Артур Шопенгауэр
The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 3 of 3)
Chapter XXXVI.20 Isolated Remarks On The Æsthetics Of The Plastic And Pictorial Arts
In sculpture beauty and grace are the principal things; but in painting expression, passion, and character predominate; therefore just so much of the claims of beauty must be neglected. For a perfect beauty of all forms, such as sculpture demands, would detract from the characteristic and weary by monotony. Accordingly painting may also present ugly faces and emaciated figures; sculpture, on the other hand, demands beauty, although not always perfect, but, throughout, strength and fulness of the figures. Consequently a thin Christ upon the Cross, a dying St. Jerome, wasted by age and disease, like the masterpiece of Domenichino, is a proper subject for painting; while, on the contrary, the marble figure by Donatello, in the gallery at Florence, of John the Baptist, reduced to skin and bone by fasting, has, in spite of the masterly execution, a repulsive effect. From this point of view sculpture seems suitable for the affirmation, painting for the negation, of the will to live, and from this it may be explained why sculpture was the art of the ancients, while painting has been the art of the Christian era.
In connection with the exposition given in § 45 of the first volume, that the discovery, recognition, and retention of the type of human beauty depends to a certain extent upon an anticipation of it, and therefore in part has an a priori foundation, I find that I have yet to bring out clearly the fact that this anticipation nevertheless requires experience, by which it may be stirred up; analogous to the instinct of the brutes, which, although guiding the action a priori, yet requires determination by motives in the details of it. Experience and reality present to the intellect of the artist human forms, which, in one part or another, are more or less true to nature, as if it were asking for his judgment concerning them, and thus, after the Socratic method, call forth from that obscure anticipation the distinct and definite knowledge of the ideal. Therefore it assisted the Greek sculptors very much that the climate and customs of their country gave them opportunity the whole day of seeing half-naked forms, and in the gymnasium entirely naked forms. In this way every limb presented its plastic significance to criticism, and to comparison with the ideal which lay undeveloped in their consciousness. Thus they constantly exercised their judgment with regard to all forms and limbs, down to their finest shades of difference; and thus, little by little, their originally dull anticipation of the ideal of human beauty was raised to such distinct consciousness that they became capable of objectifying it in works of art. In an entirely analogous manner some experience is useful and necessary to the poet for the representation of characters. For although he does not work according to experience and empirical data, but in accordance with the clear consciousness of the nature of humanity, as he finds it within himself, yet experience serves this consciousness as a pattern, incites it and gives it practice. Accordingly his knowledge of human nature and its varieties, although in the main it proceeds a priori and by anticipation, yet first receives life, definiteness, and compass through experience. But, supporting ourselves upon the preceding book and chapter 44 in the following book, we can go still deeper into the ground of that marvellous sense of beauty of the Greeks which made them alone of all nations upon earth capable of discovering the true normal type of the human form, and accordingly of setting up the pattern of beauty and grace for the imitation of all ages, and we can say: The same thing which, if it remains unseparated from the will, gives sexual instinct with its discriminating selection, i. e., sexual love (which it is well known was subject among the Greeks to great aberrations), becomes, if, by the presence of an abnormally preponderating intellect, it separates itself from the will and yet remains active, the objective sense of beauty of the human form, which now shows itself primarily as a critical artistic sense, but can rise to the discovery and representation of the norm of all parts and proportions; as was the case in Phidias, Praxiteles, Scopas, &c. Then is fulfilled what Goethe makes the artist say —
“That I with mind divine
And human hand
May be able to form
What with my wife,
As animal, I can and must.”
And again, analogous to this, that which in the poet, if it remained unseparated from the will, would give only worldly prudence, becomes, if it frees itself from the will by abnormal preponderance of the intellect, the capacity for objective, dramatic representation.
