The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Iii Part 142

A Poetical work must vindicate itself--if the execution be defective, little aid can be derived from commentaries.

On these grounds, I might safely leave the Chorus to be its own advocate, if we had ever seen it presented in an appropriate manner.

But it must be remembered that a dramatic composition first a.s.sumes the character of a whole by means of representation on the stage. The Poet supplies only the words, to which, in a lyrical tragedy, music and rhythmical motion are essential accessories. It follows, then, that if the Chorus is deprived of accompaniments appealing so powerfully to the senses, it will appear a superfluity in the economy of the drama--mere hindrance to the development of the plot--destructive to the illusion of the scene and wearisome to the spectators. To do justice to the Chorus, more especially if our aims in Poetry be of a grand and elevated character, we must transport ourselves from the actual to a possible stage. It is the privilege of Art to furnish for itself whatever is requisite, and the accidental deficiency of auxiliaries ought not to confine the plastic imagination of the Poet. He aspires to whatever is most dignified, he labors to realize the ideal in his own mind-though in the execution of his purpose he must needs accommodate himself to circ.u.mstances.

The a.s.sertion so commonly made, that the Public degrades Art, is not well founded. It is the artist that brings the Public to the level of his own conceptions; and, in every age in which Art has gone to decay, it has fallen through its professors. The People need feeling alone, and feeling they possess. They take their station before the curtain with an unvoiced longing, with a multifarious capacity. They bring with them an apt.i.tude for what is highest--they derive the greatest pleasure from what is judicious and true; and if, with these powers of appreciation, they deign to be satisfied with inferior productions, still, if they have once tasted what is excellent, they will, in the end, insist on having it supplied to them.

It is sometimes objected that the Poet may labor according to an Ideal--that the critic may judge from ideas, but that mere executive art is subject to contingencies and depends for effect on the occasion. Managers will be obstinate; actors are bent on display--the audience is inattentive and unruly. Their object is relaxation, and they are disappointed if mental exertion be required, when they expected only amus.e.m.e.nt. But if the Theatre be made instrumental toward higher objects, the pleasure of the spectator will not be increased, but enn.o.bled. It will be a diversion, but a poetical one.

All Art is dedicated to pleasure, and there can be no higher and worthier end than to make men happy. The true Art is that which provides the highest degree of pleasure; and this consists in the abandonment of the spirit to the free play of all its faculties.

Every one expects from the imaginative arts a certain emanc.i.p.ation from the bounds of reality: we are willing to give a scope to Fancy, and recreate ourselves with the possible. The man who expects it the least will nevertheless forget his ordinary pursuits, his every-day existence and individuality, and experience delight from uncommon incidents: if he be of a serious turn of mind, he will acknowledge on the stage that moral government of the world which he fails to discover in real life. But he is, at the same time, perfectly aware that all is an empty show, and that, in a true sense, he is feeding only on dreams. When he returns from the theatre to the world of realities, he is again compressed within its narrow bounds; he is its denizen as before--for it remains what it was, and in him nothing has been changed. What, then, has he gained beyond a momentary illusive pleasure which vanished with the occasion?

It is because a pa.s.sing recreation is alone desired that a mere show of truth is thought sufficient. I mean that probability or vraisemblance which is so highly esteemed, but which the commonest workers are able to subst.i.tute for the true.

Art has for its object not merely to afford a transient pleasure, to excite to a momentary dream of liberty; its aim is to make us absolutely free; and this it accomplishes by awakening, exercising, and perfecting in us a power to remove to an objective distance the sensible world (which otherwise only burdens us as rugged matter and presses us down with a brute influence); to transform it into the free working of our spirit, and thus acquire a dominion over the material by means of ideas. For the very reason also that true Art requires somewhat of the objective and real, it is not satisfied with a show of truth. It rears its ideal edifice on Truth itself--on the solid and deep foundations of Nature.

But how Art can be at once altogether ideal, yet in the strictest sense real; how it can entirely leave the actual, and yet harmonize with Nature, is a problem to the mult.i.tude; hence the distorted views which prevail in regard to poetical and plastic works for to ordinary judgments these two requisites seem to counteract each other.

