(α) The first of these relates to the kind of use to which mankind put the objects of Nature in seeking for a satisfaction which is wholly aesthetic, or due to some habit of the mind. Everything in the nature of ornament and finery, or, in general terms, everything that men convert to their use for the sake of mere show comes under this head. And the point to which we draw attention is this, that when we find men thus decorating themselves no less than their immediate surroundings, we ought not so much to conclude that all that they thus collect together from Nature's most costly and beautiful storehouse, whatever may most attract their eyes in the same—whether it be gold, precious stones, pearls, ivory, or precious raiment—that all this unrivalled rarity and brilliancy, in short, is that which for its own sake, and primarily as a product of Nature, interests them: rather their interest in it all is essentially personal as a thing suitable for the houses they live in, or for that which they most love and honour, whether it be their rulers, their temples, or their gods. A man selects in this way that which already appears to him as externally beautiful, pure translucent colour, glitter of metals, fragrant woods, marble, and all the rest. Poetry, and particularly Oriental poetry, makes a willing use of such wealth, a fact we may even illustrate from such a poem as the Nibelungenlied: and generally it is true enough that Art in such matters is not merely content with a general description of the beauty or value of such fine things; but, where the artistic form and the occasion allows, will describe such works in all the detail of their workmanship with as royal a bounty as the works themselves. There was no stint of either gold or ivory on the statue of Pallas at Athens, or that of Zeus at Olympia; and the temples of the ancient gods, the churches of Christendom, the pictures of saints, and the palaces of kings, are notable illustrations among all nations that possess any of them, to what kind of service splendour and brilliant show may be devoted; thus have nations in every age delighted in seeing upon their gods the visible presence of their own wealth, precisely as they have found delight in the splendour of their princes as a glory they still possessed, though ravished from themselves.
We all know, of course, that type of moralist who is only too ready to disturb the vision of such an enjoyment. We shall, no doubt, be reminded how many poor Athenians the aegis of Pallas could have supplied with a hearty meal, or how many slaves could have thus been liberated; and, doubtless, we must admit that in the case of the ancient world, no less than in days more near to our own wealth, all that has been lavished on temple, cloister, or cathedral, or other objects of public utility, has been expended under social conditions of the direst need to many. Nay, we may carry such melancholy reflections yet further, and find in them a condemnation not merely of particular works of art, but of Art herself and all that she gives us. What sums of money are involved in the building by the State of an Academy of Arts, or the purchase of ancient and modern works of art, and the appropriate embellishment of public galleries, theatres, and museums! But whatever the effect of such reflections may be upon us, whether ethical or otherwise, such is, after all, only due to the fact that we are once more reminded of those very constraints and hardships whose removal is a vital condition of the appearance of Fine Art. The appropriation of a unique sphere in its life for the exposition of its artistic treasures, which stands safe above the stress of that reality to which it contributes so largely, can therefore only redound to the glory and supreme honour of any people.
(β) But, further, mankind is not merely interested in the adornment of individuals and the environment of their life, but is actively employed in adapting the objects of Nature to its practical needs and purposes. It is on this plane that we come into contact for the first time with all the labour and struggle which the dependence of our humanity upon the prose of its finite life implies. And the question inevitably arises, how far all that is involved in this practical effort is suitable to artistic presentation.
