Carefully brought in the mother the sparkling and glorious red-wine,Poured in the clear-cut glasses, with rimlets all polished of pewter,Brought in the green-coloured rummers, those goblets most fit for theRhine-wine.
They drink in the fresh air what has been grown at home, of the '83 vintage, and withal in glasses that, as home-made, are just the right ones for Rhine-wine. A few lines further on our fancy is yet further kindled with the "streams of the Rhine river and its dearly-loved banks," and we are even introduced to the vineyard of the host behind the house itself; and, in short, there is nothing to arrest our attentionoutside the typical circle of a self-contented life which of its own bounty provides for its wants.
(c) In addition to both these types of human environment we must mention yet another in close association with which we all necessarily live. It is no other than the universally prevailingspiritualsurroundings of our life whether they be religious, legal, or moral, the organization of the State, that is to say, the constitution of the government, the judicial institutions, the family, the institutions of both public and private life, and all other social relations. For the ideal character is not merely to be portrayed in its relation to all that satisfies material wants, but as itself a focus of spiritual interests. It is certainly true that all that is truly substantive, divine, and essentially necessary in all these relations is fundamentally an envisagement of one reality. In the objective world, however, the forms under which this reality is manifested are various, and they are, one and all, involved in that which is wholly contingent in particular examples, and the conventional usages which are only valid for definite periods of time and distinct nations. In this variety of form all the interests of men's spiritual life receive an external embodiment of reality, with which every man is confronted in the customs, usages, and habits of society. Every man thereby, in addition to possessing a self-exclusive individuality of his own, becomes, in virtue of his association with such spiritual realities, even more a member of a whole cognate with and vital to himself than as a unit of that external world of Nature with which he is similarly conjoined. Speaking generally, we may attach to this spiritual association, of human life very much the same terms and significance we have already discussed in the foregoing sections; consequently we will for the present pass over the more detailed consideration of it, whose most important features will apply more strictly to another aspect of our inquiry, and will then be more appropriately discussed.
3. THE EXTERNALITY OF THE IDEAL WORK OF ART IN ITS RELATION TO A PUBLIC
It is therefore necessary that art, as the representation of the Ideal, must embody this Ideal in all the relations toexternal reality we have above described, and thereby associate the inward possessions of character with the objective world. A work of art, however much in form it may be a self-including and harmonious world by itself, exists none the less as such an object, both real and particular, notfor itselfbut for such asbeholdandenjoyit, that is the Public. Actors, for example, in the representation they give us of a particular drama do not merely enter into converse with one another, but appeal directly to ourselves, their audience; and it is equally important that they make themselves intelligible under both these aspects. Every work of art is in fact a direct appeal to the intelligence of everyone who confronts it. Now it is indeed true that the real Ideal, as envisaged for us in the universal interests and passions of its gods and men, is so far intelligible to everyone as it gives us a view of its characters within some typical external world of customs, usages, and everything else that characteristically distinguishes it. But the condition of art we have above formulated makes it further necessary that this element of external reality is not merely one with which the characters thereby represented are harmoniously associated, but must be also one within which we ourselves to whom the work is addressed feel equally at home. The appropriateness of the external environment to the characters enfolded within it must apply with equal force to our own attitude of mind in regarding both. But it so happens that from whatever period of the world's history the subject-matter of a work of art may be borrowed it will be sure to contain essential features, which are quite distinct from those which specifically determine other nations and periods. In other words artists of every description, whether they be poets, painters, sculptors, or musicians, select subject-matter from the Past, which in their particular state of culture and intelligence, ethical customs, usages, and the form of their government, differ from the civilization of the times they live in. Moreover, as we have already observed, this return upon the Past possesses the considerable advantage that in having thus recourse to memory instead of being face to face with all the facts of the present, there is an appreciable diminution of the material from which the artist selects his subject, and this he cannot readily dispense with. At the same timethe artist belongs only to his own century, and it is in the ethical customs, modes of conception, and generally the intellectual outlook of that he lives. The Homeric poems Homer, to take him for once as the individual creator of both "Iliad" and "Odyssey," may have actually lived through or he may not; but in any case they are at least four hundred years later[391]than the time of the Trojan war; and further a period twice as long separates the great Greek tragedians from the days of the ancient heroes, who, as translated into the atmosphere of their own time, form the subject-matter of their poetry. It is just the same in the case of the Niebelungenlied and the artist who finally fused together the various saga which that poem contains into one homogeneous work. We may no doubt admit that the artist finds himself entirely on congenial ground when dealing with everything truly pathetic, either in the history of gods or men; but the external and actual conditions of that ancient world, whose characters and actions he endeavours to portray, have altered in essential features and become consequently strange to him. And further than this a poet creates for the sake of a Public, and primarily for his own nation and his time, both of which should be able to enter into such a work of art with intelligence, and feel at home in it. The most genuine works of art no doubt assert a further claim to immortality, a hope that they may continue to be a source of delight to all times and nations. But even in the case of works of the highest class it is none the less true that nations and times situated far away from those which produced them can only fully apprehend them with the assistance of an extensive apparatus of geographical, historical, and it may be even philosophical knowledge and the results of much critical investigation.
Bearing in mind these fundamental, and to some extent incompatible differences which characterize the variouspoints of view from which a work of art must be regarded, the question arises what kind of form relatively to its external framework of locality, custom, usage, and generally any and every condition of religious, political or ethical significance a particular work of art should receive. Should an artist suffer his own times to pass from his mind altogether, and attempt only to secure the substantial appearance of the Past and what actually then existed, so that his work become simply a true portrayal of that; or is he not merely justified, but rather under an obligation, to pay an exclusive attention to his own nation and the life around him, elaborating his work with express regard to the principle that it should stand in harmonious relation to his own times? Or, to put the same thing in rather more technical language, we may propound the problem thus: Is the subject-matter of a work of art to beobjectivelyvalid in its content as one entirely appropriate historically considered, or should such matter be treatedsubjectively, that is, in complete subordination to the artist's personal standpoint relatively to the culture and social conditions of his own time? We would rather observe that both these positions, if thus pressed unduly, land us in extreme conclusions equally false; and we propose now to examine them briefly that we may by their means elucidate a more satisfactory theory.
And we would consider three fundamental aspects which this problem suggests. We willfirstexamine what is implied in the above subjective assertion of the particular culture of the artist's own time;secondly, there is the question what may be regarded as exclusively and objectively true when we refer to the Past;thirdly, we have to consider what may still be objectively valid in the true sense, though we still have a representation and appropriation of material borrowed from a time and nationality foreign to that of the artists.
