Aesthetical Essays of Friedrich SchillerSchiller, Friedrich
Philosophy
Aesthetical Essays of Friedrich Schiller
Schiller, Friedrich
Aesthetics
But all the movements of man are not capable of grace. Grace is never
otherwise than beauty of form animated into movement by free will; and
the movements which belong only to physical nature could not merit the
name. It is true that an intellectual man, if he be keen, ends by
rendering himself master of almost all the movements of the body; but
when the chain which links a fine lineament to a moral sentiment
lengthens much, this lineament becomes the property of the structure, and
can no longer be counted as a grace. It happens, ultimately, that the
mind moulds the body, and that the structure is forced to modify itself
according to the play that the soul imprints upon the organs, so
entirely, that grace finally is transformed--and the examples are not
rare--into architectonic beauty. As at one time an antagonistic mind
which is ill at ease with itself alters and destroys the most perfect
beauty of structure, until at last it becomes impossible to recognize
this magnificent chef-d'oeuvre of nature in the state to which it is
reduced under the unworthy hands of free will, so at other times the
serenity and perfect harmony of the soul come to the aid of the hampered
technique, unloose nature and develop with divine splendor the beauty of
form, enveloped until then, and oppressed.
The plastic nature of man has in it an infinity of resources to retrieve
the negligencies and repair the faults that she may have committed. To
this end it is sufficient that the mind, the moral agent, sustain it, or
even withhold from troubling it in the labor of rebuilding.
Since the movements become fixed (gestures pass to a state of lineament),
are themselves capable of grace, it would perhaps appear to be rational
to comprehend equally under this idea of beauty some apparent or
imitative movements (the flamboyant lines for example, undulations). It
is this which Mendelssohn upholds. But then the idea of grace would be
confounded with the ideal of beauty in general, for all beauty is
definitively but a property of true or apparent movement (objective or
subjective), as I hope to demonstrate in an analysis of beauty. With
regard to grace, the only movements which can offer any are those which
respond at the same time to a sentiment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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