The Philosophy of Fine Art

Abstract

Hegel’s aesthetics: art as the sensuous manifestation of the idea (the ideal of beauty), distinguished from natural beauty and ordered through the symbolic, classical, and romantic forms and the individual arts up to dramatic poetry. The text was assembled by the editor from Hegel’s manuscripts and pupils’ lecture notes.

Traduzione di F. P. B. Osmaston · Delphi Classics, 2000 · pubblico dominio

INTRODUCTION

SUBSECTION I

SUBSECTION II

SUBSECTION III

THIRD PART

INTRODUCTION

SUBSECTION II

SUBSECTION III

THIRD PART (CONTINUED)

SUBSECTION III

The present inquiry1 has for its subject-matter Aesthetic. It is a subject co-extensive with the entire realm of the beautiful; more specifically described, its province is that of Art, or rather, we should say, of Fine Art.

For a subject-matter such as this the term “Aesthetic” is no doubt not entirely appropriate, for “Aesthetic” denotes more accurately the science of the senses or emotion. It came by its origins as a science, or rather as something that to start with purported to be a branch of philosophy, during the period of the school of Wolff, in other words when works of art were generally regarded in Germany with reference to the feelings they were calculated to evoke, as, for example, the feelings of pleasure, admiration, fear, pity, and so forth. It is owing to the unsuitability or, more strictly speaking, the superficiality of this term that the attempt has been made by some to apply the name “Callistic” to this science. Yet this also is clearly insufficient inasmuch as the science here referred to does not investigate beauty in its general signification, but the beauty of art pure and simple. For this reason we shall accommodate ourselves to the term Aesthetic, all the more so as the mere question of nomenclature is for ourselves a matter of indifference. It has as such been provisionally accepted in ordinary speech, and we cannot do better than retain it. The term, however, which fully expresses our science is “Philosophy of Art,” and, with still more precision, “Philosophy of Fine Art.”

(a) In virtue of this expression we at once exclude the beauty of Nature from the scientific exposition of Fine Art. Such a limitation of our subject may very well appear from a certain point of view as an arbitrary boundary line, similar to that which every science is entitled to fix in the demarcation of its subject-matter. We must not, however, understand the limitation of “Aesthetic” to the beauty of art in this sense. We are accustomed, no doubt, in ordinary life to speak of a beautiful colour, a beautiful heaven, a beautiful stream, to say nothing of beautiful flowers, animals, and, above all, of beautiful human beings. Without entering now into the disputed question how far the quality of beauty can justly be predicated of such objects, and consequently the beauty of Nature comes generally into competition with that of art, we are justified in maintaining categorically that the beauty of art stands higher than Nature. For the beauty of art is a beauty begotten, a new birth of mind2; and to the extent that Spirit and its creations stand higher than Nature and its phenomena, to that extent the beauty of art is more exalted than the beauty of Nature. Indeed, if we regard the matter in its formal aspect, that is to say, according to the way it is there, any chance fancy that passes through any one’s head3, is of higher rank than any product of Nature. For in every case intellectual conception and freedom are inseparable from such a conceit. In respect to content the sun appears to us an absolutely necessary constituent of actual fact, while the perverse fancy passes away as something accidental and evanescent. None the less in its own independent being a natural existence such as the sun possesses no power of self-differentiation; it is neither essentially free nor self-aware; and, if we regard it in its necessary cohesion with other things, we do not regard it independently for its own sake, and consequently not as beautiful.

Merely to maintain, in a general way, that mind and the beauty of art which originates therefrom stand higher than the beauty of Nature is no doubt to establish next to nothing. The expression higher is obviously entirely indefinite; it still indicates the beauty of Nature and art as standing juxtaposed in the field of conception, and emphasizes the difference as a quantitative and accordingly external difference. But in predicating of mind and its artistic beauty a higher place in contrast to Nature, we do not denote a distinction which is merely relative. Mind, and mind alone, is pervious to truth, comprehending all in itself, so that all which is beautiful can only be veritably beautiful as partaking in this higher sphere and as begotten of the same. Regarded under this point of view it is only a reflection of the beauty appertinent to mind, that is, we have it under an imperfect and incomplete mode, and one whose substantive being is already contained in the mind itself.

And apart from this we shall find the restriction to the beauty of art only natural, for in so far as the beauties of Nature may have come under discussion — a rarer occurrence among ancient writers than among ourselves — yet at least it has occurred to no one to insist emphatically on the beauty of natural objects to the extent of proposing a science, or systematic exposition of such beauties. It is true that the point of view of utility has been selected for such exclusive treatment. We have, for example, the conception of a science of natural objects in so far as they are useful in the conflict with diseases, in other words a description of minerals, chemical products, plants, animals, which subserve the art of healing. We do not find any analogous exploitation and consideration of the realm of Nature in its aspect of beauty. In the case of natural beauty we are too keenly conscious that we are dealing with an indefinite subject-matter destitute of any real criterion. It is for this reason that such an effort of comparison would carry with it too little interest to justify the attempt.

These preliminary observations over beauty in Nature and art, over the relation of both, and the exclusion of the first-mentioned from the province of our real subject-matter are intended to disabuse us of the notion that the limitation of our science is simply a question of capricious selection. We have, however, not reached the point where a demonstration of this fact is feasible for the reason that such an investigation falls within the limits of our science itself, and it is therefore only at a later stage that we can either discuss or prove the same.

Assuming, however, that we have, by way of prelude, limited our inquiry to the beauty of art, we are merely by this first step involved in fresh difficulties.

(b) What must first of all occur to us is the question whether Fine Art in itself is truly susceptible to a scientific treatment. It is a simple fact that beauty and art pervade all the affairs of life like some friendly genius, and embellish with their cheer all our surroundings, mental no less than material. They alleviate the strenuousness of such relations, the varied changes of actual life; they banish the tedium of our existence with their entertainment; and where nothing really worth having is actually achieved, it is at least an advantage that they occupy the place of actual vice. Yet while art prevails on all sides with its pleasing shapes, from the crude decorations of savage tribes up to the splendours of the sacred shrine adorned with every conceivable beauty of design, none the less such shapes themselves appear to fall outside the real purposes of life, and even where the imaginative work of art is not impervious to such serious objects, nay, rather at times even appear to assist them, to the extent at least of removing what is evil to a distance, yet for all that art essentially belongs to the relaxation and recreation of spiritual life, whereas its substantive interests rather make a call upon its strained energy. On such grounds an attempt to treat that which on its own account is not of a serious character with all the gravity of scientific exposition may very possibly appear to be unsuitable and pedantic. In any case from such a point of view art appears a superfluity if contrasted with the essential needs and interests of life, even assuming that the softening of the soul which a preoccupation with the beauty of objects is capable of producing, does not actually prove injurious in its effeminate influence upon the serious quality of those practical interests. Owing to this fundamental assumption that they are a luxury it has often appeared necessary to undertake the defence of the fine arts relatively to the necessities of practical life, and in particular relatively to morality and piety; and inasmuch as this harmlessness is incapable of demonstration, the idea has been at least to make it appear credible, that this luxury of human experience contributes a larger proportion of advantages than disadvantages. In this respect serious aims have been attributed to art, and in many quarters it has been commended as a mediator between reason and sensuous associations, between private inclinations and duty, personified in short as a reconciler of these forces in the strenuous conflict and opposition which this antagonism generates. But it is just conceivable4 that, even assuming the presence of such aims with all their indubitably greater seriousness, neither reason nor duty come by much profit from such mediation, for the simple reason that they are incapable by their very nature of any such interfusion or compromise, demanding throughout the same purity which they intrinsically possess. And we might add that art does not become in any respect more worthy thereby of scientific discussion, inasmuch as it remains still on two sides a menial, that is, subservient to idleness and frivolity, if also to objects of more elevated character. In such service, moreover, it can at most merely appear as a means instead of being an object for its own sake. And, in conclusion, assuming that art is a means, it still invariably labours under the formal defect, that so far as it in fact is subservient to more serious objects, and produces results of like nature, the means which actually brings this about is deception. For beauty is made vital in the appearance5. Now it can hardly be denied that aims which are true and serious ought not to be achieved by deception; and though such an effect is here and there secured by this means, such ought only to be the case in a restricted degree; and even in the exceptional case we are not justified in regarding deception as the right means. For the means ought to correspond with the dignity of the aim. Neither semblance nor deception, but only what is itself real and true, possesses a title to create what is real and true. Just in the same way science has to investigate the true interests of the mind in accordance with the actual process of the real world and the manner of conceiving it as we actually find it.

We may possibly conclude from the above grounds that the art of beauty is unworthy of philosophical examination. It is after all, it may be said, only a pleasant pastime, and, though we may admit more serious aims are also in its purview, nevertheless it is essentially opposed to such aims in their seriousness. It is at the most merely the servant of specific amusements no less than the exceptional serious objects, and for the medium of its existence as also for the means of its operations can merely avail itself of deception and show.

But yet further in the second place, it is a still more plausible contention that even supposing fine art to be compatible generally with philosophical disquisition, none the less it would form no really adequate subject-matter for scientific enquiry in the strict sense. For the beauty of art is presented to sense, feeling, perception, and imagination: its field is not that of thought, and the comprehension of its activity and its creations demands another faculty than that of the scientific intelligence. Furthermore, what we enjoy in artistic beauty is just the freedom of its creative and plastic activity. In the production and contemplation of these we appear to escape the principle of rule and system. In the creations of art we seek for an atmosphere of repose and animation as some counterpoise to the austerity of the realm of law and the sombre self-concentration of thought; we seek for blithe and powerful reality in exchange for the shadow-world of the Idea. And, last of all, the free activity of the imagination is the source of the fair works of art, which in this world of the mind are even more free than Nature is herself. Not only has art at its service the entire wealth of natural form in all their superabundant variety, but the creative imagination is able inexhaustibly to extend the realm of form by its own productions and modifications. In the presence of such an immeasurable depth of inspired creation and its free products, it may not unreasonably be supposed that thought will lose the courage to apprehend such in their apparent range, to pronounce its verdict thereon, and to appropriate such beneath its universal formulae.

Science, on the other hand, everyone must admit, is formally bound to occupy itself with thinking which abstracts from the mass of particulars: and for this very reason, from one point of view, the imagination and its contingency and caprice, in other words the organ of artistic activity and enjoyment, is excluded from it. On the other hand, when art gives joyous animation to just this gloomy and arid dryness of the notion, bringing its abstractions and divisions into reconciliation with concrete fact, supplementing with its detail what is wanting to the notion in this respect, even in that case a purely contemplative reflection simply removes once more all that has been added, does away with it, conducting the notion once again to that simplicity denuded of positive reality which belongs to it and its shadowland of abstraction. It is also a possible contention that science in respect to content is concerned with what is essentially necessary. If our science of Aesthetic places on one side natural beauty, not merely have we apparently made no advance, but rather separated ourselves yet further from what is necessary. The expression Nature implies from the first the ideas of necessity and uniformity, that is to say a constitution which gives every expectation of its proximity and adaptability to scientific inquiry. In mental operations generally, and most of all in the imagination, if contrasted in this respect with Nature, caprice and superiority to every kind of formal restriction, caprice, it is here assumed, is uniquely in its right place, and these at once put out of court the basis of a scientific inquiry.

From each and all these points of view consequently, in its origin, that is to say, in its effect and in its range, fine art, so far from proving itself fitted for scientific effort, rather appears fundamentally to resist the regulative principle of thought, and to be ill-adapted for exact scientific discussion.

Difficulties of this kind, and others like them, which have been raised in respect to a thoroughly scientific treatment of fine art have been borrowed from current ideas, points of view, and reflection, the more systematic expansion of which we may read ad nauseam in previous literature, in particular French literature, upon the subject of beauty and the fine arts. Such contain to some extent facts which have their justification; in fact, elaborate arguments6 are deduced therefrom, which also are not without their tincture of apparent plausibility. In this way, for instance, there is the fact that the configuration of beauty is as multifold as the phenomenon of beauty is of universal extension; from which we may conclude, if we care to do so, that a universal impulse towards beauty is enclosed in our common nature, and may yet further conceivably infer, that because the conceptions of beauty are so countless in their variety and withal are obviously something particular, it is impossible to secure laws of universal validity either relatively to beauty or our taste for it.

Before turning away from such theories to the subject, as we ourselves conceive it, it will be a necessary and preliminary task to discuss the questions and objections raised above.

First, as to the worthiness of art to form the object of scientific inquiry, it is no doubt the case that art can be utilized as a mere pastime in the service of pleasure and entertainment, either in the embellishment of our surroundings, the imprinting of a delight-giving surface to the external conditions of life, or the emphasis placed by decoration on other objects. In these respects it is unquestionably no independent or free art, but an art subservient to certain objects. The kind of art, however, which we ourselves propose to examine is one which is free in its aim and its means. That art in general can serve other objects, and even be merely a pastime, is a relation which it possesses in common with thought itself. From one point of view thought likewise, as science subservient to other ends, can be used in just the same way for finite purposes and means as they chance to crop up, and as such serviceable faculty of science is not self-determined, but determined by something alien to it. But, further, as distinct from such subservience to particular objects, science is raised of its own essential resources in free independence to truth, and exclusively united with its own aims in discovering the true fulfillment in that truth.

Fine art is not art in the true sense of the term until it is also thus free, and its highest function is only then satisfied when it has established itself in a sphere which it shares with religion, and philosophy, becoming thereby merely one mode and form through which the Divine, the profoundest interests of mankind, and spiritual truths of widest range, art brought home to consciousness and expressed. It is in works of art that nations have deposited the richest intuitions and ideas they possess; and not infrequently fine art supplies a key of interpretation to the wisdom and religion of peoples; in the case of many it is the only one. This is an attribute which art shares in common with religion and philosophy, the peculiar distinction in the case of art being that its presentation of the most exalted subject-matter is in sensuous form, thereby bringing them nearer to Nature and her mode of envisagement, that is closer to our sensitive and emotional life. The world, into the profundity of which thought penetrates, is a supersensuous one, a world which to start with is posited as a Beyond in contrast to the immediacy of ordinary conscious life and present sensation. It is the freedom of reflecting consciousness which disengages itself from this immersion in the “this side,” or immediacy, in other words sensuous reality and finitude. But the mind is able, too, to heal the fracture which is thus created in its progression. From the wealth of its own resources it brings into being the works of fine art as the primary bond of mediation between that which is exclusively external, sensuous and transitory, and the medium of pure thought, between Nature and its finite reality, and the infinite freedom of a reason which comprehends. Now it was objected that the element7 of art was, if we view it as a whole, of an unworthy character, inasmuch as it consisted of appearance and deceptions inseparable from such. Such a contention would of course be justifiable, if we were entitled to assume that appearance had no locus standi8 at all. An appearance or show is, however, essential to actuality. There could be no such thing as truth if it did not appear, or, rather, let itself appear9, were it not further true for some one thing or person, for itself as also for spirit. Consequently it cannot be appearance in general against which such an objection can be raised, but the particular mode of its manifestation under which art makes actual what is essentially real and true. If, then, the appearance, in the medium of which art gives determinate existence to its creations, be defined as deception, such an objection is in the first instance intelligible if we compare it with the external world of a phenomena, and its immediate relation to ourselves as material substance, or view it relatively to our own world of emotions, that is our inward sensuous life. Both these are worlds to which in our everyday life, the life, that is, of visible experience, we are accustomed to attach the worth and name of reality, actuality and truth as contrasted with that of art, which fails to possess such reality as we suppose. Now it is just this entire sphere of the empirical world, whether on its personal side or its objective side, which we ought rather to call in a stricter sense than when we apply the term to the world of art, merely a show or appearance, and an even more unyielding form of deception. It is only beyond the immediacy of emotional life and that world of external objects that we shall discover reality in any true sense of the term. Nothing is actually real but that which is actual in its own independent right and substance10, that which is at once of the substance of Nature and of mind, which, while it is actually here in present and determinate existence, yet retains under such limitation an essential and self-concentred being, and only in virtue of such is truly real. The predominance of these universal powers is precisely that which art accentuates and manifests. In the external and soul-world of ordinary experience we have also no doubt this essence of actuality, but in the chaotic congeries of particular detail, encumbered by the immediacy of sensuous envisagement, and every kind of caprice of condition, event, character, and so forth. Now it is just the show and deception of this false and evanescent world which art disengages from the veritable significance of phenomena to which we have referred, implanting in the same a reality of more exalted rank born of mind. The phenomena of art therefore are not merely not appearance and nothing more; we are justified in ascribing to them, as contrasted with the realities of our ordinary life, an actually higher reality and more veritable existence. To as little extent are the representations of art a deceptive appearance as compared with the assumed truer delineations of historical writing. For immediate existence also does not belong to historical writing. It only possesses the intellectual appearance of the same as the medium of its delineations, and its content remains charged with the entire contingent materia of ordinary reality and its events, developments and personalities, whereas the work of art brings us face to face with the eternal powers paramount in history with this incidental association of the immediate sensuous present and its unstable appearance expunged.

If, however, it is in contrast with philosophic thought and religious and ethical principles, that the mode of appearance of the shapes of art, is described as a deception, there is certainly this in support of the view that the mode of revelation attained by a content in the realm of thought is the truest reality. In comparison, nevertheless, with the appearance of immediate sensuous existence and that of historical narration, the show of art possesses the advantage that, in its own virtue, it points beyond itself, directing us to a somewhat spiritual, which it seeks to envisage to the conceptive mind. Immediate appearance, on the contrary, does not give itself out to be thus illusive, but rather to be the true and real, though as a matter of fact such truth is contaminated and obstructed by the immediately sensuous medium. The hard rind of Nature and the everyday world offer more difficulty to the mind in breaking through to the Idea than do the products of art.

But if from this particular point of view we place art thus highly, we must not, on the other hand, fail to remember that neither in respect to content or form is art either the highest or most absolute mode of bringing the true interests of our spiritual life to consciousness. The very form of art itself is sufficient to limit it to a definite content. It is only a particular sphere and grade of truth which is capable of being reproduced in the form of a work of art. Such truth must have the power in its own determinate character to go out freely into sensuous shape and remain adequate to itself therein, if it is to be the genuine content of art, as is the case, for example, with the gods of Greece. On the other hand there is a profounder grasp of truth, in which the form is no longer on such easy and friendly terms with the sensuous material as to be adequately accepted and expressed by that medium. Of such a type is the Christian conception of truth; and above all it is the prevailing spirit of our modern world, or, more strictly, of our religion and our intellectual culture, which have passed beyond the point at which art is the highest mode under which the absolute is brought home to human consciousness. The type peculiar to art-production and its products fails any longer to satisfy man’s highest need. We are beyond the stage of reverence for works of art as divine and objects deserving our worship. The impression they produce is one of a more reflective11 kind, and the emotions which they arouse require a higher test and a further verification. Thought and reflection have taken their flight above fine art. To those who are fond of complaint and grumbling such a condition of things may be held as a form of decadence; it may be ascribed to the obsession of passion and selfish interests, which scare away the seriousness of art no less than its blithesomeness. Or we may find the fault to lie in the exigencies of the present day, the complex conditions of social and political life, which prevent the soul, entangled as it is in microscopic interests, from securing its freedom in the nobler objects of art, a condition, too, in which the intelligence itself becomes a menial to such trifling wants and the interests they excite in sciences, which subserve objects of a like nature, and are seduced into the voluntary exile of such a wilderness.

But however we may explain the fact it certainly is the case that Art is no longer able to discover that satisfaction of spiritual wants, which previous epochs and nations have sought for in it and exclusively found in it, a satisfaction which, at least on the religious side, was associated with art in the most intimate way. The fair days of Greek art, as also the golden time of the later middle ages, are over. The reflective culture of our life of to-day makes it inevitable, both relatively to our volitional power and our judgment, that we adhere strictly to general points of view, and regulate particular matters in consonance with them, so that universal forms, laws, duties, rights, and maxims hold valid as the determining basis of our life and the force within of main importance. What is demanded for artistic interest as also for artistic creation is, speaking in general terms, a vital energy, in which the universal is not present as law and maxim, but is operative in union with the soul and emotions, just as also, in the imagination, what is universal and rational is enclosed only as brought into unity with a concrete sensuous phenomenon. For this reason the present time is not, if we review its conditions in their widest range, favourable to art. And with regard to the executive artist himself it is not merely that reflection on every side, which will insist on utterance, owing to the universal habit of critical opinion and judgment, leads him astray from his art and infects his mind with a like desire to accumulate abstract thought in his creations; rather the entire spiritual culture of the times is of such a nature that he himself stands within a world thus disposed to reflection and the conditions it presupposes, and, do what he may, he cannot release himself either by his wish or his power of decision from their influence, neither can he by means of exceptional education, or a removal from the ordinary conditions of life, conjure up for himself and secure a solitude capable of replacing all that is lost.

In all these respects art is and remains for us, on the side, of its highest possibilities, a thing of the past. Herein it has further lost its genuine truth and life, and is rather transported to our world of ideas than is able to maintain its former necessity and its superior place in reality. What is now stimulated in us by works of art is, in addition to the fact of immediate enjoyment, our judgment. In other words we subject the content, and the means of presentation of the work of art, and the suitability and unsuitability of both, to the contemplation of our thought. A science of art is therefore a far more urgent necessity in our own days than in times in which art as art sufficed by itself alone to give complete satisfaction. We are invited by art to contemplate it reflectively, not, that is to say, with the object of recreating such art12, but in order to ascertain scientifically its nature.

In doing our best to accept such an invitation we are confronted with the objection already adverted to, that even assuming that art is a subject adapted for philosophical investigation in a general way, yet it unquestionably is not so adapted to the systematic procedure of science. Such an objection, however, implies to start with the false notion that we can have a philosophical inquiry which is at the same time unscientific. In reply to such a point I can only here state summarily my opinion, that whatever ideas other people may have of philosophy and philosophizing, I myself conceive philosophical inquiry of any sort or kind to be inseparable from the methods of science. The function of philosophy is to examine subject-matter in the light of the principle of necessity, not, it is true, merely in accordance with its subjective13 necessity or external co-ordination, classification, and so forth; it has rather to unfold and demonstrate the object under review out of the necessity of its own intimate nature. Until this essential process is made explicit the scientific quality of such an inquiry is absent. In so far, however, as the objective necessity of an object subsists essentially in its logical and metaphysical nature the isolated examination of art may in such a case, at any rate, or rather inevitably, must be carried forward with a certain relaxation of scientific stringency. For art is based upon many assumptions, part of which relate to its content, part to its material or conceptive14 medium, in virtue of which art is never far from the borders of contingency and caprice. Consequently it is only relatively to the essential and ideal progression of its content and its means of expression that we are able to recall with advantage the formative principle of its necessity15.

The objection that works of fine art defy the examination of scientific thought, because they originate in the unregulated world of imagination and temperament, and assert their effect exclusively on the emotions and the fancy with a complexity and variety which defies exact analysis, raises a difficulty which still carries genuine weight behind it16. As a matter of fact the beauty of art does appear in a form which is expressly to be contrasted with abstract thought, a form which it is compelled to disturb in order to exercise its own activity in its own way. Such a result is simply a corollary of the thesis that reality anywhere and everywhere, whether the life of Nature or mind, is defaced and slain by its comprehension; that so far from being brought more close to us by the comprehension of thinking, it is only by this means that it is in the complete sense removed apart from us, so that in his attempt to grasp through thought as a means the nature of life, man rather renders nugatory this very aim. An exhaustive discussion of the subject is here impossible; we propose merely to indicate the point of view from which the removal of this difficulty or impossibility and incompatibility might be effected. It will at least be readily admitted that mind is capable of self-contemplation, and of possessing a consciousness, and indeed one that implies a power of thought co-extensive with itself and everything which originates from itself. It is, in fact, precisely thought, the process of thinking, which constitutes the most intimate and essential nature of mind. It is in this thinking-consciousness over itself and its products, despite all the freedom and caprice such may otherwise and indeed must invariably possess — assuming only mind or spirit to be veritably pregnant therein — that mind exhibits the activity congenial to its essential nature. Art and the creations of art, being works which originate in and are begotten of the spirit, are themselves stamped with the hall-mark of spirit, even though the mode of its presentation accept for its own the phenomenal guise of sensuous reality, permeating as it does the sensuous substance with intelligence. Viewed in this light art is placed from the first nearer to spirit and its thought than the purely external and unintelligent Nature. In the products of art mind is exclusively dealing with that which is its own. And although works of art are not thought and notion simply as such, but an evolution of the notion out of itself, an alienation of the same in the direction of sensuous being, yet for all that the might of the thinking spirit is discovered not merely in its ability to grasp itself in its most native form as pure thinking, but also, and as completely, to recognize itself in its self-divestment in the medium of emotion and the sensuous, to retain the grasp of itself in that “other” which it transforms but is not, transmuting the alien factor into thought-expression, and by so doing recovering it to itself. And moreover in this active and frequent relation to that “other” than itself the reflective mind is not in any way untrue to itself. We have here no oblivion or surrender of itself; neither is it so impotent as to be unable to comprehend what is differentiated from that other17; what it actually does is to grasp in the notion both itself and its opposite. For the notion is the universal, which maintains itself in its particularizations, which covers in its grasp both itself and its “other,” and consequently contains the power and energy to cancel the very alienation into which it passes. For this reason the work of art, in which thought divests itself of itself18, belongs to the realm of comprehending thought; and mind, by subjecting it19 to scientific contemplation, thereby simply satisfies its most essential nature. For inasmuch as thought is its essence and notion, it can only ultimately find such a satisfaction after passing all the products of its activity through the alembic of rational thought, and in this way making them for the first time in very truth part of its own substance. But though art, as we shall eventually see with yet more distinctness, is far indeed from being the highest form of mind, it is only in the philosophy of art that it comes into all that it may justly claim.

In the same way art is not debarred from a philosophical inquiry by reason of its unregulated caprice. As already intimated, it is its true function to bring to consciousness the highest interests of mind. An immediate consequence of this is that, so far as the content of fine art is concerned, it cannot range about in all the wildness of an unbridled fancy; these interests of spirit posit categorically for the content that embodies them definite points of attachment20, however multifold and inexhaustible may be the forms and shapes they assume. The same may be said of the forms themselves. They too do not remain unaffected by constraining principles. It is not every chance form which is capable of expressing and presenting these interests, capable of assimilating them and reproducing them. It is only through one determinate content that the form adequate to its embodiment is defined.

It is upon grounds such as these that we are also able to discover a track adapted to critical reflection through the apparently endless vistas of artistic creations and shapes.

We have now, I trust, by way of prelude, succeeded in restricting the content of our science on the lines of definition proposed. We have made it clear that neither is fine art unworthy of philosophical study, nor is such a philosophical study incapable of accepting as an object of its cognition the essence of fine art.

If we now investigate the required mode of such scientific investigation, we are here again face to face with two contradictory modes of handling the subject, each of which appears to exclude the other and to permit us to arrive at no satisfactory result.

On the one hand we observe the science of art, merely so to speak, from an external point of view busying itself with actual works of art, cataloguing them in a history of art, drawing up a sort of commentary upon extant works, or propounding theories which are intended to supply the general points of view for artistic criticism no less than artistic production.

On the other hand we find science wholly giving itself up in its independence and self-assured to the contemplation of the beautiful, offering generalizations which do not concern the specific characteristics of a work of art, producing in short an abstract philosophy of the beautiful.

With regard to the first mentioned method of study, the starting-point of which is the empirical study of definite facts, such is the path everyone must tread who means to study art at all. And just as everyone nowadays, even though he does not actually concern himself with physical science, yet deems it indispensable to his intellectual equipment to have some kind of knowledge of the principles of that science21, so too it is generally considered more or less essential to any man of real cultivation, that he should possess some general knowledge of art; and indeed the pretension to be ranked as dilletante, or even as genuine connoisseur, meets with comparatively few exceptions.

(a) If however knowledge of this kind is really to claim the rank of connoisseurship of the first class it must be both varied in its character and of the widest range. It is an indispensable condition to such that it should possess an accurate knowledge of the well-nigh limitless field of particular works of art both of ancient and modern times, some of which have already disappeared, while others are only to be found in distant countries or portions of the globe, and which it is the misfortune of our situation to be unable to inspect. Add to this that every work of art belongs to one age, one nationality, and depends upon particular historical or other ends and ideas. On account of this it is indispensable that the finest type of art-scholarship should have at its command not merely historical knowledge of a wide range, but knowledge that is highly specialized. In other words, a work of art is associated with particular22 detail in a peculiar sense, and a specific treatment, is imperative to the comprehension and interpretation of it. And in conclusion this connoisseurship of the finest class does not merely imply like every other a retentive memory, but also a keen imaginative sense, in order to hold clearly before the mind the images of such artistic representations in all their characteristic lines, and above all, to have them ready for comparison with other works of art.

(b) Within the limits of such a method of study which is primarily historical23, distinct points of view will soon assert themselves which in the contemplation of such works we are not suffered to lose sight of, inasmuch as they are indispensable to a critical verdict. Such points of view, as is the case with other sciences the commencement of which is empirical, are summarized, after their due collection as separate units and comparison, in general criteria and propositions, emerging in a yet further stage of formal generalization in “Theories of the arts.” This is not the place to dwell at length upon literature of this kind; we will merely recall a few specimens of such work in the most general way. There is, for instance, the “Poetics” of Aristotle, which contains a theory of tragedy still of real interest. With still more pertinency among the ancients the “Ars Poetica” of Horace and the Essay on the “Sublime” by Longinus will exemplify generally the manner in which this type of theorizing is carried out. The general theses which are therein formulated are intended to stand as premises and rules, in accordance with which works of art ought to be produced, their necessity being above all insisted on in times of the decadence of poetry and art. They are, in short, prescriptions to the practitioner. The prescriptions, however, of these physicians of art were even less successful in their curative effect on art than are the ordinary ones in the restoration of bodily health.

As to such theories I will merely remark that although in their detail they contain much that is instructive, yet what they have to say is based on a very limited range of artistic production, which passed no doubt for the superlatively beautiful ones, but for all that occupied but a very restricted portion of the entire field of survey. From a further point of view such generalizations are in part very trivial reflections, which in their generality led up to no secure grasp of actual detail, though that is above all the matter of most importance. The epistle of Horace already cited is full of such general theses, and consequently a book for everyone, but one which for this very reason contains much of no importance at all. Take the lines:

Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci

Lectorum delectando pariterque monendo —

“He carries all votes who has interfused the useful and the pleasant, by at the same time charming and instructing his reader.” This is no better than copybook headings such as “Stay where you are and earn an honest sixpence” — which are good enough as generalization, but are defective in the concrete determinacy upon which action depends. An interest of another kind deducible from this type of artistic study does not so much consist in the expressed object to promote the production of genuine works of art: the intention appears to be rather that of influencing the judgment of others upon artistic works by such theories, creating, in short, a standard of taste. It is for an object of this kind that Horne’s “Elements of Criticism,” the writings of Batteux, and Ramler’s “Introduction to the Fine Arts” have found many readers in their day. Taste, in this sense, has to do with co-ordination and artistic treatment, the thing in its right place, and all that concerns the finish of that which belongs to the external embodiment of a work of art. Add to this that to the principles of such a taste views were attached which belonged to the psychology in fashion at the time, views which had been discovered by empirical observations of capacities and activities of the soul, or of passions and their potential aggrandizement, succession, and so forth. It is, however, an invariable fact that every one forms his opinion of works of art, or characters, actions and events according to the measure of his insight and his perceptive temperament; and inasmuch as the formation of taste to which we have referred merely touched what was external and therefore jejune, and apart from this deduced its prescriptions entirely from a limited circle of artistic works and an intellectual culture and emotional discipline equally restricted, its sphere of influence was ineffective, and it had neither the power to comprehend the profounder significance24 and the true, nor to make the vision more keen for their apprehension.

Such theories proceed through generalization as do the rest of the non-philosophic sciences. The content which they submit to examination is accepted from ordinary ideas as something final and received as such. Questions are then asked about the constitution of such a concept, the need for more distinct specification making itself apparent, and this too is borrowed from current ideas, and forthwith finally established from it in definitions. But in such a procedure we at once find ourselves on an insecure basis exposed to controversy. It might in the first instance no doubt appear that the beautiful was quite a simple idea. But we soon discover it combines several aspects; one writer will emphasize one of these, another some other one; or, even assuming the same points of view are considered, the question for dispute still remains which aspect is to be regarded as essential.

With regard to such questions it is generally reckoned as inseparable from scientific completeness, that the various definitions of the beautiful should be enumerated and criticized. For ourselves we do not propose to attempt this with such historical exhaustiveness as would unfold all the many refinements of such essays at definition, nor indeed on account of their historical interest. We simply, by way of illustration, shall offer a few specimens of the more recent and more interesting ways of regarding the matter which do in fact hit off pretty nearly what is actually implied in the idea of the beautiful. With this in view it is of first importance to recall Goethe’s definition of the beautiful, which Meyer has incorporated in his “History of the Creative Arts in Greece,” in which work he also brings forward the views of Hirt, though he does not actually mention his name. Hirt, one of the greatest among connoisseurs of the first class in our time, in his “Essay upon Fine Art” (Horen, 1797, seventh number), after considering the beautiful in the several arts, summarizes his conclusions in the statement that the basis of a just criticism of fine art and cultivation of taste is the idea of the Characteristic. In other words he defines the beautiful ultimately as the “Consummate25 which is or can be an object of eye, ear, or imagination.” He then proceeds to define this “consummate” as “that which is adequate to its aim, which nature or art aimed at producing in the constitution of the object — after its generic kind and specific type.” For which reason it is necessary that, in order to instruct our critical sense of beauty, we should direct our attention, so far as possible, to the specific indications of the object’s essential constitution. It is, in fact, these insignia of individuality which are its characteristic. Consequently under the term character as a principle of art he understands “that definite individual characterization26, whereby forms, movement and gesture, mien and expression, local colouring, light and shadow, chiaroscuro and pose are severally distinguished in due relation of course to the requirements of the object previously selected.” This formula is more significant in its actual terms than other definitions in vogue. If we proceed to ask what the “characteristic” is we find that it implies, first, a content, as, for instance, a definite emotion, situation, event, action, individual person or thing; secondly, the specific manner in accordance with which such a content is represented. It is to this mode or manner of presentation that the artistic principle of the “characteristic” is related. It requires that every aspect of detail in the mode of expression shall subserve the clearer definition of that expression’s content, and become a vital member of such expression.

The abstract determination of the characteristic emphasizes therefore the pertinency with which particular detail ought to bring into prominence the content which it is intended to reproduce. Attempting an elucidation of this conception apart from technical phrase we may state the limitation implied in it as follows: In the drama, for instance, it is an action which constitutes the content. That is to say, the drama has to represent how this or that action takes place. Now men do all kinds of different things. They speak to each other, take their meals, sleep, put on their clothes, say this and that, and all the rest of it. But in all this business of life what does not lie in immediate relation with the particular action selected as the real dramatic content, must be excluded in order that relatively to it everything shall be significant. In the same way in a picture which only includes one moment of that action, and it is possible to accumulate — such are the countless vistas into which the objective world draws us — a mass of circumstances, persons, situations or other occurrences, which stand in no relation to the specific action as it actually occurs, nor subserve in any way the clearer characterization of the same. But according to the definition given of the characteristic only that ought to enter into a work of art, which is appertinent to the manifestation and essential expression of precisely this one content and no other. Nothing must declare itself as idle or superfluous.

This definition is no doubt of real importance, and from a certain point of view admits of justification. Meyer, however, in the work cited, is of opinion that the view propounded has vanished, every vestige of it, and in his opinion only to the advantage of art. Such a conception he thinks would in all probability lead to caricature. This judgment is based on the previous idea that an attempt of this kind to define the beautiful once and for all is associated with the notion of prescription. The philosophy of art has absolutely nothing to do with precepts for artists. The object is to unfold the essential nature of the beautiful, and — apart from any intention to propound rules for the executant — how it is illustrated in actual work, that is works of art. To such a criticism we may observe that the definition of Hirt no doubt includes what is capable of being caricature, for caricature may also be characteristic. The obvious point to make, however, against it is this, that in caricature character in its definition is emphasized to the point of exaggeration and is, if we may say so, a superfluity of the characteristic. But a surfeit of this kind is no longer appropriate to the characteristic, but a burdensome reiteration whereby the characteristic may itself be ousted from what it ought to be. Moreover, what is of the nature of caricature is displayed as the characteristic presentment of what is ugly, which is of course a mode of distortion. Ugliness is in its own right in this way more closely related to the content27, so that it may be actually asserted that the principle of the characteristic includes also ugliness and the presentment of the same as a part of its essential determination. The definition of Hirt, of course, gives us no further account of the content of the beautiful. It merely supplies us in this respect with a purely formal statement, which, however, contains real truth in it although formulated in abstract terms.

There is, however, the further question — what Meyer would substitute for the artistic principle of Hirt, what he proposes himself? He deals in the first instance exclusively with the principle as we have it in ancient works of art, which, however, must contain in the widest connotation of the term the essential determinant28 of beauty29. In doing so he finds occasion to refer to Mengs and to Winckelmann’s definition of the Ideal, and expresses himself to the effect that he does not wish either to reject or wholly to accept this principle of beauty, but on the other hand that he feels no hesitation in subscribing to the opinion of an enlightened judge of art (that is Goethe), inasmuch as its meaning is distinct and it appears to solve the problem with more accuracy. Now what Goethe says is this: “The highest principle of the ancients was the significant; the highest result of successful artistic handling is the beautiful.”

If we look more closely at what this dictum implies we have again once more two aspects, that is to say a content or subject matter, and the mode of its presentation. In our consideration of a work of art we begin with that which is directly presented to us, and after seeing it we proceed to inquire what its significance or content is. That external husk possesses no value to us simply as such. We assume that there is an inward, an ideality or a significance behind it, in virtue of which the external appearance is made alive with mind or spirit. It is to this, its soul, that the external appearance points and attests. For an appearance which is significant of something does not present itself to us, and merely that which it is quâ externality, but something other than this; as also does the symbol for example and with yet more clarity the fable, the significance of which is simply the moral and teaching of the same. In fact there is no word which does not point to a meaning, possessing no value by itself. In the same way the human eye, the face, flesh, skin, the entire presence are a revelation of spirit, intelligence and soul; and in such a case the significance is without exception something beyond that which is offered in the bare appearance. In this way too the work of art must possess significance; it must not appear to have told its tale simply in the fact of particular lines, curves, surfaces, indentations, reliefs of stone-work, in particular colours, tones, sounds of words, whatever medium in fact art may employ. Its function is to unveil an inward or ideal vitality, emotion, soul, a content and mind, which is precisely what we mean by the significance of a work of art.

This demand, therefore, for significance in a work of art is to all intents, and in its embrace much the same thing as Hirt’s principle of the characteristic.

According to this conception we find as characteristic constituents of the beautiful an inward somewhat, a content, and an external rind which possesses that content as its significance. The inner or ideal constituent appears in the external and thus enables itself to be recognized, that which is external pointing away from itself to the inward.

We cannot, however, pursue the matter here into further detail.

(c) But the earlier fashion of this “theory-spinning,” no less than the laying down of rules for the executant already adverted to, has already been thrust on one side despotically in Germany — mainly owing to the appearance of genuine living poetry — and the right of genius, its work and effects, have had their full independence insisted upon as against the pretensions of such rules of thumb and the broad water-ducts of theory. From this foundation of an art which is itself of truly spiritual rank, as also of a sympathy and absorption of the same, have arisen the receptivity and freedom which make it possible for us to enjoy and appreciate great works of art which have long since been within our reach, whether it be those of the modern world, of the Middle Ages, or of wholly foreign peoples of the Past, the works of India for example; works, which, in virtue of their antiquity or the remoteness of their nationality, possess unquestionably for ourselves a side alien to ourselves; but which, if we consider the way in which their content passes over and beyond such national limits, and the matter in it of common appeal to all mankind, can only be hallmarked by the prejudice of theory among the products of a barbarous or corrupt taste. This recognition of works of art anywhere and everywhere, works which depart from the specific circle and forms of those upon which in the main the abstractions of theory were based, has, as a primary consequence, led to the recognition of a peculiar type of art — the romantic art. It became necessary to apprehend the notion and the nature of the beautiful in a profounder way than these theories attempted. With this fact another, too, cooperated, viz., that the notions in its form of apperception, the mind as pure thought on its part reached in philosophy a point of profounder self-cognition, and was thereby compelled forthwith to grasp the essence of art too on profounder lines. In this way, even in virtue of the point in the process reached of this general evolution of human thought, the type of theorizing upon art we have described, both relatively to its principles no less than their elaboration, has become obsolete. It is only the scholarship of the history of art which retains an abiding value, and must continue to retain it in proportion as the boundaries of its survey have enlarged in every direction by means of the advance made in man’s powers of receptivity already noticed. Its business and function consists in the aesthetic appreciation of particular works of art and the knowledge of the historical, in other words the external conditions from which the work of art originates. It is an attitude of the mind, which, if assisted with sound sense and critical insight, supported too with historical knowledge, is an indispensable condition to the complete penetration into the individuality of a given work of art. The many writings of Goethe upon art and works of art are an excellent illustration. Theorizing, in the specific sense noticed, is not the aim of this type of examination, although no doubt it not unfrequently also busies itself with abstract principles and categories, and may drop into such a style unconsciously. If, however, without letting such deviations on our route detain us, we keep before our vision those concrete illustrations of artistic works, such at least, whatever else they may do, supply a philosophy of art with the visible warrant and confirmation of actual work, into the historical detail of which, in each particular case, philosophy is not permitted to enter.

This then may be accepted as the first method of art study. It starts from the particular work which we have before us.

The method or point of view to be contrasted with this, in other words an entirely theoretical reflection, which is concerned to cognize the beautiful as such from its own intrinsic wealth, and to penetrate to the idea of it, is essentially distinct from the first method. As is well known, Plato was the first to demand of philosophical inquiry in a profounder sense, that objects should not be cognized in their particularity, but in their universality, in their generic type, their essential being and its explicit manifestation. He maintained that this true essence30 did not consist in particular actions which were good, in particular true opinions, handsome men or beautiful works of art, but in goodness, beauty, and truth in their universality. Now if in fact the beautiful ought to be cognized according to its essence and notion, this can only be effected by means of the thinking notion31, by means of which the logical and metaphysical nature of the Idea as such, as also of that of the particular Idea of the beautiful enters into the thinking consciousness. But the consideration of the beautiful in its self-independence and its idea may readily once more become an abstract metaphysic; and even though Plato is accepted as founder and pioneer, the Platonic abstraction no longer supplies all we require, not even for the logical Idea of the beautiful. We are bound to grasp this idea more profoundly and more in the concrete. The emptiness of content which clings to the Platonic Idea, no longer satisfies the richer philosophical requirements of the mind to-day. It is no doubt the case that we also in the philosophy of art must make the Idea of the beautiful our starting point; but it is by no means inevitable that we should adhere to the Platonic ideas in their abstraction, ideas from which the philosophy of the beautiful merely dates its origins.
The philosophical idea of the beautiful to indicate at any rate its true nature provisionally, must contain both extremes which we have described mediated in itself. It must combine, that is to say, metaphysical universality with the determinate content of real particularity. It is only by this means that it is grasped in its essential no less than explicit truth. For on the one hand it is then, as contrasted with the sterility of one-sided reflection, fruit-bearing out of its own wealth. It is its function, in consonance with its own notion, to develop into a totality of definite qualities, and this essential conception itself, no less than its detailed explication, comprises the necessary coherence of its particular features as also of the progress and transition of one phase thereof into another. On the other hand, these particulars into which the passage is made essentially carry the universality and essentiality of the fundamental notion, as the particulars of which they appear. The modes of inquiry hitherto discussed lack both these aspects, and for this reason it is only the notion, as above formulated, in its completeness, which conducts us to definitive principles which are substantive, necessary, and self-contained in their completeness.

III

After these preliminaries we come to closer quarters with our actual subject-matter, namely, the philosophy of Fine Art32; and for the reason that we are undertaking to treat it scientifically, our commencement must be with the notional concept of the same. It is only after we have definitely ascertained this that we can map out the division of its parts, and with it the plan of the science as a whole. A division of this kind, if it is not to be, as is the case with non-philosophical inquiry, undertaken in a purely external way, must discover its principle in the notion of the subject treated itself.

Face to face with such a demand we are at once met by the question: “Whence do we arrive at such a conception?” If we begin with the notional concept of Fine Art itself the same at once becomes a pre-supposition and mere assumption. Mere assumptions, however, are excluded from the philosophical method; whatever here is allowed as valid must have its truth demonstrated, in other words must be established in its necessity.

We will endeavour to arrive at an understanding in a few words in the presence of this difficulty which invariably recurs in the introduction to every course of philosophical study if treated independently. The subject-matter of every science presents in the first instance two aspects for consideration: first, the fact that a given object is; secondly, the question what it is.

Upon the question of fact in ordinary scientific inquiry little difficulty is experienced. Indeed it might on a cursory view even appear ridiculous if the demand were made that we had to prove in geometry, for instance, that there were such objects as space, and geometrical figures, or in astronomy and physics that there was a sun, stars, and magnetic phenomena. In these sciences, which are concerned with what is actually presented to sense perception, objects are accepted from objective experience, and so far from it being regarded necessary to demonstrate (beweisen) them, it is deemed sufficient to point to (weisen) the bare facts. Yet even within the limits of non-philosophical instruction doubts may arise as to the existence of certain objects. In psychology, for example, the science of mind, the doubt is possible whether there is a soul, an intelligence, i.e., something distinct from material conditions, something immaterial33, independent and self-substantive, or in the theology whether a God actually exists. Moreover, assuming the objects of the science to be thus immaterial, in other words, merely present in the mind, and not a part of the objective world we perceive, we have to face the possible conviction that there is nothing in the mind, but that which it has evoked in virtue of its own activity. This brings up incidentally the question whether men have produced this idea or intuition which is inward to their minds or not, and even if we do actually accept the first alternative, whether they have not made such an idea once more to vanish, or depreciated, the same at any rate to an idea of wholly subjective validity, whose content possesses no independent or self-contained existence34. In this way, for example, the beautiful has been frequently regarded as possessing no necessarily essential and independent stability in the world of our ideas; rather it is accepted as a pleasure purely personal to ourselves, due to the caprice of our senses35. Even our external intuitions, observations and perceptions frequently deceive and lead us astray; but still more is this the case with those ideas that do not arise from sense-perception, even though they possess in themselves the greatest vitality, and are able to transport us into passion, we are powerless to resist.

This doubt, then, whether an object of the inward world of our ideas and intuitions actually exists as an independent fact or not, as also that further incidental problem, whether the particular consciousness in question has produced it in itself, and whether the particular mode or process, in which it objectified it to itself, is also adequate to the object thus envisaged in its essential and independent nature — these are precisely the kind of questions which have awakened in men the higher demand of philosophy, which is that, even if there is every appearance that an object is, or that we have before us such an object, yet none the less that object must be expounded or demonstrated on the basis of its necessity. A demonstration of this kind, if developed on truly philosophical lines, ought at the same time to supply a sufficient answer to the question: What a given object is. To work this out fully would, however, carry us further than is now possible. We propose to limit ourselves to the following general remarks.

If we are to propound the necessity of our subject-matter, in other words the beauty of art, we are bound to prove that art, or the beautiful, is a result of antecedents such as, when regarded relatively to their true notional concept, conduct us with scientific necessity to the similar notion of fine art itself. Inasmuch as, however, we propose to make art the point of departure, and its idea and the objective presence of the same, and do not propose to deal with the antecedent conditions which are essential to the necessary exposition of its notional concept, for this reason art, in our treatment of it as a particular object of scientific inquiry, involves a pre-assumption, which lies outside the boundary of our investigation; which, implying as it does a different content, belongs, as scientifically treated, to another course of philosophical inquiry. We have therefore now no other alternative than frankly to accept the notional idea of art, so to speak, provisionally36, which is inevitable with every one of the particular philosophical sciences, if regarded in their abstract isolation. For it is the entire body of philosophy, and that alone, which either is or can be the comprehension of the universe as one essentially single organic totality; and which, as such a totality, self-evolved from its own notional Idea, and returning into itself so as to form a whole in virtue of the necessary principle in which it is placed relatively to itself, encloses itself, and all that is itself, into one single world of truth. In the coronal of this scientific necessity is every particular member thereof a self-complete circle which returns into itself, while, at the same time, and as imperatively, it possesses a necessary bond of connection with other parts. This bond of coherence is a backward from which it is self-derived, no less than a forward to which it is self-impelled onward, in so far as it fruitfully begets fresh material from its own resources, and renders the same open and pervious to scientific cognition. It is not therefore our purpose to demonstrate the Idea of the beautiful, which is our point of departure, or, in other words, to deduce it in all its necessity from the assumptions which are its antecedents in philosophy, and from the womb of which it is born. This is the object appropriate to an encyclopaedic development of philosophy as a whole and in its specific branches. For ourselves the notional concept of the beautiful and art is a pre-supposition supplied us by the system of philosophy. Inasmuch, however, as we are not prepared to discuss this system, and the association of art with it in the present context37, we have not as yet the idea of the beautiful before us in a scientific form: what we have and are able to deal with are simply the phases and aspects of the same as we find them in the various conceptions of beauty and art of our everyday conscious life, or as they have been conceived by previous writers. Having made our start at this point we shall then at a later stage pass on to the more fundamental investigation of those views, in order thereby to secure the advantage of, in the first instance, working out a general idea of our subject-matter no less than obtaining a provisional acquaintance, as a result of our necessarily brief criticism, with its higher principles, which will occupy our thoughts in the inquiry which follows38. By this means our final introduction39 will supply a sort of overture to the exposition of the subject itself, and will aim at being a general concatenation and direction of our reflection on the real subject-matter before us. What in the first instance is known to us under current conceptions of a work of art may be subsumed under the three following determinations:

(1) A work of art is no product of Nature. It is brought into being through the agency of man.

(2) It is created essentially for man; and, what, is more, it is to a greater-or less degree delivered from a sensuous medium, and addressed to his senses40.

(3) It contains an end bound up with it.

With regard to the first point, that a work of art is a product of human activity, an inference has been drawn from this (a) that such an activity, being the conscious production of an external object can also be known and divulged, and learned and reproduced by others. For that which one is able to effect, another — such is the notion — is able to effect or to imitate41, when he has once simply mastered the way of doing it. In short we have merely to assume an acquaintance with the rules of art-production universally shared, and anybody may then, if he cares to do so, give effect to executive ability of the same type, and produce works of art. It is out of reasoning of this kind that the above-mentioned theories, with their provision of rules, and their prescriptions formulated for practical acceptance, have arisen. Unfortunately that which is capable of being brought into effect in accordance with suggestions of this description can only be something formally regular and mechanical. For only that which is mechanical is of so exterior a type that only an entirely empty effort of will and dexterity is required to accept it among our working conceptions, and forthwith to carry it out; an effort, in fact, which is not under the necessity to contribute out of its own resources anything concrete such as is quite outside the prescriptive power of such general rules.

This is apparent with most vividness when precepts of this kind are not limited to what is purely external and mechanical, but extend their pretensions to the activity of the artist in the sense that implies wealth of significance and intelligence. In this field our rules pass off to purely indefinite generalities, such as “the theme ought to be interesting, and each individual person must speak as is appropriate to his status, age, sex and situation.” But if rules are really to suffice for such a purpose their directions ought to be formulated with such directness of detail that, without any further co-operation of mind, they could be executed precisely in the manner they are prescribed. Such rules being, in respect to this content, abstract, clearly and entirely fall short of their pretension of being able to complete42 the artistic consciousness. Artistic production is not a formal activity in accordance with a series of definitions; it is, as an activity of soul, constrained to work out of its own wealth, and to bring before the mind’s eye a wholly other and far richer content, and a more embracing and unique43 creation than ever can be thus prescribed. In particular cases such rules may prove, of assistance, in so far, that is, as they contain something really definite and consequently useful for practice. But even here their guidance will only apply to conditions wholly external.

(b) This above indicated tendency has consequently been wholly given up; but writers in doing so have only fallen as unreservedly into the opposite extreme. A work of art came to be looked upon, and so far rightly, as no longer the product of an activity shared by all men, but rather as a creation of a mind gifted in an extraordinary degree. A mind of this type has in this view merely to give free vent to its peculiar endowment, regarded as a specific natural power. It has to free itself absolutely from a pursuit of rules of universal application, as also from any admixture of conscious reflection with its creative and, as thus viewed, wholly instinctive powers, or rather it should be on its guard therefrom, the assumption being that such an exercise of conscious thought can only act on its creations as an infection and a taint. Agreeably to such a view the work of art has been heralded as the product of talent and genius; and it is mainly the aspect of natural gift inseparable from the ordinary conception of talent and genius, which has been emphasized. There is to some extent real truth in this. Talent is specific, genius universal capacity. With neither44 of these can a man endow himself simply by the exercise of his self-conscious activity. We shall consider this at greater length in a subsequent chapter45.

In the present context we would merely draw attention to the false assumption in this view that in artistic production every kind of self-reflection upon the artist’s own activity was regarded as not merely superfluous, but actually injurious. In such a view the process of creation by talent or genius simply is taken to be a general state; or we may define it more precisely as a condition of inspiration. To such a condition, it is said, genius is in some measure exalted by the subject-matter itself; it is also to some extent voluntarily able to place itself under such a condition, a process of self-inhibition in which the genial service of the champagne bottle is not forgotten46. An idea of this kind was in vogue during the so-called “Epoch of Genius,” which originated with the early poetical work of Goethe, receiving subsequent illustration in those of Schiller. These poets by their rejection of all rules hitherto fabricated made as it were an entirely new start; with deliberate intention they ran counter to such rules, and while doing so distanced all competitors by many lengths. I do not, however, propose to discuss with more detail the confusions which have prevailed over the conception of inspiration and genius, and the notion, which even at the present day finds advocates, that inspiration simply by itself can effect anything and everything. The real and indeed sole point to maintain as essential is the thesis that although artistic talent and genius essentially implies an element of natural power, yet it is equally indispensable that it should be thoughtfully cultivated, that reflection should be brought to bear on the particular way it is exercised, and that it should be also kept alive with use and practice in actual work. The fact is that an important aspect of the creating process is merely facility in the use of a medium47; that is to say, a work of art possesses a purely technical side, which extends to the borders of mere handicraft. This is most obviously the case in architecture and sculpture, less so in painting and music, least of all in poetry. A facility here is not assisted at all by inspiration; what solely indispensable is reflection, industry, and practice. Such technical skill an artist simply must possess in order that he may be master over the external material, and not be thwarted by its obstinacy.

Add to this that the more exalted the rank of an artist the more profoundly ought he to portray depths of soul and mind; and these are not to be known by flashlight, but are exclusively to be sounded, if at all, by the direction of the man’s own intelligence on the world of souls and the objective world. In this respect, therefore, once more study is the means whereby the artist brings to consciousness such a content, and appropriates the material and structure of his conceptions. At the same time no doubt one art will require such a conscious reception and cognitive mastery of the content in question more than another. Music, for example, which has exclusively to deal with the entirely undefined motion of the soul within, with the musical tones of that which is, relatively, feeling denuded of positive thought, has little or no need to bring home to consciousness the substance of intellectual conception48. For this very reason musical talent declares itself as a rule in very early youth, when the head is still empty and the emotions have barely had a flutter; it has, in fact, attained real distinction at a time in the artist’s life when both intelligence and life are practically without experience. And for the matter of that we often enough see very great accomplishment in musical composition and execution hung together with considerable indigence of mind and character. It is quite another matter in the case of poetry. What is of main importance here is a presentation of our humanity rich in subject-matter and reflective power, of its profounder interests, and of the forces which move it. Here at least mind and heart must themselves be richly and profoundly disciplined by life, experience, and thought before genius itself can bring into being the fruit that is ripe, the content that has substance, and is essentially consummate. The early productions of Goethe and Schiller are characterized by an immaturity, we may even call it a rawness and barbarity, which really are appalling. This phenomenon, that in the majority of those experiments we find a preponderating mass of features which are absolutely prosaic, or at least uninspired and commonplace, is a main objection to the ordinary notion that inspiration is inseparable from youth and its sirocco season. These two men of genius were the first beyond question to give our nation true works of poetry, are, in fact, our national poets; but for all that it was only their mature manhood, which made it a present of creations profound, sterling of their kind, creations of genuine inspiration, and no less technically complete in their artistic form49. We naturally recall the case of the veteran Homer, who only composed and uttered his immortal songs in his old age.

(c) A third view, held relatively to the idea of a work of art as a product of human activity, concerns the position of such towards the phenomena of Nature. The natural tendency of ordinary thinking in this respect is to assume that the product of human art is of subordinate rank to the works of Nature. The work of art possesses no feeling of its own; it is not through and through a living thing, but, regarded as an external object, is a dead thing. It is usual to regard that which is alive of higher worth than what is dead. We may admit, of course, that the work of art is not in itself capable of movement and alive. The living, natural thing is, whether looked at within or without, an organization with the life-purpose of such worked out into the minutest detail. The work of art merely attains to the show of animation on its surface. Below this it is ordinary stone, wood, or canvas50, or in the case of poetry idea, the medium of such being speech and letters. But this element of external existence is not that which makes a work a creation of fine art. A work of art is only truly such in so far as originating in the human spirit, it continues to belong to the soil from which it sprang, has received, in short, the baptism of the mind and soul of man, and only presents that which is fashioned in consonance with such a sacrament. An interest vital to man, the spiritual values which the single event, one individual character, one action possesses in its devolution and final issue, is seized in the work of art and emphasized with greater purity51 and clarity than is possible on the ground of ordinary reality where human art is not. And for this reason the work of art is of higher rank than any product of Nature whatever, which has not submitted to this passage through the mind. In virtue of the emotion and insight, for example, in the atmosphere of which a landscape is portrayed by the art of painting, this creation of the human spirit assumes a higher rank than the purely natural landscape. Everything which partakes of spirit is better than anything begotten of mere Nature. However this may be, the fact remains that no purely natural existence is able, as art is, to represent divine ideals.

And further, all that the mind borrows from its own ideal content it is able, even in the direction of external existence, to endow with permanence. The individual living thing on the contrary is transitory; it vanishes and is unstable in its external aspect. The work of art persists. At the same time it is not mere continuation, but rather the form and pressure thereon of the mintage of soul-life which constitutes its true pre-eminence as contrasted with Nature’s reality.

But this higher position we have thus assigned to the work of art is yet further contested by another prevalent conception of ordinary ideas. It is contended that Nature and all that proceeds from her are a work of God, created by His goodness and wisdom. The work of art is on the contrary merely a human product fashioned by human hands according to human design. The fallacy implied in this contrast between the products of Nature viewed as a divine creation and human activity as of wholly finite energy consists in the apparent assumption that God is not operative in and through man, but limits the sphere of His activity to Nature alone. We must place this false conception entirely on one side if we are desirous of penetrating to the true idea of art; or rather, as opposed to such a conception we ought to accept the extreme opposite thereto, namely, that God is more honoured by that which mind makes and creates than by everything brought into being and fashioned in the natural process. For not only is there a divinity in man, but it is actually effective in him in a form which is adequate to the essential nature of God in a far higher degree than in the work of Nature. God is a Spirit, and it is only in man that the medium, through which the Divine passes, possesses the form of spirit fully conscious of the activity in which it manifests its ideal presence. In Nature the medium correspondent to this is the unconscious sensuous52 and external materia, which is by many degrees inferior to consciousness in its worth. In the products of art God works precisely as He works through the phenomena of Nature. The divine substance, however, as it is asserted in the work of art has secured, being begotten of spirit life itself, a highway commensurable to its existence; determinate existence in the unconscious sensuousness of Nature is not a mode of appearance adequate to the Divine Being.

(d) Assuming, then, that the work of art is a creation of man in the sense that it is the offspring of mind or spirit we have still a further question in conclusion, which will help us to draw a more profound inference still from our previous discussion. That question is, “What is the human need which stimulates art-production?” On the one hand the artistic activity may be regarded as the mere play of accident, or human conceits, which might just as well be left alone as attempted. For, it may be urged, there are other and better means for carrying into effect the aims of art, and man bears within himself higher and more weighty interests, than art is capable of satisfying. In contrast to such a view art appears to originate in a higher impulse, and to satisfy more elevated needs, nay, at certain times the highest and most absolute of all, being, as it has been, united to the most embracing views of entire epochs and nations upon the constitution of the world and the nature of their religion.

This inquiry, however, concerning a necessity for art which shall not be merely contingent, but absolute, we are not as yet able to answer with completeness; it demands, in fact, a concreter mode of exposition than is compatible with the form of this introduction. We must accordingly deem it sufficient for the present merely to establish the following points.

The universal and absolute want from which art on its side of essential form53 arises originates in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, in other words that he renders explicit to himself and from his own substance54, what he is and all in fact that exists. The objects of Nature exist exclusively in immediacy and once for all.55 Man, on the contrary, as mind reduplicates himself. He is, to start with, an object of Nature as other objects; but in addition to this, and no less truly, he exists for himself; he observes himself, makes himself present to his imagination and thought, and only in virtue of this active power of self-realization is he actually mind or spirit. This consciousness of himself man acquires in a twofold way; in the first instance theoretically. This is so in so far as he is under a constraint to bring himself in his own inner life to consciousness — all which moves in the human heart, all that surges up and strives therein — and generally, so far as he is impelled to make himself an object of perception and conception, to fix for himself definitively that which thought discovers as essential being, and in all that he summons out of himself, no less than in that which is received from without, to recognize only himself. And secondly, this realization is effected through a practical activity. In other words man possesses an impulse to assert himself in that which is presented him in immediacy, in that which is at hand as an external something to himself, and by doing so at the same time once more to recognize himself therein. This purpose he achieved by the alteration he effects in such external objects, upon which he imprints the seal of his inner life, rediscovering in them thereby the features of his own determinate nature. And man does all this, in order that he may as a free agent divest the external world of its stubborn alienation from himself — and in order that he may enjoy in the configuration of objective fact an external reality simply of himself. The very first impulse of the child implies in essentials this practical process of deliberate change in external fact. A boy throws stones into the stream, and then looks with wonder at the circles which follow in the water, regarding them as a result in which he sees something of his own doing. This human need runs through the most varied phenomena up to that particular form of self-reproduction in the external fact which is presented us in human art. And it is not merely in relation to external objects that man acts thus. He treats himself, that is, his natural form, in a similar manner: he will not permit it to remain as he finds it; he alters it deliberately. This is the rational ground of all ornament and decoration, though it may be as barbarous, tasteless, entirely disfiguring, nay, as injurious as the crushing of the feet of Chinese ladies, or the slitting of ears and lips. For it is among the really cultured alone that a change of figure, behaviour, and every mode and manner of self-expression will issue in harmony with the dictates of mental elevation56.

This universal demand for artistic expression57 is based on the rational impulse in man’s nature to exalt both the world of his soul experience and that of Nature for himself into the conscious embrace of mind as an object in which he rediscovers himself. He satisfies the demand of this spiritual freedom by making explicit to, his inner life all that exists, no less than from the further point of view giving a realized external embodiment to the self made thus explicit. And by this reduplication of what is his own he places before the vision and within the cognition of himself and others what is within him. This is the free rationality of man, in which art as also all action and knowledge originates. We shall investigate at a later stage the specific need for art as compared with that for other political and ethical action, or that for religious ideas and scientific knowledge.

We have hitherto considered the work of art under the aspect that it is fashioned by man; we will now pass over to the second part of our definition, that it is produced for his sense-apprehension, and consequently is to a more or less degree under obligations to a sensuous medium.

(a) This reflection has been responsible for the inference that the function of fine art is to arouse feeling, more precisely the feeling which suits us — that is, pleasant feeling. From such a point of view writers have converted the investigation of fine art into a treatise on the emotions and asked what kind of feelings art ought to excite — take fear, for example, and compassion — with the further question how such can be regarded as pleasant, how, in short, the contemplation of a misfortune can bring satisfaction. This tendency of reflection dates for the most part from the times of Moses Mendelssohn, and many such trains of reasoning may be found in his writings. A discussion of this kind, however, did not carry the problem far. Feeling is the undefined obscure region of spiritual life. What is felt, remains cloaked in the form of the separate personal experience under its most abstract persistence58; and for this reason the distinctions of feeling are wholly abstract; they are not distinctions which apply to the subject-matter itself. To take examples — fear, anxiety, care, dread, are of course one type of emotion under various modifications; but in part they are purely quantitative degrees of intensity, and in part forms which reflect no light, on their content itself, but are indifferent to it. In the case of fear, for instance, an existence is assumed, for which the individual in question possesses an interest, but sees at the same time the negative approach which threatens to destroy this existence, and thereupon discovers in immediate fusion within himself the above interest and the approach of that negative as a contradictory affection of his personal life. A fear of this sort, however, does not on its own account condition any particular content; it may associate with itself subject-matter of the most opposed and varied character. The feeling merely as such is in short a wholly empty form of a subjective state. Such a form may no doubt in certain cases itself be essentially complex, as we find it is with hope, pain, joy, and pleasure; it may also in this very complexity appropriate various modes of content, as, for example, we have a feeling of justice, an ethical feeling, a sublime religious feeling, and so forth; but despite the fact that a content of this kind is present in different modes of feeling, no light whatever is thereby thrown on such content which will disclose its essential and definite character. The feeling throughout remains a purely subjective state which belongs to me, one in which the concrete fact vanishes, as though contracted to a vanishing point in the most abstract of all spheres59. For this reason an inquiry over the nature of the emotions which art ought or ought not to arouse, comes simply to a standstill in the undefined; it is an investigation which deliberately abstracts from genuine content and its concrete substance and notion. Reflection upon feeling is satisfied with the observation of the personal emotional state and its singularity, instead of penetrating and sounding the matter for study, in other words the work of art, and in doing so bidding good-bye to the wholly subjective state and its conditions. In feeling, however, it is just this subjective state void of content which is not merely accepted, but becomes the main thing; and that is precisely why people are so proud of having emotions. And for no other reason that is why such an investigation is tedious owing to its indefinite nature and emptiness, and even repellent in its attention to trivial personal idiosyncrasies.

(b) Inasmuch, however, as the work of art is not merely concerned with exciting some kind of emotion or other — for this is an object it would share without any valid distinction with eloquence, historical composition, religious edification and much else — but is only a work of art in so far as it is beautiful, it occurred to reflective minds to discover a specific feeling for beauty, and a distinct sense faculty correspondent with it. In such an inquiry it soon became clear that a sense of this kind was no definite and mere60 instinct rigidly fixed by Nature, which was able by itself and independently to distinguish the beautiful. As a consequence the demand was made for culture as a condition precedent to such a sense, and the sense of beauty as thus cultivated was called taste, which, albeit an instructed apprehension and discovery of the beautiful, was none the less assumed to persist in the character of immediate feeling. We have already discussed the way in which abstract theory attempted to form such a sense of taste, and how external and one-sided that sense remained. While the critical sense generally of the time when such ideas were in currency was lacking in the universality of its principles, as a specific critique of particular works of art it was less concerned to substantiate a judgment more decisive than hitherto — indeed the material to effectuate this was not as yet forthcoming — than to promote in a general way the cultivation of such a taste61. Consequently this educative process also came to a halt in the region of the more indefinite, and merely busied itself by its reflections in the fitting out of feeling as a sense of beauty in such a way that beauty could immediately be discovered whenever and wherever it might chance to appear. The real depth of the subject-matter remained notwithstanding a closed book to such a taste. Profundity of this kind demands not merely sensitive reception and abstract thought, but the reason in its concrete grasp and the most sterling qualities of soul-life. Taste on the contrary is merely directed to the outside surfaces, which are the playground of the feelings, and upon which one-sided principles may very well pass, as currency. But for this very reason our so-called good taste is scared by every kind of profounder artistic effect, and is dumb where the ideal significance62 is in question, and all mere externalities and accessories vanish. For when great passions and the movements of a profound soul assert themselves, we do not bother ourselves any more with the finer distinctions of taste and its retail traffic in trifles. It is63 conscious that genius leaves such ground far behind it in its stride; and shrinking before that power feels on its part far from comfortable, not knowing very well which way to turn.

(c) Thus it is the further change has come about that critics of art-production no longer have an eye simply to the education of taste, or are intent upon the illustration of such a sense. The connoisseur, or art-scholar, has taken the place of the man, or judge of artistic taste. The positive side of art-scholarship, in so far as it implies a sound and exhaustive acquaintance with the entire embrace of what is distinctive and peculiar in a given work of art, we have already maintained to be a necessary condition of artistic research. A work of art, owing to its nature, which, if it is material from one point of view, is also related to a particular person, originates from specific conditions of the most varied kind, among which as exceptionally important we may mention the date and place of its origins, the characteristic personality of the artist, and, above all, the degree of executive accomplishment secured by the art. All these points of view have to be taken into consideration if we wish to obtain a view and knowledge of such a work which is clear in its outlines, and founded on a true basis, nay, even wish to enjoy it rightly. It is with these that our art-scholarship is mainly occupied; and all that it can do for us in this way should be gratefully accepted. Though it is quite true such art-scholarship must be reckoned as of essential importance, it ought not to be regarded as the sole, or indeed the highest, constituent in the relation of the contemplative spirit to a work of art and art generally. Such art-scholarship (this is the defective tendency) may restrict itself wholly to a knowledge of purely external characteristics, either on the side of technique or historical condition, or in other directions; it may continue to possess the barest inkling of the true nature of a given work, or simply no knowledge at all. It may even form a depreciatory verdict on the value of profounder inquiries as compared with purely matter of fact, technical, and historical knowledge. Yet even so an art-scholarship, assuming it to be really genuine and thorough, at least proceeds upon grounds and knowledge which are definite, and an intelligent judgment; and it is association with such that our more accurate review of the distinct, if also to some extent exterior, aspects of a work of art, and our estimate of their relative significance, is secured.

(d) Following the above observations upon the modes of inquiry which were suggested by that aspect of a work of art in which, as itself an object with a material medium, it possessed an essential relation to man as himself receptive through sense, we will now examine this point of view in its more essential connection with art itself. We propose to do this partly (α) in respect to the art-product viewed as an object, partly (β) as regards the personal characteristics of the artist, his genius, talent, and so forth. We do not, however, propose to enter into matter which can in this connection exclusively proceed from the knowledge of art according to its universal concept64. The truth is we are not as yet in the full sense on scientific ground; we have merely reached the province of external reflection.

(α) There is no question, then, that a work of art is presented to sensuous apprehension. It is submitted to the emotional sense, whether outer or inner, to sensuous perception and the imaged sense, precisely as the objective world is so presented around us, or as is our own inward sensitive nature. Even a speech, for example, may be addressed to the sensuous imagination and feeling. Notwithstanding this fact, however, the work of art is not exclusively directed to the sensuous apprehension, viewed, that is, as an object materially conditioned. Its position is of the nature, that along with its sensuous presentation it is fundamentally addressed to the mind. The mind is intended to be affected by it and to receive some kind of satisfaction in it.

This function of the work of art at once makes it clear how it is that it is in no way intended to be a natural product or, on the side where it impinges on Nature, to possess the living principle of Nature. This, at least, is a fact whether the natural product is ranked lower or higher than a mere work of art, as people are accustomed to express themselves in the tone of depreciation.

In other words the sensuous aspect of a work of art has a right to determinate existence only in so far as it exists for the human mind, not, however, in so far as itself, as a material object, exists for itself independently.

If we examine more closely in what way the sensuous materia is presented to man we find that what is so can be placed under various relations to the mind.

(αα) The lowest in grade and that least compatible with relation to intelligence is purely sensuous sensation. It consists primarily in mere looking, listening, just as in times of mental overstrain it may often be a relaxation to go about without thought, and merely listen and have a look round. The mind, however, does not rest in the mere apprehension of external objects through sight and hearing; it makes them objective to its own inward nature, which thereupon, is impelled itself to give effect to itself in these things as a further step under a sensuous mode, in other words, it relates itself to them as desire. In this appetitive relation to the external world man, as a sensuous65 particular thing, stands in a relation of opposition, to things in general as in the same way particulars. He does not address himself to them with open mind and the universal ideas of thought; he retains an isolated position, with its personal impulses and interests, relatively to objects as fixed in their obduracy as himself, and makes himself at home in them by using them, or eating them up altogether, and, in short, gives effect to his self-satisfaction by the sacrifice he makes of them. In this negative relation desire requires for itself not merely the superficial show of external objects, but the actual things themselves in their material concrete existence. Mere pictures of the wood, which it seeks to make use of, or of the animals, which it hopes to eat up, would be of no service to desire. Just as little is it possible for desire to suffer the object to remain in its freedom; its craving is just this to force it to annihilate this self-subsistency and freedom of external facts, and to demonstrate that these things are only there to be destroyed and devoured. But at the same time the particular person is neither himself free, begirt as he is by the particular limited and transitory interests of his desires, for his definite acts do not proceed from the essential universality and rationality of his will, neither is he free relatively to the external world, for desire66 remains essentially determined by things and related to them.

This relation, then, of desire is not that in which man is related to the work of art. He suffers it to exist in its free independence as an object; he associates himself with it without any craving of this kind, rather as with an object reflective of himself67, which exists solely for the contemplative faculty of mind. For this reason, as we have said, the work of art, although it possesses sensuous existence, does not require sensuous concrete existence, nor yet the animated life of such objects. Or, rather, we should add, it ought not to remain on such a level, in so far as its true function is exclusively to satisfy spiritual interests, and to shut the door on all approach to mere desire. Hence we can understand how it is that practical desire rates the particular works of Nature in the organic or inorganic world, which are at its service, more highly than works of art, which are obviously useless in this sense, and only contribute enjoyment to other capacities of man’s spirit.

(ββ) A second mode under which the externally present comes before the conscious subject is, as contrasted with the single sensuous perception and active desire, the purely theoretical relation to the intelligence. The theoretic contemplation of objects has no interest in consuming the same in their particularity and satisfying or maintaining itself through the sense by their means; its object is to attain a knowledge of them in their universality, to seek out their ideal nature and principle, to comprehend them according to their notional idea. Consequently this contemplative interest is content to leave the particular things as they are, and stands aloof from them in their objective singularity, which is not the object of such a faculty’s investigation. For the rational intelligence is not a property of the particular person in the sense that desire is so; it appertains to his singularity as being itself likewise essentially universal. So long as it persists in this relation of universality to the objects in question, it is his reason in its universal potency which is attempting to discover itself in Nature, and thereby the inward or essential being of the natural objects, which his sensuous existence does not present under its mode of immediacy, although such existence is founded therein. This interest of contemplation, the satisfaction of which is the task of science, is, however, shared in this scientific form just as little by art as it shared in the common table of those impulses of the purely practical desire. Science can, it is true, take as its point of departure the sensuous thing in its singularity, and possess itself of some conception, how this individual thing is present in its specific colour or form. But for all that this isolated thing of sense as such possesses no further relation to mind, inasmuch as the interest of intelligence makes for the universal, the law, the thought and notion of the object, and consequently not only does it forsake it in its immediate singularity, but it actually transforms it within the region of idea68, converting a concrete object of sense into an abstract subject-matter of thought, that is converting it into something other than the same object of its sensuous perception actually was. The artistic interest does not follow such a process, and is distinct from that of science for this reason. The contemplation of art restricts its interest simply in the way in which the work of art, as external object, in the directness of its definition, and in the singularity wherein it appears to sense, is manifested in all its features of colour, form, and sound, or as a single isolated vision of the whole; it does not go so far beyond the immediately received objective character as to propose, as is the case with science, the ideal or conceptive thinking of this particular objectivity under the terms of the rational and universal notion which underlies it.

The interest of art, therefore, is distinguishable from the practical interest of desire in virtue of the fact that it suffers its object to remain in its free independence, whereas desire applies it, even to the point of destruction, to its own uses. The contemplation of art, on the other hand, differs from that of a scientific intelligence in an analogous way69 in virtue of the fact that it cherishes an interest for the object in its isolated existence, and is not concerned to transform the same into terms of universal thought and notion.

(γγ) It follows, then, that, though the sensuous materia is unquestionably present in a work of art, it is only as surface or show of the sensuous that it is under any necessity to appear. In the sensuous appearance of the work of art it is neither the concrete material stuff, the empirically perceived completeness and extension of the internal organism which is the object of desire, nor is it the universal thought of pure ideality, which in either case the mind seeks for. Its aim is the sensuous presence, which, albeit suffered to persist in its sensuousness, is equally entitled to be delivered from the framework of its purely material substance. Consequently, as compared with the immediately envisaged and incorporated object of Nature, the sensuous presence in the work of art is transmuted to mere semblance or show, and the work of art occupies a midway ground, with the directly perceived objective world on one side and the ideality of pure thought on the other. It is not as yet pure thought, but, despite the element of sensuousness which adheres to it, it is no longer purely material existence, in the sense at least that stones, plants, and organic life are such. The sensuous element in a work of art is rather itself somewhat of ideal intension70, which, however, as not being actually the ideal medium of thought, is still externally presented at the same time as an object. This semblance of the sensuous presents itself to the mind externally as the form, visible appearance, and harmonious vibration of things. This is always assuming that it suffers the objects to remain in their freedom as objective facts, and does not seek to penetrate into their inward essence by abstract thought, for by doing so they would (as above explained) entirely cease to exist for it in their external singularity.

For this reason the sensuous aspect of art is only related to the two theoretical71 senses of sight and hearing; smell, on the other hand, taste, and the feeling of touch are excluded from the springs of art’s enjoyment. Smell, taste, and touch come into contact with matter simply as such72, and with the immediate sensuous qualities of the same; smell with the material volatization through the air; taste with the material dissolution of substance, and touch or mere bodily feeling with qualities such as heat, coldness, smoothness, and so forth. On this account these senses cannot have to do with the objects of art, which ought to subsist in their actual and very independence, admitting of no purely sensuous or rather physical relation. The pleasant for such senses is not the beauty of art. Thus art on its sensuous side brings before us deliberately merely a shadow-world of shapes, tones, and imaged conceptions73, and it is quite beside the point to maintain that it is simply a proof of the impotence and limitations of man that he can only present us with the surface of the physical world, mere schemata, when he calls into being his creative works. In art these sensuous shapes and tones are not offered as exclusively for themselves and their form to our direct vision. They are presented with the intent to secure in such shape satisfaction for higher and more spiritual interests, inasmuch as they are mighty to summon an echo and response in the human spirit evoked from all depths of its conscious life. In this way the sensuous is spiritualized in art, or, in other words, the life of spirit comes to dwell in it under sensuous guise.

(β) For this reason, however, a product of art is only possible in so far as it has received its passage through the mind, and has originated from the productive activity of mind. This brings us to another question we have to answer, and it is this: “How is the sensuous or material aspect, which is imperative as a condition of art, operative in the artist as conjoined to his personal productive activity74?” Now this mode or manner of artistic production contains, as an activity personal to the artist, in essentials just the same determinants which we found posited in the work of art. It must be a spiritual activity, which, however, at the same time possesses in itself the element of sensuousness and immediacy. It is neither, on the one hand, purely mechanical work, such as is purely unconscious facility in sleight of hand upon physical objects, or a stereotyped activity according to teachable rule of thumb; nor, on the other hand, is it a productive process of science, which tends to pass from sensuous things to abstract ideas and thoughts, or is active exclusively in the medium of pure thought. In contrast to these the two aspects of mental idea and sensuous material must in the artistic product be united. For example, it would be possible in the case of poetical compositions to attempt to embody what was the subject-matter in the form of prosaic thought in the first instance, and only after doing so to attach to the same imaginative ideas rhymes and so on, so that as a net result such imagery would be appendent to the abstract reflections as so much ornament and decoration. An attempt of this kind, however, could only lead us to a poor sort of poetry, for in it we should have operative a twofold kind of activity in its separation, which in the activity of genuine artistic work only holds good in inseparable unity. It is this true kind of creative activity which forms what is generally described as the artistic imagination. It is the rational element, which in its import as spirit only exists, in so far as it actively forces its way into the presence of consciousness, yet likewise, and only subject to this condition, displays all its content to itself under a sensuous form. This activity possesses therefore a spiritual content, but it clothes the same in sensuous image, and for this reason that it is only able to come to a knowledge of the same under this sensuous garb. We may compare such a process with that of a man of experience in life, a man, shall we add, of real geniality and wit, who — while at the same time being fully conscious in what the main importance of life consists, what are the things which essentially bind men together, what moves them and is the mainspring of their lives — nevertheless has neither brought home this content in universal maxims, nor indeed is able to unfold it to others in the generalities of the reflective process, but makes these mature results of his intelligence without exception clear to himself and others in particular cases, whether real or invented, or by examples and such like which hit the mark. For in the ideas of such a man everything shapes itself into the concrete image determinate in its time and place, to which therefore the addition of names and any other detail of external condition causes no difficulty. Yet such a kind of imagination rather rests on the recollection of conditions, he has lived through, actual experience, than it is a creative power of itself. Memory preserves and renews the particularity and external fashion of such previous events with all their more distinct circumstances, but on the other hand does not suffer the universal to appear independently. The creative imagination of an artist is the imagination of a great mind and a big heart; it is the grasp and excogitation of ideas and shapes, and, in fact, nothing less than this grasp of the profoundest and most embracing human interests in the wholly definite presentation of imagery borrowed from objective experience. A consequence of this is, that imagination of this type75 is based in a certain sense on a natural gift, a general talent for it, as we say, because its creative power essentially implies an aspect of sense presentation. It is no doubt not unusual to speak in the same way of scientific “talent.” The sciences, however, merely presuppose the general capacity for thought, which does not possess, as imagination does, together with its intellectual activity, a reference to the concrete testimony of Nature, but rather precisely abstracts from the activity that form in which we find it in Nature. It would be, therefore, truer to the mark if we said there is no specific scientific talent in the sense of a purely natural endowment. Imagination76, on the other hand, combines within it a mode of instinct-like creativeness. In other words the essential plasticity and material element in a work of art is subjectively present in the artist as part of his native disposition and impulse77, and as his unconscious activity belongs in part to that which man receives straight from Nature. No doubt the entire talent and genius of an individual is not wholly exhausted by that we describe as natural capability. The creation of art is quite as much a spiritual and self-cognized process; but for all that we affirm that its spirituality contains an element of plastic or configurative facility which Nature78 confers on it. For this reason, though almost anybody can reach a certain point in art, yet, in order to pass beyond this — and it is here that the art in question really begins — a talent for art which is inborn and of a higher order altogether is indispensable.

Considered simply as a natural basis a talent of this kind asserts itself for the most part in early youth, and is manifested in the restless persistency, ever intent with vivacity and alertness, to create artistic shapes in some particular sensuous medium, and to make this mode of expression and utterance the unique one or the one of main importance and most suitable. And thus also a virtuosity up to a certain point in the technique of art which is arrived at with ease is a sign of inborn talent. A sculptor finds everything convertible into plastic shape, and from early days takes to modelling clay; and so on generally whatever men of such innate powers have in their minds, whatever excites and moves their souls, becomes forthwith a plastic figure, a drawing, a melody, or a poem.

(γ) Thirdly, and in conclusion: the content of art is also in some respects borrowed from the objective world perceived in sense, that is Nature; or, in any case, if the content is also of a spiritual character, it can only be grasped in such a way, that the spiritual element therein, as human relations, for example, are displayed in the form of phenomena which possess objective reality.

There is yet another question to solve, namely, what the interest or the End is, which man proposes to himself in the creation of the content embodied by a work of art. This was, in fact, the third point of view, which we propounded relatively to the art-product. Its more detailed discussion will finally introduce us to the true notional concept of art itself.

If we take a glance at our ordinary ideas on this subject, one of the most prevalent is obviously

(a) The principle of the imitation of Nature. According to this view the essential aim or object of art consists in imitation, by which is understood a facility in copying natural forms as present to us in a manner which shall most fully correspond to such facts. The success of such an exact representation of Nature is assumed to afford us complete satisfaction.

(α) Now in this definition there is to start with absolutely nothing but the formal aim to bring about the bare repetition a second time by man, so far as his means will permit of this, of all that was already in the external world, precisely too in the way it is there. A repetition of this sort may at once be set down as

(αα) A superfluous task for the reason that everything which pictures, theatrical performances represent by way of imitation — animals, natural scenery, incidents of human life — we have already elsewhere before us in our gardens or at home, or in other examples of the more restricted or extended reaches of our personal acquaintance. Looked at, moreover, more closely, such a superfluity of energy can hardly appear otherwise than a presumptuous trifling; it is so because

(ββ) It lags so far behind Nature. In other words art is limited in its means of representation. It can only produce one-sided illusions, a semblance, to take one example, of real fact addressed exclusively to one sense. And, moreover, if it does wholly rely on the bare aim of mere imitation, instead of Nature’s life all it gives us ever is the mere pretence of its substance. For some such reason the Turks, who are Mohammedans, will not put up with any pictures or copies of men and other objects. When James Bruce, in his travels through Abyssinia, showed a painted fish to a Turk, that worthy was at first astonished; but, quickly recovering himself, he made answer as follows: “If this fish shall rise up against you at the last day, and say, ‘You have certainly given me a body, but no living soul,’ how are you going to justify yourself against such a complaint?” The prophet himself, moreover, if we may believe the Sunna, said to the two women Ommi Hubiba and Ommi Selma, who told him of certain pictures in the Aethiopian churches: “These pictures will rise up in judgment against their creators on the Last Day.” There are, no doubt, no less examples of completely deceptive imitation. The painted grapes of Zeuxis, have been accepted from antiquity and long after as an instance of art’s triumph, and also of that of the principle of imitation, because, we are told, actual doves pecked at them. We might add to this ancient example that more modern one of Bültner’s monkey, which bit to pieces a painted cockchafer in Rösel’s “Diversions of Insects,” and was consequently forgiven by his master, although he destroyed by this means a fine copy of the precious work, because he proved thus the excellence of its illustrations. But if we will only reflect a moment on such and other instances we can only come to the conclusion that instead of praising works of art, because they have deceived even doves and monkeys, the foolish people ought to be condemned who imagine that the quality of a work of art is enhanced if they are able to proclaim an effect of the same so miserable as the supreme and last word they can say for it. In short, to sum up, we may state emphatically that in the mere business of imitation art cannot maintain its rivalry with Nature, and if it makes the attempt it must look like a worm which undertakes to crawl after an elephant.

(γγ) Having regard, then, to this invariable failure, that is, relative failure of human imitation as contrasted with the natural prototype, we have no end left us but the pleasure offered by sleight of hand in its effort to produce something which resembles Nature. And it is unquestionably a fact that mankind are able to derive enjoyment from the attempt to reproduce with their individual labour, skill, and industry what they find around them. But a delight and admiration of this kind also becomes, if taken alone79, indeed just in proportion as the copy follows slavishly the thing copied, so much the more icily null and cold, or brings its reaction of surfeit and repugnance. There are portraits which, as has been drily remarked, are positively shameless in their likeness80; and Kant brings forward a further example of this pleasure in imitation pure and simple to the effect that we are very soon tired of a man — and there really are such — who is able to imitate the nightingale’s song quite perfectly; for we no sooner find that it is a man who is producing the strain than we have had enough of it. We then take it to be nothing but a clever trick, neither the free outpouring of Nature, nor yet a work of art. We expect, in short, from the free creative power of men something quite other than a music of this kind, which only retains our interest when, as in the case of the nightingale’s note, it breaks forth in unpremeditated fashion, resembling in this respect the rhythmic flood of human feeling, from the native springs of its life. And as a general rule this delight we experience in the skill of imitation can only be of a restricted character; it becomes a man better to derive enjoyment from that which he brings to birth from himself. In this respect the invention of every insignificant technical product is of higher rank; and mankind may feel more proud at having invented the hammer, nail, and so forth, than in making themselves adepts as imitators. For this abstract zest in the pursuit of imitation is on the same lines as the feat of the man who had taught himself to throw lentils through a small aperture without missing. He made an exhibition of this feat to Alexander, and Alexander merely made him a present as a reward for this art, empty and useless as it was, of a bushel of lentils.

(β) Inasmuch as, moreover, the principle of imitation is purely formal, objective beauty itself disappears, if that principle is accepted as the end. For the question is then no longer what is the constitution of that which is to be imitated, but simply whether the copy is correct or no. The object and the content of the beautiful comes to be regarded as a matter of indifference. When, in other words, putting the principle of mere imitation on one side, we speak, in connection with animals, human beings, places, actions, and characters, of a distinction between beauty and ugliness, it remains none the less the fact that relatively to such a principle we are referring to a distinction which does not properly belong to an art for which we have appropriated this principle of imitation to the exclusion of all others. In such a case, therefore, whenever we select objects and attempt to distinguish between their beauty and ugliness, owing to this absence of a standard we can apply to the infinite forms of Nature, we have in the final resort only left us the personal taste, which is fixed by no rule, and admits of no discussion. And, in truth, if we start, in the selection of objects for representation, from that which mankind generally discover as beautiful and ugly, and accept accordingly for artistic imitation, in other words, form their particular taste, there is no province in the domain of the objective world which is not open to us, and which is hardly likely to fail to secure its admirer. At any rate, among men we may assume, that, though the case of every husband and his wife may be disputed, yet at least every bridegroom regards his bride as beautiful, very possibly being the only person who does so; and that an individual taste for a beauty of this kind admits of no fixed rules at all may be regarded as a bit of luck for both parties. If, moreover, we cast a glance wholly beyond mere individuals and their accidental taste to that of nations, this again is full of diversity and opposition. How often we hear it repeated that a European beauty would not please a Chinaman, or even a Hottentot — a Chinaman having a totally distinct notion of beauty from that of a black man, and the black man in his turn from that of a European. Indeed, if we consider the works of art of those extra-European peoples, their images of gods, for instance, which have been imaginatively conceived as worthy of veneration and sublime, they can only appear to us as frightful idols; their music will merely ring in our ears as an abominable noise, while, from the opposite point of view, such aliens will regard our sculptures, paintings, and musical compositions as having no meaning or actually ugly.

(γ) But even assuming that we abstract from an objective principle of art, and retain the beautiful as established on the subjective and individual taste, we shall soon discover, from the point of view of art itself, that the imitation of natural objects, which appeared to be a universal principle, and indeed one secured by important authorities, is not to be relied upon, at least under this general and wholly abstract conception of it. If we look at the particular arts we cannot fail to observe that, albeit painting and sculpture portray objects which resemble those of Nature, or the type of which is essentially borrowed from Nature, the works of architecture on the contrary — and this, too, is one of the fine arts — quite as little as the compositions of poetry, to the extent at least that these latter are not restricted to mere description, cannot justly be described as imitations of Nature. At any rate, if we are desirous of maintaining such a thesis with respect to the arts thus excluded, we should find ourselves forced to make important deviations from the track, in order to condition our proposition in various ways, and level down our so-called truth at least to the plane of probability. But once accept probability, and we should again be confronted with a great difficulty in determining precisely what is and what is not probable; and in the end no one could really think of or succeed, even if he did so, in excluding from poetry all compositions of an entirely capricious and completely imaginative81 character.

The end or object of art must therefore consist in something other than the purely formal82 imitation of what is given to objective sense, which invariably can merely call into being technical legerdemain and not works of art83. It is no doubt an essential constituent of a work of art that it should have natural forms as a foundation, because the mode of its representation is in external form, and thereby along with it in that of natural phenomena. In painting it is obviously an important study to learn to copy with accuracy colours in their mutual relations, such as light effects and reflections, and so forth, and, with no less accuracy, the forms and shapes of objects carried into their most subtle gradations of line. It is in this respect that in modern times more particularly the principle of the imitation of Nature and naturalism generally has come into vogue. The object has been to recall an art, which has deteriorated into weakness and nebulosity, to the strength and determinate outlines of Nature, or, in yet another direction, as against the purely arbitrary caprice and convention of a studio, which is in truth as remote from Nature as it is from art, and merely indicates the path of art’s declension, to assert the claim of the legitimate, direct, and independent, no less than coherent stability of natural fact. But while admitting that from a certain point of view such an effort is reasonable enough, yet for all that the naturalism which it demands, taken by itself, is neither the substantive thing, not yet of primary importance, in the true basis of art; and although the external fact in its natural appearance constitutes an element of essential value, yet the objective fact alone does not supply the standard of rightness, nor is the mere imitation of external phenomena, in their external shape that is, the end of art.

(b) And as a consequence of this we have the further question— “What is the true content of art, and with what aim is that content brought before us?” On this head we are confronted by the common opinion that it is the task and object of art to bring before our sense, feeling, and power of emulation84 every thing that the spirit of man can perceive or conceive. Art has in short to realize for us the well-known saying, “Nihil humani a me alienum puto.” Its object is therefore declared to be that of arousing and giving life to slumbering emotions, inclinations, passions of every description, of filling the heart up to the brim; of compelling mankind, whether cultured or the reverse, to pass through all that the human soul carries in its most intimate and mysterious chambers, all that it is able to experience and reproduce, all that the heart is able to stir and evoke in its depths and its countlessly manifold possibilities; and yet further to deliver to the domain of feeling and the delight of our vision all that the mind may possess of essential and exalted being in its thought and the Idea — that majestic hierarchy of the noble, eternal, and true; and no less to interpret for us misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime; to make the hearts of men realize through and through85 all that is atrocious and dreadful, no less than every kind of pleasure and blessedness; and last of all to start the imagination like a rover among the day-dream playing-fields of the fancy, there to revel in the seductive mirage of visions and emotions which captivate the senses. All this infinitely manifold content — so it is held — it is the function of art to explore, in order that by this means the experience of our external life may be repaired of its deficiencies, and yet from a further point of view that the passions we share with all men86 may be excited, not merely that the experiences of life may not have us unmoved, but that we ourselves may thereafter long to make ourselves open channels of a universal experience. Such a stimulus is not presented on the plane of actual experience itself87, but can only come through the semblance of it, that is to say through the illusions which art, in its creations, substitutes for the actual world. And the possibility of such a deception, by means of the semblances of art, depends on the fact that all reality must for man pass through the medium of the vision and imaginative idea; and it is only after such a passage that it penetrates the emotional life and the will. In such a process it is of no consequence whether it is immediate external reality which claims his attention, or whether the result is effected by some other way, in other words by means of images, symbols, and ideas, which contain and display the content of such actuality. Men are able to imagine things, which do not actually exist, as if they did exist. Consequently it is precisely the same thing for our emotional life, whether it is the objective world or merely the show of the same, in virtue of which a situation, a relation, or any content of life, in short, is brought home to us. Either mode is equally able to stir in us an echo to the essential secret which it carries, whether it be in grief or joy, in agitation or convulsion, and can cause to flow through us the feelings and passions of anger, hate, pity, anxiety, fear, love, reverence and admiration, honour and fame.

The awakening of every kind of emotion in us, the drawing our soul through every content of life, the realization of all these movements of soul-life by means of a presence which is only external as an illusion — this it is which, in the opinion described, is pre-eminently regarded as the peculiar and transcendent power of artistic creation.

We must not, however, overlook the fact that in this view of art as a means to imprint on the soul and the mind what is good and evil alike, to make man more strong in the pursuit of what is noblest, no less than enervate his definite course88, by transporting his emotional life through the most sensuous and selfish desires, the task as yet proposed to art remains throughout of an entirely formal character; without possessing independently an assured aim all that art can offer is the empty form for every possible kind of ideal and formative content.

(c) As a matter of fact art does not possess this formal side, namely, that it is able to bring before our senses and feeling and artistically adorn every possible kind of material, precisely as the thoughts of ordinary reflection89 elaborate every possible subject-matter and modes of action, supplying the same with its equipment of reasons and vindications. In the presence, however, of such a variety of content we cannot fail to observe that these diversified emotions and ideas, which it is assumed art has to stimulate or enforce, intersect each other, contradict and mutually cancel each other. Indeed, under this aspect, the more art inspires men to emotions thus opposed, to that extent precisely it merely enlarges the cleavage in their feelings and passions, and sets them staggering about in Bacchantic riot, or passes over into sophistry and scepticism precisely as your ordinary free thinkers do. This variety of the material of art itself compels us, therefore, not to remain satisfied with so formal a determination. Our rational nature forces its way into this motley array of discord, and demands to see the resurrection of a higher and more universal purpose from these elements despite their opposition, and to be conscious of its attainment. Just in a similar manner the social life of mankind and the State are no doubt credited with the aim that in them all human capacities and all individual potencies should meet with expansion and expression in all their features and tendencies. But in opposition to so formal a view there very quickly crops up the question in what unity these manifold manifestations are to be concentrated, and what single end they must have for their fundamental concept and ultimate end. Just as in the case of the notional concept of the human State so too there arises in that of human art the need, as to a part thereof, for an end common to the particular aspects, no less than in part for one which is more exalted and substantive in its character90.

As such a substantive end the conclusion of reflection is readily brought home to us that art possesses at once the power and function to mitigate the savagery of mere desires.

(α) With regard to this first conception we have merely to ascertain what characteristic peculiar to art implies this possibility of eliminating this rawness of desire, and of fettering and instructing the impulses and passions. Coarseness in general has its ground-root in an unmitigated self-seeking of sensuous impulses, which take their plunge off and are exclusively intent on the satisfaction of their concupiscence. Sensual desire is, however, all the more brutal and domineering, in proportion as, in its isolation and confinement, it appropriates the entire man, so that he does not retain the power to separate himself in his universal capacity from this determinacy and to maintain the conscious presence of such universality91. Even if the man in such a case exclaims, “the passion is mightier than myself,” though it is true no doubt that for that man’s mind the abstract ego is separate from the particular passion, yet it is purely so in a formal way. All that such a separation amounts to is that as against the force of the passion the ego, in its universal form or competency, is of no account at all. The savageness of passion consists therefore in the fusion92 of the ego as such a universal with the confined content of its desire, so that a man no longer possesses volitional power outside this single passion. Such savageness and untamed force of the possibilities of passion art mitigates in the first instance to the extent that it brings home to the mind and imagination of man what he does actually feel and carry into effect in such a condition. And even if art restricts itself to this that it places before the vision of the mind pictures of passion, nay, even assuming such to be flattering pictures, yet for all that a power of amelioration is contained therein. At least we may say, that by this means is brought before a man’s intelligence what apart from such presentment he merely is. The man in this way contemplates his impulses and inclinations; and whereas apart from this they whirl him away without giving him time to reflect, he now sees them outside himself and already, for the reason that they come before him rather as objects than a part of himself, he begins to be free from them as aliens. For this reason it may often happen that an artist, under the weight of grief, mitigates and weakens the intensity of his own emotions in their effect upon him by the artistic representation of them. Comfort, too, is to be found even in tears. The man who to start with is wholly given up to and concentrated in sorrow, is able thus, at any rate, to express that which is merely felt within in a direct way. Yet more alleviating is the utterance of such inner life in words, images, musical sound, and shapes.

It was therefore a good old custom in the case of funerals and layings-out to appoint wailing women, in order to give audible expression to grief, or generally to create an external sympathy. For manifestations of sympathy bring the content of human sorrow to the sufferer in an objective form; he is by their repetition driven to reflect upon it, and the burden is thereby made lighter. And so it has from of old been considered that to weep or to speak oneself out are equally means whereby freedom is secured from the oppressing burden, or at least the heart is appreciably lifted. Consequently the mitigation of the violence of passions admits of this general explanation that man is released from his unmediated confinement93 in an emotion, becomes aware of it as a thing external to himself, to which he is consequently obliged to place himself in an ideal relation. Art, while still remaining within the sphere of the senses, faces man from the might of his sensitive experience by means of its representations. No doubt we frequently hear that pet phrase of many that it is man’s duty to remain in immediate union with Nature. Such union is in its unmediated purity nothing more or less than savagery and wildness; and art, precisely in the way that it dissolves this unity for human beings, lifts them with gentle hands over this inclosure in Nature. The way men are occupied with the objects of art’s creation remains throughout of a contemplative94 character; and albeit in the first instance it educates merely an attention to the actual facts portrayed, yet over and beyond this, and with a power no less decisive, it draws man’s attention to their significance, it forces him to compare their content with that of others, and to receive without reserve the general conclusions of such a survey and all the ramifications95 such imply.

(β) To the characteristic above discussed adheres in natural sequence the second which has been predicated of art as its essential aim, namely, the purification of the passions, an instruction, that is, and a building to moral completeness. For the defining role that art has to bridle savage nature and educate the passions remained one wholly formal and general, so that the further question must arise as to a specific kind and an essential and culminating point of such an educative process.

(αα) The doctrine of the purification of the passions shares in the defect previously noted as adhering to the mitigation of desires. It does, however, emphasize more closely the fact that the representations of art needed a standard, by means of which it would be possible to estimate their comparative worth and unworth. This standard is just their effectiveness to separate what is pure from that which is the reverse in the passions. Art, therefore, requires a content which is capable of expressing this purifying power, and in so far as the power to assert such effectiveness is assumed to constitute the substantive end of art, the purifying content will consist in asserting that effective power before consciousness in its universality and essentiality.96

(ββ) It is a deduction from the point of view just described that it is the end of art to instruct. Thus, on the one hand, the peculiar character of art consists in the movement of the emotions and in the satisfaction which is found in this movement, even in fear, compassion, in painful agitation and shock — that is to say, in the satisfying concern of the feelings and passions, and to that extent in a complacent, delighted, or enthusiastic attitude to the objects of art and their presentation and effect: while, on the other hand, this artistic object is held to discover its higher standard exclusively in its power to instruct, in the fabula docet, and thereby in the usefulness, which the work of art is able to exercise on the recipient. In this respect the Horatian adage

Et prodesse volunt et delectare poetae97

contains, concentrated into a few words, all that in after times has been drawn out as a doctrine of art through every conceivable grade of dilution to the last extreme of insipidity.

In respect, then, to such instruction we have to ask whether the idea is that the same ought to be direct or indirect in the work of art, explicit or implicit.

Now if the question at issue is one of general importance to art about a universal rather than contingent purpose, such an ultimate end, on account of the essential spirituality of art, can only be itself of spiritual import; in other words, so far from being of accidental importance it must be true in virtue of its own nature and on its own account. An end of this kind can only apply to instruction in so far as a genuine and essentially explicit content is brought before the mind by means of the work of art. From such a point of view we are entitled to affirm that it is the function of art to accept so much the more of a content of this nature within its compass in proportion to the nobility of its rank, and that only in the verity of such a content will it discover the standard according to which the pertinency of or the reverse of what is expressed is adjudged. Art is in truth the primary98 instructress of peoples.

But, on the other hand, if the object of instruction is so entirely treated as an end that the universal nature of the content presented cannot fail to be asserted and rendered-bluntly and on its own account explicit as abstract thesis, prosaic reflection or general maxim, rather than merely in an indirect way contained by implication in the concrete embodiment of art, then and in that case, by means of such a separation, the sensuous, plastic configuration, which is precisely that which makes the artistic product a work of art, is merely an otiose accessory, a husk, a semblance, which are expressly posited as nothing more than shell and semblance. Thereby the very nature of a work of art is abused. For the work of art ought not to bring before the imaginative vision a content in its universality as such, but rather this universality under the mode of individual concreteness and distinctive sensuous particularity. If the work in question does not conform to such a principle, but rather sets before us the generalization of its content with the express object of instruction pure and simple, then the imaginative no less than the material aspect of it are merely an external and superfluous ornament, and the work of art is itself a shattered thing within that ornament99, a ruin wherein form and content no longer appear as a mutually adherent growth. For, in the case supposed, the particular object of the senses and the ideal content apprehended by the mind100 have become external to one another.

Furthermore, if the object of art is assumed to consist in utilitarian instruction of this kind, that other aspect of delight, entertainment, and diversion is simply abandoned on its own account as unessential; it has now to look for its substance to the utility of the matter of instruction, to which it is simply an accompaniment. But this amounts to saying, that art does not carry its vocation and purpose in itself, but that its fundamental conception is in something else, to which it subserves as a means. Art becomes, in short, merely one of the many means, which are either of use, or may be employed to secure, the aim of instruction. This brings us to the boundary line where art can only cease to be an end on its own independent account; it is deliberately deposed either to the mere plaything of entertainment, or a mere means of instruction.

(γγ) The line of this limit is most emphasized when the question is raised as to the end or object of highest rank for the sake of which the passions have to be purified or men have to be instructed. This goal has frequently in modern times been identified with moral improvement, and the end of art is assumed to consist in this that its function is to prepare our inclinations and impulses, and generally to conduct us to the supreme goal of moral perfection. In this view we find instruction and purification combined. The notion is that art by the insight it gives us of genuine moral goodness, in other words, through its instruction, at the same time summons us to the process of purification, and in this way alone can and ought to bring about the improvement of mankind as the right use they can make of it and its supreme object.

With reference to the relation in which art stands to the end of improvement, we may practically say the same thing as we did about the didactic end. It may readily be admitted that art as its principle ought not to make the immoral and its advance its end. But it is one thing deliberately to make immorality the aim of its presentation and another not expressly to do so in the case of morality. It is possible to deduce an excellent moral from any work of art whatever; but such depends, of course, on a particular interpretation and consequently on the individual who draws the moral. The defence is made of the most immoral representations on the ground that people ought to become acquainted with evil and sin in order to act morally. Conversely, it has been maintained that the portrayal of Mary Magdalene, the fair sinner, who afterwards repented, has seduced many into sin, because art makes repentance look so beautiful, and you must first sin before you can repent. The doctrine of moral improvement, however logically carried out, is not merely satisfied that a moral should be conceivably deducible from a work of art through interpretation; on the contrary, it would have the moral instruction clearly made to emerge as the substantive aim of the work101; nay, further, it would deliberately exclude from art’s products all subjects, characters, actions, and events which fail to be moral in its own sense. For art, in distinction from history and the sciences, which have their subject-matter determined for them, has a choice in the selection of its subjects.

In order that we may be in a position to estimate this view of the moral end of art on the basis of principle, we ought above all to raise the question as to the precise standpoint of the morality which is recommended for our reception by this view. If we examine more closely the standpoint of morality such, as is submitted us to-day under an enlightened interpretation102, we soon discover that its conception does not immediately coincide with that which we describe in a general way as virtue, respectability103, uprightness, and so forth. To be a respectable honest man is not sufficient to make a man moral in the sense under discussion, for morality in this sense implies reflection and the definite consciousness of what is consonant with duty, and the acts which issue from such a consciousness. Now duty is itself the law of the will, which man, however, freely establishes out of himself, and thereon is taken to determine himself to this duty for duty’s sake and its fulfilment’s sake; in other words he only does good as acting under the conviction already secured that it is the good. This law — the duty which is selected and carried into effect for duty’s sake to be the rule of conduct out of free conviction and the inner conscience — is, on its own account, the abstract universal of the will, which is the absolute antithesis to Nature, the impulses of sense, selfish interests, the passions and all that is commonly described collectively as emotional life and heart. In this opposition the one side is regarded as negating the other; and for the reason that both are present in the individual in their opposition, he is compelled, as determining himself from his own identity, to adopt the choice of one to the rejection of the other. Such a decision and the act carried out in accordance with it merely become moral from the standpoint now considered on the one hand in virtue of the free conviction of duty, and on the other by reason of the victory secured not only over the particular will, the natural motives, inclinations, passions and so on, but also in virtue of the noble feelings and higher impulses. For the modern ethic starts from the fixed opposition between the will in its spiritual universality and its sensuous natural particularity; it does not consist in the perfected mediation of these opposed aspects, but in their mutual conflict as opposed to one another, which carries with it the demand, that the impulses in their antagonism to duty ought to yield to it.

An opposition of this nature is not merely present to mind in the restricted confines of moral action; it asserts itself as a fundamental severation and antithesis between that which is actual essentially, and on its own account, and that which is external reality and existence104. Apprehended in entirely formal terms it is the contrast exposed by the universal, in so far as it is fixed in its substantive independence over against the particular, as the latter is also on its part rigidly exterior to it. In more concrete form it appears in Nature as the opposition of the abstract law to the wealth of particular phenomena, each of which possesses its specific characteristics. It appears in mind as that between the sensuous and spiritual in man, as the conflict of spirit with the flesh; it is that of duty for duty’s sake; of the cold imperative with particular impulses, the warm heart, the sensuous inclinations and impulses, in a word with man simply as individual. Or it appears as the harsh antagonism between the inward freedom and the external necessity of natural condition, and, lastly, as the contradiction of the dead, essentially emptied, concept, when confronted with the fulness of concrete life, in other words, of theory and subjective thought as contrasted with objective existence and experience.

Such are antithetical points of view, the discovery of which is not to be ascribed either to the ingenuity of reflective minds, or the pedantry of a philosophical cult. They have in all ages, if in manifold guise, occupied and disquieted the human consciousness, although it is our more modern culture which has emphasized their opposition most deliberately, and forced it in each case to the keenest edge of contradiction. Intellectual culture, or rather the rapier edge of the modern understanding, creates in man this contrast, which converts him into some amphibious animal. He is compelled to live in two worlds mutually contradictory; and in this divided house consciousness, too, wanders aimlessly; tossed over from one side to the other it is unable to discover permanent satisfaction105 for itself in either one side or the other. For, on the one hand, we see mankind confined within common reality and earthly temporal condition, oppressed by necessity and want, in Nature’s toils, entangled in matter, in sensuous aims and their enjoyment, dominated and whirled away by impulse and passion. On the other hand he lifts himself up to eternal idea’s, to a realm of thought and freedom. As Will he legislates for himself universal laws and destinations106, he disrobes the world of the life and blossom of its reality; he dissolves it in abstractions, that the mind may vindicate its right and intrinsic worth by this very dissolution of Nature’s rights and such maltreatment, a process in which he brings home to her again the necessity and violence he has experienced at her hands. Such a cleavage of life and mind is, however, accompanied for modern culture with the demand that a contradiction so deep-seated should be dissolved. The mere understanding of abstract reflection is unable to disengage itself from the obstinacy of such contradictions. The solution consequently remains here for consciousness a mere ought, and the present and reality is merely moved within the continuous unrest of a to and fro, which seeks for that reconciliation it is unable to find. The problem therefore arises whether such a many-sided and fundamental antagonism, which is unable to pass beyond the mere ought and postulate of its solution, can be the essential and wholly expressed truth, and107, indeed, the final and supreme consummation. If the culture of the civilized world has fallen into such a contradiction it becomes the task of philosophy to dissolve the same, in other words to demonstrate that neither the one side or the other, in its one sided abstractness, should be held to possess truth, but that they contain within themselves the principle of their dissolution. The truth only then comes before us in the reconciliation and mediation of both; and this mediation is no mere postulate, but is, in its essential nature, and in its actual presence the at the same time accomplished and self-accomplishing. And, in fact, this view agrees directly with unwitting108 faith and will, which always has before its conscious life this contradiction in its resolution, and in action accepts it as its aim and carries it into effect. All that philosophy achieves is to contribute the insight of thought into the essence of such cleavage. It demonstrates, or seeks to demonstrate, how that which truth really is is simply the resolution of the fracture, and, be it added, not in the sense that this antagonism and its alternative aspects in any way are not, but in the sense that they are there109 in reconciliation.

(d) When discussing moral improvement as the ultimate end accepted for art it was found that its principle pointed to a higher standpoint. It will be necessary also to vindicate this standpoint for art.

Thereby the false position to which we have already directed attention vanishes, namely, that art has to serve as a means for moral ends and the moral end of the world generally by means of its didactive and ameliorating influence, and by doing so has its essential aim not in itself, but in something else. If we therefore continue still to speak of an end or goal of art, we must at once remove the perverse idea, which in the question, “What is the end?” will still make it include the supplemental query, “What is the use?” The perverseness consists in this that the work of art would then have to be regarded as related to something else, which is presented us as what is essential and ought to be. A work of art would in that case be merely a useful instrument in the realization of an end which possessed real and independent importance outside the realm of art. As opposed to this we must maintain that it is art’s function to reveal truth under the mode of art’s sensuous or material configuration, to display the reconciled antithesis previously described, and by this means to prove that it possesses its final aim in itself, in this representation in short and self-revelation. For other ends such as instruction, purification, improvement, procuring of wealth, struggle after fame and honour have nothing whatever to do with this work of art as such, still less do they determine the fundamental idea110 of it.

It is then from this point of view, into which the reflective consideration of our subject-matter finally issues, that we have to grasp the fundamental idea of art in terms of its ideal or inward necessity, as it is also from this point of view that historically regarded the true appreciation and acquaintance with art took its origin. For that antithesis, to which we have drawn attention, did not merely assert its presence within the general thought of educated men, but equally in philosophy as such. It was only after philosophy was in a position to overcome this opposition absolutely that it grasped the fundamental notion of its own content, and, to the extent it did so, the idea of Nature and of art.

For this reason, as this point of view implies the reawakening of philosophy in the widest connotation of the term, so also it is the re-awakening of the science of art. We may go further and affirm that aesthetic as a science is in a real sense primarily indebted to this re-awakening for its true origination, and art for its higher estimation.

From this point of transition, I will briefly summarize the historical subject-matter that I have in my mind’s eye, partly on account of the historical importance itself, and in part because thereby the points of view are more clearly indicated to which importance is attached, and upon the basis of which we propose to continue the superstructure. In its most general definition that basis consists in this, that the beauty of art has become recognized as one of the means which resolve and bring back to unity that antithesis and contradiction between the mind and Nature as they repose in abstract alienation from each other in themselves, whether this latter is regarded as external phenomena or the inward world of individual feeling and emotion111.

It was the philosophy of Kant which, in the first instance, not merely experienced the want of such a point of union, but secured definite knowledge of it and brought it clearly before the mind. Speaking generally, Kant accepted as his basis for intelligence no less than for the will the rationality which relates itself to itself or freedom, the self-consciousness that discovers and knows itself essentially as infinite. This knowledge of the absoluteness of reason in its essential substance, which has proved in more modern times the turning-point of philosophy, this absolute point of departure deserves recognition, and does not admit of refutation, even though in other respects the Kantian philosophy is inadequate. But at the same time it was Kant who through falling back upon the fixed opposition between subjective thought and objective things, between abstract universality and the sensuous individuality of the will, in a pre-eminent degree strained to the extremest limit the very antithesis of morality we have previously adverted to, inasmuch as over and above this he emphasized the practical operation of mind to the disadvantage of the contemplative. In virtue of this fixity of the antithesis as cognized by the faculty of the understanding he had no other alternative than to express the unity exclusively in the form of subjective ideas for which no adequate reality could be demonstrated as correspondent; or, on its practical side, as postulates, which it was no doubt possible to deduce from the practical reason, but whose essential being was not within the cognition of thought, and the practical fulfilment of which remained throughout a mere “ought” deferred to infinity. And for this reason, though Kant did actually bring the reconciled opposition within the compass of intelligible ideas, he was neither able to develop its essential truth scientifically, nor to assert the same as actual and exclusive reality. Unquestionably Kant did press beyond this point, in the sense, that is to say, that he discovered the unity demanded in what he called the intuitive understanding; but in this respect too he is held up by the opposition of subjectivity and objectivity, so that, while he no doubt offers us a resolution in an abstract sense of the antithesis between conception and reality, universality and particularity, understanding and sense-perception, and suggests the Idea, yet he once more conceives this resolution and reconciliation itself in a wholly subjective sense, not as being true and real both essentially and on its own independent account. In this respect the Critique of the power of the judgment, in which he investigates the aesthetic and teleological power of the judgment is both instructive and remarkable. The beautiful objects of Nature and art, the products of Nature with their adaptations to ends, by means of which he approaches more closely the notion of the organic and the living, he considers wholly from the point of view of the reflection which judges them subjectively. And indeed Kant himself generally defines the power of judgment as “the capacity to think the particular as comprised under the universal,” and calls the power of judgment reflective “when it has only the particular submitted to it, and has to discover the universal under which it is subsumed.” To this end it requires a law, a principle, which it has to contribute to itself; and Kant affirms teleology to be this law. With regard to the conception of freedom which belongs to the practical reason the achievement of end or purpose gets no further than a mere “ought”; and in the teleological judgment, however, relatively to the living thing, Kant does manage to regard the living organism in such a way that the notional concept, the universal, succeeds in also including the particular, and as end does not determine the particular and external, the structure of the members from outside, but as an inward principle, and under the mode, that the particular conforms to the end spontaneously. Yet with such a judgment once more it is assumed that the objective nature of the thing is not known, but that it is only a mode of subjective reflection which is thereby expressed. In a similar way Kant so conceives the aesthetic judgment that it neither proceeds from the understanding, as such, in other words as the faculty of ideas, nor yet from the sensuous perception as such, and its varied manifold, but from the free play of the understanding and the imagination. In this common agreement of the faculties of knowledge the object finds its relation to the individual consciousness, and its feeling of pleasure and contentment.

(a) Now this general feeling of contentment is, in the first place, without any interest, that is to say, it is devoid of relation to our appetitive faculty. If we have an interest of curiosity, shall we say, or a sensuous interest excited for a physical want, a desire for possession and use, then the objects are not important for their own sake, but in virtue of our need of them. In a case such as this what exists merely possesses a value in relation to such a need, and the relation is of the kind, that the object is on the one side and on the other is an attribute distinct from the object to which we relate it none the less. As an illustration if I consume the object in order to nourish myself therewith, this interest rests exclusively in me, and remains alien to the object. Now, in Kant’s view, our position relatively to the beautiful is not of this description. The aesthetic judgment suffers that which is externally presented to subsist in free independence, proceeding as it does from the desire to permit the object to persist on its own account and to retain its end unimpaired within itself. This is, as we have already observed, an important observation.

(b) In the second place, Kant maintains that the beautiful is definable as that which without a conception, i.e., without a category of the understanding, is placed before us as the object of a universal satisfaction. To estimate the beautiful an educated mind is indispensable. The man in the street112 has no judgment about the beautiful; this judgment, in fact, claims universal validity. The universal is no doubt in the first instance simply, as such, an abstraction, one which, however, is in its essential and on its independent account, true; and consequently carries essentially the property and demand to pass also as universally valid. In this sense, too, the beautiful ought to be universally recognized, although the mere concepts of the understanding are compatible with no judgment thereupon. The good — the right which enters into particular actions, for example — is subsumed under universal concepts, and the action is accepted as good, if it is conformable to such concepts. The beautiful, on the contrary, ought, according to this view, to arouse a universal satisfaction without any such mediation of concept. This simply means that in the contemplation of the beautiful we are not conscious of the notional concept or any subsumption under it, and do not permit the independent passage of the separation between the particular object and the universal concept, which is present in all other cases of the judgment.

(c) Thirdly, in this view of Kant, the beautiful ought to have the teleological form to the extent that the teleological relation is apprehended in the object without the idea of an end. This is substantially a mere repetition of the view just discussed. Any natural product — take, for instance, a plant or an animal — is organized as adapted to an end, and is so immediately to us in this its teleological purpose, that we have no conception of the end on its own account as separate and distinct from the actual presence of the object. It is in this way that the beautiful also is presented us teleologically. In finite teleology end and means remain external to each other; the end stands in no essential inner relation to the material means of its execution113. In this case the idea of the end as recognized in apartness114 is distinguishable from the object in which the end appears as realized. The beautiful, on the contrary, exists as teleological in the essential sense, without means and end appearing as disparate in aspects distinct from each other. For example, the purpose of the members of the organism is the principle of life which exists in the members as actual therein. In their separation115 the parts cease to be members of a whole. For in the living thing the end and material medium of the end are so immediately united, that the existing being only exists in so far as the end remains indwelling. The beautiful, as thus regarded and in Kant’s view, does not carry its teleological purpose as an external form attached to it: but the teleological correspondence of the inner and outer is to be regarded as the immanent nature of the beautiful object.

(d) Fourthly and finally the view of Kant posits the beautiful under the mode that it is recognized without a universal concept as object of a necessary feeling of satisfaction. Necessity is an abstract category, and indicates an ideal and essential relation between two aspects or sides: if the one is, and because the one is, then, and for that reason, the other is also. The one likewise includes the other within its determinate nature. Cause is meaningless without effect. The pleasure which we obtain from beauty is necessary in this sense, and it is so wholly without a relation to conceptions, that is to say the categories of the understanding. Thus, no doubt, we derive pleasure from what is symmetrical, for this is constructed in accord with an idea of the understanding. Kant, however, demands more as a definition of delight in art than the unity and uniformity of such an idea as this.

Now what we find in all these theses of Kant is the non-severation of that which otherwise is assumed to be distinct in consciousness. In the beautiful this separation is found to be abolished. The universal and particular, purpose and means, idea and object completely interpenetrate each other. Thus, too, Kant sees the beauty of art as a concurrence, in which the particular itself is conformable to the conception. Particulars, taken alone, are primarily, both as against each other and the universal, of a contingent nature; and this very contingent element, whether we find it in sense, feeling, susceptibility, or impulse, is now in the beauty of art not merely subsumed under the categories of the understanding, and dominated by the notion of freedom in its abstract universality, but united to the universal in such a way that it appears inwardly and on its own merits as realized fact adequate thereto. By this means thought is incorporated in fine art, and the material is not externally defined by such thought, but continues to exist in its own freedom. In other words, what is natural — the senses, emotional temperament, and so forth — possess in themselves measure, end, and agreement. Perception and feeling, too, in the same way are raised to a power of spiritual universality; and thought no less not merely renounces its hostility to Nature, but is made blithe therein. Feeling, pleasure, and enjoyment are thereby justified and sanctified, and thus it is that Nature and freedom, sense and idea in one presence discover their just place and their satisfaction. Yet even this apparently complete reconciliation is ultimately still assumed to be116 merely subjective in respect to our judgment no less than our productive activity, and not to be essentially and on its own account either the true or real.

These may, I think, be taken to be the main results of the Critique of Kant so far as they affect our present inquiry. It constitutes the starting-point for the true conception of the beauty of art. Such a conception could, however, only make itself effective as the higher comprehension of the true union of necessity and freedom, particular and universal, sensuous and rational, by its overcoming the defects still latent in the previous standpoint.

It must in fact be admitted that the artistic sense of a profound and, at the same time, philosophical spirit anticipated philosophy in the stricter sense by its demand for and expression of the principle of totality and reconciliation in its opposition to that abstract finiteness of thought, that duty for duty’s sake, that understanding faculty devoid of any substantive content, which one and all apprehend nature and reality, sense and feeling, merely as a limits something downright alien or hostile. It is Schiller who must be credited with the important service of having broken through the Kantian subjectivity and abstractness of thought, and of having ventured the attempt to pass beyond the same by comprehending in thought the principles of unity and reconciliation as the truth, and giving artistic realization to that truth. For Schiller, in his aesthetic investigations, did not merely adhere to art and its interest unaffected by their relation to philosophy proper, but he compared his own interest in the beauty of art in their due relation to philosophical principles; and it is only from the starting-point of these latter and by their aid that he penetrated the profounder nature and notional concept of Beauty. Thus we are conscious that it was a feature of a certain period of his productive activity that he was actively engaged with reflective thought, more perhaps than was wholly favourable to the simple and direct beauty of his work as an art product. The deliberate character of abstract reflections, and even the interest of the philosophical notion, arrest the attention in several of his poems. He has, in fact, been made the subject of stricture on this account; and especially his work has been blamed and depreciated in its contrast with the equable serenity and straightforward simplicity of Goethe’s ideas and more objective naturalism. But in this respect Schiller as poet did but pay the debt of his century. A real ideal evolution117 was responsible, the recognition of which only redounds to the honour of this sublime soul and profound genius, as it has been no less of signal profit to science and knowledge. This stimulating movement of science during the same epoch also diverted Goethe from the sphere, most distinctively his own, as poet. But just as Schiller was absorbed in the study of the ideal depths of the mind, so the characteristic predilection of Goethe inclined to the physical aspect of art, to external nature, such as animal and vegetable organization, crystals, cloud-formation and colours. To such scientific inquiry Goethe applied his extraordinary powers of intuition, which in these provinces have driven off the field the theories of the mere understanding and their errors, just as Schiller, on the other side, succeeded in demonstrating the Idea of the free totality of Beauty as against the theory of the analytical understanding relative to volition and thinking. An entire series of Schiller’s productions is devoted to this insight into the nature of art. Above all in importance come the “Letters upon aesthetic education.” In these letters the main point of departure is that every individual man contains within himself the natural capacity of an ideal humanity. This genuine human being is represented by the State, which, in his view, is the objective, universal, and, in short, normal form, in which the separate individuals or subjects of such human consciousness aim at making all coalesce and concentrate in unity. There were then, in his view, two imaginable ways in which man in the temporal process could thus coalesce with the human being in the notional Idea118. On the one hand this could be effected in the suppression of individuality by the State under its generic idea of morality, law, and intelligence119: while, on the other, a similar result could be effected by the individual himself raising himself to the level of such a generic conception, in other words, by the man of the particular temporal condition ennobling himself to the level of the essential man of the Idea. Now, in this view, reason demands unity as such, the generic attribution; Nature, however, asks for variety and individuality, and both these legislatures make a simultaneous claim upon man. Confronted with the conflict of these antagonistic rivals, aesthetic education simply consists in giving actual effect to the demand for their mediation and reconcilement. The aim of such an education is, according to Schiller, to give vital form to inclination, the senses, impulse and emotional life in such a way that they become essentially permeated with mind; and, from the reverse point of view, that reason, freedom, and spirituality come forth from the grave-clothes of their abstractedness, are mated in union with the natural element thus essentially rationalized, and thus receive the substance of flesh and blood. Beauty is therefore affirmed to be the conformative unification120 of the rational and the sensuous, and this union is pronounced the truly real.

This view of Schiller will in its general terms be all the more readily recognized in “Anmuth und Würde121,” as also in his poems for the reason that the praise of women is in such works more particularly the theme. It was pre-eminently in their character that he recognized and emphasized the spontaneously present conjunction of the spiritual and natural.

This unity of the universal and particular, of freedom and necessity, of spirituality and the natural element, which Schiller conceived with scientific thoroughness as the principle and essence of art, and endeavoured indefatigably to call into actual life by means of art and aesthetic education, has received yet further recognition in the Idea itself, cognized as the supreme principle of knowledge and of existence, the Idea in this sense being apprehended as sole truth and reality. By means of this acknowledgment science, in the philosophy of Schelling, attained its absolute standpoint; and although art had already begun to assert its peculiar rights and dignity in their relation to the highest interests of man, it was only now that the notion itself and the scientific position of art were discovered. It was then that art was — even if, from a certain point of view, with a measure of perversity, which this is not the proper place to discuss — accepted with due reference to its exalted and true vocation. Even before this time and independently Winckelmann had been inspired by his observation of the ideals of the ancients in a way which prompted the creation of a new sense of artistic contemplation, the disengagement of it from the association of vulgar aims and mere imitation of Nature, and exercised a mighty influence in the discovery of the idea of art in works of art and in its history. Winckelmann ought, in fact, to be regarded as belonging to the type of men who have been able in the field of art to supply the mind with a new organ and wholly new methods of observation His views have, however, exercised less influence on the theory and the scientific knowledge of art.

To summarize these historical antecedents further yet more briefly, in association with the renaissance of our modern philosophy, A. W. and Friedrich von Schlegel, impelled by their zest for novelty and all that was either distinctive or arresting, assimilated just so much of the philosophical ideas as was compatible with minds essentially critical, though by no means really philosophical in any strict sense of the term. Neither of these writers in fact can claim the reputation of being speculative thinkers. They did, however, in virtue of their critical sagacity, at least approach the standpoint of the Idea; and with the aid of remarkable boldness of speech and audacity of innovation — to which, however, but very few ingredients of genuine philosophy contributed — directed a brilliant polemic against views hitherto received, and by this means unquestionably introduced a novel standard of criticism and new ways of looking at things which were of superior value to those they attacked. For the reason, however, that their criticism was not accompanied with a knowledge of the nature of such a standard based on philosophical principles, a lack of definition and continuity was inseparable from this standard; and they at one time attempted too much and again at another too little. Despite, therefore, of the fact that it may be reckoned to their credit that they have once more drawn attention to and emphasized with genuine enthusiasm much hitherto regarded as obsolete and too little appreciated by their times, the works of the older Italian masters, for example, and certain Flemish paintings, as also the “Niebelungen Lied” among other things; despite the fact that they even endeavoured with zeal to acquire knowledge of matter barely known at all, such as the poetry and mythology of India, nevertheless they not only attached too high an importance to the works of such a period, but also themselves committed the mistake of admiring works of very average merit, such as the comedies of Holberg, or of attaching an absolute value to what possessed a purely relative worth, or even of boldly proving themselves the enthusiasts of a perverse tendency and a subordinate standpoint as though one of first-rate importance.

From this tendency, and particularly from the opinions122 and doctrines of Friedrich von Schlegel, issued in all its manifold forms the so-called Irony. The idea had its profounder root, as to one of its aspects, in the philosophy of Fichte, in so far as the principles of that philosophy were applied to art. Friedrich von Schlegel, as also Schelling, made the standpoint of Fichte their point of departure. Schelling passed wholly beyond it; Fried, von Schlegel elaborated it in his own peculiar fashion, and then flung himself free of it. With reference to the more intimate connection of the doctrines of Fichte with one tendency of this irony, it is only necessary to emphasize the following point in our present context, namely this, that Fichte posits the Ego as the absolute principle of all knowledge, reason, and cognition, and in fact posits it as the Ego which persists throughout in its abstraction of pure form. For this reason this Ego is, in the second place, wholly and essentially simple, and, on the one hand, it is the negation of every particularity, attribute — in short, every content — for every positive subject-matter123 is overwhelmed in this abstract freedom and unity. On the other hand, every content, which is to pass muster for the Ego, is posited and recognized as exclusively so in virtue of the activity of the Ego. Whatever is, is only in virtue of the Ego; whatever is through me (that is, my Ego) I am in turn able to annihilate.

Now if we abide in these entirely vacant forms, which originate in the absoluteness of the abstract Ego, nothing can then be regarded as of value in itself, that is, essentially and on its own account124. It is exclusively produced by the subjectivity of the Ego. But this being so, it follows that the Ego remains lord and master over everything. In no sphere of morals or law, of all that is human or divine, profane or sacred, is there anything at all which would not in the first instance have to be posited by the Ego, and which consequently could not equally be nullified by the same agency. This is nothing less than making all that exists on its own actual and independent warranty a mere semblance, not true and a part of reality on account of itself and by its own instrumentality, but a mere show in virtue of the Ego, within whose power and caprice it remains at the free disposition of such. To suffer its presence and to destroy it stands purely in the favour of the Ego, which has attained the absolute standpoint as essentially the Ego, that and nothing more than that.

Thirdly, the Ego is a living, active individual, and its life consists in bringing home its individuality to itself no less than to others, in giving expression to itself and revealing itself among phenomena125. For every man during his life endeavours to realize himself and does realize himself. In relation to the beautiful and art this means that he lives the life of an artist, and shapes his life artistically. But, according to the principle now discussed, I live as artist when all my action and expression whatever, in so far as it has to do with a content, is for myself on the plane of mere semblance, and assumes a formal content which is wholly at my disposal. So I am not truly serious either about this content or, speaking generally, about its expression and realization. Genuine seriousness only issues from a substantive interest, a subject-matter which itself possesses a rich content, such as truth, morality, and so on — in other words, from a content which as it stands I regard as essential, so that I only become essential on my own account, in so far as I have absorbed myself in such a content, and have come to conform myself to it in the entire range of my thought and action. At the standpoint at which the artist is the Ego, which both posits and resolves everything through its own essential fiat126, for which no content of consciousness appears as absolute and essentially independent, but only as itself a semblance created and destroyable, such seriousness can find no place, nothing here receiving a right to be save the formalism of the Ego.

No doubt for others my self-revealment, in which I appear to them, may be taken seriously, inasmuch as they interpret me as though in reality I was in earnest about the business; but therein they are deluded, poor, borné creatures, without the faculty or the power to comprehend and attain to the height of my argument. And by this it is brought home to me that everyone is not so free (e.g., that is formally free) as to see in all which is usually of value, dignity and sanctity to mankind, merely a product of each man’s own possibilities of inclination, which is operative in permitting him to determine and make rich the course of his life, or the reverse. It is thus that this virtuosity of your ironical artist’s life comes to be credited as some god-like geniality, for which every conceivable thing is a purely spectral creature, to which the free creator, knowing himself to be absolutely unattached, does not yoke himself, for he can ever annihilate the same no less than create it. Whoever has reached such a standpoint of god-like geniality consequently looks down in his superior fashion on all other mortals. They are ruled out as narrow and dull, in so far, that is, as law, morals, and the rest retain for them a validity that is assured, obligatory, and essential. And the individual who thus lives this artist life, which he does no doubt associate with others, whether friends or mistresses or I know not what, yet as man of genius sets no real stock on such relations as they stand to his individual personality and particular actions. All these are as nothing in their contrast to the universal which is his in its own and independent warranty, namely that genius which faces all such with irony. This is the universal import of the genial god-like irony as this concentration of the Ego in itself, for which all bands are broken, and which can only live in the bliss of self-enjoyment. This irony was the discovery of Herr Fried, von Schlegel, and many have chattered about it after him, or it may be are giving us a fresh sample of such chatter.

The proximate form of this negativity which has been called irony is, then, on the one hand, the illusory nature127 of all that is matter of fact, or moral, or of substantive content, the nothingness of all that is objective and of essential and independent worth. So long as the Ego adheres to such, a standpoint as this, everything appears to be null and void, the personal subjectivity alone excepted, which thereby becomes hollow and empty, and nothing but conceit itself. Conversely, however, from the opposite point of view, the Ego may also fail to find satisfaction in this self-delight; it may prove an insufficient supply to its craving, so that it now feels a thirst for what is secure and substantive, definite and essential interests. From a situation such as this there arises unhappiness and the contradiction, that whereas, on the one hand, the individual seeks to penetrate into truth and longs after objectivity, yet on the other he is unable to divest himself of this isolation and self-seclusion, is unable to overcome this unsatisfied and abstract soul-inwardness, and consequently is seized with a fit of sentimental yearning, which we have also marked as one of the emanations of the philosophy of Fichte. The discontent of this quiescence and impotence, which is unable either to act or set its hands to anything, lest it have to surrender the harmony within, and which remains unreal and empty, even though it may be essentially unflecked, despite all its craving for reality and the absolute — is the source of morbid saintliness128 and yearning. A soul that is fair or saintly in a true sense acts and is a reality. But all that yearning and heart burning is merely the feeling of the nothingness of the empty and vain personage, who has it, and yet has not the power to cast himself adrift of this empty void, and fill himself with that which is solid and substantive. In so far, however, as the irony is made an art type it did not restrict itself in giving artistic shape to the life and particular individuality of the man who appropriated the irony. Over and beyond the artistic content of his own actions, etc., the artist had also to produce objective works of art as the creations of his imagination. The principle of such productions, which mainly are confined to the domain of poetry, is once more the display of the god-like as Irony. The ironical here, however, as genial individuality, consists in the self-annihilation of what is noble, great, and excellent. Consequently the independent figures of art will also have to illustrate the principle of absolute subjectivity, and to do so by exhibiting all that is of human worth and dignity as a mere naught in this process of self-annihilation. This implies not merely that we are not to take seriously justice, morality and truth, but that there is really nothing in what is highest and best. In short it amounts to this, that irony contradicts and annihilates itself as manifested in individuals, characters and actions, and consequently is an irony which overreaches itself129. This mode or art-type, abstractly considered, approaches closely to the principle of comedy. At the same time we ought fundamentally to distinguish the comic from the ironical as thus associated. For the comic must be limited to the making null what is essentially itself of no worth, that is to say, a false and contradictory appearance, a whim, for instance, a piece of egotism, a particular caprice, as set over against a mighty passion; or even some principle, assumed to be efficacious, or rigid maxims may be thus exposed in their nullity. But it is wholly a different matter, when what is in fact moral and true, generally something with really substantive core, is asserted in an individual and through the same as essentially of no account. Such an individual is then nugatory and despicable in his character, and the weakness and absence of character are thus introduced into the representation. In this distinction, therefore, between the ironical and the comic the point of real importance is what is the nature of the content which is destroyed. They are in the case of irony evil, good for nothing subjects, persons unable to hold staunchly to their fixed and important purposes, only too ready to give it up and to permit its destruction within them. Your “Irony” loves this irony of the characterless. For true character implies on the one hand an essential substance in its purpose, and on the other adherence to such a purpose, so that individuality would be rifled of its veritable existence, if it was compelled to let it drop and give it up. This doggedness and stability constitutes the keynote of character. Cato can only live as Roman and republican. Now if irony is made the keynote of the representation, we have the extreme antithesis to art accepted as the true principle of the work of art. For what we have here is in part insipid figures, in part figures that have neither content nor defined position130. Seeing that what is of substance in them is proved to be an illusion. And, last of all, we have into the bargain those yearning floods and unresolved contradictions of the soul. Compositions of this kind are not likely to arouse real interest. And for this very reason it is precisely from the advocates of this Irony that we have the continuous round of lament over the public’s want of critical sense, artistic insight and genius, which of course cannot appreciate the lofty ways of such an Irony; in other words what the public does not like is this very mediocrity, which is the half of it mere trifling131, and the other half without distinctive character. And it is right that these spectre-like, moon-shine gazing natures are no favourites; it is a comfort to think that this insincerity and hypocrisy is not in fashion, and that what men, on the contrary, demand imperatively are full and veritable interests, and no less so characters which remain true to the weighty substance at their core. We may add as a matter of historical interest that it was Solger and Ludwig Tieck who above all accepted irony as the highest principle of art.

This is not the place to speak of Solger at the length he really merits; and I must content myself with a few general remarks. Solger was not, as the others were, satisfied with a superficial philosophical culture. A truly speculative impulse of his innermost nature made him probe the very depths of the philosophical idea. And in doing so he came upon the dialectical phase of the Idea, that transition point which I call the infinite absolute negativity, the activity of the idea in its negation of itself as infinite and universal, in order to pass into finiteness and particularity, and with no less truth once more in order to annul this negation, and in so doing to establish again the universal and infinite within the finite and particular. Solger did not get beyond this negativity; and unquestionably it is a phase132 in the speculative idea; but nevertheless, as exclusively conceived in this dialectic unrest and dissolution of the infinite no less than the finite, it is only such a phase contributory, and not, as Solger imagined, the Entire Idea. Unfortunately Solger’s life was too early broken off to permit him to grasp the concrete evolvement of the philosophical Idea in all it implies. And so he never got beyond this aspect of negativity, which possesses an affinity with the dissolution by irony of all that is determinate no less than essentially substantive, a negative movement which he identified with the principle of artistic activity. Yet in the actual conditions of his life, and with due reference to the stability, seriousness, and sterling qualities of his character, he was neither himself an ironic artist in the sense we have previously described, nor was his really profound instinct for true works of art, a sense which a long course of study of art had developed greatly, either of such an ironical character. So much we will venture in the vindication of Solger, whose life, philosophy, and actual contributions to art merit being wholly kept separate from the apostles of irony previously named.

With regard to Ludwig Tieck, his culture, too, dates from that period in which Jena was the literary centre. Tieck and others who belonged to these superior people are on excellent terms with such modes of expression, without being able to tell us much what they mean. Thus Tieck always insists on the importance of Irony. But when it comes to delivering judgment on great works of art, though his recognition and description of their greatness is no doubt beyond reproach, yet if one imagines that in any particular example — let us say “Romeo and Juliet” — we have the opportunity put for an explanation of that in which here the irony consists, we are wide of the mark. We hear nothing more whatever about Irony.

V133

After the above introductory observations we may now pass on to the consideration of our subject itself. We are, however, still within the introduction; and being so I do not propose to attempt anything more than indicate by way of sketch the main outlines of the general course of the scientific inquiry which is to follow it. Inasmuch, however, as we have referred to art as issuing from the absolute Idea itself, and, indeed, have assigned as its end the sensuous presentation of the Absolute itself, it will be incumbent on us to conduct this survey of the entire field in such a way, as at least to disclose generally, how the particular parts originate in the notional concept of the beauty of art. We must therefore attempt to awaken some idea of this notion in its broadest significance.

It has already been stated that the content of art is the Idea, and the form of its display the configuration of the sensuous or plastic image. It is further the function of art to mediate these two aspects under the reconciled mode of free totality. The first determinant implied by this is the demand that the content, which has to secure artistic representation, shall disclose an essential capacity for such display. If this is not so all that we possess is a defective combination. A content that, independently, is ill adapted to plastic form and external presentment is compelled to accept this form, or a matter that is of itself prosaic in its character is driven to make the best it can of a mode of presentation which is antagonistic to its nature.

The second requirement, which is deducible from the first, is the demand that the content of art should be nothing essentially abstracts This does not mean, however, that it should be merely concrete in the sense that the sensuous object is such in its contrast to all that is spiritual and the content of thought, regarding these as the essentially simple and abstract. Everything that possesses truth for Spirit; no less than, as part of Nature, is essentially concrete, and, despite its universality, possesses both ideality134 and particularity essentially within it. When we state, for example, of God that he is simple One, the Supreme Being as such, we have thereby merely given utterance to a lifeless abstraction of the irrational understanding. Such a God, as He is thus not conceived in His concrete truth, can supply no content for art, least of all plastic art. Consequently neither the Jews nor the Turks have been able to represent their God, who is not even an abstraction of the understanding in the above sense, under the positive mode in which Christians have represented Him. For in Christianity God is conceived in His Truth, and as such essentially concrete, as personality135, as the subjective focus of conscious life, or, more accurately defined, as Spirit. And what He is as Spirit is made explicit to the religious apprehension as a trinity of persons, which at the same time are, in their independence, regarded as One. Here is essentiality, universality, and particularity, no less than their reconciled unity, and it is only a unity such as this which gives us the concrete. And inasmuch as a content, in order to unveil truth at all, must be of this concrete character, art makes the demand for a like concreteness, and, for this reason, that a purely abstract universal does not in itself possess the property to proceed to particularity and external manifestation, and to unity with itself therein.

If, then, a sensuous form and configuration is to be correspondent with a true and therefore concrete content, such must in the third place likewise be as clearly individual, entirely concrete and a self-enclosed unity. This character of concreteness, predicable of both aspects of art, the content no less than the representation, is just the point in which both coalesce and fall in with one another. The natural form of the human body is, for example, such a sensuous concrete capable of displaying Spirit in its essential concreteness and of adapting itself wholly to such a presentment. For which reason we must quit ourselves of the idea that it is a matter of mere accident that an actual phenomenon of the objective world is accepted as the mode in which to embody such a form coalescent with truth. Art does not lay hold of this form either because it is simply there or because there is no other. The concrete content itself implies the presence of external and actual, we may even add the sensuous appearance. But to make this possible this sensuous concrete, which is essentially impressed with a content that is open to mind, is also essentially addressed to the inward conscious life, and the external mode of its configuration, whereby it is visible to perception and the world of idea, has for its aim the being there exclusively for the soul and mind of man. This is the sole reason that content and artistic conformation are dovetailed one into the other. The purely sensuous concrete, that is external Nature as such, does not exclusively originate in such an end. The variously coloured plumage of birds is resplendent unseen; the notes of this song are unheard. The Cereus136, which only blossoms for a night, withers away without any admiration from another in the wilderness of the southern forests; and these forests, receptacles themselves of the most beautiful and luxuriant vegetation, with the richest and most aromatic perfumes, perish and collapse in like manner unenjoyed. The work of art has no such naïve and independent being. It is essentially a question, an address to the responding soul of man, an appeal to affections and intelligence.

Although the endowment by art of sensuous shape is not in this respect accidental, yet on the other hand it is not the highest mode of grasping the spiritually concrete. Thought is a higher mode of presentment than that of the sensuous concrete. Though abstract in a relative sense; yet it must not be one-sided, but concrete thinking, in order to be true and rational. The extent to which a definite content possesses for its appropriate form sensuous artistic representation, or essentially requires, in virtue of its nature, a higher and more spiritual embodiment is a question of difference exemplified at once if we compare the Greek gods with God as conceived under Christian ideas. The Greek god is not abstract, but individual, and is in close association with the natural human form. The Christian God is also, no doubt, a concrete personality, but under the mode of pure spiritual actuality, who is cognized as Spirit and in Spirit137. His medium of determinate existence is therefore essentially knowledge of the mind and not external natural shape, by means of which His representation can only be imperfect, and not in the entire depths of His idea or notional concept.

Inasmuch, however, as it is the function of art to represent the Idea to immediate vision in sensuous shape and not in the form of thought and pure spirituality in the strict sense, and inasmuch as the value and intrinsic worth of this presentment consists in the correspondence and unity of the two aspects, that is the Idea and its sensuous shape, the supreme level and excellence of art and the reality, which is truly consonant with its notion, will depend upon the degree of intimacy and union with which idea and configuration appear together in elaborated fusion. The higher truth consequently is spiritual content which has received the shape adequate to the conception of its essence; and this it is which supplies the principle of division for the philosophy of art. For before the mind can attain to the true notion of its absolute essence, it is constrained to traverse a series of stages rooted in this very notional concept; and to this course of stages which it unfolds to itself, corresponds a coalescent series, immediately related therewith, of the plastic types of art, under the configuration whereof mind as art-spirit presents to itself the consciousness of itself138.

This evolution within the art-spirit has further itself two sides in virtue of its intrinsic nature. First, that is to say, the development is itself a spiritual and universal one; in other words there are the definite and comprehensive views of the world139 in their series of gradations which give artistic embodiment to the specific but widely embracing consciousness of Nature, man, and God. Secondly, this ideal or universal art-development has to provide for itself immediate existence and sensuous configuration, and the definite modes of this art-actualization in the sensuous medium are themselves a totality of necessary distinctions in the realm of art — that is to say, they are the particular types of art. No doubt the types of artistic configuration on the one hand are, in respect to their spirituality, of a general character, and not restricted to any one material, and the sensuous existence is similarly itself of varied multiplicity of medium. Inasmuch, however, as this material potentially possesses, precisely as the mind or spirit does, the Idea for its inward soul or significance, it follows that a definite sensuous involves with itself a closer relation and secret bond of association with the spiritual-distinctions and specific types of artistic embodiment140.

Relatively to these points of view our philosophy will divided into three fundamental parts.

First, we have a general part. It has for its content object the universal Idea of fine art, conceived here as the Ideal, together with the more elaborated relation under which it is placed respectively to Nature and human artistic production.

Secondly, we have evolved from the notional concept of the beauty of art a particular part, in so far as the essential distinctions, which this idea contains in itself, are unfolded in a graduated series of particular modes of configuration141.

Thirdly, there results a final part which has to consider the particularized content of fine art itself. It consists in the advance of art to the sensuous realization of its shapes and its consummation in a system of the several arts and their genera and species.

In respect to the first and second of these divisions it is important to recollect, in order to make all that follows intelligible, that the Idea, viewed as the beautiful in art, is not the Idea in the strict sense, that is as a metaphysical Logic apprehends it as the Absolute. It is rather the Idea as carried into concrete form in the direction of express realization, and as having entered into immediate and adequate unity with such reality. For the Idea as such, although it is both potentially and explicitly true, is only truth in its universality and not as yet presented in objective embodiment. The Idea as fine art, however, is the Idea with the more specific property of being essentially individual reality, in other words, an individual configuration of reality whose express function it is to make manifest the Idea — in its appearance. This amounts to the demand that the Idea and its formative configuration as concrete realization must be brought together under a mode of complete adequacy. The Idea as so conceived, a reality, that is to-say, moulded in conformity with the notional concept of the Idea, is the Ideal. The problem of such consonancy might, in the first instance, be understood in the wholly formal sense that the Idea might be any idea so long as the actual shape, it matters not what the shape might be, represented this particular Idea and no other. In that case, however, the required truth of the Ideal is a fact simply interchangeable with mere correctness, a correctness which consists in the expression of any significance in a manner adapted to it, provided that its meaning is thereby directly discoverable in the form. The Ideal, however, is not to be thus understood. According to the standard or test of its own nature any content whatever can receive adequate presentation, but it does not necessarily thereby possess a claim to be the fine art of the Ideal. Nay, more, in comparison with ideal beauty the presentation will even appear defective. And in this connection we may once for all observe — though actual proof is reserved to a later stage — that the defects of a work of art are not invariably to be attributed to defects of executive skill. Defectiveness of form arises also from defectiveness of content. The Chinese, Hindoos, and Egyptians, for example, in their artistic images, sculptured deities and idols, never passed beyond a formless condition, or a definition of shape that was vicious and false, and were unable to master true beauty. And this was so for the reason that their mythological conceptions, the content and thought of their works of art, were still essentially indeterminate, or only determinate in a false sense, did not, in fact, attain to a content which was absolute in itself. Viewed in this sense the excellence of works of art is so much the greater in the degree that their content and thought is ideal and profound. And in affirming this we have not merely in our mind the degree of executive mastery displayed in the grasp and imitation of natural form as we find it in the objective world. For in certain stages of the artistic consciousness and its reproductive effects the desertion and distortion of the conformations of Nature is not so much due to unintentional technical inexperience or lack of ability, as it is to deliberate alteration, which originates in the mental content itself, and is demanded by the same. From this point of view there is therefore imperfect art, which, both in technical and other respects, may be quite consummate in its own specific sphere, yet if tested with the true notion of art and the Ideal can only appear as defective. Only in the highest art are the Idea and the artistic presentation truly consonant with one another in the sense that the objective embodiment of the Idea is in itself essentially and as realized the true configuration, because the content of the Idea thus expressed is itself in truth the genuine content. It is appertinent to this, as already noted, that the Idea must be defined in and through itself as concrete totality, thereby essentially possessing in itself the principle and standard of its particularization and definition as thus manifested objectively. For example, the Christian imagination will only be able to represent God in human form and with man’s means of spiritual expression, because it is herein that God Himself is fully known in Himself as mind or Spirit. Determinacy is, as it were, the bridge to phenomenal presence. Where this determinacy is not totality derived from the Idea itself, where the Idea is not conceived as that which is self-definitive and self-differentiating, it remains abstract and possesses its definition, and with it the principle for the particular mode of embodiment adapted to itself not within itself but as something outside it. And owing to this the Idea is also still abstract and the configuration it assumes is not as yet posited by itself. The Idea, however, which is essentially concrete, carries the principle of its manifestation in itself, and is thereby the means of its own free manifestation. Thus it is only the truly concrete Idea that is able to evoke the true embodiment, and this appropriate coalescence of both is the Ideal.
But inasmuch as in this way the Idea is concrete unity, this unity can only enter the artistic consciousness by the expansion and further mediation of the particular aspects of the Idea; and it is through this evolution that the beauty of art receives a totality of particular stages and forms. Therefore, after we have considered fine art in its essence and on its own account, we must see how the beautiful in its entirety breaks up into its particular determinations. This gives, as our second part, the doctrine of the types of art. The origin of these types is to be found in the varied ways under which the Idea is conceived as the content of art; it is by this means that a distinction in the mode of form under which it manifests itself is conditioned. These types are therefore simply the different modes of relation which obtain between the Idea and its configuration, relations which emanate from the Idea itself, and thereby present us with the general basis of division for this sphere. For the principle of division must always be found in the notional concept, the particularization and division of which it is.

We have here to consider three relations of the Idea to its external process of configuration.

(a) First, the origin of artistic creation proceeds from the Idea when, being itself still involved in defective definition and obscurity, or in vicious and untrue determinacy, it becomes embodied in the shapes of art. As indeterminate it does not as yet possess in itself that individuality which the Ideal demands. Its abstract character and one-sidedness leaves its objective presentment still defective and contingent. Consequently this first type of art is rather a mere search after plastic configuration than a power of genuine representation. The Idea has not as yet found the formative principle within itself, and therefore still continues to be the mere effort and strain to find it. We may in general terms describe this form as the symbolic type of art. The abstract Idea possesses in it its external shape outside itself in the purely material substance of Nature, from which the shaping process proceeds, and to which in its expression it is entirely yoked. Natural objects are thus in the first instance left just as they are, while, at the same time the substantive Idea is imposed upon them as their significance, so that their function is henceforth to express the same, and they claim to be interpreted, as though the Idea itself was present in them. A rationale of this is to be found in the fact that the external objects of reality do essentially possess an aspect in which they are qualified to express a universal import. But as a completely adequate coalescence is not yet possible, all that can be the outcome of such a relation is an abstract attribute, as when a lion is understood to symbolize strength.

On the other hand this abstractness of the relation makes present to consciousness no less markedly how the Idea stands relatively to natural phenomena as an alien; and albeit it expatiates in all these shapes, having no other means of expression among all that is real, and seeks after itself in their unrest and defects of genuine proportion, yet for all that it finds them inadequate to meet its needs. It consequently exaggerates natural shapes and the phenomena of Nature in every degree of indefinite and limitless extension; it flounders about in them like a drunkard, and seethes and ferments, doing violence to their truth with the distorted growth of unnatural shapes, and strives vainly by the contrast, hugeness, and splendour of the forms accepted to exalt the phenomena to the plane of the Idea. For the Idea is here still more or less indeterminate, and unadaptable, while the objects of Nature are wholly definite in their shape.

Hence, on account of the incompatibility of the two sides of ideality and objective form to one another, the relation of the Idea to the other becomes a negative one. The former, being in its nature ideal, is unsatisfied with such an embodiment, and posits itself as its inward or ideally universal substance under a relation of sublimity over and above all this inadequate superfluity of natural form. In virtue of this sublimity the natural phenomena, of course, and the human form and event are accepted and left simply as they are, but at the same time, recognized as unequal to their significance, which is exalted far above all earthly content.

These features constitute in general terms the character of the primitive artistic pantheism of the East, which, on the one hand, charges the meanest objects with the significance of the absolute Idea, or, on the other, compels natural form, by doing violence to its structure, to express its world-ideas. And, in consequence, it becomes bizarre, grotesque, and deficient in taste, or turns the infinite but abstract freedom of the substantive Idea contemptuously against all phenomenal existence as alike nugatory and evanescent. By such means the significance cannot be completely presented in the expression, and despite all straining and endeavour the final inadequacy of plastic configuration to Idea remains insuperable. Such may be accepted as the first type of art — symbolic art with its yearning, its fermentation, its mystery, and sublimity.

(b) In the second type of art, which we propose to call “Classical,” the twofold defect of symbolic art is annulled. Now the symbolic configuration is imperfect, because, first, the Idea here only enters into consciousness in abstract determinacy or indeterminateness: and, secondly, by reason of the fact that the coalescence of import with embodiment can only throughout remain defective, and in its turn also wholly abstract. The classical art-type solves both these difficulties. It is, in fact, the free and adequate embodiment of the Idea in the shape which, according to its notional concept, is uniquely appropriate to the Idea itself. The Idea is consequently able to unite in free and completely assonant concord with it. For this reason the classical type of art is the first to present us with the creation and vision of the complete Ideal, and to establish the same as realized fact.

The conformability, however, of notion and reality in the classical type ought not to be taken in the purely formal sense of the coalescence of a content with its external form, any more than this was possible in the case of the Ideal. Otherwise every copy from Nature, and every kind of portrait, every landscape, flower, scene, and so forth, which form the aim of the presentment, would at once become classical in virtue of the fact of the agreement it offers between such content and form. In classical art, on the contrary, the characteristic feature of the content consists in this, that it is itself concrete Idea, and as such the concrete spiritual; for it is only that which pertains to Spirit which is veritable ideality142. To secure such a content we must find out that in Nature which on its own account is that which is essentially and explicitly appropriate to the spiritual. It must be the original notion itself143, which has invented the form for concrete spirituality, and now the subjective notion — in the present case the spirit of art — has merely discovered it, and made it, as an existence possessed of natural shape, concordant with free and individual spirituality. Such a configuration, which the Idea essentially possesses as spiritual, and indeed as individually determinate spirituality, when it must perforce appear as a temporal phenomenon, is the human form. Personification and anthropomorphism have frequently been abused as a degradation of the spiritual. But art, in so far as its function is to bring to vision the spiritual in sensuous guise, must advance to such anthropomorphism, inasmuch as Spirit is only adequately presented to perception in its bodily presence. The transmigration of souls in this respect an abstract conception144, and physiology ought to make it one of its fundamental principles, that life has necessarily, in the course of its evolution, to proceed to the human form, for the reason that it is alone the visible phenomenon adequate to the expression of intelligence.

The human bodily form, then, is employed in the classical type of art not as purely sensuous existence, but exclusively as the existence and natural shape appropriate to mind. It has therefore to be relieved of all the defective excrescences which adhere to it in its purely physical aspect, and from the contingent finiteness of its phenomenal appearance. The external shape must in this way be purified in order to express in itself the content adequate for such a purpose; and, furthermore, along with this, that the coalescence of import and embodiment may be complete, the spirituality which constitutes the content must be of such a character that it is completely able to express itself in the natural form of man, without projecting beyond the limits of such expression within the sensuous and purely physical sphere of existence. Under such a condition Spirit is at the same time defined as particular, the spirit or mind of man, not as simply absolute and eternal. In this latter case it is only capable of asserting and expressing itself as intellectual being145.

Out of this latter distinction arises, in its turn, the defect which brings about the dissolution of the classical type of art, and makes the demand for a third and higher form, namely the romantic type.

(c) The romantic type of art annuls the completed union of the Idea and its reality, and occurs, if on a higher plane, to the difference and opposition of both sides, which remained unovercome in symbolic art. The classical type of art no doubt attained the highest excellence of which the sensuous embodiment of art is capable. The defect, such as it is, is due to the defect which obtains in art itself throughout, the limitations of its entire province, that is to say. The limitation consists in this, that art in general and, agreeably to its fundamental idea, accepts for its object Spirit, the notion of which is infinite concrete universality, under the guise of sensuously concrete form. In the classical type it sets up the perfected coalescence of spiritual and sensuous existence as adequate conformation of both. As a matter of fact, however, in this fusion mind itself is not represented agreeably to its true notional concept. Mind is the infinite subjectivity of the Idea, which as absolute inwardness146, is not capable of freely expanding in its entire independence, so long as it remains within the mould of the bodily shape, fused therein as in the existence wholly congenial to it.

To escape from such a condition the romantic type of art once more cancels that inseparable unity of the classical type, by securing a content which passes beyond the classical stage and its mode of expression. This content, if we may recall familiar ideas — is coincident with what Christianity affirms to be true of God as Spirit, in contrast to the Greek faith in gods which forms the essential and most fitting content of classical art. In Greek art the concrete ideal substance is potentially, but not as fully realized, the unity of the human and divine nature; a unity which for the very reason that it is purely immediate and not wholly explicit, is manifested without defect under an immediate and sensuous mode. The Greek god is the object of naïve intuition and sensuous imagination. His shape is therefore the bodily form of man. The sphere of his power and his being is individual and individually limited; and in his opposition to the individual person147 is an essence and a power with whom the inward life of soul148 is merely potentially in unity, but does not itself possess this unity as inward subjective knowledge. The higher stage is the knowledge of this implied unity, which in its latency the classical art-type receives as its content and is able to perfectly represent in bodily shape. This elevation of mere potentiality into self-conscious knowledge constitutes an enormous difference. It is nothing less than the infinite difference which, for example, separates man generally from the animal creation. Man is animal; but even in his animal functions he is not restricted within the potential sphere as the animal is, but becomes conscious of them, learns to understand them, and raises them — as, for instance, the process of digestion — into self-conscious science. By this means man dissolves the boundaries of his merely potential immediacy; in virtue of the very fact that he knows himself to be animal he ceases to be merely animal, and as mind is endowed with self-knowledge.

If, then, in this way the unity of the human and divine nature, which in the previous stage was potential, is raised out of this immediate into a self-conscious unity, it follows that the genuine medium for the reality of this content is no longer the sensuous and immediate existence of what is spiritual, that is, the physical body of man, but the self-aware inner life of soul itself. Now it is Christianity — for the reason that it presents to mind God as Spirit, and not as the particular individual spirit, but as absolute in spirit and in truth — which steps back from the sensuousness of imagination into the inward life of reason, and makes this rather than bodily form the medium and determinate existence of its content. So also, the unity of the human and divine nature is a conscious unity exclusively capable of realization by means of spiritual knowledge, and in Spirit. The new content secured thereby is consequently not indefeasibly bound up with the sensuous presentation, as the mode completely adequate, but is rather delivered from this immediate existence, which has to be hypostatized as a negative factor, overcome and reflected back into the spiritual unity. In this way romantic art must be regarded as art transcending itself, albeit within the boundary of its own province, and in the form of art itself.

We may therefore briefly summarize our conclusion that in this third stage the object of art consists in the free and concrete presence of spiritual activity149, whose vocation it is to appear as such a presence or activity for the inner world of conscious intelligence. In consonance with such an object art cannot merely work for sensuous perception. It must deliver itself to the inward life, which coalesces with its object simply as though this were none other than itself150, in other words, to the intimacy of soul, to the heart, the emotional life, which as the medium of Spirit itself essentially strives after freedom, and seeks and possesses its reconciliation only in the inner chamber of spirit. It is this inward or ideal world which constitutes the content of the romantic sphere: it will therefore necessarily discover its representation as such inner idea or feeling, and in the show or appearance of the same. The world of the soul and intelligence celebrates its triumph over the external world, and, actually in the medium of that outer world, makes that victory to appear, by reason of which the sensuous appearance sinks into worthlessness.

On the other hand, this type of art, like every other, needs an external vehicle of expression. As already stated, the spiritual content has here withdrawn from the external world and its immediate unity into its own world. The sensuous externality of form is consequently accepted and represented, as in the symbolic type, as unessential and transient; furthermore the subjective finite spirit and volition is treated in a similar way; a treatment which even includes the idiosyncrasies or caprice of individuals, character, action, or the particular features of incident and plot. The aspect of external existence is committed to contingency and handed over to the adventurous action of imagination, whose caprice is just as able to reflect the facts given as they are151, as it can change the shapes of the external world into a medley of its own invention and distort them to mere caricature. For this external element has no longer its notion and significance in its own essential province, as in classical art. It is now discovered in the emotional realm, and this is manifested in the medium of that realm itself rather than in the external and its form of reality, and is able to secure or to recover again the condition of reconciliation with itself in every accident, in all the chance circumstance that falls into independent shape, in all misfortune and sorrow, nay, in crime itself.

Hence it comes about that the characteristics of symbolic art, its indifference, incompatibility and severance of Idea from configurative expression, are here reproduced once more, if with essential difference. And this difference consists in the fact that in romantic art the Idea, whose defectiveness, in the case of the symbol, brought with it the defect of external form, has to display itself as Spirit and in the medium of soul-life as essentially self-complete. And it is to complete fundamentally this higher perfection that it withdraws itself from the external element, It can, in short, seek and consummate its true reality and manifestation nowhere but in its own domain.

This we may take to be in general terms the character of the symbolic, classical, and romantic types of art, which in fact constitute the three relations of the Idea to its embodiment in the realm of human art. They consist in the aspiration after, the attainment and transcendency of the Ideal, viewed as the true concrete notion of beauty.

In contrast to these two previous divisions of our subject the third part presupposes the notional concept of the Ideal, and the universal art-types. It in other words consists in their realization through specific sensuous media. We have consequently no longer to deal with the inner or ideal evolution of the beauty of art in conformity with its widest and most fundamental determinations. What we have now before us to consider is how these ideal determinants pass into actual existence, how they are distinguishable in their external aspect, and how they give an independent and a realized shape to every element implied in the evolution of this Idea of beauty as a work of art, and not merely as a universal type. Now it is the peculiar differences immanent in the Idea of beauty which are carried over by it into external existence. For this reason in this third fundamental division these general art-types must themselves supply the basic principle for the articulation and definition of the particular arts. Or, to put the same thing another way, the several species of art possess in themselves the same essential differences, which we have already become acquainted with as the universal art-types. External objectivity, however, to which these types are subjected in a sensuous and consequently specific material, necessitates the differentiation of these types into diverse and independent modes of realization, in other words, those of particular arts. Each general type discovers its determinate character in one determinate external material or medium, in which its adequate presentation is secured under the manner it prescribes. But, from another point of view, these types of art, inasmuch as their definition is none the less consistent with the fact of the universality of their typical import, break through the boundaries of their specific realization in some definite art-species, and achieve an existence in other arts no less, although their position in such is of subordinate importance. For this reason, albeit the particular arts belong specifically to one of these general art-types respectively, the adequate external embodiment whereof they severally constitute, yet this does not prevent them, each after its own mode of external configuration, from representing the totality of these art-types152. To summarize, then, in this third principal division we are dealing with the beauty of art, as it unveils itself in a world of realized beauty by means of the arts and their creations. The content of this world is the beautiful, and the true beautiful, as we have seen, is spiritual being in concrete form, the Ideal; or apprehended with still more intimacy it is the absolute mind and truth itself. This region of divine truth artistically presented to sensuous vision and emotion forms the centre of the entire world of art. It is the independent, free and divine Image153, which has completely appropriated the externality of form and medium, and now wears them simply as the means of its self-manifestation. Inasmuch, however, as the beautiful is unfolded here as objective reality, and in this process is differentiated into particular aspects and phases, this centre posits its extremes, as realized in their peculiar actuality, in antithetical relation to itself. Thus one of these extremes consists of an objectivity as yet devoid of mind, which we may call the natural environment of God. Here the external element, when it receives form, remains as it was, and does not possess its spiritual aim and content in itself, but in another154. The other extreme is the divine as inward, something known, as the manifold particularized subjective existence of Deity. It is the truth as operative and vital in sense, soul, and intelligence of particular persons, which does not persist as poured forth into its mould of external shape, but returns into the inward life of individuals. The Divine is under such a mode at once distinguishable from its pure manifestation as Godhead, and passes itself thereby into the variety of particularization which belongs to every kind of particular subjective knowledge, feeling, perception, and emotion. In the analogous province of religion with which art, at its highest elevation, is immediately connected, we conceive the same distinction as follows. First, we imagine the natural life on Earth in its finitude as standing on one side; but then, secondly, the human consciousness accepts God for its object, in which the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity falls away; then, finally, we advance from God as such to the devotion of the community, that is to God as He is alive and present in the subjective consciousness. These three fundamental modifications present themselves in the world of art in independent evolution.

(a) The first of the particular arts with which, according to their fundamental principle, we have to start is architecture considered as a fine art. Its function consists in so elaborating the external material of inorganic Nature that the same becomes intimately connected with Spirit as an artistic and external environment. Its medium is matter itself as an external object, a heavy mass that is subject to mechanical laws; and its forms persist as the forms of inorganic Nature co-ordinated with the relations of the abstract understanding such as symmetry and so forth. In this material and in these forms the Ideal is incapable of realization as concrete spirituality, and the reality thus presented remains confronting the Idea as an external fabric with which it enters into no fusion, or has only entered so far as to establish an abstract relation. And it is in consequence of this that the fundamental type of the art of building is that of symbolism. Architecture is in fact the first pioneer on the highway toward the adequate realization of Godhead. In this service it is put to severe labour with objective nature, that it may disengage it by its effort from the confused growth of finitude and the distortions of contingency. By this means it levels a space for the God, informs His external environment, and builds Him His temple, as a fit place for the concentration of Spirit, and its direction to the absolute objects of intelligent life. It raises an enclosure for the congregation of those assembled, as a defence against the threatening of the tempest, against rain, the hurricane, and savage animals. It in short reveals the will thus to assemble, and although under an external relation, yet in agreement with the principles of art. A significance such as this it can to a greater or less extent import into its material and its forms, in proportion as the determinate content of its fabric, which is the object of its operations and effort, is more or less significant, is more concrete or more abstract, more profound in penetrating its own essential depth, or more obscure and superficial. Indeed architecture may in this respect proceed so far in the execution of such a purpose as to create an adequate artistic existence for such an ideal content in its very forms and material. In doing so, however, it has already passed beyond its peculiar province and is diverted into the stage immediately above it of sculpture. For the boundary of sculpture lies precisely, in this that it retains the spiritual as an inward being which persists in direct contrast to the external embodiment of architecture. It can consequently merely point to that which is absorbed in soul-life as to something external to itself.

(b) Nevertheless, as above explained, the external and inorganic world is purified by architecture, it is co-ordinated under symmetrical laws, and made cognate with mind, and as a result the temple of God, the house of his community, stands before us. Into this temple, in the second place, the God himself enters in the lightning-flash of individuality which smites its way into the inert mass, permeating the same with its presence. In other words the infinite155 and no longer purely symmetrical form belonging to intelligence brings as it were to a focus and informs the shape in which it is most at home. This is the task of sculpture. In so far as in it the inward life of Spirit, to which the art of architecture can merely point away to, makes its dwelling within the sensuous shape and its external material, and to the extent that these two sides come into plastic communion with one another in such a manner that neither is predominant, sculpture receives as its fundamental type the classical art-form.

For this reason the sensuous element on its own account admits of no expression here which is not affected by spiritual affinities156, just as, conversely, sculpture can reproduce with completeness no spiritual content, which does not maintain throughout adequate presentation to perception in bodily form. What sculpture, in short, has to do is to make the presence of Spirit stand before us in its bodily shape and in immediate union therewith at rest and in blessedness; and this form has to be made vital by means of the content of spiritual individuality. The external sensuous material is consequently no longer elaborated either in conformity with its mechanical quality alone, as a mass of weight, nor in shapes of the inorganic world simply, nor in entire indifference to colour, etc. It is carried into the ideal forms of the human figure, and, we may add, in the completeness of all three spatial dimensions. In other words and relatively to such a process we must maintain for sculpture that in it the inward or ideal content of Spirit are first revealed in their eternal repose and essential self-stability. To such repose and unity with itself there can only correspond that external shape which itself persists in such unity and repose. And this condition is satisfied by configuration viewed in its abstract spatiality.157 The spirit which sculpture represents is that which is essentially sound, not broken up in the play of chance conceits and passions; and for this reason its external form also is not dissolved in the manifold variety of appearance, but exhibits itself under this one presentment only as the abstraction of space in the totality of its dimensions.

Assuming, then, that the art of architecture has executed its temple, and the hand of sculpture has placed therein the image of the god, we have in the third place to assume the community of the faithful as confronting the god thus presented to vision in the wide chambers of his dwelling-place. Now this community is the spiritual reflection into its own world of that sensuous presence, the subjective and inward animating life of soul, in its union with which, both for the artistic content and the external material which manifests it, the determining principle may be identified with particularization in varied shapes and qualities, individualization and the life of soul158 which they imply. The downright and solid fact of unity the god possesses in sculpture breaks up into the multiplicity of a world of particular souls159, whose union is no longer sensuous but wholly ideal.

Here for the first time God Himself is revealed as veritably Spirit — viz., the Spirit revealed in His community. Here at last He is seen apprehended as this moving to-and-fro, as this alternation between His own essential unity and His realization in the knowledge of individual persons and that separation which it involves, as also in the universal spiritual, being160 and union of the many. In such a community God is disengaged from the abstraction of His unfolded self-seclusion and self-identity, no less than from the immediate absorption in bodily shape, in which He is presented by sculpture. He is, in a word, lifted into the actual sphere of spiritual existence and knowledge, into the reflected appearance, whose manifestation is essentially inward and the life of heart and soul. Thereby the higher content is now the nature of Spirit, and that in its ultimate or absolute shape. But at the same time the separation to which we have alluded displays this as particular spiritual being, a specific emotional life. Moreover, for the reason that the main thing here is not the untroubled repose of the God in himself161, but his manifestation simply, the Being which is for another, self-revealment in fact, it follows that, on the plane we have now reached, all the varied content of human subjectivity in its vital movement and activity, whether viewed as passion, action, or event, or more generally the wide realm of human feeling, volition and its discontinuance, become one and all for their own sake objects of artistic representation.

Agreeably with such a content the sensuous element of art has likewise to show itself potentially adapted to such particularization and the display of such an inward content of heart and mind. Media of this description are supplied by colour, musical tones, and finally in sound as mere sign for ideal perceptions and conceptions; and we further obtain the means of realizing with the use of such media a content of this kind in the arts of painting, music, and poetry. Throughout this sphere the sensuous medium is found to be essentially disparate in itself and throughout posited162 as ideal. In this way it responds in the highest degree to the fundamentally spiritual content of art, and the coalescence of spiritual significance and sensuous material attains a more intimate union than was possible either in architecture or sculpture. At the same time such a union is necessarily more near to soul-life, leaning exclusively to the subjective side of human experience; one which, in so far as form and content are thus constrained to particularization and to posit their result as ideal, can only be actually effected at the expense of the objective universality of the content as also of the fusion with the immediately sensuous medium163.

The arts, then, which are lifted into a higher strain of ideality, abandoning as they do the symbolism of architecture and the classical Ideal of sculpture, accept their predominant type from the romantic art-form; and these are the arts most fitted to express its mode of configuration. They are, however, a totality of arts, because the romantic type is itself essentially the most concrete.

(α) The first art which comes next to sculpture is that of painting. It avails itself for a medium of its content and the plastic configuration of the same of visibility as such, to the extent that it is differentiated in its own nature, in other words is defined in the continuity of colour. No doubt the material of architecture and sculpture is likewise both visible and coloured. It is, however, not, as in painting, visibility in its pure nature, not the essentially simple light, which by its differentiating of itself in its opposition to darkness, and in association with that darkness gives rise to colour164. This quality of visibility made essentially ideal165 and treated as such no longer either requires, as in architecture, the abstractly mechanical qualities of mass as appropriate to materials of weight, nor, as is the case with sculpture, the complete dimensuration of spatial condition, even when concentrated into organic forms. The visibility and the making apparent, which belong to painting, possess differences of quality under a more ideal mode — that is, in the specific varieties of colour — which liberates art from the objective totality of spatial condition, by being limited to a plane surface.

On the other hand the content also attains the widest compass of particularity. Whatever can find a place in the human heart, as emotion, idea, and purpose, whatever it is capable of actually shaping — all such diversity may form part of the varied presentations of painting. The entire world of particular existence, from the most exalted embodiment of mind to the most insignificant natural fact, finds a place here. For it is possible even for finite Nature, in its particular scenes and phenomena, to form part of such artistic display, provided only that we have some reference to conscious life which makes it akin to human thought and emotion166.

(β) The second art which continues the further realization of the romantic type and forms a distinct contrast to painting is that of music. Its medium, albeit still sensuous, yet proceeds into still profounder subjectivity and particularization. We have here, too, the deliberate treatment of the sensuous medium as ideal, and it consists in the negation and idealization into the isolated unity of a single point167, the indifferent external collocation of space168, whose complete appearance is retained by painting and deliberately feigned in its completeness. This isolated point, viewed as this process of negation, is an essentially concrete and active process of cancellation within the determinate substance of the material medium, viewed, that is, as motion and vibration of the material object within itself and in its relation to itself. Such an inchoate ideality of matter, which no longer appears under the form of space, but as temporal ideality169, is sound or tone. We have here the sensuous set down as negated, and its abstract visibility converted into audibility. In other words sound liberates the ideal content from its fetters in the material substance. This earliest170 secured inwardness of matter and impregnation of it with soul-life supplies the medium for the intimacy and soul of Spirit — itself as yet indefinite — permitting, as it does, the echo and reverberation of man’s emotional world through its entire range of feelings and passions. In this way music forms the centre of the romantic arts, just as sculpture represents the midway point of arrest between architecture and the arts of the romantic subjectivity. Thus, too, it forms the point of transition between the abstract, spatial sensuousness of painting and the abstract spirituality of poetry. Music carries within itself, like architecture, and in contrast to the emotional world simply and its inward self-seclusion, a relation of quantity conformable to the principles of the understanding and their modes of co-ordinated configuration171.

(γ) We must look for our third and most spiritual type of artistic presentation among the romantic arts in that of poetry. The supreme characteristic of poetry consists in the power with which it brings into vassalage of the mind and its conceptions the sensuous element from which music and painting began to liberate art. For sound, the only remaining external material retained by poetry, is in it no longer the feeling of the sonorous itself, but is a mere sign without independent significance. And it is, moreover, a sign of idea which has become essentially concrete, and not merely172 of indefinite feeling and its subtle modes and gradations. And this is how sound develops into the Word, as essentially articulate voice, whose intention it is to indicate ideas and thoughts. The purely negative moment to which music advanced now asserts itself as the wholly concrete point, the point which is mind itself, the self-conscious individual, which produces from itself the infinite expansion of its ideas and unites the same with the temporal condition of sound. Yet this sensuous element, which was still in music immediately united to emotion, is in poetry separated from the content of consciousness. Mind, in short, here determines this content for its own sake and apart from all else into the content of idea; to express such idea it no doubt avails itself of sound, but employs it merely as a sign without independent worth or substance. Thus viewed, the sound here may be just as well reproduced by the mere letter, for the audible, like the visible, is here reduced to a mere indication of mind173. For this reason, the true medium of poetical representation is the poetical imagination and the intellectual presentation itself; and inasmuch as this element is common to all types of art it follows that poetry is a common thread through them all, and is developed independently in each. Poetry is, in short, the universal art of the mind, which has become essentially free, and which is not fettered in its realization to an externally sensuous material, but which is creatively active in the space, and time belonging to the inner world of ideas and emotion. Yet it is precisely in this its highest phase, that art terminates, by transcending itself; it is just here that it deserts the medium of a harmonious presentation of mind in sensuous shape and passes from the poetry of imaginative idea into the prose of thought.

Such we may accept as the articulate totality of the particular arts; they are the external art of architecture, the objective art of sculpture and the subjective arts of painting, music, and poetry. Many other classifications than these have been attempted, for a work of art presents such a wealth of aspects, that it is quite possible, as has frequently been the case, to make first one and then another the basis of division. For instance, you may take the sensuous medium simply. Architecture may then be viewed as a kind of crystallization; sculpture, as the organic configuration of material in its sensuous and spatial totality; painting as the coloured surface and line, while in music, space, as such, passes over into the point or moment of time replete with content in itself, until we come finally to poetry, where the external medium is wholly suppressed into insignificance. Or, again, these differences have been viewed with reference to their purely abstract conditions of space and time. Such abstract divisions of works of art may, as their medium also may be consequentially traced in their characteristic features. They cannot, however, be worked out as the final and fundamental principle, because such aspects themselves derive their origins from a higher principle, and must therefore fall into subordination thereto.

This higher principle we have discovered in the types of art — symbolic, classical, and romantic — which are the universal stages or phases of the Idea of beauty itself.

Their relation to the individual arts in their concrete manifestation as embodiment is of a kind that these arts constitute the real and positive existence of these general art-types. For symbolic art attains its most adequate realization and most pertinent application in architecture, in which it expatiates in the full import of its notion, and is not as yet depreciated, as it were, into the merely inorganic nature dealt with by some other art. The classical type of art finds its unfettered realization, on the other hand, in sculpture, treating architecture merely as the enclosure which surrounds it, and being unable to elaborate painting and music into the wholly adequate174 forms of its content. Finally, the romantic art-type is supreme in the products of painting and music, and likewise in poetical composition, as their preeminent and unconditionally adequate modes of expression. Poetry is, however, conformable to all types of the beautiful, and its embrace reaches them all for the reason that the poetic imagination is its own proper medium, and imagination is essential to every creation of beauty, whatever its type may be.

To sum up, then, what the particular arts realize in particular works of art, are according to their fundamental conception, simply the universal types which constitute the self-unfolding Idea of beauty. It is as the external realization of this Idea that the wide Pantheon of art is being raised; and the architect and builder thereof is the spirit of beauty as it gradually comes to self-cognition, and to complete which the history of the world will require its evolution of centuries.

1 The introduction begins as an introduction of lectures. But as the work is merely based to a large extent on notes for lectures, or on a manuscript which did not preserve the lectures as they were delivered, it will be found most convenient to ignore this fact, and in references to regard it simply as a written treatise.

2 Hegel, alluding no doubt to the words of the Gospel, puts it “born and born again from mind (spirit).”

3 It is assumed that such a fancy is seized and defined as such in separation from other experience.

4 The sentence is slightly ironical.

5 Dem Scheine.

6 Raisonnements: a disparaging expression.

7 Hegel here means the formal character, not the material on which it is imposed in the several arts.

8 Hegel says, “as that which has no right to be,” das Nichtseyn sollende.

9 Erscheine as contrasted with scheine.

10 Das An-und-Fürsichseyende. That which is explicitly to itself self-determinate being, no less than essentially such in its substantive right.

11 Besonnener Art. Possibly Hegel means “one more compatible with common sense.”

12 I think by the words kunst wieder hervorzurufen Hegel rather means to call up art as it was previously cultivated than merely to “stimulate art production.” The latter is, however, Professor Bosanquet’s translation.

13 Subjective apparently in the sense of being wholly personal to the writer or philosopher in so far as the form of his treatise deals in classification and arrangement peculiar to himself and so external, if not entirely arbitrary.

14 I agree with the note of Professor Bosanquet (Trans., p. 21) that the word element refers here to the mental constituents of art, as contrasted with the sensuous medium.

15 That is to say, the essential formative process involved in its necessity.

16 There must be a misprint or oversight in Professor Bosanquet’s rendering of this passage (p. 21). As the sentence now stands it does not appear to me to make sense.

17 Von ihm. The pronoun, I take it, must refer here to das Andere rather than the subject of the verb.

18 “Makes itself an alien to itself” perhaps expresses the German better.

19 That is, the work of art.

20 Haltpunkte. Points of arrest in essential ideas necessary which restrain this tendency to purely arbitrary caprice.

21 I do not think the first part of this sentence ironical. Hegel admits that a general knowledge is a legitimate feature of modern culture. But he points out that people are only too ready to confuse such a general knowledge with real art scholarship. To bring out this I have translated rather freely.

22 Detail of historical fact and artistic observation.

23 It is historical, first, regarded as a survey of historical condition, and, secondly, because facts are collected whether in relation to ancient or modern art as a historian collects his facts.

24 Lit., the inmost or most ideal (meaning).

25 Vollkommen. Complete or rather completely articulate and rounded in itself. It is not easy to select the English word that exactly corresponds.

26 Bestimmte Individualität. The definition may, as Hegel says, be more significant, but it is for all that not very clearly expressed. Professor Bosanquet translates the words “determinate individual modification.”

27 My view is that what Hegel means to say is that in caricature ugliness is emphasized and made more (näher) a part of the content than belongs to the true nature of the characteristic of which it is (in Hegel’s opinion) no essential determinant or property. The view stated in the sentence is therefore a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Professor Bosanquet’s translation appears to me to leave it doubtful whether the view stated is a just one or not. He translates näher by “closely,” not the comparative. In my view Hegel agrees that caricature may be characteristic, but he does not agree that it is a genuine property of the characteristic where it is pressed to the excess of ugliness.

28 Bestimmung.

29 That is, in Hegel’s view.

30 Das Wahre.

31 Den denkenden Begriff. It is possible that the “notion of thought” would express Hegel’s meaning, as it would be a less strange expression. But I have retained the more literal translation as the reference may be to the self-evolution of Thought in its own dialectical process, thought or the Idea thinking out itself in the Hegelian sense. Professor Bosanquet seems to assume this, as he translates “the thinking Idea.”

32 Kunstschönen. I have translated this by the expression “fine art” because Hegel in the opening of the introduction makes the expression interchangeable with schöne kunst. At the same time it must be recollected that the emphasis here is even more on “beauty” than the fact that it is the beauty of human art. And it is for this reason, I presume, that Professor Bosanquet translates it here “artistic beauty.” The only objection I have to make to this, apart from Hegel’s words I have referred to, is that the expression “artistic beauty” is sometimes used to signify beauty that is capable of being expressed by art. Of course that is excluded from Hegel’s use of the term; he means the beauty of artistic work.

33 Subjektiven.

34 Independent, that is, of the consciousness of any particular individual. Hegel does not necessarily mean independent of consciousness altogether. He has, no doubt, generally in his mind the kind of scepticism which received its most logical exposition in Hume.

35 This appears to me the meaning of zufälliger Sinn. Professor Bosanquet translates it “accidental sense.” By that I presume he understands the meaning to be “a sense of beauty that is entirely personal to the recipient,” it may be possessed by one man, but not by another. Hegel’s illustration hardly supports this, so it seems to me.

36 I do not know the exact translation of lemmatisch, and by a curious slip the sentence is omitted from Professor Bosanquet’s translation. The general sense is plain enough. Every particular science accepts its subject-matter as a datum. It starts from the empirical fact. Whether it admits the assumption or not, it does assume such facts. It is obvious that Hegel’s adoption of this standpoint is only relatively true.

37 Hegel means, I presume, mainly in the introduction. After that he does in a qualified degree discuss the profounder import of the Idea of Fine Art. His statements are not perhaps wholly free from inconsistency, because he has previously said that apart from an encyclopaedic consideration of all the sciences, it was not possible to do so, and also some of His statements seem to imply that he does not intend to do so.

38 That is, in the first Part of the entire treatise.

39 What Hegel means by the die letzte einleitende Betrachtung I am not quite sure. I presume he means the introduction to the first Part. The whole of this paragraph is not very clear.

40 By man’s sensitive life in its widest sense is, I think, intended.

41 The German words are machen and nachmachen. We have no exact equivalents.

42 Lit., “to fill out (ausfüllen) in complete equipment.”

43 Individuelle.

44 The German will admit of the interpretation that the reference is merely to genius, but I think Hegel clearly means that neither one nor the other can be thus conjured up.

45 At the end of the first main division of the work.

46 One of Meredith’s correspondents has put the question with all gravity whether he considered inspiration could be assisted by wine drinking. With equal gravity our humourist replied that though wine might be something of a restorative after mental effort it was not his experience that it contributed to first-rate artistic work. He actually mentions the case of Schiller. Though I have read somewhere that this poet used to be inspired by the smell of rotten apples I do not recollect reading that he favoured the champagne bottle. Meredith also mentions the case of Hoffmann, and adds that the type of his work does not increase our respect for the precedent.

47 Eine äusserliche Arbeit. A craftsmanship which has to deal with the outside surface. We may translate “external craftsmanship”; but the translation in the text gives the meaning best, I think.

48 Keinen geistigen Stoff. Professor Bosanquet translates “spiritual content.” I imagine the emphasis to be mainly on the absence of positive ideas available to knowledge. In any case Hegel appears to press his point of contrast too far. Men of genius such as Mozart (who was probably in his mind) and Schubert may bear him out. But on the other hand we have a Keats, Shelley, and Raphael. Genius matures rapidly, but the greatest works of musical art no less than any other imply a real maturity of mind at least, and more than is here assumed of, I should say, a rich experience. Mozart, of course, upsets any theory, and it is questionable even whether Mozart is really an exception. It depends on the point of view from which we are estimating the intelligible content of music as an expression of soul-life.

49 The “Iphigenie” was completed in Goethe’s thirty-eighth year, fourteen years later than “Götz.” The bulk of his more important works are of the same date or later. Schiller’s “Wallenstein” was completed after his thirty-fifth year.

50 This is surely not quite accurate. The medium of painting in the sense that speech or writing is the medium of poetry is not canvas or panel but oil or other colour. Canvas would correspond with the blank pages of a book.

51 Free, that is, from accidental and irrelevant matter.

52 Professor Bosanquet translates sinnliche here as “sensitive.” I am inclined to think that Hegel here rather leaves out of sight the fact that in the process of Nature we have sensitive organic life no less than unconscious inorganic. His contrast is rather between the conscious life of man and unconscious nature, the conscious life that is not self-conscious being for the object of the contrast treated as equivalent to unconscious. He would also apparently ignore the fact that man himself and the higher beauty which attaches to him is also from ope point of view a part of the natural process.

53 That is, apart from purely personal ends in its pursuit, which are accidental to its essential notion.

54 That is, in the medium of conscious life.

55 Einmal. They are there, but they do not know they are there.

56 Aus geistiger Bildung, i.e., a high level of mental culture is necessary before the advent of civilized manners and customs in which spiritual life is reflected with real refinement and directness.

57 Bedürfniss zur Kunst.

58 Lit., “In the form of the most abstract single subjectivity.” That is to say, that the main fact about it is that it is felt; but, except in respect to intensity, it cannot be described as an object of thought with defining attributes, It is abstract individual sensation.

59 By the expression Kreis Hegel would mean rather an indefinite sphere than a definite circle. The simile is perhaps not very apt. The idea, apparently, is of a sphere of feeling, that is, such as being self-complete, but is so abstract or indefinable that the introduction into it of positive ideas such as justice, etc., are the mere entrance of spectral forms which vanish in such an indefinable medium, without disclosing their nature. They are felt but not cognized for what they really are.

60 Blinder, blind in the sense that it is not guided by deliberate and self-conscious reason, i.e., mere animal instinct.

61 A difficult sentence to translate. I have followed Professor Bosanquet in assuming that the substantive with which mangelhaft agrees must be borrowed from the following sentence, though it seems also to be carried on in a loose kind of way from the previous sentence (Gesckmacksinn.) The entire sentence is built, as we have it, on the further confusion that there are two parallels which before the sentence ends are regarded as one! That is to say, the general critical sense is contrasted with the critique of particular works of art and further the defect of that general sense in its neglect of universal principles is further contrasted with the way the specific critique deals with particular works. I hardly think, however, that my admirable predecessor is justified in ignoring the comparative degree of bestimmteres, or in his translation of Zeug as “power.” I take it to mean the material of actual works of art. The sentence is a good example of, some of the difficulties of Hegel translation.

62 Die Sache. The subject-matter in its most real sense as “content.”

63 That is, the so-called “good taste.”

64 Begriff. Concrete notional Idea.

65 That is, in his physical form.

66 Hegel is here considering desire abstractedly, that is, on its own account (als solche.) It may of course in its turn subserve a rational purpose, such as the preservation of health or life. But the contrast here is between the relation of appetite, and that of the theoretic faculty to objects.

67 Sein Objekt. The object in which he finds himself; rather this, I think, than that which he has created.

68 Innerlich, i.e., in the world of mind as contrasted with that of the sensuous vorhandene.

69 Hegel or his editors have “in a converse way.” This is obviously a mistake. In both examples the point is that the object is preserved as against desire with its destruction, and the contemplative intelligence with its ideal transformation.

70 Ein ideelles. The meaning is, I think, that the materia is stamped with the hall-mark of deliberate artistic purpose. The ideality, though relatively jejune on such a work as the pyramids, in the higher reaches of art such as poetry and music affects of course the medium itself, the musical chord being pure ideality. Professor Bosanquet’s translation omits this and the previous sentence, probably by an oversight. But it is also possible that this thinker conceived the statement as here expressed to be misleading, or at least open to misconception. In architecture and even painting it is obvious, from a certain point of view, the sensuous materia, if directed to an artistic end, remains none the less the material borrowed from natural fact though the fact as natural may be modified in its form. Painting may represent the semblance, but it employs a medium simply sensuous. Hegel has mainly before his attention here obviously the arts of painting, poetry, and music.

71 They are theoretical because as applied to a work of art they imply the presence of the contemplative faculty. In a later section of the work Hegel makes a more complete analysis of what is implied in the sense of hearing as applied to musical composition and in the colour sense. In both cases it is obvious the mind contributes to the facts cognized. Hearing is, however, from Hegel’s point of view the most ideal of the two, and he conceives the position of the ears itself points to this distinction.

72 It may at least be questioned whether the ground given here of this distinction, or part of it, is strictly accurate. It may be said that our sense of sight and hearing are both in contact with the waves of the medium, the vibration of which produces the impression we call sound or light. The most obvious distinction then appears to be that the natural object is left as it is by hearing and sight. This at least holds good as against taste. But at least it may be questioned, I think, whether the sense of touch may not be the source of artistic enjoyment, certainly in the case of the blind. And the sense of smell at least leaves objects as they are, and some may contend that it is a source of enjoyment of the beauty of Nature. Hegel would reply, of course, that no works of human art are enjoyed by such means. The main ground is, however, that sight and hearing are the senses closest to intelligence.

73 By Anschauungen Hegel apparently has in mind all the ideas of poetry. We should certainly rather have expected the word Vorstellungen, the word used being rather “visible perceptions.” But the three words here seem generally to denote the subject-matter of painting, music, and poetry.

74 Lit., “Operative in the artist viewed (i.e., the artist) as the personal energy (Subjektivität) which creates.” Professor Bosanquet’s translation “as a productive state of the person” would appear to make “the sensuous side” a subjective state of the artist. But apart from construction, can we speak of this as a “state”? It is modified by his energy — but it can hardly be regarded as a part of it.

75 I find it impossible to fix any one English equivalent to Hegel’s use of the words Einbildungskraft, Phantasie, or Vorstellung, in the sense at least that fancy, imagination, or phantasy have been used and defined by famous English writers. Generally speaking, I should say that Phantasie, or as it is called sometimes “artistic” or “creative” Phantasie, stands for the most intellectual faculty, though Vorstellung is also used in much the same sense. But it is impossible to arrive at any clear distinction such as was originally made so profoundly by Ruskin between fancy, the instrument of poetical talent, the surface gift, and imagination or, as he called it, penetrative imagination, which summarizes all the powers of a genius and personality and enters into the heart of the subject-matter by an illuminating flash which reveals reality rather than illustrates by means of image. The present passage appears to me even more unsatisfactory than the more carefully digested analysis at the end of Part I, when Hegel discusses the artist. It not merely ignores the indispensable presence of imagination in the pioneers of science, but appears to myself to confuse talent as the natural gift of a man with the mode in which it is exercised in presenting ideas in sensuous imagery, or at least makes the former depend on the latter. Professor Bosanquet translates Phantasie here by “fancy.” But “fancy” is, in our way of looking at it, precisely not the faculty which distinctively belongs to “the great mind and the big heart or soul,” though other parts of the description are more applicable. And in short, as I say, to fix definite English equivalents to Hegel’s phraseology appears to me impossible.

76 Die Phantasie.

77 This is, I presume, Hegel’s way of putting the simple fact, that much of the process of artistic production is unconscious. One man instinctively draws, or picks up his notes on the piano, another cannot. I think Hegel rather refers to this original talent than the much more important one in which genius, right into maturity, rides over difficulties without knowing how it does so. Such happy or even miraculous effects — such as artists sometimes playfully call them — are obviously in part, if only in part, the result of profound artistic experience. He is dealing almost exclusively with the natural bias, which makes one man naturally an artist, whether creative or executant, and is absent from another. He hardly approaches the question what constitutes the artist of genius as contrasted with the man of natural talent.

78 This confirms the conclusion above.

79 Für sich. If merely admired as imitation and nothing more.

80 Zur Ekelhaftigkeit. “Sickeningly like” is Professor Bosanquet’s closer translation. The expression “damnably like” is not unknown.

81 I think with Professor Bosanquet that phantastischen is here not “fantastic” but strictly derived from Phantasie in its sense of imagination. “Completely,” of course, as involving no direct imitation of Nature.

82 Formal, i.e., implying no creative supplement from the artist, purely mechanical.

83 It would be both instructive and interesting to discuss if, and how far, and by virtue of what, that distinct type of modern art known as “still life,” such as a few objects of the library, or even a shell or two and so on up to more important organic life was excluded from this condemnation. It is quite clear that Ruskin would have a good deal to say that would imply important qualification.

84 Begeisterung. I think this must be the meaning. Inspiration hardly makes sense. It is art that is inspired, not those who attend the celebration.

85 Im Innersten is I think here obviously to be taken with the verb, not with the substantives.

86 Ueberhaupt.

87 The meaning of in diesem Gebiete is, I presume, the actual world. But if so it is simply otiose, and I have left it out.

88 Bestimmung. The translation given appears to be the sense, though we should rather say weaken a man from the pursuit of a definite course. Professor Bosanquet, who translates the word “aim” a little lower down, evades the word here.

89 Raisonnirende here and raissonnement below have a depreciatory sense — and signify ordinary reasoning in the first instance and the methods of the popular secularist in the second.

90 A sentence omitted by Professor Bosanquet, and it seems to amount to little more than a more generalized statement of what has gone before. The end of art both directly and indirectly concerns its subject-matter, or rather, as Hegel puts it, the need of the notion or Idea of it carries us to a further end beyond the end shared in common by its particular content.

91 I follow Professor Bosanquet in his translation of the words als Allgemeines für sich zu zuerden; but I am not sure that the more literal translation is not simply as the words stand, the sense being not to be self-conscious of himself (für sich) as the universal principle, to be aware of this property, but rather as universal principle to become for himself, i.e. “independent of desire.”

92 Einheit — unity to the point of fusion, identity.

93 Unmittelbaren Befangenheit. “Sunkenness” is Professor Bosanquet’s translation.

94 Theoretic as a direct transcript of θεώρια, θεωρειν.

95 Gesichtspunkte. The various points of view necessary to arrive at such a general conclusion.

96 Though not entirely confident I am right in accepting the words zu bringen as a repetition of the hervorzubringen just before, the alternative of Professor Bosanquet which takes the words wird zu bringen seyn as equivalent to gebracht seyn sollte certainly appears to me no direct translation.

97 “Poets aim at utility and entertainment alike.”

98 I think that Hegel in his use of erste here rather refers to the fact of past history than a fact in the individual history of nations. “Art is, in the early days of history, the instructress of nations,” gives, I think, his meaning. It is the first instructress in the history of nations.

99 I venture to think if Professor Bosanquet’s translation were the right one the German would be ein in sich selbst gebrochenes. I do not think in ihm selbst can be a German rendering of “in itself.” But I admit the translation is tempting whether Hegel had in his mind the “house divided against itself” or not.

100 Lit., “the spiritual universal,” i.e., the universal substance of its ideal content.

101 Precisely as Ruskin, for example, in his “Modern Painters” condemns both Titian and Tintoret, not because they painted the Paradise or the Assunta, to produce fine paintings, or even because they did not or did themselves believe in the truth of their subject-matter, but because they did not paint in order to make converts, an extraordinary lapse of judgment.

102 Im besten Sinne des Wortes.

103 Professor Bosanquet points out in a note on this passage (p. 101) that Sittlichkeit here, which he translates, as I have done, “respectability,” is the habit of virtue, without the reflective aspiration after goodness as an ideal. Of course there is no depreciation in the use of the term. It is simply the morality of ordinary people, who do generally what their neighbours think the right thing. The word moralität and moralisch, which I have only been able to translate by a paraphrase, is the morality of the standpoint discussed, which is very much that of Kant or “Duty for duty’s sake” in Bradley’s “Ethical Studies.”

104 That is the contingency of the world of Nature as contrasted with the essential stability of mind or spirit.

105 Lit., “To satisfy itself in its real or independent self (für sich).” It cannot identify itself with either side as its wholly real self made therein explicit. It is neither fish nor fowl.

106 Bestimmüngen may here be a reference to man’s broadest spiritual characterizations as one of the human family, the race, the nation, and so forth, or, as I think, a reference to his vocation, future destiny, general welfare.

107 An und für sich Wahre.

108 Unbefangenen, i.e., the naïve outlook of ordinary life.

109 Professor Bosanquet merely translates are not and are in italic as in the text, which of course, except that he adds a comma after are, is a literal translation. But the sense, as I understand it, is that the writer says it is not in the sense that these two contradictories do not exist at all (i.e., as relative reality), but rather in the sense that in philosophical thought which grasps their essence they are not only present but present as reconciled factors of one truth. Professor Bosanquet’s translation appears to me to amount to this: that all Hegel maintains is that the sense he means is not that such contradictory elements are not reconciled, but in the sense that they are reconciled. Perhaps this is his view. But if so, I fail to see the importance of the antithesis, which appears to me between gar nicht sind and in Versöhnung sind. Hegel before had expressly said that such contradictory sides were reconciled in philosophy, so I do not see why he should so emphatically repeat himself. The comma, of course, may be a misprint.

110 Begriff. Notion, or concrete Idea of it.

111 Of that world in its opposition to reason.

112 Der Mensch als er geht und steht. The man in ordinary conditions — the average man, however, rather than the natural man, which carries slightly different associations.

113 The difference between a material instrument, which is a mere means to an end conceived by the craftsman, such as a plough for ploughing, a rake for raking, and a purpose inseparable from the organic whole as a mouth for eating, for without life the organism collapses.

114 Für sich.

115 In his history of Aesthetic in Germany Lötze disputes this. It seems to some extent a question of definition. In Hegel’s view a dead body is not a human body in the full sense, but the corpse of a man. A hand separated from the body, whether we call it a hand or not, is no longer, whatever it may be, a living member, its essential significance as a hand has disappeared. It was only a hand in its coherence as part of a larger whole. It may still for a time preserve the semblance of its life, but it is cut off as the withered leaf. These are facts at least that are undeniable, and the objection appears to me based on a misunderstanding. A hand is only an und für sich human when it is part of a living man. What is the organic reality in the complete sense is the man as a whole. The hand is merely the extremity of one of his arms. You may call a dead hand a hand if you like. The point is what was implied in the fact that you called it a hand at all whether alive or dead.

116 That is, by Kant, of course.

117 By Verwicklung I understand the general evolution of ideal philosophy which the defects of the Kantian Critique stimulated. Professor Bosanquet apparently limits it to a perplexity personal to Schiller. I doubt whether the word will bear this.

118 That is, the concrete idea of humanity as a collective aggregate.

119 That is, intelligence as asserted by a society of human beings as public opinion, etc.

120 Die Ineinsbildung.

121 “Grace and Dignity.”

122 Gesinnungen. “Sentimental views” is probably what is implied.

123 Alle Sache.

124 Professor Bosanquet is clearly right in his view that the order of the words here should be reversed. The words an und für sich are obviously the wider explication of in sick selbst, the auxiliary, as not unfrequently in Hegel, being almost equivalent to nämlich. Whether a misprint or an oversight I have translated subject to this correction.

125 I presume the revelation is not merely that of visible shape or even mainly.

126 Das alles aus sich setzende und auflösende Ich. The three points emphasized by Hegel in Fichte’s “Philosophy” are: (a) The Ego is abstract; (b) Everything is a show for it; (c) Its own acts are a semblance.

127 Hegel uses the word Eitelkeit and eitle in their double sense of empty-nothingness — futility and vain or conceited. This cannot be readily reproduced in English.

128 Schönseligkeit. Borrowed no doubt from Goethe’s notion of a “fair soul.”

129 Like the “vaulting ambition” of Shakespeare which falls on the other side, is über sich selbst.

130 Haltung. Professor Bosanquet translates this “conduct.” I rather think it refers to “bearing, demeanour.” They are, as we say, “featureless, flaccid figures.”

131 Läppische. I am not quite sure what is exactly meant. Professor Bosanquet translates it “grotesque.” But the word is a provincial form of Schlaff apparently — loose, flaccid and so childish, trifling.

132 Moment. A phase in an evolutionary, or, as it is here, a dialectical process. A momentary feature of it.

133 This final section is called the Division of the Subject.

134 Subjektivität. That is, the ideality of consciousness, or thought.

135 Professor Bosanquet, in his note on this passage, expresses the opinion that Hegel when he writes thus is referring “To the self-consciousness of individual human beings as constituting, and reflecting on, an ideal unity between them.” This no doubt, as he suggests, does put a somewhat unnatural meaning on the word “person” or “subjekt.” No doubt there is a sense in which we can ascribe personality to a state, or nation, in the concrete unity of its life. But while admitting that unity such as this, which is not sensuous but ideal, can be “effective and actual,” I find it difficult to conclude that Hegel did himself hold that the unity of the Divine Being was merely identical with the unity or totality of concrete human life as reflected upon by single individuals. How far is human life as a whole on this Earth a unity or totality at all? That question has been discussed by Professor Bradley and others with very different conclusions. Nay, how far does human existence itself exhaust the actually present realization or self-realization of self-conscious Spirit or Intelligence? Whatever maybe the wisest answer to such and other questions I can hardly think that Hegel would have accepted Professor Bosanquet’s interpretation as completely adequate.

136 Fackeldistel. “Torch thistle,” a plant of the genus Cereus.

137 Or, “as mind and in mind.”

138 That is to say, presents to itself to conscious grasp of itself as such Art-spirit (als künstlerischer.)

139 The two evolutions here alluded to are (i) that of a particular way of regarding Nature, man, and God in a particular age and nation such as the Egyptian, Greek, and Christian viewed in express relation to art; (ii) The several arts — sculpture, music, poetry, etc., each on their own foundation and viewed relatively to the former evolution.

140 The point, of course, is that the different media of the several arts are inherently, and in virtue of the fact that we have not here mere matter as opposed to that which is intellectual rather than sensuous, but matter in which the notional concept is already essentially present or pregnant (sound is, for instance, more ideal than the spatial matter of architecture), adapted to the particular arts in which they serve as the medium of expression.

141 Professor Bosanquet explains these “plastic forms” (Gestaltungs formen) as the various modifications of the subject-matter of art (Trans., p. 140 note). I am not quite sure of the meaning here intended. It would apparently identify the term with the Gebilde referred to in the third division. I should myself rather incline to think that Hegel had mainly in his mind the specific general types, that is, the three relations of the Idea itself to its external configuration, viewed as a historical evolution, which Hegel calls symbolic, classical, and romantic. Perhaps this is what Professor Bosanquet means. But in that case it does not appear to me so much the subject-matter as the generic forms in the shaping of that matter.

142 Das wahrhaft Innere. That is, the inward of the truth of conscious life.

143 Means apparently the notion in its absolute sense.

144 Because it represents spirit as independent of an appropriate bodily form.

145 What appears to be denoted by Geistigkeit is the generic term of intelligence — that activity of conscious life which does not necessarily make us think of a single individual — the common nature of all spirit.

146 By Innerlichkeit, which might also be rendered as pure ideality, what is signified is that in a mental state there are no parts outside of each other.

147 Subjekt, i.e., the individual Ego of self-consciousness.

148 Das subjective Innere, lit., the subjective inner state.

149 Geistigkeit. Professor Bosanquet translates it here “intellectual being.”

150 The distinction between a percipient and an external object falls away. The content displayed is part of the soul-life itself.

151 Professor Bosanquet apparently assumes a negative has slipped out. But the text probably is correct in the rather awkward form in which it stands.

152 Thus poetry is primarily a romantic art, but in the Epic it is affiliated with the objective character of classical art, or we may say that there is a romantic and classical type of architecture, though the art is primarily symbolic.

153 Gestalt. Plastic power is perhaps a better translation.

154 He means that in architecture the building is merely a shrine or environment of the image of the god.

155 Infinite, of course, in the concrete sense of rounded in itself, as the circle, or, still more, the living organism.

156 Lit., “which is not also that of the spiritual sphere.”

157 That is, an object limited only in space.

158 Subjektivität. The particularization in romantic art implies the presence of an ideal element imported by the soul of the artist, which appeals directly to the soul in its emotional life. Compare a picture by an Italian master with a Greek statue.

159 Lit., “A multiplicity of isolated examples of inwardness.”

160 That is, in the life shared by all as one community actuated by a common purpose.

161 As in sculpture.

162 Professor Bosanquet’s note is here (Trans., p. 166) “Posited or laid down to be ideal. This almost is equal to made to be in the sense of not being. In other words musical sound is “ideal” as existing, quâ work of art, in memory only, the moment in which it is actually heard being fugitive. A picture is equally so in respect of the third dimension, which has to be read into it. Poetry is almost wholly ideal, uses hardly any sensuous element, and appeals almost wholly to what exists in the mind.”

163 By particularization is meant the variety in the material of colours, musical tones, and ideas, which latter are really quite as much the medium of poetry as written language. The sensuous medium is here an abstract sign and, as Hegel would contend, nothing more than this.

164 Reference, of course, to Hegel’s unfortunate acceptance of Goethe’s theory of colour.

165 The colour of art is not merely ideal as applied to only two dimensions of space, but also is “subjective” in the artistic treatment of it under a definite “scheme.” It is not clear whether Hegel alludes also to this; apparently not, though it is the most important feature. In fact, even assuming his theory of light to be correct, it is difficult entirely to follow his distinction between the appearance of colour on a flat or a round surface. As natural colour the one would be as ideal as the other. Only regarded as a composition would painting present distinction.

166 It is obvious that the reference here is mainly to an intentional appeal to the human soul through the content of the composition. But the appeal may also be made through the technique and artistic treatment of the medium itself.

167 The parts of a chord are not in space, but are ideally cognized. Hegel describes this by saying that music idealizes space and concentrates it to a point. It would perhaps be more intelligible to say that it transmutes the positive effects of a material substance in motion into the positive and more ideal condition of time. The point which is continually negated is at least quâ music the point, or rather, moment, of a temporal process.

168 By the indifferent externality of space is signified the fact that the parts of space, though external to each other, are not qualitatively distinguishable.

169 Succession in time is “more ideal” than coexistence in space because it exists only as continuity in a conscious subject.

170 Painting no doubt introduces ideal elements into the artistic composition of colour, but the colour still remains the appearance of a material thing or superficies.

171 That is to say, music or harmony is based on a solid conformity to law on the part of its tones in their conjunction and succession, their structure and resolution.

172 As in painting.

173 The views here propounded suggest considerable criticism. It appears to me that the stress here laid upon the intelligible content of poetry as contrasted with the sensuous qualities of its form as modulated speech is certainly untenable. What we call the music of verse may unquestionably be most intimately associated with the ideal content expressed; but apart from the artistic collocation of language as sound no less than symbol we certainly do not get the art of poetry. Even where Hegel deals directly with rhythm and rhyme in the body of the treatise I think it is clear he underrates all that is implied in the difference between the musical expression of poetry as contrasted even with the sonorous language of mere prose. A further question upon which more doubt is permissible is how far the actual script in written or printed letters is not entitled to be regarded as at least in part the sensuous medium. No doubt the poem is not dependent upon it as a painting is upon colour, or the canvas which supports it, for it may be recited. But at least it is practically dependent upon it for its preservation. The point may very possibly appear, however, as nugatory or entirely unimportant, beside the question whether the medium of the art is not really imaginative idea rather than articulate speech.

174 Absolute Formen. Adequate in the sense of being unconditionally so.

THE IDEA OF FINE ART, OR THE IDEAL

The conclusion of the introduction brings within sight the more methodical exposition of our subject. It will in the first place be useful as a point of departure for a true philosophy of the beautiful to sum up shortly the position of Fine Art in its general relation to the Real, no less than to emphasize the salient features which distinguish the philosophy of Fine Art from other philosophical inquiries.

(a) With this object in view we will first enumerate the diverse attempts which have been made to apprehend the beautiful in thought, placing each in the order which will best assist a critical verdict. We have already contributed something to this in our introduction. And, moreover, we may add that the mere inquiry what others have contributed either rightly or wrongly to our subject, at least with the hope of ascertaining something really instructive to an exposition which claims to be wholly scientific, will not assist us much. So far from this being so we must preface our remarks with the admission that, in the opinion of many, the beautiful, for the very reason that it is the beautiful, does not admit of such intellectual apprehension, is, in short, no object intelligible to human thought. To such a thesis we must for the present — in our response to those who at this time of day contend that all Truth is ultimately incomprehensible, and only the finiteness of the phenomenal and the contingent matters of temporal existence is within our mental grasp — reply that it is precisely Truth, and Truth alone, which is to be thus comprehended, and for this reason that it possesses the absolute notion, or, more succinctly, the Idea for its basic support. Now beauty is no other than a particular determination under which the True is expressed and revealed to us; and it lies open to the fullest comprehension of thought in so far as such can equip it with the armoury of the concrete notion. It is quite true that no idea has suffered more severely in our own time from misconceptions than this which we call the notion in its fullest explication. One is only too often misunderstood to mean a determination which is abstract and one sided, or at least a conception of the analytical understanding. As thus understood neither the totality of Truth nor the idea of beauty as a concrete whole can be brought home to a thinking consciousness. But the idea of beauty, as we have already observed, and shall seek to make more intelligible as we proceed, is no such abstraction of the mind: rather it may be defined as the absolute notion in its self-evolved concreteness, or still more specifically defined, the absolute Idea.

(b) And, further, we cannot more succinctly define the absolute Idea, in the above use of the expression, than by saying it is mind (Spirit): and we may add that the mind thus referred to is not mind regarded as finite, that is, subject to the conditions and limitations of sense-perception, but the universal and absolute Intelligence175, which, out of its own free activity, determines Truth in the profoundest signification of the term. To the ordinary consciousness of everyday life the object of perception, no doubt, breaks away from mind, as though our thought stood in opposition to Nature, which receives from us a validity equal at least to the consciousness which perceives it. But in this way of looking at Nature and the conscious subject as two neighbours set over against one another in territories equally self-subsistent it is only the finite and limited mind, not that which it is as an infinite substance and in its notional truth, which is apprehended. Nature is not thus to be set over against absolute Mind, either as conjoint with a sphere of the Real of equal worth, or as an independent boundary thereto. Rather the aspect which Nature appears to hold in this respect is that which mind or spirit itself sets up, and of which it becomes the product as a Nature in which limit and boundary are themselves determining constituents. In fact, Mind in its absolute or infinite substance can only be apprehended as this free activity, which is manifested in self-development through differentiation. This object, this other, through which such differentiation proceeds, is regarded in such opposition as Nature, but as the object of intelligence it is quite as much indebted to Mind for the free gift and fulness of its own essential substance. We must therefore conceive Nature as herself containing in potency the absolute Idea. She is that Idea in apparent shape, which mind, in its synthetic power, posits as the object opposed to itself. She is so far a product, a creation. The truth of Nature therefore is simply the determination by mind of its own substance, its ideality and power of determination, through a process which no doubt begins with a separation of itself into two factors which apparently negate each other, but which, by the very activity of such negation and separation, passes beyond the contradiction it implies to a unity which heals the fracture. Instead of finding our-elves opposed to a limit and a barrier we have a totality in which the parts which opposed each other are fused together by the free universality of mind. This ideality, in other words this infinite power of determination176, is that which constitutes the profound notion of Mind’s subjectivity. As subjectivity mind is, in the first instance, merely Nature, Mind, or Spirit that is not explicitly unfolded, mind which has not arrived at the grasp of its true notion. Nature is here set up in opposition to Mind, not as an object which itself has created, but as one whose limits it fails to overcome, an object, moreover, which, as assumed to be already subsisting in independence, Mind remains alongside of in the internal seclusion of knowledge and volition, and is only able to constitute the other side of Nature. The finiteness of scientific theory, no less than that of practical life, is to be, found in this limited mode of consciousness, where intelligence is restricted to the use of finite categories and the formal “ought” in the realization of ethical perfection177. We find here, as we have pointed out was the case with Nature, that the phenomenal is not adequate to the essential truth of that which appears; what we receive is still the confusing medley of abilities, passions, intentions, opinions, and talents, which no sooner make themselves felt than they are displaced, working at cross purposes as often against as on the side of each other, in a strife between volition, opinion, and reflection, which brings to the surface every phase of fortuitous experience in all its confusing variety. It is the standpoint of the entirely finite, temporal, contradictory, and for that reason transitory, unsatisfied, and unreconciled spirit. For the satisfactions which obtain in such a consciousness, through the finiteness which inseparably clings to its entire outlook, itself so limited and confused, are of a purely relative and isolated validity. It is inevitable that consciousness, volition, and thought should make an effort to rise above this condition and seek for the universality, unity, and satisfaction which it eventually finds in the infinite substance of Spirit and its Truth. This unity and satisfaction, to which mind is carried forward by the impulse of its own ideal activity, transmuting the raw material of its finite conditions, constitutes the first revelation of that which the world of appearances is under a more notional grasp of it. Mind grasps its finiteness as the negation of its own essential substance, and is aware of its infinity. And this essential truth of the finite mind is the absolute Mind or Spirit. In this form of self-consciousness mind is merely actualized as absolute negativity. The element of finitude which it confronts is apprehended as such and annulled. In this, the highest sphere of its activity, mind becomes the object of volition. The Absolute itself becomes the object of mind. Spirit, as self-consciousness, differentiates itself as the knowing subject from the absolute Spirit as the object of knowledge. Mind in this latter sense, in contradistinction from mind which has not overcome the conditions of finite perception, may therefore be defined as a finite mind in possession of the principle of differentiation from its true object. In the higher and more speculative consideration of truth, however, it is the absolute mind itself, which, in order to unfold explicitly the knowledge of itself, essentially becomes a principle of differentiation to itself, and thereby posits the finitude of mind, within which it becomes for itself absolute object of the knowledge of itself. It is now absolute mind within the ideal community178 which belongs to it, the actual Absolute of itself in the form of Mind and knowledge179.

This is, in fact, the starting-point of the Philosophy of Fine Art. For the idea of Fine Art is neither the logical Idea, absolute Thought, that is, which develops itself in the medium of its freest activity, nor is it the Idea of Nature apprehended under more finite categories. Its province is rather that of Mind untrammelled by either the judgments or the actions of the finite spirit.

(c) The realm of Fine Art is the realm of absolute Spirit. We can but briefly indicate the reason why this is so. A fully philosophical proof belongs rather to treatises which immediately deal with those questions of philosophy we have noticed already, by which we mean those which treat of Logic, whose content, as above explained, is that of the absolute Idea, or the philosophy of Nature, or lastly, the philosophy of Mind in its determinate spheres of finitude. For in these sciences the object is to show not merely how the logical Idea presupposes the objective particularity of Nature as a vehicle to its determinate existence, but also how it is capable of passing from such externality to mind, and, finally, of freeing itself from all the finitude that clings to it and of attaining to Spirit in its eternal concreteness and truth.

From such a point of view, which is also applicable to art when regarded in all the fulness of worth it in truth implies, we are justified in associating it with the self-same province which belongs to religion and speculative philosophy. In every direction in which Mind or Spirit becomes identical with the absolute Mind it frees itself from the restricting limits of its positive existence, and, while liberating itself from the contingent relations, which pertain to it in its temporal existence, and the finite content of its objects and interests, is made aware of and discloses the entire wealth of reality it contains.

It may be of service here to expand more completely the position which Art thus occupies in its relation respectively to the life of Nature and Spirit.

A survey of the entire field of human existence presents to the ordinary consciousness of mankind the widest variety of interests and means of satisfaction. There is, in the first instance, the complex system of purely physical necessities, to the satisfaction of which the whole economy of industrial enterprise, through all its complicated tissue of commerce, merchandize, and technical crafts, is actively pursued. If we raise the level of our review to a more spiritual range, we are confronted with the world where rights are established and enforced, the world of legislative enactment, family life, division of social classes, in a word, the concrete living organism of the State. And more than this, there is the religious want, which asserts itself in the hearts of particular men and women, and finds its satisfaction in the life of a church. Finally, there is the many-sided and intricately specialized activity of scientific research, the organized effort to integrate all knowledge, and the comprehension which that knowledge implies, in one all-embracing system. Within this latter are comprised the activities of the fine arts, the interest, that is to say, in beauty, and which derives its spiritual nutriment in the realization of that beauty in plastic shapes.

(d) The question becomes inevitable how far a spiritual want of this kind is bound up as a necessary element in the life of man and his world-history. In the first instance these two spheres180 appear simply as immediate factors of our entire survey. It is, however, the requirement of philosophy to probe more deeply into that which binds them as essential and necessarily interacting constituents of one organic whole. For on closer inspection it will be found that they do not stand in relation to one another on the mere basis of utility; rather we shall discover that only through the one we shall fully comprehend the other. In other words, the one circle overlaps the other, in the sense that the higher forms of its activity are found to be a part of the other; and that which is of less value in its own province is lifted into a finer atmosphere; and what had failed to free itself from its original bounds is now enlarged to liberty through the profounder satisfaction it receives in the widening of the range of its interests181. And it is this which makes clear the necessity of the ideal bond.

We will recall now for a moment the analysis we established of the notion of the beautiful and that of art generally. Two opposed aspects come under notice. In the first place we have a content, an end, a significance; and in addition to that we get the artistic expression of the same, the appearance and realization of such content; and, thirdly, these two aspects of the artistic product so pass into each other that the rationality or particularity is nothing short of the expression of the artistic purpose, nothing more or less is given us than the essential expression of the entire content. What we designate as content, “significance,” is just this simplicity of idea, the work of art resolved into its simplest yet most comprehensive determinants, as it exists for mind in contrast with the actual work executed. As an example we may summarize the content of a book from a few words or sentences the book contains, and nothing may be necessary to expound the content of that book sufficiently in its general import. This simple idea, the thesis or main problem of our book, which forms the fundamental basis on which the entire structure is built, is the abstract significance. It is only the detailed exposition which gives us the concrete totality.

Both sides, however, of this opposition do not stand in an indifferent or purely external relation one to the other, as, for instance, is the case when we contrast with it the particular content of an abstract mathematical figure, such as a triangle or an ellipse, to which the external particularity of its size or figure is related without affecting its significance. Rather in the former case we shall find that the content of its form, taken in abstraction in itself, possesses a determinate impulse in the direction of realization and thereby concreteness. There is in it essentially the “should” of purpose. However strongly form is here posited in independence, we are unable to rest satisfied with such abstraction, and ask for something more. This is at first apprehended merely as an unsatisfied want, a desire in the conscious subject, which strives to annul itself and secure satisfaction. From such a standpoint all we can say is that the content is purely self-contained, or subjective, over against which the objective other-than-itself is placed in opposition in such a way as to emphasize the desire to make the subjective content objective. Such a conflict between the subjective content and the objective, reality which confronts it, no less than the mere impulse to transcend the opposition, is a universal characteristic of the determination of all self-conscious life182. Even that aspect of human life which we call physical, and still more that world of man’s spiritual aims and interests depends on this necessity to carry forward that which is at first purely subjective and ideal into the objective world, that a fuller satisfaction in its essential substance may be realized. But so long as the content of aims and interests is merely and at first apprehended in the one-sided form of subjective consciousness, and that one-sidedness is apprehended as a mere limit, this loss makes itself simply felt as unrest or pain. It is a negative something which is bound to resolve itself as such negativity, and, in order to remove the sense of defect, exerts an impulse to transcend the barrier itself, already an object of consciousness and thought. And, moreover, this transcendency does not merely amount to this, that the objective “other” ceases to be an opposed factor to the general subjective consciousness: rather in the more determinate connection, this defect of subjective thought is itself and within itself a defect and negation which involves an impulse to negate and pass beyond. In other words the conscious subject is implicitly and according to its essential notion the complete whole183, that is, not merely what is inward, but the realization no less of that which is inward or ideal in and through what is without. If we assume that it exists only abstractly in one form we have to face the contradiction that whereas it is, according to its concrete notion the whole, yet according to its mode of existence it remains merely one side of that totality. It is only through the entire resolution of such a contradiction that life becomes affirmative. To pass through each phase of this opposition, contradiction and its final abrogation is the higher and legitimate demand of conscious life. That which remains always affirmative, is, and remains, without life. Life is built upon negation and pain. It is only by crushing out such contradictions in the crucible of fuller life and knowledge that it remains in its affirmative substance. If it anchor wholly on contradiction without such a possibility of resolution it must be infallibly wrecked thereon.

Such, then, is the nature of these determinations of thought regarded in their abstraction to which it was necessary to draw attention at the present stage.

The most exalted content which lies within the grasp of self-conscious life may be concisely called freedom. Freedom is the highest determination of Spirit. In its formal aspect freedom, in its first instance, consists in this, that the subject thereof ceases to find a limit or barrier in the material which is set over against it; this is no longer an element foreign to it, but one in which it finds itself again. Even under this formal definition of it all necessity and misfortune disappears; the individual consciousness is reconciled with the world, finds satisfaction in such reconciliation, and all opposition and contradiction is thereby dissolved.

But over and above this, on closer inspection, we find that it is universally the rational — that is to say ethical relations in practical life, truth in thought — which constitutes the content of freedom. But, furthermore, inasmuch as freedom itself is in the first instance only subjective, not wholly carried into effect, there must remain for the individual an element of unfreedom, a somewhat purely objective opposed to it as a necessity of Nature; and it is accompanied likewise with the demand to secure a reconciliation of this opposition. From the reverse point of view a similar contradiction is apparent in the internal domain of the subjective consciousness itself. We have, on the one hand, that which is universal and self-subsistent in its own right, in other words the universal dictates or principles of justice, goodness, and truth. On the other there are the various impulses of mankind, all the emotions, preferences, and passions which exercise their power over the heart of each man and woman individually. This opposition no less than the other excites conflict and contradiction, and in this strife man becomes subject to every conceivable longing, the profoundest grief, and, in a word, to every kind of worry and discontent. It is the prerogative of the spiritual life of mankind to be a veil severed and broken asunder, tossed as it must be on the waves of contradiction. The animal creation lives at peace with itself and its environment. Man is unable to find a complete refuge in that which is exclusively inward, the soul as such, pure thought, in the world of legal obligation and its universality. He is dependent also upon his sensuous existence, his emotions, and all that appeals to his heart and soul. It is the part of philosophy to give expression to this contradiction in thought, as it extends throughout its all-embracing compass, and to overcome the same with a reconciliation equally comprehensive.

In the immediacy of everyday life, however, man seeks to secure an immediate satisfaction. Perhaps the most obvious example of such a resolution is to be found in the domain of animal wants and their satisfaction.

The states of hunger, thirst, fatigue on the one hand, and feeding, drinking, sleep on the other, with all such similar states, illustrate the contradictions and resolutions to which we here refer.

In this sphere of human existence, which is fundamentally the same as purely animal life, the content of such satisfaction is, however, of a finite and limited range. Such satiety carries with it no permanence, but moves forward without rest to a renewed sense of want. Men eat, drink, and sleep, and on the morrow are as hungry and weary as before. Man is compelled, therefore, to strive for a freedom more lasting in that element of the spiritual life which he appropriates in knowledge and volition, the sciences and his social activities. The ignorant man is unfree because he faces a world which is foreign to himself, a world which tosses hither and thither aimlessly, to which he is joined as an appendage, unable to unite that foreign world to itself, and to feel itself at home there as in its own demesne. The merest impulse of curiosity, the awakening of the love of knowledge, the lowest phase of animate unrest, and the highest grasp of philosophical insight are ultimately derived from the same source, namely, the desire to overcome every condition that is unfavourable to freedom, and to bring the world of everyday life, and that of the subject which reflects upon it, into one harmonious unity. If we consider the world of action the result is the same; freedom in human action is the attempt to make positive or real the reason of the Will. Reason is realized by voluntary action through the life of the State. In a State that is differentiated through itself on any rational principle, all the laws and social institutions which belong to it are simply a realization of freedom according to their own essential determinants. This being so, the reason that belongs to any citizen discovers in such institutions its own essential life: and, so long as such is not in revolt from those laws, proceeds with them as with its own kith and kin rather than a foreign adversary. We not infrequently find licence identified with freedom. But the freedom of licence is irrational; it depends upon a choice and self-determination which has nothing to do with a rational will, but is rather the product of accidental impulses and their dependence on the world of sense and physical Nature.

We may conclude, then, that the physical needs of man, no less than his knowledge and power of volition, receive in fact, each in its own sphere, a satisfaction in the world, and deliberately break up the contradiction between the subjective and objective, that is to say, between the freedom of consciousness and the external necessity of things with which it is confronted. The content, however, of such a freedom and the satisfaction which is therein experienced is still subject to limitations, and for this reason both still retain an element of finitude. And wherever we find such an element supervening it is inevitable that the original contradiction should again reassert itself, and the self-satisfaction only maintain a relative significance. For example, in the sphere of jurisprudence and its realization in the State it is true enough that the rationality of each citizen, his will and his freedom are recognized; he is a person and as such is respected; he is the owner of property, and if that property is in danger the courts of law reassert his rights in their integrity. This recognition, however, and the freedom it establishes are confined to single relations and isolated objects, such as a particular house, a sum of money, some particular right or law, in fine some particular transaction in the practical world. What the consciousness has at any one time before it are particular things, which no doubt are related to one another, and in fact form a nucleus of such relations; but, on the other hand, they are appropriate to categories of purely relative validity, are subject to various conditions of tenure, which make the satisfaction only immediately experienced when their predominance is reasserted, or at any rate fail to establish any degree of permanence. And further than this the life of the State in its organic entirety, as a related whole of monarch, government, courts of justice, military control, and general grouping of all the various societies which compose it, no less than the obligations and duties which such arrangements presuppose, the aims and satisfaction to which they are directed, the entire scope of its civic and commercial activities already referred to, in one word the complete organism of a nation’s life, is indeed in a genuine State complete in itself, and in a sense rounded off as a real totality. At the same time we must observe that the fundamental principle, for the realization of which the State exists, and wherein the individual man finds his satisfaction as a citizen, is, despite all the variety of that life, all the manifold differentiation of class within itself and as related to the world without, still a whole that is one-sided and in a real sense abstract. It is only the rational freedom of the will made explicit in a particular totality. It is, in short, only the national life, and further the life of a particular nation; a life, moreover, in which freedom is realized in a particular sphere of existence as individualized reality. And on this account it is that we are necessarily conscious, that rights and obligations in the mere bounds of civic existence, on the plane, that is to say, of merely this world’s or temporal existence, do not discover the absolute satisfaction we are seeking. We require as rational beings a higher realization of their objective truth as private individuals, a fuller sanction of their imperative validity than they themselves, in such a sphere, can offer us. What mankind, pressed on all sides by the boundaries of his purely terrestrial life, in fact requires is that region of more essential reality, in which every opposition and contradiction is overcome, and freedom can finally claim to be wholly at peace with itself. And this is, of course, nothing other than absolute Truth itself, no merely relative truth. In the Truth, according to its highest notion, all must be brought home to one unity. In it there can be no more opposition between freedom and necessity, Spirit and Nature, knowledge and the object of knowledge, law and impulse, between whatever form, in fact, the opposition of these contradictory phenomena of human experience may assume.

It is in virtue of such truth that proof is possible that neither a freedom which is essentially subjective and disparate from every element of necessity is true in the absolute sense; nor, on the other hand, is it admissible to predicate truth of a necessity conceived in absolute isolation from consciousness. Our ordinary conscious life fails to overcome this contradiction, and either plunges desperately into the same, or thrusts it on one side and makes its escape from it in some other way. Philosophy will, however, so address itself to the two determinating factors of the contradiction as to show that they are apprehended as isolate from each other in abstraction, not according to their concrete notion; and by the grasp of this latter it will demonstrate the one-sidedness in its relative character, placing these opposing aspects in the fuller union and harmony which is truth. It is the function of philosophy to grasp and formulate this notion of truth. Unquestionably philosophy recognizes the concrete notion throughout; and it is in virtue of this that it is Thought with full grasp of truth. But what we call the notion is something other than this, truth, that is, in its essential verity together with the existence which is either adequate to it or is not so. In all finite reality the determinations, which are essential to ideal truth, appear separable from each other, dividing the veil of that which in its absolute Truth is a complete totality. Take the case of a living being. Under such finite categories we are forced to regard it as a subject in opposition to the inorganic Nature which environs it. Both the points of view are no doubt present in the notion, but they are there reconciled. Finite existence, however, thrusts them apart. It is, in short, an existence or reality which is unequal to the unity of the notion. We may therefore say that the notion is valid in every sphere of actuality. At the same time the main point to be determined is whether the notion in its ideal concreteness is actually completed in the particular unity presented, wherein the two aspects posited in opposition persist in no ultimate self-subsistence and coherence over against each other, but are rather ideal phases which tend to pass into a higher unity which cancels such opposition. And the reality of this highest mode of union is only reached when we enter the sphere of truth, freedom, and the satisfaction which they create. The higher life which belongs to this sphere, this supreme enjoyment of truth, which as feeling is called “blessedness,” and as conscious thought “contemplation,” we may describe generically as the life known to religion. For religion is just this universal domain184, in virtue of which the one concrete totality of the World comes to each man in union with himself, as his essential substance, while it remains no less for consciousness the essential truth of Nature. And it is this profounder truth of the Real which alone proves itself invincible over all that is merely particular and finite, being as it is the one absolute harmony wherein all that is otherwise discordant and opposed is finally resolved. Now it is through its direct concern in the true, regarded as the absolute object of consciousness, that Art belongs to the supreme sphere of Spirit, and it is to be placed, in respect to its content, if in a more specific sense, on the same basis as religion and philosophy. I connect these two last for the reason that philosophy has no other object than God. In its substance it is in fact rational theology, and in its service of the truth a continual service of God.

(e) Accepting, then, this fundamental similarity of content these three spheres of absolute Spirit only differ in the forms under which they present their object, that is, the Absolute, to human consciousness. The differences which are perceptible in these modes of presentment are due to the notion of the absolute Spirit (Mind) itself. Spirit, in its truth, is essential substance brought home to itself. It is, therefore, no essence which lies outside and in abstract relation to objectivity, but rather is, within the compass of that objectivity, the re-collected presence185 of the substance of all objects within finite spirit. It is the finite which grasps its own essential universality, and, in doing so, grasps essential Being in the absolute sense. The first mode of this comprehension is an immediate one, that is to say, it is a sensuous cognition, a cognition in the form and semblance of the object of sense-perception, in which the Absolute is presented directly to the understanding186 and feeling. The second form is that of the conceptive or imaginative consciousness. Last of all, we have the free thought of absolute Spirit. The form of sensuous perception is appropriate to art in the sense that it is art which presents truth to consciousness in its sensuous semblance; but it is a semblance which, under the mode of its appearance, possesses a higher and profounder meaning and significance, although it is not its function to render the universality of the notion wholly intelligible through the medium of sense. It is indeed rather the unity to which art attains with that of the particular appearance which constitutes the essence of the beautiful, the essence of the artistic product. This union is perfected in art not entirely through sensuous objectification, but also through the medium of imaginative conception. This is exceptionally so in the art of poetry. At the same time, even in this, the most intellectual or ideal art, the union between significance and the individual mode of its presentation is present with the same, although it is displayed to the imaginative consciousness, and every part of its content is conceived in its immediacy and visualized for the imagination187. And generally we must accept the fact that art, possessing as it does truth or Spirit for its object, is unable to reproduce the same by merely copying particular objects of Nature, such as the sun, moon, earth, and stars. Such are, no doubt, objects of sensuous perception; but, simply as such, they are isolated and can offer no reflection of what is spiritual. In thus attributing to art this absolute significance as a manifestation of Spirit we have expressly set on one side the conception of art which finds its content of too various a nature, or too much occupied with interests foreign to it, to merit such a view. And at the other extreme religion, no doubt, frequently summons art to her service, in order to bring the truths of religion more near to the emotion, or to clothe the same in imaginative form. In both cases unquestionably art is rendering a service to a province not, in strictness, its own. At the same time where art is found in most exalted perfection, in that case no doubt it unfolds in plastic guise the mode of exposition most adequate and essentially necessary to the content of the truth accepted. Among the Greeks, for example, Art was the highest medium under which the community conceived its gods, and became conscious of truth. For this reason we may justly say that the poets and artists of Greece created the gods of their people. In other words, they defined for the imagination of their people the active life and energy of the Divine Presence, giving Them the definite content of a religion. And this statement must not merely be taken to imply that all Greek artists did was to clothe in imagery or embellish with the beauty of poesy vague conceptions and hearsays which, as general religious maxims or isolated determinations of conscious life, were already present before the era of such poetic creations. The truth of this artistic production is rather to be found in this, that art and poetry were the exclusive forms in which these creative artists could bring to life and expression the ideas which fermented in themselves. In other phases of that consciousness, where we find the content less completely represented by the plastic imagery of art, the scope of Art as the handmaid of religion is of less importance.

We have thus indicated what was, at any rate, once the true position of Art in its relation to the highest interests of man’s spiritual life.

But inasmuch as art is preceded in Nature and the finite processes of life by a kind of antenatal history, so too there is a history that follows its culmination, which in other terms passes over and beyond its purely conceptive or plastic grasp of the Infinite. For art carries in the notion that gives it life a limit; and it is from this boundary that the human consciousness passes beyond into forms more adequate to its spiritual import. It is this inherent shortness of the mark that fixes the subordinate position we are only too ready to assign to art in our daily life nowadays. For us European art is no longer the highest means in which the actuality of truth is possessed. Speaking generally, thought has long ago pronounced a verdict upon art when it defined it as the portrayal of the Divine by concepts which appeal to sense-perception. This was the judgment passed on it by the Jews and the followers of Mohammed. Nay, we find it present among the Greeks themselves, as the strong opposition of Plato and Homer and Hesiod to the popular conception of the gods proves clearly. There is a period in the education of every civilized nation, when art becomes a sign-post, as it were, to that which stands beyond her border. The evolution of Christendom is itself an illustration. The historical features of that religion, the resurrection of Christ, His life and death, have doubtless offered to the art of painting a mighty field on which to exercise its imaginative bounty; and the Church has either surrounded such art with its magnificent protection, or suffered it simply to work on unheeded. But as the love of knowledge and scientific research, and yet more the felt want of a more intimate and personal spirituality necessitated the Reformation, the religious imagination was called away from the sensuous medium which enwrapped it, and centred once for all upon the inward spirituality of emotional life and conscious thought. In this way there grew up, so to speak, that posterior twilight of Art’s history I referred to, where the want has found a dwelling in man to rest satisfied alone with the pure medium of the soul as the ultimate form of truth. In the earliest beginnings of art we shall find mystery still present, a secret strain and longing which persists because Art’s imaginative powers are unable to envisage to sense the complete truth of its content. When once, however, the mind of man has succeeded in endowing such content with perfect outward shape in art, it is driven inevitably away from this objective realization to its own free spiritual activity as from something repellent to it. A period such as this is our own. We may, indeed, express the hope that art will rise to yet higher grades of technical perfection; but in any case Art in its specific form has ceased to meet the highest requirements of spiritual life. We may still wonder at the unrivalled excellence of the statues of the gods of Hellas, and imagine that God the Father, Christ, and the Virgin Mary have received ideal representation at the hands of more recent painters. But it is of no use. Our knees no longer bow to them.

The sphere of conscious life nearest to that of art is that of religion. The form which belongs to the religious consciousness is that of the imaginative concept. The Absolute is here removed from the externality of artistic production, and received in a more spiritual way by the imagination, so that the heart and emotions, the inner life of the individual that is to say, become its vehicle. This progress in spiritual insight from art to religion may be further defined by the statement that art is only one aspect of the religious consciousness. In other words, when a work of art objectifies the truth or mind for sense-perfection, and apprehends this form of the Absolute as the one appropriate to its vision, religion blends with the same the devotional attitude that flows from the inner life confronted with the absolute reality as thus presented. Devotion is a type of emotional existence which is, strictly speaking, outside the province of art. It originates in the fact that the individual suffers that object which art has rendered visible to sense to penetrate the arcana of his emotional life, and so completely identifies himself with it that this inward presence, which the imagination and the inherent might of feeling has rendered possible, becomes an essential phase in the manifestation of absolute reality. Devotion is this cultus of the community in its purest, most intimate, and subjective form; a culture, in which the principle of objectivity is at the same time consumed and absorbed, and the content thereof is transmuted without such objectivity into the possession of heart and soul.

The third and last form or phase in the evolution of absolute mind (spirit) is philosophy. In the boundaries of the religious sphere, where God is apprehended in the first instance perforce as an external object, and men are taught that there is a God, and how He has revealed Himself and still is revealed to mankind, the subjective consciousness is indeed made the vehicle of such knowledge, and the religious sense imparted stirs and fills the heart of the community; but the inwardness of devotion which is born of the emotions and the imagination is not the highest form of inwardness. We are bound to recognize that the purest form of knowledge is conscious thought in its freest activity. In this alone the content of knowledge is, adequate to the demands of that which is consciously apprehended: here alone we are in the presence of that most intelligent form of cultus, which seeks wholly to appropriate to itself, and to grasp in concrete thought what is otherwise only the evanescent content of feeling or the imagination. In the purview of such a philosophy art and religion, as two aspects of one truth, become related under a unifying conception. On the one hand, though philosophy, by its surrender of all sensuous externality, has lost the objective presentation of art, yet it has exchanged it for the highest form under which concrete reality is objectively apprehended and redeemed, in other words, that of speculative reason. It has, on the other, lost the emotional subjectivity of the religious consciousness in the same pure medium. For while human thought is the most inward and appropriate vehicle of subjective life, such thought, in its fullest grasp of truth, the Idea, is actuality in the most objective and universal sense of the term, and is only to be apprehended by pure thought in the medium native to itself.

With this adumbration of the difference between the spheres of art, religion, and philosophy we must on the present occasion rest content.

The sensuous mode of consciousness is that which first appears in the history of mankind. The earliest stages of religion are for this reason indistinguishable from a religion of art and its sensuous manner of presentation. In the religion of Spirit for the first time is God as Spirit cognized also on a higher plane, and one more adequate to thought, wherein it likewise follows as a corollary, that the presentation of truth in sensuous shape is not truly adequate to Spirit.

Now that we know something of the position which art occupies in the field of spiritual activity, and that which belongs to the philosophy of art among the several philosophical sciences, we will proceed in this introductory portion of our work in the first place to investigate the general idea of the beauty of art.

175 The German word here is Geist. I have translated it as best seems to suit the particular context in which the German word occurs.

176 Unendliche Negativität.

177 This is the “Ought” of practical feeling. As such just as in the case of the analytical sciences, what it lacks is objective determination (see “Phil. of Mind,” trans. of W. Wallace, p. 94).

178 In seiner Gemeinde. We should rather expect in seiner Gebiete.

179 The reference here appears to be to the three attitudes of thought to the objective world which may be generally indicated as that of ordinary consciousness, that of empiricism and that of speculative Philosophy. In the paragraph which follows, however, Hegel mainly refers to the logical process of dialectic and the Idea of Nature (die natürliche Idee.) The latter may, however, refer to both the previous divisions, i.e., the commonsense point of view and the scientific.

180 The spheres of art and social life are first perceived as merely independent circles of activity.

181 That is to say, nations have not only found in Art the best means of expressing their religious consciousness, but, even where religion has been raised to a higher power, have found in it the most adequate form in which to express the ideality of their general spiritual life.

182 Welche sick durch alles hindurchzieht, i.e., which permeates all experience.

183 In this metaphysical passage Hegel appears to be contrasting his own philosophical standpoint, absolute idealism, with that of critical or empirical philosophy, those at least who conceive reality either as a thing-in-itself, or the materia supplied to sense-perception from a world outside the human consciousness. The entire content of the Real is, on the contrary, all included under the form of self-conscious thought.

184 He means, I think, province of the universal, rather than “universal expansion of horizon.”

185 The words of Hegel are “innerhalb derselben im endlichen Geiste die Erinnerung des Wesens aller Dinge.” He no doubt has in his mind the derivation of the word Erinnerung. It is the inwardization or idealization of such substance.

186 Anschauung, that is to say, it is the object of man’s receptive senses.

187 The punctuation is clearly wrong. It is also very possible that derselben is a misprint for dieselbe. But in any case there should be comma rather than semicolon.

IDEA OF THE BEAUTY OF ART, OTHERWISE, FINE ART

TO ARRIVE AT the Idea of Fine Art in all its concreteness it will be necessary for us to consider it under three phases.

The second is that of natural beauty, the defects of which will demonstrate the necessity of the Ideal as Fine Art.
In the third of these aspects the subject of our investigation will be the Ideal in its positive realization, in other words as the artistic display of this Ideal in particular works of art.

THE NOTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL IN ITS GENERAL SIGNIFICANCE

WE HAVE DEFINED beauty to be the Idea of the beautiful.

The Idea. By this definition is implied that we have to conceive the beautiful as Idea, and, moreover, as Idea in a determinate shape, as Ideal. Idea, as thus posited, is just this, the conceptive notion, the realization of the same, and the unity of both. The notion, as such, is not yet the Idea, although the terms notion and idea are often loosely interchanged. Idea is the notion only as presented in, and brought into coalescence with, its objective reality. This unity, however, is by no means to be regarded as the mere neutralization of notion and reality, so that the individual character and quality of either is absorbed; as, for example, where we find that in a chemical compound salt-potash and acid tend to neutralize each other in so far as they have weakened their opposition. In this unity, on the contrary, the notion is retained as the commanding factor. It is already implicitly, in virtue of its own nature, this very identity. Out of its own wealth it evolves the reality as part of itself, by means of a process which, being no other than that of development, surrenders nothing of its own nature, but brings into more concrete actuality the riches of the notion, and for this reason continues in unity with itself and its objective realization. Such a unity of the notional concept and its realization is the Idea defined in abstract terms. The word idea is, of course, frequently used by authors of works dealing with the theory of art. It must, however, be admitted that many connoisseurs of high standing are particularly severe upon its employment. The latest and most interesting example of this polemical attitude is to be found in Herr von Rumohr’s “Italian investigations.” This work is based on the practical interest that the arts excite, and is wholly unconcerned with that which for brevity we may call the Idea. The truth is that this writer, who appears to have no knowledge of the development of philosophy in modern times, freely confuses the expression as above defined with the undetermined conceptions of the phantasy, or the abstract and characterless Ideal of well-known art theories or schools of art, ideas which present a lean contrast to the clearly defined and richly caparisoned objects of Nature in their truth, and which this writer opposes to the idea and empty Ideal, which the artist himself evolves from his own consciousness. We have, of course, no more right to suppose that creative work can be the result of such poverty, than we can with justice assume that a thinker can think with conceptions wholly indeterminate, and persist in his thought with a content destitute of all defined relation. Such an objection, however, does not apply in any respect to the Idea in the sense we use the expression. This Idea is through and through concrete; a whole which consists of relations and is simply beautiful from being in direct union with the objective form adequate to its expression.

Herr von Rumohr has placed on record in this very book (Book I, pp. 145-46) the following assertion, that “beauty in the most comprehensive meaning of the term, and as it is understood by intelligent people of our day, includes every quality of an object, which may either stir the sense of sight with satisfaction, or through that sense attune the soul and delight the mind.”

These qualities are then further subdivided into three classes as follows: “First, there is all that is perceptible through the eye; secondly, that which is apprehended by means of the peculiar, presumably innate sense of mankind for spatial relations; and thirdly, all that in the first instance works upon the understanding, and only indirectly through cognition on the emotions.” This third and most important determination rests apparently on forms “which quite independently of all pleasure to the sense and the beauty of extended shape arouse in us a specific delight which is ethical or spiritual in its quality, which in part to all appearance proceeds from the enjoyment we derive from the images excited (I presume he means ethical or spiritual ones)188, and in part from the pleasure which the mere activity of an intelligent appreciation infallibly brings with it.”

Such are the principal factors according to which this undoubted connoisseur of art defines his subject relatively to the beautiful. It may very possibly pass muster with a certain type of uncritical reader. It is, however, very unsatisfactory regarded from the philosophical standpoint. For what does it at bottom amount to but this, namely, that the sense of vision or spiritual sense, we may add the understanding itself, are moved pleasurably, or excite a feeling which results in awakened pleasure. The entire argument hinges on this one aspect of awakened gratification. This reduction, however, of the activity of the beautiful to terms of feeling — that which pleases and charms us — has been disposed of once for all by Kant. His exposition has already left far behind the feeling for the beautiful.

We will direct our attention now from this polemical tractate to a further consideration of the Idea its hostility has failed to weaken. In this, as already stated, is comprehended the concrete unity of the notion and its objective realization.

(a) Now, first, we will observe, in directing our attention more closely to the essential nature of the notion, that it is no purely abstract unity opposed to the differences of phenomenal reality; rather, as the notion, it is already the unity that integrates those relations, and by doing so is concrete totality. The abstract conceptions such as man, the quality blueness, and their like, are not notions as such at all, but rather should be called abstract general concepts, which are only raised to the dignity of the notion, when we have demonstrated that they contain opposing factors in unity, and, in such a way, that this self-related nexus of unity constitutes their notional truth. For instance, the concept “blueness” as a colour receives such a notional value when it is grasped as the unity, and, indeed, the specific unity of light and darkness189. In the same way the concept “man” contains within it the opposing factors of sense, life, and reason, body and mind (spirit); but a particular man is not to be regarded as a whole consisting in some way of these two aspects of his personality placed in a relation of indifference side by side as constituents of the same. Rather, in virtue of the notion, such a whole contains these constituents in concrete and mediated190 union. Add to this that the notion is so completely the absolute bond and unity of its differences, that independently they cease to exist, they are unable to assert the particularity, in virtue of which they might escape from such a union. For this reason the notion includes all its determining constituents in the form of its own ideal unity and universality, which constitute its subjective character in contradistinction from the real as the object of sense-perception. For example, gold is, as a particular object, of specific weight, definite colour, and placed in a certain relation to specific acids. Such are varied characteristics of gold, and yet are invariably found in a unified whole. The smallest speck contains them all in inseparable union. By analysis or abstraction we indeed separate them, but in their notion they are inseparably one. The inability of the differences, which the notion in its truth essentially possesses, to stand alone in their isolated self-identity is of a similar nature. A still more apposite illustration is presented by the unique concept of the self-conscious Ego in its universality. For that which we call soul, or more appositely the Ego, is the notion itself in its free existence. The Ego contains a congeries of most distinct concepts and thoughts in itself; it is a world of ideas; yet none the less this infinitely complex content, in so far as it lies within the Ego, remains without a vestige of substantiality or materiality packed within this ideal unity, as the pure and throughout fluid transparency of the Ego itself reflected to itself. And this is precisely the way in which the notion retains its varied determinations in ideal unity.

The determinants of the notion which are most cognate to the notion as such are the universal, the particular, and the single. Every one of these determinate qualities taken by itself is a mere abstraction. As thus regarded, however, abstract, that is to say, from one another, they are not present in the notion: that is rather their ideal unity. The notion is therefore the universal, which, on the one hand, negates itself to a condition of relativity and particularization, but, on the other, this riving asunder, in so far as it is negation of the universal, is itself again annulled. For the universal as present in the particular, which itself is only the particular aspects of the universal itself is present in no particular absolutely, but rather in that very particular reaffirms once more its essential unity as universal. In this return upon itself the notion is infinite negation; negation, I mean, not as against another, but self-determination, in which alone it subsists in its positive and correlative unity. In this way it is singularity in its truth; it is the universal nexus which shuts itself up with itself in its particulars. As the highest example of this property of the notion we would refer back to what we have already, if in a summary way, said about the essential activity of Spirit.

Through this infinite capacity of return upon itself the notion is already, by virtue of its intrinsic wealth, totality. It finds the unity of itself in the being of another, and for this reason possesses a free activity, being, however, negation as self-determination, not as the alien limitation of its own substance through something other than itself. But regarded as such totality the notion is already in potential possession of all phenomenal reality, and is that which mediates and restores the unity of the Idea. And whoever ventures to think that in the Idea we have presented to us something totally different and apart from the notion, has as little knowledge of the nature of the Idea as he has of the notion. At the same time there is, no doubt, a difference between the notion and the Idea, and it is this: in the former the particularization is only an abstract particularization, for this reason that in the notion the determinate relations are alone coherent in its transparent medium, that is to say, in its unity and ideal universality. The notion, therefore, itself remains subject to the one-sidedness of its particular material, and is hampered with the defect that although in its own nature it is a totality, yet it is only in the aspect of it as unity and universality that it is entitled to free self-development. But inasmuch as this defect in its completeness is foreign to its own essential form, the process of its activity is to remove it. It negates itself as this very ideal unity and universality and allows that which is enclosed in the barren chamber of ideal subjectivity to flow forth freely into real and substantive objectivity. In other words, the notion through its own activity posits itself as objective reality.

(b) Objectivity is therefore, truly apprehended, the real existence of the notion. It is, however, the notion under the mode of self-substantive particularization and of a differentiation of all antithetical phases191 of reality, whose ideal unity the notion in its subjective capacity constituted.

But inasmuch as it is the notion, and only the notion, whose function it is to endow objectivity with its determinate existence and reality, so too it is only through objectivity that the notion is unveiled in its actuality. The notion is, however, the mediating and ideal unity of all its particular antitheses. Within its differentiated reality this ideal unity, effective throughout particularity in modes adequate to the notion, has to establish itself in them, precisely in a way similar to that in which the realized particularity of their unity, as thus mediated to the point of ideality, has also to exist in them192. This is the might of the notion, which refuses to surrender or forfeit its universality among the disjecta membra of the objective world, but rather reveals its essential unity through such reality and within it. For it is nothing less than the very life of the notion to preserve its unity in the material which is offered it. Only by so doing is it real and veritable totality.

(c) This totality is the Idea. The Idea is not simply the ideal unity and subjectivity of the notion. It is quite as much its true and objective reality; it is, however, an objectivity which does not confront the notion as an opposing factor, but is rather that in which the notion itself is self-determined. In whichever aspect we contemplate the notion, whether as subjective to our apprehension, or as objectively real, the Idea it manifests is a totality. But it is more than this. It is the unity which for ever is mediating between and bringing into more perfected harmony the two totalities. Only as thus apprehended is the Idea truth and indeed all truth.

All that exists, then, has only truth in so far as it is a definite existence of the Idea. For the Idea is alone the truly real. The truth of the phenomenal is not derived from the fact that its particular existence is of an inward or external character, and as such is in a general sense reality; it is so wholly in virtue of the fact that such reality is adequate to the notion. Then alone is determinate existence real and true. And the truth, to which we here refer, is not a subjective interpretation of it, namely, that a particular existence is accordant with my own conception of it. It is truth in the objective sense that the reality of the Ego, or of any external object, action, or circumstance actually contributes to the realization of the notion. If this identity is not established the existence remains purely phenomenal. Instead of the objectification of the notion in its completeness what obtains is purely a detached aspect of it; and with regard to this, whatever self-subsistence it may appear to have in opposition to the unity and universality of the notion, such can only work to its final confusion by setting it in hostility to the true notion itself. Our conclusion, therefore, is that only the reality which adequately expresses the notion is truly reality, and the reason it is so is that therein the Idea manifests itself as existence.
We have maintained that beauty is Idea. It follows that beauty and truth are, in one aspect of them, identical. In other words, beauty must itself in its intrinsic being be true. A closer investigation will further show to us that truth must be distinguished from beauty.

The idea is true in the sense that it is so by virtue of its essential being and according to its fundamental principle193, and as such truth it is thought194. It is not its sensuous and external existence, but the universal Idea of thought as present in this. At the same time the Idea is driven to seek its realization in external and objectively determined existence, both in the sphere of Nature and that of Mind. The true, in the absolute sense, also exists. And in so far as, in this its external existence, it is immediately apprehended by consciousness, and the notion rests in immediate unity with its external appearance, the Idea is not only true, but is also beautiful. The beautiful may therefore be defined as the sensuous semblance195 of the Idea. For the sensuous condition and the objective world generally maintain no real self-subsistence in beauty, but have merely to surrender the immediacy of their being. In beauty such are posited simply as the determinate existence and externality of the notion, and as a form of reality, which itself manifests the notion in unity with its external appearance in this its particular objective existence. For this reason it can only pass as the semblance of the notion.

(a) Accordantly with this it is impossible for the understanding196 alone to grasp the significance of beauty. For inasmuch as objective reality is apprehended by this faculty as something at least quite other than ideality, sensuous perception, as something very different from the notion, the external object as something that is anywhere rather than within world of the conscious self, to that extent it cannot fail to emphasize the contradictions implied in such separation, rather than penetrate to the ideal unity we have above described. The understanding remains rooted in the finite, the incomplete and untrue abstraction. The beautiful is on the contrary itself essentially infinite and free.

For although the content of beauty is stamped with particularity and to that extent limited, such content is essentially in its mode of environment a totality that is infinite197 and a free existence; and it is both for the reason that it is the notion, which does not pass beyond this its objective semblance, and so fall into finite and one sided abstraction with it, but rather is immersed as a blossom with this its objectification and through the imminent unity and perfection of such inclusion is revealed as essentially infinite. With equal truth we may affirm that the notion in sealing, as it were, with a soul the real existence, in which it is part of the objective world, is itself by itself freely manifest in that world. For the notion will not suffer that external existence in the sphere of beauty to follow, as it would otherwise, the laws that therein are paramount: rather it determines out of its own riches the articulation and form of its appearance therein; and it is precisely this harmony of the notion with the mode of its external existence which constitutes the essential life of beauty. And the bond which braces all together, no less than the power behind it, is self-conscious life, unity, soul, and artistic personality.

(b) We conclude, then, that if we consider beauty in its relation to conscious life, on the subjective side that is, it is neither to be adequately apprehended by an intelligence that persists in the unfree medium of purely finite existence, nor is it the object of the finite Will. We will enlarge a little on both points.

As finite intelligence we are aware in feeling of the inner no less than the outer objects of consciousness; we observe them, perceive them to be true to our senses, allow them to form part of the content of our perceptions, concepts, and finally, no doubt, to become the abstractions which our understanding presents to us, reflecting on their appearance, and endowing them with the abstract form of universality.

Now the finiteness and absence of freedom inseparable from this mental attitude consists in the assumption that the things perceived are self-subsistent. We direct our attention to these objects, suffer them to impress us, form our ideas of them, possessed with the faith in their material existence as objects, and convinced that all we have to do is to perceive them as they appear to our passive reception, to preserve, in short, the formal side of our attention intact, holding such unfettered by our fancies, opinions, and prejudices. In thus accepting this one-sided freedom of objects we posit at the same time the want of freedom in their mental apprehension. To such the content is one wholly given from outside; and instead of a true self-determination through difference we have nothing but the reception and acceptance of what is presented as a part of the objective thing. We would arrive at truth by the suppression of all that belongs to ourselves198.

A criticism of like nature, though the defect is here just at the other extreme, may be applied to the finite Will. In this theory interests, objects, intentions, and conclusions are all relegated to the subject, whose will it is to enforce them as against the existence and properties of the material thing. This it can only do by the annihilation of the object itself, or at least, in so far as it can modify or change its form and energies, by transmuting its qualities, or permitting them to exercise such a change on each other, as water may exercise on fire, fire on iron, iron on wood, and so forth. We now find that it is the particular things, which the subject has enrolled in its service, as things to be regarded and treated as useful, which in their turn have been deprived of their self-subsistence. In other words, they have come to be regarded as objects, whose notion and meaning is not their own, but derived from the reflecting consciousness, so that what is most essential to them is precisely this relation of service in which they stand to the subjective purpose, that is, our own intelligence. The values of either side of the relation are thus completely reversed. The objective thing has lost freedom and the conscious subject secured it. As a matter of fact, the freedom on both aspects of the relation is, owing to the finitude and abstraction it implies under such a view, a purely supposititious one.

In the sphere of theory here it is the assumed independence of the objective world which creates the finitude and bondage of the conscious Ego. In that of the practical world this dependence is due to its one-sidedness, the conflict and contradiction of its aims within and the impulses and passions which press from without, no less than to the unreconciled opposition of a world of objects. For the separation and opposition of these two aspects of one whole, that is, objects and relating self-conscious life, is presupposed in, and indeed is an accurate definition of, this point of view.

And, similarly, with reference to the lack of freedom in the object. Here, too, in the sphere of intelligible conception, the independence of the object is assumed, but the freedom assumed is only apparent. For it is only posited as bare objectivity without securing the presence of its notion, as the unity and universality of the conscious subject, within such objectivity. It still remains outside it. Every object thus placed external to the notion merely exists as particularity, which comes back to us in external guise together with its manifold, and is, in all the unlimited scope of its relations, through its contact with other objects, subject to the conditions of its origin, change, opposing force and final overthrow. In the practical world the dependence of the object is expressly, in this view, assumed, and the opposition of the thing is posited in definite relation to volition without possessing in itself the power of ultimate self-subsistency permitted to the latter.

