a culture that would prevent all abuse of

it. The pursuit of independent appearance requires more power of

abstraction, freedom of heart, and energy of will than man requires to

shut himself up in reality; and he must have left the latter behind him

if he wishes to attain to aesthetic appearance. Therefore, a man would

calculate very badly who took the road of the ideal to save himself that

of reality. Thus, reality would not have much to fear from appearance,

as we understand it; but, on the other hand, appearance would have more

to fear from reality. Chained to matter, man uses appearance for his

purposes before he allows it a proper personality in the art of the

ideal: to come to that point a complete revolution must take place in his

mode of feeling, otherwise, he would not be even on the way to the ideal.

Consequently, when we find in man the signs of a pure and disinterested

esteem, we can infer that this revolution has taken place in his nature,

and that humanity has really begun in him. Signs of this kind are found

even in the first and rude attempts that he makes to embellish his

existence, even at the risk of making it worse in its material

conditions. As soon as he begins to prefer form to substance and to risk

reality for appearance (known by him to be such), the barriers of animal

life fall, and he finds himself on a track that has no end.

Not satisfied with the needs of nature, he demands the superfluous.

First, only the superfluous of matter, to secure his enjoyment beyond the

present necessity; but afterward; he wishes a superabundance in matter,

an aesthetical supplement to satisfy the impulse for the formal, to

extend enjoyment beyond necessity. By piling up provisions simply for a

future use, and anticipating their enjoyment in the imagination, he

outsteps the limits of the present moment, but not those of time in

general. He enjoys more; he does not enjoy differently. But as soon as

he makes form enter into his enjoyment, and he keeps in view the forms of

the objects which satisfy his desires, he has not only increased his

pleasure in extent and intensity, but he has also ennobled it in mode and

species.

No doubt nature has given more than is necessary to unreasoning beings;

she has caused a gleam of freedom to shine even in the darkness of animal

life. When the lion is not tormented by hunger, and when no wild beast

challenges him to fight, his unemployed energy creates an object for

himself; full of ardor, he fills the re-echoing desert with his terrible

roars, and his exuberant force rejoices in itself, showing itself without

an object. The insect flits about rejoicing in life in the sunlight, and

it is certainly not the cry of want that makes itself heard in the

melodious song of the bird; there is undeniably freedom in these

movements, though it is not emancipation from want in general, but from a

determinate external necessity.

The animal works, when a privation is the motor of its activity, and it

plays when the plenitude of force is this motor, when an exuberant life

is excited to action. Even in inanimate nature a luxury of strength and

a latitude of determination are shown, which in this material sense might

be styled play. The tree produces numberless germs that are abortive

without developing, and it sends forth more roots, branches, and leaves,

organs of nutrition, than are used for the preservation of the species.

Whatever this tree restores to the elements of its exuberant life,

without using it or enjoying it, may be expended by life in free and

joyful movements. It is thus that nature offers in her material sphere a

sort of prelude to the limitless, and that even there she suppresses

partially the chains from which she will be completely emancipated in the

realm of form. The constraint of superabundance or physical play answers

as a transition from the constraint of necessity, or of physical

seriousness, to aesthetical play; and before shaking off, in the supreme

freedom of the beautiful, the yoke of any special aim, nature already

approaches, at least remotely, this independence, by the free movement

which is itself its own end and means.

The imagination, like the bodily organs, has in man its free movement and

its material play, a play in which, without any reference to form, it

simply takes pleasure in its arbitrary power and in the absence of all

hinderance. These plays of fancy, inasmuch as form is not mixed up with

them, and because a free succession of images makes all their charm,

though confined to man, belong exclusively to animal life, and only prove

one thing--that he is delivered from all external sensuous constraint

without our being entitled to infer that there is in it an independent

plastic force.

From this play of free association of ideas, which is still quite

material in nature and is explained by simple natural laws, the

imagination, by making the attempt of creating a free form, passes at

length at a jump to the aesthetic play: I say at one leap, for quite a

new force enters into action here; for here, for the first time, the

legislative mind is mixed with the acts of a blind instinct, subjects the

arbitrary march of the imagination to its eternal and immutable unity,

causes its independent permanence to enter in that which is transitory,

and its infinity in the sensuous. Nevertheless, as long as rude nature,

which knows of no other law than running incessantly from change to

change, will yet retain too much strength, it will oppose itself by its

different caprices to this necessity; by its agitation to this

permanence; by its manifold needs to this independence, and by its

insatiability to this sublime simplicity. It will be also troublesome to

recognize the instinct of play in its first trials, seeing that the

sensuous impulsion, with its capricious humor and its violent appetites,

constantly crosses. It is on that account that we see the taste, still

coarse, seize that which is new and startling, the disordered, the

adventurous and the strange, the violent and the savage, and fly from

nothing so much as from calm and simplicity. It invents grotesque

figures, it likes rapid transitions, luxurious forms, sharply-marked

changes, acute tones, a pathetic song. That which man calls beautiful at

this time is that which excites him, that which gives him matter; but

that which excites him to give his personality to the object, that which

gives matter to a possible plastic operation, for otherwise it would not

be the beautiful for him. A remarkable change has therefore taken place

in the form of his judgments; he searches for these objects, not because

they affect him, but because they furnish him with the occasion of

acting; they please him, not because they answer to a want, but because

they satisfy a law which speaks in his breast, although quite low as yet.

Soon it will not be sufficient for things to please him; he will wish to

please: in the first place, it is true, only by that which belongs to

him; afterwards by that which he is. That which he possesses, that which

he produces, ought not merely to bear any more the traces of servitude,

nor to mark out the end, simply and scrupulously, by the form.

Independently of the use to which it is destined, the object ought also

to reflect the enlightened intelligence which imagines it, the hand which

shaped it with affection, the mind free and serene which chose it and

exposed it to view. Now, the ancient German searches for more

magnificent furs, for more splendid antlers of the stag, for more elegant

drinking-horns; and the Caledonian chooses the prettiest shells for his

festivals. The arms themselves ought to be no longer only objects of

terror, but also of pleasure; and the skilfully-worked scabbard will not

attract less attention than the homicidal edge of the sword. The

instinct of play, not satisfied with bringing into the sphere of the

necessary an aesthetic superabundance for the future more free, is at

last completely emancipated from the bonds of duty, and the beautiful

becomes of itself an object of man's exertions. He adorns himself. The

free pleasure comes to take a place among his wants, and the useless soon

becomes the best part of his joys. Form, which from the outside

gradually approaches him, in his dwelling, his furniture, his clothing,

begins at last to take possession of the man himself, to transform him,

at first exteriorly, and afterwards in the interior. The disordered

leaps of joy become the dance, the formless gesture is changed into an

amiable and harmonious pantomime, the confused accents of feeling are

developed, and begin to obey measures and adapt themselves to song.

When, like the flight of cranes, the Trojan army rushes on to the field

of battle with thrilling cries, the Greek army approaches in silence and

with a noble and measured step. On the one side we see but the

exuberance of a blind force, on the other the triumph of form, and the

simple majesty of law.

Now, a nobler necessity binds the two sexes mutually, and the interests

of the heart contribute in rendering durable an alliance which was at

first capricious and changing like the desire that knits it. Delivered

from the heavy fetters of desire, the eye, now calmer, attends to the

form, the soul contemplates the soul, and the interested exchange of

pleasure becomes a generous exchange of mutual inclination. Desire

enlarges and rises to love, in proportion as it sees humanity dawn in its

object; and, despising the vile triumphs gained by the senses, man tries

to win a nobler victory over the will. The necessity of pleasing

subjects the powerful nature to the gentle laws of taste; pleasure may be

stolen, but love must be a gift. To obtain this higher recompense, it is

only through the form and not through matter that it can carry on the

contest. It must cease to act on feeling as a force, to appear in the

intelligence as a simple phenomenon; it must respect liberty, as it is

liberty it wishes to please. The beautiful reconciles the contrast of

different natures in its simplest and purest expression. It also

reconciles the eternal contrast of the two sexes in the whole complex

framework of society, or at all events it seeks to do so; and, taking as

its model the free alliance it has knit between manly strength and

womanly gentleness, it strives to place in harmony, in the moral world,

all the elements of gentleness and of violence. Now, at length, weakness

becomes sacred, and an unbridled strength disgraces; the injustice of

nature is corrected by the generosity of chivalrous manners. The being

whom no power can make tremble, is disarmed by the amiable blush of

modesty, and tears extinguish a vengeance that blood could not have

quenched. Hatred itself hears the delicate voice of honor, the

conqueror's sword spares the disarmed enemy, and a hospitable hearth

smokes for the stranger on the dreaded hillside where murder alone

awaited him before.

In the midst of the formidable realm of forces, and of the sacred empire

of laws, the aesthetic impulse of form creates by degrees a third and a

joyous realm, that of play and of the appearance, where she emancipates

man from fetters, in all his relations, and from all that is named

constraint, whether physical or moral.

If in the dynamic state of rights men mutually move and come into

collision as forces, in the moral (ethical) state of duties, man opposes

to man the majesty of the laws, and chains down his will. In this realm

of the beautiful or the aesthetic state, man ought to appear to man only

as a form, and an object of free play. To give freedom through freedom

is the fundamental law of this realm.

The dynamic state can only make society simple possibly by subduing

nature through nature; the moral (ethical) state can only make it morally

necessary by submitting the will of the individual to the general will.

