Aesthetical Essays of Friedrich Schiller
those points essential that nature has made secondary. While nature
suffers violence in the organic world, or exercises violence, working
with power upon man, though she can only be aesthetical as an object of
pure contemplation, art, plastic art, is fully free, because it throws
off all accidental restrictions and leaves the mind free, because it
imitates the appearance, not the reality of objects. As all sublimity
and beauty consists in the appearance, and not in the value of the object,
it follows that art has all the advantages of nature without her shackles.
THE PATHETIC.
The depicting of suffering, in the shape of simple suffering, is never
the end of art, but it is of the greatest importance as a means of
attaining its end. The highest aim of art is to represent the
super-sensuous, and this is effected in particular by tragic art,
because it represents by sensible marks the moral man, maintaining
himself in a state of passion, independently of the laws of nature.
The principle of freedom in man becomes conscious of itself only by
the resistance it offers to the violence of the feelings. Now the
resistance can only be measured by the strength of the attack. In
order, therefore, that the intelligence may reveal itself in man as a
force independent of nature, it is necessary that nature should have
first displayed all her power before our eyes. The sensuous being must
be profoundly and strongly affected, passion must be in play, that the
reasonable being may be able to testify his independence and manifest
himself in action.
It is impossible to know if the empire which man has over his affections
is the effect of a moral force, till we have acquired the certainty that
it is not an effect of insensibility. There is no merit in mastering the
feelings which only lightly and transitorily skim over the surface of the
soul. But to resist a tempest which stirs up the whole of sensuous
nature, and to preserve in it the freedom of the soul, a faculty of
resistance is required infinitely superior to the act of natural force.
Accordingly it will not be possible to represent moral freedom, except by
expressing passion, or suffering nature, with the greatest vividness; and
the hero of tragedy must first have justified his claim to be a sensuous
being before aspiring to our homage as a reasonable being, and making us
believe in his strength of mind.
Therefore the pathetic is the first condition required most strictly in a
tragic author, and he is allowed to carry his description of suffering as
far as possible, without prejudice to the highest end of his art, that
is, without moral freedom being oppressed by it. He must give in some
sort to his hero, as to his reader, their full load of suffering, without
which the question will always be put whether the resistance opposed to
suffering is an act of the soul, something positive, or whether it is not
rather a purely negative thing, a simple deficiency.
The latter case is offered in the purer French tragedy, where it is very
rare, or perhaps unexampled, for the author to place before the reader
suffering nature, and where generally, on the contrary, it is only the
poet who warms up and declaims, or the comedian who struts about on
stilts. The icy tone of declamation extinguishes all nature here, and
the French tragedians, with their superstitious worship of decorum, make
it quite impossible for them to paint human nature truly. Decorum,
wherever it is, even in its proper place, always falsifies the expression
of nature, and yet this expression is rigorously required by art. In a
French tragedy, it is difficult for us to believe that the hero ever
suffers, for he explains the state of his soul, as the coolest man would
do, and always thinking of the effect he is making on others, he never
lets nature pour forth freely. The kings, the princesses, and the heroes
of Corneille or Voltaire never forget their rank even in the most violent
excess of passion; and they part with their humanity much sooner than
with their dignity. They are like those kings and emperors of our old
picture-books, who go to bed with their crowns on.
What a difference from the Greeks and those of the moderns who have been
inspired with their spirit in poetry! Never does the Greek poet blush at
nature; he leaves to the sensuous all its rights, and yet he is quite
certain never to be subdued by it. He has too much depth and too much
rectitude in his mind not to distinguish the accidental, which is the
principal point with false taste, from the really necessary; but all that
is not humanity itself is accidental in man. The Greek artist who has to
represent a Laocoon, a Niobe, and a Philoctetes, does not care for the
king, the princess, or the king's son; he keeps to the man. Accordingly
the skilful statuary sets aside the drapery, and shows us nude figures,
though he knows quite well it is not so in real life. This is because
drapery is to him an accidental thing, and because the necessary ought
never to be sacrificed to the accidental. It is also because, if decency
and physical necessities have their laws, these laws are not those of
art. The statuary ought to show us, and wishes to show us, the man
himself; drapery conceals him, therefore he sets that aside, and with
reason.
The Greek sculptor rejects drapery as a useless and embarrassing load, to
make way for human nature; and in like manner the Greek poet emancipates
the human personages he brings forward from the equally useless
constraint of decorum, and all those icy laws of propriety, which put
nothing but what is artificial in man, and conceal nature in it. Take
Homer and the tragedians; suffering nature speaks the language of truth
and ingenuousness in their pages, and in a way to penetrate to the depths
of our hearts. All the passions play their part freely, nor do the rules
of propriety compress any feeling with the Greeks. The heroes are just
as much under the influence of suffering as other men, and what makes
them heroes is the very fact that they feel suffering strongly and
deeply, without suffering overcoming them. They love life as ardently as
others; but they are not so ruled by this feeling as to be unable to give
up life when the duties of honor or humanity call on them to do so.