It is commonly supposed that one may be attained by the sacrifice of the other--the result is a failure to arrive at either. One to whom Nature has given a true sensibility, but denied the plastic imaginative power, will be a faithful painter of the real; he will adapt casual appearances, but never catch the spirit of Nature. He will only reproduce to us the matter of the world, which, not being our own work, the product of our creative spirit, can never have the beneficent operation of Art, of which the essence is freedom. Serious, indeed, but unpleasing, is the cast of thought with which such an artist and poet dismisses us; we feel ourselves painfully thrust back into the narrow sphere of reality by means of the very art which ought to have emanc.i.p.ated us. On the other hand, a writer, endowed with a lively fancy, but dest.i.tute of warmth and individuality of feeling, will not concern himself in the least about truth; he will sport with the stuff of the world, and endeavor to surprise by whimsical combinations; and as his whole performance is nothing but foam and glitter, he will, it is true, engage the attention for a time, but build up and confirm nothing in the understanding. His playfulness is, like the gravity of the other, thoroughly unpoetical. To string together at will fantastical images, is not to travel into the realm of the ideal; and the imitative reproduction of the actual cannot be called the representation of nature. Both requisites stand so little in contradiction to each other that they are rather one and the same thing; that Art is true only as it altogether forsakes the actual and becomes purely ideal. Nature herself is an idea of the mind, and is never presented to the senses. She lies under the veil of appearances, but is herself never apparent. To the art of the ideal alone is lent, or rather, absolutely given, the privilege to grasp the spirit of the All and bind it in a corporeal form.

Yet, in truth, even Art cannot present it to the senses, but by means of her creative power to the imaginative faculty alone; and it is thus that she becomes more true than all reality, and more real than all experience. It follows from these premises that the artist can use no single element taken from reality as he finds it--that his work must be ideal in all its parts, if it be designed to have, as it were, an intrinsic reality and to harmonize with nature.

What is true of Art and Poetry, in the abstract, holds good as to their various kinds; and we may apply what has been advanced to the subject of tragedy. In this department, it is still necessary to controvert the ordinary notion of the natural, with which poetry is altogether incompatible. A certain ideality has been allowed in painting, though, I fear, on grounds rather conventional than intrinsic; but in dramatic works what is desired is illusion, which, if it could be accomplished by means of the actual, would be, at best, a paltry deception. All the externals of a theatrical representation are opposed to this notion; all is merely a symbol of the real. The day itself in a theatre is an artificial one; the metrical dialogue is itself ideal; yet the conduct of the play must forsooth be real, and the general effect sacrificed to a part. Thus the French, who have utterly misconceived the spirit of the ancients, adopted on their stage the unities of time and place in the most common and empirical sense; as though there were any place but the bare ideal one, or any other time than the mere sequence of the incidents.

By the introduction of a metrical dialogue an important progress has been made toward the poetical Tragedy. A few lyrical dramas have been successful on the stage, and Poetry, by its own living energy, has triumphed over prevailing prejudices. But so long as these erroneous views are entertained little has been done--for it is not enough barely to tolerate as a poetic license that which is, in truth, the essence of all poetry. The introduction of the Chorus would be the last and decisive step; and if it only served this end, namely, to declare open and honorable warfare against naturalism in art, it would be for us a living wall which Tragedy had drawn around herself, to guard her from contact with the world of reality, and maintain her own ideal soil, her poetical freedom.

It is well known that the Greek tragedy had its origin in the Chorus; and though, in process of time, it became independent, still it may be said that poetically, and in spirit, the Chorus was the source of its existence, and that without these persevering supporters and witnesses of the incident a totally different order of poetry would have grown out of the drama. The abolition of the Chorus, and the debas.e.m.e.nt of this sensibly powerful organ into the characterless subst.i.tute of a confidant, is, by no means, such an improvement in tragedy as the French, and their imitators, would have it supposed to be.

The old Tragedy, which at first only concerned itself with G.o.ds, heroes and kings, introduced the Chorus as an essential accompaniment.

The poets found it in nature, and for that reason employed it. It grew out of the poetical aspect of real life. In the new Tragedy it becomes an organ of art which aids in making the poetry prominent. The modern poet no longer finds the Chorus in nature; he must needs create and introduce it poetically; that is, he must resolve on such an adaptation of his story as will admit of its retrocession to those primitive times and to that simple form of life.