(αα) In attempting some answer to this problem, we would draw attention to the historical fact that the earliest way in which Art attempted to banish all the prose reality of human life was the conception of the well-known golden age or, if we care to call it so, the idyllic state. In this we have Nature depicted as satisfying man's every want with no trouble to himself: while he, for his part, enjoys in a state of innocence all that mead, wood, flocks, garden, shelter, and so forth, can supply him with nourishment, dwelling, and all other comforts incidental to such a life. Of the passions of ambition or avarice, indeed of every impulse that may appear to run counter to the nobility of man's spiritual nature, we hear no word at all. At first blush, no doubt, a state of this description may strike us more or less as ideal, and certain types of art, limited in their range, may find definite satisfaction in presenting us with a picture of it. But we have only to penetrate further below the surface and we shall quickly have enough of such a vision. The writings of Gessner are little read nowadays, and when we do read them we find in such little satisfaction. The truth is that a restricted state of life, such as the above described, presupposes a very elementary stage in human development. Manhood which has attained to any real fulness of spiritual stature is moved by impulses of loftier range, and is not likely to be satisfied with the life which clings closest to Nature and its immediate products. In such idyllic poverty of soul no man ought to live, but rather to accept his birthright of toil: that which his spiritual impulse urges him forward to, that he must secure through his own activity. Once regard the matter in this way and these very physical wants of man will be found to bring into being a wide and diverse range of activities, implanting in him the conscious sense of his own powers, from the heart of which the profounder interests and forces of his life can slowly unravel themselves. But, at the same time, it is necessary that here, too, the harmonious relation between the outward and inner life should be maintained as the fundamental principle of artistic presentation. Few things are more offensive to our aesthetic taste than to find in a work of art the severity of some physical disaster portrayed through every detail of horror. Dante flashes on us the starvation of Ugolino in a few trenchant strokes. When a Gerstenberg, in his tragedy of Ugolino, wrings out every detail of the catastrophe to the last drop, telling us precisely how first Ugolino's two sons, and after them their father, were done to death by starvation, we feel at once that the subject, as thus handled, is entirely at variance with the principles of fine art.
(ββ) We shall, however, find that the condition of life which offers the strongest contrast to that we have described as the idyllic state, we will call it the generally civilized life[387], presents, though on other grounds, difficulties to an ideal exposition which are equally serious. In a Culture-State the complexus of social wants and labour, of interests and all that may go to satisfying the same, is throughout and in all its comprehensiveness completely evolved. Every individual here is immersed in an infinite network of relations with other units of the whole, and with so much loss to his complete independence. What he himself requires for himself is either nothing at all, or only, in a quite insignificant fraction of it, the result of his own labour: add to this the tendency of all a man's normal activities is to become more and more mechanical. We find, too, at the heart of this industrial development and the interchange of employment and rejection of human labour which it implies, on the one hand the most ruthless conditions of poverty, and on the other a class which, raised as it is above the bare necessities of existence, stands out in relief as wealthy, entirely released from all toil for the sake of a subsistence, able at any rate to devote individual attention to the finer interests of life and its pathetic contrasts. No doubt the possession of such a superfluity may create an impression as though for the favoured few the constant recurrence of a position of dependence had passed away, and a man is just so much the more released from the accidents incidental to property because his hands are at length free from the grime which soils them in securing it. But such a consolatory reflection will never make a man thoroughly at home in all that immediately surrounds him in the real sense that such is the garland of his own labour. For he is the centre of that to the upraising of which he has not himself been instrumental; it has come there out of that provision store which was already full without him, which quite other persons and for the most part in a quite mechanical and, therefore, formal way have provided, and to which he is only introduced after a long series of effort and struggle wholly strange to himself.
(γγ) We are consequently led to the conclusion that it is rather a third type of human society, a society which we may place halfway between the idyllic golden age and the burgher State in its fully developed industrial form, which is most fitted to be the subject matter of ideal art. We have already analysed this state of society in another connection under the description of the heroic and pre-eminently ideal world-condition. The heroic age is no longer restricted to that idyllic garden of spiritual attenuation, but includes within its borders passions and aims of deeper moment; and yet withal that which in the circle of the individual life touches closest the satisfaction of each man's immediate wants is still the entire product of his own activity.
Moreover, the means of nourishment such as honey, milk, and wine are less complex and consequently lend themselves more readily to ideal treatment[388]. A diet which includes coffee, brandy, and such like luxuries is associated in our minds with countless industries which are necessary to their preparation. Our heroes, on the contrary, kill and roast their own food, break in their own chargers, are the makers to a considerable extent of all their household gods; ploughs, armour for defence, shields, coats of mail, swords, spears, all are either the work of the possessor, or are made directly under his supervision. In a condition of life of this kind a man necessarily feels that in all the things he makes use of, and in all that encircles him, he is in touch with something produced by himself; that in contact with external objects he is in contact with his own substance rather than with objects which emanate from a world strange to himself and outside that in which he is himself master. It is, of course, assumed that all the energy he expends upon working up the material into forms adapted for his use is not so much troublesome labour, but a work which, through the satisfaction it brings him, falls easy from his shoulders, a work, in short, which he can carry over every obstacle to success.
