By your permission I lay before you, in a series of letters, the
results of my researches upon beauty and art. I am keenly sensible
of the importance as well as of the charm and dignity of this
undertaking. I shall treat a subject which is closely connected with
the better portion of our happiness and not far removed from the
moral nobility of human nature. I shall plead this cause of the
Beautiful before a heart by which her whole power is felt and
exercised, and which will take upon itself the most difficult part
of my task in an investigation where one is compelled to appeal as
frequently to feelings as to principles.
That which I would beg of you as a favour, you generously impose
upon me as a duty; and, when I solely consult my inclination, you
impute to me a service. The liberty of action you prescribe is
rather a necessity for me than a constraint little exercised in
formal rules, I shall scarcely incur the risk of sinning against
good taste by any undue use of them; my ideas, drawn rather from
within than from reading or from an intimate experience with the
world, will not disown their origin; they would rather incur any
reproach than that of a sectarian bias, and would prefer to succumb
by their innate feebleness than sustain themselves by borrowed
authority and foreign support.
In truth, I will not keep back from you that the assertions which
follow rest chiefly upon Kantian principles; but if in the course of
these researches you should be reminded of any special school of
philosophy, ascribe it to my incapacity, not to those principles.
No; your liberty of mind shall be sacred to me; and the facts upon
which I build will be furnished by your own sentiments; your own
unfettered thought will dictate the laws according to which we to
proceed.
With regard to the ideas which predominate in the practical part of
Kant's system, philosophers only disagree, whilst mankind, I am
confident of proving, have never done so. If stripped of their
technical shape, they will appear as the verdict of reason
pronounced from time immemorial by common consent, and as facts of
the moral instinct which nature, in her wisdom, has given to man in
order to serve as guide and teacher until his enlightened
intelligence gives him maturity. But this very technical shape which
renders truth visible to the understanding conceals it from the
feelings; for, unhappily, understanding begins by destroying the
object of the inner sense before it can appropriate the object. Like
the chemist, the philosopher finds synthesis only by analysis, or
the spontaneous work of nature only through the torture of art.
Thus, in order to detain the fleeting apparition, he must enchain it
in the fetters of rule, dissect its fair proportions into abstract
notions, and preserve its living spirit in a fleshless skeleton of
words. Is it surprising that natural feeling should not recognise
itself in such a copy, and if in the report of the analyst the truth
appears as paradox?
Permit me therefore to crave your indulgence if the following
researches should remove their object from the sphere of sense while
endeavouring to draw it towards the understanding. That which I
before said of moral experience can be applied with greater truth to
the manifestation of "the beautiful." It is the mystery which
enchants, and its being is extinguished with the extinction of the
necessary combination of its elements.