CHAPTER IX.
Wollt ihr hoch auf ihren Flugeln schweben,
Werft die Angst des Irdischen von euch!
Fliehet aus dem engen dumpfen Leben
In des Ideales Reich!
Das Ideal und das Leben.
Wouldst thou soar heavenward on its joyous wing?
Cast off the earthly burden of the Real;
High from tliis cramped and dungeoned being, spring
Into the realm of the Ideal.
As some injudicious master lowers and vitiates the taste of the student by fixing his attention to what he falsely calls the Natural, but which, in reality, is the Commonplace, and understands not that beauty in art is created by what Rafaele so well describes — viz., the idea of beauty in the painter's own mind; and that in every art, whether its plastic expression be found in words or marble, colours or sounds, the servile imitation of nature is the work of journeymen and tyros; — so in conduct the man of the world vitiates and lowers the bold enthusiasm of loftier natures by the perpetual reduction of whatever is generous and trustful to all that is trite and coarse. A great German poet has well defined the distinction between discretion and the