(a) Now to start with, if we consider this purely subjective assertion, it is obvious that when we press the position closely we are finally driven to exclude the objective embodiment of the Past altogether, and to maintain that artistic representation is exclusively concerned with the appearance of present times.
(α) Such a result may be doubtless, under one aspect ofit, presented by mere ignorance of the Past. It is, then, rather the result of anaïveté, which is unable to feel the contradiction between the object itself and the representation given, or at least fails to bring the same to consciousness. Such a form of artistic presentation is therefore fundamentally due to lack of sufficient culture. We could hardly wish for a more vivid illustration of this than we find in thenaïveproductions of Hans Sachs, who has, no doubt with a vivid freshness of imaginative vigour and spirit, as we may truly say, domesticated among us[392]our dear Lord and Father God no less than Adam, Eve, and the rest of the patriarchs. Here, for example, God the Father is portrayed as teaching a school in which Cain, Abel, and the rest of Adam's children—are the pupils, precisely as any pedagogue of the time might have done. He catechizes them upon the ten commandments and the Lord's Prayer. Abel knows his lesson as a pious and good boy ought to. Cain on the contrary behaves and replies to his teachers as only naughty and wicked boys would think of doing; and when it is his turn to repeat the commandments turns them inside out: thou shalt steal, thou shalt not honour thy father and mother, and so forth. A representation of much the same crude simplicity having for its subject the tale of our Lord's Passion used to be carried out in South Germany, was then made illegal, and has since once more been resuscitated. In this Pilate is portrayed in the character of an insolent, rough, and arrogant official, the common soldiers much in the same familiar way our own might, offer Christ surreptitiously a pinch of tobacco; he disdains it, and they flatten it out on his nose. Vulgarity finds all the more jest in such an incident for the reason that it wholly conforms to its notions of piety and reverence, indeed calls up such feelings all the more readily through its immediate reference to that which it finds in its own world, thereby making more vivid its own sense of devotional fervour. No doubt there is a certain justification for this mode of translating, so to speak, the appearance and form of objective history into modern equivalents, such as we have found in our literature; and we may even attach akind of greatness to the courage of Hans Sachs in making himself so familiar with God Almighty, and those old religious ideas that without the least vestige of impiety he could rivet them deep within the conditions of our most commonplace life. At the same time such an attempt is none the less a rude intrusion upon our feelings, and indicates lack of cultivation, inasmuch as it not merely disallows to the object itself a right to assert itself as it really is, but forces upon it a mode of appearance so directly contrary to that which it possesses, that the result can only impress us as an emphatic caricature.
(β) As an antithesis to the above type of subjectivity we find another equally supreme asserting itself out of sheer pride in its own culture under the belief that the views peculiar to its own times, its ethical customs, and social conventions are those alone worth preservation or acceptance. Owing to a bias of this kind it is quite unable to enjoy the content of a work of art until such a form of culture prevails in it. An illustration of this latter type is the so-called classical good taste of the French school. Everything that is here attempted must forthwith be Frenchified, and all that it presents under the form of any other nationality and more particularly with any reference to the Middle Ages is voted incorrect and barbarous and is cast on one side with absolute contempt. Voltaire expressed anything but the truth when he said that the French have improved the works of the ancient world. What they have done is to nationalize them; and by this process of recasting have corrupted them with every kind of foreign and angular quality of their own that such a taste as theirs could develop to any extent, requiring as it did throughout a culture absolutely based on court etiquette, and a conformity to conventional rule and generalization in both the meaning and mode of any dramatic work. Indeed, we shall find the trail of this abstraction of a superfine culture visible in the very diction of their poetry. Not a poet among them dare venture to use the wordcochon, or add their own nomenclature to spoons, forks, and a thousand other simple objects. Consequently we have roundabout definitions and circumlocutions. We cannot have our spoons and forks; we get instead an instrument of the hand which conveys our victuals in a liquid or arid stateto the mouth; and this by no means stands alone. And with all its refinement their taste is vulgar to a degree; for the simple truth is that genuine art, so far from planing away and polishing its content to one flat and unruffled surface of generalities, is most of all anxious to set in full relief all that makes toward the well-defined characterization of life. It is on account of this very taste that the French can make less of Shakespeare than any other poet. And when they have attempted to work him up to their graces they have clipped off from him precisely that portion which we Germans find nearest to our hearts. For the same reason Voltaire makes merry over Pindar because he has made the remark,ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ.[393]And, consequently, in their works of art they find it necessary to make Chinese, Americans, or the heroes of Greek or Roman antiquity all speak in one tongue and in one manner—that of their French court. Achilles, for instance, in the "Iphigenie en Aulide"[394]is nothing more or less than a French prince; and if we had no name to help us no one could conceivably discover one particle of Achilles in him. It is true that in the theatrical representation of this drama he was habited as a Greek, appeared at least in helmet and coat of mail; but at the same time his hair was curled and powdered, with broad hips throughposchen[395], with red claws worked on shoes fastened on the foot with coloured ribbons; and what is more, the "Esther" of Racine was expressly popular in the time of Louis XIV, for the particular reason that Ahasuerus, on his first entrance on the stage, copied the appearance of Louis XIV himself, when he entered the great hall of audience. No doubt, in this transcript, there was a considerable admixture of the oriental luxuriance; but a Ahasuerus he was none the less fully powdered and wearing the royal mantle of ermine, and followed by a complete retinue of curled and powdered chamberlains got up thoroughlyen habit françaiswith their wigs, their feathered caps under arm, their vests and hoses ofdrap d'or, with their silk stockings and red buckles on their shoes. Allthat the court and a select circle of the privileged few were only permitted to seede factowas here open to all classes alike—theentréeof the king paraded in the poet's verses. The writing of history in France is not unfrequently conducted on very much the same principle. That is to say, history itself and the real objects of history are not the main purpose of the historian, whose interest is rather concentrated either on giving the government in vogue a lesson or teaching others how they ought to detest it. And in the same way there are a host of dramas which, either expressly throughout their entire content or in passing episodes, divert the attention to the events of the day; or, if passages occur in pieces which refer to former times presenting anything which may bear on matters of contemporary interest, the parallel or the contrast is deliberately emphasized with every expression of enthusiasm.