(c) The apprehension of the object as beautiful unites these two abstract points of view. It in fact annuls the one-sidedness of both whether relatively to the subject of consciousness or its object, and by doing so cancels the finitude and lack of freedom which characterize them.

Philosophically regarded199, the reason is this, that the object is not apprehended in its existence as an isolated thing whose notion as the object of human thought is removed from the objectivity which belongs to it as something outside it, and which in its particular reality extends and is dissipated in every conceivable direction as a manifold content of intelligible relations. An object which is beautiful suffers its own notion to appear as realized in its objective presence, and reveals in that appearance the unity and life inseparable from the conscious subject. For this reason the object may be conceived as sweeping back into the curve of its unity that impulse of continuous externality, cancelling its dependence on other objects, and transmuting to our vision its unfree finitude into free infinity.

Furthermore, the Ego in its relation to the object of beauty ceases to be merely the abstract attention or sensuous perception, and the floating away of such perceptions into equally abstract reflections. Rather, it is itself concretely realized in this object, being at once the unity and reality of its notional idea, and uniting for itself in its rounded concreteness that which has hitherto remained, as abstractly perceived, apart in the Ego of the subject of perception and the thing perceived.

Coming now to the practical import of this relation as it applies to the object of beauty, we have already drawn attention to the fact at some length, that in the contemplation of it the element of sensuous passion drops away. All personal impulse that the individual may feel toward the object is done away with through that very aesthetic contemplation, which regards it as self-subsistent in itself, in other words, its own object. For this reason, the purely finite relation of the object also disappears, the relation, that is, in which it subserved, as a means for their realization, aims which were foreign to it, and towards the fulfilment of which it was either presented as unfree or was compelled to take up, however strange, into its own existence. At the same time that relation of the Ego in the practical world which we found to be unfree disappears, inasmuch as it differentiates itself no longer in subjective motives and their means or material, remaining fixed in the finite relation of the formal “ought” for the carrying out of its subjective ends in the object, but is here confronted with the notion and its aim completely realized.

We may say, then, that the aesthetic contemplation of the beautiful is a liberal education, a portrayal of the object in its free and infinite being, with no detracting consideration of its use or employment for finite wants and purposes. Further, the object as a thing of beauty is neither under force or compulsion at our hands, nor is it in conflict with and overcome by other things outside it. It is of the essence of beauty that the notion, end and soul thereof, no less than its existent form, and variety generally, manifest themselves out of their own intrinsic wealth rather than through the energy of something outside them. The reason of this lies in the fact, already insisted upon, that their truth consists solely in the unity and harmony of their notion with their objective existence. And inasmuch as the notion is itself concrete totality, its objective reality also appears as a manifestation of the same, homogeneous in all its parts, which, as thus imbedded in the notion, appear to fall into such ideal unity and animation. For this harmony of the notion and its envisagement is nothing less than perfected suffusion200. Accordingly the exterior form and shape is manifested, not as such by its separation from other material, or as an impression mechanically related to aims which are foreign to it, but as the form of reality wherein the notion accommodates itself out of its own stuff and substance. Finally, however much the particular aspects, parts or articulations of the beautiful object are presented in the ideal unity of the notion and its unified envisagement, that harmony must be so rendered visible to sense, that in relation to one another they preserve the semblance of self-subsistent freedom; in other words they must not only possess the ideal unity of the notion as such, but must reflect back the side of a reality which is substantially objective also. Both aspects, in short, must be present in beautiful objects; for these are, on the one hand, the necessity posited through the notion and discovered in the harmonious conclusion of these particular aspects, and on the other, the envisagement of their freedom as essentially one with the whole, and not merely that of the unity which exists between the parts. Necessity in its full definition means the just relation of the two aspects, which coalesce so completely that to posit one is to posit the other. Such a necessity must unquestionably be present in beautiful objects. It is not, however, under the mode of necessity that it appears; rather it should conceal itself beneath the semblance of unintentional accident. Otherwise the particular parts of such a real presence lose the position they should occupy according to their own real existence, and only appear in the service of their ideal unity, to which they therefore remain in abstract subordination.

In virtue of the freedom and infinitude above analysed, which is inherent in the notion of beauty, whether we view it in its objective presence as a thing of beauty, or under its aesthetic contemplation, we disengage the province of the beautiful from the relations of finite condition, to exalt it into that of the Idea and its truth.

188 This is, of course, a note of Hegel himself.

189 This, of course, has reference to Hegel’s unfortunate belief in Goethe’s theory of colour.

190 Mediated (vermittelt), because the concrete is first apprehended through its differences, and only after reflection do we arrive at the notional unity which transcends and unites them.

191 Momente. Phases asserted and reconciled in the evolved notional unity, organic or otherwise. The notion is subjective because it is an ideal unity.

192 The text is clearly corrupt. The full-stop after herzustellen should be a comma, and auch would be preferably changed to als die.

193 As essentially reason.

194 Not the substantive, but past participle.

195 Das sinnliche Scheinen.

196 Verstand in the technical sense of Kant’s philosophy; that is, the faculty of scientific observation or ordinary perception — analytical, in contrast to reason (Vernunft), the synthetic faculty.

197 Infinite, that is to say, as human freedom is infinite, as mind is infinite, an ideal totality, a whole complete in itself, not an endless progress, which is a contradiction.

198 Or, as Hegel says, “by suppressing the subjective principle altogether.”

199 Theoretischen here used in sense of true philosophical theory, not one-sided views as above.

200 Vollendete Durchdringung, i.e., a penetration through all parts.

THE BEAUTY OF NATURE

BEAUTY IS THE Idea as the immediate unity of the notion and its objective reality, yet is only the Idea in so far as its unity is immediately present in shape apprehensible to the senses and as semblance of the real. The most elementary form of existence, which the Idea take to itself is Nature, and the first form of beauty is that of Nature.

A. THE BEAUTY OF NATURE AS SUCH

In the world of Nature we must distinguish between the modes according to which the notion becomes existent reality in order to be part of the Idea.

(a) In the first place the notion is absorbed so immediately in pure objectivity, that, in its character of subjective and ideal unity, it wholly fails to assert itself, and passes over instead as a thing without a soul into the raw materia presented to sense. The purely mechanical or physical bodies in their isolated singularity are of this order. A particular metal is, for example, essentially no doubt a manifold of mechanical and physical qualities; every part of it, however, has such qualities equally in itself. Such a body not merely fails to possess any entire articulation of its parts in the sense that every one of its different parts receives for itself a particular material existence, but even the negative ideal unity of such differentiation is absent, which might assert itself as animating principle201. The difference here is a purely abstract multiplicity, and the unity posited the indifferent equilibrium of identical qualities.

This is the first mode of the existence of the notion. The differences here receive no independent existence, and the ideal unity is not found as ideality. For this reason such isolated bodies are essentially defective and abstract existences.

(b) Natural objects of a higher order suffer the differences asserted by the notion to appear as free, so that each one as external to another is itself independently existent. Here we have for the first time the true character of objectivity. Objectivity is just this independent assertion of the segregated differences determined by the notion. On this plane of existence the notion asserts itself in such a way that it is at least a totality of its differences, which is truly realized, in so far as the particular bodies, while they each severally possess independent existence for themselves, are at the same time members of one inclusive system. Of such a character is the solar system. In one aspect of them the sun, comets, moon, and planets appear as independent heavenly bodies apart from one another; in another, however, they derive their definite character from being parts of one system of such material bodies. Not only their specific modes of motion, but also their physical qualities, are only to be deduced from their relation to this system. This nexus which binds them together constitutes that inward unity which relates these particular existences together in one whole.

But further than this, in this conception of system the operation of the notion is not exhausted in the existent unity of independent bodies as essential parts of it. For just as the differences are real the unity which relates them to the totality has to assert itself as real. This unity, in other words, differentiates itself from the multifold particularity of those objective bodies of which it is the integrating principle. And on this plane of existence it is differentiated therefore itself against such a particularity as real, independent and objective existence. In the solar system the sun exists over against all particularity related to that system, as such a unity of the system.

Such a material existence of the ideal unity of the notion is still very defective; for whereas on the one hand we have this unity posited in its reality only as the relation or material connection between the severally independent bodies, on the other we have it posited as a body which belongs to that system, whose unity, in opposition to its real differences, it essentially represents. The sun, in short, which we take to be202 the soul of the system, has itself an independent entity apart from the members which form the explicit content of this soul. It is itself only one particular mode or phase of the notion, that, namely, of unity in its difference from the actual separation of the several parts, a unity which remains outside itself, and is consequently abstract. For however much the sun by virtue of its physical quality is plainly a principle of unity, the illuminating body as such, this is after all merely an abstract identity. For light is simple, undifferentiated appearance and nothing more. We find therefore in the solar system the unity of the notion indeed objective, and the totality of its differences explicitly realized, each body making visible one particular phase203 of the notion; but here, too, it lies absorbed in its objective reality, and it fails to assert itself in such material as is truly inherent and explicit ideality. The form of its existence which here prevails remains the independent segregation of its particular phasal units204.

It is, however, essential to the true existence of the notion, that the differences of the objectively real, the reality, that is to say, of the separate independent parts and the equally independent unity that is therein objectively realized, should as such be together brought back into unity. Only thus such a totality of innate differences can make wholly explicit either the notion as the realized differentiation of its characteristics, or at the same time release each particular that belongs to it from the element of isolated independence which it cancels by enabling the ideality, in which these differences recover their subjective unity, to assert itself fully as the universal principle of their animated being. In that case they become no longer parts hanging loosely to one another by a bond that still leaves their particularity unaffected, but genuine members of one body. They no longer possess an existence in their isolated singularity, but retain such truly in the ideal unity which binds them together. Only in such an organic articulation the ideal unity of the notion is present to the parts thus integrated. It is at once their support and immanent soul; here for the first time the notion is not overwhelmed in objective reality, but passes over into actual existence as the inward identity and universality, which it essentially is.

(c) But this third mode of Nature’s manifestation is a determinate existence of the Idea, and the Idea as thus manifested in Nature is Life. Dead or inorganic nature is not adequate to express the Idea; only the organic life of Nature unfolds its reality. For in life we shall find, first, that the objective reality of the notion as differentiated is presented as such reality; secondly, however, that the negation of such differences is entirely one of distinction in that reality205, the ideal subjectivity of the notion overcoming to itself this very reality; thirdly, the unifying principle of animation is now the positive appearance of the notion in the form of its bodily substance, that is to say, the form of infinity, which is sufficiently powerful to assert itself thus formally in its content.

(α) If we ask ordinary consciousness206 for a definition of Life, we have two determinations presented, either the imaginative conception of it as bodily life, or as soul-life. In the same view we distinguish these two determinations with qualities peculiarly belonging to each. This contrast we set up between soul and body is also of great importance in the more philosophical consideration of our subject. And it is no less part of our inquiry to investigate it. At the same time we would point out that the philosophical interest concentrates itself quite as much on the unity which exists between soul and body, a part of this inquiry which a really adequate survey of the subject has at all times found beset with the greatest difficulties. It is, however, precisely in virtue of this unity that Life is the first genuine appearance of the Idea in Nature. We must consequently apprehend the identity of soul and body as no fortuitous connection207, but a union of profounder significance. In other words, we must recognize the body and its members as the objective existence of the notion itself in systematic articulation, which in the members of the living organism, secures an objective existence for its determinate features, analogously no doubt, if on a higher plane, to the facts presented by the solar system. Within this real existence the notion asserts itself in like manner as the ideal unity of all these determinate parts. This ideal unity is the soul. The soul is the substantive unity and interfused universality which is no less a simple relation of self-determining than it is ideal Being-for-itself or self-coherent totality. This is the higher view of the union between soul and body. To put it in other words both are not merely distinct aspects set side by side; they are one and the same totality of identical determinants. Just as the Idea generally can only be grasped in its explicit reality as the notion evolving itself as such208, in which conception the differentiation and unity of both sides, that is both the notion and its objective reality, are inseparably present, in the same way Life must be conceived as the unity of both soul and body.

And further, the subjective no less than substantive unity of soul within the body is presented us and exemplified in Feeling. The feeling of a living organism is, that is to say, not merely an independent product of a particular member, but it is also this ideal and simple unity of the entire organism. It is carried through every member of the body is felt throughout in more than a hundred places at once; and indeed, to put it shortly, rather than saying there are many thousand sensitive points209 in a single organism we should more justly say there is but one, namely, the subject of consciousness. And inasmuch as the animating principle of organic Nature includes in itself this distinction between the real existence of the organic members, and the abstract or simple self-coherence within such parts, which we call the growing soul, mediating between them both by virtue of its inherent unity, such a principle of Life stands on a higher plane than that of inorganic Nature. Only with Life is the Idea existent, and only thus is the Idea truth. No doubt even in the organic world this truth can be extinguished. We find the body unable to perfect its essential ideality and animating energy. Such is the case in disease. Here we find the notion deprived of its controlling sovereignty, and other powers are potent with it. Such a life is, however, defective and crippled: it merely continues, because the inadequacy of reality to the notion has not reached the point of absolute contradiction; it is still only relatively valid. Once assume that all harmony between the two sides is broken, that all genuine articulation of the members of the body and their true identity has dropped away, and life is dissolved in death. The several members are now mere appendages to each other, with no principle of Life to hold them in unsevered unity.

(β) We must add that when we stated the soul is the totality of the notion regarded as the subjective and ideal unity, the body on the other hand, as distinguished by its members, is the same totality but rather in its material aspect as the juxtaposition and sensuous accretion of all the several parts, affirming at the same time that both soul and body are posited as one in the living organism, there is no doubt something contradictory in the statement. For the ideal unity, so far from being this material juxtaposition of parts, in which each particularity possesses its independent consistency and exclusive character, is rather in direct antithesis to such external reality. That what is diametrically opposed should nevertheless be identical is obviously a contradiction in terms. The man, however, who declares the non-existence of anything from the fact that it carries in our notion of it a contradiction which implies the identity of opposed antitheses, simply excludes Life itself from the idea of existence. For the force of Life and still more the power of Spirit (mind) consists in this very movement, namely, to assert the law of contradiction inherent within them, to bear the burden thereof and to overcome it. This affirmation and resolution of the contradiction which obtains between the ideal unity and material juxtaposition of the members, constitutes the appointed process of life itself. And Life is simply process. And this process of life includes an activity which has two distinct functions. On the one hand it has continually to affirm the material existence of the physical distinctions210 among the members of the organism thus determined; on the other, just in proportion as such distinctions grow obdurate in their independent particularity, and tend to remain fixed in absolute separation from each other, it has to make good once more that universal ideality, which is the principle of their life. This is the idealism of Life’s process. Philosophy is not the only idealism; far from it. Nature herself in her domain of actuality creates in the life-process just that which the philosophy of idealism completes in the world of contemplative thought. Only where we have these two aspects of one activity, that is, the constant realization of the corporeal definition of the organism no less than the synthetic affirmation of such material presentment in the ideal unity, which it is as one with the notion211, then and only then we have the completed process of Life, whose more primitive forms212, however, this is not the place to discuss. Through this unity of Life’s energy in both its branches all the members of the organism are up held in their integrity, and continually flushed anew with the ideality of their life. This ideality is furthermore declared by the organic parts in the fundamental law of their being, that this unity of Life is not so much an accidental quality as, on the contrary, the substance of it. In this alone they are able to preserve their specific character. This it is which precisely constitutes the difference between the part of a mere conglomerate and the member of an organism. The particular parts of a house, for example, the stones, windows, and so forth, remain just what they are, whether they form part of the structure of a house, or whether they do not. Their relationship to one another is quite indifferent, and the conceptual notion remains in their case a purely external form, which possesses no life in these parts raising them to the ideality of a subjective unity.

The members of an organism have, it is true, an external reality, but for all that it is the notion of Life which constitutes the inward, nay, the characteristic being of such reality, a reality which is not expressed through one external form uniting them, but in the ideal coherence of their parts in one living whole. For this reason the limbs have no such reality as belongs to the stones of a building, or the planets, moon, and comets in the solar system. Their reality is one wholly within the content of the organism, and all appearance to the contrary is, as such, ideally imposed on them. Dissever the hand from the body and it loses its independent existence as a member of the organism which made it what it was. Its activity, form, and colour, all that constitutes it, is at once changed; it enters the process of corruption, and ultimately ceases to exist213. Consistent character it only possesses as a limb of organic life, reality only in constant reunion with that ideal unity which sustains it. And that is just the superior mode of reality which the living organism possesses in itself. The real or positive is for ever being set up as both the negation of itself and withal the ideal resumption of itself, such ideality constituting, in fact, both the maintenance and specific character of the mode under which each of the separate parts of the bodily presence are associated together.

(γ) The reality, then, which the Idea wins for itself in the life of Nature is reality as a phenomenal process. Such an appearance stated in its simplest terms is this, that a reality exists, but its potential being214 is not immediately in its possession, rather it is at the same time negatively affirmed215 in the particular form that belongs to it. The negation of the immediately external and particular members of a body is not only a negative relative relation as the activity of the inherent idealization216, but is as such a positive realization217.

Hitherto we have considered the particular objects of the real as positive in their self-exclusive particularity. This independence, however, is negated in the living object, and the ideal unity asserted within the bodily organism is alone found to assert over itself the full force of positive determination. Such a positive ideality in the principle of negation it asserts is the soul. On the appearance of the soul in the body we have at once such an affirmative presence as the one indicated. The soul not merely asserts itself as a power against the subdivision of the bodily members, it is their plastic creator218, which preserves as inward and ideal that which is externally minted in the shape of physical members. And consequently it is this very positive and ideal inward219 which appears in the outer structure; in other words, the external, so far as it is a mere external, is a mere abstraction, a mere aspect that is untrue for the whole. In organic life the external we are confronted with is an externality through which the inward is made visible. The outward, that is to say, declares itself in its potential nature as that inward, which is its notion. Further to this notion appertains the reality in which it as notion is made visible. Inasmuch, however, as in the objective world the notion, strictly as such, is the principle of subjective life and self-determined life becoming explicit in its own objective reality220, life exists only as a living thing, an individual subject. It is only with life thus concentrated to a point that we find this negating centrum of unity. And it is negative in this sense that the ideal explicitly self-unified totality221 can only now stand forth in its reality by virtue of this principle of ideality being asserted through the differentiation of its positive presence, together with which the ideal unity of such totality is at the same time incorporated. It is of the greatest importance to make clear this aspect of the principle of subjectivity. It is only as the single living thing thus unified by such a principle that life is actually present.

If we inquire further in what manner the Idea is manifested within the actual life of such living individuals our survey will be as follows: first, this principle of Life will be realized as the totality of an organism possessing bodily shape; secondly, this physical shape is not presented as a rigid product222, but as a continous process of ideal generation, in which a living soul asserts itself. Thirdly, the changes and determinations through which this totality passes are not imposed externally to it, but are changes of form which are evolved from its inherent nature, imposed on itself and for itself, in a process wherein it stands self-determined as the subjective unity no less than the ultimate end of its being.

This free self-subsistence of the subjective principle of life is especially exemplified in the spontaneous motion of a living organism. The inanimate bodies of inorganic Nature are fettered to the conditions of Space, which limits them to one place, or they are only moved from it by external forces. The motion, in short, does not originate in themselves; and, when it is visible upon them, it appears as an energy which is foreign to them, to remove which the only force they exert is that of reaction. And if the motion of the planets with similar phenomena appear to be otherwise produced, such are at least wholly fettered by natural laws and their abstract necessity. The living animal, on the contrary, in its freedom of motion, negatives this enforced limitation to one spot by virtue of its own activity. It is through such self-determination the continuous liberation of itself from the material isolation. And for the same reason it is in this freedom of motion, if only in a subordinate degree, the release of itself from the former abstractness referable to the particular modes of motion, their direction and their speed. Under a yet closer view, moreover, the animal, regarded by itself in its organism, presents the same sensuous matter that is moved; and here, too, life is as before a freedom of motion within this organic reality, evidenced in the flow of blood and the movement of the limbs.

Motion, however, is not the only expression of animated life. The free tones of the voice of animals, which are unknown in the inorganic world, where bodies merely roar and clatter through the blow of objects external to them, these already present to us the higher expression of animated subjectivity. The most intimate and vital expression of such ideal activity is, however, brought before us when we find the living individual able to concentrate itself as individuality over against the objective world, while at the same time it appropriates and transfigures that world for its own. And this is accomplished in part through observation by means of vision, and partly for practical purposes, in so far as such an individual brings the outer world into subjection to himself, utilizes the same, assimilates it as a means of nourishment, and in this manner continually reproduces his individuality in that objective alterum. Such a process, of course, as it ascends through stronger organisms, assumes more and more emphatic degrees of unsatisfied desire, assimilation, satisfaction, or satiety.

Such, then, are the activities, in which the notion of animated life makes itself apparent. Moreover, the principle of Ideality thus rendered visible is not merely the result of our reflection; it is objectively real itself in the living subject, whose existence consequently we may go so far as to call an objective idealism. And it is the soul, as before stated, which, as this ideal energy, brings about its own manifestation223, always reducing the purely external reality of the body to an appearance, and thereby affirming itself as objective totality in that very bodily shape.

Now it is as the Idea made objectively visible to the senses that the animated life of Nature is beautiful; in so far, that is to say, as the truth or the Idea, presented in the form of Nature, where under it first appears, in other words life, is immediately given in the particular shape of reality adequate to it. Owing, however, to its sensuous immediacy the living beauty of Nature is neither beautiful for itself nor is the beauty strictly that which is the outcome of itself, a product, that is, of its purely objective appearance. The beauty of Nature is only beautiful for another, that is for us, the consciousness that apprehends its beauty. The question therefore arises in what way and by virtue of what characteristics the principle of life appears to us beautiful in its immediate existence.

(a) If we look at the practical way in which a living object becomes visible and preserves itself, the first thing which rivets our attention is spontaneous motion. This motion, regarded simply as motion, is nothing more than the entirely abstract freedom of motion from place to place and from time to time, which we find exemplified in the spontaneous, but entirely haphazard movements of animal life. In music and the dance we have, it is true, motion in its generic significance; but here motion is not merely a matter of chance and impulse, but it exhibits the laws which regulate it; it is defined, complete in itself and subject to measure; and it is all this, though we still abstract from it the significance whereof it is the beautiful expression. If we again interpret the motion of animals as the realization of an aim originating within themselves, this excited impulse is still entirely accidental, an end of most restricted import. If we further extend our survey and conceive such motion as the activity and working together of all parts of the animal organism towards a definite purpose, we shall merely find that such a conception is rendered possible by our own effort of imagination224. The case is just the same if we reflect upon the way in which an animal gratifies its physical wants, obtains nourishment through the organs which grasp it, consume it, digest it, and generally is a subject of the process which preserves its life. For in this case also we have either only before us single desires and their spontaneous and haphazard gratification, in which the inward activity225 of the organism is not present at all, or at least all these activities and their means of expression have become the subject of our imaginative reflection, which is at pains to understand such a process by relating it to definite ends, and to establish a harmony between aims assumed to belong to the animal itself and the organs which fulfill them.

We shall rather find that neither the sensuous perception of single haphazard appetites, arbitrary movements and efforts towards self-satisfaction, nor the fanciful consideration of the animal organism as one directed by purpose will present to us purely animal life as a part of the beauty of Nature. The beauty consists in the appearance of individual form, both in repose and motion, quite apart from the relation of its self-gratification to any purpose thus subserved, as it is apart from the entirely isolated contingency of self-imposed movement226. Such beauty is related to the form alone, because it is only as such that it is the external appearance, in which the objective idealism of the principle of life makes itself known to us as a thing perceived and contemplated upon through the senses. Thought apprehends this “objective idealism” in the medium of its notion, appropriating the same in the element of universality which belongs to it, albeit the contemplation of its beauty is inseparably bound with its phenomenal reality. And this reality is the external form of the articulated organism, which is, in our view of it, quite as much determinate particularity as it is a semblance, namely, that of the physical manifold of the separate members, which can only form part of the concrete totality of the living form under the guise of phenomenal appearance.

(b) From the explanation of the notion of life already given we may deduce more narrowly the form of this appearance as follows. The form is one of spatial extension, limitation, and configuration, distinguished through its various shape, colour, and motion, being, in fact, a manifold of such distinctions. If, however, the organism which manifests these differences is a living organism, it will inevitably appear that the organism does not derive its true existence from such a manifold and its physical configurations. This is brought about by the fact that the different parts, which are apprehended by us through the senses, are at the same time conjoined together in one totality; they appear consequently as the members of one individual existence, which is a unity of such differences, and which not merely possesses them in their difference, but as parts of one homogeneous whole.

(α) In the first place, however, this unity will assert itself as the purposeless identity of such differences, that is to say with no abstract relation to any causal end whatever. The parts in such a case are not rendered visible to sense merely as a means to or in the service of some defined purpose, nor are they able to fix the determinate relation of form and structure which they occupy one over against the other.

(β) Rather the contrary is the case, for, in the second place, the bodily members have for our sense-perception the appearance of being quite accidental in their form; in other words the determination of one appears to be quite indifferent to that of another. In other words, we can never conclude because one has a certain form another will have the same, as would be the case if a material uniformity was clear between them. Where uniformity is the rule an abstract determination of some kind of form, size, or whatever it may be, is the property of all parts. The windows of a building, for example, are all of one size, or at least are placed together in one row. Or we may illustrate the same similarity with the uniform worn by all soldiers belonging to one regiment. We have various parts of such clothing differing in colour, texture and the rest, but their formal opposition is no matter of chance; each has its causal connection with some other; it is there because the other is there. Neither is there here any complete distinction of form, nor any unique independence wholly asserted. With the individual organism of life the case is entirely otherwise. Here every part is absolutely distinguished; the nose from the forehead, the mouth from the cheek, the breast from the neck, the arms from the legs, and so on. Inasmuch as for our sense-perception every member possesses its unique form rather than one which belongs to another, or one which is determined by that of another, the members appear as self-subsistent parts, and for this reason free and spontaneous227. For the material juxtaposition of the parts alone throws no light upon their particular form.

(γ) Thirdly, it is obvious there must be for our imaginative perception a more inward bond of connection present in the self-subsistence of the organism, if the unity is not offered us in its rational, spatial, temporal, or quantitative relations such as are presented in the examples of uniformity referred to, which, as we have seen, the unique particularity of the parts can extinguish. This identity is not sensuous and immediately present to perception in the way the distinction between the members is presented; it is rather a secret and inward bond of necessity and harmonious relation between the members and their form. If it were only inward, quite out of reach of our vision, such a necessary unity would be apprehended only in thought, removed from our sense-perception altogether. In such a case, however, it would fail to enter into the beautiful object of our vision, and what we found as such in the living, object would cease to be the Idea in its own objective and phenomenal reality. Such a unity must consequently enter into what is externally perceived, although it is, as the ideal principle of life within it, not entirely apparent to sense or confined in spatial dimensions. It appears in fact in the individual totality as the universal ideality of its members, constituting thus the fundamental basis which supports and holds them together, the subject of the living subject. And this subjective unity in organic life finds its first direct expression in feeling. In the emotional life the Soul finds its true expression as Soul. For soul the mere juxtaposition of limbs have no real truth, and in the presence of its subjective ideality the purely spatial multiplicity of external configuration ceases to exist. Such a manifold, with its unique differentiations, its organic articulation of parts228 is no doubt presupposed; but when and in so far as the soul expresses itself through such in feeling the more inward unity ever-present to life asserts itself equally as the dissolution of all absolute independence between the physical parts, which reveal now not merely their materia, but also that wave of animation which fuses all in their soul.

(c) To start with, however, we must observe that the emotional expression of soul-life neither offers us the visual impression of any necessary inter-dependence between the separate members, nor indeed the perception of an identity which is necessary between such physical articulation and the subjective unity conferred on it by simple feeling. We will investigate this more narrowly.

(α) If indeed the form and only the form renders in some way visible this inward harmony and its necessity, it may be because we look upon this juxtaposition as the habitual relation of such members, a connection which brings to our view some specific type and the oft-repeated formal exemplifications of such a type. But the necessity of custom is after all only a subjective necessity.229 According to such a principle we may find certain animals ugly for no other reason than that we find in them an organism which differs from our ordinary experience, or runs contrary to it. For this reason we call the organisms of certain animals bizarre in so far as the way in which their organs are related together is foreign to what is more common to our experience or entirely contradicts it. Fishes whose bodies are in size out of all proportion to their length of tail, or those in which we find eyes together on one side of the head only, are an example. In the world of plants we are already prepared to find many such strange departures from type, although the cactus with its spines, and the more rectilinear shaping of its angular junctures230 may still arouse our wonder. The more a man is educated, however, in all branches of natural history, the more able he will be to recognize in their truth the subordination of all parts of organic life, and carry in the memory the greatest variety of types in their proper classification, and the less anything he may observe will surprise him.

(β) A profounder penetration into this correlation of the parts will, however, in the second place, tend to give us that truer insight competent to determine from one of the parts the entire form to which it must belong. Cuvier is a famous example of such aptitude: a man of science, who by the examination of a single bone, whether fossil or otherwise, was able to specify at once by its characteristics the kind of animal to which it belonged. An excellent illustration this of ex ungue leonem. So from a claw or a thigh bone we may discover the conformation of the teeth, or vice versa from the teeth that of the hip-bone, or that of the vertebral column. Such a profound synthesis of the type and the knowledge it implies carries us, however, beyond habitual experience only. We must assume, to render it possible, previous thought and the systematic arrangement of the isolated facts of science. Our example Cuvier had no doubt secured from previous experience a determinate content and some specific quality which prevailed in each generic conception, and asserted itself as a unity of principle in all particulars however distinct, and so enabled him to recognize their affinity. Such a specific quality is that of flesh-eating, which is then the determinating principle of the form of the other members of the organism to which it belongs. A flesh-eating animal requires teeth and jaws of exceptional vigour; when hunting it will require claws to seize its prey, mere hoofs are insufficient. Here in short is a quality which necessarily determines for us the form and principle of affinity among all the organic members. A conception of such a typical character is the ordinary one we form of the strength of an eagle or a lion. We may no doubt find something both beautiful and instructive231 in this way of regarding the animal world, in so far as we derive from it some unified idea of its configuration, which is not a mere repetition of that unity in all the parts, but gives full value to the distinctions they possess. For all that it must be remembered the dominant factor of this survey is not the perception of our senses, but the generic thought of our minds with which it is made to conform. Reviewed in this light we ought not to say that we find the object as such beautiful, but rather attribute that beauty to the reflection of our own minds upon it. And if we examine these reflections more closely we shall find they are after all a deduction of our principle of unity from a limited aspect of the organic whole. We concentrate our attention, for example, on the mode in which it is nourished, i.e., whether such an animal is carnivorous or herbivorous. Through such a limited determination we are still removed from a vision of the coalescent unity of the whole we identified with the notion, the soul itself.

(γ) The truth is we can only, in this sphere, bring before our consciousness the entire unity of life by means of our thought and grasp of reason. In the natural world the soul, in its full activity, is not found; that is to say, the subjective unity, in its pure ideality, does not exist there for a self-consciousness.

If, however, by means of thought, we endeavour to grasp the nature of soul-life according to its essential notion we shall find two aspects under which we may regard it; first, as the form subject to such a principle of animation; secondly, as the notion of soul for thought in all that the conception implies. Such a complete grasp of its true nature is not possible in the sensuous perception of the objects of beauty. Such must neither pass before us as thought, nor must we allow the interest of Thought as such to form a barrier of difference or opposition between itself and the vision revealed to us. We are left, then, with no alternative but to consider, under this point of view, the object as wholly presented to sense; we must assume that in the sphere of Nature a sensuous perception of the natural form is our genuine mode of contemplating the beautiful. “Sense,” that is the master-key232 to the position; a word which in itself is interpreted in two opposed senses. In the first place we may indicate thereby the organs of immediate233 perception, secondly, by the “sense of a thing” we may refer to the significance, or the element of thought and the universal within it. In this way “Sense” is related on one side to the immediate externality of existence, and on the other to its inward or essential nature. A sensuous perception of that existence in fact preserves both sides in unity, or rather in one direction so presents the aspect that is opposed to it in the immediate sense vision as to include therein both the essence and notion of the object. But for the reason that it combines these opposed determinations in unfractured unity, the notion is not presented as such to consciousness, but is rather to be dimly foreshadowed there234. We accept, for example, as a determinate fact the existence of three realms of Nature, which we define as that of the mineral world, that of plants, and finally that of animals; we can conclude from this, as already foreshadowed by its truth regarded as a process rising from plane to plane, that there is an inward necessity inherent in the notional articulation of its divisions, and do not confine ourselves only to the purely imaginative conception of it as a world conforming on its exterior side only to a final end. In the same way when confronted with the variety of the external presentment in each of these realms, the sense-perception surmises a controlling unity intelligible to mind, a progress subject to laws of thought, visible no less in the formation of mountain ranges than in the orderly succession of plant-life and of the animal races. The same tendency is presupposed when, after an examination of the form of any particular animal organism, an insect’s, for example, as subdivided into head, body, abdomen, and extremities, we conclude the correlation of such parts to be based on a rational principle, and are confident that though, at first blush, it may appear quite accidental that we are in possession of five senses, we shall discover a true bond of relation between that number and the notion therein asserted. Of just this type is Goethe’s method of observing and accounting for the innate reason of Nature and her phenomena. With an extraordinary intuitive sense he directed his attention directly to235 the objects of experience, entirely convinced of the ideal bond of unity which explained their interconnection. History may be written with a like object. The narration of facts and individual lives is given in such a way as indirectly to throw a light on the essential significance which such events or persons contributed to the period in which they are necessarily bound together in one organic whole.

Consequently we may affirm that Nature generally, regarded as the sensuous manifestation of the concrete notion and the Idea, is to be considered an object of beauty in so far as by such a sensuous perception of natural forms some kind of foreshadowing of the notional unity consonant to them is surmised, and we are able through the channels of sense to discover not merely their form, but somewhat of the inner necessity which binds together all their parts. Further than this incomplete surmise of the notion the sensuous contemplation of Nature as beautiful is not carried. This way of comprehending things, for which the separate parts, despite their appearance of independent freedom among themselves, nevertheless reveal to the sight the harmony that exists there either in the characteristics of their form, or detached portions of it or their motion and so forth, remains for all that indefinite and abstract. The inward unity is not open to external sense, nor can it appear in its ideal and concrete form to such perception236, whether imaginative or no; such at most acquiesces generally in the universality of a law of connection inherent in every living thing.

(a) It is, then, in the first instance only in this bond of union which reveals itself as a necessary adjunct of vitality from the objectivity of Nature, in so far as the same is presented in forms adequate to the notion, that we have before us the beauty of Nature. With this coalescence the materia is wholly identical; the form is immediately at home in the matter, as its true essence and its conforming energy237. This description may in fact stand for us, so far as beauty at this stage is concerned, as a general definition of it. We admire, for example, the natural form of a crystal on account of the law of uniformity it manifests, a law which through no mere action of forces external to it, but by virtue of its own specific definition and free activity, free in all its aspects as itself an object, is manifested there. For although an activity external to it could as such equally be free, yet in crystals the conformative activity is not extraneous to the object; rather it is a form operative as belonging to the mineral’s innate character. We may define it as the free force of its substance, which out of its own resources informs itself and is not merely passively receptive of its environment. Consequently we find here the constituent material in its realized form as a free and independent creation. In still higher and more concrete mode the immanent form projects itself through the living organism and all its parts, in the articulate form and, above all, in its motion and its vital expression as feeling. For in this last case we have the inward vitality pregnant itself as living.

(b) It is moreover through this indeterminacy of the beauty of Nature, originating in its inward principle of animation that (α) both in virtue of the conception of life and the intuition of its true notion no less than of the habitual types conformable to its adequate presentment, we are able to distinguish between animals which are beautiful and those which are ugly. Animals incapable of vitality, such as the sloth, which creeps about with difficulty, and whose entire mode of life is suggestive of incapacity for motion or activity, offend our aesthetic sense for this very reason238. Activity and mobility are precisely the qualities which assert the higher ideality of life. For the same reason we condemn forms of amphibious life, certain species of fishes, crocodiles, toads, and many kinds of insects; an additional reason will influence our similar attitude to hybrid species, where confusion of form marks the passage from one determinate type to another; the ornithorhyncus is an example239, an animal which with its mixture of bird and four-footed beast may indeed astonish us, but at the same time is repulsive to our sense of beauty. Such feelings of repulsion can no doubt be traced entirely to our habitual prepossessions which have moulded for the imagination a fixed type of animal species consonant to experience. But even so there is already actively present the intuitive surmise that the configuration of a bird, for example, is related in its parts by a necessary principle of unity, and cannot as such graft upon itself forms which belong to other species without being thereby transformed into a hybrid variety. Such abnormal deviations from type appear to us both strange and contradictory. Neither the one sided narrowness of organization, which is so defective and mean in its manifestation, that it exercises no activity over the straitened conditions of its environment, nor confusions and passages of type, which, albeit they are not so enclosed within themselves, are unable to hold fast the distinctive features of their type, belong strictly to the sphere of natural beauty.

(β) There is another sense in which we attribute beauty to Nature, namely, when we have the collective picture of a landscape before us rather than observe the living form of a simple object. Here we have no organic articulation of parts such as is derived from their notion and is presented to us as such ideal unity in spontaneous life. We have instead a rich variety of objects both organic and inorganic, which are united together on one or more planes of vision in their distinctive features, contour of mountains, winding outlines of rivers, groups of trees, huts, dwellings, palaces, and cities of mankind, ships, roadways, heaven and sea, valley and rock-cleft. We find, in addition to this variety and proceeding therefrom, a delightful or imposing harmony which appeals to our sense and interests us.

It is lastly a peculiar characteristic of the beauty of Nature that it should excite or exercise a harmonious influence over our emotional life. A mood of this kind is aroused by the stillness of moonlight, the peace of a valley, through which some brook or other meanders, the sublimity of the immeasurable storm-tossed sea, the tranquil depth of the star-strewn heavens. But the significant factor in this case is not so much to be found in the objects as in the peculiar moods they arouse in our feelings and affections. On analogous grounds we attribute beauty to animals, when the expression of their life directly suggests human qualities, such as courage, strength, cunning, good nature, and the rest. Such, no doubt, in one aspect of it, truly expresses the nature of the animals themselves; but there is also our own conception of its affinity to ourselves, and the mood in which we receive it.

(c) However much animal life, as the culminating point of natural beauty, unfolds its freest expression as a living principle, it is comparatively narrow in its range and subject to very limited qualities. The circle of such existence is a strait one; and in this the predominant interests are those of the satisfaction of natural instincts such as hunger and sex-attraction. Soul-life, regarded as the inward principle expressed through external figure, is poor, abstract, and empty of content. Add to this the consideration that this inward is not manifested at all as inward. The soul in its essential substance is not revealed by the life of Nature; it is, in fact, the determining characteristic of Nature that its soul remains shut in itself, does not, in other words, proclaim itself in its ideality. As already pointed out, the soul of an animal is not this ideal unity self-acknowledged. If it were otherwise we should have the manifestation of such personality brought home to others. Only in the self-conscious Ego do we find the ideal in its simplest terms, which is itself an ideal medium to itself, knows itself as this simple unity, and thereby endows itself with a reality, which is not limited to bodily and sensuous form, but is itself of an ideal character. Here, for the first time, reality is in possession of a form adequate to the notion; or rather the notion sets itself up as its own opposite, makes itself objectively real and finds its own realization in that objectivity. The animal life, on the contrary, is only potentially such a unity as that in which reality as bodily form is other than the ideal unity of soul. In self-consciousness we have this unity realized, whose opposing factors are constituent elements of one transparent ideality. And it is as this concrete totality of self-consciousness that the Ego is manifested to others. The forms of animal life merely enable us through imaginative perception to divine the soul’s existence. Such only possess the troubled semblance of a soul, betrayed to us through the breath or exhalement which permeates the whole, gives some unity to all the members, and reveals in the entire instinctive life the first germs of an independent character. Herein lies the primary defect of the beauty of Nature, even when taken at its point of culminating form: and it is precisely this defect which will introduce us to the necessity of the Ideal as the beauty of art. But before we consider at length the nature of this Ideal, there are two determinations involved as the most immediate result of this inherent defect in natural beauty, which invite our attention.

We have stated that in the animal form the soul appears as the bond of connection within the organism and the unified point of animation only under a cloud240 and destitute of any fully realized content. We only find there a quite indeterminate and restricted mode of soul-life. We will now consider the abstract limitations of this mode more closely.

B. THE EXTERNAL BEAUTY OF ABSTRACT FORM REGARDED AS UNIFORMITY, SYMMETRY, CONFORMITY TO RULE AND HARMONY AND REALITY IN THE SENSE OF ABSTRACT UNITY OF THE PHYSICAL MATERIAL.

There is in Nature an external reality which is, of course, visible and definitely objective, but the inward unity of which, instead of presenting itself in the concrete inwardness referable to the unity of soul-life, only goes to the point of indeterminacy and abstraction. In other words, it stops short of the inwardness self-actualized in an ideal form and as the particular existence conformable to its ideal content. Its appearance is that of the defining principle on the face of external reality. Now the specific characteristics of inwardness in all its concreteness should be these. First, the principle of soul-life is asserted for itself no less than is potentially replete with content. Secondly, external reality interpenetrates this ideal arcanum, and by so doing fully reveals its true form as such external reality. A concrete unity of this nature is not reached by mere natural beauty: it lies beyond as the Ideal. On this plane of existence we cannot say that such a concrete unity enters into the manifestation of form. We have to deduce it through analysis, examining in their separation and singularity the distinguishing features which the unity supports. The form that informs here and the sensuous external reality fall apart from one another; or rather we have two distinct aspects which we are compelled to consider separately. By virtue of this fact, which we may either regard as a division of the material of sense or as a review of certain facts taken in abstraction, the inward unity, which is one aspect of the external reality, itself falls outside it; that is to say, it is not itself asserted in that rational reality as the wholly immanent form of the entire notion which constitutes it, but rather as an Ideality and determinacy imposed externally.

Such are the points of view thus presented us which we will now consider more closely.

First, then, we have to discuss

The form of natural beauty in its abstraction is a form which is determinate and thus of limited range; in a further aspect of it it is focussed in a unity of abstract relation to itself241. On closer inspection we shall, however, find that the external manifold controls this form of abstract beauty by reason of its own determinacy and unity. We must not, however, imply in these latter any immanent inwardness or form of vital ideality, but regard them as purely material definitions and unity of the external medium. Forms of such a character are uniformity, symmetry, or conformity to rule, and finally harmony.

(a) Uniformity

Uniformity is, speaking generally, equality in external presentment, or, more specifically, the unbroken repetition of one and the same definite form, supplied by the determining unity to the form of objects. Such a unity, in virtue of its initial abstraction, is at the furthest extreme removed from the rational totality of the concrete notion. Its beauty is therefore a beauty which is referable to the faculty of the analytical understanding. The fundamental process of that faculty is to perceive objects in their abstraction, not in their self-determined completeness and identity. For example, among all lines the straight line is that which is most uniform, because it alone manifests one abstract and undeviating direction. For the same reason the cube is a figure dominated by regularity of content. All its sides are of the same size, the same length of line and the same angles, which, on account of their being rectangular, however much their size is changed, manifest no change in the form of their angles as is the case with angles which are obtuse or acute.

With this characteristic of uniformity we must closely connect that of symmetry. Form is unable long to rest in that barest abstraction of its determination, namely, undifferentiated equality. A diverse relation is sure to assert itself, breaking into the empty form of identity. In this way we obtain symmetry, which consists in no mere identical repetition of one form, but in a combination with some such form analogous to it, identical, that is to say, in its self-determination, and yet manifesting a distinct contrast with it. Through such a combination we obtain another kind of equality and unity, whose determination is more extensive and more varied. If, for example, on one side of a house we meet with three windows of the same size separated at equal intervals of distance, then three or four more of loftier size than the first-mentioned standing at more extended or closer intervals in relation to them, and again three more precisely similar in size and distance to our original ones, we have then before us a symmetrical arrangement. Mere uniformity and repetition of the same distinctions will never produce this result. We may find such distinguishing features in size, position, form, colour, tones, and many others like them, which, however, to produce symmetry must be harmoniously related to similar forms of construction. When we find a combination which presents to us an arrangement of such distinguishing characteristics according to some clearly uniform principle that then is symmetry.

Both these attributes, uniformity and symmetry, being the determinations of the form and unity of external appearance, are mainly applicable to distinctions in size. For it stands to reason that what is expressly posited as external rather than truly immanent determination is generally a quantitative242 determination, whereas the qualitative fixes the inherent character of anything. Consequently that which is assumed only to affect the external appearance cannot be concerned with the changes which are found in the qualitative aspect. Size, on the other hand, and its alteration regarded merely as size, is for the qualitative determination, when it is unable to assert itself in terms of measure, an indifferent determination. That is to say, measure is quantity, precisely in so far as it can give to itself an aspect which qualifies it, and thereby a qualitative determination is united to the purely quantitative one. As thus explained243 uniformity and symmetry are merely restricted to the determinations of size and their uniform appearance or arrangement of differences in symmetrical order. Further inquiry will show us that this due co-ordination of size is as applicable to the forms of organic life as it is to those of inorganic Nature. The human organism is, for example, at least in a certain degree both uniform and symmetrical. We have two eyes, two arms, two legs, similar hip-joints, shoulder-blades, and so on. Of other portions of the body the reverse is the case. We find no conspicuous uniformity in the heart, lungs, bowels, or liver. The question arises what precisely constitutes the difference here. The side on which uniformity, whether of size, form, or position mainly asserts itself, is obviously the aspect of the organism viewed from the outside. The uniform and symmetrical determination, in complete conformity with what we should expect, is most apparent where the fact as objectively determined is itself the external envisagement itself, and carries with it the least impression of inherent life. The reality, which is most constant to this pure externality, rests satisfied with the abstract unity congenial to it. Within the organism, on the contrary, where we find the heart of the life-process, and still more openly in the medium of untrammelled reason uniformity gives way before the subjective unity of life. Nature is, no doubt, in its opposition to mind, a determinate existence external and independent; but even in her we find that uniformity only pre-eminently asserts itself where externality is the predominant principle.

(α) Reviewing, then, shortly the prominent classifications of natural objects, we observe, in the first place, that minerals, taking the crystal for an example, as structures destitute of the principle of life, are characterized in their fundamental form by uniformity and symmetry. As already remarked, their form, it is true, is one appropriate to themselves, is not merely the determination of external forces. Through an unseen energy the form that makes them what they are as products of Nature creates their configuration both within and without. This activity, however, is not yet the completed energy of the concrete notion as an ideal principle, which directs the independent consistency of the positive reality, subsuming them under an ideal totality such as is present in animal life. The unity and definition of their form persists in purely abstract one-sidedness, and we have as the characteristics of a unity which is wholly on the outside the bare forms of uniformity and symmetry, the determinating factor in each case being an abstraction.

(β) Plant life is, of course, many degrees above the order of crystals. From the very commencement its evolution is marked by a harmonious articulation, and consumes material in a constantly active process of self-nourishment. But plant-life also is not yet really the living whole244. Although organically divided into parts, its activity is still one that consists wholly in assimilation245. It is rooted in the earth with no independent power of motion from place to place; its growth is continuous, and such energy of assimilation and self-nourishment as it possesses is not the tranquil self-subsistence of a completely individualized organic existence, but rather a continuous extension of its growth as an external object. An animal grows just as a plant grows, but at a determinate point that growth in its external size ceases, and that which reproduces itself in self-subsistence is one and the same individual. Plant-life, however, enlarges without intermission, and only its decease renders the further increase of its boughs and leaves impossible. And, moreover, all that it separately produces in this process is for ever the repeated pattern of the same organism in its entirety. For every bough is a new plant, and not, as in the case with the animal organism, only an isolated member. On account of this persistent enlargement of itself through all the separate plant formations whereof it consists plant-life is without the subjective animation peculiar to sensation and the ideal unity which belongs to it. And, generally speaking, we may say that plant-life, however much the digestive process is an inward one, in which we find nourishment is assimilated and the organism determines the form which is impressed on its substance out of itself by virtue of the increasing freedom of the notional type working through that substance, nevertheless substantially, through the entire process of its life, it remains rooted to externality without either a true independence or unity, and such self-subsistence as it possesses is continuous without a break. And it is on account of this characteristic of plant-growth, namely, that it is for ever asserted on the side of externality, that we find uniformity and symmetry to be the fundamental unity of its self-expression as it is a predominant principle of its structure. No doubt uniformity is not so regnant here as we observed it to be in the formation of minerals, and it is not expressed in the same extreme degree through the abstract straight line and right angle: but it prevails here notwithstanding. The stem for the most part runs on a straight line; the rings of plants of higher type form themselves in circles; leaves closely approach the configuration of crystals; and, at least as the basis of their type, we find that the blossoms themselves in the number of their leaves, their position and form are determined with uniformity and symmetry.

(γ) Finally, in the living organism of animals a difference is asserted in the reduplicated structure of the members. In the bodies of animals, more particularly if we examine the higher species, the organism is a more inward, self-contained and self-determined totality; like a sphere, it returns, so to speak, on itself, while still remaining an external organism. It is an external process, and yet, as a process, asserted against externality. The more important organs are those within, such as heart, lungs, and liver, and in these the life is bound up. Such are not determined under the simple characteristics of uniformity. In those members, however, even of the animal organism, which are fixed in direct relation to the outside world, symmetrical arrangement prevails. Among such must be reckoned the members and organs which assert the subjective principle externally no less than those which are the instruments of the active life. The sense-organs, such as sight and hearing, belong to the former; all that we see and hear is left as we found it. The organs of smell and taste already mark the point of union with an activity exercised externally. We only smell that which is already assimilated246 by the organ of sense, and we only exercise our taste through an act of destruction. We have, it is true, but one nose, but it is subdivided into two sections, each of which is uniform in structure. The same description is applicable to the lips and teeth and other organs like them. Further than this the eyes and ears, and the limbs employed in motion from place to place, or for direct control over external objects, in other words, legs and arms, are entirely uniform in position, form, and other qualities. We find, therefore, that in the organic world no less than in the inorganic uniformity asserts a very real predominance, qualified, however, by the fact that its presence is limited to those members which are the instruments of the organism in its direct relation to the external world. On those through which the life-process returns on itself by virtue of its own subjective principle there is no such impression of uniformity.

Such, then, are the leading characteristics of the forms of uniformity and symmetry, and the manner in which they are asserted in the configuration of natural phenomena.

(b) Conformity to Rule

We now propose to distinguish the more generic conception of conformity to law247, so far as it appears on a higher plane of organic evolution than that already adverted to, and marks the passage of the same to the freedom of natural no less than spiritual life, from the more abstract forms discussed above. Taken by itself, no doubt, conformity to rule is not alone sufficient to give us the subjective unity and freedom of totality; but we do find in the configuration to which it corresponds a totality of essentially distinguished characteristics, such as do not merely emerge in difference and opposition, but betray both unity and determinate connection in such totality. A unity thus controlled, albeit still only positively asserted in quantitative substance, is no longer referable to essentially exterior distinctions of mere size numerically ascertainable, but already introduces to our notice a qualitative relation of consistency between these contrasted determinations. In other words we have here neither the abstract repetition of one and the same determinant248, nor a uniform interchange of similarity and dissimilarity249, but the contemporaneous association of aspects essentially distinct from one another. We find, in fact, our sense of sight gratified by the association of these distinguishing features in their completeness. And it is the principle of reason which affords us such satisfaction, gratifying our sense only through the totality, or rather through the very totality of differences the nature of the fact requires. Such a connection, however, still remains an unexplained nexus, which sense-perception arrives at partly on account of its persistent repetition, and in part through an intuition of deeper source.

A few examples will make clear the process of definition from uniformity to conformity with law. Parallel lines of equal length are abstractly uniform. A further step is taken when we compare geometrical figures of the same form, triangles, for example, but assume their size to be unequal. Here the angles subtended by the corners of each and the relation of line to line is the same, but we find such similarity in different quanta. Take again the circle, it does not possess the uniformity of the straight line, but at the same time the determination of abstract equality strictly applies to it, for all its radii are of equal length. The circle is consequently still but a curved line that awakes no particular interest250.

On the other hand, there is still less uniformity in the ellipse and the parabola, and they are only understood through the law of their form. In other words the radii vectores of the ellipse are both unequal and in conformity with rule, and the same qualification applies to the greater and lesser axis of their lines of differentiation251; moreover, their foci are not central as is the case with the circle. We find in these examples, therefore, a qualitative relation of difference assert itself in the law applicable to such lines and constructive of their interconnection. If, however, we divide the ellipse by means of its greater and lesser axes we obtain four equal sections; regarded as a whole, therefore, we still find the principle of uniformity paramount in this figure. Of a higher degree of freedom in its conformity to law is the oval. We know there is such a law, though mathematicians have been unable to express its formula. This figure is not an ellipse, but the higher curve differs from that below it. Still we find that even in this example of freer eccentricity in Nature, if we divide it through its greater axis, we have still two equal halves. The final expression of mere uniformity in conformity to law is shown in lines, which, as in the example of the oval, when divided through the smaller252 axis, give us unequal sections, neither section being a mere repetition of the other. The so-called undulatory line is an example of this, in the sense Hogarth describes it as the line of beauty. Thus the inclination of the arms as they fall on either side of the human body is opposed. Here we have conformity to rule without uniformity pure and simple. Such a kind of conformity especially characterises with its variety the conformation of the nobler living organisms.

Conformity to law is, then, an attribute of substantiality, binding together both its differences and its unity; but it remains still abstract on the side of its controlling form, unable to supply individuality with the freedom of motion, or rather by virtue of that form is entirely without the higher freedom of subjectivity, and quite incapable of revealing the vitality and ideality proper to it.

On a higher plane in the sphere of abstract beauty must be placed harmony. In harmony we find qualitative distinctions are held together, and further held together in a totality of differentiation, such as is based on the essential nature of the fact itself. This consistency of support is derived from conformity to law, in so far as that form unfolds what is essentially uniformity, and thereby passes beyond the mere characteristics of equality and repetition. But in doing this the distinctions of quality assert themselves not only in their difference of opposition and contradiction, but in aspects of a unity that rivets them together, a unity in which all distinguishing features, it is true, are maintained in their proper place, but still only as belonging to one single whole. This unity of accordance is what constitutes harmony. We may either regard it as a totality of aspects essentially distinct, or as the resolution of the element of mere contradiction asserted by them, revealing their more vital interconnection and ideal solidarity. In this sense we refer to the harmony of form, or colour, or musical tone. As an example, we have blue, yellow, green, and red as the fundamentally necessary differentiation of colour253.

In these irresolvable data of the spectrum we have not merely the inequality we found in symmetry, but contradictory opposites, such as yellow and blue, their neutralization and withal concrete identity. The beauty of their harmony is revealed in the avoidance of their crude opposition, which is softened thereby in such a way as to put before us the concordance hidden beneath their difference. They do, in fact, emanate from one source, namely colour, which is not an abstract conception254, but an essential totality. So far, indeed, can the compulsive force of such totality carry us, that we can, as Goethe has pointed out, when we have but one colour presented to us, still subjectively recognize another at the same time. In the same way the tonic, mediant, and dominant are essential distinctions among musical tones, which the unity of harmony associates through their difference in one whole. We may submit the harmony of form, which is differentiated through the varied aspects of position, repose, and motion to a similar analysis. If we suffer any one of the subordinate distinctions to assume an exclusive predominance the unity which relates them will be destroyed.

Harmony, however, is not to be confused with free ideal subjectivity and soul-life. In the latter the unity manifested is not merely an interconnection and concordance, but a positive negation of difference, which, for the first time, reveals their concrete and ideal unity. A concrete unity such as this is not the result of harmony. Such concrete unity is, for example, that which we find in the actually melodious thing255, which no doubt possesses harmony as its fundamental form, but at the same time possesses the higher characteristic of free subjectivity, and by means of song gives expression to that. Harmony alone has nothing to do with the appearance of subjective life, as such, nor of that of mind, although it is the highest manifestation of abstract form, and stands in close affinity to free subjectivity. Such, then, is our determination of abstract unity as we find it brought before us in the specific modes of abstract form.

The side of abstract unity which we have now to consider is not that directly related to form, but to the sensuous material simply in which it is asserted. The unity is manifested on this side as the entirely undifferentiated concordance of the particular sensuous material. It is the one form of unity, which the material of sense, in its purely objective aspect, is capable of receiving. On this plane and under the above noted relation256 the abstract purity of the materia in its form, colour, or tone constitutes what is most essential to it. Entirely straight drawn lines, which run without a shadow of difference in their straightness or strength, bare superficies and similar examples please us by virtue of their persistent regularity and their uniform homogeneousness. The purity of the heavens, the translucence of the atmosphere, a mirror-like lake the smoothness of the ocean’s face, all give pleasure by virtue of this unity. We find the same truth brought home to us by purity of tone. The voice when purely produced, though taken quite by itself, possesses an attraction for us inexpressibly delightful; vocal notes which are not thus pure on the contrary, by permitting us to hear the organ of production along with them, disturb or weaken the pure resonance and definition of their music. In much the same way human speech possesses pure tones in its vowels, a, e, i, o, u, and its compound vowels, ae, ü, and ö. Popular dialects are particularly characterized by impurity of vocalization and mediate tones such as oa. Purity of tones consists further in this that the vowels are associated with consonants, whose sound does not tend to blurr the sonority of the vowel tones, as is too frequently the case with our northern languages, when contrasted with the way in which their purity is preserved by the Italian, a characteristic which makes that language so adaptable to singing. We experience an enjoyment of similar nature through the sight of colour in its simplest purity of tint, an absolutely pure red or blue for example, not by any means a common occurrence, such pristine colours being often weakened through the addition to them of yellow or tints of each other257. Violet can no doubt appear to us as a pure colour, but only in an external object, not, that is to say, as a compounded colour258, for it is not itself an elementary colour belonging to colour’s essential differentiation. It is these elementary or cardinal colours, easily recognized by sense in their purity, which, on account of their crude opposition, are most difficult to unite together in harmony. Colours, on the contrary, which are blurred in their transparency by many other tints, although not so antagonistic to general harmony, fail to give us such direct enjoyment from the very fact that the energy of opposition in them is weakened. Green, for instance, is a compound of blue and yellow, but it is the neutralization of these cardinal colours, and for that reason less attractive to us in its own purity than blue and yellow in their secure259 opposition. Such are the points of most importance we have to remark upon in dealing with the abstract unity of form no less than the simplicity and purity of the sensuous material. In whichever aspect we regard our subject-matter we have to review that which is by virtue of its abstract character destitute of life, and a unity with no true actuality. Ideal subjectivity is inseparable from this, and such is entirely absent from the beauty of Nature even at the highest potency of its manifestation. This essential defect points us imperatively forward to the Ideal, which Nature is unable to reveal to us, and in contrast with which the beauty of Nature appears as a subordinate mode.

The true object of our inquiry is the beauty of art viewed as the only reality adequate to the Idea of beauty. We have hitherto treated the beauty of Nature as the first mode of the existence of the beautiful. We have now to inquire more closely into that which distinguishes natural beauty from that of art.

As an abstract proposition we may affirm that the Ideal is beauty in its rounded completeness. Nature, on the contrary, brings before us beauty in its incompleteness. Such abstract predicates do not, however, help us much, for our real problem is rather to explain exactly what it is which makes the difference between the completeness of the one from the incompleteness of the other. Our inquiry therefore hinges on the question how it comes about that Nature is necessarily incomplete as a mode of beauty and how this incompleteness is asserted. When we have answered that we shall be in a better position to deduce both the necessity and essential significance of the Ideal.

We have already in following the process of Nature up to its culminating manifestation in animal life drawn attention to the modes of beauty revealed in that process. It is now of the first importance that we fix our attention more definitely on the culminating phase of that evolution where we find subjectivity and individuality presented to us in the living organism.

We have already referred to the beautiful as the Idea in a manner identical to that we employ when we speak of the good and true as the Idea, in the sense, that is to say, where we characterize the Idea as the wholly substantial and universal, the absolute substance — with no sensuous material therewith — of reality, in short, the consistency of the world. Determined more strictly, however, as already pointed out, the Idea is not merely substantiality and universality, but the unity of the notion and its reality, just that, the notion revealed to us as notion in its coincident objectivity. It was Plato who, as we have remarked in our introduction, posited the Idea as that which was alone true and universal, and, indeed, as the one concrete Universal. The Platonic Idea is, however, not itself as yet the concrete real, for apprehended under the notion and its universality it is already coincident with the real. Apprehended, however, only in its universality260, it is not realized, realized, that is to say, as Truth in its self-determinate realization. It is still only the potency of such self-realization. But just as the notion is not the notion of real existence without its full objectivity, in the same way the Idea without its realization in the objective world is not the Idea in its Truth as existent reality. The Idea must proceed to such realization, which is only present itself for the first time in a really existent subjectivity adequate to the notion, and its ideal unity and self-determination. In the generic species we find its reality first manifested as free and concrete individuality. Life only exists as a living thing; goodness is only realized in particular men; and all truth is simply the consciousness of knowledge — Spirit which has come to its own vital inheritance. Only the concrete singularity is both true and really existent, mere abstract universality and particularity is not so. This self-subsistent actuality, this subjectivity is the point on which everything turns, and which we must fully grasp in its significance. Subjectivity may be defined as ideal determination by virtue of a principle of ideal unity which asserts itself through negation of the differences presented to it as consistent parts of one objective reality261. The unity of the Idea and its realization is the negative unity of the Idea as such and its reality; it is at once and at the same time the subsumption and deposition in a unified content of the difference asserted on either side. Only in this active process is the unity of the Idea affirmatively determined in its full activity, a unity and subjectivity whose process of self-determination is infinite. We have consequently to apprehend the Idea of the beautiful in its realized mode of existence as essentially concrete subjectivity and, moreover, as individual substantiality, by virtue of which it is the Idea really existent, possessing the form of its reality in concrete and individual singularity.

But here we must distinguish between two distinct modes of singularity or individuality, namely, that which is immediately presented us by Nature and that which is predicated of mind (spirit). In both forms it is given determinate existence, and consequently is in both substantive content, the Idea in short, and in the particular sphere of our inquiry for both forms the Idea as beauty. Viewed in this way we may affirm if we please that the beautiful of Nature has a similar content with that of the Ideal. In contradistinction, however, to such a point of view we must not fail to observe that the difference of form, in which the Idea herein attains reality, that is to say the difference between the individuality which prevails in the spheres of Nature and Spirit, the difference asserted in its respective appearance, this it is which constitutes an essential distinction. As we shall see, the real point of our inquiry is this, namely, which of these two forms is really the one most adequate to the Idea, for it is obvious that it is only in the entirely adequate form that the totality of the Idea is in its full content explicitly realized. This is the more immediate point we have now to examine in so far as the difference between natural beauty and the Ideal falls into line with the formal differentiation of singularity.

Immediate singularity is no doubt primarily found in the domain of Spirit no less than in Nature as such. For, in the first place, Spirit is possessed of an external existence in bodily form; secondly, even in spiritual relations, Spirit, in the first instance, only exists in its union with immediate reality. Subdividing our inquiry in conformity with such facts, we will consider the nature of immediate singularity from three different points of view.

(a) We have already seen that the animal organism preserves its determinate existence through a persistent evolutionary process of its own in opposition to an environing inorganic Nature, which it assimilates by means of consumption and digestion, compelling thereby what is external to submit to that process, and asserting its own independent existence by so doing. We found at the same time that this living process is a system of activities, which is realized in a system of organs, whose functional action consists in those very activities. The one and single aim of this homogeneous system is the self-preservation of the living totality thereof through such a process. The animal life consists, therefore, in a life of sensuous impulses, whose general course and satisfaction is realized in the above-mentioned organic system. The living organism is for this reason articulated in its parts under a teleological principle, and the principle or end subserved is self-preservation. Life is immanent in every member; they are united to life, and life is one with them. And the net result of this animate process is that the animal is maintained as a thing conscious of itself as an individual subject of feeling, life and the self-enjoyment its singularity procures for it. We have only to compare animal life with plant life to see the difference implied in the absence of such a sense-consciousness. The plant simply brings to the birth new specimens of its species, without even being able to concentrate any single one on that point of negation, which constitutes self-singularity. We must, however, add that even in the animal organism and its life we never have actually before our eyes the true manifestation of this centre of unity, but rather simply the manifold of its members. Life is still too deficient on the side of freedom and in opposition to the mere caprice of sense-life to manifest such a subjective individuality as is capable of breaking through the external envisagement of its organic parts. The vital centre of such activities in the animal organism still remains veiled from vision, and all that we see are the mere outlines of the figure, and this for the most part concealed from our view by feathers, scales, hair, fur, or spines. There can be no question that coverings of this nature, though characteristic of the animal world, are coverings which partake of the form of the vegetable world. And it is precisely at this point that the beauty of animal life declares its essential insufficiency. That which the organism makes most visible to us is not the soul-principle. That which is directed outward and throughout appears is not the life within, but rather formations accepted from a lower plane of existence than the essential embodiment of life. The animal is only fully alive beneath that outer crust, and consequently for this very reason that its inwardness262 is not wholly made real in a form adequate to reveal it, we are unable to see the principle of Life everywhere shine freely through it; it remains only an inwardness, and the shell is external only unpermeated by the vital principle.

(b) The human body, in virtue of its more exalted station, presents us with a striking contrast. In this we are everywhere reminded that man is in possession of a unity of feeling, a soul. The human skin is not covered over plant-like with an apparently lifeless sheath; the pulsation of the blood is visible throughout the entire surface; the beating heart of life is everywhere at the same time apparent; and we have in this outward manifestation, as it were, the real fount Of life made visible, the turgor vitae as it streams from its centre. In the same way the human skin, sensitive throughout in its minutest parts, reveals to us the morbidezza of its colouring, those tints of flesh-colour and vein-colour which are the despair of an artist. On the other hand, however much the human body presents, as the apparent mirror of Life, a contrast with that of animals, it undoubtedly expresses also the natural process of self-preservation in the subdivision of the skin, and the indentations, wrinkles, pores, small hairs and veins which we find attach thereto. In fact the skin itself, though permitting the inner life to shine through it, is none the less an external protection of that life, a means obviously intended for such self-preservation. The supreme significance, however, of the contrast here presented is traceable in this extraordinary sensitiveness of the human cuticle, which, although not absolutely the seat of feeling itself, alone renders such feeling possible. But at the same time even in this direction we are made conscious of the defect, that this sensitiveness does not penetrate as a vital impulse of concentrated emphasis equally through all the members. We find in the human body itself certain organs whose form is entirely appropriate to mere animal functions, while others give a more adequate expression to the entire soul-life, its feelings and passions. Regarded in this way it is obvious that even in the human body the inner life of soul has not found its complete reflection in all parts of its external realization.

(c) The same defect is apparent on the higher plane of the spiritual world and its organizations, if we consider such under the aspect of life as immediately presented. The more extensive and the richer their configurations are, the more we shall find that the fundamental object of the inner life of such totalities requires other means co-operative with such externality for its adequate expression. Such organizations no doubt appear in immediate reality as organic wholes in which definite purpose is realized, and the realization of such purpose is manifested by the mediation of voluntary effort. Every centre of such a spiritual organism, such as the State or the family, that is to say each individual organic totality, is in possession of a will capable of such exercise, and appears in unity with the other members of the same organism; but the one inner soul of this nexus, the freedom and reason of the aim of all is not visible in external reality as such in the absolute freedom of its subjective and universal principle of life, nor is it thus manifested in every part.

The same thing may be observed in particular actions and events, where we find a similar organic totality present. The inner motive from which they proceed is not wholly made visible upon the external surface of their actual presence. What we do find is a total presentment of fact, whose most fundamental ground of unity and vitality still remains hidden from sight.

Finally, when we consider from the same point of view any single individual we are confronted with the same truth. Every human person is a self-rounded totality, held together by the central unity of life. In the immediate envisagement of reality, that is in his life, action, avoidance of action, desires and impulses, he only appears in a fragmentary way; none the less it is only from a general survey of all his actions or sufferings that we are able to form an estimate of character. The centre of unity which thus concentrates to a point the entire subject-matter of our extended survey is not as such either visible or directly apprehended.

The second point of importance to which we would draw attention is this. With the immediate appearance of individuality the Idea, as we have already indicated, receives determinate existence. Through this very immediacy however it becomes interwoven with the complexity of the external world, is conditioned by the limitations of external circumstance and the relative character of means and ends which are found there, in one word is carried into the finitude of external Nature. For though immediate singularity is in the first place a fully rounded off unity, it is for the same reason only self-exclusive as a centre of negation opposed to others, and is, by virtue of its immediate singularity, influenced by, no less than related to, a totality of real existence other than its own, upon which it is dependent in a thousand different ways. The Idea, in short, is in this very immediacy realized in every direction as individual distinction. It is consequently now merely a reflex of the inherent energy of the notion which binds all individual existence, that of Nature no less than mind in reciprocal correlation263. Such a relation to the existences themselves is a purely external one, and appears also to them as a single external necessity uniting each part of the manifold in one shifting complexus of interrelated reciprocity. The immediacy of determinate existence is therefore, as thus regarded, a system of necessary relations between apparently self-subsistent individual things and forces, in which each singular entity is committed as a means to the service of ends foreign to it, or itself is compelled to utilize that which is external to itself as such a means. And inasmuch as the Idea is under this aspect wholly realized on the ground of externality, there appears at the same time the unrestrained play of every caprice and accident, no less than the uncontrolled discharge of the burden of indigence. Singularity as immediate appearance lives and moves in the realm of unfreedom.

(a) The individual animal is, for example, fettered wholly within the bounds of its natural environment of air, water and land. Its entire way of living, the mode of its self-nourishment, everything that concerns it, is thereby determined. It is this which differentiates with such variety the species of animal life. We find, moreover, intermediate strains, such as swimming birds and suckling animals, which live in the water, amphibious species and others which still further mediate between the more obviously generic. These are, however, mere confusions of race, and indicate no higher mediation of considerable range. Throughout we find the animal subject in its self-preservation to the absolute necessities of external nature, cold, drought, or insufficient supply of the means of nourishment. Under this despotic dominion it is liable through the parsimony of circumstance to lose the fulness of external form, the blossom of its beauty, in short to become as it were the reflex of starving Nature herself. External conditions fix imperatively the measure of beauty it either preserves or forfeits.

(b) The human organism, in its particular bodily existence is subject, if not in the same measure, to external forces of Nature, and is compelled to face the same contingencies, deficient livelihoods, and every kind of harassing disease and misery.

(c) If we carry investigation further to that still higher plane of immediate reality where spiritual interests are predominant we shall find this dependence on external condition for the first time emphasized in its full relativity. Here we are face to face with the prose of human existence in its entire length and breadth. The contrast already noticed between ends subservient to purely physical wants, and those profounder aims of spiritual life, and the conflict which tends to inflict a loss on one side or the other, already opens our view of it. Add to this every individual man, in order to preserve himself as such, is compelled to make himself in many ways subservient to others, and the limited aims of others, and on the other hand, in order to satisfy his own narrow interests, to accept the service of others as a mere means for their fulfilment. The individual, then, as he appears in the prose-life of everyday existence, is not therefore active out of his own particular totality, nor is he intelligible so much in virtue of himself as in virtue of that which he is not264. For individual man stands in a relation of dependence to the influences, laws, organizations and other social relations of civic life which he finds already existing around him, and to which he must submit whether he forfeit his own independent soul-life thereby or not. And more than this, each separate individual is not presented to others as such totality, but is only reflected in whatever isolated interest they may happen at the time to possess in his actions, desires, and opinions. And what interests mankind mainly is some relation to their own particular thoughts and aims. Even historically important actions and events, with which the community is expressly associated, appear in this field of relative appearances merely as a manifold of isolated efforts. It is a varied collection to which each contributes as he may, with aims by no means identical, some of which meet with success while others miscarry, and indeed, be they ever so fortunate, are significant in a very subordinate degree if we consider them as contributions to the wellbeing of all. What the majority may carry through, in contrast with the entire aggregate of events and the end applicable to all265, to which it furnishes its quota, is after all a mere patch; nay, even men of eminent standing, who feel and are fully conscious of the universal passage of events266, as their own world, are for all that clearly immeshed in the same net of particular circumstances, conditions, and a thousand other hindrances involved in their relative position. On all these grounds it is plain that in this sphere of exterior life the individual world is unable to offer us the vision of that independent and complete freedom of the living principle, such as is essential to the true notion of beauty. It is, of course, true that the immediate appearance of human reality and its events and organizations is not without system, and as such is a totality of activities; but this whole is rather in its appearance a mere mass of isolated fragments. Moreover the practical concerns of such activities are divided and subdivided into countless parts, and in such a way that each single part is in touch with the merest fraction of all; and, in short, however much individuals may remain steadfast to their own purposes, and only bring forth to the light that which their own interest has employed as a means, the self-subsistence and freedom of their will remains more or less of a formal character, determined by external circumstance or accident, and constantly thwarted by natural causes267.

This is the prose of the world, as presented to our own consciousness no less than to that of others; a world of finitude and change, a world immeshed in relation and submerged beneath the pressure of necessity, a world from which no individual can extricate himself. The central paradox of life confronts every unit of the living whole. On the one hand there is the impulse of individuality to perfect its isolated unity in self-exclusion; on the other there is the necessary condition of dependence on others from which none may claim immunity. However prolonged the struggle to overcome this contradiction may be the effort of that interminable battle only terminates with life itself.

Thirdly, the immediate singularity of the worlds of Nature and Mind is not merely conditioned by dependence on others, but is deficient in any complete self-subsistency owing to its confined nature, or with more accuracy, because it is particularized in its own specific mode of manifestation.

(a) We will explain our meaning further. Every single specimen of life in the animal world is from the first fettered by a definite, that is to say, a restricted and constant species, beyond the limits of which it cannot pass. There is in the spiritual world, no doubt, a general picture of life and its organization, which floats vaguely before our vision; but in the real world, which is one with Nature, this universal organism breaks up into a multitude of particulars, each of which possesses the determinate type of form and grade of cultivation in which it is related to a definite portion of the social organism. In addition to this and within these insuperable limits, we find the pressure of that element of contingency, as regards general condition or external environment, predominantly asserted both uniquely and in haphazard fashion throughout every one of those individual units. Such a state of things disturbs our vision of the self-subsistency and freedom, which the idea of true beauty imperatively requires.

(b) As already observed, it is unquestionably true that Spirit discovers in its own bodily organism the notion of life completely realized. This is so much the case that, in contrast with it, the forms of the animal world appear not only as incomplete, but in inferior species as even pitiable objects. The human organism is also, however, broken up, if to a less, degree, in racial subdivisions and the ascending grades of beauty which distinguish such races. Moreover, in addition to this obviously very general line of demarcation, we have presented to us all the accidental variety of qualities, peculiar to distinct families and their interfusion with one another, such as modes of life, facial expression, and general demeanour. We must further associate with such characteristic traits, which all of them emphasize a condition of essentially unfree particularity, those peculiarities which are inseparable from activity employed in the endless round of commercial life or professional career; qualities which find their ultimate expression in the specific habits or idiosyncracies of any exceptionally marked character or temperament, or, as the reverse side of the picture, in the various confusions of arrested development. Poverty, care, anger, coldness, and indifference, the rage of passion, the obstinate retention of narrow purposes, indications of change and division in the spiritual world, entire dependence on that of Nature — in one word all that is implied in the transitory condition of human life — leaves its indelible, if quite incalculable, expression on the varied surface of the faces of mankind. Who has not crossed weather-beaten types of such, on which the storm of all the passions has imprinted its disturbing wave; or others, where the coldness and superficiality of the soul within is all the impression we receive; or, lastly, as the final verdict of self-absorbed particularity268, cases in which the general type seems almost totally to have disappeared. There is no end to the caprice of the human features. Speaking generally, we would associate with this ground the fact that the beauty of children most arrests us. In their faces we find all pronounced idiosyncracies slumber as it were beneath a quiet veil; no dominating passion as yet ravages their soul; not one of the thousand interests of the grown man has engraved for ever the expression of its necessity on these mobile features. This envisaged innocence of the child, however, though we may discover in its flexible animation the possibility of Life’s completed fulness, obviously fails to reveal those profounder indications of a spirit which has been carried forward to explore the range of its own recesses and to make its life one with rational purpose.

We may regard, then, immediate existence, both in the purely physical and spiritual sense of the term, as a finitude, or more justly as a finitude which does not satisfy its notion and for this very reason declares its finitude. For the notion, and more concretely still, the Idea, is essentially independent and free. Purely animal life, although as Life it is the Idea, is no manifestation of infinity as such or freedom. This is alone possible under conditions, where we find the notion penetrate so completely the reality which is adequate to it, that it finds itself entirely at home therein, with no extraneous matter, to disturb its possession. Then alone do we find it a really free and concrete individuality. The natural life, on the contrary, is unable to overcome the element of feeling to which it is attached, and which renders it incapable of penetrating the entire reality which enrings it. It finds itself, moreover, immediately conditioned in itself, restricted in its range and dependent, a result which is due to the fact that its freedom is not truly self-determinate, but conditioned by the external: object. And the same thing is true of the immediate and finite reality of the spirit world in its knowledge, volitional action, and fateful history. For although in this latter case we find centres of unity expressed which have a real significance, neither these any more than the particularities they unite have truth as they stand by themselves; but only that truth which, in their reciprocal relation to each other, they manifest as constituent parts of a whole. And this whole, albeit in a sense adequate to its notion, does not correspond to it in such a way as to manifest itself in its full totality269, which consequently still remains aloof from such envisagement, or rather, is only apprehended in the ideal world of thought. In other words, the notion finds no fully adequate presentation in external reality, such as is powerful enough to marshal homogeneously all the numberless fragments of particularity, and to concentrate them into one expression and one single form.

(c) This, then, is the fundamental reason which prevents Spirit itself, on the finite planes of determinate existence, and under the restricting conditions of its externality and necessity, from rediscovering the immediate vision and enjoyment of its freedom. It is consequently driven by its absence to seek that vision in a higher sphere. That sphere is art, and its realization is the Ideal.

We have thus seen that it is the defects of immediate reality which drive us forward inevitably to the idea of the beauty of art. We are further under an obligation to prove that its fundamental object270 is to manifest here on this very plane of rational reality and in its freedom the envisagement of life, and, most important of all, the life of Spirit. Here, then, we have at last the external revealed to us in a form adequate to the notion. Here, for the first time, truth is lifted up from its environment of temporal conditions, from its running to and fro among the whirl of finite particularity, and attains repose; nay, more than this, discovers an external form, from which the hunger of Nature and the prose of life no longer stare at us. Here at last we have a form worthy of substantial truth, which is wholly self-contained and self-dependent, determining with freedom its own content, and not driven from such self-assertion by the weight of that of others.

201 Als Beseelung sich kund gäbe. The reference is to the second class which follows rather than truly animates life. The sun is such an animating principle. How far modern physics with its investigations of the laws of motion that obtain among the chemical atoms of any specific form of matter and its denial of all dead matter would have modified Hegel’s view is an interesting question.

202 Wir wollen betrachten. Hegel seems to be conscious himself that there is something fanciful in this interpretation of the significance of what is simply an arbitrary, if systematic, arrangement of bodies according to natural laws.

203 Ein besonderes Moment. I think what Hegel means here is that every body as a vehicle of light reflects the mode in which the identity of the notion as system in the different parts asserts itself.

204 In other words what should be phasal elements (Momente) of a whole integrated within that unity remain independent units. They are not Momente in the full sense.

205 Als bloss real unterschiedener. The meaning is that the distinction is only in the totality, not as in the former case in a body which though part of a system, could be viewed as an independent body like the sun.

206 Gewöhnliches Bewustseyn, i.e., the ordinary view of understanding (Verstand) and sense-perception.

207 Blosser Zusammenhang. Fortuitous is rather too strong. He means a bond of union cemented by one principle without which either side fails to possess its specific character, e.g., the human body apart from the human soul its animate individuality, ceases to be human.

208 Als Begriff seyende Begriff. The reference I take to be to the logical or dialectical movement of the Idea.

209 Viele tausend empfindende, or centres of feeling.

210 Die realen Unterschiede, i. e., the distinctions of the body viewed as part of the physical process of Nature.

211 Zu ihrer subjektiven Einheit, that is to say, their unity with the notion of Life as objectively realized in Nature, subjective only in the sense that it is ideal, not apprehended by sense-perception as such.

212 Nähere. I think Hegel uses nähe in the idiomatic sense in which he uses it in the phrase (p. 150) when he speaks of Nature as das nächst Daseyn der Idee, i.e., most elementary, more near to it when the notion first presses out of abstraction into totality.

213 Lötze apparently disputes this distinction, but it appears to me very clear.

214 Seyn. The logical terms are here employed in their technical Hegelian sense. Seyn is “being” as part of a process, it is rather a tendency to become than a particular or determinate being (daseyn.)

215 Das Negiren, the negation of them as entirely independent structures.

216 Des Idealisirens, e.g., the principle of ideality which is in one aspect of it negation.

217 Affirmatives Fürsichseyn, e.g., the explicit ideal totality of Life apart from the process.

218 Bilderin.

219 Das Innere, otherwise called subjective (see note above) and meaning what is not externally visible as materia, though it may be visible indirectly as explained further on.

220 The rather difficult German here is: Da nun aber in der Objektivität der Begriff als Begriff die sich auf sich beziehende in ihrer Realität für sich seyende Subjektivität ist. The comma after Begriff is clearly a misprint.

221 The words here are das subjektive Fürsichseyn, i.e., the self-conclusion of an explicit whole in virtue of a principle of ideal unity (i.e., life) asserted, throughout.

222 Ein Beharrendes,> one that persists in an inert form.

223 Hegel uses the word scheinen both for the ideal manifestation of the Idea in the object and the appearance of material reality reduced by it to mere “show” (herabgesetzt zum scheinen), i.e., deprived of its independent reality. This introduces a slight confusion I have endeavoured to avoid by using different terms.

224 Unseres Verstandes. We supply the notion of intelligent purpose.

225 That is, the assumed subordination of all organs to one definite end.

226 Sichbewegens. The emphasis is of course on the self. But even then the statement is rather an excess. For it seems difficult to attribute all the beauty visible in the spontaneous movements of so many living creatures, notably that of birds, to their purely formal character. At least there is something given by such motion analogous to the impression we receive from music and the dance; they are gesetzmässig in short.

227 Zufällig — capricious as opposed to a uniform principle. There is, however, one apparent bond of external similarity, between the majority of such members, namely, their covering of skin; this not merely relates the cheek to the neck, for example, but to some extent destroys the distinction.

228 Physical parts, that is to say.

229 That is to say, it is based on a purely limited experience which does not necessarily concern the true nature of the objects perceived.

230 Stangen. The word may express the branches on which the flowers are carried or the stamens they carry at their apex.

231 Geistreich, “intelligent,” i.e., an ingenious way of regarding such facts.

232 Dies wunderbare Wort.

233 The use of the word Sinn to which Hegel here alludes is not quite identical with our word Sense. In the English use of the term there is more stress on the materia presented to sense-perception and perhaps less reference to intellect when the word is employed in such an expression as “That man has sense.” However, Milton has “What surmounts the reach of human sense,” and no doubt both are employed very similarly in many writers.

234 Bleibt bei der Ahnung.

235 Naiver Weise, a common epithet of Hegel to denote freedom from all philosophical prepossessions, a frank and simple attitude of reception.

236 Betrachtung appears to imply in its contrast with Anschauung the presence of that intuitive sense or imaginative co-ordination above discussed.

237 Gestaltende Macht, i.e., plastic force.

238 This account of the criterium to be adopted in determining beauty in the animal creation is open to some criticism. Mobility is no doubt one element of beauty, but it is only one. Professor Bosanquet points out in his criticism of the passage (“Hist, of Aesthetik,” p. 338) that it amounts to the assertion that ugliness is purely relative. The defect is not only due, it seems to me, to Hegel’s insufficient regard for Nature as a modern painter would so regard it, but it may be traced also to his manifest preference for motion in all the manifestations of Nature.

239 Schnabelthier, otherwise called the duck-billed platyptis, a mammal found in Australia, much the size of an otter, with the horny beak of a duck and paws formed for swimming.

240 Getrübt, we have the word trüben above, translated there “troubled,” life merely seen through the thick veil of instinctive sense.

241 That is, the unity manifested is as abstract from all concrete totality as the form itself.

242 This shows clearly that symmetry is only in an analogous way applicable to musical tones.

243 In other words, uniformity is outside the purely qualitative relation, whereas symmetry is not so.

244 Beseelte Lebendigkeit, lit., the insouled life-principle.

245 Lit., “Is continually thrust out into the external.” Its activity as life is directed outward.

246 Was schon im Sichverzehren begriffen ist. I think the distinction implied is that in smell we are in actual contact with a part of the object. The same thing would, however, be true of sight according to former theory exploded by Newton’s hypothesis.

247 Gesetzmässigkeit. I cannot think of an English word that quite reproduces it. I am not sure that either conformity to rule or law singly quite expresses it. It implies both.

248 As in uniformity.

249 As in symmetry.

250 That is to say, apart from symbolical meaning, it possesses no hidden law to be discovered in the relation of part to part.

251 The words are die grosse und kleine Axe von wesentlichem Unterschiede. These refer primarily, it appears, to the axes of an ellipse, but the expression may possibly include the axes of a parabola parallel to the sides of a cone. However I admit frankly I find the words von wesentlichem Unterschiede difficult to interpret closely.

252 In the text grossen, obviously a misprint.

253 The incorrectness of this statement according to more recent analysis does not, of course, affect the argument.

254 Nicht einseitig. I think the meaning here is that colour is not an abstract idea for independent qualities, but is the generic notion of a really existing totality.

255 Alles melodische, primarily, organic, of course.

256 Namely, that of abstract unity.

257 Hegel expresses this rather differently by saying that they tend to pass over into pink (röthliche) or orange (gelbliche) and green. I have put the same statement rather more directly.

258 I think this is the meaning of the words aber nur äusserlich, d.h., nicht beschmützt. Violet, however, is now regarded as a cardinal colour. It may also be doubted whether the difficulty of harmonizing pure colour is as Hegel states it.

259 This of course is a very questionable position from the point of view of aesthetic taste no less than the conformity of our sight to natural objects. The obvious retort is, it all depends what the nature of the green is. Why is there such a preponderance of green in Nature as we find it?

260 That is to say, under the Platonic view of universal.

261 So I have interpreted the words, Die Subjectivität nun aber liegt in der Negativen Einheit als Ideellsetzen der Unterschiede und ihres realen Bestehens.

262 Das Insichseyn, i.e., the incipient singularity of a feeling subject.

263 I have translated the words bleibt nur die innre Macht “merely a reflex of the inherent energy,” etc. I do not pretend thereby to clear up all the difficulties of this paragraph. I would rather remind the general reader that in this entire discussion of the principle of individuality and its modes of real existence we are face to face with one the fundamental difficulties of the Hegelian philosophy, the passage of the Idea to Nature. Readers who wish to see difficulties more fully developed on this aspect of Hegel’s thought should read Professor Seth’s interesting and on the whole moderately worded criticism contained in his little book “Hegelianism and Personality” (Blackwood and Sons; see particularly Lecture IV, Thought and Reality).

264 Aus Anderem, e.g., the not-self of experience.

265 Des totalen Zwecks.

266 I think the expression das Ganze der Sache means this rather than the entire “organic whole of living reality.”

267 It is well for the general reader to remember that we have here no full account of what constitutes the content of a free will. The emphasis throughout is on human activity as exercised in a world conditioned in its external aspect by necessary laws of Nature.

268 The reference here must I think he mainly, perhaps wholly, to the distorted face of the criminal, outcast, or insane classes. But it is just possible that a certain type of aggressive genius may also be denoted.

269 The totality of the notion.

270 Beruf, i.e., that which it professes to do.

THE BEAUTY OF ART, OR THE IDEAL

IN OUR CONSIDERATION of the beauty of art we will confine our attention to three fundamental points of view:

First, the Ideal in its essential import.

Secondly, the determination of the Ideal in a particular work of art.

Thirdly, the creative subjectivity of the artist.

A. THE IDEAL SIMPLY, OR AS SUCH

The most general conclusion which may be gathered from the examination we have already made in a merely formal way of the Ideal of art may be thus summarized. Truth, in its unravelment as external reality, is only fully in possession of a true and determinate existence, however much it may combine and retain in embracing unity a manifold content, in so far as every portion of the content thus unfolded permits this unity, which may be called either the animating soul or the unified totality, freely to appear. To take the human form once more under review as the most direct illustration of this, we have already remarked that it is a totality of organic members each of which is penetrated by the notion, differentiated thus in every particular organ by some particular mode of activity and the specific motion congenial to it. If we ask ourselves now in which particular organ the soul appears as such in its entirety we shall at once point to the eye. For in the eye the soul concentrates itself; it not merely uses the eye as its instrument, but is itself therein manifest. We have, however, already stated, when referring to the external covering of the human body, that in contrast with the bodies of animals, the heart of life pulses through and throughout it. And in much the same sense it can be asserted of art that it has to convert every point of the external appearance into the direct testimony of the human eye, which is the source of soul-life, and reveals Spirit. Take the famous adjuration of Plato to the stars in the lines:

When thou gazest forth at the stars, my star,

Would that I were the heavens and thence on thee

Could gaze forth out of a thousand eyes.

Conversely we may exclaim that art gives to her forms the dilation of a thousand-eyed Argus, through which the inward life of Spirit at every point breaks into view. And not merely is it the bodily form, the expression of countenance, the attitude and demeanour which thus avails; the same appearance is everywhere visible in actions and events, speech and voice-modulation, in short, under every condition of life through which it passes, and under which it is possible for soul to make itself recognized in its freedom and ideal infinity.

(a) And, in close connection with this inquiry into the interpenetration through all parts of the animating soul, we may justly ask ourselves, what precisely we understand under this conception of a soul which is throughout visible: or to restrict attention to definite limits we may inquire what are the specific characteristics of the soul whereof art reveals to us the truest manifestation. For in ordinary parlance one refers to the animating principle271 peculiar to metals, stones, wild animals, to say nothing of that belonging to every kind of human character and its expressions. To natural objects, however, such as stones and plants, the expression “soul” in the complete acceptation of the term above mentioned is not strictly applicable. Such soul as purely natural objects possess is entirely finite, transitory, and rather a specific nature than a soul. The determinate individuality of such existences is consequently completely exposed in their finite existence; and, inasmuch as all that is present there is a positive limit of restriction, such appearance as there may be of a further claim to independence and freedom is only an appearance; ideal characteristics which may indeed be imported into them from without by means of art, but are not in the nature of the objects by themselves. In the same way the soul of sense-feeling, through which Nature manifests first the Life-principle only betrays a subjective individuality, which still remains shut within itself, unable to assert its reality in the further sense of a return upon itself in a consciousness which shall attach to it the form of infinity. Its content is, therefore, of a restricted nature, and its manifestation in part the unrest, power of motion, sexual impulse, anxiety or fear of the dependent life; and, in part, it is the mere expression of an inwardness capable of overcoming its finitude. The animating life of Spirit (mind) brings us first into contact with the free infinity capable within its own external and determinate existence of remaining constant to the inner principle of unity, and, in the act of expression, still reflected back upon its ideal substance. To Spirit consequently is it alone permitted to impress the hall-mark of its infinity and free self-recurrence on its external expression, even though by such expression it enters the realm of narrow boundaries. At the same time we may observe that Spirit, too, is only free and infinite in so far as it truly apprehends its universality, and deliberately posits for itself and accepts those ends which are adequate to its own notion. Consequently, in so far as it fails to grasp its own freedom it can only exist in a restricted content, a character that is stunted, a temperament at once crippled and superficial. In combination with nullity of this kind the manifestation of Spirit must perforce remain wholly formal. We shall only find here the abstract crust of self-conscious Spirit, whereof the content contradicts the infinity of its freedom. Only by virtue of a genuine and essentially substantive content through which the restricted and mutable particularity derives its essential self-subsistency — so that definite structure and intrinsic worth, determined limit and substantial content, are realized in one totality — is such existence thereby able, through the very mode of expression which confines it, to proclaim itself also in its universal substance of self-contained soul-life. It is, in short, the province of art to comprehend and enunciate determinate and rational existence in its truth, that is to say, in the form adequate to its substance, the truly explicit content. And, consequently, the truth of art cannot consist in a mere conformity such as that to which we restrict the so-called imitation of Nature; external form must express harmoniously an internal content which is in itself harmonious throughout, and consequently can express itself as such.

(b) Art then, by comparing what is otherwise stained and rent through the contingent elements of external existence with the harmony that is essential to its notional truth, rejects that in the world of appearance which it is unable to combine in such a unity, and for the first time through this purification reveals the Ideal. It is possible to regard such a result as the flattery of art, as we sometimes hear it said, for example, that portrait-painters flatter. But even the portrait-painter, a type of art in which the Ideal is less prominent than in many others, should at least flatter in this sense, that he is bound to treat with indifference all that is merely the external detail of form, texture, and colour, the mere adjuncts, that is to say, of physical life such as hairs, pores, scars, and other external accidents, in his undivided effort both to apprehend and deliver the subject selected in its universal character and permanent spiritual individuality. It is one thing to imitate a physiognomy in the general outlines of purely superficial repose apparent at any time; it is quite another to detect and delineate the particular features which reveal the fundamental soul-life or character of the sitter. As already remarked, the Ideal is only truly found when the external presentment is in itself a vehicle of the soul. It is one of our latest fashions to attempt, by means of those so-called “living pictures,” an intentional and gratifying imitation of famous masterpieces. In these we find a fair reproduction of general accessories, such as grouping and draping; but, instead of the spiritual expression of the figures, have only too often to put up with faces absolutely commonplace. Such a defect mars the entire reproduction. The Madonnas of Raphael, on the contrary, in every detail of their countenance — whether it be cheeks, eyes, nose, or mouth — exhibit with harmonious consistency one supreme type of sacred joy, the pious, modest love of a devoted mother. We may affirm, if we will, that all women are capable of such emotion; but, at any rate, not every formal shape of feminine countenance is capable of expressing the depth of the same so consummately.

(c) This reference, then, of all points of external existence to their spiritual significance, so that the external appearance unveils in adequate measure the spirit thereof, is just what constitutes the nature of the Ideal. It is, however, a “carrying back” into inwardness, in which we do not find the universal thus carried back to its extremest limit to the form of abstract thought, that is to say, but is rather suffered to rest halfway at the point in which we find the purely external and the purely inward meet together harmoniously. The Ideal is consequently the reality selected out of the mass of chance particulars, in so far as the inner core in this external totality thus raised in opposition to universality is itself manifested as living individuality.272 For the individual subjectivity, which not only carries in itself a substantive content, but permits the same to appear in its own external appearance, stands in this central position, that in it all that is substantially the content is not suffered in its universal aspect to appear as an abstraction of itself, but still remains enclosed within the sphere of individuality, and consequently appears associated with a determinate existence, which now for its part, freed from mere finitude and transitory condition, is gathered up in a free and harmonious expression of most intimate soul-life. Schiller, in his poem “The Ideal and Life,” contrasts the reality and its pains and struggles with “the still shadowland of Beauty.” Such a land of shadow is the Ideal. The spirits which rise up here have lost in death immediate existence, are released from the hunger of Nature, freed from the claims which fettered them in subjection to external forces and all the changes and confusions which are linked together with finite appearance. But however much the Ideal treads under foot the mere object of sense and natural form, it draws at the same time the very wealth of it to itself, for it is art that is able to assign the very limits to all that the external appearance required for its self-preservation within which the external thing may appear as the manifestation of spiritual freedom. For this reason it is the Ideal which alone among things envisaged to sense presents a free and self-contained content reposing on its own resources, in complete sensuous enjoyment and satisfaction with itself. The music of this rapture may be heard through every embodiment of the Ideal. However far the external form may be carried the soul of the Ideal is never wholly absorbed in it. And in truth such manifestation is only beautiful in so far as its beauty not merely permeates the whole, but is a subjective unity, by virtue of which the subject-matter of the Ideal must appear emergent from all the fracture of its former individual parts and their respective ends and energies, raised in the Ideal itself to a higher totality and self-subsistence.

(α) We may in this respect point to the blessed repose273, this self-contentment in its own self-secure consummation, as the crown of the Ideal. The ideal form of art stands like some blissful god before us. For the blessed gods are ultimately above and beyond the grim earnest of actual necessity, anger, and interest in finite existence and purely finite ends; and this positive withdrawal involved in the negation of all isolated particularity give them the characteristics of cheerfulness and repose. In this sense we may interpret that phrase of Schiller: “Life is earnest, Art is cheerful.” Pedants, no doubt, have often enough cracked a joke over it, inasmuch as poetry in general, and Schiller’s in particular, is a serious matter; and in truth no ideal art is without such a quality; but for all that in this very earnestness the essential character of cheerfulness274 remains. This force of individuality, this triumph of self-concentrated freedom, is that which we recognize in an exceptional degree in ancient works of art and the blithesome repose of their figures. And this is not merely the case when we face a satisfaction that involves no struggle, but even in an example where the subject is rent by some breach in the entire content of its existence. For when the heroes of tragedy are represented as subject to Fate we find that the demeanour they present, which may be summed up in the words, “It is so!” still remains a simple withdrawal into personality275. The subject thus depicted remains throughout true to himself. He surrenders that which is seized from him, but the aims he pursued are not simply taken away; he suffers them to lapse and consequently does not lose his initiative. The man who is the bondman of Destiny may lose his life, but not his freedom. This repose on the essential birthright of Spirit is that which is able to preserve and reveal the blithe atmosphere of repose in grief itself.

(β) In romantic art, it is true, the breach or dissonance of the subjective principle is carried further, inasmuch as in it the exposed contradictions are emphasized and their division can be preserved. Thus, to take an example, we find the art of painting, in its representation of the Passion, not unfrequently dallies round the expression of ribaldry visible in the hideous contortions and grimaces of tormenting common soldiers; and, in its attachment to such discordant emotions, especially when depicting what is criminal, shameless, or evil, permitting the glad serenity of the Ideal to pass away. Even when such disruption loses its force, we find frequently that ugliness, or, at least, the absence of real beauty, is set up in its place. In another school of the earlier Flemish art of painting the downright directness and truth of the representation, no less than the inextinguishable confidence of the faith to which it testifies, tend to assert, in despite of itself, a reconciliation in the feelings of all who behold it276. But such an unyielding result falls277 short of the entire cheerfulness and satisfaction appropriate to the Ideal. However, it is possible also in romantic art, albeit here the representation of suffering and grief penetrates the soul and its emotions more deeply than is the case with antique art, that the delineation may reveal to us a spiritual intimacy, a delight in resignation, a blessedness in pain, a rapture in sorrow, nay, even a voluptuous ecstasy in martyrdom278. Not only in painting but in the profoundly religious music of Italian composers, we find this ecstasy and illumination of grief abundantly expressed. We may, as a summary definition in romantic art, call it “the smile through tears.” The tears have their origin in affliction, the smile in blithesome serenity, and consequently this smile through weeping indicates, as it were, the point of self-repose in the midst of pain and suffering. It is hardly necessary to add that the smile indicated here is no mere sentimental emotion, no mere vanity of the subject treated or dabbling with beauty279 over painful effects and insignificant traits of subjective feeling; rather (on its artistic side) it must appear as the firm delineation and freedom of beauty in defiance of all pain, in the spirit of what was said of Ximenes in the romances of the Cid, “how beautiful she was in tears.” In contrast to this emotional abandonment in men is either ugly and repellent, or actually ridiculous. Children, for example, break into tears at the slightest provocation, and we can only laugh at them. The tears, however, in the eyes of a man of earnest and self-contained character, under stress of deep feeling, betray a very different type of emotion. Laughter and tears can, however, very readily fall apart as unrelated, and are, as such, falsely utilized as a vehicle of art in such abstraction; the laughter chorus in Weber’s “Freischütz” may be cited as an example. Laughter, after all, is a kind of explosion, which it is impossible to exercise without restraint and preserve the Ideal. Another example of this laughter, which is nothing but laughter, occurs in a duet of Weber’s “Oberon,” throughout which we are in a continual state of anxiety for the prima donna’s throat and lungs. How very differently the inextinguishable laughter of the gods affects us in Homer, a sound which breaks from the blessed repose of divinity, and rather expresses gladsome serenity than abstract and wanton abandonment. Just as little ought weeping, devoid of all restraint, to be introduced into the ideal work of art, of such a kind as that we may hear in all its comfortlessness in another part of the “Freischütz.” And speaking generally, in music singing must take to itself the kind of joy and rapture which we catch from the lark in the open sky. Shrieking, whether of pain or delight, is not music at all. Even in the expression of suffering the sweet tones of the plaint must penetrate and clarify the sorrows, so that it continually may seem to us worth all the suffering to arrive at such sweetness of plaint in its expression. And this is the sweetness of melody, the singing of every kind of art.

(γ) Regarded in a certain relation to this fundamental axiom of art we may find some justification for the principle of irony in its modern sense; but it must not be overlooked that irony is frequently destitute of all real seriousness, and is particularly prone to expatiate over bad subject-matter; and, in another aspect of it, it is apt to run to seed in the mere yearning of emotion rather than actively participate in practical life, as is proved by the case of Novalis, one of the finer temperaments who have made this point of view their own, and for lack of definite interest, or through shrinking from the real world, are driven up and down, and cajoled into this sort of spiritual consumption. This is the kind of yearning which will not descend to mere practical business and production, because it is afraid of soiling itself with the contact of finite things, although it already secretly feels the defects of such exclusion. No doubt we find in irony that absolute principle of negativity, in which the subject of consciousness becomes self-centred through the annihilation of definite relations and particulars; but in this case the act of annihilation of definite relations and particulars, as we have already pointed out when discussing the principle, is not, as in comedy, essentially in its right place, simply exposing its own want of substance, but is directed quite as often against everything else excellent in itself and of sterling worth. Whether we regard irony, then, as this art of universal destruction, or as the yearning of which we have spoken in contrast with the true Ideal, it betrays a secret lack of proportion and restraint which is detrimental to the artist. Substantive form is what the Ideal demands, which, owing to the fact that it is clothed in the form and figure of external things, is unquestionably qualified by particularity no less than limitation; but this limitation of its form is at the same time included in such a way that everything merely external in its appearance is annulled and abolished. Only through this negation of mere externality is the determinate form of the Ideal a real exposition of the substantive content which belongs to it in a mode of appearance susceptible to sense-perception and the imagination.

The plastic presentment of form, which is as much a constituent feature of the Ideal as it is of the essentially homogeneous character of its content, and the way these two aspects are fused together, render necessary an inquiry into the relation obtaining between the ideal representation of art and Nature. For this external aspect and its embodiment is closely associated with that which we generally call Nature. In this connection we once more come upon that old and ever-renewed and still unsettled dispute, whether the representation of art should follow the objects of Nature as they appear strictly to sense, or should rather ennoble and illumine them. The right of Nature, the rule of beauty, the Ideal and the truth of Nature — with indefinite conceptions such as these arguments for and against may be bandied about for ever. A work of art, we are told, should unquestionably be natural, but there is such a thing as a mean or ugly Nature, we must not of course imitate that; on the other hand — and so our disputants wrangle on and never come to a satisfactory conclusion.

In recent times the opposition between the Ideal and Nature has once more been emphasized and received an exceptional significance through the writings of Winckelmann. Winckelmann’s enthusiasm, as already pointed out280, was first awakened by his study of the antique and its ideal forms. This insight into the peculiar excellence of classic art he thoroughly mastered and only ceased from his labours after making all that he had learned through his study of such masterpieces famous throughout Europe. From this recognition, however, originated a kind of craze for ideal representation, which, despite all its belief in the discovery of beauty, was really a relapse into flatness, absence of vitality, and superficiality. It is this kind of emptiness more particularly in the art of painting, which Herr von Rumohr had before him in the polemical writings I have already noticed.

The theory of art has to solve this difficulty. As for its interest, on the practical side of art, we shall do well to pass it wholly by. We may formulate principles as we please for mediocrity and the talents that express it, the result is always the same. Whether our theory is a distorted one or unexceptionable all we shall get is something commonplace or weak. At the same time Art and more particularly painting has unquestionably received a stimulus other than that we have deprecated from this very quest of so-called Ideals; and, through the renewed interest thereby excited in old Italian and German painters, has at least made an effort to secure a profounder and more vital content in its work.

The world is quite as tired of hearing the praises of that equally exclusive Ideal in the opposite camp, namely, that of undiluted realism in art. Theatregoers are, to take an example close at hand, heartily sick of the realistic type of domestic drama. The old story over and over again — disputes between husband and wife, sons and daughters, the source of our income, the inventory of our expenses, the servility of ministers and the intrigues of their lackeys and secretaries, down to the question of the last sixpence between the dame of the house and her kitchen-maid, or up to the last gossip of the daughters over their touching love-affairs in the parlour — such tales of woe most of us will prefer to take where, we may at least get them without adulteration — at home.

In this opposition between Ideal and Nature writers have been inclined to regard one type of art to the exclusion of others, with an especial predilection, however, for painting, whose subject-matter is the particularity of sense-perception. We will test our problem by putting the question to start with wholly in general terms, thus: “Is art to be prose or poetry?” Now what is truly poetical in art is just that which we have called the Ideal. If the question of difficulty in question is a mere matter of terminology we are quite prepared to call the Ideal something else. But, however called, the question remains what it is which constitutes poetry or prose in art. And although the adherence to what is in itself poetical in the determination of it by certain crafts may lead those arts into confusion, and, indeed, has already done so, it is contended that in so far as any subject has an express affinity with poetry, such has been also the subject of genuine pictorial treatment, genuine for the simple reason that such a content is unquestionably of a true poetical nature.

Well, let us examine a concrete case. The present exhibition of art (1818) contains several pictures, all of which are of one school, the so-called Düsseldorf. Every one of these have borrowed subjects from poetry, and indeed from the emotional side of poetry peculiarly adapted to pictorial representation. The more often and carefully we examine these pictures, the more complete will be our impression of their excessive sweetness and insipidity281.

In the foregoing contradiction there are present the following general characteristics282:

(a) First, there is the formal ideality of the work of art, that is to say, the element of poetry in its general signification, which is, as the term implies, something composed and brought together by man, which he has taken into his imagination283 and then actively worked into the artistic composition.

(α) The nature of the content of such a translation may however, be a matter of indifference or, apart from the artistic representation we thus obtain of common life, may only interest us indirectly for the moment. In this way the Dutch school of painting, for example, has recreated, as it were, by means of human workmanship, the evanescent everyday appearances of natural objects in countless new artistic effects. Velvet, armour, light, horses, work-folk, old cronies, peasants puffing their smoke from old pipe stumps, the glitter of wine in transparent tumblers, rustics in soiled jackets playing with cards as ancient — such and a hundred other subjects like them which trouble us little enough in everyday life, for the best of reasons, that although we too may have our game at cards, our drink, and our gossip we are really occupied with quite another class of interests — all this medley of objects is brought before us in their pictures. Now the claim of art in the representation of such things is precisely this external show, or reappearance of them as a product of spiritual activity, which has transmuted that which was purely external and sensuously material into a new medium supplied by mind. For instead of wool or silk that are tangible, instead of actual hair, glasses, flesh, and metals, all we see now is colour; instead of the three dimensions which are essential to external Nature, we have only superficies; and yet, despite all our losses, we have a representation identical with that of reality.

(β) In opposition to the immediate and prosaic reality of objects, then, this show of things which is effected by the mind is the wonder of ideality, a jest, if anyone cares to put it so, and an irony directed against purely external existence. Only contrast with it the preparations Nature or man has to make in ordinary life, the countless instruments of every kind they have to employ to effect the same result. What opposition the material of such objects — take a metal for example — may offer to any active effect upon it. The world of ideas, on the contrary, out of which art creates its products, is a malleable and simple element, which readily converts everything, which either Nature or man in his purely natural existence is forced to leave bluntly just as they are, to the uses which are appropriate to it. In the same way the objects of ordinary apprehension and man as we meet him in everyday life are of no incommensurable wealth, but subject to limitations — precious stones, plants, animals, etc., by themselves are of a certain positive and particular character. But man in his creative capacity is an entire world of content, which he has filched from Nature, and piled together in the comprehensive treasure-house of his world of images, and which he is now free to give forth again simply and without the restraint of external conditions and the detailed processes of actual phenomena. In this idealization art stands midway between the purely objective and restricted existence and the entirely subjective world of idea. It gives indeed objects, but they are supplied from the life of mind; it offers them for uses other than those which belong to them; it concentrates their entire interest in the abstract form of the ideal show which it therewith manifests to aesthetic contemplation, and to that alone.

(γ) Art consequently, through the ideality above explained, exalts objects otherwise unimportant, determining them, despite their ordinary character, in a fixed relation to her own medium and essential aim, and by so doing secures from us a sympathy in subject-matter which otherwise would not have enlisted our serious attention. We find the same transformation in the relation of art to Time. Its position is here too frankly ideal. That which in Nature rapidly passes by in art is secured with permanence; the flash of a smile, the sudden curve of roguish merriment on the lips, a glance, a gleam of sunshine, together with all those evanescent traits of human life, events and accidents which come and are gone, and are as quickly lost to memory. There is nothing which she cannot wrest from momentary existence, and in this respect even becomes the vanquisher of Nature herself.

In this formal ideality of art, however, it is not the content itself which makes the pre-eminent claim upon us, but the satisfaction we derive from the act of artistic reproduction. The representation must certainly strike us as natural, but it is not the reality of Nature that we require; it is rather that of the process of reproduction, this very deposition, in fact, of material conditions which is the poetical and ideal element of the work in the formal sense above indicated284. We delight in a manifestation, which appears to us a product of Nature, and which is nevertheless a product of mind without the means at Nature’s disposition. The objects charm us not so much by virtue of their approach to Nature, but rather because the artist has been able to effect that approach.

(b) A further and still profounder reason for our interest in artistic products consists in this, that the content is not brought before us in those forms in which it is found in immediate existence, but, being itself minted by the mind, is capable of considerable extension and modification within such forms. All that exists in Nature is particular, and, indeed, limited in every direction by such particularity. The creative faculty285, however, contains an intrinsic determination of universal import. And all that it produces possesses forthwith a character of universality distinct from the particularity of Nature. The creative faculty thereby secures this advantage; that being of a wider range it is more qualified to grasp ideal significance, and to insist on that explicitly in all that it shows us.

It is quite true that a work of art is not entirely the imaginative concept in its universal aspect, but rather the determinate form of its envisagement. It is for all that bound, emanating as it does from the creative medium and operations of mind, and despite the living resemblance to real things we may find upon it, to permeate the whole with this universal quality. And in this we have that higher ideality of the poetical product as contrasted with the purely formal ideality of the art of production. From this point of view it is the task of a work of art to grasp the object in its universal relations, and in the envisagement it presents to let fall everything which stands in a wholly external or indifferent relation to the content. An artist for this reason will refuse to accept all forms and means of expression offered him by the external world, on the mere ground that he finds them there. His main effort will be, if at least his aim be a real poetical creation, to secure that which will appropriately work in with his own imaginative conception; and, if he looks to Nature for assistance in supplying him with details, or, generally, as material to translate into his work, he will utilize such, not because he finds them so in Nature, but because they fall in their right place as a part of his composition and are rightly made for him. This “right” of the artist is a higher one than the mere right of immediate fact.

In his representation of the human form, for instance, an artist will not attempt such imitation as we find attempted by those restorers of ancient pictures, who reproduce old cracks, which through the swelling of either paint or varnish have involved all the older parts of the picture in a kind of arabesque, even on the portions restored. The portrait-painter will rather permit the tracery of the flesh, and a fortiori such incidents as freckles, pustules, warts, and so forth, to disappear entirely. In this respect the painter Denner, so famous for his close realization of Nature, is by no means an ideal master. For the same reason indications of muscles and veins may be given, but their distinction and relief should be far slighter than that we observe in Nature. In all such impressions little or nothing of spirit is manifested, and the expression of spirit is what is essential in the human form286. I cannot think it therefore wholly a disadvantage that we moderns have less to do with the nude in sculpture than the ancients. On the other hand the general style of our dress in comparison with the ideal drapery of classical times is less artistic and more commonplace. The object in both cases is to cover the form. The drapery, however, we find in the antique is, taken by itself, a more or less formal smooth surface only so far determinate in its adjustment to the frame by its attachment to the shoulder. In other respects the garment remains entirely formal287, hanging down simply and freely by virtue of its own immanent weight, or only determined through the position of the body and the pose and motion of the limbs. In the determination thus implied we find the external shape entirely reflecting the mutable expression of the spirit which animates the body. The particular form of the garment, the folds of it, the motion of it either up or down is clothed in the shape dictated direct from the inward impulse, and as each may momentarily appear appropriate to the particular pose or movement — and it is this form of determination which constitutes the ideality of such drapery. In the clothing we have adopted nowadays, on the contrary, the entire material is, from the first, cut out and worked up stiffly into the forms of particular limbs, so that anything approaching spontaneity in its rise and fall is impossible. Even the character of the folds is determined by previous models, and generally both cut and fall are worked out wholly by the technical rules and craftsmanship of the tailor. It is true, of course, that the configuration of the limbs determines generally the form of such clothing; but in this arrangement of the bodily form we merely have either a perverse imitation, or an enveloping of human limbs according to the convention of fashion and the accidental taste of the times. The cut of our cloth once made is irrevocably made, and neither the position of the body nor the motion of the limbs can appreciably affect it. We may move our arms and legs about as much as we please, the sleeves of our jackets and our trousers remain unalterable. Folds or creases may perhaps appear in them, but even then only on the lines of the original cutting out, as we see them, for example, on the statue of Scharnhorst. Our modern way of clothing is consequently, as an external cover, not sufficiently differentiated from the inner life to appear on its reverse side as the formal expression of that life; instead of this we have a false imitation of the human form stereotyped in the preordained and unalterable cut of our tailor.

A criticism similar to that we have directed to the representation by art of the human form and its exterior clothing might be applied to a whole multitude of things which make up the external show of life, or minister to its wants, such as eating, drinking, and sleeping — things necessary enough in themselves and useful to all men, which, however much in their manifold variety, as constituent features of the physical life of mankind, they may blend with those activities more directly related to its spirit, do not themselves form part of such activities, or stand in essential relation either to their determinations or their interests, and thereby contribute to what is the truly ideal or universal element in the content of human life. Physical aspects of life such as these may no doubt receive poetical treatment in art; and it is generally admitted that the descriptions of a poet such as Homer in this direction adhere very closely to Nature. Yet we find that even Homer, despite all his ἐνἐέργεια, all the vividness of his presentment, is forced to limit his descriptions to general observations; no one expects to find in him an entirely accurate picture of the facts in all their detail as they actually would occur in life. He may give us, no doubt, in his delineation of the bodily presence of Achilles, the lofty brow, the prominent nose, the long and stalwart legs, but he is not likely to include in the picture every detail of the veritable existence of limbs point for point, and the relation in which they stand to one another in colour, size, and so forth, in other words to offer us Nature’s reality instead of an artist’s portrait. And the reason is obvious inasmuch as in the art of poetry the type of expression is always the universal concept of the imagination as distinguished from the bare particularity of Nature. Instead of the fact the poet always gives us the denominant, the word, in which the particular thing is universalized; for the word is a product of mental conception, and as such already carries in itself the nature of a universal. One is entitled to say, of course, that it is natural in the formation of concepts and speech to employ a nomenclature, the word, as such an infinite288 abridgment of the existence we find in Nature; but if we do so the Nature to which we refer it would not merely be opposed to the natural existence with which we compare it, but would be just that which cancels it. We are therefore confronted with the question in what sense we use the word Nature when we contrast it with the characteristic of poetry. The mere undefined use of the word Nature by itself tells us nothing at all. What poetry should always give us is the energetic, the essential, the truly characteristic; and this fundamental expressiveness is precisely the Ideal and not the merely immediate, to enumerate all the details of which in the narration of an event or the portrayal of a scene will render either of these simply dull, spiritless, tedious, and intolerable. In the manifestation of this universality, however, one type of art will reveal more clearly its ideal characteristics; another will rather emphasize, by a restricted use of material form, the infinite detail of external reality. Sculpture, for example, is in its presentments more abstract than painting; in poetry the epic type, in its realization of the external appearance of life itself, will not be so complete as a dramatic poem should be. On the other hand it will surpass the latter in its portrayal of the fulness of its imaginative vision, the epic poet being most indebted to concrete pictures his imagination borrows from past history. In contrast with him the dramatist is mainly restricted to the motives of an action, the attitude of the will to it, the psychological problem in short.

(c) It is, then, Mind (Spirit), which gives external realization in a particular form to the inward world of content which is of essential interest to it; and it is in close relation to this fact that we should consider the question, what precise significance we are to infer from the opposition above discussed between the Ideal and naturalness. And first we must observe that from such a point of view the word natural is not employed in the most genuine signification of the term. As a description of the external form imposed upon facts by mind it obviously is neither the immediate naturality we find in animal life, nor that presented in Nature’s landscape. Rather its very form of determination, in so far, that is to say, as we see the mind here giving to itself an embodiment, will show us that it is an expression of mind, an expression moreover suffused with ideality. For this taking up into the mind, this plastic recreation of form on the part of mind is nothing less than idealization. It is sometimes remarked of the countenances of dead people that they take on themselves once more the lineaments of childhood. The obdurate expression of passion, custom and strife, the characteristic seal of their life of strenuous action, passes off, and the indeterminacy of the features of a child’s face reappears. In life, however, all traits whatsoever, the entire presentment in fact, receive their characteristic expression from the world of soul; and in much the same way the different races and classes of mankind reflect the distinguishing features of their spiritual tendencies and activities in their external manifestation. In all such organizations that which is outward is visibly permeated with mind; and, by virtue of its energy, already confronts mere Nature as an idealized creation. Only a clear perception of this truth will enable us to sift this significant question of an opposition between Nature and the Ideal to the bottom. If we do not possess this we shall find ourselves maintaining that the forms in which Spirit is visualized as a part of Nature have already lost in that real appearance, which is independent of art’s imitative action, such an intrinsic completeness, beauty, and excellence, that it is quite impossible that there can be another and more exalted type of beauty, which presents itself as the Ideal in contradistinction to this immediate reality, and this all the more for the reason that art is unable entirely to attain even to that which is present in Nature herself. Or, if our thoughts lean to the opposite extreme, we shall look to art to supply us independently, in opposition to Nature’s reality, with more ideal modes of representation. The polemics of Herr von Rumohr, which we have already criticized, are well worthy of attention in this connection. This writer, at any rate, whatever others may say who have the word Ideal so frequently on their lips in depreciation of the vulgarity of Nature, refers to the Idea and the Ideal in phrases of respect and contempt with absolute impartiality.

The real truth of the matter is rather this. There is in the spiritual world, both outwardly and inwardly regarded, a Nature of vulgar type, which testifies to its meanness outwardly for the simple reason that its inward content is mean, that is to say, when all that it can realize externally in its activities are the aims of envy, jealousy, and avarice in every detail of sensuous life. Such a poverty-stricken Nature can no doubt form part of the subject-matter of art, and has been treated as such. When this is the case, however, as we have already explained, it is not the subject-matter, but wholly the artistic handling of it, which creates an interest of any permanent character; and the artist will look in vain for sympathy in his subject, or rather the mere material of his subject from the true connoisseur. A particularly pertinent illustration of this type of art is the so-called genre painting, which has not shown itself above accepting subjects of this character, the artistic treatment of which has been carried by the Dutch school to the extreme limit of perfection. It may, however, be as well to ask ourselves, first, what the precise contribution of the Dutch has been to this genre-painting, what, in short, is the nature of content their dainty pictures express, pictures which at least have asserted an extraordinary power of attraction and obviously cannot be shelved right away beneath the common stigma of vulgarity. We shall not improbably find, on closer examination, that the subject-matter of these pictures is not so contemptible as it is often taken to be289.

The Dutch have selected the subject-matter of their artistic production out of their own substance, out of the actual presence of their daily life. To have once for all realized that presence even in art is no matter of reproach to them. To estimate the character of their artistic interest we must view them in close connection with the actual panorama of their own times. This is a problem of history. The Dutchman has in great measure himself created the ground wherein he lives and finds a home, and has been forced continuously to preserve and defend that home against the invasion of the sea. The citizens of the towns no less than the rural population have together, through courage, endurance, and bravery, repulsed the power of Spain in the hands of Philip II, son of Charles V, the sovereign of a world-wide empire, and in fighting their battle for civic freedom, they were fighting that of religious liberty. This staunch sense of citizenship, this passionate love of enterprise in the narrow limits of their fatherland, no less than abroad on the high seas, this careful and at the same time clean and dainty mode of life, together with the geniality and invincible self-respect which distinguishes them, all this is as much the fruit of their own actions as it is the general content of their artistic production. Such a content as this is no common material, though obviously it is not of the kind we must suppose we can approach with the supercilious superiority of critics for whom the exalted taste of courts and fine society is everything. From a sterling national self-consciousness of this sort Rembrandt painted his famous “Night-Watch” now in Amsterdam, Van Dyck so many of his portraits, Wouvermans so many of his battle-pieces; nor should even those reflections of rustic drinking-bouts, jovialities, and other scenes of merriment be wholly excluded from the category. And in illustration of its excellence we would point, by way of contrast, to a work in this year’s exhibition, which, though not downright bad genre-painting, is much inferior to the handling by old Dutch masters of similar subject-matter, coming nowhere near to their freedom and joy of life. In this picture a housewife is seen entering an alehouse to give her husband a good scolding. Here we have just a scene of cantankerous and waspish human-kind and nothing more. These Dutchmen painted their folk very differently; whether we find them among their cups, at weddings or dances, feasting or drinking, nay, even when the matter proceeds to ribaldry and blows, liveliness and lustiness is the prevailing temper. Young maids and women laugh with the rest, and a feeling of free and abandoned merriment carries all before it. This intimate delight in all enjoyment justifiably human, which will even absorb itself wholly in animal life and crop up at times as mere satiety and grossness; this freshly awakened sense of freedom and life, fully grasped and embodied in composition and colour, is what constitutes the higher spiritual import290 of these Dutch pictures.

On much the same grounds the beggar boys of Murillo, in the central gallery of the Munich collection, are excellent. Superficially regarded, the subject here, too, is of a vulgar character. The mother is scolding one of the youngsters, as he quickly munches a piece of bread; two others hard by, ragged and poor, are eating melons and grapes291. But in this very poverty of half-nakedness what gleams forth from the entire composition as the soul of that beggar life is its complete carelessness and spontaneity. No dancing dervish himself could give it us more frankly in its impression of entire health and jubilant vitality. This freedom from all external care, this inward liberty reflecting itself in that which is visible, is precisely that which the notion of the Ideal demands. There is in Paris a certain portrait of a boy by Raphael; the head leans propped at leisure on one arm, and gazes with such ecstasy of careless contentment into the open landscape that we are loth to turn away from a picture expressive of such health and exuberant animation. We receive a delight of very much the same nature from these lads of Murillo. It is obvious enough that neither their objects nor their interests aim high, but this is no result of stupidity; there they chaffer on God’s earth with, we may almost say, the bliss and contentment of the Olympian gods themselves. They, too, have their business; but though we hear little about it they are a genuine sample of humanity, neither morose nor discontented with their lot. Feeling this ground-root in them of all sterling performance we can readily imagine that in favourable conditions youth such as this might be capable of most things. A composition of this kind is entirely on a different level from the one above mentioned of the scolding housewife, or two others we might also contrast with it, of a certain peasant mending his whip and a postillion sleeping on a straw pallet292. Such paintings of genre should unquestionably be of small size; and, indeed, in their total impression on the sense, they must be made to appear of comparative insignificance, that we may not feel the character of their subject-matter and its presentment has received undue prominence. It would be intolerable to have such subjects painted life size as though the fulness of the reality were sufficiently attractive to claim our attention.

Such are the principles which should regulate our artistic treatment of and sympathy with that which it is usual to stigmatize as mean or vulgar in ordinary life.

There is, no doubt, plenty of material for art to appropriate of higher grade than the representation of animal spirits and downright citizenship in all their essentially insignificant detail. Man has clearly more serious interests and objects than these, interests which have unfolded as his own spirit has widened and deepened, and in harmony with which it is his truest interest to remain. An art will take highest rank which sets before itself the task of giving adequate representation to this more vital, or at least more profound, content. And here at once we are confronted with the old question, what is the source which will supply us with the forms most fitting to such creations of mind. On the one side theorists maintain the opinion that, inasmuch as the artist creates these lofty ideas, which he desires to clothe in artistic form, he must, also supply their artistic forms, create, for example, from his imagination the ideal figures of Greek gods, Christ, his apostles, saints, and so on. In strenuous opposition to this view Herr von Rumohr has entered the lists. This writer is of opinion that art is on a false track in supposing that the artist discovers the forms of his production in himself rather than in Nature, and it is under this conviction that he has reviewed the masterpieces both of Italian and Dutch painters. On this head he finds it a matter of censure (“Italian Investigations,” i, p. 105) “that the theory of art, during the sixty years which have elapsed, should be at the pains to prove that it is an object, or rather the main object, of art to improve upon creation as it is particularised, and by doing so to substitute forms which have no particular relation to anything, which would ape Nature’s creation by going several points beyond her, and release mortal man from all responsibility for the fact that Nature has not known how to make her appearance more beautiful.” And consistently with such a point of view he further advises the artist “to have nothing to do with the gigantic task of attempting to ennoble or elucidate the natural form, or attempt any such exalted function of the human Spirit under what name soever it may be written down in works upon art” (ibid. p. 63). He is, in short, wholly convinced that, however exalted and spiritual293 the subject to be treated may be, completely adequate forms are to be found in Nature as immediately perceived, and consequently maintains (p. 83), “that the exposition of Art, even in the case of subject-matter as highly spiritual as it is possible to conceive, is never indebted to a symbolism capriciously created by man294, but depends wholly for its consistency upon what is presented as significant by Nature in organic form.” No doubt in advancing this Herr von Rumohr has particularly under review the ideal types of antique art as they are expounded by Winckelmann. It is for all that the abiding service of Winckelmann to have pointed out and set forth in harmonious relation these very types, although he may doubtless have, committed errors of judgment with regard to particular masterpieces while carrying through the same. As a possible example of such an oversight Herr von Rumohr thinks he has made out (p. 115) that the increase of length in the lower half of the body, which Winckelmann has characterized as an ideal feature of the antique, is really borrowed from Roman statuary. And naturally enough, as an opponent of the Ideal, improves the occasion by insisting that the artist should unreservedly take Nature into his confidence in the study of form. Here, and here alone, he will find the presence of true beauty. To quote this writer once more it is affirmed (p. 144), “that the beauty of most importance depends on a symbolic of forms rooted in Nature rather than human caprice, a beauty through which these forms are nourished into their characteristic and symbolic relations, in the vision of which we necessarily have brought back to our memory definite images and conceptions, and are made more definitely conscious of previously dormant feeling.295“ I And so finally it appears that in this writer’s view (p. 105) “a mysterious trait of our spiritual life, what many would perhaps call Idea, seems to bind together the artist and the appearances of Nature, in which latter he is constantly and continuously learning to recognize the true character of his own artistic purpose296, and to find himself in a position through them to give expression to it.”

There can be no question, of course, that ideal art has no business at all with “a symbolism capriciously created;” and, if it really is the case that these ideal types of the ancients have been composed only to reduce the veritable forms of Nature to false and empty abstraction, we may freely admit that Herr von Rumohr is justified in his most trenchant opposition.

For our own part we would emphasize the points of fundamental importance to be grasped in this antithesis between the ideal of art and Nature as follows:

The forms which are borrowed from immediate Nature to determine an ideal content must be assumed to be thus taken symbolically in the usual sense of the term, namely, that they are not thus immediately significant in themselves, but only as the external embodiment of that which is inward and spiritual, the content, in fact, they express. It is only Spirit, even in the reality which they possess outside the limits of art, which constitutes their ideality in its contrast with that they entirely owe to Nature simply as such, and which is unable to reveal to us what is essentially mind. It is the object of art, on its more noble plane, to give external shape to the inward content of Spirit. This content we discover in the conscious life of men realized in the world. As such it possesses — we include with it our conscious human experience generally — an external semblance directly presented in and through which it finds expression. So much may readily be conceded. At the same time from a philosophical point of view it is simply futile to inquire whether we ought to look to the direct facts of Nature alone for objects and physiognomical traits of beauty and expression to serve as entirely adequate materials for art’s representation, shall we say, of the majesty, repose, and power of a Jupiter or of a Juno, Venus, Peter, Christ, Madonna, or any other divinity, or saint. Arguments may be supported on either side, and the question can only remain finally undecided, being wholly empirical. For the only sufficient way of deciding the matter would be to contrast what is borrowed with the realities it purports to represent, and this, in the assumed case of the Greek gods, might be matter of some difficulty; and, to take the present day, one man will see traits of beauty in their perfection where another a thousand times more acute will see nothing. But over and above such considerations we must observe that the mere beauty of form will never give us that we have named the Ideal, inasmuch as the individuality of the content is a constituent part of it, and therein form is necessarily included. A human face, for example, may be both regular and beautiful in its outlines and yet remain cold and devoid of all expression. The ideal figures of the Greek gods are, on the contrary, true individualizations; the universality of their ideal conception does not exclude the characteristic determination which belongs to each of them. And the vitality of the Ideal consists just in this, that this determinate and fundamental spiritual significance, which it is the function of art to exhibit, should wholly transfuse by appropriate artistic treatment all the particular aspects of the external embodiment, such as composition, pose, motion, physiognomy, and configuration of limbs, so that nothing empty or insignificant should be left, but the entire work should reflect that ideal significance. All that we have learned from Greek sculpture in recent times of a quality which, in fact, emanates from the school of Pheidias, is characterized by nothing so much as this penetrative vitality. The Ideal is preserved in all its severity without any lapse in the direction of mere grace, softness, elegance, and exuberance, yet retains the form in close relation to the ideal significance which should be embodied throughout the whole. This supreme vitality is the distinguishing mark of the great artist.

We may call a typical significance of this kind, in contrast to the particularity of the external world, essentially abstract. This is pre-eminently the case in sculpture and painting, arts which illuminate but a momentary state, without proceeding to such a varied development of exposition as we find, for example, in that where Homer is able to depict the character of Achilles as mild and courteous no less than severe and terrible, to say nothing of all his other characteristics. No doubt it is possible to find such a significance expressed in purely immediate reality. There are, for instance, few countenances which cannot reflect the moods of piety, devotion, and cheerfulness; but such faces also express countless other moods which either are quite inappropriate to that ideal significance, or are only indirectly related to it. For this reason it is by virtue of its particular realization that a portrait acquaints us of the fact that it is a portrait. In many old German and Flemish pictures we find the patron of the picture included in the composition with his entire family of sons and daughters. All are necessarily painted as though taken in an act of devotion, and this spirit illuminates every countenance; but at the same time we have quite as clearly set before us in the men stalwart warriors, men of vigorous action, disciplined on the strenuous field of life and commerce, and in the women dames of an equally doughty life-experience. If we compare with such faces — and we may restrict our comparison wholly to these very pictures, which are famous for their close approach to Nature in their delineation of physiognomy — those of the Virgin Mary, and the saints and apostles who surround her, we shall find in these latter one preponderating expression; and all the physical lineaments, whether we look at build of bone, structure, or muscle, traits of that express motion or repose, are concentrated upon this one artistic effect. That which is felt to be appropriate to the one class and not to the other exactly differentiates the distinction between the genuine Ideal and mere portraiture.

Some may imagine it possible for the artist to compose the ideal content of genuine types by a process of sifting and selection from the facts of immediate Nature, or quite possibly from the various physiognomies and compositions which collections of engravings from the copper-plate or the wood may furnish. But a process such as this of mere collection and sifting is not the end of the matter. An artist must maintain the creative impulse alert throughout. He must himself, in the strength of his own imagination, already impregnated with the knowledge of appropriate form and made vital with profound experience and emotion, give such an embodiment to the significance, which is the inspiring motive of the work, as will make it appear throughout as metal cast at one time and is one state of fusion.

B. THE DETERMINACY OF THE IDEAL

To comprehend the Ideal in its intrinsic significance, that is to say, according to its fundamental notion, was a comparatively easy task. But the beauty of art, in so far as it is the Idea, is not to be restricted to the purely universal standpoint of its notional concept; even as so comprehended it must necessarily include within it determination and particularity, and is compelled to take definite embodiment as external reality. The question consequently arises in what way is the Ideal able still to assert itself in this process of objectification in the medium of external things and their finitude, and despite all that is antagonistic to ideality; and as a corollary to this we have to inquire how finite and determinate existence is enabled to attach to itself the ideality of the beauty of all art.

We propose to regulate this inquiry with the following division of our subject matter.

First, the determination of the Ideal in its simplest terms.

Secondly, the determination of it, in so far as it proceeds by virtue of its particularity to a condition of discordant parts within itself and to their resolution, a condition we may generally, define as action297.

Thirdly, the determination of the Ideal from the point of view of it as an external object.

We have already observed that it is the function of art to make the Divine the focus or centre of its entire exposition. It is, however, only possible for thought in its pure medium, that is to say, apart from all the sensuous material of the figurative imagination, to comprehend the Divine in its essential significance of unity and universality. To attempt to do otherwise, by imagining a picture of God more readily grasped by the perception of the senses, is, as we know, forbidden both Jews and Mahommedans. This cuts away the ground of the figurative arts, which absolutely require form as their medium in all its concreteness of actual life; and we have only lyrical poetry left us to celebrate in its exaltation the praise of His power and glory.
Considered, however, from the reverse point of view, we must equally assert that however much unity and universality are predicable of the Divine, He is in His essential substance determined, and, so far as He withdraws Himself from the pure quality, of such predicates in their abstraction, is thereby an object for the figurative sense and external perception. If the Divine is consequently apprehended and figuratively embodied for us through the forms of the imagination, we are at once confronted with a possible variety in such determination; and it is at this point that the actual realm of ideal art finds its commencement. For, in the first place, the one Divine substance disunites and breaks itself up into a multiplicity of self-subsistent gods, such as we find presented by the polytheistic system of Grecian art; and even in the religious consciousness of Christianity God is, in opposition to His purely spiritual unity, immediately revealed on Earth and in the world-process as man. And, secondly, the Divine, regarded generally in its determinate appearance and reality, is both present and realized in emotional feeling, will, and the education298 of mankind. For this reason and in this sphere men who are filled with the Spirit of God, saints, martyrs, and, in short, all who share in the religious life, are equally the appropriate subject of ideal art. With this principle of the individuality of the Divine and its determinate existence realized necessarily in the world-process, we are face to face with — and this is the third point to be considered — the particularity of human existence. For the entire world of human emotion, with all that stirs it most profoundly — and what a power is implied in that open sea of feeling and passion, everything of deepest interest to the human heart — this entire content is nothing less than its exposition and expression. If it is true, then, that the Divine in its purest essence of reason is only the object of the thinking consciousness, it is equally true that Spirit, which takes to itself an actively bodily presence, so far, that is to say, and only so far as we find it reverberate in the heart of humanity, all this lies within the sphere of art. Once admit this, and we must admit the content of particular interests and actions, specific characters, and momentary situations, in short, the entire process of development in the external order; and it becomes of first importance to indicate under a general principle in what the relation between the Ideal and this positive determination consists.
In conformity with what we have already advanced it is clear that here, too, the Ideal will be most purely manifested in the representation — whether it be of gods, Christ, apostles, saints, or any other type of devout persons — which brings most clearly before us the qualities of beatified repose and satisfaction, a peace undisturbed with that which is earthly, and subject to the storms of life’s manifolded complexities, struggles, and contradictions. We are therefore not surprised to find that both the arts of sculpture and painting have been peculiarly fitted to incorporate under ideal form not merely the ancient gods, but Christ as saviour of the world, and individual apostles and saints. That which is the most essential truth in actual life is concentrated to a focus on itself in the determinate embodiment of art, rather than continually forced from its serenity through dependence upon finite conditions. This essential concentration is not destitute of particularity, but the divergent separation, which is a feature of the external and finite state, is purified to one simple definition, so that it appears as though all traces of external influence and the relation thus created were overcome. This deedless and infinite self-repose, this “taking a rest,” as we find it, for example, in certain statues of Hercules, is just what constitutes the significance of the Ideal. If the gods are represented in contact with the process of Nature, they must still carry with them their immortal and unapproachable majesty. Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, Mars, and their like are, it is true, definite personalities, but they are at the same time unyielding potentates and powers, which preserve within them their self-subsistent liberty, even when they are actively related to the world. And for this reason it is not merely that a specific particularity must characterize the determinacy of the Ideal, but spiritual freedom must be manifested thereby as totality, and in this state of repose suggest the potency of unfettered freedom of action. If we turn now from the gods to the less exalted plane of temporal existence and human life, we shall find the Ideal active in its representation of the substantial content of such humanity, and its dominant repression of wholly subjective particularity. By this we mean that all that is entirely isolate in feeling and action is wrested from the element of contingency, and particularity is represented in its concreteness, that is to say in its wider bond of relation with what most truly and intimately belongs to its life. When, for instance, we speak of the nobility, excellence, or perfection in particular men, we assert in so many words that the substantial core of what is spiritual, ethical, and divine has announced itself as prevailing in the individual, and man has submerged his active life, his volitions, his interests, and passions wholly in this substantive basis, that he may thereby give full satisfaction to the most authentic necessities of his soul.

At the same time, however much in the case of the Ideal the determination of Spirit and its external presence appears to be absorbed in the simple self-relation, the principle of development is likewise directly associated with the particularity unfolded299 in determinate existence, and along with this in that relation to environment which necessitates both the opposition and conflict of clashing forces. This fact necessitates a closer examination of the determination of the Ideal regarded in this very aspect of differentiation and process, an aspect which we may in a general way define as action.

The gracious innocence of beatific enjoyment, the inactive repose, the majesty of power in self-reliant tranquillity, as also the concentrated compactness generally of that which is most substantial in a given content — all these are essentially ideal modes of determination. That which is inward, however, and spiritual is in an equal degree active movement and development. One-sidedness and division are inseparable from development. Spirit that is wholly itself and a totality will, expanding into all particularity, step forth out of its repose, in despite of all satisfaction therein, and involve itself in the contradictions of the broken and confused medley of earthly existence, and is by so doing unable in this divided world to withdraw itself from the ill-fortune and ill-health that clings to finite existence.

Even the immortal gods of Polytheism do not dwell in eternal peace, but take sides in mighty conflicts wherein contending passions and interests are roused, being subject themselves to Destiny; nay, more, even the God of Christians is, not delivered from a passage of humiliation endured through suffering and shame of death, is not spared the bitterness of soul, which perforce cried aloud: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” And the mother of Christ experienced an agony of the same poignant character, and human life in every direction is a life of struggle, battle, and pain. For greatness and force of character is evolved in the greatness and force of contending elements, out of which Spirit concentrates itself again and again upon its unity. The intensity and depth of subjectivity is only the more emphasized, the more unbroken and unexampled the resistance of circumstances to its unity grows, and the more irreconcilable the contradictions appear under which it has to preserve its own self-centred equilibrium. In this development and through this alone the might of the Idea and the Ideal is preserved, for power consists precisely in this self-preservation through a process of self-negation.

Inasmuch as it is the fact, then, that the particularity of the Ideal passes into a relation with the external world through such development, and by so doing is made partaker in a world, which, so far from manifesting the ideally free association of the notion and its external reality, presents an existence which is just that which it ought not to be, in apprehending the true nature of this relation we have to consider how far the determinations which affect the Ideal either in themselves contain immediately the principle of Ideality, or are to a more or less degree susceptible of it.

In this connection we would direct attention to three fundamental points of view.

In the first place we have the actual condition of the world generally, which is assumed as involved in individual action and its specific character. Secondly, we have the particularity of condition, the determination of which introduces difference and tension within the substantive unity, which is the motive-spring of the action, in other words the situation.

Thirdly, we have to consider the situation from the side of subjectivity, and furthermore the reaction by virtue of which the conflict and resolution of the element of difference is expressly asserted, in other words, the action in its strict sense.

The ideal subjectivity is as such essentially a personal relation, a relation, that is to say, of self to every aspect of motion or activity, in which the self has to assert or perfect its own substance. And to effect this a world environment is necessary as the universal ground of its realization. When in reference to this we speak of condition we understand by this the universally prevailing mode, under which, within the sphere of spiritual reality, that which is the substantive and essentially coalescing fabric of the same is present. In this sense we refer to a condition of education, the sciences, the religious sense, or even of finance, administration of justice, family life, and similar examples. All these objects of reference are, however, merely aspects of one and the same spiritual content, which is thus in and through them rendered explicit and real. In further considering the general condition of the world as the universal mode of the reality of Spirit it will be necessary to pursue our examination from the point of view of the Will. It is through the exercise of volition that Spirit generally unites itself to-determinate existence; and the substantial nexi which are immediately present in reality betray themselves in the specific modes in which the determinations of Will, ethical and legal conceptions, and, indeed, all that belongs to that which we are accustomed, in a general way, to define as justice, actively asserts itself.

The question consequently arises how such a universal condition must be characterized in order that it may appear adequate to the individuality of the Ideal.

(a) Pursuant to the foregoing considerations we may, to begin with, emphasize the following points:

(α) The Ideal is essential unity; not a purely formal and external unity, but the immanent unity of the content in itself. This substantive repose on its own resources we have already characterized as the self-sufficiency, rest, and beatitude of the Ideal. We will, in direct relation to the plane of discussion we have now reached, develop this characteristic of self-subsistency300, making it a primary demand of our argument that what we have termed the general condition of the world appear in such a self-subsistent form as will enable it to accept the embodiment of the Ideal.

(αα) Now self-subsistency is an equivocal expression to start with. In ordinary parlance that which is essentially substantial is called simply self-subsistent by virtue of the element of causation being implied within this substantiality; we are wont to use it in this sense when describing the intrinsically divine and absolute. But as retained in this universality of substance merely as such it is not declared as itself subjective, and consequently meets with its irresolvable contradiction in the particularity of concrete individuality. In this bare antithesis all true self-subsistency disappears.

(ββ) On the other hand, it is not uncommon to find such subsistency ascribed to purely formal individuality, consisting solely in its self-reliance upon the fixed determinacy of its subjective characteristics. This subjectivity, however, in so far as the actual content of life drops away from it, so that the forces and substances which lie without it acquire in themselves an independent stability, and as such confront the subject and the inward life as a content wholly unrelated, lapses through this, too, into unequivocable contradiction with the actual substantiality of determinate existence, and forfeits all claim to self-subsistency and freedom of content. True self-subsistence consists alone in the unity and interpenetration of both individuality and universality with each other. The universal acquires through the individual a concrete existence; the subjectivity of the particular thing discovers for the first time in the universal the unassailable basis and the most genuine form of its realized totality.

(γγ) Consequently in making this demand of the universal world-condition we must ask for a form of self-subsistency in the same sense, namely, that the substantially universal in such a condition must contain within itself as the vehicle of its self-subsistence the form of subjectivity. The most obvious presentment of this identity is that of thought. For if thought is, in one aspect of it, subjective, in another it possesses universality as the product of its inherent activity, and encloses both universality and subjectivity in unfettered unity. The universal of thought is, however, not that of art, whose object is the beautiful. And, indeed, apart from this distinction, particular individuality as confronted by thought in its natural envisagement, or form, no less than in its active effects and complete realization, stands in no necessary correspondence with the universality of thought. There is, for example, a clear distinction between the subject apprehended in its concrete content of the actual world and that which is simply the thinking subject, or at least it is open to such a distinction. The same kind of cleavage affects the form of the universal itself. In other words the moment the universal begins to assert itself in distinction from its otherwise related reality by that act it has in objective existence separated itself from all the varied play of its phenomenal particularity, and, in opposition to the same, has already established an independent position assured and powerful.

In the Ideal, however, it is precisely the particular individuality which ought to persist in inseparable co-ordination with the substantive reality, and to the full extent that freedom and the self-subsistency of the subjective principle may attach to the Ideal the world-environment of conditions and relations should possess no essential objectivity independent of the individual in the subjective aspect above referred to or already presupposed. For the ideal individual is a self-enclosed totality, which already includes the objective principle, and it must not be permitted to have independent motion and development apart from the individuality of the subject; otherwise the subject falls back into a purely subordinate position in contrast to a world whose independence is already assured. Consequently the universal must indeed be actual in the individual as that which is in a unique sense its own, but not so as the property of the individual, as a thinker, but as that of his character and temperament. To put the same truth in another way, what is required for this unity of the universal and individual in art as opposed to the mediation and differentiation of thought, is the form of immediacy; and the self-subsistency which we claim here is the form of immediate self-subsistency. With that, however, the element of contingency is associated. That is to say, so long as the universal and effective301 constituents of spiritual life, such as the self-subsistency of individuals exhibits, are only presented to us in the immediate guise of subjective feeling, temperament, and disposition of character, and debarred any other category of existence, such are thereby already given over to the contingency of volition and its realization. All we have left us, then, is what is peculiar to each individual viewed as such and his sensuous experience. Such a possession of what is nothing more than personal idiosyncracy is unable to assert for itself any further potency or necessity; it appears simply as inclusion of content, fixed achievement and at the same time arbitrary commitment of the wholly self-dependent subject to the influence of feeling, disposition, energy, general ability, cunning, and talents, instead of carrying out its realization over and over again according to a principle of universal import and acknowledged stability.

This type of contingency, then, is the characteristic quality of the condition which we required for the ground upon which all the varied wealth of the Ideal is to appear.

(β) In order to make more clear the actual character of the reality which is most adapted to artistic treatment we will contrast it with that aspect of existence which is not so adapted.

(αα) We find this pre-eminently where the ethical notion, that is, justice and rational freedom, have already won for themselves and maintain a fixed position in the social order regulated by law, so that, even in the external world, it appears as a positive and necessary power, which is quite independent of the individuality and subjectivity of specific temperament and characters. This is the case in the life of the State, where that life is manifested in a form adequate to the true notion of citizenship. For obviously it is not every chance association of human beings, any more than every patriarchal community, that will fulfil the requisites of State-life. In the true State laws, customs, and rights, in so far as they constitute the determinations of freedom applicable to all, are of paramount force even in this universal and abstract relation, and are not conditioned in their applicability by the chance requirements of any individual’s idiosyncracy. As the consciousness of society has issued for itself commands and laws in a mode of statement of general application, in the same way these are externally valid as such universal fiat, which proceeds in the path of order thereby indicated, armed with powers of restraint and compulsion against any individual who may attempt to assert his caprice in an injurious opposition to such regulations.

(ββ) Such a condition at once assumes a dividing line between the universal ordinances of the regulative understanding and the immediate life, connoting by this latter term the unity in which all that is substantive and essential in morals and the conduct of justice only finds a form for its existence in the experience of individuals, their ethical feeling and opinion, that is to say, and thereby alone is exercised. In the civilized State right and justice, even religion and science, or, at any rate, provident interest in religious and scientific education, are subject to public control, which directs and co-ordinates the same.

(γγ) The position, then, that isolated individuals occupy in the State is one which contracts them within a fixed and organized order, and subordinates them thereto; and they stand in this relation for the reason that the character and disposition of each is not the only embodiment of ethical forces; but, if the State to which they belong is a genuine example, they are on the contrary compelled to regulate all the external detail of their actions, opinions, and feelings with a due regard to what is legally permissible, and to bring the same into line with it. This dependence upon the objective rationality of the State in its power of self-assertion above all subjective caprice may either be regarded as a mere subjection, inasmuch as laws and institutions possess, as the paramount power, a constraining force, or we may see in it merely the free recognition and acceptance of the reason that underlies such a necessity of fact, an acknowledgment through which the individual finds himself again in that objective order.

But even in the latter case isolated individuals continue to remain as merely incidental facts, and apart from the organic reality of the State possess no real substantiality in themselves. For substantiality, in the sense we here use the term, is by no means only the particular property of this or that individual, but a fully explicit reality302, minted, as it were, in all aspects of it, and down to the merest detail in a mode universally applicable and necessary. All that mere individuals can effect with volition and accomplishment even in actions right, moral, and legal in themselves in the interest of and attendant upon the progress of the whole, remains and must always remain, in contrast with that whole, insignificant and a mere example. Their actions are always only an entirely partial realization of a single case; and, moreover, the realization of the same has no universal significance in the sense that the particular example of it is thereby of objective validity as law, or, as such law, makes its appearance. And for the same reason, to put the matter the other way, it is wholly unimportant whether the validity of right and justice is acknowledged by private individuals judging as individuals. The validity is a vital fact of State life which holds whether it be acknowledged or no. No doubt it is a matter of interest to the general public that every one should fall in with the order established and desire it; but the wishes of isolated individuals have no influence upon that interest in the sense that it is only by virtue of the assent of this or that person that right and a moral order is preserved. Such require no such isolated example of assent; and a breach of either is followed by punishment.

The subordinate position of private persons in the civilized State is finally emphasized in the fact that, whatever share any one may have in the general civic life, it is of a definite and in every case restricted character. In the real State work must have some relation to the general good303, just as the active enterprise of the bourgeoisie in the commercial business is subdivided in the most varied way, so that the entire life of the State shall not appear as the concrete achievement of any single person, or in general can be entrusted to the arbitrary wishes, enterprise, courage, resources, and discretion of such, but on account of the fact that it comprises activities and trades of countless complexity, and must be carried out by associations of business men at least as varied. The punishment of a criminal is no longer an affair of personal heroism or the virtue of any one individual, but is throughout the entire process, in the investigation and discovery of the felonious act, in the pronouncement of judicial sentence and its execution, contributed to by different persons; nay, every important phase of such a process is in the same way subject to some kind of division of labour. To see that the laws are properly administered, then, is not within the special province of any one man, but results from an organized effort of great variety and the rules which direct it. Add to this every man who assists in such a process is bound to follow certain general principles which are laid down for his guidance, and all that is carried out under their direction is further subject to the criticism and control of yet higher officials.

(γ) In all such civic relations, then, we find that in a truly regulated State the public authority is not impressed with the imprimatur of any single person, but it is the general Will which prevails here in its universality, a condition under which the particular life of the individual has the appearance of vanishing or, at least, of becoming of a quite subsidiary importance. In a condition of things such as this the self-subsistency we were seeking for is out of the question. And for this reason we required for the free embodiment of individuality conditions which are precisely the reverse of this, in which the validity of the ethical principle derives its support from individuals, and only from individuals, men who make for themselves a great place in the arena of life through the activity of exceptional volitional power and the inherent greatness and effectiveness of their character. With such right is simply that which they choose to accept as such; and if that which is essentially moral is compromised by their action, there is no all-constraining public might which brings them to judgment and exacts punishment, but only the right of that inner voice of necessity, which accentuates itself as vital in particular character and through external circumstance and condition and only thus is actually existent. This is what differentiates punishment from revenge. The punishment exacted by law asserts the validity of the generally applicable and carefully defined right against the violation of that right, and makes use of the public power according to a definite process as its instrument, in other words, it employs a tribunal and a judge, an instrument to which personality is attached as something accidental. Even revenge may in a similar way find a justification; but such as it has is based entirely on the subjective conscience of those who deal with the criminal act, and, in pursuance of their own private convictions, avenge themselves on the unrighteous act and its perpetrator. The revenge of Orestes is, for example, justifiable; but he exacted it under the direction of the law which his own virtue prescribed, not as the execution of a judgment and a right. In the condition, then, that we claim as the most suitable for artistic treatment, that which is moral and just must be throughout personal, in the sense that its source is exclusively in the individual life, and it only is actual in such dependence. Moreover, to proceed with our contrasted conditions, in regulated States the external environment of man is made secure, and properly is protected, and he is only permitted to retain in absolute independence for himself his private views and opinions. But in that condition where the essential features of a State are not found the protection of life and property depends on the isolated energy and courage of each individual by himself, who is compelled to look after his own security and that of everything which belongs to him. Such a condition we are accustomed to identify with the heroic age. It is not, of course, our province here either to discuss or decide which of these two contrasted conditions of life is the worthier; suffice it to say that, so far as the Ideal of art is concerned, it is imperatively necessary that this hard and fixed line between the universal as an independent existence and individuality should be removed, however much this distinction may be necessary in other directions for the realization of human existence. The reason of this is that Art and its Ideal is just that universal, in so far as it may be presented to the perception of the senses, and by such presentment is permitted to enter into the variety and living forms of the world of objects.

(αα) What we were looking for, therefore, is supplied us by the heroic age, for it is here that virtue, ἀρετὴ in the full sense of that Greek word, creates the root-basis of actions. In this connection it would appear that we must distinguish between ἀρετὴ and virtus as understood by the Roman themselves. The Romans had already their State, Fatherland, and legal institutions, and as contrasted with the State, as the controlling object of all, they had surrendered personality. To be simply a citizen of Rome, to have one object for the imagination and for every other personal energy to centre itself upon, namely, the fatherland and its sovereign majesty, therein lies the earnestness and grit of Roman virtue. Heroes, on the contrary, are individuals who undertake and accomplish a complete enterprise in consistent reliance upon their personal resources and initiative, and with whom it is consequently a purely arbitrary act of their own when they execute anything in accordance with the moral principle. This immediate unity, however, of what we may call the substantive import and individuality of inclination, impulse, and will is the characteristic of Greek virtue. According to this view personality is a law to itself without any further subjection to a law, judgment, and tribunal of independent subsistence. The Greek heroes make their appearance in an epoch anterior to legal enactment, or they are themselves the founders of States, so that right and social order, law and ethical custom, emanate from them, and persist as their own creation in an indefeasible relation to them. In this way Hercules was regarded so highly by the ancients themselves, and represents an Ideal of original and heroic virtue. His free and self-reliant virtue, with which he championed the right and battled against the monstrosities of men and Nature is not a prevailing characteristic of the age, but belongs to him as an exclusive and unique possession. And we may add he was not strictly a moral hero, as his reception of the fifty daughters of Thespius in one night304 clearly shows us; neither would it appear from the tale about the Augaean stables is he pre-eminent for gentility. He is rather the general type of self-reliant strength and resource in its championship of right and justice, to exemplify which he elected summarily and from a free choice to undergo countless toils and labours. It is true that some of his deeds were carried out at the instigation of Eurystheus, but this submission is, after all, rather a formal association than a real one, no connection at least of legal validity or inevitable necessity through which the strength of his self-reliant personality was diverted from its independent course.

The Homeric heroes are of a similar type. No doubt they have their clan chieftain; but the associating bond is no fixed relation already determined by law, which enforces their submission; of their own free will it is that they follow Agamemnon, who is no monarch in the modern sense of the term. Consequently every hero volunteers his own advice, the enraged Achilles acts independently for himself in his separation, and, speaking generally, each and all come and go, act, or take their leisure as they please. In much the same independent position, that is to say, united in no fixed organization, to which they are as individuals entirely subordinate, we find the heroes of Arabian poetry portrayed, and even the Shah-Rameh of Ferdusi furnishes us with similar examples. In latter-day Christendom the age of feudalism and knighthood supplies a fertile field for the free growth of heroic enterprise and the type of individuality which belongs to it. Of such are the heroes of the round table, no less than the heroic circle of which Charles the Great is the focus. Charles is, much like Agamemnon, surrounded with independent chieftains of heroic mould, a union which as such is powerless305. He is consequently always compelled to take counsel with them, however much each of them may be influenced by private passions; he may bluster like a very Olympian Jupiter, and none the less find himself and his undertakings suddenly left in the lurch while his confederates are off on some adventures of their own. The Cid is perhaps the most complete example of the type. He, too, is the ally of a confederacy, the dependent of a king, and is bound to render duty as vassal; but in opposition to this obligation he is pre-eminently influenced by the principle of honour, the purely personal consideration of his own glory, nobility, and reputation306. And so in this case also the king can only determine a fixed line of action and make war after consulting and obtaining the consent of his vassals. If this is not given they do not fight, and, moreover, a mere majority of votes is not sufficient to compel them. Every man is independent of his neighbour, and exercises his will and steers his own course as such. We find in the accounts given us of Saracen heroes an equally brilliant picture of self-reliant and still more inflexible personality. Even the Reinecke Fuchs fable is a fresh example of this state of things. Here, it is true, the lion is master and king, but the wolf and the bear sit in council. Even Reinecke and the rest do just what they like; and when there is a general outcry, the sly fellow either gets out of the mess with his story-telling, or manages to make some particular interest of king and queen work to his own advantage, and in his own cunning way talks over his sovereign somehow.

(ββ) Moreover, in much the same way that each individual example of this heroic type of personality persists in immediate unity with all that he may will, act, and accomplish, a similar unity is further maintained in all the consequences which flow from such initiative. When we ourselves, on the contrary, act or estimate a particular action, we assume that only full responsibility can attach where the individual under consideration is in complete possession of the true nature of his action and its attendant circumstances. If the content of those surrounding conditions is otherwise than that which is present to the agent’s consciousness in such a case a man nowadays will not take upon himself the burden of all that is implied in his action. He will thrust on one side that part of it which he would not have done had he known completely or not misconceived the circumstances, and he only accepts that which was fully under his cognisance and carried out with deliberate intention in conformity thereto. The heroic character makes no such distinction. He adheres simply to all the consequences and makes good his personal responsibility for the whole. Œdipus on his way to consult the oracle meets a certain man, quarrels with him and strikes him. In those days such an act was not a crime at all. He only returned a blow after being vigorously attacked. But the stranger was his father. Œdipus further marries a royal lady. His wife is his mother. Without knowing it he commits an act of shame. On learning the truth he acknowledges such enormities to their full extent, inflicts a punishment on himself as murderer of his father and a man of incest, and this although he was entirely ignorant of the true nature of these acts, or had any intention of doing them. The self-reliant stubbornness and entirety of the heroic character refuses to parcel out responsibility and knows nothing of such distinctions as personal intention and the objective act and its consequences. In the evolution and ramification of an action as we moderns regard it these opposed points of view constantly recur, and guilt is thrown into the background as far as possible. No doubt our view of the matter is more in accordance with ethical principle, in so far as the condition of a personal knowledge of the particular circumstances, or the consciousness of an object good in itself, in short, generally the intent of an act, is what materially assists us in our judgment. But in the heroic age, where we find the individual essentially indivisible and the objective act proceeding from himself as entirely his own, each person claims absolutely all that he may do, and refuses to surrender one jot or tittle of responsibility therefor.

To an extent equally minute the heroic figure is separated from the ethical whole, to which he belongs, and his self-consciousness is bound up wholly in substantial unity with that whole. According to the views in vogue now we draw a line of distinction as private individuals between objects which are wholly personal and those which affect the community. The individual acts in all that he does from his own private personality as distinct from others, and views even his actions rather as relative to this than as part of all that is farmed out by the organic whole to which he belongs. We consequently make a distinction between individuals and their families. Such is unknown in the heroic age. The guilt of ancestors adheres to their descendants, and an entire family will suffer for the original defaulter. Men inherit the fatality of guilt and transgression. A condemnation such as this appears to us unjust as an irrational subjection to a blind fate. With us the achievements of ancestors reflect no more honour on children and descendants than the punishments and crimes of such contaminate those that follow after them, and least of all is their private character thus affected; nay, modern opinion is already close to the view that the confiscation of family property is a punishment which violates the profounder conception of liberty. But in the ancient and more plastic totality the individual is not so isolated, but rather a member of his family and race. For this reason the character, action, and fortunes of the family continue to be the private affair of each member of it; and so far from denying the actions of his parents, each man voluntarily accepts them as his own; they live in him, and he is just that which his fathers were, suffered, or transgressed. This appears to us a hardship, but that which we replace it with, this standing alone on our own possessions307, and the more subjective self-stability thus acquired is also from another point of view only the abstract self-sufficiency of each. The individuality of heroic times is none the less of a more ideal type, because it does not declare itself as satisfied with the mere form of freedom and infinity, but remains in unalterable and immediate unity with all that is most substantial in the relations of spirit which it of itself endows with living actuality. In such an individuality the substantial is immediately individual, and the individual thereby himself essentially substantive.

(γγ) From considerations such as these we conclude that the ideal figures of art must be sought for in the age of mythos, that is to say, speaking generally, in past times, where we shall find the soil most congenial to their growth. If such material is taken from the age we live in, whose most native form, as we actually find it, is tightly shut off from the imagination, it matters not how we regard it, then the modifications which the poet can hardly avoid making in it will not readily escape the appearance of a purely artificial and intentional composition. The Past entirely belongs to memory, and memory perfects the infolding veil of character, events, and actions in the vesture of universality, through which the particular external or contingent detail is unable to penetrate. Many trifling circumstances and mediating conditions, many varied and isolated phases of activity, are inseparable from the actual existence of an action or a character: in the mirror of memory all these insignificant details are obliterated. In this liberation of his work from what is accidental in the external fact the artist has a freer hand for his artistic powers of composition, when dealing with that which is individual and particular in it, if the actions, histories, and characters are borrowed from ancient times. He has, it is true, also historical memories, out of which he must mould a content conformable to the universal; but the picture of the Past possesses, as already observed, an advantage, taken simply as a picture of greater universality, while the manifold texture of mediating condition and circumstance, interwoven as it is in the entire framework of finite existence which surrounds it, offers him material ample enough to prevent his hand obliterating the individuality, which is essential to his work of art. The more closely we consider it, the clearer will be our conclusion that a heroic age has the advantage over later and more civilized times in that the isolated character and personality generally in such an age does not as yet find what is substantive either in the sphere of ethical custom, or moral obligation opposed to itself in the necessary embodiment of legal institution, and thereby presents immediately to the poet all that the form of the Ideal requires. Shakespeare has, for example, selected much material for his tragedies from chronicles and earlier romances, framed upon a condition of life which has not as yet received the impression of a fully articulated social order, but in which the energy of individuals, as emphasized in personal resolve and achievement, is still the prevailing characteristic. His genuine historical dramas have, on the contrary, a vein of historical substance running through them in the strictest sense, and for this reason lean farther away from an ideal exposition, although here, too, both circumstances and actions are made to fall in with, or are removed to suit, the unyielding self-sufficiency and wilfulness of particular characters. No doubt this characteristic remains for the most part in their case a purely formal self-inclusion, whereas if we contrast it with the self-subsistency of heroic characters we find that here the essential content of all such have proposed to accomplish is bound up therewith.

It is on account of this contrast that we should find a reason for repeating the general thesis in connection with the Ideal, to the effect that the Idyllic is exceptionally adapted for its expression, inasmuch as where that is presented the cleavage between what is determined by legal necessity and the living person is wholly absent. To this we must reply that, however simple and original idyllic situations may be, however far removed they may be from the artificial prose-existence of society, such simplicity, if we consider the nature of its content, has, in fact, too insignificant an interest to satisfy the most substantial and essential requirements of the Ideal. Material of this sort fails entirely to include the most weighty motives of heroic character such as Fatherland, moral and family problems, and their development; it is a kind of treatment which is apt to select as the very core of its subject such a fact as the loss of a single sheep or the falling in love of a girl. In this way the Idyllic not unfrequently becomes merely the resource and recreation of our hearts, to which poets such as Gessner, for example, will add their dose of sickly sweetness and sentimentalism. The idyllic aspect of the days we live in have, further, this defect, that this naïveté, this domesticated or rural atmosphere in the emotional aspect of love or the enjoyment of a good cup of coffee in the open and things of that sort are not likely to awake much interest, when we find in them nothing but the country parson flavour — find them cut off, that is to say, from all wider relations with the outside world, and not a trace of the profounder web of purposes with which that world is interwoven. It is precisely here that we have reason to admire the genius of Goethe, when he concentrated his poetic talent on material of this kind in his poem of “Hermann and Dorothea.” It is true that he selects from the life of the Present a particular theme of very limited extension, but at the same time he unfolds before us as the background and atmosphere of the picture in which his characters are portrayed the great interests of the revolution and his own native country, and, in short, associates with a subject-matter necessarily narrow in its range facts of world-history of the widest and most potent significance.

Generally speaking, we shall find that the ills of life and its evil, war, battles, and revenge, are not excluded from the subject-matter of the Ideal, but are frequently the very source and substance of the heroic age and its myths, whose form grows all the wilder and sterner in proportion to the remoteness of such a period from a fully developed society of law and moral order. In the chivalrous adventures of knight-errantry we find the heroes of such tales themselves often enough sharing the savage and dissolute characteristics of the times, and in much the same way the martyrdom of the heroes of the Church presupposes a condition of ferocious cruelty around them. At bottom, however, the Christian ideal, which is based on the depth and inwardness of man’s spiritual nature, stands in a relation of entire indifference to the external world.

We have demonstrated that the condition of particular centuries is more applicable to the Ideal; in the same way Art selects pre-eminently a particular class of society for the form under which the Ideal shall appear, the order, that is to say, of princes. And the selection is made not because art is necessarily aristocratic, or has any predilection for gentility308, but simply on account of the perfection in which free will and its products may be exemplified imaginatively through the highly placed class. We have in the chorus of ancient tragedy the characteristics and universal background of general maxims, modes of imaginative thought, and emotion, before which the definite movements of the action proceed. In contrast to this appear the more clearly defined individualities of the personages immediately concerned in the action, men and women of authority, and belonging for the most part to royal families. On the other hand, the main impression forced upon us, when seeing representatives of a lower class carrying on pursuits which are of a narrower range, is one of subjection; and, indeed, in an artificial309 state of society the freedom of action of such a class is fettered in every direction, and is necessarily involved with all its passions and interests in all the medley and despotic forces of external circumstance. It is, in fact, held closely behind the invincible power of the social order, which it is unable to come out of, and is an alien from the authority of the dominant order, even when that is asserted in accordance with just principle. In this limitation of outlook through the hard conditions of life all real independence is wrecked. For this reason both the circumstances and characters which we find in such a sphere of life are more appropriate to the treatment of comedy, everybody being permitted in comedy to rate themselves as they please, and to lay claims to a self-sufficiency in all that they will and think, which is none the less immediately negatived by the spiritual no less than the external dependence of their lives. As a rule, such a false and second-hand self-subsistency must inevitably fall to pieces when confronted with the actual conditions of life and the distorted view which is formed of them. The force of circumstances is presented to the lower orders of society on a totally different level from that in which it acts upon rulers and princes. In Schiller’s “Braut von Messina” Don Caesar is able to exclaim, and justly: “there stands no higher judge than myself!” And when he has to be punished he must himself give judgment and execute it. He is, in fact, subject to no external necessity of right and law, and even when punishment is the question is wholly dependent on himself. The characters in the Shakespearean drama do not entirely belong to the princely order and only partially are taken from mythical sources, but they are placed in the era of civil wars, in which the ties of social order and legislative enactment are either weakened or shattered, and they secure from such a condition the exceptional independence and self-sufficiency we are looking for.

(b) If we transfer our attention now from the characteristic conditions of society we have hitherto mainly considered to the actual state of the world around us and its carefully articulated scheme of ethical, judicial, and political institutions, we shall not fail to observe that the material we have here offered us for figures of truly ideal type is of a very restricted character. The province here in which an entirely open field is presented for the display of independent purpose in its fullest individuality is limited both in its range and the measure of opportunity. The qualities that make a man thorough in his relations to his own family and his business, the ideals, in short, of honest citizens and excellent wives, in so far as will and activity are concentrated on the field in which it is still possible for a man to exercise his free personality, to carry out, in short, all that he has a mind to do, this is the prevailing feature of our modern society. Such ideals inevitably lack the depth of a fuller content, and the most significant feature of them is that of the attitude of the individual mind to their realization; for we find here the content is already presented by existing social institutions, and consequently the essential interest we take in it depends on the particular way in which that content is realized and appears in the personal life, its moral and inward significance. For this reason it is not possible, as in the case of former times, to create ideals from the positions of judgeship and kingship. If a man carries out his judicial functions nowadays in accordance with duty and the requirements of his office, he merely is acting within the bounds already marked out for him by legislative enactments in the social order as the sphere of his responsibilities. All that may characterize his tenure of office beyond this, as proceeding from personal qualities, such as suavity of demeanour or acuteness of judgment, is not the main point or the substantial content, but rather an aspect of it which it is possible to dispense with as something accidental. In the same way the monarchs of our own day are no longer, as was the case with the heroes of mythical times, in themselves the embodying and culminating unity of society itself, but rather a more or less unsubstantial centrum around which all legal and social institutions, however moulded in the course of time, group themselves in independent relations. All the most important functions of the executive have nowadays been separated from the royal prerogative. Kings do not lay down the law, control finance; the preservation of social order is not one of their most characteristic functions. Peace and war are determined through the particular circumstances of international politics, which it is not within their power exclusively either to direct or control; and, if it happens that any important decision with regard to either depends in the last resort on their judgment, such a decision is not generally so much in the nature of its substance the result of any personal preference, as it is the formal seal of monarchical authority on what is already determined on public grounds, the mere imposition of that which is strictly official rather than personal in its character. In the same way, a general or field-marshal of our times has unquestionably great authority; objects and interests of profound importance are under his control and his circumspection; his courage, his determination, and his intelligence are involved in the weightiest decisions; nevertheless, whatever may be definitely traced to the essentially personal characteristics of the man has little opportunity for display in such a result. For, in the first place, the objects upon which his decisions turn are not of his own selection, and arise out of circumstances which lie beyond the sphere of his influence rather than are spontaneously fixed by himself; secondly, the means adopted to carry out such objects are not the sole result of his initiative. On the contrary, they are supplied him from sources which are not immediately under his authority or personal influence, but stand rather quite apart from the sphere of his individual powers as a general.

To sum up, then, though it is true that under the present condition of the civilized world a man may act independently for himself in many directions, the fact remains that in whatever direction he may turn he is still only a member of a fixed order of society and appears as such limited in his range rather than the vital representative and individual embodiment of society itself. He acts necessarily under such a condition of restriction, and our interest in such a personality, no less than in the content of his aims and activity, is entirely devoid of completeness. In the end we are invariably driven to concentrate our attention on the purely personal interest, how far, that is to say, he attained success, what was the nature of the obstacles and complications which, in either, through untoward chance or necessity, confronted or distracted his progress. And if it is, moreover, true that our modern personality is of infinite significance when we estimate the character thus manifested as a spiritual product, in its actions, sufferings, moral opinions, and conduct that is to say, it is also true that the moral content which is realized in such an individual is of a restricted character, rather than, as is the case in the heroic times, the realization of universal right, custom, and legality. The individual is no longer the exclusive vehicle and actual embodiment of these powers as in the previous times.

(c) Our interest, however, in and need to have presented us such a completely realized individuality and living self-dependence will always persist, however strongly we may recognize the worth and reasonable nature of the more developed condition of an organized and trained civic society. It is this necessity which makes us regard with astonishment the youthful spirit of Schiller and Goethe when they sought to discover that lost self-sufficiency in the prevailing conditions of modern times. How do we find in particular this attempt is made by Schiller in his earliest works? Simply by a rebellion directed against the whole organic framework of civil society. Karl Moor, suffering injury from the existing order at the hands of those who abuse the power entrusted them, has the courage to break the bonds which bind him to law and order altogether, cuts himself adrift and creates for himself a heroic situation, in which he appears as the champion of right, and the self-constituted avenger of wrong, injustice, and oppression. None the less, how insignificant and isolated must a private revenge of this kind appear, if we estimate it from the practical point of view, according to the probability of its success; and, in fact, in one aspect of it, it already contains the germ of wrong which can only lead to the criminal act on which it will fall to pieces. No doubt, as personal to Karl Moor himself, this is a misfortune, a fatality, however, which, despite the tragical element in it, can only engraft on mere boys the blight of such a “robber-ideal.” In much the same way the characters depicted in “Kabale und Liebe” suffer wrong under prevailing conditions of life, absorbed in the trivial facts and passions wholly personal to themselves. It is not until we come to the dramas of “Fiesco” and “Don Carlos” that we find characters of nobler significance and more substantive content, heroes, for example, resolved to liberate their country, or assert the liberty of religious conviction. With a nobility still more striking Wallenstein places himself at the head of his army that the crisis in the political situation may come to a focus. He is fully cognisant of the nature of the political forces upon which his only means of control, his army, is dependent; consequently he hesitates for long whether to follow his private inclination or his duty. He has barely arrived at a decision when he finds the instrument on which he most depended slip from his grasp; his means of action is gone. For that which in the last instance unites the leading officers and generals is no gratitude for anything that may be due to him on the ground of past services rendered; his fame as a general has nothing to do with it, but rather the duty they owe to the universally recognized seat of government, the oath they have sworn to the head of the State, the emperor of the Austrian monarchy. He finds himself consequently in the end isolated, and is not so much fought with and overcome by an external foe as he is stripped of all means of executing his purpose. He is deserted by his army and from that moment is a lost man. The “Götz”310 of Goethe starts from a dramatic situation of an analogous though somewhat inverse type. The times of Götz and Franz von Sickingen belong to the interesting epoch in which knight-errantry and the self-reliant individuality of the class of nobility is being superseded by the new creation of an external and legally constituted social order. To have selected precisely this critical time where we find the heroic characteristics of the Middle Ages and the legalized fabric of modern society meet and collide for the subject of his first artistic production shows much penetration on the part of Goethe. For Götz and Sickingen are still heroes in the genuine sense, who are resolved to exercise their influence over circumstances, whether immediately affecting them or of wider range, out of the resources of their own personalities, their courage, and their private sense of right. The new order of things involves Götz in acts of illegality and brings about the catastrophe of his life. It is only in the Middle Ages that knight-errantry and the relations of feudalism will supply a field entirely open to this type of self-reliant manhood. When we find, moreover, the legalized order co-ordinated more completely in its prosaic form, the predominant authority in fact, the adventurous self-dependence of knighthood is left outside it as an unrelated excrescence; and if an attempt is made to assert it as though it were still a valid means of attacking wrong, and assisting the oppressed, it becomes simply an object of ridicule, such as Cervantes illustrates for us in his “Don Quixote.”

In this allusion to the opposition which exists between two differently constituted régimes of society and the collision which results from action in defiance of their particular character we have already indicated what we have above defined generally as the closer determination and differentiation of the universal state of the world, that is to say, the situation as generally expressed.

The ideal world-condition which it is the function of art to present in contrast to prosaic reality we may conclude from our previous discussion to be merely a general background of society of a specific kind; it is merely the possible condition necessary for the particular presentation, not the presentation itself. What we have hitherto directed attention to is, in fact, the general background upon which the living figures of art may appear. It is undoubtedly fructified with individuality and is supported by its self-subsistency; but as a general condition it is not yet the active movement of particular individuals in the very form of life, just as we may say that the temple which Art erects is not as yet the representation of the personal godhead, but only encloses the germ of the same. For this reason we must in the first instance regard this world-condition as a kind of medium in repose, a harmony, so to speak, of forces which are operative in it, and to this extent it possesses a substantial consistency of uniform worth, which, however, must not be accepted as identical with what has been called “the age of innocence.” For it is a condition in the fulness and sovereignty of whose ethical atmosphere the terrors of division only are slumbering because, in our contemplation of it, we have before us, for the first time, the aspect of its substantial unity, and consequently are only presented with individuality in its most universal terms, a mode of viewing it which makes it fade away as though without definition or any essential disturbance of its unity, instead of giving to it the full value of definite characteristics. But such characterization is essential to individuality. And if the Ideal is to appear as definite form it is necessary for it to escape from such pure universality, or in other words for it to give the universal a particular expression, and by so doing impart to it both existence and appearance. Art consequently has in this connection not only to translate into its medium a universal world-condition, but must proceed beyond this quite indefinite conception to the composition of pictures of definite character and action.

Regarded from the aspect under which it affects individual character this general condition is the environment of circumstance which, according to its specifically detached form, tends to excite both collisions and development, forcing thereby the individuals thus affected to express their nature and exhibit such expression in a definite form. From the point of view of the world-condition this self-revelation of particular individuals appears as the passing of its universality into the distinct embodiments of living individuality, an aggregate over which universal forces still assert the mastery.311 For the eternal powers operative in the world-process constitute the substantive content of the Ideal as specifically defined in what it essentially is. The mode of existence, however, which is realized through the bare form of external condition is unworthy of this content. For in the first place such a condition is associated with habit, and the habitual is no adequate determination of those profounder interests which are active in self-conscious mind. Furthermore, as we have observed, it was the contingency and caprice of individuality, by virtue of whose spontaneous activity these very interests are permitted to appear in life; but this unessential contingency and caprice is again quite as little adequate to the substantive universality, which constitutes the notion of essential actuality. On these grounds respectively we are therefore compelled to seek an art-envisagement more worthy and better defined for the concrete content312 of the Ideal.

This new configuration the universal powers can only retain in its determinate existence in virtue of the fact that they are manifested in their essential modes of difference and movement, or, to put the matter more specifically, through their assertion of the contradictions which they relatively unfold. Two aspects of the process of individualization into which the universal thus passes must be here emphasized. In the first place, there is the substance as an embracing sphere of universal forces through the differentiation indicated, which is broken from its substantive unity into its component parts; secondly, there are the individuals, which spring forth as the active completion of these forces and give to them a specific objectification.

Now what we have characterized as the difference and opposition in which the world-condition, hitherto harmonious with the individuals conditioned by it, is involved, if we consider it from the point of view of universal condition, is the manifestation of the essential content which it carries in itself. On the other hand we observe that the substantive universal in that condition is articulated through particular units in such a way that this very universal procures for itself determinate existence, albeit it is thus immersed in the appearance of chance, disunion, and division, an appearance, which, however, is rendered nugatory by the fact that it is the universal which thus appears.

The separation of these forces and their objectification313 in individuals can, however, further take place under definite conditions and circumstances, under which and as a constituent aspect of which the entire objective appearance receives a determinate form, or as the stimulative impulse of this very realization. By themselves such circumstances are without interest314, and it is only through their relation to mankind that they receive such a significance, through whose self-consciousness the content of these spiritual forces is carried actively into objective appearance. The external circumstances are consequently only to be regarded of significance in so far as they supply an essential relation to Spirit, in so far, that is to say, as they are comprehended by those individual units and afford them a stimulus to actualize their inward spiritual needs, the aims, ideas, the determinate substance, in short, of all that requires an individual embodiment. Regarded as a stimulating influence of this kind particular circumstances and conditions create what we have called the situation, which is specifically presupposed in the actual self-expansion and activity of all that still lies undeveloped in the universal world-condition; it is for this reason we have considered the previous determination of the notion of the situation as necessary to any inquiry into the true constituents of action.

The situation expressed in general terms is in one aspect of it the circumstance particularized to the point of definite character, and under this characterization it is, to put it another way, the stimulating impulse to a particular expression of content, which it is the function of artistic presentation to transmute into a specific form of existence. Looked at from this latter point of view especially the situation offers a wide field for contemplation, inasmuch as it has ever been one of the most essential objects of art to discover situations of real interest, that is to say, of such a kind as will present to us the profound and weighty interest, the truest content of spiritual life. The requirements of the several arts in this respect no doubt differ. Sculpture, for example, is pre-eminently limited in its reference to the inwardly detailed variety of situations. Painting and music are already operative in a freer and more comprehensive medium. Finally, we are least able among them all to exhaust the possibilities of poetry in this respect.

Since we have not yet arrived at that portion of our subject where we deal directly with the specific arts, it will be sufficient here to draw attention to a few of the most general aspects of that inquiry, which we may subdivide in the following manner.

First, we would observe that the situation still retains the form of universality and thereby of indeterminacy, so long as it is undeveloped and without definite characterization; we have, consequently, at first present before us a situation which is without situation. For the form of indeterminacy is itself only one form as opposed to its contradiction of determinacy, and is shown to be, by virtue of this very contrast, a one-sided aspect which as such possesses a determinate relation.

Secondly, however, the situation passes in separation away from this universality, and becomes certainly determinate to that extent, but at first with a determinacy which produces no destructive consequences, that is to say, it is one which offers no stimulus to active opposition and its necessary resolution.

Thirdly, we find the element of disunion in all its vigour creating by the definition of its opposed characteristics the essence of the situation, which thereby is carried into a collision, which again proceeds to reactions, and, as such, forms the point of departure to the conception of artistic action properly so called.

We may, in fact, characterize the situation generally as the intermediate plane between the universal world-condition still in a state of equilibrium, and the concrete action unfolded in all its tendency to movement and reaction, a position which gives to it the characteristics of both extremes, and enables us to pass over from the one to the other.

(a) The Absence of Situation315

We passed from the notion of the universal world-condition in presenting to ourselves the form of it as essentially individual self-subsistency. Self-subsistency, however, regarded simply in its essential form, presents to us in the first instance merely the secure repose upon its own resources in its bare tranquillity. The form as thus defined is carried into no relation with another, but remains at one with itself in inclusion with its unity both, within and without. This presents us with the situation which is without situation, an illustration of which we may take those ancient types of temple-building dating from the earliest days of art, whose character of profound immutable seriousness, of tranquil, nay even of austere and grandiose, dignity has been the object of imitation even in more recent times proceeding on lines of a similar type. The Egyptian and most ancient Greek sculptures will further illustrate for us the same kind of indeterminate situation. In the plastic art of Christianity, especially if we consider particular examples of early bust-sculpture, we shall find both God the Father and Christ are presented in a similar spirit. Indeed, such a mode of delineation is peculiarly adapted to present us with the secure substantiality of the Divine, whether such be apprehended as a definite and particular Godhead, or is grasped as essentially absolute personality; and this is so in virtue of the very defect of such a representation, that it gives us portraits of persons of middle-age which are without any trace of definite situations, in which the character of the individual as such can reveal itself, and only the attempt is made to express the entirety of determinate character in its quality of stability316.

(b) The Situation defined in its Harmlessness317

The second point to emphasize is, inasmuch as the situation generally is reached in the definition of form, the passage from this tranquillity and blessed repose, or from the unbroken severity and force of self-consistency, forms which subsist in unfeatured equilibrium, that is to say, immutable both within and without, have to be set in motion and surrender their undressed simplicity. This bare progression to a more specific manifestation in some particular mode of expression is what we may describe certainly as definite situation, but a situation which has not yet asserted conflicting elements in itself, and is fully ripe for collision.

This first step in the process of individualized expression is consequently of a kind that carries with it no further result; it is set in no antagonistic opposition to something else, in a relation which evokes both collision and reaction; it is already in its character of unconstrainedness finished and complete in itself. With such a type of situation we may associate those which are mainly to be regarded as a kind of play, in so far as all that proceeds or is carried out in them indicates no real seriousness of purpose. For all earnestness in any kind of activity is generally the result of oppositions and contradictions, which drive on their way to the final removal or victory of one side or the other. For this reason situations of this kind cannot themselves be identified with actions, nor are they the stimulative impulse of actions; they are indeed, in a certain aspect, of determinate character, but they are either circumstances of the most trivial significance, or a form of action which is without an essentially serious object, which either is the result of conflicts, or is able to carry the action yet further into conflicts.

(α) The first thing to arrest us in this process is the passage generally from the repose of the unfeatured situation to a condition of emotion and expression: this is asserted partly as purely mechanical motion, in part also as the first impulse and satisfaction of any internal want. The Egyptians, for example, represented the gods in their sculpture with closely locked limbs. The Greeks, on the contrary, released both arms and legs, and endowed the bodily form with all that is appropriate to the advance and general variety of movement. Permanent repose, a seated attitude, a tranquil gaze, are all of them simple conditions under which the Greeks apprehended their gods; they are modes which unquestionably gave to the self-subsistent figure of Godhead a certain characterization, but one nevertheless which is not carried forward into other relations and oppositions, but rather remains enclosed within itself, and permanently significant as such. Situations of this simple kind attach in a particular way to sculpture, and the ancients, above all others, were inexhaustible in discovering fit subjects for such a condition of unconstrained freedom. In this respect they showed an extraordinary insight; for it is precisely through contrast with the insignificance of the particular situation that the majesty and self-subsistency of the ideal types of the Greek Pantheon were made to appear so striking. It was, in fact, through the harmlessness and insignificance of what appeared to be done or left undone that the blessed peaceful tranquillity and immutability of the immortal gods was brought most clearly to consciousness. The situation merely indicates the particular character of either god or hero in quite a general way, such as brings them into no relation with other gods, or at least into no relation suggestive of hostility or division.

(β) It is a further step in the direction of more defined situation, when we find in such any particular purpose already represented in it, an activity which stands in definite relation to something external, and the self-subsistent figure itself expressed as within the sphere of such purpose or activity. Even objectification such as these, however, which have no real disturbing influence upon the tranquillity and cheerful blessedness of the figures represented, are rather to be regarded as particular modes of presentation incidental to this very quality of cheerful contentment. The invention of the Greeks was here, too, exceptionally thoughtful and fruitful. It is essential to the unconstrainedness of such situations that the activity here presented should merely indicate an action in its initial stage in such a way that no further developments or oppositions are likely to proceed from it, but that all that appears necessary to complete it should be found enclosed in the action depicted.

As an illustration of this the situation of the Belvedere Apollo is seized at the moment when he moves forward in wrathful majesty after slaying the Python with his arrow. A situation of this kind has not the grandiose simplicity of the earlier Greek sculpture, which asserts for our intelligence the repose and open clarity of the gods by means of expressed actions of less significance. Take the case of Aphrodite peacefully gazing at herself while emerging from her bath in full possession of her charms; or of fauns and satyrs at play, play that is wholly absorbed in itself; or of that famous satyr who dandled the young Bacchus in his arms, while he looks down upon him with infinite tenderness and grace; to say nothing of the endless variety of unconstrained activities in which Eros is depicted. Such are a few examples of this type of situation. If the action is of more concrete character we are confronted with a more involved situation, which, at least for the artistic presentment of the Greek gods as self-substantive powers, is less appropriate. In a case of this kind the pure universality of the individual god is less able to transpierce the accumulated detail of the particular action which he expresses. The Mercury of Pigalli, which is a present of Louis XV to the exposition of statuary in Sanssouci, is fastening on his winged sandals. This is a perfectly harmonious action. The Mercury of Thorwaldsen, on the contrary, is depicted under a situation which is almost too complicated for sculpture. He listens attentively to the flute of Marsyas. At the same time he is craftily spying him to see how he may slay him while his hand grasps maliciously for the dagger he has concealed. In opposition to this, if we may add one more illustration from a more modern work of art, is that representation by Rudolf Schadow, of a maiden binding her sandals in much the same simple manner as we find in the case of Mercury. In this example the naïveté of the situation does not contain the interest we experience when it is a god who exhibits such unconstrained action. When it is only a maiden who fastens her sandals or spins, there is little else to engage our attention but the simple action, which is by itself of little significance or importance.

(γ) We shall find further, if we follow up the above train of thought, that the more closely defined situation can be treated more generally, as merely a more or less definite stimulus presenting the opportunity for further development of expressed action of wider range related to the primary subject with varying degrees of affinity. Many lyrical poems have what we may call an occasional situation of this kind. A particular mood or a certain atmosphere of emotion is a situation which can be arrested poetically for consciousness, and, furthermore, in particular relation to external circumstances, festivals, or public victories, is able to carry us forward to this or that artistic expression, either of more comprehensive or restricted range, and in every kind of embodiment of feeling and idea. Pindar’s odes of victory are supreme examples of this type of occasional poetry. Goethe, too, has selected as the subject-matter of his muse many lyrical situations of a similar character; and, in fact, if we look closely into the matter, we shall hardly be wrong in calling his “Werther” a poem of occasion. It is through the medium of “Werther” that Goethe has elaborated the convulsions and anguish of his own heart, incorporated, in short, the facts of his own experience in a work of art. This, after all, is true of every lyrical poet; he gives poetical expression to that which nearly affects him, and thereby throws the windows of his heart open to the fresh air. That which has hitherto been sealed up within is released in the external object, from which our humanity has freed itself, just as we are the lighter for the rain of tears, in which the sorrow is wept away. So Goethe, as in fact he has told us himself, by his composition of Werther, liberated himself from the mastery and pressure of his heart troubles. At the same time we must point out that this last-mentioned situation is not really appropriate to the type with which we are now dealing; it obviously presents the profoundest contradiction in itself which calls for resolution. No doubt in the kind of lyrical situation we have identified with “the occasional” we may have declared a circumstance objectively determined, in other words, an activity in close relation to the external world; but, on the other hand, we find the poetic temperament equally able to withdraw itself within the atmosphere it creates wholly free from its external environment, and to make that inward world which is the combined product of circumstance and emotion its true point of departure.

All the situations to which we have hitherto directed attention are, as already observed, neither true actions in themselves nor indeed the stimulative source of such action. Their determination was to a greater or less degree the purely occasional circumstance or condition, or an action in itself of no significance, in which a substantive content was expressed in such a way that its specific character appeared as a mere harmless play, in which nothing of a truly serious nature was implied. The full seriousness and weighty import of a situation can only begin when we find in it the element of disruption, where the determination itself exposes an essential aspect of difference, and by its opposition to something else becomes the source of a collision.

The collision arises, as we are now considering it, in an act of violation, which is unable to retain its character as such, but is compelled to find a new principle of unity; it is a change in the previously existent condition of harmony, a change which is still in process. The collision is, however, not an action, and is to be taken simply as stimulus to action to all that characterizes the situation. And this is true, although the contradiction in which the collision is enclosed may be the result of previous action. As an example of this we may cite the trilogies of the ancients, which carry forward the main theme by presenting at the close of one drama the collision which forms the stimulative impulse of the next, which, in its return, renders necessary the resolution which is carried out by the third. And, moreover, for this very reason that the collision always requires some resolution attendant on this conflict of opposing elements, the more a situation is full of it the more it is peculiarly adapted to the subject-matter of dramatic art, it being the especial claim of that art to present beauty in its completest and profoundest development. Sculpture, on the contrary, is not wholly suited to give embodiment to any action, through which the great spiritual forces are manifested either in their division or reconciliation, and indeed the art of painting, despite its more extended spatial significance, is only able to objectify a single moment of action.

These situations of tragic significance introduce a peculiar difficulty in dealing with them which is inherent in their very conception. For inasmuch as they obviously arise from violations of the world-condition they offer to our consideration circumstances which are unable to continue as they are, which render necessary something of a remedial nature to reclothe them. But the beauty of the Ideal consists precisely in its undisturbed unity, repose, and consummation with itself. The collision, on the other hand, disturbs this harmony of what is truly real and ethical, and drives this unity of the Ideal into discord and opposition. Through the representation of such disruption the Ideal itself suffers violation. The function of art will undoubtedly consist partly in preventing the entire destruction of free beauty in this difference, and partly in only carrying this breach of unity and the conflict it occasions to a point in which harmony may again be recovered as the result of such a conflict and its resolution, and in this way become manifest for the first time in its essential perfection. It is, however, impossible to determine on a general principle the precise limit to which such discordance may be carried inasmuch as the several arts in this respect preserve their independent character. The medium of the subjective idea can support a far intenser disruption than that of the plastic arts318. In other words, poetry is quite within its right when it breaks up the unity of the world of the imagination even to the point of the extremest form of desperation, and in its delineation of external objects to that of absolute ugliness. In the case of the plastic arts, on the contrary, in painting, that is to say, and even more so in sculpture, the external form remains in unalterable fixity; it can neither be removed nor lightly passed over in such a way that it again disappears. Under such conditions it would be a serious defect to represent once and for all an ugliness, which could not possibly be transmuted. Consequently all that would be quite compatible in dramatic poetry, which is able to represent a momentary appearance that again vanishes, is not within the province of the plastic arts.

In discussing the more obvious types of collision we can only in this portion of our inquiry indicate the most general points of view. We would particularly draw attention to three fundamental aspects under which they may be co-ordinated.

First, there are those collisions which proceed from purely natural, that is to say, physical conditions, in so far as these are characterized with qualities which are negative or evil and consequently discordant.

Secondly, we have collisions which are of a spiritual nature, but which depend on natural conditions, conditions which may in themselves have a positive319 character yet for the spirit contain within themselves the seeds of difference and contradiction.

Thirdly, there are divisions which are caused entirely by disruption in the Spirit alone; to these alone we are justified in attaching the peculiar interest of contradiction which is bound up with genuine human activity.

(α) Now with reference to the first type of conflicting forces — for the reason that here it is only external Nature, through the maladies and other evils and infirmities which are incidental to her creating, conditions which destroy the pre-existent harmony of life, replacing such with a state of antagonism — such can at most merely serve as a stimulus for something outside them. Regarded wholly by themselves such collisions are of no interest; they are the subject-matter of art simply for the sake of the disruption which may follow as a consequence of some natural misfortune. The “Alcestis” of Euripides, we may add, too, that of Gluck, the subject of whose opera is practically the same, are examples of this; in both the sickness of Admetus is necessarily presupposed. That sickness merely by itself could not fitly supply a subject for artistic treatment. It only becomes, even in the handling of Euripides, associated with it by virtue of the individual characters, who, on account of such misfortune, are compelled to face a further collision. It is the word of the oracle that Admetus must die unless another will pass to the underworld for his sake. Alcestis, out of love for her husband, devotes herself to such a sacrifice, resolves to die, in order to restrain Death from touching her beloved, the father of her children, the king. In the Philoctetes of Sophocles a physical malady is also the cause of the collision. Here the Greeks during their voyage to Troy place the man who is suffering from a wounded foot, caused by the serpent’s bite in Chrysas, on the island of Lemnos. In this case, too, the physical mishap is merely the extreme meeting point and incentive of a further collision. For, according to the prophecy, Troy can only fall when the arrows of Hercules are in the hands of the storming army. Philoctetes refuses to give them up because he has been compelled for nine years to suffer the martyrdom of his banishment. This refusal, no less than the fact of his unrighteous desertion from which it springs, could have been followed by every variety of result other than that which took place; the real interest accordingly does not centre in the malady and its physical necessity, but in the opposition which arises from the refusal of Philoctetes to surrender the arrows. The case of the plague in the Greek camp before Troy is very similar; although this is already represented entirely as the consequence of former transgression, as a punishment, in short, a mode of statement more adapted to epic than dramatic poetry, nevertheless it is closely associated with evils incidental to natural misfortune such as storm, shipwreck, and drought. As a rule, however, art will not represent such mischance as mere accident, but rather as an obstruction and misfortune whose necessity simply consists in assuming precisely this particular form rather than another.

(β) But, to turn now to our second type of the collision, inasmuch as the external powers of Nature are not that which is most essential to the interests and contradictions of human life, in cases where they are found closely associated with such spiritual relations, they will present themselves merely as the ground from which the collision breaks forth in its true character. This is the point of view from which we must regard all situations, where we trace the original source of conflict in the facts of natural birth. We will shortly distinguish between three particular cases of this.

(αα) In the first place we have the right that is bound up with natural condition, that which constitutes relationship and inheritance for example, which for the very reason that it stands in close connection with Nature carries with it a number of relations that are bound up with her, and this though the right, the fact is one and only one. The most important example of this is the right of succession to the throne. It is important to observe that this right must not as yet, in relation to the collisions which spring from it, be absolutely fixed by rule, otherwise the resultant conflict will be of quite another character. If, that is to say, the right of succession is not as yet entirely controlled by legislation and the social order which it implies, no wrong will necessarily attach to any one of the alternatives, namely, whether it be an older or younger brother, or any other relative of the royal household who obtains the sovereignty. But inasmuch as sovereignty is a qualitative rather than a quantitative possession, which cannot like gold and other material goods be divided up according to a just principle, dispute and contention is inevitably the result of such a form of succession. When Œdipus, for example, leaves the throne of Thebes without a ruler, he leaves his two sons confronting each other with a right and claim of equal strength. The brothers arrange to occupy the throne alternately from year to year. Eteocles, however, breaks the compact and Polynices brings an army against Thebes to enforce his right. The antagonism of brothers has always been in the history of art a fruitful source of collision; it commences indeed with the story of Cain who slew his brother Abel. In the tale of Shah-Rameh, the earliest example we have of a Persian book of heroic legend, it is a contention of throne succession which is the source of the most varied conflicts. In this Feridu divided the Earth among his three brothers. Selm receives as his portion Rum and Chawer; Turan and Osin are given to Thur, and Fredysh becomes lord of the Earth from Iran. All three, however, claim the land which belongs to his brothers, and endless quarrels and wars are the result. In the Middle Ages we find just the same countless examples of family and dynastic broils. Such dissensions, however, appear in themselves to be due to accidental circumstance. It is not necessary that brothers should be at enmity; particular circumstances and more important causes must be attached, such as the in itself tragic birth of the sons of Œdipus, or, as we find in “the Bride of Messina,” the author is at pains to shift the quarrel of the brothers on to still more fateful circumstances. In Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” a similar collision is the foundation of the tragic dénouement. Duncan is king and Macbeth, as his nearest and oldest relation, is consequently heir to the throne with a right precedent even to Duncan’s sons. The primary incentive of Macbeth’s crime is the wrong which the king has done him in naming his own son as heir to the throne. This justification of Macbeth, which is supported by the chronicles of the time, Shakespeare has entirely passed over, because, it was solely his object to bring into startling relief the repulsive aspect of Macbeth’s ambitious passion, in order thereby to make his work agreeable to King James, who would be naturally interested in finding the crime of Macbeth depicted without extenuating circumstances. As a consequence we can find no sufficient reason why, under Shakespeare’s handling of the subject, Macbeth fails to murder the sons of Duncan no less than their father, lets them escape in fact; nor can we understand why they are wholly overlooked by the nobles. However, the entire collision upon which, the drama of Macbeth turns carries us beyond the particular type which we are now mainly considering.

(ββ) In the second of our examples in the type of collision320 we are now discussing we find the reverse situation to that just discussed, and it consists in this that difference of birth, which carries within itself a wrongs is moreover, through ethical custom or law, held within the chains of an insuperable barrier, so that it receives at the same time the appearance of an innate wrong, and consequently is the cause of collisions. Slavery, serfdom, differences of caste, the position of Jews in many states and, with certain qualifications, even the contrast between an aristocratical and citizen class are all of them cases for consideration under this head. The conflict here consists in this, that on the one hand humanity has rights, relations, desires, aims and requirements which belong to it essentially in virtue of its fundamental idea, which nevertheless in each one of the above mentioned examples meet with dangerous restriction and obstruction owing to the compulsive necessity of natural birth. On this type of collision we have the following remarks to offer.

The differences which obtain between classes, such as the ruled and the rulers, are, no doubt, essential to the notion of state-life, and are founded on reason, for they are caused by the inevitable articulation of the organic community, and assert themselves as such through the specific forms of occupation, disposition, modes of life, and general levels of education in all their branches. It is another matter, however, when these differences as they affect individuals are determined absolutely by the accident of birth, so that the individual man from the very start is not on account of any quality in himself, but solely through the accident of Nature, irrevocably relegated to a particular class or caste. In such a case it is obvious these differences appear as innate and are, moreover, though purely external, girt with force in its highest and most aggressive mode. We are not bound to ask ourselves how this fixity and compulsive restraint came originally into existence. For the nation may originally have been united, and the natural distinction between freeman and serf been only evolved at a later time, or the difference between castes, classes, and privileged persons may have grown out of earlier distinctions of nations and races, as many are inclined to think is the explanation of the caste distinctions of India. All this is a matter of no moment to us here. The main point simply consists in this, that vital relations of this kind, which regulate the entire course of human existence, have their source in natural conditions. On general principles, no doubt, distinctions of class can be justified, but at the same time no individual should be wholly robbed of his right to determine as his choice may direct to which particular class he shall belong. Natural capacity, talents, adaptability, and education are the only right means to direct the way and decide in this respect. When, however, the right of choice is debarred from birth onwards and a man is made thereby dependent on Nature and its contingency, there is always the possibility of conflict within the sphere of this necessity between the states thus enforced on the individual by natural conditions and the measure of spiritual education which he may acquire and the higher demand which it may justly make. This is a pathetic and unfortunate type of collision which has its source in an essential wrong which the freedom of art is quite unable to respect. In the social condition of our own days distinctions of class, with a few exceptions, are not determined by birth. The ruling dynasty and the peerage are the only exceptions, and these depend on a higher conception of the State altogether. For the rest, the mere fact of birth creates no essential distinction that can ultimately determine the class to which a man may belong if he is otherwise competent to join it. For this reason, however, we must condition the demand for entire liberty of choice with the requirement that in education, knowledge, ability, and general tastes the individual is equal to the particular society with which he may desire to associate. If, on the contrary, the fact of a man’s birth presents an insuperable obstacle to such claims, which he would otherwise be quite competent to satisfy by virtue of his own vigorous activity, then such a situation must appear to us not merely a misfortune, but essentially a wrong under which he is compelled to suffer injury. He is thus separated by a purely natural partition wall which is essentially unjust, that is to say, one beyond which his talents, sentiments, and general education have already raised him, from that which he was competent to reach, and a purely natural condition whose legalized fixity has been determined wholly by caprice presumes to oppose insuperable barriers to the freedom rightly demanded by all spiritual life.

To examine more closely the nature of this type of collision we shall do well to look at it from three different points of view, each of which are of essential importance.

In the first place, it is necessary that the individual should, in the strength of his own spiritual resources, already really have passed beyond the natural barriers whose opposition is to give way before his aims and desires, otherwise the demand is simply an act of folly. If, for example, a domestic servant, whose education and ability is merely that of a menial, falls in love with a princess or a lady of high society, or, inversely, either of these with him, such a love affair is both absurd and devoid of all taste, and this is so even if the artistic representation of this passion display all the depth and interest of which an ardent heart is capable. In such a case it is not so much the difference of birth which creates the obstacle; this is rather to be found in the entire content of interests, education, aims of life, requirements, and mode of sentiment which distinguish in status, material resources, and social qualifications a lady in high position from a domestic servant. If love is, as in the case assumed, the one and only bond of a union, and is associated with nothing else throughout the entire sphere of all that men and women have to live through in just accordance with that which a particular status requires from their intelligence and experience, it must necessarily remain devoid of content and is simply a union of the senses. Love, to be wholly complete, is nothing less than a real harmony of the entire conscious life, in which the full nobility of sentiment can be shared and appreciated.

The second case we wish to examine is that in which the dependence of birth surrounds an essentially free human life and the objects it may rightly set before itself with legalized fetters of obstruction. This collision also presents an element unadapted for artistic treatment, opposed, that is to say, to the notion of the Ideal, despite its love to make use of it and the facility with which it may attempt to do so. If distinctions of birth through positive laws and the powers which support them create a persistent wrong, as doubtless may be the case where a man is born an outcast or a Jew, he obviously, from one point of view, is entirely right in holding with all the strength of his inward life, which rebels before such a barrier, that the same is dissolvable, that he, in fact, recognizes his individuality as apart from it. To oppose such restraint appears to be wholly justifiable. But in so far as it becomes impossible through the force of existing circumstances to overcome such a barrier, which is consequently converted into an irrevocable necessity, a situation of this kind can only be regarded as a misfortune which itself is not without an element of falsity. For the rational man is inevitably forced, in so far as he is unable to subjugate the opposing necessity, to submit to the same: it is not in reason to continue to fight against the inevitable, but rather quietly to let it pass over him. He must, in fact, abandon the sense of interest in and need of that which is, by virtue of this barrier, swept from his reach, and suffer what he fails to overcome with the quiet courage of passive endurance. Where a struggle is of no avail it is the part of wisdom to be quit of it in order at the least to retire into the formal independence of personal liberty. By doing so the forces of wrong have no longer power over him; if, on the contrary, he battles against them he must necessarily experience his dependence in its fullest extent. At the same time it remains unquestionable that neither this abstraction of formal independence any more than that content which can lead to no result are truly beautiful when artistically considered.

There is a third type of collision which, while being immediately connected with that we have just considered, is equally removed from the genuine Ideal. It is to be found affecting that class of persons who attempt to assert some privilege which the mere fact of birth concedes them and supports with the full weight of a religious title, positive enactments, and the prevailing conditions of society. In such a case, it is true, we have an independent position in harmonious relation with what is externally realized in positive institutions, but when considered as the mere consistency of that which is in itself unjust and irrational it is quite as much as in our former example a purely formal independence, and the notion of the Ideal disappears. We may, no doubt, very possibly persuade ourselves that the Ideal is retained because we have here an appearance as though the personal life is in full union with the universal and its legalized constitution, remaining consistently in such unity; but it will be observed that here the universal does not assert its dominating power in the particular person, as we found the heroic Ideal demanded, but only in and through the public authority of positive laws and their administration; moreover, what the individual here asserts is assumed to be essentially wrong, and he loses in consequence the substantive significance which we have seen to be also essential to the Ideal. An affair in which the ideal subject of art is concerned must itself be at bottom true and justifiable. To this type belong the legalized lordship exercised over slaves or serfs, the right to rob a foreigner of his liberty, or to sacrifice the same to the gods. No doubt it is quite possible that such a right may be sustained by individuals with unquestioning belief that they are justified in so doing, as in India, for example, the higher castes make use of their privileges, or as Thoas ordered the sacrifice of Orestes, or in Russia the lords are wont to flout their serfs. In fact, those who are in authority are very likely to execute such rights as legalized rights on account of the interest they may have in preserving them. But in a case of this kind their right will be merely the unrighteous right of the barbarian, and they must themselves appear to us in the category of barbarians, at least, who resolve to carry out and perfect what is essentially injustice. The legalized form, under which the individual shelters himself, is, for the time to which it belongs, and its spirit and the educational standard adapted to it, no doubt to be respected and justified. But if we reflect upon it rationally and apart from that, it is wholly positive321, containing no intrinsic claims or authority. Moreover, if the individual makes use of his privileges for purely personal objects, under the mastery of particular passions and the aims of mere selfishness, in addition to our barbarian we get a bad character to boot.

Poets have frequently sought to arouse our pity, and it may be our fear as well, through the presentation of conflicts of this kind, following the rule of Aristotle, who lays it down that fear and compassion are objects of tragedy. Strictly speaking we experience neither fear nor reverence when confronted with rights which only exist among barbarians and are the misfortune of uncivilized times. Any compassion which such situations are likely to arouse is almost immediately converted into a spirit of indignant hostility. The only true artistic dénouement of such a conflict is one where we find such illegitimate rights are not carried into execution, as, for example, neither Iphigenia nor Orestes are respectively sacrificed in Aulis and Tauris.

(γγ) The third and last class of that type of collision which is based on purely natural condition is that which is duetto personal passion caused by natural peculiarities of temperament and character. The jealousy of Othello is a supreme example of this. Ambition, avarice, nay, even love itself in certain aspects, will furnish other illustrations. Collision of this kind is only properly referred to such passions in so far as individuals, seized and dominated exclusively by the power of such emotions, are thereby forced into antagonism with the truly ethical constitution and inherently justifiable course of human existence, and consequently are plunged into a still more serious conflict.

This carries our inquiry into the consideration of that third subdivision of our original classification of general types of collision, the type of which is based exclusively upon the conflict of spiritual forces, in so far as such opposition is the result of human activity.

(γ) We have already observed when dealing with purely natural collisions that they only form the starting-point as it were for further states of contradiction. And the same is more or less true of the second type of conflict already adverted to. All these, in artistic compositions of really profound significance, are unable to remain in such forms of opposition as we have hitherto discussed. Such disturbances and conflicting elements merely substantiate the opportune moment, out of which the true and essential forces of spiritual life will clash together in opposition and contend for the mastery. That which is spiritual can only be set in activity by virtue of spirit. Consequently the oppositions of Spirit can only win reality in actual human deed, can only thus manifest themselves in their true character.

The position we have arrived at, then, is this. We have on one hand a difficulty, an obstacle, a violation effected through something human life has carried out in action. We have on the other a violation of interests and forces intrinsically just and right. By treating these two forms of determination in close juxtaposition we, for the first time, are able to gauge the full depth of this last type of collision.

We may distinguish between the prominent examples which fall within the consideration of this class of cases as follows:

(αα) In passing from the sphere of that type of conflict which we have pointed out rests for its primary basis on what is entirely due to Nature we observe that the first class of cases which confronts us on crossing the boundary to the consideration of a new type is closely related to that we have just left behind us. If, then, human action is assumed to be responsible for the collision, it will follow that what is carried out as natural through human action, that is to say, in so far as humanity is not entirely spiritual, will consist in this that a particular action is performed unconsciously and without purpose, which will be found afterwards to be a positive infraction of the forces of self-respecting and civilized society. The consciousness which any man latterly acquires of the injurious nature of an action, of which he was previously unaware, will drive him who still accepts the responsibility of such an action into division and conflict. The ground of such a conflict, in fact, consists in the opposition with which the mind is confronted between that which was actually before it when the action took place, and the subsequent discovery of all that was really implied in the act itself. The cases of Œdipus and Ajax will at once suggest themselves as examples. The action of Œdipus, if viewed simply with reference to his will and knowledge, amounted merely to the fact that he killed a perfect stranger in a quarrel. The unconscious act was the reality in its full significance, that is to say, the murder of his own father. Ajax, in a fit of frenzy, slaughtered the cattle of the Greeks believing them to be the Greek chieftains. On regaining his senses and discovering what he really did he is seized with a sense of shame which drives him into collision with himself. We must, however, observe that what has been unconsciously violated by a man in the type of collision we are now examining ought to be something which he himself, when fully in a position to judge, would both honour and revere. If such a reverential attitude has its roots merely in personal idiosyncrasy or superstition, such a collision can arouse, to say the least, no really profound interest.

(ββ) Further, inasmuch as in the cases we are now discussing the conflict arises from a spiritual violation of spiritual forces through human action, the collision more generally appropriate to the type will consist in a violation which is perpetrated with full consciousness proceeding out of such and the intention it implies. The point of departure here may centre again in passion, violence, folly, and other similar qualities. The Trojan war, for example, originates in the rape of Helen. Agamemnon afterwards sacrifices Iphigenia, and so violates the feelings of her mother, slaying thus the darling of her womb. Clytemnestra, in consequence, murders her spouse. Orestes avenges the murder of his father and king by assassinating his mother. In a similar way in “Hamlet” the father is sent to his grave by a stratagem, and the mother of Hamlet insults the manes of the dead man by a precipitate marriage with his murderer.

In the case of these collisions as in those already considered, the main point is this, that humanity is engaged in a self-imposed conflict with what is intrinsically moral, true, and worthy of reverence. If this is not so, then, for all who are really conscious of what is moral and right, such a conflict can only appear without worth or material significance, as is the case, for example, in the famous episode of the Mahâ-Bhârata, with reference to Nalas and Damayanti. King Nalas marries the princess Damayanti, who is allowed the privilege of making a free choice among her sisters. All the other suitors are genii floating in the air; Nalas stands on the Earth alone as a man, and she has the good sense to select him. The genii are consequently much enraged, and watch for the moment when they may find King Nalas tripping. For many years they can bring to his charge no offence, as he is capable of none. At last, however, they obtain power over him, for he commits a great crime; the crime is this, namely, that after making water, he treads with his foot upon the earth thus watered. According to Indian ideas this is a severe offence which cannot escape punishment. From that moment the genii have him in their power; one renders all his amatory desires abortive, another excites his brother against him, and finally poor Nalas, after forfeiting his throne and being reduced to beggary, is driven forth a wanderer in wretchedness with Damayanti. At length he is even compelled to part with her, until, as the tale will have it, after many adventures, he is once more set on the throne of his original happiness. The real conflict upon which for the Indians of old days the whole of this story was supported was an essential desecration of a sacred thing: according to our notions the tale is absurd from beginning to end.

(γγ) Thirdly, it is not necessary that the disruption should be direct, or, in other words, that the action taken solely by itself should be an act of collision; the fact of collision may well appear out of relations and circumstances of opposition and antagonism which are forced upon the mind during the process of that action’s execution. Juliet and Romeo are in love with one another. In the mere fact of their love there is nothing to suggest disunion. But they are aware that their families are living in mutual hate and hostility, that their parents will never consent to the marriage, and they are carried into collision by virtue of this preassumed situation of antagonistic forces.

We must content ourselves here with these very general remarks upon the relation which the determinate situation occupies in its opposition to the universal world-condition. Were we to extend our inquiry into all the divergent aspects, modifications, and nuances of the subject, attempting thereby to express an opinion upon every possible form of situation, this chapter would alone present us with sufficient matter for discussions of endless prolixity and diffuseness. The discovery of different situations implies a content of exhaustless possibilities; and in every particular example the essential question involved is how such may be adapted to the treatment of any specific art, in true subordination to the principles and character of such an art. To the fairy story much is permitted which is forbidden to a more stringent mode of artistic representation. And we may say that generally the discovery322 of the situation is a critical point in the process of art-production which often presents great difficulty to artists. In our own days the difficulty of obtaining a suitable subject-matter as a source for the circumstances and situations which the artist requires is a common complaint. At first sight it may appear to us more in keeping with our notion of poet if he borrow from his own resources, and invent situations himself; but such independence does little to increase his claims as a creative artist. For the situation does not directly constitute the spirituality of his work nor indeed give us its true artistic form: all that it does is to supply the external material in which as its appropriate medium a character or temperament is unfolded before us. It is only after working into this external material in which actions and characters find their starting-point that the true genius of the artist is actively displayed. The poet consequently has little or no claim to our thanks for merely having himself invented this least of all poetical aspects of his production. He is, in fact, fully entitled to draw as much and as frequently as he pleases from anything that comes to his hand, whether it be history, saga, mythos, or chronicle, nay, even from material and situations which have already been artistically treated. Just as we find in the art of painting the external matter of the situation is borrowed from legends of saints, and the process has been repeated on similar lines over and over again. To discover the real artistic significance of such artistic work we must penetrate far beyond the mere invention of particular situations. The same remarks will apply in full force to the entire wealth of the circumstances and developments artistically handled. In reference to this it is frequently claimed as a virtue of modern art in contrast with that of the ancients that we find in it an infinitely more exuberant imagination. As a matter of fact, we do find in the artistic creations of the Middle Ages and our modern world the most extraordinary variety and interfusion of situations, events, and occurrences, whether tragic or otherwise. This fulness of detail, however, does not take us far. In spite of it all we have very few dramas or epics of the first excellence. For the main point is not the external course and interchange of a variety of events, when we find such events and histories merely complete the entire content of our work of art; rather it is the ethical and spiritual form which embodies them, and the masterful movements of temperament and character which are exposed and unveiled during the entire process of this artistic embodiment.

Glancing now at the main position we have arrived at, and from which our inquiry will proceed, we have found that circumstances, conditions, and relations, whether determined with a reference to the external world or the subjective consciousness, only create the situation by virtue of the temperament or passion which experiences them and derives its nutriment through them. We have further seen that the situation breaks up this determinate form in opposition, obstruction, development, and disruption, so that the emotional life feels itself compelled by the force of the affecting circumstances to react with energy against this disturbing and restraining influence, which stands in the way of its objects and passions. It is here, in truth, that the action, strictly speaking, commences, when, that is to say, the contradiction has fully asserted itself, which was already implied in the fully defined situation. Inasmuch as, however, the action which is based on this collision disturbs the unity of that which is opposed to it, it calls into being by its antagonism the opposing force of that which it confronts, and consequently the action is immediately associated with the reaction. With this analysis of the forces rendered necessary by dramatic action, we have at length arrived at the notion of the Ideal as a fully defined process. For we are here presented with two distinct spheres of interest, both of which have been rent, as it were, from the harmony they originally possessed, and confront each other in conflict. Such, by the contradiction which is involved in them, make a resolution of the discord necessary. This movement, regarded as a homogeneous whole, belongs no more to the province of the mere situation and its conflicts; we are carried now into that portion of our inquiry to which we have already given the name of the genuine action.

In the development of the subject under consideration, the action immediately follows after the universal world-condition and the particular situation. In considering the action in its external relation to that portion of our inquiry we have just concluded it will be well to bear in mind the result we arrived at, that it presupposes circumstances which necessitate collisions, action, and reaction. It is impossible to determine at what point in the circumstances thus presupposed the action will begin. For that which in one aspect will appear as commencement will very possibly present itself in another as the result of earlier developments, and to that extent will postpone the real starting-point. And in like manner this, too, we may regard as a fact resulting from former collisions. To take an example; in the house of Agamemnon Iphigenia in Tauris expiates the guilt and misfortune of her family. The commencement here of this deliverance on the part of Iphigenia is the fact that Diana carries her to Tauris. This circumstance is, however, merely the result of earlier stages of the story, such as the sacrifice in Aulis, which is again conditioned by the injury done to Menelaus in the rape of Helen by Paris, and so on, ever backward, until we come to the famous egg of Leda. In the same way the events which are the subject-matter of the Iphigenia in Tauris presuppose the murder of Agamemnon, and all the crimes associated with the house of Tantalus. An analysis of much the same character might be applied to the Theban circle of mythos. If an action is to be represented with all the facts that condition it, poetry is the only real art that can attempt this. Such a complete exposition of historical fact has already become, as a certain proverb reminds us, rather a wearisome business; it is, in fact, more within the province of simple prose, and, in contrast with such completeness, poetry will rather consider its true function to be that of taking its audience at once into the heart of the matter. There is a further important reason why it should not be to the interest of art to make its commencement from that point where we find the action under consideration is in the first instance externally conditioned, and it is this: such a point of departure is, after all, only related to the process regarded as natural or historical fact323. The association of the action with this commencement merely concerns the empirical unity of its appearance; it may, however, in itself be of no significance at all to the real content of the action. This external unity of historical sequence remains just as it was, however it may chance that one particular person is affected by the involved threads of a varying series of fact. No doubt the entirety of the facts of life, its actions and fatalities, tends to make the individual what he is; but for all that his true nature, the real core of his thoughts and capacities, is manifested in one great situation and action independently of them. It is the progress of these which reveals to us really what a character is made of, a character which previously to their occurrence had been known merely in a nominal way, that is the name of one more fact among the external facts of experience.

We must therefore not look for the commencement of the action in that empirical source of it; we must rather centre the attention upon those circumstances which have taken a hold upon the particular nature with which we are dealing, and created or satisfied its needs; we must, in fact, reveal the particular collision in whose conflict and resolution the action in question consists. Homer, for example, in the “Iliad,” makes a start at once with the particular fact on which his entire epic is founded, that is to say, with the wrath of Achilles. He tells us nothing of earlier history of the life of Achilles, but emphasizes at once the critical collision, and, moreover, does it in a way which unfolds a background of the greatest interest to his picture.

The representation, then, of the action as a process complete in itself, in which action, reaction, and resolution are constituent elements, is, above all, the function of the poetic art; all the other arts can at most only seize upon and secure in their presentation one moment of this process. It is quite true that if we direct our attention to that aspect of the medium they employ which is richest, they may appear to have an advantage over poetry; in painting especially324 we find a control asserted not merely over the entire external form, but also over the expression of external demeanour and the play of such relatively to other objects grouped around it. Such a means of expression, however, cannot compare as an interpreter of truth with human speech. The action itself is the clearest means of unfolding to us individual character, whether we view it relatively to the entire emotional life325 or the objects of mind. All that a man is at the very root of his nature is first revealed to us through his acts; and action, for the reason that it is an expression of spirit, finds its ultimate expression as such most clearly and concisely in speech alone. When we speak in general terms of human action we are apt to figure to ourselves an incalculable variety of mode. For Art, however, the sphere of action suitable to artistic representation is, generally speaking, limited. Her province is wholly restricted to the type of action which is conformable to the necessary configuration of the Idea.

There are three points of essential importance necessary to grasp in connection with such action as is capable of artistic representation, and which we may emphasize as follows. The situation and the resulting conflict is that which generally stimulates it; the active movement, however, taken by itself, the element of difference, that is to say, of the Ideal in its activity, is made apparent first by virtue of the reaction. This movement may be resolved into the following component features:

First, we have the universal326 forces, which constitute the essential content and object, for the sake of which the action takes place.

Secondly, we have the realization327 of these forces in the individuals who act.

Thirdly, the two aspects above mentioned have to unite themselves in that which, in default of any better generic term, we will here call character.

(a) The Universal Forces of Action

(a) However much we have finally arrived in our consideration of the action at a point where the definition and differentiation of the Ideal is of the first importance, nevertheless the very notion of art renders it necessary that in the sphere of true beauty, be the aspect of it whatsoever it may, it must still have upon it the stamp of the Ideal; it cannot, that is to say, maintain itself without rationality and the justification it implies. Interests of an ideal character must inevitably be in conflict with another, so that might is opposed to might. These interests are, in fact, the eternal and universal forces of spiritual existence, the essential cravings of the human heart, the spontaneous and inevitable objects of human action, justifiable and rational in virtue of their own character, and consequently the very universal powers to which we have referred. They are indeed not the absolute Divine itself, but rather the sons of the one absolute Idea328, and consequently dominant and valid. They are the children of the one universal truth, albeit only determinate, particular moments of the same. Through their very distinction, it is true, they can fall into contradiction or disunion, yet despite all the element of difference contained, they must possess the original essentiality within them in order to appear as the determinate Ideal. Such are the supreme motive forces of art. They are the eternal329 religious and ethical modes of relationship, status, personal character330, and in the world of romance, before everything else, honour and love. In the particular grade of their significance these powers differ, but all are essentially the product of reason. At the same time it is these powers in the human heart and mind, which man, by virtue of his humanity, is bound to recognize, to give free play to, and to actualize. At the same time they ought not directly to appear as rights in positive legislation. For, to take one reason, the form of positive legislation, as we have seen, is already in partial conflict with the notion and content of the Ideal; furthermore, it is quite possible that the content of positive rights may contribute to that which is essentially unjust, albeit entirely clothed in the attributes of law. The relations we have above referred to, however, are not merely the supreme stable embodiment of the external world331, but the essentially substantive powers, which for the very reason that they contain in themselves the actual content of human existence, continue to be the stimulating source of its activity, and ultimately all that ever carried it forward to perfection.

Of this kind are the interests and objects which contend against each other in the “Antigone” of Sophocles. Creon, the king, as ruler of the state, by a decree couched in the severest terms, forbade the right of burial to the son of Œdipus, who had proved himself an enemy of his country by bringing an army against Thebes. This proclamation was so far justifiable that it expressed care for the weal of the entire city. Antigone, however, is animated by an ethical principle of equal authority, in other words by her love for her brother, whom she finds it impossible to leave unburied, the prey of carrion birds. To leave such a duty unfulfilled would be in direct opposition to the sacred instincts of her personal relationship. She consequently violates the decree of Creon.

(β) Collisions of the type with which we are now dealing may be introduced in every possible way; the necessity of the reaction, however, must not be occasioned by means of anything out of place or at cross purposes332 with the main action, but through that which is in itself reasonable and justifiable. For example, in the well-known German poem of Hartmann von der Aue, “The Poor Henry,” the collision is repulsive. The hero in this poem is visited by a fatality, that is to say, an incurable disease. He turns for assistance to the monks of Salermo. They state as the condition of his cure that a human being must willingly surrender his or her life, on the ground that the necessary salve can alone be forthcoming from a human heart. A poor maiden who is in love with the knight offers freely her own life and accompanies him into Italy. This is pure barbarism, and the silent love and pathetic devotion of the maiden are unable, consequently, to produce their full effect. It is true that we find the injustice of human sacrifice presented us by the ancients as the ground of the collision. The famous example is that of the story of Iphigenia, who is first offered as such a sacrifice, and afterwards is on the point of offering up her brother. But, in the first place, it is to be observed that in these examples the conflict is in close connection with other relations which are in themselves justifiable; secondly, the artistic principle is really satisfied, as we have already observed, by the fact that both Iphigenia and Orestes are finally delivered, and the power of a collision which is opposed to our notion of right is thus destroyed. And, indeed, this is also the case in the above mentioned poem of Hartmann, in so far as we may acknowledge the dénouement offered us in which, on Henry refusing to accept the sacrifice, God releases him from his malady, and the maiden is rewarded for her true love333.

In apparent association with the positive powers we have enumerated must be added others set over against them, that is to say, the forces of that which is negative and bad, evil in short. That which is purely negative, however, ought not to be taken in the ideal representation of an action as the essential ground-motive for the necessary reaction. The reality of the purely negative case, it is true, corresponds to the negative and its appropriate character, but, if the implied334 notion and object is already in itself rendered nugatory, it is even less possible that the ugliness which is exposed in the inward life should manifest any genuine beauty upon its external reality. The sophistry of passion can, indeed, by means of the capacity, strength, and energy of a character, make the attempt to graft positive characteristics upon the negative, but we only obtain thereby the vision of a whitewashed grave. For that which is purely negative is generally flat and stale and leaves us consequently either void or drives us back, whether it be used as the motive force of an action or merely as a means to promote a reaction in another. The horrible, unfortunate, the harshness of dominion, and the obduracy of superior power may form part of the content and burden of the imagination when such characteristics are exalted and carried by the abundant greatness of a particular character or object. Evil, however, taken simply for what it is, envy, cowardice, and meanness, is merely repulsive. The devil, if we take him for what he really ought to be, is consequently a bad subject, or rather a figure for which Art has no uses at all. He is just a falsehood and nothing more, and consequently an extremely prosaic personality. In the same way it is perfectly true that the Furies of hate and many other allegorical figures of later times are potencies of a kind, but they are without affirmative subsistency and holdfastness335, unfavourable to ideal representation, although in this respect a wide margin of difference is permissible in the several arts respectively, and in the particular mode in which they may immediately visualize such objects. Evil is, to express it in most general terms, essentially cold and devoid of content, because as such it is merely the source of negation, discord, and misfortune. All art, however, which is true to its essential notion, should reflect on us the vision of a harmony. Meanness, above all, is despicable, for it is a quality which arises from the envy and hatred of all that is noble, and does not shrink from distorting even a power that is essentially based upon the good into a means conformable to its own perverse and shameless passion. The great poets and artists of the classical world have in consequence never presented us with the vision of absolute evil and depravity. Shakespeare, on the contrary, in his tragedy of “King Lear,” unfolds before us the spectacle of wickedness in all its horrors. The old Lear divides his kingdom among his daughters, and, while doing so, is foolish enough to believe in their false and flattering speeches, and to misinterpret the silent and faithful Cordelia. There is already folly and madness in this, and it is followed by the most outrageous ingratitude and worthlessness of the elder daughters and their husbands to the point of absolute craze. As an antithesis of this the heroes of the French school of tragedy are stretched and puffed out with every sort of grandiose and sublime motive, and make a great parade of their honour and nobility, and yet despite of it all destroy the very meaning of such motives by the mere fact of what they really are and accomplish. But it is in modern times more especially that we find this unstable dissolution of everything spiritual336, which forces its way through every dissonance, however repulsive, become quite à la mode; moreover, it has even given us what we may describe as the humour of the abominable thing, a kind of burlesque simulation of irony, an atmosphere in which a Theodor Hoffmann, for example, has found himself so much at home.

(γ) We may conclude, then, that it is the essentially positive and substantive powers in the spiritual world which supply the real content of the ideal action. These sources of energy, however, in their artistic embodiment, must not appear in their inherent universality, albeit within the reality of the action they are essential phases of the Idea. Rather they must receive the form of independent individuals. If this were not so they would remain as merely the universals of thought or abstract conceptions which do not properly fall within the province of art. Though in their origin they should be held as intact as it is possible to hold them from mere caprices of the fancy, it is equally necessary that in their development they should acquire determinacy no less than self-consistency337, and in this way appear as essentially particularized. Such definition as they possess ought not to be carried to the point of the particularity of external objects, nor should their concentration be carried to that of the subjective self-consciousness338. Otherwise the individuality of those universal powers is necessarily involved in all the developments of finite existence. In this respect we may say, then, that the determinacy of their individuality is not to be taken too seriously. The gods of the Greek Pantheon are the most conspicuous example of this manifestation and sway of the universal forces we have just discussed in their self-subsistent form. However they may be brought before us, their blessedness and cheerfulness remains unaffected. Regarded separately as particular gods no doubt they engage in conflict, but in all their battles we shall ultimately find they are not really serious in the sense that they concentrate themselves on any definite object with the entire consequential energy of their character and passion, fully prepared to stake their existence upon the result. They engage in this affair or that wherever it may take place, identify particular interests in concrete examples with their own; they are, however, equally ready to leave the matter at any point and wing their way back happily to Olympus. Such is the view we get of the gods when they engage in warfare on the pages of Homer. The determinacy of their characterization is capable of conflict, but they remain for all that the purely universal determinations which at bottom they are. A battle begins to rage; heroes advance singly one against another; then we lose sight of individuals altogether in the universal storm and crush; it is no longer the specific qualities of individuals which are now set in relief against each other — it is the universal rush of the fight, the daemon of war loosed and roaring, and now it is that the universal powers, the gods themselves, step forth on the scene of battle. From such a temporary display of the contrasts of their characterization they ever withdraw themselves into the solitude of their self-subsistency and repose. For though the individuality of their form carries them perforce into the region of time and contingency, nevertheless inasmuch as the universal they claim as gods is that which ultimately must prevail, the individual characteristic shrinks away into the determination of external form only; they are unable in their personality to penetrate the true arcana of conscious spirit339.

Their physical definition is, in fact, either more or less only the accommodating form of their divinity. But this self-subsistency and careless repose is precisely that which gives to them their plastic individuality, and relieves them of any anxiety and constraint340 in relation to earthly objects and events341. For this reason we find in the gods of Homer no final result when actively occupied with the concrete facts of human life, although such activity is displayed for us in many and diverse directions. The material and interest of human events which happen in time is that which gives them something to do and nothing more. And in like manner we may remark other peculiar characteristics attached to the Greek gods, which we can only regard as essentially unrelated to the general notion of divinity which each god respectively connotes. Mercury is, for example, the slayer of Argus; Apollo that of the hydra; of the love affairs of Zeus we have countless tales, and, among other things, he hangs his wife on an anvil. These and many other stories like them are merely supplementary additions, which attach to the gods in their aspect of natural forces by virtue of symbol and allegory, the origin of which we propose to discuss more fully later on. In modern art we shall, it is true, find certain indications which point to a conception of definite and at the same time universal powers. These are, however, for the most part simply cold and frost-like allegories of hate, envy, hope, love, faithfulness, that is to say, generally of virtues and vices in the actual truth of which we can retain no belief. For with us moderns it is the concrete subjectivity alone, for which we, in the representations of art, feel that profounder interest, wherein abstractions such as these do not appear in their isolation, but are made to appear merely as phases or aspects of human character, whether we regard it in its particularity or as a concrete whole. In much the same way the angels possess no essential universality and self-subsistency such as characterize Mars, Venus, and Apollo, or even Oceanus and Helios. They are, it is true, objects of imaginative conception, but their specific character is that of vassals of the one Divine and essential substance, which is not in this case broken up into self-subsistent individualities, as we find it in the Greek Pantheon. For this reason we have here no imaginative vision of many objective powers dwelling in a state of tranquillity, which may be represented as essentially Divine personalities. We find, on the contrary, the essential content of such either as subsisting in the Godhead, or realized in a mode which is both particular and subjective in wholly human characters and actions. Nevertheless it was precisely in the conception342 of self-subsistency and individualization that the ideal representation of the gods originated.

(b) The Individuals in the Action

In the cases we have just discussed of the ideal gods it is not a difficult matter for art to secure the ideality she requires. But in approaching the concrete action, ideal representation is confronted with a real difficulty. For though it is here that the gods and, in general terms, the universal powers may be identified with a principle which stimulates and compels activity, we are not therefore on the plane of reality entitled to find in them the source of genuine individual action. Action is rather essentially the manifestation of human life. Consequently there are in this connection two distinct aspects of the problem to be considered. On the one hand we have these universal forces in their self-subsistent repose and for that reason more abstract substantiality; on the other there is the individuality of men, in which we must seek the final spring and determinating impulse to action no less than its actual accomplishment. It is, of course, only the simple truth that these eternally dominant powers are immanent in the identical nature of mankind, constituting, in fact, the substantive core of its character; but in so far as they are comprehended in their Divine nature themselves as individuals343, and thereby in an exclusive way, their relation to the subject of human consciousness must remain an external one. And this fact enables us to see the essential difficulty we noticed above. There is, in truth, a contradiction immediately involved in this relation between the gods and men. It is quite true that the content of the gods is that which belongs to humanity, and announces itself as his passion, resolve, and will. It is, however, equally true that the gods must not only be assumed to be and comprehended as independent from man individually considered in their actual existence, but, furthermore, as the forces at the root of all his activity and determination. And this, too, in such a way that we are forced to consider the same determinations at one time as personified in the self-subsistent and Divine personality, and at another that which appears most essentially to belong to the human heart. And it is for this reason that the free self-subsistency of the gods no less than the freedom of human individuals in their activity is seriously compromised if, to the detriment of human independence, which we have already stated to be of most essential importance to the Ideal of Art, we ascribe an exclusive power of command to the gods. And we may observe this is precisely the same kind of difficulty which confronts us in the form of the religious conceptions of Christianity. It is stated in terms that the spirit of God leads up to God. Taken strictly such a phrase can only imply that the inward life of man is regarded as a purely passive ground, upon which the spirit of God labours. In such a conception the human will disappears as a free will, and at the same time the Divine purpose which motives the “in working” above mentioned can only appear to man as a kind of Fate, under which he fails to come by his own true personality344.

(α) If, however, this question of mutual relation345 is so understood that man in his action is conceived as standing in a purely external opposition to God, here posited as eternal substance, the relation of both is one of pure matter of fact346. God gives a command, and man is obliged to hearken. Even great poets have found themselves unable to dispense with this conception of external opposition between gods and men. In the “Philoctetes” of Sophocles, for example, we find that Philoctetes, after he has confounded the deceit of Odysseus, persists in his determination not to return to the Grecian camp until Heracles appears at length as Deus ex machina, and orders him to yield to the entreaty of Neoptolimus. The content of this apparition is, no doubt, sufficiently motived, and answers to our own expectation; the catastrophe itself, however, is for all that not rightly homogeneous, but rather outside the action; and in his noblest tragedies Sophocles makes no such use of this kind of representation, according to which, if we but carry it one step further, the gods are reduced to lifeless machines, and individual men simply to the instruments of a foreign caprice. In a similar way we constantly in epic poetry meet with the active intervention of the gods represented in a mode which is external to human freedom. Hermes, for example, conducts Priam to Achilles; Apollo gives Patroclus the blow between the shoulders which ends his life. We also frequently find mythological traits treated in such a way that they appear as wholly external to the actual lives of the individuals thus affected. Achilles, for example, is dipped by his mother in the Styx and thereby rendered invulnerable and invincible to the one point of his heels. If we reflect on this rationally it is obvious that all real bravery disappears, and all that is heroic in the character of Achilles is converted from a real trait of his essential manhood to a purely physical advantage. Such a mode of representation is, however, far more permissible to the epic than it is to the dramatic type of poetry, for the good reason that in the epic that aspect of spiritual life which is directly concerned with the intention implied in the execution of objects falls into the background and a larger field is, in general, offered for the play of external characteristics. Such a criticism of the prosaic understanding as the one above, which charges a poet with the absurdity that his heroes are no heroes at all, should only be advanced with the greatest caution, for it is partly in such traits as will appear shortly, that the poetical relation between gods and men is preserved. It is another matter, and we have nothing left us but prose, when in addition the powers, which are posited as substantive individuals, are mere empty shadows, the creations of the caprice of fancy and the arbitrariness of a false originality. They are then for the most part only the adjuncts of superstition or imbecility.

(β) The truly poetic relation of ideality consists, then, in the identity of gods and men; and this must assert itself even though the universal powers are presented as independent and free from the particularity of human beings and passions. In other words, all that we attribute to the gods must at the same time establish itself as that which is essentially cognate with the spiritual life of particular men in this sense, that while the dominating powers appear as essentially personified, yet at the same time all that is thus posited in an external relation to man is none the less clearly that which is immanent in his own spirit and character. The true function of the artist is, therefore, to introduce a mediating link between the difference involved in these two aspects, to bind them, in short, by a finely conceived thread of relation which, while clearly emphasizing their springs in the spiritual life of man, shall make no less visible the universal and essential element which is therein implied and present such to the imagination in individual form. The emotional life of man must reveal itself in the gods, who, in fact, are the self-subsistent and universal embodiments of that which is active and dominant in his own spiritual experience. Then alone are the gods at the same time gods in cognate relation with his own heart and emotions. When, for example, we are told by the ancients that Venus or Amor has put a constraint upon the heart, no doubt in the first place these divinities are apprehended as external powers; but human love is equally a stimulus and a passion, which is implanted in the heart and is part of that it independently contains.

In much the same sense is the frequent reference to the Eumenides. We have to picture in the first instance no doubt these avenging maidens as Furies, who pursue the transgressor in an external form. But this pursuit is but another aspect of the Fury which drives through the soul of the perpetrator of crime; and Sophocles in the Œdipus Colonus (I. 1434) actually refers to them in this sense of inward spiritual forces, as the Eumenides of Œdipus himself, that is to say, who signify the father’s curse as the result of the stress of emotion caused by the conduct of his sons. We have, then, and equally have not reason on our side whether we identify the gods with powers external to man, or find in them that which belongs exclusively to his spiritual life. They are in fact both. In Homer, for example, the activity of gods and men is a constantly involved skein347. The gods appear to accomplish what is foreign to human activity, and yet for all that execute only that which is in vital co-ordination with his own emotional life. In the “Iliad,” for example, when Achilles, in the stress of controversy, is about to raise his sword against Agamemnon, Athene steps forth behind him and takes hold of his head of flaxen hair, visible only to himself. Hero, who is equally anxious over Achilles and Agamemnon, sends for them from Olympus, and their admission there appears to be wholly independent of the desire of Achilles. On the other hand we have no difficulty in seeing that the sudden appearance of Athene, the wisdom which puts constraint upon the hero’s wrath, is simply a reflection of internal conflict, that the entire description but states in imaginative form what was experienced in the heart of our hero. In fact Homer himself points this out a few verses previously (“Iliad,” I, v, 190), when he relates about the debate that took place in his heart in the following terms:

ἢ ὅγε φάσγανον ὀξὺ ἐρυσσάμενος παρὰ μηροῦ

τοὺς μὲν ἀναστήσειεν, ὃ δ᾽ Ἀτρέιδην ἐναρίξοι,

ἡὲ χόλον πάυσειεν ἐρητύσείε τε θυμὀν.348

This inward breaking up of anger into a divided self, this constraint, for it is in opposition to the anger, and Achilles appears at first to be wholly filled with wrath, the epic poet has a perfect right to represent at the same time as an external event. In a similar case in the “Odyssey” we find Minerva acting the part of escort for Telemachus. This attendance is rather more difficult to grasp as a personal experience of the emotional life of Telemachus, although we can readily fix on certain points of contact between the external image and the emotion experienced. And this it is we may generally say which constitutes the cheerful buoyancy of the Homeric gods, and the irony implied in the honour paid to them. Their self-consistency and seriousness are characteristics which tend to dissolve like a cloud, precisely to the extent that they unfold themselves as the very powers which are native to man’s emotional life, and thereby, in their manifestation, leave humanity alone with its own possessions.

However, it is not necessary to look so far abroad for a complete example of the conversion of a purely mechanical conception of Divine activity into the atmosphere of the subjective consciousness, the sphere, that is, of freedom and ethical beauty. In his Iphigenia in Tauris Goethe has in this connection carried the process through with a beauty that we cannot sufficiently admire. In the drama of Euripides Orestes in complicity with Iphigenia carries off the statue of Diana. This is simply an act of stealing. Then Thoas comes on the scene, and orders their pursuit, and the recovery of the bust of the goddess. Finally, in very prosaic fashion, Athene appears and orders Thoas to stay his hand on the ground that she has independently commended Orestes to the charge of Poseidon, and he, in deference to her wishes, has already carried Orestes far over seas. Thoas submits to her advice and replies to it in the following terms (v, 1442, 43): “Lady Athene, whoever, on hearing the words of the gods, does not obey them is but a fool. For how could it be right and fit to contend with the mighty gods.”

In this relation we can only see the bare external command of Athene on the one side, and an equally futile submission of Thoas on the other. In Goethe’s treatment of the subject, on the contrary, Iphigenia becomes herself exalted to the rank of a goddess, in reliance upon the truth she feels within herself, the truth of a human heart. In this sense she turns to Thoas and exclaims:

Is it then man alone who has the right

To accomplish things none ever heard before!

Shall he alone impress upon the strength

Of hearts heroic the impossible?

That which in the drama of Euripides the command of Athene effects, the change in the attitude of Thoas, Goethe’s Iphigenia endeavours to bring about, and in fact does bring about, through the depth of the feelings and ideas with which she confronts him.

With motions strange

An enterprise audacious soars within me;

A vast reproach and ills yet graver still

Will break on me if the event miscarry;

But, see, I place it on your knees! Be true,

Be only true and worthy of your fame,

So your assistance shall declare it truth,

Truth glorified through me.

And to this reply of Thoas:

What! you believe

The Scythian wild and the barbarian

Hear the wise voice of Truth and hearts humane

When Atreus of Greece still failed to hear.

she answers with the gentlest, purest trust:

Nay, all thus hear

Beneath whatever sky their birth was laid;

All needs must hear for whom the springs of life

Flow without let and purely through the soul.

Then it is she makes the final call upon her greatness of soul, and the tenderness of her faith at its highest point of effort; her entreaty touches, then masters and wrings from him, in a way that must appeal to every heart, the permission to return to her own. This alone is necessary. She has no need of the statue of the goddess; she can depart on her journey without deceit or betrayal of trust. And it is with the finest sense of beauty that Goethe refers here to the oracular word of the god:

Bring but to Greece again the sister who

All loth at heart in holy temple bides

On shores of Tauris, and the curse is gone.

The very human reconciliation disclosed in these words is clearly that the pure and holy Iphigenia, the sister, is in fact the divine personification and the protectress of the house.

Noble and beautiful I wot in sooth

All that the goddess counselled seemed to me,

exclaims Orestes to Thoas and Iphigenia:

Like to a holy picture

The fate unalterable which walled our town

By one mysterious word, one word Divine,

Is banished, now that city takes thee back,

Who art the true protectress of our home;

Reserve thyself in holy quietness,

A blessing to thy brother and thine own;

It seemed that all deliverance on Earth

Had passed away, and all comes back with thee.

In the spirit of these healing words of reconciliation Iphigenia has already revealed herself to Orestes by virtue of the purity and ethical beauty of her inner life. It is true that her discernment drives him half mad, who in the convulsion of his spirit has lost all faith in peace; but the pure love of the sister does not fail to heal him from every pang with which he is tortured by the Furies of his soul:

Within thine arms

The evil clawed me with its direst clutch

For the last time, and to the very marrow

I shuddered horribly: and then it vanished,

E’en as a serpent to its lair. Anew,

And all through thee, the day’s breadth I enjoy.

Here, as elsewhere throughout it, we can hardly emphasize sufficiently our admiration for the profound beauty of this poem.

The material which has the impress of Christianity upon it is more open to criticism than that which was the subject-matter of antique art. In the sacred legends, and generally speaking where the religious conceptions of Christendom prevail, no doubt we may find the appearance of Christ, the Virgin Mary and other saints the subject of universal belief; but along with them the imagination has clothed itself with fanciful aberrations in every direction, so that witches, ghosts, and every sort of spectral apparition are yet more conspicuous objects. In the face of such conceptions, so far at least as they appear foreign powers to our human nature, and man submits himself unreservedly to the charm, seduction, and influence of their illusions, artistic representation is wholly given up to every kind of folly and caprice of mere contingency. It is of unique importance that in the treatment of such material the artist take care that the freedom and independence of judgment are in no way impaired. Shakespeare has shown us how to do this in most noble fashion. The witches in Macbeth, for example, appear as external powers, who foretell for Macbeth his future destiny. What they do foretell, however, is precisely that which is his own most secret wish, which is reflected back on him and declared in this, merely in appearance, external form349. With a still closer regard to beauty, yet profounder insight, is the ghost in Hamlet treated as the purely objective embodiment of Hamlet’s own intuitions. We find Hamlet in the first instance overpowered with a vague feeling that something horrible has taken place. His father’s ghost then appears and gives definite form to these awful premonitions. We naturally expect that Hamlet, after receiving the facts set forth in his father’s warning, will at once proceed with energy and bring the murderer to book, a revenge which appears to have ample excuse. But he delays and delays. Critics have made this inactivity a matter of reproach to Shakespeare, blamed him, in fact, as though for this reason the play to some extent never gets properly off. But we must remember Hamlet is not a strongly practical nature, rather a finely strung one, with emotions held in persistent reserve; a nature which finds it difficult to tear itself from its internal harmony; melancholy too, prone to subtleties, hypochondriacal, with emotions deeply rooted. For this reason it is obvious that he is prima facie indisposed to prompt action. And this is fundamentally Goethe’s conception of him when he tells us that what Shakespeare sought to represent “was the imposition of some supreme action on a soul whose growth was unadapted to its execution.” He in fact interprets the entire drama relatively to this conception of Hamlet. “We have here,” he maintains, “an oak tree planted in an exquisite vase, which ought really only to contain and shelter the fair flowers; the roots spread, the vase is shattered.” But it should be noticed that Shakespeare, when referring to the apparition of the ghost, contributes a far profounder trait of character in explanation of this debated point. Hamlet delays, because he does not right off wholly believe in the ghost.

The spirit that I have seen

May be a devil: and the devil hath power

To assume a pleasing shape; yea and perhaps,

Out of my weakness and my melancholy,

As he is very potent with such spirits,

Abuses me to damn me: I’ll have grounds

More relative than this: the play’s the thing,

Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

In this passage it is obvious that the apparition as such does not leave Hamlet merely devoid of all stability350, but that he entertains a reasonable doubt, and is determined to make his conviction a certainty by his own experiments before he proceeds to act upon it.

(γ) As a summary description of these universal powers, which appear not merely in their external independence, but are the vital and moving forces in the human heart and all that is implied in its most intimate life, we may borrow an expression in use among the ancients, that is to say Pathos (πάθος.) To translate this word adequately is not easy. Passion almost always implies as its concomitant an element of meanness or baseness. We contend in ordinary parlance that a man should not surrender himself to his passions. It must therefore be understood that we use the expression pathos in a nobler and more universal sense than this without the slightest implication of anything blameworthy or egotistic. The devoted love of the sister Antigone is an excellent example of a pathos in the full significance of the Greek use of the term. Pathos in this sense is a power of the emotional life which completely justifies itself, an essential part of the content of rationality and the free will. Orestes, for example, kills his mother not so much on account of any force of his emotional life which we strictly can call passion; rather it is a pathos in itself fully considered upon and essentially sane which carries him on to the awful deed. Thus understood we may add that it is impossible to say that the gods possess pathos. They are merely the universal content of that which is the stimulating energy in the resolves and actions of human individuality. The gods as such continue in their repose and freedom from passion, and however much they may quarrel or contend among themselves, there is nothing really serious in it all, or their strife possessed merely a symbolical significance in the view we may take of it as a universal war of the gods. We must therefore strictly limit pathos to the actions of mankind, and conceive thereunder the essential or rational content, which is present in the human consciousness identical with itself and throughout suffuses the emotional life.

(αα) We may say, then, that pathos constitutes the true mediating link351, the veritable domain of art. The representation of it is the most truly effective part of a work of art, as it is its influence upon those who look at it. Pathos sets a string in motion, which vibrates through every human heart. Every one must know the type of worth and reason, which underlies the content of a genuine example of pathos, must recognize it at once when he sees it. And the cause of this is that pathos moves us because it is that which is essentially the vital force of our human existence. And it equally follows that that which is wholly external, the natural environment and particular scene, in its active support of the effect of pathos, need only be treated quite subordinately. Nature must in consequence be drawn upon as a fact essentially symbolical and suffer the pathos to re-echo from her walls, which is the most real subject-matter of artistic representation. Landscape is, for example, a type or genre of painting of less importance than historical painting; but even there we find that the school of landscape most independent should not be without a general harmonic relation to human feeling, and, in fact, possesses a certain type of pathos. In this sense we are told art generally ought to touch the emotions. Before accepting this principle, however, we ought first to inquire through what means this peculiar effect of art must be brought about. “To touch the emotions” is in general the activity of something in union with feeling, and mankind, more particularly the mankind of to-day, are, or a more considerable portion of them are, only too readily open to such experiments. The man who showers tears on us, starts the seeds of tears, which grow up fast enough. In art, however, only that ought to move us which contains in itself the real import of pathos.

(ββ) For such reasons we may affirm that neither in comedy nor in tragedy ought pathos to be that which is only folly or personal idiosyncracy. Shakespeare’s Timon, for example, is on purely material grounds a misanthrope; his friends have eaten him up, consumed his substance, and when he himself requires their gold desert him. He consequently becomes a passionate enemy of mankind. The situation is both conceivable and consistent with nature, but it contains no pathos that can be justified on principle. Even to a more striking extent is the hate we find in “The Misanthrope,” that play of Schiller’s apprenticeship, purely a vagary of modern ideas. For in this latter case the misanthrope is in addition a thoughtful, perspicacious, and entirely noble man, great-hearted towards his peasants, whom he has freed from their villeinage, and devoted to his daughter, who is, apart from her beauty, in all respects worthy of his love. In much the same way, in that novel of August Lafontaine, Quintius Heimeran von Flaming is worried with the follies of mankind. It is, however, our most latter-day poetry which, above all, loves to wind itself into every conceivable knot of fantastical falsehood352, attempting thereby to secure an effect through mere oddity, but failing to find the slightest response in any sane person for the reason that every vestige of what is really present in human life has vanished from such refinements of mental athletics.

In another direction we may remark that everything which depends solely, that is to say, in so far as scientific apprehension is the main requirement, upon instruction, testimony to the truth, and insight of what is offered as such, is no fit subject-matter for the representation of a genuine pathos. The facts of scientific knowledge are a part of this material. And the reason of this is that science demands a particular form of education, an effort towards and a knowledge of the specific forms of science and their relative importance of exceptional variety and extension; an interest in this type of study is by no means a universally moving influence in the hearts of men, but is limited and must ever remain limited to a narrow circle of votaries. The treatment of purely religious instruction presents similar difficulty, if we mean by that the development of the same in its profoundest import. No doubt the universal content of religion, such as the belief in God and similar theses, is of the deepest interest to anyone worthy of it. Art is, however, not directly concerned either in the exposition of religious dogmas, nor, indeed, in any exceptional insight into their truth; it is consequently of importance that she should be held aloof front such disquisitions. It is all the more necessary that we should through art entrust every type of pathos to the human heart, every motive of ethical significance, which are of practical and vital interest. The influence of religious ideas is rather upon the subjective world of emotion, the heaven of the heart, the ever-repeated consolation and uplifting of the individual life, than upon direct action in the strict sense. For that which is Divine in religion on its practical side is morality and the powers which are potent in the ethical life. These powers, however, in contrast with the heaven of religion in its purest form, are in definite relation to the world and that which is entirely human. Among the ancients this worldly content was fundamentally included in their conception of Deity, and consequently their gods could be related directly to human action and its artistic presentation.

From all this it will readily appear that the significant moments of volitional activity which present to us the pathos we have just endeavoured to define are numerically small and the range of them restricted. In the opera especially it is inevitable that the sphere from which such may be selected is a narrow one; we consequently have for ever dinned in our ears the plaints and delights, the misfortunes and happiness of love, fame, honour, friendship, maternal and marital devotion.

(γγ) Now a pathos of this kind requires for its display not merely the power of exposition, but also that of perfected elaboration353. And what is more, the soul which entrusts to its pathos the spiritual wealth it possesses must be one with real wealth to dispose of, and not one that can rest in a condition of purely intensive self-concentration. It must, in short, be ready to give an outward semblance to its self-expression and rise to the finished perfection of that. The distinction between this power of self-concentration and that of self-revelation is of great importance; and we shall find that in this respect the types of individuality such as generically represent different races offer essential points of contrast. Nations whose reflective consciousness has been highly trained are more eloquent in the expression of their passions than others who are not so. The ancients, for example, were accustomed to unfold the pathos, which is the animating principle of human personality, in its profoundest significance, without running off into cold generalities or empty tattle. The French also in this respect are naturally gifted, and their eloquence in the expression of passion is not by any means always merely a piling up of words, as we Germans, following the bent of our national reserve, to which the repeated expression of emotion appears to be a kind of wrong inflicted upon it, are only too ready to think it is. In fact, we have gone so far in this direction that we could mention a distinct phase in our poetical history, when the younger spirits, at any rate, sick to death of that which they dubbed “the flush of French rhetorical water-drops,” yearned to such an extent after the simplicity of Nature that their artistic energy could only express itself for the most part in interjections. It is hardly necessary to observe, however, that we shall arrive at no “open sesame” with Ahs and Ohs, a damn here and there thrown in, or any other random note of storm and bluster. The inspiration of mere interjections is a feeble one, or rather is simply the way in which the still unrefined nature expresses itself. The spirit which is to reveal to us pathos must be a spirit which is full to running over, which is able to spread itself abroad and give expression to its virtue.

We may add, too, that in this respect Goethe and Schiller present a most marked contrast. Goethe is less pathetic than Schiller, makes use of a mode of artistic expression which is more intensive; more especially in his lyrics we are struck by this characteristic of self-reserve. His songs, and this is the true quality of the pure lyric, go naturally on their way, without entirely giving us all that they contain. Schiller, on the contrary, is clearly anxious to unfold the pathos of his subject to its furthest limit, and with all the clearness and force of expression he can muster. Claudius in “Wands-becker Boten”354 has contrasted Voltaire and Shakespeare in much the same fashion, maintaining that the one is what the other only appears to be. “Master Arouet tells us: ‘I weep’; Shakespeare really weeps!” To this we can only reply that it is precisely with such telling and appearance that art is concerned and not with the mere positive fact. If Shakespeare merely wept while Voltaire made others think he wept, so much the worse for the poet Shakespeare.

To conclude, then, it is necessary that pathos, in order to be in itself concrete, as it should be in ideal art, be presented in its artistic manifestation as the pathos issuing from a spiritual nature, rich and comprehensive. And this result carries us forward to that third aspect of our consideration of “the action” already adverted to, that is to say, an inquiry into what is implied by character in this connection.

We will summarize the proceeding argument. Our point of departure was the universal and substantive powers which are the original stimulus to action. Such require as the medium of their active realization human individuality, in which they then appear as affecting pathos355. But, furthermore, the universal inherent in these powers must in particular individuals acquire the concentrated unity and concreteness of a whole, and a single whole. This totality is man apprehended in his fulfilled spiritual content and the subjectivity therein comprised, in one word the entire self-contained human individuality which we designate as character. The gods are born into the pathos of men, and pathos in its more concrete form of activity is human character.

In character, then, we find the real focus356 of the ideal exposition of art, that is to say in so far as the embodiment unites in itself the separate aspects of it already developed as consistent phases, in the construction of its own totality. For the Idea as Ideal, by which we mean as clothed in a form within the grasp of sensuous imagination and perception, and in its activity as action and accomplishment, is, if we define it strictly, just this self-relation of the subjective individuality. The individuality, however, which is truly free, and nothing short of this will satisfy the Ideal, has not merely to declare itself as universality, but at the same time, to assert its nature as concrete singularity, as the mediating bond which unites and transpierces both sides thus related, which in their self-related actuality subsist as unity. And this is precisely what we understand by character, the ideal form of which consists in the wealth of energy with which all the constituent aspects of the subjective life are welded in one whole.

We will now inquire rather more closely into the nature of this conception of character viewed under three distinct aspects.

First, as co-extensive357 individuality, that is to say, with, our attention directed to the wealth of substance contained in it.

Secondly, with direct reference to its particularity, the form in which it is bound to appear, albeit still a totality, as one that is more defined or specific.

Thirdly, in our final apprehension of it as a unity which is fully identified with its own determinate form, that is, which is throughout fused with the same by virtue of its own principle of subjective self-identity, and thereby attaches to the whole the significance of an essentially assured character.

We will now develop and elucidate more fully what we conceive to be implied in the above general propositions.

(α) And first we would draw attention to the fact that this pathos, though an essential feature in the development of completed individuality, is not, in the specific form of its appearance, the sole or exclusive interest of the individuality portrayed. It is, in fact, merely one aspect of the efficient358 character, if one of paramount importance. To put it in rather a strong way, the human soul does not merely carry within it one god as the original of its pathos; on the contrary, the spiritual scope of humanity has wider borders, and we may affirm that many gods make their dwelling in one true man, or, rather, all the powers which are scattered throughout the heaven of the gods are enclosed within that one breast. It is co-extensive with the entire field of Olympus. In this sense one of old has said: “Out of thine own passions, O man, hast thou created the gods.” And, as a matter of fact, in proportion as the intelligence of the Hellenic folk quickened, the number of their gods increased; and, furthermore, the gods of their earliest days were less intelligent, that is to say, they were god-like figures deficient both in individuality and determinate character.

In this wealth of content, accordingly, it is necessary that the character adequate to ideal art should display itself. And this is just that which creates the interest we feel in a character, namely, that a totality such as that we have above described emerges from it, and the character, while reposing on its abundance, nevertheless persists in perfect equality with itself, as one secure and self-excluding subject. If the character, however, be not conceived and depicted as this rounded and subjective unity, is abstract in the sense that it is entirely the sport of one passion, such must then appear as self-destructive359, or at least cracked, weak, and without real fibre. For the weakness and inertness of individuals is just this very thing, that the eternal forces of which we have spoken never assert themselves in them as a real part of their most essential substance, as, to put it logically, predicates which adhere to them as the subjects of such.

In Homer360, for example, every hero is the living focus of a whole congeries of qualities and traits. Achilles is the most youthful hero in the host, but his youthful exuberance is represented as quite compatible with all other entirely human qualities, and Homer unfolds before us this variety through situations which offer the finest contrast. He loves his mother, Thetis, he weeps for Briseis, when she is snatched from him, and his violated sense of honour drives him into the conflict with Agamemnon, which is the original fount of all the events that follow after it in the “Iliad.” Add to this he is the truest friend of Patroclus and Antilochus; moreover, he is the most blooming, fiery youth, swift of foot, brave, yet full of reverence for gray hairs; the faithful Phoenix and trusty servant are at his feet, and at the funeral of Patroclus the hoary Nestor is treated with the highest deference and honour. And, in contrast to all this, Achilles is represented as inflammable to a degree, effervescent, revengeful, and full of the most brutal austerity when face to face with the foe. He binds the slain Hector to his chariot, trails the corpse in fell hunter’s fashion three times round the walls of Troy; yet stays his anger when the old Priam comes to his tent, and, as he thinks within his heart of his own old father, reaches to the weeping king the hand which has done to death his son. Of Achilles we may well exclaim: “here is a man indeed, and human nature, ay, noble human too, in all the length and breadth of its riches, is unveiled before us in this one man!” It is just the same with all the other Homeric characters — Odysseus, Diomedes, Ajax, Agamemnon, Hector, Andromache — every one of them is a whole, a world in itself, a complete and living member of humanity, something very different at least from your allegorical abstract of some one particular trait. What frosty, faded personalities, despite all their vigour and rigour, are the horned Siegfried, Hagen of Troy, nay, even Volker, the musician, in comparison.

