No More Learning

Does he come back? Does he expect to come
back? Marvellous only that this enthusiastic expectation does not
become more the fashion among enthusiasts. 91

Go thine inscrutable way, Eternal Providence! Only let me not
despair in Thee, because of this inscrutableness. Let me not despair
in Thee, even if Thy steps appear to me to be going back. It is not
true that the shortest line is always straight.

92

Thou hast on Thine Eternal Way so much to carry on together, so much
to do! So many aside steps to take! And what if it were as good as
proved that the vast flow wheel which brings mankind nearer to this
perfection is only put in motion by smaller, swifter wheels, each of
which contributes its own individual unit thereto?

93

It is so! The very same Way by which the Race reaches its
perfection, must every individual man--one sooner--another later--
have travelled over. Have travelled over in one and the same life?
Can he have been, in one and the self-same life, a sensual Jew and a
spiritual Christian? Can he in the self-same life have overtaken
both?

94

Surely not that! But why should not every individual man have
existed more than once upon this World?

95

Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest?
Because the human understanding, before the sophistries of the
Schools had dissipated and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once?

Why may not even I have already performed those steps of my
perfecting which bring to man only temporal punishments and rewards?

97

And once more, why not another time all those steps, to perform
which the views of Eternal Rewards so powerfully assist us?

Why should I not come back as often as I am capable of acquiring
fresh knowledge, fresh expertness? Do I bring away so much from
once, that there is nothing to repay the trouble of coming back?

99

Is this a reason against it? Or, because I forget that I have been
here already? Happy is it for me that I do forget. The recollection
of my former condition would permit me to make only a bad use of the
present. And that which even I must forget now, is that necessarily
forgotten for ever?

100

Or is it a reason against the hypothesis that so much time would
have been lost to me? Lost? --And how much then should I miss? --Is
not a whole Eternity mine?




LETTERS UPON THE AESTHETIC EDUCATION OF MAN

BY

J. C. FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER




INTRODUCTORY NOTE

An outline of the life of Schiller will be found prefixed to the
translation of "Wilhelm Tell" in the volume of Continental Dramas in
The Harvard Classics.

Schiller's importance in the intellectual history of Germany is by
no means confined to his poetry and dramas. He did notable work in
history and philosophy, and in the department of esthetics
especially, he made significant contributions, modifying and
developing in important respects the doctrines of Kant. In the
letters on "Esthetic Education" which are here printed, he gives the
philosophic basis for his doctrine of art, and indicates clearly and
persuasively his view of the place of beauty in human life.


LETTERS UPON THE AESTHETIC EDUCATION OF MAN


LETTER I.

By your permission I lay before you, in a series of letters, the
results of my researches upon beauty and art. I am keenly sensible
of the importance as well as of the charm and dignity of this
undertaking. I shall treat a subject which is closely connected with
the better portion of our happiness and not far removed from the
moral nobility of human nature. I shall plead this cause of the
Beautiful before a heart by which her whole power is felt and
exercised, and which will take upon itself the most difficult part
of my task in an investigation where one is compelled to appeal as
frequently to feelings as to principles.

That which I would beg of you as a favour, you generously impose
upon me as a duty; and, when I solely consult my inclination, you
impute to me a service. The liberty of action you prescribe is
rather a necessity for me than a constraint little exercised in
formal rules, I shall scarcely incur the risk of sinning against
good taste by any undue use of them; my ideas, drawn rather from
within than from reading or from an intimate experience with the
world, will not disown their origin; they would rather incur any
reproach than that of a sectarian bias, and would prefer to succumb
by their innate feebleness than sustain themselves by borrowed
authority and foreign support.

In truth, I will not keep back from you that the assertions which
follow rest chiefly upon Kantian principles; but if in the course of
these researches you should be reminded of any special school of
philosophy, ascribe it to my incapacity, not to those principles.
No; your liberty of mind shall be sacred to me; and the facts upon
which I build will be furnished by your own sentiments; your own
unfettered thought will dictate the laws according to which we to
proceed.

With regard to the ideas which predominate in the practical part of
Kant's system, philosophers only disagree, whilst mankind, I am
confident of proving, have never done so. If stripped of their
technical shape, they will appear as the verdict of reason
pronounced from time immemorial by common consent, and as facts of
the moral instinct which nature, in her wisdom, has given to man in
order to serve as guide and teacher until his enlightened
intelligence gives him maturity. But this very technical shape which
renders truth visible to the understanding conceals it from the
feelings; for, unhappily, understanding begins by destroying the
object of the inner sense before it can appropriate the object. Like
the chemist, the philosopher finds synthesis only by analysis, or
the spontaneous work of nature only through the torture of art.
Thus, in order to detain the fleeting apparition, he must enchain it
in the fetters of rule, dissect its fair proportions into abstract
notions, and preserve its living spirit in a fleshless skeleton of
words. Is it surprising that natural feeling should not recognise
itself in such a copy, and if in the report of the analyst the truth
appears as paradox?

Permit me therefore to crave your indulgence if the following
researches should remove their object from the sphere of sense while
endeavouring to draw it towards the understanding. That which I
before said of moral experience can be applied with greater truth to
the manifestation of "the beautiful. " It is the mystery which
enchants, and its being is extinguished with the extinction of the
necessary combination of its elements.

LETTER II.

But I might perhaps make a better use of the opening you afford me
if I were to direct your mind to a loftier theme than that of art.
It would appear to be unseasonable to go in search of a code for the
aesthetic world, when the moral world offers matter of so much
higher interest, and when the spirit of philosophical inquiry is so
stringently challenged by the circumstances of our times to occupy
itself with the most perfect of all works of art--the establishment
and structure of a true political freedom.

It is unsatisfactory to live out of your own age and to work for
other times. It is equally incumbent on us to be good members of our
own age as of our own state or country. If it is conceived to be
unseemly and even unlawful for a man to segregate himself from the
customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, it would be
inconsistent not to see that it is equally his duty to grant a
proper share of influence to the voice of his own epoch, to its
taste and its requirements, in the operations in which he engages.

But the voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all
events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The
course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time
that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of
art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily
above necessity and neediness for art is the daughter of freedom,
and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the
necessity of spirits and not by that of matter. But in our day it is
necessity, neediness, that prevails, and bends a degraded humanity
under its iron yoke. Utility is the great idol of the time, to which
all powers do homage and all subjects are subservient. In this great
balance of utility, the spiritual service of art has no weight, and,
deprived of all encouragement, it vanishes from the noisy Vanity
Fair of our time. The very spirit of philosophical inquiry itself
robs the imagination of one promise after another, and the frontiers
of art are narrowed, in proportion as the limits of science are
enlarged.

