Aesthetical Essays of Friedrich Schiller
ruin by a personal and an inexcusable fault; or if, being able to save
himself, he did not do so, either through feebleness of mind or
pusillanimity. The interest we take in unhappy King Lear, ill-treated by
two ungrateful daughters, is sensibly lessened by the circumstance that
this aged man, in his second childhood, so weakly gave up his crown, and
divided his love among his daughters with so little discernment. In the
tragedy of Kronegk, "Olinda and Sophronia," the most terrible suffering
to which we see these martyrs to their faith exposed only excites our
pity feebly, and all their heroism only stirs our admiration moderately,
because madness alone can suggest the act by which Olinda has placed
himself and all his people on the brink of the precipice.
Our pity is equally lessened when the primary cause of a misfortune,
whose innocent victim ought to inspire us with compassion, fills our mind
with horror. When the tragic poet cannot clear himself of his plot
without introducing a wretch, and when he is reduced to derive the
greatness of suffering from the greatness of wickedness, the supreme
beauty of his work must always be seriously injured. Iago and Lady
Macbeth in Shakspeare, Cleopatra in the tragedy of "Rodogune," or Franz
Moor in "The Robbers," are so many proofs in support of this assertion.
A poet who understands his real interest will not bring about the
catastrophe through a malicious will which proposes misfortune as its
end; nor, and still less, by want of understanding: but rather through
the imperious force of circumstances. If this catastrophe does not come
from moral sources, but from outward things, which have no volition and
are not subject to any will, the pity we experience is more pure, or at
all events it is not weakened by any idea of moral incongruity. But then
the spectator cannot be spared the disagreeable feeling of an incongruity
in the order of nature, which can alone save in such a case moral
propriety. Pity is far more excited when it has for its object both him
who suffers and him who is the primary cause of the suffering. This can
only happen when the latter has neither elicited our contempt nor our
hatred, but when he has been brought against his inclination to become
the cause of this misfortune. It is a singular beauty of the German play
of "Iphigenia" that the King of Tauris, the only obstacle who thwarts the
wishes of Orestes and of his sister, never loses our esteem, and that we
love him to the end.
There is something superior even to this kind of emotion; this is the
case when the cause of the misfortune not only is in no way repugnant to
morality, but only becomes possible through morality, and when the
reciprocal suffering comes simply from the idea that a fellow-creature
has been made to suffer. This is the situation of Chimene and Rodrigue
in "The Cid" of Pierre Corneille, which is undeniably in point of
intrigue the masterpiece of the tragic stage. Honor and filial love arm
the hand of Rodrigue against the father of her whom he loves, and his
valor gives him the victory. Honor and filial love rouse up against him,
in the person of Chimene, the daughter of his victim, an accuser and a
formidable persecutor. Both act in opposition to their inclination, and
they tremble with anguish at the thought of the misfortune of the object
against which they arm themselves, in proportion as zeal inspires them
for their duty to inflict this misfortune. Accordingly both conciliate
our esteem in the highest sense, as they accomplish a moral duty at the
cost of inclination; both inflame our pity in the highest degree, because
they suffer spontaneously for a motive that renders them in the highest
degree to be respected. It results from this that our pity is in this
case so little modified by any opposite feeling that it burns rather with
a double flame; only the impossibility of reconciling the idea of
misfortune with the idea of a morality so deserving of happiness might
still disturb our sympathetic pleasure, and spread a shade of sadness
over it. It is besides a great point, no doubt, that the discontent
given us by this contradiction does not bear upon our moral being, but is
turned aside to a harmless place, to necessity only; but this blind
subjection to destiny is always afflicting and humiliating for free
beings, who determine themselves. This is the cause that always leaves
something to be wished for even in the best Greek pieces. In all these
pieces, at the bottom of the plot it is always fatality that is appealed
to, and in this there is a knot that cannot be unravelled by our reason,
which wishes to solve everything.
But even this knot is untied, and with it vanishes every shade of
displeasure, at the highest and last step to which man perfected by
morality rises, and at the highest point which is attained by the art
which moves the feelings. This happens when the very discontent with
destiny becomes effaced, and is resolved in a presentiment or rather a
clear consciousness of a teleological concatenation of things, of a
sublime order, of a beneficent will. Then, to the pleasure occasioned in
us by moral consistency is joined the invigorating idea of the most
perfect suitability in the great whole of nature. In this case the thing
that seemed to militate against this order, and that caused us pain, in a
particular case, is only a spur that stimulates our reason to seek in
general laws for the justification of this particular case, and to solve
the problem of this separate discord in the centre of the general
harmony. Greek art never rose to this supreme serenity of tragic
emotion, because neither the national religion, nor even the philosophy
of the Greeks, lighted their step on this advanced road. It was reserved
for modern art, which enjoys the privilege of finding a purer matter in a
purer philosophy, to satisfy also this exalted want, and thus to display
all the moral dignity of art.