It is this variety of characterization, and this alone, which can give to a character the interest of life. At the same time this fulness of detail must really appear as included in the personality itself, that is, it must not strike us as the mere diversion, passing freak, or suggestion of an excited fancy, such as we see in the case of children who will take up everything in turn, and even make something out of it, yet, for all that, are without essential character. Character in this latter sense will penetrate and make itself a home in the most diverse phases of the emotional life of man, will steep itself to overflowing with that abundance, and, at the same time, not remain thus immersed, but throughout all the congeries of interest, objects, qualities, all the traits that distinguish or arrest it, maintain the form of its self-exclusive and alert subjectivity intact.

For the representation of such exhaustive types of character epic poetry is, above all others, adapted, dramatic and lyrical poetry are less so.

(β) Art, however, will not be content to remain at the point which the course of our inquiry has reached, namely, the notion of character as a mere congeries of traits. For the object we have before us now is the Ideal in its specific determination, and singularity, or, rather, concrete individuality, are both of them prominent and necessary features. Action, more than anything else, in its conflict and reaction is impossible without some restriction and clear definition of form. For this reason the heroes of dramatic poetry are for the most part of simpler definition than those of epic poetry. And the way we get at a clear definition is through some pathos out of the ordinary which is so portrayed as to make some essential trait of character stand out in bold relief, and itself to be the stimulus to particular objects, resolves, and actions. If, however, this simplification is carried so far that any character appears as though it were pared down to a mere shadow-like semblance of any form of pathos, such as love or honour, all real vitality and spiritual depth must necessarily vanish, and the representation, as is not unfrequently the case in the French school of drama for this very reason, can only offer us a cold and jejune result. We may therefore conclude that in this aspect of particularity the prominent feature which asserts itself pre-eminently will be this, that within the borders of this very limitation the fulness of life is completely preserved, so that the personality in question has free scope allowed it for further expansion in many directions, a power to adapt itself to every variety of situation, and, in short, is able to unfold and express in every possible way the wealth of a truly complete spiritual life361. Despite the supreme simplicity of their pathos the characters in the Sophoclean drama possess this intrinsic vitality. We may indeed compare them in their plastic self-seclusion to the figures of sculpture. For it is also quite possible that sculpture express very various delineations of character despite all the tenacity of its definition. In contrast to the bluster of overpowering passion, which concentrates all its forces upon one single point, it exhibits out of its tranquillity and speechlessness that predominant neutrality, which peacefully envelops all powers within itself; but this unperturbed unity does not, however, persist in any indissoluble union with mere formal definition, but, rather, in virtue of its beauty, suffers at the same time the birth-throes of all that pertains to it to disrobe itself as through a cloud of immediate possibility into fresh relations of every variety. In the finest figures of sculpture we behold a tranquil depth, which unfolds, as it were, the pregnant womb, from which all other potencies may be born. In contrast with sculpture it is yet of more vital importance to the arts of painting, music, and poetry, that they should display the inmost complexity of character, and real artists of every age have recognized this. In Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” for example, the most pathetic characteristic of Romeo is his love: but he is also placed before us under relations of the greatest contrast, whether it be in reference to his parents, his friends, his love troubles, or his affair of honour in which he fights with Tybalt, his attitude of deference and trust to the monk, nay, even on the verge of the grave his conversation with the apothecary, from whom he purchases the poison. Throughout he is the same worthy and noble man of deep emotions. In the same way the character of Juliet is unfolded throughout the range of her relations to father, mother, nurse, the Count Paris, and father Lawrence. And, despite of this, she is as deeply immersed362 in her one preoccupation as she is in every one of these situations, and her entire character is transpierced with and carried away by the one single emotion, her passionate love for her lover, which is as deep and broad as the unbounded sea, so that it is but the simple truth when she exclaims, “The more I give, the more I possess, both are infinite.”

From all this it appears that even when there is but one pathos visible, it must unfold itself as the wealth of all it possesses. And this is what really happens even in lyrical poetry, where we find the pathos is not attached to actions determined by positive circumstances and conditions. For in this latter case the pathos can only assert itself as the spiritual state of an emotional nature otherwise complete in itself, which is, that is to say, free to express itself in any other conceivable circumstance and situation which may confront it. The use of words of vital significance, an imagination which can associate itself with all the world, can restore the Past to the Present, can transform the entire external environment of man’s life to a symbolical expression of his spirit, can bravely adventure into the depths of comprehensive thought, and, while doing so, reveal an exuberant, capacious, clear, exalted, and noble nature — a wealth of character such as this, freely expressing such a world, is a prize indeed for the Lyric Muse. No doubt a purely logical reflection may find it impossible that such, variety of character should co-exist with a masterful clearness of type. We may be asked, for instance, in reference to the heroic character of Achilles, whose strength of youth is the pre-eminent, trait of his beauty, how it is possible to reconcile the tender heart so manifest in his relations to his father and his friend with the cruel act of revenge wherewith he drags Hector round the walls. Precisely the same kind of inconsequence is to be met with in Shakespeare’s clowns. They are, with scarcely an exception, bubbling over with wit and the humour of genius. And, no doubt, there will always be fools enough to ask us how men thus spiritually gifted could ever betake themselves to such tomfooleries. The truth is that the reflection of the formal logic is sure to emphasize one aspect of a character, and conclude that the entire man is minted under its impression to the exclusion of all others. To such everything that asserts itself as alien to the hallmark of its beggarly mintage can only appear as an inconsequence. In the truely rational contemplation of the whole as distinct from the parts, and thereby of the living thing, that which appears as inconsequent will be precisely that which brings all into fit co-ordination. For our humanity is just this very paradox. We have not merely to carry the contradictions of our complex nature, but to suffer the load363 with patience, and throughout prove staunch to our burden.

(γ) We may conclude, then, that character must fuse together its particularity in the element of its spiritual substance; it should possess a definite type, and at the same time retain in this distinction the force and stability of a single fully self-consistent pathos. Where we find our humanity represented without such a centre of unity, the different aspects of such variety it may possess will lose all relative meaning or significance and fall away from each other. In art we shall find that what we distinguish in our conception of personality as infinite or the Divine is just this self-consistency in unity. If this view be a just one it is obvious that such characterizations as stability and determination are of great importance in the ideal representation of character. And we shall only obtain such a result, as already observed, in so far as the universality of the powers inherent in our humanity are permitted to transpierce the mere particularity of the individual character and, by virtue of the unity thus set up, create a subjective and at the same time individual life which supplies its own principle of unity and self-identity.

Such a condition is all important, and we must now advert to a number of artistic compositions, more particularly of later times, in express relation to it.

In the “Cid” of Corneille, for example, the collision between the opposing principles of love and honour is a match, no doubt, of brilliant effects. A pathos of this kind, involved as it is in the opposition of distinct forces may, no doubt, be the operative ground of conflicts; but when we find such portrayed as the spiritual struggle of one and the same character, though such antagonism may very readily supply us with the material for brilliant rhetoric and effective monologue, the cataclysm which is here presented in the emotional life of one person driven thus by turns from its abstract subjection to honour into the equally abstract one of love, and forthwith hounded back again, is not favourable to the portrayal of a character of genuine stability and homogeneousness.

It is equally inconsistent with the delineation of resolute personality when a leading character, already under the predominant influence of some specific pathos, is portrayed as one overmastered by the direction or persuasion of a subordinate character, such is thus enabled to shift the responsibility upon other shoulders. This is what actually takes place in the “Phedra” of Racine when the mind of Phedra is depicted as entirely motived by the words of Oenone. A character of real distinction acts out of its own initiative, and will not suffer the views of a mere stranger to be that which determines its own resolution. Only when action is the direct result of its own reflections do we get that clear relation between personal initiative and the consequent result which carries with it the full weight of guilt or responsibility.

We find yet another type of this instability of character as quite a peculiar possession of the more recent literary output of Germany. It is a type of character in which a kind of flatulence in emotion is the rule no less than the source. The classic example is the Werther of Goethe’s romance, a thoroughly morbid type of character, without any vestige of real manliness such as might carry him beyond the egotism of his love-passion. What makes him interesting is the passion and beauty of his emotional life, the intimate fellowship between himself and Nature which the course of his spiritual experience and the pliability of his temperament accentuate. This effeminacy has yet more recently embodied itself in many other forms of expression which descend with increasing rapidity to the lowest circle of jejune and tasteless egotism. We must not even omit, for instance, to include in our list that illustration of the lovely soul which we find in Jacobi’s “Woldemar.” In this romance we are made a present of the glory of emotional volubility in all its pretensions. It would be difficult, indeed, to cite a better example of the self-deceptive illusion of personal virtue and excellence. Here we have all that sublimity and divinity of soul, which relates itself crookedly to every possible aspect of the actual world; that type of feebleness which is wholly unable to share in or tolerate any portion of the labours or interests of practical life as it really is. So rooted is it in its own consciousness of superiority it passes everything as unworthy of it on the other side. It is, in fact, a peculiar feature of this type of “lovely soul” that, even when face to face with the truly ethical interests and wholly sane objects of life, instead of meeting them frankly, it retires into the seclusion of itself, where it weaves its own threads of finery and passes its time in hatching out its exquisite brood of religious and moral reflections. And connected closely with this personal enthusiasm for our superabundant excellence, which we set forth in front of ourselves with such a brave show, there will always be an intense sensitiveness for all other beings who may appear at any moment to sympathize with, comprehend, and appreciate this beauty of the solitary life. If such fellow-feeling is not forthcoming we find the very heart of us troubled to its depths and infinitely bruised. We have lost at one stroke all humanity, friendship, and love. We are unable to put away with whatever act of pedantry or rudeness may be in question, some trivial circumstance or stupidity over which the vision of any character of breadth or strength would pass without a tremor. It whirls away the thought of everything else, and that which is by itself of least significance proves to be that which finally most reduces us to despair. Such is the source of all that endless train of melancholy, trouble, heartache, peevishness, sickness, dejection, and poverty of spirit which follows, such the spring of all those self-torturing reflections one on the top of another, that cramp and obstinacy, nay, finally, that cruelty of soul, through which the wretchedness and weakness of the spiritual content of such a type, of “loveliness” consummates and declares itself. No heart that is truly sound can wish to unite itself with such an emotional hermitage. For it is a fundamental characteristic of all genuine character that it carries within itself both the courage and the strength to do and to will some actual thing. The interest, therefore, that such natures which are for ever revolving round themselves may arouse in us is after all an empty interest, and necessarily so despite all the conviction with which such natures may assure us that they belong to a higher and purer sphere than our own, a sphere which has revealed to our vision that peculiar type of the Divine they have uncovered from their secret parts and finally present to us, to borrow an apt figure, en negligée.

This want of genuine solidity of character appears in yet another form where we find the particular manifestations of this world of “fine feelings” turned as it were upside down and hypostatized as independent forces. Much that passes for magic, magnetism, spiritualism, the apparitions of clairvoyance, the morbid condition of sleep-walking, is attributable to this source. The living person in question is placed in a relation to these abstruse powers, which from one point of view identifies him with them, and in another makes them appear as something foreign to his spiritual life, which determines and controls it. It is assumed that underlying these undefined forces there is some inexplicable truth which borders on the marvellous, or at any rate passes comprehension. From the world of art, however, all such powers of darkness should be banished. In art there is no darkness at all, but all is lucid and transparent, and in adventuring after such types of myopy speech merely flounders into spiritual disease, or plays loose as poetry with the nebulous, empty, and trivial, a good example of which is the verse of Hoffmann, and that piece by Henry von Klust entitled the “Prince of Homburg.” The truly ideal character has nothing in his composition, or the pathos which expresses it, of another world and its ghosts, but only actual interests, in which he finds himself at home. More particularly is this feature of clairvoyance become a trivial and vulgar recipe of our more modern poets. In Schiller’s “Tell,” on the contrary, when the old Attinghausen on the brink of the grave foretells the destiny of his country, the prophetic instinct is quite in its right place. It is always, however, a misfortune for an artist to find himself forced to exchange the sanity of a character with some malady of the soul whether it be to motive the collision or excite interest. For this reason he should only avail himself of the condition of insanity in quite exceptional cases.

In conclusion we may connect with these distortions of a sane vision, which are so much opposed to all real unity and consistency of character, the principle of our latter-day irony. This false theory has betrayed the poet into grafting upon his characters qualities so essentially diverse that they are incapable of all homogeneous relation; the essential unity of every character is thus confounded. According to this theory a character is first presented as characterized in a certain way, and immediately after we have that very determination converted into its opposite, and the character itself is propounded to us as nothing more than the negation of what it was and is. Moreover this very futility is accepted by this irony as the supreme discovery of art. An audience should not, in short, be carried away by an essentially positive interest, but should be pulled up at the critical moment, much as the irony itself is no sooner launched upon anything than it is off again. They would even explain the characters of Shakespeare according to such a principle. We are informed that Lady Macbeth was an irreproachable wife of the tenderest feeling, despite the fact that she not only falls in with the suggestion of the murder, but actually eggs her husband on to its execution. But if the signet mark of Shakespeare is conspicuous on any one quality it is on the firm and decisive delineation of his characters, even when it is only the formal greatness and consistency of evil that is in question. Hamlet, it is true, is a case of mental indecision, but even he is only in doubt as to the way he shall carry out his purpose, not at all as to what has to be done. Yet nowadays they would assimilate even Shakespeare’s characters to a world of ghosts, and appear to think that this futility and indecision of ups and downs, this general squeamishness364 in short can by itself contribute to our interest. The Ideal, however, is centred in this, that Idea is made actual, and our humanity is associated with such actuality as subject and consequently as a unity which is essentially firm-rooted.

We may here, so far at least as this portion of our inquiry is concerned, bring our observations upon the individuality which is consistent with real character to a close. That which we have mainly sought to emphasize is a pathos which is at once self-determined and essential, the possession of a rich and complete nature, the spiritual world of which such a pathos transfuses under such a form that this process of transfusion no less than the pathos itself receives its artistic presentment. At the same time this pathos must not be allowed to come into conflict with itself in the hearts of men so as to stultify its very nature and consistency as pathos.

Our consideration of the determination of the Ideal was in the first instance occupied with the general inquiry why it was and how it came about that the Ideal ever received at all the definite embodiment of a particular form. Following after this we arrived at the conclusion that inherent process was essential to our notion of it, that in fact the element of difference was only by this means asserted within it, and that this process viewed as a whole is presented us in the action. We discovered, however, that in virtue of the action the Ideal passes over into actual relations with the external world; we have therefore, and this is the third important step, to solve the further question what kind of form this its final aspect, as associated with external reality, the Ideal will receive under adequate artistic representation. We would recall the fact that the Ideal is the Idea under a form which is in union with its own actuality. Up to the present point of our inquiry our attention has been exclusively occupied with that aspect or phase of this actuality which we may call in general terms human individuality and its character. Man is, however, also in possession of a concrete and external existence. In separation from this it is true he concentrates his spiritual life to a point in self-consciousness, but he remains for all that, even in this subjective unity, immediately related to the external world. To the actual existence of mankind the surrounding sphere of a world is as indispensable as the protection of a temple is to the statues of the god it contains. And for this very reason we must now advert to all or some of those many diverse threads, whereby the Ideal is woven in with this external environment and is shown in relief against it365.

This opens to our view a practically immeasurable expanse of relations and modes under which the process of the external and relative world is determined. For in the first place we are confronted at once with the bare facts of external Nature such as particular locality, situation, whether habitable or not, temporal condition, the nature of the prevailing climate, whether in our earth’s northern or southern hemispheres, and in fact in whatever direction we advance we have a fresh picture before us. Moreover, external Nature is made use of by man to satisfy his own needs and purposes; and all the ways under which he converts her to that use, that is to say the adroitness with which he discovers and then equips himself with tools and a home to live in, with weapons, with seats to recline upon, carriages to ride in, nay, all that the art of cooking may bring with it for his food, the entire apparatus of his luxury no less than his comfort, all this and much more fall within the limits of our inquiry. Add to this the further and yet more important consideration that every man lives within a comprehensive and equally real world of spiritual relations, which itself, too, presents to his view all the different modes under which command and submission is maintained, that is to say the family, blood-relationship, property, country and town life, the cultus of religion, the organization of defence and offence, civic and political associations, private society, in short every conceivable form under which ethical customs and usages are organized in the institutions and permanent activities which contribute to the actual environment of human existence.

In all the directions enumerated above the Ideal is in immediate contact with the reality of the practical world in its everyday dress, or in other words, with the commonplace prose of life. And impressed by this fact we may easily be led to the conclusion, if we have already accepted the nebulous conception of idealism elaborated recently, that art can have no alternative but to dissever herself absolutely from all connection with this world of relative appearances. Such at least can only be logically inferred from a theory which assumes that this relation of externality is one of pure indifference, or rather, in contrast to the subjective world of spirit, is of no substantive significance or worth. Agreeably to this view art is a spiritual dominion, whose sole object is to exalt us above the sphere of material wants, necessities, and dependence, and to liberate us from the logic, and we may add the comedy, of facts, which in this field claim the exclusive attention of our humanity. For, apart from any other consideration, all that meets us upon this terra firma of life’s prose is for the most part of a purely conventional character, and, conditioned as it is by time, space, and custom, simply a congeries of contingent facts, which it is derogatory to the nature of art to accept. This view of ideality, which is really an illusive one, is in part due to one of those highly flavoured abstractions of our latter-day thinking, in which we merely find that the thinker’s courage has failed him to come to terms with the external world in question; in part also it is due to that type of prepossession which drives a man to assert summarily his independence of practical necessities when the advantages of birth, status, and social position have not already effected this for him. For such a man the only relief available is a complete withdrawal into the secret world of the emotions, a prison-house of unreality he steps out of never. Here he remains in what he conceives to be the temple of wisdom gazing ecstatic at what he takes to be the stars, and naturally values at the price of a nutshell all that is found on the Earth. The real Ideal, however, is not confined to the shadow-like world of the emotions, but in its perfected whole must freely borrow from the definite structure of external objects of sight in every direction. And the reason of this is that man himself, whose nature is the central source that gives to that Ideal all its significance, is alive, and his life is only actual in a particular place and time, as one with the Present, as the individualized type of infinity366; and in short the opposition of an external garland of Nature is a fundamental characteristic of his life and its association with him and his activity is imperative. It follows that if this activity is to be apprehended by art, not merely as belonging to man alone, but in the specific form it may take in that world of appearance, the mode of its existence there will assert itself, as the mobility, reaction, and animating force of life itself in contact and transfusion with the material complex which surrounds it.

Man is, however, in virtue of his self-consciousness a world in himself367, and as such is differentiated from the external world of Nature which confronts him; and this external world is equally with himself a rounded whole whose unity asserts itself in the principle of causality. This self-exclusion of these two worlds is, however, only apparent; they are in their separation essentially related, and it is precisely this association which constitutes concrete reality, whose artistic embodiment is the content of the Ideal. And this brings us once more to the question already mooted, namely, in what semblance or form the external material which we find in this mutually related world we have referred to as concrete reality368 can be presented to us by art in a manner consistent with the Ideal of art.

We will once more accept the triple division of our subject-matter, and examine a work of art from three distinct points of view. First, there is the material of externality accepted in the bare abstractness of its forms, such as space, figure, time, colour, which we must consider relatively to the artistic form most adapted to it.

Secondly, we must consider externality in its full and actualized concreteness, as above explained, a mode of reality which imperatively requires in a work of art that it should be in close affiliation with the subjective content of the spiritual life of man immediately related to it.

Thirdly, our consideration will be directed to the important fact that a work of art is created for the delight of human perceptions, for a public in short, which justly claims that the objects of art should bring home to it the interests of its spiritual life, its real beliefs, emotions, and ideas, so that it may enter with a genuine response into their artistic presentation.

The Ideal in passing out of the bare image of its essential form into external or determinate existence secures for itself a reality which presents two distinct aspects. From one point of view we see that a work of art discloses necessarily in the content of the Ideal the concrete semblance of reality, that is to say it presents that content as a definite situation or particular circumstance, action, event or character, and presents it moreover in the mode of external existence. From another it is equally obvious that art makes some specific and sensuous material the vehicle of the particular content in its entirety of all that we have above summarized; it creates in short a new world sensible to eye and ear, the world of art. Under both these aspects we may further observe that art penetrates to the remotest limits of externality which are compatible with its form as the self-including unity of the Ideal and conformable to its appearance as a concrete whole permeated with the energy of spirit369. A work of art moreover itself may, as an object qualified by externality, be viewed in two distinct ways. We may regard it simply as an external thing, and as such only conformable to a unity that is external in the sense external objects are such. In considering it from this latter point of view we have once more to consider that relation of externality which we found it necessary to discuss in our examination of the beauty of Nature. And for this reason we shall again have to make use of those specific determinants which we previously discussed, and even then primarily in their connection with art. The modes under which external form was in the previous section exhaustively considered were then treated in a twofold way. First we analysed such conceptions as uniformity, symmetry, and conformity to rule; we then examined unity itself regarded as the simplicity and purity of the sensuous material, which art makes use of as the external medium for the existence of her expositions.

(a) We will start our inquiry by examining the position in which we now find ourselves relatively to such conceptions as uniformity and symmetry. It is obvious that these, expressing as they do the entirely lifeless unity of the geometrical logic, can by no means exhaust the nature of a work of art even when entirely regarded as an external object. Such determinations are only exhaustive in their relation to what is in itself lifeless, such as time and the configuration of space. Confined in this way though they be to the barest forms of externality, they are then true witnesses both to the power and substance of reason. And consequently we find they assert themselves in a twofold manner even in art. In the first of these, it is this very quality of their abstractness which operates by way of contrast to the living pulse of art, which is forced even in the confines of its sensuous material to raise itself over and beyond mere symmetry into the freedom of the Ideal. In this process of liberation which may be exemplified in the melodies of the art of music we do not, however, find that the conformity to rule disappears altogether, it is merely made subservient as a foundation. In the second, this principle of measure and rule in its application to the indefinite and unlimited is the one and only qualifying principle which certain arts can accept owing to the nature of the media which those arts make use of. In such cases uniformity is itself and alone raised to the ideal significance of the art. The principal example of an art of this type is that of architecture; and the reason of this is that a work of art which is wholly architectonic is directed to the one object of reconstituting, by means of an artistic form, that which is essentially the external and inorganic environment of spirit. In this art, consequently, all that is rectilinear, right-angled, circular, or presents uniformity of pillars, windows, arches, piers, vaults, and so forth is the dominant principle of unity.

The artistic structure of architecture is not erected entirely as an object in itself, but rather as an external frame, embellishment and local habitation for something else which it subserves. A building is not complete until it has received the statue of the god or the society of human beings who make their dwelling therein. An artistic work of this kind should not therefore receive all or indeed the main attention. Holding this in our minds, it will appear obviously to the purpose that uniformity and symmetry should be here the prevailing characteristic of the structure; the mind passes over very readily one that is throughout uniform, and will not trouble itself about it for any length of time. Of course, we cannot here discuss the symbolical significance, which, in addition to that above examined, may attach to architectural form in its immediate relation to the spiritual content it envelops and emphasizes with a positive localization. The same principle applies to the art of making gardens, which we may define as a specific mode of architecture, in so far at least as an artistic conformation is imposed on external Nature370. In the garden no less than in the building man himself is the main object. There are two distinct types in this art of garden-construction. The one adopts as its main principle uniformity and symmetry; the other those of variety and irregularity. As an artistic product the former is to be preferred. Labyrinths, however numerous and intricate, garden-beds in endless alternation of spiral lines, bridges over water usually stagnant, with every conceivable surprise that gothic church, temples, Chinese pagodas, hermitages, urns, summer-houses, mounds, statues may claim to afford us — one glance and only one glance at such things is sufficient, the vulgar and artificial pretensions of it all is too patent, and we do not seek for another. It is quite another matter when we cross any actual situation of real natural beauty, which has not at least been exploited expressly for our enjoyment371, and by its own exceptional merit makes an irresistible appeal to our love of Nature and our sense of her beauty. A garden laid out with strict reference to the other extreme of regularity, makes no such attempts at surprises, but permits human beings to appear as the principal object in the external framework of natural beauty372. And this is really what a garden should be. Again in the art of painting the principle of uniformity and symmetry is clearly visible in the co-ordination of the whole, the grouping of the figures, their place and pose in the composition. But inasmuch as in painting the animation of life can assert itself through objects in a far profounder degree than is possible in architecture we find that it presents much less scope for the purely formal unity of the symmetrical, and the rule of uniformity in all its severity is for the most part to be traced only as the fundamental principle of composition in the earliest phases of art, making way in its more advanced forms to the freer line, which is associated in our minds with organic form rather than such we meet with in the pyramid and similar geometrical shapes. Conformity to rule and symmetry are further important factors in the composition of music and poetry. Owing to the incident of duration in the length of tones we find in these arts an aspect of what is intrinsically a purely external relation, which is incompatible with any other more concrete mode of presentation. If we take the spatial condition it is obvious that here everything which lies in juxtaposition can be seen at a glance. It is otherwise with that which occurs in Time. Here we have merely a succession of moments, every one of which takes the place of another, and in this vanishing procession they flow on for ever. And it is precisely this indeterminacy which it is the function of musical time or beat to inform by adding thereto a real definition capable of uniform repetition. In this way the indefinite progression is subordinated to a rational principle. In musical time we have a power which exerts such a fascination upon us, that, so far from being able to treat it with indifference, we not unfrequently find ourselves beating time quite unconsciously with it while listening. This constant recurrence of equal lengths of time according to a definite measure has nothing to do with tones and their duration as we find them in Nature. Tone simply as musical sound and time abstractly regarded, are both of them equally indifferent to such uniform divisions and repetitions. Musical time is consequently something wholly created by the human mind; and indeed there is more than a suggestion of this in the fact that in listening to musical time we are at once impressed with the conviction, that we have, in this control of time according to fixed rule, nothing less than a real reflection of our spiritual nature, or rather that of the fundamental truth of self-identity, an illustration absolutely precise of the way in which the subject of consciousness applies this very principle of uniformity, unity with itself, that is to say, in constant recurrence, throughout all the variety and most intricate multiplicity of experience. And it is for this reason that the beat of musical time meets with such a startling response in the very depths of our being, gripping hold, as it does, of that self-identity, which is the fundamental abstract principle of our inmost life. Considered in this relation it is not; the spiritual content, not the concrete soul of our emotions, any more than it is the musical tone as tone, which appeals to us so intimately; it is simply the formal unity which the unity of consciousness transfers to the temporal process, and which is thus re-echoed back to our conscious life. And the same remarks apply to the measure and rhyme of poetry. The sensuous medium is here, too, in the same way carried out of the sphere of that which is external to ourselves, and at once asserts there the presence of something over and above that which is expressed by our ordinary consciousness, which in its general use treats the time-divisions of tones with indifference or caprice.

A uniformity of similar character, if not so consistently defined, may be traced still further, and is involved in the living content of poetry itself, although the relation here is quite an external one. By this we mean that in an epic poem or a drama, both of which have their particular subdivisions, cantos, or acts, whatever may be the specific term applicable, there is an approximate principle of equality apparent in the division of subject-matter. And the same characteristic is generally true in the grouping of the subject in pictures, although such should not appear to be a necessary result of the nature of the subject-matter itself, nor create the impression that this uniform distribution is due to any controlling principle of first importance.

Conformity to rule and symmetry, which are the abstract unity and definition of all that is essentially spatial and its configuration no less than of all which is external under temporal condition, are mainly the co-ordinating principles of quantity and size, as we have already noticed in our consideration of the beauty of Nature. All that which does not, in virtue of its own specific medium373, strictly form part of external extension, is consequently freed from the range of those principles which assert themselves exclusively in the relations of quantity, and are determined through relations of deeper significance, and the unity which co-ordinates them. It follows from this that the further art embraces subject-matter which is independent of the external condition, so much the less significant the principle of uniformity becomes, in the co-ordination of that art’s subject-matter and the more completely is it restricted to a subordinate position.

It will be, perhaps, advisable here to close the above discussion of symmetry with a few general observations upon harmony. The relation of harmony is no longer one to mere quantity, but rather one to essential distinctions of quality, differences of tone, that is to say, which do not persist against each other in their native opposition, but as harmony or music have to be brought into concord. In music we find that the relation of the tonic to the mediant and dominant notes of the scale is no relation of bare quantity374, but implies the presence of tones whose difference is essentially a qualitative difference; which, that is to say, combine naturally in a unity, rather than continue to assert their distinguishing timbre in all its glaring antithesis and contradiction. The true discord, on the contrary, requires its harmonic resolution. The same qualitative consistency is to be found in the harmony of colour, in reference to which it is likewise one of the requirements of art that it should neither manifest itself in a picture as a motley and haphazard juxtaposition of pigments, nor as a neutral surface whereon all fundamental distinction is dissolved375, but as the artistic expression of a whole in which essential contrast is mediated through some principle of harmonious unity. Furthermore, we observe that harmony contains in itself a definite number of contrasted differences, which have naturally a particular significance of their own. Thus we find under the differentiation of colour a definite number known as the cardinal colours, which are primary derivatives of the fundamental notion of colour, and are not due to accidental composition. Harmony consists in bringing together a number of positive colours such as this classification implies, and uniting them in concordant unity. We must, that is to say, have in a picture not merely all the primary colours, yellow, blue, green, and red present, but also a harmonious scheme under which they are related; and the old masters have, without direct consciousness of the principle involved, paid express attention to this completeness of effect and arrived at artistic results which flowed out of it. And furthermore, for the very reason that we find in harmony the beginnings of a release from the bare condition of externality it is duly qualified to absorb and express a spiritual content of wider significance. We may mark an illustration of this in the way the old masters distinguished between the drapery of their principal figures and of those of less importance, painting that of the former in elementary colours of absolute purity, but only conceding to that of the rest compound varieties. The mantle of the Virgin Mary is almost always blue; blue in its assuaging sense of tranquillity is accepted as the counterfeit of the repose and tenderness of the heart. It is only rarely that we find her in a drapery of emphatic red.

(b) The second aspect of externality is the relation it occupies directly in the various material which art employs in the various media of its presentations. The unity here consists in the clear definition and homogeneousness of the material, which ought not to deviate in the direction of a vague characterization and mere confusion, or, speaking generally, give us the impression of dirtiness. This determinacy is also entirely dependent upon the spatial condition, that is to say, upon the purity of its delineation, the distinctness of its rectilinear and circular lines, and so on, no less than upon a consistent definition of Time such as we find in the accurate measure of the musical beat. It depends furthermore on the translucency both of specific tones and colours. In a good picture we shall find that there is nothing unclean or “dirty”376 in the colours employed, but everything is clear and asserts itself openly for what it is. The directness of its purity is, in fact, that which constitutes the lovely impression of colour upon our sense; and those colours which are most direct in their simplicity, such as a yellow which has no dash of green in it, or a red that is wholly independent of blue or yellow, produce the most emphatic effect. On the other hand, it is obviously more difficult to maintain a harmony of the whole when colours are thus contrasted in all their pristine simplicity. Yet in despite of this these essentially simple colours form the foundation of every true colour scheme, and although it may be impossible to dispense with a considerable use of their compounds, even these should not be allowed to appear in one dead and dull interfusion, but with their simple and luminous derivations shining through them377; otherwise instead of the clear lambency of colour we shall get nothing but a muddy residuum. We shall find that the same thing is necessary in the timbre of musical tone. In the case of strings whether of metal or catgut it is the vibration of the material, and, moreover, of a material of definite tension and length, which educes the musical note. If the tension is insufficient, or the length of the string which is struck is not the right one, the tone inevitably loses its clearness of definition, rings false, as we say, owing to the interfusion with it of other tones378. We have the same kind of result when a purely mechanical fretting or scraping is suffered to interfere with the purity of the vibratory motion, and so to render the emitted sound confused and harsh. In the same way, it is of the first importance to the art of singing that the human voice should be produced from throat and chest freely and with purest intonation; the voice should be heard without the least indication of its organic instrument, or, as in the case of hoarseness, with an obstructive accompaniment the singer fails to repress. We may conclude, then, that this translucency and purity, free from all admixture with anything foreign to it, and consistent throughout in its clearness, is that which creates the beauty of tone as immediately apprehended by our senses, and which distinguishes it from every kind of mere noise. And we may add further it is this which in human speech conspicuously applies to the articulation of the vowels. A language which enunciates the five vowels with distinction and purity, as is strongly the case in the Italian, is essentially musical and adapted to song. The diphthongs, on the contrary, always produce a confused tone. In literature little attention is paid to the direct reproduction of folk-dialects; we find them rather reduced to the simplest form of expression. In actual speech, however, this clearness of intonation only too often entirely disappears, so that we find, and markedly so in the case of dialects such as the South German, Swabian, and Swiss, men actually speak with an articulation of sound it is quite impossible to write down. We do not regard this, however, to be necessarily a defect in human speech, but rather a reflection of the rawness of the common folk. And here we must close our observations upon that external aspect of art, which, from the fact that it is external, and nothing more, is only capable of receiving an external and abstract unity.

Now according to its more comprehensive definition it is the concrete individuality of the Ideal impregnated with reason, which takes to itself externality as the form of its embodiment, and, moreover, in such a way that the external semblance, which is thus the medium of its expression, is throughout suffused with the mind inherent in this concrete individual form. In consequence of this such modes of relation as uniformity, symmetry, and harmony, or, in other words, the more simple determinations of the sensuous material are no longer adequate. This defect naturally extends our inquiry to that second aspect of the external determination of the Ideal already stated.

The fundamental truth which we shall endeavour to substantiate before everything in the matter which now immediately engages our attention is this, that man is under an obligation to make himself at peace and at home in the environment of the world; or, to put it rather differently, his individuality must live itself into Nature and all the conditions of that external world, and by doing so assert its freedom visibly. And, moreover, this must take place in such a way that these two related factors, that is, on the one side, the entirety of his inward life and the character it possesses or displays in all conditions or actions whatsoever, and, on the other, that objective entirety of external existence which confronts him, must wholly lose the appearance of two worlds which are either indifferent to or not homogeneous with379 each other, and forthwith proclaim themselves as harmoniously related and identical in substance. This externally objective world must, in so far as it is the reality of the Ideal, surrender the semblance of its own objective self-subsistency and stubbornness, in order that its fundamental unity with that to which it supplies the external and particular embodiment may be exhibited in truth.

To establish this unity with more conclusiveness we propose now to examine our subject under three different heads of discussion.

First, we may investigate the same from the point of view that this unity which binds the two factors already defined is merely a bond which possesses no positive reality380, but is merely a mysterious and secret connection both in its origin and appearance, by virtue of which our humanity is looped together with its environment.

Secondly, however, as a deduction from the fact that it is the concrete spiritual life of man and the individuality which pertains to it which constitutes the point of departure, or rather the essential content of the Ideal, we shall further examine this association, as in truth the creation of human activity itself and only possible as such a creation.

Finally, we shall prove that this unified world created by the human Spirit is itself a complete entirety, which, in the determinate form of its existence, is objectively valid, and in essential relation with which every unit of our common humanity who is actively engaged with the vital concerns of art must infallibly remain.

In opening our discussion of the position we proposed first we would at once point out an important conclusion involved in it. We have here posited that the environment of the Ideal is not directly due to human activity, it can therefore only be regarded in this first step of our inquiry as something external to man, that is to say Nature. How, then, is this something outside man to be exhibited in the ideal work of art? We will discuss this at least in its more general terms, and here, too, draw attention to three aspects of importance.

(α) In the first place external Nature, so far as the reproduction of its external form is concerned, is in every respect a reality which is embodied in some definite shape. If our representation is in every respect to satisfy really all that is implied in this condition it must be the exact counterpart of the phenomenal truth of Nature. We have, however, already drawn attention to material points of difference between the truth of Nature and its reproduction by art which cannot be disregarded. We may, however, observe that it is an almost universal characteristic of the great masters that they are conspicuously true in their delineation and elaboration of the broad facts of Nature. And this is not so much due to a love of imitation as it is due to the fact that Nature is not merely in a general way the objective facts of a heaven and an Earth with humanity suspended, as it were, in a vacuo between them; but rather that the emotional life and activity of man can only be rightly conceived as alive and operative in a given place with all its associations of streams, rivers, hills, mountains, plains, dales, and forests. Take the case, for example, of Homer, who is not at all a poet of the picturesque in natural scenery as we now understand it; we shall, nevertheless, find even in him the descriptions and indications he gives us of actual places or natural features such as the rivers Scamander or Simois, the coast and bays of the sea and so forth correspond with such truth to Nature that geographical investigators only quite recently have been able to map out the locality to which he refers in entire accordance with his descriptions. The ballad-singers of the Middle Ages present a sordid381 contrast to him in this respect, no less than in their power of depicting character; the effect of their productions either way is bald, jejune and nebulous. Even in the case of the Meistersingers, though they versify old biblical stories which they locate in Jerusalem and elsewhere, it is little more than the bare names which we get. In the Book of heroes382 the effect is precisely similar. Otnith rides through the pine-forest, fights with the dragon, but it is no world of men or distinct locality we can recognize, and our imagination is consequently in this respect left without any support. Even in the Nibelungenlied there is no real increase of local interest. It is true the names of Worms, the Rhine, and the Danube are mentioned; but practically all further detail is omitted and the result is as barren as before. And yet it is clearly through this very clearness of definition that our narration becomes individual and real; without this it is a mere abstraction which directly gives the lie to the concrete reality it proposes to present.

(β) In addition to these fundamental requirements of clear definition and correspondence with the natural facts a certain elaboration of detail will frequently much assist us in presenting the external aspects of a picture which our perception or imagination can readily seize. Unquestionably, owing to the nature of the particular medium in which the several arts express themselves, there will be a marked difference of range to which, in any particular case, this process may be carried. If we take the art of sculpture, for example, we shall find that the repose and universality, which are the fundamental features of its characterization, are less consistent with this elaboration of external detail than is the case in some other arts. Externality is here neither defined as a particular place nor a particular environment, but is entirely concentrated upon such details as drapery, arrangement of hair, dress, weapons of war, mode of seat and the like. Nay more, the actual definition of many figures in antique sculpture is only obtained through an entirely conventional arrangement of drapery or hair, or other distinguishing accessories. This is not, however, the place to discuss further the significance of the conventional. It is obviously outside the sphere of natural fact and rather related to the contingent; or, to put the matter in this particular case more fully, it is the means through which we arrive at that which is more universal and persistent in our final artistic effect.

As a reverse case to that of sculpture the subject-matter of lyrical poetry is pre-eminently man’s emotional life; for this reason it is not so necessary in this type of poetry to lay stress on the detail of actual facts even when reference is made to the external world. It is, on the other hand, part of the function of epic poetry to state events as actual facts, to be precise as to the place where actions occurred and in what manner they were performed; and, in short, of all types of poetry it is the one to which the widest latitude and the closest accuracy of local detail is most essential. And, furthermore, if we contrast all the arts together in this respect we shall find that not one of them is, by virtue of its medium383, so exclusively occupied with the detail of external Nature as that of painting. At the same time we must add a word that applies equally to all of them. Whatever the definition of Nature may be, it never ought to give the erroneous impression of Nature’s prose reality, that is to say, as the immediate imitation of such; nor should that fulness of detail, which is devoted to the spiritual aspect of individual life and its events, be carried by enthusiasm out of the due relation of its importance to the whole. And generally we may affirm of both that such exclusive definition ought not to be all that is anywhere presented, inasmuch as everywhere in a work of art that which is a natural fact should only receive its artistic embodiment in close relation to man’s spiritual life.

(γ) We have here struck the very note we wish particularly to emphasize. We have already remarked that there are two essential conditions to any effective presentation of a real personality; we must have before us both the reflection of the man’s inner life and the natural environment which surrounds him. And in order that this external surrounding appear as one that is truly his own an essential bond of relation must be established between him and it, one which to a greater or less degree is part of his own spiritual substance, where we may, doubtless, cross many traces of contingent matter and yet find the spiritual bed of this nexus still maintained. Throughout the entire spiritual apparatus of the heroes of Epic poetry, for example, their mode of life, that is, opinions, emotions, and all that they do we ought to be able to recognize a subtle homogeneousness, a harmonious en rapport, which fuses the two aspects of such a life into one concordant whole. The Arab is thus united with Nature, and, indeed, apart from his sky, his stars, his torrid deserts, his tents, his camels, and his horses is unintelligible. He is only truly himself and at home under such conditions. In the same way the heroes of Ossian possess in the highest degree an intense inward life; but in their very gloominess and melancholy they appear as the genuine growth of their hills of heather, whose thistles are swept by the wind, of their rain-clouds, mists, mountains, and dark caves. The physiognomy of the conditions under which they live reveals to us as nothing else can the secret of that inner life of emotion which is lived through with all its sadness, mourning, its pains, its battles, and its mist-like apparitions in such a natural setting; they are, in short, entirely at home in it and in it alone.

Such considerations supply us with ample ground for the statement we let fall previously unsupported that the subject-matter of history offers unrivalled opportunities for perfecting this intimate relation between the two aspects of human life we have been discussing, and enabling, us to carry the same directly into the minutest particulars. Very rarely, indeed, are we likely to find that the imagination can simply through its own initiative create such a harmony, although we ought to feel its presence throughout, however little it may, in fact, have produced of the raw material it combines into artistic completeness. No doubt there is a common tendency to rate what we fancy is the free creation of imaginative genius above the effort of assimilating in artistic form a material which is borrowed; but it is for all that quite impossible that the imagination should alone create that harmonious entente, the unity of the Ideal requires in the consistent and defined form which lies before us in actual existence, where national traits, to cite the examples above, are the veritable growth of such a harmony.

And here we close our consideration of the principle accordant with which we have rendered more clear that aspect of the unity of the inner life with its natural environment which we posited as secret or potential, not at any rate directly due to human activity.

(b) The second phase of this harmonious relation may be explained more positively, being expressly due to man’s own activity and his adaptation of means to ends. For man adapts external objects to his own uses and, by means of the satisfaction which his work supplies, places himself in a harmonious relation to them. In contrast therefore to our first indefinite384, and, in fact, entirely general type of harmonious association the present one is directly concerned with what is particular, as exemplified in the particular needs of man and their satisfaction by his converting to his use such natural objects as he may require. The range of his wants and the consequent impulse of their satisfaction is of a practically unlimited variety; yet it is nothing in comparison with the variety of Nature herself. Simplification is therefore inseparable from the task whereby, our humanity imposes on the facts of Nature its own vital purposes, and interpenetrates the external world with its own volitions. In this way man’s environment is humanized; he proves by his own acts that it is capable of satisfying his nature and is unable to preserve any predominant independence over against him. Here at last, by virtue, that is, of his own productive exertions, we find him no longer in a merely general sense of the term, but actually in every detail of his particular surroundings a real centre of his own substance and at home.

The fundamental conception which it is most important to emphasize as that which affects art throughout in its relation to all we have above considered may be thus stated. If we look closely at the relative position man occupies in all the infinite variety of his material wants, desires, and aims, we shall find that it is not one merely of general significance, but one of actual dependence. The absence of freedom implied in this relative position is antagonistic to the Ideal; and in order that man may become a suitable object for art, he must have already released himself from the travail of this enforced condition, and thrown off the chains of his dependence. Moreover, this act of mutual accommodation, when we trace it to its origin, may strike us in one of two different ways. Either he may conclude that Nature in all friendliness on her own part supplies man with what he needs, and so far from throwing obstacles in the path of his interests and objects, rather freely gives them him as one who meets him half way wherever he goes. Or, on the contrary, we shall not fail to observe that our humanity has wants and desires, whose immediate satisfaction Nature is quite unable to secure. In cases that fall under the second type it is obvious that man can only work out the self-satisfaction vital to him through his own energies; he must take possession of that which Nature possesses, set to rights the defects which appear, modify their form, removing all that stands in his way with adroitness; and, in short, convert Nature’s raw material into means through which he will be able to attain all that he proposes. The relation in which the unity between man and his environment will be most conspicuous must be sought for in an example, where there is already a real contact between them, where, that is to say, human ability is on such good terms with the amenability of Nature that all the severity of a conflict between them as unreconciled forces disappears, and we have forthwith the completed symphony under our eyes.

For the reasons, then, already advanced the ideal province of art must be held secure from the bare necessities of life. Property and the favour of circumstances, in so far as they supply a condition, under which poverty and labour vanish not merely for this or that hour, but for the most part altogether, are for this reason, we will not say incompatible with art, but rather in full concurrence with the Ideal. Yet it would only betray a real lack of comprehension385, if in cases where the conditions of our art compelled us to consider the facts of life in all their multifold variety, we nevertheless omitted from our composition all reference to the relation in which human life is placed to these very natural constraints. It is true enough that such are purely finite conditions; but art is not therefore able to dispense with them. They must not, in fact, even be treated by her as something merely bad. It is rather her function to reconcile them with the Real in her embracing unity. And indeed the finest actions and opinions which she reflects on her mirror, if we consider the particular form of the determination and content alone386, are necessarily limited and consequently finite. That I find it necessary to provide myself with nourishment, food and drink, a house to live in, and clothing to wear, seats to sit upon, and everything else incidental to domestic life is no doubt an inevitable concomitant of the fact that I live in the world; but the life that only I myself experience within me permeates, this external aspect of my life so completely, that men are fain to clothe and arm the very gods themselves, and to picture them under conditions inseparable from a variety of things they seek to possess, and find their satisfaction in obtaining. In short, for art to be possible, this satisfaction of the necessities of life must be assured to us. Or to take an example where this is not so, there is that of adventurous knights who only secure their immunity from external hardship through the continued success of their enterprise, which is therefore itself but a contingency, in much the same way as the prosperity of savages is contingent upon the amenities of Nature. The conditions in both cases are not favourable to Art. Her true Ideal is not merely to be found where our humanity is barely lifted above the most rigorous condition of dependence upon the smiles or frowns of Nature, but is most of all at home in that superfluity which suffers it in conjunction with Nature’s bounty to expatiate with freedom no less than delight.

The above remarks are obviously of very general application. Two considerations, however, of a somewhat more restricted interest may be deduced from them.

(α) The first of these relates to the kind of use to which mankind put the objects of Nature in seeking for a satisfaction which is wholly aesthetic, or due to some habit of the mind. Everything in the nature of ornament and finery, or, in general terms, everything that men convert to their use for the sake of mere show comes under this head. And the point to which we draw attention is this, that when we find men thus decorating themselves no less than their immediate surroundings, we ought not so much to conclude that all that they thus collect together from Nature’s most costly and beautiful storehouse, whatever may most attract their eyes in the same — whether it be gold, precious stones, pearls, ivory, or precious raiment — that all this unrivalled rarity and brilliancy, in short, is that which for its own sake, and primarily as a product of Nature, interests them: rather their interest in it all is essentially personal as a thing suitable for the houses they live in, or for that which they most love and honour, whether it be their rulers, their temples, or their gods. A man selects in this way that which already appears to him as externally beautiful, pure translucent colour, glitter of metals, fragrant woods, marble, and all the rest. Poetry, and particularly Oriental poetry, makes a willing use of such wealth, a fact we may even illustrate from such a poem as the Nibelungenlied: and generally it is true enough that Art in such matters is not merely content with a general description of the beauty or value of such fine things; but, where the artistic form and the occasion allows, will describe such works in all the detail of their workmanship with as royal a bounty as the works themselves. There was no stint of either gold or ivory on the statue of Pallas at Athens, or that of Zeus at Olympia; and the temples of the ancient gods, the churches of Christendom, the pictures of saints, and the palaces of kings, are notable illustrations among all nations that possess any of them, to what kind of service splendour and brilliant show may be devoted; thus have nations in every age delighted in seeing upon their gods the visible presence of their own wealth, precisely as they have found delight in the splendour of their princes as a glory they still possessed, though ravished from themselves.

We all know, of course, that type of moralist who is only too ready to disturb the vision of such an enjoyment. We shall, no doubt, be reminded how many poor Athenians the aegis of Pallas could have supplied with a hearty meal, or how many slaves could have thus been liberated; and, doubtless, we must admit that in the case of the ancient world, no less than in days more near to our own wealth, all that has been lavished on temple, cloister, or cathedral, or other objects of public utility, has been expended under social conditions of the direst need to many. Nay, we may carry such melancholy reflections yet further, and find in them a condemnation not merely of particular works of art, but of Art herself and all that she gives us. What sums of money are involved in the building by the State of an Academy of Arts, or the purchase of ancient and modern works of art, and the appropriate embellishment of public galleries, theatres, and museums! But whatever the effect of such reflections may be upon us, whether ethical or otherwise, such is, after all, only due to the fact that we are once more reminded of those very constraints and hardships whose removal is a vital condition of the appearance of Fine Art. The appropriation of a unique sphere in its life for the exposition of its artistic treasures, which stands safe above the stress of that reality to which it contributes so largely, can therefore only redound to the glory and supreme honour of any people.

(β) But, further, mankind is not merely interested in the adornment of individuals and the environment of their life, but is actively employed in adapting the objects of Nature to its practical needs and purposes. It is on this plane that we come into contact for the first time with all the labour and struggle which the dependence of our humanity upon the prose of its finite life implies. And the question inevitably arises, how far all that is involved in this practical effort is suitable to artistic presentation.

(αα) In attempting some answer to this problem, we would draw attention to the historical fact that the earliest way in which Art attempted to banish all the prose reality of human life was the conception of the well-known golden age or, if we care to call it so, the idyllic state. In this we have Nature depicted as satisfying man’s every want with no trouble to himself: while he, for his part, enjoys in a state of innocence all that mead, wood, flocks, garden, shelter, and so forth, can supply him with nourishment, dwelling, and all other comforts incidental to such a life. Of the passions of ambition or avarice, indeed of every impulse that may appear to run counter to the nobility of man’s spiritual nature, we hear no word at all. At first blush, no doubt, a state of this description may strike us more or less as ideal, and certain types of art, limited in their range, may find definite satisfaction in presenting us with a picture of it. But we have only to penetrate further below the surface and we shall quickly have enough of such a vision. The writings of Gessner are little read nowadays, and when we do read them we find in such little satisfaction. The truth is that a restricted state of life, such as the above described, presupposes a very elementary stage in human development. Manhood which has attained to any real fulness of spiritual stature is moved by impulses of loftier range, and is not likely to be satisfied with the life which clings closest to Nature and its immediate products. In such idyllic poverty of soul no man ought to live, but rather to accept his birthright of toil: that which his spiritual impulse urges him forward to, that he must secure through his own activity. Once regard the matter in this way and these very physical wants of man will be found to bring into being a wide and diverse range of activities, implanting in him the conscious sense of his own powers, from the heart of which the profounder interests and forces of his life can slowly unravel themselves. But, at the same time, it is necessary that here, too, the harmonious relation between the outward and inner life should be maintained as the fundamental principle of artistic presentation. Few things are more offensive to our aesthetic taste than to find in a work of art the severity of some physical disaster portrayed through every detail of horror. Dante flashes on us the starvation of Ugolino in a few trenchant strokes. When a Gerstenberg, in his tragedy of Ugolino, wrings out every detail of the catastrophe to the last drop, telling us precisely how first Ugolino’s two sons, and after them their father, were done to death by starvation, we feel at once that the subject, as thus handled, is entirely at variance with the principles of fine art.

(ββ) We shall, however, find that the condition of life which offers the strongest contrast to that we have described as the idyllic state, we will call it the generally civilized life387, presents, though on other grounds, difficulties to an ideal exposition which are equally serious. In a Culture-State the complexus of social wants and labour, of interests and all that may go to satisfying the same, is throughout and in all its comprehensiveness completely evolved. Every individual here is immersed in an infinite network of relations with other units of the whole, and with so much loss to his complete independence. What he himself requires for himself is either nothing at all, or only, in a quite insignificant fraction of it, the result of his own labour: add to this the tendency of all a man’s normal activities is to become more and more mechanical. We find, too, at the heart of this industrial development and the interchange of employment and rejection of human labour which it implies, on the one hand the most ruthless conditions of poverty, and on the other a class which, raised as it is above the bare necessities of existence, stands out in relief as wealthy, entirely released from all toil for the sake of a subsistence, able at any rate to devote individual attention to the finer interests of life and its pathetic contrasts. No doubt the possession of such a superfluity may create an impression as though for the favoured few the constant recurrence of a position of dependence had passed away, and a man is just so much the more released from the accidents incidental to property because his hands are at length free from the grime which soils them in securing it. But such a consolatory reflection will never make a man thoroughly at home in all that immediately surrounds him in the real sense that such is the garland of his own labour. For he is the centre of that to the upraising of which he has not himself been instrumental; it has come there out of that provision store which was already full without him, which quite other persons and for the most part in a quite mechanical and, therefore, formal way have provided, and to which he is only introduced after a long series of effort and struggle wholly strange to himself.

(γγ) We are consequently led to the conclusion that it is rather a third type of human society, a society which we may place halfway between the idyllic golden age and the burgher State in its fully developed industrial form, which is most fitted to be the subject matter of ideal art. We have already analysed this state of society in another connection under the description of the heroic and pre-eminently ideal world-condition. The heroic age is no longer restricted to that idyllic garden of spiritual attenuation, but includes within its borders passions and aims of deeper moment; and yet withal that which in the circle of the individual life touches closest the satisfaction of each man’s immediate wants is still the entire product of his own activity.

Moreover, the means of nourishment such as honey, milk, and wine are less complex and consequently lend themselves more readily to ideal treatment388. A diet which includes coffee, brandy, and such like luxuries is associated in our minds with countless industries which are necessary to their preparation. Our heroes, on the contrary, kill and roast their own food, break in their own chargers, are the makers to a considerable extent of all their household gods; ploughs, armour for defence, shields, coats of mail, swords, spears, all are either the work of the possessor, or are made directly under his supervision. In a condition of life of this kind a man necessarily feels that in all the things he makes use of, and in all that encircles him, he is in touch with something produced by himself; that in contact with external objects he is in contact with his own substance rather than with objects which emanate from a world strange to himself and outside that in which he is himself master. It is, of course, assumed that all the energy he expends upon working up the material into forms adapted for his use is not so much troublesome labour, but a work which, through the satisfaction it brings him, falls easy from his shoulders, a work, in short, which he can carry over every obstacle to success.

We find a society of this type in Homer. Agamemnon’s sceptre is a family staff which his ancestor himself shaped from the block and left as an heirloom to his descendants. Odysseus put together with his own hands the mighty bed he shared with Penelope; and if the famous weapons of Achilles are no work of his own we only find the various and interfused array of his own activities abated that a god, Hephaestus himself, may provide them at the request of his mother Thetis. In a word, we meet everywhere the youthful delight in novel discovery, the freshness of personal possession, the victorious sense of enjoyment. Everything is in its place and at home, in everything a man discovers the energy of his own sinew, the adroitness of his own hand, the cunning of his own spirit, or somewhat that follows from his own courage and bravery. In this way, and by this alone, the instruments which satisfy our human sense are not as yet relegated to a merely external relation, but men have before them the living process of the instruments themselves, the vital consciousness of the human worth they attach to them; and they find it there inasmuch as for them they are not mere lifeless things or things which habit has made lifeless, but creations impregnated with their own energies. And for the same reason we find here an idyllic condition of things, it is true, but not in that restricted sense of the term that the Earth and her streams, seas, forests, and cattle supply to mankind their sustaining substance, while man himself is only visible to us as a passive creature limited by the active powers which support him and their enjoyment. Rather we already see within this morning-time of human life deep interests at work, in relation to which the great world itself is but a subordinate realm, the ground and the instrument for bringing into being the higher aims which are present, as a ground and environment, however, over which that harmonious concord, yet withal independence, of both sides of our human world prevails; and which does prevail in the sight of all for this reason that everything there exists as the product and for the use of human life, is at the same time the creation and enjoyment of the man who creates and enjoys its use389.

To apply such a mode of artistic presentation to material borrowed from more recent times, whose completed culture offers the strongest contrast to the heroic age above-mentioned, is always beset with extreme difficulty and liable to failure. Yet for all that Goethe in his “Hermann and Dorothea” has furnished us in this respect with an admirable masterpiece. Here an attempt will only be made to elucidate a few significant points by contrasting the same with a composition of similar type. Voss, in his famous romance “Louise,” had depicted on much the same idyllic lines our human life and activity in a quiet circle of narrow range, if also marked with independent characteristics of its own. The country parson, the tobacco-pipe, the dressing-gown, the garden-bench, and finally our coffee-pot, have all of them here important parts to play. Coffee and sugar are, however, products, which are really here out of place; they belong to an entirely different world390 throughout associated with all the varied ramifications of commercial and textile industries. This circle of country life is consequently not self-inclusive. In the beautiful picture of “Hermann and Dorothea” we are, on the contrary, under no necessity to demand such a consistency. As we already have pointed out in another connection, we find interwoven with the main threads of this poem, which is, no doubt, in its prevailing atmosphere entirely idyllic, the great political interests of the time, the struggles of the French Revolution, the defence of the Fatherland, asserted in a worthy way no less than with decision. The more limited scope of family life in a little country town is not so presented us as a whole which can even possibly remain in total ignorance of that mighty wave of the great world under stress of a real cataclysm of events, which is the view we are given of the pastor in the “Louise” of Voss. In Goethe’s poem we have, on the contrary, by means of the interfusion of these great world-movements, within which the idyllic characters and events are portrayed, the picture of a life with a typical character of its own set in the frame of a world of more significant content; and the apothecary, who is here presented as the out-and-out Philistine, and who merely lives within the more narrow borders of that country life’s surroundings, affected by that only, is excellently sketched for us with the good heart, but at the same time peevish isolation, which we find so natural. Add to this, in that which most closely touches the life of the characters thus portrayed, we find a particular emphasis laid on the fundamental aspect of this idyllic life as previously indicated in our former discussion of it. To mention one point only, we may observe that the host does not by any means drink coffee with his guests, the parson and the apothecary; on the contrary, to cite a line or two:

Carefully brought in the mother the sparkling and glorious red-wine,

Poured in the clear-cut glasses, with rimlets all polished of pewter,

Brought in the green-coloured rummers, those goblets most fit for the

Rhine-wine.

They drink in the fresh air what has been grown at home, of the ‘83 vintage, and withal in glasses that, as home-made, are just the right ones for Rhine-wine. A few lines further on our fancy is yet further kindled with the “streams of the Rhine river and its dearly-loved banks,” and we are even introduced to the vineyard of the host behind the house itself; and, in short, there is nothing to arrest our attention outside the typical circle of a self-contented life which of its own bounty provides for its wants.

(c) In addition to both these types of human environment we must mention yet another in close association with which we all necessarily live. It is no other than the universally prevailing spiritual surroundings of our life whether they be religious, legal, or moral, the organization of the State, that is to say, the constitution of the government, the judicial institutions, the family, the institutions of both public and private life, and all other social relations. For the ideal character is not merely to be portrayed in its relation to all that satisfies material wants, but as itself a focus of spiritual interests. It is certainly true that all that is truly substantive, divine, and essentially necessary in all these relations is fundamentally an envisagement of one reality. In the objective world, however, the forms under which this reality is manifested are various, and they are, one and all, involved in that which is wholly contingent in particular examples, and the conventional usages which are only valid for definite periods of time and distinct nations. In this variety of form all the interests of men’s spiritual life receive an external embodiment of reality, with which every man is confronted in the customs, usages, and habits of society. Every man thereby, in addition to possessing a self-exclusive individuality of his own, becomes, in virtue of his association with such spiritual realities, even more a member of a whole cognate with and vital to himself than as a unit of that external world of Nature with which he is similarly conjoined. Speaking generally, we may attach to this spiritual association, of human life very much the same terms and significance we have already discussed in the foregoing sections; consequently we will for the present pass over the more detailed consideration of it, whose most important features will apply more strictly to another aspect of our inquiry, and will then be more appropriately discussed.

It is therefore necessary that art, as the representation of the Ideal, must embody this Ideal in all the relations to external reality we have above described, and thereby associate the inward possessions of character with the objective world. A work of art, however much in form it may be a self-including and harmonious world by itself, exists none the less as such an object, both real and particular, not for itself but for such as behold and enjoy it, that is the Public. Actors, for example, in the representation they give us of a particular drama do not merely enter into converse with one another, but appeal directly to ourselves, their audience; and it is equally important that they make themselves intelligible under both these aspects. Every work of art is in fact a direct appeal to the intelligence of everyone who confronts it. Now it is indeed true that the real Ideal, as envisaged for us in the universal interests and passions of its gods and men, is so far intelligible to everyone as it gives us a view of its characters within some typical external world of customs, usages, and everything else that characteristically distinguishes it. But the condition of art we have above formulated makes it further necessary that this element of external reality is not merely one with which the characters thereby represented are harmoniously associated, but must be also one within which we ourselves to whom the work is addressed feel equally at home. The appropriateness of the external environment to the characters enfolded within it must apply with equal force to our own attitude of mind in regarding both. But it so happens that from whatever period of the world’s history the subject-matter of a work of art may be borrowed it will be sure to contain essential features, which are quite distinct from those which specifically determine other nations and periods. In other words artists of every description, whether they be poets, painters, sculptors, or musicians, select subject-matter from the Past, which in their particular state of culture and intelligence, ethical customs, usages, and the form of their government, differ from the civilization of the times they live in. Moreover, as we have already observed, this return upon the Past possesses the considerable advantage that in having thus recourse to memory instead of being face to face with all the facts of the present, there is an appreciable diminution of the material from which the artist selects his subject, and this he cannot readily dispense with. At the same time the artist belongs only to his own century, and it is in the ethical customs, modes of conception, and generally the intellectual outlook of that he lives. The Homeric poems Homer, to take him for once as the individual creator of both “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” may have actually lived through or he may not; but in any case they are at least four hundred years later391 than the time of the Trojan war; and further a period twice as long separates the great Greek tragedians from the days of the ancient heroes, who, as translated into the atmosphere of their own time, form the subject-matter of their poetry. It is just the same in the case of the Niebelungenlied and the artist who finally fused together the various saga which that poem contains into one homogeneous work. We may no doubt admit that the artist finds himself entirely on congenial ground when dealing with everything truly pathetic, either in the history of gods or men; but the external and actual conditions of that ancient world, whose characters and actions he endeavours to portray, have altered in essential features and become consequently strange to him. And further than this a poet creates for the sake of a Public, and primarily for his own nation and his time, both of which should be able to enter into such a work of art with intelligence, and feel at home in it. The most genuine works of art no doubt assert a further claim to immortality, a hope that they may continue to be a source of delight to all times and nations. But even in the case of works of the highest class it is none the less true that nations and times situated far away from those which produced them can only fully apprehend them with the assistance of an extensive apparatus of geographical, historical, and it may be even philosophical knowledge and the results of much critical investigation.

Bearing in mind these fundamental, and to some extent incompatible differences which characterize the various points of view from which a work of art must be regarded, the question arises what kind of form relatively to its external framework of locality, custom, usage, and generally any and every condition of religious, political or ethical significance a particular work of art should receive. Should an artist suffer his own times to pass from his mind altogether, and attempt only to secure the substantial appearance of the Past and what actually then existed, so that his work become simply a true portrayal of that; or is he not merely justified, but rather under an obligation, to pay an exclusive attention to his own nation and the life around him, elaborating his work with express regard to the principle that it should stand in harmonious relation to his own times? Or, to put the same thing in rather more technical language, we may propound the problem thus: Is the subject-matter of a work of art to be objectively valid in its content as one entirely appropriate historically considered, or should such matter be treated subjectively, that is, in complete subordination to the artist’s personal standpoint relatively to the culture and social conditions of his own time? We would rather observe that both these positions, if thus pressed unduly, land us in extreme conclusions equally false; and we propose now to examine them briefly that we may by their means elucidate a more satisfactory theory.

And we would consider three fundamental aspects which this problem suggests. We will first examine what is implied in the above subjective assertion of the particular culture of the artist’s own time; secondly, there is the question what may be regarded as exclusively and objectively true when we refer to the Past; thirdly, we have to consider what may still be objectively valid in the true sense, though we still have a representation and appropriation of material borrowed from a time and nationality foreign to that of the artists.

(a) Now to start with, if we consider this purely subjective assertion, it is obvious that when we press the position closely we are finally driven to exclude the objective embodiment of the Past altogether, and to maintain that artistic representation is exclusively concerned with the appearance of present times.

(α) Such a result may be doubtless, under one aspect of it, presented by mere ignorance of the Past. It is, then, rather the result of a naïveté, which is unable to feel the contradiction between the object itself and the representation given, or at least fails to bring the same to consciousness. Such a form of artistic presentation is therefore fundamentally due to lack of sufficient culture. We could hardly wish for a more vivid illustration of this than we find in the naïve productions of Hans Sachs, who has, no doubt with a vivid freshness of imaginative vigour and spirit, as we may truly say, domesticated among us392 our dear Lord and Father God no less than Adam, Eve, and the rest of the patriarchs. Here, for example, God the Father is portrayed as teaching a school in which Cain, Abel, and the rest of Adam’s children — are the pupils, precisely as any pedagogue of the time might have done. He catechizes them upon the ten commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. Abel knows his lesson as a pious and good boy ought to. Cain on the contrary behaves and replies to his teachers as only naughty and wicked boys would think of doing; and when it is his turn to repeat the commandments turns them inside out: thou shalt steal, thou shalt not honour thy father and mother, and so forth. A representation of much the same crude simplicity having for its subject the tale of our Lord’s Passion used to be carried out in South Germany, was then made illegal, and has since once more been resuscitated. In this Pilate is portrayed in the character of an insolent, rough, and arrogant official, the common soldiers much in the same familiar way our own might, offer Christ surreptitiously a pinch of tobacco; he disdains it, and they flatten it out on his nose. Vulgarity finds all the more jest in such an incident for the reason that it wholly conforms to its notions of piety and reverence, indeed calls up such feelings all the more readily through its immediate reference to that which it finds in its own world, thereby making more vivid its own sense of devotional fervour. No doubt there is a certain justification for this mode of translating, so to speak, the appearance and form of objective history into modern equivalents, such as we have found in our literature; and we may even attach a kind of greatness to the courage of Hans Sachs in making himself so familiar with God Almighty, and those old religious ideas that without the least vestige of impiety he could rivet them deep within the conditions of our most commonplace life. At the same time such an attempt is none the less a rude intrusion upon our feelings, and indicates lack of cultivation, inasmuch as it not merely disallows to the object itself a right to assert itself as it really is, but forces upon it a mode of appearance so directly contrary to that which it possesses, that the result can only impress us as an emphatic caricature.

(β) As an antithesis to the above type of subjectivity we find another equally supreme asserting itself out of sheer pride in its own culture under the belief that the views peculiar to its own times, its ethical customs, and social conventions are those alone worth preservation or acceptance. Owing to a bias of this kind it is quite unable to enjoy the content of a work of art until such a form of culture prevails in it. An illustration of this latter type is the so-called classical good taste of the French school. Everything that is here attempted must forthwith be Frenchified, and all that it presents under the form of any other nationality and more particularly with any reference to the Middle Ages is voted incorrect and barbarous and is cast on one side with absolute contempt. Voltaire expressed anything but the truth when he said that the French have improved the works of the ancient world. What they have done is to nationalize them; and by this process of recasting have corrupted them with every kind of foreign and angular quality of their own that such a taste as theirs could develop to any extent, requiring as it did throughout a culture absolutely based on court etiquette, and a conformity to conventional rule and generalization in both the meaning and mode of any dramatic work. Indeed, we shall find the trail of this abstraction of a superfine culture visible in the very diction of their poetry. Not a poet among them dare venture to use the word cochon, or add their own nomenclature to spoons, forks, and a thousand other simple objects. Consequently we have roundabout definitions and circumlocutions. We cannot have our spoons and forks; we get instead an instrument of the hand which conveys our victuals in a liquid or arid state to the mouth; and this by no means stands alone. And with all its refinement their taste is vulgar to a degree; for the simple truth is that genuine art, so far from planing away and polishing its content to one flat and unruffled surface of generalities, is most of all anxious to set in full relief all that makes toward the well-defined characterization of life. It is on account of this very taste that the French can make less of Shakespeare than any other poet. And when they have attempted to work him up to their graces they have clipped off from him precisely that portion which we Germans find nearest to our hearts. For the same reason Voltaire makes merry over Pindar because he has made the remark, ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ.393 And, consequently, in their works of art they find it necessary to make Chinese, Americans, or the heroes of Greek or Roman antiquity all speak in one tongue and in one manner — that of their French court. Achilles, for instance, in the “Iphigenie en Aulide”394 is nothing more or less than a French prince; and if we had no name to help us no one could conceivably discover one particle of Achilles in him. It is true that in the theatrical representation of this drama he was habited as a Greek, appeared at least in helmet and coat of mail; but at the same time his hair was curled and powdered, with broad hips through poschen395, with red claws worked on shoes fastened on the foot with coloured ribbons; and what is more, the “Esther” of Racine was expressly popular in the time of Louis XIV, for the particular reason that Ahasuerus, on his first entrance on the stage, copied the appearance of Louis XIV himself, when he entered the great hall of audience. No doubt, in this transcript, there was a considerable admixture of the oriental luxuriance; but a Ahasuerus he was none the less fully powdered and wearing the royal mantle of ermine, and followed by a complete retinue of curled and powdered chamberlains got up thoroughly en habit français with their wigs, their feathered caps under arm, their vests and hoses of drap d’or, with their silk stockings and red buckles on their shoes. All that the court and a select circle of the privileged few were only permitted to see de facto was here open to all classes alike — the entrée of the king paraded in the poet’s verses. The writing of history in France is not unfrequently conducted on very much the same principle. That is to say, history itself and the real objects of history are not the main purpose of the historian, whose interest is rather concentrated either on giving the government in vogue a lesson or teaching others how they ought to detest it. And in the same way there are a host of dramas which, either expressly throughout their entire content or in passing episodes, divert the attention to the events of the day; or, if passages occur in pieces which refer to former times presenting anything which may bear on matters of contemporary interest, the parallel or the contrast is deliberately emphasized with every expression of enthusiasm.

(γ) A third type of this personal treatment by the artist of his subject-matter may be sufficiently described as the separation of the same from all genuine artistic form whether it be characteristic of past or present works of art, a mode of production in fact which simply presents us with the entirely evanescent colour of “the man in the street” in his ordinary everyday action and vocation without adding aught to the same. In other words we may describe it as the bare counterpart of what the man of commonsense is conscious in the prosaic facts of life, that and nothing more. In such an atmosphere of prose no doubt everyone finds himself at home readily enough; or rather, he will only not find himself at home who takes up such a work with some definite conception of that which the very conditions of a work of art demand, and consequently is aware that it is precisely from this type of handling that Art undertakes to liberate us. Kotzebue, in his day, obtained all his popular effects through compositions of this kind, which aimed at nothing else but letting the general public both see and hear life’s troubles and vexations, the pocketing of silver spoons, the risking of the pillory, or, to take particular characters, parsons, chamberlains, ensign-bearers, secretaries, and cavalry-majors, in their naked colours. Everyone might here recognize his own household, or, at least, that of some relation or friend, might see at a glance where in his own precious circumstances and aims of life the shoe pinched. An originality of this sort necessarily fails to stir any real sense or idea of that which is the vital content of a work of art, however much it may awake an interest for its productions in hearts that are wont to ask for so little and are so ready to put up with the commonplaces of so-called ethical reflections. We may conclude, then, that the artistic presentation of the facts of external reality under any one of these three types just examined is subjective in a one-sided way, that is to say, it wholly fails to present us with any adequate form of that objective world as it really exists.

(b) We next propose to examine a mode of presentation the reverse of the above, one which endeavours to restore us the characters and events of the past so far as may be with every local detail of their former environment no less than any and every ethical or other particular characteristic which formerly distinguished them. We Germans have particularly come to the front in this class of work. As a rule we are, in striking contrast to the French, the most painstaking recorders of all that is peculiar in nations other than our own, and consequently make fidelity to the characteristic usages, dress, weapons, and all such antiquarian detail appropriate to particular epochs and localities a first requisite of our art. Add to this we have the necessary patience to put ourselves to no end of trouble in the way of hard study in order that we may thoroughly enter into the modes of thought and perception which belong to foreign nations and centuries distant from our own, and make ourselves thoroughly conversant with all their peculiarities. This power of looking at facts from many and diverse points of view in order to both apprehend and comprehend the spirit of every kind of national existence makes us not merely tolerant in our art towards all that strikes us as exceptionally strange in foreign customs, but clamorous even to a painful degree in our insistence that we have before us accurate correspondence with objective truth down to the most insignificant detail. The French are, no doubt, full of resource and energetic, but, however highly educated and practical men they may be, such qualities do not increase, but rather diminish the patience which they possess for quiet and exhaustive study. Criticism is always of first importance with them. We Germans, on the contrary, are by nature inclined to accept any picture of real truth for what it is, and particularly this is so with foreign works of art. From whatever part of Nature’s storehouse such may come, whether it is plants or other creations of foreign growth, implements of any kind or form, dogs and cats, even absurdities, we accept them all genially; and the result of this is we are able to be on excellent terms with modes of thought the most removed from our own, ay, sacrificial customs, legends of the saints and all the extraordinary follies that go with them, to say nothing of a host of other marvels equally surprising. And for the same reasons it only appears essentially rational that in attempting to represent characters in action we should make their conversation and pursuits conformable to their own substance, that is to say, in strict accord with the times when they lived and their own national characteristics, whether regarded individually or in association with each other.

This fundamental idea that the objective truth of a work of art is established by virtue of the type of historical accuracy above described has obtained currency in comparatively recent times, mainly, that is to say, since the literary work of Frederick von Schlegel. From that time the importance of a first principle in literary criticism has attached to it; and further than this, it is asserted that our purely personal interest should above all restrict itself to the enjoyment we may derive from historical accuracy of this kind and the life it thus reproduces. Once accept these hard and fast rules and the conclusion is obvious that we are allowed no additional interest of any superior quality which an enquiry into the essential significance of any artistic content may or may not provide for us any more than we are permitted to derive any interest more vital to ourselves from aspects of such a work directly associated with the culture and aims of our own times. It is much on these lines that we find also in Germany, where the enthusiasm of Herder in this direction started a closer attention on all sides to the “Volkslied,” a poetic inundation of national folk-songs imitating native tones of every sort of nationality whether it be the Iroquois, latter-day Greek, Lap, Turk, Tartar, Mongol, and many another; and, of course, it is assumed to be indicative of nothing less than first-rate genius396 to possess the power of thus diving into the ways and ideas of other folk, and converting all we discover into poetry. At the same time it is clear that however completely your poet may work his way into and emotionally realize all this strange kind of world, it remains and must continue to remain for that public to whose enjoyment these songs are addressed as something very much aloof from it.

The truth is that such a theory, if pressed to its abstract logical conclusion, limits its boundaries solely to the truth of history in its formal accuracy, and by doing so neglects all consideration of the nature of Art’s content and questions relative to its essential significance, just as it disregards every aspect of it in which the culture and resources of modern thought and contemporary life are asserted. But it is as impossible to detach ourselves from the truth implied in this theory as it is from equally important truths which it neglects; all equally claim satisfaction, and imperatively force upon us the necessity of finding a further solution in which the claims of historical truth may be reconciled with these rival aspects of truth in a very different way to that just examined. And this brings us to the third question we proposed as to the nature of that objectivity and subjectivity which can be fully sustained together as the reality to which a genuine work of art conforms.

(c) The point of essential importance which we should before all others wish to emphasize here is this, that no one of those various aspects of truth we have above indicated should be allowed a predominant significance such as would impair the relative force of the others; and, further, or rather notwithstanding this, historical accuracy pure and simple in external matters, such as local conditions, customs, usages, and social institutions generally, must receive in a work of art their due place, if a subordinate one, it being only right that the interest of mere historical truth should give way before that of a vitally true and imperishable content for the present no less than the past.

We cannot, perhaps, do better by way of explaining what we consider to be the true form of artistic representation than by setting up in contrast a few examples of some we take to be defective.

(α) Now, to start with, the presentation of the characteristic features of a given period may be entirely just, accurate, and impregnated with life, nay more, wholly intelligible to a modern audience, and notwithstanding fail to escape the ordinary atmosphere of prose, and present us with the real substance of poetry. Goethe’s “Götz von Berlichingen” will alone furnish us with notable illustrations of this defect. It is only necessary to open the book at the first scene, which introduces us to an inn near Schwarzenberg in Franconia; the dramatis personae are Metzler, and Sievers sitting at a table, two grooms by the fire, also the landlord.

Sievers. Another glass of brandy, Hans, my boy, and good Christian measure.

Landlord. You carry a glass that is never full.

Metzler. [Aside to Sievers.] Tell us that once again about Berlichingen; the Bambergers are in a pretty fume out there; ay, black as thunder (etc.).

The same kind of thing we find in the third Act.

George. [Enters with a gutter-spout.] There you have lead and to spare; spot the target with but one half of it, and devil a soul shall get off, who is like to say to your Majesty, that’s a miss this time397.

Lerse. [Aloud.] A fine piece of metal.

George. The rain may take another road for all I care; a brave knight and a real good rain get through most things.

Lerse. [Pours into glass.] Hold the spoon. [Goes to the window.] There’s one of those imperial cockades prowling about with his musket; they believe we have aimed a point too far. He shall have a taste of my bullet, hot too and fresh from the pan. [Loads.]

George. [Drops the spoon.] Let me have a look.

Lerse. [Fires.] There lies the fool (etc.).

All this is exceedingly vivid, intelligible, depicted in perfect keeping with the situation and the characters portrayed. Yet for all that these scenes are both trivial to a degree and essentially prosaic. All we get from either the matter or the form is just the ordinary man’s way of seeing things and reality as it appears to him or rather all of us to some extent. We find the same tendency in many another of Goethe’s youthful productions, which no doubt were deliberately directed against everything which previously had passed for the rule of the guild, and which sought for their most impressive effect by means of the nearness made clear to ourselves, an impression gained by the extraordinary grasp with which the poet’s imagination and feeling seized upon everything. But the nearness was itself too near, and the vital content in part so petty, that such compositions ran constantly into mere triviality. We are most conscious of this kind of triviality in dramatic works when we see them on the stage; it is then that after being worked up to some excitement by all the concomitants of a theatrical performance, lights, well-dressed folk, and the rest of it, we expect to see something more than a couple of peasants, and troopers and a glass of schnapps thrown in398. This phase has mainly found its admirers in readers; it never had a long run on the stage.

(β) If we now consider our subject from an opposite point of view it may be admitted that we can sufficiently make ourselves acquainted with and assimilate the historical content of a former mythology and all that is most strange to ourselves in earlier conditions of state-life and national custom to secure through such an intimacy with, the general culture then prevailing a varied knowledge of the past. In fact, this acquaintance with the art, mythology, literature, cultus, and usages of antiquity is the starting point of our present system of education. Every schoolboy knows something about the gods and heroes of Greece and the prominent characters in ancient history. It is therefore quite possible, in so far as they really enter into the imaginative life of our own times, that we may find enjoyment in the imaginative representation of such characters and interests. It is further impossible to predict whether or no such an intimacy may not be eventually carried equally as far in the case of the Indian, Egyptian, and Scandinavian mythologies. We may further observe that in the religious conceptions of all these peoples the Universal God is presented. The determinate form, however, of such conceptions, that is to say, the particular gods of Greece or India, are no longer true for us as so personified. We do not believe in their existence, and the pleasure we take in them is derived from their appeal to our imagination. For this reason they stand entirely apart from our deepest emotional life, and we can imagine nothing more empty and cold than such exclamations we hear only too often in opera: “O ye gods!” or “O Jupiter!” or even “O Isis and Osiris!” And the folly of it all reaches its height when we have the wretched saws of oracular wisdom thrown in — and the opera can seldom get along without them — a position of dignity which nowadays for the first time in tragic drama is occupied by pure folly and clairvoyance.

The same criticism applies with equal truth to all other historical material relating to national customs, laws, and the like. Such historical fact is excellent in its way, but it belongs to the past; and when it has once ceased to have anything in common with present life it necessarily ceases, in spite of all our knowledge of it, to belong to us. We have, in short, no interest399 in what has passed away on the mere ground that it once existed. What is historical can only truly be said to belong to us when it is the possession of the nation, to which we ourselves belong, or when we are able to regard the present as in a general way casually connected with the events in question, to whose continuous series the characters or actions represented are united by a bond of essential membership. For if we carefully consider the matter we shall find that the mere fact of being formerly bound together with the same external environment and people to which we ourselves belong is not sufficient — rather the very part of our nation must present features in still closer relation to the conditions, life, and existence of our own times. To take an example of what we mean, we find ourselves in the Niebelungenlied geographically on a soil that belongs to us still, but the Burgundians and King Etzel are so absolutely cut off from all that touches our present civilization and every interest which is now coincident with patriotism that, without borrowing anything from the learning of the subject, it is but simple truth to say we feel infinitely more at home in the poems of Homer400. Klopstock, no doubt, in his enthusiasm for everything that concerned the Fatherland, was prompted to substitute his Scandinavian gods for those of Hellenic mythology; but, for all his zeal, Wotan, Walhalla, and Freja remain mere names for us, which appeal to our imaginations and patriotic emotions even less than Zeus and his compeers of Olympus.

The point above all we desire to emphasize is this. Works of art are not composed primarily for the mere student or the professor, but with the express purpose that they shall be intelligible on their face, and a source of enjoyment without any one having to undertake first a circuitous route of extensive historical investigation. For Art is not addressed to a small and select circle of the privileged few, but to the nation at large. What, moreover, is generally valid for a work of art applies also to the external form of the historical reality therein portrayed. Such exposition also must express itself with clearness open to the common apprehension requiring no considerable research to make it intelligible, must be clear to ourselves as representations of our century and our own people, so that we may be able to find ourselves entirely at home in it, and not have before us a world foreign to that we live in, if not actually unintelligible.

(γ) Considerations such as the foregoing have already brought us within reach of the truer conception of the objective truth of art and the mode under which it assimilates the material of past history. We propose now to offer further illustrations in support of the same.

(αα) And we may start at once by drawing attention to a characteristic which is common alike to the genuine national poetry of all peoples and in every period of past history, namely, that the historical and formal aspect of that poetry is entirely national, that is to say, it retains nothing incongruous to the people for whom it is composed. This is a feature shared alike by the great epics of India, the Homeric poems and the Greek drama. Sophocles never made his Philoctetes, Antigone, Ajax, Orestes, Œdipus, his choregi and choruses speak in the speech and manner that would have been entirely appropriate to their own times. The Spaniards have written their romances of the Cid under the same guiding principle. Tasso in his “Jerusalem Liberated” celebrated the universal interests of Catholic Christendom. Camoens, the poet of Portugal, depicted the discovery of the seaway to the East Indies round the Cape of Good Hope, and all the infinitely various adventures of the sea heroes that made it possible; and these acts of daring were the acts of his own people. Shakespeare threw into dramatic form the tragic history of his own country and even a Voltaire wrote his “Henriade.” Far indeed have we Germans strayed from the path thus marked for us when we hope to work up into national epics histories remote from our own, which carry no longer with them a national interest of any kind. Bodmer’s “Noachide” and Kloptock’s “Messias” have started a new fashion of their own, ay, as they have overturned that old one which taught us that it redounds to a nation’s glory to have its Homer, to say nothing of its Pindar and Sophocles. Those biblical stories, it is true, present points of special affinity with the national imagination owing to our close acquaintance with the old and new Testaments; but the historical material in its association with ancient custom and the like remains for all that only intelligible to the savant, and all the most of us can pick up from such epics is the prosaic interfusion of events and characters, which, in such a process of translation, have merely some novel form of speech thrust into their mouths, and the final result can only impress us as hollow and artificial.

(ββ) At the same time art cannot be restricted wholly to material borrowed from one nation. And as a matter of fact the more nationalities have come into contact with one another, the more their poets have looked abroad among all nations and times for the subject-matter of their poems. But however this may be the case, it is none the less an error to suppose that the mere fact that a poet is able, so to speak, to live into times aloof from his own at once stamps him as a man of creative genius. It is more to the point to recollect that this historical framework must, in the co-ordination of a poem, be retained only in strict subordination, and as a means of expressing that which permanently belongs to our humanity. Precisely in this way the Middle Ages long ago borrowed much from antiquity, but so absolutely suffused it with the content of its own epoch that, in this respect verging on the opposite extreme, we really get nothing from that antiquity but the bare names of Alexander, Aeneas, and the emperor Octavius.

First in importance, then, is this permanent condition of true art, immediate intelligibility. It will be found an invariable truth that all nations have emphasized precisely that in this life which was most agreeable to their artistic sense, their desire being always to find what was most intimate to themselves, their life and existence in their art. It was this independent flavour of patriotism which Calderon worked into such characters as his Zenobia and Semiramis; and Shakespeare in the same way was able to imprint upon the most varied subject-matter the hall-mark of his English ancestry, although he knew how to preserve along with it the essential traits of historical characters belonging to nations foreign to his own, the Roman for example, in a far profounder degree than was possible to the Spanish poets. Even the Greek tragedians had their eyes constantly directed to the actual conditions of their times and the particular city in which they lived. The “Œdipus Colonus” in its local references is not merely in a peculiar way associated with Athens but, by virtue of the fact that Œdipus dies in this locality, at once indicates him as the future Preserver of that city. In somewhat other associations the “Eumenides” of Aeschylus is, owing to the decisive sentence of the Areopagus, marked by an interest of more vital interest to the Athenians401. On the other hand Greek mythology, despite all the varied and oft repeated use that has been made of it since the revival of the arts and learning, has never fully come home to the general sense of modern emotions and in various degrees in the plastic arts and still more in poetry, despite its very extensive influence here, has failed to arouse real enthusiasm. No one thinks now of writing an ode to Venus, Zeus, or Pallas402. Sculpture, it is true, can hardly get along even in modern times without the assistance of the Greek Pantheon, but for that very reason it is mainly only appreciated by and intelligible to a select circle of cultivated men who are either connoisseurs or critics. As one of these, Goethe spared no pains in his endeavour to arouse in contemporary artists an enthusiasm which should go so far as to imitate the pictures of Philostratus, but for the most part his pains were thrown away. Such examples of the work of antiquity, on account of the very flavour of past time and a life that has vanished, which clings to them, remain as strange to contemporary art as they do to the general public. As a contrary example of real success on the part of Goethe we may instance the far profounder insight he has shown us during the later period of his poetic activity in fusing by means of his “Westöstlicher Divan” the colour of the East with the poetry that really appeals to us to-day, giving to the Orient, in fact, its modern embodiment. In this process of assimilation he has clearly shown himself alive to the fact that he is a poet of the West and a German as well, and consequently while preserving the fundamental key-note of the Oriental spirit in his delineation of characters and situations to which it was appropriate, was able at the same time fully to satisfy the claims of the modern spirit and those of his own personality. Subject to such reservations it is undoubtedly in the province of a poet to borrow his material from remote regions, past centuries and foreign nations, maintaining in their broad and most characteristic outlines the historical form of ancient mythology, custom, and institution. At the same time he will take care to utilize such forms only as the external frame of his delineations, never permitting the essential content of such productions to fall into any disharmony with the profounder instincts of his own native world. As the most extraordinary example of this Goethe’s “Iphigenia” still stands without a rival.

In their relation to such a transformation the several arts dispose of their material very differently. In the love-poems of lyrical poetry very little use is made of local associations depicted with historical accuracy. The emotional situation and the movement of sentiment is here the main thing. We receive, for example, in the sonnets of Petrarch a very small substratum of natural fact relatively to Laura, hardly anything more than her name, which might just as well have been another. Of local interest we get the barest scraps, and that entirely of general significance, such as the existence of the fountain of Vaucluse and things of that kind. Epical poetry, on the contrary, requires the greatest detail in its natural descriptions, and we are most readily pleased with their historical truth, provided always that the picture is both clear and intelligible. The use of the external truth of historical facts presents the greatest pitfalls to dramatic art, more particularly in reference to its theatrical presentation, where everything is directly addressed to an audience, or purports to strike upon sense with the vividness of life, so that we are willing to recognize and entrust ourselves therein with equal directness. Here the delineation of historical truth in its external aspects must for the most part be of subsidiary importance, in fact retain little more than the framework of it. It must, in short, remain true to that natural relation we find in love-poetry, in which at the same time that we are able completely to sympathize with the feelings expressed in every way another name is given to the beloved than that of the lady most loved by ourselves403. It does not here in the least signify whether or no our critics fail to discover absolute precision in the picture presented of the particular manners, culture, and emotional expression of the time. In Shakespeare’s historical dramas we find a great deal that remains strange to us and of no considerable interest. We are contented enough on a mere reading, but in the theatre our enjoyment ceases. Critics and men of learning no doubt stick fast to their idea that such exquisite scraps of genuine history should be presented on the stage on their own merits and come down severely upon the wretched taste of the public, when it lets us see how bored it is over such things. Unfortunately a work of art and the direct enjoyment we receive from it is in no sense particularly for critics or savants, but for this very public. Critics have really no reason to give themselves such airs. They are after all but units of this public, and the mere attention to historical detail can be of as little serious interest to them as any other members of it. For this reason the English nowadays in their theatrical performances only include such scenes from the Shakespearean drama which require nothing further to make them clear and intelligible, being happily free from the pedantry of our aesthetic professors who held that all that is most remote in historical incident from the apprehension of an average audience should be thrust before their eyes. It follows also from our view of the matter that when foreign dramas are reproduced on the stage the public is clearly entitled to have them considerably remodelled404. Even that which is excellent in itself may require some alteration. No doubt it will be contended that what is essentially first-rate art retains its excellence for all times; but a work of art has also an aspect of transitory worth, which yields to the years, and it is this of course which requires remodelling. As people change so too the sense of beauty alters; and it is important that the particular public, before whom any work is represented, should feel themselves quite at home in the whole of such a work including that aspect which derives all its significance from external history.

It is this conditional acceptance of historical truth which at once explains and justifies that which is generally known in Art as anachronism, and which is usually attributed to artists as a serious defect. Primarily such examples of anachronism will be found to attach to matters of purely external interest. That a Falstaff should talk about pistols is no matter of consequence whatever. The case is more serious when we have a violin placed in the hands of Orpheus, for here the association of such prehistorical times with an instrument so essentially modern as the violin, one which everybody knows was not invented in those days, presents too glaring a violation of truth. For this reason it is now the fashion in theatrical circles to bestow incredible pains and care upon the historical accuracy of details in the matter of costume and the getting up of a piece, as, for example, the infinite trouble lavished upon the historical procession in the “Maid of Orleans.”405 Such efforts are in the majority of eases lost labour, for the simple reason that they only concern matters of relative interest or points that might be wholly passed over. The more important type of anachronisms has nothing whatever to do with stage costume and all that with which stage business is concerned, but consists in making characters express their emotions and ideas, venture upon soliloquies and actions in a form or of a substance which absolutely contradicts the conditions of their times and culture, their religious and general preconceptions. It is common to apply the conception of natural truth to such examples of anachronism, in other words, to say that it is unnatural for characters to speak or act otherwise than they would have spoken and acted in their own days. If we stick, however, too closely to the logic of this naturalism we shall only land ourselves in further complications406. For an artist, in depicting the emotional life with all that results from it, and the fundamental passions that belong to it, being mainly interested in the affirmation of individuality, ought not merely to repeat that life under its ordinary daily dress; it is rather his business to show every true manifestation of pathos in the particular light which best reveals its real quality. The whole object of his attainment as an artist is not merely to understand what is of vital significance in the truth he faces, but to be able to give it the precise form which will best direct our own eyes and ears and heart to his own discovery. To attain this it is obvious that he must keep in view the particular culture of his own time no less than all its various powers of expression. In the time of the Trojan war the kind of speech in general use, and indeed the whole fabric of social life, was as far removed from the type of culture which is reflected on us from the pages of the “Iliad” as the mass of the nation and the pre-eminent worthies of the royal houses then reigning in Greece were separated from the fully developed form of ideas and expression such as arouse our wonder when we read our Aeschylus, or behold the perfected beauty of the style of Sophocles. A violation of the so-called “path of Nature” of this kind is in art an anachronism implied in her laws. The inward kernel of that which she reveals remains unaffected, but the more developed power at the artist’s command, in revealing and disclosing this essential core of his subject, renders some change in the mode of its expression inevitable. It is a wholly different matter when a modification of this kind proceeds so far as to impose ideas and conceptions of a later form of the religious and moral consciousness on a century or a nation whose entire spiritual outlook is opposed to such more recent conceptions. The Christian religion has gathered in its train forms of the moral life, which were entirely foreign to the moral consciousness of ancient Greece. That inward introspection of conscience, for example, ever on the alert to decide the ethical significance of action, with its accompanying remorse and repentance, first appears in the moral culture of a more modern date. The heroic character knows nothing of a repentance which sets itself in hostility to its past. What it has done it abides by. Orestes does not repent of his mother’s murder. The Furies that rise out of the shadow of his action pursue him, no doubt; but the Eumenides are, at the same time, represented as universal powers, and not as voices that cry out to him from his own conscience simply. This very heart and substance of a given period of man’s history a poet must master, and only when we find him interfusing with this central core of reality matter that directly contradicts it is he guilty of any truly grave anachronism. In conclusion, then, we may say that it is indeed part of the poet’s function to live into the spirit of past times and foreign peoples, for this substance of their life, if it be truly such, remains a possession for all time; but to attempt to reflect with every accuracy of detail all the definition of that external show now buried beneath the rust of antiquity is merely the effort of a learning essentially childish, intent on preserving what is itself shadow rather than substance. No doubt even in this direction, the truth of general outlines should be carefully respected, but never to such lengths as would compel art to forfeit her claim of drawing upon the fiction of her invention, and the truth of fact with equal impartiality.

(γγ) We are now in a better condition to understand all that is really implied in the assimilation by art of that which is strange in the external features of remote history, and the true conception of the objective life of her creations. A work of art must primarily enclose for us within its embrace the higher interests of spirit and volitional power, all that is essentially human, and possesses real weight, the depths, that is to say, of man’s emotional life. The main thing of all is that this embodied content407 should transpierce all purely external conditions of manifestation, should ring, as it were, through all that is less vital in its significance408 this fundamental chord of truth. The real objectivity, therefore, unfolds as from a sheath, the pathos, that is the substantive content of a situation, unfolds, moreover, the rich and powerful personality in which the essential phases of spirit are alive, and find their realization and expression. For such embodiment all that is absolutely indispensable is a definition and determination of the real, which is generally suitable to the object thus defined, and which requires nothing further to explain it. If we have once got hold of such a form unfolded in strict accordance with our Ideal principle, then we have a work of art essentially objective in the true sense, and the question whether each and every historical detail is justified is of no further importance. We have before us a work of art which appeals directly to our inner life, and one which is our own possession. Once possessed of that, and we may take as much as we please of that element of the form which lay more closely to periods of life which have passed; but the eternal foundation is that which appeals to all men in all places, which is carried forward with a power that never wanes or fails to influence us, and it does so because the objective life it reveals is the same that abounds in and overflows our own souls. That which is merely historical in the appearance is, on the contrary, the element that vanishes; and, in dealing with works of art created in days remote from our own, we must do our best to resolve the discordance, and, indeed, must be fully prepared to blot out from our vision similar defects in works that spring from our own times. Thus it is that the Psalms of David, with their immortal celebration of the Lord in His goodness, and the wrath of His almightiness, no less than the profound sorrows of the Hebrew prophets as they face Babylon and Zion, touch men with the same force to-day as they did of old time: nay, even a moral diatribe, such as is sung by Sarastro in the “Zauberflöte,” may come home to the hearts of us all, including the sons of Egypt409, owing to the soul and vitality which rings through its melodies.

And we may add that every individual to whom a work of art objective in this, the true sense, is presented, must on his part discard his own false prepossessions, wherein he merely wishes to find his own idiosyncrasies repeated. On the first reproduction of “William Tell,” it appears, not a single Swiss among the audience was satisfied. In much the same way, when the most beautiful love-songs have been sung, many another, failing to find therein his own passions reflected, has presumed to think the beauty untrue to life; just as so many more, whose knowledge of love is confined to the perusal of romances, have imagined that the love-god would only then be their immortal possession when they found themselves face to face with precisely the same emotions and situations their favourite studies had propounded.

We have, in this first part of our aesthetical philosophy, examined as a first step the universal Idea of beauty; we then proceeded to inquire in what respects it was defective in its existence as the beauty of Nature, and after thus clearing the way we were in a position to grasp the complete notion of the Ideal as the adequate realization of beauty. We developed the Ideal, first, as conceived abstractly according to the general notion of it, and having determined that were assisted thereby to elucidate the modes of its particular manifestations. Inasmuch, however, as a work of art has its origin in the human spirit it requires the pregnant activity of an individual life from which it proceeds, and as the creation of the same exists for others, that is, a Public which is emotionally receptive. This spiritual and informing activity is the imagination of the artist. We have consequently now, and this is the third and last aspect of the Ideal to which we shall refer, to raise the question how it comes about that this product of men’s inner world is not the direct and native growth410 of that world, but receives its due form through the creative impulse of particular men, in other words, by virtue of the genius and talent of the artist. At the same time we must admit that the question is only raised that we may be able to add the statement that it really is excluded from the sphere of scientific investigation, or, at the most, we can only furnish a few general remarks towards its solution. Yet it is undoubtedly a question frequently raised this, namely, from what source an artist receives the gift and faculty of conception and execution with which he creates his work. We should all of us like, no doubt, to have a ready prescription, a recipe of what we must exactly do, what conditions we must impose on ourselves to produce something as wonderful. We would emulate Cardinal von Este when he asked Ariosto, with reference to his raging Roland: “But, Master Louis, where in the world did you get all this damned stuff from?” Raphael replied to a similar question in a letter we still possess, that he was hunting after a certain idea.

The more obvious aspects of artistic activity we propose to examine under the following heads of discussion:

First, we will give our definition of the general conception of artistic genius and the inspiration it implies.

Secondly, we will make a few observations on the objective character of this creative activity.

Thirdly, we will endeavour to ascertain in virtue of what real artistic originality consists.

Before inquiring more closely into the meaning of the term “genius” we must obviously limit the field within which we propose to discuss it. Genius is an expression of very wide connotation, and is used not merely in its application to artists, but equally when we refer to great generals and kings, as also to the heroic captains of scientific discovery. For the sake of simplification we would once more discuss the distinctions involved under a triple division of our subject-matter.

(a) The Imagination411

The most conspicuous faculty of an artist which arrests our attention when we direct it expressly upon the capacities implied in artistic productivity is the imagination. And we must be careful here not to confuse it with a visionary fancy which is wholly passive. The imagination creates.

(α) And, in the first place, we shall find that this creative activity carries with it in possession and endowment a peculiar power of grasping reality and the forms it presents, all that through the channels of alert eyes and ears imprints pictures of infinite variety caught from the external world upon the mind, and further implies an exceptionally retentive memory wherein to store up this varied world of innumerable reflections. The artist, therefore, in this initial stage of our analysis is not merely thrown back upon images of his own creation, but is rather compelled to turn aside from the dull level of ideals falsely so called and to boldly enter the fields of Nature and Life. To attempt art or poetry merely with fanciful ideas of our own is always a suspicious way of starting on our journey; for the artist must mould his creations from the abundance of his life and by no means from the overplus of abstract generalities. It is not, as in philosophy, thoughts, but the real external forms of what actually exists which furnishes the material for artistic production. In contact with this raw material to work upon the artist must feel thoroughly at home. He must have seen much, heard much, and stored away a great deal as well; and in illustration of this we almost invariably find that a great personality is distinguished by a capacious memory. All that interests mankind he will lay hold of, and the more profound his spirit the more it will enlarge the field of its interests in countless directions. This was the way in which we find the genius of Goethe first opened its wings, and throughout his life the circle of his spirit’s restless horizon broadened and broadened. This peculiar gift of receptiveness, this interest in the comprehension of facts after their true definitions and colour, their steadfast adherence to the truth of experience is the first thing we look for in a great artist. And this accurate knowledge of the truth of form must be accompanied in equal measure by a proved acquaintance with the souls of men, the passions that rise in the heart, and everything that it yearns and strives for. And, in addition to this twofold armory of knowledge, he must understand yet further all the various ways that this world of the human soul expresses itself on the face of the reality which confronts his senses, transpiercing thus the outer veil.

(β) But, in the second place, this imaginative power is not exhausted with merely receiving that which is presented to the senses, or is inferred as the content of the human soul. The ideal work of art does not merely embrace the outward semblance of the inward spirit as clothed in the forms of its actual existence, but should rather succeed in manifesting the essential truth and reason of the real itself. This element of reason, as determined in the particular object the artist has selected, must not merely be pressed in his own consciousness, as an active influence, but must already have been reflected upon in that essential and rich significance which brings it into relation with the entire breadth and depth of reality. Without reflection no man can grasp fully the wealth that is in him, and it is consequently an inseparable feature of any great work of art that everything which attaches to it both as a whole and in its detail has been long and deeply weighed and thought out. No artistic work of real sterling value can be thrown off with any mere imaginative tour de force.412 We do not, of course, suggest that the artist must therefore comprehend in the form of philosophical thought this essential core of reason in his experience; albeit such is the fundamental rock upon which religion no less than philosophy and art is based. Philosophy is by no means essential to his outfit; and, in fact, if he once begins to think about things as a philosopher, he busies himself with modes of thought which are diametrically opposed to that which should engage an artist’s attention. For what the imagination undertakes to do and only to do is not to bring to consciousness this inner core of reason in the form of general propositions and conceptions, but to apprehend it clothed in the concrete form of actual existence and individuality. All that ferments within his life the artist must reproduce in the body and envisagement, whose connected picture and general outlines he has already assimilated from the world outside, making such so far subservient to his creative effort that they in their turn may participate in the truth of his own substance and enable him to crown it with complete expression. In this interfusion of an intelligible content with an embodiment received from actual existence the artist will avail himself of the ever wakeful circumspection of his reflective faculties no less than the deep resources of emotional life which leave the stamp of vitality on his work. It is consequently but one more sample of critical aberration to imagine that poems such as the Homeric were introduced to our poet in his sleep. Without intelligent alertness, division, and distinctions of each part as related to the whole, an artist will be unable to assert his mastery over any form whatsoever that he may wish for; only fools are of the opinion that the genuine artist does not in the least know what his hands and senses are about.

Moreover, the concentration of the artist’s emotional life on each aspect of his work is also as necessary to its success as the concentration of his mind. For it is mainly through the impression of emotion, which permeates and gives a vital colour to the entire work, that the artist asserts his claim to the substance and embodiment of his creation as a part of his own spiritual substance, as something he, a given personality, may peculiarly call his own. For the external aspect of his work, the mere picture of it as we may say, tends rather to place us outside it and apart; it is the emotional energy it expresses which primarily unites it with affinity to our very souls. Only when thus understood shall we be able to realize the truth that an artist must not merely have much looked about him in the world and assimilated a rich knowledge both of its outward show and the very substance of its life, but, further, must himself have experienced many things and great things, things that have moved him to the quick and left their life-roots in his own heart and spirit — he must, as we say, have “gone through much” and “lived abundantly” — before he will find himself able to build from his stores in the concrete types of his art something approaching Life’s unsounded repletion. And this will at once explain and justify the bluster and ferment of genius in its youth, as amply reflected in the lives of Goethe and Schiller. But only the age of maturity and gray hairs will bring us the perfect work of art in all its rounded ripeness413.

(b) Talent and Genius

This productive activity of the imagination by means of which the artist gives, by a process of elaboration to that which is essentially rational in its nature, a real embodiment, a creation more his own than anything else — this is what is usually summarized as genius and talent.

(α) We have already drawn attention to those characteristics which are most obviously referable to genius. Genius is the general capacity of creating a genuine example of fine art no less than the energy implied in the execution and elaboration of the same. Moreover, this capability and the power which goes with it is essentially the property of a human soul; that is to say, self-conscious individuality alone is able to create in this sense that a spiritual creation of this quality is just what it sets before itself to produce. Critics, intent on closer definition, are wont to distinguish sharply between genius and talent. And, in fact, they are not absolutely the same things, although it is necessary to find them united in the artist who would give us artistic work of the highest class. To be more exact, Art, in so far as it generally becomes a particular art, and is exemplified for us in the real and definite appearance of its products, requires various accomplishments appropriate to the peculiar modes of its realization. Such forms of executive versatility we may call with propriety talent, as we may say that anyone possesses a talent for perfect playing on the violin, or anyone else for singing. But a mere talent for this or that can only effect for us anything really good in the, so to speak, insulated nooks and corners of art414; it moreover itself requires for its true perfection something of more universal art-capacity as also that soul-animation, something more which is essentially the hall-mark of genius. Talent, in short, without the vital spark of genius, never gets much beyond a purely mechanical facility.

(β) It is also an opinion very commonly held that superior talent and genius are inborn. Here again we must distinguish; for if there is a sense in which this is true, from another point of view it is equally mistaken. No doubt every man, by virtue of his humanity, receives at his birth the potential gifts of religion, thought, and science. In other words he would not strictly be a man if he did not already possess a capacity to grasp the idea of a Supreme Being, and generally to become the subject of a thinking consciousness. All that he requires to gain these things, in addition to the fact of his human birth, are education, culture, and perseverance. With art, however, the matter stands differently. Art requires specific aptitude415, in which unquestionably natural endowment plays an essential part. As, that is to say, beauty is itself the Idea realized in that which is apprehended as real by the senses, and a work of art embodies the workings of Spirit in a form of existence immediately cognized by the eye and the ear, in the same way the artist must discover and embody the content of his art not in the exclusively spiritual form of thought, but within the sphere of sensuous perception and feeling, and indeed as creator in actual relation to a given sensuous material and within the limits of the same. This artistic creativeness consequently encloses within itself, as art does throughout, the aspect of immediacy envisaged with the directness of Nature’s own creations, and it is this appearance, which the individual is unable to evolve from himself, but has to find it, if he finds it at all, as immediately presented to him. Herein lies the significance of the statement, and herein alone, that genius and talent are innate.

In much the same way the several arts adapt themselves as by a kind of natural affinity to particular nations. Song and melody are, we may almost say, the birth-gift of an Italian; with our northern peoples, on the contrary, music416 and the opera, though seriously cultivated and with great success, are as far from being a real home growth as the orange trees. The Greeks are conspicuous for the native and elaborate beauty of their epic poetry, and most of all for the unique perfection of their sculpture. The Romans never possessed an art that was in any strict sense exclusively their own. All that grew into blossom on their soil was transplanted from the gardens of Greece. The art whose growth has the widest natural range is that of poetry; and the reason of this is that in it we require least to draw upon a sensuous vehicle for its expressed presentment. Within the province of poetry the folk-song is most of all native to a people and inseparably yoked with their natural conditions. For this very reason the folk-song breaks into blossom even in times of the rudest culture and for the most part retains the unconscious simplicity of Nature herself. Of this Goethe himself is an example. Though he produced works in every type of poetical expression his first songs still go deepest and carry least dust from the study. In them, too, there is least the flavour of culture. The latter-day Greek is still a living witness to a people whose native gift it is both to write poetry and sing. Fauriel has published a collection of modern Greek songs, taken for the most part just as women, nurses, and school-girls were heard singing them, who could not for the world understand what he found so wonderful in them. And this is a good illustration of the way that we find Art and its specific appearance associate itself with a particular national type. In the same way the art of improvization is more than anywhere else the native growth of Italy and exemplified there with quite extraordinary talent. An Italian will even to-day improvize for you a five-act drama, and not a word of it is committed to memory; all grows up out of his experience of human passions and situations and the deeply-excited inspiration of the moment. As an example we mention the fact that a certain poor improvizer after rhapsodizing in this way for a considerable time, and then finally trudging off on his round to collect his pence from the bystanders in a battered hat, was still in such a fume of poetic frenzy that he could not bring his declamations to a stop, waved about in fact so lustily with his arms and hands that in the end all the money he had begged was shaken to the winds.

(γ) It is, thirdly417, a characteristic of genius that it should possess, and indeed it is a part of this natural endowment418, facility in creating that which it is impelled to create, and in adapting itself to the technical requirements of all the subsidiary aspects of artistic work. We talk, for instance, of the fetters with which the verse, measure, and rhyme shackle a poet; or, when referring to a painter, of the endless difficulties that draughtsmanship, knowledge of tints, chiaroscuro, and the rest fling in the way of invention and execution. Unquestionably a long course of study is a necessary condition of success in all the arts, a perseverance that never tires, a facility that is continually assisted by repetition; the greater the native strength, however, of the genius or superior gift, and the richer its resources the less it will feel the weight of its effort in securing all the necessary accomplishments involved in creative excellence419. A really first-rate artist has the lust of work born in him and an imperative impulse akin to any other natural want to give artistic form to his emotional and imaginative life that is in him. His emotional life and his ideas irresistibly run into this artistic mould; he finds as it were the instrument already within him made to the hand, so fitted to express his soul-life that all the pains it takes him to learn it are as nothing. A musician can thus unfold to us in his melodies the depths of all that stirs and moves his soul and only by this means. What he feels is at once wafted into melody, just as the life of a painter is impressed upon form and colour, or that of a poet is transmuted into the creations of his imagination, that poetry which clothes his ideas in the beauty and music of the written word. And this gift of vital form the artist does not merely possess as an imaginative power, a phantasy, an emotional impulse “that leaves not a wrack behind,” but as a direct stimulus of feeling to active enterprise, as a gift, that is, of real executive accomplishment. Both of these aspects are united in the real artist. What springs to life in his imagination is immediately alert upon his mobile fingers, precisely as the sudden thought of our mind breaks into word from the tips, or as our most intimate thoughts, ideas, and emotions are reflected on the outward man and his demeanour. Genius of the real stamp, whenever and wherever found, is easily quit of the difficulties presented by the technical workshop; and indeed has found the most beggarly and apparently impracticable material to accept and embody as it pleased the inward shapes of imagination. No doubt the endowment which the artist finds as a direct gift to himself must be kept alive and alert by indefatigable recourse to it, but he must also possess naturally a practical power of immediate execution. Without this all the facility he may have acquired in imaginative conception will never produce an essentially creative work of art. The very notion of art demands of us that both things should go together hand in hand, the productive energy of the soul and its technical realization in the forms of art.

The activity of the imagination, then, and the power of technical execution, taking both together as the inseparable antecedents of a real artist, are commonly understood as inspiration.420

(α) The first question that presents itself to us for solution with regard to it is under what conditions it arises, as to which many different views have been held.

(αα) There is, for instance, the strange notion, to some extent arising from the general truth of the peculiar intimacy with which genius attaches itself to the worlds of conscious life and Nature, that inspiration can be conjured up through mere excitation of the senses. But making our blood dance will not carry us far; we are still a long way off from the Muses, despite the champagne bottle, Such, at least, was the experience of Marmontel, for he tells us that he tried it in a wine-cellar with six thousand bottles of champagne to choose from; but not a breath of the Muses passed over him421. Ay, your genius may be as great as he lists, and for all that stretch himself many a time morning and evening on the green grass, while the fresh breeze floats over him, and stare up into the sky, and not a whisper shall the inspired Muses breathe in his ear.

(ββ) Just as little is it likely that we shall make the charmed gates of inspiration spring open by merely presenting ourselves before them with a desire to enter. Whoever fondly imagines that he is in the right mood to compose a poem, or paint a picture, or run off a first-rate melody without already possessing the stuff in him to quicken that spark into vital form, and has first to hunt about for something to say, despite all his talent, will find himself no better off for his best intuitions, quite unable, at any rate, to conceive any complete thing of beauty, or perfect a really sterling work of art. Neither the mere tickling of our senses nor any act of will or determination can father on us true inspiration. To attempt such things simply proves that both the emotional life and the imagination have as yet no real object of artistic interest. When once we have the artistic impulse of the real kind, we may conclude the interest there has already its fixed seal and object, a content that it intends to master.

(γγ) True inspiration consequently is fixed in the presence of a specific content, which the imagination takes up in order to give artistic expression to it. It is, in fact, the object of this active process of giving form both as inwardly made visible to the mind, and as outwardly reproduced in the execution of a work of art. Inspiration is equally necessary for both these aspects of artistic activity. The question once more presents itself to us, in what way such a material will come to an artist, in order to bring about this inspiration. We find many various opinions expressed on this head. On the one hand it is frequently required of an artist that the material of his work should be drawn up from the world within him. No doubt this may be so when “the poet sings as a bird from the bough.” His own cheerfulness of spirit is then the incentive which enables him to represent a particular mood of his own as the content of his production, and by this very expression of it he gives vent to his enjoyment of the same. A song of this kind, straight from the heart422, is indeed a rich reward. But quite as often, however, the greatest works of art are created from the suggestion of objects wholly external to himself. The odes of Pindar were frequently the result of direct commissions; and, in the same way, the object and subject has times without number been given to artists both for buildings and pictures, and they have been able to arouse in themselves an enthusiasm for such. Indeed, it is only too frequently the express complaint of artists that they have not the subject-matter on which to work. Such a reference to things outside, and its stimulus to artistic production, presents just that relation of the artist to Nature and her immediacy which is essential to the notion of superior executive gifts423, and is at the same time a condition to the appearance of genuine inspiration. If we consider the artist from this point of view, we shall find that it is here that this natural endowment relates itself immediately to a material already found for him, and through the incentive thereby offered him, through the inspiration of actual fact, or as, for example, was the case with Shakespeare, through that which was presented by old tales, ballads, romances, and chronicles, proceeds to embody such material in artistic form, and thereby generally to express his own personality. The impulse to production can therefore be given by something entirely outside the artist’s life, and the only condition essential to a successful result is that the interest, which fixes the artist’s attention should be of real artistic significance, and that he is able to reproduce the same in all its vitality. Such conditions virtually imply the presence of rare inspiration. And an artist who is really alive and awake himself, by reason of this very vitality of his own powers, discovers endless opportunities for actively asserting the same, and feeling inspired while doing so, opportunities which pass over other people without similarly affecting them.

(β) If we ask further, viz., of what precisely this artistic inspiration consists, we may perhaps best describe it by saying that it is the capacity of being entirely absorbed in a given subject, a capacity not merely wholly to realize it, but incapable of resting until the same is completely minted anew, and rounded off in its artistic form.

(γ) Moreover, when an artist has thus entirely appropriated his subject, it is but saying the same thing the other way to affirm that he must know how to forget his own individual idiosyncrasies, and all that accidentally attaches to them; he must, in short, on his part lose himself in the matter on hand. He must make his artistic personality the pure form under which the content he has assimilated is clothed and embodied. An inspiration in which the particular individual receives too emphatic a predominance and assertion, rather than being the vitally active instrument which displays the ideal significance of the material worked upon, is an inferior type of inspiration. This truth opens the way to a fuller consideration of what is generally understood as the objective character of artistic production.

(a) In the ordinary sense of the word we understand objectivity to mean that the content in any work of art necessarily receives the form of the reality already given, and in its artistic embodiment we have the same clearly repeated. In this sense, that we desire to see objective truth reproduced for us, we are entitled to call Kotzebue an objective poet. In his work we undoubtedly find ordinary reality simply as it is again. The object of art is, however, more precisely stated, to strip away not merely the appearance, but the actual content of all that meets us every day, and by means of the spiritual activity of the artist most personal to himself, to work out that which is essentially rational in that content in its really adequate external form. Indeed, if we look at yet better examples of art than Kotzebue’s, such as those we have already glanced at in the youthful productions of Goethe, we shall find that this realistic type of objectivity can be made essentially living in its expression, and by virtue of this quality prove highly attractive to ourselves, and yet, on account of the fact that the artistic form remains defective, fail to arrive at the real beauty of art. Purely external objectivity, therefore, which still lacks the abiding and substantial significance, is not that for which an artist should strive.

(b) A second type of objective realization presents itself to us in the case where we find the external is not the artistic aim, but the artist has seized hold of his subject with all the depth and strength of his emotional life. This inward aspect of his work remains, however, so entirely enclosed within itself and concentrated that it fails to assert itself with a clearness thoroughly possessed, or to unfold itself in its full truth. The eloquence of pathos simply restricts itself by means of illustrations external to it, without possessing either the power or the culture to be able to present the fulness of that content in an explicit form. Folksongs pre-eminently belong to such a mode of artistic production. Extremely simple as they are in their form, they suggest an emotional life which lies at their root of still wider range and depth, but which they are unable clearly to express. Their art, in fact, is itself not sufficiently elaborate or complete enough to carry into the light of day with transparent reflection all that it would unfold, and is forced to rest satisfied with suggesting to our sympathies the same by means of an external symbolism. The heart remains thrown back and concentrated upon itself, and in order to make its life intelligible to others, casts but a fainter reflection of its world upon entirely finite and external circumstances and phenomena, which, no doubt, are thus eloquent in a degree, albeit we receive from them only a far-off echo of the emotions and life they would bring home to us. Goethe has himself written many quite exquisite songs of this kind. “The Shepherd’s Lament” is one of the most beautiful. In this refrain a heart that is broken with pain and yearning still remains silent and reserved beneath the purely external traits which would fain relieve it; and, despite of this, we hear, as through an undertone, all the concentrated depth of emotion it fails to express. In the “Erl-king,” and many other of his songs, we hear the same tone. This tone, however, we may also meet in degenerate form right down to the most futile barbarism, unable to grasp either the essential character of the facts or the situation, merely clinging to their most finite aspects in all their crudeness and absence of artistic taste. An example we may give from the “Drummer-comrade of the boy Wunderhorn,”424 such inanities as “O thou dwelling house of man, O gallows,” or “Adjutant sir corporal,” expressions which are supposed to move us deeply. When on the contrary Goethe sings:

Der Strauss, den ich gepflücket,

Grüsse Dich viel tausendmal,

Ich habe mich oft gebücket

Und ihn aus Herz gedrücket,

Ach, wie viel tausendmal425.

strong emotion is suggested in a very different way, which brings before our mind nothing trivial or contrary to the main idea. What however is, as a rule, defective in this particular type of poetical realization is the expression of emotion in all its true intensity. This, in the rarest art, should not be suffered to remain a depth shut away, which merely reflects a distant echo through the external objects presented: it should either break forth in its full character, or be seen through the vehicle with complete transparency. Schiller, for example, brings out his soul in its full strength in the pathos of his work, withal a great soul, which penetrates to the very core of his subject, and is able to express its very deepest significance in the freest and most perspicuous way through the wealth and music of his verse.

(c) In conformity, then, with the notion of the Ideal, we may conclude that even when we are dealing with the mere expression of emotional life, we shall never fully establish our title to truly objective art so long as any part of all that is comprised in the subject-matter, which stirs the artistic inspiration, remains still wrapped up within the soul that seeks to express itself; rather all that lies there should be completely unfolded, and unfolded in a way which not merely shall reveal to us the essential soul and substance of the content selected, but shall embody it in some completely homogeneous type of individual art, through which, as through a transparency, both soul and substance shall radiate. For that which is highest and most excellent is not by any means that we are unable to express, as though the poet contained in himself still greater depths than those expressed on the face of his work. The work of an artist is the consummate fruit of that artist, and reflects precisely what he is, and only what he is, and all that remains behind in the temple of his soul is a naught or nothing426.

However much it may be imperatively required of the artist that he should give to his work an objective character such as we have above indicated, this must not make us oblivious to the fact that the artist’s production is at the same time the work of his inspiration; it is he alone who has, by his entire identification of his personality with the specific subject-matter and its artistic embodiment, brought into being the entire creation out of the life of his own emotional nature and imagination. And it is this identity of the free personality of the artist and the truly objective construction of his artistic creation which constitutes the third fundamental aspect of his activity as set forth above and which we must now shortly consider, in so far as we may be thus enabled to unite that which we have hitherto separated in our independent consideration of the conceptions of genius and the objective presentment of a work of art. We may characterize such a unity as the conception of true artistic originality. Before, however, we come to close quarters with all that is implied in this conception, it is necessary to clearly grasp two points of view already related to it whose insufficiency we have to expose on the ground of their one-sidedness before a true conception of originality can be fully appreciated. These may be sufficiently indicated by the terms “subjective manner”427 and style.

(a) The Subjective Manner

The point of first importance in discussing the meaning of the expression “artistic manner” is to differentiate it fundamentally from artistic originality. The term “manner,” in our view, is only used in direct relation to the specific and consequently accidental idiosyncrasies of the artist, that is, merely in so far as such qualities assert themselves as effective in his work without being called forth by the nature of the subject itself and its ideal exposition.

(α) A manner thus interpreted has no connection with the universal types of art, that is to say, types which require an essentially different mode of representation, as, for instance, the landscape painter necessarily treats the objects of Nature in quite a different way from that under which a historical painter would so treat them; or the epic poet would handle similar subject-matter in a different way from that appropriate to the dramatic poet. On the contrary, “a manner” is a form of artistic expression wholly emanating from a particular individuality, an entirely supposititious idiosyncrasy of executive ability which may be carried so far as to contradict absolutely the true notion of the Ideal. As thus defined “manner” stands at the bottom of the scale among the forms which may characterize an artist’s general handling. An artist who thus expresses his individuality simply gives free rein to any chance notions of his own without testing them as subject to the substantive claims of art. But it is a fundamental principle of art that it should abolish precisely all that is merely accidental to its content no less than to its artistic or rather external mode of presentment. And this is only to say that it requires of the artist that he should efface from his work all traces of purely personal tastes and idiosyncrasies he shares with no one else428.

(β) And for these reasons we would point out that “a manner” of this kind is not so much to be contrasted directly with the true exposition of art as to be considered in relation to the purely external aspects of art where the individuality of the particular mode of treatment comes into play. This kind of manner is most conspicuous in the arts of painting and music for the reason that these arts429 present to the artist the widest variety of external characterization for him to seize upon and reproduce. What we find here is a certain artificial manner of general execution entirely peculiar to some particular artist and the school of imitators or pupils who follow him, which through constant repetition degenerates into mere habit.

(αα) And its tendency is to develop on one of two ways in which we may regard the artistic work. First, there is the aspect of its composition. To take painting, for example, we have all the variety of ways under which the prevailing atmospheric tone, the arrangement of foliage, the contrast of light and shade, in short the entire scheme of colour may be treated. Most particularly in this feature of the general scheme430 of the colouring and lighting of a picture we find that painters permit themselves the most varied freedom of individual preference and distaste. Of course such a prevailing tone may appear to us as that we do not find in Nature for the simple reason that we have not had our attention directed to it although it is really there. But we shall often find that such a scheme has simply been adopted by this or that artist on grounds of personal taste or convenience431, and it becomes simply a habit in him to use everything now as subject to that particular scheme. And what we have observed with reference to colouring is equally true when applied to the treatment of natural objects, their grouping, position, motion, and general characterization. This inferior mode of treatment is particularly to be observed in the works of the Dutch school. Take the case of Van der Neer’s night-scenes and his artificial presentation of moonlight, or Van der Goyen’s sand-hills in so many of his landscapes. The ever-repeated reflections of light from satin and silk stuffs that we find in so many pictures of other masters of the same school are indications of the same artificial mode of handling.

(ββ) A manner of this type may be still further, traced in the execution of other details, the handling of brush or pencil, the laying on and blending of tints and many other features of executive work.

(γγ) The general conclusion we come to, after considering all such examples of specialized handling and conception in which constant repetition grows at last habitual to, and indeed becomes a second nature of the artist, is this, that just in proportion as the manner adopted is more specialized432, there is an increasing and dangerous tendency for it to degenerate into that which is nothing more than a soulless and consequently arid repetition and mechanical exercise, throughout which the artist is no longer present with the fulness of his spiritual resources and the entire strength of his inspiration. When this takes place his art necessarily sinks to the level of a mere executive facility or accomplishment of his hands, and a manner, otherwise innocent enough, may very readily grow starved and lifeless.

(γ) The more truly artistic “manner” has consequently to disengage itself from such jejune peculiarities, to broaden out into a freer atmosphere433, so that no specialized mode of handling shall be suffered to sterilize itself into what is simply a matter of habit. In this way an artist will approach the facts of Nature with a breadth of view more in keeping with her own, and will understand how to identify his larger conceptions and the general technique of his craft with the same ideal spirit. In something of the same sense we may describe it as a peculiar manner of Goethe that he is particularly apt in concluding not merely poems of society but also openings to works of a more serious character with a sudden turn of pleasantry, in order to remove the impression of or throw into the background the serious nature of previous reflection or situation. We meet with the same characteristic in the correspondence of Horace. It is, in fact, an application of the art of conversation and general sociability, which, in order to avoid following up any matter more deeply, comes to a stop, breaks off and cleverly diverts the serious into more cheerful channels. Such a mode of the literary art is undoubtedly part of the manner of the artist and his individual style, but the individuality thus exemplified is based upon a broader principle, and is asserted in a way wholly justified by the artistic purpose of the work in hand. And this particular type of an artistic manner will enable us to pass readily to the consideration of “style” generally.

(b) Style

Le style c’est l’homme même is a famous phrase of the French. Style is here generally understood as the unique characterization of personality, the particular mode of expression, however it may be applied, which wholly reveals to us its substance. Herr von Rumohr, on the other hand (“Italian Investigations,” i, p. 87), endeavours to interpret the expression as a mode habitual through its constant repetition of bringing together the most vital characteristics of the subject-matter artistically treated, by virtue of which the sculptor informs his figures with reality, and the painter gives to his the appearance of life. He further adds important observations upon the appropriate form of representation which, in the case of an art such as sculpture, the specific sensuous material either permits or proscribes. It is, however, not necessary to attach the expression “style” solely to this aspect of sensuous material; we may unquestionably extend it to all those determinations and rules of artistic production which apply naturally to any particular type of art, and in virtue of which an object is reproduced in the medium of any one of them. We consequently distinguish in the art of music the style of church music from that of opera, and in that of painting, the historical style from the style of genre painting. Style is therefore a mode of artistic presentation, which not merely follows closely the fundamental conditions of its material, but asserts itself as adequate to all that any particular type of art demands for its composition and execution and in strict conformity with the laws which apply to the subject-matter on hand. Defect of style will then, in this extension of the meaning, either imply an inability to present a composition in accordance with such necessary conditions, or will amount to a personal caprice which rather gives free rein to its own particular predilections than accepts the conditions of composition which are really proposed to it, in other words adopts an inferior “manner” of its own. Consequently it is inadmissible, as Herr von Rumohr has already pointed out, to apply principles peculiar to one type of art to another, as Mengs has done in his famous museum in the villa Albani, where both in the general conception and execution of his Apollo he adopts the modes of colouring applicable only to sculpture. A defect of the same kind may be traced in many of the pictures of Dürer, where we see that even in painting, especially in the folding of his drapery, he adopts the style of wood-cut in which he is so consummate a master.

The final result, then, of our inquiry on this head is that true originality does not consist in merely conforming to the paramount conditions of style, but in a kind of inspired state434 personal to the artist which, instead of committing itself wholly to a mere external manner of composition, seizes hold of a particular subject-matter that is essentially rational, and by virtue of its own resources and quality, re-clothes the same as from within the artist himself and not merely in a way conformable to the essential notion of the art adopted, but also in a form adequate to the universal notion of the Ideal.

(α) True originality is consequently identical with true objectivity, and combines that which is due to the personality of the artist and the actual subject-matter of his work in such a way that both aspects of his artistic product are held together in complete accord. Looked at in one way, such a work appears to reveal to us the very essence of the artist’s personality, while regarded from another we only find there the essence of the subject-matter artistically treated, so that this very uniqueness of expression appears to arise from the unique characteristics of the material to which it is applied; and we may say with equal truth either that the expressed form is due to those characteristics, or that this unique impression we obtain from them proceeds from the creative unity of the artist.

(β) True originality must be entirely kept distinct from individual caprice and every kind of personal expression that is due to fortuitous causes. A common idea of originality is simply the stringing together of so many curiosities, things which this particular individual and no other could perpetuate or even faintly imagine. That is, however, merely idiosyncracy gone mad. No people on earth are more original in this meaning of the term than Englishmen, a country where every one prides himself on committing some folly or other, which no man in his senses is likely to repeat, and then fondly imagines his performance to be original.

We may in this connection briefly refer to what has been so extolled, and never more than in our own days as the originality of wit and humour. An artist of this type of humour starts off from a point of view or an experience wholly personal to himself, and constantly recurs to the same so that the real object of his artistic production is merely treated as the peg on which he may hang, or the field in which he may give full play to, whatever wittiness, jest, quirks, and sallies his mood may chance to light upon. In this way the real object of his art and that which should render it vital in himself fall entirely apart, and we have a capricious mode of artistic production, in which the idiosyncrasy of the artist is made to appear as of first importance. A humour of this kind is often replete with intellectual brilliance and deep feeling, and in its general result is very apt to impose on us; yet for all that it is not generally such a difficult matter as is commonly believed. To constantly interrupt the rational content of that which we are really dealing with, interrupting all steady progress with a stream of capricious fresh starts and conclusions, a sort of patchwork of whims and emotional excursions, and thereby to create a caricature of imaginative vigour is far easier than to develop and round off with completeness an artistic whole of sterling quality throughout such as will testify to the real Ideal. Moreover, our humour nowadays is only too ready to give us the repulsive features of a talent for wit essentially crude, and is constantly degenerating into coarse buffoonery and emptiness. We do not often get from it real humour at all. The stalest trivialities are wont to pass now for brilliancy and depth of soul provided they only rig themselves out in the pretentious motley of humour. Shakespeare, on the contrary, possessed a grand and profound sense of humour, but even his works are by no means destitute of shallows. The humour of Jean Paul too often surprises us with the depth of its wit and the beauty of its sentiment, but we are quite as often repelled by the absurdly eccentric way in which he hitches together his subjects, or rather leaves them with the bare jointure to lie apart, and then floods all he has to say with a kind of humour that leaves it almost impossible to make head or tail of. No humourist, however great he may be, is likely to find anything resembling it in his memory; and our main impression is frequently, even in the case of Jean Paul’s kaleidoscopic effects, that they are rather the result of mechanical pasting together than a spontaneous product from the crucible of genius. For this reason Jean Paul finds it necessary, in order continually to present new effects, to drag into books differing wholly in kind, botanical, legal and philosophical disquisitions, no less than descriptions of travel; whatever whim in fact may strike his fancy at the time is promptly inserted. Even when his subject relates to scientific discovery he will run together the most heterogeneous material such as a collection of Brazilian plants and observations upon the old imperial chamber435. There are people who will praise a motley of this kind as original. But it is really precisely the kind of caprice which originality of the genuine stamp excludes.

While we are on this topic it will not be out of place to add some further remarks upon irony, which particularly prides itself upon presenting us with the very flower of originality on just those occasions when it has ceased to treat any artistic material with seriousness and converts the whole affair into a subject of witticism, only worth notice for the sake of the wit it suggests. Looked at from another point of view this irony rakes together a lot of things which are quite foreign to the essence of the matter in hand, things the deeper significance of which the poet keeps to himself, and his notion seems to be that by this subtle exercise of his powers the imagination will be enlarged. And it is just in external associations of this sort that we get what we have already described as the poetry of a poetry, wherein everything that is deepest and most excellent is concealed from us for no other reason than this, that we must not be allowed to look at it because it is so profound. And we really find in Friedrich von Schlegel’s poetry, more particularly when he became vain over his title to the rank of poet, that which clearly is set forth as the aroma of all is just that which is never expressed: no wonder this poetry of poetry turns out to be the flattest prose.

(γ) A genuine work of art must consequently be held intact from all originality of this perverse type. True originality will be asserted throughout by this and this alone, that the work has the appearance of being the unique creation of one individual mind, which does not go about picking up scraps from around it and then make thereof a patchwork, but permits the material of that work, in complete accordance with the unity most congenial to its own substance, to bind itself together in a whole all parts of which are strictly related, as truly stamped with one mint as the founder’s cast. When we find scenes and motives introduced upon grounds that are foreign to the real artistic purpose, that is to say, which do not directly grow out of the true subject, we must inevitably lose that subtle and necessary connection of all the parts which create this unity, and what we thus interpolate will unavoidably impress us as something fortuitously attached by personal caprice. Much in this way it has been the fashion to give exceptional praise to the “Götz von Berlichingen” of Goethe on the grounds of its great originality. No doubt it is true enough, as we have above remarked, that in this drama Goethe has with much intrepidity given the lie direct to and turned his back upon all that had been taken as the established principles of the aesthetic science of his age; the execution of this work, however, does not bear the stamp of genuine originality. One finds, on the contrary, in this youthful production indications of the poverty of the material upon which it is founded, so that many traits and entire scenes appear to have been raked together and united by connections foreign to the subject from material of an interest contemporary with that of the artist’s life instead of being the genuine elaboration of the fundamental subject-matter. The scene, for example, between Götz and brother Martin, where Martin Luther is clearly suggested, contains ideas which Goethe could only have borrowed from a time such as his own when people began once more to wail over the conditions of monastic life, how they durst not drink wine, could only sleep off their meals, were at the mercy of evil desires and generally must submit to the three intolerable vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Brother Martin, on the other hand, grows enthusiastic over the knightly life of Götz, how he recalled to memory the load of booty he took from his foe, whom he ran through with lance on horseback before he could shoot, then tumbled over, horse and all, and finally returned to his castle and wife. Whereupon the good monk drinks the health of the dame Elizabeth, wiping his eyes the while. With mundane reflections of this sort Luther never started on his journey, but rather as a pious monk who had penetrated to their depths the religious conceptions and convictions of Augustine, another source altogether. Subject to precisely similar defects are the pedagogical references to that period which occur in the following scene and for which Vasedow is mainly responsible. We are informed that children of that age are taught much that is unintelligible, that the true method of instruction should rather educate their minds through the senses and experience. Karl, for example, repeats phrases to his father by heart precisely similar to those current in Goethe’s own younger days: “Junthausen is a village and castle on the Junt and for two hundred years has been the ancestral property of the lords of Berlichingen.” When Götz asks him if he knows any lord of Berlichingen personally the lad stares blankly at him and through sheer over-teaching does not know his own father. Götz declares that he knew every path and road in the country before he knew the names of a single river, village, or mountain. All this kind of thing is mere literary stucco which has nothing to do with the actual subject at all. And when an occasion does arise in which we ought to find some really characteristic grip of the very marrow of the subject, as in the conversations between Götz and Weisslingen, we get nothing more than cold reflections upon the times.

We find much the same association of irrelevant matter in the same poet’s “Wahlverwandschaften.”436 The laying out of pleasure grounds, the living pictures, the observations upon pendulum oscillations, the testing of metals, the headaches, the entire description of elective affinities, which is borrowed straight from chemical science, are all of this category. It may, of course, be freely admitted that in a romance, referring to an essentially prosaic age, such things areprima facie admissible, and more particularly so when we have a Goethe to introduce them so cleverly and apply them so charmingly; moreover no work of art of any kind can be kept wholly unaffected by the culture of the artist’s own age. It is one thing to allow the reflection of contemporary culture to appear as part of the artistic whole, quite another to bring together such material of research in a way that places it as something wholly outside and independent of the genuine substance of the composition. For the true originality of the artist no less than that of his work consists exclusively in their being vitally bound up with that which is only intelligible as part of the real subject-matter treated. When the artist has fully Appropriated this objective reason, without mixing up with it, to the detriment of its clarity, details he may have borrowed from his personal experience or other sources which do not strictly belong to it; in that case alone will he stamp the material with the genuine mark of his own artistic mintage. This personal effect upon his work merely serves him as a bridge of Life over which he passes to secure a work of art wholly complete in itself, just as in all genuine thought and action true freedom consists in allowing that which is of essential significance to assert itself without restraint, so that it becomes itself the force which dominates both the particular thought and volition of the man who thus appropriates it, and by so doing reconciles every vestige of opposition. In this way the originality of art absorbs every accidental trait peculiar to a given personality; but it only absorbs it that the artist may follow without reserve the impulse and bent of his genius as inspired through every fibre of the material he moulds, and instead of reflecting a purely barren wilfulness and caprice of his own may give an objective form to his true artistic individuality conjoined with consummate accomplishment. To have no “manner” was ever the one great “manner,” and in this sense alone can we ascribe originality to Homer, Sophocles, Rafael, and Shakespeare.

271 Einer specifischen Seele. We certainly should not in ordinary speech say that inorganic objects possessed a soul. The phrase indeed is difficult to follow, except as explained by the previous technical discussion of Einzelheit.

272 The expression in dieser der Allgemeinheit entgegengehobenen Äusserlichkeit refers to the manifold in opposition to which the principle of universality is posited as a test for the selection of those aspects which manifest it as vital individuality.

273 Seligkeit.

274 Heiterkeit. I cannot satisfy myself with one English word. It seems to combine both blithesomeness and cheerfulness in the literal meaning of the word.

275 In das einfache Beisichseyn. Self-containedness would be more literal.

276 Eine Versöhnung des Gemüths. I think this refers to the emotions of the spectators. The use of the word in the next sentence points to this.

277 Diese Festigkeit, e.g., such a religiously austere mode of treatment, rather this than “rigorously true,” is I think the sense.

278 Compare that wonderful poem of G. Meredith, “Theodolinda.”

279 Schönthuerei.

280 See Introduction, pp. 86, 87.

281 Such appears to me the sense of the above passage, but it is not very clearly expressed. Hegel states the case of those who contend that a picture must be a good one because the ideal element is the main thing and to get that you have merely to borrow from poetry. He then takes an example to show this is not so.

282 Here commences the more thorough exposition of the difficulty.

283 Vorstellung, “world of ideas” would be perhaps better.

284 Apart from an error in punctuation I think this sentence is not as Hegel wrote it, certainly it is not as he would have left it after revision; as it stands the grammatical construction is entirely split into two discordant sections. I have at least made it grammatical.

285 Die Vorstellung, i.e., the imaginative conception.

286 There is, however, the question of positive characterization imposed on the work by the artist. The work of Michelangelo is of course an extreme example. This is here rather overlooked.

287 That is to say, it remains the potency of many forms; it is left in its abstract formality to be variously formed by limbs in their motion and not cut into the forms devised by a tailor.

288 Infinite, of course, not in the sense of extension, but because it is a constituent of the universal medium of thought, infinite as the judgment is so.

289 This analysis of Dutch painting is remarkable for its insight and impartiality, and may be contrasted in this respect with the writings of Ruskin.

290 Die höhere Seele. The ideal atmosphere throughout.

291 It will be recalled that it was precisely this picture, or one much resembling, that Ruskin, with less sympathy, criticized severely.

292 No doubt these were other pictures in the exhibition of pictures contemporary with the date of Hegel’s lecture.

293 Ideal.

294 Auf willkürlich festgesetzten Zeichen.

295 Not a very lucid sentence. I presume the words bei deren Anblick refer, to the forms, not to the beauty which reposes on them. The abstractness of such a point of view is obvious.

296 I think sein eigenes Wollen must practically amount to this. But it is all very vague.

297 Handlung. See below.

298 Vollbringen des Menschen. The bringing up to fuller content.

299 Lit., “turned outside upon to confront, like a coat turned inside out that the inside may face external facts.”

300 The German term is Selbständigkeit. It may often be better translated by “independence.”

301 Durchgreifende. That which penetrates the whole as the causa efficiens. The whole passage is difficult and technical.

302 Für sich selbst. That is to say, a substance that is not dependent on another for its reality but is explicit as such out of its own resources.

303 Für das Allgemeine.

304 In einer Nacht. A condensed description of the true story apparently.

305 That is to say, it is made up of units all ready to pull in different directions.

306 A remarkable instance of the type in our own days was General Gordon. A perusal of his correspondence from Khartoum makes it sufficiently clear that he considered it his duty to remain despite all orders to the contrary, so long as the garrison remained unwithdrawn; no doubt he considered the reverse course dishonourable to England, but first of all it was dishonourable to himself.

307 Fürsicheinsiehen.

308 Das Vornehme. There is probably here a further allusion to the respectability associated with grandeur. The same is true of the compositions of the great Italian painters.

309 Ausgebildeten. I have hesitated to translate this “cultivated” as the context appears to suggest rather the kind of regime we find in the highly official centralization of such a monarchy as that of Prussia in Hegel’s time or the artificial eighteenth century. But the whole passage rings rather strangely to modern ideas, or at least to English notions of democracy.

310 Götz von Berlichengen was Goethe’s first drama, published in the year 1773, though the first version of it was written in 1771.

311 Das Waltende, e.g., a force which is predominant.

312 Gehalt, content, that is, in its configurative energy.

313 Sichverwirklichen, that is, objective self-realization.

314 The whole of this passage is difficult to follow and translate, and has roots, no doubt, in some of the most disputed positions in Hegelian philosophy, such as the independent reality of Nature, and the use that Hegel makes of such conceptions as Chance (Zufälligkeit) in his explanation of it. All that can be attempted here is to give some kind of intelligible interpretation of the expressions employed literally. The student will do well to consult Professor A. C. Bradley’s criticism of Hegel’s Idea of tragedy in his “Lectures on Poetry.”

315 The situation without defined situation.

316 Festigkeit. Staunchness is perhaps better.

317 Harmlosigkeit, e.g., its inability to cause conflict.

318 Such as painting and sculpture.

319 By positive he means that in themselves they are not actually discordant or negative but only render such discordance possible in their relation to spirit.

320 That is, where a collision depends upon natural causes.

321 Positive, that is, relative to a particular concrete condition.

322 Perhaps Erfindung would here be better translated with “invention.” Both processes are involved in the word.

323 Auf den natürlichen äusserlichen Verlauf.

324 This must be implied, for it can only be asserted with qualification of sculpture and it is not true of music.

325 In betreff seiner Besinnung. Besinnung suggests, no doubt, something more of mind than Gemüth. It is the entire content of self-consciousness on its sensuous side.

326 Die allgemeinen Mächte. This phrase is explained in the paragraph which follows.

327 Die Bethätigung. The actualization would be a better word perhaps.

328 It may surprise some readers in such a context suddenly to be confronted with such serious matters. But with Hegel such surprises must be expected. With him the root of all spiritual activity is never far absent, and the relation of the State is founded on the same basis as that of the Church. And if we mean anything by the phrase of the Divine Immanence we shall at least be able to follow him.

329 Die ewigen. Eternal because essentially belonging to the explication of reason.

330 Würde. Worthiness of personal characteristics, i.e., ethical character.

331 Das nur äuserlich Feststehende. The organizations of Spirit are the most permanent realities is, I think, the meaning.

332 Etwas bizarres oder widriges, i.e., that which is arbitrary and merely awakes curiosity or excites a feeling of repulsion.

333 There is obviously a symbolic meaning in this poem of Hartmann which Hegel appears to have overlooked, the sacrifice which the monks prescribed not necessarily involving a physical sacrifice, but merely the gift of a love which would be equal to such a sacrifice.

334 This passage is not easy to follow. I think der innre Begriff must mean the entire notion of the personality evolved in the action as distinct from all particular aspects which are negative and evil. The main difficulty of the passage consists in the abstract conception of evil or the negative upon which Hegel centres the attention.

335 Halt, i.e., stable self-consistency.

336 Die innre haltlose Zerrissenkeit.

337 Abgeschlossenheit, i.e., self-exclusive individuality.

338 Zur subjektiven Innerlichkeit. That is to say, the entire self-concentration on the spiritual centre of conscious life.

339 Lit., Their individuality remains rather external form, in such a way that it fails to penetrate through to absolutely inward subjectivity.

340 Noth, the constraint of necessary conditions.

341 Mit der Bestimmten, i.e., with the definite subject-matter of temporal life.

342 In the conception, that is to say, which is at the root of the Greek idea of Divinity.

343 I presume what Hegel means is as individual gods.

344 Er nicht mit seinem eigenen Selbst dabei ist. He fails to obtain the determinate freedom of the self-excluding subject.

345 I.e., between gods and men.

346 Ganz prosaisch. Viewed practically, that is to say, rather than metaphysically. The examples explain the meaning.

347 Das Thun geht stets herüber und hinüber. Is a skein in which the threads run over and under one another.

348 “Iliad,” I, v, 190.

349 This view may be well contrasted with the less vital criticism of Schiller on this subject, which induced him actually to exclude the feature from his amended edition of the play. In fact Hegel shows more insight here than Coleridge.

350 Nicht über Hamlet haltlos verfügt. It is also obvious, I think, that such a passage need not necessarily be opposed to Goethe’s main conception. Such ideas may readily be explained as the excuses of a man who inherently shrinks from forming a grave resolve of vigorous action. No doubts are suggested when Hamlet sees the ghost.

351 Den eigentlichen Mittelpunkt. Between what? I think the examples show that it is both between a work of human art and Nature and between the work of art itself and those to whom it is addressed.

352 Lit., Screws itself like a corkscrew into.

353 Ausmalung. The metaphor is taken from the art of painting and technically refers to the finish of the same in all its details. It is here used generally.

354 Vol. i, p. 153. I do not know the book.

355 Als bewegendes Pathos. This may mean “as the motive principle of pathos,” but I incline to the interpretation “as the pathos which affects others.”

356 This appears at first sight to be somewhat contrary to the statement made above (p. 309) that “We cannot affirm pathos of the gods.” But if my translation in the above passage is the right one Die Götter werden zum menschlichen Pathos, I think we must understand Die Götter here in a more universal sense of the Divine than in the former passage, and find the emphasis here is laid upon the word menschlichen. It is, in fact, but another way of stating the incarnation of the Divine in humanity.

357 Als totale Individualität, i.e., all that is comprised in its essential notion.

358 Der handelnden Character, i.e., Character manifest in the action.

359 Ausser sich, “goes to the dogs,” as we say in vulgar parlance, i.e., ceases to be character in the true sense at all.

360 This example shows us that by the expression früheren Götter above Hegel must be referring to prehistoric times and quite archaic conceptions of Greek godhead.

361 Eines in sick gebildeten Innern. Gebildet here used in the sense of perfected, rounded to a co-ordinated content.

362 Hineingegraben, lit., buried in.

363 I am unable to express in two words the contrast presented by the German tragen and ertragen.

364 It is not easy to strike the exact interpretation of such a word as Quetschlichkeit. Apparently this or the more usual term Quabbelig have the sense of “shaking.” I believe there is a synonym for quaker’s grass, viz., quatch-grass.

365 Und durch sie sich hindurchziehen. The most obvious sense of these words would be: and (i.e., the threads) carry themselves on through it (i.e., externality). Perhaps the meaning is that the relations in question not merely unite the Ideal to the world but are carried beyond (with the Ideal) the natural external world into that higher plane of the objective spiritual world. In my translation I have practically evaded the difficulty and assumed there is either something missing, or we must understand, I admit, a very harsh change of subject.

366 Through self-consciousness he is both the individual subject and the form of an infinite content.

367 Eine subjektive Totalität.

368 I have amplified this sentence to make it quite clear to which of the three worlds, viz., (a) the subjective world in its abstraction, (b) the external world in its abstraction or, finally, the world of reality, in which a and b are mutually related, the writer here refers.

369 In welche die in sick totale Einheit des Ideals nicht mehr ihrer konkreten Geistigkeit nach hineinzuscheinen befähigt ist. Lit., Into which the self-complete unity of the Ideal is no longer capable of penetrating by virtue of the concrete spirituality which it essentially is.

370 An obvious distinction between the arts of architecture and garden-construction is that in the former all the materials used have been already informed by human hands at least where building is in any advanced stage.

371 Hegel’s actual words would seem to imply that the fact a garden is created for use and enjoyment is detrimental to its beauty.

372 It must be admitted that this summary treatment of gardens is not very satisfactory. No doubt the best authorities concur in the view that the formal garden is more artistic than the landscape, but hardly on the main ground given here. Landscape gardening such as we find it in our great English country houses has a real justification of its own. And with regard to the reason given that a garden should be entirely subordinate to the human object do we not strike here upon a weakness which is to a certain extent apparent also in Hegel’s theory of the artistic purpose of architecture. I think it must be admitted that though it is true the object of both these arts is not entirely for their own beauty, and in certain cases, not even primarily so, as in the case of a senate-house or ordinary garden, yet where the artistic purpose is manifested throughout with great deliberation they may be essentially an independent work of art; take the case,.of a cathedral, for example, or a really beautiful and homogeneous formal garden.

373 Element, subject-matter would be really a better word.

374 Kein bloss quantatives. They are not like a heap of stones, for example, but they possess relations which qualify each other, as of course the heap of stones will do in so far as it is distinguished by diversity of colour.

375 I think this must be the meaning of the words noch ah blass aufgelöste Gegensätze auftreten.

376 Grau is the word Hegel uses, but I think he must use it in the sense I have translated it. Gray in itself is a very beautiful compound, and the subtlety of its use is that which is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the very greatest colourists such as Turner and Velazquez.

377 I am not quite sure that Hegel means this exactly, but it is no doubt what an artist would mean and in water-colour especially it is of the utmost importance. Compare the flesh colour of the artists such as our Watts or Titian with that of Leighton. One of the most marvellous examples I know is a small picture of Titian, the subject of which is Herodias with the head of John the Baptist, in one of the palaces at Rome. But a modern critic would, apart from the question of dirtiness, about which there can be no doubt, say that Hegel insists too much, precisely as Ruskin does, on the superiority of the pure single colour.

378 Hegel appears to be himself slightly incorrect here. No doubt a string may ring false if it is not tightly fastened or if too slack or too long it may produce sounds the human ear is unable to appreciate. But primarily what musicians mean by a string ringing false, with wolf notes and so on, is due to the bad material or false composition of the string itself.

379 Disparat, i.e., composed of different elements, not merely separate in position.

380 I think the expression ein blosses an-sich must mean this here. Of course the usual meaning is that of something potential, unrealized, but here I think it rather signifies “not objectively or really valid.” No doubt in relation to the heads of discussion it is potential also.

381 Die traurige Bünkelsängerei. I think the adjective must here rather refer to the contrast than to the nature of the poetry. I presume the Minnesingers are referred to.

382 I do not know what book this is, nor have I ever heard of a hero with the name of Otnith.

383 Or rather by virtue both of its medium and object. Ihrer Natur nach are Hegel’s words.

384 Jenem ersten Ansichseyenden. That is to say, a relation indefinite, but essentially implying a further realization.

385 Es nur eine unwahre Abstraction bezeigen würde. “Lack of comprehensiveness” would, of course, be more literal.

386 In ihrem abstracten Gehalt. That is, regarded simply as the opinions of a private individual, and apart from all that may be implied in it under more universal relations.

387 Der Zustand der allgemeinen Bildung, not an easy phrase to translate: the Culture-State” perhaps sums it up most completely. “The state of universal education” is too indefinite or goes too far.

388 The whole spirit of this passage is a striking witness to Hegel’s admiration for classical art. Whether the arguments brought forward are wholly sound when we consider them in connection with the Elizabethan drama, for example, may readily admit of a question. At the same time, as Hegel himself points out, Shakespeare unquestionably throws the time back to what is practically a mythical age in at least three of his greatest tragedies, “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” and above all “King Lear.”

389 For the element of beauty implied in ordinary craftsmanship, and the modern view, pressed so strongly by William Morris and others, of this aspect of art and its modern necessity, the reader should peruse Professor Bosanquet’s valuable “Three Lectures on Aesthetic” (see particularly Lecture II, p. 61 et seq.).

390 Even an admirer of our author must admit, I think, here that the argument is somewhat overstrained. That Hegel possessed real humour and yet more irony few will deny who have studied him, but at times “the man with a theory” rather tends, as is so frequently the case with our German cousins, Goethe himself not excepted, to swallow up such sanative juices altogether.

391 I presume the meaning is that the poem in the shape we now have it dates some 400 years after the Trojan war. But it is not very clear from Hegel’s language whether he regards Homer as the poet who, as in the case of his example of the poet of the Niebelungenlied, fused that together or no. For if he did how could he have lived through the poems, an expression itself which is rather vague, more particularly as the better opinion is that they represent a different age themselves.

392 Vernürnbergert. A word of course coined by Hegel. Made them, that is to say, at home in the Nuremberg of Hans Sachs.

393 “Best of all things water.” Compare Meredith’s exquisite poem “Phoebus with Admetus,” “Water, first of singers o’er rocky mount and mead,” etc., stanza 3.

394 The drama of Racine.

395 What this word means I do not know — possibly quill-feathers.

396 Eine grosse Genialität. “First-rate genius” is rather too strong, “talents of the highest rank” would be more literal. We have no word that expresses Genialität. As the passage is ironical I have allowed “genius” to pass.

397 Wir haben schlecht gestanden. Literally, “there is some mistake between us.” But the idiomatic sense I presume is, “You’ve made a bad shot this time.”

398 What would Hegel have said of the first scene in the “Merchant of Venice”? No doubt Shakespeare’s play contains very much more than such scenes, and there is a profound significance in that opening scene, for it at once emphasizes the collision of families upon which the entire tragedy turns. But is such a defence needed? There appears to be indubitably a certain deficiency in the above criticism. There is no reason that a scene in which a couple of peasants and two troopers are the dramatis personae should not be infinitely amusing provided a Shakespeare, or even a Goethe, when he is not in one of his dull moods, performs the office of teaching them how to speak.

399 This surely goes too far unless “interest” is taken strictly to mean artistic interest which would appear to be so from the context. Everything that has once interested or affected mankind, however remote, has at heart an historical and antiquarian interest, and I am not sure that we should not be right in adding a general human interest. At least such is almost a dogma with a poet of the type of Browning.

400 I do not know the Teutonic poem here referred to. But what about Wagner’s famous tetralogy? The above arguments, though containing much that is true, appear to overlook for one thing the symbolic significance of mythological history, and in a certain sense to be lacking in sympathy for everything that is not modern or Hellenic. How very differently Carlyle, for example, referred to this very mythology, and his learning was not profound in the German sense.

401 The intention of Aeschylus went, of course, much farther than this, and the entire play is essentially one written by a staunch conservative against modern innovation.

402 It is strange that Hegel should have ventured such a generalization in the face of his old friend Holderlein’s poetry. In England some fine poems have been written such as Lady Margaret Sackville’s hymn to Dionysus and Swinburne’s to Proserpine. But for a good essay in support of the main contention I know none equal to Russell Lowell’s Essay on Swinburne’s “Atalanta.” I think that both our author and the critic who supports him somewhat fail to recognize the permanent reality, whether symbolical or directly spiritual, that an increasing number of men find in these Hellenic personalities, as illustrated in the poetry of Meredith, to take the finest flavour of the type.

403 I presume this is the meaning of unserer eigenen Geliebten, but from the example given of Petrarch’s Laura one would rather have expected that it was the poet’s beloved whose name was not given. In any case the sense is rather obscure.

404 I think it must be admitted that Hegel goes too far in the other extreme. The best tendency of our times is to reproduce Shakespeare as near to the best authenticated text as possible. No doubt our adaptation of French plays is in a certain sense an illustration of Hegel’s contention; but generally it is recognized that where a work is great, as for example in the case of our Greek plays, it is far better to let them speak for themselves, and attempt no botching.

405 Schiller’s play.

406 Schiefheiten, errors that divert truth from its path.

407 We should rather have expected Erhalt than Gehalt here. Gehalt means, therefore, the essential part of the entire manifestation.

408 Durch all das anderweitige Getriebe, i.e., through all that is otherwise mechanical.

409 I am not certain whether there is a definite allusion here to anything in particular, or whether the Egyptian is taken to signify any folk outside Western culture, with possibly some subtle suggestion of those who held the favoured people in bondage, Philistines in short.

410 Herausgeboren ist, cast forth, that is to say, as the natural growth of it — as Minerva from the head of Zeus.

411 Imagination appears to me the best translation of Phantasie. Our English word, however, seems rather to lie between it and Vorstellung. Practically Hegel means here what we mean when we distinguish it from fancy (Einbildungskraft), though in Ruskin’s original and most suggestive analysis of the terms, “fancy” of course implied a limited power of creative activity or at least associative activity.

412 Leichtfertigkeit der Phantasie, i.e., a careless facility of imaginative activity.

413 It must not be overlooked, however, that, especially in the arts of music and painting, genius may have reached maturity at a very early period, as was the case with Mozart, Rafael, and many another.

414 Ganz vereinzelten Seite. It is a little strange to find such an expression applied to the arts of violin-playing or singing. But the emphasis is not so much on the art as a whole as to the technical aspect of execution.

415 Anlage, lit., a laying to, an impulse in a certain direction.

416 This statement is rather surprising from a fellow countryman of Bach, Handel, Mozart, etc., down to Wagner and Strauss. The explanation appears first to be due to the distinction between a national impulse toward popular singing which the Italian no doubt possesses, and a deep-rooted emotional life which finally discovers its supreme mode of expression in the art of instrumental music as developed by the Teuton stock. Secondly, it is quite clear, I think, from Hegel’s correspondence that he had no real sympathy for orchestral music though an enthusiastic admirer of opera, particularly Italian opera.

417 The other two aspects were: (a) That genius is a spiritual activity and in its operation offers a contrast to talent, where the personal initiative is not so prominent, (b) It has a certain aspect which may be called innate.

418 It is a little surprising to find Hegel tracing technical accomplishment to the native gift. At least all technical accomplishment has to be learned.

419 This is the real point. Whatever ignoramuses may say of the “shackles” of verse poets know only too well that they supply a supreme stimulus to imaginative powers both in virtue of the atmosphere of music into which they are thus carried and the suggestiveness of the words themselves. What Hegel’s analysis appears rather to fail in is his perception of the unconscious work in the greatest men when working in most inspired moments whether in painting or poetry — the extraordinary power of their intuition.

420 No doubt Hegel does not use our word “inspiration” in quite the sense it is usually used, and I should have said even less so the German word. At the same time we do apply the word inspiration to the technical execution and most justly where it is used as a distinction.

421 Meredith in a letter to a correspondent expresses the same conviction. He even adds that he thinks Schiller’s compositions were by no means improved by artificial stimulants.

422 The Germans say, a song which “rings straight from the throat,” der aus der Kehle dringt.

423 Welche zum Begriff des Talente gehört. Talent no doubt to some extent includes genius here, but mainly in its aspect of productive power.

424 I do not know the composition and cannot make much of the quotations. For all I know Tamboure-gesellen may be the drummer-boy himself.

425 This translation may pass perhaps:

“This little nosegay plucked by me

A thousand times may it greet thee!

How many thousand times have I

Bowed over it; how many times

Pressed it to heart; how many times!”

426 Or, as Hegel puts it, “that he is not.”

427 We should rather say a personal or individual manner perhaps.

428 I have translated Zufälligen here with the words “he shares with no one else.” The suggestion is that there is no warrant or principle to support them.

429 It is rather surprising to find Hegel including music here rather than sculpture or architecture, especially the latter, which seems peculiarly adapted to illustrate what I understand to be his general point of view. His own illustrations throw no light on the matter as they are borrowed from painting or poetry.

430 I presume the difference here alluded to is such as we may see if we contrast the tone of a Correggio, for instance, with that of a Titian or a Rembrandt.

431 Er hat ihn sich angeeignet. Lack of artistic power is the main factor in an artificial style. Though there are doubtless many examples of men forced to paint in a way much below their true powers to obtain a living. But it must be admitted Hegel does not express himself very clearly. Individuality of handling is essential to a great master. The real point is that it should not crystallize into a mere habit, as in the Bologna school of painters.

432 “Artificial” would perhaps come closer to the mark.

433 In sich selbst zu erweitern. The phrase at once suggests by contrast that expression so frequently used by painters of “tightness,” incapacity to enlarge, which is such a characteristic of artificial handling, and indeed of most academic work, and so frequently gives to the original sketch of an artist a greater artistic value than to the highly finished work.

434 In der subjektiven Begeistrung.

435 The chamber at Wetzlar.

436 Elective Affinities.

EVOLUTION OF THE IDEAL IN THE PARTICULAR TYPES OF FINE ART

INTRODUCTION

ALL THAT HAS hitherto been the object of our examination in the first part of this inquiry referred to the reality of the Idea of the beautiful as Ideal of art. In whatever direction, however, we developed the notion of the ideal art-product, we throughout applied to it a meaning of purely general signification. But the idea of the beautiful implies a totality likewise of essential differences, which as such must in veritable form assert themselves. These differences we may broadly describe as the particular modes of art, as the evolved content of that which is implied in the notion of the Ideal, and which secures actual form through art. When, however, we speak of these forms of art as of distinct species or grades1 of the Ideal, we do not accept the term in the ordinary usage of it as though we found here in external guise particular classes of objects related to and modifying the Ideal respectively as their common genus. Species in the sense used here simply expresses the various and continuously expanding determination of the idea of the beautiful and the Ideal of art itself. The universality of the ideal representation is in the case posited not determined on the side of external existence, but is assumed to be the closer determination of itself in the explication of its own notion; or, in other words, it is the notion itself which unfolds itself in a totality of particular types of art.

More closely regarded, then, the specific types of art have their origin, as the unfolded realization of the Idea of the beautiful, in the very nature of the Idea itself, which by means of them presses forward to real and concrete appearance. Moreover, just in so far as it ceases to expand2 in the abstract determination or concrete fulness of any one of them, it manifests itself in some other form of realized expression. For the Idea is only Idea in its essential truth in so far as it proceeds in this self-evolution by means of its own activity. And inasmuch as it is, as Ideal, immediate appearance, and moreover with each mode thereof is still identical as the idea of the beautiful, we find that in every particular phase which reveals the Ideal in its process of self-explication we have another actual manifestation which is immediately related to the essential characterization of those diverse types of yet further expansion. It really is a matter of no consequence whether we regard this process as a process of the Idea within its own substance, or that of the form under which it attains determinate existence, inasmuch as both aspects are immediately bound up with each other, and the perfecting of the Idea as content, and the perfecting of its form are but two ways of expressing the same process. Or, to put the matter in the reverse way, the defects of a given form of art of this kind betray themselves as a defect of the Idea, in so far as such defects give a limited significance to the essential nature of the Idea in external form, and as such invest it with reality. When we consequently compare such still inadequate forms of art with what most obviously presents itself for comparison, that is, the true Ideal, we must be careful not to use expressions commonly applicable to works of art that are failures, which either express nothing at all, or have discovered an incompetence to express what ought to have been expressed. Rather for every form of the Idea there is a definite mode of appearance, which clothes it precisely in one of those particular forms of art to which we have adverted, adequate in every respect thereto, and the defective or perfected character of which consists entirely in the relative truth or untruth of the determinate form, under which and through which the Idea is actually realized. For the content must first be clothed with reality and concreteness before it can attain to the form wholly adequate to its essential truth. As we have already indicated in the previous division of our subject-matter, we have three fundamental forms or types of art to examine.

First, we have the symbolical. In this the Idea is still seeking for its true artistic expression, because it is here still essentially abstract and undetermined, and consequently has not mastered for itself the external appearance adequate to its own substance, but rather finds itself in unresolved opposition to the external objects in physical Nature and the world of mankind. And inasmuch as in this crude relation to objective existence it immediately surmises its own isolation, or is carried into some form of concrete existence by means, of universal characteristics which are void of all true definition, it vitiates and falsifies the actual forms of reality which it has found, and which it seizes in a wholly capricious way3. And, consequently, instead of being able to identify itself completely with the object, it can only assert a kind of accord, or rather a still abstract reflection of significance and figure, a mode of representation which, being neither complete in its artistic fusion, nor capable of being completed, suffers the object to emerge as reciprocally external, strange, and inadequate to itself as it was before.

Secondly, we have the form in which the Idea, here in accordance with its true notional activity, is carried beyond the abstraction and indeterminacy of general characterization4, is conscious of itself as free and infinite subjectivity, and grasps that self-conscious life in its real existence as Spirit (Mind). Spirit, as the free subject of consciousness, is self-determined through its own resources, and even in this its conscious grasp of self-determination possesses a form of externality adequate to express it, and one in which the essential import of that consciousness can be united with an explicit reality entirely appropriate. This second type of art, the classical, is based upon such absolutely homogeneous unity of content and form. In order, however, to make this unity complete the human spirit, in so far as it makes itself the object of art, must not be taken as Spirit in the absolute significance we refer to it, where it discovers its adequate subsistence wholly in the spiritual resources of its own essential domain, but rather as a still individualized spirit, and as such charged with a certain aspect of isolation. In other words, the free individual which classical art unites to its forms appears, it is true, as essentially universal, and consequently freed from all the mere contingence and particularity both of the subjective world of mind and the external world of Nature. But it is at the same time permeated by a universality which is itself essentially individualized. For the external form is necessarily both defined and singular by virtue of its externality, which it is only capable of completely fusing with an artistic content by representing that content as itself defined, and consequently of a limited character; and, moreover, it is only Spirit that is thus particularized which can pass into an objective shape and unite itself with the same in an inseparable unity.

In this form Art has reached the fulness of its own notion to this extent, namely, that the Idea, which is here spiritual individuality, brought into immediate accord with itself in the form of its bodily presence, receives from it a presentation so complete, that external existence is no longer able to preserve its consistency as against the ideal significance which it serves to express; or, to put it in the reverse way, the spiritual content is exclusively manifested in the elaborated form within which Art clothes it for sensuous perception, and thereby affirmatively asserts itself in the same.

Thirdly, we have the form in which the Idea of beauty grasps its own being as absolute Spirit, Spirit, that is to say, in the full consciousness of its untrammelled freedom. But for this very reason it is unable any more to obtain complete realization in forms which are external; its true determinate existence is now that which it possesses in itself as Spirit. That unity of the life of Spirit and its external appearance which we find in classical art is unbound, and it flees from the same once more into itself. It is this recoil which presents to us the fundamental type of the romantic type of art. Here we find, by reason of the free spirituality which pervades the content, such content makes a more ideal demand upon expression than the mere representation through an external or physical medium is able to supply; the form on its external side sinks therefore to a relation of indifference; and in the romantic form of art we consequently meet with a separation between content and form as we previously found it in the symbolic form, with this difference that it is now due to the subordination of matter to spiritual expression rather than the predominance of externality over ideal significance. It is in this way that symbolic art seeks after that perfected unity of ideal significance and external form, which classical art in its representation of substantive individuality succeeds in communicating to sensuous perception, and which romantic art passes over and beyond through its overwhelming insistence on the claims of Spirit.

1 Art. Hegel takes the ordinary scientific sense to describe the meaning. The word “type” would more truly express it.

2 Für sich selber ist. That is, having arrived at one form of determination, returns upon itself and throws off another form, just as the plant germ after arriving at the leaf expands into the bud, and so on.

3 That is, with no reference to intelligent principle.

4 Allgemeiner Gedanken. Hegel means the bare generalizations or abstract conceptions of thought.

SUBSECTION I

THE SYMBOLIC TYPE OF ART

INTRODUCTION

OF THE SYMBOL GENERALLY

Symbol, in the signification we here attach to the word, is not merely the beginning of art from the point of view of its notional development, but marks also its first appearance in history. We may consequently regard it as only the forecourt of art, which is principally the possession of the East, and through which, after a variety of transitional steps and mediating passages, we are at last introduced to the genuine realization of the Ideal in the classical type of art. We must therefore from the very first take care to distinguish symbol where its unique characteristics provide it with an independent sphere of its own, in which it determines the radical and effective type of a certain form of art’s exposition and presentment from that kind of symbolic expression which amounts to no more than a purely external aspect of form entirely without such independent significance. In the latter sense we, in fact, come across it in the classical and romantic forms of art just as certain aspects of symbolical art are not wholly without the characteristic features of the classical Ideal, or present to us the origins of romantic art. Such reciprocal interplay between the fundamental forms of art attaches, however, merely to subsidiary images or isolated traits; it has no power whatever to modify, still less to expunge, the animating principle which essentially determines the character of the entire work of art.

In such cases where we find symbol elaborated in its entirely unique and independent form it is as a general rule characterized by the quality of the sublime, because its main impression is to show us the Idea still united to measureless dimension rather than rounded in a free and self-defined content; it would fain clothe itself with form, and yet is unable to secure in the substantial appearances of the world a definite form which is entirely adequate to express the abstractness and universality of its longing. On account of this inability to attain its purpose the Idea passes over and beyond the external existence which surrounds it instead of penetrating to the core or completely making its home therein. And this flight beyond the limits of the finite and visible world is precisely that which constitutes the general character of the sublime.

But before we proceed further it will be convenient, by way of elucidating the formal aspect of our subject, to explain at once, if in quite general terms, what we understand by the expression symbol.

Generally speaking, symbol is some form of external existence immediately presented to the senses, which, however, is not accepted for its own worth, as it lies thus before us in its immediacy, but for the wider and more general significance which it offers to our reflection. We may consequently distinguish between two points of view equally applicable to the term; first, the significance, and, secondly, the mode in which such significance is expressed. The first is a conception of the mind, or an object which stands wholly indifferent to any particular content, the latter is a form of sensuous existence or a representation of some kind or other.

Symbol, then, is in the first place a sign. When we speak of the significant and nothing more there is no necessary connection between the thing signified and its modus of expression whatever. This manner of its expression, this sensuous thing or image, so far from being immediately called up by that for which it is the sign, rather presents itself to the imagination as a wholly foreign content to it, by no means necessarily associated with it in a unique way. So, for example, in language tones are signs of specific conditions of idea or emotion. By far the greater number of the tones of any language are, however, associated with the ideas, which are thereby expressed entirely by chance, so far as the content of those ideas is concerned, even though the history of the development of language may show us that the original connection between the two was of a different nature, and that an essential element in the difference between one language and another consists in this, that the same idea is expressed through a different sound. Another example of such bare signs are colours5, which we used in cockades or flags in order to express the nationality of an individual or vessel. Such colours by themselves alone carry no particular quality which can be immediately related to the thing they signify, that is, the nation which they represent. In a sense such as this, where the bond between the signification and the sign is one of indifference, symbol must not be understood when we connect the expression with art. For art consists precisely in the reciprocal relation, affinity, and substantive fusion of significance and form.
We must consequently interpret sign in a different sense when we speak of it as equivalent to symbol. The lion is, for example, a symbol of magnanimity, the fox symbolizes cunning, the circle eternity, the triangle the Triune God. Here we find that the lion and the fox themselves possess the qualities whose import they serve to express. In the same way the circle points beyond the mere indefinite extension, or the capriciously fixed limit of a straight line, or any other line that does not return upon itself, and which at the same time is suitable as the expression of a definite period of time; and the triangle regarded as a totality possesses the same number of sides and angles as is involved in the idea of God, when the determinations under which the religious consciousness defines the Supreme Being are expressed numerically.

In the latter forms of symbol therefore the objects presented to the senses have already in their own existence that significance, to represent and express which they are used; symbol as employed in this expanded sense is consequently no purely indifferent mark for something other than itself, but a significant fact which in its own external form already presents the content of the idea which it symbolizes. At the same time it is not the concrete thing it is itself, which it should bring before the imagination, but simply that general quality of significance which attaches to it.

We would, thirdly, draw attention to the fact that although symbol may not, as is the case with the purely external and formal sign, be wholly inadequate to the significance derived from it, yet, in order that it may retain its character as symbol, it must on the other hand present an aspect which is strange to it. In other words, though the content which is significant, and the form which is used to typify it in respect to a single quality, unite in agreement, none the less the symbolical form must possess at the same time still other qualities entirely independent of that one which is shared by it, and is once for all marked as significant, just as the content6 need not necessarily be a bare abstract quality such as strength or cunning, but rather a concrete substance, which on its side, too, possesses a variety of characteristics which distinguish it from the primary quality in which its symbolic character consists, and in the same way, but to a still greater degree, from everything else that characterizes the symbolical form. The lion, for example, possesses other qualities than mere strength, the fox than mere cunning, and the apprehension of God is not necessarily bound up with conceptions which imply number. The content, therefore, as thus viewed, is also placed in a relation of indifference to the symbolical form, which represents it, and the abstract quality which it typifies may quite possibly be present in countless other existing objects. In the same way a content which is thus varied in its composition may possess many qualities, to symbolize any of which other forms will equally serve where a similar correspondence with such is apparent. The same reasoning is also applicable to the external object in which any particular content7 is symbolically expressed. Such an object, in its concrete natural existence, possesses a number of characteristics for all of which it may stand as the symbol. The most obvious symbol for strength is unquestionably the lion, but the ox and the horn of the ox may equally serve as such, and from other points of view the ox possesses many other qualities as significant. But few objects, if any, have been brought home to the imagination with such a prodigal wealth of symbolic form and imagery as that of the Supreme Being. We may conclude, then, from the above remarks that the use of the term symbol is necessarily8 and essentially open to ambiguity.

(a) For, in the first place, no sooner do we look for some symbol than the doubt almost invariably arises whether a particular form is to be accepted as a symbol or no; and this is so, though we set on one side the further ambiguity with reference to the particular nature of the content, which a given form under all the variety of its aspects may be held to symbolize, many of which may be employed symbolically through associating links that do not appear on the surface9.

Now what a symbol primarily offers us is generally speaking a form, an image, which of itself is the presentment of an immediate fact. Such immediate existence, or its image, a lion for example, an eagle, or a particular colour, stands there before us as it is, a valid existing fact. The question consequently arises whether a lion, whose image is set before us, merely is set there to express the natural fact, or whether in addition to this it carries a further significance, that is the more abstract connotation of mere strength, or the more concrete one of a hero or a period of the year, husbandry and anything else we choose to infer from it; whether in fact, as we say, the image is to be taken literally, or with a further ideal significance, or possibly only with the latter. The last case finds its illustration in symbolical expressions of speech and particular words such as comprehension, conclusion10 and others of the same kind. When such signify mental activities we have simply set before us the immediate import of a mental activity and no more without any recall to our memory of the material acts, which originally were implied in the meaning of these words. When on the contrary the picture of a lion is presented us we have not merely the significance to consider which it may bear as symbol, but also the bodily shape and presence of the king of beasts before our eyes. An ambiguity of this nature can only fully disappear when the sense attached to both aspects, namely, symbolical import, and its external form, is expressly stated, and we learn by this means the exact relation which exists between them. In that case, however, the concrete fact which is set before us ceases to be a symbol in the real meaning of the term, and becomes simply an image, the relation of which to significance is expressed by the well-known form of comparison, namely, simile. In the simile, that is to say, both factors are immediately presented to us, the general conception and its concrete image. When on the contrary reflection has not proceeded so far as to hold general conceptions in assured independence, and consequently to set them forth by themselves, in that case we find that the sensuous image to which they are cognate, and in which a significance of more general11 import is able to find its expression is not yet conceived as separate from such a significance, but both are still immediately held together in unity. And this it is which, as we shall see more closely as we proceed, constitutes the distinction between symbol and comparison. An illustration of the latter kind may be found in that exclamation of Karl Moor, as he gazes on the setting sun: “Thus dies a hero!” Here we see that the ideal significance is expressly separated from the sensuous impression while at the same time it is associated with the picture. In other cases, it is true even of similes this act of separation in relation is not so clearly marked, and the association appears to be more immediate; in such cases it must already appear manifest from the general content of the narrative, from the position assigned to the picture, or other circumstances, that viewed as merely a statement of fact, such an image is not justified, but that some special significance or other, which cannot fail to arrest our attention, is intended by it. When, for example, Luther says:

A steadfast stronghold is our God.

or we read:

In den Ocean schifft mit tausend Masten der Jungling,

Still auf geretteten Boot treibt in den Hafen der Greis12.

we can have no doubt whatever upon the implied significance, whether it be of a protection suggested by “stronghold,” the world of hopes and life-plans symbolized in the picture of the ocean and the thousand masts; or the narrowed aims and possessions with the assured plot of ground at the end, which is reflected from the boat and the haven. In the same way when we read in the Old Testament: “May God break their teeth in their mouth, may the Lord shatter the hindermost teeth of the young lions,” it is obvious that neither the words “mouth,” “teeth,” nor “hindermost teeth of the young lions” are used in the literal sense, but are utilized as images and sensuous ideas, which carry a significance only present to the mind, and that such significance is all that matters.

This ambiguity, then, is all the more conspicuous in the case of symbolical representation for the reason that an image, which carries a particular significance, only receives the descriptive name of symbol when such significance ceases to be expressly marked by itself, or is otherwise clearly emphasized as it is in the case of the simile. No doubt the ambiguity of the genuine symbol is to this extent removed in that by virtue of this very uncertainty the fusion of the sensuous image and its significance becomes a matter more or less of convention and custom, a feature which is indispensably necessary in the case where mere signs are used, while on the other hand the simile asserts itself as something individual, discovered on the spur of the moment to assist the meaning, and is independently clear, because it emphasizes the significance alongside of that independence. At the same time, though no doubt the symbol may be clear enough to those who are habituated to its use, and whose imaginative life is at home in such a conventional atmosphere, it is a very different matter with all who are outside this native circle, or for whom it is now a thing of the Past; for such it is only the immediate sensuous representation which is in the first instance seized, and it remains for these in every way a question of doubt, whether they are to rest satisfied with that which lies openly before their eyes, or are to accept these as indicators to yet further imagery or ideas. When, for example, we gaze in Christian churches upon the triangle in some conspicuous position on the walls, we at once recognize that the intention is not to place before the view this geometrical figure simply as such, but rather to draw our attention to its spiritual significance. If, however, we were to find it elsewhere we should probably feel equally certain that such a figure had no reference whatever, either as sign or symbol, to the Trinity. On the other hand a folk strange to the ideas which have grown up in Christian countries might easily feel doubts in both cases, and it is by no means easy for ourselves to determine with equal certainty in all cases, whether a figure of this kind is to be understood as presenting us with its literal or symbolical interpretation.

(b) Moreover this ambiguity does not merely apply to isolated cases, but extends to vast areas of the entire domain of art, to the content of an almost unlimited material open to our inspection, to the content in full of all that Oriental art has ever produced. For this reason, as we enter for the first time the world of ancient Persian, Indian, or Egyptian figures and imaginative conceptions we experience a certain feeling of uncanniness, we wander at any rate in a world of problems. These fantastic images do not at once respond to our own world; we are neither pleased nor satisfied with the immediate impression they produce on us; rather we are instinctively carried forward by it to probe yet further into their significance, and to inquire what wider and profounder truths may lie concealed behind such representations. In other productions of the same kind it is apparent at the first glance that they are, just like so many fairy tales of children, merely an interplay of pictorial fancy, a strange texture of curiosities woven together at haphazard. For children delight in just such an even surface of pictures, a play of the fancy which makes no demand on effort or intelligence, but is simply a collection tumbled together. Nations on the contrary, even in their childhood, require as the food of their imaginative life a more essential content; and this is just what in fact we find in the figures of Indian and Egyptian art, although the interpretation of such problematical pictures is only dimly suggested, and we experience great difficulty in deciphering it.

Even in the province of classical art we meet now and again with a like uncertainty, though it is the essence of classical art to be throughout clear and intelligible on its own surface without the use of symbolism of any kind. And this clarity of classical art consists in this that it comprehends the true content of Art, in other words substantive13 subjectivity, and thereby discovers at the same time the true form, which essentially expresses nothing less than this genuine content, so that what it appears to mind, the significance that is of it is just that, which is veritably expressed in the external form, both the ideal aspect and the plastic shape being entirely adequate to each other; in symbolical art, the simile, and other forms of that kind, the image always brings before perception something in addition to that significance, for which it merely serves as the picture. At the same time classical art, too, presents us with an aspect of ambiguity. In considering the mythological phantasies of antique art it is frequently a matter most difficult to decide, whether we do rightly in taking such plastic figures simply for what they are, contenting ourselves with mere wonder over the wealth and charm, which this happy play of imaginative vigour offers us, for the reason of course that mythology is generally accepted as nothing but an idle collection of fairy tales, or whether on the contrary we have still to seek for a significance of wider range and greater depth. We shall feel the insistence of such a doubt in exceptional force where the content of these fables refers directly to the life and activity of the Divine, in cases, that is, where the stories handed down to us can only be regarded as utterly unworthy of the Supreme Being, indicative of an invention as entirely inadequate as it is in the worst possible taste. When we read, for example, the twelve labours of Hercules, or, to take a stronger case, are informed that Zeus hurled Hephaestus from Olympus on to the island of Lemnos, with the result that Vulcan remained lame ever after, we are no doubt ready to believe that the entire story is nothing but a fairy tale of the imagination. It is just as possible to believe that all the love affairs of Zeus are mere freaks of a prodigal fancy. But, on the other hand, for the very reason that such stories are told about the Supreme Divinity, it is quite equally credible that meaning of more universal import is hidden under that which such myths immediately transmit to us.

With regard to such facts as those above stated, there are two theories current of exceptional importance and contradictory to each other. The one accepts mythology as a collection of stories of purely external significance, which as such could not fail to be unworthy presentations of the Divine nature, though able, when regarded apart from such associations, to reveal to us much that is finely conceived, delightful, interesting, nay, even of great beauty. They offer us, however, no ground whatever for attempting to enlarge their significance. In this view mythology is in the form in which it is presented purely historical: under one aspect, that is, treating it as art, in its shapes, pictures, gods, together with all the practical activities and events it describes, it is amply self-sufficient, or rather by the way it brings before us that which is significant supplies its own elucidation; from another point of view, that is to say, its origin in history, we have to regard it as built up from local claims, no less than the chance caprice of priest, artist, and poet, the facts of history, foreign legends and traditions. The theory which is opposed to the above is unable to rest satisfied with the purely external husk of mythological form and narration, and insists on discovering beneath it a meaning of more universal and profounder import, to master which, as it breaks upon the surface, it conceives to be the main object of mythological inquiry regarded as the scientific examination of the mythos. In this view mythology must necessarily be apprehended as bound up with symbolism. And by symbolism all that is meant here is just this, that however bizarre, ridiculous, grotesque such myths appear to be, however much the adventitious caprice of a plastic imagination may contribute to their form, they are essentially a birth of Spirit; and in spite of it all contain in them significant ideas, that is, thoughts of universal significance upon the nature of God; they are, in short, Philosophemes.14 In this latter sense the recent work of Creuzer on symbolism is particularly noteworthy; this writer has once more taken up the review of the mythological conceptions of the ancient world, not, as is so frequently the fashion, from the external and prosaic standpoint, or simply with the object of determining this artistic merit, but rather expressly to elucidate the intrinsic rationality of their substance. Such an inquiry proceeds from the presupposition that myths and fabulous tales have their origin in the human spirit, which is capable, no doubt, of playing freely with its notions of gods, but in its religious interest marks the point where it enters a more exalted sphere, in which reason itself is the discoverer of form, albeit it is charged with the defect of being unable at this early stage to exhibit the core from which it grows with commensurate power. And this assumption is essentially just. Religion discovers its fountain-head in Spirit, which seeks after its truth, dimly discovers it, bringing the same to consciousness by means of any form, which displays an affinity with this form of truth, be it a form of narrower or wider borders. But once grant that it is reason which seeks after such forms, and the necessity is obvious to recognize the work of reason. Such a recognition is alone truly worthy of human inquiry. Whoever shelves this problem makes himself master of nothing but a motley show of unrelated learning. If we, on the other hand, probe into, the truth of mythological conceptions as it presents itself to mind, without at the same time excluding from our grasp that other aspect of them, that is, the haphazard caprice therein exercised by the imagination, and all the external influences, local or otherwise, which have contributed to this creation, we shall then be in a position to justify the various systems of mythology. To justify the work of man in the imagery and forms that are the product of his spirit is a noble enterprise, of rarer worth than the mere heaping together of the external facts of history. The objection has no doubt been pressed against Creuzer that here, treading in the steps of the new Platonists15, the wider significance he elucidates from the myths is a creation he attaches to them himself; that, in short, he discovers conceptions in them which are not merely without any historical basis to uphold them, but which it can be positively shown he must have first introduced before he could have found them; in other words it is asserted that neither the people of such times nor the poets or priests — although from another point of view emphasis is frequently laid on the occult wisdom of the priesthood — could have possessed any knowledge of such ideas, which would have been wholly incompatible with the prevailing culture. Such objections, of course, are entitled to their full weight. These peoples, poets, and priests have not, in fact, been conscious of universal conceptions in the particular form of universality which the human mind now discovers at the root of their mythological ideas, in the sense that they could have deliberately clothed such conceptions in the forms of symbolism. And as a matter of fact this is never maintained even by Creuzer. But however true it may be that the reflections of the ancient world over its mythology were entirely different from those of the modern, we are by no means therefore entitled to conclude that the conceptions of its mythology are not essentially symbolical, and as such must be fully accepted; rather our inference should be that in the times when these peoples created the poetry of their myths, from the midst of a life itself steeped in poetry, they would instinctively bring home to consciousness all that was most spiritual and profound in that life in the forms of the imagination rather than that of reflection, and fail to separate conceptions which were more universal or abstract from the concrete creations of their phantasy. That this really was the case is a fact which we have in this inquiry to accept as fundamentally established; we may, nevertheless, be equally prepared to admit that, in such a form of interpretation as the symbolical, theories are apt to slip in which are merely the product of artifice and ingenuity, much as is the case with etymological science.

(c) At the same time, however much we may find ourselves in general agreement with the view that mythology, with its tales of the gods and its circumstantial pictures of a persistently poetic imagination, includes within its borders a content, that is to say rational and profound religious conceptions, it is still open to us to ask in our examination of the symbolical form of art whether for the same reason all mythology and art is to be interpreted in a symbolical sense, in accordance with that typical assertion of Friedrich von Schlegel, to the effect that we are bound to look for an allegory in every artistic representation. The symbolical or allegorical is then understood in the sense that a general conception16 is assumed to underlie every work of art as its motive principle and every mythological form, by bringing the universal character of which into prominence it should then be possible to expound the real significance of such a work or imaginative creation. This mode of treatment is, moreover, very commonly adopted in our own days. We find, for instance, in the more recent editions of Dante a marked tendency to interpret every canto in an exclusively allegorical sense, and no doubt the poetry of Dante contains many examples of such allegories. In the same way Heyne’s editions of the classical poets evince the same disposition in their commentaries to elucidate the general significance of every metaphorical expression by means of the abstract conceptions of the understanding. Nor is this to be wondered at; for it is just this faculty which is most ready to seize upon symbol and allegory, while at the same time it separates the sensuous image from its significance, and by so doing destroys the unity of the artistic form, an aspect over which it is, in its zeal for a symbolical interpretation, which aims exclusively at setting the universal characteristic as such in relief, wholly indifferent.

Such an extension of symbolism over every province of mythology and art is by no means that which we have in view in our present consideration of the symbolical form of art. It is not any part of our labours to ascertain to what extent a symbolical or allegorical significance, in this enlarged use of the term, is applicable to the forms of art. On the contrary we shall restrict ourselves entirely to the question how far symbolism itself is entitled to rank as a form of art; and the question is raised in order that we may finally determine the precise relation which subsists between artistic significance and artistic form in so far as such a relation is symbolical and stands in contrast to other modes of artistic presentation, in particular those of the classical and romantic art-forms. We must consequently endeavour before everything else expressly to limit the field of our review to that portion where we find the symbolical is independently portrayed in its essential character and is open to our consideration as such, rather than attempt to make a symbolical interpretation co-extensive with the entire domain of art. And it is consistently with such a purpose that we have already subdivided the Ideal of art under its respective symbolical, classical, and romantic forms.

In the signification we give to the expression the symbolical disappears at the point where we find that a free subjectivity rather than purely abstract conceptions determines the content of the artistic product. In this case the conscious subject is his own self-assured significance, his own self-manifestation. All that he feels, conceives, does, and perfects, his qualities, his actions, and his character, all this he actually is himself; the entire gamut of his spiritual and sensuous manifestation has no further significance than that of declaring his subjective unity, which, in this process of expansion and development of its own wealth, brings before the eyes of all the man himself as master over the entire field of objective reality thus presented to him, the world in which he discovers his existence. Significance and sensuous presentment, inward and outward reality, fact and picture, are here no longer separate from each other, assert themselves here no longer as merely cognate, the characteristic distinction of the symbolic relation, but rather as a totality, in which the manifestation possesses no other reality, the reality no other manifestation either outside of or alongside with itself. That which declares itself and that which is declared is here posited17 in its concrete unity. In this sense the gods of Greece, in so far, that is to say, as the art of Greece was able to represent them as free, self-subsistent, and unique types of personality, are to be accepted from no symbolical point of view, but as self-sufficient in their own persons. The actions of Zeus, for example, of Apollo or Athene are actions appropriated by Art to themselves and only themselves, and must not be allowed to stand for anything but the might and passion of such personages. If we once attempt to abstract from free individualities of this kind some general conception as the essential core of their significance, setting it alongside their concrete particularity as an interpretation of their entire and individual manifestation, we let fall or annihilate all that we have failed to observe, and it is precisely all in these figures which art seeks most to secure. For this reason artists have been unable to take kindly to such symbolical interpretations of all works of art and the mythological figures we find in them. For all that is left us in the sphere of art we have just been considering which is really compatible with an interpretation based on symbolism or allegory only affects subsidiary aspects, and is for that reason expressly limited to the attribute and the representative signs; the eagle, for example, stands by Zeus, an ox is the companion of the evangelist Luke; the Egyptians, on the contrary, beheld in the form of Apis the Divine itself.

The point so difficult to decide in connection with this manifestation of self-conscious freedom, otherwise so appropriate to artistic presentment, is just this, whether that which is placed before us as such a subject really possesses a subjective individuality of the above quality, or only carries the mere semblance of it in the form of a personified shadow18. In this latter case personality is nothing but a superficial form, which fails to express its vital substance in particular acts no less than bodily form, which would otherwise enable it to penetrate through all that is external in its appearance as its own possession, and instead of this still retains another inwardness for the external reality as its significance, which is not either true personality or subjective freedom. It is precisely at this point that we find the boundary which includes or excludes symbolic art.

Our interest, then, in the consideration of the symbol consists in this, that we recognize thereby that process within itself where we find the beginnings of art, in so far as the same proceeds from the notion of that Ideal which unfolds itself gradually as art in its truth, and while doing so recognizes each stage of symbolical art as successive steps which conduct us to the same consummation. However intimate the connection between religion and art may be we are not here concerned to pass in review either symbols or religion under the range which is co-extensive with the wider signification of the word symbol or emblematical conceptions; we have exclusively to consider that aspect of them, according to which they belong to art in its own right, handing over their religious aspect to the historian of mythology and symbolism.

DIVISION OF THE SUBJECT

In proceeding now to a closer determination of the several divisions of symbolic art it will be necessary, in the first place, to fix the boundary lines within which the development of the successive grades of this type moves forward. Speaking generally, as we have already observed, the entire sphere we have now to define is in principle a forecourt of art. We have here, in the first instance, significant conceptions which are purely abstract, which are still in themselves destitute of essential individuality, the immediate artistic presentment of which may be as truly described either as adequate or inadequate19. Our first definition of boundary consists, therefore, in determining generally the earliest modes under which artistic perception and representation work themselves out20 into actuality; on the further side of the line at the other extreme we have real art, in the direction of which symbolic art uplifts itself as to its truth.

In discussing the origins of this appearance of symbolic art from the subjective point of view, we may draw attention to an observation made previously, that the artistic consciousness, no less than the religious, or rather we should say both in their essential unity, and we may even include the impulse of scientific inquiry, have originated in wonder. The man who is still unable to wonder at anything lives in a condition of crassness and obtuseness which is devoid of all interest, in which for him everything is as naught for the reason that he fails as yet to separate or unravel himself from objects around him and their own immediate and independent existence. The man, however, at the opposite extreme, whose wonder is no longer excited, is the man who contemplates the entire external world as somewhat which he has made himself clear about. It may be under the abstract conceptions of the commonsense understanding resulting in some general survey of knowledge attainable by the average mind, or it may be in the noble or profounder consciousness of his own absolute spiritual freedom and universality. In either case he has converted the bare fact of such objects and their existence into some spiritual insight of their truth brought home to himself. We may conclude, then, that wonder originates in the condition where we find that man, as conscious Spirit, torn away from his first most immediate association with Nature, and from his earliest and entirely active21 relation to desire, steps back from Nature and his own individual existence, and seeks after and finds in the objects which surround him a universal, an essential and permanent principle. Then for the first time the facts of Nature astonish him, they become for him an other-than-himself he would fain appropriate, and within which he strives to rediscover his own substance, that is the universal, thoughts, reason. For the dim foretaste here of a higher and the consciousness of the external are still unsevered, and this though a contradiction between the objects of Nature and the Spirit which perceives them is already present, a contradiction in which these objects appear to repel him quite as much as they attract, and the feeling of which, in the force wherewith they thrust him away, is, in fact, the birth-pang of his very wonder.

The earliest result of this condition of wonder in man’s vision of Nature is that on the one hand he sets himself in opposition to Nature and her objective world as a principle22, and adores her as Power; on the other he is equally possessed with a desire, which craves satisfaction, to render objective to himself his intuition of a higher, essential, and universal somewhat, and to look upon its rehabilitated presence. In this two-fold aspect of his conscious life he is confronted by reality in the following way. The particular objects of Nature, and above all those elementary facts, sea, rivers, mountains, and constellations, are not received by him in the singularity of their immediate presentment to sense, but, carried up into the sphere of imaginative conception, assume for that faculty the form of universal and essentially self-subsistent existence. And we may trace the beginning of art in this, that it reflects these ideas of the imagination thus universalized and essentially independent, in visible representation for immediate perception, and sets them forth for mind in the individual form of the same as objects. The mere adoration of external facts, with its Nature-cult and fetish-cult, is not as yet on this account an art of any kind.

Under the aspect in which it is related to the objective world, the beginnings of art are more intimately associated with religion. The earliest works of art are of the mythological order. In religion it is nothing less than the Absolute, which breaks to consciousness through its own impulse23, though the determinating factors of that consciousness be the most abstract and jejune conceivable. And the earliest phase in this evolution of the Absolute is the phenomenal presence of Nature, in whose existence man dimly forebodes the Absolute, and envisages the same for himself in the semblance of natural objects. In this striving Art discovers its source. We shall find, however, in this very effort art first made visible, not so much where the Absolute is descried by human eyes in the external world which immediately confronts them, a mode of Divine reality in which they rest content, but rather where man’s consciousness evolves from its own substance a mode of apprehending what it conceives as the Absolute in the form of a self-subsistent externality, no less than that objective presentation which he unites with it in more or less adequate fashion. For we must remember that Art possesses a substantial content which is grasped by mind (spirit), and which, it is true, appears in external guise, but for all that in a form of externality, which is not merely immediately visible to sense, but is primarily the product of mind regarded as the existing fact which intrinsically comprehends that content as a whole and then expresses it. Art is consequently and by virtue of its power to create forms cognate with its own substance the first interpreter of the religious consciousness; it, in fact, is the first to make the prosaic view of the objective world a thing valid to itself24, when our humanity has fought itself essentially free as the self-consciousness of Spirit from the immediacy of sense, and sets itself over against the same in the strength of the same freedom with which it accepts and understands that objectivity as simply external fact and no more. This complete separation of the subject and object of sense-perception is, however, indicative of a considerably later phase of man’s spiritual history. The first knowledge of truth, on the contrary, declares itself as an intermediate state between the purely unintelligent absorption of the individual in Nature and that spiritual condition which is entirely released from it. This intermediate state, however, in which Spirit merely envisages for itself its conceptions in the plastic forms of Nature’s objects because it still fails to master any form of higher significance, although it strives through such association to bring the two aspects of its experience into one homogeneous whole, is, to put it in its general terms, the attitude of art and poetry as contrasted with that of the prosaic understanding. And for this reason we find that the prosaic consciousness declares itself first in its full bloom, where, as is the case in the Roman and in later times throughout our own Christian world, the principle of the subjective freedom of Spirit is realized in its abstract and actually concrete form.

And, secondly, the final aim toward which the effort of symbolic art is directed, and with the attainment of which the symbolic type is dissolved, is classical art. But although we find in this latter form the true manifestation of art’s essence first elaborated, it is not the first type of art. Rather it presupposes within its content all the various mediating and transitional stages of the symbolic form itself. It is quite true that the essential aim of that content is to reveal the notion as a rounded and self-defined totality, that is in its concreteness and actuality as the individuality of Spirit; but the notion is only then able to declare itself in such concrete form to conscious life after it has passed through a variety of mediatory stages forced upon it by the abstract conceptions which the nature of its own initial impulse presupposes. It is classical art, however, which brings to a close all the mere preliminary experiments of art in the direction of symbolism and the sublime25. And it is able to do this inasmuch as the subjective spirit finds in it, as its essential possession, a form truly adequate to its substance, and in the same way that the self-determining notion creates from its own potency the individual existence that fully expresses it. When once Art has discovered its true content, and by doing so found its true form, its search and striving after both, wherein the defect of symbolical art consists, is therewith at an end.

If we seek further for a closer principle of division of symbolic art within the limits of the boundaries on either extreme hitherto discussed, we shall find the same generally under the modes in accordance with which it contends with the genuine significances of art and their truly appropriate forms, the battle that is apparent in a content which is still striving in opposition to the truth of art, no less than in a form that is equally inadequate to express it. For both aspects, although externally united in the identity of one creation, are neither brought completely together themselves, nor permeated throughout with the notion of art in its truth; and for this reason they appear quite as much as contestants struggling to be free from the defects of their union. We may, in short, describe symbolic art throughout as a continuous war carried on between the comparative adequacy and inadequacy of its import and form26; and the varied gradations of symbolic art are not so much kinds of specific difference as they are stages and phases of one and the same incongruity between the spiritual idea and its sensuous medium.

At first, however, this contention is only potentially present, that is to say the incompatibility of these two sides, whose union is thus affirmed and enforced, is not yet openly present to consciousness. And this is so for the reason that it neither recognizes for itself in its universal nature the import which it seizes, nor is able to comprehend the realized form in its self-subsistent and self-exclusive existence; consequently, instead of representing to the senses both aspects in their difference, it is content to proceed upon the immediate appearance of identity which it enforces. In this original point of departure we have before us the as yet inseparable unity of the art-form and the symbolical expression it seeks after, fermenting, as it were, beneath the association of contradictory elements in mysterious guise — the unity, that is, of the real and primordial symbolism, whose plastic shapes are as yet not posited as symbols at all.

The termination of this process27, on the other hand, is the disappearance and dissolution of the symbolic type altogether. The strife which has hitherto been merely implied in it is now brought home to the artistic consciousness. The act of symbolization in consequence becomes the conscious severation of the transparent significance, which is now recognized for what it is from the sensuous image cognate with it. In this severation, however, there still remains an express relation of reciprocity, which, however, declares itself as such no longer in the mode of immediate identity, but rather as a mere comparison between the two, in which that differentiation and separation which in the previous type was not brought clearly to consciousness still remains as conspicuous a factor. And this is the sphere of that symbolism where the symbol is recognized as such. Here we find the artistic import recognized and presented in its independent universality, whose concrete embodiment is expressly placed in subordination as an image of that presentment, and no more, and as such a comparative medium is utilized for the purpose of artistic representation.

Halfway between that starting-point above described and this termination of the symbolic type we find the art of the sublime. In this the essential import, posited as the universality of Spirit in its absolute self-exclusion, disengages itself in the first place from concrete existence, permitting the same to appear as a mere negative, external and subservient factor beside it, which it is unable to leave, in order that it may express itself in it, standing in its native self-subsistency. Rather it finds it necessary to declare it as that which is essentially defective and self-dissolving, and this, moreover, although it has naught beside as means for its expression than just this to which it opposes itself as external and nugatory. The splendour of this import of the sublime may be accepted in the order of the notional process as previous to that of the mode of genuine comparison for this reason, that the concrete particularity of natural and any other phenomena must necessarily be treated in the first place negatively, merely appropriated, that is to say, as the adornment and embellishment of the unreachable might of Spirit’s absolute significance, before that express severation and discriminating comparison of external shapes cognate with, and yet at the same time distinct from, the import, whose image they reproduce, can assert itself.

The three principal stages28 above indicated break up naturally on closer inspection into the following subdivisions we now summarize in the chapters which include them.

FIRST CHAPTER

A. The first stage which presents itself in this portion of our subject-matter is as yet neither to be described strictly as symbolical, nor as belonging strictly to art; it rather clears the road to both. It is the sphere of the immediately cognized and substantive unity of the Absolute regarded as spiritual significance with its unsevered sensuous existence in a form presented by Nature.

B. In the second stage we pass to the symbol in its real sense; the dissolution of the first unity above described here commences, and while, on the one hand, the significances assert themselves in their independent universality above the particular phenomena of Nature, on the other they are necessarily forced with a like insistency to present themselves to consciousness together with this preconceived universality in the concrete form of natural objects. In this primary and twofold struggle to spiritualize Nature, and to present that which is born of Spirit to sense, at this stage of the conflict between them, we meet with all the ferment and wild, tossed hither and thither medley, the entire fantastic and confused world that is to say of symbolic art, which half surmises, it is true, the incongruity of its manner of shaping, yet is unable to remedy the same save through the distortion of its figures, while straining after a purely quantitative sublimity that would fain devour all limits. In this phase consequently we find ourselves in a world steeped with poetic phantasies, incredibilities and miracle, yet fail to encounter one work of genuine beauty.

C. Owing to this strife between the spiritual significance and its sensuous presentation, we are conducted thirdly to the stage we may describe as that of the true symbol, on which the symbolic work of art for the first time appears in its complete character. The forms and shapes are here no longer those present to sense, which, as we saw on the first mentioned stage, were immediately coincident with the Absolute as their positive existence, without any further modification at the hands of art; neither, as in the second phase, are they intent on asserting their unreconciled material against the universality of the significance merely through extensions of the quantitative limits of Nature’s objects, the ebullitions of a rioting fancy. Rather the symbolic form, which is here throughout apparent, is Art’s own creation, a work not merely capable of expressing its own individuality, but from another point of view possessed with the power of presenting at the same time both the particular object that it is and the further universal significance with which it is associated, and which it thereby discloses to the mind, so that these very shapes stand before us as problems which we are imperatively called upon to unriddle and probe to the inward charge which they carry.

We may at once further venture the general remark with reference to these more clearly defined types of a symbolism still to be ranked as elementary that they spring from the religious attitude to existence of entire nations; for which reason it will form part of our plan to recall their position in history. Not that complete identification of specific types with a given period is wholly feasible. Rather it would be truer to say that particular modes of conception and presentation, when we refer them generally to some kind of artistic type, are mingled up together, so that we find the specific type, which we have reason to regard as the fundamental one in any particular nation’s general view of existence, exemplified both in earlier and later peoples29, though its repetition may only be discovered in subordinate and isolated cases. In general, however, we may say that we possess the more concrete manifestations and visible proofs of the first stage in the ancient Persian religion of the second in the Indian, of the third in that of Egypt.

SECOND CHAPTER

In the second chapter that significance, which has hitherto been more or less obscured by its particular sensuous form, has at last wrested its way to freedom, and its independent character is brought clearly to consciousness. With this victory the relation of real symbolism is dissolved; we have instead, through the way in which the absolute significance30 is cognized as the universal substance interpenetrating the entire extension of the visible world, the art of the absolute essence31 in the form of a symbolism of the sublime; and this now takes the place of purely symbolical and fantastic suggestions, deformities, and riddles.

We have here mainly two points of view to distinguish which are based upon differences in the relation of the substantive essence, that is the Absolute and Divine, to the finitude of the apparent. Or rather we may say that this relation is capable of being twofold, both positive and negative, although in both forms, inasmuch as it is in either case universal substance, which has to appear, it is not the particular form and import of the objective facts, but their general principle of animation and their position relatively to this substance which is made visible to sense.

A. In the first phase or type this relation is so conceived, that substance, here the All and the One delivered from every form of particularity, is immanent in the determinate phenomena as the animating principle which brings them into being and is their life; and moreover, it is affirmatively and immediately present to the vision in this immanence, and is comprehended, and made the object of representation by the individual who surrenders himself to its presence through the adoring self-absorption in this indwelling essence of the entire world of contingent and material things. In this point of view we have the art of the Pantheism which possesses the Sublime as its inherent principle, an art such as we find it in its elementary stage in India, then elaborated in all its splendour in Mohammedanism and its artistic mysticism, and finally with still profounder significance reappearing in certain manifestations of Christian mysticism.

B. The negative relation on the other hand of true Sublimity we must look for in Hebraic poetry. In this poetry of the Glorious, which is only concerned to celebrate and exalt the unimaginable Lord of the heavens and the earth that it may employ His entire creation as the passing instrument of His Power, as the messengers of His Glory, as the delight and ornament of His Greatness, this service of His Creation, be it never so magnificent32, is deliberately posited as negative, and this for the reason that it is unable to discover any adequate or positively sufficient expression for the Power and Dominion of the Highest, and is only able to attain a genuine satisfaction by means of the subjection of the creature, which in the feeling and admission of its unworthiness is alone able with adequacy to express its insignificance33.

THIRD CHAPTER

Through this independent self-assertion of significance, made thus transparent to consciousness in its isolated simplicity, the severation of the same from the imaged appearance, whose incommensurability over against it has already been accepted, is now essentially complete; and albeit, along with the fact of this conscious separation, both form and import may still persist in the relation of an intimate affinity, a necessity which is implied in the fact of their being symbolical art, yet this relation no longer attaches to either import or form, but is placed now in a third mode of conception, which according to its own point of view, carries relations of similarity with both these sides34, and in reliance on these relations makes visible and declares the independently transparent significance by means of the cognate and particular image.

Owing to this change the image, instead of remaining as it was previously the unique expression of the Absolute, becomes now merely an ornament, and we thereby discover a relation which ceases to correspond with the notion of beauty. In other words image and significance, instead of being moulded one within the other, confront each other as opposites, precisely, in fact, as was the case in genuine symbolism, though then the process remained incomplete. Consequently works of art which are based on this form are of subordinate rank, and their content is unable to comprise the Absolute itself, and is necessarily restricted to circumstances and occurrences of narrower range. For this reason the forms which are now under discussion are for the most part merely used occasionally and by way of diversion.

More closely considered we have in this chapter to distinguish between three principal stages of our process.

A. To the first we appropriate those types of presentation commonly known as Fable, Parable, and Apologue. In these the severation of form and significance, which constitutes the characteristic trait of the entire sphere to which this chapter refers, is not as yet expressly recognized; that is to say, the subjective aspect of the comparison is not yet fully emphasized; consequently also the representation of the particular and concrete phenomenon, through which the universal significance is finally to declare itself, still remains the predominant factor.

B. In the second stage, on the contrary, the universal import asserts its independent mastery over the elucidating form, which now appears merely as attribute, or, under the guise of an image, capriciously selected by the mind which makes the contrast. To this type belong the Allegory, Metaphor, and Simile.

C. In the third stage we meet with the visible and complete collapse of those related aspects in the symbol which previously had either been immediately joined in union, despite the fact of their relative incongruity, or in their independent severation had still persisted under a relation of affinity35. Out of this arises that form of content which is cognized as independent in its prosaic36 universality, to which the art-form has become wholly an external relation; on the one hand we find it represented by the didactic poem, on the other that very aspect of its external form is accepted for what it is, and exemplified in so-called descriptive poetry. Here we find that every association and relation of symbolism has vanished; we have to look round us for some more comprehensive union of form and content, and one more truly adequate to the notion of art.

5 So the French expression des couleurs, and our English “the colours.”

6 Hegel uses the ‘technical term Inhalt in this passage to signify either (a) the quality of significance, or (b) the object which is symbolized by virtue of some selected quality. The use of it in both senses makes the passage somewhat difficult to follow.

7 Inhalt here evidently is the abstract quality.

8 Necessarily because such ambiguity is implied in the idea (seinem Begriff nach).

9 This, I think, is the sense. The language literally is, “Which a form under several possible significations, as symbol of any of which (deren) it can be employed often through connecting links (Zusammenhänge) more remote, may be taken to symbolize.”

10 The German words are Begreifen and Schliessen, which in their original sense are “to grasp with the hand” (prehendo) and “to shut” or “lock up.” The English words in a still fainter form carry the same significance through the Latin language. The symbolism of language at this stage is obviously only apparent to the student of language.

11 That is, more abstract.

12 Or in English: /# Forth on the ocean is shipped Youth with his thousand sails: Silent in bark barely saved steals into harbour old age. #/

13 Substantielle, that is, an artistic consciousness which is aware of its own essential nature — Spirit, and the object of pure intelligence — the Ideal.

14 Perhaps we should rather say a Theosophy.

15 The Alexandrine School, of which Plotinus and Philo are leading names.

16 Ein allgemeiner Gedanke. The reference throughout this paragraph to the universality of the ideas of reflection as contrasted with the sensuous image is rather a reference to the abstract conceptions of the analytical mind, that is, which are usually understood as universals in the sense of generic conceptions, than any fuller grasp of concrete reality such as possesses a truly ideal significance. So in its application to the metaphor I imagine what is meant is that we have here the process of dry analysis which merely destroys its significance as metaphor, that is, its synthetic unity for our aesthetic sense.

17 Ist aufgehoben, here not in the sense of being cancelled, but raised to the expression of concrete unity.

18 Als blosse Personification, that is, an individualization which impersonates the subjective identity without possessing its concrete substance, a personified shadow like the sphinx. Such appears to be the sense.

19 Because the content for which such shapes (Gestaltung) are given is itself incoherent, and therefore incompatible with adequate expression.

20 Sichhervorarbeiten. Our word “elaborate” is here insufficient. Hegel means the mode in which the Idea of art works itself free from entirely potential obscurity into a living force, a real energeia. We cannot say “emerges into daylight,” however, because the highest grasp of symbolic art is still only a twilight. It is like the growth of the plant-germ, still underground, or partially so.

21 Pracktischen. Not matter-of-fact relation, but rather a relation that asserts itself exclusively in action.

22 Als Grund, that is, as a fundamental unity of the real.

23 Die erste näher gestaltende Dollmetcherin, lit., the first interpreter which supplies forms more nearly cognate with itself.

24 It is valid (geltend) because it introduces there its own spiritual nature.

25 The previous statement of Hegel must not be overlooked, however, and it may be considerably amplified, that there is much in romantic art which is related to symbolism and the sublime. Take the case of the celebrated sculpture of Michael Angelo typifying Night, Day, Dawn, and Twilight, or such modern pictures as those of Watts’s “The Minotaur” and “The Spirit of Christianity.”

26 Or rather “between those aspects of its import and form which are reciprocally homogeneous and those which are not.”

27 This process of symbolic art.

28 Hauptstufen. The word signifies either the phase or grade of a process of development, or to take the metaphor used by Hegel above (Stadien) may perhaps be better translated by “stage,” as though indicating the successive stages of a journey.

29 I think Völkern rather than Zeiten must be here understood, and the sense appears to be that the confusion indicated refers to a mingling of forms appropriate to a nation in one historical period with those that are more cognate with a people at any earlier or it may be later period. But unquestionably this attempt to identify a type as between different nations with historical periods that will harmonize with Hegel’s own classification is a difficult matter as we may see by the fact that Egypt, the oldest example of all, represents the third stage. On the other hand, if the confusion referred to is applied to the particular development of any one people, the examples given by Hegel do not bear on the difficulty they illustrate.

30 Or rather “the import of the Absolute.”

31 Substantiality, called below die Substanz; the word signifies the real essence of the Absolute.

32 The principal clause of this sentence has no end as printed. The auxiliary must be omitted either before in diesem Dienste or eine positive. I prefer the first alternative.

33 The relative here agrees, I think, with die Dienstbarkeit rather than die Kreatur or die Poesie. Hegel says “compatible with itself and its significance,” we should rather say “its sense of its own insignificance.”

34 Hegel’s words are sondern in einem subjectiven Dritten, welches in beiden Seiten nach seiner subjectiven Anschauung, etc. This “subjective third” is, as explained below, the way in which the relation between the image and the absolute significance ceases to be regarded as identical.

35 This sentence as it stands is ungrammatical; there is a change in the construction as it proceeds.

36 The prosaic universality is the prose of its form separated from content. It is prosaic because it is unrelated to the vitality of the notion.

UNCONSCIOUS SYMBOLISM

NOW THAT WE pass to the consideration of the several distinctions of symbolical art in more detail, we have to make a beginning with the identical beginning of art as it proceeds out of the notion of art itself. This commencement, as we have seen, is the symbolical form of art in its still immediate form wherein the appearance, as purely image or likeness, is neither brought to consciousness nor presupposed — unconscious symbolism, that is to say. Before, however, we shall be in a position to consider this form in its genuine symbolical character, it will be necessary to review several presuppositions which the notion of symbolism itself determines in order that we may utilize them for the basis upon which the symbol may unfold itself for scientific apprehension.

The point from which we make a start may be defined more closely as follows:

The fundamental root of the symbol is, regarding it from one aspect, the immediate union of the universal and thereby spiritual significance with the form which may at the same time be described as adequate and inadequate, an inadequacy, however, which is as yet unperceived. This association, however, must, on the other hand, receive a form from the imagination and art, and must not merely be conceived as a Divine reality exclusively immediate to sense. By this means the symbolical originates in the first instance with the severation of a universal import from the immediate presence of Nature, in whose existence the Absolute is contemplated as actually present. These two aspects supply us with the preliminary stages for the genuine forms of symbolic art.

The first presupposition consequently — we may call it the coming into being of the symbolical — is not that union which is the product of art, but rather just that immediate unity of the Absolute and True and its existence, which is discovered in the visible world apart from art’s mediation.

A. IMMEDIATE UNITY OF SIGNIFICANCE AND FORM

In this identity of the Divine immediately envisualized, a Divine, which is brought home to consciousness as the union of its determinate existence in Nature and humanity, Nature is neither taken simply for that which it is in isolation by itself, nor is the Absolute severed from it and posited in an independent self-subsistence. Consequently it is wholly beside the point to speak of a distinction here between the Inward and the External, the significance and the form, and this for the reason that the Inward is not as yet released in its independence as significance from its immediate reality in the object of sense. When we apply here the expression import37, such merely emphasizes our own reflection upon it, which is due to the necessity for ourselves personally to regard the form, which contains that which is spiritual and inward under the mode of sense-perception, generally as something external to us, through which we are desirous of penetrating into the Inward, that is, its animating life and significance, in order that we may understand it. For this reason we are under the necessity from the very first, when dealing with such general impressions of sense-perception, of making an essential demarcation between those cases in which the peoples, who in the first instance experienced them, themselves were clearly conscious of this Inward itself as such, that is, as a spiritual significance, and those in which the use of such expressions is only applicable to ourselves, who now and only now recognize an import of this kind in the content of that external expression of sense-envisagement.

In this primary unity such as the latter cases involve, there is no such distinction between soul and body, notion and reality, as is implied in the former. That which we describe as corporeal and sensuous, natural and human, is not merely an expression for a significance which proceeds at the same time to a point of distinction from it38; but the phenomenon is itself conceived as the immediate reality and presence of the Absolute, which does not in addition possess some other mode of self-subsistent existence, but is confined exclusively to the immediate presence of an object of sense, which is God or the Divine. In the service of the Lama, for example, this particular, actual human being is immediately known and adored as God, just as in other natural religions the sun, mountains, rivers, the moon, particular animals, such as the bull, ape, and so on, are looked upon as immediately Divine existences and worshipped as sacred. We may observe a similar directness, if under a mode of profounder application, even now in many aspects of the Christian consciousness. According to Catholic doctrine, for example, the consecrated bread is the real body, and the wine the real blood of God, and Christ is immediately present therein; nay, even according to the Lutheran faith, both bread and wine are converted into such real body and blood by virtue of the faith of the recipient. In this mystical union it is not merely a symbolism which is expressed, a point of view which comes into prominence as the result of it for the first time in later doctrines of the reformed Church, where we find as a result the spiritual significance is expressly severed from the sensuous object, and the external medium is then accepted as merely pointing to an import which is distinct from itself. In the same way the power of this Divine is held to operate in the miracle-working images of the Virgin as a Divine force that is immediately present within them, and not merely under symbolical guise through the significant import of such pictures.

We find, however, the most thorough and universal exemplification of this absolute and immediate unity of sense-perception in the life and religion of the ancient Zend-people, whose conceptions and institutions are preserved for us in the Zend-Avesta.

In other words the religion of Zoroaster beholds Light in the form of its natural existence, the sun, stars, and fire in the luminous activity and flames which proceed from them, actually as the Absolute, without separating this Divine independently from that Light either as its expression and image or the sensuous medium thereof. The Divine, the significance, is not thus severed from its determinate existence in the form of lights, however displayed. For even when light is accepted here in the sense of Goodness and Justice, and through such significance is extended to all that is rich in blessing, support, and life, it is still not taken as the mere image of such things, but Light is itself the Good. And the same view applies to the opposite of light, namely, obscurity and darkness when identified with that which is unclean, hurtful, evil, destructive, and deadly.

This point of view may be more closely defined and considered as follows:

(a) In the first instance the Divine, as the essential purity of Light39, and the Darkness and Unclean are, it is true, personified under the names of Ormuzd and Ahriman respectively. This personification is, however, throughout entirely superficial. Ormuzd is no essentially free individuality devoid of all relation to external objects40 as was the God of the Jews, or truly spiritual and personal as is the God of Christianity when conceived as truly personal and self-conscious Spirit; rather Ormuzd, despite the fact that he is described also as king, great spirit and judge, remains inseparable from such external existence as Light and its illuminations. He is exclusively this universal characteristic of all particular existences, in which light and thereby the Divine and Pure are realized, without any additional power to withdraw himself in a spiritual universality and independence into his own substance from that which is thus immediately presented. His consistence rests in the particular facts of existence precisely in an analogous way to that of the genus in the species. It is true that regarded as this universal he is superior to all that is wholly particular, and is the first, most supreme, the kings of kings glorious in his gold, the purest and so forth; but he retains his existence none the less exclusively in all that is luminous and pure as Ahriman in all that is obscure, evil, destructive, and charged with disease.

(b) As a result this mode of vision is at the same time extended to the conception of an empire of light and darkness, and the strife between these forces. In the empire of Ormuzd it is in the first place the Amschaspands, as the seven principal lights of heaven, which receive adoration as Divinity, inasmuch as they are the essential particular existences of Light, and for this reason constitute as a pure and spacious empeopled heaven, the existence of the Divine itself. Every Amschaspand, to which Ormuzd belongs, has assigned to it days of precedence, blessing, and beneficence. The Izeds and Ferners carry the conception still further into specification, which it is probable enough are personifications of Ormuzd himself, albeit they add to him no further shape that we may envisage as human, so that neither the spiritual nor the bodily mode of subjectivity, but simply the existence as light, appearance, illumination, splendour, remains the essential characteristic of the object envisaged.

In the same way also the particular objects of Nature, which themselves do not exist in external form as lights and luminous bodies, such as animals, plants, and so forth, no less than the forms which characterize the human world, whether we view it under its spiritual or bodily presentment, in other words the particular activities and conditions of it, the entire life of the state, the king with the seven great men who support him, the division of classes, cities, the various provinces with their governors, all that is warranted by experience as typical of the best and purest for the protection of the rest — the entire reality, in fact, of this life is regarded as an existence of Ormuzd. For everything that carries within itself and promulgates what has solidity, life, and substance is an existence of Light and Purity, and consequently an existence of Ormuzd; every particular truth, excellence, love, justness, every individual example of life, beneficence, protection, spiritual power and enjoyment or benignity is, according to Zoroaster, regarded as essentially Light and Divine. The empire of Ormuzd is the Pure and Illuminating of visible reality; and conformably to this there is no distinction between the phenomena of Nature or Spirit, just as Light and Goodness, the spiritual and the sensuous quality, are inseparably blended in the conception of Ormuzd himself. The splendour of a creature is consequently for Zoroaster the very substance of spirit, force, and life-exhalations of every kind, in so far, that is, as they tend to actual conservation and to the removal of everything positively evil and hurtful, for that which is the Real and the Good, whether in beast, man, or vegetable life, is Light, and it is according to the measure and mode of display of this luminousness that the relative power or weakness of the splendour of all objects is determined.

An articulation and graduated division of similar character is found in the empire of Ahriman, merely with the difference that what is spiritually or naturally evil, and generally the destructive and actively negative principle asserts itself in actual masterdom. But the might of Ahriman must not be suffered to spread; the aim of the entire world is consequently assumed to be that of annihilating the Empire of Ahriman, in order that the life, presence, and dominion of Ormuzd may prevail throughout creation.

(c) To this exclusive object the entire life of humanity is consecrate. The life-task of every man consists exclusively in a purification of soul and body, and in the extension of this blessing and this conflict with Ahriman throughout all the conditions and activities of the life of man or Nature. The highest and most sacred duty is consequently to glorify Ormuzd in his creation, and to love, honour, and conform oneself to all that proceeds from his Light and is essentially pure. Ormuzd is the beginning and end of all adoration. Above all else the Parsee is moved to summon the life of Ormuzd in thought and speech; he is the main object of his prayers. And in the exaltation of him, from whom the entire world of the Pure has streamed in its splendour, the devotee is in duty bound to accommodate his adoration of particular objects according to the measure in which they proclaim his majesty, worth, and perfection. So far as they are good and ring sound, to that extent, the Parsee reasons with himself, is Ormuzd alive within them; he loves them as the children of his purity, yea, rejoices over them as in the beginning of his substance, forasmuch as through him was everything brought forth in newness and purity. And for the same reason is all prayer directed first and foremost to the Amschaspands as the most intimate reflections of Ormuzd, as the primates of supreme splendour who surround his throne and advance his dominion. Such prayer to these heavenly spirits is immediately directed to their qualities and activities, and in the case of stars at the time of their uprising. The sun is invoked by day, and always with the changes appropriate to his own motion through sunrise, noonday, or sunset. From morning till noonday the devotion of the Parsee centres in this that Ormuzd may exalt his splendour; at evening he prays that the sun may through Ormuzd and the protecting care of every Tzed perfect the course of his life. But principally we find honour paid to Mithras, who, as the fruit-bringer to the Earth and the wilderness, pours forth the fermenting sap over all Nature, and as mighty champion against all the Devas of contention, war, confusion, and destruction, is the author of peace.

In addition to this the Parsee, in his generally single-toned songs of praise, exalts his ideals, that is, the purest and most veritable examples of human life, the Ferver conceived as pure human spirits, on whatever portion of the Earth’s surface they live or have lived. In the chief place prayer is offered to the pure spirit of Zoroaster, and after him to the leading lights of all classes, cities, and provinces; and already in this religion, we find that the spirits of all mankind are contemplated as united together with a sufficient bond in that they are members in the living association of Light, which hereafter in Gorotman shall receive a yet more perfect union.

Finally, not even the animals, mountains, and vegetable world are forgotten, but are appealed to as embodiments of Ormuzd; all that is good and serviceable in them to mankind is extolled, and especially the first and most excellent of its kind is adored as the present existence of Deity. And over and above this worship of Ormuzd and of every form of selected excellence among the pure and beneficent objects of his creation the Zend-Avesta is insistent upon the practice of goodness and the purity of thought, word, and deed. The Parsee is to be in the entire display of his external and inward man as Light, as Ormuzd, the Amschaspands, and the Izeds, as Zoroaster and all good men live and do. Such live and have lived in the Light, and all their deeds are Light; therefore shall every man make them an example to his eyes and follow after the same. The more purity of light and goodness man expresses in his life and accomplishment, the nearer he stands to those spirits of heaven. As the Izeds throw the blessing of their beneficence over everything, are a source of life and fruitfulness and friendship, so, too, he must seek to purify Nature, to ennoble her, and to reach abroad the light of life and the joy of plenteousness. In accordance therewith he shall feed the hungry, tend the sick, offer the drink of consolation to the thirsty, give roof and shelter to the wanderer, provide pure seed for the Earth, delve clean channels of water, plant the waste with trees, nourish to the best of his power their growth, care for the sustenance and fructification of things alive, keep pure the lambency of fire, remove from sight the dead and unclean beast, establish marriages, and in the doing thereof the holy Sapandomad, the Ized of the Earth, herself rejoices, averting the harm which the Devas and the Darvands are busy to prepare.

If we ask ourselves once more, after this delineation in outline of the fundamental conceptions of this system, what is the symbolical character of the same there can be but one reply, namely, that there is no trace here of anything we have previously described as symbolical. On the one side, no doubt, we have light in its obvious natural form, and on the other it possesses the further significance of all that is rich in goodness, blessing, and permanence. It is, therefore, possible to contend that the actual existence of light is merely an image cognate with this universal significance, which interpenetrates every part of the world of Nature and mankind. If we apply such an interpretation to the conception of Parsees themselves we shall find such a separation of existence and its import to be false; for these the Light as Light is actually the Good, and is so apprehended that it is in the form of light present and active in everything that is good, vital, and positive. The universal and Divine is carried no doubt through the distinctions of the world of particular objects, but in this its differentiated and particularized existence, the substantial and inseparable unity of import and form remains constant, and the distinctions that are involved in this unity do not affect the difference of significance quâ significance, and its manifestation, but only the distinguishing features of particular objects, such as stars, organic life, human opinions and actions, in which the Divine as Light or Darkness is immediately open to sense.

In the further embrace of such conceptions there are no doubt points of connection with incipient symbolism, but we get out of them no real type of that mode of viewing things in its completeness; they will only pass muster as isolated traits in its direction. To such effect Ormuzd is on one occasion made to say of his beloved one Dschemschid: “The holy Ferver of Dschemschid, the son of Vivengham, was great before me. His hand received from me a dagger, whose sharpness was gold, and whose shaft was gold. Therewith Dschemschid marked out three hundred portions of the Earth. He split up the Earth-realm with his gold-plate, yea, with his dagger and spake: ‘Let Sapandomad rejoice.’ He spake the holy word with prayer to the tame cattle and the wild and unto men. So his passing through was happiness and blessing for these lands and animals of the home and the field, and men ran together into great dwellings.” Here we find in the dagger, and the cleaving of the Earth-soil an image which may be interpreted as significant of agriculture. Agriculture is still no essentially spiritual activity, and just as little is it a purely natural one; it is rather a universal occupation of mankind, which results from reflective thought and experience, and which has point of association with all the relations of life. It is no doubt never expressly stated in this conception of the passing of Dschemschid that this splitting of the Earth with the dagger indicates agriculture; nor is there a single word added of any increase of the fruits of the field by virtue of this division; for the reason, however, that in this particular act more appears to be included than the mere turning over and loosening of the soil, we are led to look for a further significance beneath it. The same observations apply to more recent conceptions, such as we find exemplified in the later elaboration of the worship of Mithras, where Mithras is represented as a youth who in the dusk of a grotto raises on high the bull’s head and plunges a dagger in his neck, whereon a serpent licks up the blood, and a scorpion gnaws his genitals. This symbolical account has received an astronomical and other interpretations. We may, however, find in it a still more universal and profounder meaning, and take the bull generally to personify the principle of Nature, over which man, as essentially spirit, secures the victory, and this though astronomical associations may also be implied in it. That, however, such a revolution as the victory of Spirit over Nature is contained in it is also suggested by the name of Mithras, or mediator, more especially if we refer it to a later period when such uplifting over Nature was already a necessity present to the national consciousness. Symbols such as the above, however, as already observed, only incidentally come to the fore in the conceptions of the ancient Parsees, and do not in any way constitute a principle for their fundamental type of thought.

Still less can we describe the cultus, which the Zend-Avesta inculcates, as one of symbolical tendency. We find no trace here, for example, of symbolical dances in celebration or imitation of the interlaced revolutions of the stars; as little any other forms of activity which may pass as the suggestive counterfeit of universal conceptions; rather all actions which are prescribed to the Parsee as imperative in a religious sense are matters directly concerned with the actual enlargement of his purity, either of soul or body, and appear as directed with one intent and one object of realization, namely, that of increasing the actual dominion of Ormuzd over men and the objects of Nature, an object consequently which is not merely symbolized in such activity, but entirely carried out.

For the reason, then, that a genuine symbolic type fails absolutely when applied to this religious system, it is equally destitute of a true artistic character. No doubt we may generally describe its mode of conception as poetical for the particular facts of Nature are just as little as the particular sentiments, circumstances, acts, and affairs of men treated in their immediate and consequently haphazard and prosaic relation which is void of all significance, and are rather contemplated essentially in the Absolute as very Light; or to put it the other way, the universal essence of the concrete reality of Nature and mankind is not conceived in the universality which is without existence or form, but this universal and that particular is envisaged and expressed in immediate union. Such a mode of viewing existence may possibly claim a certain beauty, breadth, and largeness of its own, and in contrast to gross and senseless idols Light is no doubt as the essentially pure and universal element, an adequate image of Goodness and Truth. But for all that we find that poetry here fails to pass beyond a general conception; it never reaches either art or the works of art. For the Good and the Divine are neither essentially defined, nor is the consistency and form of this content a creation of mind (Spirit); but rather, as we have already found, the thing which is immediately present to sense, namely, the actual sun, stars, fire, organic nature, throughout its vegetation, animal and human life, is conceived as the appropriate form of the Absolute in this its existent and immediate shape. The sensuous representation is not, as Art requires, the plastic product of mind, shaped and discovered by the same, but immediately identified with and expressed by the external existent shape as its appropriate counterfeit. It is quite true, in another aspect, the particular thing is, by means of the imagination, also fixed in an independent relation to its reality, as, for instance, in the Izeds and Fervers, that is, in the genii of particular men; the poetic invention, however, discovered in this incipient severation is of the weakest kind for the reason that the distinction remains entirely of a formal character, so that the genius, Ized or Ferver, neither includes nor is able to include any real characteristic content of its own, but, instead of this, either repeats one identical content or possesses nothing more than the purely empty form of the subjectivity, which the existing individual already possesses. The product of the imagination here is consequently neither an other and profounder significance nor the self-subsistent form of an essentially richer individuality. And when we moreover find particular objects envisaged on the wider plane of general conceptions and generic types, to which, as appropriate to such types, the imagination vouchsafes a real existence, even here also this uplifting of multiplicity into the sphere of an all-comprehending and essential unity, regarded as the basic core and substance of the individuals that constitute the same species and genus, can only in a yet more indefinite sense be accepted as an activity of the imagination, no real exemplification of either poetry or art. So we have, for instance, in the holy fire of Behram the essence of fire; and in the same way there is a water that underlies all existent water. So, too, Horn is esteemed as the first, purest, and most stalwart among trees, the primordial tree from which the life-sap full of immortality flows; and among all mountains Albordsch, the sacred mountain, is set before us as the primaeval root of the Earth, erect in the splendour of the Light, from which the good deeds of all men proceed, who have possessed the knowledge of Light, and on whom the sun, moon, and stars repose. In general, however, we may affirm that the universal is visibly known in immediate union with the actual objects of sense, and it is merely now and again that universal conceptions are embodied in the particular image.

In yet more prosaic fashion does the cultus of this religion make as its principal object the dominion of Ormuzd a reality which interpenetrates all things, merely requiring this one essential condition to the adequacy of every object, namely, its purity, and without attempting therewith to construct from such any existent form of art that is based upon immediate life, as, for example, the warriors and wrestlers of Greece were so ready to do in their artistic elaboration of physical perfection.

From whatever side, then, or whatever may be the point of view from which we regard this first unity of spiritual universality and sensuous reality, we only get from it the basis of symbolical art; it still fails to possess a real symbolism of its own, and is unable to produce works of art. In order that we may attain this object, which is the next in view, we must pass away from the union we have just considered, and examine modes of conception where the difference and conflict between significance and form is more really emphasized.

B. FANTASTIC SYMBOLISM

Quitting now the sphere of thought in which the identity of the Absolute and its externally envisaged existence is immediately cognized, we have, as an essential determination to start from, the severation of these two aspects hitherto united, a cleavage which stimulates the effort to restore once more the visible breach by means of an elaborate fusing together of the whole thus divided by a rich use of the images of phantasy. With this attempt the essential need for art is felt for the first time. No sooner has the imagination succeeded in holding fast its envisaged content, which is no longer grasped in immediate union with the objects of sense, in isolated separation from that existence, than for the first time spirit is confronted with the task of reclothing with the material of phantasy for sensuous perception, that is, under the renewed mode of a spiritual product, these general conceptions and of creating through this activity the shapes of art. And for the reason that in the stage of our process where we now find ourselves, this task is capable of only a symbolic solution, we may easily fall under the impression that we stand already in the sphere of genuine symbolism. This, however, is not the case. What immediately faces us here are the forms of a fermenting phantasy41, which in the restlessness of its fantastic dreams merely indicates the path which conducts us to the real centre of symbolical art. In the first appearance of the distinguishing relation between significance and the mode of its presentation, both the severation and the association are still grasped in a confused manner. This confusion is necessitated by the fact that neither of the parted aspects of difference have as yet attained a totality, capable of emphasizing the precise point in the process, which will serve as the fundamental determination of the opposed side in it, and by means of which for the first,time a really adequate union and reconciliation is rendered possible. Spirit (mind), to illustrate our difficulty further, determines by virtue of its own totality the side of the external phenomenon out of its own essential substance quite as really as it does its own spiritual content for the obvious reason that the essentially complete and independent phenomenon only receives its adequate form as the external existence of that which is spiritual. In the case, however, of this primary severation of the significances apprehended by mind, and the existent world of phenomena such aspects of significance are not those of concrete spiritual life, but abstractions, and this expression also is entirely destitute of spiritual intension, and is consequently, in an abstract sense, purely external and sensuous. This twofold impulse in the direction of disunion and union is for the same reason an unsteady gait42, which ranges from the objects of sense in undefined and unmeasured waste immediately to the aspects of universal import, and is only able to discover for the inward content of consciousness the absolutely opposed form of sensuous shapes. And it is this very contradiction which is set forth as a means of really uniting elements which contradict each other. The result is that instead of so doing it is first driven from one side of the opposition into the other, and then again is hurled in its ceaselessly alternating dance into the former extreme, while it believes that in this rocking to and fro of its strain it has found the means to lull itself to repose. Instead of getting, therefore, a true satisfaction we have the contradiction merely affirmed as its genuine resolution, and in addition the union most incomplete of all is set forth as that which art really requires. We must not therefore expect to find in such a field of confusion worse confounded the true forms of beauty. In this restless leap from one opposed extreme to the other all that we find from one point of view in the sensuous material that is absorbed, regarding the same in its singularity no less than as it constitutes its elementary appearance to sense, is that the breadth and potency of every import of universality is associated therewith in what must consequently be a wholly inadequate way. From another aspect that which is most universal, as soon as the process has passed from the same, is shamelessly plunged under the reverse treatment into the very heart of the sensuous present; and if any feeling of the incompatibility of such an effort is consciously perceived, the imagination here is only capable of rendering assistance by means of distortions which carry the particular shapes over and beyond their own secure boundaries, adding to their extension, making them ever more indefinite, by an imaginative leap which mounts to the immeasurable, breaks up every bond of union, and in its very strain after reconciliation reveals each opposing factor in its most unmitigated hostility43.

These earliest and still most uncontrolled attempts of imagination and art we meet most signally among the ancient races of India, the main defect of whose productions, when viewed relatively to their particular position at this stage of our classification, consists in this, that they are neither able to seize the profounder aspects of significance in independent clarity, nor grasp the reality of sense-perception in its characteristic form and meaning. The Hindoo race has consequently proved itself unable to comprehend either persons or events as parts of continuous history, because to any historical treatment a certain soberness is essential of accepting and understanding facts in their true and independent form, and subject to their mediating links, grounds, causes, and objects, being empirically ascertained. The natural impulse to refer all and everything back to the Divine is hostile to this prosaic reasonableness, no less than its tendency to prefigure for itself in the most ordinary or most sensuous of objects a presence and reality of godhead created by its own imagination. These peoples consequently, through their confused intermingling of the Finite and the Absolute, in which the logical order and permanence of the prosaic facts of ordinary consciousness are disregarded altogether, despite all the profusion and extraordinary boldness of their conceptions, fall into a levity of fantastic mirage which is quite as remarkable, a flightiness which dances from the most spiritual and profoundest matters to the meanest trifle of present experience, in order that it may interchange and confuse immediately the one extreme with the other.

If we concentrate our attention more closely upon the more conspicuous features of this continuous bout of intoxication, this craze and condition of craze, what we are concerned with is not to trace religious conceptions as such, but merely to emphasize the points of prominence which relate such modes of conception with art. These may be indicated as follows:

One extreme of the consciousness of the Hindoo is the consciousness of the Absolute, here regarded as the essentially and absolutely Universal, undifferentiated and consequently wholly indefinite. This supreme of abstractions, inasmuch as it is neither in possession of a particular content, nor is conceived under the mode of concrete personality, is, from whatever side you may look at it, no object at all that the imagination acting through the senses can reclothe for art. Brahman44, taken in a general sense as this supreme Godhead, is absolutely removed from the sensuous and sense-perception, or rather is not even an object for Thought. For self-consciousness is inseparable from thought, which posits itself as an object of Thought, in order that it may thus come to self-knowledge. Every act of intelligence is an identification of the ego and object, a reconciliation of that which is severed outside from this relation of recognition; what I do not understand remains as something strange and foreign to myself. The mode of union, under the Hindoo conception, of human personality with Brahman is nothing more nor less than a continually ascending process of exhaustion45 in the direction of this supreme of abstractions, in which not merely the entire concrete content, but also self-consciousness itself, must be eliminated before the final consummation is realized. Or, to put the same thing another way, the Hindoo recognizes no reconciliation and identity with Brahman in the sense that the spirit of humanity becomes conscious of this union. The unity rather consists in this, that both consciousness and self-consciousness, and with them the entire content of the objective world and personality totally disappears. This emptying and annihilation to the point of absolute vacuity is treated as the supreme condition under which man is capable of identity with highest Divinity, that is Brahman. An abstraction of this sort, one of the barest it is possible to imagine, whether we consider it from the point of view of the Absolute, as Brahman, or from the human aspect of a purely theoretically conceived cultus that consists in man’s self-evaporation46 and self-annihilation, is in itself no object either for the imagination or art; all the latter can do is to profit by such opportunity as various imaginary representations of what happens by the way to this goal may offer for their exercise.
Conversely the Hindoo view of existence launches itself with just the same immediacy over this very abstraction from all sense into the wildest flood of it. Inasmuch, however, as the immediate and consequently unbroken identity of both sides is in this view cancelled, and instead of this the element of difference within this identity has become the basic principle of the type itself, this very contradiction plunges us with no mediating connections from the Finite into the Divine, and again from this latter into what is most transitory of all; and we live and move among simulacra, which rise up entirely as the growth of this alternating process, a kind of witches’ world, where the definition of every shape eludes our grasp as we endeavour to seize it, is converted all at once into its opposite, or straddles away into mere inflated enormities.

The general modes under which Hindoo art manifests itself may be summarized under the three following points of view:

(a) In the first place we find the full hugeness of the content of the Absolute is imposed by the imagination upon the sensuous in its aspect of singularity in such a way that this particular thing is itself, in its own form and station, taken completely to represent such a content and to exist as such for the imaginative sense. In the Râmâyana, for example, the friend of Râma, namely, the prince of apes Hanuman, is a principal personage, and he accomplishes the bravest of exploits. And generally we may observe that among the Hindoos the ape is revered as Divine, and we find, in fact, an entire city of apes. In the ape, as this point of singularity, the infinite content of the Absolute is envisaged and adored. It is just the same with the cow, Sabalâ, which in the Râmâyana during the episodic treatment of the expiations of Visvamitra, appears clothed with immeasurable power. If we take a glance on higher planes we find entire families in India — even though the individual here be merely a vacant and monotonously vegetating life-unit — in whom the Absolute itself, as this concrete reality, is adored in its immediate life and presence as God. This same coincidence is found in Lamaism. Here, too, a single individual receives the highest worship due to the present God. In India, however, this honour is not exclusively paid to one man. Every Brahmin proves at once his claim from the day of his birth in his own caste to be ranked as Brahman, and possesses that second birth of the Spirit which identifies his humanity with God, in the way of Nature through his actual bodily birth, so that the crown of the most Divine itself is immediately referred back upon the entirely commonplace fact of physical existence. For although the Brahmin is under the most sacred obligation to read the Vedâs, and attain by this means an insight into the secrets of Deity, this duty can be actually carried out in the most perfunctory way without detracting in the least from the Brahmin’s own divinity. In a similar manner it is one of the modes most common to the representations of Hindooism to have the primordial God set forth as the procreator or begetter, as we find Eros is in the case of Greek mythology. This procreation as Divine activity is further worked into all kinds of representations in a wholly material way, and the private parts, both male and female, are treated as sacred in the highest sense. And in a reverse way, and to no less extent, the Divine, when it passes over in its independent Divinity to the plane of existing reality, is suffered in a wholly trivial manner to get mixed up with everyday details. We may take an example of this from the commencement of the Râmâyana, where Brahmâ has come on a visit to Vâlmîkis, the mythical bard of the Râmâyana. Vâlmîkis receives him entirely in the common Hindoo fashion, pays him a compliment or two, places a stool before him, and supplies him with water and fruits. Brahmâ sits down just like anybody else and constrains his host to do likewise: and there they sit on and sit on until at last Brahmâ orders Vâlmîkis to compose the poem of the Râmâyana.

Modes of conception such as these are still not symbolic in the strict sense; for although we find that here, as the symbol requires, forms are taken from the material of sense and diverted to the use of conceptions of more universal import, we still find the further condition of this requirement wanting, namely, that the particular existences must not actually exist for sense-perception as this absolute significance, but merely suggest the same. For the Hindoo imagination the ape, the cow, and the particular Brahmin are not merely a cognate symbol of the Divine, but are contemplated and represented as the Godhead itself, as existences adequate to that Godhead.

It is the contradiction inherent in this immediacy which is the motive force of another feature in the conceptions of Hindoo art. For while, on the one hand, that which is absolutely severed from sense, the spiritual significance out and out, is conceived as the actually Divine, yet, on the other, the particular facts of concrete reality are immediately envisaged by the imagination, even in their sensuous existence, as Divine manifestations. They are no doubt partly only taken to represent particular aspects of the Absolute; but even so the particular thing in its immediacy is still incompatible with the universality, which it is, as adequate to the same, introduced to express; and it appears in all the more glaring contradiction to it for the reason that the significance is here already conceived in its universality, yet, despite of this, an express relation of identity is immediately set up by the imagination between it and the most particular of material facts.

(b) The most obvious way in which Hindoo art endeavours to mitigate this disunion is, as we have already suggested, by the measureless extension of its images. Particular shapes are drawn out into colossal and grotesque proportions in order that they may, as forms of sense, attain to universality. The particular form of sense, which is taken to express not itself and its own characteristic meaning as a fact of external existence, but a universal significance which lies outside it, fails to satisfy the imagination until it has been torn out itself into vastness which knows neither measure nor limit. This is the cause of all that extravagant exaggeration of size, not merely in the case of spatial dimension, but also of measurelessness of time-durations, or the reduplication of particular determinations, as in figures with many heads, arms, and so on, by means of which this art strains to compass the breadth and universality of the significance it assumes. The egg, for example, contains the bird within it. This particular fact is enlarged to the measureless conception of a world-egg secreting the universal life of all creation, and in which Brahmâ, the procreating God, accomplishes without effort the year of creation, until by virtue of his thought alone the the two halves of the egg fall asunder. And, in addition to natural objects, human individuals and events are exalted that they may express the significance of truly Divine action in such a way that we can neither hold fast the Divine or the human in their independence, but both seem to run in a continual confusion backwards and forwards into one another. As a striking illustration of such a mode of conception, we have the incarnations of certain Hindoo gods, principally Vishnu, the conserver of life, whose exploits figure largely in the great epic poems. Râmas is, for instance, himself the seventh incarnation of Vishnu (Râmatshandra). From a review of particular demands, actions, circumstances, modes of appearance, and traits of demeanour, we are led to infer from these poems that this content is in great measure borrowed from actual events, that is from the exploits of ancient kings who exercised a powerful influence in creating new conditions of law and order; we find ourselves surrounded by a thoroughly human atmosphere and on the firm ground of reality. But then again, in a converse direction, the entire scene expands, reaches out into the nebulous, playing over and beyond it with universal conceptions, so that we lose the vantage ground we had gained and are robbed of all our bearings. We are treated in just the same way in the Sakuntala. At first we have set before us the most gentle and odorous realm of Love, in which everything goes on its way in an entirely human fashion; and then we are all at once snatched from the wealth of this genuine world, and transported into the clouds of the heaven of Indra, where everything suffers change, and our formerly circumscribed sphere is inflated to the measure of the universal import of Nature’s life in its relation to the Brahmin and the power of Nature’s gods, which is vouchsafed to man in return for his severe self-mortifications.

Such modes of representation are also not to be termed in a strict sense symbolical. That is to say the true symbol suffers the determinate shape, which it applies, to remain under that original definition, because its purpose is not to envisage therein the immediate existent of the significance in its universality, but to point to that import merely through the qualities of the object which are cognate to it. Hindoo art, however, although it severs universality from the singular existing fact, still adds the further requirement that both sides shall be immediately united through the imagination, and is consequently forced to divest determinate existence of its specific limitations, and, albeit in a material fashion, to enlarge in the direction of indefiniteness and generally to change and reconstitute. In this melting down of all clear definition, and in the confusion which results from it, so that that form is always set down as highest for everything, whether phenomena, events, or actions, which in the mode of their figuration can neither for themselves assert nor intrinsically possess and express any control over such content, we may rather seek for features analogous to the type of the sublime than see any illustration of real symbolism. For in the Sublime, as we shall see for ourselves further on, the finite phenomenon only expresses the Absolute, which it would previsage for conscious sense to the extent that in so doing it escapes from the world of appearance, which fails to comprehend its content. This is just its treatment of eternity. Its idea of it is sublime when it has to be expressed in terms of time-duration, precisely through the emphasis it lays on the fact that no number, however great, is sufficient. In this strain runs the text: “A thousand years in Thy sight are even as a day.” Hindoo art contains much of the same or similar nature. It strikes the opening notes of “the Sublime” symphony. The main difference, however, between it and the true Sublimity consists in this, that the Hindoo imagination does not in the wild exuberance of its images bring about the essential nothingness of the phenomena which it makes use of, but rather through just this very measurelessness and unlimited range of its visions believes that it has annihilated and made to vanish all difference and opposition between the Absolute and its mode of configuration. In this extreme type of exaggeration, then, there is ultimately little of real kinship with either true symbolism or Sublimity: it is equally remote from the true sphere of beauty. It offers us no doubt, more particularly in its more sober delineation of that which is exclusively human, much that is endearing and benign, many gracious pictures and tender emotions, the most splendid and seductive descriptions of Nature, the most childlike traits of Love and naïve innocence, and withal much too that is magnanimous and noble; but, none the less, if we review it generally according to the fundamental import of all it expresses, we shall find that the spiritual is throughout rooted in sense, the meanest objects are placed on the same plane as the highest, true definition is wrecked, the Sublime is lowered to the conception of mere immeasurability, and that which is the original material of mythos for the most part vanishes before our eyes in the fantastic dreams of a restless and inquisitive imaginative power, and modes of shaping the same devoid of all intelligent purpose.

(c) In conclusion, the purest form of representation which we meet with at this stage of imaginative conception is that of personification, as it generally applies to the human figure. For the reason, however, that the significance on this plane is not as yet grasped as the free subjectivity of Spirit, but rather either under a determination of abstract universality or as a mode of natural existence, one that contains, for example, the life of rivers, mountains, stars, or sun, for this reason it is only employed as means of expression for this kind of content under a mode which really detracts from the full worth of the human form. For the human body, if we view it in its true definition, no less than the form of human activities and events, expresses simply concrete Spirit and a spiritual content, which is self-contained and subsistent in this its reality, and possesses therewith no mere symbol or external sign.

From one point of view consequently this personification, albeit the significance, which it is invoked to represent, is taken to belong to the spiritual no less than the natural, yet, on account of the abstractness which clings to this form of significance, is on this stage of thought still of a superficial nature, and needs yet many other modes of representation to be rendered clear to the closer inspection, forms with which it is here confusedly mingled and thereby itself made obscure. And, moreover, taking it under another aspect, it is not the subjectivity here and its form which supplies the characterization, but rather its expressions, actions, and so forth; for it is in deed and action that the more defined line of severation first asserts itself, which can be brought into relation with the specific content of the universal significances. In that case, however, we are again face to face with the defect that it is not the conscious subject, but merely its means of expression, which supply the signification, no less than the confusion of thought, that events and deeds, instead of constituting the reality and the existence of the subject as determinately self-realized, preserve its content and significance elsewhere. A series of such actions is able therefore very possibly to carry with it a certain result and consequence, which is derived from the content which such a series subserves as its expression. This consequent result is, however, to an extent equally great, liable again to be interrupted and in part suspended by that which is central in the personification and the man47, because subjective activity is also a stimulus to capricious action and its manifestation, so that both that which is significant and that which is destitute of this quality keep up their varied and irregular interplay just in so far as the imagination is unable to unite their significant characteristics and the forms which are appropriate to them in one substantial and secure mode of association. And, moreover, if it is the purely natural aspect of such facts which is exclusively accepted as the unified content, in that case the material must inevitably prove itself inadequate to support the human form, just as this, being only fully adapted as a means of expressing Spirit, is on its side incapable of representing what is wholly natural. In all these respects such a mode of personification as the one we are examining fails to express a true mode; for the truth of art requires, as the truth universally requires, that there should be a complete concordance between the inward and the outward, that is, the notion and its reality. Greek mythology, for example, personified the Pontine sea; Scamander possesses its river gods, nymphs, dryads, and so forth. In other words it builds up Nature in the most various forms as the content of its human divinities. It does not, however, suffer its personification to remain purely formal and superficial, but creates thereby real individuals, in whom the purely natural significance fades into the background, and the human element, on the contrary, which has taken up and absorbed such material out of Nature, becomes the prominent factor. Hindoo art, on the other hand, is unable to advance beyond a grotesque intermingling of these two sides of Nature and humanity, so that neither is treated according to its rightful claim, and both are merely given the forms which are appropriate to the other.

Speaking in a general way we cannot consider even these personifications to be as yet strictly symbolical, for the reason that owing to their formal superficiality they do not stand in any essential relation to or mode of association more truly intimate with the more determinate form which they are presumed to express. At the same time we may note here, with respect to other particular modifications and attributes, with which such personifications appear to be intermingled, and which are taken to express the more defined qualities generally attached to Divinities, an impulse in the direction of symbolic representation, for which the personification then stands merely as the universal type of widest connotation.

If we turn now to the more important examples of the imaginative sense on the plane we are now considering, we have first to draw attention to Trimûrtis, the triformed Godhead. This Deity includes in the first place Brahmâ, the activity which brings forth and procreates, the creator of the world, Lord of all the gods and much more beside. On the one hand he is to be kept distinct from Brahman (as Neuter), that is from the ultimate Being, and is the first-born of such. In another aspect, however, he again seems to fall into union with this abstract Godhead, as generally happens with Hindoo thought where the lines of difference are rarely held secure, and part are allowed to vanish and the rest simply to get confused with each other. The form with which he is most closely identified has much that is symbolical about it; he is formed with four heads and four hands, and with the latter are his sceptre and ring48. He is of a red colour, an obvious suggestion of sunlight, since these Divinities invariably carry qualities which are of universal significance in Nature and which are thus personified in them. The second Deity of this triune Trimûrtis, is Vishnu, the preserving Godhead, the third Sivas, the destructive Power. The symbols employed to represent these gods are countless. For by reason of the universality of the significances they express they comprehend an infinite number of varied activities. In part these are related to particular phenomena of Nature, mainly the elementary, such as, for example, the quality of “fiery,”49 which is an attribute of Vishnu, and frequently we have set before us shapes of the most antagonistic description.

In the conception of this triform god we have the fact at once brought home to us in the clearest way that the form of Spirit is not yet able to assert itself in its Truth if for no other reason than this, that here it is not the spiritual which constitutes the truly permeating significance. That is to say, this trinity of gods would only be Spirit if the third god were an essentially concrete unity, a unity which returned upon itself from the differentiation and reduplication of its substance. For God, according to the true conception of Godhead, is Spirit as this active and absolute self-differentiation and Unity, a conception which is generally what constitutes the notion of Spirit. In this Trimûrtis, however, the triune God is not by any means such a concrete totality, but merely a passage from this to that, a metamorphosis, a procreator, a destroyer, and so forth. We must be accordingly very careful not to imagine that we have discovered the highest Truth in these most primordial gropings of man’s reason, and in this one note of concord which, no doubt, as mere rhythmic expression50, contains the triune form of Deity, that is, the fundamental conception of Christian theology, believe that we already have before us a recognition of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

Starting from such fundamental conceptions as those of Brahman and Trimûrtis, Hindoo imagination expatiates still further without let in a countless number of the most varied formed Divinities. For those primary significances of universal application which are apprehended as essential Deity are of such a kind that they may be rediscovered in an infinite number of phenomena, which are again personified and symbolized as gods, and each and all combine in throwing the greatest obstacles in the way of any intelligible system by reason of the indefinite character and confusing volubility51 of this type of imagination, which fails utterly to grasp the real nature of anything that it discovers, and merely wrests everything that it touches from its own appropriate sphere. For these gods of subordinate rank, at the head of which we may place such a Divinity as Indrus, who represents the Air and the Heavens, the chief material is furnished by the general forces of Nature, such as stars, rivers, and mountains conceived in the various phases of their activity, their change, their influence on mankind, whether beneficent or hurtful, preservative or destructive. One of the most important subjects, however, of Hindoo imagination and art is the origin of gods and the rest of creation, in other words its Theogony and Cosmogony. For this type of imagination is generally rooted in the continual effort to carry over that which is most removed from sense into the very heart of the external world, or in the reverse process once more to expunge that which stands nearest to sense and Nature by means of the barest abstraction. Consequently the origin of the gods is referred back to the primordial Godhead52, and at the same time the workings and existence of Brahmâ, Vishnu, and Sivas are represented as actual in mountains, streams, and human events. A cosmological content of this kind can, on the one hand, contain an independent and specific order of Deities, while on the other these gods are made to merge in those universal significances of the supremest type of Godhead. Such theogonies and cosmogonies are numerous and of every conceivable variety. When anyone ventures, therefore, to say that the Hindoos have thus or thus portrayed the creation of the world or the origin of Nature, such a statement can only be taken to apply to a particular sect or book; you can very easily find a perfectly different account of these events elsewhere. The imagination of this people in the pictures and images they have created is exhaustless.

A mode of conception which is conspicuous throughout the entire series of these creation stories is the constantly repeated presentation of the creative act not in the form of spiritual fiat, but of a purely natural process of generation. Only after having made ourselves thoroughly conversant with this mode of imaginative vision shall we discover the key to unlock the meaning of many representations which at first totally confound all our feelings of shame, shamelessness being here apparently driven to its furthest limits, and in its utter sensuousness carried beyond all belief. A striking example of this mode of imaginative treatment is offered us by the notoriously popular episode from the Râmâyana, known as the descent of Gangâ. This tale is narrated on the occasion when Râmas happens by chance to come to the Ganges. The wintry and ice-covered Himavân, the prince of the mountains, was father by the slender Menâ of two daughters, Gangâ, the elder, and the beautiful Umâ the younger one. Certain gods, more particularly Indras, beseech the father to send them Gangâ, in order that they may institute the sacred rites, and as Himavat proves himself quite ready to accede to their request Gangâ mounts on high to the blessed gods. After this follows the further story of Umâ, who after accomplishing wonderful actions of humility and penitence, is espoused to Rudras, that is, Sivas. From this union spring up wild and unfruitful mountains. For a hundred years long Sivas lay with Umâ in the bridal embrace, without intermission, so that the gods aghast at the procreative power of Sivas, and full of anxiety for the productive child, beseech him that he will divert the stream of his strength on the Earth. This passage the English translator has not ventured to translate literally, for the reason that it flings too much for him every shred of shame or modesty to the winds. Sivas hearkens to the beseechings of the gods, and staying his former procreative ardour, that he may not utterly confound the universe, he loosens the seminal flood over the Earth. Out of this, transpierced with fire, rises up the white mountain which separates India from Tartary. Umâ, however, falls into scorn and anger at this complaisance, and thereon curses all wedlock. In this section of the tale we have what are mainly fearful and distorted pictures which run so entirely counter to our ordinary notions of imagination and intelligent senses that the most we can do is to observe what they would appear to offer in default of either. Schlegel has omitted to translate this section of the episode and merely added in his own words how Gangâ descends once more on the Earth. And this took place in the following way. A certain forebear of Râmas, Sagaras, was father of a bad son, and by a second wife he was father of no less than 60,000 sons, who came into the world in a pumpkin, were, however, raised up into stalwart men on clarified butter in pitchers53. Now it chanced one day that Sagaras was of a mind to sacrifice a steed, which was, however, seized from him by Vishnu in the form of a serpent. On this Sagaras sends forth his 60,000 sons. But no sooner had they come to Vishnu after great hardships and a long searching than a breath of hers burns them all to ashes. After a weary waiting a certain grandson of Sagaras, by name Ansumân the Shining, son of Asamaschas, set forth to find his 60,000 uncles and the sacrificial steed. He actually comes upon both the steed Siwas and the heap of ashes. The king of birds, Garudas, however, notifies to him the fact that unless the stream of the holy Gangâ flows down from heaven over the heap of ashes his relations will be unable to return to life. Whereupon the stalwart Ansumân endures for 32,000 years on the mountain-top of Himavân the sternest mortifications. All in vain. Neither his own chastisements nor those of yet another 30,000 years of his son Dwilipas are of the slightest avail. At last the son of Dwilipas, the glorious Bhagîrathas, succeeds in accomplishing the feat, but only after mortifications which last 1,000 years. Then the Gangâ plunges down; but in order that the Earth may not thereby shiver in pieces, Siwas now bows his head so that the water runs into his mane. Thereupon yet further mortifications are enjoined upon Bhagîrathas, in order that Gangâ may be free to stream forth from these locks. Finally she is poured forth in six streams; the seventh Bhagîrathas conducts after mighty privations to the place of the 60,000, who mount up to heaven, and therewith Bhagîrathas rules for yet many a year over his people in peace.

Other theogonies such as the Scandinavian and the Greek are very similar in type to the Hindoo. The principal feature of them all is this of physical generation and production; but not one of them plunges so headlong into the subject or in general displays such caprice and impropriety in the images of its invention as the Hindoo. The theogony of Hesiod is in particular far more intelligible and succinct, so that at least one knows where one is, and is clear as to the general significance; and this is so because the impression is far more pronounced that the form and external embodiment of the myth is set forth by the narrator as something external. The mythos starts in this case54 with Chaos, Erebos, Eros, and Gaia. The Earth (Gaia) brings forth Uranos of her own accord, and then is mother by him of the mountains, sea, and so forth, also of Cronos and the Cyclops, Centimani55, whom Uranos, however, shortly after birth incarcerates in Tartaros. Gaia thereupon induces Cronos to castrate Uranos. The deed is accomplished. And from the blood that falls on the Earth spring to life the Erinnyes and the Giants. The castrated member is caught by the sea, and from the sea’s foam arises Cytherea. In all this description the outlines are more clearly and decisively drawn. And we are thereby carried beyond the circle of mere gods of Nature.