The aesthetic state alone can make it real, because it carries out the

will of all through the nature of the individual. If necessity alone

forces man to enter into society, and if his reason engraves on his soul

social principles, it is beauty only that can give him a social

character; taste alone brings harmony into society, because it creates

harmony in the individual. All other forms of perception divide the man,

because they are based exclusively either in the sensuous or in the

spiritual part of his being. It is only the perception of beauty that

makes of him an entirety, because it demands the co-operation of his two

natures. All other forms of communication divide society, because they

apply exclusively either to the receptivity or to the private activity of

its members, and therefore to what distinguishes men one from the other.

The aesthetic communication alone unites society because it applies to

what is common to all its members. We only enjoy the pleasures of sense

as individuals, without the nature of the race in us sharing in it;

accordingly, we cannot generalize our individual pleasures, because we

cannot generalize our individuality. We enjoy the pleasures of knowledge

as a race, dropping the individual in our judgment; but we cannot

generalize the pleasures of the understanding, because we cannot

eliminate individuality from the judgments of others as we do from our

own. Beauty alone can we enjoy both as individuals and as a race, that

is, as representing a race. Good appertaining to sense can only make one

person happy, because it is founded on inclination, which is always

exclusive; and it can only make a man partially happy, because his real

personality does not share in it. Absolute good can only render a man

happy conditionally, for truth is only the reward of abnegation, and a

pure heart alone has faith in a pure will. Beauty alone confers

happiness on all, and under its influence every being forgets that he is

limited.

Taste does not suffer any superior or absolute authority, and the sway of

beauty is extended over appearance. It extends up to the seat of

reason's supremacy, suppressing all that is material. It extends down to

where sensuous impulse rules with blind compulsion, and form is

undeveloped. Taste ever maintains its power on these remote borders,

where legislation is taken from it. Particular desires must renounce

their egotism, and the agreeable, otherwise tempting the senses, must in

matters of taste adorn the mind with the attractions of grace.

Duty and stern necessity must change their forbidding tone, only excused

by resistance, and do homage to nature by a nobler trust in her. Taste

leads our knowledge from the mysteries of science into the open expanse

of common sense, and changes a narrow scholasticism into the common

property of the human race. Here the highest genius must leave its

particular elevation, and make itself familiar to the comprehension even

of a child. Strength must let the Graces bind it, and the arbitrary lion

must yield to the reins of love. For this purpose taste throws a veil

over physical necessity, offending a free mind by its coarse nudity, and

dissimulating our degrading parentage with matter by a delightful

illusion of freedom. Mercenary art itself rises from the dust; and the

bondage of the bodily, at its magic touch, falls off from the inanimate

and animate. In the aesthetic state the most slavish tool is a free

citizen, having the same rights as the noblest; and the intellect which

shapes the mass to its intent must consult it concerning its destination.

Consequently, in the realm of aesthetic appearance, the idea of equality

is realized, which the political zealot would gladly see carried out

socially. It has often been said that perfect politeness is only found

near a throne. If thus restricted in the material, man has, as elsewhere

appears, to find compensation in the ideal world.

Does such a state of beauty in appearance exist, and where? It must be

in every finely-harmonized soul; but as a fact, only in select circles,

like the pure ideal of the church and state--in circles where manners are

not formed by the empty imitations of the foreign, but by the very beauty

of nature; where man passes through all sorts of complications in all

simplicity and innocence, neither forced to trench on another's freedom

to preserve his own, nor to show grace at the cost of dignity.

AESTHETICAL ESSAYS.

THE MORAL UTILITY OF AESTHETIC MANNERS.

The author of the article which appeared in the eleventh number of "The

Hours," of 1795, upon "The Danger of Aesthetic Manners," was right to

hold as doubtful a morality founded only on a feeling for the beautiful,

and which has no other warrant than taste; but it is evident that a

strong and pure feeling for the beautiful ought to exercise a salutary

influence upon the moral life; and this is the question of which I am

about to treat.

When I attribute to taste the merit of contributing to moral progress, it

is not in the least my intention to pretend that the interest that good

taste takes in an action suffices to make an action moral; morality could

never have any other foundation than her own. Taste can be favorable to

morality in the conduct, as I hope to point out in the present essay; but

alone, and by its unaided influence, it could never produce anything

moral.

It is absolutely the same with respect to internal liberty as with

external physical liberty. I act freely in a physical sense only when,

independently of all external influence, I simply obey my will. But for

the possibility of thus obeying without hinderance my own will, it is

probable, ultimately, that I am indebted to a principle beyond or

distinct from myself immediately it is admitted that this principle would

hamper my will. The same also with regard to the possibility of

accomplishing such action in conformity with duty--it may be that I owe

it, ultimately, to a principle distinct from my reason; that is possible,

the moment the idea of this principle is recognized as a force which

could have constrained my independence. Thus the same as we can say of a

man, that he holds his liberty from another man, although liberty in its

proper sense consists in not being forced to be regulated by another--in

like manner we can also say that taste here obeys virtue, although virtue

herself expressly carries this idea, that in the practice of virtue she

makes use of no other foreign help. An action does not in any degree

cease to be free, because he who could hamper its accomplishment should

fortunately abstain from putting any obstacle in the way; it suffices to

know that this agent has been moved by his own will without any

consideration of another will. In the same way, an action of the moral

order does not lose its right to be qualified as a moral action, because

the temptations which might have turned it in another direction did not

present themselves; it suffices to admit that the agent obeyed solely the

decree of his reason to the exclusion of all foreign springs of action.

The liberty of an external act is established as soon as it directly

proceeds from the will of a person; the morality of an interior action is

established from the moment that the will of the agent is at once

determined to it by the laws of reason.

It may be rendered easier or more difficult to act as free men according

as we meet or not in our path forces adverse to our will that must be

overcome. In this sense liberty is more or less susceptible. It is

greater, or at least more visible, when we enable it to prevail over the

opposing forces, however energetic their opposition; but it is not

suspended because our will should have met with no resistance, or that a

foreign succor coming to our aid should have destroyed this resistance,

without any help from ourselves.

The same with respect to morality; we might have more or less resistance

to offer in order on the instant to obey our reason, according as it

awakens or not in us those instincts which struggle against its precepts,

and which must be put aside. In this sense morality is susceptible of

more or of less. Our morality is greater, or at least more in relief,

when we immediately obey reason, however powerful the instincts are which

push us in a contrary direction; but it is not suspended because we have

had no temptation to disobey, or that this force had been paralyzed by

some other force other than our will. We are incited to an action solely

because it is moral, without previously asking ourselves if it is the

most agreeable. It is enough that such an action is morally good, and it

would preserve this character even if there were cause to believe that we

should have acted differently if the action had cost us any trouble, or

had deprived us of a pleasure.

It can be admitted, for the honor of humanity, that no man could fall so

low as to prefer evil solely because it is evil, but rather that every

man, without exception, would prefer the good because it is the good, if

by some accidental circumstance the good did not exclude the agreeable,

or did not entail trouble. Thus in reality all moral action seems to

have no other principle than a conflict between the good and the

agreeable; or, that which comes to the same thing, between desire and

reason; the force of our sensuous instincts on one side, and, on the

other side, the feebleness of will, the moral faculty: such apparently is

the source of all our faults.

There may be, therefore, two different ways of favoring morality, the

same as there are two kinds of obstacles which thwart it: either we must

strengthen the side of reason, and the power of the good will, so that no

temptation can overcome it; or we must break the force of temptation, in

order that the reason and the will, although feebler, should yet be in a

state to surmount it.

It might be said, without doubt, that true morality gains little by this

second proceeding, because it happens without any modification of the

will, and yet that it is the nature of the will that alone give to

actions their moral character. But I say also, in the case in question,

a change of will is not at all necessary; because we do not suppose a bad

will which should require to be changed, but only a will turned to good,

but which is feeble. Therefore, this will, inclined to good, but too

feeble, does not fail to attain by this route to good actions, which

might not have happened if a stronger impulsion had drawn it in a

contrary sense. But every time that a strong will towards good becomes

the principle of an action, we are really in presence of a moral action.

I have therefore no scruple in advancing this proposition--that all which

neutralizes the resistance offered to the law of duty really favors

morality.

Morality has within us a natural enemy, the sensuous instinct; this, as

soon as some object solicits its desires, aspires at once to gratify it,

and, as soon as reason requires from it anything repugnant, it does not

fail to rebel against its precepts. This sensuous instinct is constantly

occupied in gaining the will on its side. The will is nevertheless under

the jurisdiction of the moral law, and it is under an obligation never to

be in contradiction with that which reason demands.

But the sensuous instinct does not recognize the moral law; it wishes to

enjoy its object and to induce the will to realize it also,

notwithstanding what the reason may advance. This tendency of the

faculty of our appetites, of immediately directing the will without

troubling itself about superior laws, is perpetually in conflict with our

moral destination, and it is the most powerful adversary that man has to

combat in his moral conduct. The coarse soul, without either moral or

aesthetic education, receives directly the law of appetite, and acts only

according to the good pleasure of the senses. The moral soul, but which

wants aesthetic culture, receives in a direct manner the law of reason,

and it is only out of respect for duty that it triumphs over temptation.

In the purified aesthetic soul, there is moreover another motive, another

force, which frequently takes the place of virtue when virtue is absent,

and which renders it easier when it is present--that is, taste.

