(α) In poetry it is ordinary domestic life—the main source, that is, of the probity, commonsense spirit, and the morality of everyday[301] life—which is presented by art in the usual developments of civic life, in scenes and characters selected from the middle and lower classes. Among the French Diderot stands out conspicuous for the way in which he has thus insisted on natural effects and the imitation of the bluntness of fact. Among Germans it was Goethe and Schiller who, with more lofty aim, struck out a path somewhat similar in their youth, but rather, within this naturalness of life itself and its particular detail, sought after a profounder content and conflicts of essential significance. And in contrast to them we have Kotzebue and Iffland, both of whom, in their several ways, the first with a superficial rapidity of conception and execution, the second with a more conscientious accuracy of detail and a homely kind of morality, gave us the counterfeit of the daily life of their time in the prosaic picture of its more limited aspects, with but a limited sense, either of them, for genuine poetry. And generally, we may say, that it is German art more than any other, and particularly that of our own times, which has fastened with delight on this kind of treatment till it has reached a sort of. virtuosity in it. In fact for a long period back Art was more or less something of a stranger and a guest in our country, not the child of our own loins.
Further, we may observe that in this attraction to the reality that lies actually before us it is essential that the material assimilated by such an art be cognate with such reality and at home in it[302]; it must be the national life of the poet and his immediate public. It is on this very point of the kind of appropriation suited to an art such as our own, which carried the purpose both in its content and its methods of representation of making us feel at home in it, even to the extent of sacrificing both beauty and ideality, that the impulse originated which led to such a type of artistic production. Other nations have been inclined to reject such material with scorn, or only in more recent times have taken a more vital interest in such opportunities as the ordinary course of human life offers.
(β) If we desire, however, to see what is most worthy of our admiration in such productions, we must turn our attention to the later genre-painting of the Dutch. We have already in the first part of this work, when examining the intrinsic character of the Ideal, indicated, so far as the general spirit of it is concerned, what we take to be the substantial basis of such work[303]. That contentment in life under its presentment of direct experience down to the most ordinary and most insignificant detail is mainly due to the fact that this people was obliged to work out for itself only after severe struggles and hard labour that which Nature supplies with far less reserve to other peoples. Further, circumscribed as it is by local conditions, it has become great in this very concern for and appreciation of the least things. From another point of view it is a people of fishermen, sailors, citizens, and peasants, and for this reason is forced from the start to rate highly all that may be useful and necessary both in matters of greatest and least importance which it knows how to secure with the most assiduous industry. As a further essential feature of its development the religion of this Dutch folk was Protestantism, and it is an exclusive characteristic of this form of religion that it seeks to find a home in the prose of life and suffers the same to remain just as it is by itself, and independently of religious associations, and to retain its forms of growth in unrestricted freedom. It would be quite impossible for any other nation, situated in other external conditions, to create works of art of such pre-eminent quality from the kind of material which we have placed before us in the Dutch school of painting. And, moreover, despite the peculiar nature of this artistic interest, the Dutch have not by any means discovered their whole life-in what was necessitous or barren in the conditions of their existence and what tended to oppress their vitality: on the contrary, they have reformed their church itself, have overcome a religious despotism precisely as they overcame the world-power and majesty of Spain, and have finally through their exertions, their industry, their bravery and thrift secured for themselves, in the consciousness of their self-attained liberty, prosperity, comfort, rectitude, courage, joviality, nay, even a superabundant sense of the joys of ordinary existence. Herein lies the vindication of the typical subject-matter of their art. The material of such an art will not, however, satisfy that profounder significance which is due to a content that is essentially true. If, however, neither our emotional nor our critical faculties are wholly content with it the more we consider it closely the more we shall feel reconciled to such defects. It is an essential part of the art of painting and the man who paints that they should please and carry us away with that sense of pleasure. And, to put it bluntly, if we would really know what painting is, in looking at any particular canvas we must be, at least, able to say of the master in question: "Ah, this man can paint." The