We find a society of this type in Homer. Agamemnon's sceptre is a family staff which his ancestor himself shaped from the block and left as an heirloom to his descendants. Odysseus put together with his own hands the mighty bed he shared with Penelope; and if the famous weapons of Achilles are no work of his own we only find the various and interfused array of his own activities abated that a god, Hephaestus himself, may provide them at the request of his mother Thetis. In a word, we meet everywhere the youthful delight in novel discovery, the freshness of personal possession, the victorious sense of enjoyment. Everything is in its place and at home, in everything a man discovers the energy of his own sinew, the adroitness of his own hand, the cunning of his own spirit, or somewhat that follows from his own courage and bravery. In this way, and by this alone, the instruments which satisfy our human sense are not as yet relegated to a merely external relation, but men have before them the living process of the instruments themselves, the vital consciousness of the human worth they attach to them; and they find it there inasmuch as for them they are not mere lifeless things or things which habit has made lifeless, but creations impregnated with their own energies. And for the same reason we find here an idyllic condition of things, it is true, but not in that restricted sense of the term that the Earth and her streams, seas, forests, and cattle supply to mankind their sustaining substance, while man himself is only visible to us as a passive creature limited by the active powers which support him and their enjoyment. Rather we already see within this morning-time of human life deep interests at work, in relation to which the great world itself is but a subordinate realm, the ground and the instrument for bringing into being the higher aims which are present, as a ground and environment, however, over which that harmonious concord, yet withal independence, of both sides of our human world prevails; and which does prevail in the sight of all for this reason that everything there exists as the product and for the use of human life, is at the same time the creation and enjoyment of the man who creates and enjoys its use[389].
To apply such a mode of artistic presentation to material borrowed from more recent times, whose completed culture offers the strongest contrast to the heroic age above-mentioned, is always beset with extreme difficulty and liable to failure. Yet for all that Goethe in his "Hermann and Dorothea" has furnished us in this respect with an admirable masterpiece. Here an attempt will only be made to elucidate a few significant points by contrasting the same with a composition of similar type. Voss, in his famous romance "Louise," had depicted on much the same idyllic lines our human life and activity in a quiet circle of narrow range, if also marked with independent characteristics of its own. The country parson, the tobacco-pipe, the dressing-gown, the garden-bench, and finally our coffee-pot, have all of them here important parts to play. Coffee and sugar are, however, products, which are really here out of place; they belong to an entirely different world[390] throughout associated with all the varied ramifications of commercial and textile industries. This circle of country life is consequently not self-inclusive. In the beautiful picture of "Hermann and Dorothea" we are, on the contrary, under no necessity to demand such a consistency. As we already have pointed out in another connection, we find interwoven with the main threads of this poem, which is, no doubt, in its prevailing atmosphere entirely idyllic, the great political interests of the time, the struggles of the French Revolution, the defence of the Fatherland, asserted in a worthy way no less than with decision. The more limited scope of family life in a little country town is not so presented us as a whole which can even possibly remain in total ignorance of that mighty wave of the great world under stress of a real cataclysm of events, which is the view we are given of the pastor in the "Louise" of Voss. In Goethe's poem we have, on the contrary, by means of the interfusion of these great world-movements, within which the idyllic characters and events are portrayed, the picture of a life with a typical character of its own set in the frame of a world of more significant content; and the apothecary, who is here presented as the out-and-out Philistine, and who merely lives within the more narrow borders of that country life's surroundings, affected by that only, is excellently sketched for us with the good heart, but at the same time peevish isolation, which we find so natural. Add to this, in that which most closely touches the life of the characters thus portrayed, we find a particular emphasis laid on the fundamental aspect of this idyllic life as previously indicated in our former discussion of it. To mention one point only, we may observe that the host does not by any means drink coffee with his guests, the parson and the apothecary; on the contrary, to cite a line or two:
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 the
Rhine-wine.