Modern sculpture, whatever it may achieve, is still analogous to modern Latin poetry, and, like this, is a child of imitation, sprung from reminiscences. If it presumes to try to be original, it at once goes astray, especially upon the bad path of forming according to nature as it lies before it, instead of according to the proportions of the ancients. Canova, Thorwaldsen, and many others may be compared to Johannes Secundus and Owenus. It is the same with architecture, only there it is founded in the art itself, the purely æsthetic part of which is of small compass, and was already exhausted by the ancients; therefore the modern architect can only distinguish himself in the wise application of it; and he ought to know that he removes himself from good taste just so far as he departs from the style and pattern of the Greeks.
The art of the painter, considered only so far as it aims at producing the appearance of reality, may ultimately be referred to the fact that he understands how to separate purely what in seeing is the mere sensation, thus the affection of the retina, i. e., the only directly given effect, from its cause, i. e., the objective external world, the perception of which first rises in the understanding from this effect; whereby, if he has technical skill, he is in a position to produce the same effect in the eye through an entirely different cause, the patches of applied colour, from which then in the understanding of the beholder the same perception again arises through the unavoidable reference of the effect to the ordinary cause.
If we consider how there lies something so entirely idiosyncratic, so thoroughly original, in every human countenance, and that it presents a whole which can only belong to a unity consisting entirely of necessary parts by virtue of which we recognise a known individual out of so many thousands, even after long years, although the possible variations of human features, especially of one race, lie within very narrow limits, we must doubt whether anything of such essential unity and such great originality could ever proceed from any other source than from the mysterious depths of the inner being of nature; but from this it would follow that no artist could be capable of really reproducing the original peculiarity of a human countenance, or even of composing it according to nature from recollection. Accordingly what he produced of this kind would always be only a half true, nay, perhaps an impossible composition; for how should he compose an actual physiognomical unity when the principle of this unity is really unknown to him? Therefore, in the case of every face which has merely been imagined by an artist, we must doubt whether it is in fact a possible face, and whether nature, as the master of all masters, would not show it to be a bungled production by pointing out complete contradictions in it. This would, of course, lead to the principle that in historical paintings only portraits ought to figure, which certainly would then have to be selected with the greatest care and in some degree idealised. It is well known that great artists have always gladly painted from living models and introduced many portraits.
Although, as is explained in the text, the real end of painting, as of art in general, is to make the comprehension of the (Platonic) Ideas of the nature of the world easier for us, whereby we are at once thrown into the state of pure, i. e., will-less, knowing, there yet belongs to it besides this an independent beauty of its own, which is produced by the mere harmony of the colours, the pleasingness of the grouping, the happy distribution of light and shade, and the tone of the whole picture. This accompanying subordinate kind of beauty furthers the condition of pure knowing, and is in painting what the diction, the metre, and rhyme are in poetry; both are not what is essential, but what acts first and immediately.
I have some further evidence to give in support of my judgment given in the first volume, § 50, on the inadmissibleness of allegory in painting. In the Borghese palace at Rome there is the following picture by Michael Angelo Caravaggio: Jesus, as a child of about ten years old, treads upon the head of a serpent, but entirely without fear and with great calmness; and His mother, who accompanies Him, remains quite as indifferent. Close by stands St. Elizabeth, looking solemnly and tragically up to heaven. Now what could be thought of this kyriological hieroglyphic by a man who had never heard anything about the seed of the woman that should bruise the head of the serpent? At Florence, in the library of the palace Riccardi, we find the following allegory upon the ceiling, painted by Luca Giordano, which is meant to signify that science frees the understanding from the bonds of ignorance: the understanding is a strong man bound with cords, which are just falling off; a nymph holds a mirror in front of him, another hands him a large detached wing; above sits science on a globe, and beside her, with a globe in her hand, the naked truth. At Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, there is a picture which shows us time, as Saturn, cutting off with a pair of shears the wings of Cupid. If this is meant to signify that when we grow old love proves unstable, this no doubt has its truth.