If we endeavour now to seize some point where the transition is emphasized to the stage of real symbolism, we shall find the same already in the first beginnings of Hindoo imagination. That is to say, however preoccupied the Hindoo imagination may be in its efforts to contort the sensuous phenomenon into a plurality of Divinities, a preoccupation which no other people has displayed with anything like the same exhaustless scope and countless transformations, yet from another point of view in many of its visions and narratives it remains throughout constant to that spiritual abstraction of a God supreme over all, in contrast with whom the particular, sensuous, and phenomenal is undivine, inadequate, and consequently is apprehended as something negative, something which has finally to be cancelled. For, as we have from the first noticed, it is precisely this continual involution of one side on the other which constitutes the fundamental type of the Hindoo imagination, and makes it for ever incapable of finding a true principle of reconciliation. The art is consequently never tired of representing, in every imaginable way, the surrender of the sensuous and the power of spiritual abstraction and self-absorption. Of this kind are the representations of toilsome mortifications and profound meditations, of which not merely the most ancient epical poems, such as the “Râmâyana” and the “Mahâbhârata,” but also many other works of art furnish most important examples. No doubt many of these self-chastisements are undergone on grounds of ambition, or at least with a view to definite objects, which do conduct the devotee to the highest and most final union with Brahman, and to the mortification of everything carnal and finite. An object of this kind is the endeavour to secure the power of a Brahmin; but even in this there is always the fact present to consciousness that the expiation and the continuance of a meditation that is ever more and more diverted from the objects of sense will raise the devotee over his birth-place in a particular caste, no less than help him resist the power of Nature and the gods of Nature. For this reason, that prince of Divinities of this class, Indras, opposes most signally strenuous aspirants, and strives to entice them away; or, in the case where all his seductions fail, he invokes assistance from the supreme gods lest the entire heaven fall into confusion.

In the representation of mortifications of this kind and the several kinds and grades according to which they are ranked, Hindoo art is almost as fertile in its invention as in its system of Divinities, and it pursues the theme with the most thorough earnestness.

This, then, is the point from which we may now extend our survey in a forward direction.

In the case of symbolical, no less than that of Fine Art, it is necessary that the significance which it seeks to embody should not merely be set forth, as is the case in Hindoo art, from the first immediate unity of the same with its objective existence, such as obtains before any severation or distinction has as yet been emphasized, but that this significance should itself be independent and free from the immediate sensuous content. This deliverance can only so far assert itself as the sensuous and natural medium is both grasped and envisaged as itself essentially negative, as that which has to be and has been absorbed. It is a further requirement, moreover, that the negativity, which is successful in making its appearance as the passing off and the self-dissolution of the Natural, should be accepted and receive embodiment as the absolute import of the object generally, as a phase, that is to say, of the Divine. But with a fulfilment of such claims we are already beyond the limits of Hindoo art. It is true that the consciousness of this negative side is not wholly absent from the Hindoo imagination. Sivas is the destroyer no less than the producer. Indras dies, nay, more, the Destroyer Time, personified as Kâla the terrible giant, confounds the entire universe and all gods, even Trimûrtis, who passes away at the same time in Brahman, just as the individual in his self-identification with the highest form of Divinity suffers his Ego and all his wisdom and will to vanish away. In these conceptions, however, the negative element is in part merely a transformation and change, in part only an abstraction, which allows all definition to drop away, in order that it may thrust its path to an indefinite and consequently vacuous and content-less universality. The substance of the Divine on the other hand persists through change of form, passage over and advance to a system of many Deities, and the abrogation of that system once more in the one highest form of God unalterably one and the same. It is not that conception of the one God, which itself essentially possesses, as this unity, the negative aspect as its own determination, both necessary and appropriate to its own essential notion. In an analogous way the destructive and hurtful element is placed according to the Parsee view of existence outside the personality of Ormuzd in Ahriman, and consequently only makes a contradiction and conflict manifest belonging under no form of relation to Ormuzd, as a distinct phase of his own substance.

The actual point in the advance which we have now to make consists, therefore, in this that, on the one hand, the negative aspect, fixed by consciousness in an independent relation as the Absolute, is, however, on the other, merely regarded as a phase of the Divine, as a phase, however, which is not only as outside the true Absolute incidental to another Godhead56, but is to be so ascribed to the Absolute, that the true God appears as a process in which He negates Himself, and thereby contains this negative element as an inherent self-determination of His own substance.

Through this enlarged conception the Absolute is for the first time essentially concrete, that is self-determination, and thereby essential unity, whose particular antitheses, as parts of a process, appear to consciousness as the different determinations of one and the same God. For the necessity of giving essential definition to the absolute significance is just that which at this stage it is felt to be of first importance to satisfy. All the significances up to this point persisted by virtue of their abstract character as absolutely undefined and consequently void of content, or were merged, when in a converse direction they tended to clear distinction, immediately in the Being of Nature, or fell into a conflict in respect to their configuration which gave them no repose and reconciliation. This twofold defect we have now to remove, both by showing the advance of Thought regarded as itself an ideal process, and by illustrating that advance by means of particular facts of the mind and institutions of nations on the objective plane of history.

And in the first place we may observe a more intimate bond of association is set up between the Inward and Outward aspect of consciousness in the increased recognition that every determination of the Absolute is already essentially an inchoate movement in the direction of expression. For every determination is essentially distinction57. The External, however, is as such always defined and distinct, and consequently there is thus an aspect immediately presented, according to which the External is manifested in a form more adequate to the significance than was possible under the modes of conception as yet examined. The first definition, however, and essential negation of the Absolute inevitably falls short of the free self-determination of Spirit as Spirit. It is merely the immediate negation of itself. This immediate and consequently natural negation in its most comprehensive form of statement is Death. The Absolute is consequently apprehended now in a way that it is compelled to submit itself to this form of negation as a part of the essential determination of its own notion, in other words it is obliged to enter the path of extinction, and we observe consequently the glorification of Death and grief in the first instance made present to the national consciousness as the death of the dying sensuous material. The death of Nature is cognized as a necessary part58 of the life of the Absolute. The Absolute, however, on the one hand, in order to be subject to this phase of Death, must be posited already as determinate existence; and, equally from another point of view, must not be suffered to remain in the annihilation of Death, but must be held to re-establish itself in an essentially positive unity on a yet higher plane of existence. Death is consequently not accepted here as constituting the entire significance, but merely one aspect of the same. And though no doubt the Absolute is in one sense viewed as a cessation of its immediate existence, a passage over and beyond and a passing away, yet it is quite as much in the reverse sense conceived as a return upon itself, as a resurrection, as an eternal process of Divine realization rendered possible by virtue of this evolutional principle of negation. For Death is capable of a twofold meaning. Under the first it is the immediate passing away of the natural; under the second Death is the extinction of the exclusively natural and thereby the birth of a higher type, that is, spiritual, from which the merely natural falls away in the sense, that Spirit possesses in itself this phase as an essential phase of its own substance.

For this reason, secondly, the form of Nature can no longer be accepted in the immediacy of sensuous existence as adequate to the significance referred to it, because the significance of the External consists just in this, that it must die in the form of its real existence and rise again.

On the same ground, thirdly, the mere conflict between significance and form and that ferment of the imagination, which was the fantastic product of Hindoo conceptions, drop away. The significance is, it is true, even now not yet fully and with absolute clarity cognized in its pure unity free from all sense-presented reality, so that it could be set forth in real contrast with the form of its actual embodiment; conversely, however, the form itself, this particular, object, that is, whether in its glorified shape of grandiosity or in any other more conspicuous form of caricature, as an image of animal life, a human personification, event or action, is not taken to envisage for immediate sense an adequate existence of the Absolute. This corrupt form of identity is already surpassed as fully to the extent that it still falls behind that other complete deliverance. And in the place of both of these extremes we have asserted that kind of representation, which we have above already described as the real symbolical. On the one hand it is now able to appear for the reason that the Inward, or that which is conceived as significance, is no longer something which merely, as in Hindoo conceptions, comes and passes away, at one moment is absorbed immediately in externality, at another is withdrawn from the same into the solitude of abstraction, but it begins to make itself independently secure against the mere reality of Nature. And on the other hand the symbol is now forced to seek some form of plastic shape. That is to say, although the significance, identical in every way with that which has hitherto obtained, possesses as a phasal condition of its content the negation of the Natural, yet the true Inward now for the first time shows a definite tendency to wrest its way from that Natural, and is consequently itself still swallowed up within the external mode of appearance, so that it is unable independently to be brought home to consciousness in its clear universality without having previously had to comply with the form of external reality.

Now the kind of configuration which is implied by the notion of that which generally constitutes the fundamental significance in symbolism, may be described in the following terms, namely, we find in it that the definite forms of Nature, human activities and so forth, neither — to express one aspect of it — represent or signify merely themselves severally in their isolated natural characteristics, nor — to emphasize the other aspect — bring their immediate form to consciousness as the Divine actually visible to sense. They are rather employed to suggest that same Divine through qualities which they possess cognate with a significance of more comprehensive range. For this reason it is just that universal dialectic of Life, its origin, growth, collapse in and awakening from Death, which also in this connection supplies the appropriate content for the true symbolic type; and this is so because we find in almost every province of natural and spiritual life certain phenomena, which presuppose this process as the basis of their existence, and consequently can be utilized as means of giving a visible body to such significant aspects and of pointing by suggestion to the same, a real affinity being actually inherent between the two sides. Thus plants spring from their seed, sprout, grow, bring forth fruit; the fruit corrupts and produces fresh seed. In the same way the sun rises to a low elevation in winter; in Spring he mounts on high, until we have his meridian reached in summer; it is then that he pours forth his richest blessing or exerts the greatest destructive force; after that he inclines once more towards the horizon. The various stages of human life, too, childhood, youth, maturity, and old age, illustrate precisely the same universal process. But in a special sense specific localities such as the Nile-valley are adapted to the closer particularization in the direction indicated.

In so far, then, as that which is purely fantastic is displaced by these more fundamental traits of affinity and the more intimate applicability of the expression to the import it expresses there arises a thoughtful process of selection with reference to the comparative congruity or incongruity of the symbolizing forms, and the intoxicated eddy to and fro which prevailed is laid to rest in a more intelligent circumspection.

We consequently observe that a union more at one with itself reappears in the place of that which we found in the first stage of our process, subject, however, to this characteristic difference, that the identity of the significance with its objectively real existence is no longer one immediately envisaged, but one that is set up out of the difference and consequently not one previously discovered, rather we should say a mode of union that is the product of mind (Spirit). That which, in its most general terms, we call the Inward begins at this point to assume the solidity of self-subsistence, to be conscious of itself; it seeks for its counterfeit in the objects of Nature, which on their part possess a similar reflection in the life and destinies of Spirit. Out of this eager movement to recognize the one side in the other, and by means of the external to bring for itself visibly to sense and the imaginative faculty the significance, as also to envisage by virtue of that Inward the significance of the external shapes through a union in which both sides are associated, we get that vast impulse of art which finds its satisfaction through means which are purely symbolical. Only when the Inward is free and is driven forward to make clear to the imaginative vision in real form what it essentially is, and to have before itself this very vision, moreover, in the form of an external work, do we find that the genuine impulse of art, and the particularly plastic arts, begins to be a living fact. Then it is that the necessity is felt to clothe the Inward with a form not merely previously discovered from the resources of spiritual activity, but rather one that is minted out of spirit (mind) for the first time. In the symbol, then, there is a second form created, which, however, is not independently valid for itself as its main purpose, but is rather employed to envisage the significance, and stands consequently in a dependent relation to the same.

It were possible to apprehend the above relation in such a way as though the significance were that point from which the artistic consciousness starts on its journey, and that only after having found this it begins to look round for means to express its universal conceptions through external phenomena cognate in their affinity to such conceptions. This, however, is not the way that real symbolic art proceeds. For its characteristic distinction consists in this, that its penetration fails as yet to grasp the significances in their independent consistency, independent, that is, from every mode of externality. For this reason its point of departure is rather from that which is immediately presented and its concrete existence in Nature and Spirit. This it thereupon, in the first instance, expands to the measure of the universality of such significances, whose determination such objective real existence contains only under more restricted conditions, adding this wider range in order that it may create a form from Spirit, which is to make that universality visible to consciousness in this particular reality when once it is set forth clearly before perception. Regarded as symbolical forms, therefore, the images of art have not as yet attained a form truly adequate to Spirit, inasmuch as Spirit itself is not as yet at this stage essentially clear and thereby free Spirit; but we have at least here embodiments, which essentially proclaim the fact to us, that they are not merely selected to represent simply themselves, but are intended to point to significances of profounder intension and more — comprehensive range. That which is purely natural and sensuous asserts itself as fact and nothing beside; the symbolical work of art, however, whether it be the phenomena of Nature or the human figure that it makes visible to the eye, points at the same time over and outside such facts to something further, which, however, must possess an intimate root of affinity with the images that are thus displayed, and an essential bond of relation with them. This association between the concrete form and its universal significance may conceivably be present in many different ways. At one time the emphasis will be laid on the external aspect, and it will consequently be more obscure; at another, however, the basis of affinity will be more pronounced as in the case when the universality, which is to be symbolized, constitutes, in fact, the essential content of the concrete phenomenon. In this case naturally it is a much simpler matter to grasp the symbolic character of the object.

The most abstract mode of expression in this respect is number, which, however, it is only possible to use as an indication of a further meaning beyond that it ordinarily elucidates when this significance is itself, essentially numerical. The numbers seven and twelve are frequently met with in Egyptian architecture, because seven is the number of the planets, and twelve is that of the lunar revolutions or the number of feet that the water of the Nile must necessarily rise in order to fructify the land. Such a number is then regarded as sacred in so far as it is present as a determinant in the great elementary relations, which are revered as forces in the whole life of Nature. Twelve steps or seven pillars are to this extent symbolical. The same kind of numerical symbolism has an extensive influence upon the form of widely famous mythologies. The twelve labours of Hercules, for example, appear to contain a reference to the twelve months of the year; for if Hercules under one aspect of the myth is no doubt presented to us as the thoroughly human impersonation of a hero, in another he unquestionably indicates a significance of Nature under a symbolized form, and, in fact, is a personification of the course of the sun.

In a further and more complete sense symbolical configurations of space, labyrinthine passages, and such like carry a symbolical image of the course of the planets, just as dances, too, in virtue of their complex evolutions symbolically express the motion of the great elementary bodies.

And further, on a higher plane, the bodies of animals are utilized as symbols, but most succinctly of all the human figure, which, even at this stage, as we shall see later on, appears to be elaborated in modes more compatible with its intrinsic worth for the reason that even now Spirit in general makes a real movement to embody itself from out the mere swaddling clothes of Nature in a shape more adequate to its own self-subsistent personality. Such, then, constitutes our general concept of the true form of symbolism and the necessity under which art labours to express the same. And in order that we may discuss the more concrete exemplifications of this type of symbolism, it will be necessary in dealing with this first plunge of Spirit into the wealth of its own resources to leave the East and direct our attention mainly on the West.

As a symbol of universal import to indicate the point of view where we now stand, we may perhaps first and foremost fix before our eyes the image of the Phoenix, which is its own funeral pile, yet ever is rejuvenated out of the flames of its death and rises from the ashes. Herodotus informs us (II, 73) that at least in representations he saw this bird in Egypt, and, in fact, it is the Egyptian people who also supply us with a focus for the type of symbolical art. Before, however, we proceed to the closer consideration of Egyptian art we will mention several other myths, which form, as it were, the passage to that national symbolism which we find most elaborate, no matter from what direction we approach it. Such are the myths of Adonis, that of his death, and the lament of Aphrodite over him, the funeral festivals, etc., conceptions and rites which find their original home on the Syrian coast. The service of Cybele among the Phrygians possesses the same significance, which also finds its echo in the myths of Castor and Pollux, Ceres and Proserpina.

As the essence of such significance we find in the above quoted examples, before everything else, that phasal condition of negation we have already alluded to, the death, that is, of the natural regarded as a basic and absolute condition of the Divine process, emphasized as such, and made visible in its independence. It is in this sense that we can explain the funeral festivals that celebrate the death of the god, the excessive lamentations over his loss, which is once more made good through his rediscovery, resurrection, and rejuvenescence, making it possible for the festivals of joy to follow. This universal significance contains further its more definite relation to Nature. In winter the sun loses his force, while in spring he returns once more, and with that Nature regains her youth, she dies and is reborn. In examples such as these the Divine, personified as a human event, discovers its significance in the life of Nature, which then from a further point of view becomes a symbol for the essential character of the negative condition generally, in spiritual things no less than natural.

It is in Egypt, however, that we have to look for the perfect example of symbolical representation in its systematic elaboration of characteristic content and form. Egypt is the land of symbol, which proposes to itself the spiritual problem of the self-interpretation of Spirit, without being able successfully to solve it. The problems remain without an answer; and such solution as we are able to supply consists therefore merely in this, that we grasp these riddles of Egyptian art and its symbolical productions as this very problem which Egypt propounds for herself but is unable to solve. For the reason that we find that Spirit here still endeavours in the external objects of sense, from which again it strains to free itself, and further labours with unwearied assiduity, to evolve from itself its essential substance by means of natural phenomena no less than to embody the same in the form of spirit for the vision of the senses, rather than as the pure content of mind, this Egyptian people may, in contrast to all the instances previously examined, be described as the nation Art claims for herself59. Its works of art, however, remain full of mystery and silence, without music or motion; and this is so because Spirit here has not yet truly found its own life, nor has learned how to utter the clear and luminous speech of mind. In the unsatisfied stress and impulse, to bring before the vision through her art, albeit in so voiceless a way, this wrestle of herself with herself, to give shape to the Inward of her life, but only to become conscious of her own Inward, no less than that which universally prevails60, through external forms which are cognate with it — we have in a sentence the characterization of Egypt. The people of this wonderful land was not merely agricultural, but also constructive, a folk which tossed up the soil in every direction, delved lakes and canals, and exercised their artistic instincts not merely in giving visible shape to buildings of enormous solidity, but in carrying works themselves of vast dimension to a like extent into the bowels of the earth. To erect buildings of this kind was, as we have long ago learned from Herodotus, a principal occupation of this people, and one of the chief exploits of their kings. The buildings of the Hindoo race are also unquestionably of colossal size; we shall, however, find nowhere else a variety which can compare with that of Egypt.

Reviewing now the general conceptions of Egyptian art with a closer attention to particular aspects of it, we may in the first place define the fundamental principle of so much of it as follows, that we find here the Inward is securely held in its independent opposition to the immediacy of external existence. And what is more, this Inward is conceived as the negation of Life, in other words the dead thing, not as the abstract negation of the evil and hurtful thing, such as Ahriman in contrast to Ormuzd, but as form essentially substantive.

(a) To illustrate this thought further, the Hindoo merely subtilizes his life to the most empty of abstractions, that is in result one that therewith negates every form of concrete content. Such a Brahm-becoming process is not to be found in Egypt; rather we find here that the invisible possesses a fuller significance; the corpse secures the content of the living body itself, which, however, as torn away from immediate existence, in its retirement from actual life61, still possesses its relation to that which is alive, and in this concrete form is maintained as self-subsistent. It is a well-known fact that the Egyptians embalmed and revered cats, dogs, hawks, ichneumons, bears, and wolves (Herod., II, 67), but most of all the dead human body (Herod., II, 86-90). By them the honour paid to the dead is not that of burial, but its preservation from age to age as a corpse.

(b) And moreover we may observe that the Egyptians do not merely remain constant to this immediate and still wholly natural permanency of the dead. That which is preserved in its physical or natural aspect is also conceived to endure in a form present to the imagination. Herodotus informs us that the Egyptians were the first who held the doctrine that the human soul is immortal. We consequently find that they are the first who present to us a more exalted mode of this resolution of the natural and spiritual, a mode that is to say, under which it is not merely the natural body which secures an independent self-subsistence.

The immortality of the soul is a conception which borders closely upon the freedom of Spirit. The Ego is here apprehended as removed from the purely natural mode of its existence, reposing on its own substance. This knowledge of itself, however, is the principle of freedom. No doubt we are not justified in asserting that the Egyptians grasped the notion of spiritual freedom in its profoundest sense. We must not imagine that their belief in the immortality of the soul is identical with our own form of that belief; but they already possessed the power to retain securely that which was separated from Life under a form of existence visible only to the imagination, no less than one in which it was identical with the bodily material. They have thereby made possible the passage to the full emancipation of Spirit, albeit it was but the threshold of the temple of freedom that they passed over. This fundamental conception of theirs is further expanded to a unified and substantial Kingdom of the Departed set up in contrast to the immediate presence of the real. A Court of Justice of the Dead is held in this invisible state over which Osiris as Amenthes presides. One of similar character is also instituted in the sphere of immediate reality, justice being executed even among men over the dead, and after the decease of a king every one was entitled to submit his grievances to that court.

(c) If we now proceed to inquire what is the symbolical form of art, which is given to such conceptions, we must look for this among the characteristic features of Egyptian architecture. The form of this architecture is twofold; there is one type that is superterraneous, while the other is subterraneous.

On the one hand we find underground labyrinths, gorgeous and extensive excavations, passages half a mile in length, dwellings covered with hieroglyphics elaborated with every possible care. On the other we have piled above their level those amazing constructions among which we may first and foremost reckon the pyramids. For centuries men have ventilated various notions as to the precise meaning and significance of these pyramids. It is now, however, assured beyond dispute that they are nothing more or less than the enclosures of the graves of kings or sacred animals, such as the Apis, the Cat, or the Ibis. In this way we have before our eyes in the pyramids the simple prototype of symbolical art. They are enormous crystals which secrete an Inward within them; and they so enclose an external form which is the product of art, that we are at the same time made aware they stand there for this very Inward in its severation from the mere actuality of Nature, and that their entire significance depends on that relation. But this kingdom of Death and the Invisible, which here constitutes the significance, possesses merely the one and, what is more, the formal aspect appropriate to the true type of art, that is its dissociation from immediate existence; it is for this reason primarily but a Hades, not yet a Life, which, although raised above sensuous existence as such, is none the less at the same time essentially a defined existence, and thereby intrinsically free and living Spirit. Consequently the embodiment for such an Inward still remains in relation to the determinacy of the same’s content quite as much a wholly external form and envelopment. Such an external environment, in which an Inward reposes under a veil, are the pyramids.

In so far, then, as the Inward can be generally envisaged as an external object to immediate perception, the Egyptians in their relation to the aspect opposed to this externality have come to worship a Divine existence in living animals, such as the bull, the cat, and various others. That which is alive is on a higher plane than the purely inorganic object, inasmuch as the living organism possesses an Inward, to which the external shape points, which, however, persists as an Inward and consequently a realm of mystery. This sacred cult of animals must consequently be understood as the vision of a secreted soul62, which as Life is a power superior to that which is merely external. To us no doubt it can only appear as a repugnant fact that animals, dogs and cats, are held sacred instead of that which is truly spiritual.

This worship, moreover, has nothing symbolical in it viewed simply as such; for it is the actual living animal, Apis or the like, which is here itself revered as the existence of God. The Egyptians, however, have used the shapes of animals in a symbolical way. In that case they are no longer valid, simply for what they are, but it is further assumed that they express a more universal import. We find the most ingenuous illustration of this in the use of animal masks, which we find more particularly under representations of embalming, at which process certain individuals, who take an active part, either in opening the corpse or removing the intestines, are depicted wearing such masks. It is obvious that the animal’s head is not taken to present the animal itself, but a significance at the same time distinct from it and more universal. The forms of animals are also utilized in other ways than this in admixture with the human form. Human figures are to be found with heads of lions, which have been interpreted as images of Minerva; then there are heads of the hawk, and in the heads of Ammon we find the horns still retained. Examples such as the above obviously imply symbolical relations. In a like sense the hieroglyphical writing of the Egyptians is in great measure symbolical, for it either endeavours to make its meaning comprehensible through the images of real objects which do not stand for themselves, but a universality which is cognate with them, or, as is still more frequently the case, in the so-called phonetic aspect of this style of writing, it signifies particular letters by means of the specific mark of some external object, whose initial letter possesses in speech the same tone as that which it is the intention to express.

And generally it is the fact that in Egypt pretty nearly every conformation is symbolical and hieroglyphical, expressing not itself but indicative of something more, with which it possesses affinity, or in other words a cognate relation. The truest forms of the symbol, however, are only completely illustrated in such cases where we find that this relation is of a more profound and fundamental character than those we have just adverted to. We will now briefly enumerate a few constantly recurring examples of this more important type of affiliation.

(a) Precisely as Egyptian belief63 surmises a mysterious Inwardness of content in the animal form, we find the human figure represented in such a way that the most characteristic intension64 of subjectivity is still asserted through an external relation, and consequently is unable to unfold into the freedom of Beauty. Particularly remarkable in this respect are those colossal figures of Memnon which, reposing on themselves, motionless, with arms glued to the body, feet close together, inflexible, stiff and lifeless, are set up face to face with the sun, waiting for his ray to strike them, animate them, and make them resonant. Herodotus, at any rate, informs us that these Memnonic figures emitted a musical note on the sun’s rising. The higher criticism has no doubt expressed itself as sceptical on the latter point; the fact, however, of a distinct note has recently been once more established both by Frenchmen and Englishmen; and though it appears that this echo is no result of previous mechanical ingenuity, we have an explanation of it in the fact that, as sometimes happens with minerals which make a crackling noise in water, the tone of these images of stone is actually produced by the collective action of the dew, the morning cool, and the subsequent impact of the sun’s rays, to the extent, that is, that tiny fractures appear in the stone which then again disappear. In any case we may attribute to these colossal shapes the symbolical import, that they do not possess the spiritual principle of Life free in themselves, and consequently require that their animation should be brought to them externally by Light, which alone is able to unbar the music of their life, instead of having the power to accept the same from that real soul of Inwardness, which essentially carries with it measure and beauty. In contrast to them the human voice is the echo of personal feeling and the soul’s self, without any external stimulant, just as the height of human art generally consists in the fact that the Inward of Spirit supplies the form thereof from its own substance. The Inward or soul of the human form is in Egypt still a mute, and in its animation it is the relation to external nature which alone commands attention.

(b) A further type of symbolical conception is to be found in Isis and Osiris. Osiris is an object of procreation and birth, and is done to death by Typhon. Isis seeks for the scattered members, finds, collects, and buries them. This mythos of the god has, then, in the first place as its content purely natural significance. From one point of view, that is to say, Osiris is the sun, and his life-history stands as symbolic for his yearly course; from another, however, he signifies the rise and fall of the Nile, which is necessarily the source of all fruitfulness in Egypt. For in Egypt there may not be a drop of rain for years together, and it is the Nile which primarily waters the land by its floods. In winter time it flows but a shallow stream within its bed; then, however, with the summer-solstice (“Herod.,” II, 19) it begins for a hundred days to rise, pours over its banks and streams far and wide over the land. Finally the water dries up beneath the sun’s heat and the scorching desert winds, and once more retires to its course. Under such conditions the tillage of the soil is carried out with ease; the most luxurious vegetation springs up. Everything buds and ripens. The sun and Nile, and the way both of them become weak or strong, these are the conspicuous forces of Nature in this land, which the Egyptian has symbolically depicted under a human form in the myths of Isis and Osiris. To this type of symbolism, too, belongs the symbolical representation of the zodiac, which is associated with the year’s course, just as the number of the twelve gods is bound up with the months. Conversely, however, Osiris typifies under another aspect the entirely human. He is held sacred as the founder of agriculture, of the division of the soil, property and laws, and his worship is consequently to an equal extent related to human activities, which are connected in the closest manner with ethical and judicial functions.

In the same way he is judge of the Dead, and secures as such a significance wholly released from the mere life of Nature, an import under which the symbolical tends to pass away for the reason that here the Inward and Spiritual is of itself content of the human form, which, under such a mode of relation, begins to conserve the Inward essentially belonging to it, one, that is, which through its external form signifies merely its own substance. This spiritual process, however, assumes again in equal measure as its content the external life of Nature, and, for example, in temples, number of steps, floors, and pillars, in labyrinths and their passages, windings and chambers, represents the same in an external manner. Osiris is thus quite as much the natural as he is the spiritual life in the different phases of his process65 and its transformations; and his symbolical embodiments are partly symbolic of the elements of Nature; while again in part these changes of Nature are themselves merely symbols of spiritual activities and their various phases. For this reason, too, the human form persists here as no mere personification, such as we found to be the-case previously, because here the natural aspect, albeit from one point of view it appears as the real significance, yet from another is itself merely asserted as a symbol of the Spirit; and, generally speaking, at this stage of conception, where we find that the Inward struggles to come forth from the sense-vision of Nature, it is in a position of subordinance.

For the same reason we find here that the human figure already receives an entirely different type of elaboration, attesting thereby a real effort to penetrate the arcana of true Inwardness and Spirit, though this endeavour also fails as yet to attain its object, that is, the essential freedom of the Spiritual. And it is by reason of this very defect that the human figure remains before us with neither freedom nor serene clarity, colossal, brooding, petrified, legs, arms, and head glued straitened and tight to the rest of the body, without the grace or motion of Life. Thus it is that art is first ascribed to Daedalus, in that he loosed arms and feet from their fetters, and endowed the body with movement.

On account of this alternative aspect of symbolism above referred to symbolism in Egypt is, in addition to its other characteristics, a totality of symbols in the sense that what in one respect is asserted as significance is employed as symbol in a sphere cognate with it. This ambiguous association of a symbolism which makes significance and form intertwine, which is further actually typical or suggestive of much, and thereby is already concurrent with that inward subjective sense, which alone is capable of following such indications in a variety of directions66, is the characteristic distinction of these images, albeit by reason of this ambiguity the difficulty of interpreting them is of course increased.

A significance of this type — attempts at deciphering which are unquestionably nowadays carried too far for the reason that pretty nearly every kind of form is virtually set before us as symbolical in some relation — may very possibly from the point of view of the Egyptians themselves have been clear and intelligible as significance. But, as we insisted at the very entrance of our inquiry, the appropriate motto for the interpretation of Egyptian symbolism is implicite multum nihil explicite. There is a type of workmanship undertaken with the express endeavour that it shall carry its own interpretation on the forehead, but we only find there evidence of the effort; it stops short of the essential point of self-illumination. It is in this sense that we must fix our eyes on the works of Egyptian art. They contain riddles, the full solution of which is not merely withheld from ourselves, but was equally beyond the reach of the great majority of the artists who created them.

(c) The works of Egyptian art in their excessively mysterious symbolism are therefore riddles, let us rather say the objective riddle’s self. And we may summarily define the Sphinx as symbol of the real significance of the genius of Egypt. It stands as a symbol for symbolism itself. In countless numbers, set forth in rows of a hundred at a time, we come across these Sphinx-forms on Egyptian soil; they are hewn from the hardest stone, polished, covered with hieroglyphics, and in the vicinity of Cairo of such colossal dimensions that their lion-claws alone measure a man’s height. Their animal bodies lie in repose, above which as bust a human body rears itself; now and again we find the head of a ram, but in the most common case it is that of a woman. Out of the obtuse strength and robustness of animality the spirit of man is fain to press forward, albeit still unable to attain the perfect representation of his own freedom, or a counterfeit of his body in motion; and this is inevitable, for he is still forced to remain blended in the company of that Other which confronts himself. This straining after self-conscious spirituality, which fails to grasp itself from the truth of its own substance in a form of external reality which is alone adequate to express it, and instead envisages and brings the same home to consciousness in that which is merely cognate with it, but also that which is equally foreign to it, is, in its general terms, the symbolical; and we find it here concentrated to a point as the riddle.

It is in this sense that the Sphinx in the Greek mythos, which itself again is open to symbolic interpretation, appears as the monster which propounds its riddle. The sphinx asked here the famous and problematical question: “Who is it, who walks in the morning on four legs, at noon upon two legs, and in the evening on three?” Oedipus discovered the simple answer that it was man himself, and hurled the sphinx from the rocks. The resolution of the symbol consists in the illumination of all that is implied in the significance of one word, Spirit, just as the famous Greek inscription cries out to mankind: “Know thyself.” The light of consciousness is that clarity, which suffers its concrete content to shine all luminous through the form which is wholly adapted to unfold it, and in its positive form of existence simply reveals that which it is in truth.

37 Bedeutung.

38 What Hegel means is that calling an aspect of sense bodily or natural itself implies a distinction from that which is spiritual, or only cognized by mind, and this distinction is not present to the earliest human cognition of Divine reality.

39 Das Lichtreine.

40 Except in the conceptions of the Hebrew prophets this is only true subject to qualification even of the God of Israel. For he was evidently associated with the thunder, to take but one case — the deliverance of the tables of stone on Sinai.

41 Phantasie may often be translated by the word imagination, but here the element of caprice and dependence on sensuous image rather than creative impulse directed by a principle of selection is to be emphasized.

42 Ein Taumel, i.e., the dance as of intoxication.

43 This is obviously a difficult passage to follow. The main thing to remember is that Hegel is here describing the movement of a dialectical process, that is the purely objective, rather than the point of view of personal or even national experience. Such vivid expressions as Taumel and schamlos hineinrücken remind one of the Platonic dialectic.

44 Hegel’s editor has Brahman here, but according to a passage lower down (p. 59) it should rather be Brahmâ.

45 Hinaufschrauben, lit., a screwing up to — a screwing that in fact crews the head off.

46 Verdumpfens. Either Hegel wrote Verdummens, or more probably Verdampfens. The idea of “becoming mouldy” makes no sense.

47 This I think is the sense, though Hegel expresses it by using words such as das Personificieren und Vermenschlichen, and lower down das Subjektiviren. But previously he has rather contrasted that false kind of personification which seeks for the significant in the expression of the subject, his deeds and acts, rather than in grasping the motive centre of personality, the subjective principle itself, and it appears more intelligible in a passage, which is sufficiently hard to follow in any ease, to preserve that contrast.

48 There is apparently only one ring and sceptre, but the words used are capable of the interpretation that would attach one for each of the hands.

49 Hegel cites Wilson’s Lexicon, s.v. 2.

50 Dem Rhythmus nach, that is, the Hindoo conception is entirely superficial, and expresses rather a rhythmic order than a profound spiritual truth which this number expresses, a truth which as Hegel has previously observed may be expressed under other determinations than the numerical.

51 Unstätigkeit, instability, flightiness, detachment from a fundamental principle.

52 That is Brahmâ apparently.

53 The order of the words would strictly mean that the sons were in the pitchers and it is quite possible that this is the meaning.

54 That is, in Greek cosmogony.

55 What: Centimanen refers to I do not know, possibly a name for Arges, Ceropes, and Brontes.

56 The sense is “which is not merely (to take the obvious case of opposition which is, however, not the one here described) totally outside the Absolute and incidental to,” etc. Hegel’s words would admit of the interpretation that this was part of the conception he is describing. But this is obviously not so, for, in that case, the negative would be ascribed to both the Absolute and the “other God.”

57 Ist Unterscheiden, is that which involves differentiation. To posit a quality is to distinguish from other qualities. A fundamental, aspect of Hegelian logic.

58 Glied, part of one organic totality.

59 Hegel uses an expression somewhat similar to Milton’s “Among the faithless faithful only he.” Den Bisherigen refers primarily, of course, to the Persian and Hindoo peoples.

60 Wie des Innern überhaupt, i.e., the Inward with its significance as the Absolute.

61 In seiner Abgeschiedenheit vom Leben. In other words the corpse was preserved as still the only appropriate external form of Life. Though Hegel separates the two aspects of Egyptian belief they were necessary concomitants of each other.

62 I have translated Innerem here by “soul,” but it expresses of course too much if taken strictly in its most personal sense.

63 Aberglaube, not “superstition” so much as belief that is intuitive, not rationally deduced. The emphasis is on ahnt.

64 Hegel puts it in the rather obscure and contradictory way that the human figure is represented as “still having the most unique form of subjective intensity (Das eigenste Innre der Subjectivität) outside it.”

65 That is, the mythological history of the God.

66 Lit., “Which alone is able to apply itself (that is, to the work of interpretation) in a variety of directions.”

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE SUBLIME

THE PERSPICUITY THAT has no riddles to expound, which is the object of symbolic art and veritably the mark of Spirit self-clothed to the perfect measure of its own substance, can only be attained on condition that first and foremost the significance be presented to consciousness distinct and separate from all the phenomena of external existence. To the union of both immediately envisaged we have traced the absence of art among the ancient Parsees. The contradiction involved in their severation, followed by the association which it then stimulated under the mode of immediacy, was the source of the fantastic type of Hindoo symbolism. Finally, we have seen that in Egypt, too, the free and unfettered recognition of the Inward principle and a significance essentially independent from the phenomenon was lacking; and this resulted in the mystery and obscurity of a symbolism still more complete.

The first decisive act of purification, or, in other words, express separation of the essential substance67 from the sensuous present, that is from the empirical facts of external appearance, we must accordingly seek for in the Sublime, which exalts the Absolute above every form of immediate existence, and thereby effects that initiatory mode of its abstract liberation which is the basis of the spiritual content. As Spirit in its concreteness the significance is not yet apprehended; but it is, however, conceived as an Inwardness essentially existent, reposing on its own resources, and of such a nature that purely finite phenomena are alone inadequate to express its truth.

Kant has raised a very interesting distinction between the idea of the sublime and the beautiful; and indeed all that he discusses in the first part of his critique of the Judgment from the twentieth section to the end — in spite of its considerable prolixity and its reduction of every form of determination to a fundamentally subjective principle, whether it be the content of feeling, imagination, or reason — still possesses a real interest. We may in fact recognize this very reduction on the ground of its general principle of relation to be just68; in other words, to borrow Kant’s own expressions, if the matter of our consideration is primarily the Sublime in Nature, it is not in any fact of Nature, but only in the content of our emotional life that such a Sublime is to be discovered, and, further, only in so far as we are conscious of a Nature peculiar to ourselves which involves the added assumption of one that lies outside of us. The statement of Kant is to be taken in this sense where he says: “The true sublime cannot be enclosed in any sensuous form; it is only referable to the ideas of reason, which, albeit no truly adequate representation can be given them, are excited and awakened to life within the human soul by just this very incompatibility of the permissibly sensuous representation with its object69.” The sublime is, in short, generally the attempt to express the infinite, without being able to find an object in the realm of phenomenal existence such as is clearly fitted for its representation. The infinite, for the very reason that it is posited independently as invisible and formless significance in contrast to the complex manifold of objective fact, and is conceived under the mode of inwardness, so long as it remains infinite remains indefinable in speech and sublimely unaffected by every expression of the finite categories.

The earliest content, then, which the significance secures at this stage consists in this, that in contrast to the totality of the phenomenal it is the essentially substantive One, which itself being pure Thought is only present to thought in its purity. Consequently it is no longer possible to inform this substance under the mode of externality, and to that extent all real symbolical character disappears. If, however, an attempt is made to envisage this essential unity for sense-perception, such is only possible under a mode of relation according to which, while retaining its substantive character, it is further apprehended as the creative force of everything external, in which it therefore discovers a means of revelation and appearance, and with which it is accordingly joined in a positive relation. At the same time it is an essential feature in the expressed content of this relation that this substance is asserted above all particular phenomena as such, no less than above their united manifold; from which it then follows as a still more consequential result that the positive relation is deposed for one that is negative; and the negative consists in this that a purification of the substance is thus effected from the phenomenal taken as any particular thing, that is, in other words, that which is also not appropriate to it and which vanishes within it.

This mode of giving form, which is annihilated by the very thing which it would set forth, so that it comes about that the exposition of content affirms itself as that which renders the exposition null and void is in fact the Sublime. We have therefore not, as we found to be the view of Kant, to refer the Sublime exclusively to the subjective content of the soul, and the ideas of reason which belong to it, but rather form our conception of it as having its fundamental source in the significance represented, in other words the one absolute substance. We must, then, further deduce our classification of the art-type of the Sublime from this twofold relation of the substantive unity regarded as significance to the phenomenal world.

The characteristic which is held in common by both aspects of this relation, whether we view it positively or negatively, consists in this that the substance is posited above the particular appearance, in which it is assumed to have found a representation, although it can only be declared thereby under the form of a relation to the phenomenal in its general terms, for the reason that as substance and ultimate essence it is itself essentially without form and out of the reach of concrete external existence. We may describe pantheistic art as the first or affirmative mode of conception at this stage, a type of conception which we come across partly in India, and also to some extent in the liberal atmosphere and mysticism of the more modern poets of Persian Mohammedanism, and finally in the still profounder intensity of thought and emotion which characterizes it when it reappears in western Christianity.

Generally, defined substance is cognized at this stage as immanent in all its created accidents, which for this reason are not as yet deposed to a mere relation of service, viewed simply, that is, as an ornament of glory to the Absolute, but are affirmatively conserved by virtue of the indwelling substance; and this is so albeit it is the One and the Divine alone which is set forth and exalted in all particularity. By this means the poet, who contemplates and reveres this unity in all things, and sinks his own individuality, no less than every other object in this contemplation, is able to maintain a positive relation to the substance, with which he associates all other objects.

The second or negative celebration of the Power and Glory of the one God is that genuine type of Sublimity which we find in Hebrew poetry. In this the positive immanence of the Absolute in the created phenomena is done away with, and in place thereof we have the one substance independently affirmed as sovereign Lord of the world, who subsists over against the universe of His creations, which are posited under a relation to this Supreme Being of essential and evanescent powerlessness. If under such a view any representation is attempted of the Power and Wisdom of this Unity under the form of the finite objects of Nature and human destinies, we find nothing here that resembles the Hindoo’s distortion of such objects by the unlimited accretion to their measure. The Sublimity of God is rather brought home to our senses by means of a representation whose entire object is to show us that all that exists in definite guise, with all its splendour, embellishment and glory, is a loyal accident in His service, a show that vanishes before the Divine essence and consistency.

A. THE PANTHEISM OF ART

Anyone who makes use of the word pantheism nowadays exposes himself thereby to the grossest misunderstanding. For, to take but one aspect of the difficulty, this word “all” signifies generally in our modern acceptation of the term “all, and everything in its wholly empirical particularity.” We have at once recalled to us, for example, this particular box with all its attributes, its specific colour, size, form and weight, or that particular house, book, animal, table, stool, oven, streak of cloud and so on, to the end of the list. When we consequently find the charge advanced by not a few of our modern theologians against philosophy, that it makes a God of everything in general, it is quite obvious that this “everything” is taken in the sense we have just adverted to, and this it is which is thus bodily thrust upon her shoulders. In one word the complaint which attaches to it is absolutely unwarranted. Such a conception of pantheism only exists in the heads of stupidity, and is not discoverable in any form of religion whatever, not even in those of the Iroquois and Esquimaux, to say nothing of any philosophy. The “Everything” in what has been termed pantheism is therefore neither this nor that particular thing, but rather “Everything” in the sense of the “All,” that is the One substantive essence, which no doubt is immanent in particular things, but is cognized in abstraction from their singularity and its empirical reality, so that it is not the particular as such, but the universal animating essence or soul, or to adopt a more popular way of speaking, it is the true and the excellent, both equally a real presence in this particular thing, which are here affirmed and indicated.

This it is which constitutes the real meaning of pantheism, and we shall only have occasion now to employ the expression in this sense. It applies first and foremost to the Orient, whose type of conception is based on the thought of an absolute unity of Godhead and of everything else as subsisting in this Unity. As such Unity and All the Divine can only be presented to consciousness by means of the ever recurrent evanescence of the limited number of particular objects, in which its Presence is expressed. On the one hand we have here the Divine envisaged as immanent in the most diverse objects, whether it be life or death, mountain or sea, and with still closer intimacy no doubt as the most excellent and pre-eminent among and in all determinate existence. On the other hand, inasmuch as the One is this and again that other and that other beyond it, and in short is discharged into everything, all particular existence appears for that reason to be a thing which is cancelled and vanishes, for no particular is alone this One, but this One is this manifold of particulars which pass away before semi-perception, as such particulars into the universe which comprises them. For if the One is Life, it is also at another point Death, and is to that extent not merely life, so that it is neither as life nor the sun nor the sea that these or any other objective realities constitute the Divine and One. At the same time we do not find here, as in the genuine type of the Sublime, that the accidental is expressly posited in the negative relation of mere service. So far from this being so, substance is essentially identified with one particular and accidental existence, inasmuch as it is this One in everything. Conversely, however, this very particular, because it is equally subject to change, and the imagination does not restrict substance to one definite existence, but moves over every definition, letting it fall that it may advance to another, is thereby relegated in its turn to the accidental, over which the One is superposed in the sublimity thus conjoined with it.

Such a way of viewing existence therefore can only be expressed in art through poetry; the plastic arts are closed to it, inasmuch as they bring before the vision the definite and particular, which in their contrast to the substance present in the objects of Nature has to be given up in a determinate and persistent form. Where we find pantheism in its purity no plastic art is found as a mode of its presentation.

Once more we may adduce, as a first example of such pantheistic poetry, the literature of the Hindoos, which along with its fantastic symbolism has also elaborated the type of art under discussion with distinction. In other words the Hindoo race, as we have seen, proceed in their conceptions from the point of most abstract universality and unity, which is then carried forward to the specific shaping of gods such as Trimûrtis, Indras, and the rest. This process of definition, however, is not adhered to with constancy; but to a like extent is suffered once more to break up, so that we find inferior gods are absorbed in superior gods, and the highest of all in Brahman. From this it is sufficiently obvious that this Universal constitutes the one persistent and unalterable basis of all. And if, as we freely admit, the Hindoos evince the twofold impulse in their poetry, namely, either to exaggerate the particular existence, in order that it may appear to the senses compatible with the significance of the Absolute, or, in the converse case, to suffer every form of definition to pass as mere negation when contrasted with the one abstraction of Being, yet at the same time there is another aspect of their literature, in which we also find artistic representation under the purer mode of imaginative pantheism we have just described, a mode in which the immanence of the Divine is exalted above all particular existence in which it is presented to sense and which as such disappears. We may no doubt be rather inclined to recognize in this later mode of conception a certain similarity with that type of the immediate unity of pure thought which we found to be characteristic of the religious consciousness of the Parsees. Among the Parsees, however, the One and Excellent is conserved in its independence as itself a fact of Nature, that is, Light. With the Hindoos, on the contrary, the One, or Brahman, is merely the formless One; and this it is which in its transformations through the infinite variety of the phenomenal world, first gives rise to the pantheistic mode of representation. So we read of Krishna (Bhagavad-Gita, Lect. VII, II. 4 et seq.): “Earth, water and wind, air and fire, reason and egoity are the eight pieces of my essential force; yet knowest thou somewhat more in me, a more exalted essence, which animates the earthly and supports the world. In it all existences have their origin. Ay, verily, thou knowest I am the origin of the entire universe as also its annihilation. Aught higher than myself is not; in me is this All conjoined together, as a chaplet of pearls on a thread. I am the taste of sweetness in all that flows; I am the splendour in the sun and moon, the mystic Word in the sacred writings, manhood in man, the clean savour in the Earth, brightness in flame, in all Being Life, meditation in all who repent. In that which has Life the Power of Life, in the wise Wisdom, in the glorious Glory. Everything that is true of its kind, and everything that is specious and obscure proceeds out of me. I am not in them, but they are in me. Through the illusion of these three qualities all the world is made foolish, and knows me not who am unalterable. Moreover also the Divine illusion, even Mâya, is my own illusion, which is hard indeed to surpass, albeit all who follow after me step over this illusion.” In this passage we have indicated in the most striking terms just such a substantive unity as the one above discussed, not merely from the point of view of its immanence in immediate sense, but also from that of its advance beyond and over all singularity.

In a similar manner Krishna affirms of himself that He is the most Excellent among all the different forms of existence (Lect. X, 21): “Among the star’s I am the radiant sun, among the human signs the moon, among the sacred Books the Book of Hymns, among the senses the spiritual, Meru among the tops of the mountains, the lion among animals, the vowel A among all letters, among the seasons of the year the blooming spring-time, etc.”

This enumeration, however, of superlative excellence, and we may add the description of that which is merely a change of forms, among which it is always one and the same thing that is envisaged, despite any superficial appearance such may give us at first of a prodigal imagination, is none the less, by reason of this very equality of content, extremely monotonous and in general empty and tedious.

Under a higher mode and in a freer manner from the subjective point of view we find, secondly, oriental pantheism is elaborated in Mohammedanism more particularly among the Persians.

And here we are confronted with a relation of some singularity when we direct our attention expressly to the point of view of the individual poet.

(a) To explain this more fully we would point out that so long as the poet yearns to behold the Divine in everything, and really so beholds it, he also surrenders his own personality; but, while doing so, he realizes quite as vividly the immanence of the Divine in his spiritual world thus expanded and delivered; and consequently there grows up within him that joyful ardour of the soul, that liberal happiness, that revel of bliss, which is so peculiar to the Oriental, who in freeing himself from his own particularity seems wholly to sink himself in the Eternal and Absolute, and henceforth to know and feel the image and presence of the Divine in all things. Such a self-absorption in the Divine, such an intoxicated life of bliss in God borders closely on mysticism. Under this aspect no volume is more famous than the Oschelaleddin-Rumi, of which Rückert, with the help of his marvellous powers of expression, which enable him to make light of both words and rhymes with all the wealth and freedom of the phantasy that comes so natural to the Persian poet, has supplied us with the fairest examples. Love to God, with whom man identifies himself in most boundless surrender, beholding Him as the One through every part of His Universe, with whom and to whom every and each thing is related and referred — this it is that gives us the focus of this type of thought, a centre which radiates in every direction.

(b) And, further, while in the true type of the sublime, as will appear shortly, the most excellent objects and the most glorious shapes are employed merely as the ornament of God, and as servants to celebrate the splendour and majesty of the One, being set before our eyes to do Him honour as Lord of all creation, in pantheism, on the contrary, it is the immanence of the Divine in external fact which exalts the determinate existence itself of the world, Nature, and humanity to its own self-substantial glory. The identical Life of Spirit in the phenomena of Nature and all human relations animates and spiritualizes the same in their own nature, and is further the source of that characteristic attitude of subjective feeling in the soul of the poet toward the objects he celebrates in his song. Suffused with the animating influx of this glory the soul is essentially serene, independent, free, secure in its comprehension and greatness; and in this positive identification of itself with such qualities it penetrates imaginatively with its life into the very heart of objective existence, sharing the restful unity that it finds there, and grows up in most blissful, most blithesome intimacy with the natural world and its munificence, with the drinking-booth no less than the beloved, and, in short, all that is held worthy of praise or affection. We find, no doubt, the same kind of self-absorption in the romantic temperament of the West. Generally speaking, however, and more particularly in the North, it is not so gladsome, spontaneous, or free from yearning; or, at least, it remains more exclusively shut up in itself, and is consequently selfish and sentimental. A spiritual mood of this type, in its depression and gloom, finds its most forceful outlet in the popular songs of barbarous peoples. The spontaneous and joyful emotional atmosphere is, on the contrary, congenial to the East, and particularly characteristic of the Mohammedan Persians, who openly and gladly surrender themselves with all their soul to the Divine influence, and indeed to everything that appears to merit such devotion, while they do not fail to retain the freedom of independence in such surrender, and consciously to preserve the same in their attitude to the world and all that surrounds them. We may, in fact, observe in the ardour of this passion, the most expansive ecstasy and parrhesia70 of the emotional life, through which, in its inexhaustible wealth of gorgeous and splendid images, one emphatic note of joy, beauty, and happiness rings again and again. If the Oriental suffers or is unfortunate he takes his reverses as the unalterable fiat of Destiny, and falls back upon the strength of his own resources without any increase of depression, sensitiveness, or vexation of spirit. In the poetry of Hafis we hear often enough of the lover’s woes and laments71, as of many another kind, but our poet persists through grief, no less than in happiness, as free of care as ever. This is the mood of that sometime refrain:

For thanks, in that the present glow

Of friendship circles thee,

Light strong the taper e’en in woe,

And joyful be.

The taper teaches us both to laugh and to weep; it laughs through the flame of shining merriment, albeit it melts at the same time in hot tears; in the act of consumption it spreads wide the brightness of joviality. This is also the general character throughout of this type of poetry.

Among the objects frequently referred to in Persian poetry we may mention flowers and jewels, and, above all, the rose and the nightingale. It is a matter of frequent occurrence to represent the nightingale as bridegroom of the rose. This gift of personality to the rose and love to the nightingale may be abundantly illustrated from Hafis. “Out of gratefulness, O rose,” he sings, “that thou art the sultana of Beauty, see to it that thou settest not a proud face to the love of the nightingale.” The poet himself speaks of the nightingale of his own soul. When we of the West, on the contrary, refer in our poetry to roses, nightingales, or wine, and such matters, we do so in a wise much nearer to prose. The rose merely serves us for ornament, as in the expression, among others, “garlanded with roses.” If we listen to the nightingale it is but to follow the bird with our own emotions; we think of the grape-juice, and call it “the breaker of our cares.” Among the Persians, however, the rose is no mere image or ornament, no symbol, but itself appears to the poet as possessed with a soul, as loving bride, and he transpierces with his spirit the rose’s very heart. Precisely the same character of a gorgeous Pantheism is still impressed on the most modern Persian poems. Herr von Hammer, for instance, has given us a description of a poem which was forwarded, among other gifts of the Shah, to the Emperor Francis in the year 1819. It contains an account of the exploits of the Shah in 33,000 distiches, who made a present of his own name to the Court poet in question.

(c) Goethe, too — here in contrast with the more perturbed atmosphere and the concentrated emotion of the poetry of his youth — was carried away in advanced age by the breadth of this careless and blithesome spirit; and though already a veteran, swept through by the breath of the East, dedicated the evening glow of his poetic passion, in a flood of extraordinary fervour to this freedom of emotion which, even where controversy is the sub ect-matter, still retains the beauty of its careless temper. The songs of his Westöstlicher Divan, are by no means the mere play of trivial social urbanities, but originate in a precisely similar spirit of free and unrestrained emotion. In a song of his to Suleica they are thus described by himself:

Pearls from the poet,

Thine is the treasure,

Thine was the big swell

Of passion tumultuous,

Which strewed them on desolate

Strand of his life.

Gold-tips I call it,

Pierced with bright jewels,

Tenderly conned o’er

By tapering fingers.

“Take them,” he exclaims to his beloved:

Circle thy neck with them,

Close, close to thy breast!

These raindrops of Allah

The meek shell hath ripened.

Poetry such as this is the product of an experience of the widest range, a sense which has held its own in many storms, a depth and also, too, a youth of the heart — in other words:

World of Life’s own drift of forces,

World, the wealth of whose wave-roll

Caught afar the bulbul’s passion,

Won the song which shook the soul.

In this unity of pantheism, moreover, if emphasized in its relation to personal life, which feels itself united with God thereby, and the Divine as this presence intuitively cognized, we have, speaking generally, that type of mysticism which, under this more intimate mode, has also been elaborated in the pale of Christendom. We will adduce but one example, namely, that of Angelus Silecius, who, with the greatest audacity and depth of conception and emotional fervour, has expressed the essential presence of God in objective Nature, the union of the self with God, and the Divine with human personality, with an extraordinary power of mystical presentment. The more genuine type of Oriental pantheism, on the contrary, is inclined to insist more upon the vision of the One substance in all phenomena and the self-surrender of the individual, who thereby secures the most supreme expansion of conscious life no less than the bliss of absorption into all that is most noble and excellent by virtue of the absolute release from all finitude.

B. THE ART OF SUBLIMITY

The One substance, however, which is here conceived as the real significance of the entire universe, is only truly posited as substance where we find it suffered to retire into itself as pure Inwardness and substantive Power out of its presence and realization beneath the shifting forms of the phenomenal, and thereby is set forth in self-consistency as against all finitude. It is not till we come to this intuitive vision of the essence of God as absolutely Spiritual and apart from all image, and thus opposed to the things of the World and Nature, that the Spiritual is completely wrested from all that pertains to mere sense-perception and Nature, and delivered from determinate existence in the finite. While conversely, however, the absolute substance still maintains a relation to the phenomenal world from which it is reflected back upon itself. In this relation is now asserted that negative aspect already adverted to, which consists in this, that the entire universe, despite all the fulness, power, and glory of its phenomenal contents, is expressly affirmed in its relation to substance as that which is essentially of a purely negative subsistence, a creation of God, subject to His power and service. The world is therefore envisaged as the revelation of God, and He is the Goodness which permits the created thing that has no essential claim to exist, none the less to exist in relation to Himself, nay, further to have independent existence and thereby freely to conserve Him. This conservation on the part of the finitude, however, is without real substance, and in opposition to God the creature is here assumed to be that which passes away and is powerless, so that at the same time its claim to existence72 is exhibited as a part of the goodness of the Creator, which not only veritably affirms the impotence of that which is essentially nothing apart from Himself, but thereby asserts His substance as the source of all Power. It is this relation, so far as it is set forth by art as the fundamental relation, both of content and form, which brings before us the art-type of the real Sublime. The Beauty of the Ideal and Sublimity no doubt present features of contrast. In the Ideal the Inward transpierces external reality, whose inward essence it really is under the mode at least, that both aspects are adequate to each other, and consequently appear to be in perfect fusion with one another. In the Sublime, on the contrary, the external existence, in which substance is envisaged for sense, is deposed in its opposition to that substance, such deposition and vassalage constituting the only mode, by means of which the God who is in His own seclusion without form, and in His positive essence incapable of being expressed by aught that is of the world and finite, can be envisualized by artistic means. The Sublime pre-supposes the significance in the self-subsistence of One, in relation to which externality is defined as in subjection, in so far as that Inward substance fails to appear, but its transcendent character is so asserted, that in the end nothing can be represented save just this essential and active transcendency73.

In the symbol the mode of the external form was the main point emphasized. It must possess a significance, and yet fail completely to express it. In contrast to symbol of this kind and its obscure content we have now a significance in the absolute sense of the term conjoined with its full recognition. A work of art is now the actual discharge of pure essence conceived as the intensive purport of everything, of an essence, however, which deliberately affirms that very incompatibility of form to significance, which was only implicitly present in the symbol, to be the actually transcendent significance of God Himself within the sphere of worldly existence, and above all that is contained therein.

It is a significance which is therefore sublime in the work of art, which is exclusively concerned to express the same as thus explicitly declared. We may no doubt with justice accept the description of “sacred,” as applicable generally to symbolical art, in so far as it accepts the Divine as comprised in the content of its productions; but the art of the Sublime alone can make good its claim to the distinction without any deduction, for it is here alone that God receives all the honour. In this sphere, owing to the fundamental character of the significance implied, the content is generally of a more restricted nature than that we find in genuine symbolism, whose relation to the Spiritual is that of an effort and nothing more, and which in the continuously shifting nature of its relations to to the world offers such a wide field, either for transformations of that which is spiritual into natural images, or of that which is essentially material under accordant fusion with the Spirit.

We find as nowhere else this art of the Sublime, as a mode of its original appearance, in the religious conceptions of the Hebrew race and their sacred poetry. We say poetry advisedly, because plastic art cannot possibly be in question here, where it is assumed that no image whatever is adequate to express the nature of the Divine, and that the part of poetry alone by means of the spoken or written word can be employed for such a purpose. A closer examination of this type of religious conception will secure to us the following points of view most worthy of our general attention.

If we look at the content of this poetry under the aspect of its most universal import, one of our first conclusions will be that God, as Lord of a world created to serve Him, is not conceived as incarnated in any form of the external, but rather as personality withdrawn from all determinate and worldly existence into the solitude of His pure Unity. For this reason that74 which in genuine symbolism was still associated with supreme Unity, falls apart under the view we are considering into its twofold aspect, on one side the abstract subsistency of God, on the other the concrete existence of the world.

(a) Now God Himself as this pure self-subsistency of the One substance is essentially without form, and under this abstract conception cannot be brought closer to the envisagement of sense. That which therefore the imagination is able to seize at this stage is not the Divine content viewed under the aspect of its pure essence, inasmuch as this latter precludes the possibility of artistic representation under any form adequate to it whatever. The only content therefore that is left open to it is that of the relation of God to His created world.

(b) God is the creator of the universe. This is the purest expression of the Sublime itself. In other words we find that here for the first time all those fanciful conceptions of generation and purely physical procreation of external fact by God disappear. Each and all give place to the thought of creation by virtue of spiritual power and activity. “God spake: Let there be Light, and there was Light.” A sentence dong ago cited, as a striking illustration of the Sublime by Longinus. And such indeed it is. The Lord of all, the One substance, proceeds, it is true, under the mode of self-expression; but the type of this bringing forth is the purest, nay, a mode of expression, aetherial so to speak, and without material form, the Word that is to say, the medium of thought as the ideal Power, in conjunction with whose mandate that it shall exist, the existing thing is veritably and immediately posited under the relation of tacit obedience.

(c) Into this created world, however, God is not conceived to pass over as into His reality; rather He abides withdrawn behind Himself, albeit this opposition supplies no secure ground for a logically developed dualism. For that which has been brought into being is His work, possesses no self-consistency as apart from Him. It is solely a witness to His Wisdom, Goodness, and Justice in general, just that and no more. The One is Lord over all; His dwelling is not in the facts of Nature. They are solely the accidents of His Greatness, without potency in themselves, which can indeed suffer the show of His essence to appear, but are unable to make the reality of it visible75. And this it is which constitutes the Sublime in its reference to the Divine.

Moreover, inasmuch as the one God is thus severed from the concreteness of the phenomenal world and posited in isolated fixity, while the externality of determinate existence is on its side defined and placed in subordination as the finite, both natural and human existence are now viewed under the novel aspect that they cannot be conceived as manifesting the Divine without at the same time making visible their essential finiteness.

(a) The most direct way of bringing home to ourselves the significance of the above contrasted relations may be expressed in the statement that here for the first time we have Nature and the human form set before us cut off from the Divine, prosaic fact in short. It is a Greek tale that when the heroes of the Argonautic Expedition passed in their ships through the straits of the Hellespont, the rocks which hitherto had crashed open and shut like shears suddenly came to a standstill rooted firmly for evermore in the ground. In a manner somewhat similar the process of the finite toward stability in intelligible definition, as contrasted with the infinite essence, moves onward in the sacred poetry of the Sublime, while in the conceptions of symbolism, where we have the finite overturned in the Divine and the latter quite as frequently thrust forth from its own substance into temporal existence, nothing is permitted to keep its due position. If we turn, for example, from ancient Hindoo poetry to the Old Testament we find ourselves at once in a totally different atmosphere, one in which we feel ourselves thoroughly at home, however much we may discover in the circumstances, events, actions, and characters an environment either alien or different to that in which we live. From a world of tumble and confusion we are transported to another, and have human figures presented to us, which appear as natural as those we see with our eyes, characters with the stable outlines of patriarchal life, which in the truth of their delineation stand so near that they receive an immediate assent from our intelligence.

(b) In a general view of existence such as the above which is able to grasp the natural process of life and to accept as valid the claim of natural laws, wonder for the first time is a really active force. In Hindooism everything is a wonder and consequently is no longer wonderful. No wonder can enter a world where the intelligible connection of facts is invariably broken, where everything is wrested from its place and turned topsy-turvy. For the wonderful presupposes the rational sequence of events no less than the clear perceptions of ordinary consciousness which, when it meets with some example of causal effect produced by a higher law breaking the customary chain of events now for the first time notifies the exception as a wonder. Wonders of this kind, however, are no real or specific expression of the Sublime, for the reason that the ordinary course of natural phenomena is conceived as quite as much the product of the Will of God and evidence of Nature’s submission as such interruption of the same.

(c) We must rather look for the real Sublime in the fact that under this view the entire created world is limited in time and space, with no independent stability or consistency, and as such an adventitious product which exists solely to celebrate the praise of Almighty God.

This recognition of the nullity of objective fact and the exaltation and extolment of God are at this stage the source of man’s own self-respect, and in these he looks for his own consolation and satisfaction.

(a) In this connection the Psalms supply us with classical examples of the genuine Sublime, and are set forth as a precedent for all times of what our humanity at the highest point of its spiritual exultation has superbly expressed as the reflection of its religious consciousness. Nothing in the world can here make good its claim to independent subsistence, inasmuch as everything exists and subsists simply through the Power of God, and only exists as in duty bound to extol His mightiness no less than to acknowledge its own essential nothingness. In the imagination of pantheism, which mainly unfolded in the direction of material substance an infinite extension of range was most remarkable: what we most are amazed at here is the power of spiritual exaltation which suffers everything else to fall away that it may declare the unique Almightiness of God. An extraordinarily forceful illustration of this temper is the 104th Psalm, “The Light is Thy mantle which Thou wearest; Thou spreadest out the heavens like a carpet, etc.” Light, heavens, clouds, the pinions of the winds, each and all are here nothing by themselves, merely an external vesture, the chariot or messenger in the service of God. A further expansion of the same idea is the extolment of the Wisdom of God, which has ordained all things. The springs, which leap from their sources, the waters, which flow between the hills, by the banks of which the birds of the air sit and carol among the branches; the grassy vine, which gladdens the heart of men and the cedars of Lebanon which the Lord hath planted; the sea, and its swarms without number; the whales which sport therein, all these hath the Lord made. And all that God has created He also preserves. “Thou hidest Thy Face, and they are affrighted; Thou takest their breath away and they are gone and become again as dust.” The 90th Psalm, that prayer of Moses, the man of God, insists expressly on the nothingness of man, where we read: “Thou sufferest them to pass away like a brook; they are like as a sleep, even as the grass, which is soon withered, and in the evening is cut down and dried up. Thy scorn maketh us to pass away; Thou showest Thine anger and we are gone.”

(b) Two ideas are therefore associated together with the Sublime, if viewed in its relation to the human soul, first, that of man’s finiteness, and secondly, that of the insurmountable aloofness of God.

(α) For this reason the idea of immortality is not to be found where this mode of conception obtains in its original purity; for this idea involves the assumption that the individual self, the soul, the spirit of man is essentially a self-subsistent entity. In the religion of the Sublime it is only the One that is apprehended as imperishable; opposed to that all else merely subsists and passes away, is neither essentially free nor infinite.

(β) And, further, on a similar ground man is conceived in his absolute unworthiness before God; his exaltation consists in the fear of the Lord, in a trembling before His scorn. Over and over again, with a directness which tears aside every veil and opens the very depths, we have the cry of the soul to God depicted, the sorrow over the sense of its nothingness, increasing lament and groanings unutterable.

(γ) On the other hand if the individual persist in his finiteness of opposition to God, this deliberately willed persistence is wickedness, which as evil and sin belongs only to the natural and human condition, and is conceived as remote from the One undifferentiated substance as pain and everything else that is essentially negative.

(c) Thirdly, however, within this very condition of spiritual nakedness, and, in despite of it, man secures a freer and more independent position. On the one hand out of the fundamental repose and constancy of God viewed in reference to His Will and the commands which that Will imposes upon humanity, arises the Law; while under another point of view the wholly unambiguous distinction between that which is human and that which is Divine, between the finite and the Absolute, is implied in this type of human exaltation. Therewith the judgment upon good and evil, and the onus of decision in respect to either the one or the other is transferred to the individual soul itself. This relation to the Absolute, and the question it involves as to the fittingness or unfittingness of man over against the same presents, therefore, also an aspect, which applies to the individual himself, his own behaviour and action. In other words we may trace in man’s rightful acts and his following of the Law a relation to God which is, side by side with the former one, an affirmative relation, a relation which has to bring generally the external condition of his existence, whether it be positive or negative, weal, enjoyment and satisfaction, or pain, unhappiness and oppression into union with the obedience of his heart or his stubbornness of spirit against the Law, and accept the same in the one case as favour and reward, in the other as trial and punishment.

67 Des An-und-für-sich-seyenden, i.e., the explicit content of all that is implied in actuality cognized as an object in itself.

68 According to Hegel the conception of Kant is right in that (a) He makes the Sublime to consist in a relation between the phenomenal fact and something which it is not; and (b) that he lays it down that no mere representation by means of phenomenal form can adequately express it. He is wrong, however, in that he refers the Sublime for its source wholly to the subjective content, i.e., that Nature which is peculiar to ourselves (in uns.)

69 “Critique of the Judgment,” 3rd ed., p. 77.

70 Parrhesia, i.e., πἀρρἥσια, — speaking freely or beyond ordinary bound.

71 Den Schenken should be die Schenken, and a few lines below der Kerze should be die Kerze. I omit the Schenken altogether. Of course it is possible der Kerze is Genitive, “in the woe of the taper,” and the verb intransitive; but this is very harsh.

72 This appears to be the meaning of Garechtigkeit.

73 Sondern so darüber hinausgeht, dass eben nichts als dieses Hinauseyn und Hinausgehen zur Darstellung kommen kann. That is, the art of the Sublime is based essentially on a contradiction, for while it assumes the One substance to be the significance of the external world, it is the truth of that significance that it points to that which transcends externality.

74 The thought here is not strictly logical. What is associated by symbolism with Unity is the external Other, what is divided by Hebraic conception is the entire content of the Real both in its spiritual and external aspect. But the general sense is sufficiently clear.

75 This I take to be the point of the contrast between the words scheinen and erscheinen.

THE CONSCIOUS SYMBOLISM OF THE COMPARATIVE TYPE OF ART

THE RESULT WE have now arrived at in the above consideration of the Sublime, and in contradistinction to the strictly unpremeditated type of symbolization, consists partly in the separation of its own independent Inwardness, consciously apprehended in its quality of significance, from the concrete appearance that is thereby distinguished from it, partly also in the direct or indirect affirmation of the incompatibility of the two above mentioned aspects to one another, by which it appears that the significance as the universal passes beyond the particular fact and its singularity. But in the imagination of pantheism, no less than in the type of the Sublime, the real content, that is the One universal substance of all concrete existence, was unable to be presented to imaginative vision or sense-perception without some relation to created existence, albeit created under a mode inadequate to express the essence of that Unity. This relation, however, was attached to the substance itself, which, in the negativity of its accidents, supplied the proof of its Wisdom, Goodness, Power, and Justice76. For this reason the relation between significance and content is also in the case of the Sublime, at least in a general way, of a kind that is both essential and necessary, and the two sides thus linked with each other are not yet, in the strict sense of the term, external to each other. It is, however, inevitable, for the reason that it is implicitly present in symbolism, that this externality should come to be directly posited and appear in the forms we have now to consider in this concluding chapter on the art of symbolism. We may summarily describe them as conscious77 symbolism, or, in a still more direct way, the comparative type of art.

In other words, what we understand by conscious symbolism is this, that the significance is not merely independently cognized, but is expressly set forth as distinct from the external mode, in which it is represented. The significance then appears, as in the case of the Sublime, to receive an independent expression which is not essentially in the actual embodiment given to it under the mode employed78. The relation, however, of both to one another no longer continues to be, as in the type last examined, a mode of relation which is fundamentally due to the significance itself, but is a more or less haphazard association, which may generally be expressed as the product of the subjectivity of the poet, the absorption of his spirit in an external object, the result of his wit or invention; a mode, in short, which enables the poet at one time rather to make a beginning directly from a sensible phenomenon, and to imagine for it from his own mind a spiritual significance cognate with it, and at another to select in preference as his point of departure the real or only relatively personal idea, with a view to embodying the same, or even to do nothing more than relate one image with another, which presents characteristic features of resemblance.

This kind of linking together must consequently be distinguished from that still naïve and unconscious symbolism in virtue of the fact that now the individual recognizes the inward essence of the significances he adopts for the content of his creation no less than, the positive nature of the external objects, which he employs as means of comparison for the more direct presentment of the same, placing both in this juxtaposition with clear intention owing to the similarity he has discovered between them. The distinction, on the other hand, between the present type and that of the Sublime is rather to be traced to the fact that though under one aspect it may be true that the separation and juxtaposition of the significances with their concrete shaping in the work of art is itself set forth in express relief to a less or higher degree, yet, on the other hand, for the reason that it is no longer the Absolute itself that is accepted as content, but any defined and restricted significance whatever, the typical relation of the Sublime falls away, and in its place a relation is set up within the act of severance thus intentionally made between the real significance and its embodiment, a relation which in effect produces the very result in the sphere of premeditated comparison that we found unconscious symbolism in its own way proposed as an object.

In one word, so far as content is here concerned, the Absolute itself, the Lord of creation, can no longer be conceived as the significance which Art seeks after. That this is so is rendered inevitable by the already obvious fact that on account of the severation of more concrete existence from the notion, and further, if only under the mode of comparison, the juxtaposition of both sides thus separated, the category of finitude is there and then accepted by the artistic consciousness, in so far as it conceives this form as the real and ultimate one; and for this reason, moreover, the imagined significances, being selected wholly from the sphere of the finite, have no further association whatever with the Absolute as the fundamental significance of all created things. Sacred poetry stands out in entire contrast to this, for in this God is the exclusive significance of all things; as set over against Him, they have no stability at all, but vanish or are nothing. If, however, the significance is able to discover its image and parallel of resemblance in that which is itself essentially restricted and finite, it follows that it must itself to that extent be limited in its range, as, in fact, it is in the type of symbolic conception which now occupies our attention, where that which is found is nothing more than an image, necessarily external to the content, selected purely at random by the poet for the sake of the similarity it presents to the content, and as such regarded as relatively adequate thereto. For this reason there is but one trait left us in the comparative type of art, which is also shared by that of the Sublime, and it is this that every image, instead of embodying the fact and significance directly under a mode adequate to their full reality, is only taken to present an image and similitude of either.

For these reasons this kind of symbolization is, if we conceive it apart as an independent whole, a generic class of subordinate rank. The form which it supplies is merely the descriptive selection of a portion of sensuous existence immediately perceived, or of a prosaic idea of the mind79, in other words, the significance is expressly to be distinguished from it. And, further, in a measure such an employment of comparison in works of art, which are shaped out of homogeneous material, and in their specific form constitute an indivisible whole, can only assert itself as relatively valid, that is, as mere ornament and accessory, such as we find it, in fact, in the genuine products of classic and romantic art.

It is a further consequence that if we regard the entire sphere of this type as the union of the two stages which preceded it on the ground that it not merely comprehends within itself the separation of significance from external reality, which is the fundamental causa rationis of the Sublime, but also includes the reference of a concrete phenomenon to a universal import cognate with it, as we have seen was asserted in the real type of symbolism, such a union is notwithstanding in no way a higher type of art; it is, in truth, despite its very clearness, a superficial way of apprehending things, limited in its content and formally more or less prosaic, which falls away into the consciousness of commonsense as fully remote from the secretly fermenting depth of genuine symbolism as it is from the height of the Sublime.

So far as the classification of our present subject-matter is concerned we may observe, first, that in this act of comparative differentiation, which presupposes the significance independently, and affirms either a sensuous or imaginary form in a relation of opposition to it, there is the aspect held constantly throughout that the significance is here accepted as of most importance, and the form is solely the embodiment of the same and external to it; but along with this the further difference makes its appearance, namely, that it is sometimes the one aspect of this opposition which is first pre-eminently emphasized, and made the significant point of departure, while at other times it is the other. And owing to this fact we have either the embodiment presented us as an independently external, immediate fact or phenomenon of Nature, which is then related by comparison to a significance of a more general bearing, or the significance is independently come by in another way, and only afterwards a mode of embodying it is selected from some external source, it matters not what.

Relatively to the above distinctions we may classify our material under the two first fundamental and a third and other supplementary divisions as follows:

A. In the first it is the concrete phenomenon, whether the selection be made from Nature or human events, incidents, and actions, which constitutes both the point of departure in the process of artistic conception, and the substance of essential weight in the reproduction. It is no doubt exhibited solely on account of the more general significance, which it contains and signifies, and is only so far unfolded, that it may contribute to the object of embodying this significance in a specific occurrence or condition cognate with it. The comparison, however, of the general significance and the particular case is not as yet expressly set forth as subjective activity, and the entire reproduction will not merely be the embellishment of a work which actually possesses a substantive position without it, but is set forth as itself claiming to give the character of an independent whole. The types of this class are the fable, the parable, the apologue, the proverb, and the metamorphosis.

B. In the second phase the significance on the contrary is that which is first presented to consciousness, and the concrete embodiment is that which is merely incidental or accessory to it, possessing no independent subsistency of its own, but appearing as wholly subordinate to the significance, so that we are now also made more immediately aware of the element of personal caprice in the selection of this rather than any other image. This mode of production is unable in the great majority of cases to reach the point of a fully perfected work of art, and is consequently forced to leave the forms it supplies as appurtenant to other artistic images. The important types of this class are the riddle, the allegory, the metaphor, the image, and the simile.

C. Thirdly, and in conclusion, if rather by way of supplement, we have yet further to include within our list the didactic poem, and purely descriptive poetry, inasmuch as in these types of poetry we find, on the one hand, that the presentment of the general character of the objects in the clearness under which they are made intelligible to commonsense80, no less than on the other that the exhibition of their concrete appearance receives a substantially independent form, and by doing so effects with elaborate completeness the severation of that which only in its union and really reciprocal fusion is capable of giving us a genuine work of art.

This separation of the two phases essential to the process of art-production carries with it the result that the various forms which find their place in the entire subject-matter under discussion have merely a claim to fall in as part of an inquiry into the modes of art in virtue of the fact that poetry, and only poetry, is in a position to express such a relation of self-contained independence as between significance and form. As opposed to this it is the very problem of the plastic arts to manifest such significant content in and through their external form and viewed thus externally.

A. MODES OF COMPARISON, WHICH HAVE THEIR ORIGIN UPON THE SIDE OF EXTERNALITY

The attempt to arrange the several kinds of poetic production which are apportioned to this first stage of the comparative type of art carries with it no little difficulty, and is a fruitful source of embarrassment. They are, that is to say, hybrid species of a subordinate rank, which in no way whatever mark out any necessary aspect of art They stand in the domain of Aesthetic presenting features analogous to certain animal types, and other exceptional phenomena in natural science. In both spheres the difficulty consists in this that in either case it is the notion of the science itself, which is the ground of its classification and specific differences. As differentia of the notion these are also at the same time distinctions really adequate to the notional process, and intelligible as such; with these latter such transitional modes are unable fully to conform for the reason that they are merely defective types, which proceed from a previous phase that is fundamental without being able to reach the next one. This is no fault of the notion, nay, supposing that we preferred to make such ancillary types the basis of our classification, instead of pointing out their relation to the specific phases of the notional process of our subject-matter, we should have presented us precisely that aspect of them which was inadequate to this process as the irreproachable mode of their development. A true principle of classification, on the contrary, is compelled to proceed from the true notion, and such hybrid types as those now discussed can only be suitably placed where the genuine and independently stable ones show a tendency to dissolve and pass over into others.

Apart from such considerations, however, the artistic types referred to belong to the forecourt of artistic symbolism, inasmuch as they are generally incomplete, and to that extent merely a search after art in its truth. Such a movement no doubt presents the essential ingredients of a genuine mode of configuration, but it lays hold of them in their aspect of finitude, separation, and purely relative propinquity; it fails consequently to rank on the same level. When we discuss, therefore, the fable, apologue, and the rest we must treat these forms not as though they belonged to poetry in the specific sense, as it differs among other things from music no less than the plastic arts, but only with the view of pointing out the relation in which they stand to the generic types of art. It is only thus their specific character can be elucidated. To such an object the notion of the genuine types of the art of poetry, whether epic, lyric, or dramatic, will not assist us.

We propose now to differentiate these forms in the following order; we shall begin with the fable, proceed after that to discuss the parable, apologue, and proverb, and conclude our inquiry with the metamorphosis.

Hitherto we have throughout merely dwelt upon the formal aspect of the relation of an expressed significance to its embodiment; we have now furthermore to elucidate the content, which declares its suitability for such a mode.

In our previous consideration of the various aspects of the Sublime we saw that at the point where we have now arrived, it is no longer a matter of any importance to envisualize the Absolute and One in its indivisible Power by means of the nothingness and impotency of the created thing to rise up to that infinite transcendency. We are now on the plane of the finite consciousness, and have only to concern ourselves with a finite content. If we direct our attention conversely to the genuine symbolical type, to which the comparative is under a certain aspect equally related, we find that here that inward aspect, which stands in opposition to the form up to this point always immediately presented, the natural shape, that is to say, is the spiritual, a truth that even in Egyptian symbolism received ample illustration. To the extent, however, that everything natural is left standing, and preconceived in its position of isolated solidarity, the spiritual is also something both finite and defined, that is to say man and his finite aims and the natural maintains a certain, albeit theoretical81, relationship to these objects, a significant suggestion and revelation of the same to the use and weal of mankind. The phenomena of Nature, storms, flight of birds, the constitution of the intestines of animals and so forth, in the significance they possess for human interests, are now accepted in a totally different sense to that they figured in the conceptions of Parsees, Hindoos, or Egyptians, for whom the Divine is still linked to the Natural under the mode that man, as an integral part of Nature, moves to and fro in a world full of gods, and his personal action consists in the display through his activities of this very identity of Life, whereby this doing of his, in so far as it is compatible with the natural existence of the Divine, appears itself as a revelation and bringing forth of the Divine in mankind. When, however, man is withdrawn into himself, and intuitively seeks for his freedom within the closed doors of his own substance82, he becomes intrinsically the object of his own personality; he acts, transacts his affairs, and works as he himself wills; he possesses a personal life of his own, and feels the essential character of his aims as part of himself, to which the natural is only related as something outside him. Consequently Nature becomes insulated around him, serves him under such an aspect that in his attitude to the Divine he no longer secures an envisagement of the Absolute in her, but simply regards her as a means, through which the gods enable him to discover such a knowledge of themselves as may contribute most to his advantage, unveiling their will to the human spirit through the medium of Nature and suffering the purpose thereof to declare itself through mankind. An identity of the Absolute and Nature is here presupposed, an identity in which human aims are pre-eminently emphasized. A type of symbolism such as this, however, is not within the province of art, but that of religion. That is to say, the vates or prophet subordinates every significant relation of natural events, pre-eminently to the service of practical ends, whether it be in the interest of the particular designs of individuals, or in that of the common action of an entire people. Poetry, on the contrary, is bound to recognize and express even the practical situations and relations in a more universal form adapted to contemplation.

What we have, however, to deal with now is a natural phenomenon, an occurrence, which, in its passage, exhibits a particular relation, which maybe accepted as symbol for a general significance in the circle of human deeds and dealings, in other words for an ethical maxim, a saw, for a significance, therefore, whose content unfolds a reflection over the nature of the course which either is taken or ought to be taken in human matters, that is, facts which are related to volition. Here it is no longer the Divine will, which is self-revealed in its essential nature to mankind through natural events, and their religious import. We have nothing more than a quite ordinary course of everyday occurrences, from the isolated reproduction of which we are able to abstract in a way commonly intelligible an ethical dictum, a warning, ensample, or rule of prudence, by whatever name we choose to call it, which is set before us in a form that appeals to our imagination for the sake of the reflection it carries with it. And this is just the way in which we ought to regard the fables of Aesop.

(a) In other words, the fables of Aesop in their original form are just such a mode of conceiving a natural relation or event between single natural objects generally, mainly between animals, whose intercourse with one another is based on the same practical necessities of life that are the motive force in that of humanity. This relation or occurrence, as viewed in its more general characters, is consequently of a kind that may happen in the sphere of human life, and as such carries with it a significance for man.

As thus explained the genuine fable of Aesop is therefore the reproduction of a condition of animate or inanimate life, of some occurrence in the animal world for example, which is not by any means composed at haphazard, but is put together in conformity with natural fact and genuine observation, and so reproduced in the form of narrative that, in its relation to human existence, and particularly the practical aspect of the same, a general maxim may be deduced from it. The requirement of primary importance that it implies, therefore, is that the particular case in question, which is to supply the so-called moral, must not be purely imaginary, that is to say, first and foremost the substance of the composition must not present facts which run counter to the mode of their appearance in real life. The narrative may be further and yet more clearly characterized in this that it does not record the particular case itself in its universality, but rather the mode under which this, taken in its concrete singularity and as a real fact, is in such external reality the type for all action based upon analogous circumstances.

This original form of the fable leaves upon it, and this is the third point to which we direct attention, the impress of most naïveté, because in it the didactic aim and the deduction of general significances of utilitarian colour do not appear to be that which was the original intention of the narrator, but rather something which turned up afterwards. For this reason the most attractive among the so-called fables of Aesop will be those which correspond most emphatically with this naïve tone and narrate actions, if such an expression may here be used, or at least relations and events, which in part are founded upon animal instinct, partly are the expression of some other natural relation and partly are generally put together for their own sake rather than exclusively composed as the fancy of the moment happened to dictate. For this reason it is further sufficiently obvious that the motto fabula docet, which has attached itself to these fables as we now have them presented us, either takes the true spirit out of them, or frequently is something like a fist in our eyes83, so that quite as often as not we are inclined to deduce the intended maxim’s opposite, or one or two as good if not better.

In further elucidation of this conception of these Greek fables we propose now to offer a few illustrations. The oak and the reed stand in the teeth of the storm-wind. The slender reed merely bows before it, the stubborn oak snaps. This is a frequent enough occurrence in a great storm. In its ethical suggestion what we have here is some man of high position and inflexible temper as opposed to one of more modest station who, through his natural pliancy, is able in misfortune to keep himself secure on such ordinary levels, while the great man goes to ground through his pride and obstinacy. An analogous case is the fable of the swallows which we find in the Phaedrus. The swallows and other birds with them see a rustic sowing the flax seed, from the growth of which the bird-snare is to be made. The provident swallows fly away, the other birds think nothing of the morrow; they abide at home and are caught. A real phenomenon of Nature is also at the bottom of this fable. It is a notorious fact that in autumn swallows are off to southerly climes, and consequently are absent when birds are snared. The same thing may be said of the fable about the bat, which is despised by day and night, because it belongs to neither the one nor the other. A more general human significance is attributed to real prosaic incidents of this class, much as pious people are only too ready nowadays to interpret everything that occurs in a sense that is edifying or useful. It is, however, not essential to such a purpose that in every case the true fact of Nature should appear at once as obvious. In the fable, for instance, of the fox and the raven we are unable at first blush to recognize the natural fact, although it is not wholly absent. It is, in truth, a genuine characteristic both of ravens and crows that they set about cawing when they happen to catch sight of strange objects, whatever they may be, whether man or beast, in sudden motion. Natural relations of a similar kind lie at the root of the fable of the thorn-bush, which plucks the wool off the passer-by, or wounds the fox that seeks refuge there, or that of the countryman who warms a snake in his bosom. Others set forth occurrences which may naturally form part of animal experience; take, for instance, the first example of the fables of Aesop where the eagle devours the cubs of the fox and carries off a hot coal attached to the sacrificial flesh which sets his nest on fire. And, in conclusion, we find that others contain traits of old myths, such as the fable of the dung-beetle, eagle, and Jupiter, where the circumstance borrowed from natural history — we will pass it by for what it is worth — appears to be referable to the different seasons of the year when the eagle and dung-beetle respectively lay their eggs; at the same time we may observe a clear intimation here of the traditional importance of the scarab, which, however, even in our present example, is already treated with an inclination toward comedy, an inclination still more pronounced in Aristophanes. As an excuse for not entering more fully here into the question how many of these fables can actually be traced to Aesop we mention the already well-established fact that only of quite a small minority — the last-cited one of dung-beetle and the eagle is among them — can it be shown that they date from Aesop’s time, or that in general terms there is any flavour of antiquity about them to support the view that Aesop is in fact their author.

Of Aesop himself we are informed that he was a deformed and humpbacked slave; and for his place of residence we are transported into Phrygia, the very land, that is, which marks the passage from the immediately symbolical and the existence still fettered on Nature, to a land in which man begins to take real hold of the spiritual and himself as the source of the same. In our present connection, no doubt, he does not behold the animal and natural world in the way the Hindoos and Egyptians beheld it, that is, as something of itself, superior and Divine. He regards it with prosaic vision as something whose relations are only of service in the presentment of a picture of human act and avoidance. His conceits are further merely the reflections of wit, without real energy of soul or depth of insight and a fundamental grasp of reality, without poetry and philosophy, in fact. His opinions and maxims are, in consequence, fairly rich in sensuous image and traits of cleverness, but we never get beyond the digging away into mere trifles, which, instead of creating free shapes from the unfettered life of spirit, is contented to discover some additional aspect that is new in material already close at hand, such as the specific instincts and habits of animals or other daily occurrences of little moment; and this is so because that which he would teach he is still afraid to express freely, and is only able to make it intelligible in a kind of riddle which is at the same time always being solved. Prose has its origin in the slave, and in the same way prose clings to the entire type of conception with which we are now concerned.

Despite this fact, however, the experience of almost all nations and times has in one form or another run through these old tales; and however much any particular people whose literature is generally well versed in fable may pride itself as possessing more than one fabulist of distinction, we shall find that their poetry is for the most part merely a reflection of these primary sallies of invention, merely translated into the vernacular of the age. All that has since been added to the general heritage of such conceits falls far behind the original legacy in real merit.

(b) There are, however, among these fables of Greek descent a number which betray the greatest poverty of invention and execution, being mere pegs on which to hang the instructive moral, so that the contents, whether they refer to gods or animals, have merely a formal significance. Yet even these are far enough removed from the modern tendency of doing violence to the animal world as we find it in Nature. An example of this tendency is that fable of Pfeffel about a marmot which collected provisions in autumn, an act of foresight which another marmot neglected, and so was brought to the condition of beggary and starvation. Or there is that other of the fox, the bloodhound, and the lynx, of whom it is narrated that they presented themselves before Jupiter, together with the talents which exclusively belonged to them of cunning, keen scent, and clear sight, and requested that these gifts should be equally divided between them; the fable goes on that they obtained such consent under these rather surprising terms: “The fox gets a blow on the forehead, the bloodhound is good for no more hunting, the Argus Lynx receives a cataract.” That a marmot should cease to make provision for its wants, or that the three animals above mentioned should ever incidentally meet with, or be naturally capable of receiving, a proportionate division of their respective gifts is contrary to all reason and consequently meaningless. A better fable than those above cited is that of the ant and the grasshopper, or that other of the deer with the beautiful horns and the slender legs.

Conformably to the tenor of fables of this kind we have grown, as a rule, accustomed to accept the moral of the fable as that which is of first importance, and to regard the narrative as merely an external form, and consequently an event entirely composed with a view to expound that moral. Embodiments of this sort, however, more particularly when the occurrence described is wholly at variance with the natural character of specific animals, are in the highest degree insipid, attempts at invention which mean less than nothing. The real ingenuity of a fable consists exclusively in this that it is able to impart to that which already exists in determinate form a further and more universal significance than that which is immediately presented.

The question has further been raised, in reference to the general assumption that the essence of a fable consists in setting before us the actions and speech of animals rather than those of mankind, as to what it is precisely which attracts us in this allusion. We cannot suppose, however, that there is after all much that is attractive in such a furbishing up of our humanity in animal form, even though it should exceed or at least differ from that of a comedy of apes and dogs, where, apart from the sight of the general cleverness of the dressing up, the entire interest consists rather in the deliberate contrast between animal nature as it really is and appears, and that represented as taking part in human affairs. On grounds of this sort Breitinger finds the attraction to consist entirely in the element of the marvellous. In the original type of the fable, however, the appearance of animals endowed with speech is not put before us as anything uncommon or surprising. And for this very reason Lessing is of the opinion that the introduction of animals is really of great use in helping us to understand and assisting the poet to abridge his exposition; in other words we are well acquainted with the qualities of animals, the cuteness of the fox, the magnanimity of the lion, the voracity and violence of the wolf, and are consequently able to set before our minds a concrete image in place of such abstract qualities. An advantage of this kind, however, in no essential degree mitigates the triviality of the relation when it has become one purely of form, and generally it is even a disadvantage to place animals thus before us instead of men, for the reason that the animal form remains a mask, which, so far as intelligibility is concerned, veils fully as much as it declares the significance.

The most important fable of this kind should be in that case the old history of Reinecke, the fox, which is notwithstanding strictly speaking no fable at all.

(c) In other words we may in conclusion add a third type of the fable, in which we find that there is already a tendency to pass beyond the real boundaries of the type. The ingenuity of a fable consists, as already pointed out, in the discovery of particular cases among the variety of natural phenomena, which we are able to use as evidential support of general reflections upon human action and behaviour, without essentially displacing the animal and natural world from its own native mode of existence. For the rest this general application or adaptation of the particular case to the so-called moral is an exercise of personal caprice, or shall we say native wit, and is therefore to all intents and purposes an affair of pleasantry. It is this aspect which receives the main emphasis in the type of fable now before us. The fable is in fact accepted as a witty jest. Goethe has written many a delightful and ingenious poem in this vein. The following lines occur in one of them, which is entitled “The Barking Dog”:

Down every road afield we ride

On business bent or pleasure;

And ever in our wake full-cry

A hound’s bark beats the measure.

Loosed from our horse’s stable he

Will always gallop beside us:

And this is what his clamour proves!

We ride, are with the riders.

It is equally necessary here, as in the case of Aesop’s fables, that objects which are borrowed from Nature should receive their native aspect, and only bring before us in their action and habits human circumstances, passions, and traits, which have a close affinity to those of the animal world. The story of Reinecke is one of this kind, and is really more a fairy-tale than a fable in the strict sense. We find in the content of this the reflection of an age of disorder and lawlessness, of evil generally, weakness, baseness, violence, and shamelessness, of unbelief in religion, that merely retains the appearance of a mastery, or indeed an established position in the world-drama; and the result is that craft, cunning, and selfishness have it all their own way. It is, in fact, the condition of the Middle Ages, more especially as developed in Germany. The powerful vassals pay, it is true, some appearance of respect to the king; but practically every man does as he pleases — robs, murders, oppresses the weak, betrays the king, finds a way somehow to the favours of the queen, so that if the community just holds together that is about all. Such is the human content, which by this fable is preserved, not in a mere abstract proposition but in an entire complexus of conditions and characters, and by reason of its baseness fits in with the animal nature exactly, under the forms of which it is unfolded. For this reason we find nothing embarrassing in the fact that it is without any reserves transferred to the animal realm; and for the same reason the particular form it takes does not so much appear as an exceptional case cognate with it; rather we are inclined to feel the singularity of it make way for a certain breadth of universality, a vision emphasizing the general truth: “Such is the way things happen in the world.” The comical side consists in the forms under which the whole is put together, drollery and jest being freely mingled with the bitter earnestness of the situation; the general effect of which is that we not only have human meanness admirably depicted through that of animals, but we are further made a present of the most entertaining traits, and most characteristic anecdotes wholly peculiar to animal life, so that, despite all tartness to the palate, our final view is that of a comedy whose main intention is neither bad nor purely capricious, but one that has genuine earnestness to support it.

(a) The Parable

Parable has this general affinity with fable, that it accepts events from the circle of common life, but also makes them the depositors of a higher and more universal significance, expressly with a view that the same shall become intelligible and objective by means of that daily occurrence in its ordinary guise. A difference, however, at once asserts itself between the parable and fable, and it is this, that the former selects such occurrences in human action and habits, as we have them every day before our eyes, rather than in Nature and the animal world; it then expands the particular case selected, which appears trite enough at first as such a particular, to the range of wider interest, by suggesting through it a higher kind of significance.

For this reason the range and the importance of the significances in wealth of content can materially be increased and deepened84, while, if we take the point of view of form, it is clear that the subjective process of intentional comparison and setting out of a generally instructive reflection already marks the acceptance and appearance of a more advanced type.

As a parable, still united to a wholly practical end, we may view the means of persuasion used by Cyrus to induce the Persians to rebel (Herod., I, cap. 126). His letter to the Persians advised them to betake themselves to a certain spot provided with sickles. When there he set them all on the first day to clear with hard labour a certain field overgrown with thistles. On the following day, however, after they had rested and bathed, he conducted them to a meadow and supplied them with ample cheer in the shape of food and wine. Finally, at the close of the feast, he asked of them which of the two days had proved the most enjoyable. All voted naturally for to-day rather than yesterday; the former had brought them only good things, while the latter had been a day of weariness and toil. On this Cyrus exclaimed: “Follow me, and many will be the good days such as the present has brought you. Refuse to follow me, and countless labours are in store quite a match for those of yesterday.” Of a type akin to the above, though of profoundest interest and the widest range considered relatively to their significance, are the parables we meet with in the Gospels. Take, for example, that of the sower, a narrative which as such possesses the most unimportant subject-matter, and whose significance centres throughout in the comparison it supplies to the preaching of the kingdom of heaven. The significance in these parables is wholly a religious gospel, to which the human occurrences, wherein such is imaginatively presented, stand in a relation similar to that between the animal and human world in the fables of Aesop, where the former elicits the meaning of the latter. Of a like breadth of content is the famous story of Boccaccio, which Lessing converted in his “Natham” into the parable of the three rings. The substance of the narrative is also in this case taken by itself nothing remarkable; the extraordinarily wide, reach of its content arises wholly from the way the differences between and the relative validity of the three religions, namely, the Jewish, the Mohammedan, and the Christian, are suggested by it. The same thing may be said of the latest novelties in this type of art, the parables of Goethe for example. Take that of the “cat-pasty.” In this a famous chef, in order to prove himself hunter no less than cook, went out hunting, but shot a tom-cat instead of a hare, which he then served up to the company sauced with his most consummate art. This is no doubt a reference to the Light theory of Newton. We have here under the guise of the hare-pie which the cook tried in vain to elaborate out of a cat a reflection of that abortive type of physical science which the mathematician will assume to be something better than it is. These parables of Goethe frequently have a strong touch of drollery about them, an aspect which they share with his fables by the help of which he was wont to shed himself of life’s disappointments.

(b) The Proverb

The proverb forms as it were the middle point of this sphere. In the form of their execution, that is to say, proverbs lean at one time in the direction of the fable, at another to that of the apologue. They give us a particular case selected for the most part from the daily walk of mankind, which, however, is to be interpreted universally. Take the example, “One hand washes the other,” or those others, “Every one wheels before his own door,” “Who digs a grave for another, falls into it himself,” “Bake a pudding for me and I will staunch your thirst,” and others like them. To wise saws of this type belong the many apophthegems that Goethe has contributed to modern literature, often of exquisite grace and profound to a degree. These are not modes of comparison of the type that the general significance and the concrete phenomenon are opposed to one another in separation, but the former is immediately expressed with the latter.

The apologue may be regarded as a parable, which not only serves in the way of comparison to render visible a general significance, but rather in this its very form reproduces and expresses the general moral, the same being actually included in the particular case, which is, however, related as only a single example. Conformably to this definition we may call Goethe’s “Der Gott und die Bajadere” an apologue. Here we find the Christian tale of the repentant Magdalene reclothed in accordance with Hindoo ideas. The Bajadere85 exemplifies the same humility, a like strength of love and faith; God puts her to the proof, an ordeal she completely sustains, and her exaltation and reconciliation follows. In the apologue also narrative is so extended that the outcome of it furnishes the moral itself, bare of any parallel to support it, as may be illustrated from “The Treasure-Finder”:

Work by day and guests at night,

Weeks of moil, feasts of delight,

Such the Future’s spell for thee.

The third mode we have to discuss in its contrast to the fable, parable, proverb, and apologue, is the metamorphosis. This is no doubt of a kind which is both symbolical and mythological; it sets forth, however, expressly furthermore the natural in its opposition to the spiritual. That is to say, it confers on an object immediately present to sense such as a rock, animal, flower, or spring the peculiar significance of being a delapsus and a punishment of spiritual existences. Such are the examples of Philomela, the Pieredes, Narcissus, and Arethusa, all of whom, through some false step, passion, transgression or the like, became subject to irreparable guilt or pain, and for this reason were deprived of the freedom of spiritual life, and united to the substance of physical nature. From one point of view Nature is not regarded merely under its external and prosaic aspect, simply, that is, as mountain, river-source, tree and so forth, but it further receives a content which is bound up with some action or event of spiritual life. The rock is not simply stone, but Niobe herself, who weeps for her children. From the other point of view this human action implies guilt of some kind, and this metamorphosis into the physical phenomenon is accepted as a degradation of Spirit.

It is therefore necessary to distinguish these metamorphoses of human individuals or gods very sharply from the genuine type of unconscious symbolism. To return to Egypt, for example, the Divine is here in part immediately envisaged in the mysterious and secluded intension of animal life, partly, too, the real symbol is here a natural form which is immediately associated with a wider significance cognate to it, despite the fact that this form is unable to supply the determinate existence fully commensurate with it; and this is so for the reason that neither in respect to its form or its content has unconscious symbolism arrived at the free outlook of Spirit. Metamorphosis, on the contrary, emphasizes the essential distinction between Nature and Spirit, and by doing so marks the passage from that which is both symbolical and mythological to that which is in the strict sense mythological, under, that is to say, a conception of the latter, which, albeit that it proceeds in its myths from a concrete fact of Nature such as sun, sea, rivers, trees, earth, and the like, nevertheless, further and expressly sets this purely natural aspect on one side and apart, divesting such natural phenomena of their inner content and individualizing the same as a spiritual Power in the adequate artistic form of gods clothed in the lineaments of humanity, whether we regard them as external shape or spiritual activity. In this sense Homer and Hesiod have given to the Greeks their mythology, a mythology which by no means merely consists in the revelation of the significance of such gods, by no means is merely an exposition of moral, physical, theological, or speculative doctrine, but one that is a mythology in the strict sense, that is the origin of a spiritual religion under the genuine guise of our humanity.

In the Metamorphoses of Ovid the most heterogeneous material is brought together quite apart from the entirely modern spirit in which myth is treated. Beside the mere aspect of metamorphosis, which could here in general terms only be conceived as a kind of mythical representation, we have the specific character87 of this type raised in an exceptional way in these narrations, in which embodiments of this sort, which are commonly accepted as symbolical, or are already received in their entirely mythical character, appear to have been converted into metamorphoses, and that which is elsewhere united is so presented as to assert an opposition between its significance and form, and the passage of the one into the other. In this way, for instance, the Phrygian or Egyptian symbol, the wolf, is so separated from its intrinsic significance, that the same is converted into a previous existence if not actually into the kingship of the Sun, and the existence of the wolf is conceived as resulting from an act of that human existence. In the same way in the song of the Pierides the Egyptian gods, the ram, the cat, and so forth are imaged as such animal forms, in which the mythical gods of Greece, Jupiter, Venus, and the rest have concealed themselves from sheer fright. The Pierides themselves, however, by way of punishment, in that they dared to rival the Muses with their singing, are changed into woodpeckers.

Looked at from another side it is equally necessary, with a view to securing the more accurate definition, which the content wherein the significance consists essentially carries, that we distinguish the metamorphosis from the fable. That is to say in the fable the binding together of the moral with the natural fact is an association that is harmless; for in this the thing of Nature, regarded under the mode in which it differs in its natural aspect from Spirit, does not affect the significance, although there are certainly single examples of the fables of Aesop, which, with but slight alteration, would be instances of metamorphosis. As such may be cited the forty-second fable of the bat, the thorn-bush, and the diver, whose instincts are explained as due to the ill-luck of former experiences.

And here we must end our passage through this the first circle of the comparative type of art. It started from that which was immediately present to sense, that is, the concrete phenomenon. We proceed now from the point we have arrived at to examine a further kind of significance which the type unfolds.

B. COMPARISONS, WHICH IN THEIR IMAGINATIVE PRESENTMENT HAVE THEIR ORIGIN IN THE SIGNIFICANCE.

Forasmuch as the severation of significance from embodiment is the hypostasized form for consciousness, within which the relation of both originates independently, it is both possible and inevitable that in the articulation of the self-subsistency of one side no less than the other a start should be made not only from external existence, but conversely and as emphatically from that which is immediately present to the conscious subject, in other words general conceptions, reflections, emotions, and principles of thought. For this inward aspect is equally with the images of external objects a subject-matter present to consciousness and in its independence of that which is external proceeds on its way from its own resources. In the case, then, where we find the significance is the point of departure, the expression, that is, the reality, appears as the modus formulandi, which is abstracted from the concrete world in order to give a visible and sensuously defined shape to the significance regarded as abstract content.

Owing, however, to the reciprocally indifferent relation under which both sides confront each other, this association which binds the two sides together is, as we have already seen, no essentially explicit and necessary union; consequently the relation, such as it is, that is no actual reflection of objective fact, is rather a product of active mind, which no longer even disguises this its fundamental character, but rather deliberately exposes it in the form of its representation. The very embodiment possesses this binding together of form and content, soul and body, under the guise of concrete animation88, as essentially and explicitly the substantial union of both sides in the soul as in the body, in the content as in the form. In the case before us, however, what is presupposed by consciousness is the dislocation of the two sides, and consequently their association is the vivification of the significance simply for consciousness by means of a shape external to it, and an indication of a real existence, equally subjective in its character through the relation of the same to the general conceptions, emotions, and thoughts common to humanity. For this reason what is mainly emphasized in these forms of comparative art is the subjective art of the poet in his creative capacity, and in complete works of art we have mainly in our attitude to this particular aspect of them to separate that which strictly is appurtenant to their subject-matter and its necessary embodiment from that which is attached to them by the poet as mere ornament and embellishment. Such accessory detail, which we cannot fail to distinguish, that is, consisting mainly of images, similes, allegories, and metaphor, is precisely that part of his work in virtue of which he earns his title to fame with most people, a tendency which is all the more common because it indirectly bears witness to the insight and subtlety which enables such critics to discover our poet and draw attention to that aspect of his invention which is so entirely his own. But for all that, as we have already observed, in genuine works of art such forms as those we are discussing can only be regarded as accessory, although we doubtless do find in previous works on Poetics such incidental features treated as precisely those which go to make the poet.

Furthermore however, though unquestionably in the first instance the two sides which have to be associated stand in a relation of indifference to one another, yet in order to justify the subjective relation and comparison, the embodiments must also in the character of its content itself include the same relations and qualities under a cognate mode to that which the significance intrinsically possesses; the grasp of this similarity is, in fact, the one sure ground upon which the setting forth of the significance in union with this specific form rather than any other, and the envisagement of such import by its means is based. Lastly, inasmuch as we begin here, not from the concrete phenomenon, by the abstraction of a general characteristic from that, but conversely from this universal itself, which the intention is to have reflected in an image, the significance secures the position which makes it stand out actually as the real object, and as such is predominant over the sensuous picture which is the modus of its envisagement.

The series in which we propose now to examine the particular types we have mentioned as belonging to this phase of comparative art may be indicated as follows:

First in order, as most cognate to the previous stage, the riddle will enlist our attention.

Secondly, we have to examine the allegory, in which as the main feature we shall find the abstract significance assert a mastery over the external form.

Thirdly, we have the class of the comparison in its strict sense; metaphor, image, and simile.

The true symbol is essentially enigmatical in so far as the externality, by means of which a general significance is made apparent, still differs from the import it is intended to express: in other words it thereby raises the doubt as to what is the exact signification applicable to the form. The riddle, however, appertains to conscious symbolism, and an obvious distinction between it and the genuine symbol is to be found in the fact that in the former case the meaning is clearly and fully recognized by the propounder of it, and the form which veils that which is to be interpreted by it is therefore intentionally selected for this very purpose. The genuine symbol is both before and after the act of selection an unsolved problem, the riddle, on the contrary, is essentially a problem that is solved. It is therefore with very good reason that Sancho Panza exclaims: “I should much prefer to hear the solution first and the riddle afterwards.”

(a) First, then, in the invention of the riddle, the point from which the process starts, is the apprehended meaning, the signification of it.

(b) The second step consists in the intentional selection of traits of character and other qualities from the common experience of the external world, which — such is always the aspect of Nature and external objects of every kind — are placed relatively to one another in piecemeal fashion, and in thus setting them forth in disparate contiguity, which makes their singularity the more striking. And inasmuch as they are so placed they are without the enfolding unity of mind, and their array and association intentionally distract has so far no intrinsic significance whatever. And yet for all that, and this is the other aspect of the riddle, they do expressly point to a unity in relation to which even traits to all appearance most heterogeneous contain, notwithstanding, both a real sense and significance.

(c) This unity, which may be styled the subject of these distract predicates, is just the simple preconception, the word that solves our riddle, to discover or divine which from the apparently confused medley of the mode under which it is propounded is the riddle’s problem. Thus interpreted we may call the riddle the facetiousness of symbolism, aware that it is such which puts to the proof acuteness of insight and aptness at putting things together, and finally, by stimulating the zest of solution, breaks into and destroys the very mode of presentation it has itself set up. In the main we shall find this, form, therefore, most employed in human speech, though we may find exceptional examples of it also in the plastic arts89, architecture, horticulture, and painting. With regard to its historical appearance the East is first and foremost responsible, and we may date its advent in that intermediate and transitional period out of the more obtuse type of symbolism into one of more intelligent knowledge and comprehension. Entire peoples and historical epochs have taken delight in the solution of such problems. It also plays an important part in the Middle Ages among the Arabs and the Scandinavians, and as a particular example it is much in evidence in the minstrel tourneys on the Wartburg. In modern times it is mainly under the more modest guise of recreation and purely social pleasantry that we cross it.

In the riddle we have opened a practically limitless field for witty and striking conceits, which in their reference to any given circumstance, occurrence, or object take the form of a play upon words or an epigrammatical sentence. On the one hand we have presented an object trite to a degree, on the other some conceit of the mind which emphasizes unexpectedly with conspicuous force some aspect or relation, which we failed to perceive in that object on first confronting it, and which now attaches to it the light of a new significance.

The counterpart to the riddle in this sphere of comparative art, where the point of departure is from the generality of the significance, is the allegory. From a certain point of view this form, no less than the former, endeavours to make more visible to us the definite qualities of a general conception through qualities in materially concrete objects which are cognate therewith; but in contrast to that form this is not done in the interest of a partial concealment and a mysterious problem; rather it is now quite the other way with the express object of absolute revealment; to an extent, in fact, that all which is external, and is as such utilized by it, must become through and through transpicuous with the significance which has to make its appearance therein.

(a) It is therefore in the first place concerned to personify abstract conditions of a general character or similar qualities both from the human and the natural world, such as religion, love, justice, strife, fame, war, peace, the seasons, death, and the like, and conceive them under the mode of personality. This subjective aspect, however, is neither in respect to its content nor its external form in itself either a real subject or individual, but persists as the abstraction of a general conception, whose content is merely the barren form of subjectivity which may be called as truly a grammatical subject90. In other words an allegorical being, despite every attempt to clothe it in the lineaments of humanity, entirely falls short of concrete individuality, whether it be a Greek god, a saint, or any other genuine example. It is, in fact, so forced to pare away91 from the substance of subjectivity, in order to make it conform with the abstract character of its significance, that all the true definition of individuality disappears. It is therefore only a just criticism of allegory to say that it is frosty and cold, and, having regard to the abstract quality of its significances, even in the point of invention, that it is rather the result of the matter-of-fact understanding than that of the complete vision and emotional depth of genuine imagination. Poets, such as Virgil, for example, are particularly ready to give us examples of allegorical individualization simply because they are unable to create gods of the Homeric type of personality.

(b) Secondly, however, the significant character of allegorical material is at once defined in its abstraction, and only by means of such definition is it intelligible; the expression of such particular aspects, for the reason that it is not immediately unfolded in that which is in the first instance a purely generalized conception of personality, is consequently forced to appear alongside of the subject, simply as the predicates which elucidate the same. This separation of subject from predicate, generality from particularity, is the second feature of the frostlike appearance of the allegory. The envisagement of the determinate and specific qualities is borrowed from the modes of expression, activity, and resultant effects which make their appearance in virtue of the significance, when that secures its realized form in concrete existence, or from the various means which subserve it in its true realization. For example, war is delineated through weapons, cannons, drums, and standards, etc.; the yearly seasons, by an enumeration of the flowers and fruits, which pre-eminently spring up under the favouring influence of the particular seasons. Objects of this kind may further receive purely symbolical relations, as, for instance, Justice may be brought home to our minds by means of the scales and fillet, Death by that of the hour-glass and scythe. For the reason, however, that the significance in allegory is the dominant factor, and the more specialized presentment is subordinate to it under an equally abstract form, for it is, after all, itself merely an abstraction, the embodiment of such definable characteristics only secures the validity of an attribute pure and simple.

(c) In this way the allegory is under both these aspects without vital warmth. Its general personification is empty, the definite mode of its externalization is only a sign, which taken independently has no longer any meaning, and the centrum, which is thus constrained to gather up the variety of the attributes into a focus does not possess the potency of a truly subjective unity which is itself self-embodied in its real and determinate existence inter-related throughout, but is rather a purely abstract form, for which the substantial filling-up with particular traits, which, as we have seen, never succeed in rising above the rank of the formal attribute, remains as something external. Consequently we may say that in so far as the allegory sets up any claim to real self-consistency, in which it personifies its abstraction and their delineation, it is not to be taken seriously. In other words, that which is both implicitly and explicitly self-substantive is unable really to conform with an allegorical being. The Dikê of the ancients, for instance, is not on all fours with allegorical individualization. She is universal Necessity personified, eternal Justice, the universally potent subject, the absolute substantivity of the relations which co-ordinate Nature and spiritual Life, that is, she is the absolute Self-subsistent itself, in the train of whom all other individuals are bound, whether gods or men. Herr Frederick von Schlegel has, it is true — we have already referred to the fact — ventured the opinion that every work of art must of necessity be an allegory. Such an expression of opinion is only true if limited to the sense that every work of art must contain a general idea and a significance which is itself essentially true. What we have above, on the contrary, included under the term allegory is a mode of presentation which only conforms to the notion of art incompletely, being itself no less in content than in form subordinate to it. Every human event and development, every relation in which life is concerned, possesses no doubt intrinsically an aspect of universality, which may be emphasized as such, but abstractions of this kind are already to be found in the general contents of consciousness, and merely to assert them in their prosaic aspect of generality and external delineation, which is the point where the allegory halts, is still to fall short of the true sphere of art.

Winckelmann has also written an immature work on allegory, in which he has ranged together a large number of examples, but failed for the most part to distinguish those which exemplify the symbol and allegory respectively.

Among the particular arts within which we find examples of the allegory, poetry is really acting contrary to its laws when it takes refuge in such a mode of presentment; sculpture on the contrary is in most directions barely complete without it, more especially modern sculputure, which freely admits of that which is native to portraiture, and so must avail itself of allegorical figures in order to delineate more closely the relative aspects under which the individual presentment is posed. On Blucher’s monument, for example, which has been raised to him here in Berlin, we find both the genius of Fame and Victory, although, having regard to the general treatment of the war of liberation, this allegorical aspect is once more set aside by means of a series of particular scenes such as the departure of the army, its march, and victorious return. Generally speaking, however, where the subject of sculpture is portraiture the sculptor will avail himself gladly of allegorical representation as offering to the simplicity of his central figure the contrast of environment and variety. The ancients on the other hand, on their sarcophagi for example, more frequently made use of general mythological representations of such figures as Sleep, Death, and the like.

Allegory generally is far less common in the antique than it is in the romantic art of the Middle Ages, although it must be added that such romance as it possesses is not really referable to allegory. The frequent appearance of allegorical conception at this particular epoch of human history is to be thus explained. From a certain point of view we find that the content of the Middle Ages is preoccupied with particular types of individuality and the personal aims, generally focussed in love and honour, and resulting in vows, wanderings, and adventures, which are common to them. Individuals of this type and the events of such lives invariably offer the imagination a wide scope for the inventive faculties, and the composition of accidental and capriciously imagined collisions and their resolution. On the other hand, in direct contrast to this motley show of worldly adventure we have the universal, taking it here as the stability of the ordinary relations and conditions of life, a universal which is not, as was the case in the ancient world, individualized in the figures of self-subsistent gods; consequently we find it freely and naturally emphasized in independent isolation as such universality alongside of these particular types of personality and their specific modes of appearance and activity. If the artist therefore happens to have before his mind the general conditions of life we have adverted to, and assuming that he is desirous of giving artistic embodiment to them in some form other than the accidental mode common to his age, that he wishes, in short, to emphasize their universality, he has no other alternative than to accept the allegorical type of presentment. This is precisely what we find in the sphere of religion.

The Virgin Mary, Christ, the actions and dramatic events of apostolic history, the saints with their penances and martyrdoms, are, it is true, even here individualities in the full sense; but Christendom is also to an equal extent concerned with the general conceptions of abstract spiritual qualities, such as will not comply with the concrete definition of actual persons inasmuch as the relation of universality is precisely the mode under which they are presented, of which examples are Love, Faith, and Hope. And generally the truths and dogmas of Christendom are independently cognized by the religious consciousness, and a main interest even of their poetry consists in this that these doctrines are emphasized in their universal aspect, that Truth is known and believed in as universal truth. In that case, however, it is necessary that the concrete presentation should remain a subordinate factor, itself external to the content, and allegory is just the form which satisfies this want in the easiest and most sufficient way. Conformably to this the divine comedy of Dante is full of allegorical matter. Theology, for example, in this poem is run together in fusion with the image of his beloved lady Beatrice. This personification, however, wavers in the lines of its delineation; and this uncertainty of outline is that which constitutes the beauty of it, and places it halfway between genuine allegory and a vision of his youthful love. In the ninth year of his life he looked on her for the first time: she appeared to him no daughter of mortal men, but of God. His fiery Italian nature conceived a passion for her, which the years failed to extinguish. And conscious that it was she who awoke in him the genius of poetry he finally sets himself the task, after he had lost in her that which was most loved in the fairest flower of its promise, of composing that wonderful monument of the most intimate and personal religion of his heart in the poetic masterpiece of his life.

The third sphere of content attached to the riddle and the allegory consists in the imaged thing generally. The riddle veiled the still independently cognized significance and the mode of its shaping in cognate, albeit heterogeneous and distantly placed traits of definition was still of most importance. Allegory on the contrary emphasized the perspicuity of the significance so strongly as the predominant aim, that the personification and its attributes appear deposed to the rank of mere signs. The imaged thing now connects this clarity of allegorical expression with that impulse of the riddle to envisage the significance which stands out clearly before the mind in the form of an externality cognate with it; the result, however, is not that it gives rise to problems which have first of all to be solved, but rather that the imaged shape appears, by means of which the preconceived conception is revealed with absolute transparency, notifying itself as that which it really is.

(a) The Metaphor

The first point we have to draw attention to in the metaphor is this, that it may be accepted at once as essentially a simile, in so far as it expresses clear and self-subsistent significance in a similar phenomenon of reality comparable with it. In the comparison as such, however, both sides of the comparison, that is the real meaning and the image, are definitely kept apart from each other, while on the contrary in the metaphor this separation, albeit it is essentially present, is not as yet clearly posited. For this reason Aristotle long ago distinguished comparison and metaphor by his statement that a “how” is added to the former which is absent from the latter. In other words the metaphorical expression specifies but one aspect, the image. In the context, however, to which the image is attached, the real significance which is intended lies so near that it is at the same time immediately asserted without any direct separation of it from the image. When it is said, for example: “the Spring-time of these cheeks,” or “a sea of tears,” we are inevitably forced to accept such an expression as an image rather than an actual fact, an image whose significance the context at the same time expressly designates. In the symbol and allegory the relation of actual meaning to external form is not asserted either so immediately or necessarily. From the fact that an Egyptian staircase consists of nine stages, and a hundred other circumstances of similar pregnancy, it is only the adept, the connoisseur, and the professor who will derive a symbolical significance, and doubtless will scent out and discover much that is both mystical and symbolical into the bargain, which is so much ingenuity of research thrown away for the reason that what is discovered is not there. This may have happened often enough to my honoured friend Creutzer, no less than our latter-day Platonists and the commentators of Dante.

(a) In range and variety of form it is impossible to exhaust the resources of metaphor; its definition, however, is simple. It is a wholly abbreviated comparison, in which we find, as a fact, image and significance are not as yet set in opposition to one another, but only the image is introduced by it; at the same time, however, the meaning which is thus attached to the image is not its real meaning; this is as it were effaced, and by virtue of the content in which it is set we are enabled to recognize the significance which is really intended in the image itself, albeit that meaning is not expressly asserted.

For the reason, however, that the meaning that is thus rendered intelligible under the image only comes to light by virtue of the context, the significance which is expressed in metaphor cannot claim the importance of an independent artistic presentation; their mode of appearance is purely incidental, so that metaphors, in a still more emphatic degree, can only be employed as the external embellishment of an essentially independent work of art.

(β) The metaphor is mainly used in the expressions of speech, which we may usefully consider in this relation under the following aspects.

(αα) In the first place every language includes within its own compass a host of metaphors. They arise from the fact that a word, which in the first instance merely designates something entirely sensuous, is carried over into a spiritual sphere. “Grasp”, “comprehend”92, and generally a number of words connected with the processes of thought, have in regard to their original meaning a content that is wholly sensuous, which is consequently abandoned and exchanged for the meaning applicable to mind; the first meaning is sensuous, the second spiritual.

(ββ) By degrees, however, the metaphorical aspect disappears in the general use of such a word, which as the current coin of language is converted from an expression which is not strictly accurate to one that is so, the effect of this process being that image and import, owing to the habitual frequency with which the latter is only conceived in the former, cease to differ from one another, and the image merely immediately presents the abstract significance itself instead of a concrete mode of vision93.

When we take, for example, the word “grasp” in the sense applicable to mental life it entirely escapes us that there is any sensuous relation implied between the hand and external objects94. In living languages this distinction between genuine metaphor and words which already through usage have fallen to the level of a mere means of expression is readily established; the reverse is the case with dead languages, for the reason that here mere etymology is unable finally to bring our minds to a decision, inasmuch and in so far as the question does not depend on the original source of that word, and its general development in speech, but first and foremost on the fact whether a word which has all the appearance of being used in a picturesque and metaphorical sense had or had not already lost by habitual usage under a meaning applying exclusively to spirit, and in the speech when alive, its first sensuous significance and been absorbed wholly in that higher sense.

(γγ) When this takes place the invention of new metaphors, which are the exclusive product of the poetical imagination becomes for the first time a vital necessity. That in which this invention is mainly concerned consists first in transferring the phenomena, activities, and conditions of a higher level of fact in a way that illustrates the content of less important material, and in bringing to light significances of such inferior matter in the form and image which stands above them. The organic, for example, is by itself essentially of higher importance than the inorganic, and to carry forward that which has no life within, the range of vital phenomenal enhances its expression. We may illustrate this with the saying of Ferdusi: “The keenness of my sword devours the brain of the lion, and drinks the dark blood of the courageous.” In a yet more enhanced degree we find the same result when that which is of Nature and sensuous is imaged, and thereby raised and ennobled in the form of spiritual phenomena. So we have such common turns of speech as “smiling fields,” and “angry flood,” or in the language of Calderon: “The waves sigh beneath the burden of ships.” In these examples that which exclusively applies to humanity is diverted to the expression of Nature. The Latin poets use such metaphorical language often enough, as we may find in our Virgil, take the example: Quum graviter tunsis gemit area frugibus (Georg., III, 132).

Conversely and in the second place that which pertains to mind is brought in the same way more close to our powers of vision through the image of natural objects. Such fanciful presentations, however, can very readily degenerate into mere trifling and far-fetched conceits, when that which is essentially without life receives notwithstanding every appearance of individuality, and really spiritual activities are assigned to it with perfect seriousness. The Italians more especially have given themselves over to illusive trickery of this kind, and even Shakespeare is not wholly free from them, as in that passage from “Richard II” (Act V, sc. I), where he makes the King say to the Queen on parting:

For why, the senseless brands will sympathize

The heavy accent of thy moving tongue

And in compassion weep the fire out;

And some will mourn in ashes, some coal-black

For the deposing of a rightful king.

(γ) Finally, if we look at the aim and interest of that which is metaphorical, the first thing which strikes us is that a word in the strict sense is an independently intelligible expression, the metaphor otherwise. The question consequently presents itself, what is the reason of this twofold means of expression, or, to put it another way, why is it that we have the metaphorical which essentially implies this division? The common explanation is that metaphors are used to give vivacity to poetical composition, and this animating effect is the ground in virtue of which Heyne, in particular, insists on their value. The vivacity consists in the support they offer to imaginative vision in the direction of clear definition, divesting the word, which is always something generalized, of its purely indefinite character, and bringing it home to sense by means of an image. No doubt a greater degree of vivacity is to be found in metaphors than in the strict expressions of ordinary speech; genuine vitality, however, is not to be sought for in metaphors, whether in isolation or combination, whose figurative plasticity, it is true, may frequently include a relation, which by good chance attaches at the same time to the expression an increased perspicuity and a higher definition, but quite as often, if every detail of the process of thought is thus figuratively emphasized in isolation, makes the whole unwieldy, overloading it thus with its emphasis on singular aspects.

The genius of metaphorical diction is consequently, as we shall have to elucidate more closely in our consideration of simile, to be regarded as responding to a need and potency of mind and the emotional life, which will not rest satisfied with that which is entirely simple, ordinary, and homely, but make an effort beyond this and over into something more recondite under the attraction which distinction offers and the impulse to co-ordinate contrasted effects. This binding together has itself again various causes, which may be notified as follows.

(αα) First, we have it for the sake of reinforcing an effect. The emotional life, under the pressure and movement of its passions, gives visible utterance to these forces by means of the piling up of sensuous image. More than this, it strives to express its own whirl and tumble, or persistence in the ideas which crowd upon it by means of a similar letting itself go into phenomena cognate with such a condition, and its own free movement among images of the greatest variety. In Calderon’s supplication to the Cross Julia utters the following words when she looks upon the dead body of her only just deceased brother, and her lover, Eusebio, the man who has killed Lisardo, stands before her:

O that I might close for ever

Eyes before this blood here guiltless,

Blood which cries for vengeance with its

Flooding stream of purple flowers!

Would that I could deem thee pardoned

In the rush of tears that blind thee:

Wounds and eyes are mouths which swallow

Lies which seek admittance never, etc.

With a still more vehement burst of passion Eusebio starts back from the sight of her, when Julia finally is for surrendering herself to him, as he exclaims:

Flaming sparks thine eyeballs scatter;

Every sigh is breath that scorches;

Every word is a volcano,

Every hair a scribbled lightning,

Every word is Death, and every

Soft caress is Hell’s own anguish;

Such the horror stirs within me

As I see — O awful symbol,

Crucifix thy bosom carries.

The human soul on the swell of its emotion keeps adding image on image to that immediately confronting it, and with all this impetuous seeking to and fro for new means of expression barely lays to rest its own tumult.

(ββ) A second rationale of the metaphorical consists in this that the human soul, after adding to its own depth by this the motion of its own life into the varied survey of objects cognate with it, is stirred at the same time to cast itself free of the externality of such objects, to the extent that it seeks to rediscover itself in what is external; it transmutes that external in its own free activity, and by clothing both itself and its passions in the forms of beauty, proclaims furthermore its power to present in visible semblance its own exaltation above the bare fact.

(γγ) A third ground of figurative expression, and one of at least equal force, may be found in the purely ribald exuberance of the phantasy, which is unable to set before us an object in its own outlines for what they are worth, or a significance in its unadorned simplicity, but on all occasions hankers after some concrete embodiment cognate with it, or is overmastered by the ingenuity of a personal caprice, which, in order to escape the commonplace, abandons itself to the charms of the piquant novelty, a caprice that is never satisfied until it has discovered for us points of affinity in material the most remote apparently from that before us, and has thereby related the same to the most distant objects.

And we may here observe that it is not so much the prosaic and poetic style generally as the style of the classic world in contrast with that of later periods which presents such a marked difference in the pre-eminent importance they attach to genuine or metaphorical expression respectively. It is not merely the Greek philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, or the great historians and orators, such as Thucydides and Demosthenes, but also the great poets, Homer and Sophocles, who, albeit we find examples of the simile in all them, remain on the whole, and without exception, constant in the use of their direct form of expression95. Their plastic severity and sterling substance will not permit them such a multifarious product, as is bound up with the use of metaphor, nor will it suffer them, even for the sake of gathering the so-called flowers of expression, to waver fitfully in devious ways from their ideal mintage of the completely simple and co-ordinate result as of one metal cast in one mould. The metaphor, in fact, is always an interruption to the logical course of conception and invariably to that extent a distraction, because it starts images and brings them together, which are not immediately connected with the subject and its significance, and for this reason tend to a like extent to divert the attention from the same to matter cognate with themselves, but strange to both. The prose of ancient writers in the extraordinary clarity and flexibility of its utterance and their poetry in the repose of its completely unfolded content96, are equally removed from the frequent use of metaphor by modern writers.

On the other hand it is particularly in the East, and above all the later literature of Mohammedan poetry, which makes use of the indirect or figurative modes of expression, and, indeed, finds them essential. The same thing may be said, if less emphatically, of modern European literature. The diction of Shakespeare, for instance, is full of metaphor. The Spaniards, too, are very fond of this flowery region, and, indeed, have wandered off into it to the point of the most tasteless exaggeration and superfluity. Jean Paul falls under the same charge. Goethe by virtue of the equal strength and clarity of his vision to a less extent. Schiller, however, is even in his prose exceedingly rich both in image and metaphor; in his case this is rather due to his effort to bring really profound ideas within the range of the imaginative vision without being forced to expound all they imply for the mind in the technical language of philosophy. We behold and find there the essential unity of the speculative reason reflected on the mirror of Life as it stands before us.

(b) The Image

We may place the image midway between the metaphor and the simile. It has, in fact, so close an affinity with the metaphor that we may regard it as merely a metaphor fully amplified97, an aspect which at the same time marks its very close resemblance to the simile; there is, however, this distinction, that in the case of the image as such the significance is not set forth in its independent opposition to the concrete external object expressly compared with it. That which we term the image arises when two phenomena or conditions, which by themselves stand substantially apart, are placed in concurrence so that one condition supplies the significance which is made intelligible by means of the other. The first, that is to say, the fundamental modus of the definition constitutes here the relation of independent consistency98, and is the line of division of the spheres in their separation, from which both the significance and its image are deduced; and that which is common to them, the qualities and relations and so forth, are not, as in the symbol, the indefinite universal and substantive itself, but the self-defined concrete existence on the one side no less than on the other99.

(a) Under a relation such as this the image may possess as its significance a whole series of conditions, activities, contrasts, and modes of existence, and manifest the same through a series of a similar nature from an independent if cognate source, without emphasizing in so many words the significance as such within the limits of the image. The poem of Goethe, entitled “The Song of Mahomet,” is of this kind. It is merely the title here which shows us that in the image of a rocky water-spring which, in the freshness of youth, leaps over the cliff’s edge into the abyss, and which then spreads away with the rush of tributary springs down the plain, ever and anon taking up fraternal rivers, which gives further a name to localities, and sees whole towns subject to its glory, until it finally bears in the tumultuous folds of its rapturous heart all these splendours, the brothers, its possessions, its children, to the great source that awaits them — it is, we repeat, merely the title which explains to us that in this comprehensive and radiant image of a mighty river we have the first bold appearance of Mahomet, then the rapid spread of his teaching, and, finally, the deliberately planned attempt to bring all nations to the one faith set forth with such singular directness. We may view in a similar way many of the Xenien of Goethe and Schiller, those sentences edged in part with scorn, but as often the mere vehicle of good spirits, which were flung at the public and its weak authors in particular. Take the pair of distiches which follow, as an example:

Stille kneteten wir Salpeter, Kohlen und Sewefel,

Bohrten Röhren, gefall’ nun auch das Feuer work euch!

Einige steigen als leuchtende kugeln und andere zünden,

Manche auch werfen wir nur spielend das Aug’ zu erfreun100.

Ay, we have in truth seen not a few rockets of this order changed to dull ash, to the exceeding entertainment of the better half of public opinion, only too delighted when the rabble of commonplace and miserable quality, which had for a long time spreadeagled it far and wide and laid down the law, received a genuine smack in the mouth and a bucket of cold water over its precious body into the bargain.

(β) In these last examples there is, however, already a second aspect brought to view, which in our consideration of the image should be emphasized. In other words the content is in these cases an individual which acts, brings before us objects, experiences specific states, etc., and then is reflected in the image not as such a subject, but merely with a reference to his particular actions, workings, and experiences. The individual himself as subject is, on the contrary, introduced without an image, and it is only his actions and relations strictly viewed which contain the form of indirect expression. Here, too, as in the case of the image generally, it is not the entire significance which is separated from its mode of embodiment, but the subject is alone set forth independently, while the definite content of that subject receives at the same time the form of an image; and the result is that the subject is imagined in such a way as though it was itself the means which supplied the imaged form of their existence to the objects and actions in question. The metaphorical relation is, in fact, ascribed to the individual subject expressly named. This confusion, or at least interfusion of the direct and indirect modes of expression has frequently been the subject of adverse criticism, but we do not find very solid ground to support it101.

(γ) Orientals are to an extraordinary degree distinguished by the bold use they make of this type of imagery. They will unite together and intertwine in one image entirely independent forms of existence. Take for example this sentence of Hafiz: “The life-course of the world is a bloodstained dagger, and the drops which fall therefrom are crowns.” Or that other: “The sword of the sun drips in the red of morning with the blood of Night, over which it has won the victory.” Or again this: “No one has yet drawn aside the veil from the cheeks of thought as Hafis since the day when the tips of the locks of the Word’s bride were curled.” The meaning of this image may be apparently thus expanded. Thought is the bride of the word; so Klopstock calls the word the twin-brother of Thought, and since this bride has been adorned by man with delicately turned words, no one is likely to be more competent than Hafis to suffer the thought thus adorned to appear in the clarity of its unveiled beauty.

From this last type of imagery we may proceed without a break to the consideration of simile. For in the image we already find the initial appearance of the independent and imageless expression of this significance, the subject of the image being here designated. The two types are, however, distinguished by this that in the simile everything which exclusively manifests the image in a figurative form is furthermore able to receive an independently subsistent mode of expression as significance, which thereby appears alongside of its image and is placed in comparison with the same. The metaphor and image declare the significances without making that declaration explicit, so that it is only the context, in which either metaphor or image occur, which shows without disguise what their meaning veritably is intended to be. In the simile, on the contrary, both aspects, image and significance, albeit no doubt we find at one time it is the image, and at another the significance which is most clearly and fully emphasized, are kept completely apart and set forth each in its isolation, and only then, and in such severation are related to one another in virtue of the similarity of their content.

Viewed in this relation it is possible to characterize the simile as to some extent merely a vain repetition, in so far, that is, as one and the same content is reproduced in a twofold, or it may be threefold or fourfold form. In part, too, we may even see in it a frequently wearisome superfluity, for the reason that the significance is already there as an independent factor, and requires no further mode of figuration to render it intelligible. The question consequently presses upon us here with even more insistence than in the case of the image and metaphor, what essential interest and object there may be in the employment of isolated examples or a whole number of similes. For their use is not to be justified on the commonly received ground of mere vivacity, and the contention that they increase the lucidity of expression will assist us just as little. On the contrary similes make a poem only too frequently insipid and overweighted, and an image or metaphor by itself can possess a clarity fully as pronounced without there being any previous necessity to attach the significance to either as something still outside.

We must consequently conceive the object of the simile to consist in this, that the subjective102 imagination of the poet, however much it has brought home to the artist’s consciousness the content, which it seeks to express, with distinctive emphasis according to its more abstract generality and expresses it in this universal aspect, yet it finds itself equally under a constraint to seek out a concrete form for it, and to envisualize for itself in the phenomena of sense that which already is clearly before the mind as its significance. Looked at in this way we shall find that the simile is, no less than the image and the metaphor, indicative of the bravery which invariably distinguishes imaginative power when it faces its object, it matters not what, it may be a single object of sense-perception, a definite condition, or a general significance — the enterprise, that is, to bind together with its own activity that which lies remote from it in its external environment, and by so doing to carry away by force objects of the greatest variety, and unite them to the interest which its unified content possesses, and generally to annex to the matter in hand a whole world of diversified phenomena. And this power of the imagination continually to find out the new plastic shape, and cement together heterogeneous material by means of the relations and associations of sense is, in general terms, also the rational basis of the simile.

(α) In the first place, then, this impulse to compare can find satisfaction simply by virtue of the demand which it satisfies, without bringing to light, that is to say, anything else in the brilliancy of its images than the bravery of the imagination itself. And this is but the same thing as that revelry103 of imaginative power, which, more particularly in the East, with all the easy-going tranquillity of the South regales itself in the wealth and splendour of its images nor seeks any other object, while it seduces the hearer to give himself up to the same spirit. At the same time we are frequently astounded by the amazing force, with which the poet surrenders himself to ideas of the most startling contrasts, and displays a cunning of combination which far exceeds all the effort of mere wittiness as an indication of genius. Calderon, too, supplies us with many comparisons of this type, more particularly in his pictures of important and splendid pageants and festive processions, in his descriptions of chargers and cavaliers, or in his reference to ships, which on one occasion he calls “birds without pinions, and fish without fins.”

(β) A second and more intimate aspect of these comparisons is that in virtue of which we find them to be a tarrying by one and the same object, which becomes thereby the substantial centre of a series of other ideas remote from it, by pointing to or illuminating which the interest of the content compared receives a tangible increase.

This protraction of the interest round one centre may be explained in several ways.

(αα) As the first we may draw attention to the absorption of the soul in the content, which is the source of its animation, and which attaches itself so intimately to it, that it is unable to detach itself from the permanent interest thus excited. We may at the same time observe that a fundamental difference once more asserts itself in this respect between the poetry of the East and the West resembling that we have already adverted to our discussion of Pantheism. In other words the Oriental is in his absorption less dominated by the personal relation, and consequently without the languish and yearning of self-interest: his longing, such as it is, remains a more impersonal delight in the object under comparison, and consequently more of a contemplation. He looks about him with a free mind, sees in everything which surrounds him, everything which stirs either his mental faculties or his heart, an existing image of that which actively concerns his sense-life and his spiritual forces, and with which he abounds. This type of the imagination which is free from all mere self-obsession, delivered, I mean, from all morbid introspection discovers its satisfaction in the figurative conception of the object itself, and most of all when that object, by virtue of the comparison instituted, is extolled, exalted, and declared in line with that which is most glorious and beautiful. The West is in its general contrast more remote from this impersonal spirit, and in its grief and pain more inclined to languish and yearn itself away.

This dallying, as we may call it, is then pre-eminently an interest of the emotional life, more particularly of love, which delights to take refuge in the objects of its suffering and its raptures; and as often as it finds itself unable to break loose from such feelings finds naught that is wearisome in the task of repainting the object ever anew. The lover is above all things the prodigal in wishes, hopes, and ever changing conceits. Among such conceits we have to reckon the simile, to which love and the emotions generally have recourse, all the more readily for the reason that they take up and absorb the entire soul, and are themselves the independently motive source of comparison. Whatever is their immediate content, is, that is to say, a beautiful object arrested in its singularity, whether it be the mouth, the eye, or the hair of the beloved. In such a state the human soul is active, restless, and the states of joy and pain are neither without life nor in repose, but full of activity and motion, are up and down, which at least is continuous in this that it is for ever bringing all material of whatever kind into relation with the one emotional centre of the world of the heart. In other words the interest of comparison has its root in the feeling itself, which is insistently conscious of the fact, for example, that there are other objects in Nature which are beautiful, or have given rise to pain and so on. Consequently love draws these objects with the aid of the simile into the sphere of its own content, and makes the same wider and more universal thereby. If the object of the simile is, however, entirely isolated in its material form, and brought into juxtaposition with objects of a similar nature, we shall find, and particularly so where similes of this sort are piled one on the top of another, that such a composition is due to emotion of a still rather superficial order, and to reflection equally wanting in depth; the result will be that the variety which merely plays round an external material will readily appear to us insipid and of no vital interest, because we have here no spiritual relation interpenetrating it. We may illustrate such an effect from the fourth chapter of the Song of Solomon where we find the words: “Behold thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks; thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead. Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing, whereof everyone bear twins, and none is barren among them. Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate within thy locks. Thy neck is like a tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies104. Until the day break and the shadows flee away.” This naïveté is to be met with in many of the comparisons of Ossian. Take for example the words: “Thou art as snow on the heather; thine hair is as mist on the kromla, when he curls himself up on the rock, and glistens toward the gleam in the West; thine arms are as two arrows in the halls of the mighty Fingal.”

Of the same kind, only here in wholly a rhetorical way, are the following words Ovid places in the mouth of Polyphemus (Met. XIII, vv. 789-807): “Thou art more white, O Galatea, than the leaf of the snow-white meadowland; more blooming than the fields, more slender than the elm; more brilliant than glass, more arch than the tender little roebuck; smoother than the shell ever-polished by the sea; more dear than Winter’s sun, or the shade in Summer; nobler than the fruit-tree, more comely than the lofty plane.” And so on through all the nineteen hexameters, a description not wanting in rhetorical beauty, but as the presentation of an emotion, which rouses little interest, itself equally lacking in interest.

We may find many examples of this style of comparison in Calderon, although a halt, by the way, of this kind is more suitable to lyrical emotion simply, and fetters the march of drama far too insistently, if it is not actually motived by the subject-matter. Don Juan, for instance, during the progress of the action, describes at length in this way the beauty of a veiled lady whom he had followed. This is what he says to a third person:

Natheless in despite and often

Through the gross and barriered darkness

Of that intranslucent veil,

Flashed a hand of sheen most splendid,

Mistress pure of rose and lily,

Princess, to whose matchless glory

E’en the snow’s gleam paid obeisance,

Slave all murk of Aethiop moulding.

The matter is wholly different, however, when any one capable of profound emotion, expresses his life through images and similes, in which the most secret folds of spiritual feeling are unveiled, the soul here either identifying itself with some scene of external Nature, or making such a scene the counterfeit of a spiritual content. We may cite Ossian once again in illustration of this better use of image and comparison, although the range of objects which serve him in such similitude is jejune, mainly restricted to clouds, mists, storms, trees, streams, thistles, grasses, and other facts equally obvious. Here is one of them: “The Present105 brings joy to us, O Fingal; it is as the sun on Kromla, when the hunter has mourned its absence a whole year long and now it breaks forth from the clouds.” In another passage of the same writer we find these words: “Did not Ossian hearken but now to a voice? Is it then the voice of the days that are no longer? Ofttimes, oft as the evening suns, comes the memory of times that are gone into my soul.” And for another instance take this bit of narration: “Pleasant are the words of song, saith Kuchullin, and dear to the heart are the tales of times far away. They are as the quiet dew of the morning on the hill of the roe-deer, when the sun trembles faintly on his flank, and the pool lies motionless and blue in the dale.” In the case of Ossian this halting by the same emotions, and their similitudes expresses the attitude of an old age which out of weariness and exhaustion turns to sorrowful and painful memories. And generally a recourse to comparisons is evidence of an inclination to melancholy and effeminate emotion. The desire and interest of such a soul lies far away and foregone; and for this reason we find as a rule that, instead of bracing itself up manfully, it yields to its longing to lose itself in something else. Many of the figurative expressions of Ossian consequently are quite as much a response to this wholly personal mood as they are a reflection of ideas mostly of a mournful colour, and of the restricted circle beyond which he is unable to pass.

But, conversely, it is quite possible that passion, in so far as it is able to concentrate its forces on one content, despite its own unrest, with the object of finding a counterfeit of the soul in the natural world around it, may fluctuate to and fro in a variety of images and similitudes, which are all purely conceits of the fancy over one and the same object. A fine example of this we have in that monologue of Juliet from “Romeo and Juliet,” in which she apostrophizes the night as follows:

Come, night; come Romeo; come, thou day in night;

For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night

Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back:

Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,

Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

(ββ) The similes of epic poetry as they come before us over and over again in Homer stand out in a marked contrast to the above type of almost purely lyrical simile in which sentiment is absorbed in the heart of its content. In the former case the aim of the poet, when he may by any chance wish to dally with the comparative mode around some specific object, is, on the one hand, interested in raising us over the active curiosity, expectancy, hope, and fear, by which we are moved relatively to the several situations and exploits of his heroes during the actual progress of events over, that is to say, the general concurrencies of cause, action, and consequence, and in fixing our attention upon the images which he places before us in their plastic repose, purely for our contemplation, serene as the works of sculpture. This repose, this absolution from the merely practical interest that we may enter into that which he places visibly before our eyes comes upon us with all the more force in so far as everything with which he compares the object is taken from a field entirely remote from it. Moreover, this halting round the simile possesses the further significance that by virtue of this kind of twofold painting of the same object its importance is emphasized, and is thus not permitted to be whirled away in the mere shifting stream of the song and the events it celebrates. Take, for example, what Homer says of Achilles, when that hero, fired with anger, confronts Aeneas (“Iliad,” XX, vv. 164-175):

As when the harmful king of beasts (sore threatened to be slain

By all the country up in arms) at first makes coy disdain

Prepare resistance, but at last when anyone hath led

Bold charge upon him with his dart, he then turns yawning head,

Fell anger lathers in his jaws, his great heart swells, his stern

Lasheth his strength up, sides and thighs waddle with stripes to learn

Their own power, his eyes glow, he roars, he leaps to kill,

Secure of killing: so his power then rous’d up to his will

Matchless Achilles, coming on to meet Anchises’ son106.

Much in the same spirit he speaks of Pallas, when she averted the arrow which Pandaros had let fly against Menelaus (“Iliad,” IV, vv. 130-131):

“She did not forget him, and warded off the arrow e’en as a mother flicks away some fly from her son, as he lies in sweet slumber.”

And again further on when the arrow, notwithstanding, wounds Menelaus (vv. 141-146):

Yet forth the blood flow’d, which did much his royal person grace,

And show’d upon his ivory skin, as doth a purple dye

Laid, by a dame of Caïra, or lovely Maeony,

On ivory, wrought in ornaments to deck the cheeks of horse;

Which in her marriage room must lie; whose beauties have such force,

That they are wish’d of many knights, but are such precious things,

That they are kept for horse that draw the chariots of kings;

Which horse, so deck’d, the charioteer esteems a grace to him;

Like these, in grace, the blood upon thy solid thighs did swim,

O Menelaus, etc107.

(γ) A third motive cause of similes, quite distinct from that of purely imaginative riot as also the self-absorbed sentiment or, under its other aspect, the dallying round important objects with the figurative power of the fancy, we have now to emphasize with particular reference to dramatic poetry. The content of the drama is made up of the conflict of passions, activities, pathos, actions, and the accomplishment of the thing willed by the soul, a content which does not, as in the case of the epic, take the form of a narrative of past events, but the dramatic poet places the individuals themselves before our eyes and makes them unfold their emotions personally in an objective form, and their actions as taking place in the present: his mediate position between ourselves and the objects represented therefore ceases. Looked at from this point of view it would appear as though in order to make this presence in Nature clear to us a primary requirement of drama would be that the expression of passions and the vehemence of their grief, consternation, and delight should be painted as naturally as it was possible to paint it, and consequently the simile would be here out of place. To let individuals, on the very plane of their action, in the full storm of emotion, and in the continuous strain of the busy world, speak much in the language of metaphor or image is obviously, from the commonsense point of view, an unnatural proceeding and injurious to the directness aimed at. We are by the simile diverted from the immediate situation, and the characters, whose actions and emotions are involved in it, to something external and strange to it, which in short does not strictly belong to it, as part of its own present; consequently the general course of the dialogue must unavoidably appear to lag under the interruption thus imposed. And for this reason it came about also in Germany when at last our young bloods were all for freeing themselves from the fetters of French rhetorical taste, that the Spaniards, Italians, and French were regarded as artists who did nothing more than place their own personal flights of fancy or witticism, their own conventional attitude to society and elegance of speech in the mouth of their dramatic characters in situations, too, when the very tempest of emotion cried out for Nature’s most direct expression to the exclusion of all other. We find as a result of such an insistence on the principle of realism that in many dramas, which hail from this time, the outcry of emotion, with all the exclamatory signs and hyphens which may render its nudity more visible, takes the place of a noble and dignified diction, rich in image and simile. In much the same sense even English critics have often charged Shakespeare with a superabundant and too varied recourse to the simile, some of which he not unfrequently will attach to characters in the full strain of personal bereavement, where the stress of emotion least of all admits of the tranquillity necessary to reflection, the attitude of mind which is indispensable to this type of comparison. We may no doubt admit that now and again we meet with in Shakespeare an exaggerated tendency to pile up image upon image, and that his diction is thereby overweighted. At the same time we shall see, if we examine the matter in all its bearings, that even in drama the simile is entitled to a position essential to this form of poetry and vital to its action.

In other words if the emotion makes a pause in similes for the reason that it is absorbed in its object and is unable to free itself therefrom, there is also on the plane of active life a distinct purpose subserved by it, namely, to indicate that the individual is not thus so exclusively preoccupied with the particular situation or state of the emotions then uppermost, but possesses a fine and noble nature superior to such conditions and able to assert its independence. In passion soul-life is restricted and fettered to its own seclusion, narrowed down to the point of concentrated heat, either thereby a mute, an ejaculation of monosyllables, or the rage that vents itself at random. Greatness of soul and intellectual power alike refuse to submit to such limitations: they are wings which carry the soul in a fine tranquillity over and above the storm of pathos that moves it. It is this deliverance of the soul, which the simile primarily expresses by the very mode under which it is asserted. In other words it is only a really profound composure and strength which is able to make itself the object of its pain and suffering, to compare itself with something else, and by doing so to view itself impartially108 in a strange material; or it may be in a mood of the most terrible scorn to set forth in the external thing the confronting image of its own annihilation, and still persist in the repose of its own obdurate forces. In epical poetry, as we before observed, it was the poet’s undoubted function to transmit to his audience, by means of those halts by the way which his picturesque similitudes offered, that sense of tranquillity which is essential to fine art. In dramatic art, on the contrary, the dramatis personae appear as themselves the poets and artists. Here it is the characters who objectify their own soul-life in that which they are powerful enough to imagine and inform, thereby further manifesting to us the nobility of their receptive faculties and the inherent force of their emotional resources109. For this absorption into something else that is external is now110 the deliverance of the world within from a purely practical interest, or at least is that which lifts the immediacy of emotion to the level of forms the soul may contemplate in freedom; and for this reason every comparison instituted simply for the comparison’s sake in the way we have already observed it under the first aspect of the simile discussed, is vindicated now in a much profounder sense than was then possible; it can now only appear as a victory over the exclusive obsession of passion and the release from its masterdom. In following up the course of this liberating process we will now emphasize several important distinctions to illustrate which we shall borrow exclusively from Shakespeare.

(αα) Now in the first place we would observe that when we have a soul set before us about to meet with a grave misfortune, by which it will be shaken to its depths, and the pain of this inevitable cataclysm is at length actually entered upon, it would be nothing less than an indication of a nature essentially commonplace if it were there and then to break out into the cry of horror, pain, and desperation, and so make a clean breast of it. A strong and noble spirit on the contrary holds its lamentation as such in reserve, keeps a hand of iron upon its pain, and by this means preserves a free power to embody in far-distant material imaginatively presented the profound sense of its anguish, and to express its own tragic state under the image of that which is remote. Thus man rises superior to his suffering; he is not utterly with all that is in him bondman to it; rather he is as wholly distinct from it as he is one with it; and consequently he can still pause before that which is outside and beyond him, which he relates to his emotion as an independent force cognate with his own. This will explain to us those words of the old Northumberland in Shakespeare’s “Henry IV,” when he inquires of the messenger who comes to inform him of the death of Percy, what news he brings him of his son and his brother, and, on receiving no reply, gives utterance to the composure of the most poignant grief as follows:

Thou tremblest; and the whiteness of thy cheek

Is apter than thy tongue to tell thy errand.

Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,

So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone,

Drew Priam’s curtain in the dead of night,

And would have told him half his Troy was burnt;

But Priam found the fire ere he his tongue,

And I my Percy’s death ere thou report’st it111.

This attitude of the soul, which spins about itself as it were the garments of its pain, and yet retains the power throughout to image itself under new modes of comparison, receives a particularly striking illustration in the character of Richard II, where we find him repentant over the youthful frivolity of his days of prosperity. In fact there is no trait in this royal grief that is more touching or suggestive of a child’s simplicity than the fact that he always expresses himself under the objective form of most pertinent images, and in the play of this type of self-expression preserves his suffering all the more profoundly. When, for example, Henry demands of him the crown, he replies:

Give me the crown. Here, cousin, seize the crown;

Here cousin;

On this side my hand, and on that side yours.

Now is this golden crown like a deep well

That owes two buckets, filling one another,

The emptier ever dancing in the air,

The other down, unseen and full of water.

That bucket down and full of tears am I,

Drinking my griefs while you mount up on high112.

(ββ) The other aspect to which we would now draw attention is this, namely, that a character which is already made one with its interests, its sorrow, and its destiny, endeavours by means of the simile to release itself from this immediate union, and makes this deliverance obvious to us by the very fact that it shows itself still able to deduce such similitudes. In “Henry VIII,”113 for instance, the Queen Katherine, on being forsaken by her royal consort, expresses the depth of her desolation in the words:

I am the most unhappy woman living!

Alas, poor wenches, where are now your fortunes?

Shipwreck’d upon a kingdom, where no pity,

No friends, no hope; no kindred weep for me;

Almost no grave allow’d me: like the lily,

That once was mistress of the field and flourish’d,

I’ll hang my head and perish.

In a still more admirable manner in “Julius Caesar”114 Brutus exclaims to Cassius, to whose want of spirit he has vainly striven to give the spur:

O Cassius, you are yoked with a lamb

That carries anger as the flint bears fire;

Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark,

And straight is cool again.

That Brutus in such a situation can find room for a simile is already an excellent proof that he himself has thrust his scorn into the background, and has begun to assert himself as master of it.

For the most part Shakespeare, by endowing his criminal characters with greatness of soul in crime no less than in misfortune, exalts them before he leaves them above their own evil passions: he will not let them rest in the purely abstract assertion of crimes they are for ever going to do, but never really commit, as is the French style, but actually infuses them with the imaginative power, by means of which they stand out before us as distinctly as any other personification that is new to us. Macbeth, for instance, when his last hour has struck115, exclaims in the well-known words:

Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

The same thing may be said of those last words of Cardinal Wolsey in “Henry VIII,”116 uttered at the close of his career when struck down from the summit of his greatness:

Farewell! a long farewell to all my greatness!

This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth

The tender leaves of hopes: to-morrow blossoms,

And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;

The third day comes a frost, a killing frost;

And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely

His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,

And then he falls, as I do.

(γγ) In this impersonal relation of objective fact and its expression of the comparative mode, the repose and substantial self-command of character returns to itself; it is the means whereby the pain of a great downfall is softened. So Cleopatra exclaims117 to Charmian, after she has already put the mortal aspic to her breast:

Peace, peace!

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,

That sucks the nurse asleep?

As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle —

The bite of the serpent relaxes her members so gently that Death is himself deceived and holds himself to be Sleep. And this image may well pass as itself a counterfeit of the mild and allaying influence of such similitudes.

Didactic, descriptive poetry and the ancient epigram.

The conception we have in general terms formed of the symbolic type of art is such that within it significance and expression are unable to unite sufficiently to appear in complete and reciprocal fusion. In unconscious symbolism the incompatibility of these two aspects remained a fact throughout, if not actually declared as such; in the Sublime on the contrary this inadequacy was explicitly asserted: the absolute significance, God, no less than His external reality, the world, are expressly represented in this excluding relation to one another. On the other hand, however, in all these types that further aspect of symbolism, namely, the affinity which obtains between the significance and the external form, in which it is visibly manifested, still retained its importance. In the original type of symbolism this was exclusively the case, a type which did not as yet set forth the significance in contrast to its concrete existence. But in the Sublime, too, it remained an essential relation, a type which, in order to express the Supreme Being, if here under a wholly inadequate mode, required as its means the phenomena of Nature, and the events and exploits of God’s chosen people. And finally it reappears in the comparative type of art a personal relation and one that is consequently amenable to caprice. This element of caprice, however, albeit it is an entirely present fact and particularly so in the case of the metaphor, image, and simile, is notwithstanding still hidden away behind the affinity between the significance and the image utilized to express it, in so far as it selects the comparison simply out of a regard for their mutual resemblance, a fundamental aspect of which is not so much the external form as just this relation set up between them by the activity of the soul and consisting in subjective emotions, points of view and ideas and their cognate modes of configuration118. When, however, it is not the notion of the material itself, but simply a capricious use of the judgment, which brings together the content and its artistic form, both can only be conceived as posited in an entirely external relation to one another; their association is now a juxtaposition without essential relation, simply a dressing up, that is to say, of the one side by the other. For this reason we have here to treat these last-mentioned and subordinate types of art by way of supplement. They arise from the absolute collapse of the essential phases in all true art-production; they bring before us, in short, by their independence of the principle of relativity the suicide of the symbolic type.

If we view this stage generally as a whole we find on the one hand already as wholly independent the elaborate but formless significance, for the artistic shaping of which all that we can now supply is an external ornament selected at caprice to set it off. On the other side we have the external mode pure and simple. That is to say, instead of being mediated in its identity with that on which it is imposed by the fact that this is its own essentially cognate significance it can now only be accepted and described in the aspect of its self-subsistence over against this centrum of significance, and consequently only as mere externality. From the above contrasted aspects we may differentiate in abstract terms didactic from descriptive poetry, a distinction which so far at least as the didactic is concerned is only to be made good under the poetic type for the reason that this alone is able to bring before us the significance in its abstract universality.

Inasmuch, however, as the notion of art does not consist in the dissociation, but the identification of significance and form we find even at this stage not only a complete separation, but also in line with that, a relation asserted between the sides thus opposed. This relation, however, now that the partition line of symbolism has already been crossed, is no longer of a symbolic nature, and is therefore an attempt to abolish the fundamental characteristics of that type, namely, the incompatibility, and at the same time the self-subsistence of form and content, a position that all the previous types were unable to transcend. Owing, however, to the separation of the two sides, which thus make for unity, being already presupposed by this type this attempt can only be looked upon as a mere aspiration119, to completely satisfy which in all that it involves is reserved for a more perfect type of art, namely, the classical.

We will now briefly glance at these supplementary forms, in order to make our passage from them to the real type above mentioned more fully intelligible.

When a significance, which as such co-ordinates a homogeneous complexus of relations, is apprehended exclusively as significance, yet does not receive the form strictly adequate to this content, but is merely invested with the external ornamentation of art, then we have before us the didactic poem. The didactic poem does not figure among the genuine types of art. For in it we find on the one hand a content already completely elaborated under a mode that is thereby necessarily prosaic, while on the other we have the artistic form, which is merely tacked to it in an external way, for this very reason that it had already been accepted by the mind in a form stamped with prose throughout, and is merely exhibited to our common sense or reflective faculties as instruction under this prosaic aspect, that is to say, with an exclusive reference to the significance embodied in its abstract and general terms. Consequently art, in this its external relation to a content so essentially foreign to its real informing process, can only recognize in the didactic poem its external aspects, such as metre, exalted language, episodic matter, images, similes, ebullitions of sentiment, points of acceleration and transition in the march of ideas, aspects in short which do not give us the heart of the content as such, but rather surround it as an incidental accretion, with the object of alleviating and making more enjoyable the serious and dry tone of the didactic material by means of their more inspiriting atmosphere. That which is intrinsically, in the fundamental conception of it, relegated to prose, cannot receive the poet’s mintage, though it may be the peg on which he may hang his mantle120. Just as we find, for example, that the art of gardening is in great measure a purely external rearrangement of what is already presented us by Nature, but not necessarily of that which is itself a truly lovely locality; or as the art of building ameliorates by its ornament and external decoration a locality which has been expressly devoted to prosaic purposes and affairs.

In this way Greek Philosophy made a start under the mode of the didactic poem. We may even adduce Hesiod as an example, albeit a prosaic treatment of this kind in its strict sense is only fully assured when the understanding is undisputed master of the subject with its train of reflections, consequences, and classifications, and instructs us from this standpoint alone in as pleasing and elegant a way as it can. Lucretius, too, in his relations to the philosophy of Epicurus, and Vergil, with the information he supplies on agriculture, are in part examples of the same type. Despite all their artistic adroitness they are unable to give their versification the genuine spontaneity of the artistic form. In Germany the didactic poem is new out of fashion; in France Delille, in addition to his previous efforts entitled “Les jardins, ou l’art d’embellir les paysages,” and his “Homme des champs,” has presented his compatriots with a further example of the didactic poem, in which he has treated physical science as compendiously through its forms of magnetism, electricity and the rest.

The second type which we have to examine stands out in direct contrast to the previous one. The point of departure here is not from a significance already present before the mind in an independent form of its own, but from external objects simply such as natural localities, buildings, seasons of the year or periods of time, and the modes under which they are presented to sense. But as we found in the didactic poem the content persisted in formless generality so far as its essential character was concerned, so here, if in a converse manner, the external material is independently set forth in the singularity which pertains to it simply as phenomenon without being drawn within the circle of the significances apparent to mind; and it is this particularity which is depicted and described in its external aspect precisely as it appears to the matter-of-fact consciousness. Such a sensuous content has no relation to true art whatever, except under the one feature, namely, that of its external existence; and this can only claim art’s recognition in so far as it represents the natural basis of spiritual life and individuality, its actions and events, the facts, that is to say, which constitute an environing world; as merely external form separated by itself from all that pertains to such life it has no such claim.

On grounds deducible from the above, neither the instructive nor the descriptive type is secured in the exclusive one-sidedness which would obliterate every vestige of art, and we find in the one case that the external reality is brought into appreciable relation with that which is seized by mind as significance, just as conversely in the other the abstract universal is related to its concrete mode of appearance.

(a) We have already explained how this is so in the case of the didactic poem. Without depicting external conditions and particular phenomena, without the episodical narration of mythological and other illustrations we shall rarely find a genuine example of it. By means, however, of a parallel series of this character in which the universal for mind is thus laid alongside of the particular object of sense we have merely a quite collateral relation set up instead of a union carried out in every detail, a parallelogism, moreover, which does not affect the entire content and its all-embracing artistic form, but merely isolated aspects and traits.

(b) Such a modicum of true relation is particularly conspicuous in the case of descriptive poetry, in so far as its delineations are accompanied with such emotions as the sight of natural landscape, the course of the days and seasons, a wooded hill, a lake, a babbling brook, a church, a picturesquely situated village and the poor man’s peaceful cottage are likely to arouse. We find consequently in descriptive poetry much as we do in the didactic poem episodes which, although merely accessory, animate us, in particular through the reflection of affecting emotions, such as a tender melancholy or little touches of occasional experience taken from the more homely levels of life. Such an association of spiritual feeling with the external facts of Nature can still only too easily in this type of poetry remain wholly external in its presentation. For the natural or local condition is here assumed to be something which quite independently confronts us. Man no doubt draws near to it; under its influence he entertains this or that feeling, but there is nothing which essentially unites moonlight, forests, valleys, landscape, and so on, with the emotions of the soul they excite. I am not here either the interpreter or the animating focus of Nature, but feel, as each happens to confront me, a wholly indefinite kind of harmonious reciprocity establish itself between the objects I face and the emotional life which they stimulate. Most of all are we Germans devoted to this type of picturesque description, and along with it to every variety of exquisite feeling and heart effervescence such natural scenery can possibly evoke. It is a public high-road over which all may march in line. Even some of the odes of Klopstock are tuned to its key.

(c) But thirdly, if we inquire whether there is not a profounder relation between these opposed aspects of the internal feeling and external object, we shall find our nearest approach to an answer in the ancient epigram.

(α) The very name of the epigram already expresses the original gist of it. It is an inscription.

Unquestionably we find, also here on the one hand an object, and on the other we have a definite statement propounded as to this object; but in the most ancient epigrams, among which Hesiod has preserved a few examples, we do not have the picture of an object accompanied by any reaction of feeling, rather we find, the matter of fact put before us in two distinct ways. In the one the external existence, and with it the meaning thereof and explanation, is concentrated in its form as epigram on the keenest and most forcible of its characteristics. This original characterization of the epigram, however, even among the Greeks, later examples have already lost; and we find an increasing tendency both to secure and apply the passing conceits of fancy, whether ingenious, witty, or merely entertaining, to particular incidents, works of art, people and so on, ideas in short which do not so much set forth the object itself, as illustrate the condition of personal feeling in reference to the same.

(β) The main point to observe here is this that, just in proportion as the object itself fails as such to become the predominant factor in this type of presentment to that extent it becomes less complete. In this connection we may also in passing mention a few more modern examples of an analogous nature. The novels of Tieck, for instance, not unfrequently have to deal with specific works of art or artists, or a definite gallery of pictures, composition of music and so forth, and they have then some nice little romance attached. These particular pictures, however, which the reader has never seen, these compositions, which he has never heard, the poet obviously can neither bring before our eyes nor ears. From this point of view the entire expression of his art, in so far as it depends on objects of this nature, must remain subject to this defect. In the same way in yet more important romances writers have sought to embody as the real content of their work entire arts, and their finest productions as Heinse, for instance, did with that of music in his Hildegard von Hohenthal. But in every case where we find that a work of art throughout is unable to reproduce with essential adequacy its fundamental subject-matter, we can only conclude that the primary cause of this defect arises from the inadequacy of the type of art selected.

(γ) To remove the defects above adverted to two things are clearly essential; the objective fact and the explanation of it which is offered to mind must not be suffered to fall into absolute severation as was the case in the type last considered, nor must the union when effected, an equally important point, assume a character identical with either the symbolical, sublime or purely comparative types. A yet more genuine form of presentment must be sought for under a condition in which we find that the fact in question supplies an elucidation of its ideal content by means of its external mode of appearance, and actually in this mode, a condition under which that which is of spirit unfolds itself completely in the form of its reality, and the corporeal and external presence is simply the adequate explication of the spiritual and ideal. In order, however, to follow up this problem to its complete fulfilment we must bid farewell to the symbolic types of art. For the essential character of symbolism consisted precisely in this that the union of the animating principle of the significance with its spatial embodiment always stopped short of such completeness.

76 In other words everything created being posited as unsubstantial apart from the One necessitated the conclusion that all the Goodness, etc., there divulged was referable to that Supreme Source.

77 Bewussten, that is a symbolism conscious of its typical character. I have above used the expression “premeditated,” but “conscious” is perhaps sufficient.

78 I understand auf solche Weise, “under such a mode as expressed either by Symbolism or the Sublime.”

79 It is prosaic because it has no absolute root in reality.

80 Lit., “As consciousness lays hold of the same in the clear light of ordinary reason” (seiner verständigen Klarheit.)

81 Theoretische, that is personal, contemplative rather than practical.

82 Lit., “and his freedom secludes itself with a prophetic instinct (ahndend) in itself.”

83 Wie die Faust auf das Auge passt. A proverbial expression unknown to me. We should rather say “a beam in our eyes.”

84 As contrasted, that is, with the fable.

85 An Indian dancing girl.

86 Hegel uses the term in the plural, Die Verwandlungen, possibly with reference to Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

87 Standpunkt, i.e., the form viewed relatively to the general type.

88 Beseelung.

89 Plastic must be taken here in the very loose and pregnant sense of any art that deals with external material.

90 Ein grammatisches Subject. Hegel presumably means that it is merely subject under the mode of literary expression without possessing the true determination of personality.

91 Aushöhlen muss. We should rather say that the allegorist is forced to attenuate (lit. hollow out) the substance of subjectivity, etc. But I have left the more literal rendering.

92 In the German fassen, begreifen.

93 Einer konkreten Anschauung. That is, a quality or feature that belongs to the phenomena of the concrete world of perception.

94 Of course this is not so in the English equivalent, where the primary sense is still material.

95 Lit., “Of expressions in the strict sense of the term.”

96 Ihr ruhiger vollständig ausgestaltender Sinn. The meaning that declares itself completely through the form in classic repose.

97 Ausführliche, explicit in all its detail.

98 Das Für-sich-seyn.

99 I give the literal translation. I presume a more intelligible one would be “but actual existence in its self-defined concreteness.” The passage is not easy to follow.

100

Silent we pounded up carbon, saltpeter, and sulphur,

Set the train going. Good friend! How did our cracker find you?

Some as illuminate balls soared prodigious while others exploded,

Many we flashed in our fun simply the eye to delight.

101 I find this analysis of the image more than usually difficult to follow, I have therefore made my translation very literal. I must confess that this distinction between the image and the metaphor appears to me rather an example of hyper-subtlety on Hegel’s part, or as some might say, an effort to make what is virtually only a verbal distinction correspond to a more real difference of idea.

102 That is the emphatically personal.

103 Die Schwelgerei.

104 In the German the sentence is continuous. Our version clearly gives another reading to the Hebrew.

105 May be a misprint for “thy presence,” deine instead of die.

106 Chapman’s translation.

107 Chapman’s translation, somewhat an extension of the Greek it must be admitted.

108 Theoretisch, i.e., in contemplative repose.

109 Such I take to be the contrast implied in the words den Adel ihrer Gesinnung and die Macht ihrers Gemüths. Gesinnung is the sense-perception. Gemüth includes the creative fertility.

110 Hier, i.e., as contrasted with the first stage of the discussion.

111 “Henry IV, Part II,” act i, scene I.

112 “King Richard II,” act iv, sc. 1.

113 “King Henry VIII,” act iii, sc. 1.

114 “Julius Caesar,” act iv, sc. 3.

115 “Macbeth,” act v, sc. 5.

116 “Henry VIII,” act iii, sc. 2.

117 “Antony and Cleopatra,” act V, sc. 2.

118 The meaning is that the selection is not made merely with reference to external resemblance, but is also based on relations only existing in the soul of the artist and therefore to that extent capricious, however much they appear to be essential.

119 Ein blosses Sollen, lit., a mere “should,” a mere movement in a given direction.

120 This is implied in the contrast of the verbs umstalten and überkleiden.

SUBSECTION II

THE CLASSICAL TYPE OF ART

INTRODUCTION

THE CLASSIC TYPE IN GENERAL

Thr central point121 of art’s evolution is the union, in a self-integrated totality, carried to the point of its freest expression, of content and form wholly adequate thereto. This realization, coinciding as it does with the entire notional concept of the beautiful, towards which the symbolic form of art strove in vain, first becomes apparent in classical art. We have already, in our previous consideration of the Idea of the beautiful and of art, outlined the general character of classic art. The Ideal supplies a content and form to classical art, which in this adequate mode in which it is embodied reveals that which true art is according to its notion.

To perfect this result, however, all the various phases of art, whose evolution is the subject-matter of our previous investigations, are contributive. For classical beauty has for its ideal substance122 free and independent significance, that is to say, not the significance of any particular thing, but a significance which declares itself, and thereby points to its substance. This is the spiritual substance, which in general terms is that which makes of itself an object. In this objectification of itself it possesses the form of externality, which, as identical with its ideal character, is consequently also on its own part the significance of itself, and is made conscious of itself by this self-knowledge. It is true that in our consideration of the symbolical our point of departure was that of the unity of the significance and its mode of envisagement in the art product; but this unity was purely immediate, and for this reason inadequate.

For the real content either remained essentially the natural according to its substance and abstract universality, and consequently the isolated thing in the objective world of Nature123, although it was regarded as the real determination of that universality, was not able to present the same in a mode adequate to it, or that which is purely ideal, and only to be apprehended by spirit, in so far as it was received in the artistic content, carried with it in that which was foreign to its essential nature, namely the immediate individual and sensuous thing, the mode of its appearance that was in fact incongruent with it. And generally here significance and form only stood in the relation of mere affinity and suggestion; and however much in certain respects they could be brought together homogeneously, they as clearly fell apart again in other directions. This original unity was therefore torn asunder; this simple and abstract inwardness or ideality was imaged for the Hindoo conception of the world on the one side in the manifold reality of Nature, and on the other in finite human existence; and the imagination, in the unrest of its impetuous motion, was carried from the one to the other by turns, without being either able to deliver the ideal in its essentially pure and absolute self-subsistency, or to thoroughly infuse it with the phenomenal matter as it was presented and informed, and so reproduce it throughout that material in undisturbed union. The disorder and grotesque appearance, which arose in the commingling of elements opposed to one another, no doubt again vanished, but only to make way for an enigmatical condition equally unsatisfying, which, instead of solving the problem, was only able to prevent the problem’s solution. For here, too, still was lacking the freedom and self-subsistency of content, which only thereby is rendered explicit in that the Inward is presented to consciousness as in itself a whole, and by this means as that which overlaps the externality which in the first instance is other than itself and foreign to itself. This essential self-subsistency, cognized as free and absolute significance, is self-consciousness, which has for its content the Absolute, and for its form the subjectivity of Spirit. In contradistinction to this self-determining, thinking, willing power everything else is self-subsistent in merely a relative and momentary sense. The material phenomena of Nature such as the sun, the heavens, stars, plants, animals, stones, streams and sea have only an abstract relation to themselves, and are in the eternal process of Nature bound up with other facts of natural existence, so that they can only pass as self-subsistent for the finite perception. The real significance of the Absolute is not presented in them. Nature is indeed under a mode expressed124, but only under the mode of what is outside itself; its inwardness is not as such for itself, but poured forth into the varied show of its appearances, and consequently devoid of self subsistency. Only in Spirit as the concrete, free and, infinite self-relation, is the true and absolute significance actually disclosed, and self-subsistent under the mode of its determinate existence.

On the way to this emancipation of the Idea from the immediately sensuous medium and to its self-establishment we are confronted by the Sublime and the consecration of the imagination. The absolute significance is, that is to say, in the first instance the thinking, absolute and senseless125 One, which is self-related as the Absolute, and in this relation affirms that which it creates; Nature and finitude generally, as the negative, thing, that which is essentially in itself devoid of stability. It is the explicit and essential Universal, conceived as the objective power over collective existence, whether it be that this One be brought now to consciousness and represented in its expressly negative attitude to the created, thing, or in its positively pantheistic inherence in the same. The twofold defect of this point of view, so far as it is connected with art, consists first in this that this One and Universal which constitutes the fundamental significance has not yet in itself arrived at the closer determination and distinction, and by this means just as little at the point of real individuality and personality in which it could be apprehended as Spirit, and could be set before the sensuous perception in a form which would be applicable to its spiritual content, according to its own notion, and duly conformable therewith. The concrete idea of Spirit on the contrary requires, that it both defines and distinguishes itself in itself, and by the very act of making itself an object discovers through this reduplication an external phenomenon, which although material and present, nevertheless is throughout permeated by Spirit, and consequently taken by itself expresses nothing at all, simply permitting Spirit to declare itself as its inner core, the expression and reality of which it is. Secondly, from the point of view of the objective world the defect is bound up with this abstraction of an Absolute to which the principle of self-determination is lacking that now also the real phenomenon, being that which is essentially without substance, is unable to set forth under any true mode the Absolute in concrete shape. In contrast to those songs of praise and glory, those celebrations of the abstract and universal majesty of God, we have now in the passage we are making to a higher form of art to recall to our minds that phase of negativity, change, pain, and progress through life and death, which we discovered among other matter in the conceptions of the East. We have here set before us the principle of self-distinction in its essential character under a mode which is unable to unite with its conception the unity and self-subsistency of that subjective principle. Both aspects, however, both the essential and self-substantive unity, and the differentiation of that unity by virtue of a self-defined content, are equally necessary to unfold a true and free self-subsistency in its concrete and mediate totality.

In this connection we may incidentally, together with this reference to the Sublime, mention that further conception which at the same time entered on its process of explication in the East. It is that apprehension, in opposition to the substantiality of the one God, of internal freedom, self-subsistency and innate independence of the individual, so far as the elaboration of this impulse was permitted to Eastern nations. The main source of this attitude we must seek for among the Arabs, who in their deserts, upon the infinite sea of these expanses, with the clear heavens over their heads, in a nature such as this have emphasized their own courage and the bravery of their hand, as also the means of their self-preservation, whether it be camel, horse, lance, or sword. Here we find the more stubborn independence of personal character asserting itself in its contrast to the Hindoo softness and lack of individuality, as also to the more recent pantheism of Mohammedan poetry, and opposing also to the objective world its circumscribed, securely defined and immediate reality. With this incipient stage of the independence of the individual we must also associate free friendship, hospitality, and august nobility, but at the same time an insatiable lust of revenge and the inextinguishable memory of a hate, which is insistent and will have satisfaction with an unsparing passion and an absolutely remorseless cruelty. None the less all that happens on this soil is wholly within the circle of humanity. We have here deeds of revenge, conditions of love, traits of self-sacrificing nobility from which the fantastic and the wonderful have vanished; everything is carried forward in the secure and determinate shape which the causative connection of the facts necessitate. A similar conception of real objects which are referred to their determinate basis of actuality126, and are made visible in their free power, not merely in that which conserves an exterior purpose127, we discovered in an earlier stage of our investigations among the Hebrews. The more assured independence of character, the savagery of revenge and hate lie, too, at the root of the original Jewish nationality. But the difference is at once pronounced, that in this case even the most powerful images of Nature are depicted less for their own sake than for that of the glory of God, as related to which they at once again lose their self-subsistency; and furthermore even hate and persecution are not merely a personal matter affecting persons, but are embraced in the service of God as national vengeance against whole peoples. As, for example, the later Psalms and yet more the prophets frequently only are able to desire and plead for the misfortune and overthrow of other nations, and not unfrequently find the main strength of their utterance in curses and imprecations.

No doubt the elements of true beauty and art are presented to each of these points of view above noticed; but they are in the first instance brought together in haphazard and confused fashion, and are set in a false relation to each other, instead of being referred to a genuine principle of identity. For this reason the purely ideal and abstract unity of the Divine is unable to bring forth any entirely adequate art-product in the form that is characterized by real individuality; and at the same time Nature and human individuality either are manifestly not, whether we consider their inward principle, or their external mode of appearance, permeated by the Absolute, or at least not positively pervaded by it. This externality of significance, which is thus made the essential content, and the determinate mode of appearance under which it is generally reproduced is finally and in the third place exemplified in the comparative activity of art128. In this type both sides have become wholly independent, and the unity that binds them together is merely the invisible subjectivity which compares. For this very reason that which is defective in such an external presentment returned in ever more emphatic degree and betrayed itself as that which was for the genuine art representation merely negative or, rather, entirely subversive. And when this dissolution is really effected the significance can no longer remain the inherently abstract ideal, but the inherently determinate and self-defined ideal principle, which in this its concrete totality possesses quite as essentially the other aspect thereof, that is, the form of an inherently exclusive and determinate appearance; and consequently in its external existence, as that which is its very own, merely expresses and signifies itself.

This essentially free totality which remains constant to itself throughout each successive self-determination in something other than itself, this ideal principle, which in its objectivity is self-related is the essentially true, free, and self-subsistent, which in its determinate existence unfolds nothing other than itself. In the realm of art, however, this form is not present in its form of infinitude, is not, that is, the thinking of itself, as the essential, absolute, which is made an object for itself in the form of ideal universality, and makes itself, wholly explicit, but is still in immediate natural and sensuous existence. In so far, however, as significance is self-substantive, it must in art borrow its form from its own resources and inherently possess the principle of its externality. It must consequently, it is true, repair to Nature, but as predominant over that which is external, which, in so far as it is itself an aspect of the totality of this ideal realm, no longer exists as purely natural objectivity, but being without its own self-subsistence, simply serves as the expression of Spirit. In this interpenetration consequently the natural form and externality, which is modified by Spirit contains out and out on its part, as immediately given, its significance in itself, and no longer points to this as to something separate and different from the corporeal appearance. And this is that identification of the spiritual and natural which is appropriate to the notion of Spirit, which, that is, does not merely proceed no further than the neutralization of the two opposed aspects, but raises that which is spiritual into the higher totality, in which it is able to preserve itself in its own Other, to bring the natural within its own ideal range and to express itself in and relatively to the natural. It is on this type of unity that the notion of classical art is based.

(a) This identity of significance and bodily form may be approached yet more closely under the view of it that no separation of these opposed aspects129 takes place within their consummated union; and consequently the ideal principle does not, as purely inward spirituality, return upon itself from out of the corporeal and concrete reality, under a process which would give us once more the distinction of these aspects in opposition. And inasmuch as the objective and external, in which Spirit is made visible as an object of sense, according to the very notion of it, is at once throughout defined and separate, mind which is free, and which it is the function of art to elaborate in the form of reality truly commensurate with it, can only be that spiritual individuality which is not merely defined but essentially self-consistent in its natural form. For this reason it is the human which constitutes the centre and content of true beauty and art; but as content of art — we have already developed the subject in discussing the notion of the Ideal — it is brought under the essential determination of concrete individuality and the external appearance adequate thereto, which in its objectivization has been thus purified from the imperfection of the finite condition.

(b) Under such a consideration of the matter it is at once obvious that the classical mode of representation, if we take it for what it essentially is, can no longer be of the symbolic type in the strict sense of the term, however much now and again we may find along with it the play of that which belongs to symbolism. Greek mythology, for example, which, in so far as art asserts its mastery over it, belongs to the classical Ideal, is, if we grasp it in its fundamental character, not of a beauty which is symbolical, but unfolded under the genuine character of the Art-ideal, albeit there may be certain remnants of symbolism which adhere to it, as we shall shortly see.

If we now proceed to ask ourselves what, then, is the nature of the determinate form, which can thus enter into this unity with Spirit without offering merely the suggestion of its content, we shall find it determined for us in the conception that in classical art both content and form must be adequate, must, that is, in the aspect of form meet the demands of totality and essential self-subsistency. For it is a prime condition of the free self-subsistence130 of the whole, which constitutes the fundamental determination of classical art, that either of these aspects, the ideal form no less than its external embodiment, should be essentially a totality which goes to make the notion of the whole. Only by this means is either side essentially identical with the other, and consequently their difference reduced to the purely formal differences of one and the same, through which also the totality appears now as free, the adequacy of both of its aspects being now fully displayed, inasmuch as it declares itself in either of them and is one and the same in both.

The lack of this free reduplication of itself within the same unity carried with it in the symbolic type precisely this absence of freedom in the content and with it also in the form. Spirit was here not clear to itself, and for this reason declared its external reality not as that which belonged to itself, set forth in its explicit significance through and in it. Conversely the form had no doubt to be significant, but its significance only lay partly and on one side in it. The external existence gave here primarily to what passed for its ideal aspect, though still under a mode that was external, merely itself instead of a significance which declared an ideal content; and in attempting to show that there was something further which it suggested its power was necessarily put under a constraint. In this distortion it neither remained true to itself, nor was it the Other, that is significance, but declared nothing save that which was a problematical connection and confusion between incompatible things, or tended to be the purely co-adjutant attire and external adornment of what was simply the glorification of the one absolute significance of all things whatever, until it was finally obliged to surrender itself to the purely subjective caprice of comparison with a significance which was far removed from it and indifferent to it. If this relation of unfreedom is to find a release the form must already inherently possess its significance, or, to speak more definitely, must possess the significance of mind or Spirit itself. This form is essentially the human form because the externality of this form is alone capable of revealing the spiritual in sensuous guise. Human expression in countenance, eye, pose, and carriage is, it is true, material and therein not that which the spirit is; but within this corporeal frame itself the human exterior is not merely alive and a part of Nature as the animal is, but it is the bodily presence which reflects Spirit to itself. Through the human eye we look into the soul of a man just as through the entire presentment of him his spiritual character is expressed. When consequently the body belongs to Spirit, as its determinate presence, Spirit is also that ideal principle which is appropriate to the body, and is no form of ideality which is foreign to the external form in the sense that materiality still inherently possesses a significance other than that to which it testifies or suggests. It is quite true that the human form still carries within it much of the universal animal type, but the fundamental distinction between the human and the animal body consists simply in this, that the human is obviously, by virtue of its entire conformation, declared as the dwelling, nay, we may add the only possible dwelling-place of Spirit. And for this reason also it is only in the body that Spirit is immediately present to others. This is, however, not the place to discuss the necessity131 of this association and the peculiar reciprocity of soul and body. We must here assume this necessity. We have, of course, many indications on the human figure of death and ugliness, that is, of other influences and defects which are traceable to their source. When we find this to be the case it is the function of art to expunge the divergence between the purely natural and the spiritual, to exalt the external bodily appearance to a form of beauty, that is, a form throughout dominated and suffused with the animation of Spirit.

We have seen, then, that in this type of representation symbolism is no longer presented by the external relation, and everything that partook of effort, strain, distortion, and perversion is eliminated. For when Spirit has grasped itself as Spirit it is at once explicit and clear; and on the same ground is also its association with the form adequate to it from the side of externality, something which is essentially ready to the hand and a free gift, which does not require, as a means for its declaration, a bond of connection introduced by the imagination, and contrasting with that which is immediately presented. Just as little is the classical form of art exhibited as a purely material and superficial personification. It is Spirit in its entirety, in so far as it is intended to make it the content of the art-product, which passes into that bodily shape, and is able to identify itself completely with it. From this point of view we may considerer the conception that art has followed the human figure by means of imitation. According to the common view, however, this acceptance of the human figure as the model of imitation appears as a matter of accident, whereas we should rather maintain the art which has arrived at its maturity is obliged to reveal its substance by a necessary law in the form of man as he appears to sense perception, because Spirit alone obtains in it the existence fitting to it in the sensuous material of Nature.

All that we have here observed relatively to the human body and its expression applies also to human emotions, impulses, actions, experiences, and occupations. The externalization of these is also, in classical art, not merely characterized as a part of Nature’s life, but as that of Spirit; and this ideal aspect is brought into full and adequate identity with that which is external appearance.

(c) Inasmuch, then, as classical art comprehends free spirituality as determinate individuality, and immediately envisages the same in its bodily presentment, it frequently falls under the reproach of anthropomorphism. Even among the Greeks, to take an example, Xenophanes ridiculed the presentation of Gods by means of the sensuous image in his famous remark, that if lions had been sculptors they would have given their gods the external shape of lions. Of a similar tendency is that piece of French wit: God made men according to His image, but man has returned Him the compliment by creating God in the image of man. If we consider the matter relatively to the form of art that follows, the romantic, we may in this respect observe that the content of the classical form of beauty is no doubt defective precisely as the religion of art is so; but so little does the defect consist in anthropomorphism as such, that we may rather maintain, on the contrary, that though classical art is certainly sufficiently anthropomorphic for art, for the higher form of religion it is not enough so. Christianity has carried anthropomorphism to far greater lengths; for, according to Christian doctrine, God is not merely individuality in a human form, but a real and singular individual entirely God, and entirely a real man who has entered into all conditions of existence, and is no mere Ideal of beauty and art created by man. If our conception of the Absolute is limited to an abstract Being essentially without any characterization then, no doubt, every kind of representation vanishes, but if God is Spirit he must appear as man, as individual subject, not as ideal human being, but as actual participator in the entire externality of temporal conditions132 which pertain to immediate and natural existence. In other words, from the Christian point of view, the infinite movement is carried to the extremest verge of opposition, and only returns to the absolute unity as the resolution of this separation. The man-becoming of God is incident to this phase or significant moment of separation; as real and individual subjectivity it is involved in the difference between unity and substance in its bare extension, and in this common sphere of temporal and spatial condition creates the consciousness in and pain of division in order through the ultimate resolution of such contradiction by the same means to arrive at eternal reconciliation. And this essential point of passage in the process, according to the Christian conception, is inherent in the nature of God Himself. As a matter of fact, God is here apprehended as absolute and free Spirit, in which Nature and immediate singularity is indeed proferred us as a phasal moment of a process, but, at the same time, as one which is necessarily transcended133. In classical art, on the contrary, the material medium is neither killed nor suffers death, but for this reason also we cannot wholly find in it the resurrection of Spirit. Classical art and its religion of beauty does not consequently wholly satisfy the depths of Spirit. However essentially concrete it may be, it still remains abstract for humanity because, instead of movement and reconciliation obtained by the contradiction we have adverted to of that infinite subjective process, it merely possesses as its life that undisturbed harmony of the free individuality determined in its adequate existence, this repose in its reality, this happiness, this content and greatness in itself, this eternal blitheness and bliss which even in unhappiness and pain does not lose its secure reliance on itself. Classical art has not worked its way to the full contradiction which is fundamentally involved in the notion of the Absolute and overcome that contradiction. For this reason it does not recognize the aspect which is in close relation to this contradiction, that is the essential obduracy of the subject as opposed to that which is ethical and of absolute significance, namely, sin and evil, no less than the waste of individual life in its own subjective aims, the dissolution and incontinence of that world which we may summarily describe as that of the entire sphere of its divisions, which is productive on the side both of sense and spirit of distortion, ugliness, and the repulsive. Classical art fails to cross the pure territory of the genuine Ideal.

In so far as the historical realization of classical art is concerned, it is hardly necessary to observe that we must seek for that among the Greeks. Classical beauty, with its infinite range of content, material and form, is the gift bestowed on the Greek people; and this folk is entitled to our respect on the ground that it has produced art in its highest form of vitality. The Greeks, if we regard the form of their realized life immediately presented us, lived in that happy middle sphere of self-conscious and subjective freedom and substantive ethical life. They did not persist, on the one hand, in the unfree Oriental unity, which is necessarily bound up with a religious and political despotism for the reason that the individuality of the subject is overwhelmed in a universal substance, or, in some particular aspect of the same, because it has essentially as personality no right, and consequently no ground to stand on; neither, on the other, did they pass beyond to that subjective penetration, in which the particular subject separates itself from the whole and the universal, in order to make itself more explicit in its ideality; and only through a higher return to the ideal totality of a purely spiritual world, succeeds in its final purification of the substantive and essential. On the contrary, in the ethical life of Greece, the individual was self-substantive and essentially free, without disengaging himself from the general interests of the realized State immediately visible to him and the positive immanence of spiritual freedom in the temporal condition. The universal of morality and the abstract freedom of personality, both in its ideal and external aspect, remains in accordance with the principle of Greek life in undisturbed harmony, and during the time in which, even in real existence, this principle asserted itself in still unimpaired purity, the self-substantiality of the citizen did not stand forth in relief in contrast to a morality which was to be distinguished from it: the substance of political life was so far merged in the individual, as he on his part sought his own liberty absolutely in the universal ends of the entire civic life. The feeling for beauty, the significance and spirit of this joyous harmony interpenetrates all productions, in which the freedom of Greece is self-conscious, and in which she has made visible to herself her being. Consequently her view of the world is just the midway ground on which beauty commences its true life and breaks open its serene dominion; the intermediate realm, that is, of free vitality, which is not merely a fact at once immediate and natural, but one which is the creation of a spiritual point of view revealed by art, the realm, that is, of a culture of reflection, and at the same time of an absence of reflection, which neither isolates the individual nor on the other hand is competent to bring back again its negativity, pain, and unhappiness to a positive unity and reconciliation — a realm, however, which, just as in the case of Life itself, is at the same time only a point of passage, however true it be that it scales at this point the summit of beauty, and in the form of its plastic individuality is so spiritually concrete and rich, that all tones have their interplay within it, and also, too, that which is for its own standpoint what lies behind it, albeit it is no longer present as an absolute and unqualified principle, is nevertheless felt as that which accompanies it — a kind of background to it. In this sense the Greek nation has also, in the representation of its gods, made its spirit visible to the perceptions and the imaginative consciousness, and bestowed on them, by means of art a determinate existence, which is entirely conformable with their true content. By virtue of this homogeneous form, which is alike consistent with the fundamental notion of Greek art and Greek mythology, art became in Greece the highest expression for the Absolute, and Greek religion is the religion of art itself, whereas romantic art, which appeared later, although it is undoubtedly art, suggests a more exalted form of consciousness than art is in a position to supply.
In establishing the position, as we have just done, on the one hand, that essentially free individuality is the content of classical art, and, on the other, that a like freedom is the equally requisite determinant of the form, we have already assumed that the entire blending of both together, however much it may be presented in the immediate form, is nevertheless no original unity such as Nature’s, but is necessarily an artificial association made possible by the subjective spirit. Classical art, in so far as its content and its form is spontaneity134, originates in the freedom of the Spirit that is clear to itself. And for this reason also we may say that in the third place the artist occupies a position different from that of his predecessors. That is to say his production declares itself as the spontaneous product of a man in the full possession of his senses135, who as truly knows what he wills as he is able to accomplish such a purpose; who is consequently obscure to himself neither in respect to the significance and substantive content of that which he has resolved to make visible in the form of art, nor finds himself hindered by any defects of technique from executing the result aimed after.

(a) If we look more closely at this change in the position of the artist we shall in the first place find this freedom announced to us relatively to the content in this way, that he does not feel compelled to seek for it with the restless process of symbolical fermentation. Symbolic art remains the captive of its travail to bring to birth and make clear its form to its own vision, and this embodiment is itself only the original form136, that is, on the one side Being in the immediate guise of Nature, and on the other the ideal abstraction of the universal, unity, conversion, change, becoming, origination, and passing away. In this original form of the artistic process, however, art does not come to its rightful possessions. Consequently, these representations of symbolic art, which should be expositions of content, remain still themselves riddles and problems, and merely testify to the struggle after clarity and the effort of Spirit, which on and on seeks to discover without obtaining the rest and repose of discovery. In contrast to this troublous search the content must for the classic artist be presented him as something already there in the sense that as a thing essentially positive, as belief, popular opinion, or as an actual event either of myth or tradition, it is determined for his imagination in all its essential character. Relatively to this objectively determined material the artist is placed in the freer relation that he does not himself undertake the process of production and fermentation, and pass no further than the impulse after the real significances of his art, but rather that for him a completely explicit and unfolded content lies before him which he accepts and freely reproduces from himself. The Greek artists received their material from the popular religion in which already that which had been brought over to Greece from the Orient had begun to receive a form of its own. Pheidias borrowed his Zeus from Homer, and other tragedians also did not create the fundamental groundwork of that they represented. In the same way the artists of Christianity, Dante and Raphael, have only reclothed what was already to hand in the doctrines of their faith and their religious conceptions. This is also, it is true, from a certain point of view in like manner the case in the art of the Sublime, but with this difference, that here the relation to the content, as the one substance, does not permit subjectivity to come by its just claims, and allows to it no self-substantive finality. The comparative form of art, on the other hand, no doubt starts with the selection of significances as images which it makes use of, but this initiative of selection remains at the disposition of subjective caprice, and on its part dispenses with all substantive individuality, which constitutes the notion of classical art, and for this reason must rest with the personality which creates it.

(b) The more, however, an explicitly unfolded content is present for the artist in popular beliefs, myth, and other actual facts, the more his energy is concentrated upon the object of endowing such a content with the external embodiment of art fitting to it. While in this respect symbolic art dissipates its resources in a thousand forms, and with unbridled imaginative power lays about it for material that it fails either to measure or define in order to adapt forms that are never really conformable to the significance it is seeking after, the classical artist in this respect is possessed of an aim that is at once resolute and definite. That is to say, the free form is with the content itself defined through that content, and is essentially pertinent to such content, so that the artist only appears to execute what is already accordant with the fundamental conception of what is presented him. While, therefore, the symbolic artist strives in his imagination, to suit the form to significance or vice versa, the classic artist adapts significance to plastic shape by means of the process of freeing the external phenomena which are already presented from that part of them which is merely an incidental product. In this activity, however, although all that is purely his caprice is excluded, his productive power not merely follows or is not merely limited to a bare type, but is at the same time creative throughout the whole. Art which, to start with, is forced to seek out and discover its true form neglects for that reason the very aspect of form; but where, on the contrary, the building up of form is made the essential interest and the main task there we find the content also receives its plastic shape by imperceptible degrees through the process of the reproduction, precisely as we have hitherto found in a general way that form and content proceed hand in hand during the process, wherein they are completed. In this respect the classic artist elaborates the result also where it is a religious world that is presented him; he throughout develops in the free and buoyant medium of his art the material and mythological ideas which he receives.

(c) The same applies to the technique of art. In the case of the classic artist the ingredients must be already to hand; the sensuous material through which the artist labours must already be disengaged from all brittleness and extreme stubbornness, and yield directly to the aims of the artist, in order that the content, conformably to the notion of the classic type, may make its free and unfettered way through this external medium. To classical art, consequently, belongs from the first a high level of technical ability, which has subjected the sensuous material to an apt subservience. Such a technical perfection, if it is really to carry out all that is required of Spirit and its conceptions, is presupposed by the complete elaboration of all that pertains to craftsmanship in art, that is, in especial degree of that which makes itself visible within the plastic forms of the religion to which we now refer. The religious view of things, such as the Egyptian, for example, discovers, that is, definite external forms, idols, colossal constructions whose type remains fixed, and, further, in the usual similarity of forms and shapes, supplies a considerable field for elaboration in the treatment of it by the steadily progressive executive powers. This adaptability to the talents of the craftsman must already have been presented in that which is of an inferior and distorted type before the genius of classical beauty can associate these powers of mechanical facility with the forms of technical perfection. Then, at last, when that which is purely mechanical work is confronted with no further insuperable difficulty, is art enabled to proceed in the elaboration of a form, the practice in working out which is at the same time an elaboration which is in the closest relationship to the progressive advance of both content and form.

So far as the division of classical art is concerned it is usual in the more general sense of the term to call every complete work of art classic, whatever the particular character it may otherwise carry, whether symbolic or romantic. We have no doubt thus accepted it in the particular sense of art perfection, but with this important qualification, that this perfection must be based on the thorough interpenetration of ideal and free individuality and external definition. We consequently differentiate the classic form expressly from the symbolic and romantic, whose beauty in content and form is entirely of another kind. And along with the classic, regarded in its usual and more indefinite significance, we have as little to do here at this early stage with the particular arts in which the classical ideal is represented, as, for example, sculpture, the Epic, definite forms of lyrical poetry and specific types of tragedy and comedy. These particular types of art, although classic art is imprinted upon them, will be first discussed in the third portion of the division of our subject in the explication of the several arts and their grades137. What we approach more immediately now is the classic in the sense we have secured for the term, and as bases of our subdivision we can only therefore seek out the grades of evolution, which proceed from this notion of the classical ideal itself. The essential phases of this development are as follows.

The first point to which we would direct our attention is this, that the classical type of art is not to be apprehended as was the case with the symbolic type as immediately primary, as art’s commencement, but, on the contrary, as its result. We have evolved it, consequently, in the first instance from the course of the symbolic modes of representation, which it presupposes. The essential feature on which this process turned was the concentration of content in the elucidation of an essentially self-conscious individuality, which can neither employ for its expression the mere natural form, whether it be that of the elements or animals, nor the defective and confused personification of the human figure with it, but receives its expression in the animation of the human body permeated throughout with the breath of Spirit. Inasmuch, then, as the essence of freedom consists in this, to be that which it is through its own resources, that which in the first place appeared purely as the presupposition and condition of its origin outside the sphere of classical art must take its place within the circle peculiar to the same in order to make really visible the true content and the genuine form by means of the subjection of what is unconformable to and the negation of the Ideal. This process of conformation through negation, this process by means of which, whether we view it relatively to content or form, the genuine type of classical beauty begets itself from its own substance is consequently our point of departure, and we shall treat of that in our first chapter.

In the second chapter, on the other hand, we have reached by means of this process the true Ideal of the classical type of art. We find here as the central fact the fair and novel world of the gods of Greece, which it will be incumbent on us to develop exhaustively from within, both in its aspects of spiritual individualization, and those which are related to the bodily form with which such individuality is immediately associated.

In the third place, however, the notion of classical art implies conversely, along with this becoming of the beauty which springs from itself, also the dissolution of that creation, which will carry us into a further sphere, namely, that of the romantic type of art. The gods and human individuals of classic beauty just as they rise so, too, pass away once more from the art-consciousness, which in part turns round in opposition to the aspect of Nature that still persists, in which Greek art, in fact, had elaborated itself in the full perfection of beauty, in part transcends an undeific138, defective, and vulgar mode of reality in order to reveal that which is false and purely negative therein. In this dissolution, whose artistic activity we shall take as the material of our third chapter, the specific phases in the process, which created the truly classical type in that harmony presented by the perfect fusion of immediate beauty, fall apart. The ideal essence is made explicit on the one side in its independence of the external mode of its existence on the other. Subjectivity withdraws into itself, for the reason that it fails now to find an adequate realization in the forms hitherto employed, and is constrained to enlarge itself with the fuller content of a new spiritual world of absolute freedom and infinity, looking about for novel means of expressing this profounder grasp of its substance.

121 The central point, that is, in the entire evolution of the types of art, classical art being intermediate between symbolic and romantic art and in a certain sense marking a point of culmination.

122 Zu ihrem Inneren, i. e., that which unites it as a whole rather than is the purely external form. The Inward of man is the notion of man, not the mere fact that he has a head and arms, etc.

123 The “Nature-existence,” as Hegel calls it.

124 Die Natur ist freilich heraus. Nature is there explicitly before us, but not all that is implied in Nature is made explicit in the material world.

125 Sinnlichkeitslos, “senseless” as devoid of or abstracted from all sense.

126 Auf ihr festes Maas zurückgeführt. To their own proper standard or measure that strictly applies to them.

127 I think this must be the meaning of nützlich here. But the passage is not an easy one.

128 That is, the comparative type of art discussed at the conclusion of the preceding section.

129 That is, the Inward or ideal principle and the natural externality.

130 Selbstständigkeit. Self-consistency or independence are perhaps better words here.

131 That is, I suppose, the causal necessity as part of natural evolution.

132 Bis zur zeitlichen gänzlichen Äußerlichkeit.

133 These words contain no doubt the epitome of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Religion” and are involved in its difficulties. The reference to the historical facts of Christianity under ideal conceptions is obvious. I have translated the words das Moment des Natürlichen … zwar vorhanden seyn as a phasal moment of “a process,” but I am well aware that no mere amplification of this sort can in itself make the words clear.

134 Das Freie.

135 Des besonnenen Menschen, i.e., the man of clear intelligence, sound sense, as we say.

136 The words dieser Gehalt ist selber nur der Erste would seem to refer back to the expressions Keine Erste und somit natürliche Einheit. But the sense is not very clear.

137 Deren Gattungen, their specific types.

138 Entgöttert — a mode from which the Divine is removed.

THE COMING INTO BEING OF THE CLASSIC IDEAL

IN THE NOTION of free Spirit is contained immediately that aspect of the process of intelligence we may describe as self-introspection, return upon the self, of being explicit as an object existing for the self and in a determinate place, although this penetration into the realm of subjectivity, as we have already observed, does not either necessarily proceed to the length of making the subject essentially self-substantive in its negative aspect as against all that is concrete in Spirit and presented us as the stability of Nature, nor to that absolute reconciliation which constitutes, the freedom of the infinite subjectivity in truth. With the freedom of Spirit, however, in whatever form it may appear, is generally associated the elimination of that which is purely natural, regarded as that which is the Other in contrast to Spirit. Spirit must in the first instance essentially withdraw itself from Nature, uplift itself over, her boundaries and overcome them, ere it can prevail with unfettered movement within those bounds as within an element that is opposed to it, and can build itself up in a positive mode of existence truly indicative of its own freedom. If we further ask for a closer definition of the object through the transcendence of which Spirit attains to its self-substantive form in classical art we shall find this object is not Nature merely as such, but rather a Nature that is already throughout suffused with the significations of Spirit, in other words the symbolic type of art, which made use of the immediately natural form as a means of expressing the Absolute, its artistic consciousness either seeing in animals and so forth the presence of gods, or striving vainly under false modes toward the true unity of the spiritual and the natural. It is through the removal and reformation of this defective association that the Ideal for the first time presents itself as the Ideal, and is forced to develop consequently this process of transcendence within its own sphere as a phase of its own necessary evolution. Such a consideration at once enables us to dispose of the question whether the Greeks received this religion from extraneous sources or no. We have already seen that subordinate conceptions are necessarily presupposed in the very notion of classical art. These, in so far as they in truth appear and are presented as factors of human history, are, as opposed to the higher form, which strives to pass beyond them, the actual starting-point of the new self-evolving art. And this is so, though in the particular case of Greek mythology there is not throughout historical evidence for these preliminary data. The relation, however, of the Greek spirit to these presupposed data is essentially a relation of construction and in the first instance of transformation. If this were not so the conceptions and forms of the same had remained as they were. It is true that Herodotus says, in a passage already cited, of Homer and Hesiod, that they had created their gods for the Greeks, but he also speaks expressly of particular gods, how this or that one was Egyptian or some other form: the poetic activity does not therefore exclude the reception of material from other sources, but merely suggests an essential transformation. For the Greeks possessed mythological conceptions before the time in which Herodotus places those original poets.

If we inquire further into the more obvious aspects of this necessary transformation of that which is undoubtedly involved with, but at first still alien from, the Ideal, we find it set before us in naïve form as content of mythology itself. The main fact of Greek theology is this, that it creates itself and constitutes itself from that which has gone before, which takes its place in the origins and process of its own generic history. Incidental to this origination, in so far as the gods are taken to be spiritual individualities in determinate bodily shape, we find, on the one hand, that Spirit, instead of giving visibility to its essence in that which is purely vital and animal, regards life rather as an attribute which is insufficient139, as its unhappiness and death, and, on the other, that it is in the living thing that it triumphs over the elements of Nature and its confused reproduction. Conversely, however, it is equally necessary for the Ideal of the classic gods, not merely to stand over against Nature and its elemental powers as individual spirit in its finite and abstract seclusion, but to possess itself the elements of the universal natural life notionally as a phasal moment in the vital constitution of Spirit. As the essence of the gods is essentially universal, and in this very universality they are defined as individuals, it follows also that the aspect of their bodily presence must essentially include at the same time the natural as the essential and wide-reaching power of Nature, and as vital activity intertwined with spirituality itself.

In this respect we may differentiate the process of embodiment followed by the classical art-form under the following points of view.

The first concerns the degradation of that which is purely animal, and the removal of the same from the sphere of free and pure Beauty.

The second more important aspect is related to the elemental itself, in the first instance conceived as gods put before us as powers of Nature, through whose conquest alone the genuine race of gods can attain to undisputed mastery, that is in the war between the ancient and new gods. But this negative tendency becomes, then, in the third place, after Spirit has secured its free right, to the same extent once again an affirmative force, and elemental Nature constitutes an aspect of godhead permeated with individualized spirituality in order to re-establish even the animal organism, though here only of an attributive and external sign. Following the above points of view we will now, if still at no great length, endeavour to emphasize the more definite traits, which here come under consideration.

Among the Indians and Egyptians, among Asiatics generally we find animalism, or at any rate specific kinds of animals regarded as sacred and worshipped, because in them the Divine itself is taken to be visible to sense. The animal form is consequently also a main feature of their artistic representations, albeit they are in addition merely used as symbolic and in association with human forms, in the stage previous to that where we find the human, and only the human, apprehended by consciousness as that which is alone true. It is only in virtue of the self-consciousness of the spiritual that the respect for the obscure and gloomy ideality of animal life disappears. This has already taken place among the ancient Hebrews who regard, as we have already observed, the whole of Nature neither as symbol nor as the presence of God, and attach to external objects merely the powers and vitality which in fact dwell within them. At the same time there still remains even among them, if in accidental fashion, at least a vestige of reverence for the living thing as such. We may illustrate this with the fact that Moses forbids the use of animal blood as food for the reason that life is centred in the blood. Man, however, is really under a necessity to eat that which is his natural food. The next step which we must draw attention to in this passage to classical art consists in lowering the high worth and position of what is animal, and making this degradation itself the content of religious conceptions and artistic productions. And illustrative of this we find abundant examples from which I shall merely offer the following selections.

(a) We find that among the Greeks certain animals appear conspicuous among others, as the snake, for example, is presented us in the sacrifices of Homer as an exceptionally beloved genius141, and before all others it is this species which is offered to one god, while others are appropriated to some other. We find, further that the hare, which runs across the way, birds observed in their flight to right hand or left, and entrails are investigated as fruitful in prophetic significance. All this, it is true, indicates a real reverence for the animal type, since the gods communicate through them and speak to men by means of omens. If we look at the heart of the matter, however, we shall find these to be merely isolated revelations, suggestive of superstition no doubt, but merely momentary hints of the Divine. On the other hand, it is an important fact that animals are sacrificed and the sacrificial flesh eaten. Among the Indians sacred animals are on the contrary preserved alive as such, and taken care of, and among the Egyptians they are even preserved after their death. For the Greek it is the sacrifice which is sacred. In the sacrifice man demonstrates that he is willing to give up a consecrated thing to his gods, and to deprive himself wholly of the use of the same. And in this connection we may observe a characteristic trait in the Greek rite, among which people the sacrifice was observed as at the same time a hospitable feast142, only a part of the same being dedicate to the gods, that is, the portion which it was assumed they alone could enjoy, while the Greek himself retained and feasted upon the flesh. Out of this circumstance originated a mythical tale in Greece. The ancient Greeks, it is said, sacrificed with the greatest solemnity to the gods, and suffered the entirety of the sacrificial animal to be consumed in the flames. Not even the poorer suppliants dared contest this great waste. So Prometheus endeavoured to obtain by request from Zeus, that they were merely under an obligation to sacrifice a portion, and could devote the remainder to their own uses. He slew two oxen, burnt the liver of both, converted, however, all the bones into one, the flesh into the remaining hide of the animals, and presented Zeus the choice. Zeus, deceived by appearances, selected the bones because they were a larger portion and left the flesh in this way for human consumption. For this reason, when the flesh of sacrificial animals was consumed, the remaining portions, which were devoted to the gods, were burnt up in the same fire. Zeus, however, took away fire from men because by so doing he made it impossible for them to celebrate their feast. Little help the ruse gave him. Prometheus robbed him of the fire and in the excess of his joy flew back faster than he sped thither; for which cause, so the tale goes, the bringer of good news invariably brings “speed” with him. In this way the Greeks have directed attention to this progress in human culture and preserved and reclothed the same in myth for the mind.

(b) We may connect with the above as a similar example of a yet further degradation of animalism the traditions of famous huntings, such as we find ascribed to heroes, and handed down as sacred to grateful memory. In these the slaying of animals which appear as injurious foes, such as the strangling of the Numean lion by Heracles, the slaying of the Lernean hydra, the hunting of the Caledonian boar are set forth as something famous, by means of which the heroes contended for godlike rank, whereas the Hindoos punished with death as a crime the slaughter of certain animals. Unquestionably there is a further interplay of symbolism in deeds of this kind or they lie at the base of them. In the case of Hercules there is the fact of the sun and its course, so that such heroic actions supply an essential aspect of symbolical interpretation. These myths are, however, at the same time accepted in their express significance as beneficial hunts and were consciously recognized as such by the Greeks. We must here again in a similar relation recall certain fables of Aesop, especially those already referred to of the dung beetle. The dung beetle, that primitive Egyptian symbol, in whose balls of dung the Egyptians or the interpreters of their religious conceptions saw the world balls, comes in Aesop again before Jupiter, and with the important change that the eagle does not respect his protector the hare. Aristophanes, on the other hand, has wholly made fun of him.

(c) Thirdly, the degradation of the animal is directly indicated in many of the tales of metamorphosis as Ovid has delineated them for us in detail with grace and talent and fine traits of feeling and intuition, but also composed in a rambling way without their great and commanding ideal significance, treating them merely as the sport of mythos and external fact and failing to recognize a deeper significance. Such a deeper significance is, however, there, and we will consequently, now we mention the subject, make further allusion to it. For the most part the particular narratives are if we look at this material, quaint and primitive, not so much on account of the depraved condition of the culture, but rather, as in the Nibelungenlied, on account of the condition of a still raw nature. As far as the thirteenth book, according to their content, they are older than the Homeric tales; add to this they are a medley of cosmogony and heterogeneous elements of Phoenician, Phrygian, Egyptian symbolism, treated no doubt in a human way, but in such wise that the uncouth stock still remains, whereas the metamorphoses which enumerate tales of a later period subsequent to the Trojan war, although their material is also borrowed from fabulous times, clash awkwardly with the names of Ajax and Aeneas.

(α) Generally speaking, we may regard the metamorphoses as a contrast to the conception and worship implied in animalism. Looked at from the ethical side of Spirit they include essentially the negative attitude toward Nature, making the animal and other inorganic forms a phase of human degradation. Consequently, if among the Egyptians the gods of Nature’s elements are exalted and made vital in animals, here conversely, as we have already intimated, the natural form appears before us as an easier or difficult lapse and a monstrous crime, as the existence of an ungod-like, unfortunate thing, and as the embodiment of pain, in which the human is no longer able to remain self-contained. For this reason they have not the significance of the migration of souls in the Egyptian sense of that expression; this is a migration which does not imply guilt, but rather is on the contrary, if we take the case of the passage of the human soul into the animal, regarded as an exaltation.

As a whole, however, this is no severely exclusive circle of myths, however different the objects of Nature may be, into which that which is spiritual is banished. A few examples will sufficiently elucidate the point.

Among the Egyptians the wolf plays a part of great importance, as, for example, in the case where Osiris appears as beneficent protector of his son Horus in the latter’s conflict with Typhon, and in a whole series of Egyptian coins is represented as the assister of Horus. And speaking generally the association of the wolf and the sun-god is a primitive one. In the “Metamorphoses” of Ovid, on the other hand, the conversion of Lycaon into the form of a wolf is presented us as a punishment for his impiety. After the subjugation of the giants, we are told143, and after the annihilation of their bodily shapes the Earth, warmed by the blood of its sons which had been scattered in all directions, revitalized the warm blood, and, in order that no vestige of the former wild stock should remain, brought into being a race of men. Yet for all that was this after-birth contemptuous of the gods, eager for savage deeds and murder. Then Jupiter called the gods into conclave with a view to destroy this mortal race. He informed them how Lycaon had cunningly formed stratagems against himself, the wielder of the lightning and their sovereign lord. When, such is the story, the worthlessness of the times was apparent to him, he descended from Olympus, and came to Arcadia. “I furnished signs,” the narration continues, “that a god had drawn nigh and the people began to supplicate.” First, to make merry over these pious prayers was Lycaon, who forthwith cried out: “I will make experiment whether this indeed be a god or mortality, and the truth shall not remain in doubt.” “He made preparation,” continued Jupiter, “to slay me when oppressed with slumber; he was possessed with the passion for discovering the truth. And not contented with this, he made an incision with his sword in the throat of a goat of Molassian pedigree and boiled as to one part the only partially dead members; and as to the rest baked them on the fire, and placed both portions before me to eat. Wherefore I, with avenging flame, have laid his homestead in ashes. Affrighted he fled forth from thence, and when he reached the silent field he broke forth: in howls and strove in vain to utter speech. With rage in his jaws and in the eagerness of his animal lust for murder he turned against the cattle, and rejoices even now in their blood; his garments have become the hairy hide, and his arms have turned into thighs. He is a wolf, and preserves the signs of the primitive shape.”

The tale of Procne, who was changed into a swallow, sets before us the gravity of the committed abomination with a like emphasis. When, so the tale runs144, Procne begs of her husband, Tereus — she happened at the time to stand in his favour — that he will, forthwith let her go to see her sister or suffer her sister to visit her, Tereus hastens to launch his vessel on the sea and quickly reaches the harbour of Piraeus with his seamanship. He, however, barely catches sight of Philomela before he is violently enamoured of her. At his departure Pandion, the father, binds him on oath to protect her with the love of a father, and to send back as soon as possible the alleviation of his old age. The voyage, however, is hardly over when the barbarous man deprives her — pale, trembling, already fearful of the worst, and beseeching with tears to know where her sister is — of liberty, and as twin-consort forces her to be his concubine along with her sister. Overcome with anger and thrusting all sense of shame on one side, Philomela threatens of her own accord to betray the deed. Tereus on this draws his sword, seizes and binds her and cuts off her tongue, informs, however, his wife by way of evasion of the death of her sister. Thereupon the sorrowing Procne tears off the fine linen from her shoulders and puts on mourning apparel; she raises an empty tomb and in a mode somewhat out of place, as it happens, laments the lamentable fate of her sister. How then does Philomela meet this? A prisoner, robbed of all speech, of her voice, she bethinks her of craft. With threads of purple she works the news of the crime upon a white texture, and sends the raiment secretly to Procne. The wife reads the heartrending news of her sister; she neither speaks nor weeps; she lives wholly in the image of revenge. It was the time of the festival of Bacchus. Driven forth by the furies of her passionate grief she forces her way to her sister; she tears her from her chamber and carries her off with her away. Then in her own house, while she still is in doubt what terrible act of vengeance she shall exact on Tereus, Itys appears before his mother. She stares upon him with eyes of wildness. How like he is to his father! No further word she utters, but consummates at once the doleful deed. They slay the boy and serve him on his father’s table, who partakes eagerly of his own flesh and blood. He then calls for his son, and Procne exclaims that he carries within him that which he calls for; and, as he still looks about him and seeks after him and again asks and calls for him, Philomela sets before his face the bloody head. Then he breaks away from table with an awful cry of anguish, and weeps and calls himself his son’s sepulchre, and forthwith makes after the daughters of Pandion with the naked steel. But now supplied with wings they float away from thence, the one into the forest, the other into the roof; and Tereus also, despite all the energy of his sorrow and desire of revenge, is changed into the bird which rears on its crest the comb of feathers, and carries a beak of immoderate projection. The name of the bird is the hoopoe.

On the other hand, we have changes which proceed from a guilt of less significance. As examples, there is Cygnus who became a swan, and Daphne, the first love of Apollo145, who was changed into the laurel, Clyde into the heliotrope, Narcissus, who despised in his vanity maidens, and sees himself in the watery mirror, and Biblis146, who was enamoured of her brother, and is, when he scorns her, changed into the spring which even now bears her name and flows beneath the shading oak.

However, we must not lose ourselves in further digression through particular examples, and I will merely, by way of passage, and the one further reference to the change of the Pierides, who, according to Ovid147, were the daughters of Pieros and challenged the Muses to a match of rivalry. For ourselves the distinction of importance is the nature of the songs which the combatants sang respectively. The Pierides celebrate the battles of the gods148 and honour the giants unduly while they depreciate the deeds of the great gods. Rising up from the depths of Earth, Typhoeus filled heaven with fear; in a body the gods take flight from thence until, wearied out, they rest on Egyptian soil. But here, too, so sang the Pierides, Typhoeus arrives, and the high gods are fain to hide themselves in illusive shapes. Jupiter was leader of the army, and for this reason, so ran their refrain, the Lybian Ammon to this day is figured with crooked horns; and in like manner the scion of Semele is changed into a ram, the sister of Phoebus into a cat, Juno into a snow-white cow, Venus is concealed in a fish, Mercury in the feathers of Ibis.

Here we find therefore the gods suffer reproach in their change to animal form. Although their translation is not presented as a punishment for a wrong or a crime, it is their cowardice which is held forth to us as the reason of this self-imposed metamorphosis. Calliope, on the other hand, exalts in song the good deeds and history of Ceres. Ceres was the first, so ran the strain, to scour through the fields with the crook-backed ploughshare; first was she to give fruits and fruitful means of nourishment to the ploughed fields. First was she to lay down laws for our guidance; we are collectively but a gift of her wisdom. “Ah,” she exclaims, “my task is to celebrate her, and yet how shall I tune my strain worthy of such a goddess! Assuredly the goddess is worthy of the singer’s best.” When she has finished, the Pierides adjudge themselves victors in the contest: but even as they endeavour to speak, and with loud cries, so Ovid informs us (v. 670), are flourishing about with their hands, they perceive their nails passing away into feathers, their arms become covered with down, while each is aware that the mouth of the other is closing up into the stiff bill of a bird: and while they are all for deploring their lot, they are carried up on the waves of their wings, they float away, the screamers of the woods, and as waifs of the air. And even unto this day, adds our poet, they still retain their own glibness of tongue and excited chatter, and infinite desire to gossip. In this way we find again also here that metamorphosis is presented us as punishment, and, what is more, is presented, as is so frequently the case with such stories, as punishment due to religious impiety.

(β) If we consider further examples of still well recognized metamorphoses of men and gods into animals, we shall find that, although they do not directly imply any transgression as the cause of such a change, as, for example, in the case where Circe possessed the power to change men into animals, yet, for all that, the animal condition is at least indicative of a misfortune and a humiliation, such as brings no honour even to the person who makes such a change subservient to private ends. Circe was quite a subordinate, obscure type of goddess, and her power appears as mere witchery, and Mercury assists Odysseus, when the latter contrives to free his comrades from the spell. Of much the same kind are the many shapes which Zeus takes upon himself, as, for example, when he is changed into a bull in his quest of Europa, or when he approaches Leda in the form of a swan, or fructifies the Danae in a shower of gold. In all these cases the object is one of deception, directed by purposes of an inferior, that is to say, not spiritual, but purely natural quality, purposes which the ever constant jealousy of Juno render unavoidable. The conception of a universal procreative life of Nature, which in many of the more ancient mythologies constituted the leading motive, is imaginatively reproduced in separate poetical tales about the easily enamoured disposition of the father of gods and men, exploits, however, which he does not carry through in his own or, for the most part, in human shape, but expressly either in the shape of animals, or some other embodiment of Nature.

(γ) And, lastly, we may add to our list those hybrid forms, combining both humanity and animalism, which are also not excluded from Greek art, though the animality is here accepted as something that degrades, is unspiritual. Among the Egyptians, for example, the he-goat, Mendes, was revered149, and, according to the opinion of Jablouski150, in the sense of the procreative power of Nature, generally speaking, as that of the sun, and to such an outrageous excess that, according to Pindar, even women sacrificed themselves to these creatures. Among the Greeks, Pan, on the contrary, personifies the mysterious sense of the divine presence, and later in the shape of fauns, satyrs, and Pan-like figures, the goat shape only appeared in a subordinate way, such as in the feet, and in the most beautiful representations was perhaps limited to the pointed ears and little horns. The rest of the figure is shaped in human guise, and the animal suggestion thrust back upon the barest detail. Yet, for all that, fauns were not recognized among the Greeks as gods of any important rank or spiritual forces; their fundamental characteristic remained that of a sensuous, uncontrolled joviality. It is true that they are also artistically represented with an expression of profounder significance, as, for instance, that fine example of one in Munich, which holds the youthful Bacchus in his arms, and gazes down on him with a smile which is brimming over with love and tenderness. He is not to be taken as the father of Bacchus, but merely the foster-parent, and we find given him here the beautiful feeling of joy in the innocence of the child, such as that which, in the maternal devotion of Mary for the Christ babe, is exalted in romantic art to so lofty a level of contemplation. Among the Greeks, however, this most charming love still belongs to the subordinate sphere of fauns in order to indicate that its origin is traceable from animal, that is natural, life, and consequently is entitled to rank with such a sphere151.

Mediate shapes of a similar kind are the centaurs, in which we may also observe that the Nature-aspect of sensuality and desire is also supremely prominent to the suppression of the spiritual side. Cheiron, no doubt, is of a more noble type, a clever physician, and the tutor of Achilles; but this instructive rôle, as the teacher of a child, is not appropriate to godhead strictly, but is to be related with human ability and cleverness.

In this manner the relation of the animal shape receives a modification in classical art from whatever point of view we regard it. Its prevailing employment is to indicate that which is evil, bad, inferior, merely natural and unspiritual, whereas, outside Greece it was the expression of the positive and absolute.

The second grade of more elevated rank we may contrast with the degradation of the animal condition consists in this, that the genuine gods of classical art, inasmuch as they possess for their content a free self-consciousness, which we may define as the power of spiritual individuality reposing on its own resources, are also able to be represented as subjects of knowledge and volition, that is as spiritual potences. For this reason the humanity, in the bodily form of which they are presented us, is not, as one may say, a mere form, which is girt about this content by virtue of the imagination under a mode of purely external validity, but is rooted in the significance, content, and ideal substance itself. The divine, however, generally speaking, is essentially to be apprehended us unity of the natural and spiritual; both sides are involved in the conception of the Absolute; and it is merely the different mode, under which this harmony is conceived, which constitutes from our present point of view the respective grades of the various forms of art and historic religions. According to our own Christian way of looking at it, God is the creator and lord of Nature and the spiritual world, and therewith, no doubt, exempted from the immediate and determinate existence of Nature, for the reason that, before all else, he is very God as the taking back into Himself of his own fulness, that is as absolute and self-dependent Spirit; it is only the finite and human spirit which stands in opposition to Nature as a limit and a bound, a limitation which such only thereby overcomes in his determinate existence, and exalts himself intrinsically to the grade of infinity in so far as he grasps Nature contemplatively in thought, and in the actual world152 consummates the harmony between spiritual idea, reason, the Good and Nature. This infinite actualization is, however, God, in so far as the lordship over Nature is strictly due to Him, and He Himself is conceived as explicit in this infinite activity, and the knowledge and volition of such realization.

In the religions of strictly symbolic art, on the contrary, as we have traced already, the union of the Inward and Ideal with Nature was an immediate association, which consequently made use of Nature both as regards its substance and form as its fundamental mode of determination. In this sense the sun, the Nile, the sea, the Earth, the natural processes of birth, death, procreation, and reproduction, in short, all the varied changes of the universal life of Nature were revered as divine existence and life. These Nature-forces, however, were even in symbolic art personified, and consequently set up in contrast to the spiritual. If, however, and nothing less than this is the requirement of classical art, the gods are to be spiritual individualities in harmony with Nature, mere personification is a conception insufficient for this result. For personification, in the case that its content is a purely universal force and activity of Nature, persists as a mere form, unable to penetrate to the constituting substance, and can neither give existence to the spiritual content in the same, nor its individuality. We find therefore necessarily in classical art a change of front153, to the effect that, in conformity with the degradation of the animal aspect we have just been considering, the universal power of Nature also in one aspect of it suffers humiliation, and the spiritual is proportionally exalted in contrast to it. And by this means we find that it is the principle of subjectivity, rather than mere personification, which becomes the main mode of definition. From another point of view, however, the gods of classical art do not cease to be potences of Nature, because God here has not yet come to be represented as essentially absolute and free spirituality. In the relation of a merely created and ministrant creature to a lord and creator separated from it, Nature stands, however, albeit deified, either as we have it in the art of the Sublime — conceived as an essentially abstract, that is purely ideal masterdom of one supreme substance, or — as in the case of Christianity — exalted as concrete Spirit to absolute freedom within the pure element of spiritual existence and personal actuality. Neither of these examples falls in with the point of view of classical art. God here is not as yet lord of Nature, for the reason that he does not as yet possess absolute spirituality either if regarded relatively to what is contained in Him, or to the mode under which He is apprehended. He is no longer lord of Nature, because the sublime relation of the deified natural thing and human individuality has ceased, and taken upon itself the limitations of beauty, in which their just due must be rendered for art’s representation without any tittle of loss to both aspects, the universal and the individual, the spiritual and the natural. Consequently in the god of classical art the nature-potency is preserved, but is conceived as such not in the sense of the universal and all-embracing Nature, but as the definable, and consequently limited activity of the sun, sea, and so on, generally speaking, as a particular natural potency, which is made visible as spiritual individuality, and possesses this spiritual individuality as its essential being.

For the reason, then, as we have already made clear, that the classical Ideal is not immediately present, but first makes its appearance through the process in which that which is negative to the formative content of spirit is resolved, this transformation and building up into new forms of that which is raw, unbeautiful, wild, grotesque, purely natural, or fantastic, which originated in earlier religious conceptions and views of art, will be a leading interest in Greek mythology, and consequently will necessarily reproduce a readily defined sphere154 of particular significances.

In proceeding further to examine this fundamental aspect of our present subject I must at once give utterance to the preliminary caution that the historic investigation of the varied and multifold conceptions of Greek mythology lies outside our present task. All we are concerned to inquire into here are the essential phasal steps of this process of reconstruction, in so far as the same notify themselves as phases of universal import in the new artistic configuration and its content. As for that infinite mass of particular myths, narrations, histories, things referable to a local origin and symbolism, which collectively still assert their predominance in the world of later gods, and incidentally appear in artistic production, but for all that do not belong to the vital point of interest to which our own effort is directed — we must necessarily leave all this broad field of material on one side, and can merely refer to an example or two by way of illustration. Speaking generally we may compare this road, on which we now move forwards, to the course of the history of sculpture. For inasmuch as sculpture places before the observation of sense the gods in their real form it constitutes the peculiar centrum of classical art, albeit also the better to make it wholly understood poetry expresses itself upon gods and mankind, or passes in review the worlds of gods and men in their activity and movement in direct contrast to that objectivity self-contained in repose. Just as, then, in sculpture the moment of all importance in the beginning is the transformation of the formless, the stone or block of wood that has fallen from heaven (διoπετὴς) — as the the great goddess of Pessinus in Asia Minor actually was, which the Romans directed by means of a solemn embassy to be transferred to Rome — into the human form and so makes the statue, so too we have here to make a beginning from the formless, uncouth powers of Nature, and while doing so merely to indicate the stages, in their passage through which they are exalted into spiritual individuality and are finally concentrated in shapes of fixity.

We may in this connection distinguish three separable aspects as of most importance.

The first, which arrests our attention, are the oracles in which the knowledge and volition of gods, still under a formless mode, gives witness to their presence through natural existences.

The second point of view to be noted is concerned with the universal forms of Nature, no less than the abstractions of Right and so forth, which lie at the root of the genuine spiritual and individual deities, which are, so to speak, their birth-cradles and furnish us with the necessary conditions of their origin and activity: they are the old gods in contradistinction to the new.

Thirdly, and finally, we are made aware of the essentially necessary progress to the Ideal in the fact that the primarily superficial personifications of the activities of Nature and the most abstract spiritual conditions are contested and thrust from their prominence as something essentially subordinate and negative and, by virtue of this debasement the self-sufficient spiritual individuality and its human form and action, is suffered to attain an unchallenged masterdom. This revolution, which constitutes the real central position in the historical origins of the classic gods, is in Greek mythology placed before our imagination in the conflict — a mode of presentation as naïve as it is astonishingly direct — between the old and new gods, in the headlong fall of the Titans, and in the victory which the divine race of Zeus secures.

(a) To take, then, first in order the oracles, it will not be necessary for us now to dilate on them to any considerable extent. The essential point which concerns us here is merely due to this fact, that in classical art the phenomena of Nature are no longer revered as such — in the way that the Parsees, for example, pray to naphthetic regions or fire, or as among the Egyptians, gods remain inscrutable, mysterious, and mute riddles — but that the gods, being themselves subjects of knowledge and volition, do verily give to man by means of natural phenomena indications of their wisdom. In this sense the ancient Hellenes made inquiry at the oracle of Dodona155, whether they should accept the names of gods, which have come to them from barbarians, and the oracle replied: “Use them.”

(α) The signs by means of which the gods thus made their revelations are for the most part of the simplest description. At Dodona such were the rustle and whisper of the sacred oak, the murmur of the spring, the tones of the brazen vessel, which the wind made thus to reverberate. In like manner at Delos it was the laurel which rustled and at Delphi, too, the sound of the wind on the brazen tripod was full of significance156. Over and above, however, such immediately natural sounds man is also the voice-piece of the oracle in so far as he is rendered deaf to and whirled away from the alert commonsense of his ordinary mind to a natural condition of enthusiasm; as, for example, the Pythia at Delphi was wont, stupefied by exhalations, to deliver the oracular words, or in the cave of Trophonius the inquirer of the oracle met with faces, from the interpretation of which an answer was delivered him.

(β) There is, however, another aspect which we should set alongside of the purely external sign. For in the oracles God is, it is true, accepted as He who knows, and the oracle of most famed repute is dedicate to Apollo, the god of wisdom. The form, however, in which he reveals his will, remains the wholly indefinite voice of Nature, either a natural sound, that is, or the unconnected tones of words. In this obscurity of form the spiritual content is itself equally obscure and requires interpretation and explanation.

(γ) This explanation, albeit it brings under a mode of spiritual life the deliverance of the god which in the first instance is presented purely in the form of Nature’s own voice, remains despite this fact obscure and equivocal. For the god is in his knowledge and volition concrete universality. And of the same type also must the advice or command unavoidably be which the oracle declares. The universal, however, is not one-sided and abstract, but as concrete universal contains the one side no less than the other. Inasmuch, then, as man stands over against the knowing god as one unknowing he accepts the oracular word itself in ignorance. In other words, the concrete universality of the same is not open to his intelligence, and he can merely select from the equivocal word of the god, assuming that he decides to act upon it, one aspect thereof, for the reason that every action under particular circumstances is unavoidably definite, only, that is to say, giving a decisive impulse in one direction and shutting off another. His action is barely accomplished, and the deed — which consequently has become his own and for which he must now be answerable — really carried through when he finds a collision confronting him. All in a moment he is aware that the other side, which lay already folded in the oracular sentence, is turned against himself and the fatality of his deed, his knowledge and will notwithstanding, has him in the toils; a fatality which he may not know, but of which we must suppose the gods are aware. Conversely again the gods are determinate potencies and their expressed will, when it carries this character of essential determinacy, as, for example, the bidding of Apollo, which drives Orestes forward to his revenge, brings about a collision of forces in the selfsame way. For the reason, then, that in one aspect of it the form, which the spiritual knowledge of the god assumes in the oracle, is the wholly undefined external expression or the abstract ideality of the word, and the form itself through the equivocal sense it contains includes the possibility of discord, we find that in classical art it is not sculpture, but poetry, and pre-eminently dramatic poetry, in which oracles contribute their share of the content and are of importance. In classical art, however, they do essentially maintain a place, because in it human individuality has not forced its way to the full height of spiritual attainment, where the subject draws the determination of his actions without infringement from his own resources. What we in our modern sense of the term call conscience, has not as here secured its rightful place. The Greek acts often, it is true, at the beck of his passion, bad no less than good; the genuine pathos, however, which is here held to quicken him, and does in fact so quicken him, proceeds from the gods, whose content and might is the universal of such a pathos; and the heroes are either immediately instinct with the same, or they interrogate oracles for advice, when the gods do not present themselves openly to their vision, by way of quickening the deed to be done.

(b) Moreover, as in the oracle the content is to be found in the gods that know and willy while the form of the external phenomenon is the external which is abstract and a part of Nature, from the other point of view that which is natural, if we look at it relatively to its universal forces and the activities which belong to these, becomes the content, from out of which the independent individuality has first to force its way up, and receives as its original form merely the formal and superficial personification. The thrusting back of these purely natural forces, the opposition and contention through which they are overcome is just the significant centre, for which we are indebted primarily to classical art, and which we must consequently submit to a closer examination.

(α) The first thing we would remark in this connection is attributable to the circumstance that we are not here concerned — as in that view of the world which belongs to the Sublime, or in part even that appropriate to Hindoo doctrines — with God already essentially devoid of any relation to sense, when regarded as the starting point of all creation, but rather with that in which Nature’s gods, and we may add in the first instance the more universal forces of Nature such as Chaos, Tartarus, Erebus, the entire savage and subterranean substance, and, furthermore, Uranos, Gaia, the Titan Eros, Kronos, and the rest, supply the beginning157. It is from out of these, then, that the better defined powers, such as Helios, Oceanos, and others like them first have their being; while they, in their turn, become the natural cradle for the later spiritual and individualized divinities. We find, therefore, again here another theogony and cosmogony which is the work of the imagination, whose earliest gods, however, still remain for the observer under one aspect of an undefined character, or vaguely extend beyond all reasonable limit; and, if viewed from another standpoint, still carry with them much that is essentially symbolical.

(β) The more detailed distinctions among these Titan potencies may be thus indicated:

(αα) First, we have those powers of the Earth and the stars, without spiritual and ethical content, consequently dissolute, a raw, savage race, gigantic and formless, as though they were scions of Hindoo or Egyptian imagination. They are to be classed with other individualities of Nature such as Brontes, Steropes, and again with the hundred-handed Kottos, Briareus, and Gyges, the giants and the rest standing in the first instance beneath the lordship of Uranos, then of Kronos, that chief of the Titans, who obviously is a kind of personified Time, devouring all his children, just as Time eventually annihilates everything that it has brought to birth. This myth is not without a symbolical significance. For the life of Nature is, in fact, subjugate to Time, and brings only the Past into existence, just as in the same way the prehistoric times of some people, which is only one nation, one stock, yet constitutes no genuine State, and pursues no definite objects essentially made clear to itself, becomes the sport of the power of a Time, which is destitute of history. We touch solid ground for the first time when we come to law, morality, and the State, something permanent which remains though races pass away, as it is said that the Muses give permanence and a defence to everything, which, as the life of Nature and present action, had only vanished swept away with Time.

(ββ) But, further, it is not only that the forces of Nature belong to this sphere of the old gods, but also the forces noted as earliest over the elements. In particular the first active agency upon metal through the force of what is still raw, and elementary Nature, that is air, water, fire, is of importance. We may mention in illustration the Corybantes, the Telchines, demons of both beneficent and evil influence, the Pataeci, pygmies, dwarfs, cunning in the woodman’s craft, small, with big paunches.158

More prominent notice should be taken of Prometheus, as illustrating in the chief place a fundamental point of new departure. Prometheus is a Titan of exceptional type and deserves exceptional attention. Together with his brother Epimetheus he appears in the first instance as favourable to the young gods; then he stands out as the benefactor of men, who in other respects have no defined relation with the new gods or the Titans. He brings fire to man, and thereby supplies them with the means of satisfying their needs and working the technical arts, which are no longer, however, regarded as natural products, and consequently it would appear do not stand in any closer association with Titan workmanship. For this interference Zeus punishes Prometheus until Hercules finally releases him from suffering. At the first glance there would appear to be nothing strictly Titanesque in these main features of the story; nay, it would not be difficult to point out an inconsequence in the fact that Prometheus, just as Ceres, is a benefactor of mankind, and is none the less numbered among the old Titanic potencies. If we look at the matter more closely, however, this inconsequence will at once disappear. In this connection several passages from Plato’s works will help us sufficiently to clear the difficulty. There is the myth in which the guest-friend recites to the younger Socrates that in the time of Kronos men originated from the Earth, while the god, on his part, devoted his attention to the whole159. After this step a movement of opposite tendency sprang up, and the Earth was left to itself160, so that now the beasts became savage, and mankind, whose means of nourishment and all their other needs had hitherto passed immediately into their hands, were left alone without advice or assistance. Well, according to this myth, it was in such a condition161 that fire was brought to mankind by Prometheus, all other accessories of craftsmanship being communicated by Hephaestos and his companion in craftsmanship, Athene.

Here we have notified expressly a distinction between fire and the thing which artistic ability produces by working on the raw material; and only the gift of fire is ascribed to Prometheus. Plato narrates the myth of Prometheus at greater length in the “Protagoras.” There we read162: “There was once a time when gods indeed existed, but mortal beings had not appeared. When the foreordained time of their birth also had come, the gods created them in the inward parts of the Earth, composing their substance of Earth and fire and that which is the union of both these elements. When the gods were desirous of bringing them into the light, they handed them over to Prometheus and Epimetheus to apportion and arrange the energies of each singly as was right. Epimetheus, however, requested of Prometheus that the apportionment might be left to him. After I have done this, quoth he, you may mark and express an opinion. Epimetheus, however, by a blunder apportioned everything worth having to the animal world, so that there was nothing left over for mankind; and when Prometheus made his inspection he found that though all other living things were wisely provided with all their needs mankind remained naked, unprotected, without covering or weapons. But already the appointed day had appeared in which it was necessary that man should pass from the bowels of the Earth into the light. In the embarrassment in which he was placed to procure some assistance for mankind Prometheus stole the wisdom that is shared by Hephaestos and Athene by taking fire — for without fire it would be impossible to possess it or make it of use — and made a present of this to men. Man now, it is true, possessed the wisdom necessary for the support of his life, but he was still without political wisdom, for this was still lodged with Zeus. Entry, however, to the stronghold of Zeus was no longer permitted Prometheus, and apart from this the awful watchers of Zeus barred the way. He passed, however, secretly into the chamber which Hephaestos and Athene shared in the practice of their art, and having secured the forging-art of Hephaestos he pilfered that other art (the art of weaving) which was possessed by Athene and presented this to mankind. Out of these possessions the means of satisfying the needs of Life is provided for man (ἐυπoρία τoῦ βίoυ).” Prometheus receives, however, as already narrated, punishment for the thefts he commits owing to the blunders of Epimetheus.

Plato further tells us in a passage which immediately follows the above that mankind was still destitute of the art of war for their protection against the animal world, which was merely a part of the art of politics, and consequently were collected into cities, and would have so outraged each other and finally broken up such asylums for the reason that they were without all political organization, that Zeus found it necessary to send down to them under the escort of Hermes Shame and Right.

In these passages the distinction between the immediate objects of life, which are related to physical comfort, that is, the provision for the satisfaction of the most primary necessaries and political organization, such as sets before itself as its object what is spiritual, custom, law, right of property, freedom, and communal existence is expressly emphasized. This principle of ethical life and right163, Prometheus did not give to men, he merely taught them the cunning by means of which they might overcome natural objects and make them serviceable to their needs. Fire and the craftsmanship which makes use of fire have nothing ethical about them in themselves; and it is just the same with the art of weaving; in the first instance they are devoted to the exclusive service of private individuals, without coming into any relation with that which is shared in human existence or with Life in its public character. For the reason, then, that Prometheus was unable to furnish mankind with anything more spiritual or ethical, he also does not belong to the race of new gods, but to the Titans164. Hephaestos, it is true, also possessed fire and the particular crafts to which it is essential as an instrument for his field of activity, and is none the less accredited as a new god: but Zeus cast him from Olympus, and he continued to limp ever after. Just as little is it, therefore, an inconsequence when we find Ceres placed among the younger gods, who proved herself a benefactor of mankind just as Prometheus did. For that which Ceres taught was agriculture, with which at the same time property, and yet more, marriage, social custom, and law stand in close association.

(γγ) A third class of the ancient gods contains, it is true, neither personified potencies of Nature, as such, nor the might which next follows as lord over the particular elements of Nature in the service of the more subordinate human necessities, but is already contestant with that which is essentially in itself ideal, universal, and spiritual. What, however, is none the less lacking in the powers we have here to reckon with is spiritual individuality and its appropriate form and manifestation, so that they also more or less relatively to their operations keep a position which is more nearly akin to the necessity and essential being of Nature. In illustration of this type we may recall the conception of Nemesis, Dike, the Erinnyes, Eumenides, and Moirai. No doubt we find associated with these figures the determinate notions of right and justice; but this inevitable right, instead of being conceived and clothed in the essentially spiritual and substantive medium of social morality165, remains either persistent in the universal abstract notion, or is related to the obscure right of that which is natural within the circle of spiritual connections, the love of kindred, for example, and its paramount claim, which does not appertain to Spirit in the open freedom of itself self-recognized; and consequently also does not appear as lawful right, but in opposition to this as the irreconcilable right of revenge.

To bring the view of the above nearer I will merely draw attention to one or two ideas bound up with it. Nemesis, for example, is the might to humiliate the exalted, and to cast down the man all too fortunate from his lofty seat, and consequently to restore equilibrium. The claim or right of equilibrium is the purely abstract and external right, which, it is true, certifies itself as operative in the range of spiritual circumstances, and conditions, without, however, making the ethical organization of the same the content of justice. Another aspect of importance attaches to this circumstance, that the right of the family-condition is apportioned by the ancient gods, in so far as these repose on a condition of Nature, and thereby are in antagonism with the public right and law of the community. We may adduce the Eumenides of Aeschylus as the clearest illustration of this point. The direful maidens pursue Orestes on account of the murder of his mother, a murder which Apollo, the younger god, had directed, in order that Agamemnon, the slaughtered spouse and king, should not remain unavenged. The entire drama consequently is concentrated in a conflict between these divine Powers, which confront each other in person. On the one side we have the goddesses of revenge, the Eumenides; but they are called here the beneficent, and our ordinary conception of the Furies, into which we convert them, is set before us as rude and uncouth. For they possess an essential right thus to persecute, and are therefore not merely hateful, wild, and ferocious in the torments which they impose. The right, however, which they enforce as against Orestes is only the family-right in so far as this is rooted in the blood relation. The profoundest association of son and mother is the substantive fact which they represent. Apollo opposes to this natural ethical relation, rooted as it is already both on the physical side and in feeling, the right of the spouse and the chieftain who has been violated in respect to the highest right he can claim. This distinction is in the first instance brought to our notice in an external way since both parties are champions for morality within one and the same sphere, namely the family. The sterling166 imagination of Aeschylus has, however, here — and we cannot sufficiently value it on this score — discovered for us a contradiction, which is not by any means a superficial one, but of fundamental significance. That is to say, the relation of children to parents reposes on the unity of the natural nexus; the association of man and wife on the contrary must be accepted as marriage, which does not merely proceed from purely natural love, that is from the blood or natural affinity, but originates out of a conscious inclination, and for this reason belongs to the free ethical sphere of the self-conscious will. However much, therefore, marriage is bound up with love and feeling it is none the less to be distinguished from the purely natural emotion of love, because it also freely recognizes definite obligations quite independent of the same, which persist when that feeling of love may have ceased. The notion, in short, and the knowledge of the substantiality of marital life is something later and more profound than the purely natural connection between mother and son, and constitutes the beginning of the State as the realization of the free and rational will. In like manner we shall find resident in the relation of prince to citizen the association of a similar political right, law, and the self-conscious freedom and spirituality of similar social aims. This is the reason why the Eumenides, the ancient goddesses, pursue Orestes with punishment, whereas Apollo — the clear, knowing and self-consciously knowing ethical sense — defends the right of the spouse and the chief, justly opposing the Eumenides: “If the crime of Clytemnestra were not scented out I should be in verity without honour and despised as nought by the consummator Here and the Councils of Zeus167.”

Of still greater interest, albeit wholly involved in human feeling and action, is the contradiction which we have set before us in the “Antigone,” one of the most sublime, and in every respect most consummate work of art human effort ever produced. Not a detail in this tragedy but is of consequence. The public law of the State and the instinctive family-love and duty towards a brother are here set in conflict. Antigone, the woman, is pathetically possessed by the interest of family; Kreon, the man, by the welfare of the community. Polynices, in war with his own father-city, had fallen before the gates of Thebes, and Kreon, the lord thereof, had by means of a public proclamation threatened everyone with death who should give this enemy of the city the right of burial. Antigone, however, refused to accept this command, which merely concerned the public weal, and, constrained by her pious devotion for her brother, carried out as sister the sacred duty of interment. In doing this she relied on the law of the gods. The gods, however, whom she thus revered, are the Dei inferi of Hades168, the instinctive Powers of feeling, Love and kinship, not the daylight gods of free and self-conscious, social, and political life.

(γ) The third point, which we would advert to in connection with the theogony of the outlook of artists in the classic period, has reference to the difference between individuals of the older gods relatively to their powers and the duration of their authority.

(αα) In the first place, the origin of these gods is a succession. From Chaos, according to Hesiod, proceeds Gaia, Uranos, and others, after that Kronos and his race, finally Zeus and his subjects. This succession appears in one aspect of it as a rise from the more abstract and formless to the more concrete and already fairly defined powers of Nature; in another as the beginnings of the superiority of the spiritual over the natural. Thus in his “Eumenides” Aeschylus makes the Pythia in the temple of Delphi begin with the words: “First of all I revere in my prayer her who first gave us oracles, Gaia, and after her Themis, who as second after her mother had her prophetic seat in this place.” Pausanias, on the other hand, who also names the Earth first as giver of oracles, says that Daphne was ordained by her afterwards in the prophetic office. In another series again Pindar places Night in the first place, after her he makes Themis follow, then comes Phoebe, and finally he closes the succession with Phoebus. It would be of interest to analyse more closely these particular differences; such an inquiry, however, lies outside our present purpose.

(ββ) This succession further, in addition to its aspect of being an extension into essentially profounder conceptions of godhead, possessing, that is, a fuller content, also appears as the degradation of the earlier and more abstract type within the range of the older race of gods itself. The primary and most ancient powers are robbed of their masterdom, just as we find Kronos dethroned Uranos, and the later representatives are set up in their place.

(γγ) In this way the negative relation of the reformation169, which we settled at once to be the essence of this first stage of the classic type of art, becomes the proper centre of the same. And it is so for the reason that personification is here the universal form, in which the gods are presented to the imagination, and the progressive movement comes into opposition with human and spiritual individuality. And although this appears in the first instance still in a form indeterminate and formless, we necessarily find that the imagination presents this negative attitude of the younger gods against the more ancient under the image of conflict and war. The essential advance is, however, from Nature to Spirit, implying by the latter the true content and the real form appropriate to classical art. This progress and the conflicts by means of which we perceive that it is carried forward, belong no longer exclusively to the sphere of the old gods, but centre in the war through which the new gods lay the foundation of their enduring mastery over the ancient.

(c) The opposition between Nature and Spirit is in the nature of the case inevitable. For the notion of Spirit, as in very truth totality, is, as we have already seen, essentially simply this, to split itself in twain, that is into its intrinsic constituents as objectivity and as subject, in order that by means of this opposition it may emerge from Nature and confront the same forthwith free and jubilant as vanquisher and superior might. This fundamental phase, rooted in the very essence of Spirit, is consequently a material aspect in the conception which it supplies to itself of that nature. Regarded historically, that is on the plane of ordinary reality, this passage asserts itself as the reconstruction through progressive steps of the natural man into the condition where right, property, laws, constitution and political life are paramount. Regarded under a mode which relates this process to gods and sub specie eternitatis it becomes the conception of the victory over the natural Powers by means of the spiritual and individual Divinities.

(α) This contest exposes an absolute catastrophe, and is the essential deed of the gods, by virtue of which the fundamental distinction between the old and new gods is first made visible. Consequently we ought not to point to the war, which exposes this distinction as a mythical story in the same way we should point to any other myth; rather we should regard it as the mythos, which in fact punctuates a great moment of transition, and expresses the creation of the later theogony.

(β) The result of this violent strife among the gods is the ruin of the Titans, the unique victory of the new gods, who forthwith receive in their assured dominion a plenitude of gifts in every direction from the imagination. The Titans, on the other hand, are banished, and compelled to huddle in the hollows of the Earth, or, like Oceanos, dally on the dark skirts of the clear, joyful world, or still endure many grievous punishments. Prometheus, for example, is fettered on the Scythian mountains, where an eagle insatiable devours the liver that ever renews itself. In like manner an infinite and inexhaustible thirst torments Tantalus in the lower world, and Sisyphus is for ever constrained to roll up hill in vain the rock that for ever rolls back again. These punishments are, in truth, the false type of infinity, the yearning of the indefinite aspiration or the unsatisfied craving of natural desires, which in their eternal repetition fail to discover rest or final satisfaction. For the truly godlike intuition of the Greeks regarded the mere extension into space and the region of the indefinite, not, as some modern votaries of such longings do, as the highest attainment of mankind, but as a damnation which it relegates to Tartarus.

(γ) If we ask ourselves in a general way, what from this point must for classical art fall into the background, failing, that is, to have any right to figure as its final form and adequate content, we shall find at the earliest point of departure the elements of Nature. With them disappear from the world of the new gods all that is gloomy170, fantastical, void of clarity, every wild confusion between Nature and Spirit, between significances essentially substantive and the accidental incidents of externality. In a world such as this the creations of an unrestricted imagination, which has not yet for its principle the measure of spiritual proportion, have no place, and are compelled and justly so to vanish before the clear light of day. We may furbish up the monstrous Cabeiri171, the Corybantes, these representatives of procreative force as much as we choose, yet for all that such presentations in every trait of them — to say nothing of the ancient Baubo, whom Goethe sets careering over the Blocksberg on an old sow — belong to a greater or less degree to the twilight of consciousness. Only that which is spiritual imperatively demands the light; and that which does not reveal itself and in itself expound its own interpretation is the unspiritual, which fades again once more into Night and obscurity. That which is of Spirit on the contrary reveals itself, and purifies itself, by itself defining its external form, from the caprice of the imagination, the flood of obstructing shapes, and the otherwise perturbed accessories of symbolical sense.

For the same reasons we now find that human activity, in so far as it is limited merely to Nature’s wants and their satisfaction, falls into the background. That old right, Themis, Dike and the rest, as one not determinate through laws which originate in self-conscious Spirit, loses its unimpaired validity, and in the same way, if conversely, that which is purely local, albeit there is still room left for its play, passes by incorporation into the universal figures of the gods; in which we may still trace the lingering vestiges that remain of it. For as in the Trojan war the Greeks fought and conquered as one people, so, too, the Homeric gods, who already have their conflict with the Titans behind them in the past, are one essentially secure and defined god-world, a world which is yet further with ever-increasing fulness made definite and unassailable by later poetry and the plastic arts. This invincible consistency172 is in its relation to the content of the Greek world of gods Spirit and only Spirit; but not Spirit in its abstract ideality, but as identified with its external and adequate existence, just as with Plato soul and body, as in union brought into one nature and in this consolidation from one piece, is at once the Divine and Eternal.

Despite, then, the victory of the new gods that which came before them still remains in the classical type of art partly preserved and revered in the original form in which we have already recognized it, partly under a transmuted mode. It is only the limited Jewish national god which is unable to tolerate other gods in its company for the reason that it purports as the one god to include everything, although in regard to the definition of its form it fails to pass beyond its exclusiveness wherein the god is merely the God of His own people. Such a god manifests his universality in fact only through his creation of Nature and as Lord of the heavens and the earth. For the rest he remains the god of Abraham, who led his people Israel out of Egypt, gave them laws on Sinai, and divided the land of Canaan among the Jews. And through this narrow identification of him with the Jewish nation he is in a quite peculiar way the god of this folk; and consequently, speaking generally, neither stands in positive consonance with Nature, nor appears truly as absolute Spirit referable back from his determinate character and objectivity to his universality. Consequently this austere, national god is so jealous, and ordains in his jealousy that men shall see elsewhere merely false idols. The Greeks, on the contrary, discovered their gods among other nations and accepted what was foreign among themselves. For the god of classical art has spiritual and bodily individuality and is for this reason not the one and only one, but merely a particular godhead, which, as everything else that shares particularity, has a circle of particularity which surrounds it or in opposition to it as its Other, from which it is the result, and which is qualified to preserve its validity and worth. The process here is analogous to that of the particular divisions of Nature. Although the world of vegetation is the truth of the geological image of Nature, the animal again the higher truth of the vegetable, yet the mountains and the flooded land persist as the solid basis of trees, shrubs, and flowers, which in their turn do not lose their existence alongside the world of animals.

(a) The earliest form under which among the Greeks we come upon this ancient residue, are the Mysteries. The Greek Mysteries were nothing secret in the sense that the Greek nation was not in a general way aware of their content. On the contrary, the majority of the Athenians and a large number of foreigners were among the initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries; but they were not permitted to speak of that in which they had been instructed through initiation. In our own times people have been at great pains to discover more nearly the type of conceptions which prevailed in these mysteries, and to investigate the kind of religious services which were used in their celebration. It appears, however, that on the whole there was no extensive wisdom or profound knowledge concealed in the Mysteries. They merely preserved the old traditions, the basis, that is, of what was latterly reconstructed by the genuine type of art, and consequently, so far from containing the true, higher, and more valuable content, rather unfolded that which was of less significance and of inferior rank. Whatever it was, this holiness was not clearly expressed in the mysteries, but merely handed down in its symbolical features. And in fact this character of secrecy and reticence is bound up with the old telluric, sidereal, and Titanic deposit; Spirit alone is the revealed and the self-revealer. Consonant, too, with this it is the symbolical mode of expression which constitutes the other aspect of secrecy in the mysteries, because in symbolism the interpretation remains obscure, and contains a something other than the external image, which it purports to display, in fact offers to the view. In this sense, for example, the mysteries of Demeter and Bacchus were, it is true, spiritually interpreted, and contained a profounder sense. The form of the same remained quite externally isolate from this content, so that it was impossible clearly to disengage it from it. Consequently the Mysteries had very little influence over art; for though we are told of Aeschylus, that he willfully betrayed something which attached to the Demeter mysteries, this merely amounts to an assertion on his part that Artemis had been the daughter of Ceres, which is not very profound wisdom after all.

(b) But, secondly, we find that the reverence and preservation of the old régime is yet more clearly indicated in actual artistic representation. We have already referred to Prometheus as the chastised Titan who appears in the stage immediately prior to that of genuine art. We meet with him however again as delivered. For as the Earth and as the Sun, so also the fire, which Prometheus brought down to men, that is, the eating of flesh, which he taught them, is an essential feature of human life, a necessary condition for the satisfaction of their needs; and consequently Prometheus is honoured with an enduring recognition173. In the Oedipus Colonos of Sophocles we have the words:

χῶρoς μὲν ἱερὸς πᾶς ὅδ ἔστ· ἔχει δέ νιν

σεμνὸς Πoσειδῶν· ἐν δ’ ὁ πoρφόρoς θeὸς

Tιτὰν Πρoμηθὲυς174

and the scholiast adds that Prometheus was revered in the Academy along with Athene, as Hephaestos was, and a temple was shown in a grove of the goddess, and an ancient pedestal near the entrance, where there was not only an image of Hephaestos, but also one of Prometheus. Prometheus, however, according to the statement of Lysimachides, was represented as primary and more ancient, and he held in his hand a sceptre; Hephaestos as the younger and in the second place, and the altar on the pedestal was shared by both. Prometheus, then, according to the tale, was not obliged to endure his chastisement for ever, but was released from his fetters by Hercules. In this story of his liberation we come across certain remarkable traits. In other words, Prometheus is delivered from his agony because he informs Zeus of the danger which threatens his empire at the hands of the thirteenth descendant. This descendant is Hercules, to whom, we may add in illustration, Poseidon exclaims in the “Birds” of Aristophanes175, “he will do himself an injury, if he strike a bargain with reference to the transference of the divine headship, for all that Zeus leaves behind him on his decease will most assuredly take place.” And, in fact, Hercules is the only man who passed over into Olympus, became a god after being a man, and stands higher than Prometheus, who remained a Titan. Moreover, the overturning of the old race of tyrants is intimately connected with the name of Hercules and the Heraklidae. The Heraklidae break up the power of the old dynasties and royal houses, in which we may remark the selfish desire of personal aggrandizement and lawlessness no less than disregard for their subjects admitted no judicial restraint, and consequently was responsible for the grossest cruelties. Hercules, though himself in the service of a superior lord, overcame the savagery of this despotism.

In a similar way we may, to linger once more for a moment by the illustrations we adduced on a former page, recall again to our readers the “Eumenides” of Aeschylus. The conflict between Apollo and the Eumenides is to be settled by the intervention of the Areopagus. In other words, a human tribunal, as a whole, at whose head stands Athene, stands forth as the concrete spirit of the folk, and is as such to terminate the collision. The judges, however, give an equal number of votes for condemnation and acquittal, having an equal reverence both for the Eumenides and Apollo; the white pebble of Athene, however, decides the conflict in favour of Apollo. The Eumenides break out in indignation against this decision of Athene; she, however, allays their wrath by promising them worship and altars in the famous grove of Colonos. What the Eumenides have to give in return to her people is a protection against the evils176 which result from the elements of Nature, the earth, the heavens, the sea, and the winds; they have further to ward off unfruitfulness in the fields, the failure of living seed, and misbirths in all else that is procreated. Pallas, on her part, takes beneath her protection the strife of wars and sacred contests. Ina similar way Sophocles177, in his “Antigone,” not only makes Antigone suffer and die, but to a like extent we find that Kreon is punished by the loss of his wife and the death of Haemon, both of whom perish through the death of Antigone.

