has to plastic and pictorial art, and although it is to be rejected in the
latter, it is not only permissible, but very serviceable to the former.
For in plastic and pictorial art it leads away from what is perceptibly
given, the proper object of all art, to abstract thoughts; but in poetry
the relation is reversed; for here what is directly given in words is the
concept, and the first aim is to lead from this to the object of
perception, the representation of which must be undertaken by the
imagination of the hearer. If in plastic and pictorial art we are led from
what is immediately given to something else, this must always be a
conception, because here only the abstract cannot be given directly; but a
conception must never be the source, and its communication must never be
the end of a work of art. In poetry, on the contrary, the conception is
the material, the immediately given, and therefore we may very well leave
it, in order to call up perceptions which are quite different, and in
which the end is reached. Many a conception or abstract thought may be
quite indispensable to the connection of a poem, which is yet, in itself
and directly, quite incapable of being perceived; and then it is often
made perceptible by means of some example which is subsumed under it. This
takes place in every trope, every metaphor, simile, parable, and allegory,
all of which differ only in the length and completeness of their
expression. Therefore, in the arts which employ language as their medium,
similes and allegories are of striking effect. How beautifully Cervantes
says of sleep in order to express the fact that it frees us from all
spiritual and bodily suffering, “It is a mantle that covers all mankind.”
How beautifully Kleist expresses allegorically the thought that
philosophers and men of science enlighten mankind, in the line, “Those
whose midnight lamp lights the world.” How strongly and sensuously Homer
describes the harmful Ate when he says: “She has tender feet, for she
walks not on the hard earth, but treads on the heads of men” (Il. xix.
91.) How forcibly we are struck by Menenius Agrippa’s fable of the belly
and the limbs, addressed to the people of Rome when they seceded. How
beautifully Plato’s figure of the Cave, at the beginning of the seventh
book of the “Republic” to which we have already referred, expresses a very
abstract philosophical dogma. The fable of Persephone is also to be
regarded as a deeply significant allegory of philosophical tendency, for
she became subject to the nether world by tasting a pomegranate. This
becomes peculiarly enlightening from Goethe’s treatment of the fable, as
an episode in the _Triumph der Empfindsamkeit_, which is beyond all
praise. Three detailed allegorical works are known to me, one, open and
avowed, is the incomparable “Criticon” of Balthasar Gracian. It consists
of a great rich web of connected and highly ingenious allegories, that
serve here as the fair clothing of moral truths, to which he thus imparts
the most perceptible form, and astonishes us by the richness of his
invention. The two others are concealed allegories, “Don Quixote” and
“Gulliver’s Travels.” The first is an allegory of the life of every man,
who will not, like others, be careful, merely for his own welfare, but
follows some objective, ideal end, which has taken possession of his
thoughts and will; and certainly, in this world, he has then a strange
appearance. In the case of Gulliver we have only to take everything
physical as spiritual or intellectual, in order to see what the “satirical
rogue,” as Hamlet would call him, meant by it. Such, then, in the poetical
allegory, the conception is always the given, which it tries to make
perceptible by means of a picture; it may sometimes be expressed or
assisted by a painted picture. Such a picture will not be regarded as a
work of art, but only as a significant symbol, and it makes no claim to
pictorial, but only to poetical worth. Such is that beautiful allegorical
vignette of Lavater’s, which must be so heartening to every defender of
truth: a hand holding a light is stung by a wasp, while gnats are burning
themselves in the flame above; underneath is the motto:
“And although it singes the wings of the gnats,
Destroys their heads and all their little brains,
Light is still light;
And although I am stung by the angriest wasp,
I will not let it go.”
To this class also belongs the gravestone with the burnt-out, smoking
candle, and the inscription—
“When it is out, it becomes clear
Whether the candle was tallow or wax.”
Finally, of this kind is an old German genealogical tree, in which the
last representative of a very ancient family thus expresses his
determination to live his life to the end in abstinence and perfect
chastity, and therefore to let his race die out; he represents himself at
the root of the high-branching tree cutting it over himself with shears.
In general all those symbols referred to above, commonly called emblems,
which might also be defined as short painted fables with obvious morals,
belong to this class. Allegories of this kind are always to be regarded as
belonging to poetry, not to painting, and as justified thereby; moreover,
the pictorial execution is here always a matter of secondary importance,
and no more is demanded of it than that it shall represent the thing so
that we can recognise it. But in poetry, as in plastic art, the allegory
passes into the symbol if there is merely an arbitrary connection between
what it presented to perception and the abstract significance of it. For
as all symbolism rests, at bottom, on an agreement, the symbol has this
among other disadvantages, that in time its meaning is forgotten, and then
it is dumb. Who would guess why the fish is a symbol of Christianity if he
did not know? Only a Champollion; for it is entirely a phonetic
hieroglyphic. Therefore, as a poetical allegory, the Revelation of John
stands much in the same position as the reliefs with _Magnus Deus sol
Mithra_, which are still constantly being explained.