main point, therefore, does not turn on the question how far the artist in his work is able to give us an exact transcription of the object he presents before us. We have already the completest vision of grapes, flowers, stags, sand-hills, sea, sun, sky, the finery and decoration of ordinary life, horses, warriors, peasants, smokers, teeth-extraction, and every kind of domestic scene. We have only to go to Nature for such things and others like them. What ought to captivate us is not the content in its bare reality. Rather it is the appearance, which in comparison with the object is wholly without interest[304]. This appearance is, moreover, by itself fixed independently of the beautiful[305], and art consists in the mastery of its reproduction of all the mysteries of the ever self-deepening appearance of external phenomena[306]. And, above all, the function of art consists in this that, armed with an exceptionally fine sense for such things, it lies in ambush for the momentary and wholly transient traits which it finds upon the surrounding world observed in its individual aspects of life, aspects which, however, completely coincide with the universal laws that dominate the appearance, and can retain true and secure the most fading apparition. A tree, a landscape, is something of independent and permanent stability. But to seize upon the flash of a metal, the gleam of light through the grape, a vanishing glance of the moon or the sun, a smile, the expressions of spiritual life which are no sooner seen than they vanish, or ludicrous movements, situations, and attitudes, to master such evanescent material as this is the difficult task of this type of work. If classic art in its Ideal has essentially confined its embodiment to that which is purely substantive so here we have opened to our vision the changes of Nature in their fleeting forms of expression, a stream of water, a waterfall, waves of foam on the sea, still life with the accidental flashes of glass, plate, and things of like nature, the outward appearance of man in the most exceptional situations, a wife, for instance, threading her needle by candle-light, a halt of robbers suddenly surprised, the most instantaneous fraction of some human posture, the smile or sneer of a peasant, all the things, in fact, in which men like Ostade, Teniers, or Steen are masters. It is the triumph of art over the Past, in which the substantive is likewise filched of its power over that which is accidental and transitory.
And just as the appearance simply as such reflects the real content of objects, so we may say that Art, in giving a permanent form to the evanescent show of things, goes a step further. In other words, quite apart from the objective realization, the means adopted in the reproduction are themselves independently an end, in the sense that the individual ability of the artist, and his use of the means his art supplies, may itself rank as one of the objects aimed at by the art product. In quite the early days of the school the artists of the Netherlands studied profoundly the qualities of colour in its relation to material substances[307]. Van Eyck, Hemling, and Schoreel[308] were all of them capable of imitating in the most realistic way the sheen of gold and silver, the varied light effects of jewels, silk, velvet, and fur-stuffs. A mastery of this kind which, by the magic of colour and the mysteries of its enchantment, is able to bring about artistic results so entirely surprising requires no further vindication; it justifies itself. As Spirit in thought and in its grasp of the world by means of ideas and thoughts reproduces itself, so what is most important here is the individual recreation of the external world, independently of the bare object itself, in the sensuous medium, of colours under effects of light and shade. It is in fact a kind of objective music, a system of colour tones. In music the single tone is of no value and only produces the musical effect in its relation to some other, in its opposition, concord, modulation, and unison. It is precisely the same thing with the music of colour. If we consider the appearance of painted colour closely such as the gleam of gold or the flash from the steel of battle we shall only see a number of white or yellow dashes, points, coloured surfaces. The single colour alone does not possess this gleam which we gather from the picture. It is only by its association with other tints that we get the effect of glitter and flash. Take for example the Atlas of Terburg; every individual strip of colour here alone is simply a dull gray, more or less whitish, bluish, or inclining to yellow: only when we take in the entire effect from a distance, which gives us the relative contrast of each part to the rest, dawns upon us the beautiful soft sheen which is true of the genuine Atlas. And it is just the same with our velvet effect, play of light, exhalation of cloud and so on through all pictorial effect whatsoever. It is not so much the reflex of the artist's mood[309], which, as is no doubt frequently the case with landscape, transfers itself to the objects delineated, as it is the entire ability of the artist, which seeks to make itself felt in this objective way as the use of the means at his disposal in such a vital interaction that they themselves straightway of their own cunning bring to birth a world of objects.
