It is true that a discourse of this popular kind holds somewhat closer
to life and the world of sense, but it does not become lost in it. The
mode of presenting the subject is still _didactic_; for in order to be
beautiful it is still wanting in the two most distinguished features of
beauty, sensuousness of expression and freedom of movement.

The mode of presenting a theme may be called free when the
understanding, while determining the connection of ideas, does so with
so little prominence that the imagination appears to act quite
capriciously in the matter, and to follow only the accident of time. The
presentation of a subject becomes sensuous when it conceals the general
in the particular, and when the fancy gives the living image (the
_whole_ representation), where attention is merely concerned with the
conception (the part representation). Accordingly, sensuous presentation
is viewed in one aspect, _rich_, for in cases where only _one_ condition
is desired, a complete picture, an entirety of conditions, an individual
is offered. But viewed in another aspect it is _limited and poor_,
because it only confines to a single individual and a single case what
ought to be understood of a whole sphere. It therefore curtails the
understanding in the same proportion that it grants preponderance to the
imagination; for the completer a representation is in substance, the
smaller it is in compass.

It is the interest of the imagination to change objects according to its
caprice; the interest of the understanding is to unite its
representations with strict logical necessity.

To satisfy the imagination, a discourse must have a material part, a
_body_; and these are formed by the perceptions, from which the
understanding separates distinct features or conceptions. For though we
may attempt to obtain the highest pitch of abstraction, something
sensuous always lies at the ground of the thought. But imagination
strives to pass unfettered and lawless from one conception to another
conception, and seeks not to be bound by any other connection than that
of time. So when the perceptions that constitute the bodily part of a
discourse have no concatenation as things, when they appear rather to
stand apart as independent limbs and separate unities, when they betray
the utter disorder of a sportive imagination, obedient to itself alone,
then the clothing has æsthetic freedom and the wants of the fancy are
satisfied. A mode of presentation such as this might be styled an
_organic_ product, in which not only the whole lives, but also each part
has its individual life. A merely scientific presentation is a
_mechanical_ work, when the parts, lifeless in themselves, impart by
their connection an artificial life to the whole.

On the other hand, a discourse, in order to satisfy the understanding
and to produce knowledge, must have a spiritual part, it must have
_significance_, and it receives this through the conceptions, by means
of which those perceptions are referred to one another and united into a
whole. The problem of satisfying the understanding by conformity with
law, while the imagination is flattered by being set free from
restrictions, is solved thus: by obtaining the closest connection
between the conceptions forming the spiritual part of the discourse,
while the perceptions, corresponding to them and forming the sensuous
part of the discourse, appear to cohere merely through an arbitrary play
of the fancy.

If an inquiry be instituted into the magic influence of a beautiful
diction, it will always be found that it consists in this happy relation
between external freedom and internal necessity. The principal features
that contribute to this freedom of the imagination are the
_individualizing_ of objects and the figurative or _inexact expression_
of a thing; the former employed to give force to its sensuousness, the
latter to produce it where it does not exist. When we express a species
or kind by an individual, and portray a conception in a single case, we
remove from fancy the chains which the understanding has placed upon her
and give her the power to act as a creator. Always grasping at
completely determinate images, the imagination obtains and exercises the
right to complete according to her wish the image afforded to her, to
animate it, to fashion it, to follow it in all the associations and
transformations of which it is capable. She may forget for a moment her
subordinate position, and act as an independent power, only
self-directing, because the strictness of the inner concatenation has
sufficiently guarded against her breaking loose from the control of the
understanding. An inexact or figurative expression adds to the liberty,
by associating ideas which in their nature differ essentially from one
another, but which unite in subordination to the higher idea. The
imagination adheres to the concrete object, the understanding to this
higher idea, and thus the former finds movement and variety even where
the other verifies a most perfect continuity. The conceptions are
developed according to the _law of necessity_, but they pass before the
imagination according to the _law of liberty_.

Thought remains the same; the medium that represents it is the only
thing that changes. It is thus that an eloquent writer knows how to
extract the most splendid order from the very centre of anarchy, and
that he succeeds in erecting a solid structure on a constantly moving
ground, on the very torrent of imagination.

If we compare together scientific statement or address, popular address,
and fine language, it is seen directly that all three express the idea
with an equal faithfulness as regards the matter, and consequently that
all three help us to acquire knowledge, but that as regards the mode and
degree of this knowledge a very marked difference exists between them.
The writer who uses the language of the beautiful rather represents the
matter of which he treats as _possible_ and _desirable_ than indulges in
attempts to convince us of its reality, and still less of its necessity.
His thought does in fact only present itself as an arbitrary creation of
the imagination, which is never qualified, in itself, to guarantee the
reality of what it represents. No doubt the popular writer leads us to
believe that the matter _really_ is as he describes it, but does not
require anything more firm; for, though he may make the truth of a
proposition credible to our feelings, he does not make it absolutely
certain. Now, feeling may always teach us what _is_, but not what _must
be_. The philosophical writer raises this belief to a conviction, for he
proves by undeniable reasons that the matter is _necessarily_ so.

Starting from the principle that we have just established, it will not
be difficult to assign its proper part and sphere to each of the three
forms of diction. Generally it may be laid down as a rule that
preference ought to be given to the scientific style whenever the chief
consideration is not only the result, but also the proofs. But when the
result merely is of the most essential importance the advantage must be
given to popular elocution and fine language. But it may be asked in
_what cases_ ought popular elocution to rise to a fine, a noble style?
This depends on the degree of interest in the reader, or which you wish
to excite in his mind.

The purely scientific statement may incline either to popular discourse
or to philosophic language, and according to this bias it places us more
or less in possession of some branch of knowledge. All that popular
elocution does is to lend us this knowledge for a momentary pleasure or
enjoyment. The first, if I may be allowed the comparison, gives us a
tree with its roots, though with the condition that we wait patiently
for it to blossom and bear fruit. The other, or fine diction, is
satisfied with gathering its flowers and fruits, but the tree that bore
them does not become our property, and when once the flowers are faded
and the fruit is consumed our riches depart. It would therefore be
equally unreasonable to give only the flower and fruit to a man who
wishes the whole tree to be transplanted into his garden, and to offer
the whole tree with its fruit in the germ to a man who only looks for
the ripe fruit. The application of the comparison is self-evident, and I
now only remark that a fine ornate style is as little suited to the
professor’s chair as the scholastic style to a drawing-room, the pulpit,
or the bar.

The student accumulates in view of an ulterior end and for a future use;
accordingly the professor ought to endeavor to transmit the _full and
entire property_ of the knowledge that he communicates to him. Now,
nothing belongs to us as our own but what has been communicated to the
understanding. The orator, on the other hand, has in view an immediate
end, and his voice must correspond with an immediate want of the public.
His interest is to make his knowledge _practically available_ as soon as
possible; and the surest way is to hand it over to the senses, and to
prepare it for the use of _sensation_. The professor, who only admits
hearers on certain conditions, and who is entitled to suppose in his
hearers the dispositions of mind in which a man ought to be to receive
the truth, has only in view in his lecture the _object_ of which he is
treating; while the orator, who cannot make any conditions with his
audience, and who needs above everything sympathy, to secure it on his
side, must regulate his action and treatment according to the _subjects_
on which he turns his discourse. The hearers of the professor have
already attended his lectures, and will attend them again; they only
want fragments that will form a whole after having been linked to the
preceding lectures. The audience of the orator is continually renewed;
it comes unprepared, and perhaps will not return; accordingly in every
address the orator must _finish_ what he wishes to do; each of his
harangues must form a whole and contain expressly and entirely his
conclusion.

It is not therefore surprising that a dogmatic composition or address,
however solid, should not have any success either in conversation or in
the pulpit, nor that a fine diction, whatever wit it may contain, should
not bear fruit in a professor’s chair. It is not surprising that the
fashionable world should not read writings that stand out in relief in
the scientific world, and that the scholar and the man of science are
ignorant of works belonging to the school of worldly people that are
devoured greedily by all lovers of the beautiful. Each of these works
may be entitled to admiration in the circle to which it belongs; and
more than this, both, fundamentally, may be quite of equal value; but it
would be requiring an impossibility to expect that the work which
demands all the application of the thinker should at the same time offer
an easy recreation to the man who is only a fine wit.

For the same reason I consider that it is hurtful to choose for the
instruction of youth books in which scientific matters are clothed in an
attractive style. I do not speak here of those in which the substance is
_sacrificed_ to the form, but of certain writings really excellent,
which are sufficiently well digested to stand the strictest examination,
but which do not offer their proofs by their very form. No doubt books
of this kind attain their end, they are read; but this is always at the
cost of a more important end, the end for which they ought to be read.
In this sort of reading the understanding is never exercised save in as
far as it agrees with the fancy; it does not learn to distinguish the
form from the substance, nor to act alone as pure understanding. And yet
the exercise of the pure understanding is in itself an essential and
capital point in the instruction of youth; and very often the exercise
itself of thought is much more important than the object on which it is
exercised. If you wish for a matter to be done seriously, be very
careful not to announce it as a diversion. It is preferable, on the
contrary, to secure attention and effort by the very form that is
employed, and to use a kind of violence to draw minds over from the
passive to an active state. The professor ought never to hide from his
pupil the exact regularity of the method; he ought rather to fix his
attention on it, and if possible to make him desire this strictness. The
student ought to learn to pursue an end, and in the interest of that end
to put up with a difficult process. He ought early to aspire to that
loftier satisfaction which is the reward of exertion. In a scientific
lecture the senses are altogether set aside; in an æsthetic address it
is wished to interest them. What is the result? A writing or
conversation of the æsthetic class is devoured with interest; but
questions are put as to its conclusions; the hearer is scarcely able to
give an answer. And this is quite natural, as here the conceptions reach
the mind only in entire masses, and the understanding only knows what it
analyzes. The mind during a lecture of this kind is more passive than
active, and the intellect only possesses what it has produced by its own
activity.

However, all this applies only to the vulgarly beautiful, and to a
vulgar fashion of perceiving beauty. True beauty reposes on the
strictest limitation, on the most exact definition, on the highest and
most intimate necessity. Only this limitation ought rather to let itself
be sought for than be imposed violently. It requires the most perfect
conformity to law, but this must appear quite natural. A product that
unites these conditions will fully satisfy the understanding as soon as
study is made of it. But exactly because this result is really
beautiful, its conformity is not expressed; it does not take the
understanding apart to address it exclusively; it is a harmonious unity
which addresses the entire man—all his faculties together; it is nature
speaking to nature.