§ 51. If now, with the exposition which has been given of art in general,
we turn from plastic and pictorial art to poetry, we shall have no doubt
that its aim also is the revelation of the Ideas, the grades of the
objectification of will, and the communication of them to the hearer with
the distinctness and vividness with which the poetical sense comprehends
them. Ideas are essentially perceptible; if, therefore, in poetry only
abstract conceptions are directly communicated through words, it is yet
clearly the intention to make the hearer perceive the Ideas of life in the
representatives of these conceptions, and this can only take place through
the assistance of his own imagination. But in order to set the imagination
to work for the accomplishment of this end, the abstract conceptions,
which are the immediate material of poetry as of dry prose, must be so
arranged that their spheres intersect each other in such a way that none
of them can remain in its abstract universality; but, instead of it, a
perceptible representative appears to the imagination; and this is always
further modified by the words of the poet according to what his intention
may be. As the chemist obtains solid precipitates by combining perfectly
clear and transparent fluids; the poet understands how to precipitate, as
it were, the concrete, the individual, the perceptible idea, out of the
abstract and transparent universality of the concepts by the manner in
which he combines them. For the Idea can only be known by perception; and
knowledge of the Idea is the end of art. The skill of a master, in poetry
as in chemistry, enables us always to obtain the precise precipitate we
intended. This end is assisted by the numerous epithets in poetry, by
means of which the universality of every concept is narrowed more and more
till we reach the perceptible. Homer attaches to almost every substantive
an adjective, whose concept intersects and considerably diminishes the
sphere of the concept of the substantive, which is thus brought so much
the nearer to perception: for example—
“Εν δ᾽ επεσ᾽ Ωκεανῳ λαμπρον φαος ἡελιοιο,
Ἑλκον νυκτα μελαιναν επι ζειδωρον αρουραν.”
(“Occidit vero in Oceanum splendidum lumen solis,
Trahens noctem nigram super almam terram.”)
And—
“Where gentle winds from the blue heavens sigh,
There stand the myrtles still, the laurel high,”—
calls up before the imagination by means of a few concepts the whole
delight of a southern clime.
Rhythm and rhyme are quite peculiar aids to poetry. I can give no other
explanation of their incredibly powerful effect than that our faculties of
perception have received from time, to which they are essentially bound,
some quality on account of which we inwardly follow, and, as it were,
consent to each regularly recurring sound. In this way rhythm and rhyme
are partly a means of holding our attention, because we willingly follow
the poem read, and partly they produce in us a blind consent to what is
read prior to any judgment, and this gives the poem a certain emphatic
power of convincing independent of all reasons.
From the general nature of the material, that is, the concepts, which
poetry uses to communicate the Ideas, the extent of its province is very
great. The whole of nature, the Ideas of all grades, can be represented by
means of it, for it proceeds according to the Idea it has to impart, so
that its representations are sometimes descriptive, sometimes narrative,
and sometimes directly dramatic. If, in the representation of the lower
grades of the objectivity of will, plastic and pictorial art generally
surpass it, because lifeless nature, and even brute nature, reveals almost
its whole being in a single well-chosen moment; man, on the contrary, so
far as he does not express himself by the mere form and expression of his
person, but through a series of actions and the accompanying thoughts and
emotions, is the principal object of poetry, in which no other art can
compete with it, for here the progress or movement which cannot be
represented in plastic or pictorial art just suits its purpose.
The revelation of the Idea, which is the highest grade of the objectivity
of will, the representation of man in the connected series of his efforts
and actions, is thus the great problem of poetry. It is true that both
experience and history teach us to know man; yet oftener men than man,
_i.e._, they give us empirical notes of the behaviour of men to each
other, from which we may frame rules for our own conduct, oftener than
they afford us deep glimpses of the inner nature of man. The latter
function, however, is by no means entirely denied them; but as often as it
is the nature of mankind itself that discloses itself to us in history or
in our own experience, we have comprehended our experience, and the
historian has comprehended history, with artistic eyes, poetically,
_i.e._, according to the Idea, not the phenomenon, in its inner nature,
not in its relations. Our own experience is the indispensable condition of
understanding poetry as of understanding history; for it is, so to speak,
the dictionary of the language that both speak. But history is related to
poetry as portrait-painting is related to historical painting; the one
gives us the true in the individual, the other the true in the universal;
the one has the truth of the phenomenon, and can therefore verify it from
the phenomenal, the other has the truth of the Idea, which can be found in
no particular phenomenon, but yet speaks to us from them all. The poet
from deliberate choice represents significant characters in significant
situations; the historian takes both as they come. Indeed, he must regard
and select the circumstances and the persons, not with reference to their
inward and true significance, which expresses the Idea, but according to
the outward, apparent, and relatively important significance with regard
to the connection and the consequences. He must consider nothing in and
for itself in its essential character and expression, but must look at
everything in its relations, in its connection, in its influence upon what
follows, and especially upon its own age. Therefore he will not overlook
an action of a king, though of little significance, and in itself quite
common, because it has results and influence. And, on the other hand,
actions of the highest significance of particular and very eminent
individuals are not to be recorded by him if they have no consequences.