The eyes of the philosopher as well as of the man of the world are
anxiously turned to the theatre of political events, where it is
presumed the great destiny of man is to be played out. It would
almost seem to betray e culpable indifference to the welfare of
society if we did not share this general interest. For this great
commerce in social and moral principles is of necessity a matter of
the greatest concern to every human being, on the ground both of its
subject and of its results. It must accordingly be of deepest moment
to every man to think for himself. It would seem that now at length
a question that formerly was only settled by the law of the stronger
is to be determined by the calm judgment of the reason, and every
man who is capable of placing himself in a central position, and
raising his individuality into that of his species, can look upon
himself as in possession of this judicial faculty of reason; being
moreover, as man and member of the human family, a party in the case
under trial and involved more or less in its decisions. It would
thus appear that this great political process is not only engaged
with his individual case, it has also to pronounce enactments, which
he as a rational spirit is capable of enunciating and entitled to
pronounce.

It is evident that it would have been most attractive to me to
inquire into an object such as this, to decide such a question in
conjunction with a thinker of powerful mind, a man of liberal
sympathies, and a heart imbued with a noble enthusiasm for the weal
of humanity. Though so widely separated by worldly position, it
would have been a delightful surprise to have found your
unprejudiced mind arriving at the same result as my own in the field
of ideas, Nevertheless, I think I can not only excuse, but even
justify by solid grounds, my step in resisting this attractive
purpose and in preferring beauty to freedom. I hope that I shall
succeed in convincing you that this matter of art is less foreign to
the needs than to the tastes of our age; nay, that, to arrive at a
solution even in the political problem, the road of aesthetics must
be pursued, because it is through beauty that we arrive at freedom.
But I cannot carry out this proof without my bringing to your
remembrance the principles by which the reason is guided in
political legislation.

LETTER III.

Man is not better treated by nature in his first start than her
other works are; so long as he is unable to act for himself as an
independent intelligence, she acts for him. But the very fact that
constitutes him a man is, that he does not remain stationary, where
nature has placed him, that he can pass with his reason, retracing
the steps nature had made him anticipate, that he can convert the
work of necessity into one of free solution, and elevate physical
necessity into a moral law.

When man is raised from his slumber in the senses, he feels that he
is a man, he surveys his surroundings, and finds that he is in a
state. He was introduced into this state, by the power of
circumstances, before he could freely select his own position. But
as a moral being he cannot possibly rest satisfied with a political
condition forced upon him by necessity, and only calculated for
that condition; and it would be unfortunate if this did satisfy him.
In many cases man shakes off this blind law of necessity, by his
free spontaneous action, of which among many others we have an
instance, in his ennobling by beauty and suppressing by moral
influence the powerful impulse implanted in him by nature in the
passion of love. Thus, when arrived at maturity, he recovers his
childhood by an artificial process, he founds a state of nature in
his ideas, not given him by any experience, but established by the
necessary laws and conditions of his reason, and he attributes to
this ideal condition an object, an aim, of which he was not
cognisant in the actual reality of nature. He gives himself a choice
of which he was not capable before, and sets to work just as if he
were beginning anew, and were exchanging his original state of
bondage for one of complete independence, doing this with complete
insight and of his free decision. He is justified in regarding this
work of political thraldom as non-existing, though a wild and
arbitrary caprice may have founded its work very artfully; though it
may strive to maintain it with great arrogance and encompass it with
a halo of veneration. For the work of blind powers possesses no
authority, before which freedom need bow, and all must be made to
adapt itself to the highest end which reason has set up in his
personality. It is in this wise that a people in a state of manhood
is justified in exchanging a condition of thraldom for one of moral
freedom.

Now the term natural condition can be applied to every political
body which owes its establishment originally to forces and not to
laws, and such a state contradicts the moral nature of man, because
lawfulness can alone have authority over this. At the same time this
natural condition is quite sufficient for the physical man, who only
gives himself laws in order to get rid of brute force. Moreover, the
physical man is a reality, and the moral man problematical.
Therefore when the reason suppresses the natural condition, as she
must if she wishes to substitute her own, she weighs the real
physical man against the problematical moral man, she weighs the
existence of society against a possible, though morally necessary,
ideal of society. She takes from man something which he really
possesses, and without which he possesses nothing, and refers him as
a substitute to something that he ought to possess and might
possess; and if reason had relied too exclusively on him, she might,
in order to secure him a state of humanity in which he is wanting
and can want without injury to his life, have robbed him even of the
means of animal existence which is the first necessary condition of
his being a man. Before he had opportunity to hold firm to the law
with his will, reason would have withdrawn from his feet the ladder
of nature.

The great point is therefore to reconcile these two considerations:
to prevent physical society from ceasing for a moment in time, while
the moral society is being formed in the idea; in other words, to
prevent its existence from being placed in jeopardy, for the sake of
the moral dignity of man. When the mechanic has to mend a watch, he
lets the wheels run out, but the living watchworks of the state have
to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for
another during its revolutions. Accordingly props must be sought for
to support society and keep it going while it is made independent of
the natural condition from which it is sought to emancipate it.

This prop is not found in the natural character of man, who, being
selfish and violent, directs his energies rather to the destruction
than to the preservation of society. Nor is it found in his moral
character, which has to be formed, which can never be worked upon or
calculated on by the lawgiver, because it is free and never appears.
It would seem therefore that another measure must be adopted. It
would seem that the physical character of the arbitrary must be
separated from moral freedom; that it is incumbent to make the
former harmonise with the laws and the latter dependent on
impressions; it would be expedient to remove the former still
farther from matter and to bring the latter somewhat more near to
it; in short to produce a third character related to both the
others--the physical and the moral--paving the way to a transition
from the sway of mere force to that of law, without preventing the
proper development of the moral character, but serving rather as a
pledge in the sensuous sphere of a morality in the unseen.

LETTER IV.

Thus much is certain. It is only when a third character, as
previously suggested, has preponderance that a revolution in a state
according to moral principles can be free from injurious
consequences; nor can anything else secure its endurance. In
proposing or setting up a moral state, the moral law is relied upon
as a real power, and free will is drawn into the realm of causes,
where all hangs together, mutually with stringent necessity and
rigidity. But we know that the condition of the human will always
remains contingent, and that only in the Absolute Being physical
coexists with moral necessity. Accordingly if it is wished to depend
on the moral conduct of man as on natural results, this conduct must
become nature, and he must be led by natural impulse to such a
course of action as can only and invariably have moral results. But
the will of man is perfectly free between inclination and duty, and
no physical necessity ought to enter as a sharer in this magisterial
personality. If therefore he is to retain this power of solution,
and yet become a reliable link in the causal concatenation of
forces, this can only be effected when the operations of both these
impulses are presented quite equally in the world of appearances. It
is only possible when, with every difference of form, the matter of
man's volition remains the same, when all his impulses agreeing with
his reason are sufficient to have the value of a universal
legislation.