(γ) A third type of this personal treatment by the artist of his subject-matter may be sufficiently described as the separation of the same from all genuine artistic form whether it be characteristic of past or present works of art, a mode of production in fact which simply presents us with the entirely evanescent colour of "the man in the street" in his ordinary everyday action and vocation without adding aught to the same. In other words we may describe it as the bare counterpart of what the man of commonsense is conscious in the prosaic facts of life, that and nothing more. In such an atmosphere of prose no doubt everyone finds himself at home readily enough; or rather, he will only not find himself at home who takes up such a work with some definite conception of that which the very conditions of a work of art demand, and consequently is aware that it is precisely from this type of handling that Art undertakes to liberate us. Kotzebue, in his day, obtained all his popular effects through compositions of this kind, which aimed at nothing else but letting the general public both see and hear life's troubles and vexations, the pocketing of silver spoons, the risking of the pillory, or, to take particular characters, parsons, chamberlains, ensign-bearers, secretaries, and cavalry-majors, in their naked colours. Everyone might here recognize his own household, or, at least, that of some relation or friend, might see at a glance where in hisown precious circumstances and aims of life the shoe pinched. An originality of this sort necessarily fails to stir any real sense or idea of that which is the vital content of a work of art, however much it may awake an interest for its productions in hearts that are wont to ask for so little and are so ready to put up with the commonplaces of so-called ethical reflections. We may conclude, then, that the artistic presentation of the facts of external reality under any one of these three types just examined is subjective in a one-sided way, that is to say, it wholly fails to present us with any adequate form of that objective world as it really exists.
(b) We next propose to examine a mode of presentation the reverse of the above, one which endeavours to restore us the characters and events of the past so far as may be with every local detail of their former environment no less than any and every ethical or other particular characteristic which formerly distinguished them. We Germans have particularly come to the front in this class of work. As a rule we are, in striking contrast to the French, the most painstaking recorders of all that is peculiar in nations other than our own, and consequently make fidelity to the characteristic usages, dress, weapons, and all such antiquarian detail appropriate to particular epochs and localities a first requisite of our art. Add to this we have the necessary patience to put ourselves to no end of trouble in the way of hard study in order that we may thoroughly enter into the modes of thought and perception which belong to foreign nations and centuries distant from our own, and make ourselves thoroughly conversant with all their peculiarities. This power of looking at facts from many and diverse points of view in order to both apprehend and comprehend the spirit of every kind of national existence makes us not merely tolerant in our art towards all that strikes us as exceptionally strange in foreign customs, but clamorous even to a painful degree in our insistence that we have before us accurate correspondence with objective truth down to the most insignificant detail. The French are, no doubt, full of resource and energetic, but, however highly educated and practical men they may be, such qualities do not increase, but rather diminish the patience which they possess for quiet and exhaustive study.Criticism is always of first importance with them. We Germans, on the contrary, are by nature inclined to accept any picture of real truth for what it is, and particularly this is so with foreign works of art. From whatever part of Nature's storehouse such may come, whether it is plants or other creations of foreign growth, implements of any kind or form, dogs and cats, even absurdities, we accept them all genially; and the result of this is we are able to be on excellent terms with modes of thought the most removed from our own, ay, sacrificial customs, legends of the saints and all the extraordinary follies that go with them, to say nothing of a host of other marvels equally surprising. And for the same reasons it only appears essentially rational that in attempting to represent characters in action we should make their conversation and pursuits conformable to their own substance, that is to say, in strict accord with the times when they lived and their own national characteristics, whether regarded individually or in association with each other.
This fundamental idea that the objective truth of a work of art is established by virtue of the type of historical accuracy above described has obtained currency in comparatively recent times, mainly, that is to say, since the literary work of Frederick von Schlegel. From that time the importance of a first principle in literary criticism has attached to it; and further than this, it is asserted that our purely personal interest should above all restrict itself to the enjoyment we may derive from historical accuracy of this kind and the life it thus reproduces. Once accept these hard and fast rules and the conclusion is obvious that we are allowed no additional interest of any superior quality which an enquiry into the essential significance of any artistic content may or may not provide for us any more than we are permitted to derive any interest more vital to ourselves from aspects of such a work directly associated with the culture and aims of our own times. It is much on these lines that we find also in Germany, where the enthusiasm of Herder in this direction started a closer attention on all sides to the "Volkslied," a poetic inundation of national folk-songs imitating native tones of every sort of nationality whether it be the Iroquois, latter-day Greek, Lap, Turk, Tartar, Mongol, and many another; and, of course, it is assumed to be indicative ofnothing less than first-rate genius[396]to possess the power of thus diving into the ways and ideas of other folk, and converting all we discover into poetry. At the same time it is clear that however completely your poet may work his way into and emotionally realize all this strange kind of world, it remains and must continue to remain for that public to whose enjoyment these songs are addressed as something very much aloof from it.
The truth is that such a theory, if pressed to its abstract logical conclusion, limits its boundaries solely to the truth of history in its formal accuracy, and by doing so neglects all consideration of the nature of Art's content and questions relative to its essential significance, just as it disregards every aspect of it in which the culture and resources of modern thought and contemporary life are asserted. But it is as impossible to detach ourselves from the truth implied in this theory as it is from equally important truths which it neglects; all equally claim satisfaction, and imperatively force upon us the necessity of finding a further solution in which the claims of historical truth may be reconciled with these rival aspects of truth in a very different way to that just examined. And this brings us to the third question we proposed as to the nature of that objectivity and subjectivity which can be fully sustained together as the reality to which a genuine work of art conforms.
(c) The point of essential importance which we should before all others wish to emphasize here is this, that no one of those various aspects of truth we have above indicated should be allowed a predominant significance such as would impair the relative force of the others; and, further, or rather notwithstanding this, historical accuracy pure and simple in external matters, such as local conditions, customs, usages, and social institutions generally, must receive in a work of art their due place, if a subordinate one, it being only right that the interest of mere historical truth should give way before that of a vitally true and imperishable content for the present no less than the past.
We cannot, perhaps, do better by way of explaining what we consider to be the true form of artistic representation than by setting up in contrast a few examples of some we take to be defective.
(α) Now, to start with, the presentation of the characteristic features of a given period may be entirely just, accurate, and impregnated with life, nay more, wholly intelligible to a modern audience, and notwithstanding fail to escape the ordinary atmosphere of prose, and present us with the real substance of poetry. Goethe's "Götz von Berlichingen" will alone furnish us with notable illustrations of this defect. It is only necessary to open the book at the first scene, which introduces us to an inn near Schwarzenberg in Franconia; thedramatis personaeare Metzler, and Sievers sitting at a table, two grooms by the fire, also the landlord.