Taste demands of us moderation and dignity; it has a horror of everything

sharp, hard and violent; it likes all that shapes itself with ease and

harmony. To listen to the voice of reason amidst the tempest of the

senses, and to know where to place a limit to nature in its most

brutified explosions, is, as we are aware, required by good breeding,

which is no other than an aesthetic law; this is required of every

civilized man. Well, then, this constraint imposed upon civilized man in

the expression of his feelings, confers upon him already a certain degree

of authority over them, or at least develops in him a certain aptitude to

rise above the purely passive state of the soul, to interrupt this state

by an initiative act, and to stop by reflection the petulance of the

feelings, ever ready to pass from affections to acts. Therefore

everything that interrupts the blind impetuosity of these movements of

the affections does not as yet, however, produce, I own, a virtue (for

virtue ought never to have any other active principle than itself), but

that at least opens the road to the will, in order to turn it on the side

of virtue. Still, this victory of taste over brutish affections is by no

means a moral action, and the freedom which the will acquires by the

intervention of taste is as yet in no way a moral liberty. Taste

delivers the soul from the yoke of instinct, only to impose upon it

chains of its own; and in discerning the first enemy, the declared enemy

of moral liberty, it remains itself, too often, as a second enemy,

perhaps even the more dangerous as it assumes the aspect of a friend.

Taste effectively governs the soul itself only by the attraction of

pleasure; it is true of a nobler type, because its principle is reason,

but still as long as the will is determined by pleasure there is not yet

morality.

Notwithstanding this, a great point is gained already by the intervention

of taste in the operations of the will. All those material inclinations

and brutal appetites, which oppose with so much obstinacy and vehemence

the practice of good, the soul is freed from through the aesthetic taste;

and in their place, it implants in us nobler and gentler inclinations,

which draw nearer to order, to harmony, and to perfection; and although

these inclinations are not by themselves virtues, they have at least

something in common with virtue; it is their object. Thenceforth, if it

is the appetite that speaks, it will have to undergo a rigorous control

before the sense of the beautiful; if it is the reason which speaks, and

which commands in its acts conformity with order, harmony, and

perfection, not only will it no longer meet with an adversary on the side

of inclination, but it will find the most active competition. If we

survey all the forms under which morality can be produced, we shall see

that all these forms can be reduced to two; either it is sensuous nature

which moves the soul either to do this thing or not to do the other, and

the will finally decides after the law of the reason; or it is the reason

itself which impels the motion, and the will obeys it without seeking

counsel of the senses.

The Greek princess, Anna Comnena, speaks of a rebel prisoner, whom her

father Alexis, then a simple general of his predecessor, had been charged

to conduct to Constantinople. During the journey, as they were riding

side by side, Alexis desired to halt under the shade of a tree to refresh

himself during the great heat of the day. It was not long before he fell

asleep, whilst his companion, who felt no inclination to repose with the

fear of death awaiting him before his eyes, remained awake. Alexis

slumbered profoundly, with his sword hanging upon a branch above his

head; the prisoner perceived the sword, and immediately conceived the

idea of killing his guardian and thus of regaining his freedom. Anna

Comnena gives us to understand that she knows not what might have been

the result had not Alexis fortunately awoke at that instant. In this

there is a moral of the highest kind, in which the sensuous instinct

first raised its voice, and of which the reason had only afterwards taken

cognizance in quality of judge. But suppose that the prisoner had

triumphed over the temptation only out of respect for justice, there

could be no doubt the action would have been a moral action.

When the late Duke Leopold of Brunswick, standing upon the banks of the

raging waters of the Oder, asked himself if at the peril of his life he

ought to venture into the impetuous flood in order to save some

unfortunates who without his aid were sure to perish; and when--I suppose

a case--simply under the influence of duty, he throws himself into the

boat into which none other dares to enter, no one will contest doubtless

that he acted morally. The duke was here in a contrary position to that

of the preceding one. The idea of duty, in this circumstance, was the

first which presented itself, and afterwards only the instinct of

self-preservation was roused to oppose itself to that prescribed by

reason, But in both cases the will acted in the same way; it obeyed

unhesitatingly the reason, yet both of them are moral actions.

But would the action have continued moral in both cases, if we suppose

the aesthetic taste to have taken part in it? For example, suppose that

the first, who was tempted to commit a bad action, and who gave it up

from respect for justice, had the taste sufficiently cultivated to feel

an invincible horror aroused in him against all disgraceful or violent

action, the aesthetic sense alone will suffice to turn him from it; there

is no longer any deliberation before the moral tribunal, before the

conscience; another motive, another jurisdiction has already pronounced.

But the aesthetic sense governs the will by the feeling and not by laws.

Thus this man refuses to enjoy the agreeable sensation of a life saved,

because he cannot support his odious feelings of having committed a

baseness. Therefore all, in this, took place before the feelings alone,

and the conduct of this man, although in conformity with the law, is

morally indifferent; it is simply a fine effect of nature.

Now let us suppose that the second, he to whom his reason prescribed to

do a thing against which natural instinct protested; suppose that this

man had to the same extent a susceptibility for the beautiful, so that

all which is great and perfect enraptured him; at the same moment, when

reason gave the order, the feelings would place themselves on the same

side, and he would do willingly that which without the inclination for

the beautiful he would have had to do contrary to inclination. But would

this be a reason for us to find it less perfect? Assuredly not, because

in principle it acts out of pure respect for the prescriptions of reason;

and if it follows these injunctions with joy, that can take nothing away

from the moral purity of the act. Thus, this man will be quite as

perfect in the moral sense; and, on the contrary, he will be incomparably

more perfect in the physical sense, because he is infinitely more capable

of making a virtuous subject.

Thus, taste gives a direction to the soul which disposes it to virtue, in

keeping away such inclinations as are contrary to it, and in rousing

those which are favorable. Taste could not injure true virtue, although

in every case where natural instinct speaks first, taste commences by

deciding for its chief that which conscience otherwise ought to have

known; in consequence it is the cause that, amongst the actions of those

whom it governs, there are many more actions morally indifferent than

actions truly moral. It thus happens that the excellency of the man does

not consist in the least degree in producing a larger sum of vigorously

moral particular actions, but by evincing as a whole a greater conformity

of all his natural dispositions with the moral law; and it is not a thing

to give people a very high idea of their country or of their age to hear

morality so often spoken of and particular acts boasted of as traits of

virtue. Let us hope that the day when civilization shall have

consummated its work (if we can realize this term in the mind) there will

no longer be any question of this. But, on the other side, taste can

become of possible utility to true virtue, in all cases when, the first

instigations issuing from reason, its voice incurs the risk of being

stifled by the more powerful solicitations of natural instinct. Thus,

taste determines our feelings to take the part of duty, and in this

manner renders a mediocre moral force of will sufficient for the practice

of virtue.

In this light, if the taste never injures true morality, and if in many

cases it is of evident use--and this circumstance is very important--then

it is supremely favorable to the legality of our conduct. Suppose that

aesthetic education contributes in no degree to the improvement of our

feelings, at least it renders us better able to act, although without

true moral disposition, as we should have acted if our soul had been

truly moral. Therefore, it is quite true that, before the tribunal of

the conscience, our acts have absolutely no importance but as the

expression of our feelings: but it is precisely the contrary in the

physical order and in the plan of nature: there it is no longer our

sentiments that are of importance; they are only important so far as they

give occasion to acts which conduce to the aims of nature. But the

physical order which is governed by forces, and the moral order which

governs itself by laws, are so exactly made one for the other, and are so

intimately blended, that the actions which are by their form morally

suitable, necessarily contain also a physical suitability; and as the

entire edifice of nature seems to exist only to render possible the

highest of all aims, which is the good, in the same manner the good can

in its turn be employed as the means of preserving the edifice. Thus,

the natural order has been rendered dependent upon the morality of our

souls, and we cannot go against the moral laws of the world without at

the same time provoking a perturbation in the physical world.

If, then, it is impossible to expect that human nature, as long as it is

only human nature, should act without interruption or feebleness,

uniformly and constantly as pure reason, and that it never offend the

laws of moral order; if fully persuaded, as we are, both of the necessity

and the possibility of pure virtue, we are forced to avow how subject to

accident is the exercise of it, and how little we ought to reckon upon

the steadfastness of our best principles; if with this conviction of

human fragility we bear in mind that each of the infractions of the moral

law attacks the edifice of nature, if we recall all these considerations

to our memory, it would be assuredly the most criminal boldness to place

the interests of the entire world at the mercy of the uncertainty of our

virtue. Let us rather draw from it the following conclusion, that it is

for us an obligation to satisfy at the very least the physical order by

the object of our acts, even when we do not satisfy the exigencies of the

moral order by the form of these acts; to pay, at least, as perfect

instruments the aims of nature, that which we owe as imperfect persons to

reason, in order not to appear shamefaced before both tribunals. For if

we refused to make any effort to conform our acts to it because simple

legality is without moral merit, the order of the world might in the

meanwhile be dissolved, and before we had succeeded in establishing our

principles all the links of society might be broken. No, the more our

morality is subjected to chance, the more is it necessary to take

measures in order to assure its legality; to neglect, either from levity

or pride, this legality is a fault for which we shall have to answer

before morality. When a maniac believes himself threatened with a fit of

madness, he leaves no knife within reach of his hands, and he puts

himself under constraint, in order to avoid responsibility in a state of

sanity for the crimes which his troubled brain might lead him to commit.

In a similar manner it is an obligation for us to seek the salutary bonds

which religion and the aesthetic laws present to us, in order that during

the crisis when our passion is dominant it shall not injure the physical

order.

It is not unintentionally that I have placed religion and taste in one

and the same class; the reason is that both one and the other have the

merit, similar in effect, although dissimilar in principle and in value,

to take the place of virtue properly so called, and to assure legality

where there is no possibility to hope for morality. Doubtless that would

hold an incontestably higher rank in the order of pure spirits, as they

would need neither the attraction of the beautiful nor the perspective of

eternal life, to conform on every occasion to the demands of reason; but

we know man is short-sighted, and his feebleness forces the most rigid

moralist to temper in some degree the rigidity of his system in practice,

although he will yield nothing in theory; it obliges him, in order to

insure the welfare of the human race, which would be ill protected by a

virtue subjected to chance, to have further recourse to two strong

anchors--those of religion and taste.