The following may serve to strengthen my solution of the problem as to why Laocoon does not cry out. One may practically convince oneself of the faulty effect of the representation of shrieking by the works of the plastic and pictorial arts, which are essentially dumb, by a picture of the slaughter of the innocents, by Guido Reni, which is to be found in the Academy of Arts at Bologna, and in which this great artist has committed the mistake of painting six shrieking wide-open mouths. Let any one who wants to have this more distinct think of a pantomimic representation on the stage, and in one of the scenes an urgent occasion for one of the players to shriek; if now the dancer who is representing this part should express the shriek by standing for a while with his mouth wide open, the loud laughter of the whole house would bear witness to the absurdity of the thing. Accordingly, since the shrieking of Laocoon had to be avoided for reasons which did not lie in the objects to be represented, but in the nature of the representing art, the task thus arose for the artist so to present this not-shrieking as to make it plausible to us that a man in such a position should not shriek. He solves this problem by representing the bite of the snake, not as having already taken place, nor yet as still threatening, but as just happening now in the side; for thereby the lower part of the body is contracted, and shrieking made impossible. This immediate but only subordinate reason was correctly discovered by Goethe, and is expounded at the end of the eleventh book of his autobiography, and also in the paper on Laocoon in the first part of the Propylæa; but the ultimate, primary reason, which conditions this one, is that which I have set forth. I cannot refrain from remarking that I here stand in the same relation to Goethe as with reference to the theory of colours. In the collection of the Duke of Aremberg at Brussels there is an antique head of Laocoon which was found later. However, the head in the world-renowned group is not a restored one which follows from Goethe's special table of all the restorations of this group, which is given at the end of the first volume of the Propylæa, and is also confirmed by the fact that the head which was found later resembles that of the group very much. Thus we must assume that another antique repetition of the group has existed to which the Aremberg head belonged. In my opinion the latter excels both in beauty and expression that of the group. It has the mouth decidedly wider open than in the group, yet not really to the extent of shrieking.
Chapter XXXVII.21 On The Æsthetics Of Poetry
I might give it as the simplest and most correct definition of poetry, that it is the art of bringing the imagination into play by means of words. How it brings this to pass I have shown in the first volume, § 51. A special confirmation of what is said there is afforded by the following passage in a letter of Wieland's to Merck, which has since then been published: “I have spent two days and a half upon a single stanza, in which the whole thing ultimately depended upon a single word which I wanted and could not find. I revolved and turned about the thing and my brain in all directions, because naturally, where a picture was in question, I desired to bring the same definite vision, which floated before my own mind into the mind of my reader also, and for this all often depends, ut nosti, upon a single touch or suggestion or reflex” (Briefe an Merck, edited by Wagner, 1835, p. 193). From the fact that the imagination of the reader is the material in which poetry exhibits its pictures, it has the advantage that the fuller development of these pictures and their finer touches, take place in the imagination of every one just as is most suitable to his individuality, his sphere of knowledge, and his humour, and therefore move him in the most lively manner; instead of which plastic and pictorial art cannot so adapt itself, but here one picture, one form, must satisfy all. And yet this will always bear in some respect the stamp of the individuality of the artist or of his model, as a subjective or accidental and inefficient addition; although always less so the more objective, i. e., the more of a genius, the artist is. This, to some extent, explains why works of poetry exercise a much stronger, deeper, and more universal effect than pictures and statues; the latter, for the most part, leave the common people quite cold; and, in general, the plastic arts are those which have the weakest effect. A remarkable proof of this is afforded by the frequent discovery and disclosure of pictures by great masters in private houses and all kinds of localities, where they have been hanging for many generations, not buried and concealed, but merely unheeded, thus without any effect. In my time (1823) there was even discovered in Florence a Madonna of Raphael's, which had hung for a long series of years on the wall of the servants' hall of a palace (in the Quartiere di S. Spirito); and this happens among Italians, the nation which is gifted beyond all others with the sense of the beautiful. It shows how little direct and immediate effect the works of plastic and pictorial art have, and that it requires more culture and knowledge to prize them than the works of all other arts. How unfailingly, on the contrary, a beautiful melody that touches the heart makes its journey round the world, and an excellent poem wanders from people to people. That the great and rich devote their powerful support just to the plastic and pictorial arts, and expend considerable sums upon their works only; nay, at the present day, an idolatry, in the proper sense of the term, gives the value of a large estate for a picture of a celebrated old master – this depends principally upon the rarity of the masterpieces, the possession of which therefore gratifies pride; and then also upon the fact that the enjoyment of them demands very little time and effort, and is ready at any moment, for a moment; while poetry and even music make incomparably harder conditions. Corresponding to this, the plastic and pictorial arts may be dispensed with; whole nations – for example, the Mohammedan peoples – are without them, but no people is without music and poetry.