A vulgar criticism may perhaps find it empty, paltry, and too little
determined. He who has no other knowledge than that of distinguishing,
and no other sense than that for the particular, is actually pained by
what is precisely the triumph of art, this harmonious unity where the
parts are blended in a pure entirety. No doubt it is necessary, in a
philosophical discourse, that the understanding, as a faculty of
analysis, find what will satisfy it; it must obtain single concrete
results; this is the essential that must not by any means be lost sight
of. But if the writer, while giving all possible precision to the
substance of his conceptions, has taken the necessary measures to enable
the understanding, as soon as it will take the trouble, to find of
necessity these truths, I do not see that he is a less good writer
because he has approached more to the highest perfection. Nature always
acts as a harmonious unity, and when she loses this in her efforts after
abstraction, nothing appears more urgent to her than to re-establish it,
and the writer we are speaking of is not less commendable if he obeys
nature by attaching to the understanding what had been separated by
abstraction, and when, by appealing at the same time to the sensuous and
to the spiritual faculties, he addresses altogether the entire man. No
doubt the vulgar critic will give very scant thanks to this writer for
having given him a double task. For vulgar criticism has not the feeling
for this harmony, it only runs after details, and even in the Basilica
of St. Peter would exclusively attend to the pillars on which the
ethereal edifice reposes. The fact is that this critic must begin by
_translating_ it to understand it—in the same way that the pure
understanding, left to itself, if it meets beauty and harmony, either in
nature or in art, must begin by transferring them into its own
language—and by decomposing it, by doing in fact what the pupil does who
spells before reading. But it is not from the narrow mind of his readers
that the writer who express his conceptions in the language of the
beautiful receives his laws. The ideal which he carries in himself is
the goal at which he aims without troubling himself as to who follows
and who remains behind. Many will stay behind; for if it be a rare thing
to find readers simply capable of thinking, it is infinitely more rare
to meet any who can think with imagination. Thus our writer, by the
force of circumstances, will fall out, on the one hand, with those who
have only intuitive ideas and feelings, for he imposes on them a painful
task by forcing them to think; and, on the other hand, he aggravates
those who only know how to think, for he asks of them what is absolutely
impossible—to give a living, animated form to conception. But as both
only represent true humanity very imperfectly—that normal humanity which
requires the absolute harmony of these two operations—their
contradictory objections have no weight, and if their judgments prove
anything, it is rather that the author has succeeded in attaining his
end. The abstract thinker finds that the substance of the work is
solidly thought; the reader of intuitive ideas finds his style lively
and animated; both consequently find and approve in him what they are
able to understand, and that alone is wanting which exceeds their
capacity.

But precisely for this very reason a writer of this class is not adapted
to make known to an ignorant reader the object of what he treats, or, in
the most proper sense of the word, to _teach_. Happily also, he is not
required for that, for means will not be wanting for the teaching of
scholars. The professor in the strictest acceptation is obliged to bind
himself to the needs of his scholars; the first thing he has to
presuppose is the ignorance of those who listen to him; the other, on
the other hand, demands a certain maturity and culture in his reader or
audience. Nor is his office confined to impart to them dead ideas; he
grasps the living object with a living energy, and seizes at once on the
entire man—his understanding, his heart, and his will.

We have found that it is dangerous for the soundness of knowledge to
give free scope to the exigencies of taste in teaching, properly so
called. But this does not mean by any means that the culture of this
faculty in the student is a premature thing. He must, on the contrary,
be encouraged to apply the knowledge that he has appropriated in the
school to the field of living development. When once the first point has
been observed, and the knowledge acquired, the other point, the exercise
of taste, can only have useful results. It is certain that it is
necessary to be quite the master of a truth to abandon without danger
the form in which it has been found; a great strength of understanding
is required not to lose sight of your object while giving free play to
the imagination. He who transmits his knowledge under a scholastic form
persuades me, I admit, that he has grasped these truths properly and
that he knows how to support them. But he who besides this is in a
condition to communicate them to me in a beautiful form not only proves
that he is adapted to promulgate them, he shows moreover that he has
assimilated them and that he is able to make their image pass into his
productions and into his acts. There is for the results of thought only
one way by which they can penetrate into the will and pass into life;
that is, by spontaneous imagination, only what in _ourselves_ was
already a living _act_ can become so _out of us_; and the same thing
happens with the creations of the mind as with those of organic nature,
that the fruit issues only from the flower. If we consider how many
truths were living and active as interior intuitions before philosophy
showed their existence, and how many truths most firmly secured by
proofs often remain inactive on the will and the feelings, it will be
seen how important it is for practical life to follow in this the
indications of nature, and when we have acquired a knowledge
scientifically to bring it back again to the state of a living
intuition. It is the only way to enable those whose nature has forbidden
them to follow the artificial path of science to share in the treasures
of wisdom. The beautiful renders us here in relation with knowledge
what, in morals, it does in relation with conduct; it places men in
harmony on results, and on the substance of things, who would never have
agreed on the form and principles.

The other sex, by its very nature and fair destiny, cannot and ought not
to rival ours in scientific knowledge; but it can share _truth_ with us
by the reproduction of things. Man agrees to have his taste offended,
provided compensation be given to his understanding by the increased
value of its possessions. But women do not forgive negligence in form,
whatever be the nature of the conception; and the inner structure of all
their being gives them the right to show a strict severity on this
point. The fair sex, even if it did not rule by beauty, would still be
entitled to its name because it is ruled by beauty, and makes all
objects presented to it appear before the tribunal of feeling, and all
that does not speak to feeling or belies it is lost in the opinion of
women. No doubt through this medium nothing can be made to reach the
mind of woman save the matter of truth, and not truth itself, which is
inseparable from its proofs. But happily woman only needs the matter of
truth to reach her highest perfection, and the few exceptions hitherto
seen are not of a nature to make us wish that the exception should
become the rule. As, therefore, nature has not only dispensed but cut
off the other sex from this task, man must give a double attention to it
if he wishes to vie with woman and be equal to her in what is of great
interest in human life. Consequently he will try to transfer all that he
can from the field of abstraction, where he is master, to that of
imagination, of feeling, where woman is at once a model and a judge. The
mind of woman being a ground that does not admit of durable cultivation,
he will try to make his own ground yield as many flowers and as much
fruit as possible, so as to renew as often as possible the quick-fading
produce on the other ground, and to keep up a sort of artificial harvest
where natural harvests could not ripen. Taste corrects or hides the
natural differences of the two sexes. It nourishes and adorns the mind
of woman with the productions of that of man, and allows the fair sex to
feel without being previously fatigued by thought, and to enjoy
pleasures without having bought them with labors. Thus, save the
restrictions I have named, it is to the taste that is intrusted the care
of form in every statement by which knowledge is communicated, but under
the express condition that it will not encroach on the substance of
things. Taste must never forget that it carries out an order emanating
elsewhere, and that it is not its own affairs it is treating of. All its
parts must be limited to place our minds in a condition favorable to
knowledge; over all that concerns knowledge itself it has no right to
any authority. For it exceeds its mission, it betrays it, it disfigures
the object that it ought faithfully to transmit, it lays claim to
authority out of its proper province; if it tries to carry out there,
too, _its own_ law, which is nothing but that of pleasing the
imagination and making itself agreeable to the intuitive faculties; if
it applies this law not only to the _operation_, but also to the
_matter_ itself; if it follows this rule not only to arrange the
materials, but also to choose them. When this is the case the first
consideration is not the _things_ themselves, but the best mode of
presenting them so as to recommend them to the senses. The logical
sequence of conceptions of which only the strictness should have been
hidden from us is rejected as a disagreeable impediment. Perfection is
sacrificed to ornament, the truth of the parts to the beauty of the
whole, the inmost nature of things to the exterior impression. Now,
directly the substance is subordinated to form, properly speaking it
ceases to exist; the statement is empty, and instead of having extended
our knowledge we have only indulged in an amusing game.

The writers who have more wit than understanding and more taste than
science, are too often guilty of this deception; and readers more
accustomed to feel than to think are only too inclined to forgive them.
In general it is unsafe to give to the æsthetical sense all its culture
before having exercised the understanding as the pure thinking faculty,
and before having enriched the head with conceptions; for as taste
always looks at the carrying out and not at the basis of things,
wherever it becomes the only arbiter, there is an end of the essential
difference between things. Men become indifferent to reality, and they
finish by giving value to form and appearance only.

Hence arises that superficial and frivolous _bel esprit_ that we often
see hold sway in social conditions and in circles where men pride
themselves, and not unreasonably, on the finest culture. It is a fatal
thing to introduce a young man into assemblies where the Graces hold
sway before the Muses have dismissed him and owned his majority.
Moreover, it can hardly be prevented that what completes the external
education of a young man whose mind is ripe turns him who is not ripened
by study into a fool. I admit that to have a fund of conceptions, and
not form, is only a half possession. For the most splendid knowledge in
a head incapable of giving them form is like a treasure buried in the
earth. But form without substance is a shadow of riches, and all
possible cleverness in expression is of no use to him who has nothing to
express.

Thus, to avoid the graces of education leading us in a wrong road, taste
must be confined to regulating the external form, while reason and
experience determine the substance and the essence of conceptions. If
the impression made on the senses is converted into a supreme
_criterion_, and if things are exclusively referred to sensation, man
will never cease to be in the service of matter; he will never clear a
way for his intelligence; in short, reason will lose in freedom in
proportion as it allows imagination to usurp undue influence.

The beautiful produces its effect by mere intuition; the truth demands
study. Accordingly, the man who among all his faculties has only
exercised the sense of the beautiful is satisfied even when study is
absolutely required, with a superficial view of things; and he fancies
he can make a mere play of wit of that which demands a serious effort.
But mere intuition cannot give any result. To produce something great it
is necessary to enter into the fundamental nature of things, to
distinguish them strictly, to associate them in different manners, and
study them with a steady attention. Even the artist and the poet, though
both of them labor to procure us only the pleasure of intuition, can
only by most laborious and engrossing study succeed in giving us a
delightful recreation by their works.

I believe this to be the test to distinguish the mere _dilettante_ from
the artist of real genius. The seductive charm exercised by the sublime
and the beautiful, the fire which they kindle in the young imagination,
the apparent ease with which they place the senses under an illusion,
have often persuaded inexperienced minds to take in hand the palette or
the harp, and to transform into figures or to pour out in melody what
they felt living in their heart. Misty ideas circulate in their heads,
like a world in formation, and make them believe that they are inspired.
They take obscurity for depth, savage vehemence for strength, the
undetermined for the infinite, what has not senses for the
super-sensuous. And how they revel in these creations of their brain!
But the judgment of the connoisseur does not confirm this testimony of
an excited self-love. With his pitiless criticism he dissipates all the
prestige of the imagination and of its dreams, and carrying the torch
before these novices he leads them into the mysterious depths of science
and life, where, far from profane eyes, the source of all true beauty
flows ever towards him who is initiated. If now a true genius slumbers
in the young aspirant, no doubt his modesty will at first receive a
shock; but soon the consciousness of real talent will embolden him for
the trial. If nature has endowed him with gifts for plastic art, he will
study the structure of man with the scalpel of the anatomist; he will
descend _into the lowest depths_ to be true in _representing surfaces_,
and he will question the whole race in order to be just to the
individual. If he is born to be a poet, he examines humanity in his own
heart to understand the infinite variety of scenes in which it acts on
the vast theatre of the world. He subjects imagination and its exuberant
fruitfulness to the discipline of taste, and charges the understanding
to mark out in its cool wisdom the banks that should confine the raging
waters of inspiration. He knows full well that the great is only formed
of the little—from the imperceptible. He piles up, grain by grain, the
materials of the wonderful structure, which, suddenly disclosed to our
eyes, produces a startling effect and turns our head. But if nature has
only intended him for a _dilettante_, difficulties damp his impotent
zeal, and one of two things happens: either he abandons, if he is
modest, that to which he was diverted by a mistaken notion of his
vocation; or, if he has no modesty, he brings back the ideal to the
narrow limits of his faculties, for want of being able to enlarge his
faculties to the vast proportions of the ideal. Thus the true genius of
the artist will be always recognized by this sign—that when most
enthusiastic for the whole, he preserves a coolness, a patience defying
all obstacles, as regards details. Moreover, in order not to do any
injury to perfection, he would rather renounce the enjoyment given by
the completion. For the simple amateur, it is the difficulty of means
that disgusts him and turns him from his aim; his dreams would be to
have no more trouble in producing than he had in conception and
intuition.