ON THE SUBLIME.

"Man is never obliged to say, I must--must," says the Jew Nathan

[Lessing's play, "Nathan the Wise," act i. scene 3.] to the dervish; and

this expression is true in a wider sense than man might be tempted to

suppose. The will is the specific character of man, and reason itself is

only the eternal rule of his will. All nature acts reasonably; all our

prerogative is to act reasonably, with consciousness and with will. All

other objects obey necessity; man is the being who wills.

It is exactly for this reason that there is nothing more inconsistent

with the dignity of man than to suffer violence, for violence effaces

him. He who does violence to us disputes nothing less than our humanity;

he who submits in a cowardly spirit to the violence abdicates his quality

of man. But this pretension to remain absolutely free from all that is

violence seems to imply a being in possession of a force sufficiently

great to keep off all other forces. But if this pretension is found in a

being who, in the order of forces, cannot claim the first rank, the

result is an unfortunate contradiction between his instinct and his

power.

Man is precisely in this case. Surrounded by numberless forces, which

are all superior to him and hold sway over him, he aspires by his nature

not to have to suffer any injury at their hands. It is true that by his

intelligence he adds artificially to his natural forces, and that up to a

certain point he actually succeeds in reigning physically over everything

that is physical. The proverb says, "there is a remedy for everything

except death;" but this exception, if it is one in the strictest

acceptation of the term, would suffice to entirely ruin the very idea of

our nature. Never will man be the cause that wills, if there is a case,

a single case, in which, with or without his consent, he is forced to

what he does not wish. This single terrible exception, to be or to do

what is necessary and not what he wishes, this idea will pursue him as a

phantom; and as we see in fact among the greater part of men, it will

give him up a prey to the blind terrors of imagination. His boasted

liberty is nothing, if there is a single point where he is under

constraint and bound. It is education that must give back liberty to

man, and help him to complete the whole idea of his nature. It ought,

therefore, to make him capable of making his will prevail, for, I repeat

it, man is the being who wills.

It is possible to reach this end in two ways: either really, by opposing

force to force, by commanding nature, as nature yourself; or by the idea,

issuing from nature, and by thus destroying in relation to self the very

idea of violence. All that helps man really to hold sway over nature is

what is styled physical education. Man cultivates his understanding and

develops his physical force, either to convert the forces of nature,

according to their proper laws, into the instruments of his will, or to

secure himself against their effects when he cannot direct them. But the

forces of nature can only be directed or turned aside up to a certain

point; beyond that point they withdraw from the influence of man and

place him under theirs.

Thus beyond the point in question his freedom would be lost, were he only

susceptible of physical education. But he must be man in the full sense

of the term, and consequently he must have nothing to endure, in any

case, contrary to his will. Accordingly, when he can no longer oppose to

the physical forces any proportional physical force, only one resource

remains to him to avoid suffering any violence: that is, to cause to

cease entirely that relation which is so fatal to him. It is, in short,

to annihilate as an idea the violence he is obliged to suffer in fact.

The education that fits man for this is called moral education.

The man fashioned by moral education, and he only, is entirely free. He

is either superior to nature as a power, or he is in harmony with her.

None of the actions that she brings to bear upon him is violence, for

before reaching him it has become an act of his own will, and dynamic

nature could never touch him, because he spontaneously keeps away from

all to which she can reach. But to attain to this state of mind, which

morality designates as resignation to necessary things, and religion

styles absolute submission to the counsels of Providence, to reach this

by an effort of his free will and with reflection, a certain clearness is

required in thought, and a certain energy in the will, superior to what

man commonly possesses in active life. Happily for him, man finds here

not only in his rational nature a moral aptitude that can be developed by

the understanding, but also in his reasonable and sensible nature--that

is, in his human nature--an aesthetic tendency which seems to have been

placed there expressly: a faculty awakens of itself in the presence of

certain sensuous objects, and which, after our feelings are purified, can

be cultivated to such a point as to become a powerful ideal development.

This aptitude, I grant, is idealistic in its principle and in its

essence, but one which even the realist allows to be seen clearly enough

in his conduct, though he does not acknowledge this in theory. I am now

about to discuss this faculty.

I admit that the sense of the beautiful, when it is developed by culture,

suffices of itself even to make us, in a certain sense, independent of

nature as far as it is a force. A mind that has ennobled itself

sufficiently to be more sensible of the form than of the matter of

things, contains in itself a plenitude of existence that nothing could

make it lose, especially as it does not trouble itself about the

possession of the things in question, and finds a very liberal pleasure

in the mere contemplation of the phenomenon. As this mind has no want to

appropriate the objects in the midst of which it lives, it has no fear of

being deprived of them. But it is nevertheless necessary that these

phenomena should have a body, through which they manifest themselves;

and, consequently, as long as we feel the want even only of finding a

beautiful appearance or a beautiful phenomenon, this want implies that of

the existence of certain objects; and it follows that our satisfaction

still depends on nature, considered as a force, because it is nature who

disposes of all existence in a sovereign manner. It is a different

thing, in fact, to feel in yourself the want of objects endowed with

beauty and goodness, or simply to require that the objects which surround

us are good and beautiful. This last desire is compatible with the most

perfect freedom of the soul; but it is not so with the other. We are

entitled to require that the object before us should be beautiful and

good, but we can only wish that the beautiful and the good should be

realized objectively before us. Now the disposition of mind is, par

excellence, called grand and sublime, in which no attention is given to

the question of knowing if the beautiful, the good, and the perfect

exist; but when it is rigorously required that that which exists should

be good, beautiful and perfect, this character of mind is called sublime,

because it contains in it positively all the characteristics of a fine

mind without sharing its negative features. A sign by which beautiful

and good minds, but having weaknesses, are recognized, is the aspiring

always to find their moral ideal realized in the world of facts, and

their being painfully affected by all that places an obstacle to it. A

mind thus constituted is reduced to a sad state of dependence in relation

to chance, and it may always be predicted of it, without fear of

deception, that it will give too large a share to the matter in moral and

aesthetical things, and that it will not sustain the more critical trials

of character and taste. Moral imperfections ought not to be to us a

cause of suffering and of pain: suffering and pain bespeak rather an

ungratified wish than an unsatisfied moral want. An unsatisfied moral

want ought to be accompanied by a more manly feeling, and fortify our

mind and confirm it in its energy rather than make us unhappy and

pusillanimous.

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.

The moment [see Aeneid, ii. 216-217] had arrived when the hero himself

had to be recommended to our respect as a moral personage, and the poet

seized upon that moment. We already know by his description all the

force, all the rage of the two monsters who menace Laocoon, and we know

how all resistance would be in vain. If Laocoon were only a common man

he would better understand his own interests, and, like the rest of the

Trojans, he would find safety in rapid flight. But there is a heart in

that breast; the danger to his children holds him back, and decides him

to meet his fate. This trait alone renders him worthy of our pity. At

whatever moment the serpents had assailed him, we should have always been

touched and troubled. But because it happens just at the moment when as

father he shows himself so worthy of respect, his fate appears to us as

the result of having fulfilled his duty as parent, of his tender

disquietude for his children. It is this which calls forth our sympathy

in the highest degree. It appears, in fact, as if he deliberately

devoted himself to destruction, and his death becomes an act of the will.

Thus there are two conditions in every kind of the pathetic: 1st.

Suffering, to interest our sensuous nature; 2d. Moral liberty, to

interest our spiritual nature. All portraiture in which the expression

of suffering nature is wanting remains without aesthetic action, and our

heart is untouched. All portraiture in which the expression of moral

aptitude is wanting, even did it possess all the sensuous force possible,

could not attain to the pathetic, and would infallibly revolt our

feelings. Throughout moral liberty we require the human being who

suffers; throughout all the sufferings of human nature we always desire

to perceive the independent spirit, or the capacity for independence.

But the independence of the spiritual being in the state of suffering can

manifest itself in two ways. Either negatively, when the moral man does

not receive the law from the physical man, and his state exercises no

influence over his manner of feeling; or positively, when the moral man

is a ruler over the physical being, and his manner of feeling exercises

an influence upon his state. In the first case, it is the sublime of

disposition; in the second, it is the sublime of action.

The sublime of disposition is seen in all character independent of the

accidents of fate. "A noble heart struggling against adversity," says

Seneca, "is a spectacle full of attraction even for the gods." Such for

example is that which the Roman Senate offered after the disaster of

Cannae. Lucifer even, in Milton, when for the first time he contemplates

hell--which is to be his future abode--penetrates us with a sentiment of

admiration by the force of soul he displays:--

"Hail, horrors, hail.

Infernal world, and thou, profoundest Hell;

Receive thy new possessor!--one who brings

A mind not to be changed by place or time;

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell. . . .

Here at least

We shall be free," etc.

The reply of Medea in the tragedy belongs also to this order of the

sublime.

The sublime of disposition makes itself seen, it is visible to the

spectator, because it rests upon co-existence, the simultaneous; the

sublime action, on the contrary, is conceived only by the thought,

because the impression and the act are successive, and the intervention

of the mind is necessary to infer from a free determination the idea of

previous suffering.

It follows that the first alone can be expressed by the plastic arts,

because these arts give but that which is simultaneous; but the poet can

extend his domain over one and the other. Even more; when the plastic

art has to represent a sublime action, it must necessarily bring it back

to sublimity.