The Chorus thus renders more substantial service to the modern dramatist than to the old poet--and for this reason, that it transforms the commonplace actual world into the old poetical one; that it enables him to dispense with all that is repugnant to poetry, and conducts him back to the most simple, original, and genuine motives of action. The palaces of kings are in these days closed-courts of justice have been transferred from the gates of cities to the interior of buildings; writing has narrowed the province of speech; the people itself--the sensibly living ma.s.s--when it does not operate as brute force, has become a part of the civil polity, and thereby an abstract idea in our minds; the deities have returned within the bosoms of mankind. The poet must reopen the palaces--he must place courts of justice beneath the canopy of heaven--restore the G.o.ds, reproduce every extreme which the artificial frame of actual life has abolished--throw aside every fact.i.tious influence on the mind or condition of man which impedes the manifestation of his inward nature and primitive character, as the statuary rejects modern costume, and of all external circ.u.mstances adopts nothing but what is palpable in the highest of forms--that of humanity. But precisely as the painter throws around his figures draperies of ample volume, to fill up the s.p.a.ce of his picture richly and gracefully, to arrange its several parts in harmonious ma.s.ses, to give due play to color, which charms and refreshes the eye--and at once to envelop human forms in a spiritual veil, and make them visible--so the tragic poet inlays and entwines his rigidly contracted plot and the strong outlines of his characters with a tissue of lyrical magnificence, in which, as in flowing robes of purple, they move freely and n.o.bly, with a sustained dignity and exalted repose.

In a higher organization, the material, or the elementary, need not be visible; the chemical color vanishes in the finer tints of the imaginative one. The material, however, has its peculiar effect, and may be included in an artistical com position. But it must deserve its place by animation, fulness and harmony, and give value to the ideal forms which it surrounds, instead of stifling them by its weight.

In respect of the pictorial art, this is obvious to ordinary apprehension, yet in poetry likewise, and in the tragical kind, which is our immediate subject, the same doctrine holds good. Whatever fascinates the senses alone is mere matter and the rude element of a work of art:--if it take the lead it will inevitably destroy the poetical--which lies at the exact medium between the ideal and the sensible. But man is so const.i.tuted that he is ever impatient to pa.s.s from what is fanciful to what is common; and reflection must, therefore, have its place even in tragedy. But to merit this place it must, by means of delivery, recover what it wants in actual life; for if the two elements of poetry, the ideal and the sensible, do not operate with an inward mutuality, they must at least act as allies--or poetry is out of the question. If the balance be not intrinsically perfect, the equipoise can be maintained only by an agitation of both scales.

This is what the Chorus effects in tragedy. It is, in itself, not an individual but a general conception; yet it is represented by a palpable body which appeals to the senses with an imposing grandeur.

It forsakes the contracted sphere of the incidents to dilate itself over the past and future, over distant times and nations and general humanity, to deduce the grand results of life, and p.r.o.nounce the lessons of wisdom. But all this it does with the full power of fancy--with a bold lyrical freedom which ascends, as with G.o.dlike step, to the topmost height of worldly things; and it effects it in conjunction with the whole sensible influence of melody and rhythm, in tones and movements.

The Chorus thus exercises a purifying influence on tragic poetry, insomuch as it keeps reflection apart from the incidents, and by this separation arms it with a poetical vigor; as the painter, by means of a rich drapery, changes the ordinary poverty of costume into a charm and an ornament.

But as the painter finds himself obliged to strengthen the tone of color of the living subject, in order to counter-balance the material influences--so the--lyrical effusions of the Chorus impose upon the poet the necessity of a proportionate elevation of his general diction. It is the Chorus alone which ent.i.tles the poet to employ this fulness of tone, which at once charms the senses, pervades the spirit, and expands the mind. This one giant form on his canvas obliges him to mount all his figures on the cothurnus, and thus impart a tragical grandeur to his picture. If the Chorus be taken away, the diction of the tragedy must generally be lowered, or what is now great and majestic will appear forced and overstrained. The old Chorus introduced into the French tragedy would present it in all its poverty and reduce it to nothing; yet, without doubt, the same accomplishment would impart to Shakespeare's tragedy its true significance.

