Even for poetry and art there is more than one such primary fountain or vital artery of higher sentiment. If, then, the recollection of eternal love must be recognized as one of these, who can well doubt that the pure longing after the infinite, which holds so deep and firm a root in man’s bosom, also forms another? In poetry, the former is distinctly traceable under the form of elegy—at least in the first simple poesy of fancy’s earliest and youthful days. It sounds forth here a mournful recollection of a faded world of gods and heroes—as the echoing plaint for the loss of man’s original, celestial state, and paradisaical innocence, or, lastly, in a still more general and higher sense, as the faint and dying notes of the happy infancy of the whole creation, ere yet the spiritual world had been divided by dissension, and before the first outbreak of evil, and the consequent misery of nature. Viewing it in this light, and designating poetry in general analogically to an expression which we before made use of, we may term poetry the mind’s transcendent recollection of the eternal. For the first and most ancient poetry, as the common memory of the human race—its higher organ of remembrance—passes on from century to century, and from nation to nation; and though ever dressing itself in the changing fashion of the day, yet, through all time, it refers us back to the primary and eternal.
Music, on the other hand, is eminently an art of longing. To this it owes all its ravishing enchantments—its magic and irresistible charms. In music, however, as in every other form of art, the higher and the earthly—the soul, as it were, and the body—the heavenly longing and the terrestrial are often blended together in the same note and tone, so as scarcely to be discriminated. It is this mingling of feelings and emotions—where from amid the half-unconscious earthly longing a higher and more heavenly aspiration gleams out, that in youth, when man’s sensibility is first developed and expanded, gives to newly-waking love its peculiar magic charm, the inner grace of the youthful soul contributing as much if not more than even the bloom of corporeal beauty. The question, indeed, whether in this youthful longing really a higher love of eternal duration, as an inner light, which is continually purifying and perfecting itself, be inclosed within the earthly veil—whether this first love of youth be even the true love, or whether all may have been nothing more than the transient and flickering flame of a delusion—this question can be alone determined from its results; in other words, by the life which proceeds and follows from it. It must be proved by the unwavering truth and fidelity—I might almost say, the inward truth of the heart and the outward character of the whole life; and, in short, of a higher love in its every species, whether human or divine.
Now this longing holds a most important place in man. Not only is it the crisis of transition from childish, shall we say consciousness or unconsciousness, into a more mature development—not only is it the threshold under which youthful expectation enters on a fuller and more perfect life; but also still surviving uninterruptedly to the end, it ever remains the first, strongest, and purest impulse of the inner man. The light of its never-dying flame, growing purer and stronger, lights him on his way to a higher and better existence. It seems, therefore, not out of place to add here the remark, how deeply hope, which is so closely associated with this longing aspiration, is interwoven into the very being of man, so as almost to form the characteristic peculiarity of his inner life and whole state.
The lost spirits, we are told, “believe and tremble.”[68] Love, too, is the essential property of God, and even his very essence, and in a certain sense, also, it is common to all beings created by eternal love. Even in the hidden veins of life, through all animated nature, beats this pulse of universal love. Hope, however, can not be ascribed to God, for in Him all is full and perfect. Nature can only sigh and bemoan itself; and even though it be not hopelessly wretched, yet, properly, it can not hope for aught, by its own power, at least. To man, above all other created beings, belongs the prerogative of hope. We might almost call him an immortal spirit, subjected to the condition of hope. And so, before the rest of creation, he is destined and chosen to be the evangelist of divine hope.
As the third of the inner life-springs of true art and higher poetry, I spoke of a true enthusiasm and inspired feeling of the divine. Now, among the various arts, I would especially appropriate this to the plastic art—in that widest and justest sense of the term, in which it comprises, also, the higher architecture. For, in enthusiasm and inspiration, the divinity with which it is imbued is not viewed and contemplated in the remote distance either of the past or the future. It is embraced at once as something actual and present. And this holds good both of the enthusiasm of art, and also of that which, in moral and political life, often creates for itself an epoch, shaping and bringing forth whatever is truly new and original. Now, the divine in beauty must be actually present to the mind, at least, of the artist. It must have stood vividly before his mental eye before it could have come forth in outward and visible form. Since universally the perfection of art depends on some antagonism and the artist’s triumph over it, it is self-evident that even here the most exalted enthusiasm must be associated with a thoughtful sagacity and persevering steadiness of execution, if any great and perfect work is to be produced. Moreover, it can scarcely be necessary to remind you that the arts, even though, perhaps, in each of them there is a predominance of some peculiar kind of higher feeling, or some spirit of higher life swells out in it, are not, therefore, rigidly limited on all sides and irrevocably confined within these narrow limits. On the contrary, one branch of art often passes over into the domain of another. And this interference is not always a misconception, owing chiefly to some confusion of essential matters, and, therefore, in the highest degree erroneous and prejudicial. Poetry, especially, often springs up indigenous in other domains of art, being the most universal of all. And if in poetry itself those ancient and primitive poems or epic songs of sublime recollections occupy the first place, who, therefore, would exclude from it the deep, inner, ardent longing—the oracular faculty of divination for exalted love and eternal hope, with all its music of the feelings, forming, as it does, the spiritual contents, the animating principle and distinctive essence of the lyrical art? Who, too, would dare to censure poetry, because, striving to give another and a newer expression to all that, in these divine remembrances and longing anticipations, constitutes its inmost soul, it attempts, by dramatic representation, to portray the essential features of its inmost being, with all the vivid reality and distinct completeness of the present? For does it not, in this respect, approximate, so far, at least, to the plastic arts, and begin to assume many points of affinity with them?