If we moderns must resign ourselves never to reproduce Greek art because
the philosophic genius of our age, and modern civilization in general are
not favorable to poetry, these influences are at all events less hurtful
to tragic art, which is based rather on the moral element. Perhaps it is
in the case of this art only that our civilization repairs the injury
that it has caused to art in general.
In the same manner as the tragic emotion is weakened by the admixture of
conflicting ideas and feelings, and the charm attaching to it is thus
diminished, so this emotion can also, on the contrary, by approaching the
excess of direct and personal affection, become exaggerated to the point
where pain carries the day over pleasure. It has been remarked that
displeasure, in the affections, comes from the relation of their object
with our senses, in the same way as the pleasure felt in them comes from
the relation of the affection itself to our moral faculty. This implies,
then, between our senses and our moral faculty a determined relation,
which decides as regards the relation between pleasure and displeasure in
tragic emotions. Nor could this relation be modified or overthrown
without overthrowing at the same time the feelings of pleasure and
displeasure which we find in the emotions, or even without changing them
into their opposites. In the same ratio that the senses are vividly
roused in us, the influence of morality will be proportionately
diminished; and reciprocally, as the sensuous loses, morality gains
ground. Therefore that which in our hearts gives a preponderance to the
sensuous faculty, must of necessity, by placing restrictions on the moral
faculty, diminish the pleasure that we take in tragic emotions, a
pleasure which emanates exclusively from this moral faculty. In
like manner, all that in our heart impresses an impetus on this
latter faculty, must blunt the stimulus of pain even in direct and
personal affections. Now our sensuous nature actually acquires this
preponderance, when the ideas of suffering rise to a degree of vividness
that no longer allows us to distinguish a sympathetic affection from
a personal affection, or our own proper Ego from the subject that
suffers,--reality, in short, from poetry. The sensuous also gains the
upper hand when it finds an aliment in the great number of its objects,
and in that dazzling light which an over-excited imagination diffuses
over it. On the contrary, nothing is more fit to reduce the sensuous to
its proper bounds than to place alongside it super-sensuous ideas, moral
ideas, to which reason, oppressed just before, clings as to a kind of
spiritual props, to right and raise itself above the fogs of the sensuous
to a serener atmosphere. Hence the great charm which general truths or
moral sentences, scattered opportunely over dramatic dialogue, have for
all cultivated nations, and the almost excessive use that the Greeks made
of them. Nothing is more agreeable to a moral soul than to have the
power, after a purely passive state that has lasted too long, of escaping
from the subjection of the senses, and of being recalled to its
spontaneous activity, and restored to the possession of its liberty.
These are the remarks I had to make respecting the causes that restrict
our pity and place an obstacle to our pleasure in tragic emotions. I
have next to show on what conditions pity is solicited and the pleasure
of the emotion excited in the most infallible and energetic manner.
Every feeling of pity implies the idea of suffering, and the degree of
pity is regulated according to the degree more or less of vividness, of
truth, of intensity, and of duration of this idea.
1st. The moral faculty is provoked to reaction in proportion to the
vividness of ideas in the soul, which incites it to activity and solicits
its sensuous faculty. Now the ideas of suffering are conceived in two
different manners, which are not equally favorable to the vividness of
the impression. The sufferings that we witness affect us incomparably
more than those that we have through a description or a narrative. The
former suspend in us the free play of the fancy, and striking our senses
immediately penetrate by the shortest road to our heart. In the
narrative, on the contrary, the particular is first raised to the
general, and it is from this that the knowledge of the special case is
afterwards derived; accordingly, merely by this necessary operation of
the understanding, the impression already loses greatly in strength. Now
a weak impression cannot take complete possession of our mind, and it
will allow other ideas to disturb its action and to dissipate the
attention. Very frequently, moreover, the narrative account transports
us from the moral disposition, in which the acting person is placed, to
the state of mind of the narrator himself, which breaks up the illusion
so necessary for pity. In every case, when the narrator in person puts
himself forward, a certain stoppage takes place in the action, and, as an
unavoidable result, in our sympathetic affection. This is what happens
even when the dramatic poet forgets himself in the dialogue, and puts in
the mouth of his dramatic persons reflections that could only enter the
mind of a disinterested spectator. It would be difficult to mention a
single one of our modern tragedies quite free from this defect; but the
French alone have made a rule of it. Let us infer, then, that the
immediate vivid and sensuous presence of the object is necessary to give
to the ideas impressed on us by suffering that strength without which the
emotion could not rise to a high degree.
2d. But we can receive the most vivid impressions of the idea of
suffering without, however, being led to a remarkable degree of pity, if
these impressions lack truth. It is, necessary that we should form of