It may be urged that every individual man carries, within himself,
at least in his adaptation and destination, a purely ideal man. The
great problem of his existence is to bring all the incessant changes
of his outer life into conformity with the unchanging unity of this
ideal. This pure ideal man, which makes itself known more or less
clearly in every subject, is represented by the state, which is the
objective and, so to speak, canonical form in which the manifold
differences of the subjects strive to unite. Now two ways present
themselves to the thought, in which the man of time can agree with
the man of idea, and there are also two ways in which the state can
maintain itself in individuals. One of these ways is when the pure
ideal man subdues the empirical man, and the state suppresses the
individual, or again when the individual BECOMES the state, and the
man of time is ENNOBLED to the man of idea.

I admit that in a one-sided estimate from the point of view of
morality this difference vanishes, for the reason is satisfied if
her law prevails unconditionally. But when the survey taken is
complete and embraces the whole man (anthropology), where the form
is considered together with the substance, and a living feeling has
a voice, the difference will become far more evident. No doubt the
reason demands unity, and nature variety, and both legislations take
man in hand. The law of the former is stamped upon him by an
incorruptible consciousness, that of the latter by an ineradicable
feeling. Consequently education will always appear deficient when
the moral feeling can only be maintained with the sacrifice of what
is natural; and a political administration will always be very
imperfect when it is only able to bring about unity by suppressing
variety. The state ought not only to respect the objective and
generic but also the subjective and specific in individuals; and
while diffusing the unseen world of morals, it must not depopulate
the kingdom of appearance, the external world of matter.

When the mechanical artist places his hand on the formless block, to
give it a form according to his intention, he has not any scruples
in doing violence to it. For the nature on which he works does not
deserve any respect in itself, and he does not value the whole for
its parts, but the parts on account of the whole. When the child of
the fine arts sets his hand to the same block, he has no scruples
either in doing violence to it, he only avoids showing this
violence. He does not respect the matter in which he works, any more
than the mechanical artist; but he seeks by an apparent
consideration for it to deceive the eye which takes this matter
under its protection. The political and educating artist follows a
very different course, while making man at once his material and his
end. In this case the aim or end meets in the material, and it is
only because the whole serves the parts that the parts adapt
themselves to the end. The political artist has to treat his
material--man--with a very different kind of respect from that shown
by the artist of fine art to his work. He must spare man's
peculiarity and personality, not to produce a deceptive effect on
the senses, but objectively and out of consideration for his inner
being.

But the state is an organisation which fashions itself through
itself and for itself, and for this reason it can only be realised
when the parts have been accorded to the idea of the whole. The
state serves the purpose of a representative, both to pure ideal and
to objective humanity, in the breast of its citizens, accordingly it
will have to observe the same relation to its citizens in which they
are placed to it, and it will only respect their subjective humanity
in the same degree that it is ennobled to an objective existence. If
the internal man is one with himself, he will be able to rescue his
peculiarity, even in the greatest generalisation of his conduct, and
the state will only become the exponent of his fine instinct, the
clearer formula of his internal legislation. But if the subjective
man is in conflict with the objective and contradicts him in the
character of the people, so that only the oppression of the former
can give the victory to the latter, then the state will take up the
severe aspect of the law against the citizen, and in order not to
fall a sacrifice, it will have to crush under foot such a hostile
individuality, without any compromise.

Now man can be opposed to himself in a twofold manner: either as a
savage, when his feelings rule over his principles; or as a
barbarian, when his principles destroy his feelings. The savage
despises art, and acknowledges nature as his despotic ruler; the
barbarian laughs at nature, and dishonours it, but he often proceeds
in a more contemptible way than the savage, to be the slave of his
senses. The cultivated man makes of nature his friend, and honours
its friendship, while only bridling its caprice.

Consequently, when reason brings her moral unity into physical
society, she must not injure the manifold in nature. When nature
strives to maintain her manifold character in the moral structure of
society, this must not create any breach in moral unity; the
victorious form is equally remote from uniformity and confusion.
Therefore, TOTALITY of character must be found in the people which
is capable and worthy to exchange the state of necessity for that of
freedom.

LETTER V.

Does the present age, do passing events, present this character? I
direct my attention at once to the most prominent object in this
vast structure.

It is true that the consideration of opinion is fallen, caprice is
unnerved, and, although still armed with power, receives no longer
any respect. Man has awaked from his long lethargy and self-
deception, and he demands with impressive unanimity to be restored
to his imperishable rights. But he does not only demand them; he
rises on all sides to seize by force what, in his opinion, has been
unjustly wrested from him. The edifice of the natural state is
tottering, its foundations shake, and a physical possibility seems
at length granted to place law on the throne, to honour man at
length as an end, and to make true freedom the basis of political
union. Vain hope! The moral possibility is wanting, and the generous
occasion finds an unsusceptible rule.

Man paints himself in his actions, and what is the form depicted in
the drama of the present time? On the one hand, he is seen running
wild, on the other in a state of lethargy; the two extremest stages
of human degeneracy, and both seen in one and the same period.

In the lower larger masses, coarse, lawless impulses come to view,
breaking loose when the bonds of civil order are burst asunder, and
hastening with unbridled fury to satisfy their savage instinct.
Objective humanity may have had cause to complain of the state; yet
subjective man must honour its institutions. Ought he to be blamed
because he lost sight of the dignity of human nature, so long as he
was concerned in preserving his existence? Can we blame him that he
proceeded to separate by the force of gravity, to fasten by the
force of cohesion, at a time when there could be no thought of
building or raising up? The extinction of the state contains its
justification. Society set free, instead of hastening upward into
organic life, collapses into its elements.

On the other hand, the civilized classes give us the still more
repulsive sight of lethargy, and of a depravity of character which
is the more revolting because it roots in culture. I forget who of
the older or more recent philosophers makes the remark, that what is
more noble is the more revolting in its destruction. The remark
applies with truth to the world of morals. The child of nature, when
he breaks loose, becomes a madman; but the art scholar, when he
breaks loose, becomes a debased character. The enlightenment of the
understanding, on which the more refined classes pride themselves
with some ground, shows on the whole so little of an ennobling
influence on the mind that it seems rather to confirm corruption by
its maxims. We deny nature in her legitimate field and feel her
tyranny in the moral sphere, and while resisting her impressions, we
receive our principles from her. While the affected decency of our
manners does not even grant to nature a pardonable influence in the
initial stage, our materialistic system of morals allows her the
casting vote in the last and essential stage. Egotism has founded
its system in the very bosom of a refined society, and without
developing even a sociable character, we feel all the contagions and
miseries of society. We subject our free judgment to its despotic
opinions, our feelings to its bizarre customs, and our will to its
seductions. We only maintain our caprice against her holy rights.
The man of the world has his heart contracted by a proud self-
complacency, while that of the man of nature often beats in
sympathy; and every man seeks for nothing more than to save his
wretched property from the general destruction, as it were from some
great conflagration. It is conceived that the only way to find a
shelter against the aberrations of sentiment is by completely
foregoing its indulgence, and mockery, which is often a useful
chastener of mysticism, slanders in the same breath the noblest
aspirations. Culture, far from giving us freedom, only develops, as
it advances, new necessities; the fetters of the physical close more
tightly around us, so that the fear of loss quenches even the ardent
impulse toward improvement, and the maxims of passive obedience are
held to be the highest wisdom of life. Thus the spirit of the time
is seen to waver between perversions and savagism, between what is
unnatural and mere nature, between superstition and moral unbelief,
and it is often nothing but the equilibrium of evils that sets
bounds to it.

