Carl Gustav Carus on Art and Beauty
Carl Gustav Carus - View of Dresden at sunset, 1822
Carl Gustav Carus
Nine Letters on Landscape Painting:
Written in the Years 1815–1824
[The writer of the letters signs himself Albertus, and the addressee's name is Ernst. Carus is using the two given names of his eldest son, Ernst Albert (1812-16), who died of scarlet fever.]
Letter 1
"The study of art, like that of the ancient authors, gives us a point of attachment,
a pleasure that lies within ourselves. By filling our inner life with grand objects
and ideas, it holds our outward-directed impulses in check while cherishing our
finer longings within our hearts. Our need of communication becomes less and
less; like painters, sculptors, and architects, the lover of art works in solitude,
for the sake of enjoyments that he is rarely in a position to share with others."
— Goethe, Aus meinem Leben
The chill, damp snow slides down the window; profound silence is all around me; the room is pleasantly warm, and the lamp, which is lit early on these long, murky evenings that presage the onset of winter, sheds a pleasing half-light all around me. At such times, surely, nothing can be more delightful than to yield, in all tranquillity of spirit, to thoughts that arise from art and carry us so entirely into the realm of beauty that we forget the darkness of the days and banish the memory of all earlier unease. My dear Ernst, hope that you will look as kindly as ever on these outlines of the thoughts that have occupied my mind at such times; please also accept this in fulfillment of my earlier promise to set down for you my views on the meaning and purpose of art in general and of landscape painting in particular.
You are only too likely to find these papers lacking in sustained order and adequate breadth of scope and to conclude that much of this is founded on my individual temperament, rather than confirmed by other minds. If so, regard it, as Hamlet says, as so many bubbles arising from my brain; where you can, show me a better and a straighter road to follow.
I hope you will not suppose, as many moderns do, that to speak or write of art and beauty as an investigator is to belittle or even profane them; as if nothing counted in such matters but feeling and sentiment, and as if depth and clarity were entirely incompatible. Surely, man in his true feelings is always one; only as a whole being can he attain the sublime and the beautiful. Why should our feelings be impaired, even blunted, simply because that which warms the emotions has become clear to the mind ? How can the beautiful, which is ultimately none other than the whole and the perfect, ever be profoundly known and inwardly absorbed unless it is embraced with the whole soul ?
It is my firm conviction that all art is dead and buried if the emotions are not moved; that a cold calculation of contrasts and rational concepts can give birth to nothing but poetic cripples. I am entirely in agreement with the Master's whimsical remark:
Fortzupflanzen die Welt sind alie vernünft'ge Discurse
Unvermógend; durch sie kommt auch kein Kunstwerk hervor.
[Procreation is never a matter for rational discourse;
Similarly, with Art, reasoning does you no good.]
However, I am daily confirmed in my belief that emotion, left entirely to itself, will fail for want of inner certainty and calm, since:
Nirgends haften
Die unsicheren Sohlen,
Und mit ihm spielen
Wolken und Winde.
[His unsteady feet
Find no purchase,
And he is the plaything
Of clouds and winds.]
I feel that a true poetic mood is an elevation of the whole being, involving all the powers of the soul; I perceive the error of those who by reflecting doubly eschew reflection in all matters of art; and I therefore have no hesitation in embracing beauty with every part of my soul. In the presence of a work of art, the vital response of my emotions combines with my clear understanding of inner perfection and my awareness of a pure artistic will. Only then do I experience a full and genuine poetic enjoyment. Such enjoyment, being based on beauty, truth, and rightness, never fails or lessens on subsequent encounters with the work of art, which it thereby defines as a classic. Let us freely and wholeheartedly yield to inner impulse, ranging in thought over every part of beauty's realm. Our delight in gazing down from a mountaintop is no less if we have previously made our way through all the intricacies of the lower valleys; indeed, the total experience is all the finer because it recapitulates, as it
were, and encapsulates our previous enjoyment of individual places on the lower slopes. In the same way, a far-ranging train of thought need not impair our eager delight in the wondrous and mysterious workings of art. Rather, just as any true investigation of natural history conducts us to the threshold of higher mysteries with a yet more sacred awe, we may expect an open-minded consideration of art to do the same; though we can hardly blame artists for their irritation at much of the claptrap that currently passes for aesthetic discussion, both in print and in the lecture hall.
You too, my dear Ernst, must surely have felt that there is some miraculous power in artistic genius, with its ability to re-create, to imitate an eternal, cosmic creative process, to produce and reproduce in perfect freedom.
Where else can man create even the least thing that has life ? What science have we that directly brings life rather than (as in dissection) death ?
A leaf of a plant is dissected into its cells, its respiratory pores, its vascular and fibrous structure; comparative anatomy teaches us to divide even the smallest creature into yet smaller structures; and yet, with all this science, who has ever brought to life the smallest mite or assembled even the smallest leaf ?
And now look at the creations of art, which, though not alive in the real world, are able to seem alive for us; created by human beings, they testify to the kinship between man and the world spirit. Think of those fictional characters whose ideas and words, created by the poet, bring them before us as real individuals:
Ich weifi es, sic sind ewig, derm sie sind!
[I know they are eternal: they exist!]
says Tasso, or rather Goethe, speaking of his own creations: and rightly so. Achilles, Odysseus, Orlando, Sigismund, Hamlet, Eleonora d'Esté, Ophelia, Gretchen: are not all these, as we know them, the creatures of a divine art ? Is it not as if they had walked among the living ? Do we not know their thoughts and actions as well as those of a departed friend ? He who thus brings a mind forth from his own mind: has he not a power beyond the reach of many? And should not man be uplifted by finding such power in man ?
Let us turn from poetry to the harmony of sounds !
Swifter and more fleeting than poetry, music cannot so readily create a whole human spirit, with all its sorrows and its actions; but music can encompass a moment, a mood of the soul, and bring it to life with infinite power, so that we are caught up in it despite ourselves, as if the sounds of the music were intimate friends, dragging us willy-nilly into their circle, their turn of mind.
Architecture does the same, albeit in a different and more tranquil way. Both arts hold aloof from the imitation of nature as such; both express themselves through pure proportion, in time and in space respectively. Together with poetry, they comprise the supreme triad, the noblest chord that stirs — and must stir — the human heart; for in it, through the handiwork of a single human individual, the divine freely and directly approaches and uplifts all men alike.
Do you not feel, as I do, that some inner analogy must exist between these three arts and the three realms of nature, the three fundamental forms of thought, the threefold inner organization that physiologists discover within man, the three primary colors, and the three fundamental notes, an inner connection so profound as to be guessed at but never fully explored ?
My dear Ernst, in these matters I feel as if I were standing on a mountain precipice, with a mighty river crashing into the depths beside me; wave upon wave surges forward, and all plunge into the bottomless depths; and yet the river remains full, and the rock onto which I step stands no less firm.
I can write no more today.
Yours,
ALBERTUS