To these legitimate and true powers others are, without doubt, added; the powers of evil; but they ought not to be represented as forming the real foundation and end of the action. “If the idea, the end and aim, be something false in itself, the hideousness of the ground will allow still less beauty of form. The sophistry of the passions may, indeed, by a true picture, attempt to represent the false under the colors of the true, but it places under our eyes only a whited sepulchre. Cruelty and the violent employment of force can be endured in representation, but only when they are relieved by the grandeur of the character and ennobled by the aim which is pursued by the dramatis personæ. Perversity, envy, cowardice, baseness, are only repulsive.
“Evil, in itself, is stripped of real interest, because nothing but the false can spring from what is false; it produces only misfortune, while art should present to us order and harmony. The great artists, the great poets of antiquity, never give us the spectacle of pure wickedness and perversity.”
We cite this passage because it exhibits the character and high moral tone which prevails in the entire work, as we shall have occasion to observe more than once hereafter.
If the ideas and interests of human life form the ground of the action, the latter is accomplished by the characters upon whom the interest is fastened. General ideas may, indeed, be personated by beings superior to man, by certain divinities like those which figure in ancient epic poetry and tragedy. But it is to man that action, properly so-called, returns; it is he who occupies the scene. Now, how reconcile divine action and human action, the will of the gods and that of man? Such is the problem which has made shipwreck of so many poets and artists. To maintain a proper equipoise it is necessary that the gods have supreme direction, and that man preserve his freedom and his independence without which he is no more than the passive instrument of the will of the gods; fatality weighs upon all his acts. The true solution consists in maintaining the identity of the two terms, in spite of their difference; in so acting that what is attributed to the gods shall appear at the same time to emanate from the inner nature of the dramatis personæ and from their character. The talent of the artist must reconcile the two aspects. “The heart of man must be revealed in his gods, personifications of the grand motives which allure him and govern him within.” This is the problem resolved by the great poets of antiquity, Homer, Æschylus, and Sophocles.
The general principles, those grand motives which are the basis of the action, by the fact that they are living in the soul of the characters, form, also, the very ground of the passions; this is the essence of true pathos. Passion, here, in the elevated ideal sense, is, in fact, not an arbitrary, capricious, irregular movement of the soul; it is a noble principle, which blends itself with a great idea, with one of the eternal verities of moral or religious order. Such is the passion of Antigone, the holy love for her brother; such, the vengeance of Orestes. It is an essentially legitimate power of the soul which contains one of the eternal principles of the reason and the will. This is still the ideal, the true ideal, although it appears under the form of a passion. It relieves, ennobles and purifies it; it thus gives to the action a serious and profound interest.
It is in this sense that passion constitutes the centre and true domain of art; it is the principle of emotion, the source of true pathos.
Now, this moral verity, this eternal principle which descends into the heart of man and there takes the form of great and noble passion, identifying itself with the will of the dramatis personæ, constitutes, also, their character. Without this high idea which serves as support and as basis to passion, there is no true character. Character is the culminating point of ideal representation. It is the embodiment of all that precedes. It is in the creation of the characters, that the genius of the artist or of the poet is displayed.
Three principal elements must be united to form the ideal character, richness, vitality, and stability. Richness consists in not being limited to a single quality, which would make of the person an abstraction, an allegoric being. To a single dominant quality there should be added all those which make of the personage or hero a real and complete man, capable of being developed in diverse situations and under varying aspects. Such a multiplicity alone can give vitality to the character. This is not sufficient, however; it is necessary that the qualities be moulded together in such a manner as to form not a simple assemblage and a complex whole, but one and the same individual, having peculiar and original physiognomy. This is the case when a particular sentiment, a ruling passion, presents the salient trait of the character of a person, and gives to him a fixed aim, to which all his resolutions and his acts refer. Unity and variety, simplicity and completeness of detail, these are presented to us in the characters of Sophocles, Shakspeare, and others.
Lastly, what constitutes essentially the ideal in character is consistency and stability. An inconsistent, undecided, irresolute character, is the utter want of character. Contradictions, without doubt, exist in human nature, but unity should be maintained in spite of these fluctuations. Something identical ought to be found throughout, as a fundamental trait. To be self-determining, to follow a design, to embrace a resolution and persist in it, constitute the very foundation of personality; to suffer one’s self to be determined by another, to hesitate, to vacillate, this is to surrender one’s will, to cease to be one’s self, to lack character; this is, in all cases, the opposite of the ideal character.
Hegel on this subject strongly protests against the characters which figure in modern pieces and romances, and of which Werther is the type.