bt please us as much and rather more than an equally
beautiful woman seen in painting; but what makes the former please men is
not her being an independent appearance; she no longer pleases the pure
aesthetic feeling. In the painting, life must only attract as an
appearance, and reality as an idea. But it is certain that to feel in a
living object only the pure appearance requires a greatly higher
aesthetic culture than to do without life in the appearance.

When the frank and independent appearance is found in man separately, or
in a whole people, it may be inferred they have mind, taste, and all
prerogatives connected with them. In this case the ideal will be seen to
govern real life, honor triumphing over fortune, thought over enjoyment,
the dream of immortality over a transitory existence.

In this case public opinion will no longer be feared, and an olive crown
will be more valued than a purple mantle. Impotence and perversity alone
have recourse to false and paltry semblance, and individuals as well as
nations who lend to reality the support of appearance, or to the
aesthetic appearance the support of reality, show their moral
unworthiness and their aesthetical impotence. Therefore, a short and
conclusive answer can be given to this question--how far will appearance
be permitted in the moral world? It will run thus in proportion as this
appearance will be aesthetical, that is, an appearance that does not try
to make up for reality, nor requires to be made up for by it. The
aesthetical appearance can never endanger the truth of morals: wherever
it seems to do so the appearance is not aesthetical. Only a stranger to
the fashionable world can take the polite assurances, which are only a
form, for proofs of affection, and say he has been deceived; but only a
clumsy fellow in good society calls in the aid of duplicity and flatters
to become amiable. The former lacks the pure sense for independent
appearance; therefore he can only give a value to appearance by truth.
The second lacks reality, and wishes to replace it by appearance.
Nothing is more common than to hear depreciators of the times utter these
paltry complaints--that all solidity has disappeared from the world, and
that essence is neglected for semblance. Though I feel by no means
called upon to defend this age against these reproaches, I must say that
the wide application of these criticisms shows that they attach blame to
the age, not only on the score of t