I have spoken hitherto of the dangers to which we are exposed by an
exaggerated sensuousness and susceptibility to the beautiful in the
form, and from too extensive æsthetical requirements; and I have
considered these dangers in relation to the faculty of thinking and
knowing. What, then, will be the result when these pretensions of the
æsthetical taste bear on the _will_? It is one thing to be stopped in
your scientific progress by too great a love of the beautiful, another
to see this inclination become a cause of degeneracy in character
itself, and make us violate the law of duty. In matters of thought the
caprices of “taste” are no doubt an evil, and they must of necessity
darken the intelligence; but these same caprices applied to the maxims
of the will become really _pernicious_ and infallibly deprave the heart.
Yet this is the dangerous extreme to which too refined an æsthetic
culture brings us directly we abandon ourselves exclusively to the
feelings for the beautiful, and directly we raise taste to the part of
absolute lawgiver over our will.

The moral destination of man requires that the will should be completely
independent of all influence of sensuous instincts, and we know that
taste labors incessantly at making the link between reason and the
senses continually closer. Now this effort has certainly as its result
the ennobling of the appetites, and to make them more conformable with
the requirements of reason; but this very point may be a serious danger
for morality.

I proceed to explain my meaning. A very refined æsthetical education
accustoms the imagination to _direct itself according to laws, even in
its free exercise_, and leads the sensuous not to have any enjoyments
without the concurrence of reason; but it soon follows that reason, in
its turn, is required to be directed, even in the most _serious
operations of its legislative power, according to the interests of
imagination_, and to give no more orders to the will without the consent
of the sensuous instincts. The moral obligation of the will, which is,
however, an absolute and unconditional law, takes unperceived the
character of a simple contract, which only binds each of the contracting
parties when the other fulfils its engagement. The purely _accidental_
agreement of duty with inclination ends by being considered a
_necessary_ condition, and thus the principle of all morality is
quenched in its source.

How does the character become thus gradually depraved? The process may
be explained thus: So long as man is only a savage, and his instincts
only bear on material things and a coarse egotism determines his
actions, sensuousness can only become a danger to morality by its _blind
strength_, and does not oppose reason except as a _force_. The voice of
justice, moderation, and humanity is stifled by the appetites, which
make a stronger appeal. Man is then terrible in his vengeance, because
he is terribly sensitive to insults. He robs, he kills, because his
desires are still too powerful for the feeble guidance of reason. He is
towards others like a wild beast, because the instinct of nature still
rules him after the fashion of animals.

But when to the savage state, to that of nature, succeeds civilization;
when taste ennobles the instincts, and holds out to them more worthy
objects taken from the moral order; when culture moderates the brutal
outbursts of the appetites and brings them back under the discipline of
the beautiful, it may happen that these same instincts, which were only
dangerous before by their _blind power_, coming to assume an air of
_dignity_ and a certain _assumed authority_, may become more dangerous
than before to the morality of the character; and that, under the guise
of innocence, nobleness, and purity, they may exercise over the will a
tyranny a hundred times worse than the other.

The man of taste willingly escapes the gross thraldom of the appetites.
He submits to reason the instinct which impels him to pleasure, and he
is willing to take counsel from his spiritual and thinking nature for
the choice of the objects he ought to desire. Now, reason is very apt to
mistake a _spiritualized_ instinct for one of its _own_ instincts, and
at length to give up to it the guidance of the will, and this in
proportion as moral judgment and æsthetic judgment, the sense of the
good and the sense of the beautiful, meet in the same object and in the
same decision.

So long as it remains possible for inclination and duty to meet in the
same object and in a common desire, this _representation_ of the moral
sense by the æsthetic sense may not draw after it positively evil
consequences, though, if the matter be strictly considered, the morality
of particular actions does not gain by this agreement. But the
consequences will be quite different when sensuousness and reason have
each of them a different interest. If, for example, duty commands us to
perform an action that revolts our taste, or if taste feels itself drawn
towards an object which reason as a moral judge is obliged to condemn,
then, in fact, we suddenly encounter the necessity of distinguishing
between the requirements of the moral sense and those of the æsthetic
sense, which so long an agreement had almost confounded to such a degree
that they could not be distinguished. We must now determine their
reciprocal rights, and find which of them is the real master in our
soul. But such a long representation of the moral sense by the sense of
the beautiful has made us forget this master. When we have so long
practised this rule of obeying at once the suggestions of taste, and
when we have found the result always satisfactory, taste ends by
assuming a kind of appearance of right. As taste has shown itself
_irreproachable_ in the vigilant watch it has kept over the will, we
necessarily come to grant a certain esteem to its decisions; and it is
precisely to this esteem that inclination, with captious logic, gives
weight against the duties of conscience.

Esteem is a feeling that can only be felt for _law_, and what
corresponds to it. Whatever is entitled to esteem lays claim to an
unconditional homage. The ennobled inclination which has succeeded in
captivating our esteem will, therefore, no longer be satisfied with
being subordinate to reason; it aspires to rank alongside it. It does
not wish to be taken for a faithless subject in revolt against his
sovereign; it wishes to be regarded as a queen; and, treating reason as
its peer, to dictate, like reason, laws to the conscience. Thus, if we
listen to her, she would weigh by right equally in the scale; and then
have we not good reason to fear that interest will decide?

Of all the inclinations that are decided from the feeling for the
beautiful and that are special to refined minds, none commends itself so
much to the moral sense as the ennobled instinct of _love_; none is so
fruitful in impressions which correspond to the true dignity of man. To
what an elevation does it raise human nature! and often what divine
sparks does it kindle in the common soul! It is a sacred fire that
consumes every egotistical inclination, and the very principles of
morality are scarcely a greater safeguard of the soul’s chastity than
love is for the nobility of the heart. How often it happens while the
moral principles are still struggling that love prevails in their favor,
and hastens by its irresistible power the resolutions that duty alone
would have vainly demanded from weak human nature! Who, then, would
distrust an affection that protects so powerfully what is most excellent
in human nature, and which fights so victoriously against the moral foe
of all morality, egotism?

But do not follow this guide till you have secured a better. Suppose a
loved object be met that is unhappy, and unhappy because of you, and
that it depends only on you to make it happy by sacrificing a few moral
scruples. You may be disposed to say, “Shall I let this loved being
suffer for the pleasure of keeping our conscience pure? Is this
resistance required by this generous, devoted affection, always ready to
forget itself for its object? I grant it is going against conscience to
have recourse to this immoral means to solace the being we love; but can
we be said to love if in presence of this being and of its sorrow we
continue to think of ourselves? Are we not more taken up with ourselves
than with it, since we prefer to see it unhappy rather than consent to
be so ourselves by the reproaches of our conscience?” These are the
sophisms that the passion of love sets against conscience (whose voice
thwarts its interests), making its utterances despicable as _suggestions
of selfishness_, and representing our moral dignity as _one of the
components of our happiness_ that we are free to alienate. Then, if the
morality of our character is not strongly backed by good principles, we
shall surrender, whatever may be the impetus of our exalted imagination,
to disgraceful acts; and we shall think that we gain a glorious victory
over our self-love, while we are only the despicable victims of this
instinct. A well-known French romance, “_Les Liaisons Dangereuses_,”
gives us a striking example of this delusion, by which love betrays a
soul otherwise pure and beautiful. The Presidente de Tourvel errs by
surprise, and seeks to calm her remorse by the idea that she has
sacrificed her virtue to her generosity.

Secondary and imperfect duties, as they are styled, are those that the
feeling for the beautiful takes most willingly under its patronage, and
which it allows to prevail on many occasions over perfect duties. As
they assign a much larger place to the arbitrary option of the subject,
and at the same time as they have the appearance of merit, which gives
them lustre, they commend themselves far more to the æsthetic taste than
perfect or necessary duties, which oblige us strictly and
unconditionally. How many people allow themselves to be unjust that they
may be generous! How many fail in their duties to society that they may
do good to an individual, and reciprocally! How many people forgive a
lie sooner than a rudeness, a crime against humanity rather than an
insult to honor! How many debase their bodies to hasten the perfection
of their minds, and degrade their character to adorn their
understanding! How many do not scruple to commit a crime when they have
a laudable end in view, pursue an ideal of political happiness through
all the terrors of anarchy, tread under foot existing laws to make way
for better ones, and do not scruple to devote the present generation to
misery to secure at this cost the happiness of future generations! The
apparent unselfishness of certain virtues gives them a varnish of
purity, which makes them rash enough to break and run counter to the
moral law; and many people are the dupes of this strange illusion, to
rise higher than morality and to endeavor to be more reasonable than
reason.

The man of a refined taste is susceptible, in this respect, of a moral
corruption, from which the rude child of nature is preserved by his very
coarseness. In the latter, the opposite of the demands of sense and the
decrees of the moral law is so strongly marked and so manifest, and the
spiritual element has so small a share in his desires, that although the
appetites exercise a _despotic sway_ over him, they cannot wrest his
_esteem_ from him. Thus, when the savage, yielding to the superior
attraction of sense, gives way to the committal of an unjust action, he
may yield to temptation, but he will not hide from himself that he is
committing a _fault_, and he will do homage to reason even while he
violates its mandates. The child of civilization, on the contrary, the
man of refinement, will not admit that he commits a fault, and to soothe
his conscience he prefers to impose on it by a sophism. No doubt he
wishes to obey his appetite, but at the same time without falling in his
own esteem. How does he manage this? He begins by overthrowing the
superior authority that thwarts his inclination, and before
transgressing the law he calls in question the competence of the
lawgiver. Could it be expected that a corrupt will should so corrupt the
intelligence? The only dignity that an inclination can assume accrues to
it from its agreement with reason; yet we find that inclination,
independent as well as blind, aspires, at the very moment she enters
into contest with reason, to keep this dignity which she owes to reason
alone. Nay, inclination even aspires to use this dignity she owes to
reason against reason itself.

These are the dangers that threaten the morality of the character when
too intimate an association is attempted between sensuous instincts and
moral instincts, which can never perfectly agree in real life, but only
in the ideal. I admit that the sensuous risks nothing in this
association, because it possesses nothing except what it must give up
directly duty speaks and reason demands the sacrifice. But reason, as
the arbiter of the moral law, will run the more risk from this union if
it _receives as a gift_ from inclination what it might _enforce_; for,
under the appearance of freedom, the feeling of _obligation_ may be
easily lost, and what reason accepts as a favor may quite well be
refused it when the sensuous finds it painful to grant it. It is,
therefore, infinitely safer for the morality of the character to
suspend, at least for a time, this misrepresentation of the moral sense
by the sense of the beautiful. It is best of all that reason should
command by itself without _mediation_, and that it should show to the
will its true master. The remark is, therefore, quite justified, that
true morality only knows itself in the school of adversity, and that a
continual prosperity becomes easily a rock of offence to virtue. I mean
here by prosperity the state of a man who, to enjoy the goods of life,
need not commit injustice, and who to conform to justice need not
renounce any of the goods of life. The man who enjoys a continual
prosperity never sees moral duty face to face, because his inclinations,
naturally regular and moderate, always _anticipate_ the mandate of
reason, and because no temptation to violate the law recalls to his mind
the idea of law. Entirely guided by the sense of the beautiful, which
represents reason in the world of sense, he will reach the tomb without
having known by experience the dignity of his destiny. On the other
hand, the unfortunate man, if he be at the same time a virtuous man,
enjoys the sublime privilege of being in _immediate_ intercourse with
the divine majesty of the moral law; and as his virtue is not seconded
by any inclination, he bears witness in this lower world, and as a human
being, of the freedom of pure spirits!