As the Chorus gives life to the language--so also it gives repose to the action; but it is that beautiful and lofty repose which is the characteristic of a true work of art. For the mind of the spectator ought to maintain its freedom through the most impa.s.sioned scenes; it should not be the mere prey of impressions, but calmly and severely detach itself from the emotions which it suffers. The commonplace objection made to the Chorus that it disturbs the illusion and blunts the edge of the feelings, is what const.i.tutes its highest recommendation; for it is this blind force of the affections which the true artist deprecates this illusion is what he disdains to excite. If the strokes which Tragedy inflicts on our bosoms followed without respite--the pa.s.sion would overpower the action. We should mix ourselves up with the subject-matter, and no longer stand above it. It is by holding asunder the different parts, and stepping between the pa.s.sions with its composing views, that the Chorus restores to us our freedom, which would else be lost in the tempest. The characters of the drama need this intermission in order to collect themselves; for they are no real beings who obey the impulse of the moment, and merely represent individuals--but ideal persons and representatives of their species, who enunciate the deep things of Humanity.

Thus much on my attempt to revive the old Chorus on the tragic stage.

It is true that choruses are not unknown to modern tragedy; but the Chorus of the Greek drama, as I have employed it--the Chorus, as a single ideal person, furthering and accompanying the whole plot--is of an entirely distinct character; and when, in discussion on the Greek tragedy, I hear mention made of choruses, I generally suspect the speaker's ignorance of his subject. In my view the Chorus has never been reproduced since the decline of the old tragedy.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 63: Permission G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., London, and The Macmillan Co., New York.]

SCHILLER-GOETHE CORRESPONDENCE[64]

TRANSLATED BY L. DORA SCHMITZ

SCHILLER _to_ GOETHE

Jena, August 23, 1794.

I yesterday received the welcome news that you had returned from your journey. We may therefore hope to see you among us again soon, which I, on my part, most heartily wish. My recent conversations with you have put the whole store of my ideas in motion, for they related to a subject which has actively engaged my thoughts for some years past.

Many things upon which I could not come to a right understanding with myself have received new and unexpected light from the contemplation I have had of your mind (for so I must call the general impression of your ideas upon me). I needed the _object_, the body, for several of my speculative ideas, and you have put me on the track of finding it.

Your calm and clear way of looking at things keeps you from getting on the by-roads into which speculation as well as arbitrary imagination--which merely follows its own bent--are so apt to lead one astray. Your correct intuition grasps all things, and that far more perfectly than what is laboriously sought for by a.n.a.lysis; and merely because this lies within you as a whole, is the wealth of your mind concealed from yourself. For, alas! we know only that which we can take to pieces. Minds like yours, therefore, seldom know how far they have penetrated and how little cause they have to borrow from philosophy, which, in fact, can learn only from them. Philosophy can merely dissect what is given it, but the giving itself is not the work of the a.n.a.lyzer but of genius, which combines things according to objective laws under the obscure but safe influence of pure reason.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MONUMENT TO GOETHE AND SCHILLER IN WEIMAR]

