Isolated Remarks On Natural Beauty

What contributes among other things to make the sight of a beautiful landscape so exceedingly delightful is the perfect truth and consistency of nature. Certainly nature does not follow here the guidance of logic in the connection of the grounds of knowledge, of antecedents and consequences, premisses and conclusions; but still it follows what is for it analogous to the law of causality in the visible connection of causes and effects. Every modification, even the slightest, which an object receives from its position, foreshortening, concealment, distance, light- ing, linear and atmospheric perspective, &c., is, through its effect upon the eye, unerringly given and accurately taken account of: the Indian proverb, “Every corn of rice casts its shadow,” finds here its confirmation. Therefore here everything shows itself so consistent, accurately regular, connected, and scrupulously right; here there are no evasions.

If now we consider the sight of a beautiful view, merely as a brain-phenomenon, it is the only one among the complicated brain-phenomena which is always absolutely regular, blameless, and perfect; all the rest, especially our own mental operations, are, in form or material, affected more or less with defects or inaccuracies. From this excellence of the sight of beautiful nature, is the harmonious and thoroughly satisfying character of its impression to be explained, and also the favourable effect which it has upon our whole thought, which in[174] its formal part thereby becomes more correctly disposed, and to a certain extent purified, for that brain-phenomenon which alone is entirely faultless sets the brain in general in perfectly normal action; and now the thought seeks to follow that method of nature in the consistency, connectedness, regularity, and harmony of all its processes, after being brought by it into the right swing.

17 This chapter is connected with § 38 of the first volume.

A beautiful view is therefore a cathartic of the mind, as music, according to Aristotle, is of the feeling, and in its presence one will think most correctly. That the sight of a mountain chain suddenly rising before us throws us so easily into a serious, and even sublime mood may partly depend upon the fact that the form of the mountains and the outline of the chain arising from it is the only constantly permanent line of the landscape, for the mountains alone defy the decay which soon sweeps away everything else, especially our own ephemeral person. Not that at the sight of the mountain chain all this appeared distinctly in our consciousness, but an obscure feeling of it is the fundamental note of our mood. I would like to know why it is that while for the human form and countenance light from above is altogether the most advantageous, and light from below the most unfavourable, with regard to landscape nature exactly the converse holds good.

Yet how æsthetic is nature! Every spot that is entirely uncultivated and wild, i.e., left free to itself, however small it may be, if only the hand of man remains absent, it decorates at once in the most tasteful manner, clothes it with plants, flowers, and shrubs, whose unforced nature, natural grace, and tasteful grouping bears witness that they have not grown up under the rod of correction of the great egoist, but that nature has here moved freely. Every neglected plant at once becomes beautiful. Upon this rests the principle of the English garden, which is as much as possible to [175] conceal art, so that it may appear as if nature had here moved freely; for only then is it perfectly beautiful, i.e., shows in the greatest distinctness the objectification of the still unconscious will to live, which here unfolds itself with the greatest naïveté, because the forms are not, as in the animal world, determined by external ends, but only immediately by the soil, climate, and a mysterious third influence on account of which so many plants which have originally sprung up in the same soil and climate yet show such different forms and characters.

The great difference between the English, or more correctly the Chinese, garden and the old French, which is now always be- coming more rare, yet still exists in a few magnificent examples, ultimately rests upon the fact that the former is planned in an objective spirit, the latter in a subjective. In the former the will of nature, as it objectifies itself in tree and shrub, mountain and waterfall, is brought to the purest possible expression of these its Ideas, thus of its own inner being. In the French garden, on the other hand, only the will of the possessor of it is mirrored, which has subdued nature so that instead of its Ideas it bears as tokens of its slavery the forms which correspond to that will, and which are forcibly imposed upon it—clipped hedges, trees cut into all kinds of forms, straight alleys, arched avenues, &c.