Suffering and the sublime: The paradox of beauty born from agony

“ The beautiful comes only through suffering and sacrifice. And of course dramatic work broadens a girl’s viewpoint, helps her to get the real, the worthwhile things out of life, enriching her nature with the emotional experience of her roles. It is through such pressure that we grow, and we must grow, must we not? One must strive for the ideal, for the art which will be but the pictorial expression of that, and for the emotion which must be touched by the illuminating vision of a well-developed imagination if the vital message of the film is to be felt. ”

“ Art demands absolute self-forgetfulness. You must give yourself to it in complete surrender. People may not know the difference; but the true artist seeks only to be true to himself. You produce the perfect flower; they are not to know of the anxious care—of the agony of tears, perhaps you have spent on it. But then your whole mind must be given to it; there must be no distracting cares; I will look for the missing lines myself."
"I am quite sure, papa," said Miss Carry, spitefully, "that she was far more anxious about these cutlets than about her new part this morning. ”

“ And, should the society marginalize or hurt the individual, as it often does, the individual must, according to Beethoven, humbly accept this, never considering the alternative act of attempting to harm or destroy the society in the wake of his or her personal frustrations. But, thanks to Beethoven, such an individual is provided with the means to sooth his or her misery in the wake of feeling “hurt” at the hands of society. The means is this music and the euphoric pleasure that it can provide to minds possessing the psycho-intellectual “wiring” needed to apprehend it. ”

“ As often, then, as man is excited by such external or internal impressions as demand no action (conflict, flight, adaptation) , but reach his consciousness in the form of a mood, he relieves his nervous system of this excitation through some kind of artistic activity, either by means of the plastic arts or by music and poetry.
Hence imitation is not the source of the arts, but one of the media of art; the real source of art is emotion. Artistic activity is not its own end, but it is of direct utility to the artist; it satisfies the need of his organism to transform its emotions into movement. ”

“ And it is on this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling, and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based.
If a man infects another or others, directly, immediately, by his appearance, or by the sounds he gives vent to at the very time he experiences the feeling; if he causes another man to yawn when he himself cannot help yawning, or to laugh or cry when he himself is obliged to laugh or cry, or to suffer when he himself is suffering—that does not amount to art. ”

“ And just in the same way it is art if a man, having experienced either the fear of suffering or the attraction of enjoyment (whether in reality or in imagination) , expresses these feelings on canvas or in marble so that others are infected by them. And it is also art if a man feels or imagines to himself feelings of delight, gladness, sorrow, despair, courage, or despondency, and the transition from one to another of these feelings, and expresses these feelings by sounds, so that the hearers are infected by them, and experience them as they were experienced by the composer. ”

“ For this reason it may often happen that an artist, under the weight of grief, mitigates and weakens the intensity of his own emotions in their effect upon him by the artistic representation of them. Comfort, too, is to be found even in tears. The man who to start with is wholly given up to and concentrated in sorrow, is able thus, at any rate, to express that which is merely felt within in a direct way. ”

“ But art is not a handicraft; it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced. And sound feeling can only be engendered in a man when he is living on all its sides the life natural and proper to mankind. And therefore security of maintenance is a condition most harmful to an artist's true productiveness, since it removes him from the condition natural to all men,—that of struggle with nature for the maintenance of both his own life and that of others,—and thus deprives him of opportunity and possibility to experience the most important and natural feelings of man. ”

“ If an artist is really actuated by a feeling, and is strongly impelled to communicate that feeling to other people—not for money or fame, or anything else, but because he feels he must share it—then he will not be satisfied till he has found a clear way of expressing it. ”

“ A really first-rate artist has the lust [Pg 388] of work born in him and an imperative impulse akin to any other natural want to give artistic form to his emotional and imaginative life that is in him. His emotional life and his ideas irresistibly run into this artistic mould; he finds as it were the instrument already within him made to the hand, so fitted to express his soul-life that all the pains it takes him to learn it are as nothing. A musician can thus unfold to us in his melodies the depths of all that stirs and moves his soul and only by this means. ”