Sievers.Another glass of brandy, Hans, my boy, and good Christian measure.Landlord.You carry a glass that is never full.Metzler.[Aside to Sievers.] Tell us that once again about Berlichingen; the Bambergers are in a pretty fume out there; ay, black as thunder (etc.).The same kind of thing we find in the third Act.George.[Enters with a gutter-spout.] There you have lead and to spare; spot the target with but one half of it, and devil a soul shall get off, who is like to say to your Majesty, that's a miss this time[397].Lerse.[Aloud.] A fine piece of metal.George.The rain may take another road for all I care; a brave knight and a real good rain get through most things.Lerse.[Pours into glass.] Hold the spoon. [Goes to the window.] There's one of those imperial cockades prowling about with his musket; they believe we have aimed a point too far. He shall have a taste of my bullet, hot too and fresh from the pan. [Loads.]George.[Drops the spoon.] Let me have a look.Lerse.[Fires.] There lies the fool (etc.).
Sievers.Another glass of brandy, Hans, my boy, and good Christian measure.
Landlord.You carry a glass that is never full.
Metzler.[Aside to Sievers.] Tell us that once again about Berlichingen; the Bambergers are in a pretty fume out there; ay, black as thunder (etc.).
The same kind of thing we find in the third Act.
George.[Enters with a gutter-spout.] There you have lead and to spare; spot the target with but one half of it, and devil a soul shall get off, who is like to say to your Majesty, that's a miss this time[397].
Lerse.[Aloud.] A fine piece of metal.
George.The rain may take another road for all I care; a brave knight and a real good rain get through most things.
Lerse.[Pours into glass.] Hold the spoon. [Goes to the window.] There's one of those imperial cockades prowling about with his musket; they believe we have aimed a point too far. He shall have a taste of my bullet, hot too and fresh from the pan. [Loads.]
George.[Drops the spoon.] Let me have a look.
Lerse.[Fires.] There lies the fool (etc.).
All this is exceedingly vivid, intelligible, depicted in perfect keeping with the situation and the characters portrayed. Yet for all that these scenes are both trivial to a degree and essentially prosaic. All we get from either the matter or the form is just the ordinary man's way of seeing things andreality as it appears to him or rather all of us to some extent. We find the same tendency in many another of Goethe's youthful productions, which no doubt were deliberately directed against everything which previously had passed for the rule of the guild, and which sought for their most impressive effect by means of the nearness made clear to ourselves, an impression gained by the extraordinary grasp with which the poet's imagination and feeling seized upon everything. But the nearness was itself too near, and the vital content in part so petty, that such compositions ran constantly into mere triviality. We are most conscious of this kind of triviality in dramatic works when we see them on the stage; it is then that after being worked up to some excitement by all the concomitants of a theatrical performance, lights, well-dressed folk, and the rest of it, we expect to see something more than a couple of peasants, and troopers and a glass of schnapps thrown in[398]. This phase has mainly found its admirers in readers; it never had a long run on the stage.
(β) If we now consider our subject from an opposite point of view it may be admitted that we can sufficiently make ourselves acquainted with and assimilate the historical content of a former mythology and all that is most strange to ourselves in earlier conditions of state-life and national custom to secure through such an intimacy with, the general culture then prevailing a varied knowledge of the past. In fact, this acquaintance with the art, mythology, literature,cultus, and usages of antiquity is the starting point of our present system of education. Every schoolboy knows something about the gods and heroes of Greece and the prominent characters in ancient history. It is therefore quite possible, in so far as they really enter into the imaginative life of ourown times, that we may find enjoyment in the imaginative representation of such characters and interests. It is further impossible to predict whether or no such an intimacy may not be eventually carried equally as far in the case of the Indian, Egyptian, and Scandinavian mythologies. We may further observe that in the religious conceptions of all these peoples the Universal God is presented. The determinate form, however, of such conceptions, that is to say, the particular gods of Greece or India, are no longertruefor us as so personified. We do not believe in their existence, and the pleasure we take in them is derived from their appeal to our imagination. For this reason they stand entirely apart from our deepest emotional life, and we can imagine nothing more empty and cold than such exclamations we hear only too often in opera: "O ye gods!" or "O Jupiter!" or even "O Isis and Osiris!" And the folly of it all reaches its height when we have the wretched saws of oracular wisdom thrown in—and the opera can seldom get along without them—a position of dignity which nowadays for the first time in tragic drama is occupied by pure folly and clairvoyance.
The same criticism applies with equal truth to all other historical material relating to national customs, laws, and the like. Such historical fact is excellent in its way, but it belongs to the past; and when it has once ceased to have anything in common with present life it necessarily ceases, in spite of all our knowledge of it, to belong to us. We have, in short, no interest[399]in what has passed away on the mere ground that it once existed. What is historical can only truly be said to belong to us when it is the possession of the nation, to which we ourselves belong, or when we are able to regard the present as in a general way casually connected with the events in question, to whose continuous series the characters or actions represented are united by a bond of essential membership. For if we carefully considerthe matter we shall find that the mere fact of being formerly bound together with the same external environment and people to which we ourselves belong is not sufficient—rather the very part of our nation must present features in still closer relation to the conditions, life, and existence of our own times. To take an example of what we mean, we find ourselves in the Niebelungenlied geographically on a soil that belongs to us still, but the Burgundians and King Etzel are so absolutely cut off from all that touches our present civilization and every interest which is now coincident with patriotism that, without borrowing anything from the learning of the subject, it is but simple truth to say we feel infinitely more at home in the poems of Homer[400]. Klopstock, no doubt, in his enthusiasm for everything that concerned the Fatherland, was prompted to substitute his Scandinavian gods for those of Hellenic mythology; but, for all his zeal, Wotan, Walhalla, and Freja remain mere names for us, which appeal to our imaginations and patriotic emotions even less than Zeus and his compeers of Olympus.
The point above all we desire to emphasize is this. Works of art are not composed primarily for the mere student or the professor, but with the express purpose that they shall be intelligible on their face, and a source of enjoyment without any one having to undertake first a circuitous route of extensive historical investigation. For Art is not addressed to a small and select circle of the privileged few, but to the nation at large. What, moreover, is generally valid for a work of art applies also to the external form of the historical reality therein portrayed. Such exposition also must express itself with clearness open to the common apprehension requiring no considerable research to make it intelligible, must be clear to ourselves as representations of our century and our own people, so that we may be able to find ourselves entirely at home in it, and not have beforeus a world foreign to that we live in, if not actually unintelligible.
(γ) Considerations such as the foregoing have already brought us within reach of the truer conception of the objective truth of art and the mode under which it assimilates the material of past history. We propose now to offer further illustrations in support of the same.