But the intention with which the poet sets our imagination in motion is to reveal to us the Ideas, i. e., to show us by an example what life and what the world is. The first condition of this is that he himself has known it; according as his knowledge has been profound or superficial so will his poem be. Therefore, as there are innumerable degrees of profoundness and clearness in the comprehension of the nature of things, so are there of poets. Each of these, however, must regard himself as excellent so far as he has correctly represented what he knew, and his picture answers to his original: he must make himself equal with the best, for even in the best picture he does not recognise more than in his own, that is, as much as he sees in nature itself; for his glance cannot now penetrate deeper. But the best himself recognises himself as such in the fact that he sees how superficial was the view of the others, how much lay beyond it which they were not able to repeat, because they did not see it, and how much further his own glance and picture reaches. If he understood the superficial poets as little as they do him, then he would necessarily despair; for just because it requires an extraordinary man to do him justice, but the inferior poets can just as little esteem him as he can them, he also has long to live upon his own approval before that of the world follows it. Meanwhile he is deprived even of his own approval, for he is expected to be very modest. It is, however, as impossible that he who has merit, and knows what it costs, should himself be blind to it, as that a man who is six feet high should not observe that he rises above others. If from the base of the tower to the summit is 300 feet, then certainly it is just as much from the summit to the base. Horace, Lucretius, Ovid, and almost all the ancients have spoken proudly of themselves, and also Dante, Shakspeare, Bacon of Verulam, and many more. That one can be a great man without observing anything of it is an absurdity of which only hopeless incapacity can persuade itself, in order that it may regard the feeling of its own insignificance as modesty. An Englishman has wittily and correctly observed that merit and modesty have nothing in common except the initial letter.22 I have always a suspicion about modest celebrities that they may very well be right; and Corneille says directly —
“La fausse humilité ne met plus en crédit:
Je sçais ce que je vaux, et crois ce qu'on m'en dit.”
Finally, Goethe has frankly said, “Only good-for-nothings are modest.” But the assertion would be still more certain that those who so eagerly demand modesty from others, urge modesty, unceasingly cry, “Only be modest, for God's sake, only be modest!” are positively good-for-nothings, i. e., persons entirely without merit, manufactures of nature, ordinary members of the great mass of humanity. For he who himself has merit also concedes merit – understands himself truly and really. But he who himself lacks all excellence and merit wishes there was no such thing: the sight of it in others stretches him upon the rack; pale, green, and yellow envy consumes his heart: he would like to annihilate and destroy all those who are personally favoured; but if unfortunately he must let them live, it must only be under the condition that they conceal, entirely deny, nay, abjure their advantages. This, then, is the root of the frequent eulogising of modesty. And if the deliverers of these eulogies have the opportunity of suppressing merit as it arises, or at least of hindering it from showing itself or being known, who can doubt that they will do it? For this is the practice of their theory.