For his treatment follows the principle of sufficient reason, and
apprehends the phenomenon, of which this principle is the form. But the
poet comprehends the Idea, the inner nature of man apart from all
relations, outside all time, the adequate objectivity of the
thing-in-itself, at its highest grade. Even in that method of treatment
which is necessary for the historian, the inner nature and significance of
the phenomena, the kernel of all these shells, can never be entirely lost.
He who seeks for it, at any rate, may find it and recognise it. Yet that
which is significant in itself, not in its relations, the real unfolding
of the Idea, will be found far more accurately and distinctly in poetry
than in history, and, therefore, however paradoxical it may sound, far
more really genuine inner truth is to be attributed to poetry than to
history. For the historian must accurately follow the particular event
according to life, as it develops itself in time in the manifold tangled
chains of causes and effects. It is, however, impossible that he can have
all the data for this; he cannot have seen all and discovered all. He is
forsaken at every moment by the original of his picture, or a false one
substitutes itself for it, and this so constantly that I think I may
assume that in all history the false outweighs the true. The poet, on the
contrary, has comprehended the Idea of man from some definite side which
is to be represented; thus it is the nature of his own self that
objectifies itself in it for him. His knowledge, as we explained above
when speaking of sculpture, is half _a priori_; his ideal stands before
his mind firm, distinct, brightly illuminated, and cannot forsake him;
therefore he shows us, in the mirror of his mind, the Idea pure and
distinct, and his delineation of it down to the minutest particular is
true as life itself.(59) The great ancient historians are, therefore, in
those particulars in which their data fail them, for example, in the
speeches of their heroes—poets; indeed their whole manner of handling
their material approaches to the epic. But this gives their
representations unity, and enables them to retain inner truth, even when
outward truth was not accessible, or indeed was falsified. And as we
compared history to portrait-painting, in contradistinction to poetry,
which corresponds to historical painting, we find that Winckelmann’s
maxim, that the portrait ought to be the ideal of the individual, was
followed by the ancient historians, for they represent the individual in
such a way as to bring out that side of the Idea of man which is expressed
in it. Modern historians, on the contrary, with few exceptions, give us in
general only “a dust-bin and a lumber-room, and at the most a chronicle of
the principal political events.” Therefore, whoever desires to know man in
his inner nature, identical in all its phenomena and developments, to know
him according to the Idea, will find that the works of the great, immortal
poet present a far truer, more distinct picture, than the historians can
ever give. For even the best of the historians are, as poets, far from the
first; and moreover their hands are tied. In this aspect the relation
between the historian and the poet may be illustrated by the following
comparison. The mere, pure historian, who works only according to data, is
like a man, who without any knowledge of mathematics, has investigated the
relations of certain figures, which he has accidentally found, by
measuring them; and the problem thus empirically solved is affected of
course by all the errors of the drawn figure. The poet, on the other hand,
is like the mathematician, who constructs these relations _a priori_ in
pure perception, and expresses them not as they actually are in the drawn
figure, but as they are in the Idea, which the drawing is intended to
render for the senses. Therefore Schiller says:—
“What has never anywhere come to pass,
That alone never grows old.”
Indeed I must attribute greater value to biographies, and especially to
autobiographies, in relation to the knowledge of the nature of man, than
to history proper, at least as it is commonly handled. Partly because in
the former the data can be collected more accurately and completely than
in the latter; partly, because in history proper, it is not so much men as
nations and heroes that act, and the individuals who do appear, seem so
far off, surrounded with such pomp and circumstance, clothed in the stiff
robes of state, or heavy, inflexible armour, that it is really hard
through all this to recognise the human movements. On the other hand, the
life of the individual when described with truth, in a narrow sphere,
shows the conduct of men in all its forms and subtilties, the excellence,
the virtue, and even holiness of a few, the perversity, meanness, and
knavery of most, the dissolute profligacy of some. Besides, in the only
aspect we are considering here, that of the inner significance of the
phenomenal, it is quite the same whether the objects with which the action
is concerned, are, relatively considered, trifling or important,
farm-houses or kingdoms: for all these things in themselves are without
significance, and obtain it only in so far as the will is moved by them.