“ But in spirit the whole art of music is equally subjective: equally intent on expressing, through a medium of beautiful sound, the psychological conditions of the composer. It stands in no direct relation to the external world; it neither observes, nor depicts, nor criticises; its entire function is the embodiment, so far as embodiment is possible, of an abstract idea. If, therefore, when we apply the name 'lyric' to a musician, we mean to lay stress on a certain quality of style, then we are using a term which does not preclude, but invite, the application of the critical faculty. ”

“ For, in the first place, every work of art is the outcome of its creator's personality, and depends, therefore, on the particular attributes of his character and temperament. Poetry, like the poet, is born, not made: painting, even if it borrow its model from nature, must find its power of vision in the soul of the artist: and music, in like manner, is worth nothing unless it arises from a true and spontaneous emotion. ”

“ It is true enough that music, as other arts, deals essentially with a spiritual content, and propounds the ideality of this subject-matter, or the ideal movements of emotional life, as the object of its expression: yet for all that this content remains more indefinite in outline and more vague, for just this very reason that it is apprehended with exclusive regard to its ideality, or is reflected in sound as subjective feeling ”

“ The art of music, on the contrary, as we have repeatedly pointed out, possesses as a means to such objectivity merely the element of the soul-life itself, by means of which that which purely belongs to this enters into conversation with itself, and as expressed in the utterance of emotion itself returns, as it were, upon itself. Music is spirit or soul, which ring forth in their untrammelled immediacy, and derive satisfaction in this record of their self-knowledge. As a fine art, however, it is its necessary function to regulate the expression of such life no less than its effects. ”

“ The poetry of music, that speech of human souls, which pours forth the ideal atmosphere and the pain of emotional life, and in this overflow is raised with a sense of alleviation above the natural constraint of feeling, by making present to the soul that which actually affects it strongly ”

“ We require a material which is without such stability in its relation to what is outside it, and which vanishes again in the very moment of its origin and presence. Now the art that finally annihilates not merely one form of spatial dimension, but the conditions of Space entirely, which is completely withdrawn into the ideality of soul-life, both in its aspect of conscious life and in that of its external expression, is our second romantic art—Music. ”

“ But from this it necessarily follows that the art of music must not attempt to minister to sense-perception, but must restrict its effort to making soul-life intelligible to soul, whether this is effected by its making the substantive and ideal depth of a content as such penetrate to the very core of soul itself, or by its preferring to disclose the life and motion of a content in the soul of some particular person, so that this inward life of itself becomes its actual object. ”

“ While Art Sets action on the top of suffering: The artist’s part is both to be and do, Transfixing with a special, central power The flat experience of the common man, And turning outward, with a sudden wrench, Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing He feels the inmost: never felt the less Because he sings it. ”

“ In the twinkling of an eye, the outflowing sympathies ebb back upon the heart; the whole mind seems severed from earth, and the awful feeling to suspend the breath;--there is nothing human to which we can liken it. And here begins another kind of emotion, which we call Sublime. ”

“ If we find, as in the case of the Beautiful, the same, or a similar, effect to follow from a great variety of objects which have no resemblance or agreement with one another, is it not a necessary inference, that for their common effect they must all refer to something without and distinct from themselves? Now in the case of the Sublime, the something referred to is not in man: for the emotion excited has an outward tendency; the mind cannot contain it; and the effort to follow it towards its mysterious object, if long continued, becomes, in the excess of interest, positively painful. ”

“ A man in despair, or under any mode of extreme suffering of like nature, may, indeed, if all interfering sympathy have been removed by time or after-description, be to another a sublime object,--at least in one of those suggestive forms just noticed; but not to himself. The source of the sublime--as all along implied--is essentially ab extra. The human mind is not its centre, nor can it be realized except by a contemplative act. ”