 REFLECTIONS ON THE USE OF THE VULGAR AND LOW ELEMENTS IN WORKS OF ART.

I call _vulgar_ (common) all that does not speak to the mind, of which
all the interest is addressed only to the senses. There are, no doubt,
an infinite number of things vulgar in themselves from their material
and subject. But as the vulgarity of the material can always be ennobled
by the treatment, in respect of art the only question is that relating
to the _vulgarity_ in form. A vulgar mind will dishonor the most noble
matter by treating it in a common manner. A great and noble mind, on the
contrary, will ennoble even a common matter, and it will do so by
superadding to it something spiritual and discovering in it some aspect
in which this matter has greatness. Thus, for example, a vulgar
historian will relate to us the most insignificant actions of a hero
with a scrupulousness as great as that bestowed on his sublimest
exploit, and will dwell as lengthily on his pedigree, his costume, and
his household as on his projects and his enterprises. He will relate
those of his actions that have the most grandeur in such wise that no
one will perceive that character in them. On the contrary, a historian
of genius, himself endowed with nobleness of mind, will give even to the
private life and the least considerable actions of his hero an interest
and a value that will make them considerable. Thus, again, in the matter
of the plastic arts, the Dutch and Flemish painters have given proof of
a vulgar taste; the Italians, and still more the ancient Greeks, of a
grand and noble taste. The Greeks always went to the ideal; they
rejected every vulgar feature, and chose no common subject.

A portrait painter can represent his model in a _common_ manner or with
_grandeur;_ in a _common manner_ if he reproduce the merely _accidental_
details with the same care as the essential features, if he neglect the
great to carry out the minutiæ curiously. He does it grandly if he know
how to find out and place in relief what is most _interesting_, and
distinguish the accidental from the necessary; if he be satisfied with
indicating what is paltry, reserving all the finish of the execution for
what is great. And the only thing that is great is the expression of the
soul itself, manifesting itself by actions, gestures, or attitudes.

The poet treats his subject in a common manner when in the execution of
his theme he dwells on valueless facts and only skims rapidly over those
that are important. He treats his theme with grandeur when he associates
with it what is great. For example, Homer treated the shield of Achilles
grandly, though the making of a shield, looking merely at the matter, is
a very commonplace affair.

One degree below the common or the vulgar is the element of the base or
gross, which differs from the common in being not only something
_negative_, a simple lack of inspiration or nobleness, but something
_positive_, marking coarse feelings, bad morals, and contemptible
manners. Vulgarity only testifies that an advantage is wanting, whereof
the absence is a matter of regret; baseness indicates the want of a
quality which we are authorized to require in all. Thus, for example,
revenge, considered in itself, in _whatever place or way_ it manifests
itself, is something vulgar, because it is the proof of a lack of
generosity. But there is, moreover, a _base_ vengeance, when the man, to
satisfy it, employs means exposed to contempt. The base always implies
something gross, or reminds one of the mob, while the common can be
found in a well-born and well-bred man, who may think and act in a
common manner if he has only mediocre faculties. A man acts in a
_common_ manner when he is only taken up with his own interest, and it
is in this that he is in opposition with the really _noble_ man, who,
when necessary, knows how to forget himself to procure some enjoyment
for others. But the same man would act in a _base_ manner if he
consulted his interests at the cost of his honor, and if in such a case
he did not even take upon himself to respect the laws of decency. Thus
the common is only the contrary of the noble; the base is the contrary
both of the noble and the seemly. To give yourself up, unresisting, to
all your passions, to satisfy all your impulses, without being checked
even by the rules of propriety, still less by those of morality, is to
conduct yourself basely, and to betray baseness of the soul.

The artist also may fall into a low style, not only by choosing ignoble
subjects, offensive to decency and good taste, but moreover by treating
them in a _base manner_. It is to treat a subject in a _base manner_ if
those sides are made prominent which propriety directs us to conceal, or
if it is expressed in a manner that incidentally awakens low ideas. The
lives of the greater part of men can present particulars of a low kind,
but it is only a low imagination that will pick out these for
representation.

There are pictures describing sacred history in which the Apostles, the
Virgin, and even the Christ, are depicted in such wise that they might
be supposed to be taken from the dregs of the populace. This style of
execution always betrays a low taste, and might justly lead to the
inference that the artist himself thinks coarsely and like the mob.

No doubt there are cases where art itself may be allowed to produce base
images: for example, when the aim is to provoke laughter. A man of
polished manners may also sometimes, and without betraying a corrupt
taste, be amused by certain features when nature expresses herself
crudely but with truth, and he may enjoy the contrast between the
manners of polished society and those of the lower orders. A man of
position appearing intoxicated will always make a disagreeable
impression on us; but a drunken driver, sailor, or carter will only be a
risible object. Jests that would be insufferable in a man of education
amuse us in the mouth of the people. Of this kind are many of the scenes
of Aristophanes, who unhappily sometimes exceeds this limit, and becomes
absolutely condemnable. This is, moreover, the source of the pleasure we
take in parodies, when the feelings, the language, and the mode of
action of the common people are fictitiously lent to the same personages
whom the poet has treated with all possible dignity and decency. As soon
as the poet means only to jest, and seeks only to amuse, we can overlook
traits of a low kind, provided he never stirs up indignation or disgust.

He stirs up indignation when he places baseness where it is quite
unpardonable, that is in the case of men who are expected to show fine
moral sense. In attributing baseness to them he will either _outrage_
truth, for we prefer to think him a liar than to believe that
well-trained men can act in a base manner; or his personages will offend
our moral sense, and, what is worse, excite our imagination. I do not
mean by this to condemn _farces_; a farce implies between the poet and
the spectator a tacit consent that _no_ truth is to be expected in the
piece. In a farce we exempt the poet from all _faithfulness_ in his
pictures; he has a kind of privilege to tell us untruths. Here, in fact,
all the comic consists exactly in its contrast with the truth, and so it
cannot possibly be true.

This is not all: even in the serious and the tragic there are certain
places where the low element can be brought into play. But in this case
the affair must pass into the _terrible_, and the momentary violation of
our good taste must be masked by a strong impression, which brings our
passion into play. In other words, the low impression must be absorbed
by a superior tragic impression. _Theft_, for example, is a thing
absolutely _base_, and whatever arguments our heart may suggest to
excuse the thief, whatever the pressure of circumstances that led him to
the theft, it is always an indelible brand stamped upon him, and,
æsthetically speaking, he will always remain a base object. On this
point taste is even less forgiving than morality, and its tribunal is
more severe; because an æsthetical object is responsible even for the
accessory ideas that are awakened in us by such an object, while moral
judgment eliminates all that is merely accidental. According to this
view a man who robs would always be an object to be rejected by the poet
who wishes to present serious pictures. But suppose this man is at the
same time a murderer, he is even more to be condemned than before by the
_moral_ law. But in the æsthetic judgment he is raised one degree higher
and made better adapted to figure in a work of art. Continuing to judge
him from the æsthetic point of view, it may be added that he who abases
himself by a _vile_ action can to a certain extent be raised by a
_crime_, and can be thus reinstated in our _æsthetic_ estimation. This
contradiction between the moral judgment and the æsthetical judgment is
a fact entitled to attention and consideration. It may be explained in
different ways. First, I have already said that, as the æsthetic
judgment depends on the imagination, all the accessory ideas awakened in
us by an object and naturally associated with it, must themselves
influence this judgment. Now, if these accessory ideas are base, they
infallibly stamp this character on the principal object.

In the second place, what we look for in the æsthetic judgment is
_strength;_ whilst in a judgment pronounced in the name of the moral
sense we consider _lawfulness_. The lack of strength is something
contemptible, and every action from which it may be inferred that the
agent lacks strength is, by that very fact, a contemptible action. Every
cowardly and underhand action is repugnant to us, because it is a proof
of impotence; and, on the contrary, a devilish wickedness can,
æsthetically speaking, flatter our taste, as soon as it marks strength.
Now, a theft testifies to a vile and grovelling mind: a murder has at
least on its side the appearance of strength; the interest we take in it
æsthetically is in proportion to the strength that is manifested in it.

A third reason is, because in presence of a deep and horrible crime we
no longer think of the _quality_ but the awful consequences of the
action. The stronger emotion covers and stifles the weaker one. We do
not look back into the mind of the agent: we look onward into his
destiny, we think of the effects of his action. Now, directly we begin
to _tremble_ all the delicacies of taste are reduced to silence. The
principal impression entirely fills our mind: the accessory and
accidental ideas, in which chiefly dwell all impressions of baseness,
are effaced from it. It is for this reason that the theft committed by
young Ruhberg, in the “Crime through Ambition,”[10] far from displeasing
on the stage, is a real tragic effect. The poet with great skill has
managed the circumstances in such wise that we are carried away; we are
left almost breathless. The frightful misery of the family, and
especially the grief of the father, are objects that attract our
attention, turn it aside, from the person of the agent, towards the
consequences of his act. We are too much moved to tarry long in
representing to our minds the stamp of infamy with which the theft is
marked. In a word, the base element disappears in the _terrible_. It is
singular that this theft, really accomplished by young Ruhberg, inspires
us with less repugnance than, in another piece, the mere suspicion of a
theft, a suspicion which is actually without foundation. In the latter
case it is a young officer who is accused without grounds of having
abstracted a silver spoon, which is recovered later on. Thus the base
element is reduced in this case to a purely imaginary thing, a mere
suspicion, and this suffices nevertheless to do an irreparable injury,
in our æsthetical appreciation, to the hero of the piece, in spite of
his innocence. This is because a man who is supposed capable of a base
action did not apparently enjoy a very solid reputation for morality,
for the laws of propriety require that a man should be held to be a man
of honor as long as he does not _show_ the opposite. If therefore
anything contemptible is imputed to him, it seems that by some part of
his past conduct he has given rise to a suspicion of this kind, and this
does him injury, though all the odious and the base in an undeserved
suspicion are on the side of him who accuses. A point that does still
greater injury to the hero of the piece of which I am speaking is the
fact that he is an _officer_, and the _lover_ of a lady of condition
brought up in a manner suitable to her rank. With these two titles, that
of thief makes quite a revolting contrast, and it is impossible for us,
when we see him near his lady, not to think that perhaps at that very
moment he had the silver spoon in his pocket. Lastly, the most
unfortunate part of the business is, that he has no idea of the
suspicion weighing over him, for if he had a knowledge of it, in his
character of officer, he would exact a sanguinary reparation. In this
case the consequences of the suspicion would change to the terrible, and
all that is base in the situation would disappear.