In order that the sublimity of action should take place, not only must

the suffering of man have no influence upon the moral constitution, but

rather the opposite must be the case. The affection is the work of his

moral character. This can happen in two ways: either mediately, or

according to the law of liberty, when out of respect for such and such a

duty it decides from free choice to suffer--in this case, the idea of

duty determines as a motive, and its suffering is a voluntary act--or

immediately, and according to the necessity of nature, when he expiates

by a moral suffering the violation of duty; in this second case, the idea

of duty determines him as a force, and his suffering is no longer an

effect. Regulus offers us an example of the first kind, when, to keep

his word, he gives himself up to the vengeance of the Carthaginians; and

he would serve as an example of the second class, if, having betrayed his

trust, the consciousness of this crime would have made him miserable. In

both cases suffering has a moral course, but with this difference, that

on the one part Regulus shows us its moral character, and that, on the

other, he only shows us that he was made to have such a character. In

the first case he is in our eyes a morally great person; in the second he

is only aesthetically great.

This last distinction is important for the tragic art; it consequently

deserves to be examined more closely.

Man is already a sublime object, but only in the aesthetic sense, when

the state in which he is gives us an idea of his human destination, even

though we might not find this destination realized in his person. He

only becomes sublime to us in a moral point of view, when he acts,

moreover, as a person, in a manner conformable with this destination; if

our respect bears not only on his moral faculty, but on the use he makes

of this faculty; if dignity, in his case, is due, not only to his moral

aptitude; but to the real morality of his conduct. It is quite a

different thing to direct our judgment and attention to the moral faculty

generally, and to the possibility of a will absolutely free, and to be

directing it to the use of this faculty, and to the reality of this

absolute freedom of willing.

It is, I repeat, quite a different thing; and this difference is

connected not only with the objects to which we may have to direct our

judgment, but to the very criterion of our judgment. The same object can

displease us if we appreciate it in a moral point of view, and be very

attractive to us in the aesthetical point of view. But even if the moral

judgment and the aesthetical judgment were both satisfied, this object

would produce this effect on one and the other in quite a different way.

It is not morally satisfactory because it has an aesthetical value, nor

has it an aesthetical value because it satisfies us morally. Let us

take, as example, Leonidas and his devotion at Thermopylae. Judged from

the moral point of view, this action represents to me the moral law

carried out notwithstanding all the repugnance of instinct. Judged from

the aesthetic point of view, it gives me the idea of the moral faculty,

independent of every constraint of instinct. The act of Leonidas

satisfies the moral sense, the reason; it enraptures the aesthetical

sense, the imagination.

Whence comes this difference in the feelings in connection with the same

object? I account for it thus:--

In the same way that our being consists of two principles and natures, so

also and consequently our feelings are divided into two kinds, entirely

different. As reasonable beings we experience a feeling of approbation

or of disapprobation; as sensuous creatures we experience pleasure or

displeasure. The two feelings, approbation and pleasure, repose on

satisfaction: one on a satisfaction given to a requirement of reason--

reason has only requirements, and not wants. The other depends on a

satisfaction given to a sensuous want--sense only knows of wants, and

cannot prescribe anything. These two terms--requirements of reason,

wants of the senses--are mutually related, as absolute necessity and the

necessity of nature. Accordingly, both are included in the idea of

necessity, but with this difference, that the necessity of reason is

unconditional, and the necessity of sense only takes place under

conditions. But, for both, satisfaction is a purely contingent thing.

Accordingly every feeling, whether of pleasure or approbation, rests

definitively on an agreement between the contingent and the necessary.

If the necessary has thus an imperative character, the feeling

experienced will be that of approbation. If necessity has the character

of a want, the feeling experienced will be that of pleasure, and both

will be strong in proportion as the satisfaction will be contingent.

Now, underlying every moral judgment there is a requirement of reason

which requires us to act conformably with the moral law, and it is an

absolute necessity that we should wish what is good. But as the will is

free, it is physically an accidental thing that we should do in fact what

is good. If we actually do it, this agreement between the contingent in

the use of free will and the imperative demand of reason gives rise to

our assent or approbation, which will be greater in proportion as the

resistance of the inclinations made this use that we make of our free

will more accidental and more doubtful. Every aesthetic judgment, on the

contrary, refers the object to the necessity which cannot help willing

imperatively, but only desires that there should be an agreement between

the accidental and its own interest. Now what is the interest of

imagination? It is to emancipate itself from all laws, and to play its

part freely. The obligation imposed on the will by the moral law, which

prescribes its object in the strictest manner, is by no means favorable

to this need of independence. And as the moral obligation of the will is

the object of the moral judgment, it is clear that in this mode of

judging, the imagination could not find its interest. But a moral

obligation imposed on the will cannot be conceived, except by supposing

this same will absolutely independent of the moral instincts and from

their constraint. Accordingly the possibility of the moral act requires

liberty, and therefore agrees here in the most perfect manner with the

interest of imagination. But as imagination, through the medium of its

wants, cannot give orders to the will of the individual, as reason does

by its imperative character, it follows that the faculty of freedom, in

relation to imagination, is something accidental, and consequently that

the agreement between the accidental and the necessary (conditionally

necessary) must excite pleasure. Therefore, if we bring to bear a moral

judgment on this act of Leonidas, we shall consider it from a point of

view where its accidental character strikes the eye less than its

necessary side. If, on the other hand, we apply the aesthetical judgment

to it, this is another point of view, where its character of necessity

strikes us less forcibly than its accidental character. It is a duty for

every will to act thus, directly it is a free will; but the fact that

there is a free will that makes this act possible is a favor of nature in

regard to this faculty, to which freedom is a necessity. Thus an act of

virtue judged by the moral sense--by reason--will give us as its only

satisfaction the feeling of approbation, because reason can never find

more, and seldom finds as much as it requires. This same act, judged, on

the contrary, by the aesthetic sense--by imagination--will give us a

positive pleasure, because the imagination, never requiring the end to

agree with the demand, must be surprised, enraptured, at the real

satisfaction of this demand as at a happy chance. Our reason will merely

approve, and only approve, of Leonidas actually taking this heroic

resolution; but that he could take this resolution is what delights and

enraptures us.

This distinction between the two sorts of judgments becomes more evident

still, if we take an example where the moral sense and the aesthetic

sense pronounce a different verdict. Suppose we take the act of

Perigrinus Proteus burning himself at Olympia. Judging this act morally,

I cannot give it my approbation, inasmuch as I see it determined by

impure motives, to which Proteus sacrifices the duty of respecting his

own existence. But in the aesthetic judgment this same act delights

me; it delights me precisely because it testifies to a power of will

capable of resisting even the most potent of instincts, that of

self-preservation. Was it a moral feeling, or only a more powerful

sensuous attraction, that silenced the instinct of self-preservation in

this enthusiast. It matters little, when I appreciate the act from an

aesthetic point of view. I then drop the individual, I take away the

relation of his will to the law that ought to govern him; I think of

human will in general, considered as a common faculty of the race, and I

regard it in connection with all the forces of nature. We have seen that

in a moral point of view, the preservation of our being seemed to us a

duty, and therefore we were offended at seeing Proteus violate this duty.

In an aesthetic point of view the self-preservation only appears as an

interest, and therefore the sacrifice of this interest pleases us. Thus

the operation that we perform in the judgments of the second kind is

precisely the inverse of that which we perform in those of the first. In

the former we oppose the individual, a sensuous and limited being, and

his personal will, which can be effected pathologically, to the absolute

law of the will in general, and of unconditional duty which binds every

spiritual being; in the second case, on the contrary, we oppose the

faculty of willing, absolute volition, and the spiritual force as an

infinite thing, to the solicitations of nature and the impediments of

sense. This is the reason why the aesthetical judgment leaves us free,

and delights and enraptures us. It is because the mere conception of

this faculty of willing in an absolute manner, the mere idea of this

moral aptitude, gives us in itself a consciousness of a manifest

advantage over the sensuous. It is because the mere possibility of

emancipating ourselves from the impediments of nature is in itself a

satisfaction that flatters our thirst for freedom. This is the reason

why moral judgment, on the contrary, makes us experience a feeling of

constraint that humbles us. It is because in connection with each

voluntary act we appreciate in this manner, we feel, as regards the

absolute law that ought to rule the will in general, in a position of

inferiority more or less decided, and because the constraint of the will

thus limited to a single determination, which duty requires of it at all

costs, contradicts the instinct of freedom which is the property of

imagination. In the former case we soared from the real to the possible,

and from the individual to the species; in the latter, on the contrary,

we descend from the possible to the real, and we shut up the species in

the narrow limits of the individual. We cannot therefore be surprised if

the aesthetical judgment enlarges the heart, while the moral judgment

constrains and straitens it.

It results, therefore, from all that which precedes, that the moral

judgment and the aesthetic, far from mutually corroborating each other,

impede and hinder each other, because they impress on the soul two

directions entirely opposite. In fact, this observance of rule which

reason requires of us as moral judge is incompatible with the

independence which the imagination calls for as aesthetic judge. It

follows that an object will have so much the less aesthetic value the

more it has the character of a moral object, and if the poet were obliged

notwithstanding that to choose it, he would do well in treating of it,

not to call the attention of our reason to the rule of the will, but that

of our imagination to the power of the will. In his own interest it is

necessary for the poet to enter on this path, for with our liberty his

empire finishes. We belong to him only inasmuch as we look beyond

ourselves; we escape from him the moment we re-enter into our innermost

selves, and that is what infallibly takes place the moment an object

ceases to be a phenomenon in our consideration, and takes the character

of a law which judges us.

