Human, All Too Human Volume Ii Part 45

123.

ARTISTS' AFFECTATION OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD.-Schiller, like other German artists, fancied that if a man had intellect he was ent.i.tled to improvise even with the pen on all difficult subjects. So there we see his prose essays-in every way a model of how _not_ to attack scientific questions of aesthetics and ethics, and a danger for young readers who, in their admiration for Schiller the poet, have not the courage to think meanly of Schiller the thinker and author.-The temptation to traverse for once the forbidden paths, and to have his say in science as well, is easy and pardonable in the artist. For even the ablest artist from time to time finds his handicraft and his workshop unendurable. This temptation is so strong that it makes the artist show all the world what no one wishes to see, that his little chamber of thought is cramped and untidy. Why not, indeed? He does not live there. He proceeds to show that the storeroom of his knowledge is partly empty, partly filled with lumber. Why not, indeed?

This condition does not really become the artist-child badly. In particular, the artist shows that for the very easiest exercises of scientific method, which are accessible even to beginners, his joints are too stiff and untrained. Even of that he need not really be ashamed! On the other hand, he often develops no mean art in imitating all the mistakes, vices, and base pedantries that are practised in the scientific community, in the belief that these belong to the appearance of the thing, if not to the thing itself. This is the very point that is so amusing in artists' writing, that the artist involuntarily acts as his vocation demands: he parodies the scientific and inartistic natures. Towards science he should show no att.i.tude but that of parody, in so far as he is an artist and only an artist.

124.

THE FAUST-IDEA.-A little sempstress is seduced and plunged into despair: a great scholar of all the four Faculties is the evil-doer. That cannot have happened in the ordinary course, surely? No, certainly not! Without the aid of the devil incarnate, the great scholar would never have achieved the deed.-Is this really destined to be the greatest German "tragic idea,"

as one hears it said among Germans?-But for Goethe even this idea was too terrible. His kind heart could not avoid placing the little sempstress, "the good soul that forgot itself but once," near to the saints, after her involuntary death. Even the great scholar, "the good man" with "the dark impulse," is brought into heaven in the nick of time, by a trick which is played upon the devil at the decisive moment. In heaven the lovers find themselves again. Goethe once said that his nature was too conciliatory for really tragic subjects.

125.

ARE THERE "GERMAN CLa.s.sICS"?-Sainte-Beuve observes somewhere that the word "cla.s.sic" does not suit the genius of certain literatures. For instance, n.o.body could talk seriously of "German cla.s.sics."-What do our German publishers, who are about to add fifty more to the fifty German cla.s.sics we are told to accept, say to that? Does it not almost seem as if one need only have been dead for the last thirty years, and lie a lawful prey to the public,(21) in order to hear suddenly and unexpectedly the trumpet of resurrection as a "Cla.s.sic"? And this in an age and a nation where at least five out of the six great fathers of its literature are undoubtedly antiquated or becoming antiquated-without there being any need for the age or the nation to be ashamed of this. For those writers have given way before the strength of our time-let that be considered in all fairness!-Goethe, as I have indicated, I do not include. He belongs to a higher species than "national literatures": hence life, revival, and decay do not enter into the reckoning in his relations with his countrymen. He lived and now lives but for the few; for the majority he is nothing but a flourish of vanity which is trumpeted from time to time across the border into foreign ears. Goethe, not merely a great and good man, but a _culture_, is in German history an interlude without a sequel. Who, for instance, would be able to point to any trace of Goethe's influence in German politics of the last seventy years (whereas the influence, certainly of Schiller, and perhaps of Lessing, can be traced in the political world)? But what of those five others? Klopstock, in a most honourable way, became out of date even in his own lifetime, and so completely that the meditative book of his later years, _The Republic of Learning_, has never been taken seriously from that day to this. Herder's misfortune was that his writings were always either new or antiquated.

Thus for stronger and more subtle minds (like Lichtenberg) even Herder's masterpiece, his _Ideas for the History of Mankind_, was in a way antiquated at the very moment of its appearance. Wieland, who lived to the full and made others live likewise, was clever enough to antic.i.p.ate by death the waning of his influence. Lessing, perhaps, still lives to-day-but among a young and ever younger band of scholars. Schiller has fallen from the hands of young men into those of boys, of all German boys.

It is a well-known sign of obsolescence when a book descends to people of less and less mature age.-Well, what is it that has thrust these five into the background, so that well-educated men of affairs no longer read them?

A better taste, a riper knowledge, a higher reverence for the real and the true: in other words, the very virtues which these five (and ten or twenty others of lesser repute) first re-planted in Germany, and which now, like a mighty forest, cast over their graves not only the shadow of awe, but something of the shadow of oblivion.-But cla.s.sical writers are not planters of intellectual and literary virtues. They bring those virtues to perfection and are their highest luminous peaks, and being brighter, freer, and purer than all that surrounds them, they remain s.h.i.+ning above the nations when the nations themselves perish. There may come an elevated stage of humanity, in which the Europe of the peoples is a dark, forgotten thing, but Europe lives on in thirty books, very old but never antiquated-in the cla.s.sics.

126.

INTERESTING, BUT NOT BEAUTIFUL.-This countryside conceals its meaning, but it has one that we should like to guess. Everywhere that I look, I read words and hints of words, but I do not know where begins the sentence that solves the riddle of all these hints. So I get a stiff neck in trying to discover whether I should start reading from this or that point.

127.

AGAINST INNOVATORS IN LANGUAGE.-The use of neologisms or archaisms, the preference for the rare and the bizarre, the attempt to enrich rather than to limit the vocabulary, are always signs either of an immature or of a corrupted taste. A n.o.ble poverty but a masterly freedom within the limits of that modest wealth distinguishes the Greek artists in oratory. They wish to have less than the people has-for the people is richest in old and new-but they wish to have that little _better_. The reckoning up of their archaic and exotic forms is soon done, but we never cease marvelling if we have an eye for their light and delicate manner in handling the commonplace and apparently long outworn elements in word and phrase.

128.

GLOOMY AND SERIOUS AUTHORS.-He who commits his sufferings to paper becomes a gloomy author, but he becomes a serious one if he tells us what he _has_ suffered and why he is now enjoying a pleasurable repose.

129.

HEALTHINESS OF TASTE.-How is it that health is less contagious than disease-generally, and particularly in matters of taste? Or are there epidemics of health?

130.

A RESOLUTION.-Never again to read a book that is born and christened (with ink) at the same moment.

131.

IMPROVING OUR IDEAS.-Improving our style means improving our ideas, and nothing else. He who does not at once concede this can never be convinced of the point.

132.

CLa.s.sICAL BOOKS.-The weakest point in every cla.s.sical book is that it is written too much in the mother tongue of its author.

133.

BAD BOOKS.-The book should demand pen, ink, and desk, but usually it is pen, ink, and desk that demand the book. That is why books are of so little account at present.

134.

PRESENCE OF SENSE.-When the public reflects on paintings, it becomes a poet; when on poems, an investigator. At the moment when the artist summons it it is always lacking in the right sense, and accordingly in presence of sense, not in presence of mind.