Sundry pairs of words, dualistic philosophical terms, have been long growing into use, and exercising, by the ideas they represent, an influence on the world of thought; such as subjective and objective, personal and impersonal, the Me and the Not-me; all having a reference to the central fact of the constant relation of the individual to the universal, and of their equally constant separation. The one always "works and lives in the other;" and, according to the preponderance of the one or the other element, the most various results appear in individuals and in nations.
Historians have remarked, and our own eyes see and have seen, the "profound impersonality" which is the characteristic of the German genius, as distinguished from the vivid personality of the French. L'état, c'est moi! was a concentrated formula of that personal character which is equally apparent in the centralizing murders of the Merovingian dynasty, and in those analogous assassinations whereby, thirteen centuries after, each petty deputy strove to make his personality the central life of France.
It results from these diverse characteristics, that the Frenchman has always shone in action, where the strong personal feeling, the consciousness of the self, leads to the most brilliant results, the heroic of action. The German, on the contrary, is infinitely greatest in thought, easily placing his less exacting personality on one side, so that it should shed no disturbing colors upon his calm objective view.
Into the world of art also, as into that of politics and life, these self-opposing and neutralizing elements enter. Each man, according to his personal or unpersonal mode of being, according to the predominance of the subjective or the objective in his nature, takes the one or the other position. The French school of criticism, the personal, is based upon taste. It inquires, Does this work satisfy and please my taste, that is the taste of cultivated persons; the taste of the best judges or authorities? A shifting standard, offering no absolute criterion; which places the highest aim of art in pleasing; asking triumphantly, What, then, becomes of art, if its object be not to please? According to the German formula, this is to subordinate the object to the observer.