LETTER VI.

Have I gone too far in this portraiture of our times? I do not
anticipate this stricture, but rather another--that I have proved
too much by it. You will tell me that the picture I have presented
resembles the humanity of our day, but it also bodies forth all
nations engaged in the same degree of culture, because all, without
exception, have fallen off from nature by the abuse of reason,
before they can return to it through reason.

But if we bestow some serious attention to the character of our
times, we shall be astonished at the contrast between the present
and the previous form of humanity, especially that of Greece. We are
justified in claiming the reputation of culture and refinement, when
contrasted with a purely natural state of society, but not so
comparing ourselves with the Grecian nature. For the latter was
combined with all the charms of art and with all the dignity of
wisdom, without, however, as with us, becoming a victim to these
influences. The Greeks put us to shame not only by their simplicity,
which is foreign to our age; they are at the same time our rivals,
nay, frequently our models, in those very points of superiority from
which we seek comfort when regretting the unnatural character of our
manners. We see that remarkable people uniting at once fulness of
form and fulness of substance, both philosophising and creating,
both tender and energetic, uniting a youthful fancy; to the virility
of reason in a glorious humanity.

At the period of Greek culture, which was an awakening of the powers
of the mind, the senses and the spirit had no distinctly separated
property; no division had yet torn them asunder, leading them to
partition in a hostile attitude, and to mark off their limits with
precision. Poetry had not yet become the adversary of wit, nor had
speculation abused itself by passing into quibbling. In cases of
necessity both poetry and wit could exchange parts, because they
both honoured truth only in their special way. However high might be
the flight of reason, it drew matter in a loving spirit after it,
and, while sharply and stiffly defining it, never mutilated what it
touched. It is true the Greek mind displaced humanity, and recast it
on a magnified scale in the glorious circle of its gods; but it did
this not by dissecting human nature, but by giving it fresh
combinations, for the whole of human nature was represented in each
of the gods. How different is the course followed by us moderns! We
also displace and magnify individuals to form the image of the
specks, but we do this in a fragmentary way, not by altered
combinations, so that it is necessary to gather up from different
individuals the elements that form the species in its totality. It
would almost appear is if the powers of mind express themselves with
us in real life or empirically as separately as the psychologist
distinguishes them in the representation. For we see not only
individual subjects, but whole classes of men, uphold their
capacities only in part, while the rest of their faculties scarcely
show a germ of activity, as in the case of the stunted growth of
plants.

I do not overlook the advantages to which the present race, regarded
as a unity and in the balance of the understanding, may lay claim
over what is best in the ancient world; but it is obliged to engage
in the contest as a compact mass, and measure itself as a whole
against a whole. Who among the moderns could step forth, man against
man, and strive with an Athenian for the prize of higher humanity?

Whence comes this disadvantageous relation of individuals coupled
with great advantages of the race? Why could the individual Greek be
qualified as the type of his time? and why can no modern dare to
offer himself as such? Because all-uniting nature imparted its forms
to the Greek, and an all-dividing understanding gives our forms to
us.

It was culture itself that gave these wounds to modern humanity. The
inner union of human nature was broken, and a destructive contest
divided its harmonious forces directly; on the one hand, an enlarged
experience and a more distinct thinking necessitated a sharper
separation of the sciences, while on the other hand, the more
complicated machinery of states necessitated a stricter sundering of
ranks and occupations. Intuitive and speculative understanding took
up a hostile attitude in opposite fields, whose borders were guarded
with jealousy and distrust; and by limiting its operation to a
narrow sphere, men have made unto themselves a master who is wont
not unfrequently to end by subduing and oppressing all the other
faculties.
Whilst on the one hand a luxuriant imagination creates
ravages in the plantations that have cost the intelligence so much
labour, on the other hand a spirit of abstraction suffocates the
fire that might have warmed the heart and inflamed the imagination.

This subversion, commenced by art and learning in the inner man, was
carried out to fulness and finished by the spirit of innovation in
government. It was, no doubt, reasonable to expect that the simple
organisation of the primitive republics should survive the
quaintness of primitive manners and of the relations of antiquity.
But, instead of rising to a higher and nobler degree of animal life,
this organisation degenerated into a common and coarse mechanism.
The zoophyte condition of the Grecian states, where each individual
enjoyed an independent life, and could, in cases of necessity,
become a separate whole and unit in himself, gave way to an
ingenious mechanism, when, from the splitting up into numberless
parts, there results a mechanical life in the combination. Then
there was a rupture between the state and the church, between laws
and customs; enjoyment was separated from labour, the means from the
end, the effort from the reward. Man himself eternally chained down
to a little fragment of the whole, only forms a kind of fragment;
having nothing in his ears but the monotonous sound of the
perpetually revolving wheel, he never develops the harmony of his
being; and instead of imprinting the seal of humanity on his being,
he ends by being nothing more than the living impress of the craft
to which he devotes himself, of the science that he cultivates. This
very partial and paltry relation, linking the isolated members to
the whole, does not depend on forms that are given spontaneously;
for how could a complicated machine, which shuns the light, confide
itself to the free will of man? This relation is rather dictated,
with a rigorous strictness, by a formulary in which the free
intelligence of man is chained down. The dead letter takes the place
of a living meaning, and a practised memory becomes a safer guide
than genius and feeling.

If the community or state measures man by his function, only asking
of its citizens memory, or the intelligence of a craftsman, or
mechanical skill, we cannot be surprised that the other faculties of
the mind are neglected, for the exclusive culture of the one that
brings in honour and profit. Such is the necessary result of an
organisation that is indifferent about character, only looking to
acquirements, whilst in other cases it tolerates the thickest
darkness, to favour a spirit of law and order; it must result if it
wishes that individuals in the exercise of special aptitudes 'should
gain in depth what they are permitted to lose in extension. We are
aware, no doubt, that a powerful genius does not shut up its
activity within the limits of its functions; but mediocre talents
consume in the craft fallen to their lot the whole of their feeble
energy; and if some of their energy is reserved for matters of
preference, without prejudice to its functions, such a state of
things at once bespeaks a spirit soaring above the vulgar. Moreover,
it is rarely a recommendation in the eye of a state to have a
capacity superior to your employment, or one of those noble
intellectual cravings of a man of talent which contend in rivalry
with the duties of office. The state is so jealous of the exclusive
possession of its servants that it would prefer--nor can it be
blamed in this--for functionaries to show their powers with the
Venus of Cytherea rather than the Uranian Venus.