(αα) And we may start at once by drawing attention to a characteristic which is common alike to the genuine national poetry of all peoples and in every period of past history, namely, that the historical and formal aspect of that poetry is entirely national, that is to say, it retains nothing incongruous to the people for whom it is composed. This is a feature shared alike by the great epics of India, the Homeric poems and the Greek drama. Sophocles never made his Philoctetes, Antigone, Ajax, Orestes, Œdipus, his choregi and choruses speak in the speech and manner that would have been entirely appropriate to their own times. The Spaniards have written their romances of the Cid under the same guiding principle. Tasso in his "Jerusalem Liberated" celebrated the universal interests of Catholic Christendom. Camoens, the poet of Portugal, depicted the discovery of the seaway to the East Indies round the Cape of Good Hope, and all the infinitely various adventures of the sea heroes that made it possible; and these acts of daring were the acts of his own people. Shakespeare threw into dramatic form the tragic history of his own country and even a Voltaire wrote his "Henriade." Far indeed have we Germans strayed from the path thus marked for us when we hope to work up into national epics histories remote from our own, which carry no longer with them a national interest of any kind. Bodmer's "Noachide" and Kloptock's "Messias" have started a new fashion of their own, ay, as they have overturned that old one which taught us that it redounds to a nation's glory to have its Homer, to say nothing of its Pindar and Sophocles. Those biblical stories, it is true, present points of special affinity with the national imagination owing to our close acquaintance with the old and new Testaments; but the historical material in its association with ancient custom and the like remains for all that only intelligible to the savant, and all the most of us can pick upfrom such epics is the prosaic interfusion of events and characters, which, in such a process of translation, have merely some novel form of speech thrust into their mouths, and the final result can only impress us as hollow and artificial.
(ββ) At the same time art cannot be restricted wholly to material borrowed from one nation. And as a matter of fact the more nationalities have come into contact with one another, the more their poets have looked abroad among all nations and times for the subject-matter of their poems. But however this may be the case, it is none the less an error to suppose that the mere fact that a poet is able, so to speak, to live into times aloof from his own at once stamps him as a man of creative genius. It is more to the point to recollect that this historical framework must, in the co-ordination of a poem, be retained only in strict subordination, and as a means of expressing that which permanently belongs to our humanity. Precisely in this way the Middle Ages long ago borrowed much from antiquity, but so absolutely suffused it with the content of its own epoch that, in this respect verging on the opposite extreme, we really get nothing from that antiquity but the bare names of Alexander, Aeneas, and the emperor Octavius.
First in importance, then, is this permanent condition of true art, immediate intelligibility. It will be found an invariable truth that all nations have emphasized precisely that in this life which was most agreeable to their artistic sense, their desire being always to find what was most intimate to themselves, their life and existence in their art. It was this independent flavour of patriotism which Calderon worked into such characters as his Zenobia and Semiramis; and Shakespeare in the same way was able to imprint upon the most varied subject-matter the hall-mark of his English ancestry, although he knew how to preserve along with it the essential traits of historical characters belonging to nations foreign to his own, the Roman for example, in a far profounder degree than was possible to the Spanish poets. Even the Greek tragedians had their eyes constantly directed to the actual conditions of their times and the particular city in which they lived. The "Œdipus Colonus" in its local references is not merely in a peculiar way associated withAthens but, by virtue of the fact that Œdipus dies in this locality, at once indicates him as the future Preserver of that city. In somewhat other associations the "Eumenides" of Aeschylus is, owing to the decisive sentence of the Areopagus, marked by an interest of more vital interest to the Athenians[401]. On the other hand Greek mythology, despite all the varied and oft repeated use that has been made of it since the revival of the arts and learning, has never fully come home to the general sense of modern emotions and in various degrees in the plastic arts and still more in poetry, despite its very extensive influence here, has failed to arouse real enthusiasm. No one thinks now of writing an ode to Venus, Zeus, or Pallas[402]. Sculpture, it is true, can hardly get along even in modern times without the assistance of the Greek Pantheon, but for that very reason it is mainly only appreciated by and intelligible to a select circle of cultivated men who are either connoisseurs or critics. As one of these, Goethe spared no pains in his endeavour to arouse in contemporary artists an enthusiasm which should go so far as to imitate the pictures of Philostratus, but for the most part his pains were thrown away. Such examples of the work of antiquity, on account of the very flavour of past time and a life that has vanished, which clings to them, remain as strange to contemporary art as they do to the general public. As a contrary example of real success on the part of Goethe we may instance the far profounder insight he has shown us during the later period of his poetic activity in fusing by means of his "Westöstlicher Divan" the colour of the East with the poetry that really appeals to us to-day, giving to the Orient, in fact, its modern embodiment. In this processof assimilation he has clearly shown himself alive to the fact that he is a poet of the West and a German as well, and consequently while preserving the fundamental key-note of the Oriental spirit in his delineation of characters and situations to which it was appropriate, was able at the same time fully to satisfy the claims of the modern spirit and those of his own personality. Subject to such reservations it is undoubtedly in the province of a poet to borrow his material from remote regions, past centuries and foreign nations, maintaining in their broad and most characteristic outlines the historical form of ancient mythology, custom, and institution. At the same time he will take care to utilize such forms only as the external frame of his delineations, never permitting the essential content of such productions to fall into any disharmony with the profounder instincts of his own native world. As the most extraordinary example of this Goethe's "Iphigenia" still stands without a rival.
In their relation to such a transformation the several arts dispose of their material very differently. In the love-poems of lyrical poetry very little use is made of local associations depicted with historical accuracy. The emotional situation and the movement of sentiment is here the main thing. We receive, for example, in the sonnets of Petrarch a very small substratum of natural fact relatively to Laura, hardly anything more than her name, which might just as well have been another. Of local interest we get the barest scraps, and that entirely of general significance, such as the existence of the fountain of Vaucluse and things of that kind. Epical poetry, on the contrary, requires the greatest detail in its natural descriptions, and we are most readily pleased with their historical truth, provided always that the picture is both clear and intelligible. The use of the external truth of historical facts presents the greatest pitfalls to dramatic art, more particularly in reference to its theatrical presentation, where everything is directly addressed to an audience, or purports to strike upon sense with the vividness of life, so that we are willing to recognize and entrust ourselves therein with equal directness. Here the delineation of historical truth in its external aspects must for the most part be of subsidiary importance, in fact retain little more than the framework of it. It must, in short, remain true to thatnatural relation we find in love-poetry, in which at the same time that we are able completely to sympathize with the feelings expressed in every way another name is given to the beloved than that of the lady most loved by ourselves[403]. It does not here in the least signify whether or no our critics fail to discover absolute precision in the picture presented of the particular manners, culture, and emotional expression of the time. In Shakespeare's historical dramas we find a great deal that remains strange to us and of no considerable interest. We are contented enough on a mere reading, but in the theatre our enjoyment ceases. Critics and men of learning no doubt stick fast to their idea that such exquisite scraps of genuine history should be presented on the stage on their own merits and come down severely upon the wretched taste of the public, when it lets us see how bored it is over such things. Unfortunately a work of art and the direct enjoyment we receive from it is in no sense particularly for critics or savants, but for this very public. Critics have really no reason to give themselves such airs. They are after all but units of this public, and the mere attention to historical detail can be of as little serious interest to them as any other members of it. For this reason the English nowadays in their theatrical performances only include such scenes from the Shakespearean drama which require nothing further to make them clear and intelligible, being happily free from the pedantry of our aesthetic professors who held that all that is most remote in historical incident from the apprehension of an average audience should be thrust before their eyes. It follows also from our view of the matter that when foreign dramas are reproduced on the stage the public is clearly entitled to have them considerably remodelled[404].Even that which is excellent in itself may require some alteration. No doubt it will be contended that what is essentially first-rate art retains its excellence for all times; but a work of art has also an aspect of transitory worth, which yields to the years, and it is this of course which requires remodelling. As people change so too the sense of beauty alters; and it is important that the particular public, before whom any work is represented, should feel themselves quite at home in the whole of such a work including that aspect which derives all its significance from external history.
