not, however, to delight it by his presence; but terrible, like the
Son of Agamemnon, to purify it. The Matter of his works he will take
from the present; but their Form he will derive from a nobler time,
nay from beyond all time, from the absolute unchanging unity of his
nature. Here from the pure aether of his spiritual essence, flows down
the Fountain of Beauty, uncontaminated by the pollutions of ages and
generations, which roll to and fro in their turbid vortex far beneath
it. His Matter caprice can dishonour as she has ennobled it; but the
chaste Form is withdrawn from her mutations. The Roman of the first
century had long bent the knee before his Caesars, when the statues of
Rome were still standing erect; the temples continued holy to the eye,
when their gods had long been a laughing-stock; and the abominations
of a Nero and a Commodus were silently rebuked by the style of the
edifice which lent them its concealment. Man has lost his dignity, but
Art has saved it, and preserved it for him in expressive marbles.
Truth still lives in fiction, and from the copy the original will be
restored.

'But how is the Artist to guard himself from the corruptions of his
time, which on every side assail him? By despising its decisions. Let
him look upwards to his dignity and his mission, not downwards to his
happiness and his wants. Free alike from the vain activity, that longs
to impress its traces on the fleeting instant; and from the
discontented spirit of enthusiasm, that measures by the scale of
perfection the meagre product of reality, let him leave to _common
sense_, which is here at home, the province of the actual; while _he_
strives from the union of the possible with the necessary to bring out
the ideal. This let him imprint and express in fiction and truth,
imprint it in the sport of his imagination and the earnest of his
actions, imprint it in all sensible and spiritual forms, and cast it
silently into everlasting Time.'[40]

[Footnote 40: _Ueber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen._]

Nor were these sentiments, be it remembered, the mere boasting
manifesto of a hot-brained inexperienced youth, entering on literature
with feelings of heroic ardour, which its difficulties and temptations
would soon deaden or pervert: they are the calm principles of a man,
expressed with honest manfulness, at a period when the world could
compare them with a long course of conduct. In this just and lofty
spirit, Schiller