Now, although the poet, like every artist, always brings before us only the particular, the individual, what he has known, and wishes by his work to make us know, is the (Platonic) Idea, the whole species; therefore in his images, as it were, the type of human characters and situations will be impressed. The narrative and also the dramatic poet takes the whole particular from life, and describes it accurately in its individuality, but yet reveals in this way the whole of human existence; for although he seems to have to do with the particular, in truth he is concerned with that which is everywhere and at all times. Hence it arises that sentences, especially of the dramatic poets, even without being general apophthegms, find frequent application in actual life. Poetry is related to philosophy as experience is related to empirical science. Experience makes us acquainted with the phenomenon in the particular and by means of examples, science embraces the whole of phenomena by means of general conceptions. So poetry seeks to make us acquainted with the (Platonic) Ideas through the particular and by means of examples. Philosophy aims at teaching, as a whole and in general, the inner nature of things which expresses itself in these. One sees even here that poetry bears more the character of youth, philosophy that of old age. In fact, the gift of poetry really only flourishes in youth; and also the susceptibility for poetry is often passionate in youth: the youth delights in verses as such, and is often contented with small ware. This inclination gradually diminishes with years, and in old age one prefers prose. By that poetical tendency of youth the sense of the real is then easily spoiled. For poetry differs from reality by the fact that in it life flows past us, interesting and yet painless; while in reality, on the contrary, so long as it is painless it is uninteresting, and as soon as it becomes interesting, it does not remain without pain. The youth who has been initiated into poetry earlier than into reality now desires from the latter what only the former can achieve; this is a principal source of the discomfort which oppresses the most gifted youths.
Metre and rhyme are a fetter, but also a veil which the poet throws round him, and under which he is permitted to speak as he otherwise dared not do; and that is what gives us pleasure. He is only half responsible for all that he says; metre and rhyme must answer for the other half. Metre, or measure, as mere rhythm, has its existence only in time, which is a pure perception a priori, thus, to use Kant's language, belongs merely to pure sensibility; rhyme, on the other hand, is an affair of sensation, in the organ of hearing, thus of empirical sensibility. Therefore rhythm is a much nobler and more worthy expedient than rhyme, which the ancients accordingly despised, and which found its origin in those imperfect languages which arose from the corruption of earlier ones and in barbarous times. The poorness of French poetry depends principally upon the fact that it is confined to rhyme alone without metre, and it is increased by the fact that in order to conceal its want of means it has increased the difficulty of rhyming by a number of pedantic laws, such as, for example, that only syllables which are written the same way rhyme, as if it were for the eye and not for the ear that the hiatus is forbidden; that a number of words must not occur; and many such, to all of which the new school of French poetry seeks to put an end. In no language, however, at least on me, does the rhyme make such a pleasing and powerful impression as in Latin; the rhymed Latin poems of the Middle Ages have a peculiar charm. This must be explained from the fact that the Latin language is incomparably more perfect, more beautiful and noble, than any modern language, and now moves so gracefully in the ornaments and spangles which really belong to the latter, and which it itself originally despised.