It is thus that concrete individual life is extinguished, in order
that the abstract whole may continue its miserable life, and the
state remains for ever a stranger to its citizens, because feeling
does not discover it anywhere. The governing authorities find
themselves compelled to classify, and thereby simplify, the
multiplicity of citizens, and only to know humanity in a
representative form and at second hand. Accordingly they end by
entirely losing sight of humanity, and by confounding it with a
simple artificial creation of the understanding, whilst on their
part the subject classes cannot help receiving coldly laws that
address themselves so little to their personality. At length
society, weary of having a burden that the state takes so little
trouble to lighten, falls to pieces and is broken up--a destiny that
has long since attended most European states. They are dissolved in
what may be called a state of moral nature, in which public
authority is only one function more, hated and deceived by those who
think it necessary, respected only by those who can do without it.

Thus compressed between two forces, within and without, could
humanity follow any other course than that which it has taken? The
speculative mind, pursuing imprescriptible goods and rights in the
sphere of ideas, must needs have become a stranger to the world of
sense, and lose sight of matter for the sake of form. On its part,
the world of public affairs, shut up in a monotonous circle of
objects, and even there restricted by formulas, was led to lose
sight of the life and liberty of the whole, while becoming
impoverished at the same time in its own sphere. Just as the
speculative mind was tempted to model the real after the
intelligible, and to raise the subjective of its imagination into
laws constituting the existence of things, so the state spirit
rushed into the opposite extreme, wished to make a particular and
fragmentary experience the measure of all observation, and to apply
without exception to all affairs the rules of its own particular
craft. The speculative mind had necessarily to become the prey of a
vain subtlety, the state spirit of a narrow pedantry; for the former
was placed too high to see the individual, and the latter too low to
survey the whole. But the disadvantage of this direction of mind was
not confined to knowledge and mental production; it extended to
action and feeling. We know that the sensibility of the mind
depends, as to degree, on the liveliness, and for extent on the
richness of the imagination. Now the predominance of the faculty of
analysis must necessarily deprive the imagination of its warmth and
energy, and a restricted sphere of objects must diminish its wealth.
It is for this reason that the abstract thinker has very often a
cold heart, because he analyses impressions, which only move the
mind by their combination or totality; on the other hand, the man of
business, the statesman, has very often a narrow heart, because shut
up in the narrow circle of his employment his imagination can
neither expand nor adapt itself to another manner of viewing things.

My subject has led me naturally to place in relief the distressing
tendency of the character of our own times to show the sources of
the evil, without its being my province to point out the
compensations offered by nature. I will readily admit to you that,
although this splitting up of their being was unfavourable for
individuals, it was the only road open for the progress of the race.
The point at which we see humanity arrived among the Greeks was
undoubtedly a maximum; it could neither stop there nor rise higher.
It could not stop there, for the sum of notions acquired forced
infallibly the intelligence to break with feeling and intuition, and
to lead to clearness of knowledge. Nor could it rise any higher; for
it is only in a determinate measure that clearness can be reconciled
with a certain degree of abundance and of warmth. The Greeks had
attained this measure, and to continue their progress in culture,
they, as we, were obliged to renounce the totality of their being,
and to follow different and separate roads in order to seek after
truth.

There was no other way to develop the manifold aptitudes of man than
to bring them in opposition with one another. This antagonism of
forces is the great instrument of culture, but it is only an
instrument; for as long as this antagonism lasts, man is only on the
road to culture. It is only because these special forces are
isolated in man, and because they take on themselves to impose an
exclusive legislation, that they enter into strife with the truth of
things, and oblige common sense, which generally adheres
imperturbably to external phaenomena, to dive into the essence of
things. While pure understanding usurps authority in the world of
sense, and empiricism attempts to subject this intellect to the
conditions of experience, these two rival directions arrive at the
highest possible development, and exhaust the whole extent of their
sphere. While on the one hand imagination, by its tyranny, ventures
to destroy the order of the world, it forces reason, on the other
side, to rise up to the supreme sources of knowledge, and to invoke
against this predominance of fancy the help of the law of necessity.

By an exclusive spirit in the case of his faculties, the individual
is fatally led to error; but the species is led to truth. It is only
by gathering up all the energy of our mind in a single focus, and
concentrating a single force in our being, that we give in some sort
wings to this isolated force, and that we draw it on artificially
far beyond the limits that nature seems to have imposed upon it. If
it be certain that all human individuals taken together would never
have arrived, with the visual power given them by nature, to see a
satellite of Jupiter, discovered by the telescope of the astronomer,
it is just as well established that never would the human
understanding have produced the analysis of the infinite, or the
critique of pure reason, if in particular branches, destined for
this mission, reason had not applied itself to special researches,
and if, after having, as it were, freed itself from all matter, it
had not by the most powerful abstraction given to the spiritual eye
of man the force necessary, in order to look into the absolute. But
the question is, if a spirit thus absorbed in pure reason and
intuition will be able to emancipate itself from the rigorous
fetters of logic, to take the free action of poetry, and seize the
individuality of things with a faithful and chaste sense? Here
nature imposes even on the most universal genius a limit it cannot
pass, and truth will make martyrs as long as philosophy will be
reduced to make its principal occupation the search for arms against
errors.

But whatever may be the final profit for the totality of the world,
of this distinct and special perfecting of the human faculties, it
cannot be denied that this final aim of the universe, which devotes
them to this kind of culture, is a cause of suffering, and a kind of
malediction for individuals. I admit that the exercises of the
gymnasium form athletic bodies; but beauty is only developed by the
free and equal play of the limbs. In the same way the tension of the
isolated spiritual forces may make extraordinary men; but it is only
the well-tempered equilibrium of these forces that can produce happy
and accomplished men. And in what relation should we be placed with
past and future ages if the perfecting of human nature made sach a
sacrifice indispensable? In that case we should have been the slaves
of humanity, we should have consumed our forces in servile work for
it during some thousands of years, and we should have stamped on our
humiliated, mutilated nature the shameful brand of this slavery--all
this in order that future generations, in a happy leisure, might
consecrate themselves to the cure of their moral health, and develop
the whole of human nature by their free culture.

But can it be true that man has to neglect himself for any end
whatever? Can nature snatch from us; for any end whatever, the
perfection which is prescribed to us by the aim of reason? It must
be false that the perfecting of particular faculties renders the
sacrifice of their totality necessary; and even if the law of nature
had imperiously this tendency, we must have the power to reform by a
superior art this totality of our being, which art has destroyed.

LETTER VII.