We must distinguish, moreover, between the baseness of feeling and that
which is connected with the mode of treatment and circumstance. The
former in all respects is _below_ æsthetic dignity; the second in many
cases may perfectly agree with it. _Slavery_, for example, is a base
thing; but a servile mind in a free man is contemptible. The labors of
the slave, on the contrary, are not so when his feelings are not
servile. Far from this, a base condition, when joined to elevated
feelings, can become a source of the sublime. The master of Epictetus,
who beat him, acted basely, and the slave beaten by him showed a sublime
soul. True greatness, when it is met in a base condition, is only the
more brilliant and splendid on that account: and the artist must not
fear to show us his heroes even under a contemptible exterior as soon as
he is sure of being able to give them, when he wishes, the expression of
moral dignity.

But what can be granted to the poet is not always allowed in the artist.
The poet only addresses the imagination; the painter addresses the
senses directly. It follows not only that the impression of the picture
is more lively than that of the poem, but also that the painter, if he
employ only his natural signs, cannot make the minds of his personages
as visible as the poet can with the arbitrary signs at his command: yet
it is only the sight of the mind that can reconcile us to certain
exteriors. When Homer causes his Ulysses to appear in the rags of a
beggar,[11] we are at liberty to represent his image to our mind more or
less fully, and to dwell on it as long as we like. But in no case will
it be sufficiently vivid to excite our repugnance or disgust. But if a
painter, or even a tragedian, try to reproduce faithfully the Ulysses of
Homer, we turn away from the picture with repugnance. It is because in
this case the greater or less vividness of the impression no longer
depends on our will: we _cannot help_ seeing what the painter places
under our eyes; and it is not easy for us to remove the accessory
repugnant ideas which the picture recalls to our mind.

       DETACHED REFLECTIONS ON DIFFERENT QUESTIONS OF ÆSTHETICS.

All the properties by which an object can become æsthetic, can be
referred to four classes, which, as well according to their objective
differences as according to their different relation with the subject,
produce on our passive and active faculties pleasures unequal not only
in intensity but also in worth; classes which also are of an unequal use
for the end of the fine arts: they are the agreeable, the good, the
sublime, and the beautiful.

Of these four categories, the sublime and the beautiful only belong
properly to art. The agreeable is not worthy of art, and the good is at
least not its end; for the aim of art is to please, and the good,
whether we consider it in theory or in practice, neither can nor ought
to serve as a means of satisfying the wants of sensuousness. The
agreeable only satisfies the senses, and is distinguished thereby from
the good, which only pleases the reason. The agreeable only pleases by
its matter, for it is only matter that can affect the senses, and all
that is form can only please the reason. It is true that the beautiful
only pleases through the medium of the senses, by which it is
distinguished from the good; but it pleases reason, on account of its
form, by which it is essentially distinguished from the agreeable. It
might be said that the good pleases only by its form being in harmony
with reason; the beautiful by its form having some relation of
resemblance with reason, and that the agreeable absolutely does not
please by its form. The good is perceived by thought, the beautiful by
intuition, and the agreeable only by the senses. The first pleases by
the conception, the second by the idea, and the third by material
sensation.

The distance between the good and the agreeable is that which strikes
the eyes the most. The good widens our understanding, because it
procures and supposes an idea of its object; the pleasure which it makes
us perceive rests on an objective foundation, even when this pleasure
itself is but a certain state in which we are situated. The agreeable,
on the contrary, produces no notion of its object, and, indeed, reposes
on no objective foundation. It is agreeable only inasmuch as it is felt
by the subject, and the idea of it completely vanishes the moment an
obstruction is placed on the affectibility of the senses, or only when
it is modified. For a man who feels the cold the agreeable would be a
warm air; but this same man, in the heat of summer, would seek the shade
and coolness; but we must agree that in both cases he has judged well.

On the other hand, that which is objective is altogether independent of
us, and that which to-day appears to us true, useful, reasonable, ought
yet (if this judgment of to-day be admitted as just) to seem to us the
same twenty years hence. But our judgment of the agreeable changes as
soon as our state, with regard to its object, has changed. The agreeable
is therefore not a property of the object; it springs entirely from the
relations of such an object with our senses, for the constitution of our
senses is a necessary condition thereof.

The good, on the contrary, is good in itself, before being represented
to us, and before being felt. The property by which it pleases exists
fully in itself without being in want of our subject, although the
pleasure which we take in it rests on an aptitude for feeling that which
is in us. Thus we can say that the agreeable exists only because it is
experienced, and that the good, on the contrary, is experienced because
it exists.

The distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable, great as it is,
moreover, strikes the eye less. The beautiful approaches the agreeable
in this—that it must always be proposed to the senses, inasmuch as it
pleases only as a phenomenon. It comes near to it again in as far as it
neither procures nor supposes any notion of its object. But, on the
other hand, it is widely separated from the agreeable, because it
pleases by the form under which it is produced, and not by the fact of
the material sensation. No doubt it only pleases the reasonable subject
in so far as it is also a sensuous subject; but also it pleases the
sensuous subject only inasmuch as it is at the same time a reasonable
subject. The beautiful is not only pleasing to the individual but to the
whole species; and although it draws its existence but from its relation
with creatures at the same time reasonable and sensuous, it is not less
independent of all empirical limitations of sensuousness, and it remains
identical even when the particular constitution of the individual is
modified. The beautiful has exactly in common with the good that by
which it differs from the agreeable, and it differs from the good
exactly in that in which it approximates to the agreeable.

By the good we must understand that in which reason recognizes a
conformity with her theoretical and practical laws. But the same object
can be perfectly conformable to the theoretical reason, and not be the
less in contradiction in the highest degree with the practical reason.
We can disapprove of the end of an enterprise, and yet admire the skill
of the means and their relation with the end in view. We can despise the
pleasures which the voluptuous man makes the end of his life, and
nevertheless praise the skill which he exhibits in the choice of his
means, and the logical result with which he carries out his principles.
That which pleases us only by its form is good, absolutely good, and
without any conditions, when its form is at the same time its matter.
The good is also an object of sensuousness, but not of an immediate
sensuousness, as the agreeable, nor moreover of a mixed sensuousness, as
the beautiful. It does not excite desire as the first, nor inclination
as the second. The simple idea of the good inspires only esteem.

The difference separating the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful
being thus established, it is evident that the same object can be ugly,
defective, even to be morally rejected, and nevertheless be agreeable
and pleasing to the senses; that an object can revolt the senses, and
yet be good, _i.e._, please the reason; that an object can from its
inmost nature revolt the moral senses, and yet please the imagination
which contemplates it, and still be beautiful. It is because each one of
these ideas interests different faculties, and interests differently.

But have we exhausted the classification of the æsthetic attributes? No,
there are objects at the same time ugly, revolting, and horrifying to
the senses, which do not please the understanding, and of no account to
the moral judgment, and these objects do not fail to please; certainly
to please to such a degree, that we would willingly sacrifice the
pleasure of these senses and that of the understanding to procure for us
the enjoyment of these objects. There is nothing more attractive in
nature than a beautiful landscape, illuminated by the purple light of
evening. The rich variety of the objects, the mellow outlines, the play
of lights infinitely varying the aspect, the light vapors which envelop
distant objects,—all combine in charming the senses; and add to it, to
increase our pleasure, the soft murmur of a cascade, the song of the
nightingales, an agreeable music. We give ourselves up to a soft
sensation of repose, and whilst our senses, touched by the harmony of
the colors, the forms, and the sounds, experience the agreeable in the
highest, the mind is rejoiced by the easy and rich flow of the ideas,
the heart by the sentiments which overflow in it like a torrent. All at
once a storm springs up, darkening the sky and all the landscape,
surpassing and silencing all other noises, and suddenly taking from us
all our pleasures. Black clouds encircle the horizon; the thunder falls
with a deafening noise. Flash succeeds flash. Our sight and hearing is
affected in the most revolting manner. The lightning only appears to
render to us more visible the horrors of the night: we see the electric
fluid strike, nay, we begin to fear lest it may strike us. Well, that
does not prevent us from believing that we have gained more than lost by
the change; I except, of course, those whom fear has bereft of all
liberty of judgment. We are, on the one hand, forcibly drawn towards
this terrible spectacle, which on the other wounds and repulses our
senses, and we pause before it with a feeling which we cannot properly
call a pleasure, but one which we often like much more than pleasure.
But still, the spectacle that nature then offers to us is in itself
rather destructive than good (at all events we in no way need to think
of the utility of a storm to take pleasure in this phenomenon), is in
itself rather ugly than beautiful, for the darkness, hiding from us all
the images which light affords, cannot be in itself a pleasant thing;
and those sudden crashes with which the thunder shakes the atmosphere,
those sudden flashes when the lightning rends the cloud—all is contrary
to one of the essential conditions of the beautiful, which carries with
it nothing abrupt, nothing violent. And moreover this phenomenon, if we
consider only our senses, is rather painful than agreeable, for the
nerves of our sight and those of our hearing are each in their turn
painfully strained, then not less violently relaxed, by the alternations
of light and darkness, of the explosion of the thunder, and silence. And
in spite of all these causes of displeasure, a storm is an attractive
phenomenon for whomsoever is not afraid of it.

Another example. In the midst of a green and smiling plain there rises a
naked and barren hillock, which hides from the sight a part of the view.
Each one would wish that this hillock were removed which disfigures the
beauty of all the landscape. Well, let us imagine this hillock rising,
rising still, without indeed changing at all its shape, and preserving,
although on a greater scale, the same proportions between its width and
height. To begin with, our impression of displeasure will but increase
with the hillock itself, which will the more strike the sight, and which
will be the more repulsive. But continue; raise it up twice as high as a
tower, and insensibly the displeasure will efface itself to make way for
quite another feeling. The hill has at last become a mountain, so high a
mountain that it is quite impossible for our eyes to take it in at one
look. There is an object more precocious than all this smiling plain
which surrounds it, and the impression that it makes on us is of such a
nature that we should regret to exchange it for any other impression,
however beautiful it might be. Now, suppose this mountain to be leaning,
and of such an inclination that we could expect it every minute to crash
down, the previous impression will be complicated with another
impression: terror will be joined to it: the object itself will be but
still more attractive. But suppose it were possible to prop up this
leaning mountain with another mountain, the terror would disappear, and
with it a good part of the pleasure we experienced. Suppose that there
were beside this mountain four or five other mountains, of which each
one was a fourth or a fifth part lower than the one which came
immediately after; the first impression with which the height of one
mountain inspired us will be notably weakened. Something somewhat
analogous would take place if the mountain itself were cut into ten or
twelve terraces, uniformly diminishing; or again if it were artificially
decorated with plantations. We have at first subjected one mountain to
no other operation than that of increasing its size, leaving it
otherwise just as it was, and without altering its form; and this simple
circumstance has sufficed to make an indifferent or even disagreeable
object satisfying to the eyes. By the second operation, this enlarged
object has become at the same time an object of terror; and the pleasure
which we have found in contemplating it has but been the greater.
Finally, by the last operation which we have made, we have diminished
the terror which its sight occasioned, and the pleasure has diminished
as much. We have diminished _subjectively_ the idea of its height,
whether by dividing the attention of the spectator between several
objects, or in giving to the eyes, by means of these smaller mountains,
placed near to the large one, a measure by which to master the height of
the mountain all the more easily. The great and the terrible can
therefore be of themselves in certain cases a source of æsthetic
pleasure.

