Ninth Letter
BUT are we perhaps not arguing in a circle? Is theoretical culture to bring about practical culture, and yet the practical is to be the condition of the theoretical? All improvement in the political sphere is to proceed from the ennobling of the character—but how, under the influence of a barbarous constitution, can the character become ennobled? We should need, for this end, to seek out some instrument which the State does not afford us, and with it open up well-springs which will keep pure and clear throughout every political corruption.
I have now reached the point to which all the foregoing considerations have been directed. This instrument is the Fine Arts, and these well-springs are opened up in their immortal examples.
Art, like Science, is free from everything that is positive or established by human conventions, and both of them rejoice in an absolute immunity from human lawlessness. The political legislator can enclose their territory, but he cannot govern within it. He can proscribe the friend of truth, but Truth endures; he can humiliate the artist, but Art he cannot debase. Nothing, it is true, is more common than for both Science and Art to pay homage to the spirit of the age, and for creative taste to accept the law of critical taste. Where character is rigid and obdurate, we see Science keeping a strict watch over its frontiers, and Art moving in the heavy shackles of rules; where character is enervated and loose, Science will strive to please and Art to gratify. For whole centuries now philosophers and artists have shewn themselves occupied in plunging Truth and Beauty in the depths of vulgar humanity; they themselves are submerged there, but Truth and Beauty struggle with their own indestructible vitality triumphantly to the surface.
No doubt the artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favourite. Let some beneficent deity snatch the infant betimes from his mother’s breast, let it nourish him with the milk of a better age and suffer him to grow up to full maturity beneath the distant skies of Greece. Then when he has become a man, let him return to his century as an alien figure; but not in order to gladden it by his appearance, rather, terrible like
Agamemnon’s son, to cleanse it. He will indeed take his subject matter from the present age, but his form he will borrow from a nobler time—nay, from beyond all time, from the absolute unchangeable unity of his being. Here, from the pure aether of his daemonic nature, flows forth the well-spring of Beauty, untainted by the corruption of the generations and ages which wallow in the dark eddies below it. A freak of temper can degrade his matter, as it has dignified it; but the chaste form is removed from its vicissitudes. The Roman of the first century had long bowed the knee before his emperors, while the gods’ statues still stood erect; the temples remained holy in men’s eyes when the gods had long since become objects of ridicule, and the infamous crimes of a Nero and a Commodus were put to shame by the noble style of the building which lent concealment to them. Humanity has lost its dignity, but Art has rescued and preserved it in significant stone; Truth lives on in the midst of deception, and from the copy the original will once again be restored. As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.
But how docs the artist secure himself against the corruptions of his time, which everywhere encircle him? By disdaining its opinion. Let him look upwards to his own dignity and to Law, not downwards to fortune and to everyday needs. Free alike from the futile activity which would gladly set its mark upon the fleeting moment and from the impatient spirit of extravagance which applies the measure of the Absolute to the sorry productions of Time, let him resign the sphere of the actual to the intellect, whose home it is; but let him strive, through the union of the possible with the necessary, to produce the Ideal. Let him stamp it on illusion and truth, coin it in the play of his imagination and in the gravity of his actions, in every sensuous and spiritual form, and quietly launch it into infinite Time.
But not everyone with this ideal glowing in his soul has been endowed with creative tranquillity and the great patient temper to imprint it upon the silent stone or to pour it into the sober word and entrust it to the faithful hands of Time. Much too impetuous to proceed by such quiet means as this, the divine creative impulse often plunges immediately into the present and into the practical business of life, and attempts to transform the formless substance of the moral world. The unhappiness of his generation speaks urgently to the sensitive man, its degradation still more urgently; enthusiasm is kindled, and glowing desire strives impatiently for action in vigorous souls. But has he also asked
himself whether these disorders in the moral world offend his reason, or whether they do not rather grieve his self-love? If he does not yet know the answer, he will discover it in the eagerness with which he presses for definite and rapid results. The pure moral impulse is directed at the Absolute; time does not exist for it, and the future is its present, as soon as it necessarily develops out of the present. For a reason having no limits direction is also completion, and the road has been travelled when once it has been chosen.
Give then, I shall reply to the young friend of Truth and Beauty who wants to learn from me how he can satisfy the noble impulse in his breast in the face of all the opposition in his century—give the world on which you are acting the direction towards the good, and the quiet rhythm of time will bring about its development. You have given it this direction, if by your teaching you elevate its thoughts to the necessary and the eternal, if by your actions or your creations you transform the necessary and eternal into the object of its impulses. The fabric of error and lawlessness will fall, it must fall; it has already fallen as soon as you are certain that it is leaning over; but it must lean in the inner, not merely in the outward man. In the modest stillness of your heart you must cherish victorious truth, display it from within yourself in Beauty, so that not merely thought may pay homage to it, but sense too may lay loving hold on its appearance. And lest by any chance you may receive the pattern you are to give it from actuality, do not dare to enter its doubtful society until you are assured of an ideal following in your heart. Live with your century, but do not be its creature; render to your contemporaries what they need, not what they praise. Without sharing their guilt, share with noble resignation their penalties, and bow with freedom beneath the yoke which they can as ill dispense with as they can bear it. By the steadfast courage with which you disdain their good fortune, you will prove to them that it is not your cowardice that submits to their sufferings. Think of them as they ought to be when you have to influence them, but think of them as they are when you are tempted to act on their behalf. Seek their approbation through their dignity, but impute their good fortune to their unworthiness; thus on the one hand, your own nobility will awaken theirs, and on the other, their unworthiness will not defeat your purpose. The gravity of your principles will scare them from you, but in play they will continue to tolerate them; their taste is purer than their heart, and it is here that you must lay hold of the timorous fugitive. In vain you will assail their maxims, in vain condemn their deeds; but you can try your fashioning hand upon their idleness. Drive away lawlessness, frivolity and coarseness from their pleasure, and you will imperceptibly banish them from their actions, and finally from their dispositions.
Wherever you find them, surround them with noble, great and ingenious forms, enclose them all round with the symbols of excellence, until actuality is overpowered by appearance and Nature by Art.13
