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Part VI.
Part VI.
Letter XXVII.
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 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 dwellings, 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 phaenomenon; 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, an 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 this 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, in 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.
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