It is, however, necessary to guard here against a possible misunderstanding. Not without good cause, I believe, before all things is the rigid discrimination insisted on which must separate true poetry from a spurious semblance. Poetry which condescends to minister either to the passions or to fashion, or even to prose, or any mere prosaic ends, can not deserve the name. But it is another thing when the poet works his poetical view of things (and this is that which constitutes the poet, and not the mere outward form of poetry alone) into the prosaic reality of some present time, or some historical subject. So, too, is it when in some consistent and artistic imitation of life he takes for his theme the maze of human passions, by no means for the purpose of prolonging it, and still less of inflaming it, but rather because he clearly sees through its complications, to unfold and disentangle them. This we might call—employing a term belonging to the mathematical sciences, though in a different but still analogous sense—mixed or applied poetry; and to this class belong many of the highest productions of art in different ages and nations.
The different arts, or, rather, the different directions of one and the same art, in the several epochs and ages of the world, or among nations variously divided by language and manners, as well as by the style and character of their thought and intellect, may be considered as merely so many varying dialects of one and the same language, which have a common origin and are nearly related. For they possess a common meaning, which, interpreted by a profound and noble perception of art, will be found to pervade all centuries and all people, uniting and enchaining them all by this soul-binding tie of a loving and love-kindled fancy. These eternal and fundamental feelings of the human breast, the remembrance of eternity, an innate longing and high-soaring aspiration, stand in the most intimate connection with each other, even though we can not take a full survey of it, and often feel it profoundly rather than are able perfectly to explain it. They are like so many stem-words and radical syllables, and form together, as it were, one common language. And if, as I before remarked, we should in vain seek for that common and original language, from which all those now spoken on the face of the earth can be derived, both ethnographically and geologically, may we not still find in art a universal language intelligible to all men? Is not this language (as I may term it) thus enveloped in the garb of art, through which, however, a profound significance gleams brightly forth, an original language of a higher and intellectual order, and at the same time intimately akin with our own nature? Do not its echoes, however faint and broken, when reawakened by true art and sublime poetry, strike a chord of unison in every human breast?
LECTURE V.
THE general notion of the inner life formed the point from which we started in this attempt to portray the whole spiritual man. I maintained, you will remember, that the philosophy of life proceeds on the simple assumption of this inner life. Now, in the preceding discourses it has been my endeavor to unfold this general idea into a more fully-developed and more definite conception of human consciousness, both in its several principles and total coherence. And this almost completes the first division of our whole sketch. For fully to complete a knowledge of ourselves, and of life in general, a few particulars only remain to be added, and a comprehensive review of the whole once more to be taken. And this, in the natural order of this simple development of thought, forms the next subject of our labors. By reason of the close vital connection which subsists between thought and speech, language served in the first instance for an external basis of comparison, which in the next place art enabled me to carry still farther, inasmuch as the latter may also be regarded as an inner language. For, however fragmentary and incomplete may be our collection of languages and the science thereof, notwithstanding all the enlargement it has received from modern observation and research, it is still possible, by a rigorous distinction of the derivatory and mixed offshoots from the more ancient and purer branches, to gain at least an insight into the history and progress of language, and thence to trace the probable course of its development, even while its origin, no less than the equally incomprehensible phenomenon of its first exercise, remains veiled in impenetrable obscurity. And when we called art a language, we did not mean this merely in the same sense that poetry has been styled—and indeed has even herself assumed the title of—a divine language, on account of the ornamental figures of its external form; neither was it because of the allegorical shapes and allusions, nor of the symbolical garb which plastic art so often puts on. The so transiently advanced metaphor was intended to convey the idea that art in general, not merely in its outward form, but in its inmost essence, and in all of its forms and species alike, is a language of nature of a higher and spiritual kind, or, if the term be preferred, an inward hieroglyphical writing and original speech of the soul, which is immediately intelligible to all susceptible natures, and to every one whose sensibilities a taste for any form of art has rendered open and accessible to its appeal. For the key to it lies not in any arbitrarily established principle, as is the case with that ingenious and beautiful, but still merely conventional invention of the East—the symbolical language of flowers, but in the feeling and the soul itself. For the eternal and fundamental feelings of the soul are awakened, or, rather, reawakened, in these inner-soul words of true art, which, in the same sense that we speak of the riddle of life or of the world, making its solution the object and aim of philosophy, we may likewise term a riddle of hope—of that hope, in truth, which is eternal and divine. But high art, like life and the world, remains a riddle, and must ever appear to us as such, simply because in reality, or at least for the greater part, it is only a few detached notes, without the full and coherent air, that it allows to reach us.
There is, then, an intrinsic connection between thought and speech, between language and consciousness. Moreover man, to judge of him by the collective sum of his characteristic and essential properties, is nothing else than the created word, the faint echo and very imperfect copy of the uncreated and eternal, and stands amid the rest of creation, midway between the world of nature and that of spirits. For these reasons, then, in the further exposition of his inner life I shall invariably make use of the idea of language, and even many of its characteristic properties or peculiarities, as the external basis of a comparison calculated to throw light upon much that in the inward thought of man it is otherwise difficult to express and to make clear by words. For, indeed, generally, living thought and the science thereof, can not well or easily be separated from the philosophy of language.