Can this effect of harmony be attained by the state? That is not
possible, for the state, as at present constituted, has given
occasion to evil, and the state as conceived in the idea, instead of
being able to establish this more perfect humanity, ought to be
based upon it. Thus the researches in which I have indulged would
have brought me back to the same point from which they had called me
off for a time. The present age, far from offering us this form of
humanity, which we have acknowledged as a necessary condition of an
improvement of the state, shows us rather the diametrically opposite
form. If therefore the principles I have laid down are correct, and
if experience confirms the picture I have traced of the present
time, it would be necessary to qualify as unseasonable every attempt
to effect a similar change in the state, and all hope as chimerical
that would be based on such an attempt, until the division of the
inner man ceases, and nature has been sufficiently developed to
become herself the instrument of this great change and secure the
reality of the political creation of reason.

In the physical creation, nature shows us the road that we have to
follow in the moral creation. Only when the Struggle of elementary
forces has ceased in inferior organisations, nature rises to the
noble form of the physical man. In like manner, the conflict of the
elements of the moral man and that of blind instincts must have
ceased, and a coarse antagonism in himself, beiore the attempt can
be hazarded. On the other hand, the independence of man's character
must be secured, and his submission to despotic forms must have
given place to a suitable liberty, before the variety in his
constitution can be made subordinate to the unity of the ideal. When
the man of nature still makes such an anarchical abuse of his will,
his liberty ought hardly to be disclosed to him. And when the man
fashioned by culture makes so little use of his freedom, his free
will ought not to be taken from him. The concession of liberal
principles becomes a treason to social order when it is associated
with a force still in fermentation, and increases the already
exuberant energy of its nature. Again, the law of conformity under
one level becomes tyranny to the individual when it is allied to a
weakness already holding sway and to natural obstacles, and when it
comes to extinguish the last spark of spontaneity and of
originality.

The tone of the age must therefore rise from its profound moral
degradation; on the one hand it must emancipate itself from the
blind service of nature, and on the other it must revert to its
simplicity, its truth, and its fruitful sap; a sufficient task for
more than a century. However, I admit readily, more than one special
effort may meet with success, but no improvement of the whole will
result from it, and contradictions in action will be a continual
protest against the unity of maxims. It will be quite possible,
then, that in remote corners of the world humanity may be honoured
in the person of the negro, while in Europe it may be degraded in
the person of the thinker. The old principles will remain, but they
will adopt the dress of the age, and philosophy will lend its name
to an oppression that was formerly authorised by the Church. In one
place, alarmed at the liberty which in its opening efforts always
shows itself an enemy, it will cast itself into the arms of a
convenient servitude. In another place, reduced to despair by a
pedantic tutelage, it will be driven into the savage license of the
state of nature. Usurpation will invoke the weakness of human
nature, and insurrection will invoke its dignity, till at length the
great sovereign of all human things, blind force, shall come in and
decide, like a vulgar pugilist, this pretended contest of
principles.

LETTER VIII.

Must philosophy therefore retire from this field, disappointed in
its hopes? Whilst in all other directions the dominion of forms is
extended, must this the most precious of all gifts be abandoned to a
formless chance? Must the contest of blind forces last eternally in
the political world, and is social law never to triumph over a
hating egotism?

Not in the least. It is true that reason herself will never attempt
directly a struggle with this brutal force which resists her arms,
and she will be as far as the son of Saturn in the 'Iliad' from
descending into the dismal field of battle, to fight them in person.
But she chooses the most deserving among the combatants, clothes him
with divine arms as Jupiter gave them to his son-in-law, and by her
triumphing force she finally decides the victory.

Reason has done all that she could in finding the law and
promulgating it; it is for the energy of the will and the ardour of
feeling to carry it out. To issue victoriously from her contest with
force, truth herself must first become a force, and turn one of the
instincts of man into her champion in the empire of phenomena. For
instincts are the only motive forces in the material world. If
hitherto truth has so little manifested her victorious power, this
has not depended on the understanding, which could not have unveiled
it, but on the heart which remained closed to it, and on instinct
which did not act with it.

Whence, in fact, proceeds this general sway of prejudices, this
might of the understanding in the midst of the light disseminated by
philosophy and experience? The age is enlightened, that is to say,
that knowledge, obtained and vulgarised, suffices to set right at
least our practical principles. The spirit of free inquiry has
dissipated the erroneous opinions which long barred the access to
truth, and has undermined the ground on which fanaticism and
deception had erected their throne. Reason has purified itself from
the il lusions of the senses and from a mendacious sophistry, and
philosophy herself raises her voice and exhorts us to return to the
bosom of nature, to which she had first made us unfaithful. Whence
then is it that we remain still barbarians?

There must be something in the spirit of man--as it is not in the
objects themselves--which prevents us from receiving the truth,
notwithstanding the brilliant light she diffuses, and from accepting
her, whatever may be her strength for producing conviction. This
something was perceived and expressed by an ancient sage in this
very significant maxim: sapere aude [Footnote: Dare to be wise].

Dare to be wise! A spirited courage is required to triumph over the
impediments that the indolence of nature as well as the cowardice of
the heart oppose to our in struction. It was not without reason that
the ancient Mythos made Minerva issue fully armed from the head of
Jupiter, for it is with warfare that this instruction com mences.
From its very outset it has to sustain a hard fight against the
senses, which do not like to be roused from their easy slumber. The
greater part of men are much too exhausted and enervated by their
struggle with want to be able to engage in a new and severe contest
with error. Satisfied if they themselves can escape from the hard
labour of thought, they willingly abandon to others the guardianship
of their thoughts. And if it happens that nobler necessities agitate
their soul, they cling with a greedy faith to the formulas that the
state and the church hold in reserve for such cases. If these
unhappy men deserve our compassion, those others deserve our just
contempt, who, though set free from those necessities by more
fortunate circumstances, yet willingly bend to their yoke. These
latter persons prefer this twilight of obscure ideas; where the
feelings have more intensity, and the imagination can at will create
convenient chimeras, to the rays of truth which put to flight the
pleasant illusions of their dreams. They have founded the whole
structure of their happiness on these very illusions, which ought to
be combated and dissipated by the light of knowledge, and they would
think they were paying too dearly for a truth which begins by
robbing them of all that has value in their sight. It would be
necessary that they should be already sages to love wisdom: a truth
that was felt at once by him to whom philosophy owes its name.
[Footnote: The Greek word means, as is known, love of wisdom. ]

It is therefore not going far enough to say that the light of the
understanding only deserves respect when it reacts on the character;
to a certain extent it is from the character that this light
proceeds; for the road that terminates in the head must pass through
the heart. Accordingly, the most pressing need of the present time
is to educate the sensibility, because it is the means, not only to
render efficacious in practice the improvement of ideas, but to call
this improvement into existence.

LETTER IX.