(c) Thirdly, the ancient gods do not merely preserve their place in juxtaposition to the new, but, what is of more importance, the natural basis itself is maintained by the new gods, and receives, continuing to made its echo sound in them, if in conformity with the spiritual individuality of classical art, a reverential acceptance.

(α) And for this reason people are not unfrequently led into the error of conceiving the Greek gods, in respect to their human character and form, as mere allegories of such natural elements. This is not so. In this sense we frequently hear it stated that Helios is the god of the sun, Diana the goddess of the moon, or Neptune the god of the sea. Such a separation, however, between the natural element, as content, and the humanly shaped personification, as form, no less than the external association of both, regarded merely as the masterdom of the god over the natural fact, as we are accustomed to it in the Old Testament, is quite inapplicable to Greek conceptions. We never find among the Greeks such an expression as ὁ θεὸς τoῦ ἡλίoυ, τῆς θαλάσσης, and so forth, though it is quite certain they would have used with others such an expression for the relation in question, had it been compatible with their point of view. Helios is the sun as god.

(β) We must, however, at once insist on the further fact that the Greeks never regarded mere Nature as itself divine. On the contrary, they retained the definite conception that what was purely natural was not divine. This is partly contained, if unexpressed, in what their gods actually are, in part also it is expressly stated so by themselves. Plutarch, for example, in his essay upon Isis and Osiris, refers incidentally to the modes of interpretation current of myths and divinities. Osiris and Isis belong to the Egyptian theogony, and had yet more of the natural element for their content than the Greek gods, who correspond to them; they merely express the longing and conflict to escape out of the circle of Nature to that of Spirit. In later times they were very highly honoured in Rome, and the mysteries allied with them were of great importance. Yet for all that it is Plutarch’s view that it would be an interpretation beneath the level of the subject to think of explaining them as sun, earth, or water. Only that which in the sun, Earth, and so forth, is without measure or co-ordination, defective or superfluous, can strictly be referred to the natural elements, and all that is good and conformable to order is as exclusively a work of Isis, and the rational principle, the λόγoς, a work of Osiris. It is not, therefore, the natural as such which is adduced as the substantive content of these gods, but the spiritual principle, the universal, λόγoς, reason, conformity to law.

By virtue of this insight into the spiritual nature of the gods, the more definite elements of Nature, then, had also among the Greeks been differentiated from the later gods. We have, it is true, grown accustomed to associate Helios and Selene, to take two examples, with Apollo and Diana: in Homer, however, they are presented as distinct. The same remark applies to Oceanos and others.

(γ) But in the third place an echo still lingers in the new gods of the natural powers, whose operative energies themselves belong to the spiritual individuality of the gods. We have already indicated, at an earlier stage, the basis of this positive connection of the spiritual and natural in the ideal of classical art, and may limit our observations here to a few illustrations.

(αα) In Poseidon resides, as in Pontus and Oceanus, the might of the world-encircling sea, but his power and activity extends further. He built Ilium and was a shield of Athens. Generally he is revered as the founder of cities, in so far as the sea is the element of sea-faring, of commerce, and a bond between mankind. Apollo, in like manner, is the light of knowledge, of oracular speech, and preserves, moreover, a distant relation with Helios, as the natural light of the sun. Critics differ, no doubt — take Voss and Creuzer for examples — as to whether Apollo is referable to the sun. One may, however, in fact, assert that he both is and is not the sun, since he is not limited to its natural content, but is raised thereby to the significance of a spiritual import. It is impossible to escape the inevitable connection in which knowledge and light, the light of Nature and that of Spirit, if we regard their fundamental characteristics, stand relatively to one another. Light regarded as a element of Nature is that which manifests. Without our seeing Light itself it makes visible to us the illuminated objects around. By means of Light everything grows on the plane of contemplation for something else. Spirit, that is the free light of consciousness, knowledge, and cognition, possesses just the same character of manifestation. The distinction, apart from the differences of the respective spheres, in which these two modes of manifestation reveal themselves, consists simply in this, that Spirit reveals itself, and in that which it brings us, or which it assimilates as content178, remains constant to itself. Light, however, does not make itself apprehensible to itself, but, on the contrary, makes that which is other and external to itself apprehensible; and though, no doubt, we may say this is done from its own resources, yet it cannot, as the Spirit can, once more retire into itself. For this reason it does not win the higher unity which finds itself constant by itself in another. Just as, then, light and knowledge are closely associated, we find in Apollo, as spiritual god, still a recollection of the light of the sun. For this reason Homer, for example, ascribes the plague in the camp of the Greeks to Apollo, which, in such a locality is in the summer solstice ascribable to the operation of the sun. We may add that his deadly arrows have unquestionably a symbolical reference to the solar rays. In the external representation it is external signs which more closely determine under what specific interpretation the god shall be mainly accepted.

More particularly when we follow up the origins of the later gods we are able to recognize the natural element, which the gods of the classic ideal retain in themselves. This is a point which Creuzer in particular has made clear. For example, in the conception of Jupiter there are many features which indicate a solar source. The twelve labours of Hercules, the expedition, for example, in which he carries off the apples of the Hesperides, have relation both to the sun and the twelve months. At the root of the conception of Diana we have the distinct suggestion of the mother of Nature, just as the Ephesian Diana, for example, which floats between the old world and the new, has for her fundamental content Nature generally, procreation and nutrition; which latter feature is clearly indicated in a part of her external form, namely the breasts. If we consider the Greek Artemis, on the other hand, the huntress, who slays wild animals, we find that in her humanly beautiful and maiden form and self-continency, this aspect falls entirely into the background, although the half moon and the arrows still distinctly recall to us Selene. To take Aphrodite in the same way, the more we follow her back to her original source in Asia the more she approaches a force of Nature. Once arrived in Greece, the spiritual and more individual aspect of her grace, charm, and love, passion is more emphasized, albeit here, too, the natural basis is by no means entirely absent. In the same way the productivity of Nature is, no doubt, the original cradle which gives us Ceres. Starting from that we proceed to the spiritual content, whose relations are developed from agriculture, property, etc. The source in Nature of the Muses is the murmur of the spring-water; and Zeus himself may be accepted under one aspect as the universal Power of Nature, and is revered as the Thunderer, as with Homer already thunder is the sign of misfortune or assistance, is, in short, an omen, and as such is relative to that which is human and spiritual. Juno, too, implies a natural association with the firmament of cloud and the heavenly sphere in which the gods move to and fro. So we are told, for example, that Zeus laid Hercules on the breast of Juno, and from the milk which spouted thereout flashed into being the Milky Way.

(ββ) Just as, then, in the later gods, from one point of view the universal elements of Nature are dethroned, while from another they are maintained, we have the same process repeated in that which is, more strictly speaking, animal, which we merely regarded in a former passage on the side of its degradation. We are now able to point out a more positive aspect under which such may be considered. Since, however, in the classic gods the symbolic mode of configuration is abolished, and they secure as their content the spirit that is self-luminous, the symbolical significance of animals must tend to pass away precisely in proportion as the animal form has taken to itself the right to mingle with the human under a mode naturally alien to it. It will therefore appear merely as a significant attribute, and is established in juxtaposition to the human form of the gods. Thus we find the eagle as attendant on Jupiter, the peacock on Juno, the doves as accompanying Aphrodite, the hound, Anubis, as watch-dog of the lower world, and so forth. If, therefore, there is still a symbolical aspect which attaches to the ideals of the spiritual gods, yet, if contrasted with the original significance, it will appear of little importance; and the natural significance, if strictly regarded, which previously constituted the essential content, will merely persist as a residue, and mere particular mode of externality, which, on account of its accidental character, more often than not has a grotesque appearance, for the reason that the former significance is no longer there. Inasmuch as the ideal content of these gods is that which partakes of Spirit and humanity, the externality pertinent to them approximates to a human contingency and weakness. In this connection we may once more recall to memory the numerous love affairs of Zeus. According to their original symbolic significance, they are related, as we already have seen, to the universal activity of generation, that is, the vitality of Nature. As the love affairs of Zeus, however, which, in so far as his marriage with Here is to be regarded as the permanent and substantive sexual relation, appear in the light of an infidelity towards his spouse, they have the complexion of accidental adventures, and exchange their symbolical sense for unconnected tales which possess the character of purely capricious invention.

With this degradation of the powers which are purely natural and of the animal aspect no less than of the abstract universality of spiritual relations, and with the re-acceptance of the same within the spiritual individuality, permeated and Suffused as it is with Nature, we leave behind us the origins of classical art which are stamped with necessity and are presupposed by its essence, inasmuch as it is on this path that the Ideal evolves itself by its own agency with that which it is according to its notion. This reality of the spiritual gods adequate to its notion carries us on to the genuine Ideals of the classical type of art, which, in contrast to the old régime which has been vanquished, represent immortality179, for mortality generally resides in the incompatibility of the notion to its determinate existence.

139 Als eine Unwürdigkeit. As something unworthy of the full notion of its gods.

140 That is, the relegation of it to a position of inferiority.

141 This is the German word. By genius I presume Hegel means “the familiar spirit” of a particular animal. Apparently this rather than “kind.” “Iliad,” II, 308; XII, 208.

142 “Odyss.” XIV, 414; XXIV, 215.

143 “Metam.” I, vv. 150-243.

144 “Metam.” VI, vv. 440-676.

145 “Metam.” I, vv. 451-567.

146 Ibid., IX, vv. 454-64.

147 Ibid., V, v. 302.

148 Ibid., vv. 319-31.

149 “Herod.” II, 46.

150 Creuzer, “Symb.” I, 477.

151 That is, the sphere of fauns as a part of Nature.

152 Praktisch. The contrast is between the philosophic contemplation and the world regarded as the sphere of human activity.

153 By Umkehr Hegel probably means a “return” in the direction of the art of the Sublime.

154 Einen bestimmten Kreis. The meaning seems to be that the circle of examples is here a clearly defined and limited one as contrasted with the vagueness of Oriental Pantheism.

155 “Herod.” II, 52.

156 War ein entscheidendes Moment. That is, was part of the oracular reply.

157 Both wording and punctuation of this sentence are at fault, but I give the sense no doubt intended.

158 I am not sure what is referred to here by Telchinen and Pätaken.

159 Das Ganze, means here, I think, the whole of Creation.

160 That is, took no further active interest in human life.

161 Politicus ex rec. Bekk. II, 2, p. 283; Steph. 274.

162 “Protag.” I, 1, pp. 170-4; Steph. 320-3.

163 I have just above translated Sitte with the word “custom,” that is, ethical custom. But the contrast here is, I think, between morality generally (sittlich) and juridical right (Rechtliche).

164 The argument of Hegel is ingenious. It must be admitted, however, that in several accounts of Prometheus, notably that of Aeschylus, Zeus is represented as hostile to human progress. And it is rather a strain on the facts to trace, in the case of Ceres, so much that is of an ethical colour to agriculture, and limit the use of fire simply to the crafts of Hephaestos, ignoring, that is to say, its domestic use altogether.

165 Der Sittlichkeit.

166 Gehaltvolle. That is, intrinsically sound and substantial.

167 “Eum.” vv. 206-9.

168 Soph., “Ant.” v. 451: ἡ ξὐνoικoς τῶν κάτω θεῶν Δἰκη.

169 Umgestaltung. Remodelling, reorganization. Reformation in literal sense.

170 Trübe. “Troubled” perhaps is better.

171 The Cabeiri were mystic Powers. Aeschylus wrote a drama under this title. The ancients differ greatly as to their origin and nature, Herodotus assumes an Egyptian origin.

172 Feste is as a substantive a stronghold, and this may be Hegel’s meaning, but I think he uses it here for Festigkeit, consistency, compact security.

173 The sentence is not very clear. The sense is that Prometheus is honoured as the Earth and Sun are honoured by his assistance of human needs.

174 Vv. 54-6. “This entire spot is sacred; awful Poseidon holds it, and therein is the fire bringing god, the Titan Prometheus.”

175 Vv. 1645-8.

176 Vv. 901 et seq.

177 Hegel means that in the suffering of Kleon Sophocles treats the natural law of Antigone and the higher law of the king on the same terms.

178 Lit., “what is made for it,” e.g., the detail of objective experience.

179 Unvergänglichkeit. Hegel no doubt refers to the epithet always applied by Homer and other, Greek poets to the gods of Olympus, immortal.

THE IDEAL OF THE CLASSICAL TYPE OF ART

WE HAVE ALREADY seen what the essence of the Ideal is in our general consideration of the beauty of art. Here we are to take it merely in the special sense appropriate to the classic Ideal, whose notion has already presented itself in its general features in its association with the notion of the classical art-type. For the Ideal, of which we have now to speak, consists simply in this, that classical art in very truth attains to and sets before us that which exposes its most intimate notion. As content it grasps on this particular plane the spiritual, in so far as this Spirit attracts Nature and her powers to its own appropriate realm, and sets itself before us in exposition not as mere inwardness and dominion over Nature, but furthermore accepts as its proper form, human shape, deed, and action, through which the spiritual shines forth clearly in perfect freedom, and the form penetrates with its life into the sensuous material not merely as into a mode of externality symbolically significant, but as actually into a determinate existence, which is the adequate existence of Spirit.

We may divide up, then, the present chapter into the following sections:

We have in the first place to consider the general character of the classic Ideal, which possesses what is pertinent to humanity in its form no less than its content, and elaborates both sides in the completest consistency one with the other. Secondly, however, forasmuch as here the human is absorbed wholly into the bodily shape and external appearance, it becomes the definite external shape, which in its conformity is merely a defined content. Since, therefore, we have the Ideal before us at the same time as particularity, there arises a definite number of particular gods and powers in the shape of human existence. Thirdly, this particularity does not persist in the abstraction of one type of definition, whose essential character would constitute the entire content and the one-sided principle for its representation; but rather it is quite as much essentially a totality and the individual unity and congruity which is applicable to such. Without this repletion such particularity would remain cold and empty; the vitality of Life would fail it, a contingency which is impossible to the Ideal in any relation whatever.

We have now to consider more narrowly the Ideal of classical art according to these three aspects of universality, particularity, and individual singularity.

The questions which arise relatively to the origins of the Greek gods, in so far as the real centre for ideal reproduction results from them, we have already touched upon, and seen that they belong to the elaborated tradition of art. The modification that is incidental to that treatment can only proceed by means of the twofold degradation, on the one hand, of the universal powers of Nature and their personification, and, on the other, of the animal constituents and its form, in order that thereby it may win the spiritual as its true determinate substance, and also the human mode of appearance as its true form.

(a) We have described how the classical Ideal first really becomes actual through such a remodelling of that which came before the earliest aspect of it. Along with this we have above all to draw attention to just this fact, that it is generated from mind (Spirit), and consequently has originated in the most intimate and personal resources of the poets and artists, who brought it into the presence of conscious life with the aid of a thoughtful consideration as clear as it was unfettered and with the distinct object of artistic production. In opposition to this creation we have, however, apparently the fact that Greek mythology reposes on earlier traditions, and contains distinct references to foreign, that is Oriental, matter. Herodotus, for example, although specifically asserting in the passage already cited that Homer and Hesiod created for the Greeks their gods, nevertheless in other passages associates closely these very Greek gods with other divinities such as those of Egypt. For in the second book180 he expressly narrates that Melampus gave the name of Dionysos to the Greeks, further introduced the Phallus and the entire sacrificial festival, adding, however, this discrepant detail, that Melampus had learnt the religious service from the Tyrian Kadmus and the Phoenicians, who came with Kadmus to Boeotia. These contradictory statements have roused interest in our own times, more particularly as associated with Creuzer’s researches, who endeavours to discover in Homer, for example, ancient mysteries and the sources which flowed in together towards Greece, whether they be Asiatic, Pelasgian, Dodonian, Thracian, Samothracian, Phrygian, Indian, Buddhistic, Phoenician, Egyptian, or Orphic, to say nothing of the infinitely varied peculiarities of specific localities and other details. No doubt it appears at first sight wholly inconsistent with these many sources of tradition that those poets should have supplied either the names or the substantial form of the gods. It is possible, however, to harmonize entirely both factors, tradition, and individual creation. The tradition comes first; it is the point of departure, which hands down the mere ingredients; but for all that it does not contribute the real content and the genuine form of the gods. This substantive presence is the product of the genius of those poets, who discovered by a process of free elaboration the true substantive form of these very gods and are consequently in fact become the creators of that mythology which awakes our admiration of Greek art. Yet for this reason the Homeric gods, in one aspect of them, are not to be taken as the result merely of the poetic phantasy, or nothing more than capricious invention. They have their roots in the genius and beliefs of the Greek folk and the religious basis of that nation. They are the absolute potencies and powers, the highest stretch of the Greek conception, the central point of the beautiful regarded universally, presented, so to speak, by the Muses themselves to the poet.

In this free handling, then, the artist takes up an entirely different position from that he occupies in the East. The Hindoo poets and sages have also to begin with material ready to work upon, such as the elements of Nature, the heavens, animals, streams, and so forth, or the pure abstraction of the formless and contentless Brahman. Their enthusiasm, however, is a confusion of the ideal character181 of the subjectivity which accepts the difficult task of elaborating such an external material to it, an enthusiasm which, in the unmeasured expansion of its imagination, which excludes every secure and absolute182 direction, is unable to mould its creations conformably to genuine freedom of expression and beauty, and remains the slave of that material in uncontrolled and roving productive activity. It resembles, in fact, a master-builder who has no firm foundation beneath him. Ancient ruins of half dismantled walls, mounds, and projecting rocks fetter him, quite apart from the particular aims according to which he desires to construct his building; and he can only create a wild, inharmonious, and fantastical fabric. In other words, that which he produces is not the result of his imagination freely acting under its own plastic genius. Conversely the Hebrew poets present us with revelations which, it is said, they deliver as the Lord’s voice, so that here again the creative source is an enthusiasm not fully self-conscious; it is separated, that is, and distinct from individuality and the productive genius of the artist, as in the wisdom of the Sublime generally it is the abstract and eternal, essentially in its relation to something other than it and external, which is consciously or imaginatively conceived.

In classical art artists and poets are, it is true, also prophets and teachers, who declare and reveal to mankind the nature of the Absolute and Divine. But we must emphasize here the following distinctions:

(α) In the first place the content of their gods is neither that appearance of Nature which is external to humanity nor the mere abstraction of one Godhead, whereby merely a superficial formulation or an inwardness that is without content is preserved. Their content is, on the contrary, deduced from human life and existence, and for this reason is that which is peculiar to the human breast; a content, in short, with which man himself can freely coalesce as at home with himself, while that which he thus produces is the fairest product of his own activity.

(β) Secondly, these artists are at the same time poets, that is, men of creative talent who work the aforesaid material and its content into a free and substantially independent form. As thus regarded Greek artists are in all essential respects creative poets. They have brought together all the varied original ingredients into the melting-pot, but they have produced thereby no mere broth, such as might come from a witches’ cauldron; rather they did away with all that is troubled, purely natural, unclean, foreign, and without rational measure in the pure flame of this more profound spirit; they made all glow together and permitted the form to appear at last purified, albeit it still retained a distant accord with the ruder material from which it was fashioned. What mainly concerned them in this work consisted partly in the winnowing away of all that was in their inherited material destitute of form and beauty, distorted and symbolical, and partly in the prominence they gave to what was really spiritual, which they set themselves to render under modes of individuality, and in the interest of which they had to discover gradually the external appearance most appropriate. Here for the first time we find that it is the human form and human actions and events, not merely made use of under the mode of personification, which, as we have already seen, necessarily stand forth as the uniquely adequate reality. No doubt the artist discovers these forms, too, in the real world; but he has at the same time to eradicate all that is accidental and incongruent in them, before they are entitled to appear as commensurable with that humanity, which, as essentially apprehended, shall offer to us the image of the eternal powers and gods. And this is what we call the free and spiritual, and not merely capricious production of the artist.

(γ) And, thirdly, for the reason that the gods are not merely stable existences in their own world, but also are active within the concrete reality of Nature and human, events, the poet is further concerned to recognize the presence and activity of the gods in this relation to human, fact, to interpret, that is, the particularity of natural event and human actions and destiny wherein the divine powers are apparently interfused, and to share thus the duties of the priest and the seer. We, from the point of view of our everyday prosaic reflection, explain the phenomena of Nature according to universal laws and forces, and interpret the actions of mankind as the product of their subjective intentions and self-proposed aims. The Greek poets, however, have their eyes everywhere directed toward the Divine, and create, by giving to human activities the loftier colour and habit of divine actions, and by means of such interpretation, the various aspects under which the power of the gods is made visible. For a number of such interpretations results in a number of actions, in which we are made aware of the character of this or that god. We have but to open, for example, the Homeric poems, and we shall scarcely meet with a single event of importance which is not more closely elucidated as proceeding from the volition or actual assistance of the gods. These expositions are, in fact, the insight, the independently created belief, the intuitive conceptions of the poet, just as Homer often, too, gives expression to them in his own name, and in part also places such in the mouth of his characters, whether priest or hero. Quite at the opening of the “Iliad,” for example, he has himself explained the pestilence in the Greek camp as the result of the indignation of Apollo over Agamemnon, who refused to release to Chryses his daughters183; and, in a passage that follows, he makes Calchas transmit this very interpretation to the Greeks184.

In a similar way Homer informs us in the concluding canto of the “Odyssey” — on the occasion when Hermes conducted the shades of the inanimate suitors to the meadows of Asphodel, and they find there Achilles and the other deceased heroes, who fought before Troy, and finally, too, Agamemnon joins them — how the last-mentioned describes the death of Achilles185:

“The whole day long had the Greeks fought; and when at last Zeus separated the combatants, they carried the noble body to the ships, and washed it, weeping often the while, and embalmed it. Then there arose a divine uproar on the sea, and the affrighted Achaeans would have been flung headlong into their hollow ships, had not an aged and much knowing man, Nestor to wit, restrained them, whose advice had also proved the wisest on former occasion.” Nestor then interprets for them the phenomenon in the following terms: “The mother186 comes forth from the sea with the immortal sea-goddesses, in order to meet her deceased son. And the great-hearted Achaeans at this word let their fear depart from them.” That is to say, they knew then of what kind it was — of human origin — the mother in her grief comes toward him; what they shall see and hear is that which finds its response in themselves. Achilles is her son, she is herself full of grief. And in this vein Agamemnon, turning towards Achilles, continues his narrative with a description of the universal sorrow: “And around thee stood the daughters of the ancient of the sea, lamenting, and they robed themselves in ambrosial garments; and the Muses also, the nine in conclave, wailed by turns in beautiful song; and there was I ween no man of the Argives to be seen without tears, so greatly did the clear-toned song move all.”

It is, however, another divine apparition in the “Odyssey” which has always in this connection most particularly fascinated me in my study of it. Odysseus in his sea-wanderings, insulted among the Phaeacians during the sports over which Euryalos presides, because he refused to take part in the rival throwing of the discus, makes answer indignantly with dark looks and hard words. He then stands up, seizes a disk, larger and heavier than the rest, and hurls it far and away over the mark. One of the Phaeacians marks down the throw and calls out: “Even a blind man could see the stone; it does not lie within the medley of the rest, but far beyond. Thou hast nothing to fear in this contest; there is no Phaeacian who will reach or surpass such a throw as thine is. So he spake; but the much-enduring divine Odysseus rejoiced to see a well-disposed friend in the lists.” And this word, this friendly nod of the Phaeacian Homer interprets as the friendly apparition of Athene.

(b) Of what kind, then, we may further ask, are the products of this classical mode of artistic activity, of what type are the new gods of Greek art?

(α) It is their concentrated individuality which presents to us the most general and at the same time most complete idea of their intrinsic character, in so far, that is, as this individuality is brought together out of the variety of accidental traits, isolated actions, and events into the one focus of their simple and self-exclusive unity.

(αα) What appeals to us in these gods is first of all the spiritual and substantive individuality, which, withdrawn into itself as it is out of the motley show of the particular medium of necessity, and, the many-purposed unrest of the finite condition, reposes on its own inviolable universality, as on an eternal and intelligible foundation. It is only thus that the gods appear as the imperishable powers, whose untroubled rule is made visible to us not in the particular event in its evolution with somewhat else and external to it, but freely in its own unchangeableness and intrinsic worth.

(ββ) Conversely, however, they are not by any means the bare abstraction of spiritual generalities, and thereby so-called general Ideals, but in so far as they are individuals they appear as one Ideal, an essentially of itself determinate existence, and consequently one that is defined, in other words one that as Spirit possesses characterization. Without character we can have no individuality. From this point of view we find, as we have already indicated previously, that there is at the root of these spiritual gods a definite natural force, with which a definite ethical consistency187 is blended, such as imposes on every particular god distinct bounds to the sphere of his activity. The manifold aspects and traits which are forthcoming by reason of this characterization as particular persons, being in this way concentrated in the point of a true self-identity, constitute the characters of the gods.

(γγ) In the true Ideal, however, this definition ought just as little to terminate in the blunt restriction of pure one sidedness, but must at the same time appear as withdrawn into the universality of the godhead. In just such a way, then, every god, by carrying in his own person this defined character as divine and as bound up with that as universal individuality, is in part of a definite type, and in part is all in all, and floats, as it were, precisely midway between mere universality and equally abstract singularity. And this is what gives to the genuine Ideal of classical art its infinite security and repose, its untroubled blessedness and unimpaired freedom.

(β) Add to this that as beauty of classical art the essentially self-articulate divine character is not only spiritual, but fully as much plastic form which appears externally in its bodily presence to the eye no less than to the mind.

(αα) This beauty, inasmuch as it possesses not merely the natural or animal aspect in its spiritual personification, but includes as its content that which is spiritual in its adequate mode of existence, can only take up what is symbolical in its incidental aspect and under those relations in which it appears as purely natural. Its real external expression is the form that is peculiar to mind and only mind, in so far as its ideal character reveals itself as existent truth, and pours itself wholly through that form.

(ββ) From another point of view classical beauty is debarred from giving expression to the Sublime. For it is only the abstract universal, which attaches to itself no inclusion such as is self-defined, but merely a negative determinacy relatively to particularity in general, and along with this is resolute in its antagonism to every form of embodiment which presents us with the aspect of the Sublime. Classical beauty, on the contrary, carries spiritual individuality into the very heart of what is at the same time its natural existence, and elucidates the ideal content wholly in the material of its external appearance.

(γγ) For this very reason, however, it is essential that the external form quite as much as the spiritual, which creates for itself therein its home and dwelling, should be liberated from all dependence on Nature and derangement, all finitude, all that is of fleeting character, all that is exclusively concerned with the sensuous presence, and should purify and exalt that definition of it which discloses affinity with the determinate character of the god into free commerce with the universal forms of the human figure. The stainless externality alone, from which every hint of weakness and relativity has been removed, and every flick of capricious particularity wiped off, is able to represent the Spirit’s ideality, which should sink itself in it and secure an embodiment from it.

(γ) For the reason, however, that the gods are forced once more from the defined limits of character into the universal wave, the self-subsistency of Spirit as repose on itself, and as the security of itself in its external form has to discover a real reflection also in its manifestation.

(αα) Consequently we observe in the concrete individuality of the gods — when we have before us the genuine classic Ideal, on equal terms with all else — this nobility and loftiness of Spirit, in which, despite the entire absorption within the bodily and sensuous presence, we are made conscious of the absolute removal of all the indigence of what is wholly finite. Pure self-absorption188 and the abstract liberation from every kind of determinacy is the highway to the Ideal of the Sublime. The classical Ideal, on the contrary, is made visible in an existence which entirely is its own, that is, the specific manifestation of Spirit itself; yet for all that we shall find that here, too, the Sublimity of the same is blended with the beauty, and that the one aspect passes over immediately into the other. And this it is which constitutes the expression of loftiness in these figures of the gods, making inevitable the Sublime of classical beauty. An immortal seriousness189 makes its throne on the forehead of these gods, and is poured forth over their entire presentment.

(ββ) In their beauty these gods appear, therefore, as exalted over their individual bodily shape; we have consequently a kind contradiction or contention between their lofty blessedness, which is, in fact, their spiritual self-exclusiveness and their beauty, which pertains to their external bodily presence. Spirit appears wholly lost in its external form, and yet for all that appears quite as much absorbed in itself from out that form. It is precisely as though we had the moving to and fro of an immortal god among mortal men.

In this relation the Greek gods make on us an impression which, despite all difference, resembles that which the bust of Goethe by Rauch made upon me when I first saw it. Many will have doubtless seen it, the high brow, the powerful, commanding nose, the free eye, the round chin, the affable, finely-cut lips, the pose of the head, so suggestive of genius, with its glance a bit on one side and uplifted: add to this the entire fulness and breadth of an emotional and genial humanity, and further, those carefully articulated muscles of the forehead, of the entire countenance, of all that gives evidence of passion and emotion; and in all this house of Life, the repose, stillness, and loftiness of advanced age; and we may add withal the fading ebb of the lips, which retreat back into the teethless mouth, the slackness of the neck and cheeks, whereby the bridge of the nose appears yet more dominant, and the reach of the forehead yet more towering. The force of this firmly set figure, which to an extraordinary degree brings before us the notion of immutability, appears all the more so in the loose environment which surrounds it190, just as the sublime head and form of the Oriental in his wide turban, but flapping over-garment and trailing slippers. It is the secure, powerful, timeless spirit, which, in the mask of encircling mortality, is just ready to let this husk fall away, and yet suffers it to linger around it freely and without restraint.

In much the same way the gods appear to us in their aspect of lofty freedom and spiritual repose to be exalted over their bodily presence, so that they seem to feel their form, their limbs, despite all the beauty that is there, as at the same time a superfluous appanage. And yet withal the entire presentment is suffused with vitality, identical with their spiritual being, inseparable, without the disunion of what is essentially subsistent, and those parts which are more loosely put together, the spirit in short neither escaping nor coming forth from the body, but both firmly moulded together into a whole, out of which, and in no other way, the self-absorption of Spirit looks forth in silence in its amazing and secure self-possession.

(γγ) For the reason, then, that the contention we have indicated is present, without appearing, however, as a difference or separation of the ideal spirituality from its external form, the negative which is therein contained, is for this very reason immanent in this inseparable totality and is thereby expressed. This is within the sphere of this spiritual loftiness the breath and atmosphere of melancholy, which men of genius have felt in the godlike figures of antique art even where the beauty of the external presentment is consummate. The repose of divine blessedness191 is unable to split itself up into the passions of joy, pleasure, and satisfaction, and the peace of immortality stands aloof from the smile of self-satisfaction and genial contentedness. Contentment is the emotion of the agreement of our singular subjectivity with the condition of that environment which is defined for or given to us or brought about through our own agency. Napoleon, for example, never expressed more thorough contentment than when he happened to obtain some success at the cost of making all the world discontented. For contentment is only the approval of my own being, action, and engagements, and the extreme of it is readily recognizable in that state of feeling of the Philistine to which every man of practical ability necessarily extends it. This feeling and its expression is, however, no expression appropriate to the prefigured immortal gods. Free and perfected beauty is not satisfied with joining the concordant temper of a particular finite existence; rather its individuality, in its aspect as Spirit no less than in that of form, albeit it is self-defined with characterization, only finds itself fully in union with its true nature when it is at the same time free universality and spirituality in repose upon itself. This universality is just that which people are wont to point to as the frigidity of the Greek gods. They are only cold, however, to our modern intimacy with the temporal. Independently regarded they possess warmth and life; that peaceful blessedness, which is reflected in their external presentment, is essentially an abstraction from particularity, a mode of being indifferent to the Past, a surrender of that which is external, a giving up which, albeit neither full of trouble nor pain, is for all that a giving up of what is earthly and evanescent, just as their cheerfulness of spirit looks far away and over death, the grave, loss and temporality, and for the very reason that it is profound inherently contains this negative we are discussing. And the more this earnestness and spiritual freedom is prominent in the vision of these godlike figures the more we feel the contrast between this loftiness and the determinate corporality in which they are enclosed. The blessed gods mourn quite as much over their blessedness as their bodily environment. In the letters of their form we read the destiny which lies before them, and whose development, as actual manifestation of that contradiction between this very loftiness and that particularity, spirituality, and sensuous existence classical art itself sets face to face with its final overthrow.

(c) If we ask ourselves, then, thirdly, what is the nature of the external representation, which is adequate to this notion of the classic Ideal we have just indicated, we shall find in this connection, too, that the essential points of view have already in our general consideration of the Ideal been furnished us with considerable detail. We have consequently here only further to remark, that in the genuine classic Ideal the spiritual individuality of the gods is not conceived in their relation to something else, or brought about by virtue of their particularity in conflict, and battle, but rather is made visible in their eternal self-tranquillity, in this painfulness of the godlike peace itself. The determinate character is not, therefore, made active in the way that it stimulated the gods to the sense of particular emotions and passions, or compelled them to adopt specific aims of conduct. On the contrary, it is precisely out of that collision and development, nay, out of that very relation to the finite and all that is essentially discordant that they are brought back to that condition of pure self-absorption. This repose in its most austere severity, not inflexible, cold, or dead, but sensitive and immutable, is the highest and most adequate form of representation for the classic gods. When they make their appearance consequently in specific situations, it is not necessary that there should be conditions or actions which give rise to conflicts, but rather such which, as themselves harmless, so, too, leave the gods in a like condition. It is, therefore, sculpture which among the arts is above all adapted to portray the classic Ideal in its simple self-possession, in which what is rather the universal divinity receives more obvious emphasis than the particular character. Chiefly it is the more ancient and more austere type of sculpture which maintains its firm hold of this aspect of the Ideal, and only in the later forms we find a movement towards increased dramatic vividness of situations and characterization. Poetry, on the contrary, ranges the gods in vigorous action, that is, in an attitude of negation to a definite mode of life, and brings them thereby into conflict and strife. The repose of plastic art, where it remains in the sphere which is uniquely its own, can only express the aforesaid negative phase of spirit face to face with particular facts in that serious strain of melancholy, which we have already attempted to define more nearly.

As individuality in visible form, represented under the mode of immediate existence, and withal both definite and particular, godhead necessarily is divided into a number of figures. In other words, Polytheism is unquestionably essential as the principle of classical art, and it would be the undertaking of a fool to think of embodying the one God of the Sublime and of Pantheism or the absolute religion, which comprehends God purely as Spirit and essential personality, in the plastic type of beauty, or to entertain the idea that the classical forms could have arisen among the Jews, Mohammedans, or Christians, as adapted to the content of their religious beliefs, from their own original views of the world, as they did in the case of the Greeks.

(a) In this multiplicity the divine universe192 at this stage is broken up into a sphere of particular gods, of which each individual stands by himself alone in contrast to all the others. These individualities are not, however, of the kind that they can be taken merely as allegorical presentations of universal qualities, as if Apollo, for example, were the god of wisdom, Zeus of dominion. Zeus is also quite as much wisdom, and in the “Eumenides” Apollo, as we have seen, protects Orestes, the son and the royal son to boot, whom he himself has stimulated to an act of vengeance. The sphere of the Greek gods is a multiplicity of individuals, of which every particular god, albeit also in the specific character of a particular person, is at the same time a self-exclusive totality, which itself possesses essentially also the quality of another god. For every such presentment, viewed as divine, is always, too, a whole. It is only by this means that the divine personalities of Greek religion include an abundance of traits; and although their blessedness consists in their universal and spiritual self-repose no less than in their abstraction from the direct movement which Time is for ever defeating in the sphere of the disintegrating manifold of natural fact and condition, yet for all that they possess the power in a like degree to assert themselves as energetic and active in many of its aspects. They are neither the abstract particular nor the abstract universal, but the universal which is the source of particularity.

(b) On account of this type of individuality, however, Greek polytheism is unable to make up an essentially systematic and self-integrated totality. At the first glance, it is true, it appears imperative to require of the Olympus of the gods, that the numerous gods that are there assembled, should, as thus collected together, and if their separable unities have real truth in them, and their content is to be classic in the true sense, also express essentially the totality of the Idea, should exhaust the entire sphere of the necessary forces of Nature and Spirit, and give to themselves therefore constructive completeness, in other words, manifest themselves as subject to a principle of necessity. This demand, however, would be liable from the first to the qualification that those forces present in the emotions and, generally speaking, assertive in the sphere of spiritual life in the absolute significance193 which becomes operative first in the later and higher religion, must remain excluded from the sphere of the classic gods, so that the range of content, the particular aspects of which succeed in making an appearance in Greek mythology, would be already thereby curtailed. Moreover, apart from this, we have also on the one hand, necessarily introduced by virtue of the essentially varied character of this individuality, the accidental incidents of a definition, which avoids the rigorous articulation of the differences inherent in the notion, and does not suffer these divinities to maintain the abstraction of merely one mode of determination. And, on the other hand, the universality, in the elemental medium of which the divine personalities secure their blessed state, abolishes any hard and fast particularity, and the loftiness of the eternal powers exalts itself jubilant over the cold seriousness of finite fact, wherein, if this inconsequence did not prevail, the divine presences would be evolved through the medium of their limitations.

However much, therefore, even the principal forces of the world, as the totality of Nature and Spirit, are reproduced in Greek mythology, this aggregation, quite as much in the interests of the universal Divine as in those of the individuality of particular gods, cannot assert itself as a systematic whole. If this were not so, instead of individual characters the gods would approximate rather to allegorical beings, and instead of being divine personalities would be characters wholly limited to finite and abstract modes.

(c) When we consequently consider the circle of the Greek divinities — that is all within the range of the so-called presiding divinities — more nearly according to their fundamental character, inquiring how that character appears firmly delineated by sculpture in its most general and at the same time sensuously concrete presentment, we find no doubt the essential distinctions and their totality explicitly set before us, but also in their detail also ever again obliterated, and the severity of the execution tempered to a result which is inconsistent with either their beauty or their individuality. So for example Zeus bears in his hands the dominion over gods and men, without, however, thereby essentially endangering the free independence of the other gods. He is the supreme god; his power, however, does not absorb that of the others. We find in the conception of him no doubt an association with the heavens, with lightning and thunder, and the generative vitality of Nature; but he is yet more truly the might of the State, of the order of fact which is conformable to law, the binding nexus in contracts, oaths, and hospitality, and generally the substantial bond that gives subsistence to the human condition, whether in its practical or ethical aspect, the potency, in short, both of knowledge and spirit. The dominion of his brothers is directed toward the sea or the lower world. Apollo is known as the god of knowledge, as the mouthpiece and fair presentment of spiritual interests, as the teacher of the Muses. “Know thyself” is the inscription over his temple at Delphi, a behest which is not so much concerned with the failings and defects, as the essential import of spirit, that is with art and the truth of consciousness. Subtlety and eloquence, mediation in fact generally as we also find it in subordinate spheres, which, albeit immoral elements are therein commingled, nevertheless are appurtenant to the complete range of spiritual life — such is the most important province of the activity of Hermes, who also leads the shades of the dead to the underworld. The might of war is what mainly distinguishes Ares. Hephaestos is conspicuously capable in the technical crafts. The enthusiasm which still carries with it a natural element, the strong emotions which wine, sport, and dramatic performances naturally produce are the native province of Dionysos. The spheres allotted to the feminine divinities very much correspond to the above series. In Here the ethical bond of marriage is the most dominant trait. Ceres is the instructress and developer of agriculture, and as such has presented mankind with both those adjuncts to its cultivation, that is to say, first, the care for the nurture of natural products, which satisfy man’s immediate wants, and, secondly, the spiritual accessories of property, marriage, right, the beginnings of civilization and moral order. In the same way Athene is the representative of moderation, good sense194, legality, the power of wisdom, technical capacity in the arts and courageousness, and comprises within her intelligent and warlike maidenhood the concrete spirit of the folk, the free and substantive spirit which uniquely belongs to the Athenian state, and places the same before us in positive shape as sovereign and godlike power to be revered. Artemis on the contrary, wholly distinct from the Ephesian Diana, possesses the more inflexible independence of maiden modesty for her most essential characteristic. She loves the chase, and is generally not so much the quietly pensive, as the severe and eager-striving maiden. Aphrodite, together with the charming Cupid, who in his descent from the ancient Titan Eros became a boy, is the interpreter of all that the attractions and sexual passion effect in our humanity. This, then, is the kind of content of the spiritually informed individual gods. In so far as we are concerned with their external representation we can only repeat that sculpture is the most important art in this respect, and it is carried to the point of this detail of their particularity. If, however, it is permitted to express that individuality in its more specific determination, it at once passes beyond its primary severe loftiness, although even in that case it unites the variety and wealth of such individuality under one mode of definition, namely that which we distinguish as character, and establishes this character in its more simple clarity for the envisagement of the senses, in other words for the completest and most final determination of the external presentment of these divinities. For the imagination always remains relatively to the external and real existence less distinct, when it elaborates, as it also does, as poetry the same content in a number of tales, occurrences, and events which concern the gods. For this reason sculpture is on the one hand more ideal, while on the other it individualizes the character of the gods in perfectly clear human outlines, and perfects the anthropomorphism of the classic Ideal. As this presentation of the Ideal in its mode of externality, entirely adequate as it unquestionably is to the essentially ideal content it declares, these figures of Greek sculpture are the Ideals in their absolutely explicit realization; they are the self-subsistent, eternal forms, the centre of the plastic beauty of classical art, whose type persists as the foundation, even there too, where these figures step forth on the planes of definite activity, and appear as affected by the revolutions of particular events.

Individuality and its representation is, however, unable to acquiesce in that which is still an ever relative and abstract articulation of character. A star is exhaustively summarized in the simple laws that control it. A few definite traits may sufficiently characterize the external formation of the world of rocks; but already in the vegetable world we are aware of an infinite variety of manifold structure, transition, interfusion, and anomaly. Animal organizations are distinguished by a still greater range of difference, and constantly shifting interaction with the external environment to which they are related. And finally, as we rise to the spiritual realm and its manifestation, we are conscious of a yet more infinitely embracing multiplicity, both of its internal and external existence. Inasmuch, then, as the classic Ideal does not rest content with purely self-possessed individuality, but is further concerned to place the same in motion, to bring the same into relation with something else, and to exhibit it as active in such relation — for these reasons the character of the gods does not rest stationary in the possession of what itself is an essentially still substantive determination, but secures further particular traits of wider extension. The self-exclusive movement in the direction of external existence, and the change which is inseparable from it supplies the more intimate traits that constitute the singularity of any particular god, as is meet and fit and withal necessary to complete a living personality. The accidental nature of these particular traits is, however, associated at the same time with such a type of singularity, traits, that is, we are no longer able to refer back to the universal aspect of the substantive significance. For this reason this particular aspect of the separate divinities approximates to something positive, which can consequently also merely stand about it and continue to resound as an external accessory.

(a) We are therefore at once confronted with the question: “From what source is the material secured for this mode of the appearance of singularity, and in what manner is this forward process of particularization maintained?” For the ordinary individual man, for his character out of which he brings his actions to a conclusion, for the events in which he is involved, for the destiny which awaits him, this closest and more positive material is supplied by his external conditions, such as the date of his birth, the situation he inherits, parents, education, environment, temporal relations, the entire province, that is, of the conditions of his life as they affect his spiritual nature or bodily existence. The present world contains this material, and the records of life furnished by different individuals are from this point of view characterized by every conceivable difference. It is another matter altogether, however, with the free shapes of godlike individuality, which possess no determinate existence in the concrete world of Nature, but have their birth in the cradle of the imagination. For this very reason it is an obvious assumption that poets and artists, who, speaking in general terms, have created the Ideal out of their free spiritual bounty, have merely borrowed the material for these accidental particular traits from the caprice of their own innate powers of imagination. This assumption is, however, false. For we assigned in general terms to classical art, the position that its construction in the first instance is, by means of the reaction active in its opposition to the assumptions necessarily requisite to its own peculiar province, carried forward to that which as genuine Ideal it is. It is from these presuppositions as their source that the specific traits of particularity are to be looked for, which supply to the gods their closer individual vitality. The fundamental features of these assumptions have already been submitted, and we have only here to remind our readers shortly of what has been already advanced.

(α) It is the symbolical natural religions which constitute in the first instance the abundant source which supplies Greek mythology with the primary substratum that we find then modified within it. But inasmuch as the traits that are borrowed from such a source have to be distributed among gods that are represented as individuals possessing the life of Spirit, they inevitably lose the essential feature of their character, in which they passed as symbolical; they have now no longer to retain a significance, which would differ from that which the individual himself presents and makes visible. The previous symbolical content becomes now, therefore, converted into the content of a divine subject itself, and for the reason that it implies no substantive relation of the god, but is merely an incidental feature, material of this sort falls together into an external tale, some deed or event, which is ascribed to the gods in this or that particular situation. Consequently we find under this head all the symbolical traditions of the earlier sacred poems, which receive, under the modified shape of actions proper to a truly self-conscious individuality, the form of human events and histories, which purport to be accomplished in concert with the gods, and are not merely the inventions of poets as the mood dictates. When Homer tells us, for instance, that the gods went off on a journey to feast for twelve days among the blameless Ethiopians, such would be a poor enough example of inventiveness regarded as the poet’s invention alone. It is much the same with the tale of the birth of Zeus. Kronos, we are told, had devoured all his sons; for this reason Rhea, his spouse, when she was big with her youngest child Zeus, went off to Crete, where she brought forth her son, presenting to Kronos a stone to devour instead of her child, whom she swaddled in fur. Later on Kronos brought up again all his children, his daughters, and along with them Poseidon. This story, regarded as mere invention, would be foolish enough. The remnants of symbolical significance still peer, however, through it, albeit on account of their having lost their original character, they come down to us in the guise of external history. The history of Ceres and Proserpina is on similar lines. Here we have the ancient symbolic significance of the disappearance and budding forth of the seed of corn. The myth presents this to us under the image as though Proserpina played one day in a valley with flowers, and plucked the fragrant narcissus, which from one root opened in a hundred blossoms. Then the Earth thunders; Pluto ascends from the depths, lifts the lamenting maiden into his golden car, and bears her off to the underworld. Thereon Ceres wandered over the Earth for a long time vainly stricken with a mother’s sorrow. Finally Proserpina returned to the upper world; Zeus, however, had only suffered her to do this subject to the command that she must never partake of the food of the gods. Unfortunately she had on one occasion tasted a pomegranate, and was therefore only able to remain in the upper world during spring and summer. In this tale, too, we find that the symbolical content has not been retained, but has been converted into a human event, which suffers only the more general sense to penetrate through many external traits. In the same way the supplementary names of the gods point frequently to symbolical ground-strata of a similar character, from which, however, the symbolical form has vanished, and which only serve now to give individuality a more complete characterization.

(β) Local conditions supply a further source for the positive particularities of individual divinities, no less by presenting us with the origin of the conceptions of godhead, than by pointing to the modes under which their services were originally obtained and secured, and the particular places which were in a special sense devoted to their worship.

(αα) Although, however, the demonstration of the Ideal and its universal beauty is exalted over the particular locality and its unique claims for recognition, and, moreover, has drawn together the specific external aspects in the more general range of the artistic imagination into one comprehensive picture which is throughout adequate to the substantive significance, yet for all that, when the art of sculpture associates the gods, regarded as individuals, with isolated relations and conditions, these particular traits and local colours come frequently also to the fore, in order to reproduce something of that individuality, although it is only thus more defined in its external aspect. An illustration of this is the way Pausanias adduces a mass of ideas, images, pictures, and myths, which he met with in temples, public places, temple treasuries, in any place where anything of importance was to be found or otherwise was in the range of his experience. In the same way and on the same lines the ancient traditions and local suggestions which have been borrowed from foreign sources run along with the home ones in Greek myth; and to all of them more or less a relation has been attached which unites them to the history, creation, and foundations of States, more particularly by means of colonization. Forasmuch, however, as this many-sided and specific material in the universality of the gods has lost its original significance, we necessarily come across stories, which in their motley and intricate character fail to convey any meaning whatever. As an example we may instance the case where Aeschylus in his “Prometheus” presents to us the wanderings of Io in all their severity and external garb without admitting the least suggestion of an ethical or traditional story, or a natural significance. We find just the same difficulty when we approach the stories of Perseus, Dionysos, and others. The most varied and confused kind of material is also run into the tales about Hercules, which forthwith, in such tales, assume an entirely human aspect under the guise of chance events, exploits, passions, misfortunes, and other untoward occurrences.

(ββ) In addition to all this the eternal powers of classical art are the universal constituents of the actual embodiment of the existence and actions of Greek humanity, from whose national origins consequently in their earliest form, that is, out of the heroic times and other traditions, still a very considerable residue of detail remains appendant to the gods even in later days. In this way, too, many characteristic features in the intricate tales of their gods unquestionably must be referred to historic personages, heroes, older folk-races, natural facts and circumstances attributable to wars, battles, and other matters of a public character. And just as the family and the distinction of clans is the point of departure of the State, the Greeks possessed also their family gods, penates, clan-gods, and furthermore the guardian divinities of particular cities and states. In this excessive leaning towards the point of view of history the thesis, however, is apt to be maintained that the origin of the Greek gods generally is deducible from such historical facts, heroes, and earlier kings. This is a plausible but none the less superficial view. Heyne quite in recent times has also given currency to it. In a way analogous to this a Frenchman, by name Nicholas Fréret, has, for example, accepted the quarrels of different priestly guilds as the general principle underlying the war of the gods. That such a historical phase in the life of a people may contribute something, that definite clans may have given some effect to their peculiar notions of deity, that likewise different local aspects may have afforded further matter in the process of divine individualization — all this may be admitted, no doubt. The real origin of the gods is for all that not to be traced to such external material of history, but resides in the spiritual potencies of Life, under the guise of which they were conceived. We are consequently only entitled to accept the more extensive play of all that is positive, local, and historical, in so far as it makes more definite the formal presentation of each particular individuality.

(γγ) Inasmuch as, further, the god passes into the sphere of the human imagination, and, still more important, is represented in real bodily shape, into close relations with which again man is placed by his cultus in the activities of divine worship, a fresh material is here, too, presented by such relations for the extension of all that is positive and accidental. What animals have to be sacrificed to any god, what vestments the priesthood or the worshipper must appear in, what particular sequence must be adopted in any ceremonial — by all such matters the most varied and particular incidents are accumulated. For every activity of this kind implies an indefinite number of aspects and modes of arrangement, which may accidentally fall out in this way or that, but which, as appurtenant to a sacred rite, should be something settled, and not fixed by caprice, and which necessarily tend to pass into the sphere of symbolism. The colour of the vestments is an example of this; in the ritual of Bacchus we have the colour of wine, in like manner the doe-skin in which those initiated in the mysteries were enwrapped. The same thing applies to the drapery and attributes of the gods, the bow of Pythian Apollo, the whip, the staff, and numberless other accessories. Such things become, however, gradually a custom and nothing more; no one in the practice of the same thinks any longer of their birth history; and all that we now by dint of our research point out as their significance, has in the performance of them grown to something quite external, which mankind associates himself with on account of the immediate interest, that is, from mere sense of fun, delight in the present, devotion, or simply because it is just a custom and is so fixed for his active senses, and is done in like manner by others. As an example from our own life, when we see our German youth light the Johannis fire in summer time, or play antics elsewhere, and throw it at the windows, such is for us a purely formal custom, in which the original significance fades as much into the background as at the festal dances of Greek youths and maidens the revolutions of the dance do in their imitative (like the twists and turns of some labyrinth) significance of the spiral motions of the planets. Youth does not dance in order to entertain ideas of such things, but the interest limits itself naturally to the dancing and the tasteful and graceful festivity of its beautiful motion. The entire significance, which was created by the original stimulus, and of which the reproduction was for the imagination and sensuous perception of symbolical character, is throughout an imaginative conception, whose singular traits we suffer to pass from us like a fairy story, or as in historical narrative as external detail relative to Time and Space, and of which we can only say: “It is so,” or, “Such is the tale,” and so forth. The interest of art can consequently only consist in this, namely, that it borrow one aspect from the material which has passed into the condition of positive externality, and make the best of this one for an example, which sets the gods before us as concrete, living individuals, merely retaining a distant echo of any profounder significance.

This positive aspect is precisely that which endows the Greek gods with the charm of living humanity when the imagination elaborates it anew. It is by this latter process that what is otherwise merely of substantive import, or that of power, is thereby carried into the individual present, which, speaking in general terms, is concentrated to a point out of that which is truly explicit or independently actual, and which is external and accidental, and thereby the indefinite, which otherwise is always present in the conception of the gods, is limited in its range and filled out in its content. We are unable to attach any additional value to specific tales and particular traits of characterization, for this material, which, in its earlier stage is, when we look at its primary source, the symbolically significant, has now only remaining the task to perfect the spiritual individuality of the gods in their positive sensuous definition in contrast to the human and to attach to it by virtue of a material which, in respect to its content and envisagement, is undivine, the aspect of caprice and chance, characteristics inseparable from concrete individuality. Sculpture, in so far as it presents to our senses the pure ideals of the gods, and is concerned to set before us character and expression solely under the mode of living bodies, can least of all with clearness make visible the final result of individualization. It does nevertheless give real effect to it within the limits of its own province, as we may see, for example, in the different treatment of headdress, the mode in which the folds or locks of hair are arranged in each particular case; and this is done not merely with a view to symbolical interpretation but in order to individualize. In this way Hercules has short locks, Zeus an abundant growth which rises above the forehead, Diana quite a different folding of the hair to that of Venus. Pallas, too, is distinguished by the Gorgo on the helmet, and the like result is obtained by means of weapons, girdle, fillets, bracelets, and all the variety of other external adornment.

(γ) We find as a third and final source of the closer definition of divine personality the relation which this occupies to the concrete actual world and its numerous natural phenomena, human deeds and events. For however much we have seen that this spiritual individuality is in part respectively to their universal essence, and partly in respect to their particular singularity, the visible result of earlier natural foundations which have symbolical significance, yet it also persists, if regarded as a spiritually self-subsistent personality, in a relation of continuous, vitality with Nature and human existence. It is under this point of view, as we have already intimated at length, that we have before us the imaginative flow of the poet, an ever fertile source of particular tales, traits of character and exploits, such as are related us about the gods. The artistic aspect of this stage of the process consists in this, that the divine personalities are made to blend in a vital way with human affairs, and that the isolated nature of events are without exception conceived in association with the universality of the divine, just as we ourselves, for example, are wont to say, if in another sense, of course, that this or that eventuality comes from God. Even in the reality of everyday life, in the natural process of his existence, in his daily wants, fears, and hopes, the Greek took refuge in his gods. At first it was external accidents, which the priesthood accepted as omens, and interpreted relatively to his objects and circumstances. If distress and misfortune appeared, the priest had to explain the cause of the affliction, to recognize the anger and disposition of the gods, and to suggest the means by which the misfortune might be faced. The poets proceed yet further in their interpretations for this reason, namely, that they ascribe everything, which is related to a pathos universal and essential, that is, the moving force in human resolve and action, to the gods themselves and their activity; so that the activity of mankind appears likewise as the act of the gods, who fulfil their own counsels by means of their instrument, man. The material in these poetical expositions is taken from the circumstances of ordinary life, in respect to which the poet lays it down, whether this or that god has expressed his purpose in the event which he is expounding and asserted himself actively therein. For this reason poetry to an exceptional extent enlarges the range of many specific stories, which have the gods for their principal subject-matter. We may in this connection recall to our memories several examples which we have already used as illustrations when considering another aspect of our subject, namely, the relation of the universal powers to the practical pursuits of human personality. Homer places Achilles before us as the bravest among the Greeks before Troy. This pre-eminence of his hero he expresses by means of the statement that Achilles is invulnerable in every portion of his body with the single exception of his heel, which his mother was compelled to take hold of when she dipped him in the Styx. This tale has its origin in the imagination of the poet who thus interprets the external fact. If we accept this bluntly as though an actual fact purported to be expressed therein which the ancients would have believed in the same sense that we believe in any fact on the evidence of our senses such a conclusion is a very crude one indeed. It in short amounts to this, that Homer no less than all the Greeks and Alexander with them who admired Achilles and praised his fortunes, which were the main theme of the song of Homer, were simpletons. Such a glorification must inevitably carry such a consequence if the reflection is to hold good that the bravery of Achilles was no difficult matter since he was aware of his invulnerability. But the bravery is, in truth, thereby in no way abridged, because he is equally aware of his early death, and notwithstanding never evades danger, however it may arise. The like relation is put before us in a very different way in the “Niebelungenlied.” In that the horned Siegfried is likewise invulnerable, but he has also in addition to this his cap which makes him invisible. When he assists King Gunther thus invisible in the fight of the latter with Brunhilde it becomes simply an affair of barbaric sorcery which does not enhance very much our opinion either of the bravery of Siegfried or King Gunther. No doubt in Homer the gods frequently lend assistance to particular heroes; but the gods merely appear on such occasions as the universal concept of that which man as an individual himself is and carries out, and to carry out which he must actively employ the entire strength of his heroic endowment. If it had been otherwise the gods would have only found it necessary to decimate en masse the Trojan host in battle in order to complete at once the triumph of the Greeks. Homer gives us a picture just the reverse of this when he describes the main fight as essentially a contest between individuals, and it is only when the press and medley in general, when the entire mass of combatants, the collective heart of the host clashes in fury, that Ares at length storms over the field and gods war against gods. And this is not only generally fine and splendid as an enhancement of the effect, but we may find in it the profounder significance that Homer recognizes the particular heroes in what is singular and exceptional and the universal potencies and forces in the collective effect and the general aspect. In another connection Homer permits Apollo to appear on the scene, when the moment arrives which is fatal to Patroclus who is bearing the invincible armour of Achilles195. Three times had Patroclus plunged into the crowded host of the Trojans, mighty as Ares, and three times he had already slain nine men. When he stormed there for the fourth time then it was that the god, enveloped in obscure night, made toward him among the medley and smote him on the back and the shoulders, tore away from him his helmet, so that it rolled on the ground, and rang out sharply as it struck the hoofs of the chargers; and the plumes of it were besmirched with blood and dust, which none ever wot of before. Apollo also breaks the brazen spear in his hands, the shield drops from his shoulders, and his armour is loosened on him by the god. This interference of Apollo we may accept as the poetic explanation of the circumstance, that it is exhaustion no less than natural death which seizes upon and subdues Patroclus in the turmoil and heat of battle at the fourth encounter. Then it was that Euphorbus was able to thrust his spear into his back between the shoulders. Yet one more time Patroclus endeavoured to withdraw from the battle; but Hector had already hastened to meet him, and thrust his spear deep into his side. Then Hector rejoiced and mocked the sinking hero. But Patroclus, speaking in low tones, replied that it was Zeus and Apollo who had mastered him, and withal with no trouble, because they had taken his weapons from off his shoulders. “Twenty men such as thou art,” he exclaims, “I could have laid low with my spear, but I am slain by fateful necessity and the hand of Apollo. Thou, Euphorbus, hast but slain me the second time, and thou, Hector, but the third.” Here, too, we may remark that the appearance of the gods simply points to the fact that Patroclus, albeit protected by the armour of Achilles, becomes faint, confounded, and despite of it slain. And this is not by any means a superstitious freak or empty play of the imagination, or rather a statement which amounts to this196, that Hector’s fame will be detracted from by this interposition of Apollo, and that even Apollo does not play in the entire affair a part which entirely redounds to his honour, since we necessarily take into account the might of the god — speculations of this kind merely betray a superstition of the prosaic mind as destitute of taste as it is devoid of reason. For in every case where Homer explains specific events by means of such appearances of the gods the gods use that which is already immanent in the conscious life of men, the power, that is, of their own passion and observation, or the potentialities of the general condition in which the man is placed, the force and the foundation of that which befalls and happens to anyone as a consequence of such conditions If it is true that at times traits that are wholly external and absolutely positive assert themselves in the appearance of the gods these in their turn have a comic aspect; as in the case when the lame Hephaestos goes round as cup-bearer. And generally we may say that Homer never treats the reality of such appearances from first to last seriously. At one time we see the gods in action, at another they occupy a station of complete tranquillity. The Greeks were fully conscious that it was the poets who were responsible for such apparitions; and if they believed in them their belief was connected directly with that spiritual aspect which is equally the possession of mankind, forasmuch as it is the universal, the very active and motive principle in the events thus presented. From whatever point of view, therefore, we consider the matter it is clear that it is totally unnecessary to import superstition either in our own views or in those of the Greeks before we can enjoy such poetical representations of their gods.

(b) Such, then, is the general character of the classical Ideal, whose broader development we shall have to consider more succinctly when we examine the particular arts. Here we have only to add the observation that to whatever extent either gods or men are carried in their positive opposition to the particular and external, yet in classical art the affirmative ethical substratum must assert itself as maintained. The subjectivity remains throughout in union with the substantive content of its powers. Just as in Greek art the natural element is preserved in harmony with the spiritual and is likewise subordinated to the ideal content, though it be as adequate existence, the inward heart of our humanity ever presents itself also in a thorough identity with the genuine objectivity of Spirit, in other words, with the essential content of what is moral and true. Regarded from this point of view, the classic Ideal is unaware of the separation of ideality from external presentment and of the rending of the subjective and consequently abstract individual caprice in its various objects and passions, and it is no less so, on the other hand, of the abstract universal as thereby created. The foundations of character must, consequently, always be the substantive, and what is bad, sinful and evil in the self-housed dwelling of subjectivity is excluded from classical representations. And above all else the harshness, wickedness, meanness, and hideousness which finds a place in romantic art, will be wholly alien to it. It is true, we find many instances of transgression, matricide, patricide and other crimes against the love of family and piety treated as the subject-matter of Greek art; but they are not here regarded simply as atrocities, or, as a little while since it was the fashion among ourselves, as brought about by the inscrutability of a so-called fatality which imports the appearance of a necessary result. Rather, if such transgressions are committed by mankind and in part ordered and defended by the gods themselves, such actions are on every occasion presented to us from some point of view at least in a light which declares a certain justification truly arising out of the subject-matter itself.

(c) Despite this substantive foundation we have seen the general elaboration of the gods of classical art manifest itself out of the repose of the Ideal within the variety of the individual and external embodiment, in all the detail of events, occurrences, and actions, which become ever and ever more human. By this means classical art finally, if we consider its content, carries yet further the process of articulating the accidental individualization, when we consider it as a mode of making the same pleasurable and attractive. In other words that which pleases is the elaboration of the particular aspect of the external phenomenon at every point of the same; by this means the work of art no longer arrests the spectator merely in its connection with his own concrete soul-life, but also contains many affiliating links with the finite aspect of his subjectivity. For it is precisely in the finiteness of the art-creation that the closer association subsists with that aspect of the individual which is itself finite, and which rediscovers itself once more with satisfaction in every respect as mobile and stable existence in the art-product. The seriousness of the gods becomes a grace, which does not agitate with violence or lift a man over his ordinary existence, but suffers him to persist there tranquil, and simply claims to bring him content. Just as we generally find that the imagination when it masters religious conceptions, and endows them with a form appropriate to its notions of beauty, has a tendency to make the earnest character of devotion disappear, and in this respect destroys religion strictly as religion; so, too, this very process moves forward at the stage we are discussing for the most part by the addition of that which is agreeable and pleases. For it is not by any means the substantial aspect, the significance of the gods, or their universal character, which is evolved by virtue of what delights. Rather it is the finite side, their sensuous existence and subjective inward life, which purports to awake interest and provide satisfaction. The more, therefore, the charm of the existence reproduced is the dominant factor in its beauty to that extent the gracefulness is disentwined from the embrace of the universal and removed from the content, through which alone the profounder penetration could rest satisfied.

The transition to another province of the forms of art is closely united with this externality and articulate definition. For under the mode of externality reposes the manifold of the finite condition; a manifold which, so soon as it secures a free field, asserts itself finally in opposition to the spiritual Idea, its universality and truth, and begins to rouse up the dissatisfaction of thought in a reality which is no longer adequate to express it.

180 Chapter XLIX.

181 I presume this is the sense of that difficult word des Inneren here.

182 By “absolute” I presume Hegel means here absolute in the sense of predominant, masterful — activity such as the Greek artist possessed.

183 “Iliad,” I, vv. 9-12.

184 Ibid. vv. 94-100.

185 “Odyssey,” XXIV, vv. 41-63.

186 That is, Thetis.

187 Bestimmte sittliche Substanz.

188 Das reine Insichseyn.

189 Ein ewiger Ernst.

190 I presume this refers to some drapery or curtains round the bust as exhibited.

191 This is the meaning of Heiterkeit here rather than “cheerfulness,” though Seligkeit is the usual word.

192 Göttliche Universum. A rather curious expression for, I presume, the ideal totality of the Divine Being.

193 Der geistigen absoluten Innerlichkeit. Lit., “the spiritual and absolute mode of the inward life.” He refers, of course, to Christianity, with its life of the pure in heart and the pure reason.

194 Besonnenheit.

195 “Iliad,” XVI, vv. 783-849.

196 I very much doubt whether the words Sondern das Gerede allein can have this meaning, but the obvious meaning, “but only the gossip,” hardly makes sense. I think the sentence requires revision.

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE CLASSICAL TYPE OF ART

THE GODS OF classical art contain in themselves the germ of their overthrow; consequently, when this fatal defect which they include is brought to consciousness through the elaboration of art itself, they bring about the dissolution of the classical Ideal at the same time. We established as the principle of this, so far as we have here to deal with it, that kind of spiritual individuality which secures in every respect an adequate expression in bodily or external existence immediate to our senses. This individuality was enclosed within a complex of divine personalities, whose definition is not essentially and withal from the first given up to the contingent condition in which the everlasting gods receive the appearance of dissolution for man’s conscious life no less than for his artistic creation.

It is true that sculpture in its complete plastic perfection accepts the gods as substantive potencies, and endows them with a form in whose beauty they in the first instance repose in security, for the reason that the accidental character, of their external envisagement is to the least extent emphasized. Their multiplicity and distinction does in fact, however, constitute this element of contingency, and thought annuls this in the determinate conception of one divinity, through whose inevitable power they are mutually at war with and to the detriment of each other. For however universal the power of every particular god is conceived as specific individuality, such is of a restricted range. Add to this the fact that the gods do not continue in their eternal repose; they are self-determined relatively to particular aims in actual movement through their being drawn hither and thither by the pre-existing conditions and collisions of concrete reality, in order at one time to afford assistance and at another to obstruct or destroy. These isolated relations in which the gods as active individuals participate contain within them an element of contingency, which impairs the substantive nature of the divine, however much the same may persist as the predominant substratum, and involves the gods in the contradictions and conflicts of a limited finitude. By reason of this finiteness immanent in the gods themselves they fall into contradiction with the loftiness, worth, and beauty of their existence, through which, too, they are eventually brought down to the level of mere caprice and chance. The genuine Ideal evades the complete appearance of this contradiction simply and in so far as — this is preeminently the case in true sculpture and its particular creations as we find them in temples — the divine personalities are represented as explicitly alone in the repose of blessedness, yet retain, as we have already above indicated, a certain aspect of lifelessness, somewhat aloof from all emotion, and withal that quiet characteristic of pathetic lament. It is just this mournfulness which exposes their fate by demonstrating that something of higher import stands above them, and the passage from the particularities of form to their comprehending unity is a necessary one. If, however, we fix our attention on the type and configuration of this loftier unity we shall find that it is, as contrasted with the individuality and relative determination of the gods, the essentially abstract and formless — the necessity, the fate, which under this mode of abstraction the higher can only in general terms be, and which constrains both gods and men, while remaining in itself incomprehensible and inconceivable. Fate is not as yet absolute and self-subsistent end, and thereby at the same time subjective, personal, divine purpose, but merely the one and universal Power which transcends the particularity of the different gods, and consequently is unable to be presented itself as individual entity; because otherwise it would simply appear as one among many individuals, and would stand above them. For this reason it remains without form and individuality, and is in this abstraction merely necessity and nothing more; with which gods no less than men, when they differentiate themselves as separate from one another, contend. And thus they give effect to their individual power condemned though it be to limitations, and would fain exalt themselves over the bounds and warrant of Fate, though they are, in fact, its subjects, and are forced to hearken to all that unalterably befalls them.

For the reason, then, that the principle of self-determinate Necessity197 does not appertain to the particular gods, does not supply in other words the content of their self-determination, and only floats over them as an undefined abstraction, the aspect of their insularity as individuals has consequently free play and is unable to escape from Destiny, is moreover at liberty to branch out into the external fabric of the human condition, into the finite consistency of anthropomorphism, possibilities which convert the gods into the reverse of that condition which truly constitutes the notion of what they are essentially and in virtue of their divine nature. The overthrow of these gods of beauty is consequently quite inevitably brought about for art through their own nature. The human consciousness is at last quite unable to find repose in them, and is fain compelled to take leave of them. And, moreover, if we look more closely we shall find that the mode and type of Greek anthropomorphism supplies us with a general example of how the gods vanish away from the faiths of religion no less than those of poetry.

(a) Spiritual individuality here makes its appearance in the human form, it is true, as Ideal; but for all that it is in the immediately visible, that is, the bodily presence, not within humanity in all its essential explication, under the mode in which it is conscious of itself in its own self-conscious world as distinct from God, while in the same breath it annuls the distinction, and is, by its own act, as one with God, essentially infinite and absolute self-consciousness.

(α) For this reason the plastic Ideal is unable to present itself as infinite self-conscious spirituality. These plastic shapes of beauty are not merely stone and bronze, but also the infinite form of subjective life vanishes from them in their content and expression. We may become as enthusiastic as we please over their beauty and art, but for all that our enthusiasm is and remains something native to our own souls; it is not really at home in the objects which it thus contemplates, that is in the gods themselves. To complete the true totality a real reciprocity is required on this side also of the subjective, self-knowing unity and infinity; it is this, and only this, that unfolds our conception of a living God of knowledge, and of men who thus apprehend Him. If this totality is not also essentially and with adequacy conformable to the content and nature of the Absolute, then the Absolute will itself appear not as truly a subject of spiritual being, and its presentment will confront us merely in its objective form without the possession of self-conscious Spirit. It is quite true, no doubt, that the individuality of the gods retains the content of subjectivity, but merely under modes that are contingent, and in a process of development,’ which moves independently outside that substantive repose and blessedness of the gods.

(β) On the other hand, the subjectivity which is opposed to the gods of plastic art is also not the form of conscious life which is essentially eternal and true. In other words, this latter is — as we shall see for ourselves more clearly in our consideration of the third type of art, the romantic — that which has before it the objectivity to which it is conformable under the mode of an essentially infinite and self-knowing God. Inasmuch, however, as the knowing subject, at the stage we are now discussing, does not consciously conceive itself as present in the perfections of these godlike figures, nor even in its contemplation of such objects is aware of itself as circumstantially objective, it is still wholly distinct and separate from its absolute object, and is consequently a purely contingent and finite subjectivity.

(γ) We might possibly suppose that the passage into a higher sphere of reality would have been emphasized by the imagination and art as a further war among the gods, in a way analogous, in fact, to the first transition from the symbolism of the gods of Nature to the spiritual Ideals of classical art. This is by no means the case. On the contrary, this translation is carried forward in a wholly different field, as a conflict brought home to consciousness between absolute reality and the present world. For this reason art, in its relation to the higher content, which it has to seize under new modes, occupies an entirely altered position. This new configuration does not assert its importance as revelation by means of Art, but is made manifest independently without it, and appears on the prosaic ground of controversial and rational discussion, and from thence is within the soul and its religious emotions, mainly by means of miracle, martyrdoms, and so on, carried into the world of subjective knowledge, together with a consciousness of the contradiction between all that is finite and the Absolute, which unfolds itself in actual history as the process of events toward a Present which is not merely imagined, but is the fact we have before us. The Divine, God Himself, becomes flesh, is born, lives, suffers, dies, and rises from the dead. This is a content which heart did not discover, but which, quite apart from it, was a present fact, and which consequently it has not borrowed from its own domain, but merely supplies a form to it. That old transition and war of the gods, on the contrary, discovered its origins in the artistic or imaginative view of the world simply, which created its wisdom and plastic shapes from its inner life, and gave to astonished mankind his new gods. For this reason the classic gods also have only received their existence through the fiat of the imagination, and merely exist as such in stone and bronze, or in the world open to the senses, not, however, in flesh and blood, or in very and actual Spirit. The anthropomorphism of the Greek gods is therefore without real human existence, that of body no less than that of Spirit. It is Christianity which first introduces us to this reality in flesh and blood as the determinate existence, life, and activity of God Himself. Consequently this bodily form, this flesh, however much also the purely natural and sensuous is recognized as a negation therein, receives its due and honour, and that which partakes of anthropomorphism here is sanctified. Even as man originally was made in the image of God, God is an image of man; whoso beholdeth the Son beholdeth the Father, and whoso loveth the Son loveth the Father. In a word, God is acknowledged as present in the actual world. This new content, then, is not brought home to consciousness by means of the conceptions of art, but is presented from an exterior source as an actual occurrence, as the history of the God who became flesh. A transition such as this could not take its point of departure from Art; the contrast between the old and the new would have been too disparate. The God of revealed religion, in respect to content and form, is very God in truth, in contrast with whom all rivals would become mere creations of the imagination, whom it would be quite impossible to compare with Him on equal terms. The old and new gods of classical art, on the contrary, originate in both cases independently from the ground of the imagination. They have only such reality from the finite Spirit as enables them to be conceived and represented as potencies of Nature and Spirit; the contradiction and conflict they declare, is taken seriously. If, however, the transition from the Greek gods to the God of Christendom were portrayed in the first instance by Art, the representation of such a war of gods could not in this direct form be enforced in all seriousness.

(b) Consequently this strife and transition becomes also, in more recent times, primarily an accidental, isolated subject-matter of art, which can claim to create no true epoch, and has been able in this form to embody no fundamental phase in the line of the entire development of art. We will recall here in this connection, if incidentally, a few of the more famous examples of this nature. We frequently hear in more recent times the lament over the submergence of Greek art, and a yearning towards Greek gods and heroes is not infrequently the theme of our poets198. This lamentation is expressed emphatically as in direct opposition to Christendom; and though it is, no doubt, generally granted that it contains the higher truth, the qualification is added that, so far as art is concerned, the transition is only to be regretted. This is the theme of Schiller’s “Gods of Greece”; and it is worth our while, even in the present inquiry, to consider this poem, not merely as poetry in the beauty of its exposition, its musical rhythm, its vivid pictures, or in the charm of its regretful mood, which was the motive force in its creation, but also in order to examine the content. Schiller’s pathos is always true, no less than poignant, and the result of profound reflection.

It is perfectly true that the Christian religion contains, and may justly claim to accentuate, a certain phase of art; but in the due course of its development, at the time of the Aufklärung199, it has also reached a point where we find that thought, or rather the Understanding200, has driven into the background that element, which art pre-eminently requires, the actual human envisagement and revelation of God. For the human form and all that it expresses and declares, human events, actions, feeling, is the form under which art is forced to conceive and represent the content of Spirit. Inasmuch as the Understanding has converted God into a mere fact of thought, no longer crediting the appearance of His Spirit in concrete reality, and thus has alienated the God of Thought from all actual existence, this type of religious Illumination has necessarily accepted conceptions and requirements which are intolerable to Art. When, however, the Understanding is raised once more from the region of these abstractions into that of Reason, the need at once asserts itself for something more concrete, and withal for that kind of concreteness which Art itself unfolds. The period of the illuminating Understanding has, no doubt, possessed an art of its own, but only of very prosaic type, as we may even find it in Schiller, whose point of departure was precisely that of such a period of criticism; later on, however, owing to his realization how little reason, imagination, and passion were satisfied by the critical Understanding, he experienced a deep longing for art, in the fullest sense of the term, and primarily for the classical art of the Greeks and their gods, and general views of the world. It is from this kind of yearning, a reaction, in short, from the mere abstractions of the mind, that the poem referred to originated. According to the original draft of the poem, Schiller’s attitude to Christianity is entirely polemical; afterwards he modified it considerably, no doubt realizing that its animus was only directed against the critical aspect of the Illumination, which at a later time itself began to lose its importance. In the first instance he praises the Greek point of view as fortunate in that the whole of Nature was a thing of Life to it, and full of divinities. After that he reviews the Present and its prosaic conception of natural law, and the position man here takes relatively to God:

Diese traur’ge Stille

Kündigt sie mir meinen Schöpfer an?

Finster wie er selbst ist seine Hülle,

Mein Entsagen, was ihn feiern kann201.

No doubt resignation is an essential characteristic in the evolution of the Christian life; but it is only in the monkish conception of it that it requires he should cut off from himself his soul, his emotions, the so-called impulses of his Nature, and should not incorporate his life in the moral, rational, actual world, the family and the State; and it does so precisely as the Illumination and its Deism, which presupposes that God is unknowable, imposes on mankind the extremest form of resignation, namely, that of abandoning all effort either to know or conceive Him. In any true exposition of Christian doctrine, resignation is, on the contrary, merely a phasal moment of mediation, a point of transition, in which that which is purely natural, sensuous, and in general terms finite, strips off this its incompatible nature in order to permit Spirit to attain the loftier freedom and reconciliation of its own possessions, a freedom and blessedness which was unknown to the Greeks. In Christianity as thus understood we are not entitled to speak of the celebration of the one God, of the bare seclusion of Himself, and the cutting ourselves adrift from an ungodly world, for it is precisely in this spiritual freedom and reconciliation of Spirit that God is immanent, and from this point of view the famous lines of Schiller:

Da die Göttes menschlicher noch waren,

Waren Menschen göttlicher202.

is absolutely false. We must for this very reason emphasize the later alteration made in the concluding lines which refer thus to the Greek gods:

Aus der Zeitfluh weggerissen schweben

Sie gerettet auf des Pindus Höhn;

Was unsterblich im Gesang soll leben,

Muss im Leben untergehn203.

These words support entirely the assertion we have made above that the Greek gods could only be localized in the mental conception and imagination; they were neither able to affirm such a position in the reality of life, nor satisfy in the long run finite spirit.

Of another sort is the opposition of Parny to Christianity — a poet named the French Tibullus on account of his successful elegies — which is conspicuous in a prolix poem of ten cantos, a kind of epic poem entitled “La Guerre des Dieux,” as an attempt made to bring ridicule upon Christian conceptions in the interests of jest and comedy carried out in a tone of unrestrained frivolity, yet withal marked by good humour and considerable talent. The sallies of wit here are not, however, carried beyond the point of levity; we have few traces of the wanton disregard of things that are sacred and of the highest excellence such as marks the period of Frederick von Schlegel’s “Lucinde.” The Virgin Mary no doubt is treated very badly in this poem. The monks, Dominicans and Franciscans, yield to the seductions of wine and Bacchanals, and the nuns do much the same with Fauns, and the result is sufficiently shocking. Finally, however, the gods of the old world are vanquished and withdraw from Olympus to Parnassus.

As a concluding illustration Goethe in his “Bride of Corinth” has more profoundly depicted in a vivacious picture the banishment of love, not so much as the result of any true principle of Christianity as the misconceived interpretation of resignation and sacrifice. The poet here contrasts that false asceticism which seeks to condemn the determination of a woman to be wife and rates that enforced celibacy as something more holy than marriage with the natural feelings of mankind. Just as we find in Schiller the opposition between the Greek imagination and the critical abstractions of our modern Enlightenment, so we may detect here the Hellenistic ethical and sensuous justifications in the matter of love and marriage, placed in direct contrast to ideas which can only claim to belong to the Christian religion when regarded from a wholly one-sided and therefore incorrect point of view. With the greatest art a really horrible tone dominates the entire work; and the principal reason is this, that it remains quite uncertain whether the action has reference to a real maiden, or a dead one, a living reality or a ghost; and in the metre of the verse itself in an equally masterly way the threads of light foolery and seriousness are so interwoven as to make the uncanniness still more effective.

(c) Before, however, we attempt to gauge in its profundity the new type of art, whose opposition to the old does not come into the course of Art’s development, so far, at least, as we here have undertaken to follow it along its fundamental lines, we must in the first instance make clear for ourselves that other transition in its earliest form, which attaches to antique art itself. The principle of this transition consists in this, that the Spirit whose individuality hitherto has been contemplated as in harmony with the true subsistency of Nature and human life, and which, in respect to its own life, volition, and acts, was consciously at home in that accord, begins now to withdraw itself into the infinite subjectivity of its essence, but instead of the true infinity is only able to secure a purely formal and indeed still finite return upon itself.

If we look more closely at the concrete conditions which correspond to the principle indicated, we shall see, we have already done so, that the Greek gods possess as their content the substantive materiae of real human life and action. Over and above the vision of the gods we have now the highest mode of determination, the universal interest and the end in determinate life, that is to say, presented at the same time as an existing fact. Just as it was essential to the spiritual configuration of Greek art to appear both as external and real, so, too, the spiritual growth of mankind in its absolute significance has elaborated itself in a reality that both externally appears and is real, with whose substance and universality the individual has put forward a claim to be in accordant fusion. This highest end was in Greece the life of the State, the collective body of citizens and their morality and living patriotism. Outside this supreme interest there was no other more lofty or true. The life of the State, however, as an external phenomenon of the world, fades into the Past, as do the conditions of the entire reality of the outside world. It is not difficult to demonstrate that a State under the type of such a freedom, so immediately identical with all its citizens, which as such already possess in their grasp the highest activity in all public transactions, is inevitably small and weak, and in part must prove suicidal to itself, in part fall into ruins in the natural course of the history of nations. In other words, by reason of this immediate coalescence of individual life with the universality of State-life, on the one hand we find that the peculiar idiosyncrasies of spiritual experience and its particular aspects as private life do not receive their full dues, nor do they receive sufficient opportunity for a development innocuous to society at large. Rather, as distinct from the concrete substance, into which it has not been accepted, such a nature remains simply the limited and natural egoism, which goes on its own way independently, pursues its interests however much they are alien to the true interest of the whole, and, consequently, is an instrument to the ruin of the State, against which, in the last resort, it strains to oppose its individual forces. On the other hand within the circle of this freedom itself the need of a higher personal liberty is roused, which not merely in the State, as the substantive totality, nor merely in the accepted code of morals and law, but in the very soul of the man himself asserts its claim to exist, in so far as he is ready to give life to goodness and rectitude out of the wealth of his own nature and in the light of his own personal knowledge, and to recognize the same at its real worth. The individual subject demands of consciousness that it should be, in virtue of its claim as self-identity, a substantive whole. Consequently there arises in this freedom a new breach between the end of the State and that of the man’s own personal welfare as essentially free himself. Such a conflict as this had already begun in the time of Socrates, while on the other side the vanity, self-seeking and unbridled character of democracy and demagogy corrupted the true State to such a degree that men like Plato and Xenophon experienced a loathing for the internal condition of their mother-city, where the direction of all public transactions lay in the hands of those who were either frivolous, or those who sought nothing but personal aims.

The spirit of this transition, therefore, depends in the first instance on the general line of severation between Spirit in its unfolded self-subsistency and external existence. The spiritual in this separation from its reality, in which it no longer finds itself reflected, is then the abstract mode of Spirit; it is not, however, the one Oriental god, but on the contrary the actual self-knowing conscious subject, which brings to the fore and retains within the clasp of its ideal subjectivity all that is universal in thought, truth, goodness, and morality, and possesses therein not so much the knowledge of a pre-existing reality as simply the content of its thoughts and convictions. This relation, in so far as it persists in this opposition, and sets up the two aspects of the same as purely opposites to one another, would be of an entirely prosaic character. We do not, however, at this stage as yet arrive at this point of bare prose. In other words it is true that on the one hand we have a consciousness present, which as self-secure, wills the Good, the fulfilment of its desires, conceives the reality of its notion in the virtue of its emotional life, much as we find it thus imaged in the ancient gods, morals, and laws. At the same time, however, this consciousness is split up in opposition to its existence as part of existing Life, in other words the actual political life of the time, the dissolution of the old modes of conception, the former type of patriotism and political wisdom, and adheres thereby unquestionably to that opposition between the inward life of soul and the real environment outside it. And the reason of this hesitancy is this that the bare conceptions of genuine ethical truth which it derives from its own inner world are unable to fully satisfy it; it consequently faces that which is exterior to this, to which it relates itself in a negative and hostile spirit with the object of changing it. This consciousness is, as already stated, on the one hand no doubt an inward and present content, which, self-determined and at the same time deliberately articulate, is concerned with a world that confronts it, to which this content is opposed, and which receives the task to depict this same reality in the semblance of the very traits of the corruption peculiar to that world, and which form such a contrast with its own ideas of goodness and truth. From another point of view this very contrast is cancelled by art itself. In other words, another type of art arises, in which the conflict of this opposition is not emphasized through the medium of mere thoughts, remaining thus in its disunion; but this reality in the very folly of its corruption is itself submitted to a mode of artistic presentation, which exposes it as self-destructive, and exposes it in such a way that it is precisely in and through this self-destructive process of what is of no weight that truth is enabled to assert itself upon this mirror as the secure and endurable power, and thereby all the force of a direct opposition to what is essentially true is removed from that side represented by folly and unreasonableness. This art is comedy, of the type Aristophanes dramatized for his fellow-citizens, connecting it closely with all that was essential in the world around him, and doing so with equanimity204, in a mood of pure and hearty joviality.

We may, however, observe that this resolution of art, despite its adequacy, tends to disappear to this extent, that the contradictory antithesis persists in the form of its opposition, and, consequently, instead of the poetic reconciliation a prosaic relation is imported, by means of which the classical type of art appears to be annulled, and the gods of plastic shape no less than the entire world of human beauty vanish with it. We have, then, now to look about us for a form of art, which is able to reclothe itself from the ruins of this overthrow in a loftier configuration and to extract the real significance which it implies. We discovered as the terminating point of symbolic art in the same way that the separation of pure form from its significance was emphasized in a variety of modes such as simile, fable, parable, riddle, and the like. Inasmuch as the severation above adverted to is causally responsible for the dissolution of that art-type, in a similar way the question arises what is the nature of the distinction between our present example of transition as contrasted with the previous one. The distinction is as follows:

(a) In the truly symbolic and comparative type of art the form and significance are from the very first, despite the affinity of their relationship, alien to one another; they are placed, however, in no mere negative, but rather in amicable relationship; for it is precisely the qualities and traits which are identical to or resemble each other on the two sides which assert themselves as the causal basis of their conjunction and comparison. Their persistent separation and hostility is consequently within the bounds of this union neither, relatively to the separated aspects, of a hostile character, nor is a blending of the same, within essentially narrow limits, thereby removed from them. The Ideal of classical art, on the contrary, proceeds from the perfect interfusion of significance and form, the ideal individuality of spirit and its external conformation; and when the composite aspects which have been brought together in such a consummated unity are disrupted, this disruption takes place simply because they are unable any longer to cohere one with the other, and are absolutely compelled to start forth from their peaceful state of harmony in disunion and hostility.

(b) Together with this way of looking at the relation in contrast to that of symbolic art we may add that the content of both sides is altered, as they now stand in opposition. To put it thus we may say that, in the symbolic type of art, it is abstractions more or less, general thoughts, or at least definite phrases in the form of generalities peculiar to reflective thought, which, by means of the symbolic type of art, receive a sensuous embodiment replete with suggestion. In the form, however, which makes itself predominant in this transition to romantic art the content, it is true, is made up of a similar abstraction of general thoughts, opinions, and maxims of reflective reason, but in this case it is not these abstractions in themselves, but rather their presence in the individual’s mind and his self-subsistent identity which furnish the content for one side of the opposition. For the primary requirement of this mediating stage consists in this, that the spiritual which has attained the Ideal, shall stand forth in its entire independence. Already in classical art we found that spiritual individuality was of chief importance, albeit on the side of its realization it remained reconciled with a determinate existence as immediately presented. What is of importance now is to declare a mode of subjectivity which strives to acquire the mastery over the form that is no longer adequate to it, in a word, over external reality. In this way the world of Spirit becomes liberated as independent. It recovers itself from bondage to the sensuous material and manifests itself thereby through this return upon its own resources as the subject of a self-consciousness which only finds contentment in the secret wealth of its own domain. This subject, however, which repels externality from itself, is not in respect to its ideal aspect yet the truly concrete totality which encloses as content the Absolute under the mode of self-conscious spiritual life; rather it is, as still fettered by its opposition to reality, a purely abstract, finite, and unsatisfied form of subjectivity. In opposition to this we have confronting it an equally finite mode of reality, which on its part is also independent, but just for that very reason — forasmuch, that is, as the truth of Spirit has withdrawn from it into its own ideality and henceforward neither will nor can identity itself with it, appears as a reality void of all gods and an existence fallen into rottenness. In this manner and at this point art brings forward a Spirit that thinks, that is, to repeat our former analysis, the individual consciousness of our humanity, which, supporting itself on its own possession of the abstract knowledge and volition of goodness and virtue, confronts with hostility therewith the corruption of its present environment. That aspect of this opposition which remains unresolved, and in which the ideal and external modes of its antithesis persist in their disruption, constitutes the element of prose in the mutual relation of the two sides. A noble mind or a virtuous soul to whom the realization of self-conscious life is denied in a world of vice and folly, turns away from the existence which thus confronts him with passionate indignation, or more subtle wit and more frosty bitterness, and either is wroth with or scorns a world which gives the lie direct to his abstract notions of virtue and truth.

The type of art which accepts this sudden outburst of opposition between a subjectivity still finite in its mode and a degenerate world outside it as its matter is the Satire, the ordinary theories as to which have little to commend them, for the simple reason that they break down precisely where we look for their assistance. Satire has nothing to do with epic poetry, and it has just as little affinity with lyric. In the Satire it is not the life of the emotional nature which is expressed; rather the general conception of goodness and what is essentially needful, which it no doubt blends with the particular aspect of soul-life205, appears as the virtuousness of this or that individual; but this does not suffer itself to be enjoyed in the open and unhampered beauty of imaginative conception or let that enjoyment issue freely. Rather with discontent it retains the existing discord between the writer’s own state of mind and its abstract principles and the empirical reality which mocks them. To this extent satire is neither a genuine creation of the poet nor a real work of art. For these reasons the point of view of the satirical poem can never be reached satisfactorily through those other types of poetry just mentioned; it must be apprehended in a more general way as the example of this very transitional form we referred to from the classic Ideal.

(c) Inasmuch, then, as it is, relatively to its ideal content, the prosaic resolution of the Ideal, which asserts itself mainly in satire, we do not find that Greece, which is pre-eminently the native land of Beauty, is the place where we must look for it. Satirical poems of the nature above described are the characteristic possession of Rome. The spirit of the Roman world is the sovereignty of the abstract Ideal, the law that is dead, the shipwreck of beauty and of the joyousness of civic life, the suppression of the family in the sense that it is the immediate and most natural form of morality, and generally the sacrifice of individuality, which surrenders itself wholly to the State, and in obedience to the abstract law is satisfied with the frost-like sense of political worth and critical satisfaction which it supplies. The principle of this civic virtue, the cold-blooded harshness of which subjects to its pleasure all alien peoples, while the formal rectitude of the personal life is elaborated to the furthest point of consistency on equally rigid lines, is wholly inconsonant with genuine art. We find, therefore, even in Rome no art that is at once conspicuous in its beauty, freedom, and greatness. It is from the Greeks that the Romans borrowed all that they mastered whether in sculpture or painting, epic, lyric, or dramatic poetry. It is a remarkable fact that all that we can point to as the native product of Latin art is comic farces, whereas the more cultivated types of comedy, not excluding those of Plautus and Terence, are borrowed from Greece, and are rather an affair of imitation than independent production. Even Ennius first exhausted the sources of Greek poetry before he made mythology prosaic. That type of art is alone native to the Latin genius, which was essentially itself prosaic, the didactic poem, for example, more particularly when it contains an ethical content, and endows its general reflections with the purely exterior adornment of metre, images, similes, and a rhetorically beautiful diction. But above all other forms thus excepted we place the satire. Here we find it is the mood of virtuous exasperation over the surrounding world which strives to air itself in what is, in some measure, hollow declamations. We can only call this essentially prosaic type of art poetical in so far as it brings before the vision the corrupted nature of real life in such a way that this corruption practically falls to pieces as the result of its own folly. Just as Horace, who as a lyric poet entirely identified himself by study with the artistic type and manner of Greece, in his epistles and satires — where we have his originality more emphasized — traces for us a living picture of the morals of his age, by depicting follies which are self-destructive by virtue of the stupidity, that carries them into effect. Nevertheless, even this example only presents us with a kind of merriment that for all its keen and educated sense can barely be classed as poetry, the object in the main being to make ridicule out of that which is bad. Among others, on the contrary, we find that the abstract conception of rectitude and virtue is deliberately contrasted with vice; and in this case it is exasperation, anger, hate, and scorn, which in some measure expatiate in formal eloquence over virtue and wisdom, and in part give full rein to the indignation of a soul of more nobility against the dissolution and servility of the times, or hold up before the vices of the day the mirror of the old morality, the former liberty, the virtues of a state of the world which has passed away, without any genuine hope and belief in their recovery; or rather one which has nothing to oppose to the tottering gait, the dilemmas, the need and danger of an ignominious present, save a stoical equanimity and the unshakable conscience of a virtuous soul. Roman history and philosophy not unfrequently receive something of the same tone from a mood of this kind. Sallust must needs express himself strongly against the corruptions of morals, being himself very considerably affected by them. Livy, despite his rhetorical elegance, seeks for comfort and satisfaction in his picture of the good old days. Above all we have Tacitus, who, with a severe melancholy as grand in its scope as it was profound, without the baldness of declamation, indignantly exposes in the clearest relief the evils of his time. Among the satirists Persius is remarkable for his acerbity, with a bitter edge more keen than that of Juvenal. Later on we find bringing up the rear the Greek Syrian Lucian giving free vent to his witticisms and pleasantry against all things, whether heroes, philosophers, or gods; and with exceptional prominence passing in review the ancient gods of Greece on the score of their humanity and individuality. However, only too often he goes no further in his tittle-tattle than the mere external aspect of these godlike figures and their actions, and is for that reason wearisome to modern readers. For, on the one hand, so far as our convictions are concerned, we have already disposed of all that he would destroy, and on the other we are aware that, despite all his jests and mockery, these characteristic traits of Greek divinities, when contemplated under the aspect of beauty, still retain their eternal significance.

Nowadays satirical poems are not likely to prove a success. Cotta and Goethe have proposed competitions in this form of composition, but no poems of note are forthcoming. Certain fixed principles are bound up with it, with which the present age is not in harmony; a wisdom which is devoid of content, a virtue which adheres with inflexible obstinacy to its own resources and nothing beyond, may very possibly contrast itself with the actual world, but is quite unable to bring about the truly poetical resolution of what is false and repugnant, and effect the genuine reconciliation in the truth.

In one word, Art is unable to persist in this breach between the abstract conceptions of the inward life and the objective world around, without proving itself false to its own principle. The subjective realm of the soul must be conceived as that which is itself an essentially infinite and independent existence, which, albeit it is unable to suffer the finite reality to subsist as Truth itself, nevertheless does not merely assert itself negatively toward the same in a bare contradiction, but proceeds all the while on the path of reconciliation, and for the first time, in its opposition to the ideal individualities of the classical art-form, declares this very activity, being in fact the presentment of the absolute mode of self-conscious life.

197 Lit. “the essentially-and-for-itself-necessary.”

198 Hölderlin, and of course Goethe no less than Schiller, would be included. With our moderns such as Swinburne the admission is less obvious than the qualification.

199 Die Aufklärung. That is, the end of the eighteenth century; usually translated as illumination or enlightenment.

200 Verstand, the faculty of science and common sense.

201

What! doth this same stillness tell me sadly

All I know of Him who voiced creation?

Dark as e’en the veil that hides Him from me

Is my heart’s salute of resignation.

202

Since the gods were then more human

Men were more in image godlike.

203

Wrested from the flood of Time’s abysses

Saved they float above high Pindus now;

All that was immortal life within them

Lives in song, all other life must go.

204 Zornlos lit., without anger.

205 I think this is the meaning of the words mit subjectiver Besonderheit, but the interpretation “with other material peculiar to the writer” is not impossible.

SUBSECTION III

THE ROMANTIC TYPE OF ART

INTRODUCTION

OF THE ROMANTIC GENERALLY

The type of romantic art receives its definition, as we have hitherto throughout the present inquiry seen was always the case, from the ideal notion of the content, which it is the function of art to declare. We must consequently in the first place attempt to elucidate the distinctive principle of the new content, a content which now, in its significance as the absolute content of truth, opens up to our minds a new vision of the world no less than a novel configuration of art.

In the first stage of our inquiry, the entrance chamber of art, the impulse of imagination consisted in the struggle from Nature to spiritual expression. In this strain Spirit never reached beyond what was still only an effort to find, an effort which, in so far as it was not yet able to supply a genuine content for art, could only maintain its position as an external embodiment of the significant aspects of Nature, or those abstractions of the ideal inwardness of substance which were destitute of a subjective character in the strict sense, and in which this type of art found its real centre. The reverse of this point of view we discovered in classical art. Here it is spirituality — albeit it is only by virtue of the abrogation of the significances of Nature that it is enabled to struggle forth in its independent self-identity — which is the basis and principle of the content, with the natural phenomenon in the bodily or sensuous material for its external form. This embodiment, however, did not, as was the case in the first stage, remain superficial, indefinite, and unsuffused by its content; but the perfection of art attained its culminating point by precisely this means, namely, that Spirit completely transpierced its exterior appearance, idealized the shell of Nature in this union of beauty, and drew round itself a reality adequate to its own nature as mind under the mode of substantive individuality. By this means classical art was a presentation of the Ideal which completely satisfied its notion, the consummation of the realm of beauty. More beautiful art than this can neither exist now nor hereafter.

But for all that we may have an art that is more lofty in its aim than this lovely revelation of Spirit in its immediate sensuous form, if at the same time one that is created by the mind as adequate to its own nature. For this coalition, which perfects itself in the medium of what is external, and thereby makes sensible reality its adequate and determinate existence, necessarily runs counter to the true notion of Spirit, and drives it forth from its reconciliation in the bodily shape upon its own essential substance to seek further reconciliation in that alone. The simple and unriven totality of the Ideal is dissolved, and breaks up into one of twofold aspect, namely, that of the essentially subjective life and its exterior semblance, in order to enable mind, by means of this severation, to win the profounder reconciliation in its own most proper element. In one word, Spirit, which has for its principle the mode of entire self-sufficiency, the union of its notion with its reality — is only able to discover an existence that wholly corresponds to such a principle in its own spiritual world of emotion, soul, that is to say, in the inward life where it feels at home. The human spirit becomes aware that it must possess its Other, its existence, as Spirit, which it appropriates as its own and what it verily is, and by doing so at length enjoys its own infinity and freedom.

This elevation of Spirit to its own substance, through which it attains its objectivity — which it would otherwise be obliged to seek for in the external environment of its existence within its own self and in this union with itself both feels and knows itself — is what constitutes the fundamental principle of romantic art. With this truth we may join as a corollary thereto that for this concluding stage the beauty of the classic Ideal, or in other words beauty in its most uniquely consonant form and its most conformable content, is no longer regarded as ultimate. For in arriving at the point of romantic art, Spirit206 becomes aware that its truth is not fully attained by a self-absorption in the material of sense. On the contrary, it only comes fully to the knowledge of that truth by withdrawing itself out of that medium into the inward being of its own substance, whereby it deliberately affirms the inadequacy of external reality as a mode of its existence. It is owing to this that when this new content is set the essential task of making itself an object of beauty, the beauty, in the meaning of the terms under which we have met with it before, only persists as a subordinate mode, and the new conception of it becomes the spiritual beauty of what is its own ideality made fully explicit, in other words, the subjectivity of Spirit essentially infinite in its mode.

In order, however, that mind may attain the infinity which belongs to it it must transcend at the same time purely formal and finite personality and rise into the measure of the Absolute. That is to say, Spirit must declare itself as fulfilled with that which is out and out substantive, and in doing so proclaim itself as a self-knowing and self-willing subject. Conversely, therefore, what is substantive and true is no longer to be apprehended as a mere “beyond” relatively to our humanity, and the anthropomorphism of the Greek view of things can be struck out; and in the place of this we have humanity as very and real subjectivity affirmed as the principle, and by virtue of this change, as we have already seen, anthropomorphism for the first time reflects a truth of complete and final validity.

We have now in a general way to develop the range of subject-matter, no less than its form, from the earliest phases in the evolution of this principle, whose configuration, as it thus changes, is conditioned by the new content of romantic art.

The true principle of the romantic content is absolute inwardness207, and the form which corresponds to it, the subjectivity of mind, meaning by this the comprehension of its self-subsistence and freedom. This intrinsically infinite principle and explicitly enunciated universal is the absolute negation of all particularity208; it is simple unity at home with itself, which consumes all that is separable, all processes of Nature and its succession of birth, passing away, and reappearance, all the limitations of spiritual existence, and dissolves all particular gods in its pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all gods are dethroned; the flame of the subjective essence has destroyed them; instead of the plastic polytheism art recognizes now one God only, one Spirit, one absolute self-subsistence, which as the absolute knowledge and volition of itself remains in free union with it, and no longer falls to pieces in the particular characters and functions we have reviewed above, whose single unit of cohesion was the force of an obscure Necessity. Absolute subjectivity, however, in its purity would escape from art altogether, and only be present in the apprehension of Thought, unless it could enter into external existence in order that it might be a subjectivity which was actual if also conformable to its notion, and further could recollect itself in its own province from out of this reality. And, what is more, this moment of reality is pertinent to the Absolute, because the Absolute, as infinite negativity, contains this self-relation — as simple unity of knowledge at home with itself, and therewith as immediacy — for the final consummation of its activity. On account also of this its immediate existence, which is rooted in the Absolute itself, the Absolute declares itself not as the one jealous God, who merely annuls the aspect of Nature and finite human existence, without revealing itself verily therein under the mode of actual divine subjectivity; rather the very Absolute unfolds itself, and takes to itself an aspect, relatively to which it is also within the grasp and presentation of art.

The determinate existence of God, however, is not the natural and sensuous in its simplicity, but the sensuous as brought home to that which is not sensuous, in other words to the subjectivity of mind which, instead of losing the certainty of its own presence as the Absolute, in its external envisagement, for the first time, and by no other means than this its reality, is made aware of its actual presence as such. God in His Truth is consequently no mere Ideal begotten of the imagination, but He declares Himself in the heart of finite condition and the external mode of contingent existence, and is, moreover, made known to Himself therein as divine subjective life, which maintains itself there as essentially infinite and creating this infinity for itself. Inasmuch, then, as the actual subject209 is the manifestation of God, Art for the first time secures the superior right to apply the human figure and its mode of externality generally as a means to express the Absolute, although the new function of art can only consist in making the external form not a means whereby the ideality of man’s inward condition is absorbed in exterior bodily shape, but rather conversely to make the consciousness of the Divine mind visible in the subject of consciousness. The distinguishable phases, which combine to make up the totality of this apprehension of the world-condition as, that is to say, the concrete totality of truth, are consequently made manifest to mankind from this point onwards under such a mode that it is neither the Natural in its simplicity, such as sun, heavens, stars, and so forth, nor the Greek conclave of the gods of beauty, nor the heroes and practical exploits in the field of the family cultus and political life — it is neither one nor any of these which supplies us with either content or form. Rather it is the actual and isolated individual subject who receives in the inward210 substance of his living experience this infinite worth, for it is in him alone that the eternal characters of absolute Truth — which is made actual only as Spirit — expand out of their fulness within, and are concentrated to the point of determinate existence.

If we contrast this definition of romantic art with that which was proposed to the classical — that is to say, as Greek sculpture completed the latter under the mode most conformable to it — it is obvious that the plastic figure of the god does not express the motion and activity of Spirit, in so far as the same has retired from its actual bodily shape, and has penetrated to the inner shrine of independent self-identity. That which is mutable and contingent in the empirical aspect of individuality is no doubt removed from those lofty, godlike figures: what, however, fails them is the actualization of the subjective condition in its self-subsistent being as shown in self-knowledge and self-volition. This defect makes itself felt on the exterior side in the notable fact that the direct expression of soul in its simplicity, the light of the eye, is absent from the sculptured figure. The most exalted works of beautiful sculpture are sightless. The inward life does not look forth from them as self-conscious inwardness such as this concentration of Spirit to the point of light made visible in the human eye offers us. This light of the soul falls outside of them, and is the possession of the beholder alone: he is unable to look through these figures as soul direct to soul, and eye to eye. The God of romantic art, however, is made known with sight, that is, self-knowing, subjective on the side of soul, and that soul or divine intimacy disclosing itself to soul. For the infinite negativity, the withdrawal of the spiritual into itself, cancels its discharge in the bodily frame. This subjectivity is the light of Spirit, which reveals itself in its own domain, in the place which was previously obscure, whereas the natural light can only give light on the face of an object, is in fact this terrain and object, upon which it appears, and which it is aware of as itself211. Inasmuch as, however, this absolute intimacy of the soul expresses itself at the same time as the mode of human envisagement in its actual existing shape, and our humanity is bound up with the entire natural world, we shall find that there is no less a wide field of variety in the contents of the subjective world of mind than there is in that external appearance, to which Spirit is related as to its own dwelling-place.

The reality of absolute subjectivity, as above described, in the mode of its visible manifestation, possesses the following modes of content and appearance.

(a) Our first point of departure we must deduce from the Absolute itself, which as very and actual mind endows itself with determinate existence, is self-knowing in its thought and activity. Here we find the human form so represented that it is known immediately as the wholly self-possessed Divine. Man does not appear as man in his solely human character, in the constraint of his passions, finite aims, and achievements, or as merely conscious of God, but rather as the self-knowing one and only universal God Himself, in whose life and sufferings, birth, death, and resurrection He reveals openly also to finite consciousness, what Spirit, what the Eternal and Infinite in their veritable truth are212. Romantic art presents this content in the history of Christ, his mother, and his disciples, with all the rest of those in whom the Holy Spirit and the perfected Divine is manifested. For in so far as God, who is above all the essential Universal, exists in the manifestation of human existence, this reality is not, in the Divine figure of Christ, limited to isolate and immediate existence, but unfolds itself throughout the entire range of that humanity, in which the Spirit of God is made present, and in this actuality continues in unity with itself. The diffusion of this self-contemplation, this essential self-possession of mind213, is peace, in other words the reconciled state of Spirit with its own dominion in the mode of its objective presence — a divine world, a kingdom of God, in which the Divine, which has for its substantive notion from the first reconciliation with itself, consummates this result in such a condition, and thereby secures its freedom.

(b) However much, we must fain add, this identification asserts itself as grounded in the essence of the Absolute itself, as spiritual freedom and infinity it is no reconciliation which immediately is visible from the first in either the real worlds of Nature or Spirit; on the contrary, it is only accomplished as the elevation of Spirit from the finitude of its immediate existence to its truth. As a corollary of this it follows that Spirit, in order to secure its totality and freedom, must effect an act of self-severation, and set up on the one side itself as the finitude of Nature and Spirit to its opposed self on the other as that which is essentially infinite. Conversely with this act of disruption the necessity is conjoined that from out of this retirement from its unity — within the bounds of which the finite and purely natural, the immediacy of existence, the “natural” heart in the sense of the negative, evil and bad, one and all are defined — a way is at last found by virtue of the subjugation of all that has no substantive worth within the kingdom of truth and consolation. In this wise the reconcilement of Spirit can only be conceived as an activity, a movement of the same, can only be presented as a process, in whose course arise both strain and conflict, and the appearance and reappearance, as an essential feature of it, of pain, death, the mournful sense of non-reality, the agony of the soul and its bodily tenement. For just as God in the first instance disparts finite reality from Himself, so, too, finite man, who starts on his journey outside the divine kingdom, receives the task to exalt himself to God, to let loose from him the finite, to do away with the nothing-worth, and by means of this decease of his immediate reality to become that which God in His manifestation as man accomplished as very truth in the actual world. The infinite pain of this sacrifice of the most personal subjectivity, sufferings, and death, which for the most part were excluded from the representation of classical art, or rather only are presented there as natural suffering, receive their adequate treatment necessarily for the first time in romantic art. It is, for example, impossible to affirm that among the Greeks death was ever conceived in its full and essential significance. Neither that which was purely natural, nor the immediacy of Spirit in its union with the bodily presence, was held by the Greeks as something in itself essentially negative. Death was consequently to them purely an abstract passing over, unaccompanied by horror or fearsomeness, a cessation without further immeasurable consequences for the deceased. If, however, conscious life in its spiritual self-possession is of infinite worth then the negation, which death enfolds, is a negation of this exaltation and worth, and it is consequently fearful, a death of the soul, which is in the position of finding itself thereby as itself now this negative in explicit appearance, excluded for evermore from happiness, absolutely unhappy, delivered over to eternal damnation214. Greek individuality, on the contrary, does not, regarded as spiritual self-consciousness, attach this worth to itself; it is able, consequently, to surround death with more cheerful images. Man only fears the loss of that which is of great worth to him215. Life possesses, however, only this infinite worth for mind if the subject thereof, as spiritual and self-conscious, is reality in its absolute unity, and is compelled with an apprehension, in this way justified, to image itself as doomed to negation by death. From another point of view, however, death also fails to secure from classical art the positive significance which it receives from romantic art. The Greeks never treated with real seriousness what we understand by immortality. It was only in later times that the doctrine of immortality received at the hands of Socrates a profounder significance for the introspective reflection of human intelligence. When, for example, Odysseus216 praises the happiness of Achilles in the lower world as one excelling that of all others who were before or came after him on the ground that he, once revered as a god, is now greatest chief among the dead, Achilles in the well-known words rates this fortune at a very low rank indeed, and makes answer that Odysseus had better utter no word of comfort to him on the score of death; nay, he would rather be a mere serf of the soil, and poor enough serve a poor man for wage, than rule as lord over all the ghosts of the dead who have vanished to Hades. In romantic art, on the contrary, death is merely a decease of the natural soul and finite consciousness, a decease, which only proclaims itself as negative as against that which is itself essentially negative and abolishes what has no real substance, and is consequently the deliverance of Spirit from its finitude and division, mediating at the same time the spiritual reconciliation of the individual subject with the Absolute217. Among the Greeks life in its union with the existence of Nature and the external world was the only life about which you could affirm anything, and death was consequently pure negation, the dissolution of immediate reality. In the romantic view of the world, however, death receives the significance due to its negativity, in other words the negation of the negative218, and returns back to us thereby equally as the affirmative, as the resurrection of Spirit from the bare husk of Nature and the finiteness which it has outgrown. The pain and death of the extinguished light of individual being awakes again in its return upon itself in fruition, blessedness, and in short that reconciled existence which Spirit is unable to attain to save through the dying of its negative state, in which it is shut off from its most veritable truth and life. This fundamental principle does not therefore merely affect the fact of death as it approaches man in his relation to the world of Nature, but it is bound up with a process, which Spirit has to sustain in itself, quite independently of this external aspect of negation, if life and truth are to join hands.

(c) The third presentment of this absolute world of Spirit is co-ordinated by man, in so far as he neither makes manifest the Absolute and Divine in its immediate and essential mode as such Divine, nor declares positively the process in which he is exalted to the Supreme Being, and reconciled with Him, but rather continues within the ordinary sphere of his human life. Here it is the purely finite aspect of that existence which constitutes the content, whether we regard it in the light of its spiritual purposes, its worldly interests, passions, collisions, suffering, and enjoyments, or from that point of view which is wholly external, that of Nature, its kingdom, and all its detailed phenomena. In order to apprehend this content with adequacy, however, we must take up two distinct positions relatively to it. In other words, it is true that Spirit, for the reason that it has secured the principle of self-affirmation, expatiates in this province, as one on which it has a just claim, and one which, as native to it, provides satisfaction, an element from which it merely extracts this positive character219, and is permitted thereby itself to be reflected in its positive satisfaction and intimacy; yet, on the other hand, we have the fact that this content is brought down to the level of pure contingency, a contingency which is unable to claim any independent validity, for the reason that mind cannot discover therein it veritable existence, and consequently only preserves its substantial unity by independently on its own account breaking up again this finite aspect of Spirit and Nature as a thing of finitude and negation.

In conclusion, then, so far as the relation of this content in its entirety to its mode of presentation is concerned, it would appear, in the first place, agreeably to what we have above stated, that the content of romantic art, relatively to the Divine, at any rate, is very limited.

(a) For, first, as we have already indicated, Nature is divested of the Divine principle; in other words, the sea and mountains, valleys, Time, and Night, briefly all the general processes of Nature, have here lost the worth which they carry when related to the presentation and content of the Absolute. The images of Nature receive no further expansion in a symbolic significance. The thesis that their shapes and activities might possibly sustain traits of Divine import is taken away from them. For all the mighty questions in regard to the origin of the world, in regard to the Whence, Wherefore, and Whither, of created Nature and humanity, and all the symbolical and plastic experiments in the resolution and exposition of these problems disappear at once in the revelation of God in Spirit; and we may add that also in the spiritual sphere the world of variety and colour, with the characters, actions, and events, as they were envisaged by classical art, are now concentrated in one single light-focus of the Absolute and its eternal history of redemption. The whole content meets, therefore, at this single point of the Inmost of Spirit220 — that is, of feeling, imagination, soul — all that strains after a union with truth, that seeks and wrestles to bring to birth the Divine in consciousness, and to maintain it; and, furthermore, is constrained to execute the world’s aims and undertakings, not so much for the world’s sake as to further the unique and essential undertaking of its heart by means of the spiritual conflict of man’s inward nature and his reconciliation with God, presenting personality and its conservation no less than all that paves the way to them for this object, and this alone. The heroism, which makes its appearance as the result of such aspirations, is not the kind of heroism which prescribes laws by its own fiat, establishes new systems, creates and informs circumstances, but rather a heroism of submission, which accepts everything as predetermined and ordered above it, and whose energies are now wholly restricted to the task of regulating temporal events in line with such direction, and making that which is in keeping with the higher order and of independent stability a valid factor in the world as if is and in the Time-process. For the reason, however, that this absolute content appears as concentrated to a focus in the inward life of the soul, and the entire process is imported into the life of mankind, the range of this content is thereby also infinitely extended. It expands, in fact, to a manifold variety practically without limit. For although every objective history supplies what is substantive in that self-concrete soul-life, yet for all that the subject of the same reviews it in all its aspects, presents isolated features taken from it, or unfolds it as it appears in continually novel human traits by way of addition, and may very well into the bargain both import the entire expanse of Nature, as environment and locale of Spirit, and divert them to the one single object referred to. By this means the history of soul-life is infinitely rich, and can adapt its form to ever shifting conditions and situations in every possible way. And, further, if the individual at last steps forth from this absolute sphere and actively engages in worldly affairs, the range of interests, objects, and emotions will be difficult to count on the score in proportion as the spiritual self-possession is profound, agreeably to the principle in its fullest application; man is consequently distracted by an infinitely multiplied profusion of interior and exterior collisions, revolutions, and gradations of passion, and the most manifold degrees of satisfaction. The Absolute in its unqualified and essential universality, in so far, that is, as it is unfolded in the conscious life of the human soul, constitutes the spiritual content of romantic art; and for this reason his collective humanity, no less than its entire evolution, becomes its inexhaustible material.

(b) Romantic art does not, however, as art educe this content in the way we found was the case for the most part in symbolic art, and, above all, in the classical type and its ideal gods. Romantic art, as we have seen already, is not, in its specific capacity, the instructive revelation, which, merely in the form of art, makes the content of truth visible to the senses. The content is already present in the conceptive mind, and the emotions independently and outside the sphere of art. Religion, as the consciousness of truth in its universality, is here an essential premiss of art to a degree totally different from what it was in the previous cases; and, even if we look at the position in its wholly exterior aspect for the consciousness that is actual in the reality of the material world, it lies before us as the prosaic fact of the very present. That is to say, inasmuch as the content of revelation to mind is the eternal absolute nature of mind221 itself, which breaks itself loose from Nature in its bareness and subordinates the same, its manifestation in the immediacy of present life is such that the external material, in so far as it consists and is existent, only continues as a contingent world, out of which the Absolute recollects itself in the secret wealth of Spirit, and only by such means attains independence and truth. The external show receives thus the imprimatur of an indifferent medium, in which Spirit can repose no ultimate trust, and in which it can find no dwelling-place. The more it conceives the conformation of external reality as unworthy of its fulness the less it becomes able to seek consolation therein, or to discover its task of self-reconcilement consummated by a union therewith.

(c) The manner in which, therefore, romantic art gives to itself a real embodiment agreeably to the spirit of the principle above indicated, and on the side of its external appearance, is not one which essentially overleaps the ordinary presentment of reality: it is by no means averse to accept as cover for itself real existence in its finite defects and definition. That beauty therefore disappears from it, which tended to raise the outside envisagement above the soilure of Time, and the traces that unite it with a Past, in order to declare the beauty of existence in its blossom in the room of what had otherwise been a dismantled image. Romantic art has no longer for its aim the freedom and life of existence in its infinite tranquillity and absorption of the soul in the bodily presence; no more a life such as this arrests it. It turns its back on this pinnacle of beauty. It interweaves the threads of its soul experience with the contingent material of Nature’s workshop, and gives unfettered play to the emphatic features of ugliness itself. We have, in short, two worlds included in the Romantic, a spiritual realm essentially complete in itself, the soul-kingdom, which finds reconciliation in its own sphere, and therewith the otherwise straightforward repetition of birth, death, and resurrection now for the first time perfected in the true circular orbit, doubled back in the return upon itself, the genuine Phoenix life of Spirit. On the other hand, there is the realm of external Nature simply as such, which, released as it is from its secure association and union with Spirit, becomes now a completely empirical reality, concerning the form of which the soul cares little or nothing. In classical art Spirit controlled the empirical phenomenon and transpierced it through and through, because it was the very thing which it had to accept as its completed reality. But now the ideal kingdom is indifferent to the mode of configuration in the world of immediate sense, because this immediacy is beneath the sphere of the blessedness of essential soul-life. The external phenomenon is no longer able to express this inward life; and if any call is made upon it for this purpose, it merely is utilized to make plain that the external show is an existence which does not satisfy, and is forced to point back by suggestion to the spiritual content, the soul and its emotions, as the truly essential medium. Precisely for the same reason romantic art suffers externality on its own part to go on its way freely; and in this respect permits all and every material, flowers, trees, and so on, down to the most ordinary domestic utensils, to appear in its productions just as they are, and as the chance of natural circumstance may arrange them. Such a content as this, however, carries at the same time with it the result, that as purely exterior matter, its worth is of no validity and insignificant; it only receives its genuine worth when the soul has made itself a home in it, and it is taken to express not merely the ideal, but spiritual inwardness222 itself, which, instead of blending itself with the exterior thing, appears simply to have attained its own reconciliation with itself. The ideality thus brought home to a point is that mode of expression which is without externality, invisibly declaring itself, and only itself, in other words, a tone of music simply, which is neither an object nor possesses form, a wavelet over waters223, a ringing sound over a world, which, in sounds such as this, and the varied phenomena which are united with it, can only receive and reflect one reverberation of this self-absorption of the soul.

To sum up, then, in a word, this relation of content and form in the romantic type, where it remains true to its distinctive character, we may affirm that the fundamental note of the same, for this very reason that its principle constitutes an ever expanding universality and the restlessly active depths of heart and mind, is that of music, and when combined with the definite content of imagination, lyrical. This lyrical aspect is likewise the primary characteristic of romantic art, a tone which gives the key-note also to the epic poem and drama, and which is wafted as a breath of soul even around the works of the plastic arts, since here, too, spirit and soul are desirous of speaking by means of the plastic shape to soul and mind.

As regards the division of our subject, which we must now in conclusion determine for the examination of this our third extensive domain of artistic production on the lines of its development, we shall find that the basic notion of the romantic relatively to its substantive and progressive articulation is comprised most conveniently in three branches of division we may define as follows.

The first sphere is the province of religion strictly, in which the redemption history, the life, death, and resurrection of Christ constitute the central interest. The principle which is emphasized as all-important here is that self-involution which mind accomplishes by negating its immediacy and finitude, overcoming the same, and by means of this liberation secures its own self-possessed infinity and absolute self-subsistence in its own kingdom.

This self-subsistence passes, then, in the second place from the Divine dwelling of essential Spirit, surrenders its pure exaltation of finite man to God, in order to enter the temporal world. Here it is, in the first instance, the subject of consciousness simply, which has become self-affirmative, and which possesses as the substantive material of its content, no less than as the interest of its existence, the virtues of this positive subjectivity, such as honour, love, fidelity, and bravery, the aims and obligations, in short, of romantic chivalry.

The content and form of the third chapter may be generally indicated as the formal consistency of character. In other words, if the subjective life has been so far concentrated, that spiritual independence is its essential characteristic, it follows also that the particular content, with which such independence is associated as with what is strictly its own, will also partake of such a character; this self-subsistence, however, inasmuch as it does not, as was the case in the sphere appertinent to essential and explicit religious truth, repose in the substantive core of its life, is only able to reach a formal type. Conversely the configuration of external conditions, situations, and events is now also independently free, and is involved consequently in every sort of capricious adventure. For this reason we find, to put it in general terms, as the termination of the romantic, the contingency of the exterior condition and internal life, and a falling asunder of the two aspects, by reason of which Art commits an act of suicide, and betrays the fact that conscious life must now secure forms of loftier significance, than Art alone is able to offer, in which to grasp and retain truth.

206 Throughout, of course, the German word translated in these paragraphs as mind or spirit is Geist.

207 Absolute ideality may perhaps interpret the text more intelligibly.

208 It is so because as self-identity it distinguishes itself from everything to which it is related.

209 Das wirkliche Subjekt, Hegel means, of course, individual man.

210 “Most intimate” would perhaps express the meaning more clearly.

211 Hegel here gives expression to what is perhaps not wholly defensible logic, though it may be truly poetic mysticism.

212 I would refer any reader who is inclined to gasp at this interpretation of Christian revelation to some useful remarks of Professor Bosanquet in his Preface to his translation, p. XXVIII.

213 Die Ausbreitung dieses Selbstanschauens, In-sich-und-Bei-sich-seyns des Geistes ist der Frieden. One of Hegel’s terrors for the translator, though the sense is obvious enough.

214 The analysis no doubt has its interest. But among other difficulties it is not easy to see how the argument, based as it is on rational grounds, makes for anything but annihilation. Death is a negation — it, according to the argument, puts an end to the “process” — what remains then is apparently the evanescence of the finite spirit. This reference to “happiness” assumes that conscious individual life continues, which is a mere pelitio principii. If it continues the former dual aspect would seem to be implied in it. The analysis of the actual significance of death for Christendom and Greek paganism retains, of course, its validity.

215 But surely in a sense personal life, if only limited to Earth’s existence, may be, I do not say necessarily is, all the more valuable. This is an important aspect of the matter which is not here adequately answered, and it suggests a real grievance against the extravagant follies of a certain type of Christendom. The present feeling of the wisest minds of our own time will be inclined to regard a good deal of Hegel’s remarks here as insufficient or lacking directness. One recalls those significant lines of a great writer but recently taken from us:

Sensation is a gracious gift

But were it cramped in station,

The prayer to have it cast adrift

Would spout from all sensation.

Hegel’s point of view seems neither to be that of mysticism nor mere absorption.

216 “Odyssey,” XI, vv. 481-91. But this illustration is at least evidence of the high value a Greek attached to life on Earth.

217 True enough as an analysis of the Christian consciousness; but the difficulty above pointed out remains so far as the writer refers to a future life, which he sometimes appears to do, sometimes not. Conditions are assumed for human personality of which we can form no conception.

218 He means it is the negation of that which is itself a negation, finite existence. The conclusion is of course, as above suggested, replete with difficulty.

219 That is, I presume, the positive character of natural conditions; but it may mean its own “affirmative” relation.

220 Auf die Innerlichkeit des Geistes.

221 Reason or Spirit are perhaps preferable.

222 The German words are das Innerliche and die Innigkeit.

223 This is obviously not wholly independent of form.

THE RELIGIOUS DOMAIN OF ROMANTIC ART

INASMUCH AS ROMANTIC art, in the representation of the consciousness of absolute subjectivity, understanding this as the comprehension of all truth, the coalescence of mind with its essence — receives its substantive content in the satisfaction of soul-life, in other words the reconciliation of God with the world and therein with Himself, it follows that at this stage the Ideal for the first time is completely at home. For it was blessedness and self-subsistency, contentment, repose, and freedom which we declared as most fundamentally defining the Ideal. Of course, we cannot therefore on this account deduce the Ideal simply from the notion and reality of romantic art; but relatively to the classic Ideal the form it receives is entirely altered. This relation, already in general terms indicated, we must now before everything else establish in its fully concrete significance, in order to elucidate the fundamental type of the romantic mode of presentation. In the classical Ideal the Divine is in one aspect of it restricted to pure individuality; in another aspect the soul and spiritual blessedness of particular gods find their exclusive discharge through the physical medium; and as a third characteristic, for the reason that the inseparable unity of each individual both essentially and in its exterior form supplies the principle of the same, the negativity of the dismemberment implied in human life, that is the pain of both body and soul, sacrifice, and resignation are unable to appear as essentially pertinent to these godlike figures. The Divine of classical art falls, it is true, into an aggregation of gods, but there is no organic and essential self-division, no universally proclaimed essence such as we find in the particular presentment of man whether in form and spirit, whether empirically or subjectively considered; and just as little has it confronting it, as being itself the Absolute in invisible form, a world of evil, sin, and ignorance, together with the task of resolving such contradictions in harmony, and only by thus growing on level terms with the very truth and divine out of this reconciliation. In the notion of the absolute subjectivity, on the contrary, this opposition between substantive universality and personality is inherent, an opposition, whose consummated mediation the subjective ideality perfects with its substance, exalting thereby the substantive presence to the articulate and absolute subject of self-knowledge and volition. But there is, secondly, appertinent to the reality of the subjective condition conceived as mind the profounder contradiction of a finite world, through whose abrogation as finite, and by whose resultant reconciliation with the Absolute the Infinite by virtue of its own absolute activity makes its proper being self-subsistent, and so for the first time exists as absolute Spirit. The appearance of this actuality on the terrain, and in the configuration of the human spirit receives consequently, in respect to its beauty, a totally different mode of relation to that presented by classical art. Greek beauty unfolds the inward aspect of spiritual individuality solely as it is envisaged by means of its bodily shape, actions, and events, wholly expressed in what is exterior, and living wholly therein. For romantic art, on the contrary, it is absolutely necessary that the soul, albeit envisaged in the exterior medium, should at the same time demonstrate its capacity of self-withdrawal from the tenement of the body and self-substantive life. The bodily frame can therefore now only express the inwardness of mind, in so far as it makes it plain that it is not in this material existence, but in itself, that the soul discovers its congruent reality. On account of this beauty is now no longer an idealization in respect to the objective form, but rather the ideal and essential configuration of the soul itself; it is in short a beauty of spiritual ideality, that is the specific mode of such, as every content is informed and elaborated within the temple of the subjective world, and without retaining the external medium in this its permeation with Spirit. For the reason, then, that by this means the interest disappears, which consists in clarifying real existence to the point of our classical unity, and is concentrated in the contrary direction of wafting a new breath of beauty through the unseen content of the spiritual itself, art ceases to retain the old solicitude for what is exterior at all. It accepts the same directly as it may chance to find it, leaving it to take whatever form may happen to please it. The reconciliation with the Absolute is in the Romantic an act of the inward life, which no doubt is embodied externally, but which does not retain that exterior in its material realization as its essential content and object. We may observe that in close association with this indifference towards the idealizing union of soul and body, and in its relation to the external treatment of the more predominant individuality of a sitter, we find the art of portraiture, which does not entirely erase particular traits and lines, as they are found in Nature, and her inevitable deficiencies — defects inseparable from finite effects — in order to replace them with something more adequate. Generally speaking even here there is a certain limit to the licence given to Nature in this respect; but to the general aspect of form in the first instance it is quite indifferent; and no attempt is made to exclude wholly from it the accidental impurities of finite and sensuous existence.

We may adjoin a further quite sufficient reason for the imperative character of this radical definition of romantic art from another point of view. The classic Ideal, where we find it at the culminating point of its very truth, is self-exclusive, self-subsistent, retiring and not susceptible224 in its nature, an orbed individual totality, which repels all else from itself. Its conformation is uniquely its own; its life is bound up in that and that exclusively, and it will harbour no affinity with what is purely empirical and contingent. Whoever, therefore, approaches an ideal such as this as spectator, is unable to appropriate its existence as an embodiment strictly akin to that of his own presence. The figures of the eternal gods, albeit human, do not belong to our mortality, for these gods have not themselves experienced the infirmities of finite existence, but are directly exalted above them. Their affinity with what is empirical and relative is interrupted. The infinite subjectivity, what we call the Absolute of romantic art, is on the contrary not absorbed in its presentment; it is rather carried into its own domain, and for this very reason retains such external aspect as it possesses not so much for itself as for the contemplation of others, as, in short, an exterior presence which is freely offered for this purpose. This externality must further appear in the form of common fact, the human as our senses perceive it, since it is through that that God Himself descends to the level of finite and temporal existence, in order to mediate and reconcile the absolute antithesis, which is inherent in the notion of the Absolute. For this reason our empirical humanity also contains in its bodily presence an aspect, which unfolds to man a bond of affinity and kinship, by virtue whereof he is able to contemplate even his direct natural presence with assurance; and he can do so because the Divine incarnation does not, with the severity of the classical type, thrust on one side the particular and contingent, but presents to his vision that which he himself possesses, or that which he recognizes and loves in others around him. It is just this homeliness incidental to what we ordinarily meet with which attracts and enables romantic art to entrust itself to the external aspect of reality. Inasmuch, then, as the externality which is turned adrift is called upon, through this very abandonment, to suggest the beauty of soul, the lofty pretension of its spirituality and the sacred colour of the emotional life, so, too, at the same time, it is a condition of its doing so that it be absorbed itself within the ideal realm of mind and its absolute content, and that it appropriate the same.

To sum up finally what is implied in this act of surrender we may assert that it consists in the general conception, that in romantic art the infinite subjectivity does not abide in solitary self-sufficiency, as the Greek god did, living in the full perfection and blessedness of his self-exclusion; rather it moves out of itself in relation to somewhat else, which, however, is its own substance, in which it discovers itself again and continues all the time in union with itself. This condition of self-unity in some other that is yet its own is the real form of beauty appropriate to romantic art, the Ideal of the same, which receives for its mode and envisagement what is, in its essence, subjective ideality or inwardness, soul-life and its attendant emotions. The romantic Ideal expresses, therefore, the relation to another spiritual correlative, which is so closely associated with the ideal possessions of the first one, that it is only by virtue of this further one that the soul lives in the complete wealth of its own kingdom. This essential life of the soul in another is, when expressed in terms of emotion, the inwardness of love.

We may consequently affirm lave to be the general content of the romantic, so far as the sphere of religion is concerned. Love, however, only receives its truly ideal configuration when it expresses the positive reconcilement of Spirit in its immediacy. Before, however, we shall be in a position to examine this stage of the fairest and most ideal spiritual satisfaction, we must first pass in review the process of negation, which the absolute Subject enters in overcoming the finiteness and immediacy of its human envisagement, a process which is divulged in the life, death, and suffering of God for the world and humanity, and its possible reconcilement with God. And, secondly, we have on the other side, humanity, which is called upon conversely on its own account to pass through the very same process in order to make actual the reconciliation which is implicitly contained in its nature. Midway within the steps of this process, in which the negative aspect of the sensuous and spiritual passage 011 to death and the grave constitutes the central act of achievement, we shall find that the expression of affirmative blessedness is conspicuous, which in this sphere characterizes art’s most beautiful creations. For the better division of this first chapter we may examine its subject-matter as it falls into three distinct heads of inquiry.

First, we have the redemption-history of Christ; the phasal moments of absolute Spirit presented in the person of God Himself, in so far as He becomes man, and takes to Himself an actual existence in the world of finitude and its concrete conditions, and in this to start with isolated existence gives visible shape to the Absolute itself.

Secondly, we shall consider love in its positive presentment as the feeling of reconciliation between the human and the Divine; in other words the Holy Family, the maternal love of Mary, the love of Christ and that of his disciples.

Thirdly, we have the community before us. Here it is the Spirit of God as present by virtue of the conversion of soul and the mortification of the natural and finite sense, in short, the return of man to God, a return in which penances and pains mediate in the first instance this union of God and man.

The reconciliation of God with His own substance, history in its absolute significance, or, in one word, the process of realization, is made visible to our senses and assured to our minds by the revelation of God in the world. The content of this reconcilement as expressed in the most direct way is the coalescence in unity of the absolute essence of reality with the individual subject of human consciousness. An individual man is God and God is an individual man. In this truth is implied the fact that the human spirit intrinsically, that is, relatively to its notion and essence, is Spirit in truth; and every particular individual in virtue of the humanity he connotes possesses the infinite vocation no less than the infinite significance of being an object of God and in union with God. But along with this and of a like importance the obligation is imposed on man to realize this notion, which, in the first instance, he merely possesses under the implication of his nature. In other words, he has to place before himself and attain to this union with God as the seal of his existence. Only when he has thus consummated his proper destiny does he become essentially free and infinite Spirit. This he can only do in so far as that unity is itself the origination, the eternal ground-root of the human and Divine nature. The goal is here the explicit beginning of the process, namely, the presupposition for the religious consciousness exhibited in romantic art, that God is Himself man and flesh, that He has become this particular human individual, in whom the reconciliation consequently no longer remains as only implicit, so that it is merely to be inferred from its notional existence, but asserts itself in objective existence also before the perception of human sense as this particular and actually existing man. The importance of this aspect of particularity consists in this that it enables all other individuals to find in the same the picture of his own reconcilement with God; it is now no longer a mere possibility, but a fact which has on this very account appeared as really accomplished in this one person. Inasmuch, however, as this unity, conceived as the ideal reconciliation of opposed factors of one process, is no immediately unified mode of being, it is inevitable, in the second place, that the process of Spirit as exemplified in this one individual — the process, that is, by means of which consciousness is for the first time Spirit in Truth — should receive the form of its existence in the history of this very person. This history of Spirit attaining its consummation in one personal life consists simply in all that we have already adverted to; that is to say, the particular man casts on one side his singularity both in its bodily and spiritual presence, in other words he suffers and dies, but furthermore through the agony of death rises again out of death and ascends as glorified God, very and real Spirit, who now, it is true, has entered actual existence as this particular person, yet is with equal truth only very God as Spirit in His community.

(a) This history furnishes the fundamental material for the romantic art of the religious consciousness, in its attitude to which, however, art, taken simply as Art, is to some extent a superfluity. For the main thing here is spiritual conviction, the feeling and conception of this eternal truth, and the faith which is essential evidence to itself of the truth, and becomes in consequence a vital possession of the ideality of that conception. In other words, faith in its developed condition consists in the immediate conviction that it has confronting soul, in the organic movement of this history, the truth itself. If, however, the consciousness of truth is the main point of importance it follows that the beauty of the artistic reflection and presentation is of incidental value to which we may be comparatively indifferent, for the truth is present to mind quite independently of art.

(b) From another point of view, however, the religious content comprises at the same time within its compass a certain aspect of this process, by virtue of which it not merely admits of artistic treatment, but, in a specific relation, admits of it as necessary. In the religious conception of romantic art, as we have more than once explained it, it is an inseparable concomitant of the content that it carries anthropomorphism to the verge of an extreme; and this is so because it is precisely this content which possesses for its main centrum the complete coalescence of the Absolute and Divine with the human consciousness as a visible part of sensuous reality, in other words, as envisaged in the external bodily frame of man, and further, is compelled to represent the Divine in the form of individuality such as is associated with the deficiencies of Nature and the mode of finite phenomena. In this respect Art supplies to the consciousness which seeks to envisage the Divine manifestation, the definite presence of an individual and real human figure, a concrete image, moreover, of the exterior traits of events, in which the birth, life, sufferings, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ are more widely circulated to the glory of God; so that it is exclusively by Art that the real and visible presence of the Divine is for ever renewed over again in a permanent form.

(c) In so far as, in this Divine manifestation, an emphasis is laid on this, namely, that God is essentially a particular individual to the exclusion of others, and does not merely present to us the union of Divine and human consciousness in its universal significance, but rather as that of this particular man, to that extent, the very nature of the content makes it inevitable that all the features of contingency and particularity incidental to finite existence assert themselves, from which the beauty which characterized the consummation of the classic Ideal had purified itself. That which the free notion of beauty had removed from itself as unfitting, in other words, the non-ideal, is in the present case accepted as a necessary aspect, which actually originates in the movement of the content itself and is consequently made explicit.

(α) And it follows from this that when the person of Christ is selected for the object of art, as so frequently occurs, artists, no matter when or where, have taken the very worst course of all who create in their presentment of Christ an Ideal in the meaning and mode of the classical Ideal. Such heads or figures of Christ may no doubt display earnestness, repose, and ethical worth: but the true Christ presentment should rather possess on the one hand soul-intensity and pre-eminently spirituality in its widest comprehension, on the other, intimate personality and individual distinction. Both these contrasted aspects are inconsistent with that blissful repose in the sensuous environment of our humanity. To combine these two termini of artistic reproduction, expression and form, as above defined, is a matter of the greatest difficulty, and painters especially have almost always got themselves into difficulties when they diverged from the traditional type225.

Earnestness and depth of consciousness should no doubt be prominent in the expression of such heads, but the specific features and lines both of countenance and figure ought as little to be of a simply ideal beauty as they are entitled to fall short in the direction of the commonplace and the ugly, or erroneously to aspire after the bare pretensions of the Sublime. The truest success in respect to the external figure will be found in a mean between the directness of Nature’s detail and the ideal of beauty. Rightly to hit on this just mean is difficult. It is pre-eminently in this that the ability, taste, and genius of an artist will assert itself. And in general we may assert that in all artistic execution of this character — putting on one side entirely the different nature of the content, which is inseparable from religious faith — there is more scope offered for the exercise of the artist’s private judgment than is the case when dealing with the classic Ideal. In classical art the artist seeks to present the spiritual and Divine immediately in the lines of the bodily shape itself, in the organism of the human figure; the lines of the human form, therefore, in this ideal divergence from what is ordinarily met with in finite existence, are fundamentally necessary to the interest. In the kind of art we are now discussing the configuration remains that of ordinary experience; its specific lines are up to a certain point unessential, detail, in short, that may indifferently be treated in divers ways and with greater artistic licence. The supreme interest, therefore, is concentrated, on the one hand, in the mode and manner whereby our artist makes that which is spiritual and ideal within the content under the mode of Spirit itself shine forth through this envisagement of ordinary experience; and, on the other hand, in the individual discretion exercised in the execution, the technical means and shifts employed, by virtue of which he is able to impart to his creations the breath of spiritual life and to bring home this finer essence to our hearts and senses.

(β) With regard to the further aspect of the content we have already pointed out that it is referable to the history of the Absolute under the mode that the same is deducible from the notion of Spirit itself; a history which makes objective in the real world bodily and spiritual singularity as infused with its own essential and universal nature. For the reconciliation of our individual consciousness with God does not immediately appear as an original harmony, but rather as a harmony which only is modulated from infinite pain, from resignation, sacrifice, and the mortification of the finite, sensuous, and particular. We see here the finite and the infinite brought into unity; and this reconciliation only asserts itself in its true profundity, intimacy, and power by means of the grossness and severity of the contradiction which yearns for resolution. We may therefore without fear assert that the entire asperity and dissonance of the suffering, torture, and agony, which such a contradiction brings in its train, is inseparable from the very nature of spiritual life, whose final consolation constitutes here the content.

This process of Spirit is, if accepted frankly for all it implies and unfolds, the essence, the notion of Spirit absolutely. It consequently determines for conscious life that universal history226 which is for ever repeated in every individual consciousness. For it is nothing less or more than this consciousness as the universal mind or Spirit is explicated in the multiplicity of individual life, reality and existence. In the first instance, however, for the reason that the essential significance of the spiritual process is concentrated in that mode of reality which is purely individual, this universal history comes before us itself merely in the form of one person, to which it is conjoined as its own, as the history, that is, of his birth, his suffering, death, and return from death; at the same time there is the further significance attached to this personal history, namely, that it is the history of universal and absolute Spirit itself.

The supreme turning-point of this life of God is the putting aside of individual existence as the life of a particular man simply — the story of the Passion, the suffering on the Cross, the Calvary of Spirit, the agony of death. In so far as the content here comprises the fact that the external and bodily form — immediate existence in its personal mode — is, in the pain of its inherent contradiction, propounded in this aspect of negation in order that Spirit may secure its truth and its blessedness by the sacrifice of the sensuous and its individual singularity, to that extent we reach the extreme line of division between it as an artistic creation and the classic or plastic Ideal. From one point of view no doubt the earthly body and the frailty of human Nature is expressly exalted and honoured in the fact that it is God Himself who is made manifest within it. On the other hand, however, it is just this human and bodily side which is posited as negative, and declares itself in its pain. In the classic Ideal the undisturbed harmony in no way vanishes before the co-essential Spirit. The main incidents of that Passion, the mocking of Christ, the crowning with thorns, the carrying of the cross, the final death on the same in the agony of a torturing and tedious death, are wholly incompatible with the presentment of the Greek type of beauty. The lofty aspect in such situations as these is the essential holiness implied in them, the depth of the Spirit’s inmost, the eternal significance of the agony in its relation to the spiritual process, the endurance and Divine repose.

The personal environment of this sublime figure is in part composed of friends and in part of enemies. The friends are throughout no ideal creations, but relatively to the notion227, particular individualities typical of ordinary men, which the impulse of Spirit attaches to Christ: the enemies, on the other hand, by virtue of the fact that they place themselves in hostility to God, judge, mock, put to torture, and crucify Him, are presented to us as spiritually evil, and this conception of their wickedness of heart and enmity to God brings in its train on its exterior side ugliness, grossness, barbarity, the rage and distortion of Spirit. In all these respects, in contrast with the classical beauty we have before us in such representations the non-beautiful as an inevitable concomitant.

(γ) The process of death, however, in the Divine nature is only to be regarded as a point of transition, by means of which the self-reconcilement of Spirit is effected; and the aspects of the Divine and human, the out and out universal and the phenomenal individuality, to mediate the division of which is the main object in view, are positively suffered to coalesce. This positive affirmation, which is the underlying root and origination of the process, is consequently also forced to exhibit itself in a like positive way. As emphatic situations in the Christ-history the resurrection and ascension supply conspicuously the very means to put that affirmation in the clearest light. In more isolated fashion we have over and above this for the same purpose those occasions in which Christ appears to His own as teacher. Here, however, plastic art is confronted with an exceptional situation of difficulty. For in a measure it is Spirit in its purity, which is to be presented in this very impalpable ideality, and in a measure, too, it is nothing less than absolute Spirit, which in the full pregnancy of its infinitude and universality is affirmatively propounded in union with an individual consciousness and exalted above immediate existence; and yet notwithstanding such preconceptions it has undertaken the task to envisage for sense in the bodily configuration of this person the entire expression of the infinite and innermost spiritual profundity which it refers to him228.

Mind in its ultimate and most complete explication as reason is, as such, not the immediate object of art. Its highest and most essentially realized reconciliation can only find such satisfied consummation in the intellectual medium as such, that is to say, the ideal medium which is withdrawn from the reach of artistic expression; for absolute Truth stands on a higher level than the show of beauty, which is unable to break away from the sensuous and phenomenal. If, then, Spirit is to receive an existence as Spirit in its positive reconciliation through the medium of art, an existence which is apprehended not merely as ideal, in other words, as pure thought, but can be felt and envisaged, it follows that the only mode left to us, which supplies this two-fold condition of spirituality on the one hand and of its capability of being conceived and presented by art on the other, is that of the inner realm of Spirit itself, what we understand by the soul and its emotional experience. And the condition of that kingdom which alone fully answers to the notion of free Spirit brought into peace and joy with itself is Love.

(a) In other words, if we look at the content, we shall see that its articulation is in its important features similar to the fundamental notion of absolute Spirit, the return of a reconciled presence from its Other to itself. This Other in the sense of the Other, in which Spirit continues by itself, can only be itself something spiritual, or rather a spiritual personality. The true essence of love consists in the surrender of the self-consciousness, in the forgetting oneself in another self, yet for all that to have and possess oneself for the first time in this very act of surrender and oblivion. This mediation of Spirit with itself and surcharge of its own to the unit of totality is the Absolute, not, however, of course, under the mode in which the Absolute coalesces with itself as merely singular and thereby finite individuality in another finite subject; rather the content of the spiritual individuality which is here self-mediated in another is the Absolute itself. It is, in short, Spirit which is only the knowledge and volition of its own substance as the Absolute by being in another, and which receives therewith the fruition of such knowledge.

(b) More closely regarded this content as love has the form of self-concentrated emotion, which, instead of making its content more explicit, that is to say, presenting it to consciousness in its definite terms and universality, rather converges the infinite breadth of the same directly to one focus in the clear profundity of the soul, without further unfolding in other directions for the imagination the wealth which it essentially includes. By this means a content of equal significance, which would be inconformable to artistic presentation, is fresh from the mint of its pure and ideal universality, is none the less capable of being the subject-matter of art in this individual existence of subjective emotion; for while under a mode such as this it is not on the one hand compelled to accept an articulation of perfect clarity by reason of its still undisclosed depth, which is the obvious characteristic of soul-life, yet on the other hand it receives under this mode a medium that it is possible for art to make use of. For soul-life, heart, feeling, however self-contained and spiritual they may remain, have none the less a bond of affiliation with the sensuous and material, so that they are able also on the outside show of things through the bodily members themselves, through a look, the facial expression, or in a still more spiritual way through the voice tones or a word to disclose the inmost life and existence of Spirit. But this exterior medium is in such a case only acceptable in so far as it strictly expresses this most intimate life of soul in ways that reflect the inward nature of the soul itself.

(c) We defined the notion of the Ideal to be the reconciliation of the inward life with its reality; we may now in like manner point to the emotion of love as the Ideal of romantic art in the sphere of the religious consciousness. It is spiritual beauty in its pure emanation. The classic Ideal also exhibited the mediation and reconcilement of Spirit with its Other. But here the opposing factor of Spirit was the exterior medium suffused with that Spirit, it was its bodily organism. In love, on the contrary, the opposing presence of that which is spiritual is not the phenomenon of Nature, but a spiritual consciousness itself, another subject of such; and the realization of Spirit is consequently effected by Spirit itself in its own kingdom, in that medium which is uniquely its own. It follows from this that love in this its positive self-fruition and essentially tranquillized and blessed realization is ideal, but before everything else spiritual beauty, which can only be expressed for the sake of the ideal virtue it possesses and further only in and as a part of the inmost shrine of the soul. For that Spirit, which is present in spirit to itself and is immediately aware of its own, which withal possesses what is spiritual for the substance and bottom of its very existence, abides in intimacy with itself, and, best definition of all, is the inward being of Love.

(α) God is Love; and consequently it is this most profound essence which, in this form native to artistic presentation, is thus apprehended and presented in the person of Christ. Christ is, however, Divine love in the sense that from one aspect of it declares God Himself as its object, that is, God in the mode of His invisible essence, and from another it as truly reveals humanity under the seal of its redemption; and for this reason it is not so much in Him229 that the passage of one individual into another particular individual is made manifest in His love, as the fact that we have here the idea of Love itself in its universality, in other words, the Absolute, the spirit of Truth in the medium and mode of emotion. With the universality of its object the expression of Love is also universalized in pursuance of which the purely individual concentration of heart and soul is not made the important point, just as among the Greeks in the ancient Titan Eros and Venus Urania we find, though, of course, in an entirely different connection, that it is the universal idea rather than the individual side of personal form and feeling which is the factor emphasized. Only when Christ is, in the presentation of romantic art, rather conceived as at the same time the isolate self-absorbed personality himself, is the expression of love clothed in the form of individual inwardness, and even then it is, of course, always exalted and uplifted by the universality of the content.

(β) The kind of love, however, which in this sphere of art is most within its reach and is generally the most successful object of the romantic and religious imagination, is the love of Mary, the mother’s love. It stands closest to Nature’s reality, is very human, and yet entirely spiritual, without either the interest or the egotism of sensual desire, not sensuous and yet present inward bliss in its absolute condition of fruition. It is a love that has no longing in it, not friendship, for friendship, albeit also so rich in soul quality, requires a substantive content, an essential material as the associating object. A mother’s love, on the contrary, possesses without any mutuality230 of aim or interests an immediate basis in the natural maternal bond. But in this particular case the mother’s love is just as little restricted to the purely natural affiliation. Mary possesses in the child which she has carried under her heart and borne with travail the perfected knowledge and feeling of her very self, and this selfsame child, the blood of her blood, is also in equal degree exalted above her, and yet for all that she is conscious that this higher belongs to herself, and is precisely that she gains in her act of self-oblivion and possession. The natural intimacy of the mother’s love is absolutely spiritualized, it receives for its very embodiment the Divine; but this spiritual coherence remains lowly and unaware, permeated in a wonderful manner with the unity of Nature and the emotion of womanhood. It is the blessed mother’s love, and pertains only to the one mother, who first was recipient of its joy231. It is quite true that even this love is not without its pain, but the pain is merely the grief of loss, the lament over the suffering, dying, and dead son, and, as we shall find it at a later stage232, has nothing to do with the injustice and torture suffered from a force without, or with the infinite conflict with sin, still less with agonies and pangs that arise in the soul. The inwardness of soul such as we have analysed is the beauty of Spirit, the Ideal, the human identification of man with God, with Spirit, with Truth; oblivion in its pure selflessness, the surrender of the ego, which, however, in this surrender, is from beginning to end at unity with that in which it is absorbed, and it is in this coalescence that the feeling of blessedness is consummated.

Under such a fair aspect we have maternal love embodied in romantic art, and it is at the same time a picture of Spirit itself, because Spirit is only apprehensible by art in the form of feeling; and the feeling of that union of the individual with God in its most original, most real, and most vivid form is only present in the mother’s love of the Madonna. It must inevitably form the subject-matter of art, if in the representation of this, the sphere of the religious imagination, the Ideal, the affirmative reconciliation in its joy is not to fall short of its aim. There has consequently been a time when the maternal love of the Blessed Virgin has been placed as the highest and holiest of Earth’s possessions, and as such has been revered and presented to mankind. When, however, Spirit is brought before the human consciousness in its own native element, separated, that is, from all underlying emotion, the free mediation of Spirit that is built up on such a foundation can alone be regarded as the free road to Truth; and consequently we find that in Protestantism, as contrasted to this worship of Mary whether in art or belief, it is the Holy Spirit, and the inmost mediation of Spirit which has become the loftier truth.

(γ) Thirdly, and in conclusion, the positive reconciliation of spiritual life is embodied in the feelings of Christ’s own disciples, the women and friends who follow him. Such are for the most part characters who have personally taken on themselves the severity of the idea of Christianity, hand iii hand with their Divine friend, by virtue of the friendship, teaching, and sermons of Christ, without passing through the external and inward pangs of spiritual conversion, who have carried it forward, made themselves masters both of it and themselves, and in the depth of their hearts remain strong in the same. From such, no doubt, the immediate unity and intimacy of that mother’s love in a measure vanishes; but they still possess as the bond which unites them the presence of Christ, the common service to a great life which they share, and the direct impulse of Spirit233.

In making our passage over to a concluding stage of the subject under discussion we can hardly do better than associate it with that which we have already touched upon in connection with the history of Christ. The immediate existence of Christ, as this particular man, who is God, is assumed to be wiped out, in other words, the truth itself asserts itself that in the manifestation of God as man, the true reality of God thus envisaged is not immediate sensuous existence but Spirit. The reality of the Absolute regarded as infinite subjectivity234 is simply Spirit itself; God is in knowledge, in the element of the inner life, and only there. This absolute existence of God, as absolutely ideal to the same extent as it is subjective235 universality, does not therefore admit of the limitations of this particular individual, who has in the story of his life made manifest the reconciliation between the Divine and human self-consciousness, but on the contrary is enlarged to the full measure of the human consciousness which is reconciled to God, that is, in general terms to our humanity, which exists as an aggregate of many individuals. In his independence, however, taken, that is, as a specific personality, man is not under any immediate mode the Divine, but on the contrary finite and human, which only in so far as it really propounds itself as a negation, which it essentially is, and thereby annuls itself in this negative aspect, can attain to the reconcilement with God. It is only by virtue of this deliverance from the frailty of finitude that our humanity declares itself as the vehicle of the existence of the absolute Spirit, as the spirit of the community, in which the union of the human and Divine Spirit within the bounds of human reality itself, in the sense of its realized mediation, carries into fulfilment what essentially, if we look at it in the light of the notion of Spirit, it is from the first in that very union.

The principal modes which are of importance in respect to this new content of romantic art may be distinguished as follows:

The individual, who in his separation from God lives in a condition of sinfulness and conflict with the immediacy and frailty of finite existence, possesses the eternal destiny to come into reconciliation with himself and God. Inasmuch, however, as we find that in the redemption-history of Christ the negative relation of immediate singularity is affirmed and declared an essential feature in the spiritual process, so, too, every particular individual is only through a conversion from the natural state and his finite personality uplifted to the free condition and into the peace of God.

This abrogation of finitude asserts itself in a threefold manner as follows:

First, as the repetition in actual life of the history of the Passion, a repetition of real bodily suffering — martyrdom.

Secondly, the above conversion is removed to the inmost life of soul, as spiritual mediation by means of repentance, penance, and conversion.

Thirdly, and finally the manifestation of the Divine is so conceived in the world of Nature’s reality that the ordinary course of Nature and the natural mode of occurrences as they otherwise take place is arrested, in order to display the might and presence of the Divine. Wonder or miracle is consequently the form of presentation.

(a) The Martyrs

The earliest mode under which the spirit of the community makes itself actively present in the human consciousness is effected when man forms a mirror in himself of the Divine process and so makes himself a new form of existence for the eternal Life236 of God. Here we find once more that the expression of that immediate and positive reconciliation disappears, inasmuch as man can only attain to this by abrogating his finite existence. Everything, therefore, that was of central importance in the first stage returns to us again here only in an aggravated degree, because the incompatibility and unworthiness of our humanity is here presupposed, and to remedy this defect is assumed to be man’s supreme and unique duty.

(α) The specific content of this phase is consequently the endurance of torments, and along with such the individual’s willing renunciation, sacrifice, and self-imposed renunciation with the express aim of arousing sufferings, tortures, and anguish of every kind in order that Spirit may reveal itself therein, and feel itself in union with the fruition and blessedness of its heaven237. The negative aspect of pain is an object in itself for the true martyr, and the greatness of the revelation is such that it can treat with indifference the awful aspect of that which man has thus suffered, and the dreadful nature of that to which he submits himself. The first thing, then, which will be brought beneath the ruthless mace of negation in order that the individual who still experiences this drought of the soul may wean himself from the world and become sanctified, will be his natural existence, his life, the satisfaction of the most essential necessaries of his bodily existence. The main subject-matter therefore of the type we are now dealing with will be torments of the body, sufferings which have been perpetrated on the believer either by his enemies and persecutors out of hatred and persecution, or have been deliberately accepted by himself on principle by way of expiation. In both cases the individual accepts them in the full fanaticism of his readiness to endure, not, that is to say, as an injustice to himself, but as a blessing through which alone he is enabled to break down the walls of what he feels to be his sinful flesh, heart, and soul, and so obtain reconcilement with his God.

In so far, however, as this conversion of the soul can only manifest itself in such situations, in atrocities and awful treatment of the bodily frame the beauty of the presentation of such subjects may be very readily impaired; and, in fact, we may say that the treatment of all subjects of this kind is a perilous undertaking for art. For, on the one hand, it is obvious that individuals here, impressed as they are wholly with the hall-mark of finite existence, and its inevitable blemishes and defects, will have to be represented in an entirely different atmosphere from that we claimed for the history of Christ’s Passion; and, from a further point of view, we unfortunately meet with unheard of agonies and horrors in such cases, distortion, and dislocation of limbs, bodily torments, scaffolds, decapitation, burning or roasting in oil, flaying alive, and every other sort of frightful, repugnant, and loathsome abuse of the body, such as lie much too remote from beauty for any sane art to think of selecting them for its subject-matter. The artistic dexterity of the artist may, in such cases, no doubt, so far as execution is concerned, be of the highest class; but, at best, such manual dexterity will merely possess a personal interest, we may indeed find before us the technique of an admirable painter; but it will be equally obvious that all his efforts have been unable to produce out of such material a harmonious work of art.

(β) For these reasons it will be necessary that the artistic presentation of this negative process should emphasize another aspect of it, which stands out thereby above this agony of the body and soul, and establishes in relief the positive presence of reconciliation. This is just that essential reconcilement of Spirit which is finally won as the result sought for of the pain suffered. Under an aspect such as this the martyrs may be depicted as the guardians of the Divine in conflict with the grossness of material force and barbarism of unbelief. For the sake of their heavenly treasure they endure pain and death, and this courage, steadfastness, endurance, and consolation must consequently, with equal truth, appear upon them. And yet for all that this intimate possession of their faith and love in its spiritual beauty is no sanity of soul which brings to them a sense of the sanity of their body; rather it is a sense of inward life, which has worked its way through their pain itself, or at least is made manifest in their suffering, and which, even in the moment of their ecstasy, retains the experience of pain as an essential condition of their beatitude. The art of painting has, in particular, made this attitude of saintly humiliation the object of its efforts. What this art mainly should strive after here is to delineate the bliss of such torments in the pure and simple lines of the countenance and its expression, as contrasted with the offensive laceration of the flesh; and to present such an ecstasy as may reflect the surrender and victory over pain, the fruition, in short, of the Divine Presence in the temple of the soul. If, on the contrary, the art of sculpture seeks to give a visible form to such a content, it will inevitably find itself less qualified to depict this ecstasy of soul-life at this strain of its intensity with such a concentrated power, and will consequently be compelled to emphasize that aspect of pain and laceration in so far as it declares itself in its full force on the bodily frame.

(γ) Thirdly, it is to be observed that in the kind of examples with which we are now dealing it is not merely the existence of Nature and immediate finite conditions which is affected by this attitude of self-abnegation and endurance, but the impulse of the soul is transported by such feelings to an extreme point of this heavenly rapture to such an extent, in fact, that what is merely human and of the world, even when it is essentially beyond reproach on ethical or rational grounds, is none the less thrust behind and scorned. In other words, just in proportion as the Spirit, which here makes vivid to itself the idea of its conversion, is in the first instance deficient in an educated sense, to that extent it will with so much the more uncontrollable and logical frenzy — the entire force of its piety being concentrated on this one object — turn its back on everything which as finite opposes this bare and abstract infinitude of its religious fanaticism, that is to say, on every definite human emotion, all the manifold ethical impulses, relations, and obligations of the heart. For the moral life of the family, the bonds of friendship, of blood, of love, of the State, and a man’s calling, every one of them belong to the things of the world; and all that is of the world, in so far as it is not as yet suffused with the absolute conceptions of faith and developed in unity and harmony with the same, appears to this form of abstract spiritual intensity of the soul of faith so far from being something acceptable to its emotional life and sense of obligation, that it is, on the contrary, a thing of no worth at all, and therefore both hostile and hurtful to its religious state. The moral organism of the human world is consequently not as yet respected, because its significant features and duties are not as yet recognized as necessary, integrated members in the concatenation of an essentially rational reality, in which nothing, it is true, ought to assert itself in a one-sided and independent isolation, yet, none the less, as an essential factor in the organic process, must be maintained as such and not be sacrificed. In this respect the religious reconciliation remains itself one-sided, and declares itself in the truly simple heart as an intensity of belief which is deficient in comprehensiveness, that is, as the piety of the self-secluded soul, which has not yet attained in its growth to the fully expanded self-reliance of maturity, and to conviction based on genuine insight and circumspection. When the force of a soul deficient in these qualities maintains its opposition to the world which is thus treated in a purely negative way, and forcefully breaks loose from all human ties, even though they may originally be the very closest, we can only characterize such conduct as the rawness of Spirit and a barbaric result of the power of abstraction, which is simply repulsive. So we may say that though from the point of view of the religious consciousness, as we find it to-day, it is indeed possible to honour, and to honour highly, this opening germ of religiosity in such representations, if, however, such a pious tendency proceeds to such lengths that we find it advancing to lay siege to what is both essentially rational and moral, then, so far from sympathizing with such a fanaticism of sanctity, we can only protest that a kind of abnegation such as this, which casts off from itself, shatters and treads upon that which is independently justifiable, and even sacred, appears to us both immoral in itself and subversive of the very type of religion it represents. There are many legends, tales, and poems which deal with this extreme form of the pious craze. We have, for example, the tale of a man who, though full of tenderness for his wife and family, and, moreover, beloved by all his friends, leaves his home and makes a pilgrimage. When at last he returns home in the guise of a beggar he refuses to disclose his identity. Alms are given him, and out of compassion a permanent lodging provided under the stairs. In this plight he lives for twenty years; he sees the grief of his family on his account, and only declares who he is on his death-bed. This kind of thing, which we are asked to revere as sanctity, is, of course, merely the egotism of a fanatic which revolts us. This long endurance of renunciation may remind us of the distrait nature of those penances, which the Hindoos voluntarily impose on themselves on religious grounds. But the endurance of the Hindoo has a very different significance. In that case a man deliberately places himself in a condition of vacuum and unconsciousness; in the case which we are now considering the pain, and the deliberate consciousness and feeling of the same is the real object, which it is assumed will be attained with just so much more purity as the suffering is associated with the consciousness of the value of and devotion to the severities which are accepted, and is, moreover, united with a vision for ever concentrated on the renunciation thus made. The richer the heart which takes on itself the burden of such ordeals, the nobler the content of its own possessions, and yet withal believes that it is bound to condemn them as of no merit, just so much the more difficult grows the task of reconciliation, and the more prone it is to bring about the most terrible convulsions and the most raving distraction. Indeed, to our vision, it is clear enough that a soul such as this, which is only at home in a world which, however full of ideas, is not the world of common experience, and which consequently only feels its grasp slipping from the stable and paramount centres of activity and aims of this our actual world, ay, and although it be with heart and soul held in and associated with that world, yet regards all that is moral there simply as something which contradicts its absolute destination — we can only say that such a soul, both in its self-inflicted sufferings and its renunciations, is from the rational point of view simply mad, so mad that we can neither feel any profound compassion for it, nor propose any means of liberation. What is lamentably lacking to a mode of life of this kind is an object of real substance and valid significance; what it proposes to secure is an aim wholly personal, an object sought for by the individual for himself alone, for the salvation of his own soul, for his own blessedness. Few are likely to concern themselves very deeply whether an individual, at any rate one of this type, is or ever will be happy238.

(b) The inward Penance and Conversion

The kind of representation, in the same general class of cases which we shall now contrast with the one above examined, turns aside from the extremity of merely bodily suffering, as it is also from a further point of view more indifferent to the purely negative impulse directed against what is essentially just and right in the actual conditions of the world; the material of such representations consequently, both in respect to its content and its form, opens up a ground which is more conformable with ideal art. And this ground is the conversion of the inner life of the soul, which only here seeks to express itself in its spiritual pain, and its change of heart. Here, therefore, we find in the first place that we have no more of those ever repeated horrors and barbarities of pain inflicted on man’s poor body: and, secondly, that which we have referred to as the barbarian religiosity of the soul no longer holds fast to its antagonism as against the purely ethical aspects of humanity in order to trample under iron foot in the abstraction of its purely conceptive satisfaction239, and in the pain of an absolute renunciation that other kind of sensuous enjoyment; for the most part its attention is now solely directed against what is in fact sinful, criminal, and evil in human Nature. We find here a lofty assurance that faith, this spiritual impulse towards God, is capable of converting the past action, even though it be a sin or a crime, into something alien to the man who perpetrated it, washing it away in fact. This withdrawal out of evil, that wholly negative condition, which is realized in the individual by the subjective volition and spirit at once scorning and confounding itself under its former state of evil — this return to the positive which is now self-established as the only real in contrast to the former state of sinfulness, is the truly infinite content of religious love, the presence and actuality of absolute Spirit in the individual soul itself. The feeling of the stability and endurability of the personal existence, which through God, to which it addresses itself, triumphs over evil, and in so far as it is thus mediated with Him is aware of itself as one with Him, produces as its effect the fruition and blessedness of contemplating God, it is true, in the first instance as the absolute Other in His opposition to the sin inherent in finite existence, but further of knowing this Infinite Presence as identical with me as this particular person, of knowing, in short, that I carry this self-consciousness of God, as the seat of my own personality, that is to say, my own self-consciousness, as certainly as I carry the sense of my own self-identity. Such a revolution takes place no doubt entirely within the shrine of the soul, and belongs, therefore, rather to religion than art: for the reason, however, that it is the intimate movement of the soul, which pre-eminently makes itself master of this act of conversion, and also is able to throw a gleam of light through the external embodiment, a plastic art such as painting can also claim to make visible the history of such conversions. If it attempts, however, to depict the entire course of events which belong to such a transition, much that is very far from being beautiful may readily appear in the result, because in such a case both that which is sinful and repulsive requires to be depicted, as, for example, in the story of the prodigal son. Painting, therefore, achieves its greatest success when it concentrates the act of conversion into one picture where that is the prevailing motive, and pays little or no attention to the previous course of events. The ordinary presentations of Mary Magdelene may be noted as an admirable example of this kind of work, and particularly in the hands of the old Italian masters has been treated in a way both excellent in itself and throughout consistently with fine Art. She is depicted here both in the characterization of her soul and her external presence as the fair sinner, in whom the sin no less than the sanctity is intended to exercise a sort of fascination on the spectator. But at the same time neither sin nor sanctity are treated with any great intensity. She is forgiven much because she has loved much, and her forgiveness is in a measure the portion both of her love and her beauty. And what affects us most of all in this picture is this, that she makes for herself a conscience as it were out of her love, and robed in the beauty of her sensitive soul pours forth her sorrow in a flood of tears. We are not led to feel that the fact that she has loved so much is her error, but rather that her fair and fascinating folly is this, namely, that she believes herself to be a sinner,240 for her exquisitely sensitive beauty only leaves us the impression that in her love she is both noble and profound.

The final aspect, which is closely associated with the two above considered, and is frequently asserted as a concomitant of both, is that of miracle. It plays in fact an important part throughout this stage of our inquiry. In this connection we may define miracle as the conversion-history of the immediate existence of Nature. Such reality lies before us as a commonplace, contingent existence. This finite substance is touched by the hand of God, which, in so far as it strikes upon what is purely external and particular, breaks it up, transmutes it into something entirely different, interrupting what in ordinary parlance we call the natural course of things. To bring before us the soul arrested by such inexplicable phenomena, in which it imagines it recognizes the presence of the Divine, vanquished, in short, in its ordinary view of finite events, this is the main subject-matter of a host of legends. In fact, however, the Divine can only touch and dominate Nature as Reason, that is, in the unalterable laws of Nature herself, as implanted therein by God, and the Divine has no occasion to exploit Himself in the supreme sense of this term in particular circumstances and modes of causation which run contrary to these laws of Nature, for it is only the eternal laws and determinations of reason which apply in any real sense to Nature. From another point of view legends frequently carry with them quite unnecessarily an amount of matter which is abstruse, out of taste, senseless, and ridiculous, inasmuch as the intention is that both intellect and heart should be stimulated to believe in the presence and activity of God by precisely those things which are essentially irrational, false, and heathenish. The consequent emotion, piety, and conversion of the soul may even then awake our interest, but in that case it is only on the one side, namely, that of the soul: so soon as that enters into relation with somewhat else outside it, and the idea is that this external correlative shall effect the conversion of the heart, then we inevitably require that such should not be wholly a meaningless and irrational sequence of events.

Such, then, would be the fundamental divisions of the substantive content at this particular stage of our inquiry, regarding that content as the self-subsistent Nature of God, or in its aspect as a spiritual process, through which and in which He is Spirit. We have here the absolute object, which art neither creates nor reveals out of itself, but which it has received from religion which it approaches with the conviction that it is essentially true that it may express and represent the same conformably to its modes. It is the content of the believing, yearning soul, which is intrinsically the infinite totality itself, so that for it the external medium remains to a more or less degree outside it, or a matter of indifference, and is unable to be brought completely into harmony with that inner life. And for this reason it frequently presents a repellent material which art finds itself unable wholly to subdue to its aims.

224 Nicht aufnehmend. Not ready to absorb extraneous matter.

225 This of course is an opinion which may be strongly contested in its application to particular artists.

226 Hegel means not so much the history in which the whole totality of events is comprised as that aspect of human history which declares its universal significance as infinite spirit.

227 That is, of self-consciousness in all that it implies — the personality of Christ, for example.

228 Hegel does not further dwell upon this relativity. But the next paragraph explains what is really in his mind. The important question, however, how far such events are worthy of credence as objective history, to say nothing of the inadequacy of their artistic presentation, one cannot but feel is deliberately evaded. What Hegel would say no doubt was that the bare historical aspect was only of relative importance. The main question was their significance in the spiritual process. It is in this direction that much of our noblest modern thought finds a certain indissoluble unreality of statement.

229 That is in Christ.

230 Gleichkeit. Equality, reciprocity.

231 We are reminded of our treasures in Christian art such as the Virgin and Child in Tintoret’s “Flight into Egypt,” Rafael’s San, Sisto Madonna and the rest.

232 In other words as regarded at a later date by the Church.

233 This statement hardly does justice to the profound idealism of the epistles of St. Paul.

234 Perhaps “the infinite form of subjectivity” is better. He means “the infinite form of individual self-consciousness.”

235 That is, characterized by personality.

236 Geschichte. Life as an evolved Process.

237 Compare the poem of Meredith, “Theodolinda,” in his ballads of the Tragic Life. It is, in another aspect, that iron crown which that thoughtful contemporary writer, Mr. H. W. Nevinson, refers to in his Essays on Rebellion.

238 The elimination even of sympathy with such fanaticism where it is quite sincere, a rare case no doubt, seems severe. The best illustration in modern literature I know of the principle “all or nothing,” is Ibsen’s great drama “Brandt.” Readers of Carlyle will doubtless recall from “Past and Present” and elsewhere that prophet’s repeated denunciations of the craze for personal happiness.

239 By intellectuellen Befriedigung Hegel does not mean “intellectual” in a good sense, but merely that the man imagines his happiness in his mind rather than feels it through the senses. The psychology of religious ecstasy, however, is a rather involved problem.

240 This analysis is rather surprising. Did Hegel, the robust Swabian, really think the above the finest type of art’s presentations of the Magdalene? Does it not lean very closely to that soft sentimentalism which a Carlo Dolci gives us in its decadence? At any rate the idea that the Magdalene was not really a sinner flatly contradicts the original references to her in the gospels, and to my mind at any rate seems from the artistic point of view also to destroy half the rare beauty of her repentance. The principle of such an interpretation is surely the entirely pagan one, whether Greek or French, that a great passion is its own justification quite irrespective of moral considerations. She is the historical impersonation of the frailty of a love too dependent on the senses, not of one in which either nobility of bearing or extreme selflessness is conspicuous. Hegel’s analysis may be true enough of certain pictures — but do they really present us the ideal; most assuredly not.

CHIVALRY

THE PRINCIPLE OF the essentially infinite subjective consciousness possesses for the content of faith and art in the first instance, as we have already discovered, the Absolute itself, in other words the Spirit of God as it is mediated and reconciled with the conscious spirit of man and thereby is first itself independently free. This romantic mysticism in its self-limitation to the sense of blessedness in the Absolute Presence remains a mode of spiritual inwardness which is abstract, because it confronts the things of the world in opposition and rejects the same. Faith is, in an abstraction of this kind, alienated from life, from the concrete reality of human existence, removed from the positive relations of mankind to one another, who only know and love each other in faith, and for the sake of their belief as completely bound together in yet a third association, namely, the spirit of the Christ community. This association is alone the clear spring in which the image of that blessedness is reflected, without it being necessary for man to look his brother first in the face, to enter into any direct relation with another, or to experience the unity of love, of trust, of confidence, of mutual aims and actions in contact with the living concrete presence. That which constitutes the hope and yearning of the inner life man here, in this sense of exclusive religious intimacy, can only discover as actual life in the kingdom of God, in the society of the Church. He has not as yet241 withdrawn this single identity in a third factor from his conscious life in order that he may possess all that he is really himself in his entire spiritual concreteness no less before his eyes directly in the knowledge and volition of that other whole. The collective religious content, it is true, assumes the mode of real existence, but it is still an existence which is located in the ideal world of an imagination which consumes the expanding boundaries of actual life. It is still far away from attempting to satisfy its own life also in that abundance which it receives from the world and its realization in the world as the higher demand in the medium of life itself.

It follows that the soul which found its initial consummation in the simple feeling of Divine blessedness must step forth from this heavenly kingdom peculiar to the religious sphere, must undertake the effort of self-introspection and assimilate a content which is, as vitally present, adequate to the demands of the individual consciousness in its fullest extension. And in this process that which was before a religious coalescence of soul is changed to one of secular type. Christ indeed said; “Ye must leave father and mother, and follow Me.” And in the like spirit: “Brother shall hate brother; men shall crucify you and persecute you.” But as soon as the kingdom of God has secured a foothold in the world, and is actively employed in transfusing with its spirit and illumining the aims and interests of that world; when father, mother, and brother are already numbered in the community, then the things of the world on their side commence to assert their just claim to recognition and furtherance. If this claim is not merely fought for but vindicated then also the negative attitude of the religious spirit, which was at first exclusively hostile to all that was merely human, vanishes; the spirit of man enlarges, it explores the full scope of its actual presence, and unfolds its heart in the entire world of reality242. The fundamental principle suffers no alteration; the substantive and infinite self-consciousness merely directs its attention to another province of its own kingdom. We may perhaps define this transition in the statement that the individual singularity is now as such singularity independent of its mediation with God and self-subsistently free. For precisely in that mediation, whereby it divested itself of its purely finite limitation and natural life, it has passed over the path of mere negation, and reappears after having thus secured an essentially affirmative position, in the condition of a consciousness that is free and as such makes the demand that it shall, in virtue of its own infinitude, though the infinitude is here only in the first instance one of pure form, secure complete recognition both for itself and others. In this the religious mode of the individual consciousness is reposed the entire spiritual wealth of the infinite soul, which it has hitherto filled up with God. If we, however, made the inquiry, of what material the heart of man is suffused in this its inward repletion, such a content merely concerns the infinite relation of the subjective consciousness in its active self-relation; it is simply replete with its own formal medium, that is, as essentially infinite singularity without further and more concrete expansion and significance as a content of interests, aims, and actions which is itself essentially objective and substantive243. If we further examine the matter, however, more closely we shall see there are in the main three emotions, which in their independence rise up in the individual soul to the level of this infinite mode, namely personal honour, love, and fidelity. They are not so much moral qualities and virtues as simply modes which inform the intimate presence of the individual soul when fulfilled with its own self-relation as such is recognized by romance. For the personal self-subsistency for which honour contends does not assert itself as intrepitude on behalf of a communal weal, and the repute of thoroughness in relation to it and integrity of private life. On the contrary it contends simply for the recognition and formal inviolability of the individual person. The same principle applies to love, which forms the central subject-matter of this sphere. It is merely the adventitious passion of one individual for another; and however much it may expand under the wand of imagination or may be deepened by excess of emotion, it is for all that neither the ethical relation of marriage or family. Fidelity possesses no doubt more the appearance of a moral character, inasmuch as it does not merely will its own but holds fast to something higher, something shared with itself, surrenders itself to another’s will, whether it be the wish or behest of a master, and thereby renounces the personal desire and independence of its own particular volition. But the feeling of loyalty does not concern the objective interest of the social weal in its independent form, that is, in the concrete freedom of the developed state life, but associates itself merely with the person of a master, who, in his own fashion, acts with independence, or concentrates himself in more general relations and is active on their behalf244. These three modes of feeling taken together and as they reciprocally affect one another constitute with the exception of the religious relation, which also has its part to play here, the principal content of chivalry, and furnish the necessary steps of advance from the principle of purely religious enthusiasm to the entrance of the individual soul into the concrete social life of the world, in the kingdom of which romantic art now secures a platform on which it can from its own resources work out its independence, and at the same time embody a freer type of beauty. It stands here, so to speak, in the free room midway between the absolute content of the independently stable religious conceptions and the varied particularity and restricted boundaries of the finite world. Among the various arts it is pre-eminently poetry which has shown itself most qualified to master such a material, its modes of expression being directed to the life of the soul as wholly occupied with its own domain and as realized in its aims and events.

Inasmuch as we now have before us a material which man takes possession of in his own spiritual life, or rather, from the world of his pure humanity, we might at first suppose that romantic art occupied the same ground as that of classic art. This, therefore, is an excellent opportunity for placing them together both in comparison and contrast. We have already defined classical art the Ideal of humanity certified as true in its objective self-subsistence. Its imaginative vitality requires as its core a content which is substantive in type and excludes an ethical pathos. The Homeric poems, the tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus, are in the main concerned with interests of an absolutely factual content, an austere treatment of the passions reflected therein, a solid style of speech and execution in conformity with the nature of the ideas expressed, and above this domain of heroes and other figures which alone are in their individual self-concentration at home in such an atmosphere of pathos we have the realm of the gods at a still more advanced stage of objective presentment. Even in the case where art, in more introspective fashion, is occupied with the infinite experiments of sculpture, bas-reliefs and similar forms, or the later elegies, epigrams, and other diversions of lyrical poetry, we still have the same type before us, that is to say, the type which portrays the object more or less as it finds it, and obedient to the claim that it already has secured its constructive presentment. We have, in short, represented figures of the imagination already established and defined in their characterization such as Venus, Bacchus, or the Muses. It is just the same with the later epigrams, where we get the description of a material already to hand or, as in the case of Meleager, a posy of well-known flowers, bound together with the cords of exquisite feeling and taste. It is, in short, an exhilarating mode of activity carried on in a wealthily furnished house overflowing in its stores with every kind of bounty, image and provision for every conceivable object. The poet and the artist is simply the magician, who wafts them into use, collects and groups them.

It is wholly different in romantic poetry. In so far as it is of the world worldly, and is not directly associated with the story of our Lord, the virtues and objects of its heroism are not those of the Greek heroes, whose type of morality Christendom in its early days simply regarded as a brilliant enormity. Greek morality presupposes the presence of humanity in its complete configuration, in which the volition then and there as it ought to act conformably to its essential notion of independence has received a definite content and the actual conditions of freedom imperatively valid such as belong to that content. Such are the relations of parents and children, married persons, or of citizens of city or State in the realized liberty of such. Now inasmuch as this objective content of human affairs belongs to the evolution of man’s spirit on the basis of Nature cognized and insured as actual fact, it is unable any longer to satisfy that self-absorbed introspection of the religious life, which seeks to destroy the natural aspect of human life, and must deviate considerably from the virtue of humility which opposes it, and the surrender of human freedom and its staunch self-dependence. The virtues of Christian piety simply prove the death of such a world-attitude if held in their extreme of abstraction, and only make the individual free, when he absolutely denies the human part of him. The individual freedom of our present sphere is no doubt no longer conditioned by mere endurance and self-sacrifice but essentially positive in the world arena; that infinite self-relation of the individual has, however, as we have already discovered, the inward realm of the soul as its content and only that, the subjective soul, that is, whose movement is in its own peculiar medium, as the secular ground of its own domain. In this connection poetry does not draw from any objective material already presented it, no mythology, for instance, no imaginative pictures and embodiments, which already lie ready waiting for its expression. It stands there wholly free, without any extraneous matter, purely creative and productive. It is free as a bird that sings straight from its breast. It follows, then, if this subjective activity proceeds also from a noble will and a profound soul, we shall merely have in its workings and relations and existence the evidence of caprice and contingency, for the reason that freedom and its aims proceed, relatively to a content which is throughout immaterial, from internal self-reflection. And, consequently, we do not find so much in individuals a particular pathos in the Greek conception of the term and a vital self-subsistency of character associated with it by the closest bonds, as that which is simply a grade of heroic conception in its connection with love, honour, bravery, and fidelity; a grade into which it is mainly the nobility or depravity of soul which imports the distinguishing features. The characteristic trait, however, which the heroes of the Middle Ages possess in common with those of antiquity is that of bravery. Yet even this receives a totally different complexion. It is not so much a natural courage, which reposes on the character that is sane and sound, and flows forth from the growth of an unimpaired robustness of body and will, assisting the execution of objective interests. Rather it is the outcome of the secret wealth of the soul, its honour and chivalry, and is in the main a creation of the phantasy, which undertakes adventures that have their origin in individual caprice and the chance intricacies of external circumstance or the impulses of mystical piety, and we may add generally the personal attitude of the individual.

This romantic type of art finds a home, then, in two hemispheres, in the Western world as this penetration into the more intimate shrine of Spirit, in the Eastern this its first expansion of the self-absorbed consciousness as it frees itself from the finite environment. In the West poetry reposes on a soul which is withdrawn upon its resources, which has become the centre of its activity, yet possesses this flavour of secularly merely as one part of its complexion, as one aspect, over which is superposed a yet loftier world of belief. In the East it is the Arab above all, who as a solitary,245 who in the first instance has nothing before his eyes but his dried-up desert and his heavens, stands forth in the full strength of life as the proclaimer of the splendour and primary extension of the world of Nature, and thereby still preserves at the same time the freedom of his soul. And generally we may say that in the Orient it is the Mohammedan religion, which has cleared the ground, made an end of all idolatry in the service of finite things or the imagination, and given the soul at the same time the personal freedom, which wholly floods the same, so that the secularity does not here only constitute another province, but runs beyond it into the universal licence, where heart and mind, without ascribing any objective reality to God, find their reconciliation in the jubilant lust of living just like beggars by throwing the glory of their fancy on the objects around them: enjoy their loves and are happy, blessed, and contented.

The motive of honour was unknown to ancient classic art. In the “Iliad” it is quite true that the wrath of Achilles constitutes both the content and the motive principle, so that the entire series of events is dependent upon it; but what we moderns understand by the term honour is not grasped here at all. Achilles believes himself to be insulted to all intents and purposes only in the fact that the share in the booty which he considers justly to belong to him and the reward of his personal merits, his γέρας, has been taken away by Agamemnon. The insult here has a direct reference to something actual, a bounty, in which no doubt a privilege, a recognition of fame and bravery was reposed, and Achilles is enraged because Agamemnon meets him unworthily and lets the Greeks know that they are not to pay any attention to him. An insult of this kind is not driven home to the real centre of personality in its abstract purity; in fact Achilles expresses himself satisfied with the restitution of the abducted slave and the addition of other goods and bounties, and Agamemnon finally makes this reparation although from our point of view they have both insulted one another in the grossest fashion. Maledictions of this kind, however, have only made them angry; and, after all, the particular insult, which has reference to a matter of fact, is done away with in the same matter of fact fashion.

(a) The honour of romance is, on the contrary, of another kind. Insult has no reference here to the factual values of real things, property, status, obligation, etc., but to personality simply, and its idea of its own importance, the work which the individual claims as his right. This worth is in the cases we are now discussing of an infinite significance equal to that of personality itself. In honour, therefore, man possesses the earliest positive consciousness of his infinite spiritual medium, independent of the content. What the individual has, what in him something peculiar creates, after the loss of which it may yet subsist precisely as it did before — in this elusive something the absolute validity of the entire subjective life is reposed and apprehended in it both for itself and others. The determining measure of honour therefore does not depend on what the individual really is, but on what is contained in this personal self-regard. This regard, however, raises all particularity to the level of the universal conception that the personal core in its full significance resides in this particularity which it claims as its own. Honour is merely an outward show it is sometimes said. No doubt this is so: but from our present point of view we must, if we look at it more narrowly, accept it as the appearance and reappearance of the personal medium self-reflected, which as the semblance of an entity essentially infinite is itself infinite. And through this infinitude it is just this show or semblance of honour which is the real existence of the individual, its highest actuality; and every particular quality, into which honour is reflected and appropriates as its own is by virtue of this show exalted itself to an infinite worth. This type of honour constitutes a fundamental determinant in the romantic world, and presupposes that man has not merely passed beyond the limits of purely religious conception and inward life, but actually entered the arena of the great world and makes itself vital in the material of the same simply by virtue of the pure medium of its personal self-subsistence and absolute intension246.

The content of honour may be of the most varied kind. For everything that I am, do, or is done to me by others affects my honour. We may consequently reckon within its boundaries the out and out substantive itself, loyalty towards princes, fatherland, a man’s profession, fulfilment of obligations, marital fidelity, integrity in business affairs and conscientiousness in scientific research. For the point of view of honour, however, all these essentially valid and veritable relations are neither sanctioned nor recognized in and through themselves, but only so far as the individual reposes in them his personal relation and makes them thereby matters affecting his honour. A man of honour consequently always thinks first of all about himself, and the question for him is not if anything is on principle right or not, but whether it is the right thing for him to do, whether it becomes him then as a man of honour to make himself master in it and to stand by it. And consequently he may also perpetrate the worst actions and still be a man of honour. He creates at the same time objects at will, imagines himself of a specific character, and appropriates to himself, both as he sees himself and is seen by others, that which in the natural order of things has nothing to do with him at all. Even then it is not the natural fact, but the personal view of it which places difficulties and devolutions in the path, because it has become an affair of honour to maintain that character. So, to take an example, Donna Diana conceives it to be derogatory to her honour to confess in any way the love she feels, because she has pledged herself not to listen to love. In general we may say, then, that the content of love is at the mercy of accident, because its validity depends purely on the personal attitude, and is not directed by that which is the essential mode of the inner life itself. For this reason we may observe that in romantic representations on the one hand that which is on principle justifiable is expressed as the law of honour, the individual associating with the consciousness of right at the same time the infinite self-conscious unit of his personality. What is then expressed by the statement that honour makes such and such a demand, or forbids it, is this that the entire personal attitude of consciousness implants itself within the content of such a demand or prohibition so that no trespass in any transaction can fail to attract its attention without a repair and restoration being effected; and we may add the individual is unable to attend to any other content. Conversely, however, honour may resolve itself into something wholly formal and contentless, in so far as it contains nothing but the shell of the Ego, which is formally infinite, or only accepts an entirely bad content as obligatory upon it. In this case, more particularly in dramatic representations, honour remains but a wholly frosty and unvitalized object: its aims express no longer an essential content but simply an abstract form of consciousness. But it is only an essentially substantive content which possesses the contingency of law, and is capable of explication in its multifold environment, and can be apprehended in its imperative sequence of consequences. This defect in profound content especially rises to the surface when casuistry of reflection includes within the embrace of honour matter which is purely accidental and insignificant which the individual comes in contact with. There is never a lack of material, because this casuistical tendency analyses with great subtlety in its modes of distinction, and many aspects may be elicited and made the subject of honour which in themselves are quite unimportant Above all the Spaniards have elaborated this casuistry of reflection over matters of honour in their dramatic poetry, and made their particular heroes of honour deduce all their consequences in their speeches. In this way the fidelity of the married woman may form a subject of investigation into the minutest details, and the mere suspicion of another, nay, the possibility of such even when the husband is aware that the suspicion is false may be an affair of honour. If this leads to collisions we can derive no real satisfaction from the process, because we have nothing of material moment to arrest us, and consequently instead of the resolution of an antagonism which is causally inevitable we can only extract from it a painfully contracted feeling. Also in French plays we frequently find that it is an honour which is barren, that is entirely abstract, which is made the essential fulcrum of interest Still more extreme is this essentially frostlike and lifeless type of it apparent in the drama “Alarcos” of Herr Friedrich von Schlegel. The hero here murders his noble and loving wife. And we ask why. Simply for honour’s sake; and this honour consists in this that he may marry the king’s daughter, for whom he entertains no affection, and thus become the king’s son-in-law. Such a pattern is of course contemptible and an ignoble conception which merely prides itself as something lofty and of infinite intension.

(b) Inasmuch, then, as honour is not only a semblance in me myself, but must also exist in the mind and recognition of another, which again on its part makes a claim to a similar honourable recognition, honour is the extreme embodiment of vulnerability. For it is purely a matter of personal caprice how far I choose to extend the claim and to what material I care to relate it. The smallest offence may be in this respect of significance; and inasmuch as man is placed relatively to concrete reality in the most manifold relations with a thousand things, and is able to extend practically without limit the sphere of that which he conceives to affect him, and to which he is placed in the relation of honour it follows that when we come to deal with the independence of mankind and the obstinate isolation of their units, aspects for which the principle of honour is in the main responsible, there is no end to the strife and contention to which they give rise. Moreover, in the case of insult also no less than in that of honour generally, the important matter is not the content, in which I necessarily feel myself insulted; for that which is negated has reference to the personality which has appropriated such a content as its own, and now conceives itself as this ideal centrum of infinity attacked.

(c) For such reasons every insult to honour is regarded as essentially of an infinite significance. It can consequently only be repaired by means which possess that character. No doubt we may have many degrees of insult, and as many modes of satisfaction; what however at the stage we are now considering any man may take as an insult, how far he will feel himself as insulted and claim satisfaction therefore, such considerations depend once more wholly on the personal caprice of the particular person, which is justified in pursuing its object to the utmost point of scrupulosity and outraged feeling. In this process of satisfaction, which is here claimed, it is essential that the man who delivers the insult no less than he who receives it should be recognized as a man of honour. For the latter requires the free recognition of his honour from the former; but in order to have honour in his eyes and through his action that man must appear to the recipient of insult as a man of honour, in other words he must substantiate by virtue of his personality the infinite character of the insult which he has laid upon the outraged man and despite his personal enmity that is thereby directed against him.

It is, then, a fundamental determinant in the general principle of honour that no one through his actions can give to any one a right over himself; and consequently all that he has done and may have initiated will be regarded both previous to its commencement and after its conclusion as unalterably affiliated to infinity, and will be accepted and treated under such a qualitative relation.

Moreover, since honour, in its conflicts and its satisfaction in this respect, depends on personal independence, which is conscious of itself as subject to no limitation, but acts directly from its own resources, we find a fact recur to our attention, which we previously observed fundamentally characterized the heroic figures of the Ideal, namely the self-subsistence of individuality. In honour, however, we have not merely the secure self-dependence and action from personal resources, but this self-subsistence is in this case united with the idea of itself; and it is just this preconception which constitutes the real content of honour in the sense that it perceives what is its own in that which is presented exterior to it, and envisages itself therein to the full extent of its personal life. Honour is consequently a self-subsistence, which is a self reflection, and possesses in such a reflection its exclusive essence, and moreover leaves it wholly to accident whether its content be that which is essentially moral and necessary, or contingent and insignificant.

The second emotional source which plays a predominant part in the productions of romantic art is love.

(a) We have found in honour that the individual conscious life, as it prefigures itself in its absolute independence, forms the fundamental determinant; in a similar way the highest attitude of love is the surrender of the personal life to some object of the opposed sex, a sacrifice of its independent consciousness and its personal isolation, which for the first time in the consciousness of another, is aware emotionally that it has thoroughly brought home to itself its own self-knowledge. In this respect we may contrast love and honour. Conversely, however, we are entitled to regard love as the realization of that which was already inherent in honour, in so far as honour claims recognition247 that it should be received in another as the infinite significance of personality. This recognition is only true and complete when it is not merely my personality in the abstract, or in a concrete and consequently restricted case, is respected by another, but when I, in the’ entire significance of my personal resources, with everything this either emphasizes or includes, as this particular person in all my past, present, and future relations, both penetrate the conscious life of another, and, in fact, constitute the object of his real volition and knowledge, his effort and his property. In this respect it is this same inward infinitude of the individual which makes love of such importance to romantic art, an importance which is materially enhanced by the exalted character of the wealth which the notion of love itself carries.

More closely, then, love does not subsist, as may frequently happen in the case of honour, upon the subject-matter of the mind and the casuistry of reflection, but originates in the emotions, and for the reason that here the distinctions of sex play an important part, possesses at the same time for its basis natural conditions as already related to spirit life. This basis is, however, only present in the sense that the individual comes into relation with such conditions by way of his soul-life, that essentially infinite aspect of himself.

This state of a man’s losing his own consciousness in another, this appearance of disinterestedness and unselfishness, by virtue of which a man first really finds himself and comes to himself — this oblivion of his own, so that the lover no longer exists, or is careful for himself, but discovers the roots of that life in another, and yet only comes into the full enjoyment of himself in that other is what gives us the infinite relation of love; and we must look for beauty mainly in so far as this feeling does not persist as mere impulse and emotion, but through the imagination makes its world conform to such a condition, exalts everything which otherwise belongs by virtue of its interest, circumstances, and objects to real existence and life, into an adornment of this feeling, bears away all else into the charmed circle, and only attaches a value to it in this relation. More particularly it is in female characters that love appears in most beautiful guise because this sacrifice, this surrender, is with them as the culmination of everything else. It is these qualities, in fact, which concentrate and extend life in its spiritual breadth and reality to the wealth of this emotion, which alone discover within it a stay for existence, and if any misfortune sweeps across the path, vanish like a light which is extinguished by the first rude breath248. In this personal and intimate sense of feeling love is not presented in classical art, and only appears as a feature of quite secondary importance for the representation, or is only conspicuous under its aspect of physical enjoyment. In Homer, either we find it is not emphasized at all, or love appears in its most respected type as wedded love in the sphere of the domestic state, exemplified in the figure of Penelope, or as solicitude of wife and mother, exemplified in the case of Andromache, or in other ethical relations of a similar character. The tie, on the other hand, which unites Paris to Helen is recognized as immoral, and the cause of the horror and fatal course of the Trojan war. The love, too, of Achilles for Briseis has little depth of sentiment or spiritual flavour, for Briseis is a slave entirely at his disposition. In the odes of Sappho it is true that the language of love receives the dramatic emphasis of lyrical enthusiasm; yet it is rather the insinuating and devouring flame of the blood which is here expressed than the profound emotion of the singer’s heart and soul. From another aspect we find in the short and charming odes of Anacreon a wider and more jovial sense of enjoyment, which sports with delight on the immediate sense of enjoyment as over something to be simply accepted as it falls without troubling itself with infinite heartaches, without this overmastering of the entire life or the pious submission of a burdened, yearning, and yielding soul; in this type the point of infinite importance whether it is precisely this or that girl which you possess is as absolutely disregarded as the monkish notion that you should shun maidenhood altogether. The lofty tragedy of the ancients does not recognize the passion of love in its romantic significance. Pre-eminently in the case of both Aeschylus and Sophocles we find that it makes no pretension to contribute to the main interest of the drama. For although Antigone is the accepted lover of Haemon, and Haemon claims her before his father, nay, goes to the length of committing suicide because he is unable to deliver her, yet it is the external aspects of the case rather than the power of his own personal passion, which, we may also note, is not that of a modern lover, which he emphasizes before Creon. As a more essential type of pathos love is treated by Euripides in the “Phaedra.” But here, too, it rather makes itself felt as a criminal aberration of the blood, as a passion of the senses, initiated by Aphrodite, who is desirous of slaying Hippolytus, because he refuses to sacrifice to her. In the same way we have, no doubt, in the Medicean Aphrodite a plastic figure of love, whose exquisite pose and lovely elaboration of bodily form is quite consummate; but any profound expression of soul-life such as romantic art demands is wholly absent. On the other hand, the immortality of Petrarca, although he himself treated his sonnets in the light of recreation, and it was rather through his Latin poems and other works that he appealed to posterity, is due to this very love of the fancy which, under an Italian sky, joined sisterly hands with religion in the medium of a somewhat artificial outpouring of the heart. Dante’s exaltation, too, originated in his love for Beatrice, which was transfigured in his soul to the white fervour of religious ecstasy, while the courage and boldness of his genius created energetically a religious outlook on the world, in which he dared, an attempt impossible without such gifts, to constitute himself the judge of mankind, and to apportion to individuals hell, purgatory, or paradise. In contrast to an exaltation of this kind love is placed before us by Boccaccio in those romances of his, in which he brings before our eyes the morals and life of his country, partly in all its impetuosity of passion, partly, too, in the spirit of frivolity without any ethical aim whatever. In the songs of the German Minnesingers we find a type of love, sensitive, tender, without much generosity of imagination, sportive, melancholy, and monotonous. Among the Spaniards it is copious in imaginative expression, chivalrous, somewhat casuistical in its discovery and defence of rights and duties, so far as they relate to private affairs of honour; and in this respect also possesses all the richest splendour of enthusiasm. In contrast to this among Frenchmen of more modern times love is more an affair of gallantry with a distinct bias toward vanity, an artificial state of feeling converted to the uses of poetry with a kind of sophistry of the senses often marked with the finest wit, at one time expressing a kind of sensuous enjoyment which is devoid of passion, at another a passion that brings with it no enjoyment, a sublimated condition of feeling and sensibility which feeds upon the maxims of reflection. But I must here break off these general indications which our subject does not permit me now to carry further.

(b) More closely looked at the secular interest may be treated under two general divisions. We have on the one side secularity as actually organized, such as family life, the tie of citizenship and politics, law, justice, morality, and the rest; and in opposition to this249 independent and assured existence love springs up in noble and impetuous spirits; this world-religion of hearts, which at one time we find joining hands with religion in every respect, while at another it supersedes it, forgets it, and by constituting itself the single essential, or rather the unique and supreme condition of life, is not only prepared to renounce all else, and to fly for refuge to a desert with the beloved, but proceeds in this extremity of its passion, which we can only exclude from the domain of beauty, to sacrifice all the worth of humanity in a manner at once servile, degrading, and despicable. An example of this we have in “Kätchen von Heilbronn.” On account of this cataclysm of life’s essential interests the objects of love cannot be realized without collisions in the theatre of the world. For despite of love the general conditions of life make their demand and assert their claims and the despotism of love’s passion is unable to maintain itself against them with impunity.

(α) The first and most frequently exemplified type of collision we may draw attention to is that between honour and love. In other words, honour possesses just as love possesses in its own right this infinitude of claim, and may accept a content, which may confront love as a positive obstacle in its path. The obligations of honour may require the sacrifice of love. From a certain point of view it would be, for example, dishonourable for a man of high rank to wed one of the lower classes. The distinction between class and class is a necessary fact of natural condition as ordinarily presented250. And so long as our secular life has not been emancipated through the infinite notion of true freedom, whatever may be the class or profession from which that life in the particular individual and his free choice takes its rise, to that extent it will always be Nature, that is, the birth condition, which to a greater or less degree will, on the one hand, determine the social position; and, on the other, these distinctions of status, as they thus originate, and quite independently of general grounds of honour, in so far as social position is made an affair of honour, will maintain themselves as of absolute and infinite stability.

(β) Quite apart, however, from questions of honour we must add as a further example of collision that the eternal and substantive powers themselves, the interests of the State, love of country, family obligations, and the rest, come into conflict with love and preclude its realization. Particularly in modern representations, in which the objective conditions of life have been already elaborated in all their available stringency, this is a favourite type of collision. Love is in such cases, as itself an important right of the personal soul, either set forth in opposition to other rights and duties, or despite of its own recognition of such it enters upon a conflict with them reliant upon itself and with the power of its private passion. The “Maid of Orleans”251 is an example of a drama which rests upon a collision of this kind.

(γ) And in the third case we may find in a general way that external condition and its impediments oppose obstacles in the path of love. Such are the ordinary course of events, the prose of ordinary existence, misfortunes, passion, prejudice, follies, the selfishness of others, occurrences of every conceivable complexity and kind. Much will here present itself that is hateful, terrible, and mean, for it is mainly the evil, ruthless, and savage aspects of other forms of human passion which work contrary to the tender spiritual beauty of love. More particularly in later times we frequently come across external collisions of this sort in dramas, narratives, and romances, works whose main interest centres in a sympathy for the sufferings, expectations, and ruined prospects of unhappy lovers and affect or satisfy us by means of their bad or happy endings, or merely provide entertainment. This type of conflict, however, on the ground that it merely depends upon accidental matters, is a subordinate one.

(c) No doubt love, from whatever of these points of view you choose to regard it, possesses a lofty quality, in so far as it does not merely remain an impulse of sex-attraction, but emphasizes the bounty of a really rich, beautiful, and noble soul, and is a living, active, courageous, and disinterested bond of union between one person and another. But romantic love is also not without its limitation. That which disappears from its content is the essentially realized universality.252 It is merely the personal feeling of one particular individual, which does not attest itself as fulfilled with interest of eternal import and the actual content of organic human life, as made up of family, political aims, one’s own country, obligations of profession, status, freedom, and religion, but merely with the personal consideration which is intent upon receiving again such private feeling as reflected back from some one else. Such a content of what is itself still but a formal mode of spiritual life does not correspond in full truth to the totality, which the essentially complete personality253 ought to be. In the family, marriage, duty, and the State the personal feeling simply as such and the unity which issues from it with some particular person and no other is not the main point of interest. In the love of romance, however, all centres in the fact that this man or woman loves that woman or man and no one else. Yet it is precisely this fact that it is only this or that person, which is solely based upon personal idiosyncracy, in other words, the contingency of caprice. There is no lover who does not think his beloved, no maiden who does not fancy her lover, as the fairest and most supreme, to the exclusion of all others, although they may appear very ordinary mortals in the eyes of other folk. But in just this fact that all the world or, let us say, a large number, act thus exclusively, and will not make an exception in favour of the unique Aphrodite herself, but rather possess an Aphrodite of their own, and very easily somewhat more than Aphrodite, we can only very obviously conclude that there are many who pass for the same fairy Princess, as no doubt every one knows well enough, that there are a whole bevy of pretty or good and excellent girls in the world, all of whom, or let us hope the majority, will secure their own lovers, adorers, and husbands, to whom they doubtless appear as gifted in like manner with all the beauty and virtue of Christendom. To bestow in every case our preference on one, and only one, is obviously a wholly private affair of the heart and of the separate individuality of each person, and the incommensurable obstinacy in discovering as though by a law of necessity one’s life and supremest sense of such in just that one individual is proof that it is a caprice no less infinite in its significance than it is inevitable. We have without question in this attitude the loftier freedom of the personal life and its absolute power of choice recognized, the power to be, not merely as we find in the “Phaedra” of Euripides, under the constraint of a pathos, a divinity; but in regard to the absolutely individual volition, from which such a liberty proceeds, such a choice appears at the same time to be a mere idiosyncrasy, an inflexibility of that which is wholly self-exclusive.

For this reason the collisions of love, more particularly when it is set in hostile opposition to substantive interests, retain an aspect of contingency and lack of authorization, because it is the personal life as such which confronts in opposition with a demand not independently justifiable that which for its own essential sake has a claim to recognition. The personalities in the lofty tragedy of the ancients such as Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, Oedipus, Antigone, and Creon have, it is true, among other things a personal object; but the substantive thing, the pathos, which as the content of their action is the compelling force behind them, is of absolute authority, and for this very reason, is also itself essentially of universal interest. The destiny which affects them on account of their action does not therefore move us on the ground that it is a fate of misfortune, but because it is a misfortune which affects or redounds to their honour. In other words the pathos, which will not rest until it is satisfied, possesses an essentially necessary content. When the guilt of Clytemnestra, in this concrete case of it, receives no punishment, when the insult which Antigone receives as sister254 is not removed, in both cases we have a substantial wrong. These sufferings of love, however, these shattered hopes, this being in love generally, these infinite pains experienced by lovers, this measureless happiness and bliss which such imagine, are no such essential interest but rather something that merely affects themselves. All men, it is true, should be sensitive to love and may claim satisfaction in this respect. But when a man fails to secure that object in some particular place, in precisely this or that association, under just these circumstances and in respect to one unique maiden we can admit no absolute wrong. There is nothing essentially inevitable in the fact that a man should capriciously select any particular young woman, and that we should interest ourselves consequently for that which is in the highest degree accidental, a caprice of his own conscious life, which carries with it no impersonal expansion or universal significance. We have here the source of that tendency to cool which we cannot help feeling in the representation of the passion of romantic love however that passion may be emphasized.

The third type of soul-life which is of importance to the romantic consciousness on the field of its activity in the world is fidelity. By fidelity in the sense we are now using it we do not mean either the permanent adherence to the avowal of love once given, nor yet the stability of friendship in the beautiful image of the same such as we have left us by the ancients in that of Achilles and Patroclus, or with yet more intimacy, that of Orestes and Pylades. Youth is pre-eminently both the soil and the occasion from which friendship of this latter type originates. Every man has to construct his path of life independently, to work out and sustain a given mode of realization. The time of youth, when individuals still live in an undefined atmosphere of external relations which they share, is the one in which they associate closely, and are bound together so nearly in one mode of thought, volition, and activity, that everything that any one of them undertakes becomes at the same time the undertaking of another. When men attain maturity this is no longer the case. The circumstantial life of the grown man pursues its independent course and will not admit of so close an affiliation with that of another that we can affirm of it that one cannot accomplish it without the other. Men make acquaintances and then separate; their interests and business are at one time disjoined, at another they coalesce; friendship, intimacy of mutual opinions, of principles, and the general trend of their life may remain; but this is not the friendship of youth, in which no individual unit either makes a decision or carries it into effect without inevitably making it a matter in which another is concerned. It is an essential principle at the very root of our life that in general every man must look after himself, must, in other words, prove by himself his capacity to confront the reality which affects him.

(a) Fidelity in friendship and love, then, subsists solely between equals. The fidelity which we have now to consider is relative to a superior, one more highly placed, a master. A fidelity of this type is to be found even among the ancients in that of servants to the family, the house of their lord. The most beautiful example of such a relation is supplied us by the swine-herd of Odysseus, who sweats by night and through tempest in order that he may look after his swine; who is full of anxiety on his master’s account, to whom he finally gives loyal assistance against the suitors. Shakespeare offers us a picture of fidelity no less moving, though it is here shown entirely on the side of the feelings, in his “King Lear.”255 Lear asks Kent, “Dost thou know me, fellow?” And Kent replies: “No, sir; but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master.” This borders as close as possible on that which we would make clear as romantic fidelity. Fidelity at this stage is not the loyalty of slaves and churls, however true and pathetic such unquestionably may be, which is none the less devoid of the free independence of individuality and its unrestricted aims and actions, and is consequently of subordinate rank. What we, in short, have before us is the liege-service of chivalry, in which each vassal preserves intact his own free self-dependence as an essential element in the attitude of subordination to one of higher rank, whether lord, king, or emperor. This type of fidelity, however, is a principle of supreme importance in chivalry for the reason that it forms the fundamental bond of union in a common society and its social co-ordination at least in the original form of its appearance.

(b) The object which thus receives a fuller content and is made apparent in this new type of association between individuals is not, however, by any means patriotism regarding that as an objective and universal interest, but a bond merely with one person, the lord, and for this reason conditioned by private honour, personal advantage and opinion. In its fullest brilliancy we find fidelity of this kind in a surrounding world that is unregulated and uncouth, beyond the control of right and law. Within a lawless reality of this kind the most powerful and commanding spirits stand out as fixed points of attraction, as leaders and nobles, and the rest rally round them of their own free will. Such a condition is later on elaborated into a legalized co-ordination of fealty, in which every vassal has his own claim to rights and privilege. The fundamental principle, however, upon which the entire system reposes is in its primary origins free choice, no less in relation to the dependent vassal than to the conditions under which he remains faithful to his vassalage. For this reason the fidelity of chivalry is quite prepared to maintain property, right, and personal independence and honour, and is on this account not simply recognized as an obligation which may be enforced to the entire disregard of the private inclinations of the vassal however they may arise. Quite the contrary. Every subordinate unit only continues there and helps to establish the general social order so long as the same falls in with his own wishes, inclinations, and opinions.

(c) On this account fidelity and obedience to the feudal lord can very readily clash with private feelings, an exasperated sense of honour, sensitiveness to insult, love, and many other chance incidents of the personal or external life. It is consequently of a highly precarious character. A knight, for example, is loyal to his lord, but a friend of his happens to quarrel with him. He has now to choose between the two objects of his fidelity, and, chief of all, he has to consider himself, the claims of his personal honour and advantage. The most beautiful example of such a conflict we have in the “Cid.” He remains as true to himself as he is to his king. If the king acts wisely he assists him with his arm’s strength; if his feudal lord acts wrongly or the Cid feels touched on the point of honour this powerful support is withdrawn. The paladins of Charles the Great exhibit much the same attitude. It is a tie of chieftainship and obedience not unlike that which we have already observed between Zeus and the other gods. The superior lord commands, blusters, and scolds, but the independent and powerful individualities resist him precisely when and as they please. We find the most consistent and charming picture of the conditional and easy terms under which this bond is maintained in the “Reinecke Fuchs.” Just as the magnates in this kingdom are most really true to their own aims and independence, we find that the German barons and knights in the Middle Ages were not at home when called upon to act for the sake of the general weal and their emperor; and it really looks as though our chief praise of the Middle Ages must consist in this that no man is in such a period justified in his own eyes or a man of honour, except in so far as he runs after his own inclinations, in other words, does precisely that which he is not suffered to do in a State which is organized on a rational basis.

In all these three stages of honour, love, and fidelity, we shall find the soil on which the self-subsistency of personality, the soul, is supported, an independence which, however, constantly unfolds in a wider and more affluent content, remaining in the same self-reconciled. Here stretches before us in romantic art the fairest strip of country which we can find anywhere outside the enclosure of religion in its strict sense, Its objects are concerned with that which is simply human, a relation with which we can at least from one aspect of it, namely, that of personal freedom, absolutely sympathize, and we do not find here, as we do now and again in the religious field, both a material and modes of representation which clash with our modern notions. But at the same time we must add that our present subject matter may very frequently be brought into direct relation to religion so that religious interests are interwoven with those of the world of chivalry; as, for example, was the case in the adventures of the knights of the round table in their quest of the Holy Grail. In this interfusion we find not only much that is mystical and fantastical, but also much that is allegorical added to the poetry of chivalry. And conversely this secular sphere of the interests of love, honour, and fidelity may also be totally unconnected with the deepening of their content with religious aims and opinions, and only bring to view the earliest movement of soul-life in the secular aspect of its spiritual intensity. That which, however, drops away from the present levels is the repletion of this inner life with the concrete content of human conditions, characters, passions, and realized existence generally. In contrast to this variety the essentially infinite soul still remains abstract and formal, and has therefore in front of it the task, to accept as part of its own this further material with what it held before, and to exhibit the same in the forms congenial to artistic composition.

241 He has not in this exclusive sense of religiosity identified himself with the spirit of the Christian community. Der Anderen refers to Gemeinschaft. Such appears to me the sense.

242 Zur Wirklichkeit entfaltetes Leben.

243 Put more simply we may say in popular terminology that it is filled up or amplified by virtue of the sense of individual personality. This Hegel himself further elucidates below. Falstaff undoubtedly possessed a strong personality, but in his famous soliloquy on honour he deliberately emptied himself of any sense of it by refusing to view himself under the self-relation, that is self-respect.

244 I fail to appreciate this distinction, except in a very qualified form. Even in the Middle Ages when the feudal relation was in full force, the relation between the master and the servant was surely one of the institutions of the State, though no doubt the rights of the dependent were not always very readily enforced. Even in the case of slavery in the Southern States of America the relation between master and slave carried with it quite definite ethical obligations — there was in general at least quite a distinct social if not actually political status.

245 I suppose Hegel means by ein Punkt a centre or point of life. The expression is rather unusual.

246 Absoluten Geltung, that is its absolute validity in its ideal character.

247 The punctuation in text is defective.

248 So runs the text. It comes from such a writer with a shock. Why such qualities should vanish (schwinden) in the presence of unhappiness it is not easy to see. It would rather appear that such was the condition to evoke them. What is meant is, I suppose, that the failure of reciprocity, especially in the love of women, often brings complete collapse. We may illustrate it in several of Meredith’s novels such as “Diana” and “Sandra Belloni.”

249 The two sides would appear to be the secularity of the social organism and “free” love.

250 This I think is the meaning. Until the full notion of liberty is apprehended the divisions of class will have the appearance of natural necessity.

251 Schiller’s drama of that name.

252 Die an und für sich seyende Allgemeinheit. The universal notion as explicitly made actual in life.

253 Ein in sich konkretes Individuum. The whole of this analysis appears to me a rather abstract and professorial consideration of romantic attachment, separating love from its reality of association and relation in actual life. In so far as it is true it is purely abstract truth, and must be regarded as such. In actual life it is no more true that even in the average case misfortune blights the blossom than it is true that the love of the individual concentrates itself solely on the mere attachment between two persons. It is bound up with the idea of family and continuation of the race, and so indirectly with the State.

254 As sister of her violated brother Polyneices.

255 Act I, sc. 4.

THE FORMAL SELF-SUBSISTENCY OF INDIVIDUAL PARTICULARITIES

IF WE TAKE a glance back on the territory we have passed through, we see in the first instance that the object of our investigation was the life of the soul256 in its most absolute capacity, in other words, consciousness in its mediation with God, the universal process of the self-reconciling spirit. The abstraction of this point of view consisted in this that the soul by an effort of abnegation withdrew itself from all that was secular, purely natural and human — even when the same had ethical features, and for this reason possessed a claim upon us — into its own distinctive domain in order to satisfy its yearning for the pure heaven of spirit. Secondly, we found ourselves able, it is true, to bring into view the human consciousness without this factor of abstract negation which was included in that mediation, in other words, positively in its independence and as related to others257, but the content of this secular infinitude as such was none the less only the personal self-subsistency of honour, the intensiveness258 of love and the vassalage of fidelity, a content which, no doubt, may appear before us in many relations, in a many-folded variety and many gradations of feeling and passion, subject to the most extensive changes of external condition, yet for all that only propounds just this personal independence and inwardness within such examples. The third aspect, then, which we have now left us to examine is the mode and manner in which that further material of human existence, both on the side of its inward and its external life, that is to say, Nature and its apprehension and significance for soul-life, is able to enter into the romantic type of art. We have here to deal with the world of particular objects, determinate existence generally, regarded in its unfettered independence, and which, in so far as it does not appear transparent to religion and spiritual synthesis, bringing it into unity with the Absolute, asserts itself on its own foothold and declares its self-subsistence in its own kingdom.

In this third province of the romantic type of art consequently the purely religious material and chivalry with those lofty views and aims that we found it brings to birth from its spiritual womb259, but which were not directly concordant with anything visible in the reality of the existing world, have vanished. The new object of satisfaction is a thirst for this actual presence itself, a delight in the facts of existence, a contentment of the soul with the dwelling that confronts it, with the finitude of our humanity, and what is finite, particular, and the true counterfeit of such generally. Man is intent to recreate for his own world the world as he actually finds it, although such may imply a sacrifice of the Beauty and ideality of the content and manifestation will reflect it as it stands before him endowed with life in his art, will have that present life before his eyes as the work of his own mind. The religion of Christianity as we have already seen has not sprung up from the soil of the imagination as was the case with the divinities of the East and Greece, whether we consider them relatively to form or content. It is the imagination which fashions the vital significance out of its own resources in order to promote the unity between the reality of soul life with the perfected embodiment of the same. In classical art this complete coalescence is actually attained. In the Christian religion, on the other hand, the secular aspect in its exclusive character is from the first accepted for just that which it really is as an essential factor of the Ideal; and the soul of man finds satisfaction in the ordinary and contingent presence of the external world without the necessary interposition of beauty. But man is nevertheless in the first instance reconciled to God only by implication, and as a possible result. All men are called to the blessed condition, but few are chosen; and the soul for which both the kingdom of heaven and that of this world still remain as a “beyond” is constrained to renounce both that which is spiritual in the external world and its own presence therein. The point of departure is from a distance infinitely remote from that world; and to make this reality, which in the first instance is simply surrendered, a positive constituent of that which is man’s own, in other words to bring about this rediscovery of himself and his volition in his own present life, from which all takes its rise, this it is which supplies us first with a terminating point in the elaboration of romantic art, and is the final outlook to which the spiritual penetration of man is carried and on which it is concentrated.

In so far as the form of this new content is concerned we have already observed that romantic art from its first initiation was infected with the contradiction that the essentially infinite mode of the self-conscious life is, in its independence, incapable of being united with the external material, and is bound to remain in such separation. This independent opposition of both aspects and the withdrawal of the inwardness of spirit into its own domain is that which constitutes the content of romance. These two aspects are continually separated anew by self-rehabilitation260, until at length they fall entirely apart, and thereby demonstrate that we must search for some other field than Art to secure their absolute union. And by this falling apart we find that these aspects in their relation to art are formal; in other words they fail to appear as a totality in that complete type of unity which was secured to them by the Classic Ideal. Classical art is placed in a region of stable figures, that is in the midst of a mythology and its irresoluble types perfected by art. The resolution of the classical form is consequently brought about — as we found in discussing its transition to the romantic form — leaving out of our present consideration the generally more restricted territory of the comic and satyric modes — by an over-elaboration in the direction of all that pleases the senses or an imitation which loses itself in the deadly frost of a pedantic learning, till it at length entirely degenerates into a negligent and inferior technique. The objects of art remain, however, the same throughout the process, and merely play truant to the earlier intelligent mode of production with a presentation that is increasingly more spiritless and a purely traditional and mechanical technique. The progress and conclusion of romantic art on the contrary is the resolution of the material of art within its own boundaries261 altogether, a material which falls apart into its elements, an increase of freedom in the several parts, along with which process and in contrast to the previous case, the individual craftsmanship and artistic mode of presentment is enhanced; and in proportion as the substantive content tends to break up to that extent attains a fuller perfection.

We may now attempt a more specific subdivision of this the final chapter of this part of our subject in the following terms.

In the first place we have before us the self-subsistency of character, which is, however, a particular one, that is, a definite individual self-absorbed in its world, its specific qualities and aims.

In opposition to this formal particularity of character we have the external conformation of situations, events, and actions. For the reason, moreover, that the inward spirituality of romance stands generally in an indifferent relation to that which is external the actual phenomenon262 appears in the present case independently free, that is as neither permeated by the spiritual content of human aims and actions nor clothed in modes adequate to retain them. By reason of its unrelated and loose mode of manifestation it therefore enforces the contingency of natural processes263, circumstances, the sequence of events, and manner of its realization as the unexpected.264

In the third place, and finally, the severation of the two factors asserts itself, the complete identity of which supplies us with the real notion of art. This is consequently the dismemberment and dissolution of art itself. On the one hand we find that art passes to a representation of wholly commonplace reality, to the reflection of objects precisely as they appear in their contingent isolation and its equally singular characteristics. Its interest is now wholly absorbed in reproducing this objective existence by means of the technical ability of the artist. On the other hand we have, in what is a mode of conception and representation entirely dependent on the accidental idiosyncracy of the artist himself, that is in humour, a complete reversal of the pictorial style above mentioned. For in humour we meet with the perversion and overthrow of all that is objectively solid in reality; it works through the wit and play of wholly personal points of view, and if carried to an extreme amounts to the triumph of the creative power of the artist’s soul over every content and every form.

The fundamental determinant of our present subject-matter is once again that infinitude implied in the very nature of the human consciousness which was our point of departure in the romantic type of art. The new accretions we have now, however, to add to our conception of this mode of self-subsistent infinity consist partly in the particularity of content, which constitutes the world of the individual mind, as to a further aspect of it in the immediate coalescence of the ego with this its particularity, its wishes and objects, and thirdly, in the living individuality, in which the substantive character is self-determined. We are not, therefore, entitled to understand under the expression “character” as now employed that which the Italians represented in their masks. The Italian masks are also no doubt definite characters, but this definition is only presented by them in its abstraction and generality, without a personal individuality. The characters, on the other hand, of the type under discussion are each of them a character unique in itself, an independent whole, an individual person265. If we have, therefore, occasion here to refer to the formalism and abstraction of character, such an expression is entirely relative to the fact that the fundamental content, the world of such a character appears, on the one hand, as restricted and to that extent abstract, and, on the other, as qualified by accidental causes. What the individual is is not carried or sustained by virtue of what is substantive or essentially self-accredited266 in its content, but through the naked personality asserted by the character, which consequently reposes formally on its own individual self-subsistency rather than on its content and its independently secured pathos.

Within the limits of this formalism we may now observe two main lines of distinction.

On the one hand we have the stability of character in the energy of its executive power, which restricts its line of action to specific aims, and entrusts the concentrated force of individuality thus restricted to the realization of such objects. On the other hand we have character under the aspect of a totality that is personal, which, however, persists not wholly articulated throughout the content of that inward life and in the unsounded267 depths of the soul, and is unable to unravel itself wholly, or express itself with absolute clarity.

(a) What we have therefore before us, in the first instance, is the particular character which wills to be that its immediate presence proposes, Just as animals differ from each other and discover themselves as independent creatures in this difference, so, too, here we have different characters whose range and idiosyncracy remains subject to the element of contingency268, and is not to be accurately determined by the mere notion.

(α) An individuality of this kind built up entirely on itself consequently has no ready thought-out opinions and objects, which it has associated with any universal principle of pathos: all that it-possesses, does, and accomplishes it creates right away with no further reflection out of its own specific nature; which is just what it happens to be, and has no wish to be rooted in anything more exalted, to be resolved in that and to find its justification in something substantive. Rather it reposes unyielding and unmalleable on itself, and in this stability either goes on its way or goes to ground. A self-subsistency of character of this kind is only able to appear, where the secular or natural man269, in other words, humanity in its particularity has secured its fullest claim. Pre-eminently the characters of Shakespeare are of this type. It is just this iron270 steadfastness and exclusiveness which constitutes the aspect of them which most excites our wonder. We have no word here of religion for religion’s sake, or action as the embodiment of human reconciliation, in the unqualified religious sense, or of morality pure and simple. On the contrary we are presented with individuals, conceived as dependent solely on themselves, possessed with aims that are their own exclusively, exclusively deducible from their individuality, and which they carry through as best satisfies them with the unmitigated consequences of passion, and with no incidental reflection on the principles involved. In particular the tragedies, such as “Macbeth,” “Othello,” “Richard III” and others contain one character of this type for their main interest surrounded by others less pre-eminent for such elemental energy. Macbeth is forced by his character, for example, into the fetters of his ambitious passion. At first he hesitates, then he stretches his hand to seize the crown; he commits a murder in order to secure it, and in order to maintain it storms on through the tale of horror. This regardless tenacity, this identity of the man with himself, and the object which his own personality brings to birth is the source to him of an abiding interest. Nothing makes him budge, neither the respect for the sacredness of kingship, nor the madness of his wife, nor the rout of his vassals, nor destruction as it rushes upon him, neither divine nor human claims — he withdraws from them all into himself and persists. Lady Macbeth is a character of the same mould, and it is merely the chatter of our latter-day tasteless criticism which can find in her the least flavour of affection. At her very first entrance, on reading Macbeth’s letter reporting his meeting with the witches and their prophecy in the words271: “Hail to thee, thane of Cawdor! Hail to thee king that shall be!” she exclaims, “Glamis thou art and Cawdor; and shall be what thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature; it is too full o’ the milk of human kindness, to catch the nearest way.” She shows no affectionate trait, no joy over the happiness of her husband, no moral emotion, no sympathy, no pity of a noble soul; she simply fears lest the character of her husband will stand in the path of his ambition. She regards him simply as a means. With her there is no recoil, no uncertainty, no consideration, no retreating, as we find is at first the case with Macbeth, no repentance, but the pure abstraction and rigour of character, which perpetrates that which falls in with it, until it finally breaks. This collapse which comes in a tempest on Macbeth from the outside as he executes his object, becomes madness of the mind in Lady Macbeth. Of the same type is Richard III, Othello, the old Margaret and many another also. We have its opposite in the wretched coherence272 of modern characters, such as those of Kotzebue, which are outwardly noble in the highest degree, great and excellent, yet in their soul-force are all rags and tatters. Later writers have done no better in other relations, despite their supreme contempt for Kotzebue. Heinrich von Kleish is an example with his Kätchen and Prince von Homburg273, characters in which, in contrast to the alert condition of real causal effect, magnetism, somnambulism, and sleep-walking are depicted as that which is of highest and most effective moment. This Prince von Homburg is a most pitiable exhibition of a general; he is distracted when he makes his military dispositions, writes out his orders in a way none can decipher them, is engaged in the night previous to the battle with morbid forebodings, and acts on the day of battle like a fool. And despite such duality, raggedness, and lack of harmony in their characters these writers imagine that they tread in the footsteps of Shakespeare. Wide indeed is the distance which separates them, for the characters of Shakespeare are essentially consequent in what they do; they remain staunch to their master passion; in what they are and in what confronts them, nothing makes them veer round but what is in strict accord with their rigidly determinate character.

(β) The more particular, then, the character is, which relies purely on itself, and consequently readily approaches evil, to that extent it is forced in the concrete world of reality to maintain itself, not merely against the obstacles which lie in its path and prevent the realization of life’s aims, but so much more by this very realization such is driven headlong to its downfall. In other words, on account of the fact that it achieves its object, the fate that has its origin in the specific nature of its character itself, deals it a blow in a mode of destruction it has itself prepared. The development of this fatality is, however, not merely a development from the action of the particular personality, but quite as much a growth of the soul274, a development of the character itself in its headlong movement, its running wild, its shattering in pieces or exhaustion. Among the Greeks, for whom pathos, the substantive content of action, rather than the personal character, is the important feature, a destiny affects the character that is thus sharply defined to a less degree for this reason, that it is not further evolved within the sphere of its activities, but remains at their conclusion what it was at the start. In the compass of our present subject-matter, however, by the carrying through of the action itself, the inner life of the personality is evolved quite as much as the progress of the action; the advance is not simply on the outside. The action of Macbeth appears at the same time a descent of the soul into savagery, accompanied by a result which, when all irresolution is thrown to the winds, and the dice is cast, leaves nothing further able to restrain it. His wife is from the very first decided: development is shown here merely as the anxiety of the soul, which is carried to the point of physical and spiritual ruin, the madness, in short, which strikes her down. And this is the kind of process which we can follow in the majority of Shakespeare’s characters, whether important or unimportant. The characters of ancient drama assert themselves, no doubt, also on fixed lines, and we find them even face to face with opposed forces, relief from which is no longer possible except through the advent of a deus ex machina. Yet this stability, as in the case of Philoctetes, is united to a content, and, on the whole, penetrated with a pathos which may be vindicated on ethical grounds.

(γ) In the sphere of presentation we are now considering, owing to the contingent nature of all that the characters which belong to it seize upon as their aim and the independence of their individuality, no objective reconciliation is possible. The environment of all that they are, and what opposes their progress, is in part without defined lines, but also in part we see that there is neither a “Whence” nor a “Whither” unriddled for themselves. Here we have once more presented to us that Fate which is the most abstract form of Necessity. The only reconciliation of the individual issues from the infinite mode of his soul-life, his own steadfastness, in which he stands supreme over his passion and his destiny. “Thus it came to pass,”275 whatever falls in his way, whether it be due to a controlling destiny, necessity or accident, there is his “Wherefore”; he accepts it at once without further reflection. It is fact, and man adjusts himself thereto, and tries to make himself as stone toward its authority.

(b) In absolute contrast to the above, however, there is a further or second mode in which the formal aspect of character may find its seat within the innermost of soul-life, and in which the individual may remain fixed without being able to extend its range or execute its effects.

(α) Such are those spiritual natures of intrinsic substance, who, while self-absorbed in a complex whole, are only able in the simplicity of their compactness276 to perfect that profound activity within the shrine of the soul without further development or explication in the world around them. The formalism which we have hitherto been examining was relative to the defined character of the content, the entire self-concentration277 of the individual upon one object, which it makes to appear in all its unrelieved severity, a concentration which expressed itself, was carried out, and in which, just as circumstances fell out, either collapsed or held on to the end. This further mode of formalism is emphasized in a converse way by its undisclosed and formless character, and by its defect of expression and expository power. A soul of this type is like some precious jewel, which is only visible at certain points, a manifestation which is that of a lightning flash.

(β) And the reason that such state of self-seclusion should still be of worth and interest to us is due to the fact that it presupposes a secret wealth of the soul, which, however, only permits its infinite depth and fulness, and precisely, by means of this silence, to show itself in a few and so to speak half-muted ways of expression. Such simple natures, unconscious of what they possess, and without speech, may exercise an extraordinary fascination. But that this may be so their silence must be like the unruffled stillness of the sea upon its surface, over its unsounded depths, not the silence of all that is shallow, hollow, and stupid. It is quite possible sometimes for the dullest fellow to succeed by means of an external demeanour that manages very little to expose itself, and merely presents now and again something that is but half intelligible, to awake in others the opinion that it is the veil of a profound wisdom and spiritual depth, so that people wonder what in the world lies hidden in such a heart and soul, where we find in the end there is just nothing. The infinite content and profundity of silent souls of the genuine type is made clear to us — and to declare it makes the greatest demand on the intuitive powers and executive ability of the artist — by means of isolated, unrelated, naïve, and involuntary expressions of soul-life, which quite unintentionally make it plain to all who can grasp their significance that such a soul has seized upon the substantial import of all that confronts it with the richest quality of spiritual insight, that its reflective capacity, however, is not carried further by positive expansion into the general environment of particular interests, motives, and finite aims, but rather preserves its original purity that the fact it refuses to have its powers dissipated by the commonplace excitements of the heart and the serious quests and modes of sympathy which are thus inevitable, may remain unknown to the world.

(γ) A time must, however, arrive for a soul of this type in which it becomes uniquely affected at one definite point of attachment in that inward worlds it concentrates the whole of its undivided powers in one supreme form of emotion that dominates its life-current; it adheres to this with a force that refuses to be diverted, and secures happiness therein, or goes to ground from lack of support. To retain a hold on life a man requires a constantly expanding breadth of ethical sustenance, which alone supplies an objective stability. To this type of character belong some of the most fascinating figures in romantic art, whose full perfection of beauty we shall find among the creations of Shakespeare. As an illustration we may take the Juliet in his “Romeo and Juliet.” It is possible at this moment to see a reproduction of this play in this city278. It is well worth going to. The picture we have given us there of this character is a moving, lifelike, passionate, talented, highly finished and noble one. But for all that it is possible to entertain a somewhat different conception of the part. In other words, we may figure for ourselves a maiden in the first instance simple as a child, of only fourteen or fifteen years of age, who, it is quite clear, has as yet no self-knowledge or world wisdom, no emotional activity, no strong inclination or wishes of the heart, but has rather glanced into the motley show of the world as into some laterna magica without learning anything from it, or reflecting upon what is seen there. All in a twinkling we behold the development of the entire strength of this soul, of its artfulness279, its circumspection, its force; it is prepared to sacrifice everything and to submit itself to the severest ordeals, so that in its entirety it now suddenly appears to be the first breaking forth of the full rose in all its petals and folds, an infinite outburst of the innermost purity which gushes from the spring source of the soul, in which it had held itself back previously as yet undiscerned, unmoulded and undeveloped; which moreover, as the now existing creation of one awakened interest, betrays itself unpremeditated in the fulness and strength of its beauty from the previous seclusion of spirit. It is a brand which one spark has kindled, a bud which at the first bare touch of love breaks unawares before us in full bloom. And yet the faster it unfolds the more rapidly it also sinks, and its petals fall from it. An impetuous progress is still more conspicuous in the case of Miranda. Brought up in seclusion we have her portrayed for us by Shakespeare at the critical moment when she first makes the acquaintance of manhood280. He depicts her in a few scenes, but in those we get a picture that is complete and unforgettable. We may also include Schiller’s Thecla under the same type, despite the fact that it is rather the creation of a reflective kind of poetry281. Though placed in the midst of a life of such amplitude and richness she remains unaffected by it; she remains within it without vanity, without reflection, purely absorbed by the one interest which alone dominates her soul. And as a general rule it is chiefly the beautiful and noble natures of women, in which the world and their own heart-life blossoms for the first time in love, so that it is as though their spiritual birth here takes its rise.

Under the same type of spiritual intensity, which is unable fully to unfold itself, we may for the most part classify those folksongs, more particularly our German ones, which, in the copious compactness of the soul-life therein reflected, and however much such is displayed to us as carried away by any one absorbing interest, are yet unable to express the same except in broken flashes, and thereby fully reveal just this very depth. It is a mode of artistic presentment, which in its reserve is apt to fall back on the effects of symbolism. What it offers us is not so much the open, transparent display of the entire inward life as it is purely a sign and indication of that life. But we do not get, however, from it a symbol, the significance of which, as was the case previously, remains a general abstraction, but an expression the inward content of which is nothing more nor less than this personal, living, and actual soul. In times like our own, dominated by a critical reflectiveness, which lies so far removed from a self-absorbed naïveté of this kind, such presentations are of the greatest difficulty, and if successful, are a sure proof of an original creative genius. We have already seen that Goethe, more particularly in his lyrics, has shown himself a master in this respect, namely, that he can depict and unfold to us in a symbolical way, in other words with a few simple, apparently external and insignificant traits, the entire truth and infinite wealth of a soul. His poem, “The King of Thule,” one of his most lovely bits of poetical work, is of this class. The king here makes us aware of his love by just one thing only, namely, the drinking cup which the old man preserved as a gift of his beloved. The old carouser stands up there on the point of death in his lofty palace hall; his knights, his kingdom, his possessions are around him; and he bequeaths them all to his heir, but the goblet he flings into the waves; no one shall have that.

Er sah ihn stürzen, trinken,

Und sinken tief in’s Meer,

Die Augen thäten ihm sinken,

Trank nie ein Tropfen mehr282.

A soul, however profound and still of this kind, which retains its energy of spirit pent up like the spark in the flint, unopened to form, which does not elaborate its existence and reflection beyond its own boundaries, has also failed to free itself by such expansion. It remains exposed to the remorseless contradiction that, if the false note of unhappiness ring through its life, it possesses no remedial aptitude, no bridge as a way of passage between the heart and reality; it is equally unable to ward off external conditions from itself, and by so doing to preserve an independent ground of vantage in its own self-reliance. When the collision comes therefore it is helpless; it acts hastily and without circumspection, or bows passively to the movement of events. So, for example, we have in Hamlet a beautiful and noble soul; one not so much spiritually weak, but one that wanders astray without a strong grasp of life’s realities, moving in an atmosphere of dejection, a sombre and half articulate melancholy. Gifted with a finely intuitive sense he feels that all is not well with him, that things are not as they should be though he has no external sign, no single ground for suspicion; nevertheless he surmises the atrocious deed that has been perpetrated. The ghost of his father gives yet closer embodiment to his feelings. He is at once ready in spirit to revenge, his sense of duty is always before him reflecting the innermost craving of his heart, but he is not carried away with the flood, as Macbeth; he cannot either kill, rage, or strike with the directness of a Laertes; he persists in the inactivity of a beautiful, introspective soul, which can neither realize its aims nor make itself at home in the conditions of actual life. He dallies, seeks for more positive certainty buoyed up by the fair integrity of his soul; he can, however, come to no firm decision, much as he has sought it, and permits himself to follow the course of external events. In this atmosphere of unreality he goes yet further astray in matters that lie directly in his path; he kills the old Polonius instead of the king; he acts in a hurry where he should have been more circumspect, yet persists in his self absorption, where decided action is essential; until at length, without any action on his part, the fated dénouement of the entire drama, including that of his own persistently self-retiring personality, has unravelled itself on the broad highway of Life’s external incidents and accidents.

We are particularly presented with this attitude in modern times among men of the lower levels of life, who are without an education which extends to aims of universal significance, or are devoid of the variety of objective interests. Consequently when some particular aim of their life fails they are unable to secure any further stay of their spiritual forces and a centre of control for their activities. This lack of education tends to make reserved natures, in proportion as it is undeveloped, adhere with the more rigidness and obstinacy to that which, through its appeal to their entire individuality, makes a claim upon them however limited in its range it may be. We find pre-eminently such a monotonous attitude incidental to this class of self-absorbed and speechless men among German characters, who for this reason appear in their seclusion inclined to stubbornness, ready to bristle up, crabbed, inaccessible, and in their dealings and expressions wholly unreliable and contradictory. As a master in the delineation and exposition of such obtuse characters of the poorer classes we will mention but one example, Hippel, the author of “Life’s Careers in the Line of Ascent,”283 one of our few German works stamped with original humour. He keeps himself wholly removed from Jean Paul’s sentimentality and want of taste in plot construction, and possesses moreover an astonishing individuality, freshness, and vitality. He understands, in quite an exceptional way, and one that seizes on our interest at once, how to depict the thickset type of people who are unable to breathe freely and who consequently, when they do give themselves the rein, do so with a violence that is simply fearful. They put an end of their own accord to the infinite contradiction of their spiritual life and the unhappy circumstances in which they are involved in an appalling manner; and bring about by such means that which is otherwise the result of an external fate, as we find, for instance, in “Romeo and Juliet,” where external accidents mar all the wise and able offices of the holy father’s intervention and cause the death of the lovers.

(c) We find, then, that characters of this formal quality generally either expose merely the infinite volitional force of the individual’s personality, which asserts itself frankly just as it is and storms ahead in the bare impulse of the will; or, to take the further aspect, present to us an essential self-contained284, if not wholly articulate soul, which, affected as it becomes by one specific aspect of its spiritual experience, concentrates the entire breadth and depth of its personality on this point, yet, owing to the fact of its possessing no development externally, is unable to find its proper place or to act with practical sense when it comes into collision with that world. We have yet a third point285 to mention, which consists in this, that when characters of this type, wholly one-sided and restricted as they are in respect to their aims if at the same time fully developed in mental power, awake in us not merely a formal, but also a substantial interest, we cannot fail to receive the impression that this limitation of their personal life is itself only a condition that is inevitable; in other words it is a result which grows out of the particular way in which their character is defined along with the profounder content of their personal life. Shakespeare in fact enables us to see this depth and wealth in such characters. He presents them to us as men of imaginative power and genius by showing how their reflective faculty commands them and lifts them above that which their condition and definite purpose would make them, so that they are all the while as it were forced by the misfortune of circumstances and the obstacles of their position into doing that which they accomplish. At the same time we do not mean this to the extent of asserting, for example, that the bad witches were to blame for all that Macbeth dared after consulting them. These witches are rather to be looked at as the reflex of his own obstinate will. All that the characters of Shakespeare execute, that is the particular purpose they propose, originates and finds the taproot of its force in their own personality. But along with this they maintain in one and the same individuality a loftiness, which brushes aside that which they actually are, so far as their aims, interests, and actions are concerned, and which amplifies them and exalts them above themselves. In like manner Shakespeare’s more vulgar characters, such as Stephano, Trinculo, Pistol, and that hero among them all, Falstaff, though saturated with their own debasement, assert themselves as fellows of intelligence, whose genial quality is able to take in everything, to possess a large and open atmosphere of its own, and in short makes them all that great men are. In the tragedies of the French on the contrary even the greatest and most worthy characters only too frequently, if viewed critically, assert themselves as so many evil offshoots of the brute creation, whose only intelligence consists in this that it can furnish dialectical arguments in its vindication. In Shakespeare we find neither vindication nor damnation, but merely a review of the general condition of destiny, which inevitably places such characters uncomplaining and unrepentant where they are, and from the starting-point of which they see everything, themselves included; and yet as independent spectators of themselves decline and fall.

In all these respects the realm which is peopled by such individual characters is an infinitely rich one, a kingdom, however, which very easily collapses in hollowness and dulness, so that only quite a few masters have received the gifts of poetical and intuitional power sufficient to enable them to reveal its truth.

Now that we have examined the aspect of the inward soul-life, which may, at this stage of our inquiry, be presented by art, we must direct our attention to that which lies without it, to the particularity of circumstances and situations which affect character, also to the collisions in which its development proceeds, and finally review the entire collective form, which this inward life assumes within the boundaries of concrete reality.

It is, as we have more than once pointed out, a fundamental determinant of romantic art, that the spiritual sense, in other words, the soul in its aspect of self-reflection, should constitute a whole, and relates itself for this reason to the external world, not, in its own reality, inter-penetrated by this world, but as though related to something purely external and separated from it, which goes on its way independently disjoined from Spirit, is thus evolved, and thus disposes of itself as a finite and continuously fluid, changing, and complicate object of contingent causality286. To the self-absorbed soul it is as wholly a matter of indifference what particular circumstances it confronts, as it is an affair of chance what those circumstances are which appear before it. For in its action it is less a matter of importance that it should carry out a work whose essential basis is rooted in itself and owes its subsistency to its own character than that it should generally make itself effective in action.

(a) We have, in short, before us here a process which we may from one point of view describe as the rejection of the Divine from Nature. Spirit has here withdrawn itself from the externality of phenomena, which, for the reason that the inward life no longer sees itself reflected in this sphere287, is now independently clothed on its part under a relation of indifference exterior to the subject of consciousness. Relatively to its truth Spirit is, no doubt, in its own medium mediated and reconciled with the Absolute: but in so far as we now take up our position on the ground of self-subsistent individuality, which proceeds from itself as it discovers itself in its immediacy, this divesting of the Divine288 affects character in its active capacity. It moves forward, that is to say, with its own contingent aims into a world equally subject to chance, with which it fails to unite itself in an essentially harmonious whole. This relative character of purpose in an environment which is relative, whose determination and development does not subsist in the individual mind, but is defined externally and contingently and is responsible for collisions equally adventitious, which appear as offshoots that are unexpectedly interwoven with it, creates that to which we give the name of “the adventurous,” which supplies the fundamental type of romance for the mode of its events and actions.

It is necessary that the action and dramatic event in so far as they apply strictly to the Ideal and classic art, should be referable to an essentially true or, in other words, independently explicit and necessary end, in whose conformation that which is also the determinating factor for the external form, for the particular type and mode of execution, is an object of real existence. In the case of the acts and events of romantic art this is not the case. For, although essentially universal and substantive ends are also presented in their manner of realization by this type, the definition of the action which is referable to such ends, and the principle of co-ordination and articulation which appears in its progress on its spiritual side289 is not the direct result of those ends themselves; this aspect of realization is inevitably left independent and subject to the operation of contingency.

(α) The romantic world had one and only one absolute work to accomplish, namely, the extension of Christendom, and the bringing into manifest performance the spirit of the community290. Situated in the midst of a hostile world consisting in part of the unbelieving ancient régime, and in part of a human life which was barbarous and coarse, the character of its actual accomplishment, in so far as it passed from mere theory to deeds, was, in the main, the passive endurance of pain and torture, the sacrifice of its own temporal existence for the eternal salvation of the soul. A further product of its energies, which is equally a portion of the same essential content, is, in the Middle Ages, that carried out by Christian Chivalry, the driving forth of the Moors, Arabs, and Mohammedans generally from Christian countries, and, above all, along with it, the conquest of the Holy Sepulchre in the Crusades. This, however, was not an object which affected man simply as human291, but one which a mere collection of isolated individuals had to accomplish under conditions in which the individuals which composed it streamed together at their own free will and pleasure as such. From such a point of view we may call the Crusades the collective adventure of the Christian Middle Ages; an adventure, which was essentially subject to lapses292, and fantastical, of a spiritual tendency, and yet devoid of a truly spiritual aim, and in its relation to action and character delusive. For in its relation to the processes of religion, the supreme object of the Crusades is in the highest degree empty and external. Christianity purported to secure its salvation solely in Spirit, in Christ, who is raised to the right hand of God; it finds its living reality and stay in Spirit, not in the grave of Spirit, or in the sensuous, immediately present localities of its former temporal abiding-place. The impulse and religious yearning of the Middle Ages, however, was centred on the spot, the external locality of the Passion and the Holy Sepulchre. In just the same direct contradiction with the religious object we find that wholly worldly one which was bound up with conquest; a possession, which in its relation to the secular world, carried a totally different character to that of a truly religious purpose. Men would fain win for themselves what was spiritual and health to their souls, and they set before them as an aim a purely material locality, from which Spirit had vanished; they strained after a gain that was temporal, and united this which was of the world to the pure substance of religion. It is this distraction which gives us the discordant and fantastic note in such enterprises in which we find that which is of the world confound the life of soul, or the latter prove the confounding of the former instead of a harmony which is the result of both. And for the same reason much that is contradictory appears in the execution unresolved. Piety is carried to the point of rawness and barbarous cruelty. And this rawness permits every kind of selfishness and passion to break forth, or casts itself conversely once more upon the eternal depths which either move or bruise the human spirit, and which are, in truth, the heart and substance of the matter. In the medley of elements so discrepant, there is also an absence of all unity in the object proposed by the exploits and events themselves, or in the consequential power of authority. The host of men is diverted and split up in single adventures, victories, defeats, and a variety of accidents; and the outcome of it all fails to correspond to the means and enormous preparations which were involved. Nay, the object itself is stultified in the execution. For the Crusades would once again bring truth to the sentence: “Thou couldst not leave him in peace in the grave, thou didst not suffer thy holy one to see corruption.” But it is precisely this longing to find Christ and spiritual content in such places and spaces, even the grave itself, the place of death, which is itself, whatever essential worth even a Chateaubriand may make out of it, a corruption of Spirit, out of which Christianity must rise in resurrection in order to return once more to the fresh and abundant life of the concrete world.

An object of much the same kind, mystical from one point of view, equally fantastical from another, and adventurous in its undertaking, is the search of the Holy Grail.

(β) A more exalted emprise is that which every man has to go through in his own domain, his life, in the course of which he determines his eternal destiny. It is this object which Dante has, consistently with the catholic standpoint, seized upon in his “Divine Comedy” as he conducts us in turn through hell, purgatory, and paradise. In this poem, too, despite the strenuous co-ordination of the whole, we have abundant evidence of conceptions which are fantastic293, aspects that are suffused with the spirit of adventure, in so far, at any rate, as this work in its blessing and cursing is not carried through merely in the explicit form of universal statement, but as referable to an almost innumerable company of distinct personalities, not to mention the fact that the poet takes upon himself the fiat of his church, seizes the keys of heaven in his hand, adjudicates both bliss and damnation, and so constitutes himself the judge of the v world, who places the best known individuals both of the ancient and Christian eras, whether poets, citizens, cardinals, or popes, respectively in hell, purgatory, or paradise.

(γ) The remaining material, on the basis of the worldly life, which leads up to action and event, consists in the infinitely manifold and venturesome experiments of imaginative idea, all that element of chance in what arises either without or within the soul from love, honour, and fidelity. At one time we may see men thus affected box the compass for their own reputation’s sake, at another leap to help persecuted innocence, carry out amazing exploits in defence of the honour of their lady, or vindicate some right that is invaded with the strength of their own arm, and the able use of their own weapons; and this albeit the innocence which is delivered prove only a company of knaves. In the majority of such cases there is absolutely no condition, no situation, no conflict before us in virtue of which we can assert that action follows as a necessary result. The soul simply wills it and intentionally looks out for adventure. The exploits of love, for instance, in such cases have for the most part, if we look at their more specific content, no other real principle of determination beyond the effort to give proof of the steadfastness, fidelity, and constancy of love, to testify that all the surrounding world, together with the entire complexus of its relations, is merely of value as so much material in which love may be brought to light. For this reason the specific act of such manifestation, since the only thing that matters is the proof, is not determined by its own course, but is left dependent on a freak of chance, the mood of the lady, the caprice of external accidents. The same principle holds where the objects are honour or bravery. They are proper to an individual who holds himself far aloof from all further content of a more substantive character, who is perfectly able to enter into any and every content as it may chance to occur, to find himself the object of insult therein, or to look for an opportunity in which he may display his courage and shrewdness. As we have here absolutely no criterion as to what should or what should not form part of this content, in the same way also we have no principle in accordance with which we can fix what in each case is really an attack upon honour or the true subject-matter of bravery. It is just the same with the treatment of right, which is likewise an object of chivalry. In other words, right and law are here not as yet asserted as a condition and object which is of essentially independent stability, or as a system which is continuously made more perfect in accordance with law and its necessary content, but as themselves purely the product of individual caprice, so that their interposition, no less than the judgment passed upon that which in every particular case is held to be right or wrong, is throughout relegated to the entirely haphazard criteria of individual judgment.

(b) What we have before us generally, more particularly on the secular field, in chivalry and the formalism of character above indicated, is not merely, to a more or less degree, the contingency of the circumstantial conditions of human action, but also that of the soul in its attitude of volition. For individuals of this one-sided characterization are capable of accepting as the substance of their life that which is wholly contingent, conduct that is only sustained by virtue of the energy of their character, and is carried out, or fails in its contact with the inevitable collisions which the condition of the world opposes to it. The same thing is true of the chivalry which receives in honour, love, and fidelity a more lofty ground of justification, and one entitled to rank with a truly ethical basis. On the one hand, it is still emphatically a matter of chance on account of the particular aspect of the circumstances on which it reacts; we find that here the object is to carry out aims peculiar to some particular person, instead of some work of general significance, and the modes of its attachment with the rest of life fail to possess independent stability. On the other hand, precisely at the point where we consider such action as part of the personal life of individuals, we are aware of the presence of caprice and illusion in respect to all that it either projects, originates, or undertakes. The net result of such a spirit of enterprise consequently, through all that it performs or enters upon, no less than in its ultimate effects, is no other than a world of events and fatalities which is self-dissolvent, a world of comedy for this very reason.

This self-dissolution of Chivalry we find set before us and artistically reproduced, pre-eminently and with unsurpassed adequacy, by Ariosto and Cervantes, and, so far as it affects the fate of such highly individual characters as those above described in their isolation, by Shakespeare.

(α) In Ariosto, more particularly, an attempt is made to delight the reader with the infinitely varied developments of personal destiny and aims, the fabulous complexity of fantastic relations and ludicrous situations over which the adventurous fancy of the poet plays to the point of absolute frivolity. The heroes of these dramas are seriously engaged in what is often unadulterated folly and the wildest eccentricity. And, to note especial points, love is frequently degraded from the Divine love of a Dante, or the romantic tenderness of a Petrarca, to sensual tales and ludicrous collisions; or heroism appears to be screwed up to a pitch that is so incredible it ceases to amaze, and merely excites a smile over the fabulousness of such exploits. By virtue, however, of this indifference in respect to the particular manner in which dramatic situations are brought about, astonishing complications and conflicts are introduced, broken off and once more interwoven, chopped about, and finally resolved in a surprising way; yet, despite his ludicrous treatment of chivalry, Ariosto is as able to secure and display to us the true nobility and greatness which we may find in chivalry, or the exhibition of courage, love, honour, and bravery, as he can on occasion excellently depict other passions, cunning, subtlety, presence of mind, and much else.

(β) Just as Ariosto inclines more to the fabulous element in this spirit of adventure, Cervantes develops that aspect of it which is appropriate to romantic fiction. We find in his Don Quixote a noble nature in whose adventures chivalry goes mad, the substance of such adventures being placed as the centre of a stable and well-defined state of things whose external character is copied with exactness from nature. This produces the humorous contradiction of a rationally constituted world on the one hand, and an isolated soul on the other, which seeks to create the same order and stability entirely through his own exertions and the knight-errantry which could only destroy it. Despite, however, this ludicrous confusion we have still in Don Quixote that which we have already eulogized in Shakespeare. Cervantes has created in his hero an original figure of noble nature endowed with varied spiritual qualities, and one which at the same time throughout retains our full interest. In all the madness of his mind and his enterprise he is a completely consistent294 soul, or rather his madness lies in this, that he is and remains securely rooted in himself and his enterprise. Without this unreflecting equanimity respectively to the content and result of his actions he would fail to be a truly romantic figure; and this self-assuredness, if we look at the substantive character of his opinions, is throughout great and indicative of his genius, adorned as it is with the finest traits of character. And, further, the entire work is a satire upon the chivalry of romance, ironical from beginning to end in the truest sense. In Ariosto this genius of adventure is merely the butt of frivolous jest. From another point of view, however, the exploits of Don Quixote are merely the central thread around which a succession of genuinely romantic tales are intertwined in the most charming way, in order to unfold the true worth of that which the romance in other respects scatters to the winds with the genius of comedy.

(γ) In somewhat the same way as we thus have seen chivalry, even in respect to its most momentous interests, overturned in comedy, Shakespeare, too, either places the characters and scenes of comedy in juxtaposition to his downright and stable individualities, and tragic situations and conflicts, or exalts the essential figures of his drama through a profound humour above themselves and their uncouth, limited, and false purposes. Falstaff, the fool in “Lear,” the musician scene in “Romeo and Juliet,” will sufficiently illustrate the first alternative, and Richard III the second.

(c) The dissolution of romance, in the sense we have hitherto regarded it, introduces us finally and in the third place to the spirit of the novel295, in our modern sense of the term, which historically the knight-errantry and pastoral romances precede. This spirit of modern fiction is, in fact, that of chivalry, once more taken seriously and receiving a true content. The contingent character of external existence has changed to a stable, secure order of civic society and state-life, so that now police administration, tribunals of justice, the army and political government generally take the place of those chimerical objects which the knight of chivalry proposed to himself. For this reason the knightly character of the heroes who play their parts in our modern novels is altered. Confronted by the existing order and the ordinary prose of life they appear before us as individuals with personal aims of love, honour, ambition, and ideals of world reform, ideals in the path of which that order presents obstacles on every side. The result is that personal desires and demands unroll themselves296 before this opposition to unfathomable heights. Every man finds himself face to face with an enchanted world that is by no means all that he asks for, which he must contend with for the reason that it contends with himself, and in its tenacious stability refuses to give way before his passions, but interposes as an obstacle the will of some one else whoever it may be, his father’s, his aunt’s, or social conditions generally. For the most part such a knighthood will consist of young people, who feel it incumbent upon them to hew their way through a world which makes for its own realization rather than that of their ideals, and who hold it a misfortune that there should be family ties, civic society, state laws, professions, and all the rest of such things at all, because conditions of such solidity and so inevitably restricted are so cruelly opposed to their ideal dreams and the infinite claims of their souls. The main object now is to drive a breach through this wall of facts, to change, to improve, or at least carve for themselves in despite of it some little heaven on earth such as they seek for, their ideal maiden, discover her, win her from the clutches of her wicked relations or her evil circumstances, carry her off and lay the balm of love on her wounds. Conflicts of this kind, however, in our modern world are the apprentice years, the education of individuality in the actual world; they have no further significance, but the significance has, nevertheless, a real value. The object and consummation of such apprenticeship consists in this, that the individual drops his horns and finds his own place, together with his wishes and opinions in social conditions as they are and the rational order which belongs to them, that he enters, in short, upon the varied field of life, and secures that position within it which is appropriate to his powers. However soundly he may have rated the world and have been shoved on one side, the day comes at last with the most of us when the maiden is discovered and some kind of place in the world, he marries, and is as much a Philistine as the rest of his neighbours. His wife takes charge of his domestic arrangements; children do not fail to put in an appearance; the adorable wife who was so unique, an angel, acts very much as other wives do; the profession supplies its toils and vexations, the married tie its domestic sorrows, and, in short, we have the entire process of marital caterwauling once more illustrated. In this history we may see the same old type of the adventurous spirit with this distinction, that here that spirit discovers its real significance, and all that is wholly fantastic in it receives its necessary correction.

The last point which we have to establish still more closely is that relatively to which the romantic spirit, for the reason that it already is intrinsically the principle of the dissolution of the classic Ideal, manifests, in fact, this dissolution clearly as such a process. In this connection it is of the first importance to consider the ultimately complete contingent and external character of the material, which the activity of the artist seizes on and informs. In the plastic material of the plastic arts the spiritual conception is so related to the external medium that this external show is the embodiment which uniquely belongs to that spiritual significance itself, and possesses no real independence apart from it. In romantic art, on the contrary, in which we find the inwardness of Spirit withdraws within its own domain, the entire content of the external world secures the freedom of unfettered independence and the assured subsistency of its own peculiar character and particularity. Conversely, as we have seen, if the personal life of soul forms the essential feature in the artistic product, it is a question of similar indifference with what specific content of external reality and the spiritual world the soul is vitally connected. The romantic Idea can therefore assert itself through every sort of condition; can embrace every conceivable position, circumstance, relation, aberration, confusion, conflict, and means of satisfaction; it is simply its own personal and self-subsistent mode of conformation, the expression and receptive form of the soul rather than any objective independently valid form which is the object of search and is made good. In the representation of romantic art therefore everything has its due place, all the departments and phenomena of life, the greatest and the least, the highest and most insignificant, what is moral with that which is immoral and evil. And we may further note in particular that the more secular the art becomes, the more it amasses the finite wealth of the world, the more it takes to it with, delight, bestows upon it a validity that is without reserve and exists for the artist in such a world under the sole condition that it is reproduced in its naked reality, so much the more is art at home with itself. Thus we may observe in Shakespeare, on account of the fact that with him the action as a rule runs its course in the most realistic association with objective life, and is isolated and broken up in a mass of purely accidental relations, and conditions of every kind, the least important and most incidental no less than the most sovereign flights and most weighty interests of poetry are each and all substantiated. So in “Hamlet” we have the sentry on watch no less than the royal court; in “Romeo and Juliet” the domestic ménage; in other pieces, not to mention clowns, swashbucklers, and all the vulgarities of ordinary life, we have pot-houses, carriers, chamber-pots and fleas, much as in the representations by romantic art of the birth of Christ and the adoration of the kings we do not fail to find oxen and asses, mangers and straw297. And this is the kind of thing throughout, that the scriptural text may receive its fulfilment, too, in art, “they that are of low estate shall be exalted.” It is from out this contingent sphere of its subject-matter, which in a measure asserts itself as merely the environment of a content intrinsically more important and in part also in absolute independence, that the downfall of romantic art issues, to which we have already above adverted. In other words we have, on the one hand, objective reality placed before us in what is from the point of view of the Ideal its prosaic objectivity, that is, the content of everyday life, which is not grasped in the substantive form in which it adumbrates what is both moral and divine, but rather in that which is for ever changing and which as temporal passes away. And, in the further aspect of it, it is also the subjective condition, which, with its emotion and insight, with the principle and authority of its wit or humour, is able to exalt itself in mastery over the entire world of the real, a mastery which leaves nothing in the ordinary connections and significance where the commonsense consciousness finds it, and is not fully satisfied until it has proved that everything which is a part of that world is, by virtue of the form and relative position which it receives from the view of it, mood and supreme gifts of the artist298, itself intrinsically capable of being broken up, and, as such, is for the artistic vision and feeling dissolved. We have now, in this connection, first, to add a few words on the principle contained in those very varied works of art whose level of representation approximates closely to the ordinary appearance of objective or external reality, what in common parlance is called the imitation of Nature.

Secondly, we shall have to discuss humour as a personal quality in the artist. It plays a very considerable part in modern art, and is that which in the case of many poets distinctively supplies the fundamental character of their work.

Thirdly, it remains for us to offer a few suggestions, in conclusion, on the point of view from which it is still possible for the art of to-day to find a field for its activities.