The motive has significance only through its relation to the will, while
the relation which it has as a thing to other things like itself, does not
concern us here. As a circle of one inch in diameter, and a circle of
forty million miles in diameter, have precisely the same geometrical
properties, so are the events and the history of a village and a kingdom
essentially the same; and we may study and learn to know mankind as well
in the one as in the other. It is also a mistake to suppose that
autobiographies are full of deceit and dissimulation. On the contrary,
lying (though always possible) is perhaps more difficult there than
elsewhere. Dissimulation is easiest in mere conversation; indeed, though
it may sound paradoxical, it is really more difficult even in a letter.
For in the case of a letter the writer is alone, and looks into himself,
and not out on the world, so that what is strange and distant does not
easily approach him; and he has not the test of the impression made upon
another before his eyes. But the receiver of the letter peruses it quietly
in a mood unknown to the writer, reads it repeatedly and at different
times, and thus easily finds out the concealed intention. We also get to
know an author as a man most easily from his books, because all these
circumstances act here still more strongly and permanently. And in an
autobiography it is so difficult to dissimulate, that perhaps there does
not exist a single one that is not, as a whole, more true, than any
history that ever was written. The man who writes his own life surveys it
as a whole, the particular becomes small, the near becomes distant, the
distant becomes near again, the motives that influenced him shrink; he
seats himself at the confessional, and has done so of his own free will;
the spirit of lying does not so easily take hold of him here, for there is
also in every man an inclination to truth which has first to be overcome
whenever he lies, and which here has taken up a specially strong position.
The relation between biography and the history of nations may be made
clear for perception by means of the following comparison: History shows
us mankind as a view from a high mountain shows us nature; we see much at
a time, wide stretches, great masses, but nothing is distinct nor
recognisable in all the details of its own peculiar nature. On the other
hand, the representation of the life of the individual shows us the man,
as we see nature if we go about among her trees, plants, rocks, and
waters. But in landscape-painting, in which the artist lets us look at
nature with his eyes, the knowledge of the Ideas, and the condition of
pure will-less knowing, which is demanded by these, is made much easier
for us; and, in the same way, poetry is far superior both to history and
biography, in the representation of the Ideas which may be looked for in
all three. For here also genius holds up to us the magic glass, in which
all that is essential and significant appears before us collected and
placed in the clearest light, and what is accidental and foreign is left
out.(60)
The representation of the Idea of man, which is the work of the poet, may
be performed, so that what is represented is also the representer. This is
the case in lyrical poetry, in songs, properly so called, in which the
poet only perceives vividly his own state and describes it. Thus a certain
subjectivity is essential to this kind of poetry from the nature of its
object. Again, what is to be represented may be entirely different from
him who represents it, as is the case in all other kinds of poetry, in
which the poet more or less conceals himself behind his representation,
and at last disappears altogether. In the ballad the poet still expresses
to some extent his own state through the tone and proportion of the whole;
therefore, though much more objective than the lyric, it has yet something
subjective. This becomes less in the idyll, still less in the romantic
poem, almost entirely disappears in the true epic, and even to the last
vestige in the drama, which is the most objective and, in more than one
respect, the completest and most difficult form of poetry. The lyrical
form of poetry is consequently the easiest, and although art, as a whole,
belongs only to the true man of genius, who so rarely appears, even a man
who is not in general very remarkable may produce a beautiful song if, by
actual strong excitement from without, some inspiration raises his mental
powers; for all that is required for this is a lively perception of his
own state at a moment of emotional excitement. This is proved by the
existence of many single songs by individuals who have otherwise remained
unknown; especially the German national songs, of which we have an
exquisite collection in the “Wunderhorn;” and also by innumerable
love-songs and other songs of the people in all languages;—for to seize
the mood of a moment and embody it in a song is the whole achievement of
this kind of poetry. Yet in the lyrics of true poets the inner nature of
all mankind is reflected, and all that millions of past, present, and
future men have found, or will find, in the same situations, which are
constantly recurring, finds its exact expression in them. And because
these situations, by constant recurrence, are permanent as man himself and
always call up the same sensations, the lyrical productions of genuine
poets remain through thousands of years true, powerful, and fresh. But if
the poet is always the universal man, then all that has ever moved a human
heart, all that human nature in any situation has ever produced from
itself, all that dwells and broods in any human breast—is his theme and
his material, and also all the rest of nature. Therefore the poet may just
as well sing of voluptuousness as of mysticism, be Anacreon or Angelus
Silesius, write tragedies or comedies, represent the sublime or the common
mind—according to humour or vocation. And no one has the right to
prescribe to the poet what he ought to be—noble and sublime, moral, pious,
Christian, one thing or another, still less to reproach him because he is
one thing and not another. He is the mirror of mankind, and brings to its
consciousness what it feels and does.