Although I have done so at a distance, I have long watched the course which your mind has pursued, and have observed, with ever renewed admiration, the path which you have marked out for yourself. You seek for the necessary in nature, but you seek it by the most difficult route--one which all weaker minds would take care to avoid. You look at Nature as a whole, when seeking to get light thrown upon her individual parts; you look for the explanation of the individual in the totality of her various manifestations. From the simple organism you ascend step by step to those that are more complex, in order, in the end, genetically to form the most complicate of all--man--out of the materials of nature as a whole. By thus, as it were, imitating nature in creating him, you try to penetrate into his hidden structure. This is a great and truly heroic idea, which sufficiently shows how your mind keeps the whole wealth of its conceptions in one beautiful unity. You can never have expected that your life would suffice to attain such an end, but to have struck out such a path is worth more than reaching the end of any other; and you, like Achilles in the Iliad, made your choice between Phthia and immortality. Had you been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and had you from infancy been placed in the midst of choice natural surroundings and of an idealizing Art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps even have been rendered entirely superfluous. Had such been the case, you would, on your first perception of things, have taken up the form of the Necessary, and the grand style would have been developed in you with your first experience. But being born a German, and your Grecian spirit having been cast in this Northern mold, you had no other choice but either to become a Northern artist; or, by the help of the power of thought, to supply your imagination with what reality withheld from it, and thus, as it were, to produce a Greek from within by a reasoning process. At that period of life when the soul, surrounded by defective forms, constructs its own inward nature out of outward circ.u.mstances, you had already a.s.sumed a wild Northern nature, and your victorious genius, rising above its materials, then discovered this want from within, and became convinced of it from without through its acquaintance with Greek nature. You had then, in accordance with the better model which your developing mind created for itself, to correct your old and less perfect nature, and this could be effected only by following leading ideas. However, this _logical_ direction which a reflecting mind is forced to pursue, is not very compatible with the _esthetic_ state of mind by which alone a reflecting mind becomes creative. You, therefore, had one task more: for inasmuch as your mind had pa.s.sed over from intuition to abstraction, so you had now to go back and retranslate ideas into intuitions, and to change thoughts into feelings; for it is only through the latter that genius can be productive.

It is somewhat in this manner that I imagine the course pursued by your mind, and whether I am right or not you will yourself know best.

However, what you yourself can scarcely be aware of (as genius ever remains the greatest mystery to itself) is the beautiful harmony between your philosophical instinct and the purest results of your speculative reason. Upon a first view it does indeed seem as if there could not be any greater opposites than the speculative mind which proceeds from unity, and the intuitive mind which proceeds from variety. If, however, the former seeks experience with a pure and truthful spirit, and the latter seeks law with self-active and free power of thought, then the two cannot fail to meet each other half way. It is true that the intuitive mind has only to deal with individuals, the speculative mind only with species. But if the intuitive mind is that of a genius and seeks the nature of the Necessary in experience, then individuals will be produced, it is true, but they will possess the character of the species; and again, if the speculative mind is that of a genius, and does not lose sight of experience when rising above it, then it will indeed produce species only, but with the possibility of individual life and with a well-founded relation to actual objects.

But I find that in place of sending you a letter I am writing an essay--pray excuse this, and ascribe it to the lively interest with which the subject has filled me; and should you not recognize your own image in this mirror, do not on that account flee from it, I pray.

Diderot's work[65], especially the first part, is very interesting, and, considering the subject, is handled with edifying delicacy. I beg to be permitted to keep this book for a few days longer.

It would, I think, be well if we could now soon start the new periodical, and you would perhaps be kind enough to let the first number be opened with something of yours. I, therefore, take the liberty of asking you whether you would be willing to let your novel[66] appear in our journal in successive numbers? But whether you determine to let us have it or not, I should consider it a very great favor to be allowed to read it.

My friends and my wife commend themselves to your kind remembrance.

GOETHE _to_ SCHILLER

Ettersburg, August 27, 1794.

On the anniversary of my birthday, which took place this week, I could not have received a more acceptable gift than the letter in which you give the sum of my existence in so friendly a manner, and in which, by your sympathy, you encourage me to a more a.s.siduous and active use of my powers.

Pure enjoyment and true usefulness can only be reciprocal, and it will be a pleasure to me to unfold to you at leisure what your conversation has been to me; how I, too, regard those days as an epoch in my life, and how contented I feel in having gone on my way without any particular encouragement; for it seems to me that, after so unexpected a meeting, we cannot but wander on in life together. I have always prized the frank and rare earnestness which is displayed in all that you have written and done, and I may now claim to be made acquainted by yourself with the course taken by your own mind, more especially during these latter years. If we make it clear to each other to which point we have thus far attained, the better able we shall be to work on together without interruption.

All that relates to myself I will gladly communicate to you; for, being fully conscious that my undertaking far exceeds the measure of human capabilities and their earthly duration, I should like to deposit many things with you, and thereby not only preserve them but give them life.

Of what great advantage your sympathy will be to me you will yourself soon perceive, when, upon a closer acquaintance, you discover in me a kind of obscurity and hesitation which I cannot entirely master, although distinctly aware of their existence. Such phenomena, however, are often found in our natures, and we quietly submit to them as long as they do not become too tyrannical.