(a) The Artistic Imitation of what is Immediately presented by Nature

The realm of subjects which may be included in this sphere v of artistic activity may be extended indefinitely for the reason that Art takes for its content here not that which is by its own inherent law necessary299, the range of which is essentially self-contained, but the contingent phenomena of reality in their unlimited modifications of form and relation, Nature and her kaleidoscopic play of separate pictures, the everyday action and affairs of man in his dependence on natural conditions and their means of his satisfaction, in his accidental habits also, attitudes, activities of family life, his business as a citizen, and, generally, the incalculable variety of all that shifts and changes in the world around us. And for this reason this art is not merely, in the broad sense that applies more or less to the romantic spirit in all its manifestations, a type of portraiture: rather it tends to lose itself completely in the mode of its portrayal, whether it be in sculpture, painting, or in the descriptions of poetry. The tendency is to return to the exact imitation of Nature, in other words, to the intentional approach to the contingent aspects of what is immediately before the vision and independently thus presented, prosaic existence in all its ugliness no less than its beauty. The question, therefore, at once suggests itself whether productions of this character have any right to be called art at all. No doubt, if we simply fix before our attention the notion of artistic work which fully corresponds to the Ideal, work which from one point of view it is of the first importance that their content shall not be thus intrinsically accidental or evanescent, and from another point of view that their mode of presentation must be adequate in all respects to such a content, then such artistic productions as we are now considering will unquestionably appear to fall short. On the other hand, there is another fundamental aspect of art which assumes here an exceptional importance. This is the conception and execution of a work of art which are personal to the artist, the aspect, that is, of an individual talent, which is able to remain true to the inherently substantive life of Nature no less than the embodiments of spiritual experience though carried to the very limits of contingent condition with which they may be involved, and which is further competent through the vividness of its truth to import a significance into that which is by itself insignificant, no less than by the amazing ability of the technical execution itself. We have consequently to consider here the degree in which the soul, that is, the genius and vitality of the artist, is able to enter into the very being of such objects — whether we consider their dominant idea300, or the purely external form of their appearance — and thus makes them visible in his art to our eyes. And if we look at it from this point of view it will be found impossible to deny that such creations have a genuine claim to the name of art-products.

If we approach such more closely we shall find that among the particular arts poetry and painting are the ones which are most occupied with their subject-matter. For, on the one hand, we see here that it is that which is itself essentially particular which supplies their content, and on the other hand it is the accidental though in this type of art the genuine peculiarities of the objective appearance which is sought for as the mode of the reproduction. Neither the arts of architecture, sculpture, or music are adapted to the fulfilment of such a task.

(α) In poetry it is ordinary domestic life — the main source, that is, of the probity, commonsense spirit, and the morality of everyday301 life — which is presented by art in the usual developments of civic life, in scenes and characters selected from the middle and lower classes. Among the French Diderot stands out conspicuous for the way in which he has thus insisted on natural effects and the imitation of the bluntness of fact. Among Germans it was Goethe and Schiller who, with more lofty aim, struck out a path somewhat similar in their youth, but rather, within this naturalness of life itself and its particular detail, sought after a profounder content and conflicts of essential significance. And in contrast to them we have Kotzebue and Iffland, both of whom, in their several ways, the first with a superficial rapidity of conception and execution, the second with a more conscientious accuracy of detail and a homely kind of morality, gave us the counterfeit of the daily life of their time in the prosaic picture of its more limited aspects, with but a limited sense, either of them, for genuine poetry. And generally, we may say, that it is German art more than any other, and particularly that of our own times, which has fastened with delight on this kind of treatment till it has reached a sort of. virtuosity in it. In fact for a long period back Art was more or less something of a stranger and a guest in our country, not the child of our own loins.

Further, we may observe that in this attraction to the reality that lies actually before us it is essential that the material assimilated by such an art be cognate with such reality and at home in it302; it must be the national life of the poet and his immediate public. It is on this very point of the kind of appropriation suited to an art such as our own, which carried the purpose both in its content and its methods of representation of making us feel at home in it, even to the extent of sacrificing both beauty and ideality, that the impulse originated which led to such a type of artistic production. Other nations have been inclined to reject such material with scorn, or only in more recent times have taken a more vital interest in such opportunities as the ordinary course of human life offers.

(β) If we desire, however, to see what is most worthy of our admiration in such productions, we must turn our attention to the later genre-painting of the Dutch. We have already in the first part of this work, when examining the intrinsic character of the Ideal, indicated, so far as the general spirit of it is concerned, what we take to be the substantial basis of such work303. That contentment in life under its presentment of direct experience down to the most ordinary and most insignificant detail is mainly due to the fact that this people was obliged to work out for itself only after severe struggles and hard labour that which Nature supplies with far less reserve to other peoples. Further, circumscribed as it is by local conditions, it has become great in this very concern for and appreciation of the least things. From another point of view it is a people of fishermen, sailors, citizens, and peasants, and for this reason is forced from the start to rate highly all that may be useful and necessary both in matters of greatest and least importance which it knows how to secure with the most assiduous industry. As a further essential feature of its development the religion of this Dutch folk was Protestantism, and it is an exclusive characteristic of this form of religion that it seeks to find a home in the prose of life and suffers the same to remain just as it is by itself, and independently of religious associations, and to retain its forms of growth in unrestricted freedom. It would be quite impossible for any other nation, situated in other external conditions, to create works of art of such pre-eminent quality from the kind of material which we have placed before us in the Dutch school of painting. And, moreover, despite the peculiar nature of this artistic interest, the Dutch have not by any means discovered their whole life-in what was necessitous or barren in the conditions of their existence and what tended to oppress their vitality: on the contrary, they have reformed their church itself, have overcome a religious despotism precisely as they overcame the world-power and majesty of Spain, and have finally through their exertions, their industry, their bravery and thrift secured for themselves, in the consciousness of their self-attained liberty, prosperity, comfort, rectitude, courage, joviality, nay, even a superabundant sense of the joys of ordinary existence. Herein lies the vindication of the typical subject-matter of their art. The material of such an art will not, however, satisfy that profounder significance which is due to a content that is essentially true. If, however, neither our emotional nor our critical faculties are wholly content with it the more we consider it closely the more we shall feel reconciled to such defects. It is an essential part of the art of painting and the man who paints that they should please and carry us away with that sense of pleasure. And, to put it bluntly, if we would really know what painting is, in looking at any particular canvas we must be, at least, able to say of the master in question: “Ah, this man can paint.” The main point, therefore, does not turn on the question how far the artist in his work is able to give us an exact transcription of the object he presents before us. We have already the completest vision of grapes, flowers, stags, sand-hills, sea, sun, sky, the finery and decoration of ordinary life, horses, warriors, peasants, smokers, teeth-extraction, and every kind of domestic scene. We have only to go to Nature for such things and others like them. What ought to captivate us is not the content in its bare reality. Rather it is the appearance, which in comparison with the object is wholly without interest304. This appearance is, moreover, by itself fixed independently of the beautiful305, and art consists in the mastery of its reproduction of all the mysteries of the ever self-deepening appearance of external phenomena306. And, above all, the function of art consists in this that, armed with an exceptionally fine sense for such things, it lies in ambush for the momentary and wholly transient traits which it finds upon the surrounding world observed in its individual aspects of life, aspects which, however, completely coincide with the universal laws that dominate the appearance, and can retain true and secure the most fading apparition. A tree, a landscape, is something of independent and permanent stability. But to seize upon the flash of a metal, the gleam of light through the grape, a vanishing glance of the moon or the sun, a smile, the expressions of spiritual life which are no sooner seen than they vanish, or ludicrous movements, situations, and attitudes, to master such evanescent material as this is the difficult task of this type of work. If classic art in its Ideal has essentially confined its embodiment to that which is purely substantive so here we have opened to our vision the changes of Nature in their fleeting forms of expression, a stream of water, a waterfall, waves of foam on the sea, still life with the accidental flashes of glass, plate, and things of like nature, the outward appearance of man in the most exceptional situations, a wife, for instance, threading her needle by candle-light, a halt of robbers suddenly surprised, the most instantaneous fraction of some human posture, the smile or sneer of a peasant, all the things, in fact, in which men like Ostade, Teniers, or Steen are masters. It is the triumph of art over the Past, in which the substantive is likewise filched of its power over that which is accidental and transitory.

And just as the appearance simply as such reflects the real content of objects, so we may say that Art, in giving a permanent form to the evanescent show of things, goes a step further. In other words, quite apart from the objective realization, the means adopted in the reproduction are themselves independently an end, in the sense that the individual ability of the artist, and his use of the means his art supplies, may itself rank as one of the objects aimed at by the art product. In quite the early days of the school the artists of the Netherlands studied profoundly the qualities of colour in its relation to material substances307. Van Eyck, Hemling, and Schoreel308 were all of them capable of imitating in the most realistic way the sheen of gold and silver, the varied light effects of jewels, silk, velvet, and fur-stuffs. A mastery of this kind which, by the magic of colour and the mysteries of its enchantment, is able to bring about artistic results so entirely surprising requires no further vindication; it justifies itself. As Spirit in thought and in its grasp of the world by means of ideas and thoughts reproduces itself, so what is most important here is the individual recreation of the external world, independently of the bare object itself, in the sensuous medium, of colours under effects of light and shade. It is in fact a kind of objective music, a system of colour tones. In music the single tone is of no value and only produces the musical effect in its relation to some other, in its opposition, concord, modulation, and unison. It is precisely the same thing with the music of colour. If we consider the appearance of painted colour closely such as the gleam of gold or the flash from the steel of battle we shall only see a number of white or yellow dashes, points, coloured surfaces. The single colour alone does not possess this gleam which we gather from the picture. It is only by its association with other tints that we get the effect of glitter and flash. Take for example the Atlas of Terburg; every individual strip of colour here alone is simply a dull gray, more or less whitish, bluish, or inclining to yellow: only when we take in the entire effect from a distance, which gives us the relative contrast of each part to the rest, dawns upon us the beautiful soft sheen which is true of the genuine Atlas. And it is just the same with our velvet effect, play of light, exhalation of cloud and so on through all pictorial effect whatsoever. It is not so much the reflex of the artist’s mood309, which, as is no doubt frequently the case with landscape, transfers itself to the objects delineated, as it is the entire ability of the artist, which seeks to make itself felt in this objective way as the use of the means at his disposal in such a vital interaction that they themselves straightway of their own cunning bring to birth a world of objects.

(γ) And consequently the interest in the objects delineated tends to revert to the fact that it is the unique powers of the artist himself which are thus consciously displayed, and for which the embodiment of a work of art, independently complete and self-composed, is not of so much importance as a production in which the creative artist unveils to us simply his genius. In so far as this personal aspect is no longer concerned with the external means of presentation but affects the content itself of the work, the art becomes thereby the art of caprice and humour.

(b) The Humour of Personality310

In humour it is the personality of the artist, which so reproduces itself both in its particular idiosyncrasies and profounder content, that the main thing of importance is the spiritual value of this personality.

(α) Inasmuch as humour does not so much propose to itself the task of unfolding and informing an objective content according to its own essential character, and, by artistic means, of articulating and rounding it off in such a self-evolved process, as it consists in the artist’s own self-manifestation in the material, he will be mainly concerned to let everything which tends to become an object and to secure the rigid lines of reality, or which appears in the external world, fall away and dissolve under the powerful solvent of his own fancies, flashes of thought and arresting modes of conception. By this means every appearance of self-subsistency in such a content, the embodiment of which is secured in its coalescence through means of a given fact, is entirely destroyed, and the product is now simply a play with certain objects, a derangement or a turning upside down of a given material, the enterprise of a rover throughout such, the interwoven woof of the artist’s own expression; views and moods, through which he gives free scope to himself quite as much as to his immediate subject-matter.

(β) The illusion which readily springs from such a type of art consists in this, that though it is a very easy matter to make either oneself or the object given the butt of drollery and wit, and for this reason the form of humorous composition is that frequently adopted, yet quite as often as not we find that the humour is dull enough when our artist gives free rein to any chance conceits or jest which may occur, which in their loose and patchy connections range to excess beyond all reasonable limits, and with intentional eccentricity bind up frequently together the most alien matter. Some nations have proved themselves indulgent to such artistic experiments, others are more severe. Among the French such attempts at humorous composition have not as a rule been successful; we Germans have done better, and we are more tolerant to the defects of such a style. Jean Paul, for instance, is a much admired humourist among us; and yet it would be difficult to point to any writer who is more eccentric in the way he brings to the common fund what is most remote from his subject, and patches together an incredibly motley assemblage of subjects, whose sole bond of relationship is one of the artist’s own fancy. The story, the matter and progress of events are the features of least interest in his romances. The main attraction throughout is the sportive procession of his humour which uses everything in its course as a means to establish his own triumph as a humourist. In this subordination to itself and concatenation of every conceivable stuff that can be raked out of the four quarters of the world, or the realm of the real, the material of humour approximates once more to that of symbolism, wherein significance and conformity likewise are disjoined, with this difference, however, that in the former it is purely the personality of the poet which commands the material no less than the significance, co-ordinating them according to his own caprice311. Such a series of freaks and fancies soon tires us, more particularly when we are expected to live as best we can in the not unfrequently barely decipherable combinations which have passed somehow or another in the clouds of the poet’s brain. With Jean Paul, as with scarce another, one metaphor, sally of wit, drollery, or simile proves the death of its neighbour. Nothing grows; there is an explosion, that is all. A plot, however, which purports to have a dénouement must first be unfolded and prepared for such solution. From another point of view, when the artist in question is essentially devoid of the solid core and support of a mind and heart overflowing with the real actualities of existence, his humour very readily lapses into what is sentimental and morbid. And in this respect Jean Paul is no less an example.

(γ) In a humour of the best kind, which keeps itself aloof from such excrescences, we must therefore have a genuinely spiritual depth and wealth, able to exalt that which issues as the emanation of a personality to the rank of real expression, and capable of making that which is truly substantive arise from that which the chance suggestions, the mere caprices of the artist, dictate. The self-abandonment of the poet in the course of his exposition must be, as it is with humourists such as Sterne or Hippel, a wholly unembarrassed, easy-going, scarce perceptible kind of saunter312, which, insignificant though it appear, manages precisely by that means to strike at the root of the main idea; and, for the reason that what thus bubbles up in haphazard fashion are matters of detail, it is essential that the conception, which binds the whole ideally together, should have the deeper foundation, and that such detail should simply flash forth the focal spark of genius.

We have now arrived at the point where romantic art itself for the present terminates. It is the standpoint of our most modern outlook, whose distinctive characteristic we shall find to be mainly this, that the individual personality313 of the artist stands supreme above both the material he informs and his creation. He is no longer dominated by the conditions of an essentially restricted sphere, in which he must accept as given both the content and form of his work; it now lies in his power to choose either as he wills, and to retain both on similar terms.

Art, in so far as it has hitherto been the subject of our inquiry, had for its fundamental basis the unity of significance and form, and, as a further type of it, the unity of the personality of the artist with the work he embodies and creates313. More closely defined we may say that it was the specific type of this union, which supplied the content and its appropriate artistic presentment with the substantive and directive principle running through all the images therein.

We found at the commencement of our inquiry with reference to the origins of art that in the Eastern world Spirit was not as yet independently free. It still sought that which it conceived to be the Absolute in the domain of Nature, and apprehended the natural as itself essentially Divine. At a further stage the outlook of classical art set before itself the vision of the Greek Pantheon as unconstrained and inspired beings, but still in all essential features formed as our humanity, as individuals charged with a positive physical process314. Finally it was romantic art which first permitted Spirit to penetrate the depths of its own world, in contrast to which flesh, the external reality and frame of this world generally, albeit the fact that the spiritual and absolute could alone manifest itself in this world, in the first instance was divested of all claim to reality315, but for all that afterwards asserted such a positive claim with increasing strength and urgency.

(α) These distinctive views of the world process constitute religion, the substantive Spirit or genius of peoples and eras; they not merely influence art, but are threads of life which permeate every other domain or province of the living present to which they belong. As every man, in every sphere of activity, whether it be on the field of politics, religion, art, or science, is a child of his own age, and receives the task to elaborate the essential content and consequently the inevitable plastic form of that age, so, too, the aim that determines the content of art is no other than that of finding in its own medium and resources some adequate expression for the spirit of a nation. So long as the artist is in immediate identity and unshaken faith inextricably one with the determinate content of such a view of the world and the religion where it culminates, to that extent this content and the mode of its presentation will call forth his most serious powers; in other words this content remains for him the infinite substance and truth of his own consciousness, a content, with which he lives, down to the inmost recesses of his spiritual nature, in original unity; and, moreover, the embodied presence in which he reveals the same is for him as such an artist316 the final, necessary, and highest type of such a form, namely that of bringing before the aesthetic sense the absolute being317 and the ideal significance318 of the subject-matter of his art. It is through that aspect of his material which is no other than his own immanent substance319 that he finds that which binds him to the specific mode of his exposition. For the material, and with it the form that appertains to it, carries the artist directly into himself320, as being the real essence of his determinate being, which he does not imagine but rather actually is, and consequently has only to make this essential part of him an objective fact to himself, to conceive and elaborate such in a vital form from his own resources. Only under such conditions is the enthusiasm of the artist fully awakened for either the content or manifestation of his art; only thus his creations become no mere product of caprice, but spring up within him, out of him, out of this living field of his substance, this spiritual capital, whose content never ceases to be active, until, through the efforts of the master, it has attained a defined form adequate to its own ideal notion. When, however, we of to-day would seek to make a Greek god or, as our own Protestants try to do, a Virgin Mary the object of a piece of sculpture or a picture, it is impossible for us to treat such a material with entire seriousness. It is the faith of our inmost heart which fails us here, albeit even in ages of absolute belief the artist was by no means necessarily what is commonly understood as a pious mart, any more than at any time artists generally come in an exceptional sense under that category. The demand is rather simply this that in the view of the artist his content should be no other than the substantive significance, the most spiritual truth of its own conscious life, and that it should unfold the necessary laws of its mode of presentation. For an artist is, in his creative activity, a child of Nature; his ability is in one aspect a talent he receives from her. His method of working is not the pure activity of rational apprehension, which places itself in direct opposition to its material, and unites with it in the medium of free thoughts and pure thinking. Rather, as one not yet released from the natural aspect, it321 coalesces immediately with the object, in full faith, and is identical with it heart and soul. The artistic personality reposes frankly in the object, the work of art proceeds in like manner absolutely from the unimpaired spiritual depth and power of genius; the product is ferme, unwavering, and its entire intensive effect preserved. And this it is which supplies the fundamental condition of the final demand that Art be presented us in its flawless totality.

(β) The situation, however, has entirely changed in view of the position we have been forced to indicate as that occupied by Art in this its final stage of evolution. We have, however, no reason to regard this simply as a misfortune which the chance of events has made inevitable, one, that is to say, by which art has been overtaken through the pressure of the times, the prosaic outlook and the dearth of genuine interests. Rather it is the realization and progress of art itself, which, by envisaging for present life the material in which it actually dwells, itself materially assists on this very path, in each step of its advance, to make itself free of the content that is presented. In the very fact that we have an object set before our ocular or spiritual vision, whether it be by Art or the medium of Thought, with a completeness which practically exhausts it, so that we have emptied it, and nothing further remains for our eyes to discover or our souls to explore, in that alone the vital interest disappears. Our interest only continues where our faculties are kept fresh and alive. Spirit only concerns itself actively with objects so long as there is still a mystery unsolved, a something unrevealed. And this is so so long as the material remains identical with our own substance. A time comes, however, when Art has displayed, in all their many aspects, these fundamental views of the world, which are involved in its own notion, no less than every province of the content that is bound up with such world-views: when that time arrives such art is necessarily cast loose of that which has been its previous specific content for any particular people or age; in such a case the renewed craving for material to work upon only fully awakes when it is accepted as inevitable that we must first bid farewell to all that its activity has previously substantiated: just as in Greece, for example, Aristophanes opposed a resolute face to his age, and Lucian to the entire historical Past of his country; or in Italy and Spain, in the decline of the Middle Ages, both Ariosto and Cervantes opened the attack on Chivalry.

In opposition to the age, then, in which the artist, by virtue of the concrete content of his nationality and times, stands within a definite outlook upon the world and its modes of embodiment, we become aware of a point of view diametrically antagonistic, which, so far as its complete enunciation is concerned, has only in the most modern times received its due significance. It is only in our own days that we find the artist no less than the man of science among pretty nearly all civilized nations, has mastered the cultivation of his reflective faculty, the art of criticism, and among us Germans the absolute freedom of thought, and has made this critical apparatus, both relatively to the material and the form of its production, having already run through all the necessary phases or types of romantic art, a kind of tabula rasa.322 The specific mode of association for any particular context, and a manner of presentment exclusively pertinent to that and no other material, are things which the artist of to-day looks upon as obsolete. Art has become a free instrument which is qualified to exercise itself relatively to every content, no matter what kind it may be, agreeably to the principles or criteria of the artist’s own peculiar craftsmanship. The artist stands superior to all specific modes and conformations, however much hallowed in the usage, and moves forward free and independent, untrammelled by either form or presentment such as previously have brought before man’s vision and mind the one holy and eternal substance. No content, no form is any longer identical directly with the inmost soul of the artist323, his nature, his unaware324 and substantive essence; every material he may treat with indifference, if he only keep true to the formal principle that he make his work consonant with beauty and a really artistic execution. There is, in short, no material nowadays which we can place on its own independent merits as superior to this law of relativity; and even if there is one thus sublimely placed beyond it there is at least no absolute necessity that it should be the object of artistic presentation. For these reasons the artist is situated relatively to the content of his work much as the dramatist who places before us and develops other and alien characters. It is quite true that even our poet of to-day interposes the atmosphere of his genius within his delineations, and the warp that he weaves is in fact that of his own substance; but this only applies to what is universal there or wholly accidental. The closer traits of individualization are not his own, but rather he makes use of in this respect his stores of images, modes of metaphor, earlier types of art, which by themselves he does not care for, and whose significance is exclusively dependent on the fact that they turn out to be the most suitable for this or that matter in hand. In most of the arts, and particularly in the plastic types, the subject-matter is, apart from this, supplied from outside to the artist. He works to order, and when occupied with whatever tales, scenes, and portraits thus come in his way, whether sacred or profane, has merely to look to it that he can make something out of them. For, however much he leaves the impress of his genius on a given content, it remains throughout for all that a material which is not itself directly the substance of his own conscious life. Nor is it of any real assistance to him, that he further appropriates, so to speak, with his soul and substance views of the world that belong to the Past, in other words, tries to root himself in one of such, and, let us say, turns Roman Catholic, as not a few have done in recent times for Art’s sake, in order to give their soul some secure foundation, and enable the definite lines of their artistic product to become themselves something which shall appear to have an independently valid growth. It is not a prime condition of the artistic state that the artist should come completely to terms with his own soul, or should be obliged to look after his own salvation. What is important is that his soul in its greatness and freedom should from the first, before it thinks of creating, both know and possess that whereof it is, should stand fast by it and reliant within it; and, above all, is it indispensable that the spirit and mind of the great artist of to-day should have a liberal education, one in which every kind of superstition and belief which remains limited to circumscribed forms of outlook and presentment, should receive their proper subordination as merely aspects or phasal moments of a larger process; aspects which the free human spirit has already mastered when it once for all sees that they can furnish it with no conditions of exposition and creative effort which are, independently for their own sake, sacrosanct; and only ascribes to them value in virtue of the loftier content, which itself, as creator and worker, he reposes in them, making them thus what they ought to be325.

It is somewhat in this way nowadays that any and every form and material may prove of service to and under the control of the artist whose executive talents and genius have been liberated in their independence from the former limitation to a specific mode of artistic work.

(γ) If we ask, then, in conclusion what are the content and the modes which may be considered peculiar to the present sphere of our inquiry, the result will be approximately as follows.

The universal types of art were pre-eminently related to the absolute truth to which Art attains, and they discovered the source of their differentiation in the specific grasp they respectively supplied of that which passed for the Absolute in the human consciousness, and which itself carried the principle of its manner of embodiment. In this respect we have already seen in symbolism Nature’s significances pass before us as content, and her facts and human personification as the mode of presentation; similarly in the classical type, we have passed in review spiritual individuality, but as bodily presence which carried no memory with it326, and over which the abstract necessity of Fate stood paramount. In the romantic the intellectual being of the personal consciousness was asserted inherent in its own substance, and for the inmost content of which the external form remained entirely contingent. In this concluding type as in the earlier ones the object of art was the Divine in its explicitly unfolded nature. This Divine had however to make itself an object, to define itself, and in the process to pass from its own immediate substance to the secular content of the personal consciousness. In the first instance the infinite essence of personality was reposed in honour, love, and fidelity; after that in the particular individuality, the specific character which happened to coalesce with the particular mode of human life in question. This coalescence, together with the specific limitation of content appropriate to such, was finally put an end to by humour, which proved itself capable of dissolving or making pliable to its purpose any or every line of stable definition, and by so doing made it possible for art to transcend its own limitations. In this passing away of Art beyond itself, however, Art is quite as truly the return of man upon himself, a descent into his own soul-depths, by which process art strips off from itself every secure barrier set up by a determinate range of content and conception, and unfolds within our common humanity327 its new holy of holies, in other words the depths and heights of the human soul simply, the universal shared of all men in joy and suffering, in endeavour, action, and destiny. From this point onwards it is from himself that the artist receives his content, is in truth the Spirit of man assigning to himself his own boundaries, contemplating, experiencing and giving utterance to the infinitude of his emotions and situations, a spirit to which nothing is any more alien which can possibly emanate as life from the human soul. A content of this nature is one which cannot persist under the defined modes of art independent and apart from the activity of the artist. Rather the definition of content and its elaboration is transferred by it to the caprice of his invention. But, despite of this, it excludes no vital interest, because Art is no longer under constraint to represent that, and only that, which is completely at home in one of its specific grades. Everything is now possible as its subject-matter, in which man, on whatever plane of life he may be, possesses either the need or the capacity of making his abode.

Confronted with a material of such a wide range and multiplicity, it is above all of first importance that in respect to the mode of artistic treatment the Spirit that is now active in our present life should throughout declare itself as such. Our modern artist may no doubt join the company of ancients and elders. It is a fine thing to be one of the Homerides, though we stand last of the line; pictures, too, that reflect for us once again the atmosphere of romantic art in the Middle Ages will have a worth of their own. But this universal sufficiency, depth, and unique suitability of a given material such as we above described is another thing altogether, and equally so its mode of presentation. Neither Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Ariosto, nor Shakespeare can reappear in our times. What has been sung so greatly, what has been expressed with such freedom, has been sung and expressed once for all. Only the Present blows fresh; all else is faded and more faded. In the matter of history we must fain make it something of a reproach to the French, and we may add to it a criticism on the score of beauty, that they have presented on their stage Greek and Roman heroes, Chinese, and Peruvians as so many French princes and princesses, and moreover have given them the motives and views peculiar to the age of Louis XIV or Louis XV. Yet, after all, had these very motives and opinions only been intrinsically deeper and more beautiful than they are we should have had little fault to find in the fact that the Past is here translated into Art’s present life. On the contrary all material whatsoever, it matters not from what age or nation it hails, only retains its truth for art as part of this vital and actual Present, in which it floods the human heart with the reflected image of its own life, and brings truth home to man’s senses and mind. It is just this revelation and renewed activity of that humanity which is immortal in all its varied significance and infinite reconstruction, which, in this its receptacle of human situations and emotions, forms the possible no less than the absolute content of the art of our time.

If we now take a glance back, having established in a general way the content which distinguishes the subject-matter of this portion of our inquiry, at that which we finally considered to be the modes of romantic art’s dissolution, we may recall the fact that we then defined them under a term applicable to all, as the falling to pieces of Art, a process which, in one of its aspects, was due to an imitation of the objects of Nature in all the detail of their contingent appearance, and in another was referable to humour, that unfettered activity of the individual soul in all its capricious mastery. In conclusion, we may still draw attention to a further way of fixing on our minds that terminus of romantic art without prejudice to our previous remarks upon it. In other words, just as in our advance from symbolism to classical art, we considered the transitional forms of image, simile, and epigram, we have also here in romantic art a form somewhat similar worthy of attention. In those previous modes of conception the important thing was the falling asunder of the spiritual significance and the external form, a severation which in part was cancelled by the activity of the artist’s own mind, and in the exceptional case of the epigram could possibly be converted into complete identity. Romantic art was from the beginning the profounder disunion of that inmost soul-life which finds its satisfaction in its own wealth, which, moreover, for the reason that generally the objective world does not completely satisfy the demand of Spirit essentially as such, persisted in its discordance with or indifference to it. This opposition in the evolution of romantic art finally led us perforce to the point where we found that the interest was exclusively centered on the contingent aspects of externality, or the equally capricious activity of the soul. When, however, this exclusive attention to either side, whether it be the externality or purely personal presentment, agreeably to the main principle of romantic art, is carried so far that it becomes a real penetration of the soul within the object, and the aspect of humour in its relation to the object and its embodiment within the sphere of its own individual reaction328 assumes a real importance, in that case we are face to face with what is a coalescence329 with the object, and is nothing less than an objective humour. Such a coalescence, however, can only be of limited range, and find expression merely, say, within a lyric, or at most in but a portion of a larger composition. For if its boundaries widened, and it was carried throughout the object-matter in question, it would necessarily become identical with the action and event, become, in short, a completely objective representation. What we have to consider here is rather a sensitive self-abandonment of the artist’s soul in his object, which no doubt is unfolded in some kind of process, but nevertheless remains a movement of the imagination and heart indicative rather of individual genius; a caprice in some sort, and yet not entirely capricious or intentional, but rather a sympathetic expansion of the artist’s genius, which devotes itself solely to its subject-matter, and makes it exclusively its interest and content.

We may usefully compare with such a spirit the last blooms of the ancient Greek epigram, in which this type appears in its first and simplest features. The mode we have here in our mind is in the first instance apparent when the reference to the object is not a mere statement of fact, is not merely an inscription or transcript which states what the object is, but is associated with a deeper emotion, a sleight of witticism, an ingenious fancy, or a real flash of imaginative power, any or all of which through their poetical grasp give life to and expand the minutest detail. Poems of this description, it matters little what their subject-matter may be, whether a tree, a mill-stream, spring, dead things or alive, are of infinite variety and may be found in the literature of all nations. They are, however, a subordinate grade of poetry, and very readily come off halting. For at least in a country of cultivated speech and reflection there are few objects and conditions, indeed, which will not offer some further link of association to every man. And just as the average man thinks himself qualified to write a letter he will rate his capacity to express such ideas. One is very easily tired of a universal spirit of sing-song such as this, even though a stray novelty of touch may be here and there thrown in. The importance of such a class of composition, therefore, depends almost entirely on the question how far the artist’s soul, with its full intensity of life, and with a spiritual and intellectual wealth that is both profound and extensive, has without reserve entered vitally into such conditions, situations, and so forth; has made a home there, and from the object in question created something unseen before, something beautiful, something essentially worth our attention.

To this end the Persians and Arabians pre-eminently in the oriental splendour of their images, in the unfettered enjoyment of their imagination, which enters into the being of its subject-matter in the purest spirit of contemplation, offer, even for present times and our own intensity of spiritual penetration, a glorious exemplar. Both the Spaniards and Italians, too, have done excellent things in the same direction. It is true that Klopstock says of Petrarch:

— Laura besang Petrarca in Liedern,

Zwar dem Bewunderer schön, aber dem Liebenden nicht330.

but Klopstock’s own love-odes are themselves full of moral reflections, troubled yearning and passion that is for ever writhing after immortality of happiness. What we admire most in Petrarch is the free atmosphere of essentially noble emotion, which, however much it expresses the longing for the beloved, can none the less repose on its own heart. For this kind of longing, indeed sensual desire itself, is far from being absent in the range of the art we now are considering, when the subject is restricted to wine and love, the tavern and the glass; the excessive voluptuousness of the images of Persian writers themselves are in fact an illustration of this; but in this case the imagination, in the interest it possesses for the intelligence, removes the object entirely from the sphere of desire which has a practical aim. It possesses an interest merely in the realm of its own exuberant activity, finding its delight freely in its own countless freaks and fancies, and making joys and griefs alike the subject of its sport Among our modern poets the two who preeminently combine a similar buoyancy of genius with a more intimate and spiritually searching depth of imagination are Goethe in his “Westöstlicher Divan” and Rückert. The essential contrast between Goethe’s poetry in the “Divan” and his more early efforts is quite remarkable. In his “Welcome and Farewell,” for instance, the language and description are no doubt fine in their way, true feeling is there. In other respects the situation is commonplace, the climax is poor, and of imagination in the full and free sense there is no further trace. The poem in the “Divan” entitled “Recovery”331 is composed in a totally different spirit. Love is here wholly absorbed in the imagination, and the movement, happiness, and bliss of the latter are throughout predominant. And, to speak generally of artistic productions of this class, we may affirm that we find in them no personal craving, no indications of enamourment, no mere desire, but a pure delight in the objects delineated, an inexhaustible self-absorption of imagination, an innocent play, a free surrender to the coquettish humours even of rhyme and ingenious versification; and withal an intense jubilation of the soul in its own free movement, a spirit, which, by means of this very exhilaration induced by artistic form332 lifts the soul high above all its painful perplexity into the ordered limits of the real.

And here we must close our consideration of the particular types according to which the Ideal of art throughout its process is self-differentiated. We have made these several modes the subject of a more extensive inquiry, with a view to unfolding the content of the same, a content from which the proper modes of artistic presentment are themselves also deducible. For in Art, too, as in all other human production, it is the content which is finally decisive. In fact Art, if we consider the true notion of it, has one and only one supreme function. It has to set forth in adequate form, within the grasp of our actual senses, what is itself essential content; and the Philosophy of Art should consequently regard it as its main business to comprehend in Thought what this abundance of content and its beautiful mode of manifestation verily is.

256 Subjektivität.

257 Für andere, that is for other spiritual beings than the absolute Spirit as such.

258 Die Innigkeit.

259 Aus dem Innern exzeugten.

260 Sich in sich hineinbildend. That is by continually supplying new modes to the subjective spiritual content — until we arrive at the almost purely spiritual mode of music.

261 Die innere Auflösung.

262 The phenomenal world of Nature.

263 Die Verwickelungen.

264 Die Abentheuerlichkeit. Hegel means that it is like the result of an adventure — unforeseen rather than “fantastic.”

265 Ein individuelles Subjekt.

266 That which supplies its own justification.

267 Lit., unenclosed, that is open indefinitely and so undefined, unsounded.

268 That is, it is open to extraneous causes that cannot be predicted from the mere essential notion of them.

269 I presume this is the meaning of the expression das Aussergöttliche and das partikulär Menschliche.

270 Pralle — stiff, metallic in its steeply rigidity.

271 Act I, sc. 5.

272 Miserabilität. One of Hegel’s own coinage.

273 An unknown work to me.

274 Ein inneres Werden.

275 One is reminded of the Mohammedan fatalism. It is Allah.

276 In einfacher Gedrungenheit. Hegel means that it is tightly self-sealed, that and nothing more.

277 Hineingelegtseyn. The reference of the whole being to one object.

278 This was the representation which took place in Berlin in 1820, with Mademoiselle Erelinger as Juliet.

279 List, usually in depreciatory sense, here otherwise.

280 With the exception, of course, of her presumed father Prospero.

281 That is, a poetry based rather on the reflective faculty than the creative imagination.

282

“He saw it plunge, drink boldly,

Then sink in sea-depths lost;

And what his eyes saw loosed him,

No drop the king drank more.”

283 Lebensläufe in aufsteigender Linie.

284 In sich totales, unbeschränktes Gemüth. The expressions would appear to contradict one another, but the emphasis is on the unity of a whole which is itself not fully defined.

285 It is not so much a third type as a way of looking at the previous ones.

286 It is contingent, of course, to the individual. Hegel does not mean that it is without causality.

287 The sphere of objective fact.

288 From Nature, that is.

289 Ihres inneren Verlaufs. I suppose Hegel means action under the aspect in which it forms a part of the individual development — regarded in its relation to will and consciousness.

290 That is, the Christian community.

291 Den Menschen als Menschheit, that is in his generally secular aspect.

292 I presume this is the sense of gebrochen here. But lower down it would mean apparently discordant.

293 By “fantastic” Hegel seems to me to mean that which is based on a fancy or imagination that is wholly personal to the artist, and so adventitious in its results.

294 Sicheres Gemüth— “consistent” both in its literal and metaphorical senses — one that holds together and is thus self-assured.

295 Das Romanhafte. I cannot think of an English expression which exactly corresponds.

296 Sich schrauben, like the winding smoke from a bottle — the corkscrew — ironical of course.

297 One of the finest illustrations of such a universality of interest may be found in Ruskin’s description of Tintoret’s “Adoration of the Magi.”

298 Genialität and genial mean a good deal more than our English words geniality and genial — they refer directly to genius.

299 Das in sich Nothwendige. The reference is mainly to the stricter principles of classical art.

300 Nach ihrer ganzen Inneren.

301 Lit., “Which possesses for its substantial content (Substanz) the integrity (Rechtschaffenheit), world-wisdom (here I think no more is meant than “good sense”) and the morale of daily life (des Tages).”

302 Lit., “That the material, so far as art appropriates it, be immanent and at home in that reality.” Immanent must I think refer back to die vorliegende Werklichkeit.

303 Vol. I, pp. 229, 230.

304 That is it has no interest quâ a natural object.

305 Scheinen must mean here natural rather than artistic appearance. Natural appearance is not necessarily beautiful.

306 Des sick in sich vertiefenden Scheinens. It is self-deepening in proportion to the feiner Sinn below mentioned.

307 I think this is the meaning of the expression das Physikalische der Farbe — not so much the material constituents of colour as the effect of colour on physical substances. But either interpretation makes sense.

308 An artist unknown to me.

309 Gemüth. I think Hegel uses the word here in the narrower sense rather than “soul” generally.

310 Der subjektive Humor.

311 Lit., “And arranges them side by side in an alien order.” That is, under a principle of co-ordination which does not lie in the subject-matter.

312 Unscheinbares Fortschlendern.

313 Die Subjektivität des Kunstlers. The expression as used here and below implies, of course, not so much the formal personality or character as the individual spirit and its resources.

314 I presume this is the meaning of von einem affirmativen Momente.

315 Lit., “Was at first posited as naught.”

316 That is, as an artist for whom it is wahrhafter Ernst.

317 Das Absolute here is, I think, referable to the subject-matter of art rather than to be taken as “the Absolute” simply.

318 Die Seele. Perhaps “vital principle” would be better.

319 That is, Spirit or mind.

320 There is an uncorrected misprint here, der should be den and tragen would be an improvement on trägt.

321 I am not certain whether the subject is here the artist himself, or his mode of working. The context would suggest the latter, the better sense the former.

322 Reflection has destroyed the necessity of any particular form.

323 That is the life of Spirit. Das Heilige und Ewige.

324 Bewusstlosen. His spiritual nature in its unexplored universality is, I presume, the sense.

325 Als ihnen gemäss. As adequate to their completely explicit nature.

326 Aber als leibliche unerinnerte Gegenwart. I am not sure that I know precisely the sense here, unless it amounts to this that the Greek gods were without an historical memory. Their immortality swallowed up in its repose the sense of beings in time, and assumed to be in human bodily shape.

327 Zu ihrem neuen Heiligen den Humanus macht, an uncommon phrase.

328 Innerhalt seines subjektiven Reflexes. That is, the synthetic activity of humour’s reflection.

329 Verinnigung, a stronger word than Vereinigung.

330 “Petrarch sang songs of his Laura. To him who wonders at beautiful songs they are beautiful, to the lover they are not so.”

331 “Wiederfinden.”

332 I am not quite sure that die Heiterkeit des Gestaltens does not mean “the buoyancy of the created form.”

THIRD PART

THE SYSTEM OF THE PARTICULAR ARTS

INTRODUCTION

THE OBJECTS TREATED by our science in the first part were the general notion and the reality of beauty in Nature and art, in other words beauty in its truth, and art in its truth, the Ideal in the as yet undeveloped unity of its fundamental principles, independent of its specific content and its distinguishing modes of envisagement.

This essentially genuine1 unity of the beautiful in art, in the second place, unfolded itself within its own resources in a totality of art-forms, whose determinate structure defined at the same time the content which the art-spirit was impelled to fashion from itself in an essentially articulate system of manifestations of beauty under which the Divine and human is envisaged to the world.

What still is absent from both these spheres is the reality that is present within the elementary substance of the external phenomenon itself. For although both in our examination of the Ideal as such, and in that of the specific modes of symbolic, classical, and romantic art, we throughout referred to the relation or complete mediation which obtains between the significance conceived as an ideal principle and its embodiment in the external or phenomenal materia, yet this realization merely retained its validity as that which was still exclusively the ideal art-activity in the sphere of general world-impressions2 of beauty, in and through which it is diffused. Inasmuch, however, as the fundamental conception of beautiful implies, that it make itself objective for the immediate vision, that is to say for the senses and sensuous perception as an external work of art, so that what is beautiful becomes only then itself through such a definite form appropriate to itself explicitly united with the beautiful and the Ideal, we have in the third place to review this territory of the art-product as actually self-realized in the entirely sensuous medium. For it is only through this final configuration that the work of art is truly concrete, an individual entity which is at once real, self-contained, and singular. The Ideal can only constitute the content of this third sphere of our aesthetic philosophy for the reason that it is the idea of the beautiful, in the collective totality of all its world presentments, which is thus self-realized in objective form3. For this reason the art-product is still, even up to this point, to be conceived as a totality articulated in itself, nevertheless as an organism, whose organic parts, which — while in the second part of our inquiry they were differentiated under a collective concept of essentially disparate world-aspects — now fall asunder as isolated members, every one of which becomes independently a self-subsistent whole, and in this singularity is capable of bringing into display the totality of the different art-types. Essentially and in accordance with its notion it is quite true that the collective result of this new reality of art belongs to one single totality. Inasmuch, however, as it is a portion of the realm of the sensuous4 present, in which the same is made real to itself, the Ideal is now resolved into its phasal states as a process5, and confers on them an independent and self-subsistent stability, albeit they are capable of coming into juxtaposition, essential relation, and reciprocal reintegration with one another. And this real world of art is the system of the separate arts. Just as then the particular types of art, regarded throughout as totality, expose intrinsically a process, an evolution, that is, of the symbolical to the classical and romantic types, we find also, on the one hand, a similar advance in the particular arts, in so far as it is the very art-types themselves which receive their determinate existence through these specific arts. From another point of view, however, the particular arts have also themselves within them a process, a progression, independently of the art-types to which they attach an objective reality, a process which in this its more abstract relation is common to all. Every art possesses its spring-time of perfected elaboration as art, and on the one side or the other a history that precedes or follows this period of full-bloom. For the products of the arts collectively are spiritual products, and consequently are not at once to hand in their own specialized province respectively, as are the forms of Nature, but are subject to a beginning, progression, completion, and termination, a growth, a blooming, and a decay.

These more abstract differences, whose devolution we propose at the very commencement of our inquiry briefly to indicate, since it asserts itself equally in all the arts, are identical with that which it is usual to define under the name of rigorous, ideal, and approved style, when indicating the specific styles of art in each case, which are mainly related to the general mode of embodiment and representation, partly as considered in its external shape, and its possession or lack of spontaneity, its simplicity, its surfeit of detail, briefly in all its various aspects, according to which the definition of the content emerges in the external appearance; partly no less in its aspect of the technical elaboration of its sensuous material, in which the art in question gives determinate existence to its content.

It is a common assumption that art finds its beginnings in what is devoid of complexity and is natural. In a certain sense, no doubt, we may accept this as true. In other words what is rude and barbarous is without question, when contrasted with the genuine spirit of art, something both nearer to Nature and less complex. What is, however, natural, vital, and simple in art, regarded as fine art, is something quite different to this. All beginnings which are merely simple and natural, in the sense of uncouthness, do not as yet belong to the province of art and the beautiful at all as, for example, in the case where children scrawl simple figures, and with a few formless strokes would indicate thereby a human form, a horse, and so forth. Beauty, considered as a spiritual product, demands even from the start an elaborate technique, implies a long series of experiment and practice. Simplicity, when we refer to it as the simplicity of the beautiful, its ideal proportions, is rather a result, which only succeeds in overcoming the variety, medley, confusion, excess and incumbrance of its matter, and in concealing and effacing its preparatory studies, after much mediating work, so that at last Beauty, with all its unfettered spontaneity, appears to us as though liberated in one cast6. What we find here is very analogous to the behaviour of a man of education, who, in all that he says and does, moves simply, spontaneously, and with ease, albeit he did not by any means start in the possession of such simple spontaneity, but rather has only secured such as the result of a thorough self-training.

For this reason it is no less in accordance with the nature of the fact than it is with the actual course of history that art in its beginnings rather presents us the appearance of artificiality and clumsiness, running largely into incidental detail, and generally overloaded with the elaboration of drapery and the environment of its subject-matter; and precisely in the degree that this external material is more compact and multifarious, to that extent that which is really expressive is reduced to its baldest terms; in other words what is truly the free and vital expression of Spirit in its forms and motion is that which is here least in evidence.

In this respect consequently the primitive and most ancient art-products in all the particular arts are the vehicle of a content that is essentially most abstract, such as simple tales in poetry, theogonies effervescent with abstract thoughts and their incomplete elaboration, single objects of sacred association in stone and wood and so forth, and the representation remains unaccommodating, monotonous or confused, stiff and dry. More especially in plastic art the facial expression is insipid with a repose which does not so much express spirituality in its essential penetration as a purely animal emptiness, or conversely is remorseless and exaggerated in its emphasis on characteristic traits. In the same way the bodily forms and their motion are devoid of life, the arms, for example, are glued to the body, the legs are not divided, or are clumsily moved, or in angular and constrained modes; and in other respects such figures are ill-shaped, suffer from narrow compression, or are excessively lank and extended. On the other hand we find that much more devotion and industry is spent upon accessories such as drapery, hair, weapons, and ornaments of a similar nature; the folds of the drapery remain wooden and independent, without being able to accommodate themselves to the limbs, just as we may often see for ourselves in images of the Virgin and saints of early times, where they are in part run together in monotonous regularity, and in part are continually broken up in harsh corners, not flowing freely in their lines, but scattered about with diffuseness over too wide a surface. And in the same way the first attempts at poetry are full of breaks, devoid of connection, monotonous, dominated in an abstract way by one idea or emotion, or elsewhere wild, violent, the particular being obscurely assimilated, and the whole as yet not bound together in a secure and ideal organic unity.

It is only, however, after such preparatory work as the above that the style which is the main subject of our present inquiry commences with what is truly genuine fine art. In this it is no doubt in the first instance at the same time still austere, but already moderated with more beauty in its severity. This severe style is the more lofty abstraction of the beautiful, which comes to a stop with that which is of real importance, expresses and reproduces the same in its broad outlines, still disdains all amiability and grace, suffers the main subject-matter alone to assert itself, and pre-eminently expends very little industry and elaboration on what is incidental. And in doing so, this severe style also still adheres to the imitation of that which is immediately given to sense. In other words, just as, in regard to content, it takes its stand, so far as ideas and representation are concerned, in what is given it, in the tradition, for example, of a revered religion, so also, to take the opposite point of view, namely, that of external form, it will merely render assured the fact itself, and not its own invention. It is, in short, satisfied with the general broad effect that is educed from the fact, and follows in expression closely upon the growth and definite existence of this. In the same way everything that is accidental is held aloof from this type of style, in order that the caprice and spontaneity of the individual mind7 may not appear to be involved in it. The motives are simple, the objects of representation few8; and for this reason no considerable variety in the detail of configuration, muscles and motion, is apparent.

Secondly, the ideal, purely beautiful style hovers between the simply substantive expression of fact and the fullest exposition of all that immediately pleases. We may define the character of this style as the highest degree of vitality compatible with a beautiful and reposeful greatness, such as we admire in the works of Pheidias or Homer. It is a living presentment of all traits, shapes, modifications of such, motions, limbs, in which there is nothing without significance and expression, but everything is instinct with life and action, and testifies to the breath, or very pulse of free life itself on the merest glance at the work of art in question; a vitality, however, which essentially makes visible one totality, and only one, is the expression of one content, of one individuality of action.

It is in such a truly vital atmosphere that we find moreover the breath of grace poured forth over the entire work. Grace is indeed a concession to the hearer and spectator, which the severe style despises. At the same time, whenever Charis, that is Grace, is asserted in the presence of an onlooker, if only as an acknowledgement, a means of conveying pleasure, yet in the ideal style we find that such a presence appears entirely divested of any craving to confer merely pleasure. We may perhaps explain our meaning in more technical language. The fact or subject-matter is here the substantive in its concentration and self-absorption. During the process, however, that it is manifested through the medium of art, and is, so to speak, concerned to actually exist for others, to pass over, that is, from its simplicity and essential solidarity to particularization, articulation, and individualization, we may regard this development to an existent form for others as at the same time a kind of complaisance on the part of the predominant matter, in so far, that is, as it does not appear to require this more concrete mode of existence, and yet is wholly poured forth into it for us. Such a charm as this is only entitled to assert itself in such a style so long as what is really substantive also persists in undisturbed self-possession, as we may call it, over against the grace of its manifestation, which blooms forth entirely in outward guise as an original type of superfluity. This indifference of the ideal or inner self-assurance9 for its existence, this repose of itself on itself is precisely that which constitutes the beautiful negligence of the grace, which attributes no immediate value to this, its mode of manifestation. And it is just in this that we must look for the loftiness of the beautiful style. Beautiful free art is careless in its attitude to the external form, in which it refuses to let us see any peculiar movement of the mind, or any end or intention. Rather in every expression, every modification, it points to one thing only, and that is the idea and vital principle of the whole. It is only by this means that the Ideal of the beautiful style asserts itself, which is neither harsh nor severe, but already shows the softening influence of the cheerful notes of the beautiful. Though no violence is done either to any feature of expression, any part of the whole, and every member appears in its independence, and rejoices in its own existence, yet each and all is content at the same time to be only an aspect in the total evolved presentment. This it is which alone displays, alongside of the depth and determinacy of individuality and character, the grace of Life itself. On the one side we have indeed merely the substantial subject-matter predominant, but in the detailed exposition, in the lucid, and at the same time exhaustive variety of traits, which complete the definition of the appearance, and place it before us in its transparent vitality, the spectator is at the same time freed from the thing in its baldness, in so far as he possesses and is wholly face to face with its concrete life. By virtue, however, of the last mentioned fact, this ideal style, so soon as it carries this modification in its external aspect to yet further lengths, passes over into the so-called agreeable or pleasing style. Here we have the assertion of another intent than the mere vitality of the fact10. The giving of pleasure, the active elaboration in the direction of externality is asserted as itself an object, and is a matter of independent concern. As an example we may take the famous Belvedere Apollo, not indeed as itself belonging to this latter style, but at least marking the transition from the lofty style to that of sensuous attraction. And inasmuch as in an art of this kind it is no longer the single actuality itself to which the entire embodiment is referable, the particular details become under this mode, even though in the first instance still deducible from the central object itself and rendered necessary by means of it, more and more for all that independent. We feel that they are introduced, or interpolated, as ornaments, intentional additions of episodical import. And yet for the very reason that they are only related to the object accidentally and only receive their essential definition in a personal relation to the spectator or reader, they flatter the individual taste11 of such, to which their workmanship is primarily directed. Virgil and Horace, for example, delight us in this respect by an educated style, in which we can trace a variety of things aimed at, and an effort deliberately made to give pleasure. In architecture, sculpture, and painting, owing to this spirit of complaisance, simple and imposing effects of size disappear, and we find on every side small pictures standing by themselves, ornamentation, fineries, dimples on cheeks, elegant hair-dress, smiles, all the varied folding of draperies, enchanting colours and shapes, exceptional, difficult, but for all that unconstrained movements in the pose of the figure12. In the so-called Gothic or German art of building, where the same is carried in the direction of this spirit, we find decoration elaborated without limit, so that the whole appears to be little more than a collection of little columns with all the utmost variety of ornamentations, diminutive towers, spires, and so forth, which, in their isolation, please us, without, however, destroying the impression of the larger connections of the whole and the still insistent masses of the same.

In so far, however, as the province of art we have been discussing in its entirety gives way to this activity of externalization, this presentment of what is purely exterior, we may emphasize it in its further generalization as the effect, which makes use of as a means of expression what is unpleasing, strained, and colossal, the type of uncouth contrasts such as the prodigious genius of Michael Angelo often exploits to excess. The effect may be generally indicated as the excessive leaning towards an ulterior public, which results in the form no longer being asserted in its independent, self-sufficient and buoyant repose. Rather it turns round, as it were, and makes an appeal at the same time to the onlooker, and strives to place itself in a relation to him by means of this manner of presentment. Both aspects, namely essential repose and the address to the spectator, must no doubt be present in a work of art; but these aspects should fall together in complete equilibrium. If the work of art in the severe style is wholly without qualification self-contained, without any appeal to the spectator, it leaves him cold. If, on the other hand, the appeal is made too directly to him, it creates indeed a sensuous pleasure, but loses to that extent its substantive thoroughness13, or it does so without this thoroughness of content and the simple character of the conception and delineation therein contained. This passage from itself then merges in the accidental characterization of the appearance; as a result the image itself shares this accidental character, in which we no longer recognize the actual subject-matter and the form which is imperatively rooted in itself, but rather the poet and artist with his own personal designs, his peculiar type of production and skill. And for this reason the public is entirely released from the essential content of the work, finding itself by means of it placed in a personal relation14 to the artist, inasmuch as everything now wholly depends on its seeing that which the artist through his art intended, that is, the cunning and personal skill which is embodied in his grasp of his subject and its execution. To be thus brought into personal community of insight and critical acumen with the artist is for most people a flattering concession; and our reader or audience, and very possibly the spectator of plastic art, with even more readiness wonder at their poet, musician, or painter or sculptor respectively; and the vanity of such is all the better satisfied in proportion as the work invites them to this personal criticism, and supplies them openly with hints of such designs and points of view. In the severe style, on the contrary, no such confidences are made over to the spectator at all. What we have is just the substantive nature of the content, which in its representation austerely, and even harshly, repulses the purely personal quest. A repulse of this kind will often be no doubt merely indicative of the spleen of the artist, who, after entrusting a profound significance to his work, instead of making the exposition of the same free, transparent, and buoyant, deliberately makes it hard to follow. A trade in mysteries of this kind is also nothing but another form of affectation, and a spurious alternative to the complaisance we have criticized.

It is pre-eminently in the work of the French school that we find this tendency to flatter, attract, and create effect, and they have in this way elaborated this easy-going and complaisant attitude to the public as the main object of their efforts. They seek to find the real importance of their artistic work in the satisfaction such affords others, whose interest they would arouse and whom they would duly impress. This tendency is particularly marked in their dramatic poetry. Marmontel, for example, gives us the following anecdote in connection with the performance of his drama “Dénis, the Tyrant.” The crisis culminated in a question asked the Tyrant. Clairon, in whose mouth this question was put, when the moment for asking it had arrived, and when actually in conversation with Dionysius, made a forward step in front of the audience and dramatically addressed them instead. By this rhetorical effect the enthusiastic support of the entire piece was assured.

We Germans, on the other hand, require too much a content in our works of art, in the depths of which the artist finds a deliverance from himself, without troubling himself about the public, who is just left to look at it, take trouble over it, and help himself out with it, as he pleases or is able.

DIVISION OF SUBJECT

Approaching now, after these general observations we have made with reference to the distinctions of style common to all the arts, the division of the third fundamental section of our inquiry we may observe that the one-sided understanding has looked about in many directions for various principles of differentiation in its classification of the specific arts severally. The true division can, however, only be deduced from the nature of the work of art, which in the entire complexus of its forms15 explicitly unfolds the totality of the aspects and phases which are referable to its own notion. And the first thing which asserts itself in this connection as important is the consideration that art, in accordance with the fact that its presentments now have definitely to pass into sensuous reality, becomes on account of this also art for the senses, so that the definition of this sense and the material medium which is applicable to it, and in which the work of art is made objective, must necessarily furnish us with the principles of subdivision in the several arts. Now the senses, for the reason that they are senses, or in other words, are related to a given material, a disparate exterior medium16 and an essential multiplicity, are themselves different, namely, feeling, smell, taste, hearing, and sight. It is not our business in this place to demonstrate the ideal necessity of this totality and its disparate parts; that is the function of the philosophy of Nature. Our problem is limited to the inquiry whether all these senses, or if not, which of them are capable, by virtue of their notional significance, of being organs for the reception of works of art. We have already at a previous stage excluded feeling, taste, and smell. Botticher’s mere feeling with the hand of the effeminately smooth portions of statues of goddesses is not a part of artistic contemplation or enjoyment at all. By the sense of touch the individual merely comes, as an individual endowed with sense, into contact with the purely sensuous particular thing and its gravity, hardness, softness, and material resistance. A work of art is, however, not merely a sensuous thing, but Spirit manifested through a sensuous medium. As little can we exercise our sense of taste on a work of art as such, because taste is unable to leave the object in its free independence, but is concerned with it in a wholly active way, resolves it, in fact, and consumes it. A cultivation and refinement of taste is only possible and desirable in connection with dishes of food and their preparation, or the chemical qualities of objects. An object of art, however, should be contemplated in its independent and self-contained objective presence, which no doubt is there for the mind that perceives it, but only as an appeal to soul and intelligence, not in some active relation, and with none whatever to the appetites and volition. As for the sense of smell it is just as little able to become an organ of artistic enjoyment, inasmuch as things are only presented to this sense in so far as they are themselves in a condition of process, and are dissolved through the air and its direct influence.

Sight, on the other hand, possesses a purely ideal relation to objects by means of light, a material, which is at the same time immaterial, and which suffers on its part the objects to continue in their free self-subsistence, making them appear and re-appear, but which does not, as the atmosphere or fire does, consume them actively either by imperceptible degrees or patently. Everything, then, is an object of the appetiteless vision, which materially exists in Space as a disparate aggregate, which, however, in so far as it remains unimpaired in its integrity, merely is disclosed in its form and colour.

The remaining ideal sense is hearing. This is in signal contrast to the one just described. Hearing is concerned with the tone, rather than the form and colour of an object, with the vibration of what is corporeal; it requires no process of dissolution, as the sense of smell requires, but merely a trembling of the object, by which the same is in no wise impoverished. This ideal motion, in which through its sound what is as it were the simple individuality17, the soul of the material thing expresses itself, the ear receives also in an ideal way, just as the eye shape and colour, and suffers thereby what is ideal or not external in the object to appeal to what is spiritual or non-corporeal.

As a third accretion to these two senses we have the sensuous conception, memory, the retention of images, which appear in consciousness by means of the isolated perception, in this way subsumed under universals, and become related and united to the same by means of the imagination, so that now in one particular aspect the external reality itself exists both as ideal and spiritual, while that which is spiritual from another point of view accepts under the imaginative conception the form of what is external, and is brought to consciousness as a disparate and correlated aggregate.

This triple mode of seizing on reality offers art the well-known division into first, the plastic arts, which elaborate their content for vision in the external form and colour of objects, secondly, in the art of sound, music, and thirdly, into poetry, which as the art of speech uses tone merely as a symbol, in order, by means of it, to address itself directly to what is ideal in the contemplation, emotion, and imagination of our spiritual life. If we rest satisfied with this sensuous aspect of our subject-matter, as the final principle of its differentiation, we shall, in respect to our first principles, find ourselves in a difficulty, because the grounds of this division, instead of being deduced from the concrete notion of our subject-matter, are merely borrowed from the most abstract features of it. We have consequently to look about us once more for a principle of division that has deeper roots, which has, in fact, already been put forward in the introduction of this work as the truly systematic mode of dividing this third section of it. The function of art is just this and only this, namely, to bring before the grasp of the senses truth, as it is in the world of spirit, reconciled, that is, in its unity as a whole with objectivity and the sensuous material. In so far, then, as this is possible at this stage in the element of the external reality of the art-product to that extent the totality, which the Absolute is in its very truth, breaks apart into the various modes that differentiate it as a process.

The middle point, the truly substantive centrum, is given us here in the representation of the Absolute, God Himself as God, in His independent self-subsistence, not as yet developed to the point of motion and difference, or advanced to the active operation of and separation from what is His, but presented essentially self-absorbed in supreme divine repose and stillness, briefly the Ideal embodied in a form essentially adequate to itself, which persists in its determinate existence in correspondent identity with itself. And in order that it may appear in infinite self-subsistency the Absolute must be conceived as Spirit, as conscious Subject, but as Subject which possesses essentially itself its own adequate mode of external appearance.

As divine subject, however, which passes forth into actual reality, it has confronting it an external world for environment, which, in conformity with the Absolute, must be built up to an appearance harmonious with the same, an appearance permeated with the Absolute. This environing world is then on one side the objective as such, the basis, the embrace of external Nature, which, taken by itself, possesses no absolute significance for Spirit, nor any ideality such as is present to individual consciousness18, and consequently is only able to express by suggestion the spiritual Ideal which its appearance must seek to secure by embodying its embraced content in a world of Beauty.

In opposition to external Nature we find the ideal realm of consciousness19, the human soul as the medium20 for the existence and manifestation of the Absolute. Together with this subjectivity is conjoined the multiplicity and differentiation of individuality, particularization, distinction, action, and development, that is, in general terms the full and varied world of the reality of Spirit21, in which the Absolute is known, willed, experienced, and actively present. We may already infer from what we have indicated above that the differences under which the total content of art is differentiated are in essential consonance, both for our grasp and presentation of them, with what we have previously in the second portion of our inquiry examined as the symbolical, classical, and romantic types of art. In other words symbolic art only carries the art-process to the point of marking an affinity between content and form, instead of their identity, of only suggesting the ideal significance in itself and the content which that suggestion purports to express, in other words the external appearance22. It furnishes consequently the fundamental type to that specific art, whose function it is to elaborate the objective world as such, Nature’s environment in the beautiful conclusion given by Art to Spirit (mind), and to image by suggestion the ideal significance of what is spiritual in this external medium. The classical Ideal, on the contrary, meets the case of the presentation of the Absolute as such, in its self-subsistent external reality, its essential self-repose, while the romantic Spirit (mind) type of art is, both in content and form, identical with the internal life of the soul, and the emotional life both in its infinite aspect and its finite particularity.

It is, then, on a principle such as the above that the system of the particular arts is differentiated as follows:

First, we have architecture, the beginning of all, whose foundation reposes in the very nature of its subject-matter. It is the commencement of art for this reason, that art at the start has in general terms neither discovered for the presentation of its spiritual content the adequate material, nor the forms that fully express it, and is consequently compelled to rest content in the mere search after such true satisfaction, and to do so in the externality of its content and its mode of presentation. The medium of this primary art is that which is essentially unspiritual, gross matter, that is, only capable of configuration according to physical laws of gravity. Its form is the image of external Nature, united by its regularity and symmetry in the whole of a work of art to express merely an external reflection of Spirit.

The second art is sculpture. Both for its principle and content it possesses spiritual individuality under the mode of the classic Ideal in the sense, namely, that the ideal and spiritual finds its expression in the corporeal appearance pertinent to spiritual life, which it is the function here of Art to present in existent artistic actuality. It consequently still accepts for its material gross matter in its spatial extension, without, however, shaping the same in conformity to rule merely in respect to its gravity and its natural conditions according to the forms of the organic or inorganic, or in relation to its visibility in bringing it down to, and in all essential respects particularizing it in, a simple repetition of the external appearance. The form which is here, however, determined by virtue of the content itself is the actual life of Spirit, human form, and its objective organism permeated with Spirit’s own breath, whose function it is to embody in adequate shape the self-subsistence of the Divine in its supreme repose and unperturbed greatness, unaffected by the divisions and limitations of human affairs, their conflicts and endurances.

Thirdly, we have to render intelligible in one final whole those arts whose province it is to give form to the ideal content of the individual soul-life.

The art of painting marks the beginning of this final totality. It converts the external form itself entirely into an expression of what is ideal23, which within the limits of the environing world not merely reproduces the ideal self-containedness of the Absolute, but also brings to the vision the same as essentially a personal possession24 in its spiritual existence, volition, feeling, action, in its activity and relation to another, and consequently also in its sufferings, pain, death, in the entire series of passions and satisfaction. Its object is for this reason no longer God simply, that is, as object of the human consciousness, but this consciousness itself, God, that is, either in His reality present in the action and suffering of individual life, or as spirit of the community, as the spiritual related through feeling to itself, soul-life in its resignation, its sacrifice of, or joy and blessedness in, life and action within the limits of the natural world. As a means to the presentation of this content the art of painting is bound to utilize the external phenomenon in respect to its form, not merely the human organism, but also Nature in its simplicity in so far as the same suffers what is of spirit to shine through with clarity. It is, however, unable to utilize as material physical matter and its spatial existence just as it is; it is compelled, in working it up into its forms, essentially to idealize the same. The first step by means of which the sensuous material is raised in this respect to confront mind25, consists, on the one hand, in the uplifting of the actual sensuous appearance, whose visibility is converted into the mere show by art, and on the other in colour by means of the distinctions, transitions, and modulations of which this transformation is effected. The art of painting, consequently, in order to express the soul in its ideality, resolves the three dimensions of space into that of superficies as that which most intimately asserts the ideality of what is external, and represents spatial distance and form by means of the phenomena of colour. For painting is not concerned with producing mere visibility in its general significance, but with that form of visibility which, if it is ideally produced, is also quite as much essentially particularized. In sculpture and the art of building forms are visible by means of external light. In the art of painting, on the contrary, the material which is itself essentially obscure possesses intrinsically within itself its inward or ideal, light in short. It is itself transfused in its own medium, and mere light is to that extent essentially obscured. The unity, however, and blending of light and dark is colour26.

Secondly, the art of music offers a contrast to that of painting in one and the same sphere as the latter. Its real element is the ideal realm as such, emotion in its formless independence, capable of asserting itself not in externality and its reality, but purely through the external medium which disappears immediately when it is expressed and thereby cancels itself. Its content consequently consists of the internal life of Spirit in its immediate, essential subjective unity, emotion simply; its material is musical tone, its form and configuration, the concord, discord, harmony, contrast, opposition, and resolution of such tones according to the laws of their quantitative intervals respectively and their artistically elaborated time measure.

Finally, in the third place, after painting and music we get the art of speech, poetry in its general terms, the absolutely genuine art of Spirit and its expression as such. For everything which the human consciousness conceives and spiritually embodies in the chamber of spirit speech is able to accept, express, and bring imaginatively before us, and only speech is thus able. In respect to its content, therefore, poetry is the richest and its boundaries are the widest. But in proportion as it gains as the vehicle of Spirit it loses on the side of the material object. In other words, for the reason that it neither works for the perception of the sense as the plastic arts, nor merely for the ideal emotion, as music does, but is concerned to create its spiritual significances under the form of its own spiritual medium merely for the conception and contemplation of mind, the material through which its constructive activity is asserted only retains for it the value of a means, however much it may be elaborated in an artistic sense, by which Spirit is expressed for Spirit, and no longer counts as a sensuous mode of existence, in which the spiritual content is capable of finding a reality adequate to it. Such a means can in the light of our previous consideration only be tone regarded as the still relatively most adequate material of spiritual expression. Tone here, however, does not in the present case preserve, as was the case with music, an independent validity of its own for which the unique and essential aim of art could be exhausted in finding an artistic form, but conversely is entirely steeped in the world of Spirit and the definite content of conception and contemplation, and appears simply as the external symbol of this content. So far as the embodiment which the poetry receives is concerned, in this respect poetry may claim to include the whole field of art in the sense, that is, that it repeats in its own province the modes of presentation adopted by the other arts, which is only in a qualified degree the case with painting and music.

In other words poetry gives, on the one hand, as epic poetry the form of objectivity to its content, which no doubt here does not, as in the plastic arts, attain to an external existence. It is none the less a world conceived by the mind in the form of the objective world and represented as objective for the individual imagination. This it is which constitutes human speech as such, which finds satisfaction in its own content and its expression by means of speech.

On the other hand, however, poetry is conversely to an equal degree speech of the soul, the ideal medium, which, as that inward content returns to itself, is lyrical poetry, which invokes the aid of music in order to penetrate yet more deeply the world of souls and emotion.

Finally, to take the third example, poetry proceeds through speech within the limits of a self-contained action, which it at the same time makes an object of its presentment, and consequently is able to ally itself closely to music, gesture, mimicry, and the dance. This is dramatic art, in which man, in all that the term implies27, creatively presents the work of art which is the product of human life. These five arts form the system of realized and actual art, essentially determined by itself and differentiated as such. In addition to them there are no doubt other incomplete arts, for example, the arts of gardening and dance. These we shall only refer to incidentally as the opportunity recurs. A philosophical investigation must perforce restrict itself entirely to distinctions referable to the notion, and develop and grasp these adequate and veritable modes of embodiment. Nature and reality is not, it is true, confined to these circumscribed limits, but is more liberal in its movement, and we not unfrequently hear it made a matter of praise that in this respect the products of genius are perforce compelled to expand themselves beyond just such limitations. In Nature, however, transitional organisms of either hybrid or amphibian type, instead of emphasizing the spontaneity and excellence of Nature, merely demonstrate its inability to hold fast to the essential differentiations of species which are rooted in that process, or to prevent their deterioration before external conditions and influences. The same thing may be affirmed in art with regard to these intermediate forms, although the same are capable of producing much, too, that delights us, is full of charm and utility, albeit not in the highest class of perfection.

If we turn our attention now after these introductory remarks and considerations to the more specific examination of the separate arts, we shall find ourselves from another point of view in some difficulty. For inasmuch as we have hitherto concerned ourselves with art as such, the Ideal and the general types, under which its evolution according to its notion proceeds, it is imperative to pass over into the concrete existence of art, and by doing so into the world of experience. Here we find a condition very analogous to that we observe in Nature, the provinces of which are readily grasped in their generality and the necessary laws which distinguish them, in whose actual material existence, however, the individual objects and their species, not merely in the aspects which they present to observation, but also in the form under which they exist, are of such a wealth of variety that, as a part of the difficulty, they offer as feasible every conceivable way of approaching them; and in addition to this the philosophical notion, when we are desirous of applying the standard of its simple lines of distinction, appears as insufficient for this purpose and the mere grasp of thought incapable of taking in the breath of such fulness. If, however, we merely rest satisfied with mere description and superficial reflections we fall short no less of the object we have set before us, that is, a development which is both scientific and systematic. Added to which difficulties we have the further one that nowadays every particular art makes the independent demand for a special science, inasmuch as with the continuous growth of connoisseurship in art the range of such special knowledge has become ever more rich and extensive. This science of the connoisseur, or dilettante, has, however, in our own times become fashionable under the direct teaching of philosophy itself. It has, in short, been maintained that it is in art we must look for real religion, the discovery of truth and the Absolute, that, in short, it stands on a loftier pedestal than philosophy for the reason that it is not abstract, but receives at the same time the Idea in reality and for a contemplation and emotion which are concrete28. And on the other hand it is regarded nowadays as of august importance in art29 to occupy one’s attention with an infinite superfluity of detail of this kind, in the interests of which the demand is made from everyone that he should have observed some novelty or other. Such critical labour is a kind of learned trifling which may very readily be overdone. It causes, no doubt, considerable pleasure to examine works of art, to grasp the thoughts and reflections which such may suggest, to give currency to the points of view, which others have pointed out, and by this means to become judges and critics. The more rich, however, by this means, namely, that everybody is intent on having discovered on his own account something uniquely his own, a learning and process of reflection has become, the more every particular art, nay, every branch of the same, now renders necessary the completeness of a treatment of it from the individual’s standpoint. As a corollary the historical aspect of such a survey and the criticism of works of art, which becomes inevitable, only add yet further to the learning and range of the subject. It is, moreover, essential before we take part in any discussion over the details of matters of artistic import that we should already have seen much and many times. Personally I have no doubt seen a considerable amount, but by no means all that is necessary to enable me to discuss the material of art exhaustively. All such difficulties, however, we may meet with the simple response that it does not lie within the aim of the present work to teach art-criticism, or to bring forward an historical review of such learning, or only to the extent such is necessary to apprehend on philosophical principles the essential and universal aspects of our subject, and their relation to the idea of the beautiful in its realization within the sensuous medium of art. If we keep this aim before us the variety of artistic effects we above indicated need cause us no embarrassment; for despite this complexity the essential character of the subject-matter according to its notional idea is the controlling factor; and although this is frequently lost in accidental matter by virtue of the medium in which it is realized, points of view are none the less in evidence, in which it is as clearly proclaimed. To grasp these aspects, and to develop them in a scientific way, is the very problem which it is the function of philosophy to elucidate.

FIRST SUBSECTION

ARCHITECTURE

Art, by enabling its content to attain a realized existence under a definite form, becomes a particular art. We may therefore now for the first time refer to it as an actual art and find therein the real beginning of art. With this particularity, however, in so far as it purports to bring before us the objectivity of the Idea of the beautiful and art, we have presented to us at the same time in its notional significance a totality of what is particular. For this reason when we now, in the sphere of the specific arts, begin our examination of the same with the art of building this must not merely be accepted in the sense that architecture asserts itself as the art which, by virtue of its notional definition, is first presented to us as such an object of inquiry, but we may equally accept as a result, that it is also in relation to its existence the art first to be considered. In supplying, however, an answer to the question, what the mode of origin was, which fine art, relatively to its notion and realized form, has received, we must exclude the experience of history no less than reflections, conjectures, and ordinary conceptions, which merely have reference to objective history, and are so readily and in such variety propounded. In other words, men are ordinarily actuated by an impulse, to bring before their mental vision anything in its original mode of appearance for the reason that the beginning is the simplest mode, under which the fact asserts itself. And connected with this impulse we have present behind it the covert conviction that the simple mode of appearance informs us of the fact in its notional significance and real origin, and the further amplification of such a beginning to the actual point in the process which only really concerns us is further with a like readiness conceived under the trivial mode of thought, that a process so understood has gradually brought art forward to the crucial stage above indicated. A beginning, however, of this simplicity is, if we look at its content, something which, taken by itself, is so unimportant, that for philosophical thought it can only appear as wholly accidental, albeit it is for the ordinary consciousness only just in such a way that the origin can be readily grasped. For example, we have the story, as an explanation of the origin of the art of painting, told us of a maiden who followed the dim outline of the shadow of her sleeping lover. In the same way we have sometimes a cave and sometimes a hollow tree adduced as the point of departure in the art of building. Beginnings of this kind are so intelligible in themselves that further comment on the fact appears unnecessary30. In particular the Greeks invented many charming tales to explain the origins not merely of fine art, but also ethical institutions and other conditions of life, all of which satisfied the primary need to make such beginnings visible to the imagination. Such beginnings are not substantiated by history, and yet they do not aim at making the manner of origin intelligible directly as a process involved in the notion, but purport to confine their explanation to the field of objective history.

DIVISION OF SUBJECT

We have, then, in such a way to establish the beginning of art from its notional significance, that the first problem of art is made to consist in giving form to that which is essentially objective, the ground, that is, of Nature, the external environment, and by doing so to make that which is without ideal import to conform both to significance and form, both of which still remain external to it, for the reason that they are not either the form or significance inherent in the objective material. The art, which has set before it this task is, as we have seen, an architecture which has already discovered its first elaboration under the modes of sculpture, or painting and music31.

If we now direct our attention to the most primitive origins of the art of building, we find at the earliest stage that we can accept for such a beginning the hut, regarded as the human dwelling, and the temple, as the exterior enclosure of the god and his community. With a view to define this commencement more closely a dispute has been raised with reference to the nature of the material employed for building, whether, that is to say, it originated in buildings of wood, which is the opinion of Vitruvius, and is supported by Hirt in a similar reference, or rather from those of stone. This contrast of original material is no doubt of importance, for it does not merely concern its external quality as one might at first sight suppose, but rather the architectonic character of fundamental forms; for instance, the kind of decoration united with it is essentially bound up with this external material. We may, however, entirely set aside the distinction as a purely subordinate aspect of the matter rather referable to what is accidental and empirical, and devote our attention to a point of more importance.

In other words, in dealing with houses, temples, and other buildings we are confronted with the essential condition, to which we attribute the fact that buildings of this kind are merely means which presuppose an external end. Hut and house of God alike presuppose those who dwell in them, and for whom they have been erected, men and the images of gods. Man is also prompted by a desire to leap and sing; he requires the mediacy of human speech; but speech, leaping, shouting, and singing are not as yet poetry, the dance and music. And when within the architectonic adaptation of means to ends in order to satisfy specific needs, in part referable to daily life and in part to the religious cultus or the state, the impulse in the direction of artistic form and beauty asserts itself, we find at the same time a division apparent in the kind of building above mentioned. On the one hand we have man, thinking man, or the image of the god as the essential object, for which, from the other point of view, architecture merely supplies the means of environment and covering. With such a divided point of view we are unable to constitute our beginning, which is in its nature the immediate, and simple, not a relativity or essential relation of this sort; rather we must look for a point of departure, where a distinction of this kind does not yet arise.

In this respect we have already at an earlier stage stated that the art of building corresponds to the symbolic type of art, and in a unique degree gives realization to the principle of the same as particular art because architecture generally is adapted to suggest the significances implanted in it purely in the external framework of the environment. If the distinction, then, above referred to between the object of the external cover independently presented in the living man, or the temple’s image, and the building regarded as the fulfilment of such an object, is to be absent from our earliest stage, we shall have to look about us for buildings which precisely, as works of sculpture, do stand up in independent self-subsistence, which in short carry their significance in themselves rather than in some other object or necessity. This is a point of the highest importance, which I have never found raised hitherto, although it goes to the root of the matter, and alone is capable of disclosing the manifold nature of external forms, and of supplying a thread to conduct us through the maze of architectonic configuration. A self-subsistent art of building of this kind will also to a similar degree differ from sculpture on this ground, namely, that it, as architecture, does not create images, whose significance is that which is essentially spiritual and personal, and which itself intrinsically possesses the principle of an appropriated embodiment throughout adequate to its ideal import, but builds up works which, in their exterior form, can merely give an impress of the significance in a symbolic way. And for this reason this type of architecture, both in respect to its content and, its presentation, is really of a symbolic type.

All that we have said with reference to the principle of this stage of art applies equally to its mode of presentation. Here, too, we find that the mere distinction between buildings of wood and stone is not sufficient, in so far as the same points to a means of limiting and enclosing a defined space for a specific religious or other human purposes, as is the case with dwellings, palaces, and temples. Such a space, may be obtained either by hollowing out essentially solid and stable masses, or conversely, by preparing walls and roofs to enclose it. We can make our beginning of the art of building with neither of these alternatives, which we should consequently define as an inorganic form of sculpture; such a type no doubt piles up independently stable images, but while doing so does not in any way make the end of free beauty and the manifestation of Spirit in the bodily form commensurate with the end it pursues, but in general terms sets up a purely symbolic form, which purports in itself to indicate and express a particular idea.

Architecture is, however, unable to remain standing at such a point of departure. Its function indeed consists just in this, namely, to build up external Nature as an environment which emanates from Spirit itself through the gates of art under the forms of beauty, and to build it for the independently present life of mind, that is mankind, or for the images of the gods that are set up and clothed by man in objective form, and to build up the same as that which no longer carries its significance in itself, but discovers the same in another, that is man, and his necessities and objects of family and State-life, culture and so forth, and by so doing surrenders the self-subsistency of such buildings.

Regarded under this aspect we may assume the advance of architecture to consist in this, that it suffers the above indicated distinction between end and means to appear in separation, and constructs for man, or the individual human form of gods, which is the work of sculpture, an architectural dwelling, palace, or temple analogous to the significance of the same.

And, thirdly, the termination32 unites both phases in the process, and appears within this aspect of division as at the same time self-subsistent. These points of view present to us, as the classification of the entire art of building, the following heads of division, which essentially comprehend the notional distinctions of the matter in question no less than the historical development of the same.

First, we have the genuine symbolic or self-subsistent type of architecture.

Secondly, there is the classical type, which gives independent form to spiritual individuality, divesting on the other hand the art of building of its self-subsistency, and degrading it in the intent to set up an inorganic environment under the forms of art, for the spiritual significances which are now on their part independently realized.

Thirdly, romantic architecture, in other words the so-called Moorish, Gothic, and German, in which, it is true, houses, churches, and palaces are also merely the dwellings and places in which civic and religious needs and activities are concentrated; which, however, conversely are also shaped and raised without let or hindrance for the express object of emphasizing their self-subsistency.

Although on the grounds already advanced architecture in respect to its fundamental character remains of a symbolic type, yet the artistic types known as the truly symbolic, classical, and romantic constitute the closest means of defining it, and are here of greater importance than in the other arts. For in sculpture the classical, and in music and painting the romantic, penetrates so profoundly to the entire root-basis of these arts respectively, that for the elaboration of the type of the other arts33, to a more or less degree, but little room is left for other aspects. And, finally, in poetry, though it is the fact that it gives the most complete impress in its art-products of the entire series of art-types, we shall find it necessary to make our classification not by means of the distinction between symbolic, classic, and romantic poetry, but according to the specific differentiation applicable to poetry as a particular art in epic, lyrical, and dramatic poetry. Architecture is, on the other hand, art in its immediate relation to the external medium, so that in this case the essential differences consist in this, whether this external matter receives its significance intrinsically, or is treated as a means for an object other than it, or finally asserts itself in this subservience as at the same time independent. The first case is identical with the symbolic type simply, the second with the classical, the real significance attaining here an independent presentation, and in doing this the symbolic is attached as an environment wholly external to it, a type which is exemplified in the principle of classical art. The union of these two types is coincident with the romantic, in so far, that is, as romantic art makes use of the exterior medium as a means of expression, yet withdraws itself into itself out of this reality, and is consequently able once more by doing so to let objective existence stand forth in self-subsistent embodiment.

1 Gediegene here seems to mean that the unity is a real one throughout all its manifestations — it is one of sterling efficacy.

2 By the words die innere Produktion der Kunst is meant apparently “the creative activity of art-production as ideally conceived in a series of general world-impressions (Weltanschauungen).” The main contrast between the theoretic apprehension of such an evolution of art as a series, held in its broad generic outlines by mind, and its practical realization as differentiated in the actual products of different arts is sufficiently clear. The difficulty remains, however, as to how far Hegel regarded these Weltanschauungen in their universality to have themselves an objective significance no less than a subjective one — how far, in other words, are they merely abstract concepts of the observer, the schemata of scientific generalization, or do actually unfold an objective, if ideal process — how far is the thought one with the revelation of the Absolute itself. It is, of course, a difficulty not unknown to the student of Hegel in other directions. At least, as translator, I must content myself, as an excuse for obscurity in this and other passages, with drawing attention (a) To the main contrast which is quite clear, and (b) To the fundamental difficulty which remains. As a rule the word Weltanschauung is generally used rather in the sense of a world-outlook as from the point of view of an observer. In this passage, and still more obviously a little lower down, the sense appears to be rather world-presentment or manifestation — and the emphasis certainly on the objective aspect. Thus the Ideal of Beauty is defined as “the collective totality of its Weltanschauungen.” How far within such, which have previously been called exclusively ideal (innere) can be incorporated the positive concrete embodiments of definite works of art is for myself the difficulty, which I do not profess myself to be able to solve. I am in fact not entirely clear as to the entire meaning of Hegel myself. The mere statement that the one is made objective by the other does not appear to me to remove the difficulty; for, to mention no other objection, a particular work of art is not exclusively either concrete or objective in the sense that an ideal process is so, or an Ideal which combines the ideal stages or moments in such a process.

3 Welche sich objectivirt. See note above.

4 The present, that is, which is objective to sense.

5 So löst sich das Ideal in seine Momente auf. According to this it would appear that the process is wholly identified with the system of the particular arts. But the universal world-presentments are surely equally a process or at least an abstract of such a process. And this is in fact affirmed lower down.

6 A favourite metaphor of Hegel. The idea is that the metal is all one infusion producing a result that is like the appearance of Athene from the brow of Zeus.

7 Der Subjektivität. The mind of the artist.

8 A misprint. Der should be die.

9 Zuversicht. Confidence in itself.

10 Die Sache. The fact, the artistic object primarily treated.

11 Die Subjektivität. What is personal in the perception of judgment.

12 A fine illustration of this passage is to be found in Miss Harrison’s description of the Praxiteles Hermes in her admirable “Introductory Studies in Greek Art” (see chap, VI), a work every student of Greek Art should peruse.

13 Gediegenheit. Sterling solidity. To understand all that is implied the above cited work of Miss Harrison is the clearest and most useful I know.

14 In Unterhaltung. Finds himself, so to speak, directly conversing with him.

15 Der Gattungen, i.e., specific types.

16 Das Aussereinander. A differentiated exteriority.

17 Subjektivität, the ideal unity that is — not so much as soul or personality.

18 Kein subjektives Inneres. No ideal content that implies a unifying subject.

19 Same expression as last note. An ideal realm in its aspect of relation to an individual soul.

20 Als Element.

21 Or reason (Geist.)

22 As such content.

23 This must be taken subject to qualifications which appear further on.

24 An sich selbst subjektiv. As essentially appertinent to the individual soul.

25 Sich entgegenheit dem Geist, i.e., raises itself as a medium opposed to — or, as we should say, subservient to.

26 This is obviously a reference to the false theory of light advanced by Goethe and accepted by Hegel.

27 Das ganze Mensch. The entire man with all his faculties.

28 This is a reference, of course, to the Art Philosophy of Schelling.

29 Zum vornehmen Wesen. Ironical, of course. It is part of the aristocratic pretensions of the connoisseur.

30 He means that as an explanation they are obvious provided the facts are true, which he then points out in such cases is not so.

31 I am not sure I follow the sense here. I presume the meaning is that, as notionally considered, we have to commence with an architecture to which other arts are already subservient. The process of elaboration has already been carried beyond mere architecture. And in this sense he calls sculpture an elaboration (Ausbildung) of architecture. But the addition of painting and music as such elaboration is, to say the least, an unnecessary obscurity. Such an elaboration of a primitive form of music is suggested lower down. But the conception appears to me rather confusing.

32 That is the final phase, romantic architecture.

33 Other than architecture.

INDEPENDENT SYMBOLICAL ARCHITECTURE

THE PRIMARY AND original necessity of art is this, that a conception, a thought emanate from mind, be produced and emphasized by man as the result of his activity, just as in speech there are simple ideas which man communicates thereby and makes intelligible to others. In human speech, however, the means of communication is accepted merely as a sign, and for this reason is an entirely arbitrary mode of externalization. The function of art, on the contrary, is not only to make use of the mere symbolic sign, but, in contrast to this, to supply a sensuous presence correspondent to significances. On the one hand, therefore, the sensuous product, which art presents to us, must afford lodging for an ideal content; on the other it has to represent this content in a manner which enables us to see that it is itself as its content not merely a realization of immediate reality, but an actual product of human conception and its spiritual activity. If I see, for example, an actually living lion I deduce from the unique presentment of the same the concept of lion precisely as I should in the case of a picture of it. In the picture, however, we find something more than this. It demonstrates to us that the form has been conceived in the mind, and has found the origination of its existence in the human spirit and its productive activity, so that now we not only receive the idea of an object, but the idea of a human conception of that object. There is, however, no original artistic necessity that either a lion, merely as such34, a tree, or any other single object be added for the success of such reproduction. We have seen, on the contrary, that art, and pre-eminently plastic art, proceeds with the presentation of such objects in order to affirm in them the dexterity of the counterfeit from the artist’s own point of view. The interest in its first origination is directed to bringing before the vision of the artist himself and others the primary impressions of the objective facts, and the universal or essential thoughts thus stimulated. Such popular impressions are, however, in the first instance abstract and in themselves of indefinite character, so that man, in order that he may present them to the imagination, lays hold of that which is essentially just as abstract, the material medium as it is — which is at once massive and ponderous — a material which is no doubt capable of a definite, but not of an intrinsically concrete and veritably spiritual, content. The relation between content and sensuous reality, by virtue of which the content is to pass from the concipient world into that of imagination, can consequently only be of a symbolical type. At the same time, however, a building, which purports to declare a general significance for others, stands there for no other purpose save that of essentially expressing this loftier aspect, and is consequently an independent symbol of a thought that goes straight to its essential import, and is of universal validity, a kind of speech which is present to spiritual life on its own account, however much it may not be expressed through sound. The products, therefore, of this type of architecture are necessarily stimulating to thought of themselves, and arouse universal concepts, albeit they fail to be the mere envelope and environment of significances which otherwise possess independent form. For this reason, however, the form which permits a content of this kind to appear through it cannot perforce merely pass as symbolic sign, as, for example, in the case when we raise a cross to a deceased person, or erect stones in memory of battles. For signs of this character are doubtless qualified to stimulate ideas, but a cross, or a pile of stones, do not suggest, in virtue of their own nature, the idea which it is our object to awake, but are just as able to remind us of much else entirely different. This distinction constitutes the general notion of the stage now discussed35.

With regard to this it may be affirmed that entire nations have known how to express their profoundest requirements in no other way than by the arts of building, or at least pre-eminently in an architectonic way. This has been, however, to an essential degree only in the East, as will appear from what we have already seen when we were called on to discuss the symbolic type of art. To an exceptional degree we may say that the constructions of the more ancient art of Babylonia, India, and Egypt — which we have now before us to some extent only in ruins, ruins which have been able to defy all ages and their revolutions, and which excite our wonder and astonishment as much on account of what is wholly fantastic in their forms as in virtue of their extraordinary proportions and mass — either completely bear this character, or in great measure are derived from it. They are works whose construction enlists at certain periods of history the entire activity and life of nations.

If, however, we inquire more closely into the classification proposed by this chapter and the heads of subject-matter comprised in it, we shall find that the point of departure in this kind of architecture is not, as in the case of the classic or romantic type, from definite forms similar to that of the house. In other words we have here no independently secure content, and with it no secure mode of embodiment, advanced as the principle thereof, which is forthwith related in its further development to the entire range of the different constructions. Rather the significances which are accepted as content remain, as in the case of the symbolic type generally, likewise inchoate and general conceptions, elementary, in many respects separated and interfused abstractions of natural life mingled with thoughts of spiritual activity, without being, ideally concentrated to a focus as the evolved states of one mind36. This aspect of dissolution gives them the appearance of the greatest variety and change, and the object of such architecture merely consists in emphasizing in its presentation first one aspect and then another, in making such symbolical, and, by means of human labour, making such symbolism apparent to us. Before a multiplicity of content such as this we cannot pretend in this discussion to be either exhaustive or systematic. I shall limit myself to an attempt, so far as this is possible, to bring simply that which is of most importance into connection with a rational classification.

The prominent features of such a survey may be thus briefly enumerated.

As content our demand was for modes of view of a wholly general character, in which peoples and individuals possess an ideal resting-place, a point, a unity for consciousness. The proximate object, therefore, of such independent and self-substantive construction is simply to raise some work, which forms the unity of a nation or nations, a place in which its life may be concentrated. We may also find along with this the further object more nearly associated, to present by means of this very embodiment, that which generally unites mankind, in other words the religious ideas of nations, by virtue of which works of this kind receive likewise a more definite content for their symbolical expression.

Furthermore, in the second place, such an architecture is unable to remain fixed within the limits of this incipient determination of its entire content; the symbolical images tend to become isolated; the symbolical content of their signification is more closely defined, and by this means we find that the distinctions of their forms tend to come into more assured prominence, as for instance we see in the case of the Lingam columns, obelisks, and other examples of this kind. From another point of view the art of building, in the spirit of such isolated self-subsistency, presses forward in its passage to sculpture, its acceptance of organic animal forms or human figures, its enlargement of either and association of both of them, however, on a prodigious scale, in its further addition of walls, doors and passages, and throughout in its treatment of what is adapted to sculpture in such objects in an entirely architectonic manner. The Sphinxes, Memnons, and enormous temples of Egypt come under this category.

Thirdly, this symbolical art of building begins to present the transitional stage to the classic type. In other words it excludes sculpture from its immediate province, and sets about constructing itself as a receptacle for other significances, which are themselves not merely expressed under an architectonic mode. That the reader may better understand the process thus indicated I will recall to memory a few famous examples of such buildings.

“What is holy?” is a question raised by Goethe in a certain distich, and the answer he gives is: “that which binds together many souls.” In this sense we may affirm that what is sacred, together with the end expressed in the above association, and as such association, has actually formed the primary content of self-subsistent building and the art of such. The earliest example of this we may take from the story of the building of the tower of Babylon. In the broad expanse of the Euphrates valley we are told that mankind erected an enormous architectural work. It is built by the labour of a community, and this public character of its construction is at the same time the end and content of the work itself. And what is equally true is this, that this foundation of an association of communal labour is no mere unity of a patriarchal stamp; on the contrary we find here that the mere unity of the family is precisely that which is set on one side, and this building, which is raised to the heavens, is the objective presentment of the dissolution of the more primitive type of unity and the realization of another of more expansive range. The collective activity of peoples belonging to that age worked in it; and, in proportion as they came together in order to accomplish a building of prodigious size, the product of their activity came to be the band, which, on the ground and soil they had thus selected, and by means of the accumulated mass of stone and the architectural construction on the land — just as in our case morality, custom, and the lawful constitution of State-life — bound them in unity together. A building of this kind is in consequence also symbolical for the reason that it merely suggests the band of unity which it is, because it is only able, by means of its form and content, to express the sacred unity which unites men in an external way. It is also equally a part of this tradition that the communities have once more split apart from the centre of attraction which united them on a work of this external character.

A further and yet more important building, which has, too, already a more reliable historical basis, is the temple of Belus, of which Herodotus informs us37. We will not here inquire in what relation this stands to that of Biblical tradition. It is impossible to call this structure, taking it as a whole, a temple in any ordinary meaning of that term; rather we should call it a temple enclosure in the form of a square, each side of which was two stadia long, with brazen gates for means of entry. In the centre of this sacred place, according to Herodotus, who had actually seen this colossal work, a tower of thick walls (with no interior, solid throughout, in other words a πέργος στερεός) was built, both in length and breadth a stadium: on this was placed yet another, and again another on that, and so on, eight towers in all. On the outside of this a roadway was made to the top; and it appears that halfway up to the summit was a place of rest with benches on which all who ascended could rest themselves. On the summit, however, of the last tower there was a huge temple, and in the temple was a great bench, well cushioned, and before it stood a gold table. No statue, however, was placed in the temple. No one was permitted to be there at night with the exception of the attendant women, who, according to the statements of the Chaldaeans, the priests of this god, were selected by him pre-eminently for service. The priests further maintained (c. 182) that the temple was visited by the god, who rested on the bench made for him. Herodotus, it is true, also states (c. 183) that below within this sanctuary there was yet another temple, in which was placed a great image of the god of gold, together with a huge golden table before it, and at the same time refers to two great altars outside the temple on which the sacrifices were made. Notwithstanding these facts it is impossible to picture this gigantic building as a temple either in the Greek or modern sense of the term. For the first seven cubic towers are solid throughout, and it is only the eighth one at the summit which serves as a resting-chamber for the invisible god, who received therein no obeisance either from priesthood or the community. His image was below outside the building, so that the entire construction was raised in really independent and self-contained form, and did not subserve the objects of religious ritual, although it is no longer a purely abstract point of unity that we find here but a sanctuary. The form remains no doubt subject to accidental causes, or it receives its determinate character purely on account of the material security of the cube form; at the same time we have evidence of a demand which seeks for a significance which may supply a determinate relation to it more directly symbolical and applicable to the work taken as a whole. We must look for this, though this is not a point expressly adverted to by Herodotus, in the number of the massive floors. There are seven of them with an eighth superposed for the nightly abode of the god. This number of seven in all probability symbolizes the seven planets and spheres of heaven.

We find also in Media cities built in accordance with such a symbolism. There is, for example, Ecbatana with its seven encircling walls, of which Herodotus38 states that in part by virtue of the height of the elevation on the slope of which the city was built, and in part intentionally and by artificial means, they were higher one than the other, and their battlements were coloured differently. White was on the first, black on the second, purple on the third, blue on the fourth, red on the fifth; the sixth, however, was coated with silver, and the seventh with gold, and within this last stood the royal stronghold and its treasure. “Ecbatana,” remarks Creuzer, in his work on Symbolism, when referring to this type of building39, “that Median city, and its royal stronghold in the centre, with its seven circles of walls and its battlements of seven different colours, represents the spheres of heaven which enclose the stronghold of the sun.”

The first point we have to consider in the further development of our subject consists in this, that architecture accepts for its content significances that are more concrete, and aims at their more symbolical presentation in accordance with forms that are similarly more concrete, which, however, whether we take the case of their insulation40, or collective accretion in gigantic buildings, they do not make use of in the way sculpture makes use of them, but architectonically in their own independent province. In the case of this present type we have to direct our attention to more specific facts, although all that we advance can put in no pretension to completeness, or an a priori development for the reason that art in so far as it proceeds in its products to embrace the full range of the actual, that is the historical ways of comprehending the world and its religious conceptions, is lost in aspects of a contingent character. The fundamental definition of the type is simply this, that we have a confused blend of sculpture and architecture, albeit the art of building is that which permeates all and predominates.

(a) We had occasion before, when discussing the symbolic type of art, to mention the fact that in the East it is frequently the universal living force of Nature, that is, not the spirituality and might of consciousness, but the productive energy of generation, which is emphasized and revered. More particularly in India this religious attitude was universal; also from its sources in Phrygia and Syria under the image of the great goddess, the fructifyer, a conception was derived which the Greeks themselves accepted. Still more closely considered this conception of the universally productive energy of Nature was represented and held sacred in the form of the organs of sex, Phallus and Lingam. This cultus was in the main promulgated in India, albeit also, as we learn from Herodotus, it was not wholly foreign to Egypt. At any rate we meet with something of the kind in the festivals of Dionysus. According to the statement of Herodotus, “they have invented other puppets as substitutes for the phalli of an ell’s length, which the women draw about with a string, on which we find the sexual member no smaller in size than the rest of the body.” The Greeks accepted a similar ministration, and Herodotus expressly informs us (c. 49) that Melampus had knowledge of the Egyptian sacrificial festival of Dionysus, and had introduced the phallus which was carried about in honour of the god. It was in India especially that the worship of the energy of generation assumed the exterior shape and significance of the organs of sex. Enormous columnar images were in this respect raised of stone as massive as towers and broadening out at the base. Originally they were themselves independently the aim and objects of such worship; only at a later time it became customary to make openings and hollow chambers within them and deposit in these divine images, a custom which was maintained in the Hermes figures of the Greeks, little temple shrines that could be carried. The point of departure, however, in India was the phallus pillars, which had no such hollows, and which only at a later date were divided into a shell and kernel, growing thus into pagodas. For the genuine Indian pagodas, which should be distinguished essentially from later Mohammedan or other imitations, do not originate in the form of the dwelling, but are narrow and lofty, and receive their fundamental type from these columnar constructions. We find a similar significance and form also once more in the conception of the mountain Meru as expanded by Hindoo imagination, which is conceived as twirling stick in the sea of milk, and is the creative source of the world. Herodotus mentions similar columns, some constructed in the shape of the male, others in that of the female organ. He ascribes their construction41 to Sesostris, who erected them everywhere on his military expeditions against all the peoples he conquered. The majority of such pillars no longer existed in the days of Herodotus. It was only in Syria that the historian42 had himself seen them. However, the fact that he ascribes them all to Sesostris is merely based on the tradition he adopts. Moreover, his explanation is wholly Greek in its colour; he converts the natural significance into one of ethical import and in this sense informs us: “In cases where Sesostris during his expedition crossed nations which were brave in battle, he set up pillars in their land together with inscriptions, which gave his own name and nation, and indicated that he had subdued these peoples. Where, on the contrary, he overcame without opposition, he indicated on such pillars the female organ of sex without attaching an inscription in order to declare the fact that these nations had been cowards in battle.”

(b) We find further constructions of a similar nature, intermediate, that is, between sculpture and architecture, principally in Egypt. With these we may include, for example, the obelisks, which do not, it is true, borrow their form from the living organisms of Nature, such as plants, animals, or the human form, but are of a form wholly subject to geometrical rule, yet at the same time no longer constructed expressly as subservient to the human dwelling or temple, but are erected in free and independent self-subsistency, and possess the symbolical significance of the solar rays. “Mithras,” maintains Creuzer, “the Mede or Persian, rules in the solar city of Egypt43, and is there prompted by a dream to build obelisks, that is to say solar rays in stone, and to inscribe on them letters which are known as Egyptian.” Pliny had already attached this import to obelisks44. They were dedicated to the sun’s divinity, whose rays they were intended to catch and at the same time to reflect. Also we find that in the images set up in Persia we have rays of fire which ascend from columns45.

After obelisks we should mention as most important the sculptured Memnons. The huge statues of Memnon of Thebes, of which Strabo was still able to see one fully preserved and made from a single stone, while the other, which uttered a sound at setting of the sun, was already in his day mutilated, possessed the human form. They were two seated colossal human figures in their grandiose and massive proportions rather inorganically and architectonically designed than in the strict sense sculptured, as also appears in the case of the linear arrangement of the Memnon columns, and, inasmuch as they are only valid in such equable order and size, they wholly digress from the aim of sculpture and are subject to the art of building. Hirt46 refers the colossal melodious statue, which Pausanias states the Egyptians regarded as the image of Phamenoph, not so much to deity as to a king, who possessed in it his monument, as Osymandyas and others in a similar way. It is, however, quite possible that these imposing images supplied a more definite or indefinite conception of something universal. Both Egyptians and Aethiopians worshipped Memnon, the son of the Dawn, and sacrificed to him on the first appearance of the solar rays by means of which the image greeted with its vocal sound the worshippers. Producing as it did vocal sound it is not merely in virtue of its form of importance and interest, but by reason of its nature as a living, significant and revealing thing, albeit the mode of revelation is purely one of symbolic suggestion.

This relation we have pointed out in the case of these statues of Memnon is equally true in that of the Sphinxes, which we have already discussed in our reference to their symbolic significance. We find these Sphinxes in Egypt not merely in extraordinary numbers but also of stupendous size. One of the most famous of them is the one which is situated in close proximity to the Cairo group of pyramids. Its length is 148 metres, its height from the claws to the head is 65 metres; the feet that repose in front, measured from the breast to the points of the claws, are 57 metres, and the height of the claws 8 metres. This enormous mass of rock, however, has not in the first instance been excavated and then carried to the place now occupied by it. On the contrary, the excavations which have been made to its foundations prove that the foundation consists of limestone, and in a manner which showed that the entire huge work was hewn from one rock of which it only forms a portion. This enormous image more nearly approaches, it is true, genuine sculpture in its colossal proportions; it is, however, equally true that the Sphinxes were also set side by side linearly in passages, in which position they, too, receive a wholly architectonic character.

(c) Such independent figures are, as a rule, not only to be found in isolation, but are supplemented by the construction of large buildings resembling the temple type, labyrinths, subterranean excavations of every kind, or amongst other things are utilized in masses and surrounded by walls.

The first thing we may remark with regard to the temple enclosures of Egypt is this that the fundamental character of this huge type of architecture, detailed information as to which we have latterly received in the main from French writers, consists in this that they are constructions open to the day, without roofing, doors, passages between partitions47, and above all, between columned halls, entire forests of columns. They are works, in short, of the greatest range and variety of interior construction which, without serving as the habitation of a god, or a communion of worshippers, independently by this self-consistent operation appeal to the wonder of our imaginations quite as much in the colossal size of their proportions and masses, as through the fact that their isolated forms and images make an independent and exclusive claim to our interest. Such forms and images are in truth placed there as symbols for significances which are strictly universal in their import, or in the position they occupy as representing literature, in so far, that is, as they declare such significances not through the manner of their form, but by means of writings, works of imaginative form which are engraved on their surfaces. We may in part describe these gigantic buildings as a collection of sculptured images; for the most part, however, these appear in such a number and with such repetition of one and the same form, that the arrangement becomes one of a series, and it is only in this kind of line and order that they receive what is precisely their architectonic definition, which becomes, however, once more an object in itself, and does not merely mean beams and roofing and nothing beyond them.

The larger constructions of this type start with a paved passage, one hundred feet broad, according to Strabo’s statement, and three or four times as long. On either side of this approach (δρόμος) stand Sphinxes, in rows of fifty to a hundred, in height from twenty to thirty feet. After this comes an imposing and splendid portal (πρόπυλον), narrower at the top than at the base, with piers and columns of enormous bulk, ten or twenty times higher than the height of a man; partially isolate and independent, and in part fixed in walls and gorgeously decorated structures48, which also stand up perpendicularly in independence to the height of from fifty to sixty feet, broader at the bottom than at the top, without being connected with transverse walls, or carrying entablatures49, and so constituting a dwelling. On the contrary, what we find is that, in contrast to vertical walls, which rather suggest they are built to support a weight, they belong to the independent mode of architecture. Here and there Memnon images lean against these walls, which also constitute passages, and are entirely covered with hieroglyphics and enormous pictures on stone, so that they appeared to the Frenchmen who recently saw them like printed calico. We may regard them as so many leaves of books, which by means of their spatial and limited superficies arouse unlimited astonishment, feeling, and reflection in the human soul. Doors follow at frequent intervals, and alternate with each series of Sphinxes; or we find an open spot engirt throughout by a wall with columned passages to these walls. After that we get a covered place, which does not serve as a dwelling, but is a forest of pillars, the columns of which have no roofing but carry slabs of stone. After these Sphinx passages, series of columns, and structural walls over-flowered with hieroglyphics, after them a frontage building with wings, before which obelisks are erected and lions couched; or also, after forecourts, or a cincture of yet more narrow approaches, we reach the culmination of the entire construction, the real temple, the sanctuary (σηκὸς), according to Strabo of moderate proportions, which either contained no image of the god, or merely an animal image. This dwelling of godhead was now and again a monolith, as Herodotus, for example, narrates50 in respect of the temple of Buto. This temple was worked out of one piece of stone to a length and breadth, which in each of its walls of equal size measured forty cubits, and as final roof to the same was placed a single stone with a cornice of four cubits’ breadth. In general, however, these sanctuaries are so small, that no communion of worshippers could find room inside. Such a communion, however, is an essential concomitant of a temple; otherwise the same is merely a box, a treasury, a place where sacred images are conserved.

To such an extent buildings of this type run on for miles with their rows of animal figures, their Memnons, their immense doors, their walls and colonnades of the most stupendous dimensions, some of greater breadth, some of less, their isolated obelisks and much else, that while we wander within works so huge and so calculated to excite our surprise, which in part possess merely a more restricted purpose in the diverse activities of the system of culture to which they belong the question is irresistible, what these masses of stone have to tell us of the Divine they secrete. For on closer inspection symbolical meanings are everywhere in-woven in these constructions in that the number of Sphinxes and Memnons, the position of columns and passages have relation to the days of the year, the twelve signs of the Zodiac, the seven planets, the great periods of the lunar cycle and other phenomena. To some extent we find here that sculpture has not yet freed itself from architecture; and in some degree again the really architectonic aspect of measure, interval, number of columns, walls, steps, and so forth is so treated, that the real object of these relations is not to be found in their own intrinsic character, that is, in their symmetry, harmony, and beauty, but is referable to their symbolical definition. And in this way all this work of construction asserts itself independently as an object in itself, as itself a cultus, in which both nation and king are united. Many works, such as canals, the lake Maeotis, and generally waterworks have a particular relation to agriculture and the floods of the Nile. An example of this we have in the statement of Herodotus51 to the effect that Sesostris had the entire country, which up to this time had been ridden and driven over, cut up into canals to provide drinking-water, and in this way made horses and wagons useless. The main constructions, however, remained those buildings with a religious purpose, which the Egyptians instinctively piled up much as the bees do their cells. Their property was regulated52, their other social conditions equally so, the soil of the country was extraordinarily fruitful, and required no laborious cultivation, so that we may almost say their agriculture merely consisted in sowing and harvest. We hear little of other interests and exploits, such as are common to nations, and, with the exception of the tales of the priesthood with reference to the maritime undertakings of Sesostris, we have no account of sea voyages. Speaking generally, the Egyptians restricted their efforts to this work of construction within their own country. It is, however, what we have called self-substantive and symbolical architecture which forms the fundamental type of their imposing works and for this reason that the human ideal, the spiritual in its aims and external forms, has not as yet come to self-knowledge, or constituted itself the object and product of its free activity. Self-consciousness has not as yet ripened in the fruit, is not yet independently secured, but is restless, seeking, surmising, ever for producing without absolute satisfaction, and consequently without repose. It is only in the form that is commensurate with Spirit that mind essentially at home with itself finds satisfaction and finds its true definition in what it produces. The symbolical work of art on the contrary remains more or less indefinite. Among such creations of the Egyptian art of building we may include the so-called labyrinths, courts with columned approaches, circumambient paths between partitions, which entwine about in a mysterious fashion, but whose confusing intricacy is not constructed with the puerile object to make the means of exit a problem, but to create for the senses an intricate mode of motion that is dominated by mysteries of symbolical import. For these paths, as we have already indicated, imitate in their course that of the heavenly bodies and embody the same for imagination. They are in part constructed above the ground and in part underneath it, and in addition to their passages are furnished with chambers and halls of enormous size, whose walls are covered with hieroglyphics. The largest labyrinth which Herodotus himself saw was not far from the lake Maeris. He affirms53 that its size exceeded his powers of description, and it surpassed the pyramids themselves. The building he ascribes to the twelve kings, and he describes it in the following terms. The entire building surrounded by one and the same wall consisted of two stories, the one above and the other beneath the level of the ground. Taken together they enclosed three thousand chambers, each story containing fifteen hundred. The upper story which alone Herodotus was able to see was divided into twelve adjacent courts54, with doors placed opposite to each other, six facing the North and six the South, and every court was engirt with a colonnade, constructed of white and carefully worked stone. From these courts, Herodotus continues, you have ingress to the chambers, and from these into the halls, and from the halls into other chambers, and from these chambers into the courts. According to Hirt55 Herodotus only so far defines this latter relation to the extent that he places in the first instance the chambers in juxtaposition to the courts. With regard to the labyrinthine passages, Herodotus states that the numerous passages through the roofed-in chambers and the multitudinous incurvations between the courts had filled him with infinite astonishment. Pliny56 describes them as obscure and tedious for a stranger on account of their windings, and when their doors were opened there was a noise in them like thunder; we also learn from Strabo, an evidence of importance, for he was an eye-witness no less than Herodotus, that the labyrinthine passages encircled the court spaces. It was the Egyptians who mainly built such labyrinths: but we find in imitation of Egypt a similar one in Crete, though of smaller extent, and also, too, in the Morea and Malta. Taking into consideration the fact, however, that, on the one hand, an art of building of this kind in its chambers and halls already approximated to the dwelling type, while, on the other, according to the delineation of Herodotus, the subterranean portion of the labyrinth, an entrance into which was forbidden him, had for its definite object the sepulchre of the founders of the building and sacred crocodiles — so that here the essential characteristic of the labyrinth was entirely the symbolic import in an independent sense — we may find in such works a point of transition to the form of symbolical architecture, which in its own constituent parts begins already to approach the classic type of building.

However stupendous in size the construction we have just considered are the subterranean architecture of Oriental peoples such as the Hindoos and Egyptians, which offer many features of resemblance, are still more imposing and calculated to excite our wonder. Whatever aspect of grandeur and nobility is in this respect discoverable above ground presents no parallel to that which among the Hindoos is presented us beneath the earth in Salsette, which faces Bombay, and in Ellora, that is, in Upper Egypt and Nubia. In these extraordinary excavations what we have in the earliest examples exposed is the immediate necessity of an enclosure. The fact that mankind have sought protection in caves, and made their dwelling there and that entire peoples have possessed no other mode of dwelling is due to the compelling force of their needs. Caves of this kind existed in the land of Judaea, where in works of many stories there was room for thousands. There were also in the Harz mountains in the Rammelsberg near Goslar chambers, into which men crept for cover, and used to bring their provisions for safety.

(a) Of an entirely different type, however, are the Hindoo and Egyptian subterranean constructions to which we have alluded. In some degree they served as places of assemblage, subterranean cathedrals, and are constructions whose object was to excite religious wonder and concentrate the communion of spiritual life; they are united to designs and suggestions of a symbolical character, colonnades, sphinxes, Memnons, elephants, colossal images of idols, which, hewn from the bare rock, were as fully left a component growth of the formless stone as the columns in such excavations were made to stand out in isolation from it. In front of the walls of rock these buildings were here and there wholly exposed to the light, in other parts they were entirely devoid of it, and illuminated merely with torches, while in other portions light was introduced from above.

Relatively to the super-terranean constructions these excavations appear as prior in time, so that we may regard the enormous spaces laid out above the soil as an imitation and efflorescence of similar tracts of land beneath it. In excavations there is no positive building, but we have rather a given material taken away. And to nest thus in the ground, to excavate is more natural to man than to seek for a material, and with it to construct and inform a mass of buildings. In this respect we may assume the cave to be utilized prior to the hut or dwelling. Caves are the extension of spatial covering instead of a limitation of such, or an extension which grows up as a limit and enclosure, in which the enclosure is already present. The subterranean construction consequently inclines to start with what is already present, and, in so far as it leaves the fundamental material as it finds it, is not erected with the freedom applicable to a configuration raised above the surface of the soil. In our view, however, these constructions already belong to a further stage of the art of building, however much they may also have features of a symbolical type, because they no longer are placed there as independently symbolical, but already possess the aim or purpose of an enclosure, a partition, a roof, within which more symbolical figures as such are set up. That which is connoted under the conception of temple and dwelling, both in the Greek and more modern use of the terms, we have here in their most natural form.

We may include in the above class the caves of Mithras, although we find them in a very different locality. The worship and ritual of Mithras originates in Persia. A cultus, however, of a similar kind was also promulgated in the Roman Empire. In the Paris Museum we find a very famous bas-relief, which represents a youth in the act of striking an ox with a steel weapon. It was discovered in the Roman Capitol in a deep grotto beneath the temple of Jupiter. In these Mithras caves vaults are also met with, and passages which on the one hand appear definitely to symbolize by suggestion the course of the stars, and from another point of view also (precisely as still in our own time takes place in our free-mason lodges, where people are conducted through many passages and have to see dramatic scenes and much else) the ways, which the soul must pass through in its purification, albeit it may be true enough that this fundamental meaning is more fully and directly expressed in sculpture and other work than in architecture simply. In a connection somewhat similar we may also mention the Roman catacombs, the fundamental idea of whose construction was certainly something quite other than that of being subservient to aqueducts, sepulchres or any system of drainage.

(b) In the second place we may seek for our present use a more definite point of transition from the architecture of independent type in those constructions which have been raised as housings of the dead, partly in the form of excavations beneath the ground, and partly as buildings above it. More particularly among the Egyptians this kind of construction, whether subterranean or super-terranean, was associated with a realm of the dead, just as in general among the Egyptians it is a realm of the invisible which in the first instance receives a habitation and is placed before us. The Hindoo burns his dead, or suffers their bones to lie and moulder on the earth. According to the Hindoo’s point of view mankind are, or become, god or gods, whichever way one cares to put it, and we are unable to find in their case this assured distinction between the living and the dead regarded as dead. Hindoo constructions, consequently, so far as they do not originate in Mohammedanism, are not dwellings for the dead, and appear generally to belong to an earlier period as we assumed was true of the astonishing excavations described. In the case of the Egyptians, however, the contrast between living and dead asserts itself predominantly. That which is spiritual begins to separate itself essentially from what is material. We have here the resurrection of spirit in concrete individuality, the movement of that process. The dead are therefore retained fast as personality57, and are secured and preserved securely above the conception of dissolution into Nature, that is into universal evanescence, flood and extinction. Singularity is the principle of the spiritual in its notion of independence, because spirit is only able to exist as individuality, that is personality. Consequently this honour paid to and preservation of the dead can only appear to ourselves as a first and important element in the definition of the existence of spiritual individuality, since it is here that singularity is asserted as maintained rather than abandoned, inasmuch as the body at any rate is treasured and respected as this Nature’s own mode of individuality. Herodotus assures us, a fact we have already noticed, that the Egyptians were the first to declare that the souls of men were immortal, and despite the fact that the grasp on spiritual individuality is in their case very incomplete, in so far as in their view the deceased must for three thousand years pass through a whole series of animals belonging to land, water, and air, yet for all that in this conception, and in the embalming of the body, we find fixedly the notion of bodily individuality, and of the independent self-existence as separate from that body.

It is therefore also of importance in the arts of building that in these the separation of the spiritual, no less than the ideal significance, which58 is independently represented, be carried into effect while the corporeal shell is set round it as a purely architectonic environment. The dwellings of the dead of the Egyptians constitute for this reason the earliest examples of the temple type. The essential feature, the central core of worship is a subject, an individual object which appears of significance by itself, and expresses itself as distinct from its dwelling, which is thereby interpreted as purely a subservient covering. And no doubt it is not an actual man, for whose requirements a house or palace had to be built, but deceased objects that are without such needs, kings, sacred animals, around whom immeasurable constructions are enclosed.

Just as agriculture fixes the wandering of nomads in the stable possession of a definite locality, we may say that generally sepulchres, monuments, and the service of the dead unite mankind, and even offer to those who possess no States, no limitations of property, a place of rendez-vous, sacred places which they defend and refuse to have taken away from them. As an illustration we may cite the case of the Scythians, a nomad people, who retired everywhere, according to the narration of Herodotus59, before Darius. And when Darius sent an embassage to them with the message that if their king deemed himself strong enough to offer resistance he should come forth to battle, but if he did not he ought to recognize Darius as his lord, Idanthyrsus met the same with the reply that they possessed neither cities nor tilled land, and had nothing to defend for the reason that Darius had nothing to ravage; if, however, Darius made a point of having a fight they possessed the sepulchres of their fathers, let him therefore dare to advance against these, he will then discover whether they will fight for their sepulchres or not.

The most ancient and imposing monuments erected to the dead we find in Egypt. They are the Pyramids. What most excites our wonder at first sight of these astonishing constructions is their extraordinary magnitude, which at once makes us reflect upon the duration of time, the variety, superabundance and persistence of human energies which is inseparable from the completion of such colossal buildings. From the point of view of form there is nothing in them to protract attention: in a few minutes we have surveyed and taken in the entire effect. With this simplicity and uniformity of their form in view their object has ever been a subject of controversy. It is true that even the ancients, as for example Herodotus and Strabo, adduced the aim, which they subserved; but for all that both in former and more recent times, travellers and writers have contributed much that is fabulous and unwarranted in their reflections. The Arabs endeavoured to effect entrance by force, hoping to discover treasure in the interior of the Pyramids; such assaults, however, beyond disturbing much, have failed in their object to reach the actual passages and chambers. Europeans of a later date, among whom we may mention in particular for distinction, Belzoni, a native of Rome, and Caviglia of Genoa, have at last succeeded in ascertaining more accurate information with respect to the interior of these fabrics. Belzoni discovered the royal sepulchre in the Pyramid of Chephren. The entrances to the Pyramids were closed in the securest way by square blocks of stone, and it appears that Egyptians endeavoured in their construction so to effect matters that the entrance, even when discovered, could only be followed up and opened with the greatest difficulty. This proves to us that the Pyramids remained closed and could not be again used. Within their interior explorers have found chambers, passages, which point by suggestion to the ways, which the soul undertakes after death in its course and transmigration, great halls, channels beneath the earth at one time descending, at another mounting up. The royal sepulchre of Belzoni runs on in this way hewn out of the rock for a mile. In the principal hall stood a sarcophagus of granite, sunk in the ground; but all that was discovered in it was the remains of animal bones of a mummy, probably that of an Apis. The whole, however, proved beyond a doubt that the object in view was that of being a dwelling for the dead. The Pyramids differ in age, form, and size. The most ancient appear to be stones piled on one another in a more or less pyramidal shape. The more recent ones are constructed with uniformity; some are somewhat flattened out at the summit, others run up entirely to a point. On others have been found deposits, an explanation of which may be gathered from the description Herodotus60 gives us when referring to the Pyramid of Cheops of the manner in which the Egyptians carried out such works, so that Hirt includes such among the Pyramids which remained unfinished61. In the older Pyramids according to the latest evidence of Frenchmen the chambers and passages are more winding; in the more recent ones they are simpler, but entirely covered with hieroglyphics, to interpret which throughout will take several years.

In this way the Pyramids, despite all the wonder they arouse of their own accord, are really nothing but crystals, mere shells, which enclose a kernel, that is a departed spirit, and serve as custodians of his still consistent bodily presence and form. In this departed and deceased person, who secures an independent reproduction, we fail to find consequently any significance62; the architecture, however, which up to this point independently possessed its significance in itself as architecture, is now divided in its aim, and in this division is subservient to something else, whereas sculpture receives the function to give body to the genuine ideal aspect, although in the first instance the individual figure in its unique and immediate natural shape is retained. We find consequently, on a general survey of the Egyptian art of building, on the one hand, the self-subsistent symbolical buildings; on the other, however, and more particularly in everything which is attached to the monuments of the dead, the specific determination of architecture to be an enclosure and nothing more, already clearly asserts itself. It is an essential concomitant of this, that architecture not only be limited to the construction of excavations and caves, but attest itself as an inorganic Nature built by human hands on the spot where men have actual need of it, and for a definite purpose will it to be.

Other nations have raised monuments of the same kind, sacred buildings as dwellings of the dead bodies, over whom they happen to be erected. As examples we may instance the mausoleum in Curia, and of more recent date that of Hadrian, the still existing Englesburg in Rome, a palace of careful construction raised in honour of a dead person, all of which were even in antiquity famous works. According to the description of Uhden63 we may also mention in this connection a type of mortuary, which in its arrangement and environment imitated in its smaller aspects temples dedicate to gods. A temple of this kind possessed a garden, arbours, a spring, a vineyard, and moreover chapels, in which portrait statues of gods were placed. More particularly in the time of the Roman Empire were such monuments to the dead built with statues of the deceased under the image of gods such as Apollo, Venus, and Minerva. Figures like the above, no less than the entire construction, consequently received during that age the significance of an apotheosis and a temple in honour of the dead man, just as also among the Egyptians the process of embalming, the emblems placed thereby, and the sarcophagus attest that the deceased was treated as a god-like Osiris64.

The most imposing and least complex constructions of this kind, however, are the Egyptian Pyramids. In this type we have the peculiar and essential line of the art of building, that is the straight one, and in general terms the uniformity and abstract simplicity65 of forms. For architecture, as merely enclosure and inorganic Nature, or Nature that is not itself vitally and essentially suffused by the indwelling spirit in an independent mode, is unable to possess form except as one which is external to itself; external form, however, is not organic, but abstract and purely referable to the organs of sense66. However much the Pyramid already begins to receive the determining characteristics of the dwellings, yet the rectangular principle is still not throughout predominant, as it is in a real dwelling-house; it has still an independent determinacy, which is not merely of service to the purpose for which it is erected, and consequently closes up of itself by a process of gradation directly from the foundation to the apex.

(c) It is from this point that we may make the transition from the independent type of building to that of an art of construction, which is serviceable of a purpose.

There are two points of departure to this later type. There is on the one hand symbolic architecture, and on the other practical necessity and the impulse of purpose to subserve that necessity. In the case of symbolical forms, as we have already had occasion to observe, architectonic purpose is merely an incidental feature, merely an external mode of co-ordination. The dwelling-house, on the contrary, erected as necessity itself, requires posts of wood, or just walls standing up straight with beams, which are laid across them at right angles, and a roofing, and constitutes, the other extreme. There can be no question that the necessity of this real and effective expediency makes its appearance as the result of its own demand. The distinction that may be raised, however, in answer to the question, whether genuine architecture — as we shall shortly have to consider it as the classic art of building — takes its rise solely in this necessity, or is to be deduced from independent and symbolical works, which conducted us of their own accord to buildings devoted to service, is the point in essential dispute.

(α) It is the force of circumstances which brings to the fore forms in architecture which are wholly stamped with a useful purpose, and the abstract deductions of science, such as the rectilinear line, the right angle, and the smooth surface. For in serviceable architecture that which constitutes the real object, is, in its independence, as a statue, or more closely as human individuals, that is community, a people, brought together for objects of general significance, which no longer have as their aim the satisfaction of physical wants, but are such in a religious and political sense. In a special degree the need asserts itself to shape an enclosure for the image, the statue of the gods, or generally for that which is independently placed before us and actually present as sacred. Memnons, Sphinxes, and the like stand up in the open, or in a grove, that is in the external environment of nature. Images of this kind, however, and still more human images of gods, are borrowed from another realm than that of immediate Nature. They belong to the world of imagination, and come into existence through the artistic powers of mankind. The purely natural environment is therefore not sufficient; they require for their external frame a ground and an enclosure, which shall be derived from the same source as their own, in other words, such as are the product of the imagination, and have received their form by means of artistic effort. It is only in an environment created by art that the gods find themselves at home67. In such a case, however, this external frame does not possess its object in itself, but it subserves something other than itself, and is subject to the principle of purpose or expediency.

If, however, these, in the first instance, purely serviceable forms are exalted to an expression of beauty they are unable to persist in their original abstract mode, and are forced to accept, in addition to what is merely symmetrical and harmonious, that which is organic, concrete, essentially itself conclusive and varied. And because this is so men are forced to reflect over distinctions of determinating form, no less than the express emphasis to be made on certain aspects of form, which is wholly superfluous where the question is only one of a definite purpose to be attained. A beam, for example, is from one point of view that which is carried forward in a straight line; at the same time, however, it terminates at both extremes. In the same way a post which has to support either rafter or roof stands on the ground and reaches its terminating point where the rafter rests upon it. The architecture of service asserts distinctions of this kind and gives form to them by means of art; an organic design, on the contrary, such as a plant, or a human being, ay, whether we look at such above or below, but in any case throughout, has to be organically embodied, to be differentiated in the latter case consequently by feet and head, or in the former by roots and corona.

(β) Conversely symbolic architecture takes its point of departure more or less from organic forms of this kind, as we see is the case with sphinxes, memnons, and so forth; yet it is also unable wholly to exclude in its walls, doors, beams, obelisks, and the rest, the principle of the straight line and uniformity, and is generally obliged to accept the assistance of such principles appertinent to the genuine art of building as equality of size, interval of relative position, rectilinear progression of rows, in short, order and regularity when it proposes to place in a series and to set up in accordance with architectural design the colossal sculptured figures to which we have referred. By doing so it unites in itself both principles68, whose union brings for result an architecture, the beauty of which is promoted along with the object to which it is subservient, albeit in the symbolic type these two aspects69 still lie in separation side by side instead of being fused in unity.

(γ) We may therefore so conceive the transition that on the one side the art of building, hitherto self-subsistent in type, is forced to modify under scientific principles70 the forms of organisms in the direction of regularity, and to pass into the province of proposed expediency; while conversely what is entirely such intended purpose in the form moves in opposition to the principle of the organic world. Where these two extremes come together, and mutually pass into one another, we get what is really beautiful classic architecture.

We may recognize this union, as it actually arises, clearly in the transformation now introduced of that which we already have met with in the architecture which was anterior under the form of columns. In other words, it is true that from one point of view walls are necessary to make an enclosure; but walls, too, can stand up independent, as we have already proved with examples, without making the enclosure complete, to which a roofing, no less than an enclosure of the sides, essentially contributes. But a roofing of this kind has to be supported. The simplest way of doing this is by columns, whose essential and, at the same time exclusive, rationale consists here in being simply supports. For this reason walls are really a superfluity is so far as it is only a question of support. For supporting is a mechanical relation, and belongs to a province of gravity and its laws. And in this71 gravity the weight of a particular body is concentrated in its point of gravity, and must be assisted at this centre in remaining horizontal without a fall. This is precisely what the column does, so that with it the power of support appears to be reduced to the minimum limit of exterior means to effect this. What a wall at great cost72 effects, is equally effected by a few columns. It is a very beautiful characteristic of classic architecture not to set up more columns than are actually necessary to carry the weight of the rafter and that which reposes thereon. In genuine architecture columns, for purposes of mere decoration, are not truly beautiful. For the same reason also columns which stand up entirely alone do not perform their true function. No doubt triumphal columns have been erected, such as the famous ones in honour of Trajan and Napoleon: but these, too, are really but a pedestal for statues, and moreover covered with sculptured reliefs to commemorate and glorify the hero, whose image they carry. In the case of the column, then, it is of exceptional importance to see how in the course of architectural development it is compelled to divest itself of the concrete form of Nature before it can secure its more abstract form, the form, that is, which is as compatible with a definite object as it is with beauty.

(αα) Independent architecture, on account of the fact that it starts with organic images, makes use of human shapes, as, for example, we find in Egypt figures in some measure at least human, such as Memnons and the like, are utilized. This is, however, a mere superfluity, in so far, that is, as a definition of this character is not the true medium of support. We find among the Greeks that Caryatides are used in another mode and under a more severe obedience to rule to support superimposed weight, but such cannot be extensively employed. Moreover, we can only regard it as a misuse of the human form to crush it together under such burdens, and it is for this reason that Caryatides receive the character of the oppressed; their drapery suggests a state of slavery under which it is a degradation to carry such burdens.

(ββ) The more natural organic form for pillars and supports which have to bear a weight is consequently the tree, plant-life generally, a stem, a thin stalk which strives upwards in a vertical direction. The hole of a tree already carries of its own nature its crown of branches, the blade of corn the ear, the stem the flower. These forms, too, the Egyptian art of building, which has not as yet attained the liberty of viewing them in their abstract intension, borrows directly from Nature. In this respect the grandiose quality which we discover in the style of Egyptian palaces or temples — the colossal proportions of its rows of columns, the huge number of them, and withal the imposing mutual relations of the entire structure, has ever filled the spectator with wonder and astonishment. In these colonnades we do not find that all columns have the same form; they alternate between one, two, or three types. Denon, in his work on the Egyptian expedition, has collected a great number of such types. The combined effect is not as yet any uniform shape based on abstract principles of selection; rather the foundation is the shape of an onion, a reed-like efflorescence of leaf from the bulb, or, in other examples, a compression together of the root-leaves according to the manner of several kinds of plant. From this base, then, the thin stem breaks upwards straight, or mounts as column with twisted coils, and the capital is also a separation of leaves from branches which suggests the process of a flower. The imitation, however, is not true to Nature, but the plant-like forms are drained off under the architectural impulse, and made to approximate to circular, geometrical, and regular forms, or straight lines, so that such columns, in their entirety, resemble what are usually described as arabesques.

(γγ) This is not the place to enter into a general discussion of the arabesque for the reason that notionally it marks precisely the transition from the architecture which adopts as its basic form the natural organism to that which by its adoption of a more severe regularity is more strictly architectonic. When, however, the art of building has become free in its definitive character it relegates arabesques to the function of decoration and ornament. They are then pre-eminently forms of plants strained off, so to speak, or forms which originate from plants together with entwined forms of animals and human beings, or forms of animals in their passage over to plant-life. In so far as they purport to authenticate a symbolical significance the transitional passage between the different spheres of the animal kingdom hold good for it. Apart from such an interpretation they are simply the play of the imagination in the selection, combination and articulation of the most diverse forms of Nature. For architectural ornamentation of this kind, in the invention of which the imagination finds scope for its activity in the most varied creations of every kind, not even excluding utensils and drapery, the fundamental determinant and type is this, that whether it be plants, leaves, flowers, or animals, all are made to approximate to the abstract figures of science, in other words the inorganic. For this reason we frequently find arabesques to be stiff, untrue to organic life; and it is on this account that they are not unfrequently condemned and art is blamed for the use of them. This is exceptionally true of painting, though Raphael himself did not scruple to paint arabesques in great profusion, characterized with the highest charm, nobility of feeling, variety, and grace. No doubt arabesques are an antithesis to nature, whether we compare them with organic forms or the rigid laws of mechanics; but an opposition of this kind is not merely a right of art generally, but even an obligation under which architecture is bound. It is only by this means that living forms in other respects unfitted for the art of building are made adaptable to the truly architectural style and brought into harmony with it. Such an adaptability is offered in an exceptionally close degree by vegetable Nature, which is also in the East utilized to an extravagant extent in arabesques; in other words plants are not as yet individual objects which possess feeling, but naturally present themselves as adapted to architectural design, by virtue of the fact that they form coverings and protection against rain, sunlight, and wind, and, generally speaking, do not possess the free oscillation73 of lines which breaks forth from the regularity of scientific conceptions74. Architecturally used the regularity of leaves already present is yet further subjected to rule in the definition of rondure and straight line, so that by this means everything which it is possible to regard as distortion, unnaturalness, or stiffness in the plant-forms is fundamentally to be considered as a transformation adapted to the requirements of what is genuinely architectural.

In some such way in the column the real art of building passes from that which is purely organic imitation to the definite purpose of scientific rule, and from this to a position which again approximates to the organic result. We find it necessary to draw attention to this twofold point of departure from the actual necessities and the purposeless self-subsistency of architecture, because the true type unites both principles. The beautiful column originates in the natural form, which is then transformed into the post, that is, it submits to the uniformity and scientific precision of form.

CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE

THE ART OF building, when it has attained the position peculiarly its own and adequate to its notional content is subservient in its products to an end, and a significance which it does not itself essentially possess. It becomes an inorganic environment, a whole that is co-ordinated and built conformably to the laws of gravity, whose configurations are subject to that which is severely regular, straight, rectangular, circular, the relations of definite number and quantity, that which is essentially limited measure and strict conformity to rule. Its beauty consists in this very relation to purpose, which, in its freedom from direct75 admixture with what is organic, spiritual, and symbolical, and despite the fact that it subserves an end, nevertheless combines in an essentially exclusive totality, which suffers its own aim to appear through all its modifications, and in the harmonious co-ordination of its relations clothes that which is purely adapted to purpose in the forms of beauty. Architecture, however, at this stage76 corresponds to its real notion, for the reason that it is not in a position to endow that which is in the most explicit sense spiritual with a fully adequate existence, and is consequently only able to inform what is external and devoid of spirit in its contrasted appearance with that which is spiritual.

We propose, in our consideration of this art of building, in which the relation of service is as truly a characteristic as that of beauty, to adopt the following course of argument.

In the first instance we have to establish the general notion and character of the same.

Secondly, we shall have to adduce the particular fundamental determinants of the architectonic types which are deducible from the ulterior purpose which the classical work of art is erected to subserve.

Thirdly, we propose to survey the concrete reality which results from the development of classical architecture.

I do not, however, propose in discussing any of the above relations to enter into detail, but will limit myself to points of most general significance, a restriction more easy to observe in the present case than it was in that of the symbolical type of building.

(a) In conformity with the principle I have already more than once adverted to the fundamental idea of the genuine art of building consists in this, that the spiritual import is not exclusively reposed in the work of construction itself, which by this means becomes an independent symbol of ideal signification77, but, with the converse result, that this significance secures its free existence outside the limits of architecture. This existence may be of a twofold character, to the extent in other words that another art of extensive range — I refer, above all, to the art of sculpture of the true classical type — sets before us and gives independent form to the significance, or the individual man in himself receives and gives effect to the same in the active verity of his life. Apart from this78, these two aspects may still appear together. When, therefore, the Oriental architecture of the Babylonians, Hindoos, and Egyptians, on the one hand, gave symbolical form, in images of independent consistency, to that which was reckoned among these people as the absolute and true, or, from another aspect, enclosed, despite its external natural form, that which was conserved after death — in contrast to this what we find now is — whether we regard it relatively to art’s activity, or to the life of actual existence — that the spiritual is separated from the work of construction in independent guise for itself, and architecture becomes the vassal of what is spiritual, which constitutes the real significance and the determinating end. This end is consequently predominant. It controls the entire work; it determines the fundamental form of the same no less than its external skeleton, and neither suffers the material nor the individual’s imagination and caprice to assert their independence in a self-substantive way, as was the case in symbolical architecture, or to develop, over and beyond the true purpose of the work, a superfluity of manifold parts and configurations, as is the case in the romantic type.

(b) In considering a construction of this character we have, then, first to ask ourselves not merely what are the circumstances under which it was erected, but what is its aim and purpose. To make its construction compatible with such considerations, to have a due regard for climate, position, and the environing landscape, to create a whole, one in spontaneous co-ordination, by a regard for all these aspects as subservient to one purpose, this is the task stated broadly, in the entire fulfilment of which the instincts and genius of the artist will appear conspicuous. Among the Greeks we find that it is public buildings, temples, colonnades, and halls utilized for the ordinary rest and commerce of the day, approaches, such as the famous ascent of the Acropolis in Athens, which are pre-eminently the objects of the builder’s art. Private residences, on the other hand, were of a very simple character. With the Romans, on the contrary, it is the luxurious character of private houses, especially villas, which becomes prominent; and we may say the same thing of imperial palaces, public baths, theatres, circuses, amphitheatres, aqueducts, and springs. Buildings of this type, however, the utility of which throughout remains the commanding and directing principle, are merely able to accept beauty in a more or less decorative sense. The object most compatible with freedom of treatment in this sphere is that of religion — the temple-house as the enclosure of an individual which itself is appropriated by fine art, and placed before us by sculpture as the statue of the god.

(c) In the pursuit of aims such as those above mentioned, then, genuine architecture appears to be more free than the symbolic type of the previous stage, which seizes on the organic forms from Nature, nay, more free than sculpture, which is compelled to accept the human form it finds, and unites itself with them and their general relations as presented it. Classical architecture rather invents its forms and their configuration, so far as the content is concerned, from ends of spiritual import and in respect to form from human reason without any prototype. This greater freedom must, in a relative sense, be admitted; but the province in which it is exercised remains restricted, and the treatment which belongs to the classical art of building, on account of the rationality79 of its forms is, taken as a whole, somewhat of an abstract and dry character.

Frederich von Schlegel has described architecture as a frozen music; and in truth both these arts repose on a harmony of relations, which admit of being referred to number, and are consequently readily grasped in their fundamental characteristics. In our own case the fundamental determinant for these essential traits and their simple, more serious and imposing, or more charming and elegant relations is supplied by the dwelling-house, that is, walls, columns, beams brought together in the wholly crystalline forms of scientific deduction. What the relations are we are not permitted to reduce to the bare determinants of number and measure. But an oblong, quadrilateral figure with right angles is more pleasing than a square, because in the case of the oblong we are more thus affected both by equality and inequality80. If the one dimension, namely breadth, is half as large as the other, we have a relation which pleases; with an oblong which is long and narrow the reverse is the case. Along with this the mechanical relations of support and being supported must likewise be maintained in their genuine measure and law; a heavy entablature, for instance, cannot rest on slender and delicate columns, or conversely great structures be prepared in order after all to lay on them something very light. In all these mutual relations, such as that of the breadth to the length and height of the building, the height of the columns to their thickness, the intervals and number of the columns, the character and variety or simplicity of decorations, the size of many plinths, borders, and so forth, a secret principle of rhythm81 prevails among the ancients, which the instinct of the Greeks before all others has discovered; from which he may no doubt now and again deviate in points of detail, but the fundamental relations of which he is in general bound to preserve in order that he may not fall away from beauty.

(a) We have already alluded to the old controversy whether the material of wood or stone is to be accepted as the point of departure in building, and whether also it is from this difference of material that the architectural types proceed. For the real art of building at least, in so far as it lays emphasis on the aspect of ultimate purpose and elaborates the fundamental type of the dwelling on the lines of beauty we may accept wood as the more original of the two.

This is the conclusion of Hirt, following in this respect Vitruvius, and his conclusion has been much disputed. I will in a few words offer my own view on the matter in dispute, In the ordinary course of such reflections we seek to discover the abstract and simple law for a concrete result assumed as already present. It is in this way that Hirt looks for the basic model of Greek buildings, in like manner the design82, the anatomical framework, and finds it, so far as form and the material connected with it is concerned, in the dwelling and building of wood. No doubt a house as such is built mainly as a dwelling, a protection against storm, rain, weather, animals, and human beings, and requires an enclosure that is complete, in order that a family or a larger community of men may collect in independent seclusion and may look after their necessities and pursue their avocations in such seclusion. The house is a structure throughout with a definite purpose, a creation of mankind for human objects. For this reason we find him occupied upon it in many ways and with many objects, and the structure is articulated in an aggregate pile of all kinds of mechanical ways of mutual interlacement and imposition83 in order to hold in position and secure, according to the laws of gravity, what men are compelled to look after, that is, the making stable what is erected84, the closing it in, the support of what is superimposed, and not merely in the way of support, but, where the structure rests horizontally, the preservation of it in such a position, and, further, the uniting of all that clashes together at nooks and corners and so on. Now it is quite true that the house makes it necessary that the enclosure should be complete; and for this walls are most serviceable and safest; and from this point of view the building of stone appears most to answer the purpose. We may, however, with equal ease construct our fence with posts standing in juxtaposition, upon which then beams will rest, which at the same time both bind together and secure the perpendicular posts. Finally we come to the cover of all and roofing. In the temple house, moreover, the fact of enclosure is not the main fact of importance, but the feature of support and being supported. For this mechanical result the wooden structure is obviously the nearest to hand and the most natural. For the post, as that which supports, which at the same time requires a means of conjunction, and suffers the same to weigh on it in the shape of the cross-beam, constitutes here all that goes to the root of the matter. This essential division of parts and connection as well as the association of these aspects for a definite purpose belongs to the very nature of a wooden structure, which has its necessary material directly supplied it by the tree. In the tree we find already, without working upon it to any considerable or laborious extent, both post and beam, in so far as, that is, the wood already by itself possesses a definite form and consists of separate lengths, more or less in the straight line, lengths which can be brought together into rectangular corners no less than those which are acute or obtuse, and in this way provide corner pillars, supports, cross-beams and roof. Stone, on the contrary, never at any time possesses a form so definite. In contrast to the tree it is a formless mass, which first must be intentionally isolated and worked upon, in order that it may fit in juxtaposition to or superposition on other pieces and so once more be brought together with such. It requires, in short, several processes before it receives the form and serviceableness which wood already possesses independently. Moreover, stone material, when it is used in great masses, invites rather excavations and generally speaking, being ab initio relatively formless, is capable of every kind of form, for which reason it is rather the congenial material for the symbolical as also the romantic types of building, while wood, by reason of its natural form of straight stems, is demonstrably without mediation more serviceable to that more severe type of purpose and observance of rule, which is the fountain-head of classical architecture. In this respect the structure of stone is mainly predominant with the self-substantive type of building, although even among the Egyptians, in their colonnades bordered with plinths, other considerations supervene, which the structure of wood is able more readily and in the first instance to satisfy. Conversely we do not find that classical architecture restricts itself entirely to buildings of wood, but, on the contrary, where it is elaborated in conformity with beauty, executes its buildings in stone; but in such a way, however, that we are from a certain point of view still able to recognize in the architectural forms the original principle of the wood structure, if also from a further one definite relations attach which do not belong to that kind of building as such.

(b) The points of fundamental importance, which emphasize the dwelling-house as the basic type of the temple, may be in all essential particulars enumerated as follows. If we consider with closer attention the house in its mechanical relation to itself we shall find, in accordance with what we have already stated, on the one hand, masses of architectural form which serve as support and, on the other, those that are supported both being united for stability and security. Thirdly, we have before us the definite aspect of enclosure and limitation according to the three dimensions of length, breadth, and height. A construction, moreover, which, by the fact of its being a mutual correlation of definite aspects distinct from each other, is a concrete whole, is bound to declare this unity in its constitution. So we find here that essential differences arise which perforce assert themselves no less in their division and specific elaboration than they do in their rational connexus.

(α) Of first importance in this respect to consider is the aspect of service in the way of support. When we speak of masses that support we commonly, under the influence of every-day needs, think of the wall as the most secure and reliable means of support. Support as such, however, as we have already seen, is not the exclusive principle of the wall; for the wall serves essentially as a means of enclosure and connection, and for this reason is a predominant feature in the romantic type of building. What is the peculiarity of Greek architecture is this, that it gives direct form to the principle of support by itself, and for this object employs columns as a fundamental contribution to the purpose and beauty of its architecture.

(αα) The aim of the column is to support and only this; and although a series of columns set up in a straight line make a boundary, such an enclosure falls short of a secure wall or partition, and is, in fact, expressly cancelled by the genuine partition and placed in a position of free independence. Owing to this exclusive object of support which pertains to the column, it is of first importance that it should display the aspect of such a purpose relatively to the weight which rests upon it. Consequently it should neither be too strong nor too slender, nor again too compressed, not mount upwards to such a height and with such ease as though the weight upon it was not treated seriously.

(ββ) And just as this column is thus differentiated from the enclosing wall, or fence, it is further from another point of view distinct from the mere post. In other words, the post is fixed directly in the ground and ceases with like directness at the precise point where a weight is reposed upon it. For which reason its determinate length, its commencement and termination equally appear as a negative limitation by means of something else, as a determinacy which is the result of chance, which it does not possess in its own right. Commencement and termination, however, are defining characteristics, which are part of the very notion of the supporting column, and consequently must declare themselves in it as the conditions85 of its own substance. This is the ground of the fact that architecture, in the elaboration of its beauty, assigns to the column a base and a capital. In the Tuscan order, no doubt, we find no base; the column springs immediately from the ground. This being so, however, the length appears to the vision as something accidental. We are ignorant whether the column has not been to some undefined extent driven into the soil by the superimposed weight. In order that its commencement must not expose this undefined and accidental appearance it must with intention have the foot assigned to it, on which it stands, and which expressly enables us to recognize the commencement as in reality such. Art will therefore affirm as part of its function that the column begins at a certain place and for the rest it will make the security, and stable subsistence obvious to the eyes, and set the vision at rest in this respect also. For similar reasons our column should terminate in a capital, which is quite as much evidence of the real function of being a support as it is an affirmation of the fact that the column terminates here. This conception of a commencement and conclusion which are both deliberate is what affords us, in fact, the profounder explanation of base and capital. An analogous case is that of a cadence in music, which requires a secure resolution, or that of a book which should terminate without a full stop, or should start off without a capital letter, in the making of which, however, especially in the Middle Ages, large illuminated letters have been employed, with similar decorations at the work’s conclusion, in order to bring prominently before the mind the facts of commencement and termination. However much, therefore, both base and capital appear to exceed what is obviously required we must not regard them as a decorative superfluity, or think of simply deducing them from the example of Egyptian columns, which still imitate the type of the vegetable kingdom. Figures of organic design, such as are represented by sculpture in animal and human form, begin and terminate in the free outlines they themselves present, for it is the rational organism itself, which gives outline to the form working thereon from its own intrinsic nature. Architecture, on the contrary, possesses for the column and its shapes nothing beyond the mechanical relation of support, and the spatial distance from the ground to the point where the weight that is supported terminates the column. Art, however, is bound to emphasize and disclose the particular aspects which lie together in this determinate relation for the reason that they are essential features of the column. Its precise length and its twofold boundary both above and below, that is, no less than its relation as support, must consequently not appear as coming to it incidentally and by virtue of something else, but must also be represented as immanent in its very being.

With respect to the form of column other than its base and capital, it is in the first place round, circular-shaped, for it has to stand up in free and independent self-seclusion. The most essentially simple, securely exclusive, rationally defined86, and most regular line is in fact the circle. For this reason the column already proves from its shape that it is not adapted to form an even surface when placed in adjacent rows, as is the case with adjacent posts which are squared to the rectangular corner, and so present walls and partitions, but it has merely the object to offer a support under its own self-limitation. Moreover the columnar structure is ordinarily reduced in size gradually, as it ascends from one-third of its height, it becomes less in circumference and thickness, because the portions beneath have to carry that above, and it is felt necessary to emphasize and make obvious also this mechanical relation of the several parts of the column itself. Finally, we frequently find that columns are grooved; the reason of this is twofold, first, essentially to diversify the simple form, and secondly to make the columns appear more thick by means of such a division where this is necessary.

(γγ) Although, then, the column is set up in independent isolation it has none the less to make it appear evident that it is not placed there for its own sake, but as subservient to the mass which it is erected to support. In so far as the house requires a boundary on every side the singular column is therefore not sufficient, but others have to be placed adjacent to it, in other words we come upon the definite conception of a diversity of columns placed in a series. And when several columns support the same weight this common service is at the same time that which determines the equal height which they all possess and which unites them together, in other words the beam. This marks the transition from the aspect of support to the opposed object supported.

(β) That which columns support is the entablature superimposed. The relation of most importance to be considered here is that of rectangularity. Not merely in its relation to the ground, but also in that to the entablature the supporting structure must be rectangular. For the horizontal position is by the laws of gravity that which is alone intrinsically the most stable and fitting, and the right angle the only definitely secure one. The acute and obtuse angles are, on the contrary, indefinite, and both vary in their degree and are subject to contingency.

We may differentiate between the component parts of the entablature as follows:

(αα) The architrave, that is, the main beam, rests immediately upon the columns which stand adjacent in a direct line of equal height; this unites the columns together and places on them a weight shared equally. As beam, and nothing more, it merely requires the form of four level surfaces mutually related as rectangular in all three dimensions and their abstract regularity. Owing to the fact, however, that the architrave as to one part of it is supported by the columns, and in another constitutes the stay of the rest of the entablature, and it is from this latter again that itself receives the necessary relation of being a support, progressive architecture also places in external relief this twofold aspect of the main beam by emphasizing in the upper portions of the aspect of support by means of jutting plinths and so forth. In this respect therefore the main beam is not merely related to the columns which support it, but in like degree to other burdens which repose upon it.

(ββ) These in the first instance constitute the frieze. The border or frieze consists in one part of it of the tops of the joists87, which rest on the entablature, in another part of the spaces between the same. For this reason the frieze contains more essential differences than those distinguishing the architrave, and is bound to emphasize them more sharply, especially in the case where architecture, although executed in stone materials, follows more stringently the fundamental type of the wood construction. This is supplied us by the distinction between triglyphs and metopes. In other words triglyphs are the tops of the beams which are divided into three spaces, the metopes are the rectangular spaces between the separate triglyphs. In former times they were in all probability left bare, in later, however, they are filled up88, nay, even covered over and decorated with reliefs.

(γγ) The frieze, moreover, which rests on the entablature, carries the wreath or cornice. The function of this is to support the roof, which completes the whole upwards. Here we at once meet with questions of what form this final limitation is to be. For we may have in this respect two kinds of termination, either the horizontal and rectangular, or the one inclined to an acute or obtuse angle. If we look at the mere question of natural necessity we shall see that Southerners, who suffer little from rain and storm, merely require protection from sunlight; in their case a horizontal and rectangular roofing of house is likely to suffice. Northerners, on the contrary, have to protect themselves against inevitable showers of rain, against contingency of snow, that the weight may not prove too great; they require inclining roofs. At the same time, in the case of a fine art of building, mere necessity is not only of account; as art it has also to satisfy the profounder requirements of what is pleasing and beautiful. What mounts upwards from the ground must be conceived with a base, a foot, on which it stands and which serves it for support; and in addition to this columns and the partitions of genuine architecture supply us visibly with the means of support. That which closes all above, the roofing, has no longer to support a weight, but merely to be supported, and is bound to declare in itself this definite aspect that it no longer supports anything. In other words, it must be so constructed that it is actually unable to support, and consequently fine down to an angle, whether it be acute or obtuse. Ancient temples have in consequence no horizontal roofing, but two roof surfaces which meet at obtuse angles, and it is out of consideration for beauty that the building is thus terminated. In short, roof surfaces that are horizontal do not give us the appearance of a building entirely complete; a horizontal flat may always add further weight to its height; this the line in which inclining roof surfaces terminate is no longer able to do. To take an analogous case in the art of painting, it is the pyramidal form in the grouping of figures which best satisfies artistic taste.

(γ) The final determining factor which we have to consider is that of the enclosing, the walls, and partitions. Columns no doubt support and form a boundary, but they do not enclose; they are, on the contrary, as such boundary, incompatible with the interior which is hemmed in by walls. If we require such an absolute enclosure we must have also thick and solid dividing walls erected. This is actually the case in temple construction.

(αα) We have nothing further to add with respect to walls except the fact that they must be built in a straight and even line and perpendicularly for the reason that walls that rise obliquely to acute and obtuse angles present the threatening aspect of collapse, and possess no direction once and for all securely defined; it can merely appear as a matter of chance that they are reared in whatever more acute or obtuse angle it may happen to be. The demand of scientific rule and purpose alike is here also once more for the right angle.

(ββ) Owing to the fact that walls act as enclosures no less than as means of support, while we restricted the true function of the column to that of mere support, we approximate to the conception that where we have to satisfy these two distinct needs of support and enclosure columns may be set up and may be united to one another by means of thick walls in such partitions; it is thus that we get half columns. In this way, for example, Hirt, following Vitruvius, makes a start in his original type of construction with four corner-posts. If the necessity of an enclosure is to be satisfied no doubt our columns, if we are obliged to include such, must be walled up and it is not difficult to prove that half columns date from remote antiquity. Hirt, for instance89, affirms that the employment of half columns is as old as the art of building itself, and deduces their origin from the circumstance that columns and piers supported and carried the roofing and other superimposed structures, but at the same time rendered partition walls necessary as a protection against sun and inclement weather. Since, however, the columns already supported the main building in a sufficient manner, it was not necessary to erect partition walls of either so thick or firm a material as the columns, and consequently this latter, as a rule, abutted on the exterior of the building. This theory of their origin may be correct, but for all that half columns are repugnant to a rational view of them; we have, in short, here two ends standing side by side in opposition, and essentially confounding each other, without any law of necessity being disclosed. It is of course possible to defend half columns, if the point of departure in considering even the column is so strictly that of the structure of wood, that we regard their essential function to be that of an enclosure. Placed in thick walls, however, the column has lost all its significance; it is degraded to the mere post. The true column is in its nature round, essentially complete, and expresses by this very trait of exclusiveness in a visible way that it is antagonistic to an even surface, and, consequently, every inclusion in a wall. If, therefore, we desire to have the support of walls such must be even, not circular columns, but surfaces which can be extended evenly in a wall.

As far back as 1773 Goethe exclaimed with spirit to the like effect in his youthful essay, “On the German Art of Building”: “What does it matter to us, you philosophical art-critic of the latest French school, that original man, spurred on by his needs to invent, drove into the ground four trunks, then fastened four poles on top and covered the whole with branches and moss. And after all it is wholly false to say that this hut of yours was the first begotten on earth. Two poles that cross each other at their ends, two behind and one stuck diagonally above in forest fashion is and remains, as you may any day see for yourself in the huts of the fields and the vineyard slopes, a far earlier discovery from which it is quite impossible for you to deduce a principle for your pig-stye.” In other words Goethe seeks to prove that columns enclosed in walls placed in buildings whose essential object is that of mere enclosure have no meaning. This is not because he would not recognize the beauty of the column. On the contrary, he is loud in its praise. “But take good care,” he adds, “not to employ them improperly: it is their nature to stand up free. Woe to the wretch who has soldered their slender growth in blockish walls.” It is from such a point of view that he proceeds to consider the building art of the Middle Ages and our own time and affirms: “The column is of no value as a constituent feature of our dwellings: it rather contradicts the essence of all our buildings. Our houses do not consist of four columns in four corners; they consist of four walls on four sides, which stand in the place of all columns, totally exclude such, and where they are thrust in they are a burdensome superfluity. This applies to our palaces and churches, subject to one or two exceptions, which it is not necessary to particularize.” We have in the above statement, which is the result of independent observation of the facts, the principle of the column correctly expressed. The column must place its foot down in front of the wall and appear in complete independence of it. In our more modern architecture no doubt we find pilasters freely used; architects, have, however, regarded them as the repeated adumbration of previous columns, and made them flat rather than round.

(γγ) From this it is clear that though no doubt walls may serve as support, yet, for the reason that the function of support is already independently performed by columns, they must, on their part in finished classical architecture be accepted as essentially having for their object the enclosure. If they are taken as columns are taken, to provide means of support, the essentially distinct defining functions of these latter are not, as is most desirable, performed also as by distinct constituent parts of the building90, and the conception of what walls ought to provide is impaired and confused. We consequently find even in temples that the central hall, where the statue of the god was placed, to enclose which was the main object, is often left open in the upper part. If, however, a roofing is required, the claims of the lofty style of beauty made it necessary that the same should be supported independently. In other words the direct imposition of entablature and roof on the enclosing walls is purely a matter of necessity and need; it is not appertinent to free architectural beauty, because in the art of classical buildings we require as means of support neither partitions nor walls, which would be rather derogatory to the design in so far as — we have already noticed the fact — they put together contrivances and a wall-space of greater extent than is actually necessary.

These would be the main distinguishing features which in classical architecture we have to keep apart.

(c) Although we may then, on the one hand, declare it as a principle of first importance that the distinctions which have been summarily indicated must appear with their differences emphasized, it is equally necessary on the other that they should be united in a whole. We will shortly, in conclusion, draw attention to this union which in architecture will be rather and simply a juxtaposition, association, and a thorough eurhythmy of the entire construction. Generally speaking the Greek temple buildings present an aspect which both satisfies, and if we may use the expression, sates us to the full.

(α) There is no soaring up, but the whole just expands on the broad level and is extended without particular elevation. In order to view the building’s face it is barely necessary to raise the sight with intention; it is, on the contrary, allured to the bare expanse, while the building art of Germany in the Middle Ages strives up almost without mass and soars. Among the ancients breadth, regarded as secure and convenient foundation on the earth, is the main thing. Height is rather borrowed from the height of man, and merely is increased in proportion as the building increases in breadth and width.

(β) Furthermore, embellishments are so effected that they do not impair the impression of simplicity. For much also depends on the mode of decoration. The ancients, more particularly the Greeks, preserve here the finest sense of proportion. Extensive surfaces and lines of entire simplicity, for instance, do not appear so large in this undivided simplicity as in the case where some variety, somewhat that destroys this uniformity is introduced, by which at once an extension of more definite outline is presented to the vision. If this subdivision, however, and its adornment is wholly elaborated in detail, so that we have nothing before us but a variety and its details, even the most imposing relations and dimensions appear to be crumbled away and destroyed. The ancients, therefore, as a rule are actuated in their works neither to let the same and their proportions by such means appear in any way greater than they actually are, nor do they break up the whole by means of interruptions and embellishments to the extent that — because all parts are small and a unity is absent which shall once more bring everything together and fuse it throughout — therefore the whole also shall appear as insignificant. To quite as little an extent are their works of beauty in their perfection merely piled up as mere weight on the ground, or tower up out of all relation to their breadth to the skies. They preserve in this respect, too, the mean of beauty, and offer at the same time in their simplicity necessary scope to a duly proportioned variety. Above all, however, the dominant feature of the whole and its simple particularities appear to permeate in the most transparent way through all and everything, and overmasters the individuality of the configuration precisely in the way that in the classical Ideal the universal substance retains its power to control what is accidental and particular, in which the same receives its living form, and to bring it into harmony with itself.

(γ) With regard to the disposition and articulation of the several parts of a temple we find, on the one hand, a very marked graduation of elaboration, and on the other much that is purely traditional. The main distinctions that have an interest for us in this inquiry are limited to the temple precinct (ναὸς), enclosed by walls containing the image of the god, also the dwelling in front (πρόναος), that in the rear (ὀπισθόδομος), and the colonnades that encircle the entire structure. A dwelling in front and behind with a series of columns before it had originally the typical form, which Vitruvius calls ἀμφιπρόστυλος; to this was afterwards added a row on either side of the building, that is the περίπτερος; finally we have the completest form of elaboration in the δίπτερος, where this row of columns is doubled throughout the circuit, and in the ὔπαιθρος colonnades detached from the walls, and which it is possible to pass round, as in the case of the colonnades above, are added in double rows with the interior of the ναὸς itself. For such a type of temple Vitruvius instances as an example the eight-columned temple of Minerva at Athens, and the ten-columned one of Olympian Jupiter91.

We will pass over in this place the more detailed consideration of the number of columns no less than the nature of the intervening spaces between themselves and the walls, and merely draw attention to the unique significance which such colonnades and forecourts, or halls possessed in general for the Greek temple. In these prostyles and amphiprostyles, that is, these single and double colonnades, which brought you direct into the open sunshine, we observe that men can move about openly and free and can group themselves as they choose, or according to the chance of the moment. Columns are, in short, not an enclosure, but a limitation through which you can always pass, so that you can be partially within and without them at once, and at any rate can everywhere step from them into the open day. In the same way the long walls at the back of the columns do not permit of any pressure to one central point, whither our sight may instinctively turn when the passages are crowded. On the contrary the eye is rather diverted from such a point of unity in every direction; and instead of the conception of a congregation brought together for One purpose we observe a tendency outwards, and merely receive the impression of a means of spending the time devoid of seriousness, light-hearted, idle, and provocative of chatter. Within the enclosure no doubt we have suggested a profounder aim, but even here we find surrounding features92, which more or less indicate that we are not to take such a purpose too seriously. Consequently the impression of such a temple, though no doubt simple and imposing, is at the same time gay, open, and pleasing to the sense; the entire building, in short, is rather arranged as a place for standing about in, strolling round, for ingress and egress than in order to enable an assembly of persons to concentrate their numbers in one spot shut off from the rest of the world.

Casting our glance now on the different forms of construction which offer us the predominant examples of distinctive type in classical architecture we may emphasize the following as most important.

(a) What first arrests our attention in this field are those kinds of building whose lines of distinction are most noticeable in their columns; for this reason I shall myself, too, limit myself to a statement of the pre-eminently characteristic traits of the various types of column.

The most famous among the orders of columns are the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, over whose architectural beauty and adaptation to definite purpose, neither the research of earlier times nor our own has been able to add anything. For we may assume that the Tuscan, or, according to Hirt93, the ancient Greek type of building belongs in its undecorative crudeness to the original and simple type of wood structure, not to the architecture of beauty, and the so-called Roman order of columns is of no real moment, being merely an increase in the decorative character of the Corinthian. The important points in this inquiry are the relation of the height of columns to their thickness, the type of base and capital to be distinguished in each case, and, finally, the greater or less intervening spaces between the columns. With regard to the first, if the column is not of a height four times as large as its diameter it appears too bulky and depressed; if its height, however, exceeds such a proportion by being ten times as large, the column will appear too slender to the eye, and too slim as a means of support. The respective intervals between the columns must, however, be considered in close relation to the above facts; if the columns appear more stout they should be placed nearer to one another, if on the contrary the impression they produce is one of slightness and lankness the intervals have to be larger. It is a matter of equal importance, and this is so whether the columns have a pedestal or not, whether the capital is of higher or less ample size, is without or with decoration, for it is by this means that the entire character of the column is altered. With regard to the column’s shaft, however, the rule obtains that it should be smooth and devoid of decoration, although it does not rise throughout of the same thickness, but is appreciably more slender at the top than it is midway and at the base, and the change is such that there is a swelling which, though barely perceptible, is none the less present. In more recent times no doubt, notably in the Middle Ages, when the antique types of columns were converted to the use of Christian architecture, the smoothness of shaft was found to be too cold, and for this reason wreaths of flowers were entwined round them, or columns of spiral form were permitted no doubt on similar grounds; this, however, is inadmissible and opposed to the best taste, because the true function of the column is simply that of support, and to carry this out they ought to rise in a secure and straight line and be self-subsistent94. The only divergency from the rule in columnar structure which the ancients admitted was that of the groove, a variation which, as Vitruvius points out, made such appear broader than when their surface is wholly smooth. Such grooving we find carried out very extensively.

I will now indicate more closely the main distinguishing features of the Doric, Ionian, and Corinthian order of columns respectively.

(α) In primitive buildings security of structure is the fundamental characteristic beyond which architecture fails to go; consequently it does not as yet dare to risk relations of a slender kind with the bolder lightness which belongs to them, but rests satisfied with forms of greater bulk. This is the case in the Doric type of building. We find here that the material aspect with its onerous weight still is that which is most influential, and is particularly apparent in the relations of breadth and height. When a building is erected in lightness and freedom the burden of heavy masses is overcome; if on the contrary its disposition is one which suggests mainly breadth and a low elevation the prevailing impression, as in the Doric style, is that of stability and solidity, subservient to the dominant force of gravity.

Consistently with this character Doric columns, if contrasted with the other two orders, are the broadest and lowest. The more ancient examples do not rise above a height which is six times their diameter, and not unfrequently they are merely four times that breadth; for this reason they give, by virtue of their unwieldiness, the impression of an earnest, simple, and unadorned manliness, such as we have exemplified in the temples at Paestum and Corinth. The later examples of the Doric order, however, extend their columns to a height of seven times this unit of measure, and, for buildings other than temples, Vitruvius adds yet another half diameter. More generally, however, the distinctive character of the Doric type consists in this that it approximates most nearly to the primitive simplicity of the wood building, although it is more receptive than the Tuscan to decorative work and embellishments. The columns, however, have almost without exception no distinctive base; they stand up directly on their foundation95, and their capitals are arranged in the simplest way out of ovolo ornament and plinth. The shaft is sometimes left smooth, sometimes grooved with twenty drills, which frequently were flat for one third of the way from the base, and hollowed out in circular form the rest of the way96. As regards the interval between the columns, according to the older monuments, the breadth is twice the diameter of a column, and only a few exceed this by a width between two and two and a half diameters. Another peculiarity of the Doric type of building in which it approaches the type of wood construction consists in triglyphs and metopes. In other words triglyphs indicate in the frieze the tops of the beams of the entablature with which the architrave culminates inserted there by means of prismatical incisions97, while the metopes fill up the spaces between one beam and another, and in the Doric construction still retain the form of the square98. As a decoration they are frequently covered with reliefs, while beneath the triglyphs, which rest on the architrave, and as a culmination to the surfaces of the cornice on their lower side, we have for embellishment six small conical bodies, technically known as drops.

(β) In the Doric style we are already made aware of an advance in the characteristics of a solidity which affects us with pleasure. In Ionic architecture this upward progress is further emphasized in a type notable for its slenderness, charm, and grace, if still expressed in a simple way. The height of the columns varies between that of seven and ten times the width of the diameter at the base, and is determined, according to the conclusions of Vitruvius, pre-eminently by the breadth of the intervening spaces of the columns, that is to say, where they are wider the columns appear thinner, and consequently more slender, where they are more narrow, however, they appear stouter and of less height. For this reason the architect is forced, in order to avoid an excess of thinness or bulk, in the first case to reduce the height, and in the second to increase it. In the case, then, where the intervals exceed three diameters the height of the columns will merely carry eight of such, where there is an interval of two and a quarter rising to three, the height will rise to eight and a half diameters. If the columns, however, are separated only by the width of two diameters, the height must be extended to nine and a half times the unit, and in the extreme case of an interval of but one and a half times, such height will even rise to ten times the breadth of diameter. However, cases such as these latter ones appear very seldom, and, in so far as we may judge from such monuments of the Ionic type of building that have come down to us, the ancients made very scanty use of those relations which necessitated the more lofty columns.

The Ionic type is further distinguished from the Doric in this that the Ionic columns do not rise directly with their shaft from the substructure, but are set up on a variously articulated pedestal, and then in unobtrusive rejuvenescence rise lightly in their slender height to their capitals with a deeper hollowing out than in the Doric type, a broad grooving of four and twenty grooves. It is especially in this characteristic that the Ionic temple at Ephesus is distinguishable from and in contrast to the Doric at Paestum. In the same way we find an increase of variety and grace in the Ionic capital. It has not only a carved coussinet99, little ledge and plinth, but receives both to the right and left a spiral winding, and at the sides a decorative kind of cushion, from which is derived its title of the pulvinated capital. The volutes at the end of the pad or cushion indicate the end of the column, which, however, may rise to a still greater elevation, but in this possible increase makes itself essentially a curve.

Compatibly with this slender character of the pleasing decoration of its columns the Ionic type of building requires a less bulky weight in its beams, and is concerned in this way too to secure an increase of grace. By doing so it no longer suggests as a predecessor as the Doric does the wood construction, and consequently suffers triglyphs and metopes to fall away in the flat frieze, introducing in their place as its principal means of decoration, heads of sacrificial animals united with flowery coils, and, instead of the suspended mutule100 tops, we find tooth-like ornamentation101.

(γ) Finally, to come to the Corinthian order, we find it is in fundamentals composed upon the Ionic, only that with a similar slenderness it is elaborated in more tasteful luxuriance, and unfolds the consummate finish of adornment and embellishment. Like it content to possess the definite and various divisions of its structure as a legacy from the wood building, it emphasizes the same without permitting their origin to be conspicuous by means of its decorative work, and expresses, in its manifold ledges and borders on cornice and beam, on its weather moulds, its moulding flutes, its variously articulated pediments and its more luxuriant capitals, a multiplicity of pleasing features.

The Corinthian column, it is true, does not exceed in height the Ionic, rising as a rule with a grooving of similar character, merely eight times or eight and a half times as high as the diameter of the lower portion of the column, but it appears more slender and above all more exuberant by virtue of a loftier capital. For the capital’s height is one and an eighth times the diameter beneath, and has at each of its four corners more slender volutes which suffer the pulvination of the previous type to fall off, while the part below is decorated with acanthus leaves. The Greeks have a charming tale relative to this. A maiden of exceptional beauty, they tell us, died. Her nurse collected her playthings in a little basket and placed it on her grave, where an acanthus plant sprang up. The leaves very soon embraced the basket, and it was this which suggested the thought of the capital of a column.

Of other points of difference between the Corinthian and the Ionic and Doric orders, I will only further mention the delicately curved mutules under the cornices, and the projection of the water moulding, and the indentations and corbel-heads on the cornice102.

(b) We may, secondly, regard the Roman type of building as an intermediate form standing between that of Greek and Christian architecture, in so far as here we find mainly the application of arch and vaultings. It is not possible to determine with accuracy the time when the construction of arches was first discovered; it appears, however, certain that neither the Egyptians, despite the great progress they made in the arts of building, nor the Babylonians, Israelites, and Phoenicians were cognisant of the ogive or the vault. The monuments of Egyptian architecture at any rate only show us that when it was a question of superimposing a roof over the interior of a building the one means the Egyptians had at their disposal was that of placing huge slabs of stone across like beams in horizontal position. If it was required to arch up broad entrances, or cross arches they knew of no other way of doing this than letting one stone on either side project forward, with another still more projecting one above it, so that the side walls gradually approached upwards until they reached a point where only one stone was necessary to close the remaining space between. Where such an expedient was not necessary they covered the spaces with huge slabs of stone arranged across in the manner of rafters.

Among the Greeks we do, I believe, find monuments in which the arch construction has already been adopted, but they are rare; and Hirt, who has written with most authority over the building and the history of the building of antiquity, affirms that among such monuments we can rely on none with security as dating from a time previous to that of Pericles. In other words, in Greek architecture the features which are characteristic and elaborated are the column and beam in horizontal position, so that we find here the column very little used in a relation which lies apart from its true function, namely that of supporting beams. Moreover the arch that is vaulted from two piers or columns, and the knob-like formation, connotes a yet further feature, for we find here that the column already begins to forsake its determinate attribute of support. For the circular arch in its rise, its flexure and its declivity is related to a centre which has nothing to do with the column as a means of support. The separate parts of the circular arch are carried in mutual opposition; they support and prolong each other in a way that shows them far more remote from the direct assistance of the column than is the horizontally superimposed beam.

In Roman architecture, then, as stated, the arch-construction and vaulting is of very common occurrence, or rather we have certain remains which we can only attribute to the age of the Roman kings, if we may fully believe the evidence of later times. Of this type are the catacombs and cloaca, which were vaulted, but must be regarded as works of a more recent restoration. The most probable discoverer yet suggested of the vault is Democritus103, who occupied himself in a variety of ways with mathematical problems and is held to be the discoverer of lithotomy.

One of the most famous buildings of Roman architecture, in which the circular arch appears as fundamental type is the Pantheon of Agrippa dedicated to Jupiter Ultor, which, in addition to the statue of Jupiter, contained colossal images of gods in no less than six other niches, namely, Mars, Venus, the deified Julius Caesar as well as three others whose identity we cannot fix with accuracy. In either side of these niches stood two Corinthian columns, and the whole was vaulted with one majestic vault in form of the half globe and corresponding to the vault of heaven. With reference to the material of this vault we may note that it is not a stone one. In other words the Romans, in the majority of their vaultings, in the first instance carried out a construction of wood, and covered the same with a composition of chalk and puzzolana cement, which was made of the dust of a light kind of tufa and broken tile shards. When this composition was dry the whole was formed into a mass so that the wooden scaffolding could be removed and the vaulting, by virtue of the lightness of its material and the stability of its consolidation, exercised only an insignificant pressure on the walls.

(c) The architecture of the Romans possessed moreover generally, and apart from this novel employment of arch construction, an entirely different scope and character than that of Greece. The Greeks distinguished themselves, while carrying throughout their work its main purpose, and by virtue of their perfection as artists, in the nobility, the simplicity no less than the airy delicacy of their decorations. The Romans on the contrary are, as artists, at least on the mechanical side of construction more rich and more ostentatious, but at the same time of less nobility and grace. Add to this in their architecture we meet with a variety of intention which was unknown to the Greek. As I have already observed the Greeks entirely devoted the splendour and beauty of art to public objects. Their private dwellings remained insignificant. Among the Romans, however, not only do we find an increase of public buildings, whose main purpose of construction was splendidly embellished in theatres, spaces for animal combats and other means of public sport, but architecture received a deliberate impulse in the direction of private use. More especially after the civil wars villas, baths, colonnades, flights of steps were constructed with the imposing character of the most luxurious extravagance, and by this means a new opening was made for the arts of building, which also included that of gardening, which was perfected in a way that evinced very considerable talent and taste. The villa of Lucullus is a striking example.

This type of Roman architecture has in many respects rendered service as a model to Italians and Frenchmen of t more recent times. Among ourselves we have for a long time to some measure followed in the steps of the Italians, and also to some extent in those of the French; finally men have once more devoted their attention to the Greeks, and have accepted as an object of imitation the antique in its purer form.

ROMANTIC ARCHITECTURE

THE GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE of the Middle Ages, which constitutes here the characteristic centre of the truly romantic type, has for a long time, more especially since the popularization and predominance of the French taste, been regarded as something rude and barbarous. In recent times it was Goethe who mainly, in the first instance, and in the youthful freshness of his own nature and artistic outlook, brought once more the Gothic type to its place of honour. Critical taste has been more and more concerned to appreciate and respect these imposing works as giving effective expression both to the distinctive purpose of Christian culture, and the harmonious unity thereby created between architectonic form and the ideal spirit of Christendom.

In so far as the general character of these buildings is concerned, in which religious architecture is that which is most prominent, we discovered already in our introduction to this part of our inquiry that in this type both those of independent and serviceable architecture are united. This unity, however, does not in any way consist in a fusion of the architectural forms of the Oriental and the Greek, but we must look for it in the fact that, on the one hand, the house or dwelling-enclosure furnishes yet more the fundamental type than in the Greek temple construction, and, on the other, mere serviceableness and purpose is to that extent eliminated, and the house is emphasized apart from it in its free independence. No doubt these houses of God and other buildings of this type appear to the fullest extent as constructed for definite objects, as already stated, but their true character is precisely this, that it reaches over and beyond the determinate aim and presents itself in a form of self-seclusion and positive local independence. The creation stands up in its place independent, secure, and eternal. For this reason the character of the entirety is no longer to be deduced from any purely scientific or theoretical relation. Within the interior the box-like envelope of our Protestant churches falls away which are built simply that they may be filled with men and women, and do not possess church pews as stalls; in their exterior, the building soars in its roofing and pinnacles freely upwards, so that the relation of purpose, however much it be also present, tends again to disappear, leaving the impression of the whole that of a self-subsistent existence. Such a building is entirely filled up by nothing expressly; everything is absorbed in the grandeur of the whole: it possesses and declares a definite object, but in its grandiose proportions and sublime repose it is essentially and with an infinite significance exalted104 above all mere intentional serviceableness. This exaltation over finitude and simple security is that which constitutes the unique characteristic aspect of it. From another point of view it is precisely in this type that architecture finds the greatest opportunity for particularisation, diversion of effect and variety, without permitting, however, the whole to fall into mere details and accidental particulars. The imposing character of the art we are considering restores, on the contrary, this aspect of division and dismemberment in the original impression of simplicity. It is the substantive being of the whole which is set in division and dismemberment in an infinite multiplicity throughout the entire complexus of individual and varied distinctions; but this unbounded complexity is subdivided in a simple way, is articulated according to rule, broken into parts symmetrically by the same substance, which is the motive and constitutive principle throughout in a harmonious co-ordination which entirely satisfies, and which combines without let or hindrance the mass of detail in all their length and breadth in securest unity and most perspicuous independence.

If we pass now to a consideration of the particular forms in which romantic architecture receives its specific character we shall find, as we have already above noticed, that our entire discussion will be confined to what is genuine Gothic architecture, and mainly that of the church buildings of Christendom, in their contrast to the Greek temple.

(a) As fundamental form underlying all the rest, we have here the wholly shut off dwelling-house.

(α) In other words, just as the Christian spirit withdraws itself within an ideal realm, the building is the place essentially delimited on all sides for the congregation of the Christian community and the gathering together of spiritual life. It is the concentration of essential soul-life which thus encloses itself in spatial relations. The devotion of the Christian heart, however, is at the same time and in the same degree an exaltation over finitude, so that this exaltation, moreover, determines the character of God’s house. Architecture secures thereby as its significance, independently of the object which renders it necessary as a building, this exaltation to the Infinite, a significance which it is forced to express through the spatial relations of architectural forms. The impression, therefore, which art is now called upon to emphasize is, in one aspect of it, and in contrast to the open gaiety of the Greek temple, that of the tranquillity of the soul which, released from external nature and worldly conditions, retires wholly into self-seclusion; in the other aspect of it it is that impress of a solemn sublimity, which strains and soars over and beyond all rational limits. If, therefore, the buildings of classical architecture as a rule offer the expansion of breadth, we find in contrast to this that the romantic character of Christian churches asserts itself in the growth upwards from the soil and a soaring to the skies.

(β) In this oblivion of external Nature and all the diverting occupations and interests of finite existence, which is to be effected by means of such seclusion, the open forecourts and colonnades and the like, which are in direct communication with that world, furthermore and of necessity fall away, or only receive an entirely modified representation within the interior of the building. And in like manner the light of the sun is either excluded, or glimmers in broken rays through windows of painted glass, which, to prevent total immersion in darkness, are perforce admitted. What humanity needs here is not the gift of external Nature, but a world created through it and for it alone, for its devotion and the activity of its soul-life.

(γ) We may fix as the pervading type by which the house of God is generally and with particular reference to its sections characterized that of the free rise and running up into pinnacles, whether they be built up by means of the arch or straight lines. In classical architecture, where we find columns and piers with superimposed beams is the fundamental form, rectangularity and the office of support is the feature of importance. For the construction superimposed at right angles marks in a definite way that it is supported. And even though the beams do in their turn carry the roofing, the surfaces of this latter portion incline to one another in an obtuse angle. In such a construction we find no trace of a genuine tendency to points and a soaring up: we find simply repose and support. In the same way, too, a circular arch, which extends in a continuous and equally gradated incline from one column to another, and is referable to one and the same centre, rests on its substructure of support. In romantic architecture, however, we no longer find the relation of support simply and rectangularity the fundamental form, but rather we have before us the fact that all that is enclosed either on its interior or exterior side independently springs upward, and, without the secure and express distinction between the relationship of weight and support, concentrates in a point. This pre-eminently free striving upwards and tendency to inclines that run to culminating points is what constitutes here the essential determinant, by virtue of which either acute-angled triangles with a more slender or broader base or pointed arches appear, both of which aspects stand out most obviously in the characterization of Gothic architecture.

(b) Moreover, the obligations of spiritual devotion and exaltation, regarded as a cultus, bring before us a variety of definite conditions and features which cannot be fully met on the exterior of the building in the open halls or forecourts of a temple, but can only be satisfied within the house of God itself. If, therefore, in the case of the temple of classical architecture it is the external form which is of most importance, and we find it remaining by means of the colonnades more independent of the interior construction, romantic architecture presents a contrast to this not merely in the fact that the interior of the building is more essentially important, for the reason that the whole purports to be simply an enclosure, but also in this, that the interior permeates the very form of the exterior throughout, and determines its specific shape and mode of articulation.

In this connection we will, in order to examine the matter more closely, first make an entrance into the interior, and working outwards therefrom endeavour to elucidate the exterior.

(α) The definition I have already adduced as best describing the interior of the church is that of a certain place set apart and enclosed in all its aspects, whether it be in opposition to the inclemency of the weather or the distractions of the outer world, for the community and its spiritual worship. The space of the interior is consequently an enclosure in the completest sense, whereas Greek temples, apart from the presence of open passages and halls in the environment, not unfrequently possessed open cells.

Inasmuch as, moreover, Christian worship is an exaltation of the soul above the limitations of natural existence and a reconciliation of the individual with God, we find in this fact a mediation of points of view which are separably distinct in one and the same essentially concrete unity. At the same time romantic architecture receives the function in the form and co-ordination of its building to make the above content of spiritual life, to enclose which is the prime object of its construction, so far as this is architecturally feasible, shine through and determine the actual shape both of the exterior and the interior. The following points will assist our understanding of the nature of this problem.

(αα) The space of the interior will have to be no abstractly undifferentiated and empty one, which possesses no essentially defined features or links that relate them respectively. It must have a concrete form, one, that is, which presents differences in respect to all the mutual relations of length, breadth, height, and the mode of such dimensions. The form of the circle, the square, the oblong, with the equality of enclosing walls and roofing which is necessary to these figures, will not be suitable here. The movement, severation, and mediation of soul-life in its exaltation from that which is of earth to that which is eternal, to the far-off and the more lofty, would fail to find apt expression in this bare equality of a square figure.

(ββ) It is only a corollary to this that in the Gothic style the substantial purport of the house, both in respect of its enclosing form of sidewalls and roof, and in that of its columns and beams relatively to the configuration of the whole and its parts, becomes a matter of subordinate importance. And with this disappears, on the one hand, as we have already noticed, the strict distinction between burden and support, as on the other we find no longer rectangularity is emphasized as essential to the building’s purpose. Recourse is made once more to an analogous form of Nature, namely, one that prefigures a solemn place of assemblage and enclosure which freely soars upwards. If we step into the interior of a cathedral of the Middle Ages we have brought before us not so much the stability and mechanical purpose of supporting piers and a vault that rests upon it. We are rather reminded of the arches of a forest, whose rows of trees incline with their branches to one another and form an enclosure by this means. A cross-beam requires a secure centre of gravity and the horizontal position. In Gothic architecture, however, the walls mount up freely and independently, and in the same way the piers, which then expand above in several directions apart from one another, and coalesce as though by accident. In other words their function, to support the vaulting, is, although the same in truth reposes on the piers, not expressly emphasized and independently set forth105. The effect is as though they did not carry such, just as in the tree the branches do not appear as though supported by the stem, but rather in their airy incurvation as a continuation of the stem, and with the branches of other trees, form a roof of leaves. A roofing of this kind, which is thus fixed upon as the cover of the life of Spirit, this awful environment, which invites us to contemplation, it is which the cathedral presents us, in so far as the walls and among them the forest of piers freely coalesce in their summits. But for all that we do not actually assert that Gothic architecture has accepted trees and woods for the actual exemplar of its forms.

While the sharpening to a point offers us generally the basic type in Gothic we find in the interior of churches this tendency take the more specialized shape of the pointed arch. By this means the columns in particular receive an entirely fresh significance and appearance.

The broad Gothic churches require a roofing to close them in, a roofing which on account of the breadth is a severe burden and renders support unavoidable. Here, therefore, the columns appear to be in their right place. For the reason, however, that the straining upwards is precisely that which converts support into the appearance of free soaring-up columns are unable to be employed here with the significance they possess in classical architecture. They become, on the contrary, piers which, in lieu of the cross-beam, carry arches in a manner whereby they appear as simply a continuation of the pier and coalesce together without definite object in a point. We may, no doubt, conceive the unavoidable termination of two piers that stand apart from one another as analogous to a gut-roof that rests on corner posts; but taking into consideration the surfaces at the sides, although they, too, are planted on piers in entirely obtuse angles, and incline to one another in an acute angle, we find in the latter case none the less the conception on the one hand of burden, and on the other of support. The pointed arch, on the contrary, which apparently in the first instance mounts up in a straight line, and only by imperceptible and slower degrees leans forward in order to incline to the opposite side, presents for the first time the complete idea as though it was just nothing but the continuation of the pier itself, which forms an arch with another. Piers and vaulting appear, in their contrast to columns and the beam, as one and the same image, although the arches rest upon the capitals from which they spring. The capitals, too, in specific cases, such as occur in Netherland churches, keep away altogether, and by this means the inseparable unity above-mentioned is made expressly visible to the eye.

Moreover, on account of the fact that this striving upwards is declared as the fundamental character, the height of the piers exceeds that of the breadth of their base in a proportion that we cannot calculate at sight. The piers are thin, slender, and soar up so high the sight is unable to take in the entire form at a glance, and is compelled to rove about in its upward flight until it attains repose at last in the gently inclined vaulting of the uniting arch, much as the soul moving with restlessness in its devotion from the ground of finitude uplifts itself and finds rest in God alone.

The final point of distinction between piers and columns consists in this, that the piers which are distinctively Gothic, and, where they are elaborated in their specific character, do not, as columns do, remain in the circular form, essentially secure in that, and one and the same cylinder, but to begin with at their base in a reed-like way constitute a convolute, a bundle of fibres, which break into varied distinction as the pier mounts and radiate forth on all sides under various modes of continuation. And, while we find already in classical architecture that the column represents an advance from that which is merely subject to laws of gravity, from the solid and simple to that which is more slender and more adorned, so, too, we find much the same change visible in the pier, which, in this more slender upgrowth, ever withdraws itself more from the mere service of support, and freely soars upward albeit shut in at its summit.

The same form of piers and pointed arches is repeated in windows and doors. More particularly the windows, not merely the lower ones of the side aisles, but also in a still higher degree, the upper ones of the transepts and choir, are of colossal size in order that the glance, which rests upon their lower portion, may not at once take in the upper part as well and may be uplifted as in the case of the vaultings. This adds to the restless motion of the upward flight which it is intended to communicate to the spectator. Add to this the window panes, as we have already remarked, are with their coloured glass only partially transparent. Sometimes they present sacred histories and sometimes they are merely panes of varied colour with the object of increasing the twilight effect and permitting the light of the wax candles to shine forth. For in these buildings it is another daylight than that of Nature which illumines.

(γγ) Finally, as regards the entire articulation of the interior of Gothic churches we have already seen that it is imperative that the particular parts of such should be differentiated in their breadth, height, and length. The primary distinction to consider in this respect is that of choir, transept, and nave from the encircling aisles. These latter are constructed on the sides external to the fabric by means of walls which enclose it, and from which piers and arches are carried, and in their separation from the interior by means of piers and pointed arches, which present openings toward the nave, having no partition walls between. They receive therefore the converse aspect to that of the colonnades in Greek temples, which are open on the outside and are enclosed towards the interior, whereas the aisles in Gothic churches permit free passage between the piers to the nave. In certain examples we find two such aisles in juxtaposition; in fact, Antwerp cathedral is an example which possesses three of them at either side of the nave.

The nave itself soars up by means of enclosing walls on either side, at different degrees of elevation, according to various modes of disposition, above the aisles, broken by colossal windows in such a way that the walls themselves at the same time have the appearance of being slender piers, which everywhere separate in pointed arches and build up vaultings. There are, however, churches in which the side aisles have the same height as the nave, as, for example, in the later choirs of the Sebaldus Church in Nuremberg, which offers the impression of an imposing, free, and capacious type of slenderness and delicacy. In this way the whole is divided by means of rows of piers, which are brought together at their summits like a forest in flights of branching arches. Attempts have been made to discover in the number of these piers, and generally in the relations of number much mystical significance. There can be no question but that at the period of the finest efflorescence of Gothic architecture, that, for example, of Cologne Cathedral, a great significance was attached to the symbols of number, the as yet more gloomy presentiment of what is rational falling in readily with an insistence on external traits of this kind. But despite this fact the artistic productions of architecture, which are carried through by means of that which is always to a greater or less degree merely the capricious play of a symbolism of subordinate rank, is neither of the profoundest significance, nor of the most exalted form of beauty, for the reason that the genuine spirit of these is expressed in entirely different forms and modes than those applicable to the significance of numeral distinctions. We must therefore be especially cautious not to carry such investigations too far. To attempt to go to the root of everything and in every direction to desire to discover a deeper meaning will tend quite as much to contract our horizon and destroy our thoroughness of search as is common with all short-sighted learning which passes over the depth which is clearly expressed and presented without grasping it. In respect to the more detailed distinction between choir and nave, I will in conclusion emphasize the following points. The high-altar, this real centre of the ritual, is placed in the choir, which is thus dedicated as the place for the priesthood as distinct from the community, whose proper place is that of the nave, where we find the pulpit for the preacher. A flight of steps, which varies in its height, conducts us to the choir, so that this latter section and all that takes place in it is visible everywhere. In the same way this choir section is relatively to decoration more ornate, and, moreover, in its distinction from the more prolonged nave, even where the vaultings in both cases are of equal height, is more serious, solemn, and sublime. Above all we find here that the entire building is finally enclosed with piers of greater thickness and more closely, by means of which the breadth tends to disappear, and the entire effect is one of greater stillness and height, whereas the transepts and the nave through their towers still provide with their means of entrance and exit a connection with the outside world. According to the points of the compass the choir is placed to the east, the nave lies in a westerly direction, and the transepts stand towards the north and south. We find, however, churches with a double choir, in which the two choirs lie respectively in the direction of morning and evening and the main entrances are placed in the transepts. The stone font for baptism, that is, for the sanctification of human entry into the Christian community, is placed in a porch by the main entrance into the church. And, finally, we may note that, while the more express worship is provided for by the entire building, and notably the choir and nave, there are also small chapels which form in each case a fresh and independent church.

This must suffice as a description of the articulate structure of the whole. In a cathedral of this type there is space enough for an entire people. For here it is the intention that the community of a city and district do not congregate round the building, but within the same. And for this reason all the varied interests of life which in any way come into contact with religion have, too, a place assigned them. No fixed divisions of seats placed in rows divide and diminish the broad space, but everyone comes and departs in peace, engages for himself or takes a seat for immediate use, kneels down, offers his prayer and removes himself once more. If it is not the hour of high mass the most various things take place at the same time, and there is no confusion. In one portion a sermon is delivered, in another a sick man is brought in; between these points we may find a slow procession; at one spot, we have a baptism, at another a deceased person is carried through the church. Or we may find in one place a priest delivering mass or celebrating the marriage services and in every direction the people in broken groups kneel before altars and sacred images. All such things are embraced by one and the same building. But this very variety and individualization disappears, nevertheless, with its alternations when contrasted with the expanse and size of the building. Nothing completely fills up the whole, every incident passes by; individuals with all that they do are lost and dispersed as points in this grandiose whole. What happens at a given time is merely visible in its passing flight, and over and above all the huge and almost measureless spaces soar up in their secure and immutable form and construction.

Such, then, are the fundamental characteristics of the interior of Gothic churches. We must not look here for any definite purpose as such, but rather an object for the private devotion of the soul in its self-absorption in every detail of the spiritual life106, and its elevation over all that is isolated and finite. For this reason these buildings are cut off from Nature by spaces enclosed on all sides, built up in the atmosphere of gloom and at the same time to the smallest detail in a spirit that strives upwards sublime and immeasurable.

(β) If we direct our attention now to the external aspect we shall find, as we have already above observed, that in contrast to the Greek temple the exterior configuration in Gothic architecture, the decoration and co-ordination of the walls and all else is determined from within outwards, the exterior having to appear simply as an enclosure of the interior.

In this connection we have good reason to emphasize the following points:

(αα) In the first place in the form of the cross which we find dominates the whole exterior we cannot fail to recognize in outline a similar construction as that which obtains within, a form which cuts, the nave and choir in two, and supplies, moreover, the distinctions of height which obtain between the aisles, the nave and choir.

On closer inspection we find that the principal façade, as the external form of the aisles and nave, corresponds in the portals to the particular construction within. A more lofty principal door, by which we pass direct into the nave, stands between the smaller entrances into the aisles, and suggests by means of the contraction in perspective that the exterior must draw together, grow more narrow, and disappear in order than an entrance may be thereby provided. The interior is the background already visible, into the depths of which the exterior is carried, just as the soul is constrained to grow more profound as ideality when it enters its own intrinsic wealth. Over the doors at the sides extend in the most direct connection with the interior colossal windows, just as the portals rise up to similar pointed arches, in a way similar to that in which they are employed as the particular form for the vaultings of the interior. Between these doors over the principal portal a large circular window branches out, the rose-window, a form which is, we may add, the exclusive and peculiar possession of this type of building, and only fitted to it. Where such rose-windows are absent we find substituted for them a still more colossal window with pointed arches. The façades of the transepts are divided in a similar way while the walls of the nave, the choir, and the aisles in their windows and their form, no less than in the position of the solid walls between, repeat in all respects the form of the interior and set the same forth on the outside.

(ββ) In the second place, however, the exterior begins to make itself at the same time intelligible to itself107 in this close association with the form and subdivision of the interior for the very reason that it has its own peculiar tasks to fulfil. In this connection we may mention the flying buttresses. They represent the position of the many piers within the building and are necessary as points of support for the elevation and security of the whole. At the same time they further make apparent on the outside, so far as interval, number, and other features are concerned, the rows of piers on the inside, albeit they do not exactly reproduce the shape of the interior piers, but the higher they mount up become reduced in the strength of their springing buttresses.

(γγ) Inasmuch as, however, in the third place, it is only the interior which has to be one essentially complete enclosure, this feature is lost in the form of the exterior and makes way in every respect for the all-prevailing characteristics of continuous elevation. And for this reason the exterior receives at the same time a form independent of the interior, which asserts itself mainly in a tendency to strive upwards on all sides into points and pinnacles, breaking out in them one on the top of another. To this fundamental feature belong the lofty uplifted triangles which, independently of the pointed arches, soar upwards over the portals, pre-eminently the principal façade, though also over the colossal windows of the nave and choir, and in a similar way the slenderly pointed shape of the roof, whose gable-end is especially prominent in the façades of the transepts. Add to these the flying buttresses, which everywhere terminate in little pointed pinnacles, and in this way, just as the rows of piers within the building create a forest of stems, branches, and vaultings, on their part on the exterior stretch up heavenwards a forest of points.

With most independence and most emphatically, however, it is the towers which rise upwards in their sublime summits. In other words we find that the entire mass of the building concentrates among other things itself in them, in order that thus in its main towers it may be without hindrance uplifted to an incalculable height without thereby losing its character of repose and stability. Such towers are either placed in the principal façade over the two side entrances, while a third and broader main tower springs up at the point where the vaulting of the transepts, choir, and nave meet, or one single tower constitutes the principal façade and is raised above the entire breadth of the nave. Such are at any rate the positions which are most usual. In direct connection with the worship such towers have belfries, that is, to the extent that the ringing of bells properly applies to Christian services. This merely indefinite tone of the bell is a solemn stimulus of the soul-life, though in the first instance one that as yet prepares the worshipper only on the outside of the building. The articulate tone, on the other hand, wherein a definite content of feelings and ideas is expressed, is the song which is only to be heard within the church. The inarticulate clang of the bell finds its right place on the outside and only there and is sounded forth from the towers that its peal may pass forth as from some pure height far over the land.

(α) The first point we have to emphasize is the importance of ornament generally for Gothic architecture. Classical architecture preserves as a rule a wise mean in the adornment of its constructions. Inasmuch as, however, it is the main interest of Gothic architecture to make the masses which it places in position appear larger and considerably more lofty than they in fact are it is not satisfied with plain surfaces, but subdivides the same throughout; and, moreover, breaks them up with forms which themselves suggest on their part a striving upwards. Piers, pointed arches, and triangles, which rise above them with their pinnacles, occur, too, as decorative work. In this way we find that the simple unity of the great masses is impaired, and the elaboration is carried to the point of every conceivable detail, leaving the entire effect, however, involved in the most flagrant contradiction. On the one hand we cannot fail to observe the most obvious outlines in a clearly defined co-ordination, on the other we have fulness and variety of delicate embellishment impossible to follow with the eye, so that the most motley particularity is directly set up in contrast to what is most universal and simple, just as the soul, in the opposition implied in Christian worship, is deeply engaged in finite things, and indeed carries its life into the mere detail and the trifle. This very opposition acts as a stimulus to contemplation, this striving up invites to a like action. For what is of paramount importance in this style of decoration is this that it do not, by the mass and alternation of its ornament, destroy or cover up the fundamental outlines, but rather suffer them completely to make their way through such variety as the essential feature of importance. Only when it can do this, and I speak in particular of Gothic buildings, is the solemnity of their imposing seriousness kept intact. Just as religious devotion has to permeate all particular experiences of soul-life, the life-conditions of every type of humanity, has further to engrave indelibly on the heart its universal and incommutable ideas, so in the same way the simple and fundamental architectural features should have strength sufficient to recall the most varied articulation, diversity and embellishment of the structure once more within the fundamental impression of those outlines and wholly thus absorb them.

(β) A further aspect in decorative work is bound up in the same way with the romantic type of art in general. The romantic has on the one hand for its principle Ideality, the return of the Ideal to itself. On the other the Ideal has to re-appear in that which is external, and then withdraw itself into itself from the same. In architecture it is the sensuous, material mass in relations of Space, in which the most Ideal essence itself is, so far as that is possible, to be presented in visible shape. With a material such as this to deal with there is no other alternative possible than that of not suffering this material to assert itself with power in its materiality, but to break up and dismember its masses in every direction, and to wrest from the same the appearance of its immediate coherence and self-subsistency. In this connection the ornamentation, more particularly that of the exterior, which has not to display the fact of enclosure as such, assumes the character of a net-work108 carried in every direction, or rather interwoven over the surfaces; and we have no example of an architecture which, taking into account the enormous and heavily weighted masses of its stone and their secure coherence, nevertheless has preserved to such a complete extent the character of lightness and delicacy.

(γ) We have only further and thirdly to remark with reference to such embellishments that in addition to pointed arches, piers, and circles, the forms once more call to mind those of the real organic world. The fretwork and working out of the mass already carries a suggestion of this. Regarded in more detail, however, we actually find leaves, rosettes of flowers, and, in entwining work of an arabesque character, human figures and those of animals partly realistically and partly fantastically linked together; the romantic imagination, in short, even in architecture, displays its wealth of imaginative creation, and its power to unite in unexpected ways heterogeneous elements, although from another point of view, at any rate during the period of the purest type of Gothic architecture, even in the matter of ornament, as, for example, in the pointed arches of the windows, we may observe a decisive return to simple forms.

The last point on which I have a few observations to make is that of the principal types followed by romantic architecture in its course of development at different periods. I must, however, add the premise that in this work no attempt can be made to supply a history of this branch of the art.

(a) We must wholly distinguish from Gothic architecture, such as I have above described it, the so-called pre-Gothic, whose development originated in Roman architecture. The most ancient form of Christian churches is that of the basilica. These originated out of the public buildings of the Empire, huge oblong halls, with the frame-work of their roofing of wood, such as Constantine placed at the disposal of Christians. In buildings such as these there was a tribune, on which, during congregational religious services conducted by priests, there was singing and an address delivered, or merely reading aloud. The conception of the choir may have originated with this. In the same way Christian architecture accepted other of its forms such as the use of columns with circular arches, the rotunda and the modes of classical embellishment throughout, more particularly in the western Roman Empire, while in the eastern section it appears to have remained constant to this type until the time of Justinian. Even buildings erected by the Ostrogoths and Lombards in Italy retained essentially the fundamental Roman type. In the more recent architecture, however, of the Byzantine Empire several modifications made their appearance. A rotunda supported on four great piers forms the centre, to which different constructions were attached to meet the particular objects of Greek as distinct from the Roman ritual. We must not, however, confuse this genuine architecture of the Byzantine Empire with that which, in its general relation to architectural types, goes by the name of Byzantine, and which was employed in Italy, France, England, Germany, and other places up to the close of the twelfth century.

(b) In the thirteenth century was evolved the Gothic architecture in the distinctive form whose main characteristics I have above described in detail. It is nowadays denied that it is the work of Gothic architects, and the name given it is that of Deutsch or German architecture. We may, however, retain the more customary and ancient nomenclature. In other words we find in Spain very ancient indications of this type of construction, which suggest an association with historical circumstances under which Gothic kings, forced back into the mountains of Asturia and Galicia, retained their independence in such localities. Under such conditions, no doubt, a close affiliation of Gothic and Arab architecture appears probable, yet both may be essentially distinguished. For the characteristic trait of Arab architecture in the Middle Ages is not the pointed arch, but the so-called horseshoe form. Moreover, these buildings, which are constructed for an entirely different ritual, exhibit an Oriental wealth and splendour, embellishments resembling plant-life and other forms of decoration, which, in an external form, mix together what is of Roman ancestry and that which belongs to the Middle Ages.

(c) On parallel lines with this evolution of religious architecture we find, too, the course of civil construction, which from its particular point of view imitates and modifies the character of ecclesiastical buildings. In an architecture directed to the uses of citizen life, however, art has less opportunity for display inasmuch as here objects of more restricted character, combined with a great variety of requirements, are more strict in the range of satisfaction presented, and do not suffer beauty to pass beyond mere decoration. Except for the general harmonious disposition of its forms and masses, art is in the main merely able to assert itself in the embellishment of façades, staircases, windows, doors, gables, towers, and the like, and has to do this throughout subject to the condition that the practical purpose of the building is what finally determines everything. In the Middle Ages it is pre-eminently the tower-like form of secure dwellings, which is the fundamental type of structure not merely for particular declivities and summits but also within the towns, where every palace, every private dwelling, as in Italy for example, received the form of a small fortification or keep. Walls, doors, towers, bridges and the like are executed as necessity dictates, and are decorated and embellished by art. Stability and security coupled with a grandiose type of splendour and a vital individuality of single forms and their connecting links constitute the determining factors, to enter into the detail of which would carry us beyond our present purpose. By way of supplement we may in conclusion briefly allude to the art of gardening, which does not only create under a wholly novel form an environment for spirit, we may call it a second exterior Nature, but draws the landscape of Nature itself within the operation of its constructive purpose and treats the same architectonically as an environment of buildings. I will only take as an example of what I mean the famous and exceedingly imposing terrace of Sans-souci.

In our examination of the genuine art of gardening it is most important to distinguish the painter’s point of view of it from that of the architect. All that pertains to mere park construction, for instance, is not truly architectonic, no building, that is, with freely disposed natural objects, but an artist’s portrayal109, which leaves the objects in their natural form and aims at imitating wide Nature in its freedom. Everything is here suggested in turn, which finds its glad place in a landscape — whether rocks and the huge rough masses which are their substance, or dales, woods, pastures, meandering brooks, broad streams with their animated banks, still lakes, wreathed round with trees, rushing waterfalls, and everything else of the kind, and is brought together with one total effect. In this way the gardening art of the Chinese embraces entire landscapes together with their islands, rivers, expanding views, and rockeries.

In a park of this kind, particularly in modern examples of such, everything is, on the one hand, intended to hold intact the freedom of Nature, while, on the other, it is artificially elaborated and constructed and conditioned by the locality where it is situated. This involves a contradiction which is never satisfactorily disposed of. In this respect, for the most part, it is impossible to instance an example of worse taste than such an attempt to make visible in all directions a studied purpose in that which is without purpose, and to force that which refuses to be compelled. Add to this the fact that here the genuine character of what is strictly a garden disappears, in so far, that is, as a garden is primarily adapted for strolling about in at pleasure and conversation within a certain place, which is no longer simply Nature, but a Nature remodelled by man to meet his desire for an environment created by himself. A huge park, on the contrary, particularly if it be garnished with Chinese temples, Turkish mosques, Swiss châlets, bridges, hermitages, and any other conceivable foreign importation, makes an independent claim on our interest as spectator. It offers an independent pretension of being and signifying something. A charm of this sort disappears as soon as it arises; we do not care to see it twice, for an addition like this spreads before our sight no suggestion of infinity, nothing that possesses a really existent vitality110, and is further only wearisome and tedious for conversation as we pass through it.

A garden, strictly speaking, should be only a cheerful environment and simply an environment, which will not pass for something independently valid and withdraw men from their own life and concerns. It is here that architecture, with its scientific lines, order, regularity, and symmetry, is in its proper place and co-ordinates natural objects themselves architectonically. The art of the Mongols on the other side of the great wall, in Tibet, the paradise of the Persians, already adapt themselves more closely to this type. They are no parks in the English sense, but halls with flowers, springs, courts, and palaces, which have in the form of a retreat in Nature been arranged on a splendid, grandiose, and extravagant scale for the needs of mankind and their convenience. But we find the architectural principle most thoroughly carried out in the French art of gardening, which, as a rule, borders upon great palaces, plants trees in the strictest conformity of line in long avenues, prunes them, builds up straight walls from trimmed fences, and in this way converts Nature herself into a broad dwelling beneath the open sky.

34 Simply as a physical object.

35 That of symbolic architecture.

36 Als Momente eines Subjektes. That is as the constituent parts of the mind of one individual.

37 Herod. I, c. 181.

38 I, c. 98.

39 I, p. 469.

40 As in obelisks, Memnons, etc.

41 II, c. 162.

42 c. 106.

43 Symb. (2nd ed.), p. 469. The solar city of Heliopolis.

44 XXXVI, 14, and XXXVII, 8.

45 Creutzer I, p. 778.

46 “History of Architecture,” vol. I, p. 69.

47 Wandungen. I presume this refers to every kind of subdivision no less than boundary walls.

48 Pracktgewänden. Presumably this refers to the isolated structures in which the columns are built — having flat surfaces like walls.

49 Balken. The word would suggest perhaps that Hegel means here beams of any kind.

50 II, c. 155.

51 Her. II, c. 108.

52 Herodotus dwells on this in the above passage.

53 II, c. 148.

54 Commentators of Herodotus point out that we have no direct evidence here of their number, which, comparing this with Strabo’s account, is doubtful, and still more so the number of the chambers (οἱκήματα). Strabo says there were twenty-seven courts. The connection between the halls was not an architectural one but by means of the chambers and colonnades (παστάδες). See Blakesley’s notes, vol. I, pp. 279-80. Neither from Herodotus nor Hegel is it very easy to form a clear notion of the building.

55 “History of Ancient Building,” vol. I, p. 75.

56 XXXVI, 19.

57 Ein Individuelles. Lit., An individual entity.

58 The relative pronoun refers to the separation of both aspects.

59 II, c. 126-7.

60 Her. II, c. 125.

61 Geschichte der Baukunst der Alten, I, S. 55.

62 Symbolical significance.

63 Wolff’s and Buttmann’s Mus., B. I, p. 536.

64 Hegel uses the coined word osirirt I presume in this sense.

65 Abstraction. Abstract in the sense of possessing no ideal complexity.

66 Verständig. Comes under the categories of the Understanding.

67 Lit., “Find the element that is congenial.”

68 That is, the principle of geometrical design and that of organic structure.

69 That is the beauty and the ulterior aim of utility.

70 Verständig. See note above.

71 The sphere of mechanical gravity.

72 I presume Aufwande means expense here; it would be more reasonable perhaps to say “waste of room,” columns being only too often so much more expensive for their size.

73 That is, the free treatment of line under scientific forms of abstraction rather than limited to specific modes of organic form in Nature.

74 Der Verständigen Gesetzmässigkeit. The principle of scientific architecture.

75 Immediate imitation, that is.

76 Of classical art.

77 Symbol des Innern.

78 That is, apart from the classical type.

79 That is, the scientific reason of abstract principle or rule.

80 Weil beim Oblongum in der Gleichheit und Ungleichheit ist. That is, more pleasure is derived from contrast than mere similarity. He then qualifies or explains the general principle.

81 Eurhythmie, that is, eurhythmy or a rhythmic movement between the several parts.

82 I presume this is the meaning of die Theorie here. That is the purposeful motive of the architectural skeleton of the fabric — what explains it rationally.

83 Schiebens. It is possible that Hegel uses the word in its primary sense of “shifting.”

84 The idea is slightly confused in the course of the sentence. It is not the necessity (des Bedürfnisses) to build a stable house which has to be held in position, etc., but the structure which that necessity forces men to construct in a certain way.

85 Ihre eigenen Momente. “Its unique traits” is possibly adequate here.

86 Hegel probably has in his mind when using the expression verständig bestimmte the close analogy between the self-exclusive concreteness of reason and the completeness of the circular figure.

87 It is not quite clear what Hegel means by the Köpfen der Deckenbalken. The technical word that corresponds to Deckenbalken is “joists”; here, according to the words that follow, it would appear to mean either the last horizontal line of the architrave or the entire growth of the triglyph. As he uses the word Zwischenraümen after we appear to be driven on the latter alternative. The frieze, of course, was the entire space between cornice and architrave, including both triglyphs and metopes.

88 Called femora. They were divided by two gutters or drills. The triglyph slightly projected and united perpendicularly cornice and architrave.

89 Die Baukunst nach den Grunds. der Alten, Berlin, 1808, S. III.

90 He means that the distinct functions are not assigned to those features of the building to which they are naturally or most essentially related.

91 Hirt, Geschichte der Baukunst, III, S. 14-18, and II, S. 151.

92 He refers to the columns placed round.

93 Gesch. d. Bauk. I, S. 251.

94 By sebstständig Hegel means apparently that there must be nothing in their external form that would divert attention from their essential character.

95 Auf dem Unterbau. I presume this means generally that portion beneath the ground.

96 I presume what is meant is that in one case the drills or grooves are hollowed in round shape and towards the base in square shape.

97 What is precisely meant by the expression durch prismatische Einschnitte I frankly do not know. The expression Balken is evidently used to mark the association between the slabs of stone and beams or rafters.

98 That is, the spaces between the lower part of the cornice and the uppermost slab of the entablature.

99 The coussinet is that part of the Ionic capital between the abacus and quarter round, which serves to form the volute. There are four volutes or spiral scrolls in the Ionic capital.

100 The mutule is the projecting block worked under the corona of the Doric cornice.

101 Hirt, Gesch. der Baukunst, I, S. 254.

102 This must, I think, refer to the main moulding of the architrave immediately resting on the column.

103 Seneca, Ep. 90.

104 Lit., “Is raised to infinitude.”

105 As it is, for example, by Greek capitals.

106 Lit., “In its penetration into the most spiritual (innerste, ideal) particularity.”

107 Sich verselbstständigen. Hegel means that the main purpose of the exterior is expressed on the face of it.

108 I presume the word Durchbrechen is here used in its specific architectural sense.

109 Ein Malen.

110 Keine in sich seyende Seele. I presume Hegel means that being an artificial fragment of Nature’s landscape it lacks the infinite horizon and the living relation to the whole.

SUBSECTION II

SCULPTURE

INTRODUCTION

Over against the inorganic nature of Spirit, in the form we find given it by art in architecture, Spirit opposes itself directly in the sense that the work of art receives and displays spirituality as its actual content. The necessity of this advance we have already adverted to. It underlies the notion of Mind, which differentiates itself under the twofold aspect of subjective self-substantive111 existence and pure objectivity. In this latter form of externality the ideal substance, it is true, makes its appearance by virtue of the architectonic treatment; such, however, does not amount to a complete transfusion of the objective material, or a conversion of it into an entirely adequate expression of Spirit (Mind), such as suffers it, and only it, to appear. Consequently art withdraws itself from the inorganic realm, which architecture, under its yoke of the laws of gravity, has striven to bring nearer as a means of Spirit’s expression, to that of the Ideal, which forthwith then independently asserts itself in its more lofty truth without this intermingling with what is inorganic. It is during this, return passage of Spirit to its own native realm112 from out of the world of masses and material substance that we come across sculpture.

The first stage, however, in this new sphere is, as yet, no withdrawal of mind into the completely ideal world of subjective consciousness113, so that the representation of what is of Spirit would require what is itself a purely ideal mode of expression. Rather Spirit grasps itself, in the first instance, only in so far as it is still expressed in bodily shape, and therein possesses its homogeneous and determinate existence. The art which accepts for its content this attitude to the possessions of Spirit will consequently have, as its due function, to clothe spiritual individuality as a manifestation under material conditions, and we may add, in what is actually material to the senses. For discourse and speech are also indications114 which Spirit assumes under the form of externality, but they belong to a mode of objectivity, which, instead of possessing the attributes we attach to matter in its immediate and concrete sense, is merely as tone, motion, the undulation of an entire body and the rarified element, the atmosphere, a communication of such Spirit. What I call immediate corporeality, on the contrary, is the spatial mode of material substance such as stone, wood, metal, or clay, wholly spatial in all three dimensions. The form, however, which is adequate to Spirit is, as we have already seen, the unique bodily form which belongs to it; and it is through this that sculpture makes what is of Spirit actual in a whole which is subject to the spatial condition.

From this point of view sculpture stands on the same plane as architecture115 to the extent, namely, that it gives form to the sensuous material as such, or what is material according its spatial condition as matter. It is, however, to a like extent distinguishable from architecture by virtue of the fact that it does not work up the inorganic substance, as the opposite of Spirit, into an environment created by Spirit and endowed with its purpose in forms to which a purpose is attached which is exterior to it; rather it sets before us spirituality itself in the bodily shape which, from the standpoint of the notion, is adequate to Spirit and its individuality. In other words its efficient function and independent self-subsistency brings indivisibly before our sight both aspects, body and spirit, as one whole. The configuration of sculpture, therefore, breaks away from the specific function of architecture, which is to serve Spirit merely as an external Nature and environment, and assumes a really independent position. Despite, however, this separation the image of sculpture remains in essential relation to its environment. A statue or group, and yet more a relief, cannot be made without considering the place in which such a work of art is to be situated. One ought not first to complete a work of sculpture and then consider where it is likely to be put, but it should in the very conception of it be associated with a definite exterior world, and its spatial form and local position. In this respect sculpture retains a specific relation to the architectural aspect of space. For the primary object of statues is that of being temple images and being set up in the shrine of the sanctuary, just as in Christian churches painting supplies images for the altar, and Gothic architecture also attests a similar connection between works of sculpture and their local position. Temples and churches, however, are not the only place for statues, groups of statuary and reliefs. In a similar way halls, staircases, gardens, public squares, doors, single columns and arches of triumph receive an animation from the forms of sculpture; and every statue, even though placed in dissociation from such a wider environment, requires a pedestal of its own to mark its local position and base. And here we must conclude what we have to say as to the association of sculpture with or distinction from architecture.

If we further compare sculpture with the other arts we shall find that it is more especially poetry and painting which will engage our attention. Small statues no less than groups present to us the spiritual form in complete bodily shape, man, in short, as he exists. Sculpture therefore appears to possess the truest means of representing what is spiritual, whereas both painting and poetry have the contrary appearance of being more remote from Nature for the reason that painting makes use of the mere surface instead of the sensuous totality of the spatial condition, which a human form and all other natural things actually assume; speech, too, to a still less degree, expresses the reality of body, being merely able to transmit ideas of the same by means of tone.

However, the truth of the matter is precisely the reverse of this. For although the image of sculpture appears no doubt to possess from the start the natural form as it stands, it is just this externality of body and nature reproduced in gross material which is not the nature of Spirit as such. If we regard the essential character of it its peculiar existence is that expressed by means of speech, acts, and affairs which develop its ideal or soul-life, and disclose its true existence.

In this respect sculpture has to yield the place of honour and pre-eminently when contrasted with poetry. No doubt clarity of outline116 is superior in the plastic arts, in which the bodily presence is placed before our sight, but poetry too can describe the exterior figure of a man, such as his hair, forehead, cheeks, size, dress, pose and so forth, though of course not with the precision and sufficiency of sculpture. What it loses, however, in this respect is made up by the imagination, which, moreover, does not require for the mere conception of an object such a fixed and definite outline, and before everything else brings before us man in his action, with all his motives, developments of fortune and circumstance, with all his emotions, discourses, everything that discovers the soul-life or throws light on external incidents. This sculpture is either wholly unable to do, or only in a very incomplete way for the reason that it neither can present to us the individual soul117 in its particular inward life and passion, nor as poetry a sequence of expressed results, but only offer us the general characteristics of individuality, so far as the body expresses such, and whatever happens together in one particular moment of time, and this too in a state of repose without the progressive action of real life. In these respects, too, it is inferior to painting. For the expression of spiritual life receives in painting an emphatically more defined accuracy and vitality by means of the colour given to the human face and its light and shadow, not merely in the sense in which it satisfies generally the material substance of nature, but pre-eminently in the way it expresses physiognomy and the phenomena of emotion. It is possible, therefore, at first to entertain the view that sculpture requires merely for its greater perfection to associate the further advantages of painting with that itself possesses in the spatial totality, and to regard it as a mere act of caprice that it has made up its mind to dispense with the palette of the painter, or, as indicating a poverty and incapacity of its execution, that it entirely restricts its effort to one aspect of reality, namely, that of the material form, and withdraws its attention from that, much as the silhouette and the engraving may be set down as mere makeshifts118. We are, however, not warranted in thus applying such a term as “caprice” to genuine art. The form such as it is in the object of sculpture, remains in fact merely an abstract aspect of the concrete human bodily presence. Its presentments receive no variety from particularized colours and movements. This is, however, no defect due to accident, but a limitation of material and manner of presentment itself pre-supposed in the notion of art. For Art is a product of mind, and we may add of the more exalted and thoughtful mind. A work of this order claims as its object a content of this defined character, and consequently implies a mode of artistic realization which excludes other aspects. We have here a process similar to that observed in the different sciences where we find, for example, geometry exclusively adopts space as its object, jurisprudence law, philosophy the explication of the eternal Idea and its determinate existence and self-identity in the facts of experience, wherein each of the above mentioned sciences develops these objects by differentiation out of their differences, without one of them actually presenting to consciousness in its completeness that which we are accustomed in ordinary modes of thought to call concrete real existence.

Art then, as a creative informing activity of spiritual origination, proceeds step by step, and separates that which in the notion, in the nature of the thing, albeit not in its determinate existence, is separated. It retains such stages consequently in their self-exclusive finity, in order to elaborate them according to their distinct peculiarities. And what contributes to this notional distinction and exclusive separation in the spatial material substance, which constitutes the element of the plastic art is corporeality in its aspect of spatial totality and its abstract configuration, in other words bodily form simply, and the more detailed particularization of the same relatively to the variety of its colorization. We find at this first stage the art of sculpture so placed relatively to the human form, which it treats as a stereo-metric body, merely, that is, according to form which it possesses in the three spatial dimensions. The work of art, whose process is in and through the sensuous material, must no doubt have an existence for another119, with which forthwith the particularization commences. The primary art, however, which is concerned with the human bodily form as an expression of spiritual life, only proceeds so far in this “being for another” to the point of its first, or rather the still universal mode of Nature’s own existence, that is to the point of mere visibility and existence in light generally, without uniting with the same in its presentment the relation of the latter to darkness, in which that which is visible is particularized in its own medium120 and becomes colour. And the art occupying such a position is that of sculpture. For plastic art, which is unable as poetry to bring together the totality of the phenomenon in one equal element or world of idea, inevitably breaks up this totality121.

For this reason we get on the one hand objectivity, which in so far as it is not the unique configuration of spirit, stands over against it as inorganic Nature. It is this relation of bare objectivity which converts architecture into a mere suggestive symbol, which does not possess its spiritual significance in itself. The point of extreme contrast to objectivity as such is subjectivity, that is the soul122, emotional life in the entire range of all its particular movements, moods, passions, exterior and interior agitations and actions. Between these two we are confronted with the spiritual individuality which no doubt has a definite structure, but which is not as yet deepened to the extent of the essential ideality of the individual soul; in which, instead of the full personal singularity, the substantive universality of Spirit and its objects and characteristic traits is the prevailing factor. In its generality it is not as yet absolutely withdrawn into its own exclusive domain to the point of purely spiritual unity; rather it comes before us as this midway point123 still hailing from the objective side, that is the side of inorganic Nature, and consequently even carries as part of itself corporeality, as the particular form of existence appropriate to spirit, in the body that not merely is its own, but also discloses it. In this mode of externality, which no longer remains something simply opposed to what is ideal, spiritual individuality has now to be displayed, not, however, as living form, that is to say as corporeality continuously referred back to the point of unity implied in the singularity of spiritual life, but rather as form set forth and manifested in its external guise, into the mould of which Spirit has no doubt been poured, without, however, being from this outward bond of association, made visible in the sense that it is so when it withdraws into its own essential and ideal domain124.

From the above observations the two points to which we have already drawn attention become more clear, namely, first, that sculpture makes use of the human form directly, which is the actual existence of spiritual life, instead of accepting a mode of expression which is symbolical with a view to promoting the spiritual import of modes of appearance that are merely suggestive. At the same time, secondly, it is content, as the manifestation of that mode of subjectivity which does not express emotion and the soul essentially unparticularized125, with form and nothing more, where the focus of subjectivity is dissipated126. This is also the reason why sculpture does not on the one hand present Spirit in action, in a series of movements, which both possess and testify to one aim nor in undertakings or exploits, wherein a certain character is made visible, but rather as persisting throughout in one objective way, and for this reason pre-eminently in the repose of form, the movement and grouping of which is merely a first and obvious commencement of action, not, however, in any sense a complete presentment of the subjective life as agitated by all the conflicts that assail it whether within or without, or as its development is variously affected in contact with the external world. Consequently what we also miss in the figures of sculpture is precisely this revealed focus of the subjective life, the concentrated expression of soul as soul, namely, the glance of the eye, a fact upon which we shall have something further to say later. We miss it because such a figure presents to our sight Spirit embedded in corporeality, and Spirit, too, which has to show itself visible in the entire form. From another point of view an individuality, which is not as yet essentially separated into its component parts, that is, the object of sculpture, does not as yet require the painter’s charm of colour as means to display it, a charm which is as capable of making visible, through the fine gradations and variety of its nuances, the entire wealth of particular traits of character, the absolute manifestation of spiritual presence, its ideal significance127, as by means of the vital flash of the eye it will concentrate in a point all the vigour of the soul. Sculpture must not, in other words, accept a material which is not rendered necessary by its fundamental point of view. It only makes use of the spatial qualities of the human figure, not the colouring which depicts it. The figure of sculpture is in general of one colour, hewn from white not vari-coloured marble. And in the same way metals are used as the material of sculpture, this primitive substance, self-identical, essentially undifferentiated, a light in fluxion, if we may so express it, without the contrast and harmony of different colours128. The Greeks are indebted to their unrivalled artistic insight129 for having grasped and firmly retained this point of view. No doubt we find, too, in Greek sculpture, to which we must for the main part confine ourselves, examples of coloured statuary; we must, however, take care in this respect to distinguish both the beginning and end of this art from that which is created at its culminating point.

In the same way we must discount that which is admitted by art in deference to traditional religion. We have already found it to be true in the classical type of art that it does not forthwith and immediately set forth the Ideal, in which its function is to discover its fundamental lines of definition, but in the first instance removes much that is inconsonant with it and foreign; it is the same case precisely with sculpture. It is forced to pass through many preliminary stages before it arrives at its perfection; and this initial process differs very considerably from its supreme attainment. The most ancient works of sculpture are of painted wood, as, for example, Egyptian idols; we find similar productions among the Greeks. We must, however, exclude such examples from genuine sculpture when the main point is to establish its fundamental notion. We are therefore in no way concerned to deny that there are many examples at hand of painted statues. It is, however, also a fact that the purer art-taste became, the more strongly “sculpture withdrew itself from a brilliancy of colour that was not really congenial, and with wise deliberation utilized, on the contrary, light and shadow in order to secure for the beholder’s eye a greater softness, repose, clarity, and agreeableness130.” As against the uniform colour of the bare marble we may no doubt not merely instance the numerous statues of bronze, but also in still stronger opposition the greatest and most excellent works, which, as in the case of the Zeus of Pheidias, were artificially coloured. But we are not here discussing absence of colour in such an extreme abstract sense. Moreover, ivory and gold are not primarily the use of colour as the painter employs it; and generally we may add that the various works of a definite art do not ever in fact retain fixedly their fundamental notion in so abstract and unyielding a way, inasmuch as they come into contact with the conditions of life subject to aims of all kinds; they are placed in different environments, and are thereby associated with circumstances of an external kind, which inevitably modify their real and essential type. In this way the images of sculpture are not unfrequently executed in rich material such as gold and ivory. They are placed on magnificent chairs or stand on pedestals which display all the extravagance and luxuriousness of art, or receive costly decorations, in order that the nation, when face to face with such splendid works, may likewise enjoy the sense of its power and wealth. And sculpture in particular, for the reason that it is essentially, taken by itself, a more abstract art, does not on all occasions hold fast to such exclusiveness, but, on the one hand, introduces incidentally much that is of a traditional, scholastic, or local character as a contribution from its history, while, on the other, it ministers to vital popular necessities. Active humanity demands for its diversion variety, and seeks in diverse directions for a stimulus to its vision and imagination. We may take as an analogous case the reading aloud of Greek tragedies, which also brings before us the work of art under its more abstract form. In the wider field of external existence we have still to add, to make a public performance, living actors, costume, stage scenery, dancing, and music. And in like manner, too, the sculptured figure is unable to dispense with much that is supplementary on its own stage of reality. We are, however, only concerned here with the genuine work of sculpture as such; external aspects such as those above adverted to must not be permitted to prevent us bringing before the mind the notion of our subject-matter in its most ideal and exclusive sense of definition.

Proceeding now to the more definite heads of division in this section we may observe that sculpture constitutes the very centre of the classical type of art to such a degree that we are unable to accept the symbolical, classical and romantic types as distinctions which affect throughout and form the basis of our division. Sculpture is the genuine art of the classical Ideal simply. It is quite true that sculpture has also its stages in which it is in the grasp of the symbolical type, as in Egypt for example. But these are rather preliminary stages of its historical evolution, no genuine distinctions which essentially affect the art of sculpture when notionally considered, in so far, that is, as these exceptional examples, in the manner of their execution and the use that is made of them, rather belong to architecture than are strictly within the aim and purpose of sculpture. In a similar way, when we find the romantic type thereby expressed, sculpture passes beyond its rightful sphere, and only receives with the qualified imitation of Greek sculpture its exclusively plastic type. We must therefore look about us for a principle of division of another character.

In agreement with what we have just stated we shall find that it is from the particular way in which the classical Ideal means of sculpture acquires a form of reality that most fully expresses it that the focus of our present inquiry is derived. Before, however, we are in a position to make an advance in this evolution of the ideal figure of sculpture we must by way of introduction demonstrate what kind of content and form are pertinent to the point of view of sculpture regarded as a specific art, and the course it follows by virtue of both until the point is reached where the classical Ideal is fully unfolded in the human form permeated by spiritual life, and in its shape as subject to spatial condition. From another point of view the classical Ideal stands, and falls with an individuality which is unquestionably substantive, but also to an equal degree essentially particularized, so that sculpture does not accept for its content the Ideal of the human form in its generality, but the Ideal as specifically defined; and, by virtue of this fact, it is variously displayed under forms distinct from each other. Such distinctions partly originate in the conception and representation simply, in part are due to the material in which such is realized, and which further, according to the way it affects execution, introduces points of severation on its own account, to both of which finally, as the last ground of difference, the various stages are related in the historical development of sculpture.

Having made these observations we will indicate the course of our inquiry as follows.

In the first place we have merely to deal with the general determinants of the essential content and form, such as are deducible from the notion of sculpture.

Secondly, as a further step, we have to differentiate more closely the nature of the classical Ideal, in so far as it attains a determinate existence in its most artistic form.

Thirdly, and finally, we shall find that sculpture avails itself of various types of presentation and material, and expands to a world of productions, in which, either under one aspect or another, the symbolical or romantic types also definitely assert themselves, albeit it is the classical which constitutes the true point of centre between them in plastic art131.

THE PRINCIPLE OF GENUINE SCULPTURE

SCULPTURE, TO PUT the matter in general terms, conceives the astounding project of making Spirit imagine itself in an exclusively material medium, and so shape this external medium that it is presented to itself in such and recognizes the presentment to be the objective form adequate to its ideal substance.

In this respect our inquiry will take the following directions.

First, we have the question what kind of spiritual life is capable of being reproduced in this material of a form entirely sensuous and spatial.

Secondly, we have to ask in what manner the forms of the spatial condition have to be modified in order to permit us a recognition of the spiritual in the bodily shape of beauty.

What we have generally to consider here is the unity between the ordo rerum extensarum and that of the ordo rerum idearum, the primal fair union of soul and body, in so far as spiritual ideality is expressed by sculpture exclusively in its bodily existence.

This union, thirdly, corresponds to what we have already found to be the Ideal of the classical type of art; and for this reason the plastic forms of sculpture are nothing less than the very art itself of the classical Ideal.

The elementary medium, in which sculpture realizes its creations is, as we have seen, the elementary, still universal material subject to spatial condition, in which no further particularization can be utilized for an artistic purpose than the universal spatial dimensions, and the more detailed132 spatial forms which are compatible with these dimensions under their most beautiful configuration. Now what most exceptionally corresponds as content to this more abstract aspect of the sensuous material is the objectivity of Spirit which reposes on its own resources, in so far, that is, as Spirit has neither differentiated itself in contradistinction to its universal substance, nor to its determinate existence in its bodily presence, and consequently is not as yet withdrawn as independent self-subsistency into its own subjective world. There are two points we would draw attention to here.

(a) Spirit as Spirit133 is no doubt always subjectivity, that is ideal knowledge of the Self, the Ego. This Ego can, however, separate itself from everything that constitutes, whether in knowledge, volition, conception, feeling, action, or achievement, the universal and eternal content of Spirit, and can concentrate its hold on that aspect of individual experience which is unique and contingent. It is then subjectivity as such which we have before us, which has let go the truly objective content of Spirit, and is self-related formally, and without content. In the case of self-satisfaction, for example, I can no doubt view myself from a certain standpoint in an entirely objective way and remain satisfied with myself on account of moral action. I do, however, as thus self-satisfied, already withdraw myself from the content of such action. I separate myself as a distinct person, as this particular Ego, from the universality of Spirit, in order to compare myself with it. The sense of unison of myself with myself through this comparison produces this self-satisfaction, in which this determinate Ego, as this core of unity, rejoices in itself. No doubt this personal Ego is involved in all that a man knows, wills, or carries out; but it makes an immense difference whether, in-dealing with knowledge and action, the matter of concern is the man’s own unique Ego, or that in which the essential content of consciousness consists; whether, in other words, a man sinks himself and his self-identity in this content, or lives in the unbroken seclusion of his subjective personality.

(α) In this exaltation over what is substantive134 the subjective life passes into the abstract and disrupt world of personal inclination, the caprice and contingency of emotions and impulses, owing to which, in the changes to which it is subject in particular acts and undertakings, it grows dependent upon particular circumstances as they happen to arise, and is unable generally to dispense with this association with something else. In such a condition of dependence the individual life is nothing but finite subjectivity as contrasted with a real spirituality. And if this personal state essentially persists through the volition and knowledge which characterizes it in this contradiction of its conscious life, it can only further become involved — to put on one side the mere emptiness of its imaginings and self-conceits — in the deformity of character and its evil passions, in crime and moral offence, in malice, cruelty, obstinacy, envy, pride, insolence, and every other kind of the reverse side of human nature and its insubstantial finiteness.

(β) This province of the subjective life must be excluded in its entirety and without hesitation from the content of sculpture. The art is exclusively co-extensive with the objectivity of Spirit. And by the term objectivity we mean in this connection what is substantive, genuine, not transitory, the essential nature of Spirit, apart from its involvement in that which is accidental and evanescent, for which the individual person is responsible simply in his unmediated state of self-relation.

(γ) Spirit, however, even in its truly objective sense, can only realize itself as Spirit when associated with explicit self-identity. Spirit is only Spirit as self-consciousness135. The position, however, of this aspect of individual consciousness in the spiritual content of sculpture is of such a character that it is not independently expressed, but displays itself as throughout interfused with this substantive content, and not formally reflected back upon itself apart from it. We may consequently affirm that though such a mode of objectivity possesses a type of self-subsistency, yet it is a self-knowledge and volition which is not released from the content it fulfils, but forms an inseparable unity with it.

The presentment of Spirit in this complete and independent seclusion of what is essentially substantive and true, this unperturbed and unparticularized being of Spirit, is that which we name divinity in its contrast to finitude, which is the process of disruption into contingent existence, a world that is broken into complex forms and varied movement. From this point of view the function of sculpture is to present the Divine simply in its infinite repose and sublimity, timeless, destitute of motion, entirely without subjective personality in the strict sense and the conflict of action or situation. And in proceeding to the more detailed definition of our humanity in shape and character, it must, nevertheless, exclusively rivet its attention on what is unalterable and permanent, in other words what is truly substantive in its characterization, and merely select such aspects for its content, passing over what it finds there of an accidental or evanescent nature; and it must do so for the reason that the objectivity which it presents does not rightly include a differentiation of this fluctuating and fleeting kind, and one which comes into being by virtue of a subjective consciousness whose conception of itself is that of pure insulation. In a biography, for instance, which gives an account of the motley incidents, events, and exploits of some individual, we find as a rule the course of varied developments and fortuities finally closed by a character sketch which summarizes the entire breadth of detail in a few general qualities such as goodness, honest dealing, courage, exceptional intelligence, and so forth. Characteristics such as these we may term the permanent features of a personality; the remaining peculiarities it possesses are merely accidental features in the impersonation. It is just this stable aspect of life which it is the part of sculpture to present as the unique being and determinate substance of individuality. Yet we must not suppose that it creates allegories out of such general qualities. It rather builds up true individuals, which it conceives and informs as essentially complete and enclosed within their objective spiritual presence, in their self-subsistent repose, delivered thereby from all antagonism as against external objects. In the presentment of an individuality of this character by sculpture what is truly substantive is throughout the essential foundation, and neither purely subjective self-knowledge and emotion, nor a superficial and mutable singularity136 must be permitted in any way to be predominant, but what is eternal in the god-like and our humanity should, divested of all the caprice and contingency of the particular self137, be set before our eyes in its unimpaired clarity.

(b) The further point we would draw attention to consists in this, that the content of sculpture, for the reason that its material requires an external presentment in the complete form of the three spatial dimensions, is also unable to be a spiritual content as such, that is, the ideality self-enclosed within and absorbed into itself, but rather in the sense that it is only explicit in its opposed factor, in other words, the bodily form. The negation of what is external is already implied in the ideal subjective consciousness, and can therefore have no place here, where what is divine and human is accepted as content with exclusive reference to its objective characteristics. And it is only this self-absorbed objective aspect, which does not comprise ideal subjectivity in the strict sense138, that gives free play to an externality conditioned in all its three dimensions, and is capable of being associated with such a spatial totality. For these reasons it is incumbent on sculpture that it only accept out of the objective content of Spirit that which admits of the fullest expression in external and bodily shape; if it do otherwise it simply selects a content which its specific material is unable to assimilate or to unite with an adequate mode of exposition.

We must now inquire into the nature of the bodily forms which are adapted to give an impression of a content of this kind.

Just as in classical architecture the dwelling-house is the anatomical skeleton framework which art has to inform with its accretions, in like manner sculpture, on its part, discovers the human form as the fundamental type for its figures. Whereas, however, the house is already a piece of human workmanship, though not as yet elaborated artistically, the structure of the human form, on the contrary, appears as a product of Nature unaffected by man. The fundamental type of sculpture is consequently given to it, that is, does not hail from human inventiveness. The expression, however, that the human form is a part of Nature is a very indefinite one, which we must submit to closer analysis.

In Nature it is the Idea, which is given there, as we have already found when discussing natural beauty, its primary and immediate mode of existence, receiving in animal life and its complete organic structure the natural existence adequate to its notion. The organization of the animal frame is therefore a birth of the notion in its essential totality, which exists in this corporeal mode of being as soul, yet, as the principle of merely animal life, modifies the animal frame in the most varied classifications, albeit too every specific type continues to be subject to the general notion139. The fact that notion and bodily form, or more accurately, soul and body, correspond to one another — to fully understand this is the problem of natural philosophy. We should have to demonstrate that the different systems of the animal frame in their ideal140 structure and conformation no less than their association, and the more definite organs in which the bodily existence is differentiated are in general accord with the phasal steps of the notion’s movement, so that it becomes clear, to what extent we have here presented to us as real only the particular aspects of the soul-life which are necessary. To develop this exposition, however, does not lie within the scope of the present inquiry.

The human form is not, however, as the animal form, merely the corporeal framework of the soul, but of Spirit. In other words, spirit and soul are essentially to be distinguished. For the soul is merely this ideal and simple unity of self-subsistence attaching to the body in its corporeal aspect141, whereas Spirit is the independent selfness of conscious and self-conscious life together with all the emotions, ideas, and aims of such a conscious existence. In contemplating the immense difference which separates merely animal life from spiritual consciousness, it may appear strange that the bodily frame attaching to the latter, the human body, is nevertheless so clearly homogeneous with that of animal life. It will tend, however, to decrease such an astonishment if we recall to mind the definition, which Spirit itself has authorized us to make in accordance with its own notion, that it is a mode of life and essentially therefore itself also a living soul and natural existence. As such living soul the life of conscious spirit, by virtue of the same notion that is inherent in the animal soul, is entitled to accept a body, which fundamentally in its general lines runs parallel to the organic structure of animal life. However superior to mere animal life Spirit may be it is evolved through142 a corporeal frame whose visible appearance receives an identical articulation and principle of life with that which the notion of animal life in general underlies. Inasmuch as, however, and furthermore Spirit is not merely the Idea as determinate existence, that is, the Idea as Nature and animal life, but the Idea which secures independence in its own free medium of ideality as Idea, the spiritual principle elaborates for itself its own specific mode of objectivity over and beyond that of animal life, simply, in other words, science, the reality of which is exclusively that of thought itself. Apart from thought, however, and its philosophical and systematized activity, Spirit is involved within an abounding life of feeling, inclination, idea, imagination, and so forth, which is fixed in a more direct or less immediate association with its vital being143 and bodily frame, and consequently possesses a reality in the human body. In this reality, which is part of its own substance, Spirit asserts itself also as a principle of life, shines into it, transpierces it, and is made manifest to others by means of it. Consequently, in so far as the human body remains no purely natural existence, but has asserted itself also in its configuration and structure as the natural and sensuous existence of Spirit, it is, nevertheless, regarded as the expression of an ideality more exalted than that compatible with the purely animal body to be distinguished from it, despite the fact that the human body in its broad lines is in harmony with it. For this reason, however, that Spirit is itself soul and life, that is, an animal body, it is and can only be modifications, which the indwelling Spirit of one living body attaches to this corporeal form. As a manifestation of Spirit consequently the human shape is distinct from the animal by virtue of these modifications, albeit the distinctions of the human organism from the animal are as much the result of the unconscious creation of spiritual activities, as the soul of the animal kingdom is the informing though unconscious activity of the body that belongs to it.

We have thus reached the precise point of our present departure. In other words, the human body is present to the artist as Spirit’s expression. What is more, he discovers it as such not merely in a general way, but also in particular characteristics it is pre-supposed to be the type which, in its form, its specific traits, its position and general habit, reflects the ideality of Spirit.

We shall find it a difficult matter to fix in clear terms of thought the precise nature of the association between spirit and body in their relation respectively to feeling, passion, and other spiritual conditions. It has, no doubt, been attempted to develop the same scientifically both from the pathognomical144 point of view and the physiognomical. Such attempts have hitherto not met with much success. For ourselves the science of physiognomy can only be of importance in so far as that of pathognomy is exclusively concerned with the mode under which definite feelings and passions are physically located in particular organs. It has been stated, for example, that the seat of anger is in the gall, of courage in the blood. Such statements, we may remark incidentally, are erroneous in their manner of expression. For even assuming the activity of particular organs corresponds to specific passions, we cannot say that anger, for instance, has its local position in the gall bladder, but, in so far as anger is corporeally related, the gall is pre-eminently that in which its active appearance asserts itself. In our present inquiry this pathognomical aspect does not, as already stated, concern us, because sculpture has merely to deal with that which passes over from the ideal side of Spirit into the external aspect of form permitting Spirit thus to be visible in the physical environment. The sympathetic interaction between the internal organism and the feeling soul is no object of sculpture; indeed, we may add, it is unable to accept much which appears on the external surface itself, such as the tremble of the hand and the entire body in an outburst of anger, the movement of the lips, and others of like nature.

With regard to physiognomical science I will limit myself to this observation. If the work of sculpture, which has as its fundamental basis the human form, has to exhibit the way in which the bodily presence as such manifests not only the divine and human aspect of Spirit in its broadest and most substantive features, but also the particular character of a definite individuality in this divine presence, we are no doubt compelled to discuss what parts, traits, and conformations of the body are fully accordant with any specific mode of ideality. We are indeed forced upon such an inquiry by the sculpture of antiquity, which we must as a matter of fact admit includes the expression of individual god-like characters with that of divinity generally. Such an admission does not, however, amount to an assertion that the association of spiritual expression with bodily form is merely a matter of accident and caprice rather than the creation of a figure of self-subsistent actuality. In this connection every organ must, in a general way, be looked at from two points of view, as a mode of expression that possesses its physical side no less than its spiritual. We need hardly caution our readers that the method of Gall in conducting such an inquiry is inadmissible. This writer reduces Spirit to what is little better than a Calvary.

(a) The advance of sculpture, in respect to the content which its function is to declare, is limited to the investigation how far the substantive and at the same time individual condition of spiritual life is made vital in bodily form, receiving therein determinate existence and form. In other words, through the content adequate to genuine sculpture the contingent individualization of the external appearance is from one point of view excluded, and this applies both to the spiritual and physical aspects of the presentment. Only that which persists, and is universal and according to rule in the human form is the object of a work of sculpture. And this is so albeit we have the additional necessity to individualize the universal in such a way that not only the abstract law but an individual form, which is brought into the closest fusion with it, is placed before our eyes.

(b) From another point of view it is necessary that sculpture, as we have seen, be kept unaffected by purely contingent personal life145, and all expression of such in the independent ideal mode under which it asserts itself. For this reason an artist, in dealing with physiognomical characteristics, is not entitled to move in the direction of individual manner146. For a facial manner is simply just this appearance on the surface of an individual idiosyncrasy and some particular aspect of emotion, idea, and volition. A man by his chance expressions of countenance expresses the feelings he has as some particular person, whether it be in his exclusive relation to his own life, or in his self-relation to exterior objects, or other persons. One sees, for example, on the street, more particularly in little towns, in many, or rather the majority of men, that they are exclusively preoccupied, in their demeanour and expression of face, with themselves, their dress and attire, in general terms, that is, their purely personal particularity, or, at least, matters of momentary importance, and any unforeseen or accidental features thus presented. Countenances which express pride, envy, self-satisfaction, depreciation, and so forth, are of this nature. Moreover, the feeling and contrast of substantive being with my personal idiosyncrasy may be responsible for such alterations of expression. Humility, defiance, threats, fear, are expressed in this way. In a felt contrast of this kind we find already a separation between the individual in the subjective sense and the universal asserted. Reflection on what is truly substantive continually leans in the direction of merely personal considerations, so that it is the individual rather than the substantive character which is predominant in the content. The form, however, which remains severely true to the principle of sculpture ought neither to express this severation nor the predominance of the personal aspect above adverted to.

In addition to definite expressions of countenance147 physiognomy presents us with much that merely passes momentarily across the features and indicates the human mood. A sudden smile, an instantaneous outburst of anger, a quickly repressed expression of scorn, are a few of many examples. In particular, the mouth and eyes possess most mobility and resource in seizing and making apparent every shifting mood of soul-life. Changes of this character, which are compatible with the art of painting, the sculptor must exclude. Sculpture must rather concentrate its attention on the permanent traits of spiritual expression, and retain and disclose such in the posture and configuration of the body no less than in the face.

(c) The task of sculpture, then, essentially consists in this, that it implants that which is of substantive spiritual import in that form of individuality which is not yet essentially particularized in the narrow subjective sense within the figure of a man, and contributes to the same such a harmony, that it is only that which is universal and permanent in the bodily shapes correspondent with the life of Spirit which is made to appear therein, while that which is accidental or mutable is brushed aside, albeit a certain mode of individuality is not absent from its forms.

An accord of this complete nature between what is ideal and what is external, the goal of sculpture, in short, offers us a point of transition to the third point which we have still to discuss.

The conclusion that most immediately follows upon the above observations is this, that sculpture in a way, and to an extent unrivalled by any other art, remains constant to the Ideal148. In other words, from one point of view it is free of the symbolical type both by virtue of the translucency of a content, which clearly grasps itself as Spirit, and on account of the fact that it is able to disclose such a content with absolute mastery. And so, too, from another it refuses as yet to enter into the subjective aspect of the personal life, to which the external form is indifferent. Consequently it forms the focus of classical art. No doubt both the symbolical and romantic types of architecture and painting were shown to be adapted to classical ideality; but the Ideal, in its genuine sphere, is not the supreme principle of these types of art, inasmuch as they do not, as is the case with sculpture, take for their object self-subsistent individuality, character, that is, throughout objective, in other words, the beauty that is both free and inevitable149. The configuration of sculpture must, however, entirely proceed from the pure spiritual energy of an imagination and thought that denudes its content of all the haphazard features of personal life and bodily presence; it must have no leanings for idiosyncrasies, or any place for the mere emotion, desire, and variety of accidental impulse and pleasantry150. What the artist has at his disposal for his most elevated creations is simply, as we have seen, the bodily presentment of Spirit in what is exclusively the general configuration of the organic structure of the human form. His invention is therefore restricted to promoting on the broadest lines the harmony between what is ideal and what is external, and partly to making, in however an inobtrusive way, the individuality of the presentment accommodate itself to and interfuse with the truly substantive character of his design151. Sculpture must give form, just as the gods create in their own sphere according to eternal ideas, within what is in other respects the world of reality, but exclude as rejected residue all licence and mere selfness from its creations. Theologians make a distinction between the acts of God and all that man in his folly and capriciousness accomplishes. The plastic Ideal is, however, exalted above such questions. It stands at the very centre of this blessedness and free necessity for which neither the abstraction of the universal nor the caprice of the particular are valid or significant.

This insight into the consummate plastic union of the divine and human was pre-eminently native to Greece. We fail to grasp Greece at her heart and centre in her poets and orators, historians and philosophers, unless, as the key to our problem, we are already possessed of an insight into the Ideal of sculpture, and can contemplate from the standpoint of plastic art both the figures of her epic and dramatic heroes and her actual statesmen and philosophers. For characters in her practical life, no less than poets and thinkers, possessed also in the palmy days of Greece, this plastic, universal, and yet individual character, stamped with one mint, whether we look at its external or more personal features. They stand up big and free, a self-subsistent growth, on the basis of their essentially substantive individuality; a growth of their own making, built up into that which they ultimately became and intended to be. In particular the period of Pericles was rich in such characters. Pericles himself was one of them. We may add Pheidias, Plato, and pre-eminently Sophocles. So, too, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Socrates, everyone with his own type, not one of them impairing the quality of the rest; all are out-and-out artistic natures, ideal artists in the work of self-creation, personalities of one mould, works of art, which stand before us like figures of immortal gods, in whom we can detect no taint of Time and mortality. We may find a similar plastic subsistency in the artistic perfections of the bodily frames of the victors at the Olympic games; nay, even in the apparition of Phryne152 herself, who, as the fairest woman, came from the sea naked before all the world.

THE IDEAL OF SCULPTURE

NOW THAT WE pass on to consider the really ideal style of sculpture we must once again recall the fact that the perfected type necessarily presupposes the imperfect as its predecessor; and it does so not merely in relation to its technique, which, in the first instance, does not concern us here, but in respect to the general notion, in other words the mode of its conception and the particular way in which it sets forth the same ideally. We have in general terms called the symbolical type that of inquiry; consequently pure sculpture, too, has for its presupposition a certain stage of the symbolical type, and by this we do not merely mean a stage of the symbolic form as generally conceived, in other words of architecture, but a form of sculpture which is itself characterized by the symbolical principle. We shall find an opportunity of supporting this assertion with the example of Egyptian sculpture in the third chapter.

We may in this place and from the point of view of the Ideal generally, and for the present wholly in an abstract and formal manner, assume that which we term symbolical in a specific art is its incompleteness; as, for example, we may so apply this term to an attempt of children to draw the human figure, or mould it from wax and clay. What they execute is to this extent merely a symbol, as it only suggests the living reality it purports to exhibit, remaining, however, wholly unfaithful to the actual object and its significance. Art is consequently in the first instance hieroglyphical, no mere accidental and capricious mark, but a haphazard delineation of an object for the imagination. For this purpose a badly drawn figure suffices if it recalls that object it is intended to suggest. In a similar way piety is content with badly executed images, and still worships Christ, the Virgin, and any other saint in the most bungling counterfeit, although such images may merely derive such individualization purely from particular attributes conveyed by such means as a lantern or a mill-stone. For piety refuses to be reminded of aught save the object; the soul adds all else thereto, which will be filled up with an image of the object, however untrue the counterfeit may be. It is not the living expression of the present which is required; it is not that which is presented which is intended to enkindle us by itself. Rather a work of art of this kind already brings satisfaction if it excites the general concept of the objects by virtue of its images, however insufficient they be. A concept of this kind, however, already abstracts from the given content. I can readily imagine some known thing, such as a house, a tree, a man; but even in such a case, where the reference is to something quite determinate, the concept merely includes wholly general traits, and is in fact only a true concept153 in so far as it has effaced from the concrete presentment the wholly immediate singularity of the objects and simplified the same. If the imaged concept, which the work of art has to arouse in us, is that of the divine nature, and if this has to receive recognition from an entire people, this object is especially attainable when no alteration is allowed in the mode of presentation. For this reason art is on the one hand conventional, and on the other scholastic154; and this is so not merely in the case of the more ancient Egyptians, but also in that of more ancient Greek and Christian art. The artist in such case was bound to restrict himself to definite forms and to repeat their type.

The crucial point of transition, where fine art wakes from its sleep, must consequently be sought there, where at last the artist is creative by virtue of his own free conception, where the flash of genius strikes into the material presented, and communicates freshness and vitality to the presentment. Then for the first time the atmosphere of mind155 enfolds the work of art, which is no longer restricted to merely calling up in a general way some idea before the mind, and recalling to it some deeper significance which the spectator already is essentially possessed of, but which proceeds to make visible this significance as throughout made vitally present in some individualized creation, and which consequently neither makes no further advance beyond the purely superficial generality of its forms, nor binds itself on the other hand, in respect to the detail of its delineation, to the characteristics of all that common reality offers it.

In the rise of ideal sculpture we presuppose perforce a complete passage to such a sphere of creation. In establishing the facts of this appearance we may emphasize the following points of view.

First, we have to address ourselves to the general character of the ideal form in its contrast to the stages previously discussed.

Secondly, we shall have to adduce specific aspects of it, the importance of which is most obvious, such as the way in which facial characteristics, drapery, and pose are modelled or treated.

Thirdly, we have to enforce the position that the ideal figure is not merely a general type of beauty in the formal sense of type, but includes, by virtue of its principle of individuality, which belongs to the really living Ideal, essentially, too, the aspect of differentiation and specific definition within its own sphere, and by this means the province of sculpture is expanded in a cycle of particularized images of gods and heroes.

We have already examined at length what the general principle of the classical ideal is. Our present inquiry is therefore limited to the particular mode under which this principle is realized through the medium of sculpture in the human form. In this connection the lines of difference between the human physiognomy, expressive as it is of spiritual life and the general build of the animal organism, which is unable to pass beyond the mere expression of natural life in its unbroken association with natural wants and an organism that is exclusively adapted to their satisfaction, will supply us with a standard of comparison which carries us considerably further. Yet even such a standard is still somewhat indefinite for the reason that the human form alone neither is as bodily form, or as an expression of Spirit, wholly and as we find it first of ideal type. On the contrary we may observe with more closeness from the fine masterpieces of Greek sculpture what the ideal of sculpture in the spiritually fine expression of its creations has to bring before us. It was pre-eminently Winckelmann who, with this intimate knowledge of and devotion for art of this kind, and by means of his receptive enthusiasm, no less than his intelligence and critical faculty, made an end of indefinite statements over the Ideal of Greek beauty by leaving the characterization of detail in the form at once distinct and precise, an endeavour which by itself is full of instruction. No doubt the results he obtained supply abundant opportunity for further criticism, exceptions, and the like; but we should be careful, before attempting to criticize details and errors in his work, not to obscure the main result which he established. However far aesthetic science may extend its borders that at least must be pre-supposed as essential. Assuming this, it cannot, however, be denied that since Winckelmann’s death our knowledge of the antique has not only been essentially enlarged in the number of examples submitted to criticism, but also has been placed on a securer basis in its relation to the style of these works and the true appreciation of their beauty.

Winckelmann, no doubt, passed under review a great number of Egyptian and Greek statues; we have, however, added in more recent times the closer acquaintance of the Aeginetan sculptures, no less than those masterworks which in part are ascribed to Pheidias and in part we must recognize as creations of his age and under his supervision. In a word we have secured a more intimate knowledge of a number of sculptures, whether single statues or reliefs, which, in their relation to the severity of the ideal style, are referable to the age in which Greek art was at its fullest bloom. For these astonishing monuments of Greek sculpture, as is well known, we are indebted to the efforts of Lord Elgin, who, as English ambassador to Turkey, had a number of statues and reliefs of the greatest beauty taken from the Parthenon at Athens and other towns to England. People have blamed such acquisitions and called them temple robbery. Lord Elgin has, however, as a matter of fact, really rescued these works of art for Europe and preserved them from complete destruction. Such an enterprise deserves its true recognition. Moreover, it is due to this circumstance that the interest of all connoisseurs and friends of art have been directed to an epoch and a mode of presentation, which, in the exceptionally consistent severity of its style, constitutes the true greatness and height of the Ideal. What the general verdict has highly estimated in the works of this epoch is not the charm and grace of form and pose, not the elegance of expression which already, as in the times subsequent to Pheidias, makes an external appeal and distinctly aims at pleasing the spectator, nor yet the delicacy and boldness of the elaboration; rather the general chorus of praise is concentrated upon the expression of self-subsistency and essential repose in these figures, and more especially has this note of admiration been most emphatic by virtue of the free vitality, the absolute transfusion of and command over the purely natural and material aspect, a command by which the artist moulds the marble, makes it alive and endows it with a soul. And we may add that when all has been said that can be said in such praise the figure of the reclining river-god remains as most emphatically its object, which is one of the finest examples of antique art we have recovered.

(a) The vitality of these works consists in this, that they are the free product of the genius of the artist. The artist at this stage is neither satisfied with giving, by means of general and haphazard contours, suggestions and expressions, a general conception of that which he desires to reproduce, nor does he, on the other hand, in respect to what is individual and singular, accept the forms as he has received them by chance from the external world. For this reason also he does not present them again with loyalty to this accidental aspect, but he is concerned to place within his own free creation what is empirically particularized in isolated aspects that thus appear in a further individual accord with the universal types of the human form, an accord which is made to appear as throughout transpierced with the spiritual configuration of that which he is called to make apparent, when he suffers us to see his own vitality, conception and animation in the work regarded on the side of the artist’s activity. The universal aspect of the content of his work is not due to his creation. It is presented him by means of mythology and saga precisely in the way that he finds the general effect and details of the human form; but the free and living individualization, which permeates all portions on his work, is the result of his own personal point of view, his efforts and services.

(b) The effect and charm of this vitality and freedom is only produced by means of the sufficiency, the honest candour of the elaboration of all the particular parts to which the most definite knowledge and review of the construction of these parts belongs, no less in their position of repose than also in that of their motion. The way in which the different members are disposed and moulded with regard to rondure and smoothness, in every condition of rest and movement, must be expressed in the most satisfactory way. This fundamental elaboration and placing in relief of all the separate parts we find in all products of antique art, and the animation thus produced is only the effect of infinite pains and truth. When the eye contemplates works of this kind it is, in the first instance, unable clearly to recognize a mass of distinction; and it is only by virtue of a particular manner of lighting that we can appreciate the same by means of a stronger contrast between light and shadow. But though these fine nuances are imperceptible at first glance, the general impression they produce is not for that reason lost. In part they appear as the spectator varies his point of view, and in part we derive from them what is essentially the impression of the organic continuity of all the members and their forms. This spirit of vitality, this soul of material configuration, is due wholly to the fact that, though every part is entirely complete in its separable independence, yet it is to a like extent throughout, by virtue of the wealth of its modes of transition, associated not merely with the part that is immediately its neighbour, but with the entire work. For this reason the form is vital in every part of it; the least detail of it is stamped with purpose; every part of it is differentiated from the rest, possesses that which distinguishes it and makes it distinct, and yet is affected by the same fluidity of treatment, is only what it is vitally as a part of the whole, so that we are able to recognize the whole in the very fragments of it, and a part that is broken off enables us not merely to see but to enjoy a totality that is not thus mutilated. The material surface, although for the most part statues are now seriously impaired by the weather and other causes in this respect, presents a soft and malleable appearance; and in one particular example of the head of a horse I have in mind it literally glows with the ardour of life on the face of the marble itself. This scarce perceptible undercurrent of fluidity in all organic parts, united to the most conscientious elaboration which avoids purely regular surfaces and anything approaching the bare convexity of circular shape, supplies that softness and ideality of all parts, that harmonious unity, which extends throughout the whole as the spiritual breath of one animating presence.

(c) However true, notwithstanding, expression of detailed or general configuration may be, this truth is no mere imitation of Nature simply. Sculpture is always occupied with the abstraction of form, and is consequently obliged, on the one hand, to omit from the bodily presentment what is most essentially the natural aspect, in other words, what is exclusively indicative of natural function. From a further point of view it is unable to carry to extremes its particularization of detail, but rather as, for example, in its treatment of hair, must restrict its attention and reproduction to the more general of its forms. In this way, apart from any other, the human figure, when properly treated by sculpture, is at once declared as the form and expression of Spirit, rather than of a purely natural form. Closely connected with this consideration is the fact that, though a spiritual content is expressed by means of sculpture in the bodily form, yet in the genuine Ideal it is not asserted so prominently in the exterior form to the extent of making that which is simply external in its charm and grace either the exclusive or predominant attraction to the spectator. On the contrary, though the genuine and more severe Ideal of Spirituality is here presented in bodily shape, and is exclusively thus presented by means of such shape and its expression, yet this configuration must equally appear to be without exception unified, supported and transfused by this ideal content. The swell of life, the malleability and bodily presence, or sensuous fulness and beauty of the bodily organism, must as little supply independently the object of the presentation, as what is individual in the spiritual presence can be carried to the length of expressing the more intimate and more closely related inner life of the spectator, when we consider his own particularity.

If we direct our attention now to the more specific consideration of the fundamental phases, on which the ideal form of sculpture reposes, we shall do well to follow Winckelmann in essentials, who has laid stress on the several types with the finest intuitive sense, and with the most fortunate results, as well as on the way in which the same have been treated and shaped by Greek artists, with the result that they finally present to us the Ideal of sculpture. The vitality, this floating emanation no doubt evades the definitions of the understanding, which in the present case is unable to hold fast and transpierce the particular as in architecture, which, however, asserts itself in the entire work, as we have already seen, as the coalescence of free spirituality and bodily forms.