But perhaps there is a vicious circle in our previous reasoning?
Theoretical culture must it seems bring along with it practical
culture, and yet the latter must be the condition of the former. All
improvement in the political sphere must proceed from the ennobling
of the character. But, subject to the influence of a social
constitution still barbarous, how can character become ennobled? It
would then be necessary to seek for this end an instrument that the
state does not furnish, and to open sources that would have
preserved themselves pure in the midst of political corruption.

I have now reached the point to which all the considerations tended
that have engaged me up to the present time. This instrument is the
art of the beautiful; these sources are open to us in its immortal
models.

Art, like science, is emancipated from all that is positive, and all
that is humanly conventional; both are completely independent of the
arbitrary will of men. The political legislator may place their
empire under an interdict, but he cannot reign there. He can
proscribe the friend of truth, but truth subsists; he can degrade
the artist, but he cannot change art. No doubt, nothing is more
common than to see science and art bend before the spirit of the
age, and creative taste receive its law from critical taste. When
the character becomes stiff and hardens itself, we see science
severely keeping her limits, and art subject to the harsh restraint
of rules; when the character is relaxed and softened, science
endeavours to please and art to rejoice. For whole ages philosophers
as well as artists show themselves occupied in letting down truth
and beauty to the depths of vulgar humanity. They themselves are
swallowed up in it; but, thanks to their essential vigour and
indestructible life, the true and the beautiful make a victorious
fight, and issue triumphant from the abyss.

No doubt the artist is the child of his time, but unhappy for him if
he is its disciple or even its favourite. Let a beneficent deity
carry off in good time the suckling from the breast of its mother,
let it nourish him on the milk of a better age, and suffer him to
grow up and arrive at virility under the distant sky of Greece. When
he has attained manhood, let him come back, presenting a face
strange to his own age; let him come, not to delight it with his
apparition, but rather to purify it, terrible as the son of
Agamemnon. He will, indeed, receive his matter from the present
time, but he will borrow the form from a nobler time and even beyond
all time, from the essential, absolute, immutable unity. There,
issuing from the pure ether of its heavenly nature, flows the source
of all beauty, which was never tainted by the corruption of
generations or of ages, which roll along far beneath it in dark
eddies. Its matter may be dishonoured as well as ennobled by fancy,
but the ever chaste form escapes from the caprices of imagination.
The Roman had already bent his knee for long years to the divinity
of the emperors, and yet the statues of the gods stood erect; the
temples retained their sanctity for the eye long after the gods had
become a theme for mockery, and the noble architecture of the
palaces that shielded the infamies of Nero and of Commodus were a
protest against them. Humanity has lost its dignity, but art has
saved it, and preserves it in marbles full of meaning; truth
continues to live in illusion, and the copy will serve to re-
establish the model. If the nobility of art has survived the
nobility of nature, it also goes before it like an inspiring genius,
forming and awakening minds. Before truth causes her triumphant
light to penetrate into the depth of the heart, poetry intercepts
her rays, and the summits of humanity shine in a bright light, while
a dark and humid night still hangs over the valleys.

But how will the artist avoid the corruption of his time which
encloses him on all hands? Let him raise his eyes to his own
dignity, and to law; let him not lower them to necessity and
fortune. Equally exempt from a vain activity which would imprint its
trace on the fugitive moment, and from the dreams of an impatient
enthusiasm which applies the measure of the absolute to the paltry
productions of time, let the artist abandon the real to the
understanding, for that is its proper field. But let the artist
endeavour to give birth to the ideal by the union of the possible
and of the necessary. Let him stamp illusion and truth with the
effigy of this ideal; let him apply it to the play of his
imagination and his most serious actions, in short, to all sensuous
and spiritual forms; then let him quietly launch his work into
infinite time.

But the minds set on fire by this ideal have not all received an
equal share of calm from the creative genius--that great and patient
temper which is required to impress the ideal on the dumb marble, or
to spread it over a page of cold, sober letters, and then entrust it
to the faithful hands of time. This divine instinct, and creative
force, much too ardent to follow this peaceful walk, often throws
itself immediately on the present, on active life, and strives to
transform the shapeless matter of the moral world. The misfortune of
his brothers, of the whole species, appeals loudly to the heart of
the man of feeling; their abasement appeals still louder; enthusiasm
is inflamed, and in souls endowed with energy the burning desire
aspires impatiently to action and facts. But has this innovator
examined himself to see if these disorders of the moral world wound
his reason, or if they do not rather wound his self-love? If he does
not determine this point at once, he will find it from the
impulsiveness with which he pursues a prompt and definite end. A
pure, moral motive has for its end the absolute; time does not exist
for it, and the future becomes the present to it directly, by a
necessary development, it has to issue from the present. To a reason
having no limits the direction towards an end becomes confounded
with the accomplishment of this end, and to enter on a course is to
have finished it.

If, then, a young friend of the true and of the beautiful were to
ask me how, notwithstanding the resistance of the times, he can
satisfy the noble longing of his heart, I should reply: Direct the
world on which you act towards that which is good, and the measured
and peaceful course of time will bring about the results. You have
given it this direction if by your teaching you raise its thoughts
towards the necessary and the eternal; if, by your acts or your
creations, you make the necessary and the eternal the object of your
leanings. The structure of error and of all that is arbitrary, must
fall, and it has already fallen, as soon as you are sure that it is
tottering. But it is important that it should not only totter in the
external but also in the internal man. Cherish triumphant truth in
the modest sanctuary of your heart; give it an incarnate form
through beauty, that it may not only be the understanding that does
homage to it, but that feeling may lovingly grasp its appearance.
And that you may not by any chance take from external reality the
model which you yourself ought to furnish, do not venture into its
dangerous society before you are assured in your own heart that you
have a good escort furnished by ideal nature. Live with your age,
but be not its creation; labour for your contemporaries, but do for
them what they need, and not what they praise. Without having shared
their faults, share their punishment with a noble resignation, and
bend under the yoke which they find is as painful to dispense with
as to bear. By the constancy with which you will despise their good
fortune, you will prove to them that it is not through cowardice
that you submit to their sufferings. See them in thought such as
they ought to be when you must act upon them; but see them as they
are when you are tempted to act for them. Seek to owe their suffrage
to their dignity; but to make them happy keep an account of their
unworthiness; thus, on the one hand, the nobleness of your heart
will kindle theirs, and, on the other, your end will not be reduced
to nothingness by their unworthiness. The gravity of your principles
will keep them off from you, but in play they will still endure
them. Their taste is purer than their heart, and it is by their
taste you must lay hold of this suspicious fugitive. In vain will
you combat their maxims, in vain will you condemn their actions; but
you can try your moulding hand on their leisure. Drive away caprice,
frivolity, and coarseness, from their pleasures, and you will banish
them imperceptibly from their acts, and at length from their
feelings. Everywhere that you meet them, surround them with great,
noble, and ingenious forms; multiply around them the symbols of
perfection, till appearance triumphs over reality, and art over
nature.

LETTER X.