Even in the manifestation of the most sublime virtue, the poet can only

employ for his own views that which in those acts belongs to force. As

to the direction of the force, he has no reason to be anxious. The poet,

even when he places before our eyes the most perfect models of morality,

has not, and ought not to have, any other end than that of rejoicing our

soul by the contemplation of this spectacle. Moreover, nothing can

rejoice our soul except that which improves our personality, and nothing

can give us a spiritual joy except that which elevates the spiritual

faculty. But in what way can the morality of another improve our own

personality, and raise our spiritual force? That this other one

accomplishes really his duty results from an accidental use which he

makes of his liberty, and which for that very reason can prove nothing to

us. We only have in common with him the faculty to conform ourselves

equally to duty; the moral power which he exhibits reminds us also of our

own, and that is why we then feel something which upraises our spiritual

force. Thus it is only the idea of the possibility of an absolutely free

will which makes the real exercise of this will in us charming to the

aesthetic feeling.

We shall be still more convinced when we think how little the poetic

force of impression which is awakened in us by an act or a moral

character is dependent on their historic reality. The pleasure which we

take in considering an ideal character will in no way be lessened when we

come to think that this character is nothing more than a poetic fiction;

for it is on the poetic truth, and not on historic truth, that every

aesthetic impression of the feelings rest. Moreover, poetic truth does

not consist in that this or that thing has effectually taken place, but

in that it may have happened, that is to say, that the thing is in itself

possible. Thus the aesthetic force is necessarily obliged to rest in the

first place in the idea of possibility.

Even in real subjects, for which the actors are borrowed from history, it

is not the reality of the simple possibility of the fact, but that which

is guaranteed to us by its very reality which constitutes the poetic

element. That these personages have indeed existed, and that these

events have in truth taken place, is a circumstance which can, it is

true, in many cases add to our pleasure, but that which it adds to it is

like a foreign addition, much rather unfavorable than advantageous to the

poetical impression.

It was long thought that a great service was rendered to German poetry by

recommending German poets to treat of national themes. Why, it was

asked, did Greek poetry have so much power over the mind? Because it

brought forward national events and immortalized domestic exploits. No

doubt the poetry of the ancients may have been indebted to this

circumstance for certain effects of which modern poetry cannot boast; but

do these effects belong to art and the poet? It is small glory for the

Greek genius if it had only this accidental advantage over modern genius;

still more if it were necessary for the poets, in order to gain this

advantage, to obtain it by this conformity of their invention with real

history! It is only a barbarous taste that requires this stimulant of a

national interest to be captivated by beautiful things; and it is only a

scribbler who borrows from matter a force to which he despairs of giving

a form.

Poetry ought not to take its course through the frigid region of memory;

it ought never to convert learning into its interpreter, nor private

interest its advocate with the popular mind. It ought to go straight to

the heart, because it has come from the heart; and aim at the man in the

citizen, not the citizen in the man.

Happily, true genius does not make much account of all these counsels

that people are so anxious to give her with better intentions than

competence. Otherwise, Sulzer and his school might have made German

poetry adopt a very equivocal style. It is no doubt a very honorable aim

in a poet to moralize the man, and excite the patriotism of the citizen,

and the Muses know better than any one how well the arts of the sublime

and of the beautiful are adapted to exercise this influence. But that

which poetry obtains excellently by indirect means it would accomplish

very badly as an immediate end. Poetry is not made to serve in man for

the accomplishment of a particular matter, nor could any instrument be

selected less fitted to cause a particular object to succeed, or to carry

out special projects and details. Poetry acts on the whole of human

nature, and it is only by its general influence on the character of a man

that it can influence particular acts. Poetry can be for man what love

is for the hero. It can neither counsel him, nor strike for him, nor do

anything for him in short; but it can form a hero in him, call him to

great deeds, and arm him with a strength to be all that he ought to be.

Thus the degree of aesthetical energy with which sublime feelings and

sublime acts take possession of our souls, does not rest at all on the

interest of reason, which requires every action to be really conformable

with the idea of good. But it rests on the interest of the imagination,

which requires conformity with good should be possible, or, in other

terms, that no feeling, however strong, should oppress the freedom of the

soul. Now this possibility is found in every act that testifies with

energy to liberty, and to the force of the will; and if the poet meets

with an action of this kind, it matters little where, he has a subject

suitable for his art. To him, and to the interest we have in him, it is

quite the same, to take his hero in one class of characters or in

another, among the good or the wicked, as it often requires as much

strength of character to do evil conscientiously and persistently as to

do good. If a proof be required that in our aesthetic judgments we

attend more to the force than to its direction, to its freedom than to

its lawfulness, this is sufficient for our evidence. We prefer to see

force and freedom manifest themselves at the cost of moral regularity,

rather than regularity at the cost of freedom and strength. For directly

one of those cases offers itself, in which the general law agrees with

the instincts which by their strength threaten to carry away the will,

the aesthetic value of the character is increased, if he be capable of

resisting these instincts. A vicious person begins to interest us as

soon as he must risk his happiness and life to carry out his perverse

designs; on the contrary, a virtuous person loses in proportion as he

finds it useful to be virtuous. Vengeance, for instance, is certainly an

ignoble and a vile affection, but this does not prevent it from becoming

aesthetical, if to satisfy it we must endure painful sacrifice. Medea

slaying her children aims at the heart of Jason, but at the same time she

strikes a heavy blow at her own heart, and her vengeance aesthetically

becomes sublime directly we see in her a tender mother.

In this sense the aesthetic judgment has more of truth than is ordinarily

believed. The vices which show a great force of will evidently announce

a greater aptitude for real moral liberty than do virtues which borrow

support from inclination; seeing that it only requires of the man who

persistently does evil to gain a single victory over himself, one simple

upset of his maxims, to gain ever after to the service of virtue his

whole plan of life, and all the force of will which he lavished on evil.

And why is it we receive with dislike medium characters, whilst we at

times follow with trembling admiration one which is altogether wicked?

It is evident, that with regard to the former, we renounce all hope, we

cannot even conceive the possibility of finding absolute liberty of the

will; whilst with the other, on the contrary, each time he displays his

faculties, we feel that one single act of the will would suffice to raise

him up to the fullest height of human dignity.

Thus, in the aesthetic judgment, that which excites our interest is not

morality itself, but liberty alone; and moral purity can only please our

imagination when it places in relief the forces of the will. It is then

manifestly to confound two very distinct orders of ideas, to require in

aesthetic things so exact a morality, and, in order to stretch the domain

of reason, to exclude the imagination from its own legitimate sphere.

Either it would be necessary to subject it entirely, then there would be

an end to all aesthetic effect; or it would share the realm of reason,

then morality would not gain much. For if we pretend to pursue at the

same time two different ends, there would be risk of missing both one and

the other. The liberty of the imagination would be fettered by too great

respect for the moral law; and violence would be done to the character of

necessity which is in the reason, in missing the liberty which belongs to

the imagination.

ON GRACE AND DIGNITY.

The Greek fable attributes to the goddess of beauty a wonderful girdle

which has the quality of lending grace and of gaining hearts in all who

wear it. This same divinity is accompanied by the Graces, or goddesses

of grace. From this we see that the Greeks distinguished from beauty

grace and the divinities styled the Graces, as they expressed the ideas

by proper attributes, separable from the goddess of beauty. All that is

graceful is beautiful, for the girdle of love winning attractions is the

property of the goddess of Cnidus; but all beauty is not of necessity

grace, for Venus, even without this girdle, does not cease to be what she

is.

However, according to this allegory, the goddess of beauty is the only

one who wears and who lends to others the girdle of attractions. Juno,

the powerful queen of Olympus, must begin by borrowing this girdle from

Venus, when she seeks to charm Jupiter on Mount Ida [Pope's "Iliad," Book

XIV. v. 220]. Thus greatness, even clothed with a certain degree of

beauty, which is by no means disputed in the spouse of Jupiter, is never

sure of pleasing without the grace, since the august queen of the gods,

to subdue the heart of her consort, expects the victory not from her own

charms but from the girdle of Venus.

But we see, moreover, that the goddess of beauty can part with this

girdle, and grant it, with its quality and effects, to a being less

endowed with beauty. Thus grace is not the exclusive privilege of the

beautiful; it can also be handed over, but only by beauty, to an object

less beautiful, or even to an object deprived of beauty.

If these same Greeks saw a man gifted in other respects with all the

advantages of mind, but lacking grace, they advised him to sacrifice to

the Graces. If, therefore, they conceived these deities as forming an

escort to the beauty of the other sex, they also thought that they would

be favorable to man, and that to please he absolutely required their

help.

But what then is grace, if it be true that it prefers to unite with

beauty, yet not in an exclusive manner? What is grace if it proceeds

from beauty, but yet produces the effects of beauty, even when beauty is

absent. What is it, if beauty can exist indeed without it, and yet has

no attraction except with it? The delicate feeling of the Greek people

had marked at an early date this distinction between grace and beauty,

whereof the reason was not then able to give an account; and, seeking the

means to express it, it borrowed images from the imagination, because the

understanding could not offer notions to this end. On this score, the

myth of the girdle deserves to fix the attention of the philosopher, who,

however, ought to be satisfied to seek ideas corresponding with these

pictures when the pure instinctive feeling throws out its discoveries,

or, in other words, with explaining the hieroglyphs of sensation. If we

strip off its allegorical veil from this conception of the Greeks, the

following appears the only meaning it admits.

Grace is a kind of movable beauty, I mean a beauty which does not belong

essentially to its subject, but which may be produced accidentally in it,

as it may also disappear from it. It is in this that grace is

distinguished from beauty properly so called, or fixed beauty, which is

necessarily inherent in the subject itself. Venus can no doubt take off

her girdle and give it up for the moment to Juno, but she could only give

up her beauty with her very person. Venus, without a girdle, is no

longer the charming Venus, without beauty she is no longer Venus.