It is this conditional acceptance of historical truth which at once explains and justifies that which is generally known in Art asanachronism, and which is usually attributed to artists as a serious defect. Primarily such examples of anachronism will be found to attach to matters of purely external interest. That a Falstaff should talk about pistols is no matter of consequence whatever. The case is more serious when we have a violin placed in the hands of Orpheus, for here the association of such prehistorical times with an instrument so essentially modern as the violin, one which everybody knows was not invented in those days, presents too glaring a violation of truth. For this reason it is now the fashion in theatrical circles to bestow incredible pains and care upon the historical accuracy of details in the matter of costume and the getting up of a piece, as, for example, the infinite trouble lavished upon the historical procession in the "Maid of Orleans."[405]Such efforts are in the majority of eases lost labour, for the simple reason that they only concern matters of relative interest or points that might be wholly passed over. The more important type of anachronisms has nothing whatever to do with stage costume and all that with which stage business is concerned, but consists in making characters express their emotions and ideas, venture upon soliloquies and actions in a form or of a substance which absolutely contradicts the conditions of their times and culture, their religious and general preconceptions. It is common to apply the conception of natural truth to such examples of anachronism, in other words, to say that it is unnatural for characters to speak or act otherwise than they would have spoken and acted in their owndays. If we stick, however, too closely to the logic of this naturalism we shall only land ourselves in further complications[406]. For an artist, in depicting the emotional life with all that results from it, and the fundamental passions that belong to it, being mainly interested in the affirmation of individuality, ought not merely to repeat that life under its ordinary daily dress; it is rather his business to show every true manifestation of pathos in the particular light which best reveals its real quality. The whole object of his attainment as an artist is not merely to understand what is of vital significance in the truth he faces, but to be able to give it the precise form which will best direct our own eyes and ears and heart to his own discovery. To attain this it is obvious that he must keep in view the particular culture of his own time no less than all its various powers of expression. In the time of the Trojan war the kind of speech in general use, and indeed the whole fabric of social life, was as far removed from the type of culture which is reflected on us from the pages of the "Iliad" as the mass of the nation and the pre-eminent worthies of the royal houses then reigning in Greece were separated from the fully developed form of ideas and expression such as arouse our wonder when we read our Aeschylus, or behold the perfected beauty of the style of Sophocles. A violation of the so-called "path of Nature" of this kind is in art an anachronism implied in her laws. The inward kernel of that which she reveals remains unaffected, but the more developed power at the artist's command, in revealing and disclosing this essential core of his subject, renders some change in the mode of its expression inevitable. It is a wholly different matter when a modification of this kind proceeds so far as to impose ideas and conceptions of a later form of the religious and moral consciousness on a century or a nation whose entire spiritual outlook is opposed to such more recent conceptions. The Christian religion has gathered in its train forms of the moral life, which were entirely foreign to the moral consciousness of ancient Greece. That inward introspection of conscience, for example, ever on the alert to decide the ethical significance ofaction, with its accompanying remorse and repentance, first appears in the moral culture of a more modern date. The heroic character knows nothing of a repentance which sets itself in hostility to its past. What it has done it abides by. Orestes does not repent of his mother's murder. The Furies that rise out of the shadow of his action pursue him, no doubt; but the Eumenides are, at the same time, represented as universal powers, and not as voices that cry out to him from his own conscience simply. This very heart and substance of a given period of man's history a poet must master, and only when we find him interfusing with this central core of reality matter that directly contradicts it is he guilty of any truly grave anachronism. In conclusion, then, we may say that it is indeed part of the poet's function to live into the spirit of past times and foreign peoples, for this substance of their life, if it be truly such, remains a possession for all time; but to attempt to reflect with every accuracy of detail all the definition of that external show now buried beneath the rust of antiquity is merely the effort of a learning essentially childish, intent on preserving what is itself shadow rather than substance. No doubt even in this direction, the truth of general outlines should be carefully respected, but never to such lengths as would compel art to forfeit her claim of drawing upon the fiction of her invention, and the truth of fact with equal impartiality.
(γγ) We are now in a better condition to understand all that is really implied in the assimilation by art of that which is strange in the external features of remote history, and the true conception of theobjectivelife of her creations. A work of art must primarily enclose for us within its embrace the higher interests of spirit and volitional power, all that is essentially human, and possesses real weight, the depths, that is to say, of man's emotional life. The main thing of all is that this embodied content[407]should transpierce all purely external conditions of manifestation, should ring, as it were, through all that is less vital in its significance[408]this fundamental chord of truth. The real objectivity,therefore, unfolds as from a sheath, thepathos, that is the substantive content of a situation, unfolds, moreover, the rich and powerful personality in which the essential phases of spirit are alive, and find their realization and expression. For such embodiment all that is absolutely indispensable is a definition and determination of the real, which is generally suitable to the object thus defined, and which requires nothing further to explain it. If we have once got hold of such a form unfolded in strict accordance with our Ideal principle, then we have a work of art essentially objective in the true sense, and the question whether each and every historical detail is justified is of no further importance. We have before us a work of art which appeals directly to our inner life, and one which is our own possession. Once possessed of that, and we may take as much as we please of that element of the form which lay more closely to periods of life which have passed; but the eternal foundation is that which appeals to all men in all places, which is carried forward with a power that never wanes or fails to influence us, and it does so because the objective life it reveals is the same that abounds in and overflows our own souls. That which is merely historical in the appearance is, on the contrary, the element that vanishes; and, in dealing with works of art created in days remote from our own, we must do our best to resolve the discordance, and, indeed, must be fully prepared to blot out from our vision similar defects in works that spring from our own times. Thus it is that the Psalms of David, with their immortal celebration of the Lord in His goodness, and the wrath of His almightiness, no less than the profound sorrows of the Hebrew prophets as they face Babylon and Zion, touch men with the same force to-day as they did of old time: nay, even a moral diatribe, such as is sung by Sarastro in the "Zauberflöte," may come home to the hearts of us all, including the sons of Egypt[409], owing to the soul and vitality which rings through its melodies.