There is not in the Greek mythology a more terrible, and at the same
time more hideous, picture than the Furies, or Erinyes, quitting the
infernal regions to throw themselves in the pursuit of a criminal. Their
faces frightfully contracted and grimacing, their fleshless bodies,
their heads covered with serpents in the place of hair—revolt our senses
as much as they offend our taste. However, when these monsters are
represented to us in the pursuit of Orestes, the murderer of his mother,
when they are shown to us brandishing the torches in their hands, and
chasing their prey, without peace or truce, from country to country,
until at last, the anger of justice being appeased, they engulf
themselves in the abyss of the infernal regions; then we pause before
the picture with a horror mixed with pleasure. But not only the remorse
of a criminal which is personified by the Furies, even his unrighteous
acts: nay, the real perpetration of a crime, are able to please us in a
work of art. Medea, in the Greek tragedy; Clytemnestra, who takes the
life of her husband; Orestes, who kills his mother, fill our soul with
horror and with pleasure. Even in real life, indifferent and even
repulsive or frightful objects begin to interest us the moment that they
approach the monstrous or the terrible. An altogether vulgar and
insignificant man will begin to please us the moment that a violent
passion, which indeed in no way upraises his personal value, makes him
an object of fear and terror, in the same way that a vulgar, meaningless
object becomes to us the source of æsthetic pleasure the instant we have
enlarged it to the point where it threatens to overstep our
comprehension. An ugly man is made still more ugly by passion, and
nevertheless it is in bursts of this passion, provided that it turns to
the terrible and not to the ridiculous, that this man will be to us of
the most interest. This remark extends even to animals. An ox at the
plow, a horse before a carriage, a dog, are common objects; but excite
this bull to the combat, enrage this horse who is so peaceable, or
represent to yourself this dog a prey to madness; instantly these
animals are raised to the rank of æsthetic objects, and we begin to
regard them with a feeling which borders on pleasure and esteem. The
inclination to the pathetic—an inclination common to all men—the
strength of the sympathetic sentiment—this force which in nature makes
us wish to see suffering, terror, dismay, which has so many attractions
for us in art, which makes us hurry to the theatre, which makes us take
so much pleasure in the picturing of great misfortune,—all this bears
testimony to a fourth source of æsthetic pleasure, which neither the
agreeable, nor the good, nor the beautiful are in a state to produce.

All the examples that I have alleged up to the present have this in
common—that the feeling they excite in us rests on something objective.
In all these phenomena we receive the idea of something “which
oversteps, or which threatens to overstep, the power of comprehension of
our senses, or their power of resistance”; but not, however, going so
far as to paralyze these two powers, or so far as to render us incapable
of striving, either to know the object, or to resist the impression it
makes on us. There is in the phenomena a complexity which we cannot
retrace to unity without driving the intuitive faculty to its furthest
limits.

We have the idea of a force in comparison with which our own vanishes,
and which we are nevertheless compelled to compare with our own. Either
it is an object which at the same time presents and hides itself from
our faculty of intuition, and which urges us to strive to represent it
to ourselves, without leaving room to hope that this aspiration will be
satisfied; or else it is an object which appears to upraise itself as an
enemy, even against our existence—which provokes us, so to say, to
combat, and makes us anxious as to the issue. In all the alleged
examples there is visible in the same way the same action on the faculty
of feeling. All throw our souls into an anxious agitation and strain its
springs. A certain gravity which can even raise itself to a solemn
rejoicing takes possession of our soul, and whilst our organs betray
evident signs of internal anxiety, our mind falls back on itself by
reflection, and appears to find a support in a higher consciousness of
its independent strength and dignity. This consciousness of ourselves
must always dominate in order that the great and the horrible may have
for us an æsthetic value. It is because the soul before such sights as
these feels itself inspired and lifted above itself that they are
designated under the name of sublime, although the things themselves are
objectively in no way sublime; and consequently it would be more just to
say that they are elevating than to call them in themselves elevated or
sublime.

For an object to be called sublime it must be in opposition with our
sensuousness. In general it is possible to conceive but two different
relations between the objects and our sensuousness, and consequently
there ought to be two kinds of resistance. They ought either to be
considered as objects from which we wish to draw a knowledge, or else
they should be regarded as a force with which we compare our own.
According to this division there are two kinds of the sublime, the
sublime of knowledge and the sublime of force. Moreover, the sensuous
faculties contribute to knowledge only in grasping a given matter, and
putting one by the other its complexity in time and in space.

As to dissecting this complex property and assorting it, it is the
business of the understanding and not of the imagination. It is for the
understanding alone that the diversity exists: for the imagination
(considered simply as a sensuous faculty) there is but an uniformity,
and consequently it is but the number of the uniform things (the
quantity and not the quality) which can give origin to any difference
between the sensuous perception of phenomena. Thus, in order that the
faculty of picturing things sensuously may be reduced to impotence
before an object, necessarily it is imperative that this object exceeds
in its quantity the capacity of our imagination.

                   ON SIMPLE AND SENTIMENTAL POETRY.

There are moments in life when nature inspires us with a sort of love
and respectful emotion, not because she is pleasing to our senses, or
because she satisfies our mind or our taste (it is often the very
opposite that happens), but merely because she is nature. This feeling
is often elicited when nature is considered in her plants, in her
mineral kingdom, in rural districts; also in the case of human nature,
in the case of children, and in the manners of country people and of the
primitive races. Every man of refined feeling, provided he has a soul,
experiences this feeling when he walks out under the open sky, when he
lives in the country, or when he stops to contemplate the monuments of
early ages; in short, when escaping from factitious situations and
relations, he finds himself suddenly face to face with nature. This
interest, which is often exalted in us so as to become a want, is the
explanation of many of our fancies for flowers and for animals, our
preference for gardens laid out in the natural style, our love of walks,
of the country and those who live there, of a great number of objects
proceeding from a remote antiquity, etc. It is taken for granted that no
affectation exists in the matter, and moreover that no accidental
interest comes into play. But this sort of interest which we take in
nature is only possible under two conditions. First the object that
inspires us with this feeling must be really _nature_, or something we
take for nature; secondly this object must be in the full sense of the
word _simple_, that is, presenting the entire contrast of nature with
art, all the advantage remaining on the side of nature. Directly this
second condition is united to the first, but no sooner, nature assumes
the character of simplicity.

Considered thus, nature is for us nothing but existence in all its
freedom; it is the constitution of things taken in themselves; it is
existence itself according to its proper and immutable laws.

It is strictly necessary that we should have this idea of nature to take
an interest in phenomena of this kind. If we conceive an artificial
flower so perfectly imitated that it has all the appearance of nature
and would produce the most complete illusion, or if we imagine the
imitation of simplicity carried out to the extremest degree, the instant
we discover it is only an imitation, the feeling of which I have been
speaking is completely destroyed. It is, therefore, quite evident that
this kind of satisfaction which nature causes us to feel is not a
satisfaction of the æsthetical taste, but a satisfaction of the moral
sense; for it is produced by means of a conception and not immediately
by the single fact of intuition: accordingly it is by no means
determined by the different degrees of beauty in forms. For, after all,
is there anything so specially charming in a flower of common
appearance, in a spring, a moss-covered stone, the warbling of birds, or
the buzzing of bees, etc.? What is that can give these objects a claim
to our love? It is not these objects in themselves; it is an idea
represented by them that we love in them. We love in them life and its
latent action, the effects peacefully produced by beings of themselves,
existence under its proper laws, the inmost necessity of things, the
eternal unity of their nature.

These objects which captivate us _are_ what we _were_, what we _must be_
again some day. We were nature as they are; and culture, following the
way of reason and of liberty, must bring us back to nature. Accordingly,
these objects are an image of our infancy irrevocably past—of our
infancy which will remain eternally very dear to us, and thus they
infuse a certain melancholy into us; they are also the image of our
highest perfection in the ideal world, whence they excite a sublime
emotion in us.

But the perfection of these objects is not a merit that belongs to them,
because it is not the effect of their free choice. Accordingly they
procure quite a peculiar pleasure for us, by being our models without
having any thing humiliating for us. It is like a constant manifestation
of the divinity surrounding us, which refreshes without dazzling us. The
very feature that constitutes their character is precisely what is
lacking in ours to make it complete; and what distinguishes us from them
is precisely what they lack to be divine. We are free and they are
necessary; we change and they remain identical. Now it is only when
these two conditions are united, when the will submits freely to the
laws of necessity, and when, in the midst of all the changes of which
the imagination is susceptible, reason maintains its rule—it is only
then that the divine or the ideal is manifested. Thus we perceive
eternally _in them_ that which we have not, but which we are continually
forced to strive after; that which we can never reach, but which we can
hope to approach by continual progress. And we perceive _in ourselves_
an advantage which they lack, but in which some of them—the beings
deprived of reason—cannot absolutely share, and in which the others,
such as children, can only one day have a share by following _our_ way.
Accordingly, they procure us the most delicious feeling of our human
nature, as an idea, though in relation to each _determinate_ state of
our nature they cannot fail to humble us.

As this interest in nature is based on an idea, it can only manifest
itself in a soul capable of ideas, that is, in a moral soul. For the
immense majority it is nothing more than pure affectation; and this
taste of _sentimentality_ so widely diffused in our day, manifesting
itself, especially since the appearance of certain books, by sentimental
excursions and journeys, by sentimental gardens, and other fancies akin
to these—this taste by no means proves that true refinement of sense has
become general. Nevertheless, it is certain that nature will always
produce something of this impression, even on the most insensible
hearts, because all that is required for this is the moral disposition
or aptitude, which is common to all men. For all men, however contrary
their acts may be to simplicity and to the truth of nature, are brought
back to it in their ideas. This sensibility in connection with nature is
specially and most strongly manifested, in the greater part of persons,
in connection with those sorts of objects which are closely related to
us, and which, causing us to look closer into ourselves, show us more
clearly what in us departs from nature; for example, in connection with
children, or with nations in a state of infancy. It is an error to
suppose that it is only the idea of their weakness that, in certain
moments, makes us dwell with our eyes on children with so much emotion.
This may be true with those who, in the presence of a feeble being, are
used to feel nothing but their own superiority. But the feeling of which
I speak is only experienced in a very peculiar moral disposition, nor
must it be confounded with the feeling awakened in us by the joyous
activity of children. The feeling of which I speak is calculated rather
to humble than to flatter our self-love; and if it gives us the idea of
some advantage, this advantage is at all events not on our side.

We are moved in the presence of childhood, but it is not because from
the height of our strength and of our perfection we drop a look of pity
on it; it is, on the contrary, because from the depths of our impotence,
of which the feeling is inseparable from that of the real and
determinate state to which we have arrived, we raise our eyes to the
child’s determinableness and pure innocence. The feeling we then
experience is too evidently mingled with sadness for us to mistake its
source. In the child, all is _disposition_ and _destination_; in us, all
is in the state of a _completed_, _finished_ thing, and the completion
always remains infinitely below the destination. It follows that the
child is to us like the representation of the ideal; not, indeed, of the
ideal as we have realized it, but such as our destination admitted; and,
consequently, it is not at all the idea of its indigence, of its
hinderances, that makes us experience emotion in the child’s presence;
it is, on the contrary, the idea of its pure and free force, of the
integrity, the infinity of its being. This is the reason why, in the
sight of every moral and sensible man, the child will always be a
_sacred_ thing; I mean an object which, by the grandeur of an idea,
reduces to nothingness all grandeur realized by experience; an object
which, in spite of all it may lose in the judgment of the understanding,
regains largely the advantage before the judgment of reason.