To serious consideration it might almost appear as high treason against our reason that even the slightest violence should be done to a thought or its correct and pure expression, with the childish intention that after some syllables the same sound of word should be heard, or even that these syllables themselves should present a kind of rhythmical beat. But without such violence very few verses would be made; for it must be attributed to this that in foreign languages verses are much more difficult to understand than prose. If we could see into the secret workshops of the poets, we would find that the thought is sought for the rhyme ten times oftener than the rhyme for the thought; and even when the latter is the case, it is not easily accomplished without pliability on the part of the thought. But the art of verse bids defiance to these considerations, and, moreover, has all ages and peoples upon its side, so great is the power which metre and rhyme exercise upon the feeling, and so effective the mysterious lenocinium which belongs to them. I would explain this from the fact that a happily rhymed verse, by its indescribably emphatic effect, raises the feeling as if the thought expressed in it lay already predestined, nay, performed in the language, and the poet has only had to find it out. Even trivial thoughts receive from rhythm and rhyme a touch of importance; cut a figure in this attire, as among girls plain faces attract the eye by finery. Nay, even distorted and false thoughts gain through versification an appearance of truth. On the other hand, even famous passages from famous poets shrink together and become insignificant when they are reproduced accurately in prose. If only the true is beautiful, and the dearest ornament of truth is nakedness, then a thought which appears true and beautiful in prose will have more true worth than one which affects us in the same way in verse. Now it is very striking, and well worth investigating, that such trifling, nay, apparently childish, means as metre and rhyme produce so powerful an effect. I explain it to myself in the following manner: That which is given directly to the sense of hearing, thus the mere sound of the words, receives from rhythm and rhyme a certain completeness and significance in itself for it thereby becomes a kind of music; therefore it seems now to exist for its own sake, and no longer as a mere means, mere signs of something signified, the sense of the words. To please the ear with its sound seems to be its whole end, and therefore with this everything seems to be attained and all claims satisfied. But that it further contains a meaning, expresses a thought, presents itself now as an unexpected addition, like words to music – as an unexpected present which agreeably surprises us – and therefore, since we made no demands of this kind, very easily satisfies us; and if indeed this thought is such that, in itself, thus said in prose, it would also be significant, then we are enchanted. I can remember, in my early childhood, that I had delighted myself for a long time with the agreeable sound of verse before I made the discovery that it all also contained meaning and thoughts. Accordingly there is also, in all languages, a mere doggerel poetry almost entirely devoid of meaning. Davis, the Sinologist, in the preface to his translation of the “Laou-sang-urh,” or “An Heir in Old Age” (London, 1817), observes that the Chinese dramas partly consist of verses which are sung, and adds: “The meaning of them is often obscure, and, according to the statements of the Chinese themselves, the end of these verses is especially to flatter the ear, and the sense is neglected, and even entirely sacrificed to the harmony.” Who is not reminded here of the choruses of many Greek tragedies which are often so hard to make out?
The sign by which one most immediately recognises the genuine poet, both of the higher and lower species, is the unforced nature of his rhymes. They have appeared of themselves as if by divine arrangement; his thoughts come to him already in rhyme. The homely, prosaic man on the contrary, seeks the rhyme for the thought; the bungler seeks the thought for the rhyme. Very often one can find out from a couple of rhymed verses which of the two had the thought and which had the rhyme as its father. The art consists in concealing the latter, so that such lines may not appear almost as mere stuffed out boutsrimés.
According to my feeling (proofs cannot here be given) rhyme is from its nature binary: its effect is limited to one single recurrence of the same sound, and is not strengthened by more frequent repetition. Thus whenever a final syllable has received the one of the same sound its effect is exhausted; the third recurrence of the note acts merely as a second rhyme which accidentally hits upon the same sound, but without heightening the effect; it links itself on to the existing rhyme, yet without combining with it to produce a stronger impression. For the first note does not sound through the second on to the third: therefore this is an æsthetic pleonasm, a double courage which is of no use. Least of all, therefore, do such accumulations of rhymes merit the heavy sacrifices which they cost in the octave rhyme, the terza rima, and the sonnet, and which are the cause of the mental torture under which we sometimes read such productions, for poetical pleasure is impossible under the condition of racking our brains. That the great poetical mind sometimes overcomes even these forms, and moves in them with ease and grace, does not extend to a recommendation of the forms themselves, for in themselves they are as ineffectual as they are difficult. And even in good poets, when they make use of these forms, we frequently see the conflict between the rhyme and the thought, in which now one and now the other gains the victory; thus either the thought is stunted for the sake of the rhyme, or the rhyme has to be satisfied with a weak à peu près. Since this is so, I do not regard it as an evidence of ignorance, but as a proof of good taste, that Shakspeare in his sonnets has given different rhymes to each quatraine. At any rate, their acoustic effect is not in the least diminished by it, and the thought obtains its rights far more than it could have done if it had had to be laced up in the customary Spanish boots.
