Do not fear for reality and truth. Even if the elevated idea of
aesthetic appearance became 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 afterwards 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 ardour, 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 hindrance. 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 recognise the instinct of
play in its first trials, seeing that the sensuous impulsion, with
its capricious humour 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 measure 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 honour, the conqueror's sword
spares the disarmed enemy, and a hospitable hearth smokes for the
stranger on the dreaded hill-side 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 simply possible 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 generalise our individual
pleasures, because we cannot generalise our individuality. We enjoy
the pleasures of knowledge as a race, dropping the Individual in our
judgment; but we cannot generalise 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 realised, 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 harmonised 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.