Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 5.djvu/120

106 Diderot was sufficiently akin to us; as, indeed, in everything, for which the French blame him, he is a true German. But even his point of view was too high, his circle of vision was too extended, for us to range ourselves with him, and place ourselves at his side. Nevertheless, his children of nature, whom he continued to bring forward and dignify with great rhetorical art, pleased us very much; his brave poachers and smugglers enchanted us; and this rabble afterward throve but too well upon the German Parnassus. It was he also, who, like Rousseau, diffused a disgust of social life,—a quiet introduction to those monstrous changes of the world in which everything permanent appeared to sink.

However, we ought now to put aside these considerations, and to remark what influence these two men have had upon art. Even here they pointed, even from here they urged us, toward nature.

The highest problem of any art is, to produce by semblance the illusion of some higher reality. But it is a false endeavour to realise the appearance until at last only something commonly real remains.

As an ideal locality, the stage, by the application of the laws of perspective to coulisses ranged one behind the other, had attained the greatest advantage; and this very gain they now wished wantonly to abandon, by shutting up the sides of the theatre, and forming real room-walls. With such an arrangement of the stage, the piece itself, the actors' mode of playing, in a word, everything, was to coincide; and thus an entirely new theatre was to arise.

The French actors had, in comedy, attained the summit of the true in art. Their residence at Paris; their observations of the externals of the court; the connection of the actors and actresses with the highest classes, by means of love-affairs,—all contributed to transplant to the stage the greatest realness and seem-