“ We do not deny that much bodily suffering may be admitted with effect as a subordinate agent, when, as in the example last added, it is made to serve as a necessary expositor of moral deformity. Then, indeed, in the hands of a great artist, it becomes one of the most powerful auxiliaries to a sublime end. All that we contend for is that sympathy alone is insufficient as a cause of sublimity. ”

“ In order that music therefore may as an art express the ideal significance no less than purely subjective emotion of the profoundest content, that of religion for example, and above all that of the Christian religion, in which the profoundest depth of suffering is an essential constituent, it must possess the means within its empire of tone to depict such a conflict of opposing forces. ”

“ These great moods, as deep suffering of soul or mighty exaltation, may derive from outer events, for we are human beings and our fate is ruled by external circumstances: but when they impel the musician to production these great moods have already turned to music within him, so that in the moment of creative inspiration it is no longer the outer events that guide and govern the composition, but the musical emotion that this event has generated. ”

“ The first question which presents itself for solution is whether there is any art which can teach sublimity or loftiness in writing. For some hold generally that there is mere delusion in attempting to reduce such subjects to technical rules. “The Sublime,” they tell us, “is born in a man, and not to be acquired by instruction; genius is the only master who can teach it. ”

“ I think that when you expect a man to produce beautiful and wonderful works of art you ought to allow him a certain freedom of action, you ought to give him a long rope, you ought to let him follow his fancy and look for his material wherever he thinks he may find it. A mother can't nurse her child unless she follows a certain diet; an artist can't bring his visions to maturity unless he has a certain experience. You demand of us to be imaginative, and you deny us the things that feed the imagination. ”

“ As a matter of cold, hard fact, it is your modern who is ancient; the ancients were younger. Consider the Greeks and their naïve joy in creation! The twentieth-century man brings forth his works of art in sorrow. His music shows it. It is sad, complicated, hysterical and morbid. I shan't allude to Chopin, who was neurotic—another empty medical phrase!—or to Schumann, who carried within him the seeds of madness; or to Wagner, who was a decadent; sufficient for the purposes of my argument to mention the names of Liszt, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky [Pg 13] and Richard Strauss. ”

“ How, then, would it be possible to endure this feeling of threefold insufficiency if one were not able to recognise something sublime and valuable in one’s struggles, strivings, and defeats, if one did not learn from tragedy how to delight in the rhythm of the great passions, and in their victim? Art is certainly no teacher or educator of practical conduct: the artist is never in this sense an instructor or adviser; the things after which a tragic hero strives are not necessarily worth striving after. ”

“ He could count on the applause of all who understood good music, and never failed to receive it. Under what other conditions can sound works of art emerge? The composer who debases his muse to the popular mood either lacks real genius or, having it, abuses it. For to catch the ear of the public is not a difficult task and merely connotes an agreeable facility. Composers of that class are like artisans who frankly fashion their goods to suit their market. But Bach never condescended to such artifices. The artist, in his judgment, is the dictator of public taste, not its slave. ”

“ Let it suffice if we can appreciate how, in some respects, his music, with a certain cruelty towards itself, determines to subserve the course of the drama, which is as unrelenting as fate, whereas in reality his art was ever thirsting for a free ramble in the open and over the wilderness.
Chapter X. An artist who has this empire over himself subjugates all other artists, even though he may not particularly desire to do so. For him alone there lies no danger or stemming-force in those he has subjugated—his friends and his adherents ”

“ The public dislikes novelty because it is afraid of it.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to the public, and whenever it appears it gets so angry and bewildered that it always uses two stupid expressions—one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. When the public says a work is grossly unintelligible, it means that the artist has said a beautiful thing that is new; when the public describes a work as grossly immoral, it means that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. ”

“ It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him....
"The one thing that the public dislikes is novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public ”

“ It is obvious that I then misunderstood what constitutes the veritable character both of philosophical pessimism and of German music,—namely, their Romanticism. What is Romanticism? Every art and every philosophy may be regarded as a healing and helping appliance in the service of growing, struggling life: they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: on the one hand those that suffer from overflowing vitality, who need Dionysian art, and require a tragic view and insight into life ”