The Breviary of Aesthetic 27
displeases us in the false and imperfect forms is tire struggle
of several different states of the soul not yet unified, their
stratification, or mixture, their vacillating method, which
obtains apparent unity from the will of the author, who for
this purpose avails himself of an abstract plan or idea, or of
extra-æsthetic, passionate emotion. A series of images
which seem to be, each in turn, rich in power of conviction,
leaves us nevertheless deluded and diffident, because we do
not see them generated from a state of the soul, from a
“sketch” (as the painters call it), from a motive; and they
follow one another and crowd together without that precise
intonation, without that accent, which comes from the heart.
And what is the figure cut out from the background of the
picture or transported and placed against another back-
ground, what is the personage of drama or of romance out-
side his relation with all the other personages and with the
general action? And what is the value of this general action
if it be not an action of the spirit of the author? The secular
disputes concerning dramatic unity are interesting in this
connection; they are first applied to the unity of “action”
when they have been obtained from an extrinsic determina-
tion of time and place, and this finally applied to the unity
of “interest,” and the interest would have to be in its turn
dissolved in the interest of the spirit of the poet—that is, in
his intimate aspiration, in his feeling. The negative issue of
the great dispute between classicists and romanticists is in-
teresting, for it resulted in the negation both of the art which
strives to distract and illude the soul as to the deficiency of
the image with mere feeling, with the practical violence of
feeling, with feeling that has not become contemplation, and
of the art which, by means of the superficial clearness of the
image, of drawing correctly false, of the word falsely correct,
seeks to deceive as to its lack of inspiration and its lack of