Aesthetic Poetry | Page 6

idea that is quite present in the appearance, the appearance which is
quite formed and penetrated by the idea."
"Beauty is the world secret that invites us in image and word," is the
poetical expression of Plato; and we may add, because it is revealed in
both. We feel in it the harmony of the world; it breaks forth in a beauty,
in a lovely accord, in a radiant point, and starting thence we penetrate
further and yet further, and find as the ground of all existence the same
charm which had refreshed us in individual forms. Thus Christ pointed
to the lilies of the field to knit His followers' reliance on Providence
with the phenomena of nature: and could they jet forth in royal beauty,
exceeding that of Solomon, if the inner ground of nature were not
beauty?
We may also name beauty in a certain sense a mystery, as it mediates to
us in a sensuous sign a heavenly gift of grace, that it opens to us a view
into the eternal Being, teaching us to know nature in God and God in
nature, that it brings the divine even to the perception of sense, and

establishes the energy of love and freedom as the ground, the bond, and
the end of the world.
In the midst of the temporal the eternal is made palpable and present to
us in the beautiful, and offers itself to our enjoyment. The separation is
suppressed, and the original unity, as it is in God, appears as the first,
as what holds together even the past in the universe, and what
constitutes the aim of the development in a finite accord.
The beautiful not only presents itself to us as mediator of a foreign
excellence or of a remote divinity, but the ideal and the godlike are
present in it. Hence aesthetics requires as its basis the system in which
God is known as indwelling in the world, that He is not far distant from
any one of us, but that He animates us, and that we live in Him.
Aesthetics requires the knowledge that mind is the creative force and
unity of all that is extended and developed in time and space.
The beautiful is thus, according to these later thinkers, the revelation of
God to the mind through the senses; it is the appearance of the idea. In
the beautiful spirit reveals itself to spirit through matter and the senses;
thus the entire man feels himself raised and satisfied by it. By the unity
of the beautiful with us we experience with delight that thought and the
material world are present for our individuality, that they utter tones
and shine forth in it, that both penetrate each other and blend in it and
thus become one with it. We feel one with them and one in them.
This later view was to a great extent expressed by Schiller in his
"Aesthetical Letters."
But art and aesthetics, in the sense in which these terms are used and
understood by German philosophical writers, such as Schiller, embrace
a wider field than the fine arts. Lessing, in his "Laocoon," had already
shown the point of contrast between painting and poetry; and aesthetics,
being defined as the science of the beautiful, must of necessity embrace
poetry. Accordingly Schiller's essays on tragic art, pathos, and
sentimental poetry, contained in this volume, are justly classed under
his aesthetical writings.

This being so, it is important to estimate briefly the transitions of
German poetry before Schiller, and the position that he occupied in its
historic development.
The first classical period of German poetry and literature was contained
between A. D. 1190 and 1300. It exhibits the intimate blending of the
German and Christian elements, and their full development in splendid
productions, for this was the period of the German national epos, the
"Nibelungenlied," and of the "Minnegesang."
This was a period which has nothing to compare with it in point of art
and poetry, save perhaps, and that imperfectly, the heroic and
post-Homeric age of early Greece.
The poetical efforts of that early age may be grouped under--(1)
national epos: the "Nibelungenlied;" (2) art epos: the "Rolandslied,"
"Percival," etc.; (3) the introduction of antique legends: Veldeck's
"Aeneide," and Konrad's "War of Troy;" (4) Christian legends
"Barlaam," "Sylvester," "Pilatus," etc.; (5) poetical narratives:
"Crescentia," "Graf Rudolf," etc.; (6) animal legends; "Reinecke Vos;"
(7) didactic poems: "Der Renner;" (8) the Minne-poetry, and prose.
The fourth group, though introduced from a foreign source, gives the
special character and much of the charm of the period we consider.
This is the sphere of legends derived from ecclesiastical ground. One of
the best German writers on the history of German literature remarks:
"If the aim and nature of all poetry is to let yourself