Philoctetes filled the Greek stage with his lamentations; Hercules
himself, when in fury, does not keep under his grief. Iphigenia, on the
point of being sacrificed, confesses with a touching ingenuousness that
she grieves to part with the light of the sun. Never does the Greek
place his glory in being insensible or indifferent to suffering, but
rather in supporting it, though feeling it in its fulness. The very gods
of the Greeks must pay their tribute to nature, when the poet wishes to
make them approximate to humanity. Mars, when wounded, roars like ten
thousand men together, and Venus, scratched by an iron lance, mounts
again to Olympus, weeping, and cursing all battles.
This lively susceptibility on the score of suffering, this warm,
ingenuous nature, showing itself uncovered and in all truth in the
monuments of Greek art, and filling us with such deep and lively
emotions--this is a model presented for the imitation of all artists; it
is a law which Greek genius has laid down for the fine arts. It is
always and eternally nature which has the first rights over man; she
ought never to be fettered, because man, before being anything else, is a
sensuous creature. After the rights of nature come those of reason,
because man is a rational, sensuous being, a moral person, and because it
is a duty for this person not to let himself be ruled by nature, but to
rule her. It is only after satisfaction has been given in the first
place to nature, and after reason in the second place has made its rights
acknowledged, that it is permitted for decorum in the third place to make
good its claims, to impose on man, in the expression of his moral
feelings and of his sensations, considerations towards society, and to
show in it the social being, the civilized man. The first law of the
tragic art was to represent suffering nature. The second law is to
represent the resistance of morality opposed to suffering.
Affection, as affection, is an unimportant thing; and the portraiture of
affection, considered in itself, would be without any aesthetic value;
for, I repeat it, nothing that only interests sensuous nature is worthy
of being represented by art. Thus not only the affections that do
nothing but enervate and soften man, but in general all affections, even
those that are exalted, ecstatic, whatever may be their nature, are
beneath the dignity of tragic art.
The soft emotions, only producing tenderness, are of the nature of the
agreeable, with which the fine arts are not concerned. They only caress
the senses, while relaxing and creating languidness, and only relate to
external nature, not at all to the inner nature of man. A good number of
our romances and of our tragedies, particularly those that bear the name
of dramas--a sort of compromise between tragedy and comedy--a good number
also of those highly-appreciated family portraits, belong to this class.
The only effect of these works is to empty the lachrymal duct, and soothe
the overflowing feelings; but the mind comes back from them empty, and
the moral being, the noblest part of our nature, gathers no new strength
whatever from them. "It is thus," says Kant, "that many persons feel
themselves edified by a sermon that has nothing edifying in it." It
seems also that modern music only aims at interesting the sensuous, and
in this it flatters the taste of the day, which seeks to be agreeably
tickled, but not to be startled, nor strongly moved and elevated.
Accordingly we see music prefer all that is tender; and whatever be the
noise in a concert-room, silence is immediately restored, and every one
is all ears directly a sentimental passage is performed. Then an
expression of sensibility common to animalism shows itself commonly on
all faces; the eyes are swimming with intoxication, the open mouth is all
desire, a voluptuous trembling takes hold of the entire body, the breath
is quick and full, in short, all the symptoms of intoxication appear.
This is an evident proof that the senses swim in delight, but that the
mind or the principle of freedom in man has become a prey to the violence
of the sensuous impression. Real taste, that of noble and manly minds,
rejects all these emotions as unworthy of art, because they only please
the senses, with which art has nothing in common.
But, on the other hand, real taste excludes all extreme affections, which
only put sensuousness to the torture, without giving the mind any
compensation. These affections oppress moral liberty by pain, as the
others by voluptuousness; consequently they can excite aversion, and not
the emotion that would alone be worthy of art. Art ought to charm the
mind and give satisfaction to the feeling of moral freedom. This man who
is a prey to his pain is to me simply a tortured animate being, and not a
man tried by suffering. For a moral resistance to painful affections is
already required of man--a resistance which can alone allow the principle
of moral freedom, the intelligence, to make itself known in it.
If it is so, the poets and the artists are poor adepts in their art when
they seek to reach the pathetic only by the sensuous force of affection
and by representing suffering in the most vivid manner. They forget that
suffering in itself can never be the last end of imitation, nor the
immediate source of the pleasure we experience in tragedy. The pathetic
only has aesthetic value in as far as it is sublime. Now, effects that
only allow us to infer a purely sensuous cause, and that are founded only