Aesthetical Essays of Friedrich Schiller
have simplicity in their character. Among the ancients I need only name
Julius Caesar and Epaminondas; among the moderns Henry IV. in France,
Gustavus Adolphus in Sweden, and the Czar Peter the Great. The Duke of
Marlborough, Turenne, and Vendome all present this character. With
regard to the other sex, nature proposes to it simplicity of character as
the supreme perfection to which it should reach. Accordingly, the love
of pleasing in women strives after nothing so much as the appearance of
simplicity; a sufficient proof, if it were the only one, that the
greatest power of the sex reposes in this quality. But, as the
principles that prevail in the education of women are perpetually
struggling with this character, it is as difficult for them in the moral
order to reconcile this magnificent gift of nature with the advantages of
a good education as it is difficult for men to preserve them unchanged in
the intellectual order: and the woman who knows how to join a knowledge
of the world to this sort of simplicity in manners is as deserving of
respect as a scholar who joins to the strictness of scholastic rules the
freedom and originality of thought.
Simplicity in our mode of thinking brings with it of necessity simplicity
in our mode of expression, simplicity in terms as well as movement; and
it is in this that grace especially consists. Genius expresses its most
sublime and its deepest thoughts with this simple grace; they are the
divine oracles that issue from the lips of a child; while the scholastic
spirit, always anxious to avoid error, tortures all its words, all its
ideas, and makes them pass through the crucible of grammar and logic,
hard and rigid, in order to keep from vagueness, and uses few words in
order not to say too much, enervates and blunts thought in order not to
wound the reader who is not on his guard--genius gives to its expression,
with a single and happy stroke of the brush, a precise, firm, and yet
perfectly free form. In the case of grammar and logic, the sign and the
thing signified are always heterogenous and strangers to each other: with
genius, on the contrary, the expression gushes forth spontaneously from
the idea, the language and the thought are one and the same; so that even
though the expression thus gives it a body the spirit appears as if
disclosed in a nude state. This fashion of expression, when the sign
disappears entirely in the thing signified, when the tongue, so to speak,
leaves the thought it translates naked, whilst the other mode of
expression cannot represent thought without veiling it at the same time:
this is what is called originality and inspiration in style.
This freedom, this natural mode by which genius expresses itself in works
of intellect, is also the expression of the innocence of heart in the
intercourse of life. Every one knows that in the world men have departed
from simplicity, from the rigorous veracity of language, in the same
proportion as they have lost the simplicity of feelings. The guilty
conscience easily wounded, the imagination easily seduced, made an
anxious decency necessary. Without telling what is false, people often
speak differently from what they think; we are obliged to make
circumlocutions to say certain things, which however, can never afflict
any but a sickly self-love, and that have no danger except for a depraved
imagination. The ignorance of these laws of propriety (conventional
laws), coupled with a natural sincerity which despises all kinds of bias
and all appearance of falsity (sincerity I mean, not coarseness, for
coarseness dispenses with forms because it is hampered), gives rise in
the intercourse of life to a simplicity of expression that consists in
naming things by their proper name without circumlocution. This is done
because we do not venture to designate them as they are, or only to do so
by artificial means. The ordinary expressions of children are of this
kind. They make us smile because they are in opposition to received
manners; but men would always agree in the bottom of their hearts that
the child is right.
It is true that simplicity of feeling cannot properly be attributed to
the child any more than to the man,--that is, to a being not absolutely
subject to nature, though there is still no simplicity, except on the
condition that it is pure nature that acts through him. But by an effort
of the imagination, which likes to poetise things, we often carry over
these attributes of a rational being to beings destitute of reason. It
is thus that, on seeing an animal, a landscape, a building, and nature in
general, from opposition to what is arbitrary and fantastic in the
conceptions of man, we often attribute to them a simple character. But
that implies always that in our thought we attribute a will to these
things that have none, and that we are struck to see it directed
rigorously according to the laws of necessity. Discontented as we are
that we have ill employed our own moral freedom, and that we no longer
find moral harmony in our conduct, we are easily led to a certain
disposition of mind, in which we willingly address ourselves to a being
destitute of reason, as if it were a person. And we readily view it as
if it had really had to struggle against the temptation of acting
otherwise, and proceed to make a merit of its eternal uniformity, and to
envy its peaceable constancy. We are quite disposed to consider in those
moments reason, this prerogative of the human race, as a pernicious gift
and as an evil; we feel so vividly all that is imperfect in our conduct
that we forget to be just to our destiny and to our aptitudes.
