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 attention outside 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 prevailing spiritual surroundings 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 to external 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, not for itself but for such as behold and enjoy it, 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 time the 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 various points 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 be objectively valid in its content as one entirely appropriate historically considered, or should such matter be treated subjectively, 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 will first examine 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 of it, presented by mere ignorance of the Past. It is, then, rather the result of a naïveté, 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 the naïve productions 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 a kind 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 word cochon, 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 state to 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 through poschen[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 thoroughly en habit français with their wigs, their feathered caps under arm, their vests and hoses of drap d'or, with their silk stockings and red buckles on their shoes. All that the court and a select circle of the privileged few were only permitted to see de facto was here open to all classes alike—the entrée of 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 his own 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.