And we may add that every individual to whom a workof art objective in this, the true sense, is presented, must on his part discard his own false prepossessions, wherein he merely wishes to find his own idiosyncrasies repeated. On the first reproduction of "William Tell," it appears, not a single Swiss among the audience was satisfied. In much the same way, when the most beautiful love-songs have been sung, many another, failing to find therein his own passions reflected, has presumed to think the beauty untrue to life; just as so many more, whose knowledge of love is confined to the perusal of romances, have imagined that the love-god would only then be their immortal possession when they found themselves face to face with precisely the same emotions and situations their favourite studies had propounded.
We have, in this first part of our aesthetical philosophy, examined as a first step the universal Idea of beauty; we then proceeded to inquire in what respects it was defective in its existence as the beauty of Nature, and after thus clearing the way we were in a position to grasp the complete notion of the Ideal as the adequate realization of beauty. We developed the Ideal,first, as conceived abstractly according to thegeneralnotion of it, and having determined that were assisted thereby to elucidate the modes of itsparticularmanifestations. Inasmuch, however, as a work of art has its origin in the human spirit it requires the pregnant activity of an individual life from which it proceeds, and as the creation of the same exists for others, that is, a Public which is emotionally receptive. This spiritual and informing activity is the imagination of theartist. We have consequently now, and this is thethirdand last aspect of the Ideal to which we shall refer, to raise the question how it comes about that this product of men's inner world is not the direct and native growth[410]of that world, but receives itsdue form through thecreative impulseof particular men, in other words, by virtue of the genius and talent of the artist. At the same time we must admit that the question is only raised that we may be able to add the statement that it really is excluded from the sphere of scientific investigation, or, at the most, we can only furnish a few general remarks towards its solution. Yet it is undoubtedly a question frequently raised this, namely, from what source an artist receives the gift and faculty of conception and execution with which he creates his work. We should all of us like, no doubt, to have a ready prescription, a recipe of what we must exactly do, what conditions we must impose on ourselves to produce something as wonderful. We would emulate Cardinal von Este when he asked Ariosto, with reference to his raging Roland: "But, Master Louis, where in the world did you get all this damned stuff from?" Raphael replied to a similar question in a letter we still possess, that he was hunting after a certain idea.
The more obvious aspects of artistic activity we propose to examine under the following heads of discussion:
First, we will give our definition of the general conception of artisticgeniusand the inspiration it implies.
Secondly, we will make a few observations on theobjectivecharacter of this creative activity.
Thirdly, we will endeavour to ascertain in virtue of what real artisticoriginalityconsists.
1. IMAGINATION, GENIUS, AND INSPIRATION
Before inquiring more closely into the meaning of the term "genius" we must obviously limit the field within which we propose to discuss it. Genius is an expression of very wide connotation, and is used not merely in its application to artists, but equally when we refer to great generals and kings, as also to the heroic captains of scientific discovery. For the sake of simplification we would once more discuss the distinctions involved under a triple division of our subject-matter.
(a) The Imagination[411]
The most conspicuous faculty of an artist which arrests our attention when we direct it expressly upon the capacities implied in artistic productivity is theimagination.And we must be careful here not to confuse it with avisionary fancywhich is wholly passive. The imagination creates.
(α) And, in the first place, we shall find that this creative activity carries with it in possession and endowment a peculiar power ofgrasping realityand the forms it presents, all that through the channels of alert eyes and ears imprints pictures of infinite variety caught from the external world upon the mind, and further implies an exceptionally retentivememorywherein to store up this varied world of innumerable reflections. The artist, therefore, in this initial stage of our analysis is not merely thrown back upon images of his own creation, but is rather compelled to turn aside from the dull level of ideals falsely so called and to boldly enter the fields of Nature and Life. To attempt art or poetry merely with fanciful ideas of our own is always a suspicious way of starting on our journey; for the artist must mould his creations from the abundance of his life and by no means from the overplus of abstract generalities. It is not, as in philosophy, thoughts, but the real external forms of what actually exists which furnishes the material for artistic production. In contact with this raw material to work upon the artist must feel thoroughly at home. He must have seen much, heard much, and stored away a great deal as well; and in illustration of this we almost invariably find that a great personality is distinguished by a capacious memory. All that interests mankind he will lay hold of, and the more profound his spirit the more it will enlarge the field of its interests in countless directions. This was the way in which we find the genius of Goethe first opened its wings, and throughout his life the circle of his spirit's restless horizon broadened and broadened. This peculiar giftof receptiveness, this interest in the comprehension of facts after their true definitions and colour, their steadfast adherence to the truth of experience is the first thing we look for in a great artist. And this accurate knowledge of the truth of form must be accompanied in equal measure by a proved acquaintance with the souls of men, the passions that rise in the heart, and everything that it yearns and strives for. And, in addition to this twofold armory of knowledge, he must understand yet further all the various ways that this world of the human soul expresses itself on the face of the reality which confronts his senses, transpiercing thus the outer veil.
(β) But, in the second place, this imaginative power is not exhausted with merely receiving that which is presented to the senses, or is inferred as the content of the human soul. The ideal work of art does not merely embrace the outward semblance of the inward spirit as clothed in the forms of its actual existence, but should rather succeed in manifesting the essential truth and reason of the real itself. Thiselement of reason, as determined in the particular object the artist has selected, must not merely be pressed in his own consciousness, as an active influence, but must already have been reflected upon in that essential and rich significance which brings it into relation with the entire breadth and depth of reality. Without reflection no man can grasp fully the wealth that is in him, and it is consequently an inseparable feature of any great work of art that everything which attaches to it both as a whole and in its detail has been long and deeply weighed and thought out. No artistic work of real sterling value can be thrown off with any mere imaginativetour de force.[412]We do not, of course, suggest that the artist must therefore comprehend in the form ofphilosophicalthought this essential core of reason in his experience; albeit such is the fundamental rock upon which religion no less than philosophy and art is based. Philosophy is by no means essential to his outfit; and, in fact, if he once begins to think about things as a philosopher, he busies himself with modes of thought which are diametrically opposed to that which should engage an artist's attention.For what the imagination undertakes to do and only to do is not to bring to consciousness this inner core of reason in the form of general propositions and conceptions, but to apprehend it clothed in the concrete form of actual existence and individuality. All that ferments within his life the artist must reproduce in the body and envisagement, whose connected picture and general outlines he has already assimilated from the world outside, making such so far subservient to his creative effort that they in their turn may participate in the truth of his own substance and enable him to crown it with complete expression. In this interfusion of an intelligible content with an embodiment received from actual existence the artist will avail himself of the ever wakeful circumspection of his reflective faculties no less than the deep resources of emotional life which leave the stamp of vitality on his work. It is consequently but one more sample of critical aberration to imagine that poems such as the Homeric were introduced to our poet in his sleep. Without intelligent alertness, division, and distinctions of each part as related to the whole, an artist will be unable to assert his mastery over any form whatsoever that he may wish for; only fools are of the opinion that the genuine artist does not in the least know what his hands and senses are about.
