at our feet appears beautiful to us. And now we return to the point from which we started when we asserted that it is the manner of seeing and hearing, of receiving impressions in general, that constitutes artistic genius. It is objectivity, love, the interest merely in the thing itself, that enables the man of genius to become absorbed in an object, to lose himself completely in the impression it produces. But the more we abandon ourselves in this manner to things themselves, the more will they say to us, the more will they reveal to us their most secret nature, and the more closely shall we approach truth. Hence Goethe's saying: "The first and last thing that is demanded of genius is love of truth." But what is truth? Truth is the all-unity of mind. Truth is, that all men, all animals, all things, the whole apparent world, are only the outward and visible expression of one single Being Whom we call God. Men, animals, plants, and all seemingly lifeless things, are only masks and disguises of the Divinity. God is contained in all, and so the division and separation among persons as well as among things is only seemingly such. For in reality everything is one Personality, or one spiritual Unity, whichever we choose to call it. By their outward appearance things and also persons are separated from each other, but truth is their unity. Now, the further a man penetrates through this outward semblance into the nature of things, and the more he becomes absorbed in their inmost being, the more will he recognise their unity, first their unity among themselves, and next their unity with himself. He recognises himself in them, his soul is reflected in them, and God within him perceives Himself in His world. Beauty is the visible expression of this relation between observer and observed, between subject and object. Beauty is divine unity in sensation. The artistic genius observes with the eyes and hears with the ears of God. The Hindoo says, "Thou art I;" that means, my ego lives again in you, my ego is much greater than I know myself, my ego is not confined to my person alone, but embraces all that exists. When I die, only this one form of my ego vanishes, while countless other forms remain and continually arise anew. Death does not annihilate me, for I live in God, and God lives in all. Love is the expression of this relation; it unites what is seemingly divided: it brings about the gracious miracle that man passes beyond his finite, limited, single personality, by expanding his ego and absorbing into his will the existences of others too. What else is loving but enriching, expanding, enlarging oneself by the addition of what one loves? Why do I take care of him whom I love, why do I give him of my best, and even, when necessary, lay down my life for him? Why do I do all this? Because my ego has become a part of his ego; because I live in him, just as he, if he loves me, lives also in me. I can enlarge and expand my ego more and more by expanding my love in ever wider circles, until I have received within my will the existence of the whole world. Hence Schiller says: "Love is the noblest phenomenon in the world of souls, the all-powerful magnet in the spiritual sphere, the source of devotion and of the sublimest virtue. Yet love is only the reflection of this single original Power, an attraction of the Excellent, based upon an instantaneous permutation of individuality, an interchange of being. When I hate, I take something from myself; when I love, I become richer by what I love. "There are moments in life when we are impelled to press to our heart every flower, every remote star, each worm, and the sublimest spirit we can think of. We are impelled to embrace them, all nature, as we do our beloved. A man who has advanced so far as to read off all the beauty, greatness, and excellence in the great and small of nature, and to find the great unity for this manifold variety, has advanced much nearer to the Divinity. The great creation flows into his personality. If each man loved all men, each individual would possess the whole world." 1 Such is the expression of the godlike feeling of Schiller's genius. The self-seeking, subjectively prejudiced man robs himself of these highest goods, and therein lies his shallowness, his narrowmindedness, in the domain of art as well as in other fields. By loving only himself, by desiring merely his own existence, and by regarding everything only from the standpoint of his personal interest, he impoverishes himself and remains blind to the boundless wealth that surrounds him, to the divine, ideal beauty that beams in upon him from all sides. Objectivity, love, is the secret of all genius, hence also of artistic intuition. The artist loves the object that he contemplates, he desires its existence, and consequently he regards it not one-sidedly, not with reference to particular characteristics of practical interest, but from all sides, in all directions essential to the existence of the object itself. He does not see in the forest, as the timbermerchant does, a mere business project, a sum of money; he loves the thing, the forest itself. It pleases him, because he is engrossed by the sight of it, because he sees and hears it all. He is indeed all eye and ear, delighted by the fragment of still-life before him that speaks in so 1 Esthetical and Philosophical Essays. Newly translated, 1910, pp. 385, 387. eloquent a language to his heart, he seeks to give expression to his feelings, and thus there arises, according to the special talent and to the chosen form of art of the person in question, a poem, a song, a picture, or a marble statue. If he has been denied the power of embodying his feelings in an artistic form, he will try to express himself in abstract thought or noble action. That which the artist produces is therefore not a mere, outward imitation of the object, but an original creation which owes its origin to the impression made by the object. It is impossible for the artist to make a mere imitation serve the purpose of the beautiful reality, since the latter must ever be far superior to any imitation. The artist therefore creates a second reality, a second original under the impression made by the first, and this now acts upon us as the first reality acted upon him. It is utterly ridiculous and inadmissible to demand that an artist should keep exactly to his model and do nothing more than counterfeit nature, that he should not, for the life of him, idealise and compose, but only reproduce some fragment or other of existing nature, and this without adding to or taking from it anything whatever. That would be not art, but a childish pastime, for it would entirely miss its aim, seeing that a mere, dead, spiritless imitation cannot approach the original in its effect. The man who loves, however, sees the object already idealised and perfected. Again and again he becomes engrossed in the contemplation of the beauty of each separate part, until the whole melts together into a single harmony; it becomes a unity, a complete whole a finished poem, a musical composition, or a picture. The mere cold reproduction of a fragment singled out and torn off from the reality is an absolute impossibility to an artistic genius. For such work a shallow, prosaic B man is required, not a man of genius. Since the former studies the object before him without loving it, he does not penetrate into its innermost being, but notices only its purely external characteristics. The object does not become alive for him, it does not speak to him, because he remains a stranger to it; for what we do not love, remains for us a purely external, a secondary, a strange and incomprehensible thing. The artistic genius finds himself again in the beloved object - as Byron says: "I live not in myself, but I become -the prosaic, narrow-minded man gapes at the thing and believes that he is reproducing it, when he records a few outward features which strike his eye. With all his striving to be perfectly natural, such an artist becomes quite unnatural, for no mere imitation of nature can be nature itself, and hence will always be something quite different. The man of genius, on the other hand, who grasps the purposes of nature, himself creates a piece of nature under its influence. The man of genius is always original and natural, from the very fact that he does not merely imitate, but creates under the influence and impression of objects from his innermost self, from the nature within him. In this sense must be understood the words of Goethe: "The very thing in works of art which strikes uneducated persons as most like nature, is not nature (from without), but man (nature from within)." 2 The artist of genius idealises the object he reproduces, but does he thereby become untrue and unnatural? Is he not rather then just to the thing when, in pursuing the intentions of nature, he perfects, completes, idealises 1 Childe Harold, III, 72. 2 Criticisms, Reflections, and Maxims, p. 243. |