But this girdle as a symbol of movable beauty has this particular

feature, that the person adorned with it not only appears more graceful,

but actually becomes so. The girdle communicates objectively this

property of grace, in this contrasting with other articles of dress,

which have only subjective effects, and without modifying the person

herself, only modify the impression produced on the imagination of

others. Such is the express meaning of the Greek myth; grace becomes the

property of the person who puts on this girdle; she does more than appear

amiable, it is so in fact.

No doubt it may be thought that a girdle, which after all is only an

outward, artificial ornament, does not prove a perfectly correct emblem

to express grace as a personal quality. But a personal quality that is

conceived at the same time as separable from the subject, could only be

represented to the senses by an accidental ornament which can be detached

from the person, without the essence of the latter being affected by it.

Thus the girdle of charms operates not by a natural effect (for then it

would not change anything in the person itself) but by a magical effect;

that is to say, its virtue extends beyond all natural conditions. By

this means, which is nothing more, I admit, than an expedient, it has

been attempted to avoid the contradiction to which the mind, as regards

its representative faculty, is unavoidably reduced, every time it asks an

expression from nature herself, for an object foreign to nature and which

belongs to the free field of the ideal. If this magic girdle is the

symbol of an objective property which can be separated from its subject

without modifying in any degree its nature, this myth can only express

one thing--the beauty of movement, because movement is the only

modification that can affect an object without changing its identity.

The beauty of movement is an idea that satisfies the two conditions

contained in the myth which now occupies us. In the first place, it is

an objective beauty, not entirely depending upon the impression that we

receive from the object, but belonging to the object itself. In the

second place, this beauty has in itself something accidental, and the

object remains identical even when we conceive it to be deprived of this

property. The girdle of attractions does not lose its magic virtue in

passing to an object of less beauty, or even to that which is without

beauty; that is to say, that a being less beautiful, or even one which is

not beautiful, may also lay claim to the beauty of movement. The myth

tells us that grace is something accidental in the subject in which we

suppose it to be. It follows that we can attribute this property only to

accidental movements. In an ideal of beauty the necessary movements must

be beautiful, because inasmuch as necessary they form an integral part of

its nature; the idea of Venus once given, the idea of this beauty of

necessary movements is that implicitly comprised in it; but it is not the

same with the beauty of accidental movements; this is an extension of the

former; there can be a grace in the voice, there is none in respiration.

But all this beauty in accidental movements--is it necessarily grace? It

is scarcely necessary to notice that the Greek fable attributes grace

exclusively to humanity. It goes still further, for even the beauty of

form it restricts within the limits of the human species, in which, as we

know, the Greeks included also their gods. But if grace is the exclusive

privilege of the human form, none of the movements which are common to

man with the rest of nature can evidently pretend to it. Thus, for

example, if it were admitted that the ringlets of hair on a beautiful

head undulate with grace, there would also be no reason to deny a grace

of movement to the branches of trees, to the waves of the stream, to the

ears of a field of corn, or to the limbs of animals. No, the goddess of

Cnidus represents exclusively the human species; therefore, as soon as

you see only a physical creature in man, a purely sensuous object, she is

no longer concerned with him. Thus, grace can only be met with in

voluntary movements, and then in those only which express some sentiment

of the moral order. Those which have as principle only animal

sensuousness belong only, however voluntary we may suppose them to be, to

physical nature, which never reaches of itself to grace. If it were

possible to have grace in the manifestations of the physical appetites

and instincts, grace would no longer be either capable or worthy to serve

as the expression of humanity. Yet it is humanity alone which to the

Greek contains all the idea of beauty and of perfection. He never

consents to see separated from the soul the purely sensuous part, and

such is with him that which might be called man's sensuous nature, which

it is equally impossible for him to isolate either from his lower nature

or from his intelligence. In the same way that no idea presents itself

to his mind without taking at once a visible form, and without his

endeavoring to give a bodily envelope even to his intellectual

conceptions, so he desires in man that all his instinctive acts should

express at the same time his moral destination. Never for the Greek is

nature purely physical nature, and for that reason he does not blush to

honor it; never for him is reason purely reason, and for that reason he

has not to tremble in submitting to its rule. The physical nature and

moral sentiments, matter and mind, earth and heaven, melt together with a

marvellous beauty in his poetry. Free activity, which is truly at home

only in Olympus, was introduced by him even into the domain of sense, and

it is a further reason for not attaching blame to him if reciprocally he

transported the affections of the sense into Olympus. Thus, this

delicate sense of the Greeks, which never suffered the material element

unless accompanied by the spiritual principle, recognizes in man no

voluntary movement belonging only to sense which did not at the same time

manifest the moral sentiment of the soul. It follows that for them grace

is one of the manifestations of the soul, revealed through beauty in

voluntary movements; therefore, wherever there is grace, it is the soul

which is the mobile, and it is in her that beauty of movement has its

principle. The mythological allegory thus expresses the thought, "Grace

is a beauty not given by nature, but produced by the subject itself."

Up to the present time I have confined myself to unfolding the idea of

grace from the Greek myth, and I hope I have not forced the sense: may I

now be permitted to try to what result a philosophical investigation on

this point will lead us, and to see if this subject, as so many others,

will confirm this truth, that the spirit of philosophy can hardly flatter

itself that it can discover anything which has not already been vaguely

perceived by sentiment and revealed in poetry?

Without her girdle, and without the Graces, Venus represents the ideal of

beauty, such as she could have come forth from the hands of nature, and

such as she is made without the intervention of mind endowed with

sentiment and by the virtue alone of plastic forces. It is not without

reason that the fable created a particular divinity to represent this

sort of beauty, because it suffices to see and to feel in order to

distinguish it very distinctly from the other, from that which derives

its origin from the influence of a mind endowed with sentiments.

This first beauty, thus formed by nature solely and in virtue of the laws

of necessity, I shall distinguish from that which is regulated upon

conditions of liberty, in calling it, if allowed, beauty of structure

(architectonic beauty). It is agreed, therefore, to designate under this

name that portion of human beauty which not only has as efficient

principle the forces and agents of physical nature (for we can say as

much for every phenomenon), but which also is determined, so far as it is

beauty solely, by the forces of this nature.

Well-proportioned limbs, rounded contours, an agreeable complexion,

delicacy of skin, an easy and graceful figure, a harmonious tone of

voice, etc., are advantages which are gifts of nature and fortune: of

nature, which predisposed to this, and developed it herself; of fortune,

which protects against all influence adverse to the work of nature.

Venus came forth perfect and complete from the foam of the sea. Why

perfect? because she is the finished and exactly determined work of

necessity, and on that account she is neither susceptible of variety nor

of progress. In other terms, as she is only a beautiful representation

of the various ends which nature had in view in forming man, and thence

each of her properties is perfectly determined by the idea that she

realizes; hence it follows that we can consider her as definitive and

determined (with regard to its connection with the first conception)

although this conception is subject, in its development, to the

conditions of time.

The architectonic beauty of the human form and its technical perfection

are two ideas, which we must take good care not to confound. By the

latter, the ensemble of particular ends must be understood, such as they

co-ordinate between themselves towards a general and higher end; by the

other, on the contrary, a character suited to the representation of these

ends, as far as these are revealed, under a visible form, to our faculty

of seeing and observing. When, then, we speak of beauty, we neither take

into consideration the justness of the aims of nature in themselves, nor

formally, the degree of adaptation to the principles of art which their

combination could offer. Our contemplative faculties hold to the manner

in which the object appears to them, without taking heed to its logical

constitution. Thus, although the architectonic beauty, in the structure

of man, be determined by the idea which has presided at this structure,

and by the ends that nature proposes for it, the aesthetic judgment,

making abstraction of these ends, considers this beauty in itself; and in

the idea which we form of it, nothing enters which does not immediately

and properly belong to the exterior appearance.

We are, then, not obliged to say that the dignity of man and of his

condition heightens the beauty of his structure. The idea we have of his

dignity may influence, it is true, the judgment that we form on the

beauty of his structure; but then this judgment ceases to be purely

aesthetic. Doubtless, the technical constitution of the human form is an

expression of its destiny, and, as such, it ought to excite our

admiration; but this technical constitution is represented to the

understanding and not to sense; it is a conception and not a phenomenon.

The architectonic beauty, on the contrary, could never be an expression

of the destiny of man, because it addresses itself to quite a different

faculty from that to which it belongs to pronounce upon his destiny.

If, then, man is, amongst all the technical forces created by nature,

that to whom more especially we attribute beauty, this is exact and true

only under one condition, which is, that at once and upon the simple

appearance he justifies this superiority, without the necessity, in order

to appreciate it, that we bring to mind his humanity. For, to recall

this, we must pass through a conception; and then it would no longer be

the sense, but the understanding, that would become the judge of beauty,

which would imply contradiction. Man, therefore, cannot put forward the

dignity of his moral destiny, nor give prominence to his superiority as

intelligence, to increase the price of his beauty. Man, here, is but a

being thrown like others into space--a phenomenon amongst other

phenomena. In the world of sense no account is made of the rank he holds

in the world of ideas; and if he desires in that to hold the first place,

he can only owe it to that in him which belongs to the physical order.