(γ) And consequently the interest in the objects delineated tends to revert to the fact that it is the unique powers of the artist himself which are thus consciously displayed, and for which the embodiment of a work of art, independently complete and self-composed, is not of so much importance as a production in which the creative artist unveils to us simply his genius. In so far as this personal aspect is no longer concerned with the external means of presentation but affects the content itself of the work, the art becomes thereby the art of caprice and humour.
(b) The Humour of Personality[310]
In humour it is the personality of the artist, which so reproduces itself both in its particular idiosyncrasies and profounder content, that the main thing of importance is the spiritual value of this personality.
(α) Inasmuch as humour does not so much propose to itself the task of unfolding and informing an objective content according to its own essential character, and, by artistic means, of articulating and rounding it off in such a self-evolved process, as it consists in the artist's own self-manifestation in the material, he will be mainly concerned to let everything which tends to become an object and to secure the rigid lines of reality, or which appears in the external world, fall away and dissolve under the powerful solvent of his own fancies, flashes of thought and arresting modes of conception. By this means every appearance of self-subsistency in such a content, the embodiment of which is secured in its coalescence through means of a given fact, is entirely destroyed, and the product is now simply a play with certain objects, a derangement or a turning upside down of a given material, the enterprise of a rover throughout such, the interwoven woof of the artist's own expression; views and moods, through which he gives free scope to himself quite as much as to his immediate subject-matter.
(β) The illusion which readily springs from such a type of art consists in this, that though it is a very easy matter to make either oneself or the object given the butt of drollery and wit, and for this reason the form of humorous composition is that frequently adopted, yet quite as often as not we find that the humour is dull enough when our artist gives free rein to any chance conceits or jest which may occur, which in their loose and patchy connections range to excess beyond all reasonable limits, and with intentional eccentricity bind up frequently together the most alien matter. Some nations have proved themselves indulgent to such artistic experiments, others are more severe. Among the French such attempts at humorous composition have not as a rule been successful; we Germans have done better, and we are more tolerant to the defects of such a style. Jean Paul, for instance, is a much admired humourist among us; and yet it would be difficult to point to any writer who is more eccentric in the way he brings to the common fund what is most remote from his subject, and patches together an incredibly motley assemblage of subjects, whose sole bond of relationship is one of the artist's own fancy. The story, the matter and progress of events are the features of least interest in his romances. The main attraction throughout is the sportive procession of his humour which uses everything in its course as a means to establish his own triumph as a humourist. In this subordination to itself and concatenation of every conceivable stuff that can be raked out of the four quarters of the world, or the realm of the real, the material of humour approximates once more to that of symbolism, wherein significance and conformity likewise are disjoined, with this difference, however, that in the former it is purely the personality of the poet which commands the material no less than the significance, co-ordinating them according to his own caprice[311]. Such a series of freaks and fancies soon tires us, more particularly when we are expected to live as best we can in the not unfrequently barely decipherable combinations which have passed somehow or another in the clouds of the poet's brain. With Jean Paul, as with scarce another, one metaphor, sally of wit, drollery, or simile proves the death of its neighbour. Nothing grows; there is an explosion, that is all. A plot, however, which purports to have a dénouement must first be unfolded and prepared for such solution. From another point of view, when the artist in question is essentially devoid of the solid core and support of a mind and heart overflowing with the real actualities of existence, his humour very readily lapses into what is sentimental and morbid. And in this respect Jean Paul is no less an example.
(γ) In a humour of the best kind, which keeps itself aloof from such excrescences, we must therefore have a genuinely spiritual depth and wealth, able to exalt that which issues as the emanation of a personality to the rank of real expression, and capable of making that which is truly substantive arise from that which the chance suggestions, the mere caprices of the artist, dictate. The self-abandonment of the poet in the course of his exposition must be, as it is with humourists such as Sterne or Hippel, a wholly unembarrassed, easy-going, scarce perceptible kind of saunter[312], which, insignificant though it appear, manages precisely by that means to strike at the root of the main idea; and, for the reason that what thus bubbles up in haphazard fashion are matters of detail, it is essential that the conception, which binds the whole ideally together, should have the deeper foundation, and that such detail should simply flash forth the focal spark of genius.