Moreover, the concentration of the artist's emotional life on each aspect of his work is also as necessary to its success as the concentration of his mind. For it is mainly through the impression of emotion, which permeates and gives a vital colour to the entire work, that the artist asserts his claim to the substance and embodiment of his creation as a part of his own spiritual substance, as something he, a given personality, may peculiarly call his own. For the external aspect of his work, the mere picture of it as we may say, tends rather to place us outside it and apart; it is the emotional energy it expresses which primarily unites it with affinity to our very souls. Only when thus understood shall we be able to realize the truth that an artist must not merely have much looked about him in the world and assimilated a rich knowledge both of its outward show and the very substance of its life, but, further, must himself have experienced many things and great things, things that havemoved him to the quick and left their life-roots in his own heart and spirit—he must, as we say, have "gone through much" and "lived abundantly"—before he will find himself able to build from his stores in the concrete types of his art something approaching Life's unsounded repletion. And this will at once explain and justify the bluster and ferment of genius in its youth, as amply reflected in the lives of Goethe and Schiller. But only the age of maturity and gray hairs will bring us the perfect work of art in all its rounded ripeness[413].
(b) Talent and Genius
This productive activity of the imagination by means of which the artist gives, by a process of elaboration to that which is essentially rational in its nature, a real embodiment, a creation more his own than anything else—this is what is usually summarized as genius and talent.
(α) We have already drawn attention to those characteristics which are most obviously referable to genius. Genius is the general capacity of creating a genuine example of fine art no less than the energy implied in the execution and elaboration of the same. Moreover, this capability and the power which goes with it is essentially the property of a human soul; that is to say, self-conscious individuality alone is able to create in this sense that a spiritual creation of this quality is just what it sets before itself to produce. Critics, intent on closer definition, are wont to distinguish sharply between genius and talent. And, in fact, they are not absolutely the same things, although it is necessary to find them united in the artist who would give us artistic work of the highest class. To be more exact, Art, in so far as it generally becomes aparticularart, and is exemplified for us in the real and definite appearance of its products, requires various accomplishments appropriate to the peculiar modes of its realization. Such forms of executive versatility we may call with propriety talent, as we may say that anyone possesses a talent for perfect playing on the violin, or anyone else for singing. But a mere talent for this or that can onlyeffect for us anything really good in the, so to speak, insulated nooks and corners of art[414]; it moreover itself requires for its true perfection something of more universal art-capacity as also that soul-animation, something more which is essentially the hall-mark of genius. Talent, in short, without the vital spark of genius, never gets much beyond a purely mechanical facility.
(β) It is also an opinion very commonly held that superior talent and genius areinborn.Here again we must distinguish; for if there is a sense in which this is true, from another point of view it is equally mistaken. No doubt every man, by virtue of his humanity, receives at his birth the potential gifts of religion, thought, and science. In other words he would not strictly be a man if he did not already possess a capacity to grasp the idea of a Supreme Being, and generally to become the subject of a thinking consciousness. All that he requires to gain these things, in addition to the fact of his human birth, are education, culture, and perseverance. With art, however, the matter stands differently. Art requiresspecificaptitude[415], in which unquestionably natural endowment plays an essential part. As, that is to say, beauty is itself the Idea realized in that which is apprehended as real by the senses, and a work of art embodies the workings of Spirit in a form of existence immediately cognized by the eye and the ear, in the same way the artist must discover and embody the content of his art not in the exclusively spiritual form of thought, but within the sphere of sensuous perception and feeling, and indeed as creator in actual relation to a given sensuous material and within the limits of the same. This artistic creativeness consequently encloses within itself, as art does throughout, the aspect of immediacy envisaged with the directness of Nature's own creations, and it is this appearance, which the individual is unable to evolve from himself, but has to find it, if he finds it at all, as immediately presented to him. Herein lies the significance of the statement, and herein alone, that genius and talent are innate.
In much the same way the several arts adapt themselvesas by a kind of natural affinity to particular nations. Song and melody are, we may almost say, the birth-gift of an Italian; with our northern peoples, on the contrary, music[416]and the opera, though seriously cultivated and with great success, are as far from being a real home growth as the orange trees. The Greeks are conspicuous for the native and elaborate beauty of their epic poetry, and most of all for the unique perfection of their sculpture. The Romans never possessed an art that was in any strict sense exclusively their own. All that grew into blossom on their soil was transplanted from the gardens of Greece. The art whose growth has the widest natural range is that of poetry; and the reason of this is that in it we require least to draw upon a sensuous vehicle for its expressed presentment. Within the province of poetry the folk-song is most of all native to a people and inseparably yoked with their natural conditions. For this very reason the folk-song breaks into blossom even in times of the rudest culture and for the most part retains the unconscious simplicity of Nature herself. Of this Goethe himself is an example. Though he produced works in every type of poetical expression his first songs still go deepest and carry least dust from the study. In them, too, there is least the flavour of culture. The latter-day Greek is still a living witness to a people whose native gift it is both to write poetry and sing. Fauriel has published a collection of modern Greek songs, taken for the most part just as women, nurses, and school-girls were heard singing them, who could not for the world understand what he found so wonderful in them. And this is a good illustration of the way that we find Art and its specific appearance associate itself with a particular national type. In the same way the art of improvization is more than anywhere else the native growth of Italy and exemplified there with quite extraordinary talent. AnItalian will even to-day improvize for you a five-act drama, and not a word of it is committed to memory; all grows up out of his experience of human passions and situations and the deeply-excited inspiration of the moment. As an example we mention the fact that a certain poor improvizer after rhapsodizing in this way for a considerable time, and then finally trudging off on his round to collect his pence from the bystanders in a battered hat, was still in such a fume of poetic frenzy that he could not bring his declamations to a stop, waved about in fact so lustily with his arms and hands that in the end all the money he had begged was shaken to the winds.