But his physical nature is determined, we know, by the idea of his

humanity; from which it follows that his architectonic beauty is so also

mediately. If, then he is distinguished by superior beauty from all

other creatures of the sensuous world, it is incontestable that he owes

this advantage to his destiny as man, because it is in it that the reason

is of the differences which in general separate him from the rest of the

sensuous world. But the beauty of the human form is not due to its being

the expression of this superior destiny, for if it were so, this form

would necessarily cease to be beautiful, from the moment it began to

express a less high destiny, and the contrary to this form would be

beautiful as soon as it could be admitted that it expresses this higher

destination. However, suppose that at the sight of a fine human face we

could completely forget that which it expresses, and put in its place,

without chancing anything of its outside, the savage instincts of the

tiger, the judgment of the eyesight would remain absolutely the same, and

the tiger would be for it the chef-d'oeuvre of the Creator.

The destiny of man as intelligence contributes, then, to the beauty of

his structure only so far as the form that represents this destiny, the

expression that makes it felt, satisfies at the same time the conditions

which are prescribed in the world of sense to the manifestations of the

beautiful; which signifies that beauty ought always to remain a pure

effect of physical nature, and that the rational conception which had

determined the technical utility of the human structure cannot confer

beauty, but simply be compatible with beauty.

It could be objected, it is true, that in general all which is manifested

by a sensuous representation is produced by the forces of nature, and

that consequently this character cannot be exclusively an indication of

the beautiful. Certainly, and without doubt, all technical creations are

the work of nature; but it is not by the fact of nature that they are

technical, or at least that they are so judged to be. They are technical

only through the understanding, and thus their technical perfection has

already its existence in the understanding, before passing into the world

of sense, and becoming a sensible phenomenon. Beauty, on the contrary,

has the peculiarity, that the sensuous world is not only its theatre, but

the first source from whence it derives its birth, and that it owes to

nature not only its expression, but also its creation. Beauty is

absolutely but a property of the world of sense; and the artist, who has

the beautiful in view, would not attain to it but inasmuch as he

entertains this illusion, that his work is the work of nature.

In order to appreciate the technical perfection of the human body, we

must bear in mind the ends to which it is appropriated; this being quite

unnecessary for the appreciation of its beauty. Here the senses require

no aid, and of themselves judge with full competence; however they would

not be competent judges of the beautiful, if the world of sense (the

senses have no other object) did not contain all the conditions of beauty

and was therefore competent to produce it. The beauty of man, it is

true, has for mediate reason the idea of his humanity, because all his

physical nature is founded on this idea; but the senses, we know, hold to

immediate phenomena, and for them it is exactly the same as if this

beauty were a simple effect of nature, perfectly independent.

From what we have said, up to the present time, it would appear that the

beautiful can offer absolutely no interest to the understanding, because

its principle belongs solely to the world of sense, and amongst all our

faculties of knowledge it addresses itself only to our senses. And in

fact, the moment that we sever from the idea of the beautiful, as a

foreign element, all that is mixed with the idea of technical perfection,

almost inevitably, in the judgment of beauty, it appears that nothing

remains to it by which it can become the object of an intellectual

pleasure. And nevertheless, it is quite as incontestable that the

beautiful pleases the understanding, as it is beyond doubt that the

beautiful rests upon no property of the object that could not be

discovered but by the understanding.

To solve this apparent contradiction, it must be remembered that the

phenomena can in two different ways pass to the state of objects of the

understanding and express ideas. It is not always necessary that the

understanding draws these ideas from phenomena; it can also put them into

them. In the two cases, the phenomena will be adequate to a rational

conception, with this simple difference, that, in the first case, the

understanding finds it objectively given, and to a certain extent only

receives it from the object because it is necessary that the idea should

be given to explain the nature and often even the possibility of the

object; whilst in the second case, on the contrary, it is the

understanding which of itself interprets, in a manner to make of it the

expression of its idea, that which the phenomenon offers us, without any

connection with this idea, and thus treats by a metaphysical process that

which in reality is purely physical. There, then, in the association of

the idea with the object there is an objective necessity; here, on the

contrary, a subjective necessity at the utmost. It is unnecessary to say

that, in my mind, the first of these two connections ought to be

understood of technical perfection, the second, of the beautiful.

As then in the second case it is a thing quite contingent for the

sensuous object that there should or should not be outside of it an

object which perceives it--an understanding that associates one of its

own ideas with it, consequently, the ensemble of these objective

properties ought to be considered as fully independent of this idea; we

have perfectly the right to reduce the beautiful, objectively, to the

simple conditions of physical nature, and to see nothing more in beauty

than effect belonging purely to the world of sense. But as, on the other

side, the understanding makes of this simple fact of the world of sense a

transcendent usage, and in lending it a higher signification inasmuch as

he marks it, as it were, with his image, we have equally the right to

transport the beautiful, subjectively, into the world of intelligence.

It is in this manner that beauty belongs at the same time to the two

worlds--to one by the right of birth, to the other by adoption; it takes

its being in the world of sense, it acquires the rights of citizenship in

the world of understanding. It is that which explains how it can be that

taste, as the faculty for appreciating the beautiful, holds at once the

spiritual element and that of sense; and that these two natures,

incompatible one with the other, approach in order to form in it a happy

union. It is this that explains how taste can conciliate respect for the

understanding with the material element, and with the rational principle

the favor and the sympathy of the senses, how it can ennoble the

perceptions of the senses so as to make ideas of them, and, in a certain

measure, transform the physical world itself into a domain of the ideal.

At all events, if it is accidental with regard to the object, that the

understanding associates, at the representation of this object, one of

its own ideas with it, it is not the less necessary for the subject which

represents it to attach to such a representation such an idea. This

idea, and the sensuous indication which corresponds to it in the object,

ought to be one with the other in such relation, that the understanding

be forced to this association by its own immutable laws; the

understanding then must have in itself the reason which leads it to

associate exclusively a certain phenomenon with a certain determined

idea, and, reciprocally, the object should have in itself the reason for

which it exclusively provokes that idea and not another. As to knowing

what the idea can be which the understanding carries into the beautiful,

and by what objective property the object gifted with beauty can be

capable of serving as symbol to this idea, is then a question much too

grave to be solved here in passing, and I reserve this examination for an

analytical theory of the beautiful.

The architectonic beauty of man is then, in the way I have explained it,

the visible expression of a rational conception, but it is so only in the

same sense and the same title as are in general all the beautiful

creations of nature. As to the degree, I agree that it surpasses all the

other beauties; but with regard to kind, it is upon the same rank as they

are, because it also manifests that which alone is perceptible of its

subject, and it is only when we represent it to ourselves that it

receives a super-sensuous value.

If the ends of creation are marked in man with more of success and of

beauty than in the organic beings, it is to some extent a favor which the

intelligence, inasmuch as it dictated the laws of the human structure,

has shown to nature charged to execute those laws. The intelligence, it

is true, pursues its end in the technique of man with a rigorous

necessity, but happily its exigencies meet and accord with the necessary

laws of nature so well, that one executes the order of the other whilst

acting according to its own inclination.

But this can only be true respecting the architectonic beauty of man,

where the necessary laws of physical nature are sustained by another

necessity, that of the teleological principle which determines them. It

is here only that the beautiful could be calculated by relation to the

technique of the structure, which can no longer take place when the

necessity is on one side alone, and the super-sensuous cause which

determines the phenomenon takes a contingent character. Thus, it is

nature alone who takes upon herself the architectonic beauty of man,

because here, from the first design, she had been charged once for all by

the creating intelligence with the execution of all that man needs in

order to arrive at the ends for which he is destined, and she has in

consequence no change to fear in this organic work which she

accomplishes.

But man is moreover a person--that is to say, a being whose different

states can have their cause in himself, and absolutely their last cause;

a being who can be modified by reason that he draws from himself. The

manner in which he appears in the world of sense depends upon the manner

in which he feels and wills, and, consequently, upon certain states which

are freely determined by himself, and not fatally by nature.

If man were only a physical creature, nature, at the same time that she

establishes the general laws of his being, would determine also the

various causes of application. But here she divides her empire with free

arbitration; and, although its laws are fixed, it is the mind that

pronounces upon particular cases.

The domain of mind extends as far as living nature goes, and it finishes

only at the point at which organic life loses itself in unformed matter,

at the point at which the animal forces cease to act. It is known that

all the motive forces in man are connected one with the other, and this

makes us understand how the mind, even considered as principle of

voluntary movement, can propagate its action through all organisms. It

is not only the instruments of the will, but the organs themselves upon

which the will does not immediately exercise its empire, that undergo,

indirectly at least, the influence of mind; the mind determines then, not

only designedly when it acts, but again, without design, when it feels.

From nature in herself (this result is clearly perceived from what

precedes) we must ask nothing but a fixed beauty, that of the phenomena

that she alone has determined according to the law of necessity. But

with free arbitration, chance (the accidental), interferes in the work of

nature, and the modifications that affect it thus under the empire of

free will are no longer, although all behave according to its own laws,

determined by these laws. From thence it is to the mind to decide the

use it will make of its instruments, and with regard to that part of

beauty which depends on this use, nature has nothing further to command,

nor, consequently, to incur any responsibility.

And thus man by reason that, making use of his liberty, he raises himself

into the sphere of pure intelligences, would find himself in danger of

sinking, inasmuch as he is a creature of sense, and of losing in the

judgment of taste that which he gains at the tribunal of reason. This

moral destiny, therefore, accomplished by the moral action of man, would

cost him a privilege which was assured to him by this same moral destiny

when only indicated in his structure; a purely sensuous privilege, it is

true, but one which receives, as we have seen, a signification and a

higher value from the understanding. No; nature is too much enamored

with harmony to be guilty of so gross a contradiction, and that which is

harmonious in the world of the understanding could not be rendered by a

discord in the world of sense.