The first general feature of distinction which arrests us concerns the determination of works of sculpture in a general way, by virtue of which the human form has to express that which is spiritual. The spiritual expression, albeit it has to be poured forth over the entire bodily presence reaches its highest degree of concentration in the facial form, whereas the remaining members are merely able to reflect what is spiritual by means of their position, in so far, that is, as the same proceeds from Spirit in its essential freedom.

In our examination of these ideal forms we will make a beginning in the first place with the head; we will, then, in the second place enlarge upon the position of the body, after which we shall conclude with the principle of the drapery.

(a) In the ideal configuration of the human head we are first and foremost confronted with the so-called Greek profile.

(α) This profile consists in the peculiar union of the forehead and nose; in the almost straight or merely slightly crooked line in which the forehead unites without interruption with the nose, as also, to speak more accurately, in the vertical direction of this line to another which, extending it from the root of the nose to the orifice of the ear, forms a right angle with the line of the forehead and nose above mentioned. In a line of this sort nose and forehead stand throughout to one another in the ideal and fine art of sculpture, and the question presents itself whether this is a merely national and artistic contingency or a physiological necessity.

Camper, the famous Dutch physiologist, has, with more exactness and in an exceptional way, characterized this line as the line of facial beauty; he in fact discovers therein the main distinction between the form of the human visage and the profile of animal life; and on account of this follows up the modifications of this feature throughout the various human races. In this respect his researches are no doubt in conflict with those of Blumenbach156. Speaking generally, however, the line adverted to is in fact a most marked means of distinction between the outward form of man and animal. Among animals, it is true, muzzle and nasal bone also form a more or less straight line, but the specific projection of the animal’s snout, which is forced to the front, as being in the nearest practical relation to objects, is essentially determined through its connection with the skull, united to which the ear is moreover placed above or below, so that in the present instance the line that is carried forward from the skull to the root of the nose or the upper jaw, where the teeth are in position, forms an acute angle instead of a right angle as is found in the case of man. Everybody can independently feel in a general way the strength of this distinction, which no doubt opens the path to more definite thinking on the subject.

(αα) In the formation of the head of animals the most insistent feature is the mouth as the organ by means of which it feeds in co-operation with the upper and lower jaws, the teeth, and the muscles of mastication. All the other organs are subordinate and in a position of subservience to this principal feature. Notably the snout as a means of scenting food, the eyes being to a lesser degree instrumental in spying it out. The express insistence on these animal features as exclusively devoted to the natural wants and their satisfaction gives to the head of the animal the appearance as though intended merely to satisfy natural functions without any trace of spiritual ideality. For this reason the entire animal organism is rendered intelligible from the mouth as a point of departure. A specific mode of nourishment, that is to say, requires a specific structure of the muzzle, a particular formation of the teeth, together with which the structure of the jaw bones, the muscles of mastication, cheek-bones, and, moreover, the vertebrae, the thighbones, claws, and so forth all stand in the closest relation. The body of the animal merely subserves natural ends and on account of this dependence on the purely material aspect of nourishment gives the impression of absence of spirit. If, then, the human countenance is, even in its bodily conformation, to possess a spiritual stamp, those organs which in the animal form are so predominant must in the case of man, retire from such a pre-eminence and give way to those which do not so much suggest a practical relation as one that is referable to the ideality of mind.

(ββ) The human countenance has consequently a second central point, in which that attitude to facts, which indicates the relation of the soul or spirit, is declared. We find this in the upper portion of the face, in the thoughtful brow and the eye, through which we face the soul, which looms out beneath it, together with its environment. Thought, reflection — that is, the introspection of the spiritual identity — is necessarily connected with the forehead, whose internal life in concentrated clarity looks forth from the eye. Through the prominence of the forehead and the correspondingly retreating appearance of the mouth and the cheek-bones the human countenance derives its spiritual character. This projection of the brow is therefore necessarily that which determines the entire formation of the skull, which no longer falls back, forming the side of an acute angle as its extreme point the mouth is pressed to the front157, but rather permits of a line being drawn from the forehead through the nose to the point of the chin, which, with a second drawn over the rear of the skull to the apex of the forehead, form a right angle, or one at least which approximates to it.

(γγ) Thirdly, we may say that the nose forms the passage and connection between the lower and upper portion of the face, that is to say, between the purely contemplative and spiritual forehead and the practical organ of nutrition; and if we take into consideration its natural function as the organ of smell it is rightly placed in this intermediate position between an attitude to the external world which is either wholly practical or ideal. No doubt the sense of smell in such a position is still associated with an animal want; it is intimately connected with the taste; and for this reason, in the case of the mere animal, the snout is at the service of the mouth and the organ of nourishment. But the sense of smell is by itself as a fact no actual consumption of objects, as eating and tasting are; it merely accepts the result of the process in which the objects pass into the atmosphere and its invisible and mysterious medium of dissolution. Assuming, then, that the passage from forehead and nose is of such a formation that the forehead viewed independently arches forward, and yet in relation to the nose retreats, whereas this latter organ on its part, in proximity to the forehead, is withdrawn back and only projects beyond this point, we see that both these portions of the face — that is, the contemplative part, the forehead, and that which suggests a practical use, with which we may associate the mouth, form an emphatic contrast, in virtue of which the nose, as belonging in a sense to both extremes, appertains equally to the practical aims158 of the mouth. Furthermore, the forehead, in its isolated position, receives the appearance of severity and exclusive spiritual concentration in its contrast to the eloquent sympathy of the mouth, which is primarily the organ of nutritive support, and at the same time accepts the nasal organ into its service as its instrument in creating the natural want by virtue of its smell, and thereby declares its direct relation to the material side. And in close connection with this reciprocity is the contingent character of the form to the indeterminable modifications of which both nose and forehead may be carried. The particular type of the forehead’s arch, the nature of its projection or retreat, loses its secure lines of definition, and the nose can be fiat or fine, drooping, arched, more acutely flattened and a snub.

By virtue of amelioration159 and accommodation, however, that beautiful harmony, which the Greek profile asserts in the gentle and uninterrupted communication between the spiritual forehead and the nose, that is, between the upper and lower portions of the face, the nose appears on this very account of closer affinity to the forehead, and consequently receives itself a spiritual expression and character as though drawn up into the spiritual system. The sense of smell becomes at the same time a sense independent of purely practical ends, a nose refined for spiritual purpose; just as in fact also the nose by its sneer and similar movements, however unimportant by themselves they may be, is nevertheless shown to be in the highest degree pliable as a mode of expressing the judgments and emotions of soul-life. So, for example, we say of a proud man that he holds his nose high, or ascribe sauciness to a young girl who tosses up her bit of a nose.

And the same thing may be said of the mouth. No doubt it is on the one hand referable as an instrument to the satisfaction of hunger and thirst; it expresses, however, in addition to this conditions of the soul, opinions, and passions. Even among animals it is used in this relation as the organ of animal cries, and by man as that of speech, laughter, sighs, and so forth, by which means the lineaments of the mouth are themselves associated with the facts of eloquent soul-sympathy, or of joy, sorrow, and similar conditions.

It is no doubt asserted that, though for the Greeks, such a configuration of the human countenance is presented as the true presentation of beauty, the Chinese, Jews, and Egyptians, regarded on the contrary an entirely different type, or rather forms absolutely in conflict with such, as equally beautiful, or yet more beautiful, and the conclusion is made that, cancelling one example by another, we have not proved that the Greek profile is the type of genuine beauty. Such a statement, however, is wholly superficial. The Greek profile must in fact not be regarded as any mere external and accidental form, but approximates to the ideal of beauty by its independent claims, namely, first, because it is the type of countenance in which the expression of soul-life forces into the background all that is purely material, and, secondly, because it to the fullest extent detaches itself from all that is contingent in the form, without, however, displaying thereby mere subservience to rule, and leaving no place for every kind of individuality.

(β) With respect to specific types and their closer consideration I will merely touch upon certain fundamental aspects selected from the abundant material which otherwise invites attention. In this respect we may in the first instance refer to the forehead, the eye, and the ear, as those parts of the face which are most nearly related to the contemplative, or at least spiritual aspect, and, secondly, to the nose, mouth, and chin, as those relatively speaking more connected with the organs of practical import.

Thirdly, we shall have somewhat to say of the hair as the external setting, by virtue of which the head is rounded off in an oval shape of beauty.

(αα) The forehead is in the ideal form of classical sculpture, neither fully arched forward, nor as a rule lofty; for, although the spiritual aspect has to be prominently emphasized in its configuration of the visual features, yet it is not as yet spirituality simply as such, which sculpture has to present before us, but rather individuality as still exclusively expressed in bodily form.

In heads of Hercules, for example, the forehead is preferably low, for the reason that Hercules possesses rather the muscular vigour of the body directed towards external objects than the introspective energy of mind. And for the rest we find the forehead subject to many modifications, lower in the case of charming and youthful feminine forms, and more lofty in the case of figures that represent substantial character and serious reflection.

In speaking of the eye it is important at once to make it clear that in the figure of ideal sculpture, in addition to the absence of any true colour such as is found in painting, the glance of the eye is also absent. It is possible no doubt to show on historical evidence that the ancients, in the case of particular images of Minerva and other gods placed in temples, have painted the eye, since we find actual traces of colour in certain statues; in the case of images dedicated to a sacred purpose, however, artists have frequently held fast so far as possible to traditional usage in the face of good taste. In the case of other examples it is clear that they must have possessed eyes in the shape of precious stones inserted. This practice, however, is the result of a desire already adverted to of adorning the images of gods in as rich and lavish a manner as possible. And we may affirm generally that such either mark the beginnings of the art, or are due, as exceptions, to the traditions of religion. Moreover, apart from this, mere colour is still far from giving to the eye the essentially concentrated look, which alone communicates to it an expression that is wholly complete. We may therefore here assume it as a fact that in the case of statues and busts of a truly classical type, unaffected by such exceptional conditions which have come down to us from antiquity, the light focus of the eye, no less than the spiritual expression of its glance, is absent. For although not unfrequently the focus is inserted in the apple of the eye, or at least is indicated by a conical depression, and a modification which expresses the light point of this focus and by this means a kind of visual glance, such remains nevertheless the purely external configuration of the eye-ball, and is no presentation of its vitality; in other words it is not the glance of it simply, the inward glance, that is, of the soul.

We can readily imagine that it must cost the artist a great deal to sacrifice the eye in its simple aspect of animation. We have only to look a man in the eyes to discover a point of arrest, a centre that explains and is basic to his entire presentment, which we may grasp in its simplest terms from the unifying declaration of its bare look. The eye-glance is in fact that aspect which is most steeped in soul; it is the concentration of the inward life and its subjective emotion. Just as a man by means of a handshake, so, too, with yet more rapidity he is brought into unity with his fellow by virtue of the eye-glance he faces. And it is this pre-eminently spiritual mode of revelation which sculpture is forced to dispense with. In painting, on the contrary, this outward expression of soul-life makes its appearance by means of the subtle gradations of colouring either in its entire spiritual effect, or in a manifest association with external facts and the particular interests, feelings, and passions, which are called up by their presence. But the province of the sculptor in his art is neither the essential inwardness of soul-life, the concentration of the entire man in the simple centre of self-identity, which gleams out in the human glance as its ultimate point of illumination, nor the developed subjectivity as we find it diffused amid the surrounding world. The end of sculpture is the totality of the external form, into which the soul must disintegrate itself, and present itself by means of the manifold of the medium thus utilized, so that the recourse to one simple soul-focus, in other word the immediacy of the spirit-glance, is not here permitted. The work of sculpture possesses no such ideal intimacy in its simplest terms which is allowed to assert itself, as the human look does assert itself in contrast to other parts of the human body, thereby unfolding a contrast between the eye and the body; rather in sculpture what the individual is in his ideal and spiritual significance remains wholly fused in the total aspect of form, which the spirit that contemplates it, the spectator, can alone grasp in its unity. And in the second place, and with equal truth the eye peers into the world that surrounds it; it necessarily looks at something positive, and thereby is witness to man in his relation to a manifold world of objects, just as in the sphere of feeling he is united to his environment and general experience. It is, however, precisely this union with external objects from which the true figure of sculpture is withdrawn, being rather absorbed in what is substantive in its own spiritual content, essentially self-subsistent, that is without further diffusion or development. Thirdly, the glance of the eye receives its fully evolved significance by virtue of the expression of the rest of the bodily presentment, such as in its general mien and speech, albeit as the purely formal point of subjective life, in which the entire manifold of the form and its environment is concentrated to a focus, it holds itself aloof and contrasted with this development. A breadth of vision of this specific kind is, however, foreign to the plastic art. For this reason the more specialized mode of expression in the human vision, which did not at the same time immediately discover its further reciprocal response of effect in the entire compass of its configuration, could only be an accidental particularity, which the sculptured figure must dispense with. For reasons such as these, sculpture does not merely deprive itself of nothing when it leaves its figures bare of the eye’s full glance; but we may affirm that it is only true to its fundamental principle when it totally disregards this mode of the soul’s expression. Consequently it is merely one more example of the fine insight of antiquity, that it recognized firmly this limitation and restriction of sculpture, and remained loyal to the abstract view it implied. It is an evidence of the lofty intelligence of the ancients, based on the fulness of their reasoning faculties, and the comprehensive grasp of their outlook. No doubt we do meet with cases in antique sculpture, in which the eyes gaze upon some definite point, as for example in the case of the faun we have alluded to several times who glances at the young Bacchus. This smile of recognition is expressed in a moving way; but even here the eye is itself visionless, and the real statues of the gods in their simple situations are not presented to us in relations of this specific character so far as the direction of eye and glance is concerned.

With regard to the form of the eye in ideal sculpture it is large of size, widely extended, oval and in respect to position placed at right angles toward the line of the forehead and nose, and in considerable depression. As far back as Winckelmann160 the large size of the eye was accounted significant of beauty, just as a great light is more beautiful than a small one. “The size, however,” his description continues, “is relative to the bone of the eye or its cavity, and is expressed in the mode of incision161 and in the opening of the eyelids, of which in beautiful eyes the upper describes a more circular arch toward the angle within than the lower one.” In the case of profile heads of superior workmanship the apple of the eye itself possesses a profile and receives precisely by virtue of this opening thus cut away a nobility and a free glance, whose very light, according to Winckelmann’s observation, is rendered visible on coins through an exalted point or focus on the apple of the eye. At the same time mere size does not make all eyes beautiful; they are this in the first place by virtue of the cast of the eyelids, and in the second through being themselves deepset. In other words the eye ought not to press forward, and by so doing be thrust on the external world, for it is just this close relation to the external world which is removed from the ideal, exchanging for this the self-retirement of personality upon its own resources, that is, upon what is ideally substantive in the individuality. The projection of the eye, however, also suggests the thought that the apple of the eye is at one time pushed to the fore and at another withdrawn, and, particularly in the case of the staring gaze, only testifies to the fact that the individual is beside himself, either staring in total absence of thought, or in an equally soulless way absorbed in the gaze upon some material object. In the Ideal of antique sculpture the eye is placed in even more pronounced retreat than we actually find it in Nature. Winckelmann suggests as a reason for this that in the case of statues of larger size which are placed more remote from the vision of the spectator, without this more receding position, on account of the fact that apart from this the apple of the eye was for the most part flat, the eye itself would have been without meaning and practically lifeless, if by just this more emphatic projection of the bone of the eye-socket, the thereby accentuated play of light and shadow had not made the eye more apparently active. Yet this deepening of the eye has a yet further significance. In other words, if the forehead is thereby suffered to receive a prominence superior to that of Nature the contemplative portion of the face is the predominant factor, and we receive a keener sense of spiritual expression, while also the emphasized shadow in the eye-sockets on its own account enables us to feel a depth and unimpaired inwardness, a look that is shut off from external objects, and retires on the essential presence of individuality, whose depths are suffused over the entire presentment. In the case of coins, too, of the best period the eyes are deep-set, and the enclosing bones of the eye are projected. The eye-brows on the contrary are not expressed by a more extended arch of tiny hairs, but merely suggested by means of the acute sharpness of the eye-bone ridge, which, without interrupting the forehead in its form of continuity as eye-brows actually do through their colour and relative elevation, surround the eyes as with an elliptical garland. The more elevated and consequently more independent arch of the eye-brows has never been regarded as beautiful.

Winckelmann162 further observes with regard to the ears that the ancients devoted the greatest care to their elaboration, so that in the case of cut stones indifferent attention to the execution of the ear is an infallible sign of the spuriousness of the work in question. In particular he insists that statues which are portraits often reproduced the characteristic and individual type of the ear. It is consequently possible in many cases to ascertain the very personality represented from the ear, if the same happens to be known, and to take one example, from a single ear with an exceptionally large opening into it, to deduce the presence of a Marcus Aurelius. Indeed, the ancients have not failed to indicate in this respect what is actually misshapen. As examples of a peculiar type of ear to be found in ideal heads, Winckelmann draws attention to certain ears given to Hercules, which are beaten out flat, and others which bulge out in their cartilaginous folds. They indicate wrestlers and pancratiasts, just as Hercules himself carried off the prize at Elis as a pancratiast in the games of Pelops.

(ββ) We have still to add some remarks with reference to that part of the countenance which is more nearly related to the practical or sensuous side of natural function, in other words the specific form of the nose, the mouth, and the chin. The distinction in the form of the nose gives to the face a variety of configuration and many various kinds of expression. A keenly cut nose with thin folds163 at the apertures we are accustomed to associate with an acute understanding, whereas a broad and drooping one, or a snub nose that is somewhat brutish, suggests as a rule sensuality, folly, and bestiality. It is, however, the function of sculpture to hold itself aloof, not merely from such extremes, but also the intermediate stages of design and expression, and refuse consequently to accept, as we have already seen is the case with the Greek profile, not simply the separation from the forehead, but also the extreme curve, whether upwards or downwards, the acute point and the more extended rounding off, the elevation in the middle and the depression towards the forehead and the mouth, generally speaking the extreme acuteness and thickness of the nose, setting in the place of these varied modifications a comparatively indifferent type, if at the same time one which in a quiet way is throughout vitalized by individuality.

Second only to the eye the month belongs to the most beautiful portion of the face, provided that it is formed not so much in express relation to its natural function as an organ for eating and drinking as in accommodation to its spiritual significance. In this respect it only gives place to the eye in the variety and wealth of its means of expression, and this though it is enabled to express with vital force the finest nuances of scorn, disdain, envy, the entire gamut of sorrows and joy through the slightest of movements and the fullest play of such, and to a similar degree to express the charm of love, earnestness, sensuous feeling, obstinacy, attraction, and other such emotions by its state of repose. Sculpture, however, makes less use of it to express the nuances of particular expression, and, above all, is bound to keep what is entirely sensuous, and suggests natural wants away from the form and delineation of the lips. For the most part, therefore, it models the mouth neither over-full-shaped nor too spare, for extremely thin lips also suggest a parsimony of emotional life; makes the underlip more full than the upper, which was also the case with Schiller, upon the modelling of whose mouth was inscribed every kind of significance and fulness of temperament. This more ideal type of the lips in its contrast to the animal snout presents the appearance of a certain absence of desire, whereas in the case of the beast, if the upper portion projects, we are at once reminded of the headlong devouring of food and the grasp for it. Among human beings the mouth is, when we have regard for its spiritual relation, primarily the seat of human speech, the organ for the free communication of self-conscious life, just as the eye is that of the emotional spirit. Moreover, according to the ideals of sculpture, the lips are not tightly closed; rather in the works of art in its blooming season the mouth is set slightly open without suffering the teeth, however, to be visible, which have nothing to do with the expression of a spiritual significance. This attitude is so far supported by the fact that when the organs of sense are strongly active, as, for example, when we gaze intently at an object, the mouth is closed; when, on the contrary, we are absorbed in visionless thought it opens slightly and the angles of the mouth are to an appreciable extent inclined downwards.

Last in our review of the objects above named, the chin, in its ideal form, completes the spiritual expression of the mouth, that is, assuming it is not wholly absent, as in the case of animals, or only retained in a retreating and meagre condition as in works of Egyptian sculpture, but as rather lengthened out even beyond the degree which is usual, receiving thus in the rounded fulness of its arched curve, more particularly where we have shorter underlips, yet further increase of size. To sum up in fact a full chin conveys the impression of a certain satiety and repose. Odd fussy wenches wag with their withered-up chins and meagre muscles. Goethe, for example, likens their chops to a pair of tongs that will be snatching at something. All restlessness of this kind disappears with a full chin. The dimple, however, which nowadays is held to have some claim to beauty is, as an accidental grace itself, no essential accompaniment of beauty. In its place, however, a rounded chin of considerable proportions is an infallible sign of antique heads. In the case of the Medicean Venus it is not so noticeable, but it is proved on good evidence that the statue has suffered a loss in this respect.

(γγ) We have only now in conclusion to refer to the hair. Generally speaking the hair has rather the character of a vegetable than an animal formation; it testifies less to the strength of the organism than it is indicative of weakness. Barbarians allow the hair to hang in straight lines, or cut it off close to the head rather than in undulating line or locks. The ancients, on the contrary, devoted excessive attention to the elaboration of the hair in their ideal works of sculpture, a direction in which more modern artists devote less trouble and skill. No doubt the ancients also, when the stone on which they worked was extremely hard, did not suffer the hair of the head to flow in freely hanging locks, but arranged as though it was cropped short164 and, in that form, finely combed out. In the case of marble sculpture of the better time the hair is in locks and of great vigour both in the case of male and female heads, where we find it presented in upward rolls and bound together on the crown of the head; one finds it at least, as Winckelmann points out, drawn out in winding rolls and with express depressions the better to indicate its various folds in light and shadow, which is impossible if the drills are shallow. Add to this in the case of particular gods the line of direction and the arrangement of the hair is different In a similar way in Christian painting Christ is made recognizable by a definite type of the crown of the head and the locks of hair, following which type in our own time there are not a few who deliberately imitate such an appearance.

(γ) The parts above described in their form sum up collectively the head as a whole. The beautiful form is here determined by a line which most nearly approaches the oval of an egg, and thereby resolves every indication of sharpness, pointedness, and angularity in harmonious form and a gently progressive association, without, however, being exclusively regular and abstractly symmetrical, or issuing in multifold variety of lines and their direction and inclination as is the case with other portions of the body. In order to form this self-collected oval shape, the beautiful and free inclination from the chin to the ear contributes, particularly if we look at the face from the front, no less than the line already indicated, which describes the termination of the forehead, the bones of the eye-socket. And the arch over the profile from forehead over the point of the nose to the chin is equally noticeable, and the beautiful arching of the back of the head to the nape of the neck. So much I have permitted myself, without entering on further detail, to observe on the ideal shape of the head.

(b) In respect to the other organic members such as neck, breast, back, belly, arms, hands, thighs, and feet, we find here another type of co-ordination. They can no doubt possess a beautiful form, but the beauty is sensuous, vital, without expressing by virtue of their form as such a spiritual significance as the countenance expresses it. The ancients have shown for the form of these parts of the body the highest sense of beauty; but in genuine sculpture they must not merely pass as the beauty of a living organism, but as members of the human form it is their further function to present the appearance of a spiritual effect, so far as this is compatible with what is purely bodily presence. Otherwise the expression of the soul would be concentrated wholly in the face, whereas in plastic sculpture what is spiritual must appear as permeating nothing less than the entire configuration, and must not be permitted to isolate itself independently and in contrast to what is corporeal.

If we now inquire what are the means which enable the breast, the torso, the back, and the extremities to contribute to the expression of spirit and thereby to receive over and beyond a beautiful vitality, the breath of a spiritual life, we shall find the following:

In the first place there is the relation in which the limbs, in so far as that relation proceeds from the ideality of Spirit, and is freely determined by that ideality, are brought into juxtaposition.

Secondly, there is the motion and repose in their complete freedom and beauty of form.

Thirdly, this type of position and motion in their definite affiliation165 and expression supplies the situation more closely, in which the Ideal, which can never consist purely in the Ideal of abstraction, is comprehended.

I will add yet further some general remarks on the above points.

(α) With regard to position of first importance is that aspect we have had already occasion to notice in a superficial way, namely, the upright position of man. The body of animals moves in a parallel line with the ground; mouth and eye follow the same direction, and the animal is unable independently to raise himself from this relation to gravity. The opposite is the case with mankind; the eye looking straight forward is placed in its natural direction, that is, in a right angle with the line of gravity and the body. Man is no doubt able to go on all fours just as animals do, and children do so in fact; but as soon as consciousness begins to awaken, man wrests himself from the animal chains of the earth, and stands up straight in free independence. This stansion is an act of will, for if we cease to try to stand our body collapses and falls to the ground. In this way the upright position possesses a spiritual significance, in so far as the self-elevation from the ground remains linked with the volition and thus with that which is spiritual and ideal; just as we are accustomed to say of an essentially free and independent man, who keeps his opinions, view’s, principles, and aims unaffected by others, that he stands on his own feet.

The upright position is, however, not yet merely as such beautiful; it is only so by virtue of the freedom of its form. In other words if a man stands up only straight in an abstract way, letting his hands fall glued to his side with no interval of separation, his legs in the same way being close to each other, we receive an untoward expression of stiffness, even although in the first instance this is due to no compulsion. From this stiff effect we deduce on the one hand the abstract and likewise architectonic principle of uniformity, under which the limbs adhere together in the like position, and on the other hand we do not discover in it any determination derived from what is spiritual and the ideal principle. In such a case arms, legs, breast, body, all the members stand and hang just as though they had from the first grown there on man, without being brought by means of his spirit, his volition and emotions into a change of position. The same thing may be said of the sitting posture. Conversely also the squatting or perching on the ground is destitute of freedom for the reason that it suggests an attitude of subordination, dependence, and serfdom. The free position, on the contrary, avoids in a measure this abstract uniformity and angularity, and places the position under lines which approximate to the organic form; and to a further extent it suffers spiritual relations to shine through, so that by virtue of such a position the conditions and passions of the soul are cognizable. Only in this manner can the position pass as a genuine exhibition of Spirit.

In the application of positions as significant pose166, it is necessary, however, that sculpture proceed with great circumspection, and it has thereby many a difficulty to overcome. On the one hand, no doubt, the reciprocal relation of the members is to be derived from the ideal principle of Spirit; on the other hand, however, this determination from the ideal side ought not to place the particular parts under a mode which contradicts the corporeal structure and the laws of the same, and thereby produce the impression of a constraint imposed on the members, or come into collision with the material of substance, in which sculpture is set the task to execute the artist’s conceptions. And, in the third place, the pose must appear wholly spontaneous, as though the body received it of its own initiative, otherwise body and spirit have the appearance of being distinct and separable from each other, and are involved in the relative position of mere direction from one side and purely abstract obedience from the other, whereas both in sculpture ought rightly to constitute one and the same immediately congruent totality. This absence of constraint is here of the first importance. Spirit, as the ideal principle, must throughout transfuse the members, and these latter must in like degree essentially accept spirit and its determination as to the content of its own soul. As to the pose itself and its character, which we may empower to express the just attitude in ideal sculpture, we can readily infer from our previous exposition that it ought not be one wholly referable to change or instantaneous action. The representation of sculpture must produce no effect such as is seen in the case where men, while in the art of motion and action, were turned to stone or frozen by means of Hüon’s horn. On the contrary, it is necessary that the posture, although it may without question point to some characteristic action, express for all that merely a beginning and preparation, an intention, or it must indicate the close of an action and a return from the same to the state of repose. The repose and self-subsistency of a spiritual life, which potentially encloses in itself an entire world, is the most suitable aspect for the ideal form of sculpture.

(β) And, in the second place, what we have observed of posture is equally applicable to motion. There is in sculpture as such less room for motion in the full sense of the term than other arts167, just in so far as the same does not as yet advance to the mode of presentation which is more nearly related to an art whose sphere of effect is more extensive. The tranquil image of the god in his blessed self-seclusion is the presentment which it is its task mainly to set before us in all its essential freedom from conflict. A variety of movement is necessarily excluded from such. What we ought to have is rather a stansion or reclining posture of essential self-absorption168. This attitude of self wholly referable to self it is which does not proceed to a definite action, and by doing so does not contract its entire energy to the space of a single moment, making such of first importance, but rather persists in the continued equilibrium of tranquillity. We ought to be able to imagine that the figure of the gods will remain for ever in the same posture. The escape from self-subsistency, the plunging of individual life within the vortex of a particular action that implies conflict, the strain of the moment, which is unable to continue as such — such relations are foreign to the ideality of sculpture. We cross them rather where, in the case of groups and reliefs, the particular moments of an action are presented with a distinct inclination to the principle of painting. A result brought about by powerful effects, and their passing exhibition, no doubt exercises upon us an immediate impression; but after once having received it we do not readily return to it. For that which is so prominent in the presentation is the affair of a moment’s passage, which we both observe and recognize in that moment, whereas the ideal fulness and freedom, what is infinite in its significance, in other words that which holds our attention permanently, is relegated to the background.

(γ) In asserting this, however, we do not maintain that sculpture, where, in the case where it adheres to its principle in all its severity and attains its highest point, must necessarily exclude entirely the attitude of movement. If it did so it would merely present to us the divine in its indeterminacy and indifference. On the contrary, in so far as it is its function to comprehend the substantive as individuality, and to present it to our vision in bodily form, both the ideal and external condition, in accordance with which it brings its content and form to an impression, is necessarily individual. And it is this individuality of a definite situation which is pre-eminently expressed by means of the pose and movement of the body. Inasmuch as, however, the substantive in sculpture is of most importance, and individuality is not as yet itself extricated from the same to the point of particular self-subsistency, the specific determinacy of the situation must not be of a kind that it impairs or annuls the simple sterling character169 of that substantiveness, by either making it one-sided or drawing it into the conflict of collisions, or in a general way by placing it without reserve under the overmastering importance and variety of what is particular. It must rather remain, independently regarded, a determinacy less essential in its result, or rather we may say a vivacious play of vital force, harmless in effect over the superficial features of individuality, whose substantive character in no respect suffers loss thereby in depth, subsistency, and repose. This is, however, a point which I have at an earlier stage of this investigation already170 discussed at length in relation to the Ideal of sculpture when the situation itself was under review, in which the Ideal ought to appear in definite relation to the presentation: further discussion may here be consequently dispensed with.

(c) The last point of importance we have now to consider is the question of drapery in sculpture. At first sight it may appear as though the nude form and its corporeal beauty permeated by spiritual significance, in the manner of its pose and movement, were the most appropriate form for the Ideal of sculpture, and drapery were simply a hindrance. In accordance with such a view we hear the complaint raised, more particularly in our own time, that modern sculpture is so frequently forced to drape its figures, whereas no drapery should touch the beauty of human organic forms. And we have finally the wail added that our artists should have so little opportunity of studying the nude which was ever before the eyes of the ancients. In general we may simply reply to this that though without question, from the point of view of sensuous beauty, the preference must be given to the nude form, yet merely sensuous beauty is not the ultimate aim of sculpture, so that the Greeks do not give the lead to a false path when they presented the larger number of their male figures no doubt in the nude, but by far the greater number of female figures draped.

(α) And generally we may add that, apart from artistic purpose, drapery is justified in real measure in the necessity of providing a protection from climatic changes, Nature having failed to provide man with any covering of hide, feathers, hair, such as animals possess. And from another point of view it is the sense of modesty which compels man to cover himself with raiment. Now this shame, regarded in a general way, is a beginning of indignation over that which is coarse or crude. Man in fact, who is conscious of his more elevated calling to be Spirit, must necessarily regard what is purely animal as an incompatibility with that, and pre-eminently seek to cover, as that which is not consonant with the Ideal of his soul171, those parts of his body, such as the belly, breast, back, and legs, which are subservient to animal functions, or only are directed to external uses, and possess directly no spiritual determinacy, and no spiritual expression. We therefore find among every people, who have entered upon the life of reflection, this sense of shame and the necessity of clothing in some degree, whether great or small. As far back as the narrative of Genesis we have this transition expressed in the shrewdest way. Before Adam and Eve have eaten of the tree of knowledge they walk in Paradise in the nakedness of innocence; but no sooner is their consciousness as spiritual beings172 aroused than they are ashamed of their nakedness. The same sense is prevalent among all other Asiatic nations. So, for example, Herodotus asserts in narrating173 how Gyges came to the throne, that it was regarded even in a man as a matter of shame among the Lydians, and almost all barbarians, to be seen naked; and as a proof of this we have the tale of the wife of Candaules, king of the Lydians. The tale runs that Candaules exposed his wife in nudity to the gaze of Gyges, his satellite and favourite, in order to convince him that her beauty as a woman was beyond compare. She, however, discovered the outrage, which it was intended to conceal from her, by chance seeing Gyges, who had been hidden in her sleeping chamber, slip out of the door. Indignant at the outrage, she received Gyges in audience the following day, and declared to him that, inasmuch as the king had taken this step and permitted Gyges to see what he ought not to have seen, he might select one of two courses, either kill the king as his punishment, and possess himself both of her and the kingdom, or himself die. Gyges selected the first alternative, and after assassinating the king mounted the throne and married the widow. On the other hand the Egyptians represented frequently, or, indeed, for the most part, their statues in the nude to the extent that the male figures merely carried an apron; and in the case of Isis the drapery was indicated by nothing more than a barely perceptible fringe round the legs. This, however, was neither due to a defective sense of shame, nor in virtue of their instinct for the beauty of organic forms. For if we consider their symbolic point of view we can only maintain that what concerned them was not the configuration of a presentment consonant with a spiritual significance, but rather the meaning, the essence and conception of that which the form was intended to present to intelligence; and they permitted the human form to be thus, without reflection upon the further and more remote adequacy of the same to Spirit, in its natural state, which they moreover copied with great closeness to life.

(β) Finally, among the Greeks, we meet with both aspects, both nude and draped figures. And in actual life also they were equally clothed, albeit from other considerations they held it a point of honour to have first contested in the games nude. To an exceptional degree the Lacedaemonians were the first to wrestle naked. But this was with them not due so much to a sense of beauty as to their general indifference to what savoured of refinement and spiritual purport in the sense of modesty. In the national character of the Greek people, among whom the feeling for personal individuality in all its immediacy, and as it is the spiritual animation of their existence, is so strongly developed, taking this as the instinct for free and beautiful forms, it was also inevitable that what was human in its immediacy, the bodily presence, that is, as it belongs to man and is suffused with his spirit, should be elaborated in independent form, and that the human form should be revered above all others for the reason that it is the freest and the most beautiful. In this sense, no doubt, they threw aside that instinct of shame, which will not suffer us to look at what is purely corporeal in’ man, not out of indifference to what was spiritual, but with an indifference to what is purely sensuous in desire, for the sake of beauty; and this intention is manifest in full play throughout a great number of their nude figures.

This entire absence of drapery, however, it was impossible wholly to justify on principle. For, as I have already indicated when distinguishing the head from other parts of the body, it is undeniable that the spiritual expression of the form is restricted to the face and the pose and movement of the whole, to the general mien, which is pre-eminently eloquent by virtue of the arms, hands, and position of the legs. For these organs, whose activity is in an outward direction, have still, and precisely by the nature of their pose and movement, for the most part the expression of a spiritual deliverance. The other members of the body, on the contrary, are and remain solely productive of a sensuous beauty; and the distinguishing features which are visible on them can only be bodily vigour, development of muscle, or degrees of delicacy and softness, such as characterize respectively the two sexes, age, youth, and childhood. As a means, therefore, of expressing what is spiritual in the form, the nudity of these parts is also from the standpoint of beauty indifferent; and it is only due to our moral sense, when, that is to say, the main thing looked for is the paramount presentation of the spiritual in man, that such parts should be veiled. What in general ideal art does in the case of every separate part of the body is to remove the necessary limitations of animal life in its detailed particularities, such as little veins, wrinkles, hairs of the skin, and so forth, and simply to enforce and emphasize the spiritual impression of the form in its vital outlines, and this is precisely what drapery effects. It covers up the superfluity of the organs, which are no doubt necessary for the body’s self-support, but are in other respects superfluous as an expression of the spirit’s import. We are, therefore, not entitled to assert without condition that the nudity of figures of sculpture in every respect betrays a higher sense of beauty, and a greater ethical freedom and emaculacy. It was in this respect, as in others, that a just and spiritual instinct dominated the Greek.

Children, Cupid for example, where we find the bodily presentment one of unreserved innocence, and the spiritual beauty consisting just in this; or, to take other examples, youths, youthful gods, heroic gods, and heroes, such as Perseus, Hercules, Theseus, Jason, in which cases heroic courage, and the use and elaboration of the bodily frame in works of bodily strength and permanence is of most importance; or wrestlers in the national games, where it is not so much the content of the action, the spirit and individuality of character, as the physical aspect of the exploit, the vigour, suppleness, and free play of the muscles and limbs, which is the source of exclusive interest; or finally fauns and satyrs, Bacchantes in the frenzy of the dance, no less than Aphrodite, in so far as the sensuous charm of her beauty is emphasized — such are the kind of examples which were rendered in the nude by antique sculpture. Where, on the contrary, a more lofty significance and reflection, a more ideal earnestness is made prominent, where in general the natural features are not superlatively emphasized, there we get drapery. So Winckelmann adduces a case where among ten statues of the female form only one is wholly undraped. Among the goddesses Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Diana, Ceres and the Muses are pre-eminently those which are veiled in drapery, while among the gods such a treatment particularly applies to Jupiter, and the bearded Indian Bacchus, with some others.

(γ) And finally with regard to the principle of drapery, it is unquestionable that we have here a subject that critics are very fond of discussing, and which has consequently to some extent been already well thrashed out. I will, therefore, limit myself to the few following remarks.

Generally we have no reason to lament the fact that our modern feeling of what is respectable is somewhat averse to setting up totally nude figures. For if the drapery merely permits the pose in question to be entirely transpicuous instead of covering it up, we lose nothing at all; rather the drapery is just that which rightly fixes the emphasis, and is in this respect even an advantage, in so far as it draws us aside from the direct view of that which as merely sensuous is without true significance, and simply shows us what is there in relation to the situation expressed by means of pose and movement.

(αα) Once accept this principle, and it may at first sight appear that such covering is of most signal advantage for the artistic treatment, which conceals the contour of the limbs, and consequently also the pose as little as possible, precisely in fact as this is the case with our sufficiently enclosing modern garments. Our closely fitting sleeves and trousers follow the outlines of the form, and stand in the way of the motion and mien least of all by their making the entire form of the limbs visible. The long white garments and bulging-out hoses of the Orientals, on the contrary, are intolerable to our sense of vivacity and multifarious activities, and are only fitting for folk who, like the Turks, sit the whole day long in one place with legs crossed, or only perambulate slowly and with great gravity. And yet we are conscious at the same time — indeed the very first glance at either modern statues or pictures will establish the truth for us — that our modern clothing is entirely unartistic. In other words what we behold in it really is, as I have already in another passage, insisted, not the fine, free, and vital outlines of the body in their tender and flowing elaboration, but stretched out sacks with stiff folds. For albeit we do obtain the most generalized form, yet the beauty of the organic undulations is lost; and what we really look at is a contrivance of exterior aim, a matter of tailor’s work, which in one place is stitched together, in another folded back over, and yet in another made tightly fitting — in other words, as a whole, forms that are not free, folds and surfaces which are fastened together by stitch, buttons and button holes. To all intents and purposes such a clothing as this is simply a cover and veil, which, while devoid of any real form of its own, yet in its other aspect, though in a general sort of way following the organic contour of limbs, hides from the view just that sensuous beauty and vital rondour and undulation which belongs to them, merely to replace it with the material aspect of the mechanically elaborated stuff of which it is composed. And thus we get what is so entirely inartistic in our modern form of garments.

(ββ) The principle for an artistic type of clothing, then, consists in this that it is at the same time treated as a work of architectonic design. Such a work is simply an environment, in which a man can likewise move in freedom, and which must essentially possess and declare on its part a determinate shape of its own as its mode of covering quite apart from the form which it encloses. Add to this such a work, in its aspect of a thing which is worn and carried, must freely follow its own mechanical texture. A principle of this type follows in the track of the kind of draping which we find adopted in the ideal sculpture of the ancients. Particularly here do we find that the mantle is as it were a house in which free motion is possible. It is no doubt carried, but is only made fast at one point, namely, on the shoulder. For the rest it evolves its particular form according to the modifications brought about by its own weight; it hangs, falls along the ground, and casts folds spontaneously, and only receives through the pose the varied changes of this free kind of configuration. In like manner there is little to impair essentially, if in varied degree, the freedom of disposition in other parts of antique drapery. This it is which constitutes its artistic quality. It is only in drapery such as this that we do not face something which is a burden, and something artificial, whose shape merely displays an external constraint and necessity, which is rather something itself independent in its form, and which, however, accepts from a spiritual source, that is the pose of the figure, its point of departure. For this reason the garments of the ancients are only fastened to the body so far as is actually unavoidable, that is, to prevent their collapse, and are modified by the pose of it. In all other respects they hang freely about it, and themselves in their power of movement through the motion of the body give yet further support to the same principle. And this is wholly as it should be; for the body is one thing and its drapery another, and the latter ought thereby to receive its full due and be displayed in its freedom. Modern clothing on the contrary is either wholly carried by the body and purely in subjection to it, so that even the pose itself is too emphatically repeated, and it merely follows the forms of the limbs, or, in cases where it is able to secure an independent form in the formation of folds, it is after all merely the tailor’s work who makes this form according to the exigences of fashion. The material is, on the one hand, dragged up and down by the various parts of the body and their movements, and, on the other, by its stitches and seams. On grounds of this description the antique form of drapery is by a long way to be preferred to our modern style as the ideal standard for works of sculpture. No end has been written with every resource of antiquarian research over the form and details of the ancient ways of draping, for although men as a rule do not permit themselves to chatter much over fashion in their clothes, the kind of cloth, border, cut, and every other such detail, yet they find ample justification from the antiquarian standpoint for treating these trifling matters also as important, and of talking about them with even greater prolixity than is permitted to woman herself in her unchallenged field of supremacy.

(γγ) It is, however, a totally different problem we have to consider when the question is asked whether modern clothing, that is, the kind so greatly to be contrasted with the antique, is in all cases to be rejected. This question is of particular importance when we examine the case of portrait statues; and inasmuch as its main interest closely touches a principle of importance to art as we have it now, we will consider it at rather greater length. When nowadays we have to create a portrait of some contemporary it becomes necessarily a part of it that the drapery and the environment are both accepted from the actual facts of their individual existence, for, inasmuch as it is just this actual person which is here made the object of art, this external framework, to which the clothing essentially belongs, is in its reality and truth precisely that which is most important. And this is more especially to be observed when what is aimed at is the presentment before our vision in our individuality of well-defined characters whose greatness and activity in any particular sphere have been remarkable. Whether it be in a picture, or in the marble, an individual is, in fact, exhibited to our immediate vision in a bodily mode, in other words under external conditions, and to seek to carry the portrait beyond such a restriction would virtually imply the self-contradiction that the individual was associated with that which was essentially untrue, and this for the reason that the service, what is peculiar and distinguished in actual men, consists precisely in their active relations to the real, that is in their life and action in definite professional spheres. And if this individual activity is to be made clear to us the environment must exhibit nothing that is foreign to or tends to impair the effect. A famous general, for example, has lived in respect to his professional surroundings with cannon, rifles, and powder before his eyes. If we intend to depict him in his professional activity we recur most naturally to the way he gives orders to his adjutants, commands the line of battle, and advances against the enemy. And with yet more detail such a general is not merely one of a class, but is distinguished by the particular style of his uniform. He is either a leader of infantry or a stalwart hussar, and so forth. In every example of this kind we have some exceptional form of habiliment which is appropriate to the circumstances. Moreover a famous general is simply a famous general, not necessarily a law-giver, poet, or even very possibly a religious man; he commands in all respects as a soldier; he is just that; he is, in a word, no complete totality, and this alone gives us the ideal and divine type. For the divinity of the ideal figures of sculpture is to be sought in nothing so much as this that their character and individuality are appertinent to no particular relations and professed callings, but are rather removed from such division, or, in the case that the idea of such relations is mooted, it is so placed before us that we are forced to believe about such individuals that their powers of performance are unlimited. For reasons such as the above a demand to represent the heroes of our time or the more recent Past, when their heroism is of a restricted nature, in ideal drapery is very superficial. Such a demand testifies no doubt to a zeal for artistic beauty, but a zeal which is unintelligent, and in its devotion to the antique overlooks the fact that the greatness of the ancients likewise reposes essentially in the lofty comprehension of all that they accomplished. In other words, they have, no doubt, represented what is essentially ideal, but they have not sought to enforce a form that is opposed to reality. If the entire content of the individuals in question is not of an ideal character, then their draping ought not to be such; and if a powerful, determined, and resolute general does not already possess a countenance indicative of the lineaments of Mars, then to drape him with Greek drapery would be as much a folly as though we popped a bearded man in a maiden’s petticoats. Despite this truth, however, modern clothing does involve us in considerable difficulty because it is subject to fashion, and consequently subject to change. For the rational principle of fashion consists in this that it exercises over Time the claim to be always subject to modification. A robe, according to some particular cut, soon passes out of fashion, and it is only in fashion so long as it pleases. But when the fashion is over, we cease to be used to it, and what pleased us a few years back now appears suddenly ridiculous. For this reason only those forms of garments are appropriate for statues which carry the specific character of a period in a more permanent type; but, in general, it may be advisable to find a middle way, as our artists attempt to do. Yet, despite of the rule, it is generally a mistake to clothe portrait statues in modern clothing when they are either small, or the object sought after is simply a familiar presentation. In such cases mere busts are best, which are the more easily lifted to an ideal elevation, simply neck and breast being retained, inasmuch as the head and the physiognomy thus remain of most importance, and everything else is relegated to incidental insignificance. Where we have large-sized statues on the contrary, more particularly where the pose is one of tranquillity, we see at once, because they are in repose, how they are draped; and large-sized male figures, even in the painted portrait, when clothed after modern wont can only with difficulty be raised over what is insignificant. As instances we may mention the full-figure seated portraits by old Tischbein of Herder and Wieland, of which we have excellent engravings on copper. One feels at once, when looking at them, that it is a somewhat stale, flat, and unprofitable business to gaze at their breeches, stockings, and shoes, and absolutely so to see their cosy, self-contented posture on a sofa, where they have their hands lying happily together over their paunches.

It is another matter with portrait statues of individuals where, either in respect to the period of their activity they are far removed from our own, or are themselves essentially of an ideal greatness. In such cases what is old is already divested of the temporal aspect and has passed into the more indefinite background of the general idea, so that in this release from its particular form of actuality it is also in the mode of its drapery capable of an ideal presentation. And this is still more true in the case of individuals, who by virtue of their self-subsistency and the ideal fulness of what are otherwise the mere limitations of their particular profession, and detached from what is merely the activity of a definite period of time, create independently for themselves a free totality, a world of relations and activities, and consequently should appear, even in the aspect of their habiliments, as exalted above the familiar guise of every-day life in their ordinary temporal costume. As far back as the Greeks we find statues of Achilles and Alexander, on which the more individual traits of portraiture are of so fine a quality that we should rather imagine them to be sons of gods than human beings. In the case of the genial and greathearted youth Alexander this is quite as it should be. And in much the same way, moreover, Napoleon himself has been lifted to such a fame, and is a genius of so comprehensive a grasp, that there is no reason why he should not be depicted in ideal drapery, which indeed would not be unfitting for Frederick the Great, when the object is to celebrate him in all his greatness of soul. No doubt the size of the statues is here, too, of importance. In the case of small figures, which carry an air of familiarity, the three-cornered little hat of Napoleon is out of place no less than the famous uniform and the arms crossed over breast, and, if we desire to have before us the great Frederick as “old Fritz,” we may have him pictured for us with hat and stick as we find him on tobacco boxes.

Hitherto we have considered the Ideal of sculpture in its general character and in the further aspect of the more detailed forms which distinguish it. We have thirdly only left us to emphasize the fact that the Ideals of sculpture, in so far as, in respect to their content, they have to manifest what is substantive in individualities, and in respect to their external form the human bodily shape, are also under the necessity of an advance in which the particularity of their presentation is differentiated, and an aggregate of specific individuals is thereby created, just as we already, in the classical type of art, recognize the embracing circle of the Greek gods. We may, no doubt, very possibly imagine to ourselves there can only be one exemplum of the finest beauty and perfection, which may be, moreover, concentrated in its absolute completeness in one statue. Such a conception of one Ideal in its purity is deficient in insight and indeed ridiculous. For the beauty of the Ideal consists just in this, that it is no purely general form or standard, but essentially individuality, and consequently possesses both particularity and character. It is simply owing to this that vitality is imported into works of sculpture, and it is this174 which expands the one abstract beauty, in a totality of essentially definite creations. Taken as a whole, however, this aggregate is, if we regard its content, one with marked limits; and the reason is that a number of categories, which we are, for example, accustomed to employ in our Christian outlook, fall absolutely away in the case of the genuine Ideal of sculpture. The ethical points of view and virtues, for example, such as were brought together by the Middle Ages and our modern world in a synthetical nexus of duties which yields to some modification, moreover, in every epoch, has no meaning at all when applied to the ideal gods of sculpture; it is simply absent from such a circle altogether. Consequently we can as little expect to find here the presentation of sacrifice, of egotism overcome, of the conflict, against what is sensuous, of the victory of chastity and so forth, as that of incommutable fidelity, of the honour and honesty of either man or woman, or of the expression of religious meekness, subjection, and blessedness in God. All these virtues, qualities, and conditions repose in part on the breach between what is spiritual and what is corporeal; and in part they retire altogether beyond what is of the body within, the intimate shrine of the soul, or betray the individual personal life in its separation from its entirely concrete and explicit substance, as also in its struggle to find again mediation in the same. Moreover, the circle of these veritable gods of sculpture is no doubt a totality, but, as we already discovered in our consideration of the classical type of art, it is, when we examine the distinguishing differences of its notion, no stringently articulated and unified system. Moreover, the particular examples are every one of them to be distinguished from all the others in their essentially definite and self-exclusive individuality, albeit they are not thus set apart by virtue of the characteristics of a purely abstract mintage, but rather, on the contrary, include much which they share in common relatively to their ideal and divine substance.

We will now pass in review the distinctions above indicated under the following aspects:

First, we have to examine purely external marks, incidental attributes, style of drapery, style of armour, and such like, indications with the detail of which Winckelmann deals at exceptional length.

Secondly, we shall see how the most important differences do not merely consist in external marks and traits of this kind, but rather in the individual configuration and habitus of the entire figure. What is most important in this respect is the distinction of age, sex, no less than that of the different sphere, from which the works receive their content and form, whether they are the impressions of gods, heroes, satyrs, fawns, or such representations as reach their final dissolution in the attempt to render animal images.

And, thirdly, we propose to direct the attention on a particular example of each class, in the individual form of which sculpture elaborates these general differences. Here, no doubt, we are faced with a multiplicity of material, and can only permit ourselves to deduce parts of it by way of example, a province, too, as it moreover is which implies a large experience.

(a) In considering these first mere attributes and all such external accessories, the kind of ornament, armour, tools, vessels, and in general all that is associated with mere environment, we find that such things are of a very simple character in superior works of sculpture, and retained only in a temperate and restricted degree, so that we see little of them beyond what is suggestive or sufficient to appeal to our minds. It is the independent figure, that is its expression and not outside accessories, which has to give us the spiritual significance and its manifestation. Conversely, however, marks of this kind are nevertheless necessary, in order to enable us to recognize the particular gods. In other words divinity in its universal guise, which is the source of the substantive part of the presentment in the case of each individual, asserts, by virtue of this very equality of ground-basis, close affinity between the expression of each example and also between the individual figures, so that every god is to this extent withdrawn from the aspect of his particularity, and can indeed further pass through other conditions and modes of expression, than would otherwise belong to them. For this reason we do not as a rule have set before us the particular characterization with complete seriousness; and it is frequently these external additions which exclusively make the particular god intelligible. Among these indicating marks I will allude briefly to the following.

(α) I have already discussed the real attributes when the classical type of art and its gods presented an opportunity. In sculpture the same lose yet more their self-subsistent, symbolical character, and merely retain the right to appear as the external presentation and form which is referable to simply one aspect of the specific gods, a presentment which is true to this extent or approximately so. Such marks are frequently borrowed from animal life, as for example when Zeus is represented with the eagle, Juno with the peacock, Bacchus with the tiger and panther, who are harnessed to his car, because, as Winckelmann observes175, this animal is an exceptionally thirsty one, and, moreover, fond of wine; and in the like manner we have Venus with her hare. Other attributes are tools or utensils of some kind, which are related to activities and actions, which may be ascribed to any particular god by virtue of his or her specific individuality. So we have Bacchus depicted with the thyrsus wand, in order to entwine thereon the ivy-leaves and garlands; or he receives a wreath of laurel leaves, to indicate him as victorious in his expedition to India, or a torch, with which he lighted Ceres home.

Accessories such as these, among which I have here, of course, only adduced the most famous examples, are an exceptional stimulus to the acuteness and learning of our professors, and carry them into a kind of commerce in trifles, which too frequently leads them out of bounds, and finds significance in things where there is really none. As an example we are assured that two famous sleeping female figures in the Vatican and the Villa Medici are representations of Cleopatra, simply because they have a bracelet in the shape of a viper, and to the vision of such archaeologists a serpent at once suggests the death of Cleopatra, much as it would suggest to a pious father of the church the original serpent who seduced Eve in Paradise. It was, however, a prevailing custom for Greek women to wear bracelets in serpent coils, and such bracelets in fact were called by that name. Consequently the just sense of Winckelmann176 has long ago rejected this interpretation, and Visconti has finally recognized177 them as figures of Ariadne, as she at lasts sinks to sleep after her sorrow at the departure of Theseus. Although in uncounted cases acuteness of this quality shows itself at fault in dealing with detail of this kind, and makes itself appear contemptible in its departure from such insignificant facts, yet unquestionably both research and criticism of apparently unimportant facts are necessary, because it is only thereby that we can arrive at the closer determination of a figure. Yet even here the difficulty crops up, that attributes no less than form, do not in all cases point our conclusions to one god, but may be shared in common by several. We have the vase, for example, not only associated with Jupiter, Apollo, Mercury, Aesculapius, but also with Ceres and Hygiaea. Several goddesses receive the ear of corn; we find the lily in the hand of Juno, Venus, and Hope; and even the lightning is not the exclusive possession of Zeus, for it is shared by Pallas, who on her part again does not alone carry; the Aegis, but on equal terms with Zeus, Juno, and Apollo178. The source of the individual deities from a general significance of less determinate character which, they share itself is associated with ancient symbols, which were appertinent to this more general and consequently more widely shared nature.

(β) Accessories of this incidental nature are more in place with works which, already departing from the simple repose of the gods, represent actions, groups, or the series of figures such as we find on reliefs, and for this reason are able to make more extensive use of a variety of external indications and suggestions. On gifts dedicate to a devout purpose, which are frequent in all kinds of works of art and nowhere more frequent than, in the case of statuary, on statues of Olympic victors, but more particularly on coins and cut stones, the rich and prolific invention of the Greek found ample scope for the presence of symbolical references of this type, such as that to his city’s locality and others like it.

(γ) Other signs are more removed from purely external significance, and penetrate deeper within the individuality of such deities. These themselves are a part of the particular type in question, and are an integrating factor in it. Among such we may mention the specific type of the drapery, armour, adornment of the hair, and other attire of a similar nature, in respect of which I must here content myself in elucidation with a few examples borrowed from Winckelmann, who exercised great acuteness in such matters. Among the several gods Zeus was pre-eminently recognizable by the general treatment of his hair, and our authority maintains179, that any particular head can at once be determined as one intended for this deity or no by the hair over his forehead, or his beard, even though there be nothing else significant to arrest us. In other words he asserts that, “the hair is elevated in an outward curve on the brow, and its different divisions fall in a narrow curve with broken lines180 down again.” This type of hair-treatment was so rigorous, that we even find it persisted in among the sons and grandchildren of Zeus. So, for example, the head of Zeus is barely to be distinguished from that of Aesculapius in this respect, who consequently receives another kind of beard, more particularly over the upper lip, where the same is more depressed in its curve, whereas that of Zeus is rather folded over the angle of the mouth and intermingled with the beard on the chin. Winckelmann further recognizes the fine head of a statue in the Villa Medici, later in Florence, by means of the more curled beard, which, moreover, folds over the upper lip, and is of greater thickness, and must be distinguished from the heads of Zeus with their greater tendency to curled locks. Pallas, in direct contrast to Diana, wears her hair long, bound together in its downward fall from the head, and then beneath the fillet flowing in a series of locks. Diana, on the contrary, wears hers thrown up from all sides, and fastened in a knot on the crown of the head. The head of Ceres is up to the back portion covered with her veil. Add to this, in addition to the corn she carries, she holds a diadem as Juno does, in front of which, to quote our authority once more181, the scattered hairs are thrown into a charming confusion, as though to suggest possibly her sorrow at the robbing of her daughter Proserpine. Individuality of the same kind is emphasized by other exterior means, as for example, when we recognize Pallas by her helmet and its particular shape, in her type of drapery and various other things.

(b) The truly vital individuality, however, in so far as it should find its mintage in sculpture by means of the spontaneous and beautiful bodily form, ought not to be asserted merely by such accessories as the external attributes or modes of things we have cited, but should be displayed no less in the form itself than in its expression. In attempting such an individualization the fine insight and creative power of the Greek artist increased in proportion as the figures of their deities possessed a substantive basis of essentially the same kind, from which, without wholly departing from it, it was their task so to elaborate the characteristic individuality that this ground-root of their conception was still maintained as a wholly vital and present fact. Nothing invites our admiration so much in the best works of antique sculpture than the exquisite attention the artist directed to the task of bringing the smallest traits of the presentment and expression into harmony with the entire figure, an attention which is, in fact, the source of such a harmony.

(α) If we inquire further after general distinctions of main importance which assert themselves as the substantive bases in most direct relation to the more individual severation of the bodily forms and their expression we may note, first, the distinction of more youthful figures in contrast to those of more mature age. In the genuine Ideal, as I have already stated, every trait, every particular part of the figure is expressed; and, moreover, the direct line, which is taken straight forward, avoids the abstractly level surface precisely as the circular form avoids the geometrical circle; and instead of this the vital variety of lines and shapes is elaborated in the finest way throughout by the nuances of their transitional forms which unite them. In juvenile and youthful age the boundaries of forms are less noticeably fluent, and pass into each other so finely, that we may compare them, I borrow the simile from Winckelmann182, with the surface of a sea unruffled by the wind, of which we may say that, although in continuous motion, it is still. In the case of more advanced age, however, such distinguishing features are more definitely emphasized, and have to be elaborated with more pronounced characterization. Consummate male figures consequently are more likely to please us at the first glance, because the expression is throughout more distinct, and we wonder more readily at the knowledge and ability of the artist. Youthful examples appear more easy in their accomplishment because of their softness, and the smaller number of their distinguishing features. As a matter of fact, however, the opposite is the case. That is to say, in so far as “the forming of their parts in the interval between their first growth and their completion is permitted to be indefinite183,” the joints, bones, sinews, muscles, are necessarily more delicate and tender, yet are none the less suggested. Antique art celebrates its triumph in just this fact, that even in its most delicate figures all parts throughout and their appropriate organization are somehow made perceptible in barely visible nuances of elevation and depression, by means of which the science and virtuosity of an artist is only followed by an observer whose research and attention is equally thorough. If, for example, to take the case of a delicate human figure, such as the youthful Apollo, the entire structure of the human body were not reproduced actually, and in all its essentials with consummate, if half veiled insight, the members might indeed appear well and fully rounded off, but they would be at the same time flaccid, without expression and variety, so that the entire effect could hardly satisfy. As a striking example of the distinction between the youthful body and a man’s in mature age, we may adduce the sons and father in the Laocoon group.

Speaking generally the Greeks, in the representation of their deities, preferred the still youthful age, and even in heads and statues of Zeus and Neptune do not indicate old age.

(β) In the case of the sex, in which the figure is portrayed, the difference, that is, between male and female figures, we meet with a distinctive mark of still more importance. In general we may affirm of the latter what I have already briefly stated in the contrast drawn between the more youthful and more advanced age. The female figures are more tender and soft, the sinews and muscles, albeit they must be there, are less pronounced, the transitional lines are more flowing and malleable, yet in the wide interval of expression from the point of quiet earnestness, greater severity of power and dignity to that of the most delicate charm and grace of the love attraction, there is room for the richest gradations and variety. We find a wealth of form equally great in the male figures, in the treatment of which we have, moreover, the expression of elaborate bodily strength and courage. The cheerful tone of delight, however, is shared by all, a blithesomeness and blessed indifference, which soars above all particularity, associated not unfrequently with a trait of tranquil sorrow, a kind of smile through tears, in which we neither have wholly smile nor tears.

There is not a marked line of distinction here between the masculine and feminine character, for the more youthful figures of Bacchus and Apollo frequently are fined out to the point of feminine delicacy and softness, nay, we even find representations of Hercules in which there is so much the appearance of a young woman’s form that critics have confused him with Iole, his sweetheart. And it is not merely this point of transition but even the combination of the male and female figure, which the ancients have expressly represented in their hermaphrodites.

(γ) Thirdly, and in conclusion, there is the question as to the main distinctions which the figure of sculpture receives in order that it may be classed within one of the specific divisions of subject-matter which constitute the content of the ideal outlook on the world appropriate to this art.

The organic forms which sculpture can utilize generally in its plastic effort are on the one hand the forms of humanity, on the other those of animal life. In respect to the animal forms we have already seen that in the case of the more severe type of the art at its culminating perfection they will only be found as attributes associated with the divine form, as when we find a hind with the hunting Diana, or Zeus with an eagle. And the same thing may be said of the panther, griffin, and similar figures. Apart from the genuine attributes animal forms are, however, accepted partly in combination with human shapes, and in part entirely by themselves. The extent, however, of such representations is of a limited character. Apart from figures of the roebuck it is above all the horse whose beauty and fiery animation obtains a recognition in plastic art, whether it be in union with the human form, or in its own free and independent shape. In fact, we find that the horse stands generally in a close relation to the courage, bravery, and dexterity of human heroism and heroic beauty, whereas other animals, such as the lion, which Hercules overcomes, and the wild boar, which Meleager kills, are objects of heroic deeds themselves, and consequently are entitled to a place within the circle of representation, when such are expanded in groups and reliefs where a freer field is admissible for situations of movement and action.

The human figure on its part, in so far as it is conceived in form and expression as pure Ideal, supplies the adequate form for the divine, which, being still in union with the sensuous material, is not capable of being concentrated in the simple unity of one God, and can merely embrace a collective whole of divine figures. And similarly, to put the matter conversely, the human, whether we regard it according to its form or its expression, cannot pass out of the province of human individuality, albeit the same is at one time brought into intimacy and union with the divine, and at another with the animal nature.

For these reasons sculpture is faced with various sources out of which it can select and elaborate its subject-matter, and which I will now review. The essentially central source is, as I have already several times indicated, the sphere of the particular gods. Their distinction from humanity pre-eminently consists in this, that as they, in respect to that which they express, appear essentially gathered up over and beyond the finitude of care and mortal passion within a blessed repose and everlasting youth, so, too, their bodily shapes are not merely purified from the finite particularity of mankind, but they are further detached from everything which would suggest the needs and necessary limitations of sensuous life, without, however, losing their vitality. We have, for example, an object of human interest in the way a mother pacifies her child. The Greek goddesses, however, are always represented as childless. Juno, according to the myth, tosses the young Hercules from her, and the Milky Way is the result. To associate a son with the majestic spouse of Zeus was beneath the dignity of the antique point of view. Even Aphrodite does not appear in sculpture as mother. Cupid is no doubt very near to her, but scarcely in the sense of her child. In the same way Jupiter is nursed by a goat, and Romulus and Remus are suckled by a wolf. Among Egyptian and Hindoo representations, on the contrary, we find many, in which deities receive mother’s milk from goddesses. Among Greek goddesses the maiden form is that which is pre-eminent, this being that which to the least extent asserts the purely natural functions of the wife.

The above constitutes an important contrast between classical art and romantic, in the latter of which maternal love is a leading subject. After the gods we find that sculpture deals with heroes and those figures which have both the human and animal form in their composition, such as centaurs, fauns, and satyrs.

The line of distinction between heroes and gods is a very fine one; and much the same interval separates them from ordinary human life. Winckelmann observes with regard to a Battus on a coin of Cyrene, “With a single glance of tender jollity we could make a Bacchus of it, and one trait of god-like greatness would leave us an Apollo.” And yet even in such cases human forms, where the object is to envisage the force of the will and bodily strength, tend in certain directions to make for greatness; the artist gave to the muscular development a vital activity and movement, and in violent actions set in motion all the springs of Nature’s workmanship. Inasmuch as, however, we find the same hero subject to an entire series of conditions not merely distinct, but opposed to each other, the masculine forms here also frequently approximate to the feminine. This is, for example, the case where Achilles first appears among the maidens of Lycomedes. Here we do not find him in his full heroic strength such as he displays before Troy, but in drapery resembling that of a woman and a fascination of figure which almost conceals his sex. Hercules, too, is not always depicted in the gravity and power suggestive of the tedious labours which he performed, but in the milder impersonation of his service to Omphale, as also in the repose of his deification, and generally in a variety of situations. In other relations heroes possess the closest affinity for the figures of the deities themselves, Achilles for that of Mars, for instance; it is consequently only after the most profound study that we can recognize the specific meaning of a piece of statuary merely from the characterization without further suggestion from attributes. Really expert connoisseurs can, however, deduce the character and shape of the entire figure from isolated pieces and supply what is missing; from which fact we again are instructed to admire the fine insight and the consequential character the individualization of Greek art displays to us, whose masters knew how to preserve and execute even the smallest detail in consonance with the entire effect.

Coming now to satyrs and fauns we find in them made visible what is throughout excluded from the lofty Ideal of the gods, the needs of mankind, the jollity of life, sensuous pleasure, satisfaction of excessive desire, and the like. Yet we find in particular young satyrs and fauns so remarkable for the beauty in which they are represented by the ancients that, to adopt a phrase of Winckelmann184, “Every example of such figures may be exchanged, if we except the head, for a statue of Apollo, I refer to that one which is styled Sauroktonos, and possesses the same stansion of the legs.” The heads of fauns and satyrs may be known by their pointed ears, their stiffly erected hair, and their little horns.

A second province of sculpture is occupied by what is human simply. In this we have above all else the beauty of human form as we find it set before us in its elaborate power and dexterity in the sacred games. Wrestlers, discoboli, and the like are its main subject-matter. In such productions sculpture proceeds in a way that is somewhat opposed to the mere portrait, in which department the ancients, even in cases where they actually copied real personages, still understood how to hold fast throughout to the principle of sculpture as we have come to know it.

The last field that sculpture makes its own is that of independent animal figures, more particularly lions, hounds, and some others. Here, too, the ancients did not fail to grasp, make vital in its individuality, and enforce the principle of sculpture, the substantive significance of form, and indeed attained to such a perfection that, to take one example, the cow of Myron has become more famous than all his other works. Goethe, in “Kunst und Alterthum185,” has described it with great charm of style, and pre-eminently drawn attention to the fact that, as we have already seen, such as animal function as suckling is only presented by Greek art in the entirely animal world. He entirely sets on one side poetical conceits such as we find in ancient epigrams, and with acuteness confines his attention to the naïveté of the conception out of which this most familiar of artistic themes arises.

(c) In concluding this chapter we have now to refer a little more closely to the particular individuals, in the characterization and vitality of which the distinctions above mentioned are elaborated, that is to say, for the most part to the presentment of gods.

(α) However much, speaking generally — and we may no doubt seek to enforce our conviction in reference also to the spiritual deities of sculpture — this spiritual significance is at bottom the emancipation of individuality — and the remark applies to Ideals also according to the degree of their ideality and nobility — to that extent as individuals their distinction from one another is less marked. And the astonishing thing in the problem of sculpture, as solved by the Greeks, consisted just in this, that despite of the universality and ideality of their gods they have none the less preserved their individuality and lines of distinction; they have done so despite the fact that in certain directions we are conscious of the endeavour to eliminate hard-and-fast boundaries and to depict particular forms in their transitional state. If, moreover, we are inclined to regard individuality in a way that suggests definite traits as being appropriate to definite deities, much as the traits of a portrait are so, a fixed type will thereby necessarily appear to be substituted for a vital creation and art will suffer accordingly. But this is quite as little in accordance with the facts. On the contrary we find that their invention in such individualization and vitalization gained in subtlety just in proportion as a substantive type lay at the roots of the same.

(β) Again, in considering the particular deities, we are inevitably led to the conviction that one individual is of commanding influence in determining all these ideal figures. This supreme value and dignity Pheidias attached in an unrivalled degree to the form and expression of his Zeus, albeit the father of the gods and mankind, is set before us at the same time with a blithe and benignant look throned in serenity of mature age, that is not in the first flush of youth, without, however, on the other hand emphasizing in the least any harshness of form or suggesting the feebleness of age. The most obvious parallels in form and gesture with Zeus are his brothers Neptune and Pluto, whose interesting statues in Dresden, for example, despite all that they share with him, nevertheless retain a clear line of distinction — Zeus himself, by virtue of the benignity of his lofty presence, Neptune, by virtue of his greater ruggedness, Pluto, who is a kindred type to the Egyptian Serapis, by virtue of his profounder gloom and melancholy.

Essentially more apart from Zeus are Bacchus and Apollo, Mars and Mercury, the first pair in their more youthful beauty and the greater delicacy of their figures, the second more masculine albeit beardless. Mercury, too, is more robust, more slender in shape, with exceptional fineness noticeable in the facial traits. Mars is not so much marked out from the others as Hercules might be in the strength of his muscles and other parts of his figure, but rather as a more youthful and beautiful hero of an ideal form.

Among the goddesses I will only refer to Juno, Pallas, Diana, and Aphrodite.

Just as Zeus among the masculine deities, so, too, Juno among the feminine displays in her figure and its expression the greatest dignity. The large circular-arched eyes are proud and commanding, in like manner, too, the mouth by which she is at once recognized more particularly in profile. Generally she presents the appearance of “a queen, who will rule, is to be revered and must awaken devotion186.” Pallas, on the contrary, receives the expression of more austere maidenhood and chastity. Tenderness, love, and every kind of womanly weakness are kept away from her; her eyes are less expanded than those of Here, less emphatically arched and somewhat downcast in the tranquillity of reflection, just as her head is, which is not proudly erect as in the case of the spouse of Zeus, although it is armed with a helmet. A very similar type of maidenhood characterizes the figure of Diana. She is, however, endowed with a more fascinating quality, more lightly poised, more slender, albeit there is no self-conscious delight in her charm. She is not given the pose of tranquil observation, but is generally in motion, pressing forward as toward some object in her vision.

Finally we have Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty as such, who is, along with the Graces and the Hours, alone depicted by the Greek artists as undraped and even here subject to exceptions. In her case nudity is justified on the good ground that she expresses, above all, sensuous beauty and its conquest, grace, attractiveness, tenderness, elevated and tempered by spiritual qualities. Her eye, even in cases where a more grave and lofty expression is emphasized, is smaller than that of Pallas and Juno, not so much in length, but narrower by reason of the lower eyelid being slightly raised, by which means Love’s yearning look is admirably expressed. She varies, however, very considerably in the type expressed. In some cases her pose is more serious and powerful; in others delicacy and tenderness are most insisted upon; her age, too, is sometimes that of maidenhood, at other of riper years. Winckelmann compares the Medicean Venus to a rose which blossoms in the fair light of its own colour at daybreak. Uranian Aphrodite is, on the contrary, indicated by a diadem which resembles that worn by Juno, and which Venus victrix also wears.

(γ) The discovery of this plastic individuality, whose entire expression is wholly elaborated through abstract form and nothing further, was in a like degree of consummate perfection peculiar to the Greeks and is due to religion itself. A more spiritual religion can rest satisfied with the contemplation and devotion of the soul, so that works of sculpture pass for it simply as so much luxury and superfluity. A religion so dependent on the sense vision as the Greek was must necessarily continue to create, inasmuch as for it this artistic production and invention is itself a religious activity and satisfaction, and for the people the sight of such works is not merely so much sight-seeing, but is part of their religion and soul-life. And in general the Greeks did everything with a public and universal aim in view, in which every man discovered his enjoyment, pride, and honour. In this public aspect the art of the Greeks is not merely an ornamental object, but a vital thing that meets a really felt want, in much the same sort of way as that of painting in its most glorious season responded to the life of Venice. Only on grounds such as these can we find a rational explanation, if we consider the great difficulties which the technique of sculpture implies, for the host of sculptured figures, this forest of statues of every kind, which in their thousand and indeed thousands, were to be met with in one single city, in Elis, in Athens, in Corinth, and even in towns of lesser importance, and in the same way in the greater Greece beyond and the islands of the Cyclades.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF PRESENTMENT, MATERIAL, AND HISTORICAL STAGES IN THE EVOLUTION OF SCULPTURE.

WE HAVE HITHERTO in our inquiry in the first instance looked about us for the general determinants, out of which it is possible to develop the most adequate content for sculpture and the form which best responds to it. We discovered the classical Ideal supplied this content, so that in the second place we were called to establish the precise mode, in which sculpture among the particular arts is most readily adapted to give shape to this Ideal. Inasmuch as we found, moreover, that this Ideal is only to be comprehended in its essential import as individuality, not only did we find that the ideal outlook of the artist expand to a collective cyclus of ideal figures, but the external mode of representation and execution in actual works of art breaks up into particular types of sculpture. In this latter direction we have still several points of view left us to discuss as follows:

First, there is the manner of representation, which, in so far as actual execution is concerned, either creates single statues, or groups, until finally in the relief we are confronted with the step of transition to painting.

Secondly, there is the external medium, in which these distinctions are given actual effect to.

Thirdly, we have to deal with the historical stages of evolution, or the process within which works of art are executed in the various types and material.

Just as, in the case of architecture, we made an essential distinction between independent building and that which was subservient we may also here establish a similar dividing line in sculpture, that is between such works that have an independent position and those which rather contribute to architectural decoration. In the case of the first the environment is nothing more than an artificially prepared locality, whereas in the latter cases their relation to the building which they adorn is of the first importance, and does not merely determine the form of the work of sculpture, but in a large measure even its content. Speaking in a summary way we may assert in this respect that single statues are set up on their own account, while groups and a fortiori reliefs tend to lose this independence and are utilized by architecture for its own artistic purposes.

(a) As to the single statue their original function is that of sculpture generally, that is to supply temple images as they are set up in the shrine of the temple, and all that surrounds them is in direct association with them.

(α) In such a case sculpture retains its most adequate purity. It displays the figure of the god apart from all situation, in beautiful, unimpaired, and inactive tranquillity, or at least free, unmolested, without definite action and development, such as I have on several occasions depicted, that is, in unconstrained situations.

(β) The earliest departure from this austere loftiness consists in this that the entire pose suggests the beginning of an action, or the conclusion of the same, without the god-like repose being thereby disturbed, or the figure being presented as in struggle or conflict. We place under this type the famous Medicean Venus and the Belvedere Apollo. In the times of Lessing and Winckelmann the admiration of the critical world over these statues, as the highest Ideal of art, was unconditional; nowadays, since we have come to know works more vital and substantial in their configuration, and more profound in their expressive power, we must deduct somewhat from this estimate; critics, in fact, place them in an age somewhat subsequent to the great period, an age in which the smoothness of their elaborate workmanship already suggests that to please is the main object, and the genuine grand and severe style is not persisted in. An English traveller goes so far as to say that the Apollo is “a theatrical coxcomb,” and while admitting that the Venus has extraordinary softness, sweetness, symmetry, and coy grace, yet only finds in this a spiritual quality that is wanting in much, a negative perfection, and — a good deal of insipidity. We may generally review that transition from the former more severe repose and holiness as follows. Sculpture is no doubt the art of lofty seriousness, but this elevated austerity of the gods, inasmuch as the same are no abstractions, but individual figures, brings with it the absolute blithesomeness, and thereby a reflex attitude to reality and finite life, in which the blithesomeness of the gods does not express the feeling of absorption in such finite content, but the feeling of reconciliation, of spiritual freedom and alertness.

(γ) In consequence of this Greek art is throughout permeated with all the blithesomeness of the Greek genius, and has found its satisfaction, delight, and an object for its activity in a countless number of gratifying situations. When it once had discovered a way from the constraint of the abstractions of its presentment to an appreciation of vital individuality, which is the unifying factor of the whole, its joy in all that is indicative of life and cheerfulness became a real thing, and artists became occupied with a great variety of subjects, which, without glancing aside at anything suggestive of pain, horror, distortion or injurious, fixed as its final limit unoffensive humanity and remained thus. The ancients have in this respect executed much of the greatest excellence. I will here only mention, among the many mythological subjects of playful, that is playful in the most innocent way, interest, the sports of Cupid, in which we already see a close approach to the ordinary life of mankind, just as there were others in which the vitality of the presentment is the main interest, and indeed the very attempt to secure and execute such subject-matter itself contributes this blithesomeness and innocence to the effect. In this kind of way we may point out that the dice-players and satellite of Polycleitus were thought quite as highly of as his Argive statue of Here. The discus-throwers and racers of Myron were equally famous. How dear to this folk, too, and admired is that youth in a seated posture who extracts a thorn from his foot? There were many others of the same type of production in great measure merely by name. We are face to face with the fleeting moment of natural existence, which is here arrested for ever by the sculptor.

(b) Beginning with examples such as the above of a movement towards external objects, sculpture proceeds further in the representation of situations, conflicts, and actions yet more involved with motion, and at last arrives at the group. For with an increase of specific detail in the action we have placed before us the more concrete animation, which expands in contradiction, reactions, and thereby, too, in the presence of several figures essentially related and intertwined with each other.

(α) At first we have, however, merely tranquil juxtapositions, such as, for example, the two colossal horse-tamers, which are set up in Rome on Mount Cavallo, and indicate Castor and Pollux. The one statue is commonly ascribed to Pheidias, the other to Praxiteles. There is, however, no strong evidence for this, although the extraordinary excellence of conception, and the no less exquisite thoroughness of the execution justifies names as famous. Such are entirely independent groups, which as yet express no real action, or the result of it, and are wholly appropriate as representations of sculpture and public exposition before the Parthenon, where it appears they were originally placed.

(β) Sculpture, however, is equally occupied in the group with the presentment of situations, which have as their content conflicts, discordant actions, pain, and other similar conditions. In this direction, too, we can only speak highly of the genuine artistic insight of the Greeks, which did not set forth such groups independently, and by themselves, but brought them, for the reason that sculpture has already made a departure from its peculiar, that is to say its self-subsistent, province, into closer relation to architecture. The temple figure, that is the isolated statue, stood in unimpaired tranquillity and sacredness within the inner shrine. The external pediment, on the contrary, was decorated with groups which represented definite actions of the god, and consequently admitted of more animated movement in its elaboration. The famous group of Niobe and her children is of this type. The general form for the co-ordination of each part is determined by the space which the group in question had to fill. The principal figure stood in the middle, and was thus able to be the largest in size and most prominent. The rest according as they were placed in the direction of the acute angle of the gable-end had to submit to other postures, the limit being reached by that of a reclining figure.

Of other famous works I will here only mention the Laocoon group. It has now for over forty years been the object of much inquiry and controversy. In particular it has been regarded as a matter of real importance, whether Virgil in his description followed this work of sculpture, or the sculptor adopted his work to the scene depicted by Virgil, whether Laocoon here is actually crying out, and whether it is appropriate in a work of sculpture to attempt to express such a cry, and many more criticisms of this kind. Critics have worried themselves up and down with such matters of psychological interest for the simple reason that they have not as yet secured the sort of enthusiasm and critical acumen which Winckelmann possessed; and, moreover, arm-chair professors are more readily disposed for such investigations for the reason that not unfrequently they have neither the opportunity granted them to see real works of art, nor the capacity to grasp them for what they are when they do so. The most essential thing which can occupy our attention in this group is this namely, that in the supreme pain, the supreme truth, the convulsive tension of the body, the distention of all the muscles, the noble aspect of beauty is still preserved, and the process has not been carried in the remotest degree to the extremes of grimace, distortion, and over-strain. Despite of this, however, the entire work belongs without doubt — we have only to consider its subject-matter, the artificiality of its co-ordinate grouping, the disposition of each posed figure and the type of its elaboration — to a much later period, which already seeks to pass beyond simple beauty and vitality by means of a deliberate obtrusion of science in the configuration and muscular development of the human body, and no less is anxious to please by refined excess in its executive elaboration. The step from the ingenuous ease and greatness of art to a mere mannerism is already taken.

(γ) Works of sculpture may be set forth in very various places, such as in the entrances to columned halls, forecourts, landings of staircases, niches, and so forth. It is just in this variety of local position and architectural setting, which, on its account too, is variously related to human circumstances and conditions, that the content and object of such works of art are for ever changing, approaching as such art does in the group yet more closely our humanity. It is, however, a serious defect to place groups that embody much movement and variety of figure on the top of a building without further background against the sky. In other words the colour of the sky may sometimes be gray, at others blue and dazzlingly bright, so that it is impossible to see the outlines of the figures. Yet these outlines, that is, the silhouette we find in them, is just what is most important; it is the main thing which we recognize, and which simply makes the rest intelligible. For in the case of a group we find that many portions stand in front relatively to others, an arm before the trunk of the body, or one leg in front of another. Now the fact of distance alone disturbs the clearness and intelligible articulation of such parts, or at least tends to do this more emphatically than in the case of outlined portions which are independent. We have only to imagine a group depicted on a piece of paper in which certain parts of a figure are strongly and sharply indicated, while others on the contrary are marked with lines of less defined and arresting definition. This is precisely the effect of a statue’s lines, and yet more those of groups, which have no other background but that of the sky; in the latter case we only see a sharply indicated silhouette, in which, so far as what is within the compass of that outline, only relatively weaker articulation is visible.

This is the reason that, to take an example near home, the Victory on the Brandenburg gate in Berlin not only affects us strongly by virtue of its simplicity and repose, but can be readily followed through its separate figures. The horses, in fact, stand far from each other, without either of them impairing the view of the other; and similarly the figure of Victory rises sufficiently high above them. Conversely the Apollo drawn in a car by griffins, which we have on the Opera House, is less satisfactory from this point of view, however artistic the entire conception and technical work may be in other respects. By the favour of a friend I saw these figures before they were taken from the workshop. The effect promised was noble. But as we see them now at such a height, we have far too much of one outline partly obscuring another, which in its turn is backed by something else, and consequently is less freely and clearly silhouetted than would be the case were all the figures silhouetted in their simple outlines187. The griffins, which necessarily, on account of their shorter legs, do not stand up either so highly or so freely as horses, have wings into the bargain, and Apollo, too, has his tuft of hair and his lyre. All this detail is too much for the position, and only tends to make the outlines obscure.

(c) The final mode of representation, in which sculpture makes an important step in the direction of the principle of painting is the relief; in the first instance the high-relief, and after it the low-relief. The condition here is the surface, the figures standing on one and the same plane, so that the spatial totality of the figure, which is the point of departure of sculpture, more and more tends to disappear. The older form of relief, however, does not as yet approximate so closely to painting, which involves distinctions of perspective between the foreground and background, but rather holds fast to the surface or plane as such without permitting the different objects to project into or to retire within the distinctions of their spatial position by means of an artificial reduction of size. In the present case figures in profile are preferred, and they are placed side by side on an even surface. A simple treatment of this kind does not admit the content of complicated actions, but actions which in real life already adopt more or less of one and the same line of motion, processions of all kinds, whether those of sacrifice or Olympian victors or others. Add to this the relief is capable of the greatest variety of form. It not only fills up and decorates the friezes and walls of temples, but is attached to utensils of all kinds, sacrificial bowls, votive gifts, shells, goblets, urns, lamps, and so forth; it is the adornment of seats and tripods, and is closely allied to the skilled crafts. Here as nowhere else the ingenuity of invention receives the fullest scope in every kind of form and combination, and is no longer in position to retain the true object of independent sculpture.

We have, by our acceptance of the principle of individuality, which is fundamental to sculpture, been compelled not merely to emphasize in separation the different provinces of the divine, human and natural, from which plastic art accepts its subject-matter, but also to classify the several modes of presentation in the single statue, group, or relief. In the same way we have to discover a like variety of division in the material which the artist can make use of in his works. For different kinds of content and mode of presentation are more particularly congenial to different kinds of sensuous material, and betray a secret attraction to and affinity with such.

By way of generalization I will merely here permit myself the remark that the ancients, in addition to the extraordinary excellence of their invention, equally excite our astonishment by reason of the amazing elaboration and versatility of their technical accomplishment. Both aspects present an equal difficulty in sculpture, because the means at hand here for such presentation are without the ideal many-sidedness, which is at the disposal of the other arts. Architecture is no doubt poorer still in this respect; but it is not her province to embody spirit in its vitality, or what is actually alive in Nature in a material which is by itself wholly inorganic. This elaborate dexterity in the absolutely consummate treatment of pure material is, however, bound up with the notion of the Ideal itself, for its very principle is a complete entrance into the sensuous concreteness and the blending together of the Ideal with its external mode of existence. The same principle is therefore once again asserted, where the Ideal attains its executed form and realization. In this respect we have no reason to wonder, when it is asserted that artists, in periods distinguished by great executive ability, either executed their works of marble in clay without models, or, if they had recourse to them, set about their work in a much freer and unconstrained manner than is the case in our own times, where, to put the fact bluntly, it only makes copies which are now executed in marble after originals carried out in the clay188. The old artists retained in fact the vital enthusiasm, which is always to a more or less extent lost in the case of copies and replicas, although it is undeniable that now and again we meet with defective work in famous masterpieces, as, for example, eyes that are not of the same size, ears one of which is placed lower than the other, feet that are of unequal length and others of the same kind. They did not lay so much stress on the absolute precision of the compass in such things as ordinary production and art criticism, that mediocrity of talent which imagines itself so profound, is wont to do; and it can do little else.

(a) Among the different materials in which sculptors have executed images of gods, wood is one of the most ancient. A trunk, a post at the top of which a head can be indicated, such was the beginning. Among the earliest examples of the temple image many are of wood, but the material was also used even in the days of Pheidias. The colossal Minerva of Pheidias at Plataea was mainly carved from wood which was gilded, the head, hands, and feet being of marble189; Myron, too190, executed a Hecate out of wood here with only one head and body, and no doubt for Aegina, where Hecate was most revered and a festival took place annually in her honour, a festival which the Aeginetans maintained the Thracian Orpheus had inaugurated for them.

Generally speaking, wood, when it is not covered over with gilding or some other precious material, by reason of its texture and the grain of it, appears too fine a material for works of importance and more appropriate to smaller figures, for which purpose it was frequently used in the Middle Ages, and is still thus utilized nowadays.

(b) Other materials of most importance are ivory, associated with gold, founded bronze and marble.

(α) As is well known, Pheidias employed ivory and gold for his masterpieces, such as his Olympian Zeus, and also for his famous colossal Athene in the Acropolis of Athens, who carried on her hand an image of Victory, itself being larger than life-size. The nude portions of the body were made out of sheets of ivory, the drapery and mantle from gold plates, which could be removed. This type of workmanship in yellowish ivory and gold dates from a period in which statues were coloured, a kind of representation which steadily approximated to the one colour tone of bronze and marble. Ivory is an extremely pure material, smooth and without the granular character of marble, and, moreover, costly. And among the Athenians the costliness of the statues of their gods was itself of importance. The Pallas at Plataea had merely a superficial gilding, that at Athens solid metal plates. The statues had to be both of colossal size and of the richest material. Quatremère de Quincy has written a masterly work upon these works, upon the “toreutic” of the ancients. “Toreutic” — τορεύειν, τόρευμα — is primarily applicable to figures whose lines are brought out by engraving in metal, or cutting of some kind such as cut stones; one uses the expression, however, to indicate entire works or parts of entire works in metal, which are executed by means of moulds and the founder’s art, that is, not by means of engraving, then, still more remotely from the original meaning, of superb figures on earthenware utensils, and finally in the widest sense of mouldings191 on bronze. Quatremère’s researches have particularly been directed to the technical aspect of the execution; he calculates what must have been the size of the plates made of elephants’ tusks, and, among other things, how much space, in proportion to the gigantic dimensions of the figure, they would leave covered. From another point of view he is equally concerned to reproduce for us from the sketches, or other evidence192 we possess from antiquity, a drawing of the seated figure of Zeus, and, most of all, the great chair with its rich decorations of bas-reliefs, and by so doing to give us in every respect some conception of the splendour and perfection of the work.

In the Middle Ages ivory is mainly used for smaller works of very varied character, such as Christ on the Cross and the Virgin Mary, or yet again for drinking vessels with scenes of hunting and the like, in which cases ivory, on account of its smoothness and hardness, is in many respects preferable to wood.

(β) The material which was most favoured and most widely employed by the ancients was bronze, in the casting of which it attained a success of the highest mastery. Preeminently during the period of Myron and Polycletus it was the prevailing material utilized in statues of deities and other kinds of sculpture. The darker, less defined colour, the sheen, the smoothness of bronze generally, has not reached the abstract formality of the white marble, and it is at the same time warmed. The bronze which the ancients used was partly gold and silver, partly copper, varying considerably in the degrees of its component parts. The so-called bronze of Corinth is, for example, a composition unique of its kind which originated after the burning of Corinth from the almost incredible wealth of this city in statues and vessels of bronze. Mummius had many statues carried off on his ships; and the excellent man was so full of anxiety for their safe deliverance in Rome that he informed the captain that in case of loss he must recreate the same exactly or suffer, such was the threat, heavy punishment. In the founding of bronze the ancients attained an incredible mastery, by aid of which it was possible to them to cast it securely despite its extreme thinness. It is possible to regard such a feat as merely a matter of technical dexterity which is unconnected with true art. Every artist, however, works upon a certain material, and it is an essential quality of genius to be complete master of the same. Dexterity and adaptability in matters which concern the technique and instruments of its work constitute one distinct aspect of genius. On account of this virtuosity in the founder’s art a work of sculpture in this medium involved a less expensive process, and was in the reach of a larger number than the chiselling out of marble statues. A second advantage, which the ancients were able to attain in casting their work in bronze, was the purity thereby acquired, which they carried so far that their bronze statues did not require further enchasening, and consequently lost nothing of the finer marks of expression, which is almost inevitable where such a process is necessary. If we consider, then, the extraordinary number of works of art, which originated in this facility and mastery over technical matters, we cannot fail to be astonished and admit that the artistic sense for sculpture is a distinctive impulse and instinct of spirit, which can only, that is, in so overwhelming a degree, appear in one period and one people. In the whole of the Prussian State, for example, at the present time we can easily reckon up the number of bronze statues, the single bronze door of a church we find in Gnesen, and, with the exception of the standing figures of Blücher at Berlin and Breslau, and Luther at Wittenburg, we have merely a few more in Königsberg and Düsseldorf193.

The very various tone and the infinite adaptability to form and fusibility of this material, which may accommodate itself to every kind of representation, gives to sculpture the pass into every conceivable variety of production, and makes its sensitive material suitable for a host of conceits, prettinesses, utensils, ornaments, and innocent trifles of all kinds. Marble, on the other hand, is limited in its suitability for the depicting of objects and their size; it is, for instance, possible to execute bas-reliefs in it of a certain size on urns and vases. It is, however, unsuitable for smaller objects. In the case of bronze, however, which is not merely cast into specific forms, but can also be beaten into shape and informed by the engraver’s tools, there is hardly any type or size of representation which it does not command. We may here, by way of more definite example, instance the case of coinage minting. In this art, too, we find that the ancients executed masterworks of beauty, albeit in the technical aspect of the mere mintage194 they stand as yet far behind our present elaboration of all that is mechanical in the design. The coins in fact were not really minted, but beaten but of pieces of metal closely resembling a globular form. This department of the art attained its culmination in the time of Alexander. The coins of the Roman Empire have already deteriorated. In our own time Napoleon endeavoured to revive the beauty of antique work in his medals and coinage, and they are of great excellence. In other states, however, the mere worth of the metal and accurate weight is mainly important in the mintage of coin.

(γ) The last kind of material exceptionally favourable to sculpture is stone, which possesses independently the external aspect of consistency and permanence. The Egyptians long before chiselled out their sculptured colossi with a labour that spared no pains from the hardest granite, syenite and basalt. Marble is, however, most directly, as a material, in harmony with the aims of sculpture through its soft purity, whiteness, no less than by the absence of definite colour and the mildness of its sheen, and in particular possesses, by virtue of its granular texture and the soft interfusion of light which it carries, a great advantage over the chalk-like dead whiteness of gypsum, which is too bright, and easily kills with its glare the finer shadows. We find a distinct preference given to marble, only at a later epoch of the Greek school, that is during the period of Praxiteles and Scopas, who executed their most famous works in marble. Pheidias no doubt worked in marble, but for the most part only in the execution of head, hands, and feet. Myron and Polycletus mainly made use of bronze. Praxiteles and Scopas, on the other hand, appear to have sought to remove from sculpture that feature which is alien to its main principle, namely colour. No doubt it is undeniable that the beauty of the ideal of sculpture is capable of being embodied in bronze as in marble, with no diminution whatever of its purity. When, however, as was the case with Praxiteles and Scopas, art begins to approach the softer forms of grace and charm of figure, the marble asserts itself as the more congenial medium. For marble “encourages, by virtue of the transparency of its surface, a softness of outline, its gentle articulation195 and mild conjunction; add to this that the tender and artificial elaboration of consummate work always appears more clearly on the soft whiteness of stone than on bronze, however noble it may be, which, in proportion as the transition of green is beautifully gradated, makes the lustres and the reflections all the more disturbing to the effect of repose196.” For the same reason the careful attention, which at this period was paid to effects of light and shade, whose nuances and gradations are more clearly marked by marble than by bronze, was a further reason why stone should be preferred to metal.

The ancient gems, cameos and pastes are invaluable. They repeat in fact on the smallest scale, yet with consummate finish, the entire survey of sculpture, from the simple figure of a god, through all the varied forms of grouping to every possible kind of conceit in dainty delight and prettiness. Winckelmann, however, observes with regard to the Stosch collection197: “It was while looking at this that I was made aware of a truth, which afterwards became to me of great value in elucidating monuments, very difficult to understand; and the truth is this, that on cut stones, no less than on imposing works of sculpture, we very rarely come across events which took place after the Trojan war, or after the return of Odysseus to Ithaca, if we only except the one case of the Heracleidae and the descendants of Hercules; for in this latter case the limits of history and fable still overlap, and fable is the main subject of these artists. Only one example of the tale of the Heracleidae, however, is known to me personally.” As for gems, the genuine and most consummately executed figures are of the greatest beauty, fine as the work of organic Nature, and may be inspected through a magnifying glass without any loss to the purity of their delineation. I refer to this fact in proof that the technique of art in such cases is almost an art of intuition; the fineness is such that the artist is unable as the sculptor is to follow the work with his eyes, but is rather compelled to feel after it. He holds the stone which is made fast on wax against tiny sharp wheels which are made to spin by means of a flying-wheel, and in this way cuts out the forms. By this process what we have is a kind of instinctive sense, which takes in and directs so consummately the conception, the intention of line and drawing, that we can almost fancy ourselves to have before us in these stones, when one sees them properly illuminated, a relief work.

The work on cameos is to be contrasted with the above. These represent figures finely cut in out of the stone. The onyx was particularly utilized as material for this kind of work. In dealing with these, the ancients were expert in setting off to advantage and with taste the various strata, in particular the white and yellow-brown. Aemilius Paulus had a number of such stones and other trinkets carried to Rome.

In the representations which were depicted upon all this varied material the Greek artists adapted as the basis of their work no situations which were poetically conceived by themselves, but selected their subject-matter invariably, if we only except examples of Bacchanals and dances, from myths about the gods and sagas. Even in the case of urns and representations of events relative to deceased persons they had definite facts before them, which were associated with the individual, whom it was thought right to honour by reason of his decease. The direct allegory, in fact, does not belong to the genuine Ideal, but only becomes perspicuous in art’s later development.

We have hitherto regarded sculpture as the most adequate expression of the classical Ideal. The Ideal, however, has not merely an intrinsic forward development on its own account, by virtue of which it approximates to that which it is in virtue of its notion, and by doing so equally begins a forward movement beyond this absolute harmony with its own essential nature. Quite apart from this, as we have already seen in the second main division of this work during our review of the particular types of art as a process, it contains, putting on one side its mode of presentation under the symbolical type, a certain aspect pre-supposed, which it is bound to pass beyond in order generally to establish itself as Ideal, and moreover a further type of art, that is the romantic, from which it will once more pass away. Both types of art, the symbolical no less than the romantic, likewise seize upon the human figure as an element of their presentment, whose spatial outlines they adhere to, and consequently set forth as sculpture sets them forth. We have, therefore, when it is a question of drawing attention to the historical-development, not only to speak of Greek and Roman sculpture, but also Oriental and Christian. It was, however, the Egyptian people pre-eminently among all, among whom the symbolical type sums up the fundamental character of their art-production, who first began to associate with their deities the human figure as it emerges from a mode of existence that is purely natural, and for this reason it is mainly among them that we meet too with sculpture, inasmuch as they gave as a rule to their general outlook an artistic existence in that which was simply material. The sculpture of Christianity is of wider range and richer development. We do not merely refer here to its uniquely romantic character in the Middle Ages, but also to that further elaboration, in which we find it made an effort once again to approach more closely the principle of the classical Ideal, and establish that type most specifically consonant with sculpture.

I will in concluding the present section of my work in its entirety, and following the above general observations, add a few words, first, upon Egyptian sculpture as contrasted with the Greek as the introductory stage of the true Ideal.

The characteristic elaboration of Greek sculpture makes our second stage, which closes with Roman sculpture. On the present occasion what will mainly concern us will be to survey the stage which precedes the really ideal mode of presentation, because we have already in our second chapter considered at length ideal sculpture.

Thirdly, we have merely left us to indicate briefly the principle of Christian sculpture. I can only undertake in this place to refer to it in the most general terms.

(a) When we have the intention to investigate on the soil of Greece the classical art of sculpture from the historical standpoint, we find ourselves already confronted with Egyptian art in the form of sculpture before we have arrived at our object; and we must add not merely is this so in regard to great works which bear witness to the highest technique and elaboration in an entirely unique artistic style, but as the point of departure and source for the forms of Greek plastic art. That this last result on the ground of historical fact amounts also to an external contact, an acceptance and an instruction to which Greek artists submitted, this must be left to the history of art to establish, whether it be in reference to the significance of figures of deities represented from the field of mythology, or to the particular methods of artistic treatment. The association between Greek and Egyptian ideas of the gods is a conviction set forth with proofs by Herodotus. Creuzer is of the view that we find this external association of these arts most clearly demonstrated on coins, and he lays exceptional stress on ancient Attic examples. He has showed me one in his own possession in which without question the face, a profile possessed quite the outline of the physiognomy of Egyptian figures in every respect198. We must, however, here leave this purely historical aspect to stand on its own merits, and confine ourselves to the inquiry whether apart from it a more ideal and necessary bond of connection cannot be established. This bond of intrinsic causality we have already adverted to above. It is necessary that the art which is incomplete must precede the complete form of art, the Ideal, by means of the negation of which, that is by the stripping off of that aspect which adheres to it as a defect, the Ideal is first realized. In this respect unquestionably classical art is a becoming or a process, which, however, apart from it must necessarily possess an independent existence, inasmuch as quâ classical it must leave all deficiency, all the mere becoming behind it, and be essentially rounded in “completion.” This process as such consists in this, that the form of the presentation first begins to run counter to the Ideal, and yet remains incapable of an ideal grasp, belonging as it does to the symbolical synthesis, which is unable to embody in union the universal aspect of the significance, and the individual embodiment as it appears to sense. That Egyptian sculpture possesses such a fundamental character, is the single point that I will now briefly touch upon.

(α) The primary fact that calls for attention is the deficiency we find here in ideal and creative spontaneity, despite the greatest technical perfection. The source of works of Greek sculpture is the vitality and freedom of the imagination, which builds up individual figures from the religious ideas which are prevalent, and in the individuality of this its production makes an actual fact of its own ideal outlook and classical perfection. The Egyptian figures of deities, on the contrary, receive an inherited199 type. As Plato long ago observes200, the representations were long before fixed by the priestly caste, and it was neither permitted to painter nor any master of sculpture to introduce novelty, nor indeed to invent anything at all, but to accept instead what was already among them and traditional; neither is such permission conceded now. We consequently find that what was made and fashioned, it may be myriads of years before (to allow oneself a hyperbolical expression for the great number that is actual verity), is neither more beautiful nor more ugly than the work of to-day. The circumstance must also be associated with this scholastic accuracy, that in Egypt, as appears clear from Herodotus201, artists did not enjoy the same respect as other citizens, but were forced with their children to defer to all who were not engaged in artistic work. Add to this art among the people was not followed according to natural inclination; the institution of caste was paramount, and the son walked after his father, not merely in the matter of profession, but also in the way in which he made himself efficient in his duties and his art. One man simply placed his feet in the steps of another, so that, as Winckelmann has already observed202, “Not a soul appears to have left behind him a footmark, which he can appropriate as his own.” Consequently art, when fully confronted with this enforced serfdom of Spirit — in conjunction with which the mobility of free and artistic genius, in other words, not the mere impulse after external honour and reward, but the more elevated impulse to be artist, is banished — maintained itself simply as the mere craftsman working in a purely mechanical and abstract way according to forms and rules ready to hand, rather than with the vision of the artist of his own individuality in his work, viewed in this way as his own unique creation.

(β) Coming now in the second place to the actual works of art, here, too, we may borrow from Winckelmann, whose descriptions attest once more his exceptional acuteness of observation and distinction, and whose account of the character of Egyptian sculpture is in its main lines as follows203.

Speaking generally we may say that both grace and vitality, which are the result of the genuine sweep and balance of organic line, are absent from the entire figure and its detailed parts; the outlines are straight or in lines that show less deviation from it, the pose appears constrained and stiff, the feet are thrust close together, and in cases of figures in the upright position where one foot is placed before the other, both point in the same direction instead of having the toes turned outwards. In the same way, in masculine figures, the arms hang down straight and glued to the body. Further, the hands, such is Winckelmann’s view, are shaped much as we find them in men who possess hands not badly shaped originally, but deteriorated and neglected; feet, on the other hand, are too flat and spread out, the toes are of equal length and the little toe is neither crooked nor curved inwards: in other respects hands, nails, and toes are not badly shaped, although neither the joints of fingers nor toes are indicated. And similarly we may say of all the rest of the nude figure the muscles and bones are but slightly indicated, and the nerves and veins not at all. In short, so far as detail is concerned, despite the laborious and able execution, just that aspect of the elaboration is absent which alone communicates to the figure its true animation and vitality. The knees, however, bones, and elbows are traceable in relief, as we find them in Nature. Masculine figures are conspicuous for their exceptionally narrow waist above the hips. The backs of figures, on account of their position against columns and their being sculptured from one block with them, are not visible.

Together with this lack of mobility, which is not entirely due to the technical inferiority of the artists, but must be regarded as a result of their primitive conception of the figures of deities and their mysterious repose, is nearly associated the absence of any true situation and any sort or kind of action, which are asserted in sculpture by means of the position and motion of the hands and the demeanour and expression of delineation. No doubt we do find among Egyptian representations on obelisks and walls many figures in movement, but these are purely reliefs and are for the most part painted.

To add a few more examples of even more intimate detail, the eyes are not deeply set as in the Greek ideal, but are almost on a level with the forehead; they are flattened and extended obliquely. The eye-brows, eyelids, and rims of the lips are mainly suggested by the graver’s lines, or the brows are indicated by a stroke in relief, which extends as far as the temples and is at that point cut off angular wise. What we above all find wanting here is the projection of the forehead, and along with this, together with uncommonly high placed ears and arched noses, as is the rule with vulgar natures, we have the retreating form of cheekbones, which in contrast to other parts are strongly indicated and emphasized, whereas the chin is always retiring and small; the rigidly closed mouth, too, draws its corners in an outward rather than an under-ward direction, and the lips appear to be separated from each other by a mere slit. Speaking generally, then, such figures are not only wanting in freedom and vitality, but more than anything else the head fails to show us the expression of spiritual significance; the animal aspect is the prevailing one, and Spirit is not as yet suffered to appear in its self-poise and independence.

The execution of animal figures is, on the contrary, according to the same authority, carried through with much knowledge and an exquisite variety of gently gradated outlines and of parts that flow one into the other without a break. And if in the human figures spiritual life is not as yet liberated from the animal type and the interfusion of the Ideal with what is sensuous and of Nature on a new and free model is absent, yet we find here that the specifically symbolical significance of the human no less than the animal figures is directly expressed by means of sculpture in these embodiments of forms, in which human and animal shapes pass into one mysterious union.

(γ) Consequently the works of art, which carry on their face this character, remain at the stage where the breach between significance and form is not yet bridged over. For such a stage significance is still of main importance, and what is aimed at is rather the conception of that in its general aspect, than the vitalization of any one individual figure and the artistic enjoyment derived from such presentment. Sculpture proceeds here from the genius of an entire people, about which we may on the one hand affirm, that it has in the first instance arrived at the point where the need of imaginative conception is disclosed; and it is satisfied to find that indicated in the work of art, which is present in the conception, and here of course is a conception which is religious. We are not therefore entitled, taking into consideration the great strides they have made in laborious activity upon and actual perfection in technical execution, to call the Egyptians uneducated in their sculpture merely on the ground that, despite all this, they did not as yet in great measure seek to attach truth, vitality, and beauty to their results, by virtue of which qualities the free work of art receives a soul. Doubtless from another point of view the Egyptians did advance beyond the mere idea and its necessary demand. They sought further to envisage and embody the same in human and animal forms, nay, they knew how to comprehend and set forth the forms, which they reproduced, clearly, without distortion and in their just relations. They failed, however, to impart to them the breath of vitality, which the human form in its natural state already possesses, and to infuse with them that more exalted life, by virtue of which an active and fluent motion of spirit could be expressed in a created image that was adequate to its significance. Their works rather attest a seriousness that is entirely lifeless, an unsolved riddle, so that the configuration does not so much embody their own individual ideality as permit us to surmise a further significance which is still alien to it. I will here only adduce one example, namely, the frequently recurring figure of Isis, holding Horus on her knees. Here we have, so far as externals are concerned, the same subject-matter that we meet with in Christian art as the Madonna and her Child. In the symmetrical, straight-lined, and immovable pose of the Egyptian example we discover, to quote a recent description204, “neither a mother, nor a child; there is no trace of affection, smile, or endearment, in a word there is no real expression at all. Tranquil, unperturbed, and immovable is this divine mother, who suckles her divine babe; or rather we have here neither goddess nor mother, nor son, nor god. It is simply the sensuous sign of a thought, which is capable of no result and no passion; it is not the genuine presentation of a real action, still less the just expression of a natural emotion.”

And it is precisely this which constitutes the breach between signification and determinate being, which creates the absence of figurative expression in the artistic results of the Egyptian people. Their ideality or spiritual sense is still so imbruted, that it has no imperative desire to possess the precision bound up in a true and vital representation carried through with detailed accuracy, to which the onlooker has nothing to add, but may simply surrender himself to the attitude of reception and translation, because everything is already a gift of the artist. We must have a more lofty feeling of the individual’s self-respect aroused than the Egyptians possessed, before we cease to be content with the indefinite and superficial features of art, and make valid in its products a claim to reason, science, motion, expression, soul, and beauty.

(b) We find this artistic self-consciousness, so far as sculpture is concerned, first wholly alive among the Greeks. By its presence all the defects of the Egyptian phase of art vanish. Yet in this further development we do not have to make a wide leap from the imperfections of a type of sculpture still symbolical to the perfected result of the classical Ideal. Rather the Ideal has, in its own distinctive province — I have noticed this more than once — although lifted to a higher range, to remove the defects whereby in the first instance its onward path of perfection is obstructed.

(α) I will here very briefly refer to Aeginetan and ancient Etruscan works of art as examples of such beginnings within the sphere itself of classical art. Both these stages, or rather styles, already pass beyond that point of view, which is satisfied, as was the case with Egypt, in repeating forms, we will not say absolutely opposed to Nature, but at least forms that are lifeless, precisely as they have been received from others, and is further content to place before the imagination a figure, from which the same can abstract its own religious content and recover the same for memory, without, however, attempting to work it out under a mode, by virtue of which the work is made apparent as the individual conception and vitality of the artist himself.

But along with this and to the same degree this preliminary stage of ideal art fails as yet to force its way entirely to the true classical ground, and this, first, because it is still clearly constrained within the bonds of the type and therewith the lifeless; secondly, because though it makes an advance in the direction of vitality and motion, yet in the first instance all that it attains to is the vitality of what is wholly of Nature, rather than that beauty, whose animation is Spirit’s own gift, and which manifests the life Spirit inseparably conjoint within the living presentment of its natural form, accepting the individual modifications of this fully completed union with equal impartiality from present vision of actual fact and the free creation of genius. It is only in recent times that we have obtained a more detailed knowledge of Aeginetan works of art, over which it has been a matter of controversy, whether they belonged to Greek art or no. In considering their artistic quality, as representations, we must at once make an essential distinction between the head and the rest of the body. The whole of the body, if we except the head, attests the most faithful apprehension and imitation of Nature. Even accidental features of the skin are copied and excellently executed with an extraordinary manipulation of the marble’s surface; the muscles are set forth in full relief and the skeleton framework of the body well indicated; the figures are thickset in their severity of line205, but are reflected with such knowledge of the human organism, that they appear alive to a limit of actual deception, ay, to an extent, so Wagner assures us206, that we are almost scared at the sight and hardly like to touch them.

On the other hand, in the execution of heads all attempt to represent Nature is abandoned. One uniform design of face is throughout apparent in all the heads despite every divergence of action, character, and situation; the noses are pointed; the forehead is still the retreating type, which fails to rise up straight and with freedom; the ears are set high in the head; the long slit eyes are flat and oblique; the closed mouth ends in corners which are pursed outwards; the cheeks are stretched flat-shaped; the chin, however, is strong and angular207. Of a similar uniformity is the form of the hair and the fall of the drapery, in which symmetry, a principle which is also uniquely conspicuous in the pose and groupings, and second to that, a peculiar kind of exquisiteness are the prevailing characteristics. This uniformity has been in part imputed to a lack of the sense of beauty in seizing national traits, and in part traced to the fact that reverence for the ancient traditions of an art still immature has fettered the hands of the artists. An artist, however, whose life is that of his personality, and who lives in his work, does not suffer his hands to be thus shackled; consequently we can only explain this type of work, associated as it is with great ability in other respects, by assuming some bondage of spirit, as yet not wholly conscious of its freedom and independence of its creative powers.

The pose of these figures is of the same kind of uniformity, not so much a quality of stiffness as uncouthness, lack of enthusiasm, and in a measure, where we have the attitudes of warriors, resembling what we sometimes find from artisans at their trade, such as the rough work of joiners with the plane208.

The net result, which we gather from the above description, we may affirm to be that, however interesting they may be for the history of art, what is wanting in such works of art, in the conflict they disclose between tradition and the imitation of Nature, is spiritual animation. For we must remember that, in accordance with what I have already explained in the second chapter of this part of my work, spiritual significance is exclusively expressed in the countenance and the pose of the figure. The other parts of the body no doubt indicate natural distinctions of soul, sex, and age, but what is spiritual in the full sense can only be reflected by the general pose. But it is precisely the traits of countenance and the posture which in Aeginetan sculpture is the relatively spiritless.

The Etruscan works of art, that is, such whose genuineness is fully authenticated by inscription, display the same imitation of Nature in a yet higher degree; they are, however, freer in their pose and facial characteristics, and, in fact, some of them approximate closely to the portrait. Winckelmann, for example209, mentions the statue of a man which appears to be simply a portrait, though it would also appear to date from a later period of art. It is a man of life-size, representing some kind of orator, a magisterial, worthy sort of person. It is executed with an extraordinary spontaneity and naturalness both of pose and expression. Remarkable and significant it would indeed be, if we did not recollect that on Roman soil it is not the Ideal but actual and prosaic natural fact which is from the first at home.

(β) In the second place truly ideal sculpture, in order to reach the highest point of classical art, has above all, to abandon the mere type and the respect for what is traditional, and to give free scope to the principle of spontaneity in artistic production. It is alone possible to a freedom of this kind entirely to incorporate the significance in its generality in the individual presentment of the form; or, from another point of view, to elevate the sensuous forms to the high level of a true expression of their spiritual import. Only after doing this do we find the rigid and inflexible aspect which is native to the origins of the more ancient art, no less than the emphatic prominence of the significance over the individuality, by means of which the content ought to be expressed, liberated as that vital creation, in which the bodily forms also on their part equally lose the abstract uniformity of a traditional, character, and an illusive realism, and by doing so move in the direction of the classical individuality, which quite as much makes, vital the universality of the form in the particularity of its object as, on the other hand, it makes the sensuousness and actuality of the same throughout interfused with the expression of a soul’s inspiration210. A vitalization of this type affects not only the form, but also the pose, movement, drapery, grouping, in short every aspect of the sculptured figure to which I have already drawn attention. What here communicates unity are these two principles of universality and individualization. They have, however, not merely to be brought into harmony in respect to the spiritual content, but also in relation to the material form, before they can be participant in the indissoluble association which is the classical type in its full flavour. This identity, however, has itself a series of stages. In other words, under one extreme we find that the Ideal still somewhat inclines to the aspect of loftiness and severity, which it is true does not deprive the individual object of its living impulse and movement, yet does tend to concentrate it more securely under the lordship of the general type. At the other extreme we find that the universal aspect more and more tends to dissolve in the individual; and while it pays the penalty for doing so in loss of depth it can only replace this loss by further elaboration of this sensuous individuality. Consequently it descends from the heights to the lower levels of that which gives pleasure, is exquisite, blithesome, and displays the charm which flatters. Between these two there is a further phase, one, namely, which carries forward the severity of the first to increased individualization, without reaching that point where mere charm of aspect is held to be the supreme object.

(γ) Thirdly, in the art of Rome we have indications of the dissolution of classical sculpture. In this art it is no longer upon the true Ideal that the entire conception and execution depends. The poetry inherent in the vital action of Spirit, the breath and nobility of the soul apparent in the essentially perfected presentment, these peculiarly emphasized excellences of Greek plastic art disappear, and give place, as a rule, to a preference for portraiture studies. And this insistence on realistic truth in art is carried out in all possible modifications. Notwithstanding, this Roman sculpture maintains so lofty a position in this its own province, that it is only in so far as it withdraws from that which brings a work of art to its full perfection, in other words, the poetry of the Ideal in the true sense of the word, that it essentially falls behind Greek art.

(c) Fixing now our attention on Christian sculpture we shall find that the principle of artistic conception and its mode of embodiment is from the commencement one that does not so directly commend itself to the material and forms of sculpture as we find to be the case in the classical Ideal of the Greek imagination and art. The romantic Ideal in short is essentially concerned, as we discovered in the second portion of this work, with a personal withdrawal of the self into its own realm from the external world, with a self-absorbed individuality, which no doubt possesses its external reflection, but which permits this external appearance to issue independently from it in its aspect of particularity, without enforcing a fusion between it and its ideal and spiritual self. Pain, torture of body and soul, martyrdom and penance, death and resurrection, the personality of the individual soul, inner life, love, and emotional life in general — this characteristic content of the romantic imagination, in a religious sense, is no object, for which the external form taken simply for what it is in its spatial entirety, and the material which belongs to it in its more sensuous existence unrelated to ideality, can supply either a form that is wholly relevant to it, or one similarly congruent with it. It is therefore not in romantic art sculpture contributes the fundamental type and the affiliating quality of membership in a system211 to all the other arts as in Greece, but yields the palm in this respect to painting and music, as arts more adequate to express the life of the soul, distinct from the external world of particularity which is withdrawn from it. No doubt we find also in Christian art repeated examples of sculpture in wood, marble, bronze, and both silver and gold work, examples of the greatest excellence. Yet for all that sculpture is not here the art which, as in Greek art, is most fitted to reveal the Divine image. Religious romantic sculpture, on the contrary, is to a larger extent than in the case of the Greek, an embellishment of architecture. The saints are placed as a rule in the niches of towers and buttresses, or at the entrance doors. Likewise the birth, baptism, the histories of the passion and resurrection, and many other incidents in the life of Christ, the day of Judgment and so forth, accommodate themselves naturally by the multiplicity of their subject-matter to reliefs over church doors, on church walls, and stalls in the choir, and readily approximate to the character of arabesques. All such sculpture contains, for the reason that it is the life of the soul which is herein pre-eminently expressed, characteristics suggestive of the painter’s art in a higher degree than is permitted in the plastic of ideal sculpture. And from another point of view, for the same reason, such a sculpture seizes more readily upon aspects of ordinary life, and therewith inclines to portraiture, which, as in the case of painting, it is quite prepared to associate with religious representations. The goose-seller, for example, in the Nürnberg marketplace, which is highly prized by Goethe and Meyer, is an ordinary rustic of very realistic appearance in bronze (it would be impossible in marble), who carries a goose under either arm to market. There are, too, the many sculptured figures, which we find upon the St. Sebaldus Church and on many other churches and buildings, especially dating from the period previous to Peter Vischer, and which in their representation of religious subjects such as the Passion, make clear to us with great vividness this particular type of individualized form, expression, mien and attitude, more particularly in their reflection of every degree of sorrow.

As a rule, then, romantic sculpture, which has deviated only too frequently into every kind of confusion, remains most loyal to the genuine principle of plastic art in those cases where it approaches most nearly the Greek, and either is concerned to treat in the mode of sculpture ancient subject-matter, much as the ancients would have done, or to model the standing figures of heroes and kings, and portraits, with an intention to imitate the antique. This is exceptionally the case nowadays. Much of the most excellent work, however, has been accomplished by sculpture, even in the religious field. It is only necessary here to mention the name of Michelangelo. We can hardly admire sufficiently his dead Christ212, of which we have a plaster cast in our Royal Museum. The authenticity of the sculptured figure of the Madonna in the Frauenkirche at Bruges, a consummate work, is disputed by certain critics. Speaking for myself, nothing has ever more impressed me than the tomb of the Count of Nassau at Breda213. The Count reposes with his lady, life-size figures both in alabaster, on a slab of black marble. At the angles of this are placed Regulus, Hannibal, Caesar, and a Roman warrior in a bowing posture, and they support above their heads a black slab similar to the one beneath. Could anything be more interesting than to see a character such as that of Caesar placed before our eyes by Michelangelo. Even when dealing with religious subjects the genius, the power of imagination, the force, thoroughness, boldness, in short all the extraordinary resources of this master tended, in the characteristic production of his art, to combine the plastic principle of the ancients with the type of intimate soul-life which we find in romantic art. But as we have seen, the direction as a rule of the Christian emotion, where the religious point of view and idea are paramount, is not towards the classical form of ideality, which primarily and with highest results is the determinant factor of its sculpture.

From this point we may now fix the transition from sculpture to another principle of artistic apprehension and presentment, which requires for its realization another sensuous material. In classical sculpture it was the objective and substantive individuality in its human shape, which constituted the vital core, and the human form was placed thereby at such a lofty level, that it was in fact retained in its abstract simplicity as the beauty of form, and as such converted to the Divine image. Under such a one-sided aspect of content and representation man is not fully himself in his concrete humanity. The anthropomorphism of art remains in its incomplete state in ancient sculpture. For that which fails us here is humanity in its objective universality, a universality which we identify at the same time with the principle of absolute personality, quite as much as that aspect of it which in common parlance is called human, in other words the phase of subjective singularity, human weakness, contingency, caprice, immediate sense life, passion, and so forth, a phase or factor which must be taken up into that universality in order that the entire individuality, the subject of conscious life, that is, in its entire range, and in the infinite compass of its reality, may appear as the vital principle both of the mode of presentment and its content.

In classical sculpture one of these phasal aspects, that is the human from the side of immediate Nature, is in part only brought before us in animals, quasi-animals, fauns and the like, without being reflected back again into the personal life of soul, and stated as a negation of that; and also in some measure this type of sculpture only accepts the factor of particularity, only directs its interest to external things in the pleasing style, in the countless sallies of delight and conceits, in which the antique plastic lives and moves. Owing to this we wholly fail to meet here the profundity and infinity which lies at the root of man’s personal life, that inmost reconciliation of Spirit with the Absolute, that ideal union of humanity with the humanity of God. No doubt Christian sculpture is the instrument which makes visible the content which here enters the domain of art more consonant with the above disregarded principle. But it is precisely its modes of art’s embodiment which expose to us the fact that sculpture is insufficient for such a content, that other modes of art will infallibly arise able to reach in very truth the mark which sculpture failed in its work to achieve. We may collectively unite these new arts under the title of the romantic arts. They are indeed the modes most adequate to express the romantic type of art.

111 Sein subjektives Fürsichseyn. Subjective independence of material conditions. Self-consciousness.

112 Rückkehr in sich. Into itself, its own ideal world of conscious thought and emotion.

113 In seine innerliche Subjektivität. That is, what is essentially the world of soul. Spirit here stands for mind and Gemüth or emotional life.

114 Ein Sichzeichen des Geistes, i.e., are signs of itself which mind evolves in a mode of externality.

115 Here called generically Baukunst.

116 Die plastische Deutlichkeit.

117 Das subjektive Innere, i.e., spiritual experience of a personality.

118 That is in comparison with the fully independent arts.

119 That is to say it must be a distinct object of the senses.

120 In sich materiell particularisirt. We see Hegel’s false notions of the theory of colour influencing his expression. It is really false to say that sculpture has nothing to do with colour. Light and shadow at least are necessary and colour is implied.

121 That is, lets fall some of its aspects.

122 Das Gemüth. Strictly the more emotional part.

123 Between the extremes of architecture and poetry or music.

124 Lit., “Without being manifested in its return to itself as ideal substance.”

125 Unparticularized, that is in its essential experience.

126 He explains this lower down. The concentrated point is in the flash of the eye. Perhaps here he merely refers to it generally.

127 Als Innerlichkeit.

128 This is only partially true of bronze, and any marble that has had weathering.

129 By grosse geistige Sinn Hegel means no doubt more than “taste.” He refers to the deep-rooted instinct in the genius of the race.

130 Meyer, “History of the Plastic Arts among the Greeks,” vol. I, p. 119.

131 Die acht plastische Mitte. Hegel means that plastic art comes to its most important focus, as it were, between the arts that either incline too much to the material as in architecture, or to ideality as in poetry.

132 Näheren.

133 The reader must always bear in mind that Spirit (Geist) includes intelligence. It might no doubt in some places be better translated as “mind.”

134 Substantielle. That is what is the concrete fulness of real spiritual content.

135 Als Subjekt.

136 Besonderheit. The isolated self of the Aufklärung.

137 Zufälligen Selbstischkeit. Contingent selfness. The ego above described.

138 Ohne innere Subjektivität als solche. That is, in the wholly abstract sense.

139 Begriff appears to refer here to the notion of animal life generally, rather than the generic notion in its narrow sense.

140 Innern Strukture. The structure that ideally motives the whole.

141 Dieses ideelle einfache Fürsichseyn des leiblichen. Apparently this includes the vegetable world.

142 Macht sich. That is an operative principle in the working out of.

143 Als Seele, i.e., in the narrow sense of the expression above defined.

144 Pathognomik, i.e., the science, that is, of the expression of the passions, together with that of their physiological aspect.

145 Lit., contingent subjectivity.

146 Hegel’s expression Mienen is not easy to translate by a single English equivalent. It signifies the passing look — the general variety of facial expression as contrasted with the permanent expression of substantive character.

147 Den eigentlichen Mienen. The definite aspects of the face which express relatively permanent states of soul-life.

148 Persists in the line of direction of the Ideal.

149 Die schöne freie Nothwendigkeit.

150 By Witzigkeit I presume Hegel means oddity and funniness of every kind — perhaps “humorous eccentricity” would interpret it.

151 I think this gives the sense, though the language is rather confused because his image is that of invention attaching itself to what is already presented rather than creating a form that is based on external suggestion.

152 The celebrated courtesan. She entered the sea with dishevelled hair at a celebrated festival at Eleusis. She had a statue of gold at Delphi.

153 Eigentlich Vorstellung ist.

154 Statarisch. That is, modelled on historical associations or the results of former work; perhaps “eclectic” would be a better word.

155 Der geistige Ton.

156 De varietate nationum, § 60.

157 As in savage animals.

158 The word system is used, which is not readily translated in this context, though I have adopted the literal translation lower down.

159 Mildrung. The softening of its severe lines.

160 Werke, vol. IV, bk. 5, c. 5, § 20, p. 198.

161 It is difficult to see what Hegel means exactly here by Schnitte. I suppose he means the external lines of the eye-socket.

162 L.c. § 29.

163 Flügeln must here refer to the orifices of the nose.

164 Winck, l.c. § 37, p. 218.

165 Hegel’s word is habitus. Customary attitude and mode of connection appears to be included.

166 Gebehrde, a word somewhat difficult to translate here. It seems to combine the ideas of gesture and pose.

167 The reference is, of course, to painting and indirectly to poetry.

168 Ein in sich versunkenes Dastehn oder Liegen.

169 Gediegenheit.

170 See vol. I, pp. 268-272.

171 Das höhere Innere.

172 Das geistige Bewusstseyn.

173 Her. I, c. 10.

174 This vitality.

175 Vol. V, bk. 2, p. 503.

176 Vol. V, bk. 6, ch. 2, p. 56.

177 Mus. Pio-Clement. Tom. 2, pp. 89-92.

178 Winck., vol. II, p. 491.

179 Vol. IV, bk. 5, ch. I, § 29.

180 I am not sure what is exactly meant by gekrümmt here. The description is not very lucid.

181 IV, 5, 2, § 10.

182 Winck., vol. VII, p, 78.

183 Winck., vol, VII, p. 80.

184 Vol. IV, p. 78.

185 Vol. II, § I.

186 Winck., vol. IV, p. 116.

187 Such is, I think, the general meaning, though the literal translation of the words als den Figuren sämmtlich die Einfachheit abgeht is not quite clear. I take the word sämmtlich to mean “taken collectively as separate units.”

188 Winck., Werk., vol. V, p. 389. Anmerk.

189 Meyer’s Gesch. der bild. Künste bei den Griechen, vol. I, p. 60.

190 Pausanias, II, 30.

191 I presume this is the meaning of Bildnerei.

192 I am not sure whether Angaben refers to actual sketches, or merely other evidence handed down.

193 In the year 1829.

194 That is in the accuracy of mechanical line as the result of machine.

195 Sanftes Verlaufen, i.e., passage from one plane surface to another. Zusammen-stossen appears to me the melting together of lines, i.e., conjunction, fusion.

196 Meyer’s Gesch., vol. I, p. 279.

197 Vol. III, Vorr. XXVII.

198 That is in 1821.

199 Statarischen, scholastic, eclectic.

200 “De Leg.,” Lib. II, ed. Bekk., III, 2, p. 239.

201 Herod, II, c. 167.

202 Vol. III, bk. 2, ch. I, p. 74.

203 Vol. III, bk. 2, ch. 2, pp. 77-84.

204 “Cours d’Archéologie par Raoul-Rochette, 1-12me leçon,” Paris, 1828.

205 I am not sure if this rightly gives the sense of the words Die Gestalten bei strenger Zeichnung gedrungen.

206 Ueber die Aeg. Bildwerke mit kunstgesch. Anmerk. von Schelling, 1817.

207 That is, it does not approach Egyptian type so nearly.

208 Hegel’s words mean this, I suppose, though the German is somewhat compressed and not very clear as it stands.

209 Vol. III, ch. 2, § 10, p. 188 and Pl. VI, A.

210 Hegel uses the unusual word Begeistigung, I presume somewhat in the sense of Begeisterung, signifying the personal inspiration of the artist.

211 This appears to be the meaning of the difficult phrase that sculpture supplies das gesammte Daseyn, i.e., is the affiliating link of the collective body. All the different arts are stamped with its characteristics.

212 I presume the Pietà in St. Peter’s.

213 Hegel’s “Vermisch. Schriften,” vol. II, p. 561.

SUBSECTION III

THE ROMANTIC ARTS

THE SOURCE OF the general transition from sculpture to the other arts is, as we have seen, the principle of subjectivity, which now invades art’s content and its manner of exposition. What we understand here by subjectivity is the notion of an intelligence which ideally exists in free independence, withdrawing itself from objective reality into its own more intimate domain, a conscious life which no longer concentrates itself with its corporeal attachment in a unity which is without division.

There follows from this transition, therefore, that dissolution, that dismemberment of the unity which is held together in the substantive and objective presence of sculpture, in the focus of its tranquillity and all-inclusive rondure and as such is apprehended in fusion. We may consider this breach from two points of view. On the one hand sculpture, in respect to its content, entwined what is substantive in Spirit directly with the individuality, which is as yet not self-introspective, in the exclusive unit of a personal consciousness, and treated thereby an objective unity in the sense in which objectivity suggests what is intrinsically infinite, immutable, true — that substantive aspect, in short, which has no part in mere caprice and singularity. And from another point of view sculpture failed to do more than discharge this spiritual content wholly within the corporeal frame as the vital and significant instrument of the same, and by doing so create a new objective unity in that meaning of the expression, under which objectivity, as contrasted with all that is wholly ideal and subjective, indicates real and external existence.

When we find, then, that these two aspects, at first thus reconciled in one another by sculpture, are separated, that which we call self-introspective spirituality is not merely placed in opposition to that which is external, but also, in the domain of what is spiritual throughout, what is substantive and objective in that medium, in so far as it no longer continues to be retained in what is substantial individuality simply, is dissevered from the vital particularity of the conscious life, and all these aspects which have been hitherto held together in perfect fusion are relatively to each other and independently free, so that they can be treated too by art as free in this very way.

If we examine the content, then, we have through the above process, on the one hand, the substantive being of what is spiritual, the world of truth and eternity, the Divine in fact, which however here, in accordance with the principle of particularity, is comprehended and realized by art as a subject of consciousness, or as personality, as the Absolute, which is self-conscious in the medium of its infinite spiritual substance, as God in His Spirit and Truth. And in contrast to Him we have asserted the worldly and human condition of soul-life, which, regarded now as no longer in direct union with the intrinsic substance of Spirit, can unfold itself in all the fulness of that particularity which is simply human, and thereby permits the heart of man wherever and whenever represented214, the entire wealth of our human mortality, to be open to art’s acceptance.

The meeting-ground upon which these two aspects once more coalesce is the principle of subjectivity, which is common to both. The Absolute is, in virtue of this, disclosed to us to the full extent a living, actual, and equally human subject of consciousness, as the human and finite conscious life, viewed as spiritual, makes vital and real the absolute substance and truth, or in other words simply the Divine Spirit. The new bond of unity which is thus secured no longer, however, supports the character of that former immediacy, such as sculpture disclosed it; rather it is a union and reconciliation which asserts itself essentially as a mediation of opposed factors, and whose very notion makes its apprehension only possible in the realms of the soul and ideal life.

I have already, when the general subdivision of our science in its entire compass offered an opportunity for doing so, laid it down, that if the Ideal of sculpture sets forth in a sensuously present image the essential solidity215 of the individuality of the God in the bodily form alone able to express that substance, the community thereupon essentially confronts such an object as the intelligent reflection of that unity. Spirit, however, that is wholly self-absorbed can only present the substance of Spirit under the mode of Spirit, in other words as a conscious subject, and receives thereby straightway the principle of the spiritual reconciliation of individual subjective life with God. As particular self, however, man also possesses his contingent natural existence, and a sphere of finite interests, needs, aims, and passions, whether it be more extensive or restricted, in which he is able to realize and satisfy his nature quite as much as he can in the same be absorbed in those ideas of God and the reconciliation with God.

Secondly, if we consider the aspect of the representation on its external side, we find that it is by virtue of its particularity at once self-subsistent and possesses a claim to stand forth in this independence, and this for the reason that the principle of subjectivity excludes that correspondence in its immediacy, and disallows to itself the absolute interfusion of the ideal and external aspects in every part and relation of it. For the subjective principle is here precisely that which comes to be, in self-subsistent seclusion, that inward life which retires from real or objective existence into the realm of the Ideal, the world of emotion, soul, heart, and contemplation216. This ideal life is manifested no doubt in its external form, under a mode, however, in which the external form itself appears, that is to say it is merely the outer shell of a conscious subject that is growing independently within. The hard and fast association of the bodily form and the life of Spirit in classical sculpture is not therefore carried to the point of an all-dissolving unity217 but in so light and slack a coalescence that both aspects, albeit neither is present without the other, preserve in this connection their separate independence relatively to the other, or at least, if a profounder union is really secured, the spiritual aspect as that inward principle, which asserts its presence over and beyond its suffusion with the objective or external material, becomes the essentially illuminating focus of all. And it results from this that, to promote the enhancement of this relatively increased self-subsistency of the objective and material aspect, — we have in our mind mainly, no doubt, the extreme case of the representation of external Nature and its objects, even in their isolated and most exclusive particularity, — yet even in such a case and despite all realism in the presentment it is necessary that such counterfeits should permit a reflection of the artist’s soul to be visible on their face. They should in other words suffer us to see the sympathy of Spirit in the manner of their artistic realization, and therewith discover to us the life of soul, the ideal life which is the vital breath of their co-ordination, the penetration of man’s emotional life itself into this extreme type of external environment.

Speaking, then, generally, we may affirm that the principle of subjectivity carries with it as its inevitable result, on the one hand, that the wholly unconstrained union of Spirit with its corporeal frame should be given up, and the bodily aspect be asserted in a more or less negative relation over against the former, in order that the ideality of Spirit may be emphasized on the front of that external reality, and, on the other hand, in order to procure free scope for every separate feature of the variety, division, and movement of what is spiritual no less than what directly appeals to man’s senses.

And, thirdly, this new principle has to establish itself in the sensuous material, of which art avails itself in its new manifestations.

(a) The material hitherto was matter simply, that is, the material of gravity in the content of its spatial extension, and no less was it form under its simplest and most abstract definition of configuration. Now that the subjective and at the same time the essentially particularized content of the soul is imported into this material, the spatial totality of such material will without question in some measure suffer loss in order that the former content may appear upon its face with its ideal mintage218, and contrariwise will be converted from its immediately material guise to an appearance which is the product of mind or spirit; and, on the other hand, both in respect to form and its externally sensuous visibility, all the detail of what appears will be necessarily emphasized in the way that the new content requires. Art is, however, even now compelled in the first instance to move in the realm of the visible and sensuous, because, following the above course of our inquiry, though no doubt the inward or ideal is conceived as self-introspection219, yet it has further to appear as a return of its own quality to itself from this very realm of externality and material shape, in short, as a return of itself to itself, which can only from the earliest point of view be portrayed in the objective existence of Nature and the corporeal existence of Spirit’s life.

The first among the romantic arts will consequently have as its proper function to assert its content in the visible forms of the external human figure and the natural shape wherever disclosed, without, however, remaining bound to the sensuous ideality and abstract range of sculpture. This is the task and province of painting.

(b) In so far, however, as we find in painting for its fundamental type, not as in sculpture the entirely perfected resolution of the spiritual idea and the bodily form in one content, but rather the predominant exposition of the self-absorbed ideality of soul, to that extent the spatial figure in extension is not a truly adequate medium of expression for the inward life of Spirit. Art therefore abandons the previous medium of configuration, and in the place of spatial forms employs the medium of tone in the limited duration of its sounds; tone in fact by its assertion of the material of Space under a purely negative relation secures for itself a finite existence nearer to ideality, and corresponds to that soul-life, which in accordance with its own inward experience conceives and grasps that life as emotion, and then expresses that content, as it enforces its claim in the unseen movement of heart and soul, in the procession of tones. The second art, therefore, which follows this principle of exposition is that of music.

(c) Thereby, however, music merely is placed at the opposite extreme, and, in contrast to the plastic arts, both in respect to its content and relatively to its sensuous material, and the mode of its expression, cleaves fast to the formless content of its pure ideality. It is, however, the function of art, in virtue of its essential notion, to disclose to the senses not merely the soul-life, but the manifestation and actuality of the same in its external reality. When, however, art has abandoned the process of veritably informing the real and consequently visible form of objective existence, and has applied its activity to the element itself of soul-life, the objective reality, to which it once more recurs, can no longer be the reality as such in itself, but one which is merely imagined and prefigured to the mind or sensitive soul. The presentment, moreover, as being the communication to Spirit of creative mind working in its own domain is compelled to use the sensuous material united to its disclosure simply as a mere means for such communication. It must consequently lower its denomination to that of a sign which of itself is without significance. It is at this point that poetry or the art of speech, confronts us, which now incorporates its art-productions in the medium of a speech elaborated to an instrument of artistic service, precisely as intelligence already in ordinary speech makes intelligible to spiritual life all that it carries in itself. And, moreover, for the reason that it is able thus to unfold the entire content of Spirit in its own medium, it is the universal art, which belongs indifferently to all the types of art, and is only excluded in that case where the spiritual life which is still unrevealed to itself in its highest form of content is merely able to make itself aware of its own dim presentiments in the form and configuration of that which is external and alien to itself.

THE ART OF PAINTING

THE MOST ADEQUATE object of sculpture is the tranquil self-absorption of personality in its essential substance, the character whose spiritual individuality is in the fullest degree displayed on the face of its corporeal presentment, making the sensuous frame, which reveals this incorporation of spirit, adequate to such an embodiment of mind wholly in its aspects of external form. The sightless look has as yet failed to concentrate at one point the supreme focus of ideal life, the vital breath of soul, the heart of most intimate feeling, and is as yet without spiritual movement, without the deliberate distinction between a world without it and a life within. It is on account of this that the sculpture of the ancients leaves us in some degree unmoved. We either do not remain long before it, or our delay is rather due to a scientific investigation of the fine modifications of form and detail which it displays. We cannot blame mankind if they are unable to take the profound interest in fine works of sculpture which such works deserve. To know how to value them is a study in itself. At first glance we either experience no attraction, or are immediately conscious of the general character of the whole. To come to closer quarters we have first to discover what it is that continues to supply such an interest. An enjoyment, however, which is only the possible result of study, thought, learning, and a wide experience is not the immediate object of art. And, moreover, the essential demand we make that a character should develop, should pass into the field of action and affairs, and that the soul should thereby meet with divisions and-grow deeper, this, after all our journey in search of the delight which this study of the works of antique sculpture may bring to us, remains unsatisfied. For this reason we inevitably feel more at home in painting. In other words we are at once and for the first time conscious in it of the principle of our finite and yet essentially infinite spiritual substance, the life and breath of our own existence; we contemplate in its pictures the very spark which works and is active in ourselves. The god of sculpture remains for sense-perception an object simply; in painting, on the contrary, the Divine appears as itself essentially the living subject of spiritual life, which comes into direct relations with the community, and makes it possible for each individual thereof to place himself in spiritual communion and reconcilement with Him. The substantive character of such a Divinity is not, as in sculpture, an individual that persists in the inflexible bond of its own limitations220, but is one which expands into and is differentiated within the community itself.

The same principle generally differentiates the individual from his own bodily frame and external environment to quite as considerable an extent as it brings the soul into mediated relation with the same. Within the compass of this subjective differentiation — regarded as the independent assertion of human individuality as opposed to God, Nature, and the inward and external life of other persons, regarded also conversely as the most intimate relation, the most secure communion of God with the community, and of individual men with God, the environment of Nature and the infinite variety of the wants, purposes, passions, and activities of human existence — falls the entire movement and vitality, which sculpture, both in respect to its content and its means of contributing expression, suffers to escape; and it adds an immeasurable wealth of new material and a novel breadth and variety of artistic treatment which hitherto was absent. Briefly, then, this principle of subjectivity is on the one hand the basis of division, on the other a principle of mediation and synthesis, so that painting unites in one and the same art what hitherto formed the subject-matter of two different arts, namely, the external environment, which architecture treated artistically, and the essentially spiritual form, which was elaborated by sculpture. Painting places its figures on the background of a Nature or an architectural environment, both of which are the products of its own invention in precisely the same sense, and is able to make this external material in both of these aspects by virtue of its emotional powers and soul a counterfeit within its ideal realm, in the degree that it understands how best to place it in relation and harmony with the spirit of the figures that live and move therein.

Such is the principle of the new advance that painting contributes to the representative powers of art.

If we inquire now the course which the more detailed examination of our subject necessitates the following division will serve us.

In the first place we shall have yet further to consider the general character which the art of painting must necessarily receive in accordance with its notion and relatively both to its specific content, the material that is made consonant with this content and finally the artistic treatment which is thereby involved.

Secondly, we have to develop the separate modes of definition, which are contained in the principle of such a content and manner of presentation, and more succinctly fix the boundaries of the subject-matter which is adapted to painting no less than the modes of its conception, composition, and technical qualities as painting.

Thirdly, painting is itself broken up into distinct schools of painting by reason of the above divisions of matter, technique, and so forth, which, as in the other arts, have their own phases of historical development.

After having thus emphasized as the essential principle of painting that world of the soul in its vitality of feeling, conception, and action cast in embrace round heaven and earth, in the variety of its manifestations and external disclosures within the bodily frame, and affirmed on this account that the focus, and centre of this art is to be sought for in romantic and Christian art, it may immediately occur to the reader that not only do we find excellent artists among the ancients, who are as distinguished in this art as others of their age in sculpture — and we cannot praise them more highly — but also that other peoples, notably the Chinese, Hindoos, and Egyptians, have secured distinction in the direction of painting. Without question the art of painting is, by virtue of the variety of the objects treated and the particular type of its manner of execution, less221 restricted in the range of nations that exemplify its pursuit. This, however, is not the point at issue. If our question is simply that of the historian doubtless we find single examples of one type222 of painting or another have been produced at the most varied epochs by the nations already mentioned and others. It is, however, a profounder question altogether when we ask ourselves what is the principle of painting, examine the means of its exposition and in doing so seek to establish that content, which by virtue of its own nature is emphatically consonant with the painter’s art as such and its mode of presentment, so that we can affirm the form thus selected to be wholly adequate to the content in question. We have but little left us of the painting of the ancient world, examples, in fact, which we see can neither have formed part of the most consummate work of antiquity in this respect, nor have been the product of its most famous masters. At least all that has been discovered through excavation in private houses is of this character. It is impossible, however, not to admire the delicacy of taste, the suitability of the objects, selected, the clearness of the grouping, and, we may add, the lightness of the handling and freshness of the colouring, excellences which without doubt were present in the originals of such pictures in a far higher degree, in imitation of which, for example, the wall paintings in the so-called house of the tragedian at Pompeii have been executed. We have, unfortunately, no examples of the works of famous masters. Whatever degree of excellence, however, these more original productions attained, we may none the less affirm that the ancients could not, alongside of the unmatchable beauty of their sculptures, have lifted the art of painting to the level of artistic elaboration as painting which we find secured in the Christian era of the Middle Ages, and pre-eminently in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And we may assume this to be so on the philosophical ground that the most genuine heart of the Greek outlook is, in a degree which is inapplicable to the other arts, concordant with the root and fragrance of that which sculpture and sculpture alone can supply. And in art we are not entitled to separate spiritual content from its mode of presentation. If, having this clear to our minds, we inquire how it is that painting only reached its most characteristic consummation through the content of the romantic type of art, we can but reply that it is precisely the intimacy of feeling, the blessedness223 and pain that give to us the soul of this profounder content, whose demand is for such a vital infusion, which has paved the way to and in fact been the cause of this higher perfection of painting.

As an example of what I mean I will but recall to recollection one particular instance already cited, namely, that we borrow from Raoul-Rochette of the treatment of Isis carrying Horns on her knees. In general the subject is identical with the Madonna pictures, a Divine mother and her child. The difference of handling and conception in the two cases, however, is immeasurable. The Egyptian Isis, as we find her thus situated on bas-reliefs, has nothing maternal about her, no tenderness, no trait of soul or emotion, such as is not even wholly absent in the stiffer Byzantine pictures of the Madonna. And if we think of Raphael, or any other great Italian master, what results have they not achieved from this subject of the Mother and Christ-babe! What depth of emotion, what spiritual life, what intimacy and wealth of heart, what exaltation and endearment, how human and yet how entirely filled with divine spirit is the soul which speaks to us from every line and feature. And under what infinite variety of forms and situations is this one subject presented to us even by particular masters taken singly and still more by different artists. The mother, the pure Virgin, the physical, the spiritual beauty, loftiness and devotion of love, all this and countless other features are emphasized in their turn as the main significance of the expression. But chief of all we find throughout that it is not the sensuous beauty of mere form, but the animate life of Spirit, by virtue of which artistic genius no less than mastery of execution is asserted and secured. Now it is quite true that Greek art has passed a long way beyond Egyptian art, and we may add that it has made the expression of man’s soul an object aimed for. But it was not capable of grasping that intimacy and depth of emotion which is discovered to us in the Christian type of expression, and indeed was careful, in accordance with its entire character, not to attach itself to such intensity of feeling. Take, for instance, the case I have more than once already cited of the faun, who carries the youthful Bacchus in his arms; it is, no doubt, expressive of extremely tender and amiable qualities. The nymphs are equally so who tend upon Bacchus, a situation which is depicted by a gem in a very beautiful group of figures. In such cases we have an analogous sentiment of unconstrained love for a child, equally free from passion and yearning; but, even putting on one side the maternal relation224, the expression possesses in no respect the intimacy, the depth of soul, which confront us in Christian paintings. The ancients may very well have painted excellent portraits, but neither their way of conceiving natural fact, nor the point of view from which they regarded human and divine conditions was of the kind that, in the case of painting, an infusion of soul-life could be expressed with such intimate intensity as was possible in Christian painting.

The demand of painting, however, for this more personal type of inspiration is a result of its very material. In other words, the sensuous medium in which it moves is an extension on pure surface, and the display of form by means of the use of diversified colours, by virtue of which process the objective shape, as we have it presented to the vision, is converted to an artificial illusion adopted by a spiritual agency225 in the place of the actual form of fact. It is part of the principle of such a treatment of material that which is external should not ultimately retain its validity in its independent native existence, even in the modified form it takes as a vital product of human hands, but should in this form of realization be lowered as reality to a purely phenomenal reflex of the inward soul-life itself, which seeks to contemplate itself independently as such. When we look into the heart of the matter we shall find that the advance from the rounded form of sculpture amounts to nothing less than the above statement. It is the soul-life, the ideality of Spirit which undertakes to express itself in an intimate way through the counterfeit of the objective world. Add to this, in the second place, that the surface on which the art of painting makes its objects visible, opens independently the path to the employment of a surrounding background and other complex relations; and colour too, regarded as the articulation of that which appears, requires a correspondent differentiation of soul-life, which can only be rendered clearly through the definition of expression, situation, and action, and consequently makes necessary variety, movement, and the detailed exposition of both the inward and external life. This principle of inwardness226 taken alone, which at the same time in its actual manifestation is associated with the variety of external existence and is cognizable on the face of such particular existence as an essentially complete and independent complex of conditions, we have already seen to be the principle of the romantic type of art, in whose configuration and mode of presentation consequently the medium of painting discovers in a unique way its wholly adequate object. Conversely we may affirm at the same time that romantic art, when the question is actually one of definite works of art, must seek for material which is consonant with its content, and in the first instance it finds such in painting, which consequently remains more or less of a formal character when dealing with all objects and compositions not of this type227. Granting, then, the fact that we find outside the Christian paintings an Oriental, Greek, and Roman school of painting, yet the real centre and focus of all is none the less the elaboration which this art secured within the boundaries of romantic art. We can only speak of Oriental and Greek painting in the same kind of way as we did when, despite our main thesis that sculpture attained its highest crown of perfection in the classical Ideal, we referred to a subordinate Christian type of sculpture. In other words we are forced to admit that the art of painting first apprehends its content in the material of the romantic type of art, which completely corresponds to its instruments and its modes, and consequently that it was only after the treatment of such material that it discovered how best to use and elaborate in every direction all the means at its disposal.

Following now the course of the above remarks in a wholly general way we have to observe as follows in connection with the content, material, and artistic mode of treatment of painting.

(a) The fundamental definition of the content of painting is, as we have seen, subjectivity as an independent process228.

(α) In this process, looking at it from the point of view of a reflex of soul-life, individuality must not wholly pass into the universality its substance, but must on the contrary disclose how it retains that content as a distinctive personality229, and possesses and expresses its inward life, that is the vitality of its own conception and feeling in the same; neither should the external form be wholly dominated by the ideal individuality as is the case in sculpture. For the principle of subjectivity, albeit that it permeates the external material as the mode of objectivity adequate to express it, is notwithstanding likewise an identity which withdraws itself into itself out of that objective domain, and by virtue of this self-seclusion is relatively to that objective aspect neutral, leaving it quite untrammelled. Just as therefore, on the spiritual side of the content, the particularity of the personal life is not set forth in direct union with its substance and universality, but is essentially reflected as the culminating feature of its independent embodiment230, so, too, in the objective envisagement of form, the particularity and universality of the same are carried from their previous plastic union231 to a predominance of the individual aspect, and indeed of comparatively accidental and indifferent features, and in a manner much the same as that which, in the reality of sense experience, is the prevailing character of all phenomena.

(β) A further important point is that connected with the range of scope that is permitted to the art of painting in virtue of its principle with regard to the objects to be thus presented.

The free principle of subjectivity suffers on the one hand the entire field of natural objects, and every department of human activity to remain in its substantive mode of existence; on the other, it is capable of entering into fusion with all possible detail, and creating therefrom a content of its own ideal life, of rather we should say that only in this interfusion with concrete actuality does it assert itself as concrete and vital in its products. Consequently it is possible for the painter to import a wealth of material into the realm occupied by his artistic works, which remains outside, the reach of the sculptor. The entire world of the religious idea, conceptions of heaven and hell, the history of Christ, his disciples and saints, external Nature, all that concerns humanity down to the most fugitive of situations and characters, all this material and more can find a place here. For as we have seen all that pertains to the detail, caprice, and accidental features of human need and interest is affected by this principle, which at once strives to comprehend and compose it.

(γ) And along with this fact we have as its corollary that painting makes the soul of man itself the subject of its creative work. All that is alive within the soul is present in ideal form, if it is, when we consider its content, at once objective and absolute in the abstract sense232. For the emotional life of soul can without question carry the universal within its content, a content, however, which, as feeling, does not retain the form of this universality, but appears under the mode as I, this individual person — I know my identity therein and feel the same. In order to educe and set forth this objective content as objective, I must forget myself. In this way the painter no doubt reveals to our sight the ideal substance of soul in the form of external objects, but the truly real content which it expresses is the personal soul that feels. For which reason painting, from the point of view of form, is unable to offer such distinctive envisagements of the Divine as sculpture, but only ideas of less defined character such as belong to the emotions. It may appear as a contradiction to this position that we find again and again selected as subjects of the paintings of masters, who stand without question in the highest rank, the external environment of mankind, mountains, valleys, meadows, brooks, trees, ships, buildings, their interiors, in short earth, sea, and sky. What, however, constitutes the core in the content of such works of art is not the objects themselves, but the vitality and soul imported into them by the artist’s conception and execution, his emotional life in fact, which is reflected in his work, and gives us not merely a counterfeit of external objects, but therewith his own personality and temperament233. And it is precisely by his doing this that the objects of Nature, as reflected by painting, even from this realistic point of view, are relatively insignificant, because the influence of soul-life begins to assert itself in them as the main significance. In this tendency towards temperament, which, in the case of objects borrowed from external Nature, may frequently only amount to a general response emphasized between the two sides, we find the most important distinction between painting on the one hand and sculpture and architecture on the other. Painting indeed approximates in this respect more closely to music and emphasizes here the point of transition from the plastic arts to that of tone.

(b) To proceed to our second main division I have already several times referred, if only in respect to features of fundamental importance, to the difference we discover between the sensuous material of painting and that of sculpture. I will therefore in this place only touch upon the closer connection which obtains between this material and the spiritual content which it most notably has to display to us.

(α) The first fact we have to consider in this connection is this that painting compresses the three dimensions, of Space. Absolute concentration would be carried to the point, as elimination of all juxtaposition, and as unrest essentially predicable of such concentration, as we find it in the point of Time. Such a mode of negation carried out in its entire result, however, we only meet with in the art of music. Painting, on the contrary, permits the spatial relation still to subsist, and only effaces one of the three dimensions; superficies is made the element of its representations. This reduction of the three dimensions to level surface is implied in principle of increasing reality, which is only capable thereby of asserting itself in spatial relation as such ideal transmutation, owing to the fact that it does not suffer the complete totality of objective fact to persist as such, but restricts the same. Ordinarily we are accustomed to view this reduction as a caprice of the art which amounts to a defect. What is here sought for, it appears, is that natural objects in all their naked reality, or spiritual ideas and feelings, by means of the human body and its postures should be made visible to our senses for such an aim it is obvious that the surface is insufficient and inferior to Nature, which appears before us with a completeness wholly different.

(αα) Painting is unquestionably yet more abstract than sculpture in respect to material conditioned in Space; but this abstraction, remote as it is from being a purely capricious limitation, or an indication of human incapacity, is just that which brings about the necessary advance from sculpture. Even sculpture is not simply an imitation of natural or physical existence, but a creation of intelligence, which removes from form all aspects of natural existence which are not in accord with the definite content it undertakes to present. This elimination was carried out by sculpture in the case of all colour detail, so that what remained to it was only the abstraction of material form. In painting we have the opposite process, its content being the ideality of soul-life, which can only appear on the face of objective reality, by a process of self-absorption from that very material234. The art of painting, therefore, no doubt, works for the sense-perception, but in a way, through which the object which it displays remains no longer an actual natural existence wholly in Space, but is changed to a counterfeit creation of intelligence, in which it only so far reveals its spiritual source as it annuls the actual existence of its object, recreating it for itself in a purely phenomenal semblance within its own spiritual realm — for Spirit.

(ββ) And to this intent painting must necessarily effect a breach with the totality of the spatial condition, and there is no reason for charging to human incapacity this loss of Nature’s completeness. In other words, inasmuch as the object of painting from the point of view of its spatial existence, is merely a semblance, reflective of the soul of man, exhibited by art for his spirit, the self-subsistency of the object as we find it actually in Space is dissolved, and the object is related in a far more restricted way to the spectator than is the case in sculpture. A statue is by itself wholly an isolated object, independent of the spectator, who may place himself where he pleases; his point of view, his movements, his walking round it, not one of them affect the work of art as a whole235. If this self-subsistency is to be preserved the sculptured figure must also have some definite impression to offer each and every point of view. And this independence of the work must be retained in sculpture for the reason that its content is the tranquillity, self-seclusion, and objective presence which, in both an external and ideal sense, reposes on their own substance. In painting, on the contrary, whose content is conditioned by an ideal atmosphere, and in fact is composed of ideal relations essentially particularized, it is precisely this aspect of discord in a work of art between object and spectator which has to be emphasized, and yet with a like directness to be resolved in the fact, that the work, as depicting the ideality of intelligence in its entire mode of presentation, can be only defined under the assumption that it stands there related to an individual mind, that is a spectator, and apart from the same has no self-subsistency. The spectator is assumed and reckoned to be there from the first, and the work of art is only intelligible as related to this point of personal contemplation236. For such a relation to mere visibility and its reflection upon an individual consciousness, however, the mere show of reality is sufficient; or rather the actual totality of the spatial condition is a defect, because in that case the objects seen retain an independent existence, and do not appear to be created by Spirit for its own contemplation. Nature consequently is not entitled to reduce its images to the plain surface; its objects possess and claim to possess a real and independent existence. The satisfaction, however, we derive from painting is not in actual existence, but in the contemplative interest we receive from the external reproduction of ideal truths, things born of the soul, and its art therefore dispenses wholly with the need and apparatus of spatial reality in its complete organization.

(γγ) And together with this reduction to the level surface we may thirdly associate the fact that painting is placed in a still more remote position to architecture than that occupied by sculpture. Works of sculpture even where exhibited independently for themselves in public places or gardens, require some kind of pedestal treated architectonically, and, in the case of apartments, forecourts, and halls, either the art of building merely assists in presenting the statue’s fitting environment, or conversely the sculptured figure is used as the decoration of the building, and between these two thus related objects we find a close association. Painting, on the contrary, whether placed in the enclosed apartment, or in public halls, or under the open sky, is limited to the wall. Originally its function is simply to fill up empty wall spaces. Among the ancients this original destination is mainly sufficient, and they decorated in this way the walls of their temples, and in more recent times also their private chambers. Gothic architecture, whose main task is the enclosure under the most grandiose conditions, supplies no doubt still larger surfaces, or rather the largest possible, yet it is only in the most ancient mosaics that we find painting is employed as a decoration of empty spaces, whether in the case of the outside or the interior. The more recent architecture of the fourteenth century, on the contrary, fills up its enormous wall surfaces in an architectural manner, the most imposing example I know of which is the main façade of Strasbourg cathedral. Here we find that the empty surfaces, excluding the entrance doors, the rose and other windows, are filled in by the ornamental work analogous to that of windows traced over the walls, and decorated by figures of considerable delicacy and variety of form, so that we have no need here for painting. In the case of religious architecture, therefore, painting mainly appears in buildings which begin to approximate to the ancient type of architecture. As a rule, however, Christian painting is to be distinguished from the arts of building, and presents its works in independent form, as for example in large pictures, whether placed in chapels or on high altars. It is true that here, too, the picture must retain some relation to the character of the place, which it is destined to fill; for the rest, however, it is not merely intended to fill up wall spaces, but to hang them as a work of art independently just as a work of sculpture may do. In conclusion painting has its use as a decoration of halls and apartments in public buildings, town halls, palaces, and private houses, in which respect its association with architecture is once more closely marked, an association, however, in which its independence as a free art ought not to be lost.

(β) A further necessary ground for the contraction of the spatial dimensions in painting to bare surface is due to the fact that the art of painting is concerned to express ideal conditions essentially in their separation237, and thereby rich in every kind of particular character. A mere restriction to the shapes of spatial form, with which sculpture is able to rest satisfied, vanishes therefore in the more luxuriant art; for the forms of spatial dimension are the most abstract in Nature, and an attempt must now be made to seize particular distinctions, in so far as the demand is now for an essentially more multifold material. The matter specifically defined in the physical sense is attached to the very principle of presentation in Space, the differences of which238, if they are to appear as essential in the work of art, themselves disclose this fact239 in the total configuration of spatial form, which no longer remains the final mode of presentation, and they are compelled to make a breach in the complete form of spatial dimensions, in order to cancel the exclusive appearance of the physical medium. For the dimensions in painting are not presented by themselves in their actual reality, but are merely by means of this physical aspect made to appear and be visible as such.

(αα) If we further inquire what is the nature of the physical element which the art of painting makes use of we shall find this to be Light, regarding it as that medium which renders all objects whatever visible.

Previously the sensuous, concrete material of architecture was the resisting matter of gravity, which more particularly in the art of building asserted this character of heavy material in its features of burden, constraint, power to support and be supported, and even in sculpture still retained such characteristics. Heavy material encumbers because it does not possess its centre of material unity in itself, but in something else; and it seeks for this centre and strives towards it, though it retains its position through the resistance of other bodies, which become by doing so bodies of support. The principle of light is an opposite, or extreme, of that material of weight which is not as yet enclosed within its unity. Whatever else we may predicate of light it is obvious that it is absolutely devoid of weight and offers no resistance; rather it is pure identity with itself, and thereby simple self-relation, the primordial ideality, the original self of Nature. In light Nature make its start on the path of ideality or inwardness240, and is the universal physical ego, which of course is not carried here to the point of particularity241, nor has as yet concentrated itself within the unit of individuality and self-seclusion, yet is thereby enabled to cancel the bare objectivity and external show of heavy matter and abstract from the sensuous and spatial totality of the same242. From this aspect of the more ideal quality of light it becomes the physical principle of the art of painting.

(ββ) Light regarded simply as such, however, only exists as one aspect contained in the principle of subjectivity, that is, as this more ideal identity. In this respect light is manifestation, just that, which, however, in Nature is only asserted generally as the power of making objects visible, holding the particular content of that which it reveals outside itself as an objective world, which is not light, but rather that which confronts it and consequently is dark. These objects light renders cognizable under their distinctions of form by irradiating them, that is, illuminating to a greater or less degree their obscurity and invisibility, and permitting certain parts to be more visible, namely, as they approach the spectator, and others, on the contrary, more obscure as they withdraw from him. For light and darkness, putting for the present on one side the particular colour of an object, is generally speaking due to the relative remoteness of the illuminated objects from us in their specific degree of illumination. In this direct relation to objectivity light is no longer asserted simply as light, but as essentially particularized brightness and obscurity, light and shadow, whose varied manifestations render the shape and distance of objects from one another intelligible to the spectator. This is the principle which painting makes use of, because from the first differentiation is implied in its notion. If we compare this art in this respect with sculpture and architecture we shall see that in these latter arts the actual distinctions of spatial configuration are set forth in their nakedness, and light and shadow are suffered to retain the ordinary effect which light produces in Nature relatively to the position of the spectator, so that the rondure of form is here already independently243 present and light and shade, whereby they are rendered visible, are merely a result of that which was already actually on the spot independently of this further aspect of their becoming visible. In the art of painting, however, brightness and darkness together with all their gradations and finest transitions are themselves part of the fundamental artistic material, and it is a purely intentional appearance they produce of that medium, which sculpture gives form to in its native state. Light and shade, in short, the appearance of objects under this illumination, is effected by art rather than the mere natural light, which consequently only makes that kind of brightness, darkness, and lighting visible, which are the products of painting. And this it is which constitutes the positive rationale deduced from the material of the art itself, why painting does not require three dimensions. Form is the creation of light and shadow simply, and that form which exists in spatial reality is superfluous.

(γγ) Bright and dark, shadow and light, no less than their interplay are, however, merely an abstraction, which do not exist in Nature as such abstraction, and consequently cannot be utilized as sensuous material. In other words Light, as we have already seen, is related to its opposite Dark. In this relation both principles have no self-subsistency apart from each other, but can only be asserted in their unity, that is, as the interplay of light and dark. The light, which is in this way essentially impaired and obscured, which, however, to a like extent transpierces and illumines darkness244, supplies us with the principle of colour as the genuine material of painting. Light in its purity is devoid of colour, it is the pure indeterminacy of essential identity. Distinction from bare light, a lowering of its value, is the characteristic of colour, which in contrast to light is already in some degree obscurity, and together with which the principle of light is asserted in union. It is consequently an incorrect and false idea to hold that light is the aggregate result of different colours, or in other words different degrees of obscuration245.

Form, distance, limitation, rounded shape, in short, all spatial relations and distinctions visible in the phenomena of Space are unfolded in the art of painting entirely by means of colour, the more ideal principle of which is capable of presenting a more ideal content and by virtue of its profounder oppositions, the infinite variety of its transitional gradations and the delicacy of its softest modulations relatively to the fulness and detail of the objects it accepts as subject-matter, is possessed of a field for its activity of the widest range. It is beyond belief what mere colour is able to accomplish in this art. Two human beings are, for example, something totally distinct. Either is in his self-conscious identity no less than his bodily organism an independent and exclusive spiritual and bodily totality, yet the entire result of this difference is in a picture reduced to a distinction of colours. In one place some particular shade of colour ceases, in another a particular one starts up, and by such means we get everything set before us, shape, distance, play of posture, expression, what is nearest to sense and what is most akin to intelligence. And we are not to regard this reduction as a make-shift and defect. Quite the reverse is the fact; the art of painting dispensing with the third dimension in no such way, but deliberately rejecting it in order to set in the place of purely spatial reality the higher and richer principle of colour.

(γ) This wealth enables painting to elaborate in its reproductions the entire extent of the phenomenal world. Sculpture is more or less restricted to the stable self-seclusion of individuality. In painting, however, the individual cannot remain in such limitations of stability whether regarded in his ideal aspect or relatively to the external world, but is placed in every kind of varied definition. For on the one hand, as already pointed out, he is placed in a far closer relation to the spectator, and on the other he receives a more varied connection with other individuals and the environment of Nature. A process, therefore, which merely illuminates semblance of objective fact makes possible the widest expansion of distances and spaces and the present of such and all the varied objects that appear in them in one and the same work of art. Yet it must no less, as a work of art, prove itself to be a self-contained and unified whole, and exhibit itself in this synthesis, not simply as an aggregate whose limits and boundaries are defined by no principle, but rather as a totality whose unified consistency is due to its own subject-matter.

(c) In the third place we have, after this general consideration of the content and sensuous material of painting, briefly to adduce in general terms the principle of the artistic mode of treatment adopted by it.

The art of painting more so than either sculpture or architecture admits of the two extremes. In the first case prominence is given to the religious and ethical severity of the conception and presentation of the ideal beauty of form, and in the second, where the subject-matter is, taken by itself, insignificant, to the detail of what it contains and the personal aspect of the creative art. We may therefore not unfrequently hear two extreme kinds of criticism. Our critic in the one case apostrophizes the nobility of the object, the depth and astonishing sufficiency of the conception, the greatness of the expression, and the boldness of the delineation246. And in the other equal praise is given to the fine and unexampled character of the painter’s treatment of his colour. This contrast is implied in the very notion of the art; indeed, we may affirm that it is impossible to unite both aspects on one plane of elaboration. Each must remain inevitably independent of the other. For painting has shape simply as such, that is, the forms of spatial limitation, no less than colour as means contributive to its artistic result, and is placed thereby midway between the Ideal of the plastic arts and the extreme form of the direct detail of Nature’s reality; by reason of which we get two distinct types of painting. One, that is the ideal, whose essential basis is universality; and the other, that which presents particular objects in all their closeness of detail.

(α) In this respect painting must accept, in the first instance, as sculpture, that which is substantive in the sense that the objects of religious belief are such, no less than the great events of history, and its pre-eminent individual characters, albeit it renders visible this substance in a form wherein the ideal and personal aspect is emphasized. It is the imposing character, the serious significance of the action portrayed, or the depth of the soul expressed which is here of most importance, so that the elaboration and employment of all the rich artistic means which are within the reach of painting, and the dexterity, which the wholly consummate use of these means demands regarded as a tour de force of technique, cannot here be entirely indicated. In cases of this kind it is the force of the content to be presented and the absorption in what is essential and substantive in the same, which tend to drive into the background the overwhelming facility in the art of painting as that aspect which is less essential. In this sense, for instance, the Cartoons of Raphael are of invaluable merit, and fully display the entire excellence of their composition, although Raphael, even in the case of particular pictures, despite all his mastery in drawing, and the purity of his ideal, and at the same time wholly vital personal figures, and the composition he may have arrived at, most certainly in colour, and all that concerns landscape and other aspects, is excelled by the Dutch masters. This is yet more the case with the earlier Italian heroes of art, in contrast to whom Raphael is to a somewhat similar degree inferior in depth, power, and ideality of expression, as he surpasses such in the technique of his craft, in the beauty of vital grouping, in draughtsmanship and the like247.

(β) Conversely, however, the art of painting, as we have seen, ought to advance further than this exclusive absorption in the ideal and infinite content of man’s soul-life; its function is equally to assert the subsistency and freedom of detail, which however incidental it may be, contributes to the environment and background of the work. In this advance from the profoundest seriousness to the objective features of independent detail it is bound to force its way to the extreme articulation of the purely phenomenal, where any and every content is a matter of indifference, and artistic illusion in a realistic sense is the main interest. In such a type of art we find depicted for us the most fugitive aspect of the sky, the time of day, the lighting up of the woods, the gleam and reflection of the clouds, waves, lakes, streams, the shimmer and glitter of wine in the glass, the glance of the eye, and every conceivable look and smile of the human countenance. Painting in such cases moves from the idealistic standpoint to that of living reality, whose phenomenal effect it mainly seeks to reproduce by means of accuracy in the execution of every bit of detail248. Yet this effort is no mere assiduity of elaboration, but a real exercise of genuine talent, which strives to present every kind of detail in its independent perfection, and yet retain the whole composition in unity and fusion, and this can only be done by the finest art. In such work the vital force of the realistic appearance thus secured tends to be more near to the artist’s aim than the Ideal; and it is precisely this kind of art, as I have already found occasion to remark, which raises, as no other, controversial points over the significance of the Ideal and Nature. No doubt it is very possible to blame the use of the most elaborate technique in subjects of little importance by themselves as mere extravagance; yet there is no real reason for rejecting such material, and it is precisely of that kind which ought to be treated in this way by art, and be permitted to keep every conceivable subtlety and refinement of surface appearance that it possesses.

(γ) The artistic treatment does not, however, stop at this more general kind of opposition, but, inasmuch as painting reposes on the principle of soul-expression and particularity, proceeds yet further in the direction of differentiation in its results. Both architecture and sculpture, it is true, assert differences of national type, and in particular we are made aware in sculpture of a closer individuality typical of certain schools and masters. In the art of painting this distinction and personal aspect in the modes of representation expands to an incalculable degree in proportion as the objects, which it may accept, are taken from a field without definable limitations. In this art to a pre-eminent extent the genius of particular peoples, provinces, epochs and individuals asserts its claims and affects not merely the choice of subjects and the spirit of their conception, but also the character of drawing, grouping, colouring, handling of the dry point no less than that of particular colours down to characteristics of personal style and wont.

Inasmuch as the function of painting is so without restriction concerned with the ideal aspect and the details of its subject-matter, it follows of course that it gives us quite as little opportunity to make definite statements of universal validity as to adduce specific facts which can always without exception be accepted as true of it. We must, however, not rest satisfied with what I have already discussed in respect of the principle of the content, the material and the artistic treatment, but make a further effort, however much we leave on one side all that confronts us in its multifold variety, still to subject certain aspects, that most emphatically enlist our attention, to further examination.

The different points of view, according to which we have to undertake this closer characterization, may be already anticipated from our previous discussion. They refer once more to the content, the material and the artistic treatment.

First, as to content, we have no doubt found the content of the romantic type of art offer the most adequate subject-matter; we must, however, inquire further what specific portions we should select from the entire wealth within this type as pre-eminently adapted to the art of painting.

Secondly, we have already made ourselves fairly cognisant with the principle of the sensuous material. We have now to define more narrowly the forms, which may be expressed on the level surface by means of colouring, in so far as the human form and other facts of Nature have to be made visible in order that the ideality of Spirit may be thereby disclosed.

Thirdly, we have a similar question with regard to the definite character of the artistic conception and presentation, which corresponds to the different character of the content thus itself similarly differentiated, producing thereby different types or schools of painting.

(a) I have already at an earlier stage recalled the fact that the ancients have had excellent painters, but added thereto the statement that the function of painting is only completely satisfied by the way of looking at things and the type of art which is referable to the emotional life and which is actively asserted in the romantic type of art. What appears, however, to contradict this from the point of view of content is the fact that at the very culminating point of Christian painting, during the age of Raphael, Rubens, Correggio, and others, we find that mythological subjects are used and portrayed in part on their own merits, and in part for the decoration and allegorization of great exploits, triumphs, royal weddings, and so forth. In this sense Goethe, for example, has once more borrowed from the descriptions of Philostratus of the pictures of Polygnotus, and, assisted by his imaginative powers as a poet, has added a novel freshness to such subjects for the painter’s benefit. If, however, such contributions further imply the demand that subjects of Greek mythology and saga, or scenes, too, from the Roman world, for which the French at a certain period of their painting have evinced a great inclination, should be conceived and portrayed in the definitive mood and significance attached to them by the ancient world we can only object generally that it is impossible to recall to life this past history, and what is peculiarly appropriate to the antique is not wholly compatible with the art of painting. The painter must consequently create from such material an entirely different result, must import therein a totally different spirit, other emotions and modes of seeing things than those present to the ancients, in order to bring such a content into accord with the real problems and aims of painting. For this reason also the circle of antique material and situations is not that which painting has elaborated in a consequential process; rather it is an aspect of it which has been passed over as alien to its material, and which has first to be essentially remodelled. I have several times insisted that painting has before all to seize that, the presentment of which it can, in deliberate contrast to sculpture, music, and poetry, master by means of external form. And this is pre-eminently the self-concentration of Spirit, which is denied to sculpture, while music again is unable to make the passage to the external appearance of ideality, and poetry itself can merely render visible the bodily presence in an incomplete way. Painting, on the contrary, is still in a position to unite both aspects. It can express the entire content of soul-life in an external form, and is consequently bound to accept for its essential content the emotional depth of the soul no less than the particular type of character and its specific traits in its deepest impression — in other words intensity of feeling and ideality in its differentiation, for the expression of which definite events, conditions, and situations not only must appear as the explanatory source of individual character, but the specific individuality must disclose itself as a part of the moulded form of the soul and physiognomy, rooted therein, and entirely taken up into the external embodiment.

In order to express generally this ideality of soul we do not require that ideal self-subsistency and largeness249 of the classical type we have previously dealt with, in which individuality persists in immediate accord with the substantive core of its spiritual essence and the physical characteristics of its bodily presentment; to quite as little extent will suffice to the manifestation of this soul-life Nature’s ordinary hilarity, that Greek geniality of enjoyment and blissful absorption in its object; rather true depth and self-revelation of spiritual life presupposes that the soul has worked its way through its emotions, its forces, its whole inward life, has overcome much, has suffered and endured much anguish or misery of spirit, and yet in all these divisions has retained its sense of unity and come back to the same out of them. The ancients no doubt also place before us in the mythos of Hercules a hero, who after many troubles receives his apotheosis, and enjoys among the gods the repose of blessedness; but the labours which Hercules accomplishes are purely external, and the bliss, which he obtains as a reward, is merely a tranquil cessation from labour; and the ancient rune, that Zeus will have brought his empire to its consummation by his efforts, he, that is the greatest hero of Greece, has not accomplished. Rather the end of the rule of these self-subsistent gods then commences for the first time, where we find man overcomes the dragons and serpents of his own breast, the obstinacy and stubbornness of the soul’s native realm rather than the living dragons and serpents of Nature. Only thereby will Nature’s gladsomeness attain to that loftier cheerfulness of the spirit, which is perfected in its passage through the negative phase of division, and finally secures an infinite satisfaction through such travail. The feeling of blitheness and happiness must be glorified and expanded in real blessedness. For happiness and content still retain an association with external conditions which partake of Nature’s contingency. In blessedness, however, that happiness, which is still related to immediate existence, is left behind, and the entire content is made one with the inner life of soul. Blessedness is a satisfaction which is an attained result, and is thereby justified; it is the gladness of a victory, the emotion of a soul which has essentially set at nought what is sensuous and finite, and thereby thrust from itself the care which lurks for ever in ambush. Blessed is the soul, which has, it is true, experienced both conflict and pain, but come victorious through its troubles.

(α) If we now inquire what is the nature of the actual Ideal in this content we shall find it to be the reconciliation of the individual soul with God, who in His human manifestation has Himself traversed this passage of sorrows. The substantive ideality250 can only be that of religion, the peace of self-consciousness, which only feels itself truly satisfied, in so far as it is concentrated in its own substance, has broken its earthly heart, has raised itself above the purely natural conditions of finite existence, and in this exaltation has secured an inward life of universal significance, an ideal union in and with God Himself. The soul wills itself, but it finds the object of its will in something other than itself, in its particularity; it thereby gives itself up in its opposition to God, in order to find itself again and its joy in Him. This is the vital character of Love, the soul’s function in its truth, that is religious love purged of mere desire, which communicates to Spirit reconciliation, peace, and blessedness. It is not the enjoyment and delight of the actual love of living nature, but rather one that is devoid of passion, nay, one that is without inclination, a tendency of the soul, a love in fact which on the side of Nature is identical with death, and is such a state, so that the actual relation as earthly bond and relation of man to man floats before us as a thing of the Past, which essentially has no consummation in its usual existing form, but carries within itself the defect of its temporality, and as such prepares the way for an exaltation to something beyond it, which is found to be at the same time a conscious state and enjoyment of a love that is without yearning and sensuous desire.

It is this character which gives to us the soulful, intimate, and more elevated Ideal, which we find now in the place of the tranquil greatness and self-subsistency of the antique. No doubt the divinities of the classical Ideal were not without a trait of sombre grief, a negative replete with fateful import, which is as it were the shadow of a cold Necessity passing over these blithesome figures, which remain, however, secure in their substantive divinity and freedom, their simple greatness and might. The freedom of Love, however, is not a freedom of this kind, being more instinct with soul-life, for the reason that it subsists in a relation between soul and soul, and spirit to spirit. This inward glow enkindles the ray of bliss made actual in the soul, a love, which in suffering, and the extremest loss not merely can discover comfort or independence therefrom, but in proportion to the depth of its suffering can feel the more profoundly therein the reality and assuredness of its love, making clear the mastery of its own essential substance in that suffering. In the Ideal of the ancients on the contrary we find no doubt, independently of that trait of a tranquil sorrow already indicated, the expression of the pain of noble natures, as for instance in the case of Niobe and Laocoon. They do not betake themselves to lamentation and despair, but adhere to their greatness and loftiness of spirit; but this self-continency remains empty; their suffering, their pain is likewise the conclusion of the matter. In the place of reconcilement and satisfaction we can only have an austere resignation, which, without suffering entire collapse, surrenders that upon which it had previously laid hold. It is not the base that is crushed251; no rage, no contempt or vexation is expressed; but despite of it all the loftiness of this type of individuality is nought but an inflexible self-continency252, an endurance of destiny that is without relief, in which the nobility and pain of the soul do not appear as reconciled in fulfilment. In the romantic love of religion we find for the first time the expression of blessedness and freedom. This union and satisfaction is by nature concrete in a spiritual sense, for it is the feeling of Spirit which is made cognizant of its unity in something other than itself. And for this reason we find necessary here, if the content presented is to be complete, two aspects, in so far as the reduplication of spiritual personality is necessary to love’s appearance. It reposes upon two independent individuals who possess, however, the sense of their intrinsic union. With this union, however, the negative condition is always at the same time connected. In other words Love belongs to the soul’s condition; the subject of such a conscious state is, however, this independently self-stable253 heart, which to experience love must bid good-bye to itself, surrender itself and sacrifice the unyielding focus of its individual isolation. It is this sacrifice which constitutes the motive principle of Love, the life and emotion of which is bound up wholly in a self-surrender. In consequence of this, if notwithstanding a man retains his consciousness of self in an act of such surrender, and just in this very annihilation of his personal independence attains to a truly positive self-subsistency, in that case he has left him at least in the feeling of this unity and its supreme happiness the negative aspect, the movement of Love’s principle, not so much in a sense of sacrifice, as of a blessedness undeserved, which in despite of himself permits him still to feel his assured identity at unity with itself. The movement is the feeling of the dialectical contradiction, namely, to have surrendered personality and yet to remain in self-subsistent unity, a contradiction which is present in Love and eternally resolved in it.

In so far, then, as the aspect of an individual human state of soul-life is concerned in this universal condition we find that the unique Love, which blesses and discovers its heaven within it, tends to rise over all that is finite and the specific individuality of character, which lapses into a position of insignificance. Already we have observed that the divine ideals of sculpture pass into one another, always provided, however, that they are not wrested from the content and province of that original and immediate type of individuality; and yet it must be admitted that this individuality remains the essential form of the mode of presentment. In this later pure gleam of blessedness, however, particularity is on the contrary cancelled. Before God all men are equal, or rather piety makes them actually equal, so that the sole point of importance is the expression of love in the concentrated focus above depicted, and which has no further need of happiness, or this or that particular object. No doubt religious Love, too, requires definite individuals as a condition of its existence, which possess also, apart from this experience, other spheres of existence; for the reason, however, that this soul-possessed state of intimate life supplies the really ideal content, the expression and reality of such are not to be found in the isolated distinctions of character, its talents, conditions, and fortunes, but are rather lifted above the same. When consequently nowadays we hear people make a regard for distinctions in the soul-life of different persons a matter of first importance in education, and in that which is the essential requirement of each man individually, from which we deduce the fundamental thesis that every one will and indeed inevitably must act differently in a given case, such a position directly clashes with the fact of the love of religion, in which all such diversities of individual life fall into the background. Conversely, however, individual characterization now, precisely for the reason that it is the unessential, which refuses wholly to fuse with the spiritual realm of celestial Love, receives a more emphatic definition. In other words, agreeably to the romantic type of art, it is free, and is written in character all the more distinct in proportion as it refuses to accept as its supreme principle classical beauty, that is the entire transfusion of immediate vitality, and the particularity of finite existence, with a spiritual or religious content. In despite of this fact, however, there is no absolute reason that this individual characterization should impair this inward intensity of Love, which, as such on its own account, is not shackled to such features, but has become free, and constitutes independently the truly self-substantive Ideal of Spirit.

What, then, constitutes the ideal centre and main content of the religious field is, as we have already indicated in our examination of the romantic type of art, the essentially reconciled and satisfied Love, whose object should appear in the art of painting, whose function it is to exhibit the most spiritual content under the mode of human and corporeal actuality, as no mere “beyond” of Spirit, but in its veritable presence. In conformity with such a result we may adduce the Holy Family, and above all the love of the Madonna to her child as the ideal content pre-eminently fitted to this sphere. On either side of this centre, however, a mass of additional material extends which is in varying degree less adapted in this sense to the art in question. I will now attempt to differentiate the whole of this material on the following lines.

(αα) The first objectification is the object of Love itself in its pure universality and unimpaired unity with itself — God Himself in His unphenomenal essence — or God the Father. In this case, however, painting has great difficulties to overcome, when it attempts to depict God the Father as the religious imagination of Christendom seeks to grasp Him. The Father of gods and men regarded as a particular personality is exhaustively dealt with by art in Zeus. What on the contrary falls away from the Christian conception of God the Father is the human individuality, in which painting is alone in a position to reproduce the spiritual aspect. For taken in His independent self-exclusion God the Father is no doubt spiritual personality and supreme Power, Wisdom and so forth, but only retained as such without defined form and as an abstraction of thought. The art of painting is, however, unable to avoid anthropomorphization, and must perforce assign to Him the figure of man. However broad in its generalization, however lofty, ideal, and masterful the presentment of such a figure may be, we fail to get beyond the fact that it is entirely a human individual of more or less grave aspect, which fails entirely to coalesce with the conception of God the Father. Among the early Flemish painters Van Eyck in his God the Father of the altar picture at Ghent has attained the greatest success that we can conceive as possible in this sphere. It is a creation that may well match our conception of the Olympian Zeus. But however consummate it may be also in its expression of eternal repose, loftiness, power, worth, and other qualities — and it is quite impossible to overstate the depth and imposing character of its conception no less than its execution — yet our imagination cannot fail to find something in it which does not satisfy. For what is here set before us as God the Father, that is to say a creation that is likewise human personality, is just what we first meet with in Christ the Son. It is in Him that we contemplate for the first time this decisive moment in which individuality and human existence combine as a moment in the Divine Life254, and moreover combine in such a way that the same is not disclosed as an ingenious creature of the phantasy, as was the case with the Greek divinities, but as essential and very revelation, the fact of all importance and fundamental significance.

(ββ) The more essential object, therefore, of Love in the creation of painting will be Christ. In other words, with this object Art at once finds itself in the sphere of humanity, a sphere which along with Christ embraces further material in its presentations of the Virgin Mary, Joseph, John the Baptist, the disciples, and so forth, and ultimately the common folk who in part are followers of the Gospel, and in part cry out for the crucifixion of its Master and mock Him in His sufferings.

And here once more the already mentioned difficulty confronts us how we are to conceive and depict Christ in his universality, when he is presented in the ordinary way of half-length figures or portraits. I must admit that for myself at any rate, the heads of Christ I have seen by Caracci and others and, to take two famous examples, that of Van Eyck, formerly in the Sully Collection and now in the Berlin Museum, and that of Von Hemling, now in Munich, do not give me the entire satisfaction which they ought to do. That of Van Eyck, no doubt, is very imposing in figure, forehead, colour, and general conception, but the mouth and eye wholly fail to express anything that transcends our humanity. The expression is rather that of an inflexible seriousness, which is emphasized by the general type of the form, the parting of the hair, and other traits. And when such heads incline still further in expression and shape towards the specifically human type, and a milder, more yielding and tender aspect is thereby imported, much of their depth and power of impression is very readily lost; and least of all suited to such, as I have already observed, is the beauty of Greek form.

For this reason Christ, as depicted in the experiences of His actual life, is a more suitable subject for pictorial effort. Yet in this connection an essential distinction must not be overlooked. It is quite true that in the biographies of Christ we have from one point of view the human consciousness of God presented us as a fundamental aspect. Christ is one of the gods, but under the guise of an actual man, and takes His place among men as one of them, in whose phenomenal appearance He can consequently be depicted in so far as such expresses the life of Spirit. From another point of view, however, he is not merely an individual man, but entirely God. In such situations, therefore, in which this supreme Divinity forces its way beyond the limits of human soul-life, the art of painting is met with a fresh source of difficulty. The very depth of the content begins to be too overpowering. For in the majority of cases in which we find Christ presented for example merely as a teacher, art will not pass much beyond the point in which He is depicted as the noblest, most worthy, and wisest of men, much as Pythagoras or any other wise man, is presented to us in such a picture as Raphael’s “School of Athens.” The most important way in which painting can overcome such a difficulty is to bring the Divinity of Christ mainly into direct contrast with His surroundings, and above all, to contrast it with the sins, the repentance and penance, or the meanness and evil of our humanity, or again conversely through His worshippers, who, by their adoration of Him remove Him as one of themselves and a man, existing in a particular place, from such immediate conditions, so that we behold Him exalted to the heaven of Spirit, and at the same time get a glimpse of the fact that His appearance has not merely been that of God, but also that of the human form under its ordinary and natural, in other words, not wholly ideal conditions, who as Spirit essentially possesses his existence in our humanity and the human community, and expresses His divinity as reflected in the same. But we must not understand this reflection as though God is present in humanity as in a purely accidental or external mode of form and expression; rather we ought to regard the Spirit manifested in the consciousness of mankind as the essential spiritual existence of God Himself255. Such a mode of presentation will be exceptionally appropriate where Christ is to be represented as man, teacher, as the risen and glorified person who ascends up to heaven before our eyes. To speak plainly, in situations such as these the means of expression in painting such as the human form and its colour, the countenance, the glance of eye, are not wholly sufficient to express all that is implied in the Christ. And least of all will the antique beauty of forms suffice. In particular the resurrection and ascension, and generally, all scenes in the life of Christ, in which He, the individual man, is already divested of immediate existence as such on His return to His Father, require a more elevated expression of Divinity than the art of painting is able to supply, for the reason that it ought to cancel the very means it uses in its representation, that is, the expression of human soul-life in its external form, and glorify the same in a light of purer quality.

Consequently, we shall find those scenes of Christ’s life treated with greater advantage and more fitting effect in which He Himself has not yet arrived at the full consummation, or where His Divinity appears to be obstructed and depressed in the moment of negation. And this we find is the case in His childhood and the Passion. That Christ as a child expresses definitely from a certain point of view the significance which attaches to Him in religion. He is God Who becomes man, and Who consequently passes through the stages of man’s natural life. In another aspect of the same fact that He is presented to our minds as a child we are led to feel the practical impossibility of disclosing entirely to us all that He essentially is. And it is just here that the art of painting possesses the incalculable advantage of being able to show how the loftiness and dignity of Spirit can shine forth from the naïveté and innocence of the child, which in some measure derives actual force from such a contrast, and in part, for the very reason that it is predicated of an infant, is to an infinitely less extent required by us in comparison with that we look for in Christ as man, teacher, and judge of the world. In this way the examples of Christ the babe which we find in Raphael’s pictures, and above all, that in the Sistine Madonna picture at Dresden, offer us the most beautiful presentment of childhood. We are, however, aware in them also of a tendency to pass beyond merely childlike innocence, a passage which discloses quite as much the Divine already present in the opening sheath, as it enables us to surmise the expansion of such Divinity to an infinite fulness of revelation, a revelation the incompleteness of which in the child carries with it its own justification. In the Madonna pictures of Van Eyck, on the contrary, the Divine babe is the least successful feature, for they are in general stiff and emphasize the defective form of a newly-born child. It has been attempted to regard this as allegorical and intentional. They are not to be fair in aspect because it is not the beauty of the Christ babe which is that which is adorable, but the Christ as Christ. Such a mode of thought is not consonant with the true aim of Art, and the babes of Raphael regarded as works of art are in this respect of far higher rank.

In the same way the history of Christ’s passion, such as the scenes where He is mocked and crowned with thorns, that of the Ecce Homo carrying the cross, deposition, and burial, are exceptionally appropriate to pictorial presentment. For in these it is precisely the Divinity, in its contrast to its triumph and in the depression of its unlimited power and wisdom, which supplies the content. Art is not merely able to present this, but there is ample room for the play of originality in the composition of such scenes without falling into purely fantastical imagery. God is here set before us as suffering, in so far as He is man and under certain determinate bounds. Such pain is not merely disclosed as human pain over human calamity, but it is an awful suffering, the feeling of an infinite negativity, albeit in human form, as the conscious life of one individual. And withal there is added, for the reason that it is God who suffers, a certain sense of alleviation, a reduction of such anguish which is thus unable to break forth in actual despair, distortion, and horror. This expression of soul-suffering is, more particularly in the works of several Italian masters, an original creation. The pain is in the lower portions of the countenance, a gravity of mien, and nothing more, not as in the Laocoon a contraction of the muscles, which can be interpreted as an actual cry; but in the eyes and on the forehead the billows of soul-anguish are, so to speak, allowed to roll over one another. The sweat drops that bespeak the heart’s agony stand forth; and with true instinct on the brow, in which the immovable bone constitutes the determining feature, precisely at the point where nose, eyes, and forehead coalesce, and the life of mind and heart is concentrated and emphasized, we find that just one or two indications of skin-folds and muscles, unable to be distorted to any great extent, are suffered pre-eminently to bear and express in tension this accumulated weight of agony. In particular I can recall a certain head in the gallery of Schleisheim, in which the master — I fancy Guido Reni256 — and doubtless others in a similar way, have discovered a distinct colour tone for the flesh, which is quite unlike that of human flesh. They had to disclose the night of the Spirit and created for the same a dowry of colour, most admirably adapted to express this tempest, these black clouds of Spirit which are likewise encompassed by the brazen forehead of the Divine Nature257.

As the most perfect subject of such painting, however, I have already affirmed that Love, which is essentially satisfied, whose object is no purely spiritual Beyond, but one actually present, so that we can behold Love itself in its object. The highest and most unique form of such a Love is that of the Virgin Mother for her Christ child, the love of the one mother who has brought forth the Saviour of the world and carries Him in her arms. This is the content of most loveliness to which we may say Christian art generally and pre-eminently the painter’s art in the religious sphere has been exalted.

The love of God, and more expressly258 that of which Christ is the object, is of an entirely spiritual type. Its object is only visible to the eyes of the soul, so that in these cases we do not in the strict sense get the reciprocity which is bound with the notion of Love, and moreover there is no natural tie which secures the lovers and from its origin binds them to each other. Every other type of love, to put the matter conversely, remains in some measure accidental in its incidence, and in another aspect of it the lovers possess, as, for instance, sisters, or the father’s love for his children, yet further relations outside this particular one, which assert an essential claim upon them. A father or brothers are compelled to direct their attention to the world, the State, affairs or war, in one word universal ends; the sister becomes wife, mother, and so forth. In the case of a mother’s love of her child, on the contrary, the love is from its very nature neither something that is contingent, nor is it merely a single phase259. It is its highest earthly type, in which its natural character and its most sacred function immediately coalesce. From the point of view, however, in which as a rule in maternal love the mother sees and feels at the same time her husband in her child, we may observe that this aspect, too, in the Virgin Mary’s case disappears. Her feeling has nothing in common with a wife’s love for her wedded husband; on the contrary her relation to Joseph is rather that of a sister, and on the side of Joseph a feeling of respectful reverence for the Child that is God’s and Mary’s. We therefore find that religious love is set forth in its fullest and most ideal260 human form, not in that for Christ amid His sufferings, nor in His resurrection, nor as He delays His departure among His friends, but in the emotional nature of a woman, in Mary. Her entire soul and life is human love for the Child, which she calls her own, and along with it adoration, and love of God with whom she feels herself thus united261. She is humble before God, and yet is steeped in the infinite exaltation that she is the single one among maidens who is above all blessed. Not alone and apart, but only in her Child is she made perfect in God, but in that, whether it be by the cradle or as queen of heaven, she is entirely content and blessed, without passion and yearning, with no other want, with no other aim to have or possess anything but that which she possesses.

The manifestation of this love under the aspect of its religious content expands in many directions, such as the annunciation, the visitation, the birth, the flight into Egypt, and other such incidents. We may also associate with it, during the later course of the Christ-life, the disciples and women, who follow Him, and in whom the love of God is more or less a personal relation of their love to the living, present Saviour, Who, as actual man, pursues His course among them, and in like manner also the love of those angels who, on the occasion of His birth and at other times, hover around in grave adoration or simple joy. In treating all such figures the art of painting in particular discloses the complete peace and content of such a love.

But this peace, furthermore, is dissolved in the most heartfelt anguish. Mary the mother beholds Christ carrying the cross. She sees Him suffer on the cross and die; she sees Him taken from the cross and buried, and no grief is more poignant than her own. And yet we may observe that it is neither the irreparableness262 of such a grief, or rather of such a loss, nor the weight of the calamity, nor the lament over the injustice of destiny, which constitutes the real content in such anguish, so that a contrast between it and the sorrow of Niobe is particularly instructive. Niobe, too, has lost all her children, and is set before us in severe loftiness and unperturbed beauty. The main content here is the aspect of the natural life of this ill-starred sufferer, the beauty in which Nature has robed her and which embraces the entire presentment of her actual existence. She, this actual personality, is beauty personified, and therein she persists. But her soul-life, her heart, has lost the entire content of its love, its soul, and her individuality and beauty can only turn into stone. The grief of Mary is of a wholly different type. She feels intimately the dagger which cuts through her soul’s very centre, her heart breaks, but she does not become stone. She did not merely possess love, but her soul-life throughout is nothing but love, that is, free and concrete ideality, which retains the absolute content of that which it loses, and in the loss itself of the beloved persists in the peace of love. Her heart indeed breaks, but the substantive principle of her heart, the content of its life263, which is disclosed through her anguish of soul with a vital strength that can never be lost, is something infinitely more exalted, namely, the living beauty of the human soul, as contrasted with its abstract substance, whose ideal existence as presented in bodily shape, when it is lost remains indeed indestructible, but is turned to stone.

There is one further subject for painting in connection with Mary the mother of Jesus, and that is her death and assumption. Schoreel has with exceptional beauty depicted a death of Mary in which we find the charm of her youth once more restored264. This master has united in his picture the expression of somnambulism, presence of death, rigidity, and blindness towards the exterior world with one which seems to suggest that the spirit, which seems somehow to penetrate through their general aspect, has found a home elsewhere and is blessed therein.

(γγ)Thirdly, we must include within the sphere of the actual presence of God in the life, sufferings, and glorification of Himself, mankind at large265, that is to say the consciousness of individual human life, which God, or more accurately the events of His history, constitutes as itself an object of His love, communicating to it a content which is not merely finite but absolute in its significance. Here, too, we may emphasize the three aspects of tranquil devotion, repentance, and conversion, which both from the point of view of the soul and that of external condition the history of the Divine Passion repeats to mankind, no less than the ideal consummation in glory and the blessedness of pure attainment.

In respect to the first of these, namely, devotion, we have here what is primarily the content of prayer. This relation is in one aspect of it a humbling, surrender of the self, the seeking of peace in another; from another point of view it is not a petition but rather a prayer266. Petition and prayer are no doubt closely connected in so far, that is, as a prayer can be a petition. And yet the genuine petition seeks after something for itself. It importunes the man who possesses something of importance to myself, that he may feel inclined to do me a favour in virtue of the request, that his heart may yield, or his love may be roused toward me, in one word that his feeling of identity with myself may be awakened. What I, however, feel in making a petition is the desire for something, which the other person must lose if I am to secure it. The other person is to love me in order that my self-love may be satisfied, and my weal and necessity be promoted. I on the contrary give nothing further in the transaction unless it be contained in an admission that the person thus opportuned may ask for similar favours from myself. Prayer is not a petition of this type. It is an exaltation of the heart to the Absolute, which is assumed to be essentially Love, and as such possesses nothing independently267. The devotion itself is the gift, the petition itself is the blessedness. For although prayer may contain a petition for some particular thing, yet it is not this particular thing which is the true purport of the prayer; rather the essential truth of it is the conviction that the petition will be heard, and not heard in its relation to the particular request so much as to the absolute trust that God will apportion that which is best for me to receive. And thus even in such a connection prayer is itself its own satisfaction, the enjoyment, the express feeling and consciousness of eternal Love, which not only with its ray of illumination shines through the object268 of prayer and its situation, but in fact constitutes the situation and what is there actually or is thereby manifested. It is this type of supplication which we find exemplified by Pope Sixtus in the picture of Raphael already mentioned269, no less than by Santa Barbara in the same picture, and by many other representations of the prayers of apostles and saints, of Saint Francis270 and the like at the foot of the Cross, where we find in the place of the suffering of Christ, or the dismay, doubt, and despair of the disciples the love and adoration of God, and the prayer that loses itself in Him is selected as the significant content. We find such rendered with particular force for the most part on the countenances of aged men marked strongly with the sufferings and experience of life in the earlier period of painting, faces that appear to be portraits, souls permeated with devotional feeling to such an extent that this attitude of prayer does not merely appear to be experienced at this particular moment, but rather they are presented us as pious and saintlike persons whose entire life, thought, instinct, and volition is one prayer, and whose expression despite of all the truth of their portraiture may be summed up wholly in this assurance and peace of Love. It is otherwise, however, among many of the earlier German and Flemish masters. The subject of the altar picture in Cologne Cathedral is the adoring kings and patrons of Cologne. We find this subject too frequently selected by the school of Van Eyck. In such examples the persons who adore are frequently famous individuals, princes, as, for instance, in a well-known adoration picture, which has been taken for the work of Van Eyck, critics have identified two of the kings with portraits of Philip of Burgundy and Charles the Bold. In the case of personages of this type we see that they are something more than saints, have affairs in the world, and only go to mass on Sunday or in the early morning, but during the rest of the week or for the rest of the day have other business to look after. And more particularly in our Flemish or German pictures the patrons are pious knights, God-fearing housewives with their sons and daughters. They resemble Martha who fares hither and thither and is concerned with matters of external or mundane significance, rather than Mary who has selected once and for all the best part. Their piety is not deficient, it is true, in intensity and soul; but we do not find here the song of Love which is at once the beginning and end of it, and which is perforce not merely an exaltation, a prayer, or thanks for a gift received, but is as much its unique life as that of the nightingale.

We may summarize the distinction which can be drawn generally in pictures of this kind between saints and worshippers on the one hand, and pious members of the Christian community as they actually appeared on the other, in the statement that the worshippers, more especially in Italian pictures, disclose in the expression of their piety a complete harmony of external and spiritual condition. It is their very soul which we find written for the most part on their countenances, which are not permitted to express anything opposed to the emotions of their heart. In the actual conditions of life this is not always the case. An infant, for example, when it weeps, more particularly when beginning to do so, quite apart from the fact that we know its grief is not worth the trouble of crying over, often makes us smile with its ugly faces. And in the same way old folk pucker up their face when they laugh, because the lines of their features are too pronounced, cold, and stiff to accommodate themselves readily to an unreserved and natural laugh or a friendly smile. The art of painting should endeavour to avoid this incompatibility between the emotions of piety expressed and the sensuous forms which have to express them, and, so far as possible, produce a harmony between the soul and its external mode of expression. And this in the highest degree was effected by the Italians; the Germans and Flemish were less successful, because the main object in their work was living portraiture.

I will add one further remark, that this devotion of the soul ought not to reach the point of the actual cry of anxiety, that cry of tribulation and desire, such as the Psalms and many Lutheran hymns express, and we may illustrate it with the old words: “As the hart crieth for the water-brooks, so crieth my soul for Thee.” We may rather indicate it as a gradual melting away, not to that attenuation of sweetness perhaps we associate with the nun, but at any rate a surrender of the soul, and an enjoyment and satisfaction in such surrender. For that travail of faith, that anxious troubling of soul, that doubt and desperation which persists in disunion, such a type of hypochondriacal piety which never is certain whether it is still sin, whether there has been repentance and pardon is complete, a surrender, in which the soul can never advance a step, and is always betraying the fact by his anxiety, such a state is not compatible with the beauty of the romantic Ideal. We much prefer that the eye of devotion should raise its look of yearning heavenwards, although it is both more artistic and gives us yet more satisfaction when it is centred on some present object of adoration, whether it be the Virgin Mother, Christ, or saint. It is a facile thing, only too facile, to attach to a picture a spiritual interest, by making its central figure gaze heavenwards, anywhere beyond the world, just as we find that nowadays people are only too ready to make use of an equally facile way of proving God and religion to be the foundation of society by quoting texts of the Bible rather than establishing such a basis on the reason of actual reality. Such a gaze of countenance upwards becomes in the pictures of Guido Reni271, for example, a pure mannerism. The Assumption of the Virgin, too, which we find at Munich, has been much eulogized by its admirers and critics, and we may admit that the exalted character of its transfiguration, the absorption and surrender of the soul in the heavenly vision, and indeed the entire pose of the ascending figure, to say nothing of the brilliance and beauty of the colouring, is most impressive. But for myself I find such representations which depict the Virgin Mother in her own daydream of love and blessedness with her glance centred on her babe still more appropriate to her truth. The other type of yearning and strain, with its upward gaze heavenwards, is somewhat too near to our modern sentimentalism.

A further aspect of importance is concerned with the entrance of the principle of negation into the spiritual devotion of Love. The disciples, saints, and martyrs, have to pass through, in some measure as an experience of their souls, and in part, too, as one of their external life, that way of suffering along which the Christ in the history of His Passion passed before them.

This suffering lies to some extent on the confines of art. Painting can very easily overstep this boundary, in so far, that is, as it accepts for its subject-matter the horrors and terrors of the bodily torture, whether it be in flaying, or burning, or crucifixion, and its pains. This it is not permitted to do, if it is not to forsake the spiritual Ideal. This is not solely due to the fact that to present martyrs under such conditions to our sight is not beautiful to the sense, nor because our nerves nowadays are too keenly strung, but on the better ground that this material aspect is not the really important one. The true content we have to follow with sympathy and which should be depicted is the spiritual experience, the soul in all that it suffers through Love, and not the direct bodily pain of a certain individual, the grief for the sufferings of another, or the anguish felt personally for personal demerit. The endurance of martyrs in physical tortures is an endurance which carries with it merely physical pain: what the spiritual Ideal looks for is the trial of the soul in its own domain, its own peculiar suffering, the wounds of its love, the repentance, mourning, anguish, and penance of its heart.

But we must add that in depicting this pain of soul the positive aspect must not wholly be absent. The soul must be assured of the actual and essentially consummated reconciliation between mankind and God, and only experience anxiety that this eternal salvation be realized as a truth in itself. In this connection we not unfrequently meet with repentant people, martyrs, and monks, who, despite of their assuredness of an objective atonement, partly are overwhelmed with sorrow for a heart whose entire surrender they deem to be right, and partly have already made such complete surrender, and yet are always for realizing such reconciliation anew, and consequently for ever imposing on themselves the burden of penances. And we find, therefore, in the artistic treatment of such situations a twofold point of departure. In other words, the artist may, to start with, presuppose in his subject an open disposition, freedom, cheerfulness, and decision of spirit, such as carries with ease life and the yoke of the actual world and knows how to readily deal with the same, then he may fitly associate with such painful experiences a native nobility, grace, freshness, freedom, and beauty of form. When, on the contrary, his work is based upon a natural sense that is more refractory, defiant, savage, and limited, the conflict of the spirit in overcoming the flesh and the world, and securing to itself the religion of salvation will necessarily imply more severe travail. In cases of such obstinacy of soul, therefore, the harsher reflections of force and stability are more apparent, the scars of the wounds which have been inflicted on an obstinacy of this type are more visible and enduring, and the beauty of the physical result tends to vanish272.

Thirdly, that positive aspect of atonement, the transfigurement that results from grief’s travail, the blessedness that comes of repentance may be independently accepted as the subject of artistic presentment though it may readily pass into false conceptions.

Such, then, are the main distinguishing characteristics of the absolute spiritual Ideal regarded as the essential content of romantic painting. It forms the material of its most successful and solemn creations, works that are immortal by virtue of the depth of their contemplation; and when the representation of essential truth is thereby expressed they are nothing less than the most exalted expansion of the soul to its heaven of bliss, the most intimate and complete revelation of ideal life that an artist can bring before our vision.

Following this pre-eminently religious sphere of artistic production we have still to investigate two further fields of its activity.

(β) In direct contrast to the province of religion we have that which, if we consider it in its isolated abstraction, is equally destitute of the life of soul and God, Nature in its simplest terms, and regarded more definitely in its connection with painting, Nature’s landscape. We have stated the character of the object of religion to be such that in it the substantive ideality of the soul expresses therein the indwelling sense of Love as united to the Absolute273. This inward ideality has, however, a further content. It is able to discover in that which is wholly external an accord with soul-life, and can recognize in the objective world as such traits which have an affinity with what is spiritual. Regarded in their immediacy, no doubt, hills, mountains, woods, valleys, streams, meadows, sunlight, moon, and the starry heavens, are simply perceived to be the natural objects they are. But, in the first place, these objects have to start with an independent interest, in so far as it is the free life of Nature, which appears in them, and produces a sense of fellow feeling in the individual as one who shares that life himself; and, secondly, the particular changes of Nature’s moods bring about states in the soul which correspond to such moods. It is possible for man to follow with his own life this animation of Nature and partake in this harmony of soul with its environment, and feel thereby at home in Nature. Just as the Arcadians spoke of a Pan, who made them shudder and frightened in the gloaming of the forest, in the same way the varied conditions of Nature’s landscape in its gentle blithesomeness, its balmy repose, its spring-freshness, its wintry chill, its morning awakening and evening rest find their counterfeits in states of the soul. The tranquil depth of the ocean, the possibility that its depths may break forth with infinite power is akin to soul movements, just as conversely the roaring, upwelling, foaming, and break of storm-tossed waves stir the soul with concordant music. It is an ideal significance of this kind that the art of painting accepts as its object. And for this reason it is not natural objects merely as such in their external form and association which ought to constitute its true content, so that painting is nothing more than a mere imitation, but rather the animation of Nature’s life, which interfuses it throughout and which is able to bring into prominence and assert with more vividness in the scenes of Nature reproduced the characteristic affinity of specific conditions of this life with particular spiritual states — it is a vital participation in Nature of this kind which gives us the meeting-point, steeped as it is in the soul-life and temperament of the artist, by means of which Nature may become the content of painting not merely as environment, but as possessing a distinct individuality274.

(γ) There is yet further a third type of idealization which we find partly in the case where objects wholly insignificant are detached from the position they occupy in the landscape, and, partly, in scenes of human life, which may appear to us not merely as wholly accidental as thus selected, but even of a kind that is both mean and commonplace. I have already found an opportunity for an attempt to justify the artistic selection of such subjects275. I will in connection with painting merely add the following remarks to our former discussion.

The art of painting is not merely concerned with the inward life of the soul, but with that ideal element that is essentially particularized276. This latter type of ideality for the reason that particularity is its principle is not content to rest satisfied with the absolute object of religion, and as little will merely accept from the external world Nature’s vitality and its defined character as landscape; rather it insists on partaking of everything, in which man as an isolated individual soul can take a rational interest and find pleasure. Even in the case of its representations of religious material art, in proportion as it develops, it attaches such more closely to terrestrial conditions and the objects of actual vision, giving to its content the complete presence of natural existence, so that we ultimately find that the aspect of sensuous existence is most important and the interest of devotional life only so in a subordinate degree. For here, too, art receives the task to work out the Ideal in its fullest realization, in other words, to present to our senses that which is originally detached from them, to carry over objects taken from the remoteness of past life into present life and unite them with that present human life.

At our present stage of human evolution it is the ideality which we find in actual life as it faces us, in the circumstances of daily experience, the most common and the most trivial, which is the actual content.

(αα) If we inquire, then, what it is that makes a content of this kind, otherwise so poverty-stricken and indifferent, compatible with the claims of art, we must reply that it is the substantive core that is contained and made valid therein, in general terms the vitality and delight of self-subsistent existence, exemplified in the greatest variety of its aims and interests. The life of mankind is always in the immediate Present. What a man may do in each moment thereof is something specific, and its justification consists in the fact that he carries through all his engagements, the least no less than the greatest, with heart and soul. In this way he is united with each particular incident, and, by infusing into each the entire force of his individuality, appears to identify his whole existence with such. This coalescence277 produces that harmony of the individual with the specific character of his immediate activity in the circumstances that are nearest him, which is itself a mode of ideality, and which communicates in such a case to the subsistency of an existence, which is an exclusive and perfected whole, its attractive character. The interest, therefore, that we derive from representations of this kind is not to be attributed to the subject-matter, but rather to this animating soul, which by itself, and independently of that wherein it is disclosed as vital, finds an echo in every uncorrupted nature, in every free spirit, and is for the same an object of sympathy and delight. We must not, therefore, impair our enjoyment on the ground that the demand is made of us to admire such works of art under the aspect of their likeness to Nature so-called and such illusive imitation278. This demand, which works of this kind appear at first blush to support, is itself merely a deception which fails to hit the real point. For an admiration of this type is solely deducible from the wholly external comparison of a work of art and a work of Nature, and is only associated with the similarity of the counterfeit with an object or fact presented us, whereas the real content here and the artistic quality in the composition and execution is the coalescence of the matter portrayed with its own substance, which is the reality as independently depicted in its vital characterization. According to the principle of illusion, for instance, the portraits of Denner are entitled to our praise, which are, no doubt, imitations of Nature, but for the most part fail entirely to present us that vital animation on which we lay the main stress in these cases, and are mainly concerned with depicting hair, wrinkles, and generally every kind of trait which, without exactly being indicative of a corpse, are equally remote from the human physiognomy depicted as alive.

Moreover, if we permit ourselves to level down our enjoyment through superficial thoughts of the above fashionable kind, believing subjects of this type to be mean and unworthy of our contemplation, we accept the content by doing so in a form other than that in which art offers them us. In other words we merely associate with them the relation in which we stand to them according to our personal needs, pleasure, such education as we otherwise possess and other objects we have before us, that is to say we merely conceive them in respect to their external purport, throughout which it is our own requirements which are the vital thing we aim at for ourselves, and the matter of all importance. The life of the subject-matter itself, however, is thereby destroyed, in so far, that is, as the sole object of its existence appears to be that of a means simply, or lapses into a thing of no moment at all, just because we personally have no need for it. A gleam of sunlight, for example, which falls upon a room we enter through an open door, a part of the country we travel through, a sempstress, a maid we happen to see busily engaged, one and all we may regard with indifference, because we suffer them to pass by remote from the thoughts and interests which are bound up with them, and consequently in our soliloquy, or conversation with another will not suffer the situations which actually lie before us to speak a word in the current of our own thoughts and speech; or we cast what is merely a passing glance at them, the summary of which does not amount to more than the remark, “how pleasant, fine, or ugly they are.” Thus we are charmed with the joviality of dance of peasants, while we merely glance at it superficially, or turn away from it with contempt, because we are hostile to “every sort of barbarism.” We treat in a similar way the human countenances we come across in our daily life, or which we happen to chance upon. Our own personal point of view, and the various matters which engage us are for ever being interposed. We are forced to address this or that person in a certain way, we have affairs to despatch, we have certain things to consider, thoughts that affect our relation to such a person; we observe him under the particular circumstances of our knowledge; we regulate our conversation relatively to that, or we are silent upon it, if he may be likely to resent it — in short we have always in our minds the man’s business, station, and status, and our attitude to and business with him, remaining in a wholly practical relation, or in a position of indifference and preoccupied inattention. Art, however, when it depicts such real life, wholly changes our attitude to it; it cuts away once and for all all practical deviations279, such as we are wont to associate with such material; it places us simply in the attitude of abstract contemplation to it; and in the like degree it does away with its indifference, and directs our otherwise preoccupied attention wholly to the situation portrayed; upon which we must collect and concentrate all our faculties, if we are to enjoy it. Sculpture, in particular, by virtue of its ideal mode of production from the first strikes off all practical relation to the object to the extent that its product at once betrays the fact that it does not belong to this reality. Painting, on the contrary, carries us wholly into the presence of the daily life with which we are in immediate contact, but it furthermore destroys all the threads of practical necessity, attraction, inclination, or disinclination, which draw us to such a Present, or the reverse, and forces us to approach those objects more intimately as ends to themselves in their own particular phase or mode of life. What we meet with here is just the opposite to that which Herr von Schlegel, for example, in the tale of Pygmalion, expresses so very prosily as the return of the completed work of art to common life, that is to a relation of a man’s own inclinations and an actual enjoyment, a return which is the very opposite of that alienation, in which the work of art places the objects delineated in their relation to our practical necessities, and, precisely by doing so, sets forth before us their own independent life and appearance.

(ββ) Just as, then, art, in this particular sphere, re-establishes the forfeited independence of a content, which we otherwise failed to preserve in its unique characteristics, in the same way, secondly, it is able to secure in stability such objects as may happen to appear in actual existence in a form we are not accustomed to respect simply as such. The higher Nature stretches in its organization and shifting appearance the more it resembles the actor who only serves the present need. In this connection I have already emphasized the fact as a triumph of art over reality, namely, that it is able to fix that which is most evanescent. This power of art in attaching permanence to momentary things applies not only to the sudden flash of life we find concentrated in certain situations, but also to the magical effect of its external presentment in the rapid changes of its colour. A troop of horsemen, for example, may alter every moment in the mode of its grouping, and the mutual relation of each rider within it. If we were one of such we should have something else to do than consider the lively effect of such changes. We should have to mount, dismount, make up our haversack, eat, drink, rest, groom, drink and feed our horses: or, if we looked on as ordinary folk, we should look at such with wholly different interests. We should want to know what they are there for, what nationality they are, for what reason they have left their barracks, and so forth. The painter, on the contrary, smuggles off the most volatile of the movements, the most evanescent expressions of countenance, the most momentary gleams of colour apparent in such motion, and places such before us solely in virtue of its interest in the animation of such phenomena which without it would vanish. For especially it is the play of the colouring, not treated merely as flat tint, but in its lights and shadows, and in the prominence or subordination of the objects painted which is the reason that the representation appears lifelike, a fact which we are accustomed to observe in works of art less than such an aspect deserves, bringing as it does art first clearly to our minds. And, moreover, the artist preferably accepts in depicting these natural relations the effort of following the least detail, and making his work concrete, definite and stamped with individuality, endeavouring as he does to secure for his subject-matter the individuality which phenomenal life itself supplies in its most momentary flashes; and yet withal does not so much seek for such a detail merely as imitated closely to strike our senses with its directness, but rather to furnish a definite image to the imagination in which at the same time the ideality of the entire composition remains active.

(γγ) The more insignificant the objects are, in comparison with the material of religion, which this particular phase of painting accepts for its content, to that very extent it is just this quality of artistic creation, the manner of observation, conception, elaboration, the vitality communicated by the artist to his work by all his individual faculties, in short the soul and living enthusiasm of his execution, which constitute a prominent aspect of its interest, and are part of its content. That which the subject treated is under his workmanship must, however, substantially remain what it is in fact and is capable of being. We believe, indeed, that we look upon something different, and novel, because in actual life we do not pay the same detailed attention to similar situations, and their manner of colouring. Looked at on the reverse side no doubt we have something, too, that is new added to such ordinary subjects, namely, just this very enthusiasm, artistic insight and spirit, the soul, in which the artist handles them, adapts them to his uses, and by doing so infuses the enthusiasm of his activity like the breath of a new life throughout all his work280.

Such, then, are the essential points of view, which it was necessary to discuss in regard to the content of painting.

(b) The second aspect which we have next in order to examine is connected with the more particular modes of definition, to which the sensuous material, in so far as it has to accept in itself a given content, has to accommodate itself.

(α) The first of these of importance is the linear perspective. This is introduced as necessary, because painting has only the superficies at its disposal and no longer, as was the case with the bas-relief of antique sculpture, can extend its figures side by side on one and the same plane, but has to proceed to a mode of presentation, which finds it necessary to make the remoteness of its objects in all their spatial dimensions merely appear as such to our senses. For the art of painting has to unfold the content it selects, to place the same in its various movement before our eyes, and to associate in different ways its figures with the landscape of external Nature, its buildings and so forth, in a wholly distinct grade of literalness to that which sculpture in the relief is able to secure. And that which painting in this respect cannot place before us in its actual degree of remoteness in the realistic manner of sculpture it must present under the illusion of reality. What we have first to notice here consists in this that the single surface which confronts painting is divided into distinct planes, apparently remote from one another, and by this means the contrasts of a near foreground and a remote background are secured, which furthermore are linked together by means of a middle distance. Inasmuch as the objects are, the more distant they are from the vision, proportionately reduced in size, and this deduction follows in Nature itself optical laws capable of mathematical determination, the art of painting, too, has on its part to follow the same rules, which, by virtue of the fact that objects are set forth on one surface, are applicable here in a particular way. And this is the rational ground of the so-called linear or mathematical perspective in the art of painting, whose more detailed exposition, however, it is not our business here to discuss.

(β) In the second place, however, objects are not only placed at a certain distance from one another, but they also differ in shape. This particular mode of their spatial limitation by virtue of which every object is made visible in its particular form is the subject-matter of draughtsmanship. The art of drawing gives us for the first time not merely the comparative distance of objects from one another, but their respective configuration. Its most important principle is accuracy of form and relative distance, which of course in the first instance is not as yet associated with ideal281 expression, but related simply to external appearance, and consequently forms the purely external framework282, an accuracy, however, which, more particularly in the case of organic forms and their varied movements, is on account of the fore-shortenings thereby rendered necessary one of extreme difficulty. In so far as these two aspects are related purely to form and its spatial totality they constitute the plastic or sculpturesque features in painting, which this art, for the very reason that it expresses what is most ideal in its significance by means of external form, can as little dispense with as it can in another respect remain solely content with. For its supreme task is the employment of colour, and in such a way that in all that is truly painting distance and shape only attain and discover their genuine presentment by virtue of the distinctions of colour.

(γ) It is, therefore, colour, and the art of colouring, which make the painter a painter. We dwell with pleasure, no doubt, on the drawing, and exceptionally so on the study or sketch, as on that which pre-eminently betrays the quality of genius; but however rich with invention and imagination, with whatever directness the soul of an artist may assert itself in such studies by reason of the more transparent and mobile shell of their form, yet the fact remains to be painting we must have colour, if the work is not to continue abstract from the point of view of its sensuous material in the vital individuality and articulation of its objects. We must, however, at the same time admit that drawings and dry point drawings from the hand of great masters such as Raphael and Albrecht Dürer are of real importance. In fact from a certain point of view we may say that it is just these hand drawings which carry with them the finest interest. We find here the wonderful result that the entire spirit of the master is expressed directly in such manual facility, a facility which places with the greatest ease, in instantaneous work, without any preliminary essays, the essential substance of the master’s conception. The border drawings of Dürer, for example, in the Prayer-book of the Munich library, are of indescribable ideality and freedom. Idea and execution appear in such a case to be one and the same thing, whereas in finished pictures we cannot avoid the sense that the consummate result is only secured after repeated over-paintings, a continuous process of advance and finish.

In despite of this, however, it is only through its employment of colour that the art of painting is able to give a real and vital presentment to the wealth of soul-life. All the schools of painting have, however, not retained the art of colouring at the same high level. It is a significant fact that we may, with an exception here and there, assert that it is only the Venetians and the Dutch283 who have become consummate masters in their use of it. Both peoples were linked to the sea-coast, both situated on a low-lying land divided by fens, streams, and canals. In the case of the Dutch we may find an explanation in the fact that, on account of their having so perpetually a cloud-covered horizon, their conception of a gray background became fixed in their minds, and owing to this very gloomy prepossession they were the more driven to study colour in all its effects and variety of lighting, shadow, and chiaroscuro, to emphasize this and to discover in this the main task of their artistic efforts. In contrast to that of the Venetians and the Dutch the painting of the Italians generally, if we except that of Correggio and one or two others, appears to be more dry, sapless, cold, and lifeless. Looked at more closely we may emphasize the following points in connection with the art of colouring as the most important.

(αα) In the first place we have the abstract basis of all colour in light and dark. When we posit this contrast and its transitions by themselves without further distinctions of colour effect, we get thereby simply the contrasts supplied us by white as light and black as shadow together with their transitional grades and nuances, contrasts which offer to the art of drawing its integrating quality, appertaining as they do to the real plastic character of form, and producing the prominence, retreat, rondure, and distance of objects. We may incidentally mention in this connection the art of engraving on the plate which is wholly concerned with light and shadow as such284. Apart from the infinite assiduity and labour it implies we find in this highly valuable art, at the point of its supreme attainment, soul intimately associated with the utility of great variety of form285, a variety which the art of bookbinding also possesses. Such an art, however, is not wholly occupied with effects of light and shade as that of simple draughtsmanship is; it endeavours further in its elaboration to become distinctly a rival of painting, and in addition to light and shade such as is purely the effect of illumination, also strives to express those distinctions of more emphatic light and darkness which are primarily the result of local colour; we find, for example, in a copperplate engraving that an attempt is made by its use of light effects to render visible the distinction between blond and black hair.

In painting, however, as already remarked, mere light and darkness only supply the fundamental basis, albeit such a foundation is of the greatest importance. For it is this contrast and only this which defines the comparative prominence and retirement, the rondure, and generally the actual appearance of form as sensuous shape, all that we understand by modelling. Masters of colour in this respect simply carry the process to the most extreme contrasts of the most brilliant light and the deepest shadow, and merely produce thereby their grand effects. Such contrasts are, however, only permissible in so far as they avoid harshness, that is, in so far as they are made within the limits of a just interplay of intermediate tones and colour transitions, which bind the entire composition in a fluid unity and render the finest gradations of tint possible. If such contrasts are entirely absent the entire effect will be flat, because it is precisely this distinction between that which is more brilliant and more obscure which gives emphatic prominence to particular aspects of the work and a like subordination to others. And especially in the case of compositions having a large content, and where the distance between objects is considerable, it is necessary to introduce the deepest shadow in order to make the scale of light and shadow a broad one.

With regard to the closer definition of light and shade we find that this depends more than anything else upon the mode of lighting accepted by the artist. The light of day, that of morning, noon, and evening, sunlight or moonlight, a clear or clouded sky, the light of tempest, candle-light, a light that is veiled, or falls upon the object or diffuses itself gradually, every conceivable mode of lighting, in short, is possible, and the cause of every kind of effect. In treating a subject of public interest, full of incident, a situation that at once appeals to our common sense, the question of external lighting is of subordinate importance. The artist will avail himself here with most advantage of ordinary daylight, if, that is, the demands of dramatic vividness, and a desire to emphasize particular figures and groups, or to throw into the background others, do not render a less usual mode of lighting necessary, which may fall in more readily with such objects.

The great painters of the earlier school have consequently as a rule made little use of such contrasts or specific schemes of lighting. And they did rightly, inasmuch as their emphasis was rather on the spiritual aspect as such than on the sensuous impression of their pictures. And on account of the pre-eminent ideality and spiritual significance of the content they were able to dispense with the aspect of their work which inclined more or less to the material side. In the case of landscapes, on the contrary, and subjects of less importance taken from ordinary life, the question of lighting makes a very different appeal. In these important artistic and, often, artificial and mysterious effects are indispensable. In the landscape the bold contrasts between large masses in illumination and other parts in the strongest shadow will receive their full effect, but tend also to develop the artistic mannerism. Conversely we find, more especially in the treatment of landscape, reflections of light, the flash and its counterfeit, that wonderful echo of light, which arises from the interplay of light and dark, and offers an ample and progressive subject of study both to the artist and the spectator. Such a scheme of lighting, which the artist has either by direct imitation or imaginatively conceived in his work, can, however, by itself only be a transient one, which is subject to rapid change. However sudden or uncommon the lighting thus permanently retained may be, the artist must see in the treatment of his composition, even though it be as full of movement as possible, that the whole, despite all its variety, is not injured by mere restlessness and wavering motive, but is throughout clear and marked with unity.

(ββ) In accordance with what has already been stated the art of painting, however, has not merely to express light and dark in its purely abstract intension, but to add to it the distinctions of colour. Light and shadow must be coloured light and shadow. We have therefore in the second place to discuss colour simply.

The first point we have to deal with here is the brightness and obscurity of particular colours respectively to one another, that is in so far as they are operative as light and dark in their varied relations, and either emphasize or suppress and impair their individual effect. Red, for example, and still more yellow, is at an equal grade of intensity more brilliant than blue. This is dependent upon the nature of the colours themselves, which in recent times Goethe has for the first time fully explained286. In other words, we find that in blue shadow is of main significance, which, in its first operation through a brighter, but not as yet fully transparent medium, appears to our sight as blue. The sky, for example, is dark, and on the highest mountains it is yet darker. Seen through a transparent but thick medium, such as the atmosphere of its lower planes is, it appears as blue, and its brightness increases in proportion as the air is less transparent. In the case of yellow, on the contrary, essential brightness works through a density, which, however, suffers this brightness to shine through it. Smoke, for example, is such an obscuring medium; looked at in front of anything black which works its way through it, it appears of a bluish tint, and before anything bright it appears yellow and reddish. Genuine red is the actively royal and concrete colour, in which blue and yellow, themselves also extremes of opposition, press together in fusion, We may also regard green as such a union, not, however, in a unity that is concrete, but merely as a difference that is cancelled, as a medium of satiated and tranquillized neutrality287. These colours are the purest, simplest, and original cardinal colours. We may consequently find a symbolical significance in the way that the old masters made use of them. Especially is this so in their use of blue and red. Blue corresponds with the milder, sensuous, more tranquil aspect, a contemplation which is rich in feeling, in so far as it has obscurity for its principle, and offers no resistance, whereas the brightness therein rather suggests that which resists, produces, is alive and blithesome. Red corresponds with what is masculine, dominant, and royal, green with that which is indifferent and neutral. According to such symbolism for example, the Virgin Mary is frequently clothed in red where she is enthroned, and set before us as queen of heaven; where she is depicted as mother, she wears a blue mantle288. All the other colours in their endless variety must be regarded as mere modifications of the above, in which we must recognize a certain degree of shadow fused with the cardinal colours. In this sense no painter would call violet a colour289. Furthermore all these colours, in their mutual relation to each other, are respectively of greater brightness or obscurity, a fact that the artist must bear in mind if he is not to fail in getting the just tone which any particular section of his modelling or distance effects ought to have. In other words we have here a source of exceptional difficulty. In the countenance, for example, the lip is red, the eyebrow dark, black, brown, or, if blonde, at least darker as such than the lip; in the same way the cheeks with their reddish tint are more brilliant in colour than the nose, with its main impression of yellow, brownish, or greenish tint. Such portions of the face can readily receive a greater brightness and intensity owing to this local colour than is consonant with their modelling as parts of the whole. In sculpture, indeed in mere drawing too, such parts of a composition receive their light and shadow wholly in reference to their particular form and its manner of lighting. A painter on the contrary must accept their local colouring, and this disturbs such a relation. Such a difficulty is even more obvious between objects more removed from one another. For the ordinary vision of sight it is our mind which determines the distance and form of such objects, not merely by means of their colour appearance, but also on a variety of other grounds. In painting, however, all that we have before us is colour, which as such is able to interfere with that which is demanded by mere brightness and darkness as such. The art of the painter, therefore, consists in his ability to resolve this contradiction, and so to arrange his colours that neither in their local tints, nor in their mutual relation in any other way, they impair the modelling as a whole. Only if success is secured in both respects are we likely to see the actual shape and colour of the objects realized in perfection. With what consummate art, for example, have the Dutch painted the sheen of satin dresses with all their variety of reflections and gradations of shadow in their folds, or the flash of silver, gold, copper, vessels of glass and velvet; and in the same way we may mention the lighting a Van Eyck gives to his jewels, gold borders, and metals. The colours by means of which the flash of gold is presented have nothing of metallic about them: looked at closely we merely see yellow, which by itself is of no great brightness. The entire effect is due on the one hand to the prominence of the form, and on the other to the contiguity of the mutual gradations of distinct colour tones.

A further aspect in the second place is the harmony of the colouring.

I have already observed that the very nature of the facts necessitates that colour should have itself an articulated system. And this complete result should appear. No fundamental colour should be wholly omitted, otherwise our sense of this integrated whole is lost. To an exceptional degree the old Italian masters and the Dutch satisfy us in this respect. We find in their pictures blue, yellow, red, and green290. It is this completeness which supplies the basis of our colour harmony. The colours, moreover, must be so arranged that not merely their artistic contrast, but also their mediation and resolution, and a repose and reconciliation as the result of such, is made visible to the sight. Such effective contrast and repose in conciliated extremes is brought about partly by the way the colours are associated, and partly by the degree of intensity which characterizes each colour. In early painting it was principally the Dutch school291, which employed the cardinal colours in their purity and their unimpaired brilliance, by which means the harmony is rendered more difficult by reason of the emphasis laid on contrast, but when secured should be pleasing to the eye. Where, however, the decisive character and force of colour is insisted on the nature of the subject-matter itself should be more definite and simple. And by attending to this a higher degree of harmony between colouring and content is also obtained. The important personages, for instance, must receive the colour that is most emphatic, and in their characterization, their entire deportment and expression should appear more imposing than the subordinate figures, who will receive merely the composite colours. In landscape painting the contrast of pure cardinal colours is less pronounced. In scenes, on the contrary, in which human figures are of most importance, and more particularly where drapery occupies large spaces of canvas, the more simple colours will be in their right place. In such we have a scene taken from the world of spiritual life, in which that which is inorganic, the natural environment, is more abstract, in other words must not appear in its natural completeness and isolated manner of effect, and the varied tints of landscape in all the profusion of their gradations are less suitable. As a rule the landscape is not so entirely fitted to the environment of human scenes as a room, or generally that which is architectural, inasmuch as situations which take place in the open air are in general not accepted from a class in which the life of soul without considerable reserve is manifested. If a man is placed before us with the open landscape around him it should appear simply as environment. And in cases of this type it is right to make use of colours that are exceptionally prominent. But the use of such involves also boldness and power of execution. Sickly sweet, overpowered292, doting faces are not the kind for such treatment. Such soft expressions, such over-diluted countenances, which, ever since Mengs gave them as people are wont to think typical of ideality, would be entirely pulverized by such decision of colour. In recent times and among us Germans, weak faces which have essentially nothing to say293, carefully posed in ways that imagine themselves to possess grace, simplicity, and imposing character, are all the fashion. This lack of distinction, on the side of spiritual characterization, has its counterpart in and indeed produces a similar lack of definition in colour and tone, so that all colours are run together in one confusion, and forceless condition of mutilation and evaporization, and no real emphasis is laid on any. You cannot say that one suppresses another exactly, but then none adds contrast to another. It is no doubt a colour harmony of a kind, and frequently it impresses with its excessive sweetness and flattering endearment, but the note of distinction is absent. In this connection Goethe thus expresses himself in his observations added to the translation of Diderot’s essay on painting: “Critics do not by any means admit that it is easier to make weak colour harmonious than a strong scheme: but it stands to reason when colour is strong, when colours are placed before us vividly, in that case the eye will experience their harmony or discord with greater vividness. If, however, we weaken our colours, employ some with brilliance, others in fusion, others in obscure squalour, then it is obvious no one will be able to say whether the picture he looks at is harmonious or not. One thing in any case we can say of it, it lacks distinction.”

With harmony of colour, however, we have not by any means attained the goal of the art of colouring. To reach this consummate effect, in the third place, several other aspects must not be neglected. In this respect I will restrict my observations to three points, first, the so-called atmospheric perspective, secondly, flesh-colour, and in conclusion, the magic of colour brilliancy.294

Linear perspective is connected in the first instance merely with the different degrees of size, which the lines of objects possess in their greater or less remoteness from the human eye. This alteration and reduction of form is, however, not the only thing painting has to reproduce. In Nature everything is affected by the presence of atmosphere, not merely between different objects, but even different parts of them, a difference which asserts itself in colour. This tone of colour which thus as it were evaporates with the distance is what constitutes atmospheric perspective, in so far as thereby objects are modified partly in deliberate outline, and partly in respect to their light and shadow and general colouring. As a rule people think that what is nearest to the eye in the foreground is brightest, and what lies in the background is more obscure; in truth the matter is otherwise295. But lights and shadows in the foreground are strongest, in other words the contrast between light and shade has a more powerful effect, and outlines are more defined near to the spectator. In proportion, however, to the degree of their remoteness, they lose in definition of colour and form, because the contrast of their light and shadow is gradually reduced, until finally everything disappears in transpicuous gray. Different schemes of lighting, however, necessitate in this respect various modes of treatment. In landscape painting more especially, but also in other compositions, which present large spaces, atmospheric perspective is of first importance, and the great masters of colour have carried out by this means the most bewitching effects.

The most difficult achievement in colouring, the ideal and consummation of its art, is the colour effect of the human flesh296, which unites in its perfection all other colour tones, without permitting any particular one to be singly prominent. The healthy red in the cheeks of youth is, no doubt, pure carmine without any admixture of blue, violet, or yellow, but this red is itself only a flush, or rather a sheen, which appears to rise on the surface, and imperceptibly passes into the prevailing flesh-tints. And this is an ideal297 commixture of all the fundamental colours. Through the transparent yellow of the skin the red of the arteries and the blue of the veins is visible, and along with the light and shade and all the variety of sheen and reflection we have further tones of gray, brown, even green, which at first sight appear as contrary to Nature, but for all that may contribute to the justness and truth of the effect. Moreover, this composite treatment of many apparent tints is wholly without sheen as such, that is, it reflects nothing alien to it on its surface; its vital quality is entirely a result of itself and the living thing it is. It is this rendering of that which is the life shining through the organic integument which constitutes the main difficulty. We may compare it to a lake in the evening glow, in which we behold the objects that it reflects298 no less than the clear depth and native character of water. The flash of metal combines on the contrary, no doubt, both light of its own and transparency, jewels both flash and are translucent, and something similar is seen in the case of velvet and silk-stuffs, but none of these approaches the life-conferred interfusion of colours apparent on the surface of the living flesh. The skin of animals, whether hair or hide, wool, and so forth, are in like manner of the most varied colouring, but it is a colour capable of more direct and independent definition in its parts, so that the variety is rather the result of different surfaces and planes, it is not a single transfusion and suffusion of many colours such as human flesh is. The nearest approach to it perhaps is the interplay of colour visible in the bunch of grapes, or the exquisitely tender gradations of translucent colour in the rose. And yet even this last example is unable to give us the counterfeit of ideal animation299 which flesh-colour should possess. It is this volatile emanation of the soul exhibited on a non-transparent surface which is one of the most difficult problems of painting. For this ideality, this reflex of the inward life of soul must not appear on a surface as imported there, must not be pasted there as so many streaks, hatchings, and so forth of material colour, but seem to us itself to belong to the living whole300, a transparent depth, as the blue of heaven, which offers our vision no repellent surface, but one in which we are infallibly invited to unfold. Already Diderot, in the essay on painting translated by Goethe, expressed himself as follows on this head: “He who once has truly felt and secured the apparition of flesh-colour is far on his way to perfect victory. Thousands of painters have died without such a feeling, and many thousands more will die without doing so.”

In so far as the material is concerned, by means of which this untransparent vitality of flesh is reproduced, the first medium to declare its suitability for such an effect was the oil-pigment. Work in mosaics is of all the least fitting to present us such a composite effect. Its permanency is no doubt a recommendation, but inasmuch as it can only express colour gradations through variously coloured glass cubes or stones placed in juxtaposition, it is wholly unable to reproduce the intermingling flow of one unified presentment of many colours. Fresco and tempera painting carry us considerably further in this direction. Yet in the case of fresco-painting the colours are put on the wet plaster with too great rapidity, so that, on the one hand, the greatest facility and sureness of brushwork is an essential, and, on the other, the work has to be carried out with broad adjacent strokes, which on account of their drying so rapidly do not admit of a fine degree of finish301. The same kind of difficulty meets us in the case of tempera-painting, a process302 which no doubt admits of great lucidity of expression303 and beautiful contrasts of light and shadow, yet for all that, by reason of the fact that its medium dries so quickly, is less adapted to the fusion and elaboration of its effects, and necessitates an articulate surface made up of definite strokes of the brush. The oil pigment, on the contrary, not only permits of the most tender and subtle melting together and elaborate fusion of colour effect, so that transitions are so imperceptible we cannot say where one colour begins and where it leaves off, but it is, where its component elements are properly fused and the execution of it is as it should be, itself remarkable for a luminous quality like that of precious stones, and it can, by virtue of its distinctions between opaque or transparent colours304, reproduce in a far higher degree than tempera painting the translucency of different layers of colour.

The third and last point for our consideration in this connection is the emanation305 and mystery of colour in its entire effect. This witchery of colour appearance will mainly be found, where the substantive ideality of objects has become an effusion of spirit which enters into the scheme and treatment of its coloured presentment. In general, we may say that the magic consists in a handling of colour by means of which we obtain an interplay of scenic effect which is devoid of defined articulation as such, which is, in fact, simply the result of moulding of colour in the finest degree of fluency, a fusion of coloured material, an interplay of reflected points which pass into one another, and are so fine and evanescent in their gradations, so full of vital cohesion that the medium here seems already to have entered that of musical sound. From the point of view of modelling the mastery of chiaroscuro is part of this magic result, an aspect of the art in which among the Italians Leonardo da Vinci and, above all, Correggio were supreme. While introducing the very deepest shadow, the transparency of this is not only preserved, but is carried through imperceptible gradations to the most brilliant light. By this means roundness in the moulding of form is complete; there is no harshness of line or limit, but all is equable transition. Light and shadow are not here merely in their immediate effect as such, but gleam through one another much as a spiritual force is operative through an external shell. It is just an effect like this we find in the artistic treatment of colour, and the Dutch were no less than others consummate masters of this. By virtue of this ideality, this mutual relation between the parts, this interfusion of reflections and colour scintillations, this alternation and evanescence of transitional tones, a breath of soul and vitality is throughout communicated in the brilliancy, depth, the mild and juicy illumination of colour. It is this which gives us the magic effect of a masterpiece of colour; it is the unique gift of the genius of the artist who is himself the magician.

(γγ) And this brings us to the last point we have to discuss on this part of our subject.

We started with the linear perspective, we passed on then to drawing and concluded with colour; first considering light and shade in its relation to modelling, and, secondly, viewing it as colour simply, or more accurately, as the mutual relation between degrees of brightness and darkness in colours, regarding it, moreover, in its aspects of harmony, atmospheric perspective, flesh-colour and magical effect. We have now to consider more directly306 the creative impulse of the artist in bringing about such colour effects.

The ordinary view is that the art of painting follows definite rules in attaining its results. This is, however, only true of the linear perspective, being as it is a wholly geometrical science, and even in this case rules must not obtrude themselves in their abstract stringency, if we are to preserve all that essentially contributes to our art. And, in the second place, we shall find that artistic drawing accommodates itself even less readily than perspective to universal rules, but least of all is this true of colouring. Sense of colour ought to be an artistic instinct or quality, should be as much a unique way of looking at and composing existing tones of colour, as it should be an essential aspect of creative power and invention. On account of this personal equation in the production of colour, the way, that is, the artist looks at and is active in the making of his world, the immense variety which we find in different modes of treating, it is no mere caprice and favourite mannerism of colouring, which is absent from the facts in rerum natura, but lies in the nature of the case. Goethe supplies us with an example of personal experience which, as confided in his “Dichtung und Wahrheit,” illustrates what I mean: “As I returned to my cobbler’s house (he had just visited the Dresden Gallery) once more to take lunch I could scarce trust the evidence of my eyes. I believed myself to see before me a picture of Van Ostade307, so complete it was, that you might have hung it there and then in the Gallery. Composition of subject-matter, light, shadow, brown tone of the whole, all that is admirable in this artist’s pictures I saw actually before me. It was the first time that I was aware, to such a high degree of the power which I subsequently exercised with intention, the power of seeing, that is, with the eyes of the particular artist, to whose works I had just happened to devote exceptional attention. This facility afforded me great enjoyment, but also increased the desire from time to time to persevere in the exercise of a talent which Nature seemed ungracious enough to disallow me308.” This variety in the manner of colouring is exceptionally conspicuous in the painting of human flesh, quite apart from all modifications rendered necessary by the mode of lighting, age, sex, situation, and the like considerations. And for the rest, whether the subject depicted be daily life, outside or within the interior of private houses, taverns, churches, or other buildings, or it be that of Nature’s landscape, with its wealth of objects and colour, which finds more or less accurate reflection in the personal essay of any particular painter, the result cannot fail to illustrate this varied play of form and colour effect309, which will infallibly appear, due as it is to the manner in which each comprehends, reproduces, and creates his own work according to his own outlook, experience and imaginative powers.

(c) We have hitherto, in discussing the several points of view which are given effect to in the art of painting, referred, firstly, to its content, and secondly to the sensuous medium in which such content can be built up. We have in conclusion to define the mode under which the artist is bound to conceive and execute his content as a painter and under the conditions of his particular medium. We will divide the very considerable matter which such an investigation implies in the following manner:

First, we have to deal with the more general distinctions in forms of conception, which it will be necessary to classify and follow in their progressive advance to richer manifestations of life.

Secondly, we shall have to direct attention to the more definite aspects, which, within these general types of conception, are more directly referable to genuine pictorial composition, that is, the artistic motives apparent in the particular situation and manner of grouping selected.

Lastly, we propose to review rapidly the mode of characterization, which results from distinctions of subject-matter no less than modes of conception.

(α) With respect to the most generally prevailing modes of artistic conception310, we shall find these are in some measure due to the content which has to be depicted, and in part are referable to the course of the art’s evolution, which does not from the first seek to elaborate all that is apparent in any subject, but rather through a variety of stages and transitions makes itself fully mistress of Life and its manifestations.

(αα) The first position which the art of painting is able to secure still betrays its origin from sculpture and architecture: in the entire mode of its conception it is still in close association with these arts. And this will pre-eminently be the case where the artist restricts himself to individual figures, which he does not place before us in the vital connections of an essentially concrete situation, but in the simple independence of its self-repose. Out of the many sources of content which I have indicated as adapted to painting, we shall find religious subjects, Christ, his apostles, and the like are exceptionally suited to such abstract treatment. Such figures as these must necessarily be assumed to possess sufficient significance in their isolation, to be complete in themselves, and to unfold an object sufficiently substantive of adoration and love. Belonging to this type, particularly in early art, we meet with examples of Christ or his saints isolated without definite situation and environment. If we do find the latter it mainly consists in architectural embellishments, particularly Gothic; this is frequently the case in early Flemish or upper German art311. In this relation to architecture, among the columns and arches of which such figures as the twelve apostles and others are frequently composed, painting does not as yet attain to the life-like actuality of its later development, and we find that even the figures still retain in some measure a character which inclines to the statuesque, or to some extent do not move beyond such a general type as we find indicated in its fundamentals by Byzantine painting. For isolated figures of this character, devoid of any background or only retaining a purely architectonic outline, a more severe simplicity of colour, and a more emphatic brilliancy, is as it should be. The oldest school of painters have consequently employed a single-tinted ground of gold instead of a rich natural landscape, a ground which the colours of drapery have to confront, and to which they are compelled to adapt themselves; these are consequently more decisive and glaring than the colours employed in the periods of Art’s finest bloom, just as we find as a rule that simple vivid colours such as red, blue, and the rest are most pleasing to uncultivated people.

To this earliest type of conception it is that for the most part the miracle-working pictures belong. To such as to something stupendous man is merely placed in a relation of stupidity, from which the aspect of their artistic merit vanishes, so that they are not brought nearer to his conscious life in friendly guise in accordance with their vital humanity and beauty, and the very pictures which are most revered in a religious sense are from an artistic standpoint the most execrable.

If, however, isolated figures of this type do not supply an object for devotion or interest as being already complete and independent personality, their execution, carried out as it is in consonance with the principle of statuesque conception, has no meaning at all. Portraits, for example, are of interest to relatives who know the man thus portrayed and his individuality. But where the personages thus depicted are forgotten or unknown the sympathy which is excited by their portraiture in a given action or situation, which gives definite content to a particular character, is of a wholly different kind to that which we find in the entirely simple type of conception above referred to. Really great portraits, when they face us in the fullest wealth of life all the means of art can display, possess in this wealth itself the power to stand forth from and step out of their frames. In looking at the portraits of Van Dyck, for example, more particularly when the pose of the figure is not wholly full face, but slightly turned away, the frame has struck me like the door of the world, which the man before me enters. When consequently individuals do not possess, as saints, angels and the like do, a characterization which is in itself sufficiently complete and acknowledged, and are only interesting by virtue of the definite character of a given situation, some single circumstance or particular action, it is not suitable to present them as independent figures. As an example of this the last work of Kügelchen in Dresden was a composition of four heads, half figures, namely, Christ, John the Evangelist, John the Baptist, and the Prodigal Son. So far as Christ and John the Evangelist are concerned I found the conception quite appropriate. But in the case of the Baptist, and in every respect in that of the Prodigal Son, I failed to connect with them the authentic character which could justify a treatment of them as half-length portraits. In such cases it is essential to place the figures in a condition of action or incident, or at least to show them in situations, by means of which, in vital association with external environment, they can assert the individuality which marks an essentially exclusive whole. The head of the Prodigal Son in the above picture expresses no doubt, very finely too, pain, profound repentance and remorse, but the only indication we have given us that this is the repentance of the Prodigal Son is a very diminutive herd of swine in the foreground. Instead of a symbolical reference of this kind we ought to see him among his swine, or at least in some other scene of his life. The Prodigal Son, in short, does not possess for us any further general characterization complete as such in our minds and only exists, in so far as he is not purely allegorical, in the well-known scenes of Biblical narrative. He should be depicted to us as leaving his father’s house, or in his misery, his repentance and return, that is, in the concrete facts of the tale. Those swine put in the foreground do not carry us much further than a label with “The Prodigal Son” written on it.

(ββ) And generally it is obvious that painting, for the reason that its function is to accept as its content the wealth of soul-life in all its detail, is, to a yet greater extent than sculpture, unable to rest satisfied with that repose on itself which is without defined situation and the conception of a character taken by itself and alone simply. It is bound to make the effort to exhibit such self-subsistency and its content in specific situation, variety, and distinction of character viewed in their mutual relations and in association with their environment. It is, in fact, just this departure from purely eclectic and traditional types, from the architectonic composition of figures and the statuesque mode of conception; it is just this liberation from all that is devoid of movement and action, this striving after a living human expression, a characteristic individuality; it is this investment of a content with all the detail of the ideal and external condition that affects it which constitutes the advance of the art, in virtue of which it secures its own unique point of view. Consequently to painting as to no other plastic art is it not merely permitted, but it is even required from it, that it should unfold dramatic realization, and by the composition of its figures display their activity in a distinctly emphasized situation.

(γγ) And, in the third place, closely connected with this absorption in the complete wealth of existing life and the dramatic movement of circumstance and character, we are aware of the importance which is increasingly attached, both in conception and execution, to the individuality and the vital wealth of the colour aspect of all objects, in so far as in painting we attain to the supremest effects of vital truth which are capable of being expressed purely by colour.

This magical result of appearance can, however, be carried to such a pitch, that in contrast to it the exhibition of content becomes a matter of indifference, and painting tends to pass over, in the mere charm and perfume of its colour tones, and the contrast, fusion, and play of their harmonies, into the art of music, precisely as sculpture, in the elaboration of its reliefs, tends to associate itself with painting.

(β) What we have in the first instance now to pass in review are the particular lines312 that pictorial composition is constrained to adhere to in its productions when presenting to us a definite situation and the more immediate motives referable to it by virtue of the way it concentrates and groups together various figures and natural objects in one self-exclusive whole.

(αα) What is of fundamental and pre-eminent importance here is the happy selection of a situation adapted to the art.

In this respect the imaginative powers of the painter possess an immeasurable field to select from, a field whose limits extend from the simplest situation313 of an object insignificant in itself, such as a wreath of flowers, or a wineglass composed with plates, bread, and certain fruits, to rich compositions of important public events, political actions, coronation fêtes, battles, or even the Last Judgment, in which God the Father, Christ, his apostles, the heavenly legions, nay, our entire humanity, and earth, heaven, and hell are brought together. And here a closer inspection will show us that we must clearly distinguish what is truly pictorial on the one hand from that which is sculpturesque, and on the other from what is poetical in the sense that it is only poetry that can fully express it.

The essential difference between a pictorial, and sculpturesque situation consists, as we have already seen, in this, that the main function of sculpture is to place before us that which is self-subsistent in its tranquillity, without conflict under conditions that do not affect it, in which distinctness of definition is not the main demand, it is only in the relief that it really begins to approach a group composition, and an epic expanse of figures begins to represent actions involving motion, and which imply collision of opposing forces. The art of painting, on the contrary, only thoroughly takes up its proper task, when it moves away from figures composed independently of their more concrete relations, moves away from a situation that is deficient in its elaboration, in order that it may thus pass into the sphere of living movement, human conditions, passions, conflicts, actions in persistent association with external environment, and even in its composition of natural landscape is able to retain firmly this definite structure of a given situation and its most lifelike individuality. It was for this reason that from the first we maintained that painting was called upon to effect the exposition of character, soul, and ideal qualities, not in the way that this spiritual world enables us to recognize it directly in its external shape, but in the way it evolves and expresses its actual substance by means of actions.

And the truth we have just mentioned is that which brings painting into closer relation with poetry. Both arts have in this respect an advantage314, and from another point of view, also a disadvantage. Painting is unable to give us the development of a situation, event, or action, as poetry or music, that is to say, in a series of changes; it can only embody one moment of time. A simple reflection is deducible from this, namely, that we must in this one moment have placed before us the substance of the situation or action in its entirety, the very bloom of it; consequently, that moment should be selected in which all that preceded and followed it is concentrated in one point. In the case of a battle, for example, this moment will be that of victory. The conflict is still apparent, but its decisive conclusion is equally so. The artist is able, therefore, to retain as it were the residue of the Past, which, in the very act of withdrawal and disappearance, still asserts itself in the Present, and furthermore can suggest what has yet to be evolved as the immediate result of a given situation. I cannot, however, here enlarge further on this head. The painter, however, together with this disadvantage as against the poet, is to this extent advantaged in that he can bring the precise scene before our vision in all the appearance of its reality, can depict it perfectly in all its detail. “Ut pictura poesis erit” is no doubt a favourite saying which is particularly and pertinaciously advanced by theorists, and is no doubt actually accepted and exemplified by narrative poetry in its descriptions of the seasons, its flowers, and its landscapes. Detailed transcription of such objects and situations is, however, not only a very dry and tedious affair, and indeed, so far from being exhaustive, always leaves something more to say. It is, further, contrasted with painting, only a confusing result, because it is forced to present as a successive series of ideas what painting sets before our vision once and for all, so that we constantly tend to forget what has gone before and lose it from our minds, despite the fact that it should be held in essential relation with that which follows, inasmuch as under the spatial condition it is in fact a part of it, and only is significant in this association and this immediacy. It is, however, just in this contemporaneous exposition of detail that the painter can restore that which, in respect to the progressive series of past and future events, he fails to secure.

There is, however, another respect in which painting yields place to poetry and music, and that is in its lyrical quality. The art of poetry can not only develop emotions and ideas generally as such respectively, but also in their transitions, movement, and increased intensity. In respect to concentrated intensity this is yet more the case in music, which is essentially concerned with soul-movement. To represent this painting has nothing beyond the expression of face and pose; and if it does exclusively direct its effort, to what is actually lyrical, it misconceives the means at hand. However much the soul’s passion may be expressed in the play of the countenance or bodily movement, such expression should not be directly referable to emotion as such, but to emotions in so far as they are present, with a definite mode of expression, in an event or action. The fact that it reveals ideality in external form therefore does not connote the abstract meaning that it makes the nature of the soul visible by means of physiognomy and form, under the mode of which it expresses soul-life; it is rather just the individual situation of an action, passion in some specific outburst thereof, by means of which the emotion is unfolded and recognized. When, therefore, it is attempted to interpret the poetical quality of painting under the assumption that it should express the soul’s emotion directly, without a motive and action more near to it in facial expression and pose, all that we do in such a case is to throw the art back upon an abstraction, which its effort should precisely strive to be rid of; we ask of it, in short, that it should master the peculiar and just contribution of poetry; and if it attempts to do this the result will be a barren and stale one.

I particularly insist on this point because in the exhibition of art we had here last year (1828) several pictures from the so-called Düsseldorf school have received much attention, the painters of which, while displaying in their work considerable knowledge and technical ability, have laid almost exclusive stress on this ideal aspect, on material that is only capable of adequate presentment in poetry. The content, for the most part borrowed from poems of Goethe or from Shakespeare, Ariosto, and Tasso, may be generally indicated as the ideal emotion of Love. As a rule the most capable of these pictures set before us a pair of lovers, Romeo and Juliet, for example, or Rinaldo and Armida, without any further situation, so that these couples have nothing more to do and express except the fact that they are in love with each other, in other words, they share a mutual attraction, gaze on each other as lovers, and as lovers look yet again. Naturally in such a case the main expression must be concentrated in the mouth and eyes; and we may add that our Rinaldo has been so placed relatively to his spider legs that he looks very much as though he did not know what to do with them. They are extensions which are entirely without meaning. Sculpture, as we have seen, dispenses with the glance of eye, the soul-flash; painting, on the other hand, seizes on this potent means of expression, but it must not focus everything at this one point, it should not make the fire or the refluent languor and yearning of the eye or soft friendliness of lips the soul and centre of expression without any other motives. Equally defective was the fisherman of Hübner, the theme of which was borrowed from that famous poem of Goethe, which depicts with such wonderful depth and charm of feeling the indefinite yearning for the repose, coolness and purity of water. The naked fisher lad, who in this picture is being drawn into the water, has, just as the male figures in the other pictures have, a very prosaic looking face, such as we could not imagine, if the features were in repose, to be capable of profound or beautiful emotions. And, as a rule, we cannot assert of these figures, whether male or female, that they are beautiful in a healthy sense; they, on the contrary, merely betray the nervous excitement, weakness, and disease of Love and emotional life generally, which people have no business to repeat and which we would willingly, whether in life or Art, be spared. To the same class of conception belongs the way that Schadow, the master of this school, has depicted Goethe’s Mignon. The character of Mignon is wholly poetical. What makes her interesting is her Past, the severity of her destiny as it affects both her inward and outward life, the conflict of her Italian, wholly excited passion in a soul which is still obscure to itself, which can neither decide upon a course of action or object, and which, being this mystery to itself, merges itself in such and yet can do itself no good. It is this self-expression wholly divided in itself and yet retiring into itself, and only letting us see its confusion in isolated and unrelated eruptions, which creates the awful interest we cannot fail to experience in her. Such a network of contradictions we may no doubt imagine in our minds, but the art of painting is wholly unable to, present it to us, as Schadow has attempted to do, simply by means of Mignon’s form and physiognomy, without defining further any situation or action. We may, therefore, assert generally that the above-mentioned pictures are conceived without any real insight for situations, motives, and expression. It is, in short, an inseparable condition of genuine artistic representations of painting that the entire subject-matter should be grasped with imaginative power, should be made visible to us in figurative form, which is expressed and manifests its ideal quality through a series of feeling, that is, through an action, which is of such significance to the emotion, that each and everything in the work of art appears to be entirely appropriated by the imagination to express the content selected. The old Italian painters have to a conspicuous degree, no less than their modern fraternity, depicted love-scenes, and in part borrowed the material from poetry; but they have known how to clothe the same with imagination and delight. Cupid and Psyche, Cupid and Venus, Pluto’s rape of Proserpine, the rape of the Sabine women, such and other similar subjects the old masters depicted in lifelike and definite situations, in scenes properly motived and not merely as simple emotion conceived without imaginative grasp, without action. They have also borrowed love scenes from the Old Testament. We may find an example in the Dresden Gallery, a picture of Giorgione, in which Jacob, after his long journey, greets Rachel, presses her hand and kisses her; in the distance there stand a pair of youths by a spring, busily engaged in watering their herds, which are feeding, a large number of them, in the dale. Another picture presents to us Isaac and Rebecca. Rebecca gives Abraham’s carls water to drink and is recognized in doing so. In the same way scenes are taken from Ariosto; we have Medor, for example, writing the name of Angelica on the edge of a spring. When, therefore, people nowadays refer to poetry in painting, this can only mean, as already insisted, that we must grasp a subject imaginatively and suffer emotions to unfold themselves in action; it excludes the idea of securing feeling simply as such or endeavouring thus to express it. Even poetry, which is capable of expressing emotion in its ideal or spiritual substance, is unfolded in ideas, images, and descriptions. If this art was content to abide by a mere “I love thee,” repeated eternally, as its entire expression, such a consummation no doubt, might prove highly agreeable to those masters who have talked so much about the poetry of poetry, but it would be the blankest prose for all that. For art generally in its relation to emotion consists in the apprehension and enjoyment of the same by means of the imagination, which in poetry displays passion in its conceptions, and satisfies us in their expression, whether that expression be lyrical, or conveyed in epical events, or dramatic action. As a presentment of the inward life of soul, however, in painting the mouth, eye, and pose, do not alone suffice; we must have the total objective realization in its concreteness to make valid and vouch for such ideality.

The main thing, then, in a picture is that it present to us a situation, the scene of some action. And closely associated with this we have the primary law of intelligibility. In this respect religious subjects possess the supreme advantage, that they are universally known. The annunciation of the angel, the adoration of the shepherds or of the three kings, the repose in the flight to Egypt, the crucifixion, burial, resurrection, no less than the legends of the saints, were well known subjects with the public, for whom such pictures were painted, albeit to our own generation the stories of the martyrs are removed to some distance. For a particular church, for example, it was mainly the biography of its patrons or its guardian saints which was represented. Consequently it was not always the painters themselves who selected such subjects; particular circumstances rendered such selection inevitable for particular altars, chapels, and cloisters, so that the place where they are exhibited in itself contributes to their elucidation. And this is, in part, necessary, for in painting we do not find speech, words, and names, by which interpretation of poetry may be materially assisted to say nothing of all its other means. And in the same way in a royal residence, council-hall, or parliament-building, scenes of great events, important situations taken from the history of the state, city, and building in which they are found are there, and receive a just recognition in the place for which they were originally painted. It is hardly likely, for instance, that in painting a picture for one of our palaces an artist would select a subject borrowed from English or Chinese history, or from the life of King Mithridates. It is otherwise in picture galleries, where we have all kinds of subjects brought together that we could wish to buy or possess as examples of fine works of art. In such a case, of course, the peculiar relation of any picture to a definite locale, no less than its intelligibility, so far as it is thereby promoted, disappears. The same thing is true of the private collection. The collector brings together just what he can get; the principle is that of a public gallery, and his love of art or caprice may extend in other directions.

