What contributes among other things to make the sight of a beautiful
landscape so exceedingly delightful is the perfect _truth and consistency_
of nature. Certainly nature does not follow here the guidance of logic in
the connection of the grounds of knowledge, of antecedents and
consequences, premisses and conclusions; but still it follows what is for
it analogous to the law of causality in the visible connection of causes
and effects. Every modification, even the slightest, which an object
receives from its position, foreshortening, concealment, distance,
lighting, linear and atmospheric perspective, &c., is, through its effect
upon the eye, unerringly given and accurately taken account of: the Indian
proverb, “Every corn of rice casts its shadow,” finds here its
confirmation. Therefore here everything shows itself so consistent,
accurately regular, connected, and scrupulously right; here there are no
evasions. If now we consider the sight of a beautiful view, merely as a
brain‐phenomenon, it is the only one among the complicated brain‐phenomena
which is always absolutely regular, blameless, and perfect; all the rest,
especially our own mental operations, are, in form or material, affected
more or less with defects or inaccuracies. From this excellence of the
sight of beautiful nature, is the harmonious and thoroughly satisfying
character of its impression to be explained, and also the favourable
effect which it has upon our whole thought, which in its formal part
thereby becomes more correctly disposed, and to a certain extent purified,
for that brain‐phenomenon which alone is entirely faultless sets the brain
in general in perfectly normal action; and now the thought seeks to follow
that method of nature in the consistency, connectedness, regularity, and
harmony of all its processes, after being brought by it into the right
swing. A beautiful view is therefore a cathartic of the mind, as music,
according to Aristotle, is of the feeling, and in its presence one will
think most correctly.
That the sight of a mountain chain suddenly rising before us throws us so
easily into a serious, and even sublime mood may partly depend upon the
fact that the form of the mountains and the outline of the chain arising
from it is the only constantly _permanent_ line of the landscape, for the
mountains alone defy the decay which soon sweeps away everything else,
especially our own ephemeral person. Not that at the sight of the mountain
chain all this appeared distinctly in our consciousness, but an obscure
feeling of it is the fundamental note of our mood.
I would like to know why it is that while for the human form and
countenance light from above is altogether the most advantageous, and
light from below the most unfavourable, with regard to landscape nature
exactly the converse holds good.
Yet how æsthetic is nature! Every spot that is entirely uncultivated and
wild, _i.e._, left free to itself, however small it may be, if only the
hand of man remains absent, it decorates at once in the most tasteful
manner, clothes it with plants, flowers, and shrubs, whose unforced
nature, natural grace, and tasteful grouping bears witness that they have
not grown up under the rod of correction of the great egoist, but that
nature has here moved freely. Every neglected plant at once becomes
beautiful. Upon this rests the principle of the English garden, which is
as much as possible to conceal art, so that it may appear as if nature had
here moved freely; for only then is it perfectly beautiful, _i.e._, shows
in the greatest distinctness the objectification of the still unconscious
will to live, which here unfolds itself with the greatest naïveté, because
the forms are not, as in the animal world, determined by external ends,
but only immediately by the soil, climate, and a mysterious third
influence on account of which so many plants which have originally sprung
up in the same soil and climate yet show such different forms and
characters.
The great difference between the English, or more correctly the Chinese,
garden and the old French, which is now always becoming more rare, yet
still exists in a few magnificent examples, ultimately rests upon the fact
that the former is planned in an objective spirit, the latter in a
subjective. In the former the will of nature, as it objectifies itself in
tree and shrub, mountain and waterfall, is brought to the purest possible
expression of these its Ideas, thus of its own inner being. In the French
garden, on the other hand, only the will of the possessor of it is
mirrored, which has subdued nature so that instead of its Ideas it bears
as tokens of its slavery the forms which correspond to that will, and
which are forcibly imposed upon it—clipped hedges, trees cut into all
kinds of forms, straight alleys, arched avenues, &c.