We see, then, in nature, destitute of reason, only a sister who, more
fortunate than ourselves, has remained under the maternal roof, while in
the intoxication of our freedom we have fled from it to throw ourselves
into a stranger world. We regret this place of safety, we earnestly long
to come back to it as soon as we have begun to feel the bitter side of
civilization, and in the totally artificial life in which we are exiled
we hear in deep emotion the voice of our mother. While we were still
only children of nature we were happy, we were perfect: we have become
free, and we have lost both advantages. Hence a twofold and very unequal
longing for nature: the longing for happiness and the longing for the
perfection that prevails there. Man, as a sensuous being, deplores
sensibly the loss of the former of these goods; it is only the moral man
who can be afflicted at the loss of the other.
Therefore, let the man with a sensible heart and a loving nature question
himself closely. Is it your indolence that longs for its repose, or your
wounded moral sense that longs for its harmony? Ask yourself well, when,
disgusted with the artifices, offended by the abuses that you discover in
social life, you feel yourself attracted towards inanimate nature, in the
midst of solitude ask yourself what impels you to fly the world. Is it
the privation from which you suffer, its loads, its troubles? or is it
the moral anarchy, the caprice, the disorder that prevail there? Your
heart ought to plunge into these troubles with joy, and to find in them
the compensation in the liberty of which they are the consequence. You
can, I admit, propose as your aim, in a distant future, the calm and the
happiness of nature; but only that sort of happiness which is the reward
of your dignity. Thus, then, let there be no more complaint about the
loads of life, the inequality of conditions, or the hampering of social
relations, or the uncertainty of possession, ingratitude, oppression, and
persecution. You must submit to all these evils of civilization with a
free resignation; it is the natural condition of good, par excellence, of
the only good, and you ought to respect it under this head. In all these
evils you ought only to deplore what is morally evil in them, and you
must do so not with cowardly tears only. Rather watch to remain pure
yourself in the midst of these impurities, free amidst this slavery,
constant with yourself in the midst of these capricious changes, a
faithful observer of the law amidst this anarchy. Be not frightened at
the disorder that is without you, but at the disorder which is within;
aspire after unity, but seek it not in uniformity; aspire after repose,
but through equilibrium, and not by suspending the action of your
faculties. This nature which you envy in the being destitute of reason
deserves no esteem: it is not worth a wish. You have passed beyond it;
it ought to remain for ever behind you. The ladder that carried you
having given way under your foot, the only thing for you to do is to
seize again on the moral law freely, with a free consciousness, a free
will, or else to roll down, hopeless of safety, into a bottomless abyss.
But when you have consoled yourself for having lost the happiness of
nature, let its perfection be a model to your heart. If you can issue
from the circle in which art keeps you enclosed and find nature again, if
it shows itself to you in its greatness and in its calm, in its simple
beauty, in its childlike innocence and simplicity, oh! then pause before
its image, cultivate this feeling lovingly. It is worthy of you, and of
what is noblest in man. Let it no more come into your mind to change
with it; rather embrace it, absorb it into your being, and try to
associate the infinite advantage it has over you with that infinite
prerogative that is peculiar to you, and let the divine issue from this
sublime union. Let nature breathe around you like a lovely idyl, where
far from artifice and its wanderings you may always find yourself again,
where you may go to draw fresh courage, a new confidence, to resume your
course, and kindle again in your heart the flame of the ideal, so readily
extinguished amidst the tempests of life.
If we think of that beautiful nature which surrounded the ancient Greeks,
if we remember how intimately that people, under its blessed sky, could
live with that free nature; how their mode of imagining, and of feeling,
and their manners, approached far nearer than ours to the simplicity of
nature, how faithfully the works of their poets express this; we must
necessarily remark, as a strange fact, that so few traces are met among
them of that sentimental interest that we moderns ever take in the scenes
of nature and in natural characters. I admit that the Greeks are
superiorly exact and faithful in their descriptions of nature. They
reproduce their details with care, but we see that they take no more
interest in them and more heart in them than in describing a vestment, a
shield, armor, a piece of furniture, or any production of the mechanical
arts. In their love for the object it seems that they make no difference
between what exists in itself and what owes its existence to art, to the
human will. It seems that nature interests their minds and their
curiosity more than moral feeling. They do not attach themselves to it
with that depth of feeling, with that gentle melancholy, that
characterize the moderns. Nay, more, by personifying nature in its
particular phenomena, by deifying it, by representing its effects as the
acts of free being, they take from it that character of calm necessity
which is precisely what makes it so attractive to us. Their impatient
imagination only traverses nature to pass beyond it to the drama of human
life. It only takes pleasure in the spectacle of what is living and
free; it requires characters, acts, the accidents of fortune and of
manners; and whilst it happens with us, at least in certain moral
dispositions, to curse our prerogative, this free will, which exposes us
to so many combats with ourselves, to so many anxieties and errors, and