Convinced by my preceding letters, you agree with me on this point,
that man can depart from his destination by two opposite roads, that
our epoch is actually moving on these two false roads, and that it
has become the prey, in one case, of coarseness, and elsewhere of
exhaustion and de pravity. It is the beautiful that must bring it
back from this twofold departure. But how can the cultivation of the
fine arts remedy, at the same time, these opposite defects, and
unite in itself two contradictory qualities? Can it bind nature in
the savage, and set it free in the barbarian? Can it at once tighten
a spring and loose it, and if it cannot produce this double effect,
how will it be reasonable to expect from it so important a result as
the education of man?

It may be urged that it is almost a proverbial adage that the
feeling developed by the beautiful refines manners, and any new
proof offered on the subject would appear superfluous. Men base this
maxim on daily experience, which shows us almost always clearness of
intellect, deli cacy of feeling, liberality and even dignity of
conduct, associated with a cultivated taste, while an uncultivated
taste is almost always accompanied by the opposite qualities. With
considerable assurance, the most civilised nation of antiquity is
cited as an evidence of this, the Greeks, among whom the perception
of the beautiful attained its highest development, and, as a
contrast, it is usual to point to nations in a partial savage state,
and partly barbarous, who expiate their insensibility to the
beautiful by a coarse or, at all events, a hard austere character.
Nevertheless, some thinkers are tempted occasionally to deny either
the fact itself or to dispute the legitimacy of the consequences
that are derived from it. They do not entertain so unfavourable an
opinion of that savage coarseness which is made a reproach in the
case of certain nations; nor do they form so advantageous an opinion
of the refinement so highly lauded in the case of cultivated
nations. Even as far back as in antiquity there were men who by no
means regarded the culture of the liberal arts as a benefit, and who
were consequently led to forbid the entrance of their republic to
imagination.

I do not speak of those who calumniate art, because they have never
been favoured by it. These persons only appreciate a possession by
the trouble it takes to acquire it, and by the profit it brings; and
how could they properly appreciate the silent labour of taste in the
exterior and in terior man? How evident it is that the accidental
disadvantages attending liberal culture would make them lose sight
of its essential advantages! The man deficient in form despises the
grace of diction as a means of corruption, courtesy in the social
relations as dissimulation, delicacy and generosity in conduct as an
affected exaggeration. He cannot forgive the favourite of the Graces
for having enlivened all assemblies as a man of the world, of having
directed all men to his views like a statesman, and of giving his
impress to the whole century as a writer; while he, the victim of
labour, can only obtain, with all his learning, the least attention
or overcome the least difficulty. As he cannot learn from his
fortunate rival the secret of pleasing, the only course open to him
is to deplore the corruption of human nature, which adores rather
the appearance than the reality.

But there are also opinions deserving respect, that pronounce
themselves adverse to the effects of the beautiful, and find
formidable arms in experience, with which to wage war against it.
"We are free to admit"--such is their language--"that the charms of
the beautiful can further honourable ends in pure hands; but it is
not repugnant to its nature to produce, in impure hands, a directly
contrary effect, and to employ in the service of injustice and error
the power that throws the soul of man into chains. It is exactly
because taste only attends to the form and never to the substance;
it ends by placing the soul on the dangerous incline, leading it to
neglect all reality and to sacrifice truth and morality to an
attractive envelope. All the real difference of things vanishes, and
it is only the appearance that determines their value! How many men
of talent"--thus these arguers proceed--"have been turned aside from
all effort by the seductive power of the beautiful, or have been led
away from all serious exercise of their activity, or have been
induced to use it very feebly? How many weak minds have been
impelled to quarrel with the organisation of society, simply because
it has pleased the imagination of poets to present the image of a
world constituted differently, where no propriety chains down
opinion and no artifice helds nature in thraldom? What a dangerous
logic of the passions they have learned since the poets have painted
them in their pictures in the most brilliant colours and since, in
the contest with law and duty, they have commonly re mained masters
of the battlefield. What has society gained by the relations of
society, formerly under the sway of truth, being now subject to the
laws of the beautiful, or by the external impression deciding the
estimation in which merit is to be held? We admit that all virtues
whose appearance produces an agreeable effect are now seen to
flourish, and those which, in society, give a value to the man who
possesses them. But, as a compensation, all kinds of excesses are
seen to prevail, and all vices are in vogue that can be reconciled
with a graceful exterior. " It is certainly a matter entitled to
reflection that, at almost all the periods of history when art
flourished and taste held sway, humanity is found in a state of
decline; nor can a single instance be cited of the union of a large
diffusion of aesthetic culture with political liberty and social
virtue, of fine manners associated with good morals, and of
politeness fraternising with truth and loyalty of character and
life.

As long as Athens and Sparta preserved their independence, and as
long as their institutions were based on respect for the laws, taste
did not reach its maturity, art remained in its infancy, and beauty
was far from exer cising her empire over minds. No doubt, poetry had
already taken a sublime flight, but it was on the wings of genius,
and we know that genius borders very closely on savage coarseness,
that it is a light which shines readily in the midst of darkness,
and which therefore often argues against rather than in favour of
the taste of the time. When the golden age of art appears under
Pericles and Alexander, and the sway of taste becomes more general,
strength and liberty have abandoned Greece; eloquence corrupts the
truth, wisdom offends it on the lips of Socrates, and virtue in the
life of Phocion. It is well known that the Romans had to exhaust
their energies in civil wars, and, corrupted by Oriental luxury, to
bow their heads under the yoke of a fortunate despot, before Grecian
art triumphed over the stiffness of their character. The same was
the case with the Arabs: civilisation only dawned upon them when the
vigour of their military spirit became softened under the sceptre of
the Abbassides. Art did not appear in modern Italy till the glorious
Lombard League was dissolved, Florence submitting to the Medici, and
all those brave cities gave up the spirit of independ ence for an
inglorious resignation. It is almost super fluous to call to mind
the example of modern nations, with whom refinement has increased in
direct proportion to the decline of their liberties. Wherever we
direct our eyes in past times, we see taste and freedom mutually
avoiding each other. Everywhere we see that the beautiful only
founds its sway on the ruins of heroic virtues.

And yet this strength of character, which is commonly sacrificed to
establish aesthetic culture, is the most power ful spring of all
that is great and excellent in man, and no other advantage, however
great, can make up for it. Accordingly, if we only keep to the
experiments hitherto made, as to the influence of the beautiful, we
cannot certainly be much encouraged in developing feelings so
dangerous to the real culture of man. At the risk of being hard and
coarse, it will seem preferable to dispense with this dissolving
force of the beautiful, rather than see human nature a prey to its
enervating influence, notwithstanding all its refining advantages.
However, experience is perhaps not the proper tribunal at which to
decide such a question; before giving so much weight to its
testimony, it would be well to inquire if the beauty we have been
discussing is the power that is condemned by the previous examples.