Now it is precisely this contradiction between the judgment of reason
and that of the understanding which produces in us this quite special
phenomenon, this mixed feeling, called forth in us by the sight of the
simple—I mean the simple in the manner of thinking. It is at once the
idea of a childlike simplicity and of a childish simplicity. By what it
has of childish simplicity it exposes a weak side to the understanding,
and provokes in us that smile by which we testify our superiority (an
entirely speculative superiority). But directly we have reason to think
that childish simplicity is at the same time a childlike simplicity—that
it is not consequently a want of intelligence, an infirmity in a
theoretical point of view, but a superior force (practically), a
heart-full of truth and innocence, which is its source, a heart that has
despised the help of art because it was conscious of its real and
internal greatness—directly this is understood, the understanding no
longer seeks to triumph. Then raillery, which was directed against
simpleness, makes way for the admiration inspired by noble simplicity.
We feel ourselves obliged to esteem this object, which at first made us
smile, and directing our eyes to ourselves, to feel ourselves unhappy in
not resembling it. Thus is produced that very special phenomenon of a
feeling in which good-natured raillery, respect, and sadness are
confounded. It is the condition of the simple that nature should triumph
over art, either unconsciously to the individual and against his
inclination, or with his full and entire cognizance. In the former case
it is _simplicity_ as a _surprise_, and the impression resulting from it
is one of gayety; in the second case, it is simplicity of _feeling_, and
we are moved.

With regard to simplicity as a surprise, the person must be _morally_
capable of denying nature. In simplicity of feeling the person may be
morally incapable of this, but we must not think him physically
incapable, in order that it may make upon us the impression of the
simple. This is the reason why the acts and words of children only
produce the impression of simplicity upon us when we forget that they
are physically incapable of artifice, and in general only when we are
exclusively impressed by the contrast between their natural character
and what is artificial in us. Simplicity is a _childlike ingenuousness_
which is encountered when it is not _expected_; and it is for this very
reason that, taking the word in its strictest sense, simplicity could
not be attributed to childhood properly speaking.

But in both cases, in simplicity as a surprise and simplicity as a
feeling, nature must always have the upper hand, and art succumb to her.

Until we have established this distinction we can only form an
incomplete idea of simplicity. The affections are also something
natural, and the rules of decency are artificial; yet the triumph of the
affections over decency is anything but simple. But when affection
triumphs over artifice, over false decency, over dissimulation, we shall
have no difficulty in applying the word simple to this. Nature must
therefore triumph over art, not by its blind and brutal force as a
_dynamical power_, but in virtue of its form as a _moral magnitude_; in
a word, not as a want, but as an _internal necessity_. It must not be
_insufficiency_, but the inopportune character of the latter that gives
nature her victory; for insufficiency is only a want and a defect, and
nothing that results from a want or defect could produce esteem. No
doubt in the simplicity resulting from surprise, it is always the
predominance of affection and a want of reflection that causes us to
appear natural. But this want and this predominance do not by any means
suffice to constitute simplicity; they merely give occasion to nature to
_obey without let or hinderance_ her _moral constitution_, that is, the
_law of harmony_.

The simplicity resulting from surprise can only be encountered in man
and that only in as far as at the moment he ceases to be a pure and
innocent nature. This sort of simplicity implies a will that is not in
harmony with that which nature does of her own accord. A person simple
after this fashion, when recalled to himself, will be the first to be
alarmed at what he is; on the other hand, a person in whom simplicity is
found as a _feeling_, will only wonder at one thing, that is, at the way
in which men feel astonishment. As it is not the moral subject as a
person, but only his natural character set free by affection, that
confesses the truth, it follows from this that we shall not attribute
this sincerity to man as a merit, and that we shall be entitled to laugh
at it, our raillery not being held in check by any personal esteem for
his character. Nevertheless, as it is still the sincerity of nature
which, even in the simplicity caused by surprise, pierces suddenly
through the veil of dissimulation, a satisfaction of a superior order is
mixed with the mischievous joy we feel in having caught any one in the
act. This is because nature, opposed to affectation, and truth, opposed
to deception, must in every case inspire us with esteem. Thus we
experience, even in the presence of simplicity originating in surprise,
a really moral pleasure, though it be not in connection with a moral
object.

I admit that in simplicity proceeding from surprise we always experience
a feeling of esteem for _nature_, because we must esteem truth; whereas
in the simplicity of feeling we esteem the _person_ himself, enjoying in
this way not only a moral satisfaction, but also a satisfaction of which
the object is moral. In both cases nature is _right_, since she speaks
the truth; but in the second case not only is nature right, but there is
also an act that does _honor_ to the person. In the first case the
sincerity of nature always puts the person to the blush, because it is
involuntary; in the second it is always a merit which must be placed to
the credit of the person, even when what he confesses is of a nature to
cause a blush.

We attribute simplicity of feeling to a man, when, in the judgments he
pronounces on things, he passes, without seeing them, over all the
factitious and artificial sides of an object, to keep exclusively to
simple nature. We require of him all the judgments that can be formed of
things without departing from a sound nature; and we only hold him
entirely free in what presupposes a departure from nature in his mode of
thinking or feeling.

If a father relates to his son that such and such a person is dying of
hunger, and if the child goes and carries the purse of his father to
this unfortunate being, this is a simple action. It is in fact a healthy
nature that acts in the child; and in a world where healthy nature would
be the law, he would be perfectly right to act so. He only sees the
misery of his neighbor and the speediest means of relieving him. The
extension given to the right of property, in consequence of which part
of the human race might perish, is not based on mere nature. Thus the
act of this child puts to shame real society, and this is acknowledged
by our heart in the pleasure it experiences from this action.

If a good-hearted man, inexperienced in the ways of the world, confides
his secrets to another, who deceives him, but who is skilful in
disguising his perfidy, and if by his very sincerity he furnishes him
with the means of doing him injury, we find his conduct simple. We laugh
at him, yet we cannot avoid esteeming him, precisely on account of his
simplicity. This is because his trust in others proceeds from the
rectitude of his own heart; at all events, there is simplicity here only
as far as this is the case.

Simplicity in the mode of thinking cannot then ever be the act of a
depraved man; this quality only belongs to children, and to men who are
children in heart. It often happens to these in the midst of the
artificial relations of the great world to act or to think in a simple
manner. Being themselves of a truly good and humane nature, they forget
that they have to do with a depraved world; and they act, even in the
courts of kings, with an ingenuousness and an innocence that are only
found in the world of pastoral idyls.

Nor is it always such an easy matter to distinguish exactly childish
candor from childlike candor, for there are actions that are on the
skirts of both. Is a certain act foolishly simple, and must we laugh at
it? or is it nobly simple, and must we esteem the actors the higher on
that account? It is difficult to know which side to take in some cases.
A very remarkable example of this is found in the history of the
government of Pope Adrian VI., related by Mr. Schröckh with all the
solidity and the spirit of practical truth which distinguish him.
Adrian, a Netherlander by birth, exerted the pontifical sway at one of
the most critical moments for the hierarchy—at a time when an
exasperated party laid bare without any scruple all the weak sides of
the Roman Church, while the opposite party was interested in the highest
degree in covering them over. I do not entertain the question how a man
of a truly simple character ought to act in such a case, if such a
character were placed in the papal chair. But, we ask, how could this
simplicity of feeling be compatible with the part of a pope? This
question gave indeed very little embarrassment to the predecessors and
successors of Adrian. They followed uniformly the system adopted once
for all by the court of Rome, not to make any concessions anywhere. But
Adrian had preserved the upright character of his nation and the
innocence of his previous condition. Issuing from the humble sphere of
literary men to rise to this eminent position, he did not belie at that
elevation the primitive simplicity of his character. He was moved by the
abuses of the Roman Church, and he was much too sincere to dissimulate
publicly what he confessed privately. It was in consequence of this
manner of thinking that, in his instruction to his legate in Germany, he
allowed himself to be drawn into avowals hitherto unheard of in a
sovereign pontiff, and diametrically contrary to the principles of that
court: “We know well,” he said, among other things, “that for many years
many abominable things have taken place in this holy chair; it is not
therefore astonishing that the evil has been propagated from the head to
the members, from the pope to the prelates. We have all gone astray from
the good road, and for a long time there is none of us, not one, who has
done anything good.” Elsewhere he orders his legate to declare in his
name “that he, Adrian, cannot be blamed for what other popes have done
before him; that he himself, when he occupied a comparatively mediocre
position, had always condemned these excesses.” It may easily be
conceived how such simplicity in a pope must have been received by the
Roman clergy. The smallest crime of which he was accused was that of
betraying the church and delivering it over to heretics. Now this
proceeding, supremely imprudent in a pope, would yet deserve our esteem
and admiration if we could believe it was real simplicity; that is, that
Adrian, without fear of consequences, had made such an avowal, moved by
his natural sincerity, and that he would have persisted in acting thus,
though he had understood all the drift of his clumsiness. Unhappily we
have some reason to believe that he did not consider his conduct as
altogether impolitic, and that in his candor he went so far as to
flatter himself that he had served very usefully the interests of his
church by his indulgence to his adversaries. He did not even imagine
that he ought to act thus in his quality as an honest man; he thought
also as a pope to be able to justify himself, and forgetting that the
most artificial of structures could only be supported by continuing to
deny the truth, he committed the unpardonable fault of having recourse
to means of safety, excellent perhaps, in a natural situation, but here
applied to entirely contrary circumstances. This necessarily modifies
our judgment very much, and although we cannot refuse our esteem for the
honesty of heart in which the act originates, this esteem is greatly
lessened when we reflect that nature on this occasion was too easily
mistress of art, and that the heart too easily overruled the head.

True genius is of necessity simple, or it is not genius. Simplicity
alone gives it this character, and it cannot belie in the moral order
what it is in the intellectual and æsthetical order. It does not know
those rules, the crutches of feebleness, those pedagogues which prop up
slippery spirits; it is only guided by nature and instinct, its guardian
angel; it walks with a firm, calm step across all the snares of false
taste, snares in which the man without genius, if he have not the
prudence to avoid them the moment he detects them, remains infallibly
imbedded. It is therefore the part only of genius to issue from the
known without ceasing to be at home, or to enlarge the circle of nature
without _overstepping_ it. It does indeed sometimes happen that a great
genius oversteps it; but only because geniuses have their moments of
frenzy, when nature, their protector, abandons them, because the force
of example impels them, or because the corrupt taste of their age leads
them astray.

The most intricate problems must be solved by genius with simplicity,
without pretension, with ease; the egg of Christopher Columbus is the
emblem of all the discoveries of genius. It only justifies its character
as genius by triumphing through simplicity over all the complications of
art. It does not proceed according to known principles, but by feelings
and inspiration; the sallies of genius are the inspirations of a God
(all that healthy nature produces is divine); its feelings are law’s for
all time, for all human generations.

This childlike character imprinted by genius on its works is also shown
by it in its private life and manners. It is _modest_, because nature is
always so; but it is not _decent_, because corruption alone is decent.
It is _intelligent_, because nature cannot lack intelligence; but it is
not _cunning_, because art only can be cunning. It is _faithful_ to its
character and inclinations, but this is not so much because it has
principles as because nature, notwithstanding all its oscillations,
always returns to its equilibrium, and brings back the same wants. It is
_modest_ and even timid, because genius remains always a secret to
itself; but it is not anxious, because it does not know the dangers of
the road in which it walks. We know little of the private life of the
greatest geniuses; but the little that we know of it—what tradition has
preserved, for example, of Sophocles, of Archimedes, of Hippocrates, and
in modern times of Ariosto, of Dante, of Tasso, of Raphael, of Albert
Dürer, of Cervantes, of Shakespeare, of Fielding, of Sterne,
etc.—confirms this assertion.

Nay, more; though this admission seems more difficult to support, even
the greatest philosophers and great commanders, if great by their
genius, have simplicity in their character. Among the ancients I need
only name Julius Cæsar 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 Vendôme 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 heterogeneous 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 to wish to exchange it for the condition of beings
destitute of reason, for that fatal existence that no longer admits of
any choice, but which is so calm in its uniformity;—while we do this,
the Greeks, on the contrary, only have their imagination occupied in
retracing human nature in the inanimate world, and in giving to the will
an influence where blind necessity rules.

Whence can arise this difference between the spirit of the ancients and
the modern spirit? How comes it that, being, for all that relates to
nature, incomparably below the ancients, we are superior to them
precisely on this point, that we render a more complete homage to
nature; that we have a closer attachment to it; and that we are capable
of embracing even the inanimate world with the most ardent sensibility.
It is because nature, in our time, is no longer in man, and that we no
longer encounter it in its primitive truth, except out of humanity, in
the inanimate world. It is not because we are more _conformable to
nature_—quite the contrary; it is because in our social relations, in
our mode of existence, in our manners, we are in _opposition with
nature_. This is what leads us, when the instinct of truth and of
simplicity is awakened—this instinct which, like the moral aptitude from
which it proceeds, lives incorruptible and indelible in every human
heart—to procure for it in the physical world the satisfaction which
there is no hope of finding in the moral order. This is the reason why
the feeling that attaches us to nature is connected so closely with that
which makes us regret our infancy, forever flown, and our primitive
innocence. Our childhood is all that remains of nature in humanity, such
as civilization has made it, of untouched, unmutilated nature. It is,
therefore, not wonderful, when we meet out of us the impress of nature,
that we are always brought back to the idea of our childhood.

It was quite different with the Greeks in antiquity. Civilization with
them did not degenerate, nor was it carried to such an excess that it
was necessary to break with nature. The entire structure of their social
life reposed on feelings, and not on a factitious conception, on a work
of art. Their very theology was the inspiration of a simple spirit, the
fruit of a joyous imagination, and not like the ecclesiastical dogmas of
modern nations, subtle combinations of the understanding. Since,
therefore, the Greeks had not lost sight of nature in humanity, they had
no reason, when meeting it out of man, to be surprised at their
discovery, and they would not feel very imperiously the need of objects
in which nature could be retraced. In accord with themselves, happy in
feeling themselves men, they would of necessity keep to humanity as to
what was greatest to them, and they must needs try to make all the rest
approach it; while we, who are not in accord with ourselves—we who are
discontented with the experience we have made of our humanity—have no
more pressing interest than to fly out of it and to remove from our
sight a so ill-fashioned form. The feeling of which we are treating here
is, therefore, not that which was known by the ancients; it approaches
far more nearly that _which we ourselves experience for the ancients_.
The ancients felt naturally; we, on our part, feel what is natural. It
was certainly a very different inspiration that filled the soul of
Homer, when he depicted his divine cowherd[12] giving hospitality to
Ulysses, from that which agitated the soul of the young Werther at the
moment when he read the “Odyssey”[13] on issuing from an assembly in
which he had only found tedium. The feeling we experience for nature
resembles that of a sick man for health.

As soon as nature gradually vanishes from human life—that is, in
proportion as it ceases to be _experienced_ as a _subject_ (active and
passive)—we see it dawn and increase in the poetical world in the guise
of an _idea_ and as an _object_. The people who have carried farthest
the want of nature, and at the same time the reflections on that matter,
must needs have been the people who at the same time were most struck
with this phenomenon of the _simple_, and gave it a name. If I am not
mistaken, this people was the French. But the feeling of the simple, and
the interest we take in it, must naturally go much farther back, and it
dates from the time when the moral sense and the æsthetical sense began
to be corrupt. This modification in the manner of feeling is exceedingly
striking in Euripides, for example, if compared with his predecessors,
especially Æschylus; and yet Euripides was the favorite poet of his
time. The same revolution is perceptible in the ancient historians.
Horace, the poet of a cultivated and corrupt epoch, praises, under the
shady groves of Tibur, the calm and happiness of the country, and he
might be termed the true founder of this sentimental poetry, of which he
has remained the unsurpassed model. In Propertius, Virgil, and others,
we find also traces of this mode of feeling; less of it is found in
Ovid, who would have required for that more abundance of heart, and who
in his exile at Tomes sorrowfully regrets the happiness that Horace so
readily dispensed with in his villa at Tibur.

It is in the fundamental idea of poetry that the poet is everywhere the
_guardian_ of nature. When he can no longer entirely fill this part, and
has already in himself suffered the deleterious influence of arbitrary
and factitious forms, or has had to struggle against this influence, he
presents himself as the _witness_ of nature and as its avenger. The poet
will, therefore, be the _expression_ of nature itself, or his part will
be to _seek_ it, if men have lost sight of it. Hence arise two kinds of
poetry, which embrace and exhaust the entire field of poetry. All
poets—I mean those who are really so—will belong, according to the time
when they flourish, according to the accidental circumstances that have
influenced their education generally, and the different dispositions of
mind through which they pass, will belong, I say, to the order of the
_sentimental_ poetry or to _simple_ poetry.

The poet of a young world, simple and inspired, as also the poet who at
an epoch of artificial civilization approaches nearest to the primitive
bards, is austere and prudish, like the virginal Diana in her forests.
Wholly unconfiding, he hides himself from the heart that seeks him, from
the desire that wishes to embrace him. It is not rare for the dry truth
with which he treats his subject to resemble insensibility. The whole
object possesses him, and to reach his heart it does not suffice, as
with metals of little value, to stir up the surface; as with pure gold,
you must go down to the lowest depths. Like the Deity behind this
universe, the simple poet hides himself behind his work; he is _himself_
his work, and his work is _himself_. A man must be no longer worthy of
the work, nor understand it, or be tired of it, to be even anxious to
learn who is its author.

Such appears to us, for instance, Homer in antiquity, and Shakespeare
among moderns: two natures infinitely different and separated in time by
an abyss, but perfectly identical as to this trait of character. When,
at a very youthful age, I became first acquainted with Shakespeare, I
was displeased with his coldness, with his insensibility, which allows
him to jest even in the most pathetic moments, to disturb the impression
of the most harrowing scenes in “Hamlet,” in “King Lear,” and in
“Macbeth,” etc., by mixing with them the buffooneries of a madman. I was
revolted by his insensibility, which allowed him to pause sometimes at
places where my sensibility would bid me hasten and bear me along, and
which sometimes carried him away with indifference when my heart would
be so happy to pause. Though I was accustomed, by the practice of modern
poets, to seek at once the poet in his works, to meet his heart, to
reflect with him in his theme—in a word, to see the object in the
subject—I could not bear that the poet could in Shakespeare never be
seized, that he would never give me an account of himself. For some
years Shakespeare had been the object of my study and of all my respect
before I had learned to love his personality. I was not yet able to
comprehend nature at first hand. All that my eyes could bear was its
image only, reflected by the understanding and arranged by rules: and on
this score the sentimental poetry of the French, or that of the Germans
of 1750 to 1780, was what suited me best. For the rest, I do not blush
at this childish judgment: adult critics pronounced in that day in the
same way, and carried their simplicity so far as to publish their
decisions to the world.

The same thing happened to me in the case of Homer, with whom I made
acquaintance at a later date. I remember now that remarkable passage of
the sixth book of the “Iliad,” where Glaucus and Diomed meet each other
in the strife, and then, recognizing each other as host and guest,
exchange presents. With this touching picture of the piety with which
the laws of _hospitality_ were observed even in war, may be compared a
picture of chivalrous generosity in Ariosto. The knights, rivals in
love, Ferragus and Rinaldo—the former a Saracen, the latter a
Christian—after having fought to extremity, all covered with wounds,
make peace together, and mount the same horse to go and seek the
fugitive Angelica. These two examples, however different in other
respects, are very similar with regard to the impression produced on our
heart: both represent the noble victory of moral feeling over passion,
and touch us by the simplicity of feeling displayed in them. But what a
difference in the way in which the two poets go to work to describe two
such analogous scenes! Ariosto, who belongs to an advanced epoch, to a
world where simplicity of manners no longer existed, in relating this
trait, cannot conceal the astonishment, the admiration, he feels at it.
He measures the distance from those manners to the manners of his own
age, and this feeling of astonishment is too strong for him. He abandons
suddenly the painting of the object, and comes himself on the scene in
person. This beautiful stanza is well known, and has been always
specially admired at all times:—

“Oh nobleness, oh generosity of the ancient manners of chivalry! These
were rivals, separated by their faith, suffering bitter pain throughout
their frames in consequence of a desperate combat; and, without any
suspicion, behold them riding in company along dark and winding paths.
Stimulated by four spurs, the horse hastens his pace till they arrive at
the place where the road divides.”[14]

Now let us turn to old Homer. Scarcely has Diomed learned by the story
of Glaucus, his adversary, that the latter has been, from the time of
their fathers, the host and friend of his family, when he drives his
lance into the and friend of his family, when he drives his lance into
the ground, converses familiarly with him, and both agree henceforth to
avoid each other in the strife. But let us hear Homer himself:—

“Thus, then, I am for thee a faithful host in Argos, and thou to me in
Lycia, when I shall visit that country. We shall, therefore, avoid our
lances meeting in the strife. Are there not for me other Trojans or
brave allies to kill when a god shall offer them to me and my steps
shall reach them? And for thee, Glaucus, are there not enough Achæans,
that thou mayest immolate whom thou wishest? But let us exchange our
arms, in order that others may also see that we boast of having been
hosts and guests at the time of our fathers.” Thus they spoke, and,
rushing from their chariots, they seized each other’s hands, and swore
friendship the one to the other.[15]

It would have been difficult for a _modern_ poet (at least to one who
would be modern in the moral sense of the term) even to wait as long as
this before expressing his joy in the presence of such an action. We
should pardon this in him the more easily, because we also, in reading
it, feel that our heart makes a pause here, and readily turns aside from
the object to bring back its thoughts on itself. But there is not the
least trace of this in Homer. As if he had been relating something that
is seen every day—nay, more, as if he had no heart beating in his
breast—he continues, with his dry truthfulness:—

“Then the son of Saturn blinded Glaucus, who, exchanging his armor with
Diomed, gave him golden arms of the value of one hecatomb, for brass
arms only worth nine beeves.”[16]

The poets of this order,—the genuinely simple poets, are scarcely any
longer in their place in this artificial age. Accordingly they are
scarcely possible in it, or at least they are only possible on the
condition of _traversing_ their age, like _scared persons_, at a
_running_ pace, and of being preserved by a happy star from the
influence of their age, which would mutilate their genius. Never, for ay