Allegorical pictures are far inferior to those of historical content in the matter of intelligibility; they are, moreover, for the reason that the ideal vitality and emphatic characterization of the figures must in great measure pass out of them, indefinite, and not motive to enthusiasm. Landscapes and situations borrowed from the reality of daily life, are, on the contrary, no less clear in their substantial import than, in respect to their characterization, dramatic variety, movement and wealth of existence, they supply a highly favourable opportunity for inventive power and executive ability.

(ββ) To render the defined situation of a picture intelligible, in so far as the artist is called upon to do this, the mere fact of its local place of exposition and a general knowledge of its subject will not suffice. As a general rule, these are purely external relations, under which the work as a work of art is less affected. The main point of real importance consists, on the contrary, in this that the artist be sufficiently endowed in artistic sense and general talent to bring into prominence and give form to the varied motives, which such a situation contains, with all the bounty of invention. Every action, in which the ideal world is manifested in that which is external, possesses immediate modes of expression, sensuous results and relations, which, in so far as they are actually the activities of spirit, betray and reflect its emotion, and consequently can be utilized with the greatest advantage as motives which contribute to the intelligibility of the work no less than its individual character. It is, for example, a frequent criticism of the Transfiguration picture of Raphael, that the composition is cut up into two unrelated parts; and this from an objective standpoint is the case. We have the transfiguration on the hill and the incident of the possessed child in the foreground. From an ideal315 point of view, however, an association of supreme significance is undoubtedly present. For, on the one hand, the sensuous transfiguration of Christ is just this very exaltation of himself above the earth and his removal from his disciples, a removal which as such separation ought to be made visible; and from a further point of view the majesty of Christ is in this, an actual and particular case, to the highest degree emphasized by the fact that the disciples are unable to heal the possessed child without the assistance of their Master. In this instance, therefore, this twofold action is throughout motived, and the association is enforced before our eyes, both in its external and ideal aspect, by the incident that a disciple expressly points to Christ who is removed from them, and in doing so suggests the profounder truth of the Son of God to be at the same time on Earth, in accordance with the truth of that saying, “If two are gathered together in my name I am in the midst of them.” I will give yet another illustration. Goethe on one occasion gave as a subject for a prize exhibition the representation of Achilles in female garments at the coming of Odysseus. In one drawing Achilles glances at the helmet of the armed hero, his heart fires up at the sight, and in consequence of this emotion the pearl necklace is broken which he wears round the neck. A lad seeks for and picks up the pieces from the ground. Such is an example of admirable motive.

Moreover, the artist finds he has to a more or less extent large spaces to fill in; he requires landscape as background, lighting, architectonic surrounding, and he has to introduce incidental figures and objects and so forth. All this material he should apply, in so far as it can be so adapted, as motives in the situation, and bring this external matter into unity with his subject in such a way that it is no longer insignificant. Two princes or patriarchs shake hands. If this is indicative of a peace treaty, and the seal upon the same, warriors, armed bands, and the like, preparations for a sacrifice to solemnize the pact, will be an obviously fitting environment. If such people happen to meet each other with a similar welcome on a journey, other motives will be necessary. To invent the same in a way that attaches real significance and individualization to the action, this it is which more than anything else will test the artistic insight of the painter so far as this aspect of his work is concerned. And in order to promote this not a few artists have also attached symbolical relations between background and the main action. In the composition, for example, of the Adoration of the three Kings, we not unfrequently find the holy Infant in His cradle beneath a ruined roof, around Him the walls of a building falling in decay, and in the background the commencement of a cathedral. The falling stone-work and the rising cathedral directly suggest the victory of the Christian church over paganism316. In the same way we find, not unfrequently, in pictures, more especially of the Van Eyck school, which depict the greeting of the angel Gabriel to Mary, flowering lilies like stamens. They indicate the maidenhood of the mother of God.

(γγ) Inasmuch as in the third place the art of painting, by virtue of the principle of ideal and external variety, in which it is bound to give clear definition to situations, events, conflicts, and actions, is forced to deal on its way with many kinds of distinction and contradiction in its subject-matter, whether purely natural objects or human figures, and, moreover, receives the task to subdivide this composite content, and create of it one harmonious whole, a way of posing and grouping its figures artistically, becomes one of the most important and necessary claims made upon it. Among the crowd of particular rules and definitions, however, which are applicable to this subject, what we are able to affirm in its most general terms can only be valid in quite a formal way, and I will merely draw attention shortly to a few of the main points.

The earliest mode of composition still remains entirely architectonic, a homogeneous juxtaposition of figures or a regular opposition and symmetrical arrangement, not merely of the figures themselves, but also their posture and movements. We may add that at this stage the pyramidal form of grouping is much in favour. When the subject is the Crucifixion of our Lord such shapes follow as a matter of course. Christ is suspended on high from the cross, and at the sides we have a group of the disciples, Mary the mother, or saints. In pictures of the Madonna also, in which Mary is seated with her Child on a raised throne, and we find adoring apostles, martyrs, and so forth, beneath them on either side we have a further illustration of this form. Even in the Sistine Madonna picture this mode of grouping is still in its fundamental features retained. And, generally, it brings repose to the eye because the pyramids, by virtue of its apex, makes the otherwise dispersed association coherent, giving an external point of unity to the group317.

Within the limits, however, of such a generally abstract symmetrical composition, the pose of the figures may be marked in detail by great vividness and individuality, and equally the general expression and movement. The artist, while using in combination the means of his art, will have his several planes, whereby he is able more definitely to emphasize the more important figures as against the others; and he can in addition avail himself of his scheme of lighting and colour. The way he will arrange his groups to arrive at this result is sufficiently obvious. He will not, of course, place his main figures at the sides, or place subordinate ones in positions which are likely to attract the highest attention. And similarly he will throw the strongest light on objects which are part of the most significant content, rather than leave them in shadow, and emphasize with such strong light and the most conspicuous tints objects which are incidental.

In the case he adopts a method of grouping less symmetrical, and thereby more life-like, the artist will have to take especial pains not to make the figures press too closely on each other, which results in a confusion not unfrequently noticeable in certain pictures; we should not be under the necessity of having first to identify limbs and discover which belong to which, whether they be arms, legs, or other properties, such as drapery, armour, and so forth. It will, on the contrary, be wisest in the case of larger compositions, in the first instance no doubt, to separate the whole into component parts easily ascertained, but, at the same time, not to isolate them in dispersion entirely. And particularly will this be advisable where we have scenes and situations, which on their own account naturally tend to a broad and disunited effect such as the gathering of manna in the wilderness, market-fairs, and similar subjects.

On the above subject I must restrict myself here to these very general observations.

(γ) Having thus, firstly, dealt with the general types of pictorial composition, and, secondly, with a composition from the point of view of selection of situations, arrangement of motives and grouping, we will now add a few remarks upon the mode of characterization, by means of which painting is to be distinguished from sculpture and its ideal plastic character.

(αα) I have several times previously taken occasion to remark, that in painting the ideal and external particularity of soul-life is admitted in its freedom, and consequently is not necessarily that typical beauty of individualization which is inseparable from the Ideal itself, but one which is suffered to expand in every direction of particular appearance, by virtue of which we obtain that which in modern parlance is called characteristic. Critics have generally referred to “the characteristic” thus understood as the distinctive mark of modern art in its contrast to the antique; and, in the significance we are here attaching to the term, no doubt the above contrast is just. According to our modern criterion Zeus, Apollo, Diana, and the rest are really not characters at all in this sense, although we cannot fail to admire their infinitely lofty, plastic, and ideal individualities. We already find a more articulate individualization is approached by the Homeric Achilles, the Agamemnon and Clytemnestra of Aeschylus318, or the Odysseus, Antigone, and Ismene in the type of spiritual development which by word and deed Sophocles unfolds to us, a definition in which these figures subsist in what appears to be consonant with their substantive nature, so that we can no doubt discover the presentment of character in the antique if we are prepared to call such creations characters. Still in Agamemnon, Ajax, Odysseus, and the rest, the individualization remains throughout of a generalized type, the character of a prince, of frantic rage, of cunning in its more abstract determinacy. The individual aspect is in the result closely intertwined with the general conception, and the character is merged in an individualization of ideal import. The art of painting, on the contrary, which does not restrain particularity within the limits of such ideality, is more than anything else occupied with developing the entire variety of that aspect of particularization which is accidental, so that what we have now set before us, instead of those plastic ideals of gods and men, is particular people viewed in all the varied appearance of their accidental qualities. Consequently perfection of corporeal form, and the fully realized consonancy of the spiritual or ideal aspect with its free and sane existence, in a word, all that in sculpture we referred to as ideal beauty, in the art of painting neither make the same claim upon us, nor generally are regarded as the matter of most importance, inasmuch as now it is the ideality of soul-life itself, and its manifestation as conscious life which forms the centre of interest. In this more ideal sphere that realm of Nature is not so profoundly insistent. Piety of heart, religion of soul can, no less than ethical sense, and activity in fact did in the Silenus face of Socrates, find a dwelling in a bodily form which, viewed on the outside simply, is ugly and distorted. No doubt in expressing spiritual beauty, the artist will avoid what is essentially ugly in external form, or will find a way to subdue and illumine it in the power of the soul which breaks through it, but he cannot for all that entirely dispense with ugliness319. For the content of painting, as we have above depicted it at length, includes within itself an aspect, for which it is precisely the abnormal and distorted traits of human figures and physiognomy, which are most able to express. This is no other than the sphere of what is bad and evil, which in religious subjects we find mainly represented by the common soldiers, who take a part in the passion of Christ, or by the sinners and devils in hell. Michelangelo was pre-eminent in his delineation of devils. In his imaginative realization, though we find he passes beyond the scale of ordinary human life, yet at the same time an affinity with it is retained. However much notwithstanding the impersonations which painting sets before us necessarily disclose an essentially complete whole of characteristic realization, we will not go so far as to maintain that we cannot find in them an analogue of that which we refer to as the Ideal in the most plastic type of art320. In religious subjects, no doubt, the feature of all importance is that of pure Love. This is exceptionally so in the case of the Virgin mother, whose entire life reposes in this love; it is more or less the same thing with the women who accompany the Master, and with John, the disciple of Love. In the expression of this we may also find the sensuous beauty of forms associated, as is the case with Raphael’s conceptions. Such a close affinity must not, however, assert itself merely as formal beauty, but must be spiritually made vital through the most intimate expression of soul-life, and thereby transfigured; and this spiritual penetration must make itself felt as the real object and content. The conception, too, of beauty, has its real opportunity in the stories of Christ’s childhood and those of John the Baptist. In the case of the other historical persons, whether apostles, saints, disciples, or wise men of antiquity, this expression of an emphasized intensity of soul-life is rather simply an affair of particular critical situations, apart from which they are mainly placed before us as independent characters of the actual world of experience, endowed with force and endurance of courage, faith and action, so that what most determines the gist of their characters in all its variety is an earnest and worthy manliness. They are not ideals of gods, but entirely individualized human ideals; not simply men, as they ought to be, but human ideals321, as they actually are in a certain place, to which neither particular definition of character is wanting, nor yet a real association between such particularity and the universal type which completes them. Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, in his famous Last Supper, have supplied examples of this type, in the composition of which we find an entirely different quality of worth, majesty and nobility present than in those presented by other painters322. This is precisely the point at which painting meets on the same ground with the ancients, without, however, sacrificing the character of its own province.

(ββ) Inasmuch, moreover, as the art of painting, to the fullest extent among the plastic arts, acknowledges the claim of the specific form, and the individualized characterization to assert itself, so above all we find here the transition to real portraiture. We should be therefore wholly in the wrong if we condemned portrait painting as incompatible with the lofty aims of art. Who indeed could desire to lose the great number of excellent portraits painted by the great masters? Who is not, quite apart from the artistic merits of such works, curious to have definitely substantiated to their vision this actual counterfeit of the idea of famous personalities, their genius, and their exploits, which they may have otherwise had to accept from history. For even the greatest and most highly placed man was, or is, a veritable individual, and we desire to see in visible shape this individuality, and the spiritual impression of it in all its most actual and vital characteristics. But apart from objects, which lie outside the purview of art, we may assert in a real sense, that the advances in painting from its imperfect essays consist in nothing so much as this very elaboration of the portrait. It was, in the first instance, the pious and devotional sense which brought into prominence the ideal life of soul. A yet finer art added new life to this sense by adding to its product reality of expression and individual existence; and with this profounder penetration into external fact the inward life of spirit, the expression of which was its main object, was also enhanced and deepened. In order, however, that the portrait should be a genuine work of art the unity of the spiritual individuality must, as I have already stated, be stamped upon it, and the spiritual impression of the characterization must be the one mainly emphasized and made prominent. Every feature of the countenance contributes to this result in a conspicuous degree, and the fine instinct for detecting such in the artist will declare itself by the way in which he makes visible the unique impression of any personality by seizing and emphasizing precisely those traits, and parts in which this distinctive personal quality is expressed in its clearest and most vitally pregnant embodiment. In this respect a portrait may be very true to Nature, executed with the greatest perseverance, and yet entirely devoid of life, while a mere sketch323, a few outlines from the hand of a master, may be infinitely more vivacious and arresting in its truth. Such a study should, however, by indicating the lines or features of real significance, reflect that character in its structural completeness324, if on the simplest scale, which the previous lifeless execution and insistence upon crude fact glosses over and renders invisible. The most advisable course, as a rule, is to maintain a happy mean between such studies, and purely natural imitation. The masterly portraits of Titian are of this type. The impression such make on us is that of a complete personality. We get from them an idea of spiritual vitality, such as actual experience is unable to supply. The effect is similar to that afforded by the description of great actions and events in the hands of a truly artistic historian. We obtain from such a much loftier and vitally true picture of the facts than any we could have taken from the direct evidence of our senses. Concrete reality is so overburdened with the phenomenal, that is incidental or accidental detail, that we frequently cannot see the forest for the trees, and often the most important fact slips by us as a thing of common or daily occurrence. It is the indwelling insight and genius of the writer which first adds the quality of greatness to events or actions, presenting them fully in a truly historical composition, which rejects what is purely external, and only brings into prominence that through which that ideal substance is vitally unfolded. In this way, too, the painter should place before us the mind325 and character of the impersonation by means of his art. If success is fully attained we may affirm that a portrait of this qualify is more to the mark, more like the personality thus conceived than the real man himself is. Albrecht Dürer has also executed portraits of this character. With a few technical means the traits are emphasized with such simplicity, definition, and dignity, that we wholly believe ourselves to be facing spiritual life itself. The longer we look at such a picture, the more profoundly we penetrate into it, the more it is revealed to us. It reminds one of a clear-cut drawing, instinct with genius, which completely gives expression to the characteristic, and for the rest is merely executive in its colour and outlines in so far as the same may make the characterization more intelligible, apparent, and finished as a whole, without entering into all the importunate detail of the facts of natural life. In the same way also Nature in her landscape paints every leaf, branch, and blade to the last shadow of a line or tint. Landscape painting, on the contrary, has no business to attempt such elaboration, but may only follow her subject to a principle of treatment, in which the expression of the whole is involved, which emphasizes detail, but nevertheless does not copy slavishly such particulars in all their threads, irregularities and so forth, assuming it is to remain essentially characteristic and individual work. In the human face the drawing of Nature is the framework of bone in its harsh lines, around which the softer ones are disposed and continue in various accidental details. Truly characteristicportraiture, however, despite all the importance we may rightly attach to these well defined lines, consists in other traits indicated with equal force, the countenance in short as elaborated by the creative artist.326 In this sense we may say of the portrait that it not only can, but that it ought to flatter, inasmuch as it neglects what pertains to Nature’s contingency, and only accepts that which contributes to the characteristic content of the individual portrayed, his most unique and most intimate self. Nowadays we find it the fashion to give every kind of face just a ripple of a smile, to emphasize its amiability, a very questionable fashion indeed, and one hard to restrain within the limit imposed. Charming, no doubt; but the merely polite amiability of social intercourse is not a fundamental trait of any character, and becomes in the hands of many artists only too readily the most insipid kind of sweetness.

(γγ) However compatible with portraiture the course of painting may be in all its modes of production it should, however, make the particular features of the face, the specific forms, ways of posing, grouping, and schemes of colour consonant with the actual situation, in which it composes its figures and natural objects in order to express a content. For it is just this content in this particular situation which should be portrayed.

Out of the infinitely diversified detail which in this connection we might examine I will only touch upon one point of vital importance. It is this that the situation may either be on its own account a passing one, and the emotion expressed by it of a momentary character, so that one and the same individual could express many similar ones in addition and also feelings in contrast with it, or the situation and emotion strikes at the very heart of a character, which thereby discloses its entire and most intimate nature. Situations and emotions of this latter type are the truly momentous crises in characterization327. In the situations, for example, in which I have already referred to the Madonna, one finds nothing, however essentially complete the individualization of the Mother of God may be in its composition, which is not a real factor in the embracing compass of her soul and character. In this case, too, the characterization is such that it is self-evident that she does not exist apart from what she can express in this specific circumstance. Supreme masters consequently have painted the Madonna in such immortal maternal situations or phases. Other masters have still retained in her character the expression of ordinary life otherwise experienced and actual. This expression may be very beautiful and life-like, but this form, the like features, and a similar expression would be equally applicable to other interests and relations of marriage lore. We are consequently inclined to regard a figure of this type from yet other points of view than that of a Madonna, whereas in the supremest works we are unable to make room for any other thoughts but that which the situation awakens in us. It is on this ground that I admire so strongly the Mary Magdalene of Correggio in Dresden, and it will for ever awake such admiration. We have here the repentant sinner, but we cannot fail to see that sinfulness is not here the point of serious consideration328; it is assumed she was essentially noble and could not have been capable of bad passions and actions. Her profound and intimately self-imposed restraint therefore can only be a return to that which she really is, what is no momentary situation, but her entire nature. Throughout this entire composition, whether we look at form, facial expression, dress, pose, or environment, the artist has therefore not in the slightest degree laid a stress on those circumstances, which might indicate sin and culpability; she has lost the consciousness of those times, and is entirely absorbed in her present condition, and this faith, this instinct, this absorption appears to be her real and complete character.

Such a complete reciprocity between soul-life and external surroundings, determinacy of character and situation, the masters of Italy have illustrated with exceptional beauty. In the example I have already referred to of Kügelchen’s picture of the Prodigal Son, on the contrary, we have no doubt the remorse of repentance and grief expressed to the life; but the artist has failed to secure the unity of the entire character, which, apart from such an aspect of it, he possessed, and of the actual conditions under which such was depicted to us. If we examine quietly such features, we can only find in them the physiognomy of any one we might chance to meet on the Dresden bridge or anywhere else. In the case of a real coalescence of character with the expression of a specific situation such a result would be impossible; just as, in true genre-painting, even where the concentration is upon the most fleeting moments of time, the realization is too vivid to leave room for the notion that the figures before us could ever be otherwise placed or could have received other traits or an altered type of expression.

These, then, are the main points we have to consider in respect to the content and the artistic treatment in the sensuous material of painting, the surface, that is, and colour.

In our consideration of this third section of our subject we are unable to confine ourselves, as we have hitherto done, to a wholly general examination of the content and purport appropriate to painting, and the mode of configuration, which follows from its principle, for in so far as this art is built up on the particularity of characters and their situation, and upon form and its pose, colour, and so forth, we are compelled to fix in our minds and discuss the actual reality of this art’s separate productions. No study of painting is complete that does not take into its survey and is unable to enjoy and criticize the pictures themselves, in which the aspects of it we have examined are enforced. This is a general rule in the case of all art, but it applies with exceptional force to painting among those we have up to the present considered. In the case of architecture and sculpture, where the embrace of the content is more restricted, the means of exposition and configuration are to a less extent stamped with wealth and distinctive modification, and the particular aspects of their definition are simpler and more radical, we can more readily avail ourselves of copies, descriptions, and casts. It is essential in dealing with the art of painting that we should see the actual works themselves. In this case mere descriptions, however important they may be in a subsidiary sense, will not suffice. In the infinite variety, however, of its explication, the various aspects of which are united in particular works of art, these works appear to us in the first instance as a mere motley array, which, by reason of the fact that our review of it is based upon no principle of classification, is only to a small extent able to disclose to us the unique quality of individual pictures. And it follows from this that galleries, as a rule, if we are not already able to connect with each picture our knowledge of the country, period, school, and master to which it belongs, is simply a collection without meaning, in which we lose ourselves. The most profitable arrangement for study and enjoyment with our eyes is therefore an exhibition based on historical sequence. A collection of this kind, co-ordinated in relation to such a principle, unique and invaluable of its class, we shall shortly be able to admire in the picture gallery of the royal museum in this city329. In this we shall not only possess a historical survey of the technique of art in its stages of development, but shall have set before our minds, as an essential process with a history, that articulation of its ideal content in the distinctions of its schools, their various subject-matter, and their different modes of artistic conception and treatment. It is only through having given us a survey as consonant as this is with that vital process that we can form an idea from its origins in traditional and eclectic types, of the living growth of art, its search after expression and individual characteristic, its liberation from the inactive and tranquil station of its figures, that we can appreciate its progress to dramatic movement, grouping, and all the wealth and witchery of its colour, or finally learn to distinguish its schools, which either to some extent treat similar subject-matter in a way peculiar to themselves, or are distinct from each other by reasons of the variety of their respective content.

A historical development of painting such as that referred to is of as great importance to scientific observation and exposition as it is to accurate study. The content of art as I have presented it, namely, the elaboration of its material, the distinct and fundamental changes in the mode of its conception, we find all this and more receives thus for the first time its concrete coherence in a sequence and under a classification which corresponds with the facts. It is therefore incumbent on us to glance at this process, if only by way of emphasis to what most immediately arrests attention.

In general the advance consists in this, that it originates in religious subjects conceived still in a typical way, with simple architectonic arrangement and unelaborated colour. After this, in an increasing degree of fusion with religious situations, we get actuality, vital beauty of form, individuality, depth of penetration, charm and witchery of colouring, until Art finally turns its attention to the world itself, makes itself master of Nature, the daily occurrence of ordinary life, or what is of significance in national history whether present or past, or portraiture and anything else down to the merest trifle and the least significant fact, and with an enthusiasm equal to that it devoted to the religious ideal, and pre-eminently in this sphere secures not merely the most consummate result of technical accomplishment, but also a treatment and execution which is most full of life and personality. This progress is followed in clearest outline if we take in succession the schools of Byzantine, Italian, Flemish, Dutch, and German painting, after noting the most prominent features of which briefly we shall finally indicate the transition to the art of music330.

(a) In our review of Byzantine painting we may remark to start with that the practice of painting among the Greeks was to a definable degree always carried on; and examples of antique work contributed to the greater excellence of its results relatively to posture, draping, and other respects. On the other hand the touch of Nature and life wholly vanished from this art; in facial types it adhered strictly to tradition; in its figures and modes of expression it was conventional and rigid; in its general composition more or less architectonic. We find no trace of natural environment and a landscape background. The modelling, by means of light and shadow, brilliance and obscurity, and their fusion, no less than perspective and the art of lifelike grouping, either were not elaborated at all, or to a very slight extent. By reason of this strict adherence to a single acknowledged type independent artistic production had little room for its exercise. The art of painting and mosaic frequently degenerated into a mere craft, and became thereby lifeless and devoid of spirit, albeit such craftsmen, equally with the workers on antique vases, possessed excellent examples of previous work, which they could imitate so far as pose and the folding of drapery was concerned. A similar type of painting spread its sombre influence over the ravaged West and more particularly in Italy. Here, however, although in the first instance with beginnings of little strength, we are even at an early date conscious of an effort to break away from inflexible forms and modes of expression, and to face, at first, however, in a rough and ready way, a development of loftier aim. Of Byzantine pictures we may, on the contrary, affirm, as Herr von Rumohr331 has maintained of Greek Madonnas and images of Christ that “it is obvious even in the most favoured examples, their origin was that of the mosaic, and artistic elaboration was rejected from the first.” In other words332 the Italians endeavoured even before the period of their independent art development in painting, and in contrast to the Byzantines to approximate to a more spiritual conception of Christian subjects. The writer above-named draws attention also as noteworthy support of his contention to the manner in which the later Greeks and Italians respectively represented Christ on crucifixes. According to this writer “the Greeks, to whom the sight of terrible bodily suffering was of common occurrence, conceived the Saviour suspended on the Cross with the entire weight of his body, the lower part of the body swollen and the slackened knees bent to the left, the bowed head contending with the pains of an awful death. Their subject was consequently in its essentials bodily suffering. The Italians, on the contrary, in their more ancient monuments, while we must not overlook the fact that the representation of the Virgin Mary with her Child no less than the Crucified is only of rare occurrence, were accustomed to depict the figure of the Saviour on the cross adopting, so it appears to us, the idea of the victory of the spiritual, not as in the former case the death of the body. And this unquestionably nobler conception asserts itself at an early date in the more favoured parts of Western Europe333.” With this sketch I must here rest content.

(b) We have, however, secondly, another characteristic of art to consider in the earlier development of Italian painting. Apart from the religious content of the Old and New Testament and the biographies of martyrs and saints, it borrows its subjects in the main from Greek mythology, very seldom, that is, from the events of national history, or, if we except portraits, from the reality of contemporary life, and equally rarely, and only at a late stage and exceptionally, from natural landscape. Now that which it before all contributes to its conception and artistic elaboration of the subject-matter of religion is the vital reality of spiritual and corporeal existence, relatively to which at this stage all its forms are embodied and endowed with animation. For this vitality the essential principle on the spiritual side is that natural delightfulness, and on the corporeal side is that beauty which is consonant with physical form, a beauty which independently, as beautiful form, already displays innocence, buoyancy, maidenhood, natural grace of temperament, nobility, imagination, and a loving soul. If there is further added to a naturel of this type the exaltation and adornment of the soul in virtue of the ideal intimacy of religion and the spiritual characteristics of a profounder piety established as a vitalizing principle of soul-life in this essentially more admitted and inviolable province of spiritual redemption334, — in such a case we have presented to us thereby an original harmony of form and its expression, which, wherever it is perfected, vividly reminds us in this sphere of romantic art and Christian art of the pure Ideal of art. No doubt also within a new accord of this type the inward life of the heart will be predominant; but this inward experience is a more happy, a purer heaven of the soul, the way of return to which form what is sensuous and finite, and the return to God, albeit the passage may be through a travail in the profounder anguish of repentance and death, is, however, less saturated with trouble and its insistency. And the reason of this is that the pain is concentrated in the sphere of soul, of idea, of faith, without making a descent into the region of passionate desire, intractable savagery, obstinate self-seeking and sin, and only arriving at the hardly won victory through smiting down such enemies of the blessed state. It is rather a transition of ideal permanence335, a pain of the inward life, which feels itself as such suffering rather simply in virtue of its enthusiasm, a suffering of more abstract type, more spiritually abundant, which has as little need to brush away bodily anguish as we have to seek signs in the characterization of its bodily presence and physiognomy of obstinacy, uncouthness, crookedness, or the traits of superficial and mean natures, in which an obstinate conflict is first necessary, before such are meet to express real religious feeling336 and piety. This more benign337 intimacy of soul, this more original consonancy of exterior forms to ideal experience of this kind is what creates the charming clarity and the untroubled delight, which the genuinely beautiful works of Italian painting excite and supply. Just as we say of instrumental music that there is tone and melody in it, so, too, we find that the pure song of soul floats here in melodious fusion over the entire configuration and all its forms. And as in the music of the Italians and in the tones of their song, when the pure strains ring forth without a forced utterance, in every separate note and inflection of sound and melody, it is simply the delight of the voice itself which rings out; so, too, such an intimate personal enjoyment of the loving soul is the fundamental tone of their painting338. It is the same intimacy, clarity, and freedom which meet us again in the great Italian poets. To start with this artistic resonance of rhymes in their terzets, canzonets, sonnets, and stanzas, this accord, which is not merely satisfied to allay its thirst for reverberation in the one repetition, but repeats the echo three times and more, this is itself a euphony which streams forth on its own account and for the sake of its own enjoyment. And a like freedom is stamped upon the spiritual content. In Petrarch’s sonnets, sestets, and canzonets it is not so much the actual possession of their subject, after which the heart yearns; it is not the consideration and emotion which are involved in the actual content of the poem as such, and which is therein necessarily expressed; rather it is the expression itself which constitutes the source of enjoyment. It is the self-delight of Love, which seeks its bliss in its own mourning, its laments, its descriptions, memories, and experience; a yearning, which is satisfied in itself as such, and with the image, the spirit of those it loves, is already in full possession of the soul, with which it longs to unite itself. Dante, too, when conducted by his master Virgil through hell and hell-fire, gazes at what is the culmination of horror, of awfulness; he is fearful, he often bursts into tears, but he strides on comforted and tranquil, without affright and anxiety, without the sullenness and embitterment which implies “these things should not be thus.” Nay, even his damned in hell receive the blessedness of eternity. Io eterno duro is inscribed over the gates of hell. They are what they are, without repentance and longing; they do not speak of their sufferings; they are as immaterial to us as they are to them, for they endure for ever. Rather they are absorbed simply in their personal experience and actions, secure of themselves as rooted in the same interests, without lamentation and without yearning339.

When we have grasped this trait of happy independence and freedom of the soul in love we shall understand the character of the greatest Italian painters. It is in this freedom that they are masters of the detail of expression, and situation. On the wings of this tranquillity of soul they can maintain their sovereignty over form, beauty, and colour. In their most defined presentation of reality and character, while remaining wholly on the earth and often only producing portraits, or appearing to produce such, what we have are pictures of another sun, another spring. They are roses which are equally heavenly blossoms. And, consequently, we find that in their beauty we do not have merely beauty of form, we do not have only the sensuous unity of soul impressed on sensuous corporeal shapes; we are confronted with this very trait of reconciled Love in every mode, feature, and individuality of character. It is the butterfly, the Psyche340, which in the sunlight of its heaven, even hovers round stunted flowers341. It is only by virtue of this rich, free, and rounded beauty that they are able to unfold the ideals of the antique art’s more recent perfection.

Italian art has, however, not immediately and from the first attained to such a point of perfection; it had in truth a long road to traverse before it arrived there. And yet, despite this, the purity and innocence of its piety, the largeness of the entire conception, the unassuming beauty of form, this intimate revelation of soul342, are frequently and above all in the case of the old Italian masters most conspicuous where the technical elaboration is still wholly incomplete. In the previous century it was fashionable to depreciate these earlier masters, and place them on one side as clumsy, dull, and barren343. It is only in more recent times that they have been once more rescued from oblivion by savants and artists; but the wonder and imitation thus awakened has run off into the excess of a preference which tends to deny the advances of a further development in mode of conception and presentment, and can only lead astray in the opposite direction.

In drawing the reader’s more close attention to the more important phases in the development of Italian art up to this period of its fullest perfection, I will only briefly emphasize the following points which immediately concern the characterization of the essential aspects of painting and its modes of expression.

(α) After the earliest stage of rawness and barbarism the Italians moved forward with a fresh impetus from that in the main craftsmanship type of art which was planted by the Byzantines. The compass of subjects depicted was, however, not extensive, and the distinctive features of the type were austerity, solemnity, and religious loftiness. But even at this stage — I am quoting the conclusions of Herr von Rumohr — who is generally recognized as an authority upon these earlier periods344, Duccio, the Sienese, and Cimabue, the Florentine, endeavoured to assimilate the few remains of antique drawing, which was grounded on laws of perspective and anatomical precision, and so far as possible, to rejuvenate the same in their own genius. They “instinctively recognized the value of such drawings, but strove to soften the extreme insistence345 of their ossification, comparing such insufficiently comprehended traits with the life such as we find it in fact or suggestion when face to face with their own productions345.” Such are merely the first and mediating efforts of art to rise from the inflexibility of a type to lifelike and individual expression.

(β) The further step of advance consists in the complete severation from those previous Greek examples, in the full acceptance, relatively both to the entire conception and execution of what is distinctively human and individual, and along with this in the profounder suitability of human characters and forms which was gradually evolved to express the religious content thus to be expressed.

(αα) It is here before all we must draw attention to the great influence which Giotto and his pupils exercised. Giotto, along with the changes he effected in respect to modes of conception and composition, brought about a reform in the art of preparing colours. The later Greeks probably, such at least is the result of chemical analysis, made use of wax either as a medium of colour, or as a kind of varnish346, and from this we get the yellow-green and obscure general tone, which is not sufficiently explained by the action of lamplight347. Giotto wholly dispensed with this glutinous medium of the Greek painters, and used instead, when preparing his colours348, the clarified milk of young shoots, unripe figs, and other less oliginous limes349, which Italian painters of the early Middle Ages had used, very likely even before they strenuously imitated the Byzantines350. A medium of this kind had no darkening effect on the colours, but left their luminosity and clarity unimpaired. Still more important was the reform effected by Giotto in Italian painting with respect to selection of subjects and their manner of presentment. Ghiberti himself praises Giotto for having abandoned the rude style of the Greeks, and without leaning in this direction to an excess having introduced the truth and grace of Nature. Boccaccio, too, says of him that Nature is unable to create anything that Giotto could not imitate to the point of deception351. In Byzantine pictures we can hardly detect a trace of natural appearance. It was Giotto, then, who concentrated his attention on what is present and actual, and compared the forms and effects which he undertook to exhibit with Life as it existed around him. And we may associate with this tendency the fact that during the times of Giotto not only do we find that the state of society was more free and intent on enjoyment, but that the veneration of several later saints took its rise then, saints whose lives more or less fell in that period352. It was such Giotto utilized particularly in emphasizing the truthful presentment of the subjects of his art; there was, in fact, thus the further demand suggested by the content itself that he should bring into prominence the natural features of the bodily presence and exhibit more defined characterization, action, passion, situation, pose, and movement. What we find, however, to a relative degree disappears from this attempt is that imposing religious seriousness which is the fundamental characteristic of the phase of art which it followed353. The things of the world receive a stage and a wider opportunity for expression; and this is illustrated by the way Giotto, under the influence of his age, found room for burlesque along with so much that was pathetic. In this connection Herr von Rumohr states rightly, “Under conditions of this description I am at a loss to understand how certain critics, who have exclusively insisted on this feature of Giotto’s work, can so overestimate Giotto’s tendency and performance by claiming it as the most sublime effort of modern art354.” It is a great service of the above-named critic to have once more placed in a true light the point of view from which Giotto can be justly appreciated; he throughout makes us careful to see, that in this tendency of Giotto to humanize and towards realism he never really, as a rule, advances beyond a comparatively subordinate stage in the process.

(ββ) The advance of painting continued under the manner of conception for which Giotto was in the main responsible. The typical representation of Christ, the apostles, and the more important events which are reported us by the evangelists, were more and more thrust into the background. Yet in another direction the embrace of subject-matter was for that reason extended. As our author expresses it: “All artists engaged in depicting the various phases in the life of latter-day saints, such as their previous worldliness, the sudden awakening of conscience, their entrance into the life of piety and asceticism, the miracles of their lives, more particularly after their decease, in the representation of which, as is to be expected from the external conditions of the art, the expression of the effect upon the living exceeded any suggestion of invisible powder355.” Add to this that the events of the Life and Passion of Christ were not neglected. The birth and education of Christ, the Madonna with her Child were exceptionally favoured subjects, and were invested with a more life-like domesticity, touched with a more intimate tenderness, revealed to us in the medium of human feeling, and, moreover, to quote yet further: “In the problems356 suggested by the Passion it was not so much the sublime and the triumph as simply the pathetic aspect which was emphasized, a direct consequence of the enthusiastic wave of sympathy with the earthly sufferings of the Saviour, to which Saint Francis, both by example and teaching, had communicated a vital energy hitherto unheard of.”

In respect to a yet further advance towards the middle of the fifteenth century, we have to lay exceptional stress on two names, Masaccio and Fiesole. In the progressive steps through which the religious content was vividly carried into the living forms of the human figure and the animated expression of human traits Herr von Rumohr357 draws attention to two essential aspects as of most importance. The one is the increase of rondure in all forms to which it applies; the other he indicates as “a profounder penetration into the articulation, the consistency, the most varied phases of the charm and significance of the features of the human countenance.” Masaccio and Angelico da Fiesole between them were the first to contribute effectively to the solution of this artistic problem, the difficulty of which in its entirety exceeded the powers of any one artist of that period. “Masaccio was mainly occupied with the problem of chiaroscuro, and the rounding and effective articulations of groups of figures. Angelico da Fiesole, on the other hand, devoted himself to sounding the depths of ideal coherence, that indwelling significance of human features, the mine of whose treasure he was the first to open to painting358.” The effort of Masaccio was not so much one in the direction of grace as in that of imposing conception, manliness, and under the instinctive need for unity of the entire composition. The impulse of Fra Angelico was that of religious intensity, a love severed from the world, a cloistral purity of emotion, an exaltation and consecration of the soul. Vasari assures us in his account of him that he never commenced work without prayer, and never depicted the sufferings of the Redeemer without bursting into tears359. We have, then as aspects of this advance of painting a more exalted vitality and realism: but, on the other hand, the depth of piety, the ingenuous devotion of the soul in its faith overran itself and overpowered the freedom, dexterity, naturalism, and beauty of the composition, pose, drapery, and colour. If the later development was able to attain to a far more exalted and complete expression of the spiritual consciousness, yet the epoch we are now considering has never been surpassed in purity and innocence of religious feeling and serious depth of conception. Many pictures of this time may very well, by reason of the fact that the forms of life, which are used to depict the religious intensity of soul-life, do not appear fully adequate to this expression, give us something like a repulse; from the point of view, however, of spiritual emotion, which is the most vital source of these works of art, we have still less reason to fail to acknowledge the naive purity, the intimacy with the most profound depths of the truly religious content, the assuredness of faithful love even under oppression and in grief, and oft, too, the charm of innocence and blessedness, inasmuch as the epochs that followed it, however much in other aspects of artistic perfection they made a step forwards, yet for all that never secured again the perfection of these previous excellencies, when once it had been lost.

(γγ) A third aspect attaches to the further development of the art, in addition to those already discussed, which may be described as the wider embrace of it relatively to the subjects accepted for presentation by the new impulse. Just as what was regarded as sacred had from the very commencement of Italian painting approached more closely to reality by reason of the fact that men whose lives fell about the time of the painters themselves were declared to be saints, so too Art received into its own sphere other aspects of reality and present life. Starting from that earliest phase of pure spirituality and piety, an art whose aim was wholly absorbed in the expression of such religious emotions, painting proceeded more and more to associate the external life of the world with its religious subject-matter. The gladsome, forceful self-reliance of the citizen in the midst of his professional career, the business and the craft that was bound up with such qualities, the freedom, the manly courage and patriotism, in one word, his weal in the vital activities of the Present, all this newly-awakened sense of human delight in the virtues of civil life and its cheer and humour360, this harmonized sympathy with what was actual in both its aspects of ideal life361 and the external framework of the same, all this it was which entered now into his artistic conceptions and modes of presenting such and was made valid therein. It is in this spirit that the enthusiasm for landscape backgrounds, views of cities, environment of church buildings and palaces becomes a real instinct of artistic life; the living portraits of famous savants, friends, statesmen, artists, and other persons remarkable in their day for their wit and vivacity find a place in religious compositions; traits borrowed from both civil and domestic life are utilized with a greater or less degree of freedom and dexterity; and if, no doubt, the spiritual aspect of the religious content remained the foundation of all, yet the expression of piety was no longer exclusively isolate, but is linked together with the more ample life of reality and the open stage of the world362. No doubt we must add that by reason of this tendency the expression of religious concentration and its intimate piety is weakened, but art required also this worldly element in order to arrive at its culminating point.

(γ) Out of this fusion of the more embracing reality of life with the ideal material of religious emotion arose a new problem for genius to solve, the complete solution of which was reserved for the great masters of the sixteenth century. The supreme aim now was to bring the intimate life of soul, the seriousness and the loftiness of religious emotion into harmony with the animation, the actual presence of characters and forms both in its corporeal and spiritual aspect, in order that the bodily configuration in its pose, movement, and colour, may not simply remain an external framework, but become itself essentially an expression of spirit and life, and by virtue of that expression, made throughout all its parts wholly the reflex of soul-life no less than of external form, reveal a beauty without break or interruption.

Among the masters of most distinction, who set before themselves such an aim, we should pre-eminently mention Leonardo da Vinci. It was he, who, by virtue of his artistic thoroughness, his almost over-refined passion for detail, his exquisite delicacy of mind and feeling, not only penetrated further than any other363 into the mysteries of the human form and the secrets of its expression, but, through his equally profound knowledge of all the technique of a painter, attained to an extraordinary infallibility in the employment of all the means that his researches and practice had placed within his reach. And, along with this, he was able to retain a reverential seriousness in composing his religious subjects, so that his figures, however much they present to us the ideal of a more complete and rounded actuality, and disclose the expression of sweet, smiling joyfulness in facial traits and the delicate rhythm of drapery, do not thereby dispense with the dignity, which the worth and truth of religion demand364.

The most unflecked quality365 of perfection reached in this direction was, however, that first attained by Raphael. Herr von Rumohr assigns more particularly to the artists of the Umbrian School dating from the middle of the fifteenth century a mysterious fascination, which no sympathetic nature can resist, and endeavours to find the source of this attraction in the depth and tenderness of feeling no less than the marvellous unity into which these painters knew how to bring memories from the oldest essays of Christian art of a style only very partially understood by them366 with the milder conceptions of a later time, and in this respect proved themselves superior to the Tuscan, Lombard, and Venetian fellow artists of that period367. It was just this expression of “flawless purity of soul and absolute surrender to the yearning and enthusiastic flow of tender feeling” to which Pietro Perugino, the master of Raphael, devoted his artistic efforts, and succeeded by doing so in fusing the objectivity and vitality of external forms, throughout all its actual realization and in every detail, an aim which had previously received the most marked attention in the elaborate work of the Florentines. Starting from the work of Perugino, to whose artistic taste and style he appears to have consistently adhered in his early work, Raphael proceeded yet further to realize to the most consummate degree the demand of the ideal above indicated. In other words we find united in him the highest ecclesiastical feeling for the themes of religious art and a complete knowledge and enthusiastic respect for natural phenomena in all the animation of their colour and shape together with an insight fully as great for the beauty of the antique. This great admiration for the idealistic beauty of the ancients did not bring him in any way to imitate and adapt to his work the forms which Greek sculpture had elaborated in their perfection. What he seized from it was simply the general principle of their free beauty which in his hands was throughout suffused with a more individual vitality more applicable to his art and with a type of expression more deeply informed with soul-life, and at the same time with an open, blithesome clarity and thoroughness, in all the detail of the presentment that up to his time was as yet unknown among Italian artists. In the elaboration and consistent fusion and coherence of this ideal atmosphere he reached the highest point of his attainment. On the other hand, in the magical charm of chiaroscuro, in the exquisite tenderness and grace of soul-expression, of forms, movements, and grouping, it is Correggio who most excels, while the incomparable greatness of Titian consists in the wealth of natural life that he displays, the illuminating bloom, fervency, warmth, and power of his colour. We know nothing more delightful than the naïveté of Correggio’s not so much natural as religious and spiritual grace, nothing more sweet than his smiling, unconscious beauty and innocence368.

The artistic perfection of these great masters is a culminating point of art such as could only be mastered by one nation in the course of historical development.

(c) Thirdly, in so far as the question is that of German painting we may affiliate that which is entirely German with that of Flemish or Dutch painters. The general distinction between the above schools and that of the Italians, consists in this, that neither the Germans nor the painters of the Netherlands were willing as a creation of their own to attain to the free ideal forms and modes of expression characteristic of Italian art, or were able to progress to that spiritually transfigured type of beauty which is essentially the result of such. What they did elaborate, however, was, in one aspect of it, the expression of depth of emotion and the austere seclusion of the individual soul, and, from another point of view, they attach to this intensity of faith the separate definition of individual character in the broader significance of it, that is to say, one which does not merely disclose the fact of its close interest with the claims of faith and salvation, but also shows how the individuals represented are affected by the concerns of the world, how they are buffeted by the cares of life, and in this severe ordeal have gained worldly wisdom, fidelity, consistency, straightforwardness, the constancy of chivalry and the sterling character of good citizens. Agreeably to this more restricted and depressed vision of the detail of life we find here, and it is particularly conspicuous in the German school, from the beginning, in deliberate contrast with the purer forms and characters of the Italians, rather the expression of a formal obstinacy of stubborn natures, which either oppose themselves to God with energetic defiance and brutal wilfulness, or are forced to impose restraint on themselves in order that they may, with sore travail, wrest themselves from their limitations and uncouthness, and fight their way to the reconciliation of religion; consequently the deep wounds which they inflict on their spiritual life inevitably contribute to the visible expression of their piety. In illustrating this more closely I will merely draw attention to certain prominent features, which are important indications of the contrast between the older Flemish school and the upper German and more recent Dutch masters of the seventeenth century.

(α) Among the early Flemish masters, the brothers Van Eyck, Hubert, and John are exceptionally distinguished in the early half of the fifteenth century, and it is only recently that their true merits have once more been established. It is now an established fact that they discovered, or at least they were the first to fully perfect, the process of oil-painting. Looking at the great advance they made we must now assume that a distinct series of stages in the course of this progress to its culmination could be set forth. We have, however, no historical array of works of art preserved for us whereby we could illustrate such a gradual process. We are face to face at one moment of time with the beginning and final consummation. For painting of greater excellence than that of these two brothers it is almost impossible to imagine. Moreover, the works that have come down to us, in which the mere type is already dispensed with and overcome, not merely display a grand mastery in drawing, arrangement, grouping, ideal and exterior characterization, enthusiasm, clarity, harmony, and delicacy of colouring, dignity and repose of composition; but we must add that the entire wealth of painting respectively to nature’s environment, architectonic accessories, backgrounds, splendour and variety of material, drapery, style of weapons, ornamentation, and much besides, is already treated with such fidelity, with such an instinctive sense of what is pictorial, and with such a technical virtuosity, that even later centuries, at any rate from the point of view of thoroughness and truth, have been unable to produce any more consummate result. We are, however, more strongly attracted by the master works of Italian painting, if we contrast them with this Flemish school, because the Italians, along with the completest expression of soul-life and the religious sense, retain throughout the ideal of spiritual freedom and imaginative beauty. The figures of Flemish art delight us, no doubt, by virtue of their innocence, naïveté, and piety; nay, in the depth of their emotional life they, in some measure, surpass the work of the most excellent Italian artists; but the Flemish masters have never been able to attain to a beauty of form and a freedom of soul comparable with that of the Italians. Their Christ-babes are, in particular, badly modelled; and for the rest their characters, whether men or women, however strongly, subject to their dominant expression of religious fervour, they may display a sterling character in their relation to secular interests sanctified by the depth of their faith, nevertheless appear to us lacking in a significance which can exalt itself over such a piety, or rather, as dominated by it, do not appear able at the same time to be essentially free, instinct with imagination and the enterprise of superior qualities.

(β) A further aspect we shall do well to consider is the transition from the more tranquil, reverential piety to the representation of martyrdoms, and, in general, what is not beautiful in reality. It is more particularly the North German masters who excel in scenes borrowed from the Passion in which they emphasize the savagery of the soldiery, the evil aspects of the mocking, the fierceness of the hate against Christ during the course of His sufferings, with particular insistence on features of ugliness and distortion, and which are intended to denote external forms correspondent with the depravity of spirit. The tranquil and beautiful activity of an unassuming personal piety is thrown into the background, and the movements which are inseparable from the situations above mentioned unfold us hideous distortions, expressions of ferocity, and all the unbridled exhibition of passions. Where we have the contending tumult and the uncouthness of characters presented with such detail, it is not surprising that such pictures are defective in the ideal harmony of their composition no less than their colour, so that, more especially where a taste for old German paintings first crops up, critics when thus confronted with what is, as a rule, an inferior class of technical accomplishment, fall into many mistakes when determining the date of their production. Thus it has been maintained that they are previous to the more consummate pictures of the Van Eyck period, although, for the most part, they hail from a more recent time. However, the Upper German masters were not exclusively occupied with works of this type, but have likewise treated a variety of religious subjects, and, indeed — Albrecht Dürer, with others, exemplifies this — even in scenes from Christ’s Passion, have understood how effectively to grapple with the extremes of pure savagery, and even when treating such themes to preserve an ideal nobility and an external independence369 and freedom.

(γ) Finally, the development of German and Flemish art is characterized in a complete identification of itself with the ordinary life of the Present; and, along with this, in a unified system of the most varied modes of presentation, which, both in respect to their content and technique, are distinct from one another and independently elaborated. We have seen already the advance made by Italian painting from the simple nobility of devotion to an ever-increasing assertion of secular motive, which here, however, as we pointed out in the case of Raphael, was in some measure permeated by ecclesiastical prepossessions, and in part limited by the coherent principle of antique beauty. We may add that the later course of this school is not so much a dissolution of that unity in the representation of every kind of subject-matter under the predominant interest of the colourist as a more superficial disposition, or rather, eclectic imitation of styles of draughtsmanship and painting. German and Flemish art, on the contrary, has in the most definite and exceptional degree traversed the entire scheme of content and modes of treatment, starting from its wholly traditional church pictures, single figures and half lengths, then on to thoughtful, pious, and devotional subjects, until we come to that animation and extension of the same in larger compositions and scenes, in which, however, the free characterization of figure, the heightened vitality effected by means of processions, retinues, incidental personages, embellishment of garments and utensils, wealth of portraiture, architectural works, environment, views of churches, cities, streams, forests, mountains, is still conceived and executed as a whole subject to religious motivation. This focal centre still persists; but we find that the range of subjects, which had hitherto been held together in unity, is broken into division, and the separate parts become, in the specific singularity and contingent character of their alternations or independent modifications, subject to every possible type of conception and pictorial execution370.

In order to arrive at a full appreciation of this aspect of art’s development in the present context, for we have already referred to the point, we will pass briefly in review the national conditions which were operative in the change. We are under the necessity to justify, as we shall attempt to do in the following observations, a transition from direct relations to the Church and the outlook and pictorial modes of piety to a delight in the world simply, that is to say, to the objects and particular phenomena of Nature, to domestic life in its dignity, congeniality, and peaceful seclusion, to an enjoyment of national festivities and processions, rustic dances, the games and follies attendant upon church fêtes. Now the Reformation had thoroughly penetrated Holland. The Dutch had become Protestants and overcome the despotism of the Spanish Crown and Church. And what is more we do not, if we consider the political condition here, either find a distinguished nobility which drives forth its princes and tyrants, or imposes laws on them, nor yet an agricultural people, oppressed peasantry, who break free as the Swiss have done, but rather a population which, in by far the largest proportion of it, if we except the few brave souls that tilled the soil and its more than brave heroes of the sea, consisted of citizens of the town, men of business, well-to-do burghers, men who, rejoicing in their ordinary avocations, entertained no lofty pretensions, but, as became their courage and intelligence, with audacious reliance in God, stood up to defend the freedom of their hardly-won liberties and the particular privileges of their provinces, cities, and guilds, dared to oppose themselves to all hazards without fear of the transcendent prestige of the Spanish dominion over half the world, to bravely let their blood flow for such an aim, and by virtue of this righteous boldness and endurance victoriously secured both their religious and civic independence. And if we may brand any single condition of soul-life as distinctively deutsch, it is just this loyal, well-to-do, and genial citizenship, which, in a self-respect that is without pride, in a piety which is not merely absorbed in enthusiasm and devotion, but which is concretely pious in the affairs of the world371 and is homely and contented in its abundance, remains neat and clean, and in persistent carefulness and contentment under all circumstances, armed with its own enduring sense of independence and freedom, is able, with loyalty to its former life, to preserve the sterling character of its forefathers unimpaired. This intelligent and artistically endowed people furthermore seeks its enjoyment in the pictorial presentment of its vigorous, justly co-ordinated, satisfying, and comfortable existence; it is all for taking a renewed delight by means of its pictures in the cleanliness under all conditions of its towns, houses, and domestic arrangements, of enjoying thus its household felicity, its wealth, the generous adornment of its wives and children, the splendour of its civic feasts, the boldness of its seamen, the fame of its merchandise and the shipping, in which it rides over all the seas of the world. And it is just this instinct of orderly and cheerful existence, which the Dutch masters emphasize also in their landscape subjects. In one word, in all their pictorial accomplishment they succeed in combining with freedom, and truth of conception, with their enthusiasm for what is in appearance of inferior and momentary significance, with the freshness of open vision and the concentration of their entire soul on all that is most stamped with the seclusion and limitations of their life, the most ample freedom of artistic composition, no less than the finest feeling for accessories and the most perfect effects of studious elaboration. From one point of view this school of painting has developed to an incomparable degree the magic and mystery of lighting and colour372 generally in its scenes borrowed from war and military life, in its tavern jollifications, in its weddings and other rustic fêtes, in its pictures of domestic life, in its portraits, landscapes, animals, flowers, and the rest. From another aspect it has elaborated with a similar excellence the characterization which penetrates to the heart of life in all the truth of which Art is capable. And although its insistence on the insignificant and contingent includes the expression of what is boorish, rude, and common, yet these scenes are so permeated throughout with ingenuous lustiness and jollity, that it is not the common in its meanness and naughtiness so much as the gaiety and joviality which creates the artistic subject and its content. We do not look at mean feelings and passions, but simply what is boorish, in the sense of being rustic, near to nature, in the poorer classes, a quality which connotes geniality, waggishness, and comedy. In short the Ideal itself is not wholly absent from this unperturbed easy-way-of-life. It is the Sabbath of Life, which brings all to one level and removes all badness, simply as such. Men who are thus so whole-heartedly of good temper can neither be wholly bad nor mean. In this respect it is not one and the same thing, whether evil is of purely momentary appearance in a character, or lies at its root and essence. In the work of these Dutch painters what is humorous in a situation cancels what is evil, and it is at once clear to us that the characters could be something other than that in the guise of which they are for the time being set before us373. A gaiety and comedy of this description contributes much to the invaluable character of these pictures. If pictures of this rollicking type are attempted nowadays, the painter, as a rule, only places before us what is essentially mean, coarse and bad without the illuminating atmosphere of a comic situation374. A bad wife rails at her tipsy husband in the tavern with all her might. In a scene of this kind we have only put before us, as I have already remarked, the bald facts that the man is a dissipated brute and the woman a rating wench.

If we look at the Dutch masters in this light we shall no longer entertain the view that the art of painting should have said good-bye to such subjects altogether, and merely confined itself to depicting the gods of old, myths, and fables, or even Madonna pictures, crucifixions, martyrs, popes, and saints of both sexes. What is a vital ingredient of every work of art is inseparable also from painting, and this is the observance of what generally concerns our humanity, the spirit and characterization of man, in other words what man is and what each individual is. This vital grasp of the conscious life of human nature and the external forms of its appearance, this naive delight and artistic freedom, this freshness and cheerfulness of imaginative sympathy, this absolute directness of execution is what constitutes the poetry that underlies the work of the majority of the Dutch painters of this period. In their paintings we may study and acquaint ourselves with human nature and mankind. Nowadays, however, our artist only too frequently will confront us with portraits and historical pictures, at which we have only to cast a bare glance, and we see that, while flatly contradicting the wildest dream of what is possible in mankind or anyone in particular, he neither knows aught at all about man or his natural colour, nor yet the modes of composition375 in which we may justly express that humanity376.

214 Die gesammte Menschen-brust.

215 Die in sich gediegene Individualität des Gottes.

216 Betrachtung, here implying thought rather than vision.

217 That is a unity which dissolves all difference.

218 Als Inneres.

219 Als Reflexion in sich. Probably Hegel means simply the ultimate fact of self-conscious life — which is to find itself in Nature as the antithesis of the synthetic unity of the ego. This is developed in the latter half of the sentence.

220 Lit., “Is not an essentially persistent and stereotyped (Erstarrtes, stiffened) individual.”

221 Less than sculpture.

222 He may mean type of art generally, but I think the reference here is simply to painting. The passage is an important one.

223 I presume Hegel uses the word seeligkeit in the ordinary sense, not “soulfulness.” The close relation with Schmertz necessitates this. But the spelling suggests the other interpretation.

224 Which is absent in the classical treatment.

225 That is, the creative artist.

226 Innerlichkeit. It is impossible to express Hegel’s use of this word by one expression. It combines intimacy, ideal union, and inwardness of soul-life in its contrast to objective reality.

227 That is the romantic type.

228 Die für sich seyende Subjektivität. That is a process that elaborates itself in independent form consonant to its own substance.

229 Als dieses Subjekt. That is, I assume, as the distinctive personality of the artist. This must appear on the face of the work as the crown of its independent type and concrete unity (Zur Spitze des Fürsichseyns) but must not dominate it to the extent of destroying all natural detail, not even to the extent of sculpture.

230 Zur Spitze des Fürsichseyns. See note above.

231 That is their union in sculpture.

232 Als solcher. Hegel means that the universal present in emotion is objective therein as part of the self-conscious life, but is only presented in the concrete objective shape in the work of the artist who therein suffers to escape the wholly personal side.

233 Sein Inneres, his ideal substance, with more direct reference to feeling.

234 Aus demselben in sich hineingehend. I think what is meant is that the material is idealized out of one of its spatial conditions rather than that the artist selects his medium in consonance with his temperament and technique.

235 That is, does not affect the stability and total effect of the work. Of course the actual effect may vary.

236 Für diesen festen Punkt des Subjekts.

237 Die in sich besonderte Innerlichkeit.

238 The distinctions in matter conditioned in Space.

239 The meaning, if rather obscurely expressed, appears to be this. The art of sculpture shows us when it treats the spatial dimensions as essential that we must have the entire spatial form to do this, and it shows us that if we wish to pass from the mere presentment of bodily form to a fuller ideal quality we must contract this exclusive appearance of physical matter.

240 Lit., “Begins to be subjective.” Begins to possess a self-excluding centre of unity, i.e., self-identity.

241 That is to the point of a real subject or ego.

242 E.g., secure an abstract result in superficies only.

243 Apart from artistic means.

244 Though the statements here are suggestive, they are obviously influenced by Hegel’s belief in the false theory of light propounded by Goethe.

245 This is a direct reference to the Newtonian theory, of course.

246 Zeichnung here refers to line rather than technical excellence in draughtsmanship. It must be admitted Hegel’s emphasis of these two aspects is carried rather too far.

247 The above passage is open to criticism. Hegel hardly makes allowance for the fact that the defective technique, so far as it is defective, of the earlier masters, was mainly due to their state of knowledge. Art was, in a certain aspect of technique, in its infancy. Moreover to compare Dutch landscape with that of Bellini or Raphael is to compare things that are each unique of their kind and not comparable. Their aim was entirely different. In such pictures as the San Sisto Madonna of Raphael, the great Crucifixion of Tintoret, or the Entombment of Titian it is quite impossible to maintain that the earnestness of conception is in any way inferior to the technique, although we have no doubt a different degree of conviction expressed by Fra Angelico. And the classical landscape of Titian or Tintoret is of its type supreme.

248 This statement of Hegel again requires parenthesis or at least interpretation. There is a realism such as that we find in the most consummate work of a Titian, or the genre work of the Dutch school, or our own Pre-Raphaelites, to say nothing of mere academical realism, which hardly comes within his remarks. It is obvious that the Ideal is subserved in different degrees by such examples, and in fact to preserve that unity of conception despite the greatest elaboration, is to serve the Ideal at least in one aspect of it. Hegel, at least in the concluding part of this paragraph, appears mainly to have in his mind still life and the genre pictures of the Dutch, and rather seems to overlook his own statement as to the necessity of selection and the power to express detail by the shorthand of genius rather than deliberate imitation.

249 Grossartigkeit.

250 Innigkeit. Intimate ideality, inwardness.

251 I am not sure what Hegel means by the expression Nicht das Niedrige ist zerdrückt. If the text is correct I suppose it means the sensuous side does not make way for a more spiritual synthesis. What we should expect is some other verb than zerdrückt such as ausgedrückt, the sense being that “though the mean emotion is not expressed, and no rage, etc., is asserted, yet despite of it all,” etc. I think there must be some misprint here.

252 Ein starres Beisichseyn. Compare the expression lower down affirmatives Fürsichseyn with which it contrasts.

253 Für sich bestehende Herz.

254 Als ein göttliches Moment. It means an actual phase in the Divine existence.

255 An important statement. Hegel’s words are Sondern wir müssen das geistige Daseyn im Bewusstseyn des Menschen als die wesentliche geistige Existenz Gottes ansehn.

256 A bad master at any rate for such a subject.

257 This metaphor appears to me rather confused, and in fact I do not pretend wholly to understand its meaning. I suppose the idea is that beyond the clouds of soul-life there are the clouds that obscure Providence. In all this passage Hegel shows his limitations as an art student.

258 Näher. That is our love of God is mainly through Christ.

259 Ein bloss eingelnes Moment. A phase that passes or becomes relatively insignificant.

260 Innigste, most intimate. A curious but characteristic conclusion of Hegel.

261 This analysis must be accepted of course mainly as an analysis of the ideal proposed to us by the profoundest Christian art. It is obviously not true of much Italian art, Titian’s work for example, and it is equally remote from many of the most probable facts of history.

262 Die Starrheit. The rigid or unyielding character.

263 Der Gehalt ihres Gemüths. It is possible to see in this analysis something rather capricious and far-fetched, and yet to appreciate its value as an analysis of Christian love for the deceased beloved as contrasted with pagan sentiment. The finest illustration I myself can recollect of this is not the mother Mary at all, but the figure of the Magdalene in Tintoret’s “Deposition” in the S. Giorgio Maggiore Church in Venice. As a matter of fact the divine mother in sacred art is almost invariably depicted in a state of swoon under the stress of her grief, though Tintoret’s Pietà in the Brera is a notable exception.

264 I do not know this painter. For pathos I know no finer conception of the death than that of Rembrandt’s etching. Blake’s drawing, exhibited recently at Cambridge, shows us the tranquillity and dignity of the scene more finely than any other representation.

265 I presume Hegel means this by the words die Menschheit, but it is a difficult passage.

266 It is impossible in English to preserve the antithesis between bitten and beten.

267 Und nichts für sich hat. That is to say reciprocity is of its essence. “Give and it shall be given unto you.”

268 Die Gestalt may possibly refer to the suppliant.

269 The Sistine Madonna.

270 A good instance is the great Crucifixion of Fra Angelico in the S. Mark convent in Florence.

271 And a painter like Carlo Dolci or the Caracci are even worse.

272 It would perhaps have been more instructive to consider the difference of temperament in the artist when dealing with such subjects and its influence on his treatment. It is very far from an obvious truth that physiognomy upon which the conflict of soul-life is most marked loses thereby the characteristics of beauty. There is the beauty of gnarled oak no less than that of the rose and the lily.

273 Das Beisichseyn der Liebe im Absoluten. Lit., the self-inherency cf Love within the Absolute.

274 Sondern auch selbständig. He seems to mean that they receive from this relation the subsistent individuality of spirit. This reference to landscape is obviously very perfunctory and insufficient.

275 See vol. I, p. 220.

276 Mit dem in sich particularisirten Innern. With the ideal complexus of particular objects as related to one subject. Their particularity is due to their characterization, and that is dependent on idealization.

277 Diess Verwachsenseyn. Lit., this growing up with.

278 There is, however, the aspect of consummate execution which in itself is a very real source of artistic enjoyment, and Hegel rather seems to overlook this here.

279 Verzweigungen. All off-shoots of attention or interest.

280 Of course, even in the painting of still life, artistic composition itself implies by its selection and subordination to an idea a new result. And the characteristic technique of a painter inevitably has the same result.

281 Geistigen Ausdrück.

282 Grundlage.

283 It is perhaps rather strange that Hegel should have considered the Dutch and Flemish schools as pre-eminently colourists. Apart from Rembrandt the truth is not very apparent. But he was mainly thinking of their dexterity in the lighting of a picture and the scintillation of colour.

284 That is, as black and white and its gradations.

285 It is not quite clear what is intended here by Vervielfältigung, probably power of being adapted to various subject matter and modes of expression.

286 It is hardly necessary to point out that this discussion, being based on Goethe’s false theory of colour in opposition to Newton’s prismatic analysis, has no scientific value, though historically of interest. The blueness of the sky is due to the blue rays being detained.

287 I presume by concrete unity Hegel refers in some form to a unity that is such owing to its intrinsic nature.

288 But red quite as often symbolizes enthusiasm and love, and in Tintoret’s Paradise the Virgin has the red tunic and the blue mantle.

289 As a matter of fact violet or purple is a cardinal colour.

290 Green is not a cardinal colour.

291 Hegel seems to have in view the Flemish school rather than the Dutch in the restricted sense. It is rather strange that he should dwell on this rather than work of the Venetians such as Bellini.

292 Verschwemmte. Carried away by a stream.

293 Such as Ary Scheffer and others of the same monotony. The flesh tints of Leighton and Poynter and many less men suffer in the same way.

294 Farbenschein, as Hegel uses it later on, I find it impossible to translate in one word. In fact it is not easy to seize precisely what he means. “Modulation of colour” partly expresses it. But he also seems to refer to what we understand as the personal quality of a picture or its general atmosphere, not regarded simply as Nature’s atmosphere, but as the communication of the artist’s own afflatus.

295 I crossed a young landscape-artist of growing fame the other day, who affirmed and endeavoured to express in his pictures the conviction that colour was as strong in distance as foreground. His pictures were of great interest, but I still think his robust theory unsound.

296 We have no English equivalent for the German das Incarnat or colour incarnate.

297 Ein ideelles Ineinander. By ideal Hegel means apparently that the distinctions of tint fine away beyond the grasp of sense vision. This of course is true in all natural colouring. Possibly he may mean that the idea of Life is contributive to the result.

298 Hardly a just simile for the reason that, as Hegel himself points out, flesh does not reflect external objects.

299 Den Schein innerer Belebung. This expression seems to prove that Hegel uses the word ideel in its ordinary sense of spiritual ideality.

300 Als selbst lebendiges Ganze. The colour must appear as itself a part of the vitality, not a mere covering.

301 Vertreibung. What Hegel exactly means I am not sure, probably finish by over-paintings.

302 Fresco painting is strictly in tempera. I suppose Hegel has here before him the two processes of tempera painting on the wet wall of plaster and tempera painting on some other dry surface.

303 Zu grosser innerer Klarheit und schönen Leuchten. I give what appears to me to be the meaning.

304 I presume Hegel understands by Deck und Lasurfarben the distinction of our opaque and transparent colours such as flake white and the madders or umbers. He clearly refers to glazes.

305 Die Duftigkeit, Magie in der Wirkung des Kolorits. This is a difficult passage to translate, and I am not quite sure what Hegel is aiming at. He seems to have in his mind both the ideal atmosphere of a composition and the presence of a personal style.

306 Hegel has already related the effects considered to the artist’s personality. He now endeavours to examine more closely what is implied in the relation.

307 Adriaen van Ostade, 1610-1685.

308 He means painting, of course. He never passed beyond the stage of the average amateur.

309 Spiel von Scheinen. The play of appearance, that is, as it strikes on different natures.

310 Malerischen Auffassung. Here the ideas on mental conception and artistic composition seem to be combined. But Hegel is rather loose in his use of them.

311 Hegel has doubtless Albrecht Dürer and yet earlier German art in his mind.

312 Die besonderen Bestimmungen. The lines of its definite exposition.

313 I adopt Hegel’s generic term. But he means here little more than delineation or composition.

314 As between the art of painting and those of poetry and music.

315 Geistig. We may say the same thing of Tintoret’s great Golden Calf picture. But the objection to the composition as a work of art remains more strongly than is the case with Raphael’s picture.

316 The same thing is a characteristic of Tintoret’s Annunciation in the S. Rocco Scuola and several pictures of Dürer.

317 Fine examples of this are Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross in the Munich Gallery, and the group of mourners in Tintoret’s Great Crucifixion.

318 They have in this respect been well contrasted with the characters of Euripides in the play of Aristophanes which particularly emphasizes the difference between the heroic type of Aeschylus and the realism of Euripides, “The Frogs of Aristophanes,” text and translation of B. B. Rogers; see Introd., pp. XVIII, XIX, XLV.

319 As to ugliness and its treatment by Hegel, see Professor Bosanquet’s “History of Aesthetik,” pp. 338, 355, and generally pp. 432-436.

320 That is sculpture. Hegel calls it im Plastischen.

321 An ideal with Hegel is not necessarily an image of the mind, but far more generally the concrete realization of life.

322 He should have added Tintoretto at least. What could be more pertinent than his Sages in the Palazzo Reale in Venice.

323 Applies to the study rather than the talent exercised.

324 Aber ganze Grundbild des Charakters darstellen.

325 Den geistigen Sinn und Charakter. He means the entire spiritual impression, heart, soul, and intelligence, with its practical effect in substantive character.

326 I think this is implied here in Hegel’s use of the words verarbeitet durch den Geist. But it may mean “in the face as worked upon the soul within the person portrayed.”

327 Die wahrhaften absoluten Momente für die Characteristik.

328 The German expression is, “It is not a serious affair with her sinning.” I am not sure that Hegel’s view here does not lean towards the sentimentalism he generally so strongly opposes. No doubt a clear conception of the Magdalene’s character is difficult. But it is obvious that the less stress we lay upon her sin, the less weight her conversion carries from the religious point of view, and the less great appears the effect of the interposition of her divine Master. Correggio was not a master likely to penetrate profoundly into his subject. But, on the other hand, it must be admitted that Hegel’s contention is in one aspect of it supported by the far finer conceptions of the Magdalene in Tintoret’s work. At least this great master clearly shows us that in his view of her she was strongly emotional, heart and soul in everything whether for good, under good influence, or for evil under opposite direction. It is possible to understand Hegel’s interpretation as one mainly aesthetic.

329 In Berlin. The statement is made in February 1829.

330 The omission of the Spanish school at least omits a most important link with modern impressionism and its close relation to that transition to music. And it is impossible to indicate the progress of landscape without reference to the English school.

331 “Ital. Forsch.,” vol. I, p. 279.

332 The words in ähnlicher Weise make no sense.

333 “Ital. Forsch.,” vol. I, p. 280.

334 Literally the sense is “Which (apparently agrees with the trait of piety) invigorates with soul that assuredness and accepted fact (Fertigkeit) of existence, which is from the very first (von Hause aus) more decisive (entscheidenere) in this province of salvation (des Heils).” Heils must obviously be used in the same sense as Heiland above. My translation is necessarily rather free, but I hope I have emphasized the meaning.

335 Ein ideal bleibender Uebergang. The transition is rather one the soul imagines than an actual fact. “Ideal persistence” is perhaps better.

336 Religiosität here used in good sense.

337 Lit., “More free from struggling.” Compare Saint John and Saint Paul as examples on the higher levels.

338 That is Italian painting.

339 Hegel’s delight in Italian opera is well known to readers of his correspondence. In the above fine passage he to some extent unbelts himself from his ordinary tone of rather austere reticence.

340 The distinction seems to be between the more formal unity of personality and the peculiarly seductive charm of Italian art. It is rather a fine one and it seems to me rather confusing. Moreover I do not quite see the pertinency of the simile of a Psyche that is wafted as a butterfly even round blooms that have been spoiled of their treasure, for such I understand to be the sense of verkümmerte Blumen. A butterfly comes into no active relation with such unless the idea is pictorial decoration. But possibly Hegel was thinking of his reference to Dante, and in that case employed the metaphor loosely, rather too loosely I should say.

341 “Stunted” is perhaps the best translation. The fault of the simile lies in its superficiality. It does not penetrate the conception Hegel has before him.

342 Giotto, Mantegna, Carpaccio, Masaccio, would be leading names in point here. Hegel mentions two himself lower down.

343 “Ital. Forsch.,” vol. II, p. 4.

344 Grelle. That is harsh and flagrant outline.

345 Ihrer must refer I think to the Italians, though the sentence might mean, “In contrast to these Greek productions.”

346 Als Ueberzug. The expression suggests it was used as a facial glaze or varnish.

347 “Ital. Forsch.,” vol. I, p. 312.

348 That is mixed with the attrited colour in its dryness.

349 Leimen. Leim is size or lime, in the compound word leim-farbe signifying distemper.

350 “Ital. Forsch.,” vol. II, p. 42.

351 Decam. Giorn., 6. Nov. 5.

352 Such as S. Francis as presented us in Giotto’s great frescoes in Assisi.

353 No doubt the serious aspect is less imposingly emphasized; but if the opinion condemned below is too sweeping it remains the fact that we can imagine nothing more profoundly serious in the religious sense than the frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua.

354 “Ital. Forsch.,” vol. II, p. 73.

355 “Ital. Forsch.,” vol. II, p. 213.

356 Aufgaben, artistic problems, themes.

357 “Ital. Forsch.,” vol. II, p. 243.

358 This of course is too strong a statement, and indeed is ridiculous to anyone who has complete knowledge of the best work even of Giotto.

359 “Ital. Forsch.,” vol. II, p. 252.

360 The frescoes of Mantegna, and those of Ghirlandaio, we would mention in particular the fine examples in the S. Maria Novella church in Florence, or for Mantegna our own cartoons at Hampton Court and the invaluable but now hopelessly ruined frescoes of Gozzoli, in the Campo Santo of Pisa, are fine illustrations of the text.

361 Des inneren Geistes may here refer to the ideal aspects of civil and domestic life, but I think Hegel is contrasting the two extremes and it refers to the religious content.

362 “Ital. Forsch.,” vol. II, p. 282.

363 To make this judgment in any degree a sound one we must assume the stress is laid on the mysterious aspect of expression and form. The genuine examples of Leonardo are so very few. But quite apart from that unless we exclude the great triumvirate of the Venetian school altogether Tintoret, Titian, and Veronese, the praise here given to Leonardo as a consummate master of the technique in oil-painting can only be received with considerable reserve and qualification.

364 Compare “Ital. Forsch.,” vol. II, p. 308.

365 Die reinste Vollendung. The adjective refers to the character of the perfection as an expression of artistic feeling and execution.

366 Halbdeutliche Erinnerungen. Not I think memories that are obscure themselves so much as memories which have failed to grasp the content of what is recollected. The expression is rather confused.

367 Modern criticism would doubtless have a good deal to say in qualification of this. The name of Bellini alone is sufficiently suggestive.

368 This emphasis on the work of Raphael and Correggio is characteristic of the best art criticism of the times of Hegel, but marks its limitations. Neither Raphael nor Correggio can be called religious painters in the sense that those profound masters Tintoret and Michelangelo were such. The essentially academic aspect of so much of Raphael’s later production is not noticed. And it is these three great names, Titian, Tintoret, and Michelangelo, who most truly mark the transition to our modern outlook.

369 Eine aüssere Abgeschlossenheit. This must mean, I think, a dignified and reserved treatment of the technique mainly of such themes.

370 The technical and somewhat long-worded aspect of Hegel’s style is here at its worst and I find it hard to make complete sense of this doubtless unrevised passage. The main difficulty is this, that the sentence appears to assert that “the centre” (der Mittelpunkt) of religion persists (fortbleibt) and yet asserts in the same breath that the informing unity is broken up. I have done my best.

371 A piety which is not merely emotional, but is concrete in active life, possesses practical content.

372 See note at end of chapter.

373 This appears rather to contradict what Hegel has said before of the impression a fine picture such as Correggio’s Magdalene leaves upon us that we cannot imagine the character to be other than it is. See note below.

374 More literally, “Without the alleviating effect of what is comic.”

375 I presume die Formen refers here rather to the artistic forms of grouping and composition than the traits of vital expression. But perhaps the latter interpretation would be more natural to the words.

376 The above survey of Dutch art is of great interest, and in its careful comparison of the type of that art with the national development of the Dutch may be contrasted favourably with the somewhat prejudiced criticism of such a critic as John Ruskin. At the same time I think it must be obvious that Hegel is a little inclined to overrate the ideal aspect of that portion of it we may indicate in the work of painters such as Wouvermans or Teniers, many examples of which are little removed from the defects of theme he points out in more modern work. Also personally I should say that, if we exclude the supreme genius of Rembrandt, he rather exaggerates their rank as supreme colourists in respect to the scintillation, mystery, and other effects of light. To consider that they rank above the Venetians in this respect is wholly impossible, to say nothing of Velasquez. Rubens, however, may add some support to the view, but he is hardly in the school described, and Van Dyck stands with him.

MUSIC

INTRODUCTION

If we glance back at the course the evolution of the several arts has taken, we shall find that it began with architecture. It was the art which was least complete; for, as we discovered, it was, by reason of the purely solid material, which it attached to itself as its sensuous medium, and made use of according to the laws of gravity, incapable of placing before us under an adequate mode of presentation what is spiritual; it was consequently constrained to limit itself to the task of preparing from the resources of the mind an artistic external environment for Spirit in its living and actual existence.

Sculpture, on the contrary, and in the second place, was able, it is true, to accept the spiritual itself as its object. It was, however, neither one in the sense of a particular character, nor as the intimate personal life of soul, but rather as a free individuality, which is as little separate from the substantive content as it is from the corporeal appearance of Spirit; a presentment which only displays itself as such individuality, in so far as the same enters into it, in the degree that the same is actually required to import an individual vitality into a content which is itself intrinsically essential. Moreover, it only, as such ideal spiritualization, is fused with the bodily configuration to the extent of revealing the essentially inviolable union of Spirit with that natural embodiment which is consonant therewith. This necessary identity in the art of sculpture of Spirit’s independent existence wholly with its corporeal organization, rather than with the medium of its own ideal essence, makes it incumbent upon the art still to retain solid matter as its material, but to transform the configuration of the same, not, as was the case with architecture, into a purely inorganic environment, but rather into the classical beauty adequate to Spirit and its ideal plastic realization.

And just as sculpture in this respect proved itself to be pre-eminently fitted to give vitality to the content and mode of expression of the classical type of art in its products, while architecture, despite all the service it rendered in the content which belonged to it, was unable in its manner of presentation to pass beyond the fundamental mode of a purely symbolical significance, so, too, thirdly, with the art of painting, we enter the province of the romantic. No doubt we find still in painting that the external form is the means by virtue of which the ideal presence is revealed. In this case, however, this ideality is actually the ideal and particular subjectivity, is, in short, the soul-life returning upon itself from its corporeal existence, is the individual passion and emotion of character and heart, which are no longer exclusively delivered in the external form, but mirror in the same the very ideal substance and activity of Spirit in the domain of its own conditions, aims, and actions. On account of this intimate ideality of its content the art of painting is unable to rest satisfied with a material that, in one aspect of it, is in its shape merely solid matter, and in another as such crude form is merely tangible and unparticularized, but is forced to select exclusively the show and colour semblance of the same as its sensuous means of expression. The colour, however, is only present in order to make still apparent spatial forms and shapes as we find them in the actuality of Life, even in the case where we see the art developed into all the magic of colouring, in which the objective fact at the same time already begins to vanish away, and the effect is produced by what appears to be no longer anything material at all. However much, therefore, painting is evolved in the direction of a more ideal independence of a kind of appearance which is no longer attached to shape as such, but is permitted to pass spontaneously into its own proper element, that is, into the play of visibility and reflection, into all the mysteries of chiaroscuro, yet this magic of colour is still throughout of a spatial mode, it is an appearance growing out of juxtaposition on a flat surface, and consequently a consubsistent one.

If, however, this ideal essence, as is already the case under the principle of painting, asserts itself in fact as subjective soul-life, in that case the truly adequate medium cannot remain of a type which possesses independent subsistency. And for this reason we get a mode of expression and communication, in the sensuous material of which we do not find objectivity disclosed as spatial configuration, in order that it may have consistency therein. We require a material which is without such stability in its relation to what is outside it, and which vanishes again in the very moment of its origin and presence. Now the art that finally annihilates not merely one form of spatial dimension, but the conditions of Space entirely, which is completely withdrawn into the ideality of soul-life, both in its aspect of conscious life and in that of its external expression, is our second romantic art — Music. In this respect it constitutes the genuine centre of that kind of presentment which accepts the inner personal life as such, both for its content and form. It no doubt manifests as art this inner life, but in this very objectification retains its subjective character. In other words it does not, as plastic art, suffer the expression in which it is self-enclosed to be independently free or to attain an essentially tranquil self-subsistency, but cancels the same as objectivity, and will not suffer externality to secure for itself an inviolable presence377 over against it.

In so far, however, as this annihilation of spatial objectivity, regarded as a means of manifestation, is an abandonment of the same which is itself already in anticipation asserted of the sensuous spatiality of the plastic arts themselves378, this principle of negation must also in a similar way have its activity conditioned by the materiality, which, up to this point, we have indicated as one of tranquil independent self-subsistency, just as the art of painting reduces in its province the spatial dimensions of sculpture to the simple surface. This cancelling of the spatial form therefore merely consists in this, that a specific sensuous material surrenders its tranquil relation of juxtaposition, is, in other words, placed in motion but is so essentially affected by that motion that every portion of the coherent bodily substance not merely changes its position, but also is reacted upon and reacts upon the previous condition379. The result of this oscillating vibration is tone, the medium of music.

In tone music forsakes the element of external form and its sensuous visibility, and requires for the apprehension of its results another organ of sense, namely hearing, which, as also the sight, does not belong to the senses of action but those y of contemplation; and is, in fact, still more ideal than sight. For the unruffled, aesthetic observation of works of art no doubt permits the objects to stand out quietly in their freedom just as they are without any desire to impair that effect in any way; but that which it apprehends is not that which is itself essentially ideally composed380, but rather on the contrary, that which receives its consistency in its sensuous existence. The ear, on the contrary, receives the result of that ideal vibration of material substance381, without placing itself in a practical relation towards the objects, a result by means of which it is no longer the material object in its repose, but the first example of the more ideal activity of the soul itself which is apprehended. And for the further reason that the negativity into which the oscillating medium here enters is from one point of view an annihilation of the spatial condition, which is itself removed by means of the reaction of the body382, the expression of this twofold negation, that is tone, is a mode of externality which, in virtue of its very mode of existence, is in its very origination self-destructive, and there and then itself fundamentally disappears. And it is by virtue of this twofold negation of externality, in which the root-principle of tone consists, that the same corresponds to the ideal personal life; this resonance which, in its essential explicitness383, is something more ideal than the subsistent corporeality in its independent reality, also discloses this more ideal existence384, and thereby offers a mode of expression suited to the ideality of conscious life.

If we now, by a reverse process, inquire of what type this inner life must be, if we are to prove it on its own account adapted to the expression of sound and tones, we may recall the fact already observed that by itself, that is, accepted as a real mode of objectivity, tone, in contrast to the material of the plastic arts, is wholly abstract. Stone and colour receive the forms of an extensive and varied world of objects, and place them before us in their actual existence. Tones are unable to do this. For musical expression therefore it is only the inner life of soul that is wholly devoid of an object which is appropriate, in other words, the abstract personal experience simply. This is our entirely empty ego, the self without further content. The fundamental task of music will therefore consist in giving a resonant reflection, not to objectivity in its ordinary material sense, but to the mode and modifications under which the most intimate self of the soul, from the point of view of its subjective life and ideality, is essentially moved.
We may say the same of the effect of music. The paramount claim of that, too, is the direct contact with the most intimate ideality of conscious life. It is more than any other the art of the soul, and is immediately addressed to that. The art of painting, no doubt, as we have observed, is able to express in physiognomy and facial traits with other things the inner life and its activity, the moods and passions of the heart, the situations, conflicts, and fatalities of the soul; what, however, we have before us in pictures are objective appearances, from which the self of contemplation, in its most ideal self-identity, is still held distinctly apart. However much we become absorbed in or penetrate into the object, the situation, the character, the forms of a statue or a picture, admire a work of art, lose ourselves in or possess ourselves with it, the fact still remains that these works of art are and remain objects of independent subsistency, in respect to which it is quite impossible for us to escape the relation of external observation disappears. In music, however, this distinction disappears. Its content is that which is itself essentially a part of our own personal385 life, and its expression does not result at the same time in an objective mode of spatial persistency, but discloses, in virtue of the continuity and freedom of its flight as it appears and vanishes386, that it is a manifestation, which, instead of possessing itself an independent consistency, is dependent for its support on the ideality of conscious life, and only can exist for that inward realm. Tone is therefore no doubt a mode of both expression and externality; but it is an expression which inevitably disappears precisely at the point of and in virtue of becoming externality. At the very moment that our organ of sense receives the sound it is gone. The impression that should be given is at once transferred to the tablets of memory. The tones merely resound in the depths of the soul, which are thereby seized upon in their ideal substance, and suffused with emotion. This ideality of content and mode of expression in the sense that it is devoid of all external object defines the purely formal aspect of music. It has no doubt a content, but it is not a content such as we mean when referring either to the plastic arts or poetry. What it lacks is just this configuration of an objective other-to-itself, whether we mean by such actual external phenomena, or the objectivity of intellectual ideas and images. We may indicate the course of our further examination as follows:

In the first place we have to define more accurately the general character of music and its effect in contradistinction to the other arts, not merely from the point of view of its material, but also from that of its form, which the spiritual content accepts.

Secondly, we shall have to discuss the particular distinctions, in which musical tones and their modes387 are developed and mediated partly in respect to their temporal duration, and partly in relation to the qualitative distinctions of their actual resonance.

Thirdly, and in conclusion, music possesses a relation to the content, which it expresses, either by being associated as an accompaniment388 with emotions, ideas, and considerations independently expressed by word of mouth, or by its free expansion within its own domain in unfettered independence.

In proposing now, however, after having thus in a general way specified the principle and division of the subject-matter of Music, to enter into a more detailed examination of its particular aspects, we are inevitably confronted with a peculiar difficulty. In other words, for the reason that the musical medium of tone and ideality, in which the content moves as a process, is of so abstract and formal a character, it is impossible for us to attempt such a closer survey without at the same time broaching technical formulae and definitions such as belong to the relations of tone-measure or distinctions that apply to different instruments, scales, or chords. I must admit to no expert knowledge in this sphere of musical science, and can only offer my apologies for being unable to do more than limit myself to more general points of view and a few isolated observations.

The essential points of view which are of general importance in a survey of music we may examine under the following heads of division:

First, we have to compare music on the one hand with the plastic arts, and on the other with poetry.

Secondly, we shall by means of the above comparison be in a better position to understand the way in which music is able to master and disclose a given content.

Thirdly, and as a result of the latter inquiry, we may with more accuracy explain the peculiar effect which the art of music, in contradistinction to the other arts, exercises on the soul.

(a) With regard to the first point we should, if we are desirous of setting it forth clearly in its specific individuality, compare music with the other two arts from three distinct points of view.

(α) And, first, it may be observed that it stands in a relation of affinity to architecture, although it is in strong contrast with it.

(αα) Our meaning is this. In the art of building the content which should be made apparent in architectonic forms, does not, as is the case in works of sculpture and painting, wholly enter into the configuration, but remains distinct from it as an external environment; so, too, in music, under its aspect of the most specifically romantic art, the classical identity of ideality and its external existence receives its resolution in a similar, if converse, way to that in which architecture, as the symbolical type of presentation, was not as yet wholly able to secure such a unity. For this ideality of Spirit proceeds from what is purely the concentration of soul-life, to ideas and images and the forms of such, as elaborated by the imagination, whereas the art of music is throughout more occupied in expressing merely the element of feeling and furthermore surrounds the independently expressed ideas of the mind with the melodic chime of emotions, just as architecture in its province places around the statues of the god, no doubt in an unyielding way, the reasonable forms of its columns, walls, and entablatures389.

(ββ) In this way tone and its formative combinations is for the first time a medium created by art and entirely artistic expression of a wholly different type from that we find in painting and sculpture acting through the material of the human body and its pose and physiognomy. In this respect, too, music may be more nearly compared with architecture, which does not accept its forms from what is actually presented, but as the creation of human invention, in order to inform them, partly according to the laws of gravity, and in part according to the rules of symmetry and harmonious co-ordination. Music does the same thing in its own sphere, in so far as it from one point of view follows the harmonious laws of tone which depend on quantitative relations independently of the expression of emotion, and in another aspect of it, in the recurrence of time and rhythm no less than in the further development of the tones themselves, in many respects is subject to the forms of regularity and symmetry. Consequently we find operative in music not merely the profoundest ideality and soul, but the most rigorous, rationality. It unites, in fact, two extremes, which readily lend themselves to emphatic contrast in their independent self-assertion. In this aspect of independence music more particularly assumes an architectonic character when we find in it a coherent temple of harmony of its own creatively composed and co-ordinated according to the laws of music, and released from the direct expression of soul-life390.

(γγ) Despite all this similarity, however, the art of tones moves to quite as large a degree in a sphere wholly opposed to that of architecture. We find, no doubt, in both arts as a basis quantitative or more accurately measure relations; the material, however, which in each case is informed, agreeably to such relations, is totally different. Architecture attaches itself to the heavy sensuous material in its tranquil juxtaposition and external form in Space. Music, on the contrary, lays hold of the tone-spirit391 as it rings freely out of the spatial material in the qualitative distinctions of musical sound and in the flow of a movement subject to the condition of time. For this reason the works of both arts belong to two entirely distinct spheres of spiritual activity. The art of building places in an enduring form its colossal constructions for external contemplation in symbolical forms. The swiftly evanescent world of tones, on the other hand, directly penetrates through the ears of man to the depths of his soul, attuning the same in concordant emotional sympathy.

(β) And if we, in the second place, consider the closer relation of music to the two other plastic arts392, we shall find that the similarity and distinction, which attaches to such a comparison, is in some measure founded upon the truths already enunciated.

(αα) Of these music is furthest removed from sculpture; and this is not merely so in respect to material and type of configuration, but also in that of the completed coalescence of its ideal and external aspects. There is in short a closer affinity between painting and music. In part this is due to the predominant ideality of expression exemplified in both; in part it is referable to treatment of material, in which, as we have already seen, it is permissible for the art of painting to approach the very boundary of music itself. Painting has, however, for its aim in common with sculpture the representation of an objective form in Space, and is restricted in its material to the actual form of things already present outside the sphere of art. It is unquestionably true that neither in the case of the painter nor the sculptor do we accept a human countenance, a position of the human body, the outlines of a mountain, the leafage of a tree precisely in the forms they present to us as here or there in Nature; in both cases we are bound to justify what we have before us under the conditions of the art in question, to adapt it to a particular situation, no less than to employ it as a means of expressing the inevitable artistic result of the entire content of the work. We have, therefore, in both cases on the one hand an independently recognized content, which has to receive artistic individualization, and, on the other, we are confronted with the forms of Nature as they are similarly presented in isolation; and the artist is bound, if he be truly an artist, and seek to unite these two sources of inspiration in his composition, to discover in both the material and support393 for his conception and execution. In short, he will, acting in the first instance on the security of such general principles394, endeavour on the one hand to fill out with more concrete detail the generality of his imaginative idea, and on the other to idealize and spiritualize the human or any other of the forms of Nature, which are submitted to serve him as particular models. The musician, on the contrary, it is true, does not abstract from all and every content, but finds the same in a text, which he sets to music, or with absolute freedom gives musical utterance to some definite mood in the form of a theme, which he proceeds to elaborate. The actual region, however, of his compositions remains the more formal ideality, in other words pure tones, and his absorption of content becomes rather a retreat into the free life of his own soul, a voyage of discovery into that, and in many departments of music even a confirmation, that he as artist is free of the content. If we are in a general way permitted to regard human activity in the realm of the beautiful as a liberation of the soul, as a release from constraint and restriction, in short to consider that art does actually alleviate the most overpowering and tragic catastrophies395 by means of the creations it offers to our contemplation and enjoyment, it is the art of music which conducts us to the final summit of that ascent to freedom. Or in other language that which the plastic arts secure through the objective fact of a plastic beauty, which displays the entirety of human life, human nature as such, its universal and ideal significance, in the detail of its particularity, without losing that essential harmony, this effect music must produce in a wholly different manner. The plastic artist need only exhibit, in that which is enclosed in the conception, what was already therein from the first, so that every detail in its essential determinacy is merely a closer explication of the totality which already floats before the mind in virtue of the content which is there to exhibit it. A figure, for example, in a plastic work of art, requires in this or that situation a body, hands, feet, bust, a head with a given expression, a given pose, other figures, or other aspects to which it is related as a whole, etc., and all these aspects presuppose the others, in making collectively essentially complete work. The elaboration of the theme is in such a case merely a more accurate analysis of that which already itself essentially contains it, and the more elaborate the picture is, which thereby confronts us, the more concentrated is the unity, and the stronger becomes the connection of the parts. The most consummate expression of detail must be, if the work of art is the best class, at the same time an elucidation of the highest form of unity. No doubt the ideal articulation and rounding off in a whole, in which the one part follows inevitably from another, ought to be present in a musical composition. But in some measure the execution here is of a totally different type, and moreover we can only accept the unity in a restricted sense.

(ββ) In a musical theme the significance which has to be expressed is already exhausted396. If it is repeated or carried on to further oppositions and mediations these repetitions, modulations, and elaborations by means of other scales may very readily appear superfluous, and rather are appertinent to the purely musical development and the assimilation of the varied content of harmonic progressions which are neither demanded by the content itself397, nor remain dependent upon it, whereas in the plastic arts the execution of the detail and the passage to it is simply and always a more accurate exhibition and analysis of the content itself.

But of course it is impossible to deny that another theme is actually motived by the way a theme is developed, and each of them, then, in their alternation or their interfusion progress, change, are at one time suppressed, at another emphasized, and by their victory or defeat are able to make a content explicit in its more definite features, oppositions, transitions, developments, and resolutions. But in this case, too, the unity is not made more profound and concentrated by virtue of such elaboration as is the case in sculpture and painting, but is rather an expansion, an extension, a correlative series398, an addition of remoteness or a return, for which the content, which is thus expressed, remains no doubt the universal centrum, yet does not keep the whole so securely together as we find it is possible to do in the plastic arts, particularly where their subject-matter is confined to the human organism.

(γγ) Looked at from this point of view the art of music, as contrasted with the other arts, lies too close to the medium of that formal freedom of soul life, and thereby cannot fail to a greater or less degree to be diverted beyond what is actually presented, in other words the content399. The recollection of a theme proposed is likewise a self-revealment400 of the artist, in other words is an ideal realization, to the effect that this self is the artist, and he may progress just as he likes, and by what by-paths he likes. But on the other hand the free exercise of imaginative caprice of the above description is expressly to be distinguished from a musical composition which is essentially conclusive, that is to say, which constitutes a fundamentally self-integrated totality. In the free improvization401 the absence of restrictions is itself an object, so that the artist is able to assert his caprice in the acceptance of any material he chooses, to interweave acknowledged melodies and motives in his improvized productions, to emphasize some new aspect of such, to elaborate them in a variety of modifications, or make them steps in his progression to other material, and advance from thence in the same way to developments of still more arresting contrasts.

In general, however, a musical composition determines the freedom of the composer, either by limiting it to a more self-contained execution, and the observance of what we may describe as a more plastic unity, or by permitting him with the full force of his personality and caprice to pass at every point into more or less important digressions, to let spontaneous ideas travel hither and thither as they please, to lay stress for the moment on this or that motive, and then once more to drown it in an overwhelming torrent. While, then, the study of Nature’s forms is essential to both painter and sculptor, the art of music can look for no such fixed body of fact outside its own prescribed forms, with which it would be forced to comply. The extent of the regularity and necessity of its formal character is almost wholly determined within the sphere of tone itself, which does not come into so close an association402 with the definition of the content that is therein reposed, and consequently in respect to deviations beyond the same permits for the most part a considerable opportunity for the free play of the characteristic impulse of the composer.

And this is the main point of view, from which we may contract music with the strictly plastic arts.

(γ) Looked at from another aspect music is, in the third place403, most nearly affiliated to poetry; both in fact make use of the same sensuous medium, that is, tone. Despite this, however, these arts are very strongly distinct from one another not only in virtue of the mode of treating tones in each case, but also in respect to their different modes of expression.

(αα) In poetry, as we have found already in our general differentiation of the several arts, tone is not as such elicited and artistically produced by various humanly constructed instruments, but the articulate sound of the human organ of speech is reduced to the mere symbol of speech, retaining thereby nothing more than the value of a sign of ideas, which is by itself devoid of significance. Consequently we find here that tone remains throughout a self-subsistent sensuous entity, which, as the mere symbol of emotions, ideas, and thoughts, possesses the externality and objectivity which is inherent in itself simply in virtue of the fact that is a sign and nothing more. For the true objectivity of the soul-life as such does not consist in utterance and words, but in this fact, that I, as subject, am aware of a thought, a feeling, and so forth, that further I confront it as an object, and in this way have it present to the imagination, or forthwith develop for myself what is implicit in a thought or a conception, setting forth in a series the external and spiritual relations of the given content, and relating the particular features of it to one another. Unquestionably we think throughout in language, without, however, needing actual speech as spoken. By reason of this ability to dispense with speech-utterance in its sensuous aspect as contrasted with the spiritual content of ideas, etc., to elucidate which they404 are employed, tone receives once more self-subsistency. In the art of painting no doubt colour and its arrangement, regarded simply as colour, is likewise by itself without significance, and in the same way, as contrasted with the spiritual embodied, thereby a self-substantive sensuous medium; but we get no painting from colour simply as such: we must first attach to it form and its expression. With these spiritually animated forms colouring is brought into an association by many degrees more constrained than that which pertains to uttered speech and its coalescing result of words with ideas.

If we will now look at the distinction between the poetical and musical use of tones we shall find that music does not depress the tone sound to the mere speech-utterance, but creates out of tone simply its own independent medium, so that, in so far as there is musical tone, it is treated as the object of the art405. And on account of this the realm of tone, inasmuch as it cannot serve merely as a symbol, is by virtue of this emancipated function of its life406 able to attain to a mode of configuration, which makes the form that is its peculiar possession, that is to say, the modes of tone as artistically developed, its fundamental aim and object. In recent times especially, the art of music, by its wresting itself from all content that is independently lucid, has withdrawn into the depths of its own medium. But on this very account and to this extent it has lost its compelling power407 over the soul, inasmuch as the enjoyment, which is thus offered, is only applicable to one aspect of art, in other words, is only an interest in the purely musical characteristics of the composition and its artistic dexterity, an aspect which wholly concerns the musical expert, and is less connected with the universal human interest in art.

(ββ) All that poetry loses, however, in external objectivity by being able to place on one side its sensuous medium, in so far as that can be wholly dispensed with by art, it secures for itself, in the ideal objectivity of its vision and ideas, which poetical speech presents to soul and mind. For it is the function of imagination to clothe these concepts, emotions, and thoughts in a world that is itself essentially complete408 with its events, actions, moods, and exhibitions of passion, and by this means it creates works, into which the entire fabric of reality, both in its external aspect as phenomena and in the ideal significance of its content, is brought home to the emotions, vision, and imagination of spiritual life. It is this type of objectivity which the art of music, in so far as it asserts its independent claims in its own province, is compelled to renounce. In other words, the realm of tone possesses, no doubt, as I have already indicated, a relation to the soul, and an alliance which is consonant with its spiritual movement; but it fails to pass beyond a sympathetic relation which is always of an indefinite character, albeit in this aspect of it a musical composition, if originating in the soul-life itself, and permeated by genius and emotions of a rich quality, cannot fail to react on our nature with an equivalent power and variety. In the case of a content and the ideal and personal creation such as poetry implies our emotions pass more completely out of their elementary medium of undefined conscious life into the more concrete vision and more universal409 imagination which is embodied in such content. This may also be the effect of a musical composition, so soon as the emotions which it excites in ourselves by virtue of its own nature and the artistic energy that animates it are involved more closely in ourselves with a distinct vision and ideas, and thereby present to consciousness the tangible definition of soul-impressions in a more stable outlook and more universally accepted ideas. This is, however, our imagination and vision, which no doubt has been suggested by the musical work, but which has not been itself directly disclosed by virtue of the artistic elaboration of musical tones. Poetry, on the contrary, expresses emotions, perceptions, and ideas as they are410, and is further able to delineate a picture of external objects, although it cannot itself either attain to the plastic clarity of sculpture and painting or the spiritual intimacy of music, and is consequently obliged to call as auxiliary to its powers the direct vision we otherwise receive through the senses and the speechless apprehension of soul-life in music.

(γγ) Thirdly, however, the art of music does not confine itself to this independent position over against that of poetry and the spiritual content of conscious life. It allies itself with a clearly expressed content already completely elaborated by poetry, and as the accompaniment of emotions, opinions, events, and actions. If, however, the musical aspect of such a work of art remains the fundamental and predominant one, the poetry, whether in the form of poem, drama, or any other, has no right to assert an independent claim of its own therein. And as a general rule in this association, of music and poetry the preponderance of one art is injurious to the other. If therefore the text, a poetical creation, possesses a fully independent value of its own, the support to be expected from music should be merely an insignificant one, as we find, for example, was the case with the dramatic choruses of the ancients where the music was nothing more than an incidental accompaniment. If, conversely, the music is composed with a more independent individuality of its own, then the text in its turn should be of a more superficially poetical execution, and should as an independent production confine itself to emotions of a general character and ideas depicted on universal lines. The poetical elaboration of profound thoughts is as little appropriate to a good musical text as is the delineation of the objects of external Nature or descriptive poetry generally. Songs, operatic arias, the texts of oratorios, and so forth may be consequently, so far as the detail of their execution as poetry is concerned, jejune and of a certain degree of mediocrity. The poet must not make his merits as poet too conspicuous if the musician is to find in his text a genuine opportunity. In this respect it is especially the Italians, such as Metastasio and others, who have displayed the greatest skill, while Schiller’s poems, which were never written with such an object in view at all, have been shown to be ill adapted and indeed useless for musical composition411. In cases where the music receives a more artistic elaboration, the audience understands next to nothing of the text, and this is more particularly so with our German speech and pronunciation412. For this reason it is not in the interest of music that the weight of interest should be reposed in the text. An Italian audience, for example, chatters away during the unimportant scenes of an opera, takes refreshment, plays cards, and so on; but the instant an aria of emphatic appeal or an important musical movement begins, every section of it is all attention. We Germans, on the contrary, take the greatest interest in the fortunes and speeches of the princes and princesses of opera with attendants, squires, intimates, and waiting-maids, and we do not doubt there are many among us still who regret the fact, when the singing begins, that the interest is interrupted, and take their refuge in conversation.

In religious music also the text is either for the most part a well-known credo, or a selection of single psalms, so that the words are regarded as merely an incitement to a musical commentary, which possesses an independent style peculiar to itself, that is to say one which not merely is used to expound the text, but which for the most part simply emphasizes the universal character of the content much in the same way that painting selects its material from sacred history.

(b) The second aspect of our present inquiry is that of the distinction that obtains between the way in which the art of music lays hold of its subject-matter as contrasted with the other arts, the form, that is, in which, whether it be as an accompaniment or independently of a given text, it is able to apprehend and express a particular content. As to this I have already observed that music is not only more capable than the other arts of liberating itself from an actual text, but also from the expression of a definite content, in order that it may find its satisfaction in an essentially complete series of combinations, modifications, contrasts, and modulations, which are comprised within the realm of absolute music413. In such a case, however, music is empty, without significance, and is, for the reason that one fundamental aspect of art, namely spiritual content and expression, is absent, not really genuine music at all. It is only when that which is of spiritual import is adequately expressed in the sensuous medium of tones and their varied configuration that music attains entirely to its position as a true art, and irrespective of the fact whether this content receives an independent and more direct definition by means of words, or is perforce emotionally realized from the tone music itself and its harmonic relations and melodic animation.

(α) In this respect the unique function of music consists in this, that whatever its content may be it is not so created by the art for human apprehension as though it either was held by consciousness as a general concept is so contained, or as definite external form is ordinarily presented to our perception, or as such receives its more complete reflection in the artistic counterfeit, but rather in the way in which a content is made a living thing in the sphere of the personal soul. To make this essentially veiled life and in weaved motion ring forth through the independent texture of tones, or attach itself to expressed words and ideas, and to steep such ideas in this very medium, in order to re-emphasize anew the same for feeling and sympathy, such is the difficult task assigned to the art of music.

(αα) The life of soul itself is consequently the form in which music is able to grasp its content, and thereby seeks to absorb within itself everything that can generally enter into the shrine of the soul and above all disclose itself under the veils of emotional movement. But from this it necessarily follows that the art of music must not attempt to minister to sense-perception, but must restrict its effort to making soul-life intelligible to soul, whether this is effected by its making the substantive and ideal depth of a content as such penetrate to the very core of soul itself, or by its preferring to disclose the life and motion of a content in the soul of some particular person, so that this inward life of itself becomes its actual object.

(ββ) This abstract inwardness of soul is in the most intimate sense differentiated, under the mode in which music is related to it, by feelings in other words the self-expanding medium of the personal subject, which unquestionably moves in a content, but suffers the same to persist in this direct self-seclusion of the Ego, and in a relation to the Ego, that is, void of externality. Consequently feeling is throughout simply all the envelope of that content, and it is the sphere which is claimed by music414.

(γγ) It is a province which unfolds in expanse the expression of every kind of emotion, and every shade of joyfulness, merriment, jest, caprice, jubilation and laughter of the soul, every gradation of anguish, trouble, melancholy, lament, sorrow, pain, longing and the like, no less than those of reverence, adoration, and love fall within the appropriate limits of its expression.

(β) Tone as interjection, as the cry of grief, as sigh and laughter, is already, outside the province of art, the most immediately vital expression of soul-conditions and feelings, the ah and oh of the soul. We find in it a self-production and objectivity of soul as such, an expression which stands intermediately between unconscious absorption and the self-return to thoughts ideally determinate, a disclosure, which has no relation to external fact, but is confined to the contemplative state, just as the bird, too, in its song possesses this enjoyment and this production of its inner self.

The purely natural expression, however, of interjections is not as yet music, for though these outcries are no doubt no intentionally articulate sign of ideas as speech is and consequently express no conceived content in its generalized form as concept, but give vent to a mood and emotion in and through tone itself, a state which is reposed immediately in similar tones and opens the heart in the outburst of the same, yet this emancipation is not one which is promoted by art. The art of music must on the contrary bring the emotions into tone relations of definite structure, and wean the expression of Nature of its wildness, its uncouth deliverance, and ameliorate it.

We may perhaps say that interjections constitute the point of departure of music; but it is only music when an interjection in the form of a cadenza, and in this respect it has to elaborate its senuous material artistically in a higher degree than either painting or poetry before it is qualified to express the content of spirit. We shall have to examine later on more narrowly the particular way in which the content of music is worked up to such a pitch of adaptability; at present I will merely repeat the observation that the tones are themselves essentially a totality of differences, which are capable of disuniting and uniting themselves in the most varied kinds of immediate concords, essential discords, oppositions and transitions. To these opposed and united tones, no less than the differentiation of their movements and transitions, their entry, their progression, their conflict, their self-resolution and their disappearance, the ideal character both of this or that content and of the emotions, in the form whereof both heart and soul obtains the mastery of such content, corresponds in closer or more remote affinity, so that the like tone relations, apprehended and informed conformably thereto, disclose the animated expression of that which is present to Spirit as definable content.

The medium of tone asserts itself as more cognate with the ideally simple essence of a content than the senuous material previously dealt with for this reason that tone instead of making itself secure in spatial form and coming to a halt as the varied presentment of juxtaposition and extension, is comprised in the ideal realm of Time, and for this reason does not progress to a condition under which simple ideality and concrete bodily shape and appearance are differentiated. And this is equally true of the form of the feeling of a content whose expression mainly falls upon the art of music. In other words in sense-perception and conception we have already, as in self-conscious thought, the necessary distinction between the perceiving, conceiving and thinking Ego and the object of perception, conception, and thought. In emotion, however, this distinction is resolved, or rather it is never propounded, but the content is interwoven with the inner life without such division. When consequently music is united as an art of accompaniment with poetry, or conversely poetry is united with music as an interpreter to its elucidation, in such a case music is unable to render conspicuous in an external form or to reflect with intention ideas and thoughts as they are thus apprehended by self-consciousness; it is obliged as stated either to offer the simple character of a content in true relations to feeling, as they are cognate with the ideal relation of this content, or to seek more nearly to express, by means of tones which accompany and give intensity to poetry, that feeling itself, which the content of perceptions and ideas can arouse in the spirit that is both sympathetic and imaginative.

(c) Following the course of these remarks it is possible in the third place to form an estimate of the unrivalled power which is thereby directly exercised by music on the soul, which is neither carried forward to the vision of reason, nor diverts consciousness in isolated points of view, but is accustomed to live within the ideal range and secluded depths of pure emotion. For it is precisely this sphere, the intimacy of soul-life, the abstract appropriation of its own realm, which is grasped by music, which thereby sets in movement the source of these ideal changes, namely, the heart and soul, which we may consider at this concentrated focus and centre of our entire manhood.

(α) In a particular sense sculpture endows its art products with a wholly independent subsistency, an objectivity essentially exclusive whether we regard it from the point of view of its content, or that of its external art-manifestation. Its content is the substantive being of the life of Spirit possessed no doubt with individual vitality, but along with this reposing in self-subsistent coherence on itself; its form is the material configuration under the condition of space. For this reason a work of sculpture retains as an object of sense-perception the highest degree of self-subsistency. A picture, as we have already pointed out in our consideration of the art of painting, comes into closer contact with the spectator. In part this is due to the essentially more subjective415 content thereby depicted; in part it is referable to the fact that it is merely the show of reality which it displays, thereby making us aware that it is not a thing independently substantive, but rather essentially something intended for something else, and exclusively so, in other words for the human vision and soul. Yet even in the case of a picture we have still left us a freedom more independent it fails to absorb; even here we have still only to do with an object externally presented, which only reaches us through sense perception, and only thus excites our emotion and imagination. The spectator may consequently approach the work of art as he likes; he may observe this or that aspect of it; he may analyse the whole, as it throughout persists confronting him, may make it the object of various reflections, and in short remain throughout at liberty to continue his independent review of it.

(αα) The musical work of art, on the contrary, no doubt, as such a work, posits in like manner the incipiency of a distinction between the work itself and the individual that enjoys it; that is to say in its actually resonant tones it receives a sensuous existence that is distinct from the soul of the listener. But on the one hand this opposition does not proceed, as in the case of the plastic arts, to an external subsistency in Space and the visibility of a mode of objectivity that coheres independently, but on the contrary makes its real existence vanish in the immediate passage through Time. On the other hand the art of music does not make the separation of its external material from its spiritual content in the same way that poetry does so, in which the aspect of idea is elaborated with more definite independence from the sound of speech416, and more cut off as it is than any of the arts from this aspect of externality, issues as such in a unique progression of mental ideas constructed by the imagination. No doubt the observation may readily be made here that, agreeably with what I have already stated, the art of music is able to conversely to release tones from their content and thereby give them independent form; this liberation is, however, not that which really falls within Art’s province, which on the contrary wholly consists in employing harmonious and melodic motion for the expression of the content originally selected and the emotions, which the same is qualified to excite. Inasmuch as, therefore, musical expression has for its content the inward life itself, the ideal significance of fact and emotion, and a tone-world which, at least in art, does not proceed to spatial configuration, and in its sensuous existence is wholly evanescent, it follows that music directly penetrates with its movements to the ideal habitat of all the fluctuations of soul-life. In other words it seizes on consciousness, where it is no longer confronted with an object, and in the loss of this freedom from the flood of tones as it streams on is itself whirled away with it417. Yet there is here, too, by reason of the divers directions which music may separately follow, an effect of varied character. In other words, when a more profound content, or, to put it generally, an expression more steeped in soul, is absent, we may find as a result that we experience on the one hand delight in the purely sensuous sound and harmony without any further emotional movement, or, on the other hand, we follow the course of the harmony and melody with our critical judgment, a progression by which the inmost heart of us is no further touched or affected. Or rather we may say that pre-eminently in the case of music there is such a purely critical analysis, for which there is nothing else presented in the work of art to evoke it beyond the skill of an expert in its laboured production418. If we, however, withdraw ourselves from this critical science, and give ourselves up unreservedly, we become entirely possessed with the musical composition and are carried with it quite independently of the power, which the art of it simply as art exercises upon us. And the peculiar power of music is an elementary force, that is to say it lies in the element of tone, in which the art here moves.

(ββ) The individual is not only carried away by this medium in virtue of the character of its exposition in any particular case, or simply drawn to it by the specific content thereof; but, viewed simply as self-conscious subject, the core and centre of his spiritual existence is interwoven with the work and himself placed in active relations with it. We have, for example, in the emphasis of the music’s current rhythms, an opportunity to beat in time with it, or unite our voices with the melody, and in the case of dance-music at least, we may associate the movement of our legs. And, generally speaking, the claim is made upon us as distinct personalities. Conversely, in the case of purely methodical action, which, in so far as it is subject to time relations, is compatible with a distinct beat in virtue of its regularity and possesses no further content, we require on the one hand an expression of this regularity as such in order that this action shall be present to the individual under a mode that is itself subjective; and, on the other, we require a more intimate realization of this rhythm. Both requirements are supplied by the musical accompaniment. This is effected, for instance, by music as associated with the march of soldiers. Such arouses the soul to the rhythmical beat of the march, makes the individual full of the fact of his marching419 and steeps him in the harmonious action of it. In something of the same sense the unregulated bustle of a table d’hôte and the unsatisfactory excitement it arouses annoys many people. Such feel that the moving up and down, the clatter and chatter should be subject to rule, and as we have in our eating and drinking an empty space of time to deal with, we should have that emptiness filled up for us. Such, therefore, is also an occasion among many others when music will help us considerably, suggesting as it does other thoughts, recreations, and ideas.

(γγ) In these instances we are made aware of the connection between the individual soul with Time simply, a condition in which the medium of music consists. In other words the inward life regarded as subjective unity is the active negation of the indifferent420 juxtaposition in Space, and thereby negative unity. In the first instance, however, this identity remains in itself entirely abstract and void of content, and consists merely in this that it makes itself an object, though it then annuls this objectivity, which is itself of a wholly ideal type and of the same character which the subject of consciousness is, in order thereby to enforce itself as subjective unity. An ideal negative activity of the same kind in its sphere of externality is Time. For in the first place it effaces the indifferent co-extension of the spatial condition and concentrates the continuity of the same in the point of Time, the Now. The point of time, however, secondly, discloses itself at the same time as negation of itself; in other words this Now no sooner is than it annuls itself in another Now, and by doing this makes apparent its negative activity. Thirdly, we no doubt do not get, on account of externality421, in whose element Time is in motion, the truly subjective unity of the first point of Time with the next, to which the Now by self-effacement proceeds, but the Now remains throughout in its change always the same422. For for every point of Time is a Now, and is as undifferentiated from the other Now, taken as the bare point of Time, as is the abstract Ego from the object, relatively to which it annuls itself423, and in which it falls into self-coalescence, for the reason that this object is itself merely the empty Ego. The actual Ego itself, too, belongs yet more closely to Time, with which it coalesces, in so far as it is, if we abstract from the concrete content of consciousness and self-consciousness, nothing but this empty movement which posits itself as another and then cancels the exchange, in other words cancels itself, in order thereby to conserve the Ego and here only the abstract424 Ego therein. Ego is in Time, and Time is the being of the conscious subject itself. Inasmuch, then, as Time and not the spatial condition as such supplies the essential element, in which tone secures existence in respect to its validity as music, and the time of tone is likewise that of the conscious subject, for this reason tone, by virtue of this fundamental condition of it, penetrates into the self of conscious life, seizes hold of the same in virtue of the most simple aspect of its existence, and places the Ego in movement by means of the motion in Time and its rhythm; while in addition to this the other configuration of tones, as the expression of emotions, brings yet further a more definite material to enrich the unity of consciousness, a wealth by which it is at once affected and carried forward.

We find, then, that the fundamental ground for the elementary might of the art of music is of this nature.

(β) In order, however, that music may exercise its full effect we must have something more than the purely abstract tone in its movement in Time. The further aspect we have to attach to it is a content, an emotional wealth steeped in spirit presented to the soul, and the expression, the soul of this content in tones.

We have no right, then, to entertain any exaggerated425 opinion of the sovereign might of music simply as music, about which ancient writers, both sacred and profane, have told us so many fabulous tales. If we go back to the miracles which Orpheus performed as a pioneer of civilization we find indeed that tones and their movements spread their influence to the wild creatures, which encircled him shorn of their wildness, but they did not extend to humankind, who required the content of a nobler strain. It is something of this latter kind that we must attach to the hymns ascribed to Orpheus, which, in the form we have received from tradition, even though it be not their original one, support mythological and other ideas. In a similar way, too, the warlike songs of Tyrtaeus are famous, by means of which, so we are told, the Lacedaemonians, after long and fruitless conflicts, were stirred up to an irresistible enthusiasm and finally were wholly victorious over the Messenians. In this case, too, the content of the ideas which these elegies excited was the main thing, although pre-eminently in the case of barbaric peoples and in times of deeply moved passions we cannot deny that the musical aspect of them exercised a real force and effect. The pipes of the Highlanders contribute essentially to the animation of their courage, and the power of the Marseillaise as sung in the French Revolution is undeniable. The real source of enthusiasm is, however, to be looked for in the definite idea, in the true interest of the Spirit with which a nation is steeped, and which can be exalted to a more direct and living feeling when the notes of music, the rhythm and the melody carry along whoever may give himself up to them. In our own days, however, we can hardly hold that music is capable by itself of evoking such a courageous temper and contempt of death. Almost all armies nowadays have excellent regimental music, which calls the soldiers to their duties, releases them from such, gives life to the march and incites them to the attack. No one, however, dreams of beating the enemy with such means. The courage of the field of battle does not come with the blast of trumpets and the beat of drums, and it will indeed take a host of trombones before a fort will tumble in ruin at their blast like the walls of a Jericho. It is the enthusiasm born of ideas, cannon, and the genius of generals which are the main thing now rather than music, and this can only act as a support of the forces which have already filled and taken hold of the soul.

(γ) In conclusion, we may point out in respect to the personal effect of musical sound there is an aspect which is referable to the particular manner in which the musical work of art approaches us in its distinction from other works of art. In other words, inasmuch as musical tones do not as buildings of construction, statues, and pictures possess independently a permanent objective consistency, but vanish in the act of passing by the musical work of art requires in virtue of the fact of this purely momentary existence a continuously repeated reproduction. And what is more, the necessity of such a renewal of life points to a further more profound significance. For, in so far as it is the personal soul itself, which music accepts for its content with the object, to make manifest itself not as external form and objectively subsistent product, to this extent the expression of it must also assert itself immediately in the form of a communication disclosed by a living person, in which that person reposes his entire and unique personality. This is to the fullest extent the case in the song of the human voice, but it is relatively so in all instrumental music, which can only be executed by means of a practised artist and his living and spiritual no less than technical powers as such.

It is only by virtue of this personal relation in respect to the active effect of the musical work of art that the significance of the subjective aspect of music is substantiated, which, however, too, it is possible in this direction to carry to the extreme length of isolation in the case, that is, where the personal virtuosity of the reproduction as such is made the exclusive focus and content of the enjoyment to be derived.

With the above observations I will now close what I have to say with regard to the general character of music.

We have hitherto contemplated music purely under the aspect, that its function is to embody and give life to tone as the musical expression of the personal life of soul; we have now to ask ourselves the further question, by reason of what it is both possible and necessary that tones are no purely natural outcry of emotion but the articulate artistic expression of the same. For feeling as such possesses a content; tone regarded as mere tone is without such. It must consequently first be rendered capable by means of an artistic treatment of essentially assimilating the expression of an ideal life. Speaking generally, we may establish the following conclusions on this head.

Every tone is a substantive, essentially accepted real thing, which, however, is neither articulated nor consciously apprehended in a living unity, as is the case with the animal or human form, nor from the further point of view demonstrates in itself, as a particular member of the bodily organism, or any isolated trait of the animated body, whether in its spiritual or physical aspect, that this individualization can only exist in vital association with the other limbs and traits, and secure thus its meaning, significance, and expression. Viewed according to external material, a picture no doubt consists in single strokes and colours, which can also independently exist, but the real material on the other hand, which first creates a work of art from such strokes and colours, the lines and surfaces that is to say of the form, have only a meaning when viewed as a concrete totality. The separate tone, on the contrary, is independently substantive and can also be animated up to a certain degree by means of emotion and receive a definite expression.

Conversely, however, inasmuch as tone is no purely indefinite rustle and sound, but only possesses in general musical validity by virtue of its clear definition and pure tonality, it stands immediately, by reason of this definite articulation, not merely according to its actual sound, but also its temporal duration, in a relation to other tones; nay, this relation is that which first contributes to it its real and actual definition and along with this its difference and contrast as opposed to other tones or its unity with such.

In presence of the more relative self-subsistency this relation, however, remains as something external to the tones, so that the relations into which they are brought do not appertain to the single tones under the mode of their notion, as we find such in the members of the animal and human organism, or also in the forms of natural landscape. The coalescence of different tones in different relations is consequently something which albeit not contradictory to the essence of tone, is, however, in the first instance artificial, and not otherwise presented in Nature. Such a relation proceeds to that extent from a third party and only exists for such, namely, for the person who apprehends426 it.

On account of this externality of the relation the definition of tones and their co-ordination subsist in the relation of quantity, in relations of number, which of course have their foundation in the nature of tone itself, yet are employed by music in a system which is, in the first instance, discovered by Art and modified427 in the most varied manner.

From this point of view it is not essential vitality, regarded as organic unity, which constitutes the foundation of music, but equality, inequality, etc., and generally the form of the understanding428, as it is asserted in quantitative relations. If we consequently speak definitely of musical tones we indicate the same purely by numerical relations as also by letters selected at will by virtue of which we are accustomed to indicate the tones according to such relations.

In such a reference back to mere quantities and their intelligible, external definition music possesses its most pronounced affinity with architecture, inasmuch as it, just as this latter art does, builds up its inventions upon the secure basis and scheme of proportions, a basis which does not essentially expand and coalesce through vital unity in an organically free articulation, in which the remaining differentiated parts are given with the one aspect of definition, but only begins to grow into free art in the further elaborations, which are enabled by it to arise out of the aforesaid conditions.

Although architecture carries the process of liberation no further than a harmony of forms and the characteristic animation of a mysterious eurhythmy, music, on the contrary, for the reason that it has for its content the most intimate, personal, and free life and essence of the soul, strides into and emphasizes the profoundest opposition that exists between this free life of soul and those quantitative relations on which it is based. It is, however, unable to persist in this opposition; rather it is its difficult function to overcome it as essentially as it accepts it, by assigning to the free movements of the soul, which it expresses, a more secure foundation and basis by means of these necessary proportions, a basis on which it then, however, gives movement to and develops the inner life in the freedom which for the first time receives its fulness of content by virtue of such fundamental necessity429.

In this respect there are in the first instance two aspects of tone we should distinguish, according to which it is artistically to be employed. First, we have the abstract foundation, the universal but not as yet physically specified element, that is, Time, in the domain of which tone falls. After that we get sound itself, the real distinction of tones, not merely according to aspects referable to the difference of the sensuous material, which sounds, but also in that aspect of the tones themselves as they are related to one another, whether in their singularity or as a whole. To such we must then adjoin thirdly, the soul, which gives animation to the tones, rounds them off in a free totality, and gives to them a spiritual expression in their temporal movement and their real sound. By virtue of these aspects we receive for their more definite classification a series of stages as follows.

First, we have to occupy our attention with the purely temporal duration and movement, which it is the function of art not merely to leave to chance in their arrangement, but to determine according to definite measures, and to render various by virtue of their differences, and once more again to establish their unity in these distinctions. From this we deduce the necessity for time-measure, beat, and rhythm.

Secondly, however, music has not merely to deal with abstract time and the relations of longer or shorter duration, musical phrase and so forth, but with the concrete time of their sound according to definite tones, which consequently are not merely distinct from one another according to their duration. This difference reposes, in the first place, on the specific quality of their sensuous material, by reason of whose oscillations the tone is produced; on the other hand it depends on the different number of such oscillations, in which the resonant bodies oscillate in an equal measure of time. And furthermore these differences assert themselves as essential aspects for the relation of tones in their concord, opposition, and mediation. We may give this portion of our subject the general designation of the theory of harmony.

Thirdly, and finally, it is the melody, by virtue of which on these foundations of a beat characterized by rhythmical vitality and of distinctions and movements of harmony itself that the realm of tones is unitedly discharged in a spiritually free mode of expression, and conducts us thereby to the final main section of our subject, which will undertake to consider music in its concrete unity with the spiritual content it is intended to express in beat, harmony, and rhythm.

(a) Time-measure, Beat, Rhythm

So far as in the first place the purely temporal aspect of musical tone is concerned, we have first to discuss the necessity, which generally in musical time is the dominant factor. Secondly, we shall consider beat under the aspect of time-measure wholly regulated under scientific rule. Thirdly, we shall treat of the rhythm, under which a start is made in animating this abstract rule by the prominence or subordination it attains to definite divisions of time.

(α) The figures of sculpture and painting are placed side by side in space and present the extension of reality in actual or apparent totality. Music, however, can only place before us tones in so far as it makes a body under the spatial condition tremble, setting the same in an oscillating motion. These oscillations only affect art under the aspect, that they follow one another; and for this reason the sensuous material generally only enters into music with the temporal duration of its movement instead of taking with it its spatial form. No doubt that motion of a body is always present in space, so that painting and sculpture have the right to exhibit the appearance of movement, albeit their figures are in their reality at rest. In respect to this aspect of Space, however, music does not accept movement, and there remains consequently as part of its configuration only the time, into which the oscillation of the body falls.

(αα) Time, however, in consequence of what we have already above considered, is not as Space is, the positive condition of juxtaposition, but on the contrary negative externality. As juxtaposition, which is cancelled, it is the point of passage, and as negative activity it is the abrogation of this point of time in another, which is itself immediately cancelled, and becomes another and so on continuously. In the continuous series of these points of time every single tone not merely is asserted independently as single, but is brought from a further point of view into quantitative association with other tones, by which process Time is referable to number. Conversely, however, for the reason that time is the unbroken rise and passage of such points of time, which, regarded as mere points of time, possess in this unparticularized abstraction no distinction one to another, for this reason to a like extent time appears as the equable stream, and the duration essentially undifferentiated.

(ββ) In this indeterminacy, however, music is unable to leave time. Rather it is compelled to define it more narrowly, to give it a measure, and regulate its stream according to the rules of such a measure. By virtue of this regular treatment we get the time-measure of tones. And here at once arises the question, wherefore then once and for all music requires such measure. The necessity of definite periods of time may be evolved from this fact, that time stands in the closest affinity with, the self in its simplicity, which apprehends, and has a right to apprehend, its inward life through the medium of tones; time, in fact, regarded as externality, essentially possesses the same principle, which is active in the Ego as the abstract foundation of all that pertains to the soul and spirit. If, then, it is the simple self, which as soul-life has to be made objective in music, so, too, the universal medium of this objectivity must be treated conformably to the principle of that subjective life. The Ego, however, is not the indefinite continuance and the unbroken430 duration, but is only self-identity when we regard it as an aggregate and a return upon itself431. The assertion of itself, wherein it becomes object, is doubled back in the being thus self-for-itself; and it is only through this relation to itself that it becomes self-feeling, self-consciousness and so forth. In this aggregate, however, we find essentially a breaking off of the purely indefinite change, such as we held time to be in the first instance, in which the rise and suppression, the disappearance and renewal of the points of time were nothing but a wholly formal passage from every now to another present of similar character, and consequently nothing but an uninterrupted progression. In contrast to this empty process the self is that which itself persists by itself, the totality whereof essentially breaks up the undefined series of time points, creates an infraction into the abstract continuity, freeing the Ego, which recollects itself in this process of discrete division and finds itself again therein, from what is a purely external process of change.

(γγ) The duration of a tone does not, agreeably to this principle, pass away in a process of relative indeterminacy, but emphasizes with its beginning and end, which accordingly is a definite beginning and cessation, the series of the time moments, which, apart from it, are not thus distinguishable. If, however432, many tones follow one after another, and every one of them receives a duration which can be separately distinguished from each other, then we must assume that instead of having that original indefinite series devoid of content, we only once more get by a converse process the fortuitous, and, along with this to a like extent, the indefinite variety of particular quantities. This unregulated rambling about contradicts quite as much the unity of the Ego as the abstract progress forward; and it can only find itself reflected and satisfied in such a varied mode of definition in so far as single quantities are brought under one unifying principle, which for the reason that it subsumes the particular parts under its synthetic embrace, must itself be a definite unity, yet in the first instance as merely an identity of external application can only persist as one of an external type.

(β) And this carries us to the further principle of co-ordination which we find in the time-beat.

(αα) The first thing to be considered here consists in this, that, as stated, distinct divisions of time are united in a unity, in which the Ego independently creates its identity with itself. Inasmuch as the Ego in the first instance only supplies the foundation as abstract self this equability, in respect to the advance of time and its tones, can only assert itself as operative under the mode of a uniformity that is itself abstract, that is to say as the uniform repetition of the same unity of time. Agreeably to the same principle the beat according to its simple definition can only consist in this, that it establishes a definite unity of time as measure and rule not merely for the deliberate433 breaking up of the time-series held previously without such distinction, but also for the equally capricious duration of single tones, which are now apprehended together under a definite bond of union, and that it permits this measure of time to be continuously renewed in abstract uniformity. In this respect time-beat possesses the same function as the principle of symmetry in architecture, as, for instance, when this places side by side columns of similar height and thickness at intervals of equal distance, or co-ordinates a row of windows, which possess a definite size, under the principle of equality. We find present in this case, too, an assured distinction of parts and a repetition in every way complete. In this uniformity self-consciousness discovers itself once more as unity, in so far as it in part recognizes its own equality in the co-ordination of a fortuitous variety; partly, too, in the return of the same unity, it is recalled to the fact that it has already been there, and precisely by means of its return asserts itself as the prevailing principle434. The satisfaction, however, which the Ego receives through the time-beat in this rediscovery of itself is all the more complete because the unity and regularity do neither apply to time or tones as such, but are something which is wholly appertinent to the Ego, and is carried into the time relation by the same as a means of self-satisfaction. We do not find this abstract identity in what is wholly of Nature. Even the heavenly bodies retain no regular time-measure435 in their motions, but accelerate or retard their course, so that they do not pass over equal spaces in identical periods of time. The same thing may be said of falling bodies, with the motion of projectiles, etc., and we may add that animal life to a still less degree regulates its running, springing, and seizing of objects on the principle of an exact recurrence of one definite time-measure. In this respect the time-measure of living things proceeds far more completely from spiritual initiative than the regular definitions of size applicable to architecture for which we may more readily discover analogies in Nature.

(ββ) If, however, the Ego is to return upon itself by means of the time-beat by thus appropriating throughout an identity which it itself is and which proceeds from itself, we imply in this, in order that the distinct unity may be felt as a principle, that in a similar degree what is presented to it should be that which is unregulated and not uniform. It is in short only through the fact that the definite beat of the measure prevails over and co-ordinates what is capriciously unequal, that it asserts itself as unity and regulating principle of a fortuitous variety. It must consequently appropriate the same within itself, and suffer uniformity to appear in that which is not so. This it is which first gives to the time-beat its specific and essential definition to be asserted too in contrast to other measurements of time, which can be repeated relatively to the same principle.

(γγ) By reason of this the multiplicity which is enclosed in a given time-measure possesses its definite standard according to which it is divided and co-ordinated. From this we arrive, in the third place, at distinct kinds of time-measure. The first thing of importance to notice in this connection is the division of time according to either an even or an uneven number of equally divided parts. Of the first kind we have, for example, the two-four and the four-four time. In these even number is predominant. Of the opposite kind is the three-four time, in which the co-ordinate divisions constitute a unity of equal parts, of course, but in a number that is uneven. Both types are to be found united in six-eight time, to take an example, which no doubt numerically appears to be similar to the four-four time, but as a fact, however, does not fall into three but into two divisions, of which, however, the one no less than the other, relatively to its closer aspect of division, accepts three, that is an uneven number, as its principle.

A particularization of this kind constitutes the constantly repeated principle of every particular measure of time. However much notwithstanding the definite time-measure is bound to control the variety of the time-duration and its longer or shorter sections, we must not therefore extend its effective power to the length that it places this variety in subjection in a wholly abstract way, that in short, for example, in the four-four measure only four notes of equal length as fourths can appear, in the three-four time only three, and so forth. The regularity restricts itself to this, that as, for instance, in the four-four time the sum of the separate notes are only equal to four equal parts, which may not only be divided into eighths and sixteenths, but conversely may again contract into less divisions, and indeed are capable moreover of more diffuse division.

(γ) The further, however, this elastic mode of differentiation is carried the more necessary it is that the essential divisions of the time should be asserted as predominant and also should be indicated in an effective way as an illustration of the fundamental principle of their co-ordination. This is carried out by the rhythm, which first gives vital significance to time-measure and the beat. With respect to this vitalization436 we may distinguish the following points.

(αα) In the first place we have accent, which to a greater or less degree attaches in an audible way to definite divisions of time, while others pass by on the other hand without an accent. By virtue of such emphasis, or lack of emphasis, which is itself of various kinds, every particular measure of time possesses its particular rhythm, which is placed in exact association with the specific mode of division to which its rhythm applies. The four-four time, for instance, in which an even number is the principle of division, has a twofold arsis; on the other hand there is that on the first note or fourth division, and then, though in weaker power, on the third. The first is called on account of its stronger accentuation, the strong accent, the second in contrast to it the weak one. In the three-four time the accent rests entirely on the first fourth, in six-eight time on the contrary it is on the first of the eight divisions and the fourth, so that in this case the twofold accent asserts a division of equal length in two halves.

(ββ) In so far as music is an accompaniment rhythm is brought into essential relation with poetry. In the most general way I will on this merely venture the observation that the accents of the musical beat ought not to directly contradict those of the metre. If, for example, one of the unaccentuated syllables, relatively to the rhythm of the verse, is placed in a strong accent of the beat, while the arsis, or it may be the caesura, falls in one of the weak accents of the music, then we get a false opposition between the rhythm of the poetry and that of the music which it is better to avoid. We may affirm the same thing with regard to the long and short syllables. These also ought in general to fall into harmony with the duration of the tones, so that the longer syllables are coincident with the longer notes, the shorter with the shorter, albeit this accordance is not to be pressed with absolute precision, inasmuch as music is frequently permitted greater play for the duration of its long notes, no less than for the exuberant subdivision of the same.

(γγ) In the third place we may at once in anticipation observe that we have to distinguish the animated rhythm of melody from the abstractly considered and severely regular return of the beat rhythm. In this respect music possesses a similar and, in fact, yet greater freedom than poetry. In poetry the beginning and termination of words437 need not necessarily coincide with the beginning and end of the verse feet; rather a thoroughgoing coincidence of this nature gives us a verse that halts and is without caesura. And, furthermore, the beginning and ending of the sentences and periods ought not throughout to mark the beginning and conclusion of a verse. On the contrary, a period will terminate more satisfactorily in the beginning or even in the middle and near the last feet of the verse. From which point we begin with a new one which carries the first verse into the one that follows. The same thing holds good in the case of music relatively to its time-beat and rhythm. The melody and its different phrases438 need not absolutely commence with the fall of a beat and close with the conclusion of another: such may in a general way move freely to this extent that the main-arsis of the melody may be incident to that portion of a musical beat, on which, relatively to its ordinary rhythm, no such emphasis applies; whereas, conversely, a tone, which in the natural process of the melody would necessarily receive no accentuated prominence, may quite conceivably be placed in the strong accent of the time-measure, which requires an arsis, so that consequently such a tone, relatively to the time-rhythm, has a different effect from that which the same tone claims to assert as distinct from that rhythm and purely in the melody. This opposition, however, asserts itself most strongly in so-called syncopations. If, on the other hand, the melody absolutely adheres in its rhythms and divisions to the time rhythm it tends to drag, and lacks warmth and invention. In short, what is required is a freedom from the pedantry of metre and the barbarism of a uniform rhythm. A deficiency in more free movement readily increases the limpness and sluggishness to the point of actual gloom and depression; and in this way, too, many of our popular melodies possess aspects of mournfulness, drag and burden, in so far as the soul merely possesses a means of advance as its expression more monotonous than itself, and in virtue of such is constrained to consign to it also the doleful emotions of a broken heart. The speech of Southern peoples, on the other hand, more especially the Italian, offers a rich field for a rhythm and flow of melody which is more notable for its variety and movement. And it is precisely here that we mark an essential distinction between German and Italian music. The uniform coldness of the Iambic mode of scansion, which recurs in so many German songs, kills the free and jubilant impulse of the melody, and restrains any further rise and devolution439. In more recent times Reichard and others, owing to this very fact that they have said good-bye to this iambic drone, have imported into their lyrical compositions a new and rhythmical life, although we still find traces of the former type in some of their songs. However, we do not only mark the influence of the iambic rhythm in songs, but also in many of our most important musical compositions. Even in the Messiah of Handel the composition does not only in many arias and choruses follow the meaning of the words with declamatory truth, but also adheres to the fall of the iambic rhythm, partly in the distinction simply that it makes between its long and short duration, partly in the fact that the protraction of the iambic rhythm requires a more elevated tone than the corresponding short syllable in the metre. I have no doubt this is one of the characteristic features of Handelian music, owing to which we Germans feel so much at home with the same, quite apart from its excellences in other respects, its majestic swing, its victorious onward movement, the wealth it discloses of profoundly religious no less than more simple idyllic emotions. This rhythmical substance of the melody comes more directly to our sense of hearing than that of the Italians, who are inclined to find in it a want of freedom, as something, too, that strikes the ear as strange and alien.

(β) Harmony

The further aspect, in virtue of which alone the abstract basis of time-beat and rhythm receives its fulfilment, and thereby is enabled to become actually concrete music is the kingdom of tones regarded as such. This more essential domain of music is dominated by the laws of harmony. We have here a further elementary fact to deal with. In other words, a material substance440 does not only through its oscillation for art emerge from the mere visible reproduction of its spatial form, and is carried further into the elaboration of its configuration in Time441, but it produces distinct sounds according to its particular physical constitution no less than its different length and brevity and number of vibrations through which it passes in a given period of time, and consequently in this respect, too, Art is compelled to take account of it and give it form agreeably to its own nature.

With regard, then, to this second element we have to emphasize with more accuracy three main points.

The first one presented to our consideration is the difference between the various instruments, whose invention and elaboration has been found essential to create that totality of musical sound, which in respect to musical sound constitutes a sphere of different tones independently of all distinction of the relation of pitch whether it be a high or a low one.

Secondly, however, musical tone is, quite apart from the different peculiarities of either instruments or the human voice, itself an articulated totality of different tones, tone-series, and scales, which in the first instance repose on quantitative relations, and in the determination of these relations are tones which it is the function of every instrument and the human voice, according to its specific quality, to produce in less or greater completeness.

Thirdly, music neither consists in single intervals nor in purely abstract series of tones, that is, keys unrelated to each other, but is a concrete interfusion of opposed or mediating sound, which necessitates a forward progression and a passage from one point to another. This juxtaposition and change does not depend on mere contingency and caprice, but is subject to definite rules, which constitute the necessary foundation of all true music.

In passing now to the more detailed consideration of these several points of view I am forced, as already stated, to limit myself for the most part to the most general observations.

(α) Sculpture and painting discover their sensuous material, such as wood, stone, metals, and the like, or colours and other media of that type more or less straight to hand, or, at least, they are only compelled to elaborate the same in a subordinate degree, in order to adapt them to the uses of art.

(αα) Music, on the contrary, which throughout is set in motion through a medium artificially prepared for the purposes of art from the first, must necessarily pass through a distinctly more difficult preparation before the production of musical tones is secured. With the exception of the human voice, which returns us Nature in her immediacy, Music is compelled itself to create all its other instruments of genuine musical tone throughout before it can exist as an art.

(ββ) With regard to these means as such we have already above formed our conception of the timbre proper to them in the sense that it is the result of a vibration of the spatial medium, is the first excitation thereof of ideal import, which enforces itself as such in contradistinction to the purely sensuous juxtaposition, and, by virtue of this negation of spatial reality, asserts itself as the ideal unity of all the physical qualities of specific gravity and the purely sensuous type of corporeal coalescence. If we inquire further as to the qualitative peculiarities of the medium thus made to emit musical sound we shall find that in its character as material substance no less than as artificially constructed, it varies greatly. We may have a longitudinal or oscillating442 column of air, which is limited by a fixed channel of wood or metal, or we may have a longitudinally stretched string of gut or metal, or in other cases a stretched surface of parchment or a bell of glass or metal. In this connection we may draw attention to the following distinguishing features. In the first place it is the lineal direction443 which is mainly predominant, and produces the instruments most effective in musical employment; and this is so whether, as in the case of wind-instruments, the main principle is represented by a column of air which is relatively more deficient in cohesion or by a material line adapted to tension, but of sufficient elasticity to be made to vibrate, as is the case with stringed instruments.

Secondly, we have the principle of surface rather than line represented in instruments of inferior significance, such as the kettle-drum, bell, and harmonica. There is, in fact, a subtle sympathy between the self-audible principle of ideality and that type of rectilinear tone444, which, by virtue of its essentially simple subjectivity, demands the resonant vibration of simple line extension rather than that of the broad and round surface. In other words, ideality is as subject this spiritual point, which is made audible in tone as its mode of expression. But the closest approach to the exposition and expression of the mere punctum is not the surface, but the simple linear direction. From this point of view broad or round surfaces are not adapted to the requirements and enforcement of such audibility. In the case of the kettle-drum we have a skin stretched over a kettle or basin, which by being struck at a single point sets the entire surface vibrating with a muffled sound. Though a musical sound, it is one which from its very nature, as belonging to such an instrument, it is impossible to bring either to clear definition or any considerable degree of variety. We find a difficulty of an opposite type in the case of the harmonica and the bells of glass which are set in vibration in it. In this case it is the concentrated intensity of tone which fails to project itself, and which is of such an affecting character that not a few, when hearing it, receive actual nervous pain. But, despite this specific effect, this instrument is unable to give permanent pleasure and is with difficulty combined with other instruments on the rare occasions such an attempt is made. We find the same defect on the side of differentiation of tone in the bell and a similar punctually repeated stroke as in the case of the kettle-drum. The ring of a bell, however, is not so muffled as in the latter; it rings out clearly, although its persistent reverberation is more the mere echo of the single beat as struck at regular intervals.

Thirdly, the human voice may be regarded in respect to the tones emitted as the most complete instrument of all. It unites in itself the characteristics of both the wind instrument and the string. That is to say we have here in one aspect of it a column of air which vibrates, and, further, by virtue of the muscles, the principle of a string under tension. Just as we saw in the case of the colour inherent in the human skin, we had what was in its aspect of ideal unity, the most essentially perfect presentment of colour, so, too, we may affirm of the human voice that it contains the ideal compass of sound, all that in other instruments is differentiated in its several composite parts. We have here the perfect tone, which is capable of blending in the most facile and beautiful way with all other instruments. Add to this that the human voice is to be apprehended as the essential tone of the soul itself, as the concordant sound which by virtue of its nature expresses the ideal character of the inner life, and most immediately directs such expression. In the case of all other instruments on the contrary we find that a material thing is set in vibration, which, in the use that is made of it, is placed in a relation of indifference to and outside of the soul and its emotion. In the human song, however, it is the human body itself from which the soul breaks into utterance. For this reason, too, the human voice is unfolded, in accord with the subjective temperament and emotion, in a vast manifold of particularity. And this variety, if we consider its distinguishing features sufficiently generalized, is based on national or other natural relations. Thus, for example, we find that the Italians are pre-eminently the people among whom we meet with the most beautiful voices. An important feature of this beauty is to start with the content of the sound simply as sound, its pure metallic quality, which neither fines away in mere keenness or vitreous attenuation, nor maintains a persistent muffled and hollow character, but, at the same time, though never carried to the point of tremolo in its tone, preserves in the compact body of its tone something of the vital vibration of the soul itself. Above all else the purity of voice-production is most essential, or in other words we must have no foreign element of sound asserted alongside of the freest expression of essential tone.

(γγ) Such a totality of instruments the art of music can employ, either in separation or complete combination. In the latter case of late years we may note an exceptional artistic development. The difficulty of such artistic collaboration is enormous. Every instrument possesses a character of its own, which is not directly congenial to the peculiarity of some other instrument. It follows from this that whether we are considering the harmonious co-operation of various instruments of different type, or the effective production of some particular quality of sound such as that of wind or strings, or the sudden blast of trombones, or the successive alternations of change that are inseparable from the music of a large choir, in all such cases knowledge, circumspection, experience, and imaginative endowment are indispensable, in order that, in every example of the kind, whether of tonal quality, transition, opposition, progression, or mediation, we do not lose sight of an ideal significance, the soul and emotional value of the music. For example, I find in the symphonies of Mozart, who was a great master of instrumentation and its sense-appealing, that is its vital no less than luminous variety, a sort of alternation between the different instruments which frequently resembles in its dramatic interplay a kind of dialogue. In one aspect of this the character of some particular type of instrument is carried to a point, which anticipates and prepares the way for that of another; looked at in another way, one kind of instrument replies to another; or asserts some typical mode of expression which is denied to the instrument it follows, so that in the most graceful fashion we thus get a kind of conversation of appeal and response, which has its beginning, advance and consummation.

(β) The second material which enlists our attention is no longer the physical quality asserted in the sound, but the essential definition of the tone itself, and its relation to other tones. This objective relation, whereby musical tone in the first instance, not merely in its essential and emphatically defined singularity, but also in its fundamental relation to simultaneously persistent tones, expatiates, constitutes the actual harmonious element of music, and is based, regarded under its own original physical conditions, upon quantitative differences and numerical proportions. A closer examination of the contents of this system of harmony presents, as understood to-day, the following points of importance.

First, we have separate tones in their definite metrical relation, and associated with other tones. This is the theory of particular intervals.

Secondly, there is the connected series of tones or notes in their simplest form of succession, in which one tone immediately leads up to another; such are the scales.

Thirdly, we have the distinctive characteristics of these scales, which, in so far as each starts from a different tone, as its fundamental tone, is thereby differentiated into the particular keys distinct from each other, and into the system of keys which they constitute.

(αα) The particular notes do not only receive their tone, but also the more inclusively positive445 determination of such sound by virtue of a corporeal substance in vibration. In order to get at this determinacy we have to define the type of vibration itself not in any chance or capricious manner, but once for all as it essentially is. The column of air, for example, or the string or surface under tension, which produces sound possesses invariably a certain length or extension. If we take a string, for instance, and fasten it between two points, and set the part of it thus stretched in vibration, the points of initial importance to discover are the thickness of the string, and the degree of tension. If we have these two aspects identical in the case of two strings then the all-important question follows, as was first noticed by Pythagoras, what is the string’s length, the reason being that strings, in other respects identical, if of different lengths give a different number of vibrations in the same interval of time. The difference of one of these numbers from another and the relation of any one to another constitutes the fundamental ground for the distinction and relation between different tones in their degrees of pitch as high or low. Doubtless when we listen to notes thus related our perception carries little resemblance to one of numerical relations. It is not necessary for us to know anything of numbers and arithmetical proportions; and indeed when we do actually perceive a string vibrating, such vibration passes away without our being able to apprehend the numerical relation, while of course it is equally unnecessary for us to glance at the body in vibration at all, in order to receive the impression of its tone. An association, therefore, between the tone and its numerical relations may very possibly at first sight strike us, not merely as incredible, but we may receive the impression that its acceptance implies that our sense of hearing and ideal apprehension of harmonies suffer even depreciation when we look for their cause in that which is purely quantitative. However this may be, it is an undoubted fact that the numerical relation of vibrations in identical periods of time is the foundation of the specific definition of tones. The fact that our sense of hearing is essentially simple is no valid objection. The apparently simple impression, no less than the complex may, in respect to its essential character and existence, carry within its compass other aspects essentially multifold and related fundamentally to something different. When we perceive, for example, blue or yellow, green or red, in the specific purity of these colours, we receive in like manner the appearance of a perfectly simple determinacy, whereas violet readily is decomposed into its constituent colours of blue and red. Despite this fact the pure blue is not a simple fact, but a distinct correlation and fusion of light and shadow446. Religious emotions, a sense of right in any particular case, appear to us in the same way as simple; nevertheless all religious feeling, every impression that partakes of this sense of right, is related to ourselves in entirely different ways, though producing this simple feeling as its point of unity.

In just such a manner, then, tone is based upon a manifold, however much we hear and perceive it as something entirely ultimate; a varied nature, which, for the reason that musical tone comes into being by means of the vibration of a body, and thereby together with its vibrations is subject to temporal condition, is deducible from the numerical relation of this oscillation in time, in other words from the determinate number of vibrations in a given period. I propose to draw attention merely to the following points in respect to this deduction.

Tones that accord in the fullest sense, and on hearing which a distinction is not perceptible as opposition, are those in the case of which the numerical relation of their vibrations is of the simplest character; those on the contrary which are not so out and out accordant possess proportionate numbers more complex. As an example of the first kind we have octaves. In other words, if we tune a string, where we shall have the keynote given us by a definite number of vibrations, and then halve the same; in that case this second half will give us in the same time precisely the same number of vibrations as the previous entire string447. Similarly in the case of fifths we have three vibrations to two of the keynote; in the case of thirds we have five to four of the keynote. In the case of seconds and sevenths we have a different kind of proportion; here to eight vibrations of the keynote we have in the former case nine and in the latter fifteen.

(ββ) Inasmuch then — we have already referred to this — as these relations cannot be posited as we like, but disclose an ideal necessity for their particular aspects448, no less than the totality they together constitute, for the like reason the particular intervals, which are fixed by such numerical relations, do not persist in their relation of indifference to each other, but are inevitably comprised together in and as a whole. The first form of this totality of notes thus created is, however, as yet no concrete concord of different notes, but an entirely abstract series of a system, a series of notes related under the most elementary mode to each other, and their position within the totality thus comprised. This is no other than the simple series of notes known as scales. The fundamental basis of this is the tonic, which repeats itself in its octave, and is extended through the remaining six notes placed between these limits, which by virtue of the fact that the keynote directly falls into unison with its octave makes a return upon itself. The remaining notes of the scale either harmonize completely449 with the keynote, as is the case with the fifth and the third, or possess a more fundamental distinction of sound in conflict with it, as is the case with seconds and sevenths, and take their place consequently in a definite series, which, however, I do not now propose to discuss or explain further.

(γγ) Thirdly, in these scales we find the source of different keys. In other words, every note of the scale can, in its turn, be posited as the keynote of a fresh series of notes, which is co-ordinated precisely as the first is. With the development of the scale through an increase of notes the number of keys has correspondingly increased. Modern music avails itself of a larger variety of keys than that of the ancients. Further, inasmuch as generally the different notes of the scales, as already observed, are related to one another in unobstructed harmony, or a relation that deviates from such immediacy in a more fundamental way, it follows that the different series which arise from these notes, taken severally as keynotes, either display a closer relation of affinity, and consequently permit of a passage readily from one to another, or, on account of their alien character, do not so admit of this. Add to this that the keys are divided from each other by the distinction of hardness and softness, that is, as major or minor tonality; in conclusion they possess, in virtue of their key-note, from which they are generated, a definite character, which of itself responds to a particular kind of emotion, such as lamentation, joy, mourning, and so forth. In this particular even writers in ancient times have anticipated much on the subject of distinction between the keys, and applied their theory in many ways to actual composition.

(γ) The third important matter, with the discussion of which we may conclude our brief remarks upon the theory of harmony, is concerned with the simultaneous concord of the notes themselves, in other words, the system of chords.

(αα) We have no doubt already seen that the intervals constitute a whole; this totality, however, is in the first instance comprised in the scales and the keys merely in the form of an associated series, in the succession whereof each note is asserted separately in isolation. In consequence the tonal sound remained abstract, because we find here that it is only one particular and determinate tone that is asserted. In so far, however, as the notes in fact are what they are450 merely in virtue of their relation to one another, it follows necessarily that their tonal modality should attain also an existence as this concrete body of tone itself, in other words different notes will have to coalesce in one and the same body of tone. In this conjoint fusion, in the composition of which, however, the mere number of notes capable of such coalescence is not the essential point, for we may have a unity of this kind with merely two451, we possess our definition of chords. For inasmuch as the different notes are not definable for what they are as a result of caprice or chance, but are necessarily regulated by virtue of an ideal principle and co-ordinated in their actual succession, it follows that a regularity of similar character will have to declare itself in the chords, in order that we may determine what kind of associations will be adapted to musical composition, and what on the contrary must be excluded. It is these rules which first give us the theory of harmony in the full sense; and it is according to this we find again that the chords are embraced in an essentially regulated system.

(ββ) In this system chords are particularized and distinguished in their passage from one to another, inasmuch as it is clearly defined notes which thus sound together. We have consequently to consider as an immediate fact a totality of separately distinguishable chords. In attempting the most general classification of these we shall find that the original distinctions we cursorily alluded to in our discussion of intervals, scales, and keys will once again serve us.

In other words the first kind of chords are those in which notes come together, which are completely consonant. In the musical effect of these consequently there is no opposition, no contradiction perceptible; the consonance remains completely undisturbed. Such is the case in the so-called consonant chords, the foundation of which is supplied by the triad. This confessedly is generated from the key-note, the third, the mediant452 and the fifth or dominant. In these we find the notion of harmony expressed in its simplest form, or rather the intrinsic idea of harmony generally. For we have a totality of distinct notes under consideration, which assert this distinction while they also declare an undisturbed unity.

We have here an immediate identity, which moreover is not without the element of separation and mediation, albeit this mediation is not at the same time limited by the self-subsistency of different tones453, satisfied with the mere transitional passage from one note to another in the relation of a series, but the unity is here an actual one and a return in immediacy upon itself.

But in the second place we may observe as a further incident of distinct types of the triad, which I cannot now examine in more detail, the deliberate appearance of a deeper mode of opposition. We have, however, already at an earlier stage seen that the scales contain over and above those notes, which coalesce without opposition, others which annul such consonance. Examples of these are the diminished and augmented seventh. Inasmuch as these notes equally belong to the totality of tones, they too will necessarily find an entrance into the triad form. And when this happens it follows that the immediate unity and consonance above mentioned is disturbed, to the extent that we have added a tone essentially of another character, by means of which for the first time we meet with a genuine difference which actually asserts itself as contradiction. In this way we have the true depth of musical tone really asserted. It proceeds to contradictions that are fundamental and does not flinch from the acerbity454 or fracture they involve. And, in fact, the notion in its truth is no doubt essential unity; but it is not only immediate unity, but one which ideally is disrupt, which falls into contradictions. In this sense I have for example in my Logic developed the notion as subjectivity, but at the same time disclosed how this subjectivity, as ideal transparent unity, is resolved in that which confronts it in opposition, namely, objectivity. And further such subjectivity regarded as itself wholly ideal is nothing more than a one-sided and abstract presentment of it, which as such retains a something else, an opposed other over against it, namely, objectivity, and only becomes subjectivity in the profounder significance of its truth, in so far as it enters into this opposing other-than-itself, overcomes it and resolves it. And for this reason in the world of reality it is to the higher natures that power is given to endure the pain of that fundamental contradiction of conscious life and to overcome it. In order that music therefore may as an art express the ideal significance no less than purely subjective emotion of the profoundest content, that of religion for example, and above all that of the Christian religion, in which the profoundest depth of suffering is an essential constituent, it must possess the means within its empire of tone to depict such a conflict of opposing forces. And a means of this kind it does possess in the so-called dissonant chords of the seventh and ninth455. The function of these, however, I cannot venture further to discuss here.

Looking, however, from a general point of view at the nature of these chords I would draw attention to the further important point, that they hold what is contradictory, under the mode of contradiction already explained, in one and the same unity. That, however, what is contradictory as such should remain in unity is a contradiction in terms and unintelligible. The very nature and notion of a contradiction assumes that assured repose in it and what it implies is impossible. On the contrary it is as such self-destructive. Harmony is therefore unable to remain in chords of this character; our ear and feeling, in order to obtain satisfaction, imperatively demands their resolution. To the extent of this contradiction we are inevitably impelled to seek a resolution of dissonance and a return to the consonant triad. And this motion, as the return of the principle of identity upon itself, is the movement of truth in the widest sense. In the art of music, however, this completed identity is only possible as a succession of its moments in time, which appears consequently as a series, but declares its collective dependence in this that a necessary movement of an advance, which is essentially self-caused and a movement of change belonging to its very nature, is thereby asserted.

(γγ) And this suggests a third point it may be as well to draw attention to. In other words just as the scale was an essentially co-ordinate, albeit in the first instance still abstract series of tones, so too the chords do not persist in their isolation and self-consistency, but possess an ideal relation to one another, and a necessary impulse to change and progress. In this advance, although the same can be changed and extended to a far more considerable extent than in the scales, yet again mere caprice is not more possible in the one case than the other. The transition of chord to chord is effected in part by the nature of the chords themselves, and in part by the keys, to which these chords lead us. It is in virtue of this that the theory of music has established many rules, to enumerate and adequately explain which would, however, extend our survey into much too difficult and discursive matters. I must therefore rest content with having confined myself to a few observations of most general interest.

Taking now a glance in retrospect on that which, as connected with the means of musical expression, has already engaged our attention, it will be seen that first in order came the mode of configuration appropriate to the temporal duration of tones considered as time-measure, beat, and rhythm. We then proceeded to discuss the actual tones of musical sound themselves; first, that is to say, in the sound produced by musical instruments and the human voice; secondly, in the fixed and determinate measure of the intervals, and the abstract succession of notes that are subject to them in the scale and the various keys; thirdly, in the rules which appertain to the different chords and their conjoint progression. The concluding subject, which still remains for us to consider, and in which those previous to it discover their synthetic unity, and disclose in the same the fundamental form by virtue of which tones are for the first time in veritable freedom and union unfolded and co-ordinated, is melody.

In other words, harmony possesses merely the essential relations, which establish the law of necessity in the world of tone; but these are not in themselves, any more than beat and rhythm are, actually music: they are rather the substantive basis, the foundation of rule and principle, upon which the soul in its freedom expatiates. The poetry of music, that speech of human souls, which pours forth the ideal atmosphere and the pain of emotional life, and in this overflow is raised with a sense of alleviation above the natural constraint of feeling, by making present to the soul that which actually affects it strongly; by enabling it freely to dally round its essential being, and by liberating it by this very means from the oppression of joys and sufferings — well, this power of soul-expression in the domain of music is in the first instance melody456. It is this concluding section of our inquiry, in so far as it constitutes the more supremely poetic aspect of music, the realm of its really artistic creations, while availing itself of the elements previously discussed, which obviously possesses an exceptional claim to our attention. Unfortunately it is just in this direction that we find ourselves confronted with the difficulties already adverted to. In other words, to mention one of them, a detailed and scientific treatment of the subject implies a more accurate knowledge of the laws of composition, and a totally different sort of acquaintance with the masterpieces of musical composition to any I possess or indeed am able to secure, for we seldom hear anything of a definite or conclusive character on this head either from musical experts or practical musicians, from the latter, only too frequently men of very average intelligence, least of all. And we may further observe that it is a characteristic of the art of music itself, that we should find the task of presenting and expounding particular detail in general terms a less easy matter than in the case of the other arts. It is true enough that music, as other arts, deals essentially with a spiritual content, and propounds the ideality of this subject-matter, or the ideal movements of emotional life, as the object of its expression: yet for all that this content remains more indefinite in outline and more vague, for just this very reason that it is apprehended with exclusive regard to its ideality, or is reflected in sound as subjective feeling; and the transitional states of music are not in each case at the same time the change of a particular emotion or idea, a thought or an individual form, but are merely a musical progression, which consists in self-exposition or play, and avails itself of artistic method for this purpose. I will consequently limit myself merely to the following general observations, which have fallen in my way and strike me as of interest.

(α) From a certain point of view, no doubt, melody, in its free disclosure of musical tone, floats independent of beat, rhythm, and harmony; but none the less the only means employed in its realization are just these rhythmical and metrically constructed movements of tone in their essentially necessary relations. The movement of melody, therefore, is inseparable from the means employed to create it, and, if merely opposed to the practical necessity of the subjection of these means to rule, is unable to exist at all. In this intimate association between melody and harmony, however, no real surrender of freedom is involved: what melody is thus emancipated from is a purely capricious fancy of the composer exercised in odd or eccentric progressions and transitions. It is united by this very association to a stable and self-consistent art. Genuine liberty is not opposed to the principle of necessity as a foreign and therefore oppressive and suppressive power; rather it possesses in the substantive character of the same what is a constituent of and identical with the core of its being; in following the demands of it it therefore is only conforming to its own laws, acting in accordance with its own nature. And in fact it is by the rejection of such proscriptions and only then that it proves an alien to its nature, untrue to itself. Conversely, it is sufficiently obvious that beat, rhythm, and harmony are, taken independently, merely abstractions, which as thus isolated have no musical457 significance, and are able only to acquire real existence as music in virtue of melody, and as within the domain of this, supplying moments to or aspects in its realization. It is precisely in the manner that the distinction between melody and harmony is thus effectively mediated and resolved that the secret power of great compositions is disclosed.

(β)Secondly, in this question of the individual character of melody the following points appear to me of importance.

(αα) In the first place, melody may be restricted, if we consider its harmonious progression, to a very simple compass of chords and keys, extended within the embrace of tone-relations destitute of all opposition in their harmonious fusion, which it employs merely as the fundamental ground on which to develop its more appropriate form and movement. Song melodies, for instance, which be it understood are not on that account in the least superficial, but may express the depths of soul-life, as a rule are motived by constructive harmony of this most simple character. They do not propound the more difficult problems of chords and keys in so far as they deal with such things and their modulation at all. They are mainly satisfied with obtaining a simple harmonious accompaniment, which is not carried to the point of serious opposition, and consequently requires few resolutions in order to recover the final impression of unity. Such a mode of composition no doubt may lead to superficial results, such as we find in a great many modern Italian and French melodies. In such cases the development of the harmony is entirely superficial. The composer endeavours to substitute for the genuine demand of his work in this aspect of it a merely piquant charm of rhythm or flavour of some kind. Generally speaking, none the less the emptiness of a melody is not the inevitable result of a simple harmonic basis.

(ββ) A further distinction consists in this that melody in the case supposed is no longer developed, as in our previous example, merely in the exposition of separate notes composed upon a relatively independent harmonic progression, regarded simply as the base of it: in the melody now under consideration every separate note of the melody is substantially complete as a concrete whole In a chord. In this manner it, on the one hand, includes a world of tones, and from another it is so closely interwoven with the movement of the harmony, that it is now impossible to retain the distinction previously accepted between a melody unfolded in relative independence, and a harmony which supplies the emphatic pauses of the accompaniment and its more fixed and determinate musical basis. Harmony and melody are here one and the same compact whole, and a modification of the one implies a correspondent and necessary alteration of the other458. This may be pre-eminently illustrated by chorales written in four parts. In like manner the same melody can be so interwoven in the varied vocal expression of its parts, that this interlacery itself creates a harmonic progression; or we may have different melodies in a similar way elaborated harmonically in association, so that the union of particular notes of these melodies produces musical harmony. We often, for example, meet with this in the compositions of Sebastian Bach. In such cases the music progresses by means of parts that vary greatly from one another in their character and movement, which appear to associate or inter-thread with each other on independent lines, yet retain at the same time an essential harmonic relation to each other. A necessary and coherent union is thereby asserted.

(γγ) In composition of this kind it is not merely necessary for music which has any claim to profundity to be developed to the bare limits of undisturbed consonance, nay, even first to pass beyond it in order that it may return thereto: rather the first simple mode of concord will have to be rent asunder in dissonances. It is only through such conflict that the profounder combinations and mysteries of music in which an independent necessity reposes, discovers their source and ground; and for the same reason it is only in such profounder harmonic progressions that the arresting moments of melody originate. A bold style of musical composition will consequently part company with a purely consonant progression. It will pass into the sphere of opposing forces, will summon to its aid the most discordant contrasts, and disclose its unique power amid the tumult of all the resources of harmony, the conflicts of which it is equally able to calm, wholly confident in its ability to celebrate finally the grateful triumph of melodic tranquillity. We have in short here a battle waged between freedom and necessity; a conflict between the freedom of inventive genius, seeking to yield itself to its upward flight, and the necessary constraint of those harmonic conditions, which it is forced to acknowledge as the means of its expression, and in which its own ideal significance is reflected. On the other hand if the harmony, the employment, that is, of all its resources, the unrelenting nature of its conflict in the disposal of them and in its attitude to them is the main interest, the composition may very easily become heavy and overweighted with science, in so far at least as the freedom of movement is really impaired, or at least we are not allowed to feel the complete effect of its triumph.

(γ) To put the matter in other words, in every genuine melody a truly melodic, songful impulse, which is its essential type as music, must declare itself as predominant and independent, as something which it neither forgets nor loses in the plenitude of its expression. Thus regarded melody presents, no doubt, an infinite power of adaptation and co-ordination in the progressive motion of tones, but the mode or form of this must be such that throughout we are made aware of an essentially complete and self-subsistent whole. This totality contains, it is true, a varied complexity, and implies in itself a forward advance; but it must for all that, regarded as a whole, be beyond all doubt rounded off and secure. It must therefore have a distinct beginning and termination to the extent at least that the intermediate part of it may be simply presented as the mediating link between that beginning and end. Only as such a movement, asserted with unmistakable emphasis, itself self-differentiated and returning on its own unity, does the melody of music reflect the free self-consciousness459 of soul-life, whose expression it ought to be; only as thus perfected can music, in its own peculiar medium of ideality, enforce expression in its pure immediacy, or avail itself of the ideal freedom of that mode of expression which is the untarnished reflection of the inner life, an expression which, despite its subordination to the necessary laws of harmony, enables the soul to perceive a more exalted vision.

After passing in review the general nature of musical art we considered the particular aspects according to which notes and their duration in time secured their necessary form. Having now arrived in our discussion of melody at the confines of a world of free artistic invention and actual musical composition, what we have now to deal with is a content, which, under its rhythm, harmony, and melody, is capable of receiving an expression conformable to art’s requirements. After fixing clearly in our minds general modes of this expression we shall as our conclusion be in an advantageous position to review the different provinces of musical composition. With these objects before us we may in the first instance advert to the following important distinction.

On the one side music may be, as already observed, in the nature of an accompaniment. This is the case where its spiritual content is not merely seized in the abstract ideality of its significance, or as individual emotion, but enters into the movement of the music subordinate to the significance it has already received from idea and words. As a type of music opposed to this we have the composition which is disconnected with any such content already prepared for it; music in this case establishes itself in its own proper sphere, so that it either, if it still is forced to deal with a definitely received content, resolves the same wholly in melodies and their harmonic development, or asserts its absolute independence in the medium of musical tone simply and its harmonic or melodic configuration. We have already seen that a similar distinction is apparent in a wholly different section of our inquiry. I refer to the case of architecture considered either as an independent art, or in the service it renders to that of building generally. But in music the mode of its accompaniment is of an essentially freer type than that of our illustration; it is far more intimately united with its content than is ever possible in the case of architecture.

In the actual domain of art this distinction marks the difference between vocal and instrumental music. We are not, however, entitled to accept it in the purely external interpretation of it, as though in vocal music it was merely the sound of the human voice, while in instrumental music it was the more varied tones of the many distinct instruments which were made serviceable. We must not in other words overlook the fact that the voice expresses at the same time in its song deliberate speech, presenting us the ideas of a specific content, so that music, regarded as the word that is sung, if the twofold aspect of the same in tone and human speech is not to fall into a condition of indifference or absence of relation, is obviously bound, so far as the art enables it to do so, to supply its musical expression to this content, which as such content is brought before the receptive faculties in its nearest approach to definition, and no longer is left unrelated in more indefinite feeling. In so far, however, as the presented content, as libretto, is, despite of the above union, independently ascertainable in legible form, and is also consequently distinguishable in the mind itself from its musical expression, to this extent the music attached to a libretto is an accompaniment, whereas in sculpture and painting the unfolded content does not already attain to any presentment independently of its artistic form. At the same time we must be careful not to go to the other extreme and entertain an idea of such accompaniment, as though its entire purpose were one solely of subordination; the truth is precisely the reverse. The libretto is written in the interest of the music, and has no further importance save in so far as it brings home to the mind a more intimate knowledge of the actual subject the artist has selected for his work. Music maintains this freedom pre-eminently by virtue of the fact that it does not apprehend the content in the manner the libretto may be assumed to make it intelligible. Rather it exhibits its mastery of a medium, to which sense-perception and imaginative idea do not belong460. In this respect I have already, when discussing the general characteristics of music, pointed out that music expresses the principle of ideality in its intrinsic quality. The ideality of soul-life, however, may be of a twofold type. That is to say, to accept an object in its ideal presentation461 may, in the first place, mean that we do not conceive it in its actual appearance in the phenomenal world, but relatively to its ideal significance. We may, however, mean by this, secondly, that a content is expressed as we find it realized in the experience of personal emotion. Both forms of idealization are represented in the art of music. I will therefore endeavour to explain in more detail how this comes about.

In old church music, take the movement of a crucifixus est for example, we find that the profound meanings unfolded in the central idea of the Passion regarded as Christ’s suffering, death, and burial, are severally so conceived, that it is not simply one merely personal feeling of sympathy or individual pain over these facts that is expressed, but along with this the very facts themselves, or in other words the depth of their significance is motived by the harmony of the music and its melodic progression. It is, of course, true that even here the impression is one which acts upon the emotion of those who hear it. We do not actually perceive the pain of the crucified, we do not merely receive a general idea of it; the aim is throughout that we experience in the depths of our being the ideal substance of this death and this divine suffering, that we absorb with heart and soul its reality, so that it becomes as it were a part of ourselves, permeating our entire conscious life to the exclusion of everything else. And in like manner must the soul of the composer, if his work is to disclose such a power of impress upon others, entirely lose itself in these facts and only in them. It must not merely have experienced a personal emotion of them. It must accept as its aim the task of making in its music the facts themselves live again for the ideal sense.

Conversely, I may read a text, a libretto, which narrates an event, places before me an action, gives to feelings the impress of speech, and thereby become moved even to tears in my profoundest being. This effect of personal emotion, which may attend all human action and conduct, every expression of inner life, and further may be excited by the perception of every such event and by participation in the presentment of such, the art of music is able to regulate; by so doing it ameliorates, tranquilizes and idealizes by its influence the fellow-feeling in the listener who finds himself attuned to it. In both cases, therefore, the content rings through the inner life, in which music, for the very reason that it subdues consciousness in the simple attitude of rapt attention462, is able to restrain the unfettered range of thought, imagination, sensation, and passage beyond the true boundary-line of the subject on hand. Music, in short, keeps the soul absorbed in a particular content, fructifies its energy therein, and moves and fills the life of feeling up to the brim within these limits.

Such is our conception and description, so far as the present occasion permits, of the manner of which music, as an accompaniment, when dealing with a definite content which is, as previously explained, set before it by means of a libretto, elaborates that aspect of it we have termed ideality. Inasmuch, however, as music is pre-eminently called up to do this in vocal music, and the human voice is added to this associated with instruments, it is customary to speak of instrumental music in a special sense as the music of accompaniment. It is no doubt true that it accompanies the voice, and should not either assert unqualified independence or claim an unqualified precedency. But for all that vocal music is placed, as thus associated, in a more direct relation still under the definition previously given of an accompanying tone. The voice expresses words articulate to the mind; and song is merely a fresh or additional modification of the content of these words, or in other words it is the explication of them in the language of the emotions. In the case of instrumental music, if taken by itself, the expression of imaged idea vanishes, and such music must necessarily confine itself to the means and modes of purely musical expression463.

The discussion of these points suggests a third one, which, in conclusion, it is well not to overlook. I have previously drawn attention to the fact that the reality of a musical composition, in its full and vital embodiment, depends on a continually repeated reproduction. In this respect it is at a disadvantage as compared with sculpture and painting. The sculptor, no less than the painter, conceives a given work and executes it throughout. The entire artistic activity implied therein is centred in one single individual, and by this means absolute reciprocity between the creative idea and its execution is secured. The architect, on the contrary, is in a less favourable position, who, in carrying through all the variety of structure in a building, has to entrust such work to other hands than his own. The composer in a similar way, must leave the execution of his work to other hands and voices. But in his case there is this difference, that the execution, from the point of view of mere technique, no less than that of the vital spirit of his work, itself demands an artistic activity, not one of mere craftsmanship. In this respect we may in our own time, no less than previously in that of the older Italian opera, whereas in other arts there has been little or nothing fresh of the kind, point to a marvellous advance in two respects in music. The first is to be noted in the conception, the second in the increased virtuosity of execution. It is due to these results the very notion of what music implies and is able to perform has, even in the case of acknowledged experts, been increasingly enlarged464.

We may now briefly summarize the heads of the concluding sections of this portion of our work.

First, we shall investigate more carefully music regarded as accompaniment, and raise the question with what modes of expression in a given content it is as a rule most compatible.

Secondly, it will be necessary to consider this question more closely as viewed in relation to musical composition that is exclusively independent.

Thirdly, our conclusion will be reached with a few observations upon artistic execution.

(a) Music as Accompaniment

It follows, as a necessary result of what I have already described as being the relative position of libretto and music, that, in this sphere of its activity, musical expression is compelled to concern itself far more exclusively with a defined content than in the alternative case where it is able to surrender itself without restraint to its own movement and inspiration. A libretto offers us to start with definite ideas, and compels the attention to forsake that field of more visionary emotion destitute of distinct idea, in which we are permitted to range without interruption, and are not forced to abandon our licence to receive from pure music whatever chance impression or wave of emotion it may arouse. In this act of artistic interlacery with words, however, it is not right that music should carry its loyalty so far as to impair the free course of its progressions, even though it do so with the object of emphasizing the full character of what is contained in the libretto. To do this is to employ the mere pedantry of learning, to adapt means of musical expression for the most faithful presentment possible of a content which is not in the first instance its own, but supplied it externally. It is to accept this artificial result rather than the creation of a real self-subsistent work of art. And to that extent we have here evidenced a definite check and hindrance to free artistic activity. It is equally wrong in the opposite extreme that music should, as is almost invariably the fashion with modern Italian composers, wholly emancipate itself from the contents of the libretto, as though its specific character were only a bond, and with no other aim than that of approaching independent music as closely as possible. The true function of such music is this. It ought to steep itself in the meaning of the expressed words, situation, or action, and by virtue of such impregnation, ideally conceived, discover therefrom a vitally arresting expression, and elaborate the same in terms congenial to art. That is the course followed by all great masters. They appropriate everything of vital interest in the words; but the stream of their music, the tranquil flow of the composition, remains for all that as free as ever. We acknowledge the natural growth of the music no less than its affinity to the text it illustrates. We would draw attention to three distinct types of expression all illustrative of this free spirit.

(α) To start with, there is that aspect of musical expression which we may describe as the truly melodic. We have here simply emotion, the utterance of soul itself, which, apart from anything else, finds self-enjoyment in such expression.

(αα) The domain here, in which the composer moves, is coincident with the human heart and the moods of the soul; and melody, which is the pure musical utterance of this inward world, is in the most profound sense the soul of music. Musical tone only attains to expression that is really vital when emotion is embodied in it or reflected in sound from it. Connected with this the purely natural cry of feeling, whatever it may be, of horror, for example, or the sobbing of grief, or the exclamation or outburst of uncontrolled jubilation, are themselves highly expressive; and indeed I have already referred to them as the starting-point of music, subject of course to the statement that art is unable to accept them under the mode of purely natural utterance. Here, too, we find a distinction between music and painting. The art of painting is frequently able to produce the most beautiful and artistic effect by its realization in every respect of the actual form, the colour and animation of a particular human being in some definite situation and environment, and its complete reflection of all that it has thus assimilated and received in its bare vitality. The truth of Nature, if presented conformably to artistic truth, is here entirely justified. But the art of music ought not thus to repeat emotional expression in the form it assumes as a purely natural utterance of passion; what it should do is to vitalize with the emotional forces musical sound elaborated under the definite conditions of its tonal progression, and to this extent resolve the expression in a medium of sound wholly created by art and inseparable from the artistic purpose, a medium in which the mere cry becomes a series of musical tones with a definite progression, the transitions and course of which are subject to the laws of harmony and unfolded in the completeness of a melodic phrase.

(ββ) The essential significance of this melodic quality and its bearing on the human spirit is best apprehended if we view the latter as a whole. The fine arts of sculpture and painting give an objective existence to the ideality of soul-life; moreover, they liberate the mind from this externality of their presentation in so far as, from a certain point of view, it discovers itself therein as an ideal, spiritual work, and from another everything which partakes of adventitious singularity465, of capricious idea, opinion, and reflection, is rejected, the content thereof being placed before us in its entirely appropriate individuality. The art of music, on the contrary, as we have repeatedly pointed out, possesses as a means to such objectivity merely the element of the soul-life itself, by means of which that which purely belongs to this enters into conversation with itself, and as expressed in the utterance of emotion itself returns, as it were, upon itself. Music is spirit or soul, which ring forth in their untrammelled immediacy, and derive satisfaction in this record of their self-knowledge. As a fine art, however, it is its necessary function to regulate the expression of such life no less than its effects. It ought not to permit that expression to be whirled away in bacchantic thunder and tumult, or be left in the distraction of despair, but retain the blessed freedom of its deliverance in the extremity of sorrow no less than the jubilant outburst of delight. And this is the character of truly ideal music, the utterance of melody such as we find it in Palestrina, Durante, Lotti, Pergolese, Glück, Haydn, and Mozart. Tranquillity of soul is never lost in the compositions of these masters. Grief is no doubt often expressed, but the resolution is always there; the luminous sense of proportion never breaks down in extremes: everything finds its due place knit together in the whole; joy is never suffered to degenerate into unseemly uproar and even lamentation carries with it the most benign repose. I have already, when discussing Italian painting, emphasized the fact, that a spirit of reconciliation is not wanting even in extreme examples of sorrow and distraction of soul; by virtue of this, even where we have tears and suffering, some trait of tranquillity and assurance is preserved; the tenderness and grace which assert themselves in the harlequin’s rôle illustrates the same truth. In like manner a feeling for nature and the endowment of musical expression is pre-eminently a characteristic of the Italians. In their earlier church music we find that, along with the deepest devotional feeling, the sense of reconciliation is expressed in its purity; and though grief may stir the soul most profoundly, yet beauty and rapturous joy, the simple greatness and impress of an imagination which discovers delight in its own varied expatiation, is equally present. It is a beauty of an apparently sensuous type, so that it is not unusual to refer to such melodious contentment as a purely sensuous enjoyment. But it is sometimes overlooked that it is precisely in this realm of the senses that art discovers its life and movement, and thereby transfers Spirit to a sphere in which, as in the world of Nature, this essential wave of self-satisfaction is throughout the fundamental tone.

(γγ) Albeit, therefore, particularity of emotional content must be duly represented, yet it is right that music, while permitting passion and imagination to stream forth in its harmonies, should at the same time lift the soul that is absorbed in such emotion over the same, enable it to hover around such content, and in short create an atmosphere wherein the recovery from such an absorption, and the pure reflection of itself is possible. This it is which gives us in fact the really melodious character to song-music. The important feature of it is not merely the progression of determinate emotion such as we indicate by the words love, yearning, jollity, and so forth; it is rather that inward sense, which presides over it, which expatiates in its suffering no less than its delight, and finds satisfaction in doing so. Precisely as the bird in the brake, the lark on high sings its glad and touching song for the mere sake of singing, an outburst of Nature herself, having no further thought or intention whatever, it is just the same with human song and the expression of its melody. Consistently with this not infrequently Italian music, in which this truth is pre-eminently emphasized, will, just as poetry will, pass into mere melodious sound simply, and can readily appear to part company with the emotional stimulus and its particular mode of expression, or even in fact do so, for the very good reason that its object is the enjoyment of art by itself, and the contentment of all who thus are able to enjoy themselves. And apart from the Italians this is more or less the characteristic of all right melody. The specific nature of the expression, albeit present also, passes away, in so far as our hearts are absorbed in what we appropriate rather as our own, than in that which belongs to another, a something beyond us. By reason of this and this alone — it is much as we receive the impression of pure light — we are admitted to the most intimate conception of ideal blessedness and attuned spirits.

(β) In the art of sculpture the predominant impression is ideal beauty or self-repose. Painting, on the other hand, already presents a movement in the direction of specific characterization, and the emphasis it attaches to articulate expression is an essential feature of its executive purpose. In a similar fashion the art of music is unable to rest satisfied with melodious expression as above indicated. The purely emotional grasp by the soul of its intrinsic nature, and the play in musical sound of this apprehension is, regarded as the mere atonement of mood, when we take it strictly, too general and abstract. It is inseparable from the danger not merely of an alienation from the more careful interpretation of the content expressed in the libretto, but of that of becoming generally empty and trivial. If sorrow, joy, yearning, and so forth are to find adequate reflection in melody, the soul that is actual and concrete only comes by such emotions in the downright reality of the same as involved in a veritable content, that is, in particular situations, events, actions, and so on. If, for example, a song arouses the emotion of mourning, the lament at a loss, we inevitably ask ourselves, what is the nature of that loss. Is it, shall we say, the loss of life with all its many interests? Is it a loss of youth, happiness, wife, beloved, children, friends, or anything else? For this reason it is further incumbent upon music that it should of itself differentiate in like manner its mode of expression when dealing with a specific content and the various relations and situations, which the soul has experienced, and the more ideal or intimate life of which it seeks to reflect in its harmonies. Music in short is not primarily concerned with the bare form of the inward soul, but with that innermost life as replenished, the specific content of which is most closely related to the particular character of the emotion roused, so that the mode of the expression will, or should, inevitably assert itself with essential differences, according to the varied nature of the content. In a similar way the soul, precisely in the degree that it takes a headlong plunge into any distracting experience, proceeds through an accumulating series of effects, and, in opposition to our previously described state of benign self-contentment, passes through conflicts and distraction, wrestlings with passions, and in short reaches an extreme of division, for which the mode of expression hitherto observed is no longer adequate.

Now what we mean by the detail of the content is just that which is supplied by the libretto or words. In the case of a simple melody, which is less concerned with this specific character, the more defined characteristics of the libretto are appreciably of less importance. A song, for instance, although it essentially implies as a poem and text a whole of variedly motived moods, perceptions, and ideas, none the less as a rule asserts throughout one fundamental progression of emotion; it is primarily one chord of the soul that it emphasizes. To grasp this, and to reflect the same in the language of music, this is what such song-melody is mainly called upon to do. Consequently we may have identically the same music through all the verses of our poem, although the meaning they carry admits of much variety; and what is more, this very repetition, so far from proving injurious to the effect, may serve to enforce and enhance it. We may see the same thing in a landscape, where, too, the most varied objects confront the vision, and yet for all that the prevailing mood and aspect of Nature, which animates the whole, is one and the same. It is just such a prevailing tone that ought to assert itself in the song, and this, though it only applies strictly to some of the verses, but does not so apply to others; and the reason of this is that here the specific sense of the words is not to be taken as of most importance. What comes first is the simple melody that floats freely over all variety of content. In the case of many compositions which infringe this principle, and which start every fresh verse with a novel melody, which not unfrequently varies from the preceding one in beat, rhythm, and even scale, it is quite impossible to understand why, if such essential modifications were really inevitable, the poem itself ought not to have been altered in metre, rhythm, and rhyme, through all its verses.

(αα) What is, however, appropriate for the song, which is a genuine melodious utterance of the soul, is not applicable to every kind of musical expression. It is necessary, therefore, to draw attention to a further aspect in contrast to pure melody as such, one of equal importance, and by virtue of which alone song is really brought into line with accompanying music. We find this in that mode of expression which is dominant in the recitative. Here we have no independently exclusive melody, which at the same time reflects the fundamental mood of the content, in the elaboration of which soul-life, as at home with itself, receives back in musical sound some portion of its ideal activity; rather in the case before us the content of the words, to the full compass of its specific character, is imprinted upon the musical expression, the import of which no less than the course it determines; and this is so whether we regard it from the point of view of the elevation or profundity which distinguishes it, or the prominence or subordination of its particular features. By such means music, as contrasted with melodic expression, approximates to an emphatic declamation, one accurately corresponding with the movement of the words, whether the view we take of them be that of their meaning, or that of their syntactical arrangement. And in so far as it adds also, as a novel element, the aspect of a more exalted emotion, it stands midway between the pure melody and poetical speech. Conformably to such a station, therefore, we have a free accentuation, which adheres strenuously to the specific sense of particular words. Moreover it is not necessary for the libretto in this case to be written in any particular metre, nor need the musical exposition, as the pure melody does in a like case, follow beat and rhythm with absolute precision; rather the music under this condition of it, that is in its acceleration, suspension, or pause in particular progressions, or rapid passage over such, is entitled to adapt itself freely to the emotion aroused by the meaning of the words. For the same reason the modulation is not so restricted as in the case of melody. Precisely as the text which it attempts to express may suggest, it may begin, proceed, pause, break off, begin again, or stop with absolute licence. Unexpected accents, progressions only partially mediated, sudden transitions and resolutions are equally permissible; and, in direct contrast to the continuous stream of melodious music, provided always that the libretto’s content requires it, this latter mode of expression is equally in its place, though delivered in fragments, and torn asunder by passionate emotion.

(ββ) Being of this character this form of declamatory expression, known as recitative, is suitable for tranquil statement of situation, or facts, no less than the presentment of the entire compass of the emotions, under which the distraction of the soul in exceptional circumstances is depicted, and which in its soul-full harmonies stirs the heart sympathetically with its every movement. The recitative is first mainly applicable to the oratorio, either as the declamed narration, or the more vivacious presentment of instantaneous occurrence; or, secondly, we find it in dramatic song, in which case it can appropriately express every shade of parenthetical statement, no less than every sort of passion, it matters not whether the result be expressed in abrupt, curtailed, or fragmentary variation, or with aphoristic violence, or in a dialogue of rapid lightning flashes and counter flashes, or in a more continuous stream. In both these provinces of epic or dramatic poetry, we may add that instrumental music is a possible accompaniment. Its function in either case is either quite simply to emphasize the pauses in the harmonic progression, or to interrupt the course of melody with incidental music, which, agreeably to the general import of the former, depicts in musical language other aspects and movements of the situation.

(γγ) What, however, we find defective in this declamatory recitative is just the qualities which are essentially characteristic of the pure melody; these are the definite articulation and unification of its parts, the expression of that spiritual homogeneity or unity of which we have spoken, that which, it is true, is confined in a particular content, but at the same time asserts its own sense of unity in that content, being enabled to do this through its refusal to be distracted or broken up by its absorption in particular aspects of it, or rather, instead of this, still retaining in them as predominant its ideal coalescence. For this reason the art of music cannot rest satisfied, even where we are dealing with the more sharply defined features of the libretto proposed, with such recitative of declamation; nor in general can it remain content with the unmediated difference between the pure melody, which, in comparison with it and as above explained, floats over the particularity of the words, and the recitative, whose task it is so far as possible to identify itself with it. On the contrary we must look for some mode of mediation between these extremes. We may compare with this new type of unity a constituent which entered into our consideration of the distinction between harmony and melody. This harmony was acknowledged as being not merely the general, but to a like extent the essentially specific and particularized foundation of melody; and far from the latter being thereby deprived of its freedom of movement, we found that it only thus secured for the same a power and definition comparable to that the human organism secures by virtue of its consistent bone-structure, which only impedes inappropriate postures and movements, while it adds stability and security to the right ones.

This brings us to the final point of view of our discussion of music as an accompaniment.

(γ) This third mode of expression consists in this that the melodic song, which accompanies words, is also involved in their particularized substance, and thereby is not permitted to remain wholly indifferent to the principle of most force in recitative; rather it appropriates this with the result that while it repairs its own defects in clear definition, it confers on the characteristic recitative an organic articulation and a unified self-consistency. For, as already observed, even that which is throughout melody is impossible without a certain defined content. When, therefore, I mainly emphasized the fact that in all and every mode of it the tranquil self-reflection of the soul’s own essential substance and ideal unity is the mode of expression peculiarly that of simple melody, inasmuch as, musically considered, it presents a similar unity and a similarly complete return upon itself, I did so because I then had in view this aspect as the distinctive point of contrast between the pure melody and the recitative. It is, however, further incumbent on the melodic phrase to bring it about that its mode come into actual possession of that which in the first instance appears necessarily to have its movement outside it, and by means of this replenishment, in so far as it then is equally of a declamatory or a melodic character, for the first time attain to a truly concrete expression. It follows also from the converse point of view that the declamatory part of it is no longer independently aloof from it, but finds its own one-sidedness supplemented in like manner by the accretion of melodic expression. This is what constitutes the necessary condition of such concrete unity. In order to examine this more closely we had better keep distinct the following points of view.

First, it will be as well to glance at the kind of libretto, or text, which is adapted to musical composition, and for this reason that it has been now proved that clear definition in the content of words adapted to music and its expression is of essential importance.

Secondly, we have now introduced as a fresh constituent of composition declamatory characterization; it will therefore be necessary to consider this in its relation to the principle, which we, in the first instance, identified as that of melody.

Thirdly, we must endeavour to specify the more prominent modes under which we may review this type of musical expression.

(αα) Music466 is not merely in a general way an accompaniment of the content of a work in a sphere which already engages our attention, but it is part of its function, as already observed, to define still further the characterization of such a work. It is consequently an injurious assumption that the construction of the libretto is a matter of indifference to the musical composition. We find, on the contrary, that really distinguished musical compositions presuppose an excellent libretto, carefully selected by the composers or actually written by them. It is impossible that an artist should treat with indifference the material with which he is dealing and a musician least of all, precisely in the degree that poetry has already worked out and settled for him the epic, lyrical, or dramatic configuration of the content in question.

What is of first importance in the construction of a good text is this that its content should be stamped by essential self-consistency.467 It is impossible that music should conjure forth an artistic product of real strength and penetration from what is commonplace, trivial, barren, or absurd. With all the spices and seasonings in the world your musical chef will never make a hare pie out of a roasted cat. In the case of song compositions no doubt the nature of the words is less decisive, yet even here we require words with a really genuine content. From a further point of view, however, it is equally necessary that such a content should not tax our reflection too much, or aspire to philosophical profundity, as is rather the case with the lyrics of Schiller. In such an example the extraordinary range of pathos exceeds the musical expression of lyrical emotion. The same thing may be said of the choruses of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The penetrative power here displayed in imaginative conception is so exceptional, they are so elaborate in their detail whether regarded in their scenic or ideal presentment, they are already so absolutely complete as poetry that we have nothing left for music to add to them468. We have literally no room left us for any further play or exposition of ideal significance or movement beyond that already presented. The more modern material and mode of treatment we find in the so-called romantic poetry are in their type the strongest contrast to these. Their pretension, as a rule, is that of being naive and popular; but we only too frequently find a naïveté which is finical, artificial, and stilted. Instead of pure and genuine emotions we get a simplicitas that is nothing but feeling worked upon and acting under the constraint of reflection; a false kind of yearning and affectation, which is far too complaisant with dulness, stupidity, and vulgarity, and is equally blind to the defects of passions, envy, licence, and even devilish wickedness wholly without ideal content; which is, moreover, as self-satisfied with its assumed excellence in the one case as it is with the dissolution and baseness of the other. Emotion that is spontaneous, simple, thorough, penetrative, is here entirely absent, and music, in any attempt to reproduce it, can suffer no greater injury. We may therefore accept the fact that neither mere depth of thought, nor the vanity or worthlessness of mere emotion can give us a satisfactory content. On the contrary what is most adapted for music is a certain intermediate type of poetry, which we Germans are loth even to admit as poetry, and the true feeling and talent for which is more largely possessed by Italians and Frenchmen. It is a poetry of a genuine lyrical quality, extremely simple, which indicates situations and emotions in a few words. Where it is more dramatic it remains luminous and vital without too involved a development; detail is not so much elaborated, but it is rather, as a rule, concerned to supply general effects, than the completely articulate results of a poet’s activity. We find here that the composer receives, in accordance with his demand, merely the general foundation, upon which he can, in subordination to his own invention, and his own threshing out of motives of every kind, erect his building, treating many aspects of the subject as part of his own life and movement. For inasmuch as music has to adapt itself to words, these words should not particularize the picture too closely; if they do the musical declamation becomes absorbed in trifles, lacking in a common impulse, too contracted in the direction of particular features, and the unity and general effect is impaired. In this direction people are only too frequently at fault when expressing an opinion upon the excellence or insufficiency of a libretto. It is one of the most common verdicts, for example, that the libretto of the Magic Flute is hopelessly bad, though this piece of manufacture is nevertheless among the best of opera librettos. Among the many wildly fantastic and commonplace productions of his pen Schickaneder has in this for once hit the right track. The empire of Night, with its queen, the empire of the Sun, these mysteries, these initiations, this Wisdom, Love, these ordeals, and with it all this typically world-wise ethic, excellent in the breadth of its applicability — all this when combined with the depth, the bewitching loveliness and soul of the music expands and floods our imagination, and warms the heart.

To mention further examples, the old Latin texts of great masses and other services are unrivalled for religious music. This is in part due to the fact that they set before us in the greatest simplicity and brevity the most general content of religious faith, in part also to this that they present in the same spirit the varied stages of emotion that accompany the substance of this in the consciousness of the community of the faithful, and by doing both offer the musician a wide field for his own particular development. The great Requiem and many selections from the Psalms are equally serviceable. In a similar way Handel welded his texts, partly from religious dogmas themselves, but, above all, from scriptural passages and situations of symbolical import, into a completely consistent whole.

In the field of lyrical poetry the more suitable for this purpose are the emotional and shorter poems, in particular the simple ones, in content no less than speech, steeped in emotion, which penetrate into one prevailing mood or affection, or those too of lighter and more gay character. There is hardly a nation that does not possess such. In the sphere of drama I will only mention Metastasio, and with him Marmontel the Frenchman, who, himself richly emotional, cultured, and lovable, instructed Piccini in French, and knew so wisely how to combine in the drama grace and vivacity with the skill and interest of the action and development. But before all else we shall do well to emphasize the libretti of the famous operas of Glück. Without exception we shall find their motives simple. The content they offer to the emotions is in a sphere the most sterling of all, depicting as they do the love of mother, wife, sister, friendship, honour, and so forth, and permitting these simple motives and the form of their essential collisions to unfold in an atmosphere of tranquillity. And for this reason the passion they disclose is throughout pure, great, noble, and of plastic simplicity.

(ββ) It is, then, the function of music, by the characterization of its expression no less than its wealth of pure melody, fittingly to reproduce a content of the above nature. And that we may obtain such a result it is not merely necessary that the text contain in itself earnestness of heart, the comic and tragic greatness of human passion, the depth of religious idea and emotion, the powers and fatalities that the human breast discloses, the composer also on his part must be absorbed wholly in the composition, and must have lived in and through it heart and soul.

What is equally important is the relation under which what is characteristic and melodious in such music is on either hand associated. The main point appears to be, that as between them it is the melodic expression which without exception, as the factor of synthetic unity, which gains the day, rather than that which tends to distract and break up the whole into particular characterization. To take an example of the latter case from modern dramatic music, the effect often sought for here is one of powerful contrasts, and this is brought about by forcing into one continuous stream of music, under the conditions of conflict permitted to the art, contrasted passions. We have, it may be, expressed for us jollity, marriage, and festive associations, intermingled with which we may have hate, revenge, hostility, so that for result we are presented a fine uproar in which joviality, delight, dance-music, passionate scolding, and the very extremes of distraction are all involved. But contrasts of interrupted life such as these are, and which tumble us from one side to another, without any principle of union, are opposed to harmonious beauty precisely in the degree that the point of opposition in such characterization is acutely emphasized, and any return of the melody to a real self-repose and self-enjoyment is out of the question. And in general the union of the melodic and characteristic features of such music readily incurs the risk of overstepping the finely drawn boundaries of musical beauty, more especially when the intention is to express force, selfishness, evil, impetuosity, and other extremes of exclusive passion of a similar nature. The moment that music is involved in its abstract task of such characteristic limitation it can hardly avoid making for chaos, becoming, that is to say, more acute, unpliable, and, in fact, thoroughly unmelodious and unmusical, to the extent even of sheer misuse of discord.

A similar result will be found if we look at the different features of characterization generally. I mean that if these are strongly emphasized in their independent form the connection between themselves and other traits is readily weakened and their self-subsistency in repose is at once evident: but in musical exposition our difficulty is, we have an essential movement throughout, and it is in this progression that we are forced to look for the relation of stability; this being so the isolation of effect cannot fail to act injuriously on the flow and unity of the music.

Genuine beauty in music consists, under the aspect now being discussed, in this, that while there is no doubt a movement towards characterization out of that which is simply melodic, yet within the sphere of this more defined articulation469, the melodic aspect is still maintained as the sustaining soul and unity, much as we find in what is most characteristic in the paintings of Raphael the fundamental tone of beauty is throughout conserved. Melody is then not without definite significance, but in all such definition betrays a coalescing and suffusing principle of life, and more characteristic detail presents itself merely as the emphasized prominence of certain aspects, which are none the less always and essentially fused again in this medium of unity and animation. To hit off the just mean in this respect is, however, a more difficult task for music than the other arts, for the reason that music surrenders itself more readily to such antagonistic modes of expression. For this reason criticism over musical composition is almost always divided into two camps. The one attaches most importance to the melodic structure, the other prefers further advance in characterization. Handel, for example, who frequently in his operas insisted on having certain lyrical episodes emphasized acutely, had to face many a tussle on this head with Italian singers, and was finally compelled, when the public ranged itself on the side of the Italians, to confine himself wholly to the composition of oratorios, in which field his genius pre-eminently asserted itself. In the time of Glück also the long and vehement controversy between the supporters of Glück and Piccini is famous. Rousseau also in his turn insisted on the superiority of the more melodious Italian music as compared with the deficiency in this respect of the earlier French composers. We have in our own days the same old controversy waged for or against Rossini and the more modern Italian school. The opponents of the former condemn his music as if it were so much empty ear-tickling; if we, however, assimilate his melodies more generously we shall find that there is much in this music of real feeling and genius; it is not without a real message to our faculties, although it does not make any claim to the characteristic effects, which are more especially dear to our severe German musical sense. And indeed it must be admitted that only too often Rossini says good-bye to his libretto, and gives free vent to his melodies, precisely as his mood dictates, so that we have nothing left us but the alternative either to stick to the subject-matter and grumble over the music that is indifferent to it, or abandon the former and take our hearty delight in the inspired irrelevances of the composer and the soul which they reveal470.

(γγ) I will now in conclusion briefly summarize the most notable forms of music regarded as accompaniment.

First, in the order of our classification we may mention ecclesiastical music. Music of this type, in so far as it is not concerned with the personal emotion of individuals, but with the substantive content of emotion in its widest compass, or shall we say the universal emotion of the community viewed collectively, is in a large measure throughout of epical consistency, even though it instructs us in no events in so many words. How an artistic conception is able to be epical in significance, though we have in it no narrative of event, we shall endeavour to explain at a later stage when we come to deal more closely with epic poetry. This fundamentally religious music is among the profoundest and most impressive creations that Art can bring into being in any sphere whatever. Its true position, in so far, that is, as it is associated with the sacerdotal petition for the community, we find in the cult of Roman Catholicism, conjoint with the Mass, and more generally as a means of musical devotion attendant to the most varied ecclesiastical functions and festivals. Protestants can also boast of musicians of the profoundest gifts not merely as religious men, but also in the sterling character and opulence of their imaginative resource or executive ability. Sebastian Bach here stands before us as the master of masters. For the first time in our own day we have been taught to appreciate at something like its value the great genius of this man, his truly protestant, robust temper, and withal his profound erudition. Of first importance we may observe in this connection, and in contrast to the direction followed by the music of Catholicism, the emergence in complete form of the oratorio, in the first instance out of the Passion music. Nowadays, of course, music for Protestantism is no longer so closely associated with the cult of religion, nor so essentially a part of its services; and indeed it is often more a matter of exercise in musical scholarship than a really vital creation.

Second in order we have lyrical music, which expresses in melody isolated moods, and for the most part should be disjoined from the wholly characteristic or declamatory mode, although it may rightly undertake to combine with its expression the specific content of the words illustrated, whether their import be religious or otherwise.

Tempestuous passions, however, which neither issue in repose or finality, the unresolved division of the heart, emotional distraction destitute of all relief, such experiences are more suitably reproduced as an integral part of dramatic music; they are out of place in the harmonious consistency of the lyrical mode.

This dramatic form is then our third and final division. The tragedy of the ancients was associated with music; but this aspect was not emphasized, and for this reason that in truly poetical works precedence must necessarily be given to human speech and the poet’s own exposition of ideas and emotion; the only way music could in these times assist — which in its harmonic and melodic expression had not as yet reached that of a subsequent Christian era — was mainly from the rhythmical point of view by heightening with increased animation the musical sound of the poetical language, and thereby bringing the same more home to the heart.

Dramatic music, however, receives a really independent position when once the form of church music is essentially complete, and in lyrical expression some degree of perfection has been attained. We find this in our modern operas and operettas. It must be admitted that from the point of view of song the operetta is a halfway house of less importance, one which mixes together with no vital connection speech and song, what is musical and unmusical, the language of prose and that of melody. It is a common objection no doubt that song in the drama is without exception unnatural. Such an objection cannot be pressed, and would be far less open to argument as against the opera, in which from the first line to the last every idea, emotion, passion, and resolve is accompanied by and expressed in song. On the contrary, it is rather the operetta which still requires justification in so far as it introduces music in which we have a more animated presentment of the emotions and passions, or the latter are adapted for such presentment, while in the juxtaposition of a confused melody of prosaic dialogue with these artistically treated interludes of song we have what is a perpetual embarrassment. In other words, the emancipation of art is incomplete. In genuine opera, however, in which the action throughout receives its musical analogue, we are once and for all transported into an ideal world of art, the atmosphere of which is throughout the work maintained in so far as the music accepts for its fundamental content the ideal aspects of emotional stress, the particular phases of such in specific situations, and the conflicts of passion, that it may, by virtue of the more complete effects of its expression, add the final emphasis they would otherwise have lost. Conversely in the vaudeville, where airs already popular and well known are set to the more pointed and arresting rhymes, singing is merely a self-imposed kind of irony. The fact that there is singing at all is intended to be taken rather as parody or amusement: here the main point is the meaning of the text and its fun, and the singing has no sooner ceased than we laugh that it should ever have commenced.

(b) Independent Music

We may compare melody, as an essentially self-contained and self-supported whole, to plastic sculpture; in the more detailed characterization of painting we shall find an analogous type to that of musical declamation. And inasmuch as in the latter case we have an aggregate of specific differentia unfolded such as the more simple movement of the human voice is unable in all its variety to express, the more all these many aspects of life enter into the movement of the music, to that extent instrumental music is a necessary accompaniment. In addition to this, as a farther point of view, whether in its relation to the music that accompanies a libretto, or the characteristic expression of the words, we have to recognize in its freedom a content of definite ideas, which is, as transmitted, wholly independent of musical sound.

Now what constitutes the essential principle of music is the ideality of the soul-life. But this innermost, or ideality of the concrete self is the subjective state in its bare simplicity, that is, as defined by no assured content, and for this reason not forced into motion either one way or another, but reposing on its unity in unfettered freedom. And if this subjective principle is to come entirely to its own in music also it must rid itself of a traditional text, and in all purity, out of its own resources, master its content, the movement and the kind of expression, the unity and development of its creation, the carrying out of a main conception, no less than all episodical or incidental matter; and in doing this, for the reason that the significance of the whole is not expressed in language, it must restrict its means to those exclusively of musical value. And this is what does take place in the sphere I have already described as independent music. Music, as an accompaniment, possesses that which it undertakes to express outside its own domain; to this extent it is associated in its expression with that which does not belong to it as music, but to an alien art, poetry. If music is to be nothing but music simply, it must disengage itself from this factor, which it has only borrowed elsewhere, detach itself absolutely from the definite substance of language. Thus alone it becomes entirely free. And this is the point we have now to examine more closely.

We have already noticed the beginnings of such an emancipation within the limits of music as an accompaniment. For though it is true that in part here music was compelled by the force of poetical language to be subservient, yet also in part it either moved in benign repose over the more limited characterization of the words or removed itself entirely from the significance of ideas therein expressed, to expatiate of its free will in the musical language of joy or sorrow. The same result is apparent in its effect on an audience, the public as we say, and more especially in its attitude to the music of drama. In other words, an opera has many constituents. We have the local condition, landscape and the rest, or the movement of the action, or incidental episodes and pageants. From another point of view we are confronted with human passions and their expression. In short, there is a twofold content — namely, the external action and the soul-emotion that corresponds. If we take the action simply we shall find that, though it is that in which all the parts cohere, yet regarded merely in its movement forward it is less adapted to musical expression and mainly elaborated in recitative. With a content of this nature an audience is not so arrested; its attention is particularly liable to wander off from the dialogue of recitation, and to fix itself upon the portion of the work that is really musical and melodious. We have an exceptional illustration of this — I have already adverted to the fact — in our modern Italian opera, which is from the first made to fall in with the custom of the audience to engage in conversation, or other ways of enjoying itself, during the chatter or trivialities of the musical dialogue, and which only returns to that part of the music which is truly music, with the full measure of sympathetic attention, enjoyment, and delight. In this case we find, then, that composer, no less than audience, barely fall short of bidding good-bye to the libretto’s substance altogether, and of treating music for the purposes of enjoyment as an absolutely independent art.

(α) The true province of such independence is, however, not the accompaniment of vocal music undeniably conditioned by a text, but instrumental music simply. As already observed, the human voice is the appropriate musical expression of man’s inner life in its entirety, a life also expressed in ideas and words, which therefore discovers in its own voice and song its distinctive organ, so often as it seeks to express and recover this inner world of its ideas permeated throughout with the concentrated intensity of emotion. In the case of instruments taken by themselves, however, this basis of an associated text of words disappears; here we find an opening for the empire of a music that is confined strictly to its own unassisted powers.

(β) Such a music of particular instruments presented us in quartets, quintets, sextets, symphonies and the like, without text or vocal music, remains unrelated to any movement of ideas independently asserted, and is for this very reason compelled to have recourse to emotions of a more indefinite character, emotions which in such music can only be expressed in general terms. The aspect of importance here, in short, is the varied motion of the music simply, the ups and downs of the harmony or melody, the stream of sound through its degrees of opposition, preponderance, emphasis, acuteness or vivacity, the elaboration of a melodic phrase in every respect that is suitable to the means of musical art, the musician-like fusion of all the instruments as one ensemble of tone, or in their succession, alternation, and emphatic display of themselves and each other. It is in this sphere pre-eminently that the distinction between the ordinary person and the expert of music asserts itself. The ordinary man likes best in music an expression of emotion and ideas that is at once intelligible, that whereof the content is obvious; his predilection is consequently for music under the mode of an accompaniment. The connoisseur, on the contrary, who is able to follow the relation of musical sounds and instruments as composition, enjoys the artistic result of harmonious modulation, and its interwoven melodies and transitions on its own merits. He is entirely absorbed by this alone, and is interested in comparing the detail to which he listens with the rules and principles he is fully able to apply to it, in order thus to follow the performance with judgment and delight, although even in his case it frequently happens that our modern type of virtuosity, with variations in tempo or other nuances for which our connoisseur is unprepared, will perplex him not a little. A complete satisfaction of this kind comes rarely to the mere amateur. He is seized with the vain desire to master this apparently phantomnal process of music, to discover arresting points for his attention in the musical development, and generally more definite ideas and a more detailed content in the volume of sound that invades him. In this respect he seeks to attach to music a symbolical significance, yet can find in the same little beyond mysterious problems that vanish in the moment they are propounded, which baffle his powers of solution and in general are capable of a variety of interpretations.

The composer is able, it is true, on his part to associate with his work a definite significance, a content of specific ideas and emotions, which are expressed articulately in movement that excludes all else; conversely he can, in complete indifference to such a scheme, devote himself to musical structure simply and the assertion of his genius in such architectonic. Composition, however, of this character readily tends to become defective both in the range of its conception and emotional quality, and as a rule does not imply any profound cultivation of mind or taste in other respects. And by reason of the fact that such a content is not necessary, it frequently happens that the gift of musical composition not merely will show considerable development in very early age, but composers of eminence remain their life long men of the poorest and most impoverished intellectual faculty in other directions. More penetration of character may be assumed where the composer even in instrumental music is equally attentive to both aspects of composition; in other words, the expression of a content, if necessarily less defined than in our previous mode, no less than its musical structure, by which means it will be in his power at one time to emphasize the melody, at another the depth and colour of the harmony, or finally to fuse each with the other.

(γ) We have throughout posited subjectivity in its unconstrained presentment within the limits of music as the general principle of this type of composition. This independence of a content already proposed to it from an alien source will, however, more or less assert itself in opposition to mere caprice, though the restrictions under which it admits it are not defined rigorously. For, albeit this type of composition has its own rules and modes, the authority of which no mere whim or fancy can reject, yet they are regulations which only affect the broader aspects of music; in actual detail there is no end to the opportunity which the inner content of soul-life471, provided it once accepts the boundaries fixed by the essential conditions of musical composition, may discover for its otherwise free expatiation and exposition. And, in fact, as a result of the elaboration of modes congenial to this type, the caprice of individual composers asserts, in contrast to the steady advance of purely melodic expression and music in association with a definite text, a practically unrestrained mastery in every sort of conceit, caprice, interlude, inspiriting drollery, startling suspension, rapid transition, lightning flashes, extraordinary surprises and effects.

In sculpture and painting we have a work of art presented us as an external and independent result of artistic activity; we do not regard this activity itself as the actual creation of life472. It is, however, necessary to the presentation of a musical work of art that we should have an executant musician in co-operation, just as in dramatic poetry we have the representative presence of living manhood as an essential factor in this type of art’s realization.

We have, then, reviewed musical composition under the two aspects, that is to say, in so far as it sought to conform with a specific content, or struck out on its own free path of independence. We may now in the same way distinguish between two main types of purely executive art. The one is wholly absorbed in the work of art on hand, and makes no attempt to reproduce anything over and beyond this. The other, on the contrary, is not simply reproductive; it actually creates expression, delivery, in short the essential animation of the work, not merely from the composition as composed, but predominantly from its own resources.

(α) In the case of the epic poem, wherein the poet seeks to unfold an objective world of event and modes of action, the rhapsodist, who recites it, has no occasion to do anything further than wholly withdraw the expression of his own personality in the presence of the exploits and events he brings home to us. The more reserved he is in this respect the better; indeed such recitation is not incompatible with a monotoned and unemphasized delivery. What is effective here is the fact of the poem, the poetical execution, the narrative itself, not its realization in voice and speech. This illustration will suggest to us the rationale for our first type of musical reproduction. In other words, if the composition is in a similar way of a genuine objective quality, in the sense that the composer has simply translated his subject-matter, or the emotion that is absorbed with it, into musical language, the artistic reproduction should retain the same objective character. It is not merely true that here there is no reason for the executant to import into it his idiosyncrasies; by doing so he necessarily impairs the true artistic effect. He must subordinate himself entirely to the character of the work, and prescribe to himself simply this attitude of attention. On the other hand, he must not, as is too frequently the case, confuse such an attitude with that of the purely servile artisan, and lower himself to the level of an organ-grinder. If such execution is to retain any artistic claim the artist is bound to avoid leaving the impression of a musical automaton, which merely repeats its prescribed lesson mechanically, and instead to animate the entire work with the heart and soul of the composer himself. The virtuosity of such a vital reproduction is restricted, however, to the just elucidation of the technical difficulties presented by the work, and in doing so the object will be not merely to cover any appearance of triumph over an exacting task, but to portray the freest movement under such conditions, and, in so far as superior artistic endowment and experience can in the particular case manage to do so, attain in the reproduction to the spiritual altitude of the composer and reflect the same in actual performance.

(β) It is another matter when we come to deal with works of art, in which personal idiosyncrasy and caprice are even by the composer himself features brought into prominence, and where generally we find the traces of such a clearly objective quality in expression, the treatment of the harmonic or characteristic development less pronounced. In such a case the bravura of virtuosity is, it is our first distinction, quite admissible; and over and above this executive ability is not only limited to the reproduction of the actual score, but may considerably amplify; an artist will himself add to the composition in his delivery, supplement defects, add substance to what is comparatively superficial, import into parts a new life, and in doing so assert independent judgment and invention. In the Italian opera, for example, much is always left to the singer’s discretion; in particular where we have embellishments a more liberal opportunity of display is granted, and in so far as the exposition of sound is further removed from the mere interpretation of the libretto, the execution in its independence becomes a more spontaneous flow of melody, in which the soul of the singer is permitted to enjoy itself and exult in its own free rapture. When therefore it is objected that Rossini for one has made the singer’s task too easy, the stricture is only in part justified. The difficulty is none the less there, only he frequently leaves it to the trained intelligence of the executant to work it out for himself. If in the result we are conscious of the co-operation of genius, the work as thus reproduced makes an exceptionally favourable impression. We have not merely a work of art reproduced, but we are conscious at the same time of actual musical creation. In this very present realization of life the external conditions of artistic reproduction disappear, such as place, opportunity, the local associations of a divine service, the content and intent of a dramatical situation; we have no further need for, nor do we desire any text, we have left us simply the unspecialized impulse of emotion, in the element of which the soul of the artist can surrender itself without let or hindrance to its own rapture, displaying thereby inventive genius, the finest qualities of emotion, and a mastery of technique; and in fact, provided we find the right spirit, ability, and personal charm to justify it, it may venture to interrupt the flow of melody itself with humour, caprice and virtuosity, and accept for once the moods and suggestions of the moment.

(γ) This kind of virtuosity is yet more remarkable in cases where the instrument is not the human voice, but one of human invention. By this I mean to say that such naturally in the kind of sound they produce are further removed from the soul’s direct expression; they are in relation to that of an external object, apiece of dead mechanism, and music is essentially a spiritual movement and activity. When we find, therefore, this externality of the instrument vanishes altogether, in the case, that is, where the music of the soul breaks right through this alien crust of mechanism, by means of such virtuosity, even an instrument of this character is transformed into one as fully adapted to express the soul of the artist as it is possible to conceive. Among the memories of my youth I can still recall the case of an astonishing executant on the guitar, who in his own eccentric fashion had composed huge battle-pieces for this comparatively insignificant instrument. By profession, if I remember rightly, he was a weaver, and in conversation he had little enough to say for himself. But no sooner did he begin to play than one wholly forgot the absurd pretensions of his composition, forgot these precisely as he forgot all else but the music, and the marvellous result he made of it by being totally absorbed body and soul in his instrument, entirely witless of any form of nobler execution than that expressed in the tones of a guitar473.

A virtuosity of this type, in so far as it asserts such a unique superiority, is not only a proof of extraordinary mastery over material forces, but we receive from it as it strides victoriously over difficulties apparently unplayable, even turns aside to add to them, or in wayward mood breaks in upon us jestingly with I know not what interruptions and surprises, and by original invention even makes us enjoy what would otherwise be vulgar, is a direct reflection of absolutely free soul-life474. It is quite true that a mere charlatan475 of this type is unable to produce original works of art; but where real genius is part of the endowment we can have extraordinary mastery in composition no less than over a particular instrument, the limitations of which this virtuosity lays itself out to overcome, and in audacious vindication of its triumph will reproduce the artistic effects of other instruments entirely remote in other hands from its own. It is an accomplishment of this kind which delights us with our acutest sense of the life of music. And this riddle of riddles we discover in the fact that a mere piece of mechanical craft can become an instrument one with our life, which enables us to follow, as through a flash of lightning, a power of ideal conception no less than execution, by virtue of which the imagination of genius penetrates to the core of life as instantaneously as it vanishes therefrom.

Such, then, are the most essential features, which I have selected from my own experience of music, the more general points of view which I have detached from the subject and concentrated attention upon in the present discussion.

377 Ein festes Daseyn, lit., an assured existence.

378 We should not expect the plural. Hegel apparently includes the transitional relief of sculpture.

379 Lit., “But also strives to set itself back into the previous condition.” He refers to the mutual relation of tones.

380 In sich selbst Ideellgezetzte. That is, posited as ideal in the way music does with its object, as to which further explanation is given below.

381 It is difficult to follow closely this very technical interpretation of musical sound, and a doubt may be perhaps permitted as to whether it corresponds to the scientific facts. I mean it does not appear fully to do justice to the reaction of the organ of human hearing itself and the intelligence with which it is related upon the sound waves that through such mediation are cognized as musical sound. The ideality appears to me to be more complete than even Hegel’s theory would suggest, or, at any rate, some of his expressions. And surely, too, in sight, though it may be true we see independent objects, we only do so, in so far as their secondary qualities are concerned, by virtue of a considerable action of what he here calls Seelenhaftigkeit. But this is not the place for more than a suggestion. The main points of contrast are in Hegel’s interpretation sufficiently obvious.

382 Des Körpers. I am not sure that I quite follow the meaning of this second moment of negation. If it means the reaction or synthetic process of human hearing it removes in great measure the objection above. We then have as the twofold negation the negation by the ideality of sound and that through the human sense. But owing to Hegel’s use of Material to indicate the medium which is subject to oscillation, it would rather appear to mean that one vibration is cancelled by another.

383 Das an und für sich schon etwas Ideelleres ist. This would correspond to the ideality of the first negation of spatial condition.

384 He means its own ideal existence. Aufgeben must here be used in the primary sense of “delivers.” He does not mean that it gives expression to the ideality of spirit; this is added by the next clause.

385 This is, I think, Hegel’s meaning for das an sich selbst Subjektive. Its content is also formally ideal or abstract as above explained, but to express this he would rather have used the word ideell or innerlich. It is also, as I have pointed out, in great measure ideal in the sense that as musical tone it is not natural even in the qualified sense that colour is. It is even more dependent on the human organism for its quality and synthesis. But I do not think Hegel means subjective in this sense, but that it directly expresses human emotion.

386 Both ideas are contained in the word Verschweben, which means to hover and slowly vanish away.

387 Figurationen. Their modal combinations.

388 It is obvious that in this respect music to some extent infringes on the distinction Hegel has already pointed out between its content and that of poetry.

389 By verständige Formen Hegel means, of course, forms that express an artistic, that is, an intelligible purpose. The whole passage is not very clearly expressed. The general meaning is, however, that as architecture surrounds its statues with a medium of material environment co-ordinated by artistic design and invention, so, too, music in its medium of emotional content is equally indefinite and may be used as an accompaniment (as architecture is a kind of accompaniment to statuary) in the melodic play of its harmonies to definite ideas in uttered speech. The reader of Browning will doubtless recollect the fine use made of architecture as metaphorical illustration in the poem “Abt Vogler.” I think it was Schopenhauer who first spoke of architecture as frozen music. But Schelling speaks of it in the same way.

390 I presume Hegel here refers primarily to scholastic music, musical exercises intended to exhibit the structure of music. The exercises, for example, of Cramer or Fuchs. Bach’s forty-eight fugues would occupy a transitional place.

391 Tonseele. There is, of course, something almost mystic in Hegel’s conception of musical sound as the ideality issuing from the material world.

392 That is, sculpture and painting.

393 By Haltpunkte Hegel appears to mean material that will act as stays and supports in contrast to those which are indifferent.

394 I presume by solchen festen Bestimmungen Hegel refers to the general definition of artistic function just enunciated. But the sense may possibly be, “while the point of departure is the stable determinations of natural form.”

395 We are inevitably reminded of the release which Art was to such men as Beethoven, Dante, Milton, and Blake.

396 In the theme.

397 It seems doubtful how how far a musician would accept this at least in so far as it applies to classical music of the formal type. The development, for instance, on the repetition of a theme in a sonata is at least part of the formal content of the sonata movement as a whole.

398 Ein Auseinandergehen. Variations on a theme would be a good example. But surely the development of a theme may do precisely this in great measure, I mean disclose both the depth of it and its concentration.

399 No doubt this is so if we assume the content to be mainly a theme, a motive. But the content of a movement includes the development. The main difference after all is the fundamental one that in music the content is unfolded in a time series and in the plastic arts instantaneously in spatial form. And in poetry the apprehension is also in a temporal series.

400 It is impossible in English to reflect the play of words between Erinnerung (memory) and Er-innerung (self-penetration or ideal realization).

401 I am not sure whether Hegel exactly means by Phantasiren what we understand as Improvization. But it is the only form of music that strictly applies to his definition. Even the rhapsodies of Liszt are controlled by the form, as in a sense all music is.

402 As the plastic arts. It certainly is not so closely associated with a definition given outside it by Nature, that is, but it is obviously very closely associated to the formal modes of music, such as the laws of counterpoint, fugue, sonata, etc.

403 The first is its relation to architecture, the second that to the plastic arts.

404 That is, the ideas. By “receiving self-subsistency” Hegel means it maybe regarded independent of the art, something essentially outside it.

405 By Ton Hegel means, of course, musical sound. The object of music is music and ideas only in so far as they are expressed in music.

406 In diesem Freiwerden. In this free medium of its existence.

407 How far would Hegel have applied this criticism to the great symphonies of his compatriots? I think it is obvious, at any rate, that his criticism of pure music is somewhat lacking in sympathy. Nowadays it is not even a wholly obvious fact that the song or the opera are the most popular. The truth is that musical education, and that is what the appreciation of programme or symphonic music implies, has made enormous strides since his day. But his criticism will still hold for many in regard to more modern developments in Strauss and his school.

408 By fertig Hegel must mean here that the world of poetry is one whose claims to independent coherence is generally acknowledged.

409 By “universal” Hegel appears to mean more universally intelligible, He uses the same word in a like sense just below.

410 If Hegel means to imply that pure music, in so far as it presents ideas by suggestion, has any advantage over music the effect of which is entirely a musical effect he is on dangerous ground. The Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven may or may not be more popular than Beethoven’s other symphonies, but it is unquestionable that its artistic merit depends exclusively on its claims as musical composition. And indeed its worth as music suggestive of ideas is mainly so great because, as Beethoven himself claimed, it is rather a suggestion of emotional mood than the imitation of natural sounds or the suggestion of distinct ideas. So far as popularity or universality of appeal is concerned, he may be right. But this is obviously no final test of the significance of music as compared with other arts, though it may mark a distinguishing feature. And surely music expresses emotions at least “as they are” (selber) more directly than poetry. Poetry no doubt gives them as we express them in ordinary life. But music makes us feel them as they are unexpressed in our souls, a still higher grade of reality.

411 Hegel probably never heard Beethoven’s ninth symphony with its “Song of Joy.” As to its success as set to music there may be two opinions, but the fact that it is the culmination of so celebrated a composition is in itself a qualification of Hegel’s statement.

412 Both Mendelssohn and Schumann deplored the fact that they could get no really good libretto and would unquestionably not have received all the statements here without considerable qualification. Hegel appears to be too dominated by the character of Italian opera. German opera as further developed by Wagner and even in the hands of Beethoven and Glück and Weber makes a very different demand. It is unquestionably true that there must be a certain reciprocity of quality between the two. But some of the finest music has been written for some of the finest poetical language, namely that of our Bible. Composers like Bach, Handel, and S. S. Wesley insisted on having the very best form of their religious ideas they could obtain.

413 Lit., “Within the purely musical realm of tones.” Hegel’s strictures would only apply to the most formal kind of exercises or studies. It would really be a misnomer to say that Chopin’s studies for the piano or Spohr’s or even Kreutzer’s exercises for the violin wholly come under it.

414 It is on this ground that Aristotle calls music the most imitative art. They represent emotions directly without the mediatory office of Nature’s objectivity (vide “Three Lectures on Aesthetic,” by Bernard Bosanquet, p. 53).

415 It is more subjective because the content is more ideal, and more closely related to the artist’s personal qualities.

416 More definite than feeling and soul-life is from tone.

417 That is, vanishes with the evanescence of the music.

418 Die Geschicklichkeit eines virtuosen Machwerks. Machwerk is used, of course, in a depreciating sense. The contrast is between it and a truly inspired composition.

419 Lit., “Of the business on hand.”

420 Gleichgültig. I am not sure whether Hegel means fortuitous in the sense that Nature in its abstraction is such, or purely objective, i.e., no self-reflection, probably the latter. They are “dead elements.”

421 That is, spatial externality.

422 The meaning appears to me that apart from conscious life which can contrast the fleeting moments of Time with its permanent self-identity the process is without meaning — there is no process, it is a παντά ρεῖ with no differentiation.

423 It cancels itself in so far as it makes itself an object. The dialectical movement of self-consciousness is here viewed in the bare form of its original abstraction.

424 Das Ich als solches.

425 Abgeschmackte. Not so much bad taste here as false judgment.

426 Auffasst. Hegel would appear to mean the intelligent hearer rather than the composer, though the word would refer to either. Even then it is not clear why music should not be said to exist by its mere performance. But, of course, such presupposes the human executant, and this is possibly what Hegel intends to imply.

427 Nüancirt. Made subject to the nuances or modifications introduced into such relations.

428 Verstand as contrasted with Vernunft. The analytical faculty of science.

429 That is, the quantitative basis.

430 Die haltungslose Dauer. That is, a duration that is unbroken by arresting points in its progress.

431 That is, self-conscious, synthetic unity holding the temporal process in relation to itself. It thus becomes not merely a werden but a für sich seyn. In contrast to the purely abstract process the self is das Bei sich selbstseyende i.e., that which persists along with itself. This totality or aggregate of particulars Hegel calls Sammlung. The analysis is really an analysis of the form of conscious experience.

432 This is the converse case of a series of definite points of contrast, but unrelated by any integrating principle. I admit frankly that I am not sure I have wholly seized the meaning in these difficult paragraphs. I have adhered in my translation, therefore, as closely as possible to the original.

433 Markirte.

434 Herrschende Regel.

435 Because their orbits are elliptical and motion is accelerated as they approach the focus.

436 Verlebendigung.

437 He means of a specific collection of words, sentences.

438 Perioden.

439 Umschwung. Perhaps all that is meant is the return to the previous level, as we should speak of the rise and fall of voices.

440 Ein Körper.

441 Seiner zeitlichen Gestalt.

442 Gezwungene. I presume the meaning is that the oscillations are effected by a curved form of musical instrument.

443 I am not sure there is not a certain confusion here. Our text, at any rate, when speaking of wind instruments, refers to the column of air as the medium of sound, but in the case of stringed instruments draws attention rather to the thing which creates the waves of vibration, the string itself. The nature of the timbre of an instrument is no doubt an important one, but it may be questioned whether this distinction between line or column and surface is very satisfactory or sufficient.

444 Jenem linearen Tönen. The expression appears to me not very easy to interpret even from Hegel’s own point of view. In what sense can you call a musical tone linear? The theory here stated, though ingenious enough, appears to me to miss the fundamental question, what actually constitutes the timbre of an instrument, in its assertion, for instance, of distantly related harmonies or non-assertion of such. Even assuming that the form of the instrument, or the part of it set into vibration, may partially explain this, it is obvious, I think, that Hegel’s manner of stating it is open to considerable criticism.

445 Die näher abgeschlossene Bestimmtheit. The meaning seems to be that definition of them in which they stand out with most distinctness from others.

446 The comparison is unfortunate — in two respects. Violet is a cardinal colour, and the theory of Goethe to which it refers is, of course, untenable.

447 The true scientific reason why octaves resemble each other so much more closely than two notes at any other interval is that the upper of two notes at an octave’s distance is the first “upper-partial” tone of the lower, and all its harmonies are also harmonies of the lower note; the compound tone, for there is no entirely simple tone, of the higher note contains no new sound, which is not in the compound tone of the lower. This is not the case with two notes at any other interval.

448 Ihre besonderen Seiten. I presume this means what is immediately called below the several intervals between note and note.

449 There is really a distinction between the consonance of the dominant and a major or minor third.

450 That is, the third is only third in relation to the key-note, or the leading-note only as the note previous to the octave.

451 Three notes are really essential to any true chord.

452 The mediant lies about midway between the tonic and dominant as the third of the scale. The researches of Helmholtz prove that the distinction between consonant or semi-consonant and dissonant intervals is not arbitrary, but the result of the nature of the intervals themselves. A musical tone is mostly a compound one, containing, besides its principal tone, other tones with fixed relations to the lowest note, called harmonics, or “upper partials.” Helmholtz has shown that when two of the earlier-produced and stronger of these upper partial tones coincide in two notes sounded together, the resulting tone is pure, free, that is, from the inequalities known as “beats” (Prout, “Harmony,” 10th ed., pp. 21, 22).

453 As, of course, in the scale, notes independent of each other.

454 Schärfe.

455 The reader of Browning will recall how the poet in his “Abt Vogler” exclaims “Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?” or speaks of blunting the minor into the ninth where the musician “stands on alien ground, surveying awhile the heights.”

456 This extreme emphasis on melody must be read as further explained lower down of melody in the wider sense. Even as thus qualified it is rather an overstatement. It may be questioned whether in the mind of a musician of genius the freedom of harmonic progression is of a different quality to that of melodic. It may appear no doubt less spontaneous. But it is the task of the great artist to overcome that appearance in one case as much as in the other.

457 It may be doubted how far such a statement is true of many chord progressions in modern music. It seems to me that this notion of harmony as für sich having no musical significance is, to say the least, very misleading.

458 This really is the point. Inspired harmony in its progression unfolds what is really a tissue of melodic threads. The complex musical structure of a Brahms symphony is a good example.

459 Lit., “the free self-subsistency (Beisichseyn) of subjective life.”

460 Hegel puts it the other way. What he means is that in the medium of music we neither apprehend objects of sense nor ideas as we receive them in imagination or thought.

461 Hegel throughout uses the term Innerlichkeit. That which is the Inmost is, in fact, the ideal. It is the raison d’être and the notion itself.

462 He means at the point proposed by the dramatic theme. Hegel’s words are literally “it subdues the subject (i.e., of consciousness) referably to its simple concentration (i.e., on the subject at hand).”

463 The above distinction is hardly consonant with that of customary parlance. We should rather say that the melody of the song gave an utterance to the words, and the instrumentation was, for the very reason that it was more independent, more directly an accompaniment. But the point emphasized here seems to be the closeness of the association. In this aspect, no doubt, the music actually sung is more an accompaniment to the intelligible content. As a rule accompaniment is generally used as the accompaniment of a song or choral writing, and Hegel himself uses it in this sense previously.

464 A general truth, no doubt. But not without qualification if we consider the works and indeed the execution of such giants as Bach and Handel.

465 That is, particularity due to the idiosyncrasies of the artist, and merely personal to him. But the statement applies to classic art more strictly than modern.

466 That is, music as an accompaniment.

467 Gediegenheit. Something that rings true as a whole, not a thing of patches.

468 The music of Mendelssohn and others in this direction will raise a doubt in some whether Hegel does not rather overstate his case here.

469 Besonderung. The relative isolation that is effected by marked assertion.

470 Throughout this discussion the personal bias of Hegel for the Italian opera is obvious. In the light of the actual knowledge of his day the wonder is that his own tastes permitted his being even as fair as he is. It may be doubted whether he had any strong sense for orchestral or chamber music at all. His reflections must be read throughout with this reservation.

471 Or, as Hegel more technically calls it, and I have above translated it, “subjectivity.”

472 That is, dependent on living beings for its presentation in every case.

473 The execution of Paganini is, of course, the classic example. But all cadenzas executed by a great artist, even though carefully studied, express something of the spirit.

474 Hegel means that such music expresses not so much rational freedom as the fundamental independence of the self-conscious principle.

475 By dürftiger Kopf I understand Hegel to mean the headstrong charlatan as contrasted with the virtuoso who is also a trained musician. Paganini had a vein of both in his composition. The epithet dürftig, lit., thirsty, is, however, not very clear, and in so far as it is, the emphasis would not be so much on quackery as absence of all training.

THIRD PART (CONTINUED)

THE SYSTEM OF THE PARTICULAR ARTS

SUBSECTION III

THE ROMANTIC ARTS

POETRY

INTRODUCTION

The temple of classical architecture demands a god, who resides therein. Sculpture exhibits the same in plastic beauty, and confers forms on the material it employs for this purpose, which do not in their nature remain external to what is spiritual, but are the form itself immanent in the defined content. The corporeality, however, and sensuousness, no less than the ideal universality of the sculptured figure, are opposed on the one hand to subjective ideality, and in part to the particularity of the individual, in whose element the content of the religious, no less than also the worldly life, must secure reality by virtue of a novel form of art. This mode of expression, which is of subjective import, and at the same time particularized in its characterization, the art of painting itself contributes under the principle of the plastic arts. In other words it subordinates the realistic expression of form to the more ideal presentment of colour, and makes the expression of the ideality of soul the central point1 of the presentment. The universal sphere, however, in which these arts are motived, the one in the ideal of symbolism, the other in the plastic ideal, the third in the romantic type, is the sensuous or external form of spirit and natural objects.

The spiritual content possesses, however, as essentially appertinent to the ideality of consciousness, a determinate existence which is for this ideality at the same time foreign to the medium itself of the external appearance and envisagement presented to it by material form. From this foreign element it is further necessary that it removes its conceptions in order to place them in a realm which, in respect to material no less than the mode of expression, is independently of an ideal or subjective character. This was the forward step which we saw music make, in so far as it embodied pure ideality and subjective emotion in the configurations of essentially resonant sound rather than in visible forms. It, however, passed by this very means into a further extreme, that is, an ideal mode of concentration not fully explicit, whose content in musical tones itself only found symbolic expression. For tone taken by itself is without content, and has its definition in the numerical relations, so that what is qualitative in the spiritual content no doubt generally corresponds to these quantitative relations which are expressed in essential differences, oppositions, and mediation, but in its qualitative determinacy is not entirely able to receive its impression in musical tone. If this aspect is not wholly to fail the art of music must, by reason of its onesidedness, summon to its assistance the more definite articulation of language, and requires for its more secure attachment to particularity and the characteristic expression of the content a text, without which it is unable to complete fully the ideality which is poured forth by means of musical tones.

By virtue of this expression of ideas and emotions, the abstract ideality of music receives a clearer and more secure exposition. At the same time what we have here unfolded by its means is, to a certain extent, not the point of view of idea and the artistic mode adapted to its expression, but merely the emotional life as it accompanies the same; also in part we find that here, too, music entirely divests itself of fusion with the verbal text in order to develop its own movement without restraint in the world of tone simply. For this reason the realm of idea, which is unable to remain under I such a more purely abstract mode of ideal intensity, and seeks a configuration in a world which embraces its one homogeneous and concrete reality, breaks away on its part likewise from the bond of music, and in the exclusive art of poetry discovers the adequate realization it demands.

Poetry, in other words the art of human speech, is the third or final step, the totality, which unites and embraces in a yet higher sphere, in the sphere of the very life of Spirit itself,2 the two extremes of the plastic arts and music. For on the one hand poetry contains just as music does the principle which apprehends an ideal content in its ideality, the principle which in architecture, sculpture, and painting is lost, or at most incompletely asserted. And on the other hand it expatiates itself, under the modes of ideal conception, intuition, and feeling simply, in an objective world, which does not entirely destroy the defined forms of sculpture and painting, and is capable of unfolding all the conditions of an event, a succession or interchange of emotional states, passions, conceptions, and the exclusive course of human action with more completeness than any other art.

But in a still more intimate way the art of poetry constitutes a third or final term in its relation to painting and music regarded as the romantic arts.

(a) One reason of this is that its principle is that generally of an intelligence which has nothing further to do with gross matter as such, seeking, as is the case with architecture, to transform it through symbolism to an environment related analogically to spiritual life, or as in the case of sculpture in order to implant upon material substance the natural form congenial to such life under the spatial condition of its expression. What the end is now is to express immediately for mind the manifestations of Spirit with all its ideas of imagination and art, without setting forth their external and visible bodily presence. And a further reason consists in this, that poetry is able to grasp in the form of ideality itself and with a far greater wealth than is possible for music or painting, not merely the innermost actuality of conscious life, but also what is particular and individual in external existence, and equally able to contrast such facts in the complete diversity of their specific traits and accidental peculiarities.

(b) The art of poetry is, however, as totality, also again, from another point of view, essentially to be distinguished from the above-mentioned arts whose fundamental qualities it thus in a measure combines.

(α) In this respect, if we compare it with painting, the latter art is throughout at an advantage, where it is of importance to bring before our senses a content under the condition of its external appearance. It is true no doubt that poetry is able by various means to envisualize objects precisely in the way that for the imagination generally the principle of objectification is made real to our intuitive sense. But in so far as conceptive power, in the element of which poetry pre-eminently moves, is of a spiritual nature and implies the presence of the universality of thought, it is incapable of attaining the definition of sensuous perception. On the other hand, the varied traits which poetry brings together, in order to make the concrete form of a content visible, do not fall as with painting into one and the same totality, which is set before us wholly as a simultaneous appearance of all its details, but they break apart, inasmuch as the imagination can only give us the complexity it contains under the form of succession. This is, however, only a defect from the sensuous point of view, a defect which reason is able in its own way to rectify. That is to say, inasmuch as human speech, even in the case where it endeavours to summon before our sight a concrete object, is not concerned with the sensuous apprehension of an immediate external object, but always with the ideal relation, the mental intuition, for this reason the particular characteristics, albeit they are set before us in a series, are nevertheless fused together in the element of one essentially homogeneous spirit, which is able to qualify the effect of succession, to bring the varied array into one picture, and to secure and enjoy this picture in imaginative contemplation. Moreover, this deficiency of sensuous realization and objective definition, when we contrast poetry with painting, brings as a contrary result the possibility of an incalculable superfluity of material. For inasmuch as the poetic art in painting restricts itself to a determinate space, and even more to a distinct moment in a situation or action, for this reason it is prevented from portraying an object in its entire ideal profundity no less than in the extension of its temporal development. But what is true is throughout concrete in the sense that it comprises within its embrace a unity of essential determinations. In its phenomenal appearance, however, these are not merely unfolded as a co-existent spatial phenomenon but in a temporal series as a history, whose course painting is only able to present in a relatively inadequate manner. Even in the case of every stalk, every tree, each has in this sense its history, a change, sequence, and exclusive whole of varied conditions. And this is even more true of the sphere of spirit, which can only be exhaustively portrayed as veritable spirit in phenomenal guise when it is set before our imagination as such a process.

(β) We have already seen that poetry possesses for its external medium that of tone in common with music. The wholly external, or, as we might say in the false sense of the expression, the objective material in the progressive series of the particular arts finally vanishes in the subjective medium of sound, which is divested of all visibility, and which suffers an ideal content only to be apprehended by a conscious state independent of sight.3 For music, however, the configuration of musical tone as such is the essential end. For although the soul in the course and movement of melody and its harmonic relations presents what is ideal in objects, or its own ideal content, to the emotional life; yet the ideality thus presented is not pure ideality, but the human soul interwoven in the closest way with the musical tone as its expression, and the configuration of such musical expression which confers on music its true character. So much is this the case that music receives its independent position as an art just in proportion as the animation given by it to the emotional life is more emphasized in the world of pure music than in that of man’s ordinary spiritual activity.4 But for this very reason it is only to a relative degree capable of reproducing the variety of spiritual ideas and intuitions, the entire extension of the ideal wealth of conscious life: it remains restricted to the more abstract universality of all that it grasps as content, and the more indefinite manifestations of our emotion.

In the like degree, then, that mind (Geist) elaborates the more abstract universality in a concrete whole of idea, ends, actions, and events, and no less contributes to its conformation the particularizing perception, it not only forsakes the subjective life of mere emotion and builds up that life into an unfolded realm of objective reality in this case, too, within the ideal world of the imagination itself, it is compelled, by virtue of the nature of such transformation, to forsake the attempt to express the new realm thus secured solely and exclusively by means of tone relations. Precisely as the medium of sculpture is too poor to express the more ample content that it is the function of the art of painting to call into life, so too the conditions of musical tone and melodic expression are unable to realize fully the imaginative pictures of the poet. For these in part possess the ideas more accurately defined to consciousness and, in part, the form of external appearance impressed on the inner sense of perceptive reason. Spirit consequently withdraws its content from musical tone as such, and declares itself through words, which it is true do not entirely forsake the element of sound, but sink to the purely external sign of the communication. In other words, by means of this repletion with spiritual ideas, musical tone becomes the voice of articulate words; language, in its turn, is diverted from an end in itself to a means of ideal expression which has lost its independent self-subsistancy. This constitutes in fact what we have already established as the essential difference between music and poetry. The content of the art of speech is the collective art of the world of ideas elaborated by the imagination, the spiritual which remains at home in its vision, which remains in this ideal realm, and, even in its movement toward an objective world, is only conscious of the same as a symbol that differs from its own conscious content. In music art reproduces the penetration of Spirit in a sensuously apparent and present form. In poetry it even forsakes the element of musical tone and articulation opposed to it, at least to the extent that this musical tone is no longer reclothed in fully adequate externality and the exclusive expression of that content. The ideal no doubt is expressed, but it fails to discover its real existence in the sensuous medium of tone, despite the fact that it is of a more ideal character; this it discovers exclusively in its own essential content, by virtue of which it expresses the content of mind as it is realized in the ideality of the imagination simply as such.

(c) In the third place, and finally, if we consider the specific character of poetry relatively to this distinction between music and painting, and we may include with it the other plastic arts, we shall find the same simply to consist in the subordination of the mode under which all poetical content is envisaged and configured by the medium of sense. In other words, when tone, as it does in the art of music, or for that matter, colour as in that of painting, no longer essentially recovers and expresses the entire content, in that case the musical treatment of the composition under its aspects of time, no less than those of harmony and melody, drops away; we have left us merely the generalized configuration of the time-measure of syllables and words, to which we may add rhythm, euphony, and the like. And further, it is to be noted that we have this, not in the sense of a genuine medium for the content, but rather as a mode of externality which is accidental, and which only receives an artistic form, because art cannot permit any mode of its external manifestation whatever to be entirely a question of accidental caprice.

(α) In connection with this withdrawal of the spiritual content from the sensuous medium we are at once met with the question what it is then which, under such a view, constitutes the actual externality or objectivity in poetry, that of tone being thus excluded. The answer to this is simple. It is the ideal envisagement and imaginative content itself. We have here spiritual forms substituted for sensuous, and supply a configurative material, such as we met with before in marble, bronze, colour, or musical tones. In other words, we must guard ourselves from such an inadequate statement of the facts as that ideas and imagery are nothing more or less than the content of poetry. This is unquestionably true in a sense, as we shall demonstrate more closely later on. Despite this, however, we are equally justified in asserting that idea, imagery, emotion, and the like are specific modes, under which every content in poetry is subsumed and manifested; and consequently, that is, owing to the fact that the sensuous aspect of the communication remains throughout a purely accidental one5 — it is these forms which supply the real material which the poet has to elaborate artistically. No doubt the fact, the content, must in poetry, as in other arts, receive its due objectification for spirit; objectivity in this sense, however, is the exchange of what was previously an external reality for one that is ideal; one which receives an existence exclusively in conscious life itself, as something conceived or imagined exclusively by mind. Mind is here on its own ground objective to itself, and it suffers the medium of speech merely as a means, that is to say, partly as one of communication, and partly as one of immediate externality, from which, as from the pure symbol merely, it is withdrawn throughout from itself into itself. For this reason, in the case of genuine poetry, it is of no consequence whether a poetical work be read in private or listened to; and for the same reason it can also, without essential depreciation of its value, be translated into other tongues, be transferred from versification into prose, and thereby transmitted in tonal relations of an entirely different character.6

(β) In the second place the question presents itself as to the nature of the object for which the ideal concept is employed in poetry. We answer that it is thus used relatively to essential truth in everything of interest to Spirit; not merely, that is, relatively to what is substantive in the same in the universality of its symbolic significance or classical differentiation, but equally to all that is at the same time specific and particular, in short, to practically everything in and with which mind is in any way interested and concerned. The art of language, consequently, both in respect to its content and the mode under which that content is made explicit, possesses a field of immeasurable compass, wholly incomparable with that of the other arts. Every content, every sort of spiritual or natural fact, event, history, deed, action, all conditions, whether ideal or external, fall within the domain and configurative powers of poetry.

(γ) Material of this most varied character is not, however, made poetical merely by reason of the fact that it is in a general way the content of idea. Ordinary consciousness is able to elaborate precisely the same content in the field of ideas, and to particularize concepts without creating any poetical result. We recognized this fact when we called the concept of mind merely the material or medium, which only receives a form adapted for poetry, in so far as it partakes of a novel configuration by virtue of art. In precisely the same way mere colour and tone in their immediacy are not as such the colour or tone of a painter or a musician. We may in a general way describe the distinction by stating that it is not the idea as such, but the imagination of the artist which creates a poetical content, under conditions, that is, in which the imagination grasps the same content in such a way that it is itself therewith associated in language, words and their more beautiful conjunction as human speech, just as in the other arts we find it present in the architectonic form; the plastic of sculpture, that adapted to painting, or musical tones and harmony.

A further necessary limitation of the art’s appearance is this that the content must, on the one hand, not be embraced in relations applicable to mere thinking, whether that of science or speculative philosophy, nor further in the form of inarticulate emotion, or with a clarity and self-sufficiency which appeals exclusively to the organs of sense;6 neither, in another direction, must it suffer the idea to pass entirely into what we may in general terms describe as the contingency, divisions, and relativity of finite reality. The imagination of the poet in this respect must maintain a middle course between the abstract universality of pure thinking and the concrete corporeality of material objects, in so far as we are acquainted with the latter in the productions of the plastic arts. Furthermore such an art must generally conform to the requirements we have, in an early section of this work, insisted as essential to every art-product. In other words, the art itself must find in its content the adequate object of its appearance, must elaborate everything, which it embraces, so far as the interest appeals to the intelligence simply,7 as an essentially independent and self-exclusive world. Only in so far as it does this is the demand of art satisfied, and the content thereof becomes, by virtue of the specific mode of its manifestation, an organic whole, which in its parts presents the appearance of a limited association and ideal synthesis, while at the same time, as contrasted with the world of accidental subordinations, its consistency is one of essential freedom, a whole made explicit through itself.

The last point to which we must in conclusion draw attention in respect to this distinction between poetry and the other arts is connected with the different mode under which the imagination of the poet substantiates its ideas in the objective medium of its exposition. The arts hitherto considered were entirely serious in their attachment to the material of sense, a medium in which they themselves were operative, in so far as they merely bestowed on their content a form, which could be throughout accepted and elaborated by means of conglomerations of material substance, whether bronze, marble, or wood, or the media of colour and tones.8 In a certain sense, no doubt, poetry also has to meet a condition somewhat similar. That is to say, in poetical composition we must not overlook the fact that its results have to be intelligible to mind by means of the communication of human speech. But we shall find none the less that the situation in the two cases is essentially altered.

(a) Otherwise expressed, by reason of the importance pertaining to the material aspect in the plastic arts and music, we find that, as a result of the defined restrictions of this material, only a limited number of conceptions can be fully reproduced in a particularized form of reality such as stone, colour, and tone: the content therefore and the possibilities of artistic composition are narrowed within very definable limits. It was on account of this fact that we were able to associate closely and exclusively every one of these specific arts with one particular form of artistic creation pre-eminently adapted to it. In this way the form of symbolism was appropriate to architecture, the classical to sculpture, and the romantic to painting and music. It is no doubt true that the particular arts in both directions from and toward their proper domain tended to pass over into the other forms. We took account of this fact when we found it possible to refer to a classic and romantic style of architecture, a symbolical and Christian type of sculpture, and even used the term classic in connection with painting and music. Departures such as these from the prevailing type were, however, merely experimental essays which prepared the way in subordination to a new type rather than its culminating effort; or they showed us how one art tended to pass beyond its true limits in seeking to grasp a content or a relation to its material of a type that only a further art development could adequately elaborate. Generally speaking, we have seen that architecture has least resource in the expression of its content; in sculpture there is already an increase of possibility, which is further extended to its widest range9 by painting and music. And the reason of this is that in proportion as the ideality and particularization under all its aspects by the external medium is made more explicit the variety of the content and of the forms it receives also increases.

Poetry, on the other hand, casts itself free of all subordination to the material of sense, at least to this extent, that in the definition of external or objective expression no reason whatever remains why it should restrict itself to specific content or any limitation to its power of composition and reproduction. It is therefore exclusively united to no specific art type; rather we may define it as the universal art, which is capable of reclothing and expressing under every conceivable mode every content that can possibly enter into or proceed from the imagination of man. And it can do this because its material is nothing more or less than the imagination itself, which is the universal root and ground of all the particular arts and their specific types.

We have already, in another connection, when concluding our discussion of the particular artistic types, come across what was practically the same thing. What we sought for, then, in our conclusion was that art in one of its types should make itself independent of that mode of representation properly called specific, remaining thereby predominant above the entire sphere in which such a totality of particularization is reproduced. An elaboration so comprehensive is among all the particular arts by the very nature of the case only possible to poetry. Its realization is effected through the development of poetical creation in part by means of the actual reconstitution of every particular type, and partly by the liberation of the mode of conception and its content from the boundaries fixed for it in the essentially exclusive types of conception, whose character we have severally defined as symbolical, classical, and romantic.

(b) The above considerations will further serve to justify the position, which, in the course of our inquiry, regarded as the development of a philosophy, we previously assigned to the art of poetry. In other words by reason of the fact that poetry is, to a degree quite impossible to any other mode of artistic production, concerned with the universal simply as such in Art, we might appear to have some reason for insisting that it marks the commencement of an investigation in the full sense of the word philosophical, and only from such a starting point can we enter into the sphere of particularization, in which we find the series of the other arts as limited and determined by their specific sensuous medium. Looking back, however, at the result arrived at in our investigation of the particular art types we shall find that the course of philosophical evolution consisted, first, in an increased penetration of the ideal content, and, from another point of view, in the demonstration that originally Art sets forth in the search, then in the discovery of and finally with an advance beyond that content compatible with its powers. This notion of the beautiful and Art must enforce itself in the arts themselves. The starting-point of our inquiry, therefore, was architecture, in which we found merely an impulse toward the complete representation of what pertains to Spirit in a material medium. This is so much the case that it is only through sculpture that art first attains to a genuine interfusion of ideality with the medium; and further that only in the arts of painting and music do we reach the stage where, by virtue of the ideal and subjective character of their content, we find the perfected fusion effected no less under the aspect of conception than that of practical execution in the medium accepted. This process culminates most decisively in poetry, by virtue of the fact that the very nature of its objective realization can only be apprehended as an effort to draw apart from and cancel the material of sense rather than one of reproduction which does not as yet venture to clothe itself and move in the objective medium of sense-perception. In order, however, to make this liberation intelligible in philosophical terms it is of importance that we have already disposed of the question what it is from which art undertakes to liberate itself. This question stands in close relation to the fact that poetry is essentially capable of embracing the entirety of intelligible content and artistic modes of expression. We may add further that we have viewed this as the acceptance of a totality, which can only be interpreted philosophically as the abrogation of limitation in particularity. Our previous consideration of what we mean by things that are one-sided would be involved in such an exposition, the self-exclusive character of such one-sidedness being cancelled by such a totality.

It is only through the course of such an exposition that we can effectively demonstrate that poetry is the specific art in which a point is reached which marks the beginning of the disintegration of art itself, a point at which the philosophical consciousness discovers its bridge of passage to the notion of religion as such, as also to the prose of scientific thought. The boundary lines of the realm of beauty are, as we have already seen, on the one hand the prose of finite condition and our ordinary conscious life, starting from which Art makes its effort in the direction of truth, and, on the other, of the loftier spheres of religion and science, from which it passes over into a comprehension of the Absolute till more emancipate from all material association.

(c) Despite therefore the completeness with which the art of poetry reproduces, under a mode of objectification that is most ideal, the entire totality of Beauty, nevertheless intelligence is able to discover even here too in this final domain of art a residue of defect. We may for this purpose within our art-system directly contrast the poetic art with that of architecture. In other words architecture was still unable to subordinate the external material to the ideal content sufficiently to clothe the same in a form adequate to mind; poetry on the other hand carries the process of negating its sensuous medium so far that instead of transforming that which stands in opposition to gross spatial matter, namely tone, as architecture does with its material into a significant symbol, it rather reduces it to a mere sign of no significance. But by doing so it destroys the fusion of spiritual ideality with external existence, so thoroughly that to this extent it ceases to be compatible with the original notion of Art. In other words it comes dangerously near to bidding goodbye to the region of sense altogether, remaining wholly absorbed in that of ideality. The fair mean between these extremes of architecture and poetry is secured by sculpture, painting, and music. Every one of these arts not merely still reproduces the spiritual content completely in a medium borrowed from the objective world, but also leaves us with that which lies open to our senses, no less than our intelligence. For although painting and music, regarded as romantic arts, attach themselves to a medium already more ideal, they do none the less supply the immediacy of objective existence, which, however, in this increase of ideality, shows indications of disappearance, while again from the opposite point of view they prove themselves, through their media of colour and tone, more profuse in fulness of particularization and manifold configuration than is required from the material of sculpture.

No doubt the art of poetry in its turn also endeavours, as a set-off to this defect, to place the objective world before us with a breadth and variety which even painting, at least in a single composition, fails to secure: none the less this comprehensiveness remains throughout merely a realization confined to consciousness itself; and, if it so happens that poetry, in response to a demand for more material artistic realization, attempts to increase the impression on our senses, it is only able to do this by either borrowing these effects from music and painting, in order to secure artistic means otherwise foreign to it; or it is forced, if it seeks retain its genuine character, to employ these sister arts only under a subordinate relation of service, while the main stress is laid on the ideas of conscious life, the imagination which appeals to the imagination, with which it is above all concerned.

This will suffice for discussion of the general relation under which poetry is placed to the other arts. We shall now proceed to a closer examination of the art of poetry itself, and with a view to this propose to co-ordinate the same as follows.

We have already seen that in poetry it is the ideal concept itself from which we derive content no less than medium. By reason, however, of the fact that we already find outside Art’s domain the world of idea to be the most obvious mode of conscious life, it is above everything else important to distinguish the conception of poetry from that of prose. The art of poetry, however, is not complete in this ideal world of the imagination alone. It is necessary that it should clothe the same in expressive language. It has therefore a twofold task confronting it. On the one hand it is called upon so to arrange this world of constructed idea that it may admit of complete translation into speech: on the other it must take care not to leave this medium of language in the form appropriated by ordinary conscious life. In other words such must be treated poetically in order that the expression of art may be distinguishable in the selection of words no less than their position, and even their sound from that of ordinary prose.

Furthermore, on account of the fact that, though poetry avails itself of language as a means of expression, it secures by far the most unqualified freedom from those conditions and restrictions imposed on the other arts by virtue of the particularization of their material, it is possible for a poetical composition in a pre-eminent degree to elaborate every one of the various modes of expression, otherwise adopted unaffected by the onesidedness incidental to their application to a particular art. The subdivision of such modes of expression in all their variety is consequently by far the most complete in the works of poetry.

The further course of our investigation may now be epitomized as follows:

First, we have to elucidate what is in general terms poetical, and the poetical composition in particular.

Secondly, poetry will be examined as a means of expression.

Thirdly, we shall deal with the subdivision of the art into Epic, Lyric, and Dramatic poetry.

1 Mittelpunkt. We should rather say the unifying significance of the creation.

2 It would be perhaps better to translate geistigen Innerlichkeit with the words “the self-conscious life of the human reason.” This is developed and explained, however, in the next paragraph.

3 Hegel expresses this as “making the inner or ideal content perceptible to the ideal faculty,” that is, prima facie, consciousness, or at least that sense which is nearest related to it, viz., hearing.

4 By statt des Geistigen Hegel clearly contrasts pure music with music related as accompaniment to human speech in song.

5 Lit., “one that merely plays by the way.”

6 Such a statement is obviously one which would be strongly resisted. The stress laid here on the purely ideal content as contrasted with the beauty of rhythm and modal arrangement would certainly suggest that Hegel was deficient in a sense for the musical possibilities of language I presume he does use gebunden in the sense of verse.

7 Hegel’s expression is in rein theoretischen Interesse.

8 The medium of music is not of course strictly on all fours with the others.

9 That is under the limits of these four arts.

POETICAL COMPOSITION AS DISTINGUISHED FROM THAT OF PROSE

We find it difficult to recall a single writer among all who have written on the subject of poetry who has not evaded the attempt to describe what is poetical as such, let alone a clear definition. And in fact if any one begins a discussion upon poetry, regarded as an art, without previously having investigated the nature of the content and mode of conception appropriate to Art in its most general terms, he will find it an extremely difficult matter to determine where we must look for that in which the essential character of poetry consists. To an exceptional degree is this failure to tackle this problem visible in those cases where a writer takes as his point of departure the actual execution in particular works of art, and seeks to establish, by means of this connoisseurship, some general principle which he may apply as relevant to every sort and kind of composition. In this way works of the most heterogeneous character come to rank as genuine poetry. If we once start from such assumptions, and then proceed to the inquiry by virtue of what productions of this nature can be reasonably classed together as poems we are at once confronted with the difficulty I have above adverted to. Happily our own position here is not that of these inquirers. In the first place we have by no manner of means arrived at the general notion of our subject-matter through an examination of any particular examples of its display; we have on the contrary sought to evolve the actual constitution of the same by a reference to the fundamental notion.1 Agreeably with this it is not part of our demand that everything in ordinary parlance regarded as poetry should in our present inquiry fall into the general notion we have accepted. At least this is certainly not so in so far as the decision whether any particular work is or is not poetical is only deducible from the notion itself. Furthermore it is unnecessary now to expound more fully what we understand by the notion of poetry. To do this we should simply have to repeat again the course of our inquiry into the nature of Beauty and the Ideal as developed in general terms in the first part of this work. The intrinsic character of what is poetical stands in general agreement with the generic notion of artistic beauty and the art-product. That is to say, the imagination of the poet is not, as is the case with the plastic arts and music by reason of the nature of the materia, through which they are reproductive, constrained in its creative activity in many directions, and forced to accept many others of a onesided or very partial completeness; it is on the contrary merely subservient to the essential requirements and general principle of an ideal and artistic presentation.

From the many different points of view applicable to our present purpose, I will attempt to emphasize merely those of most importance, as for example, firsts that which relates to the distinction between the mode of composition employed respectively by poetry and prose; secondly, that which contrasts a poetical work as completed with one of prose; and, finally, I propose to add a few observations relative to the subjective faculty which creates, or, shall we say, the poet himself.

(a) In so far as the content appropriate to poetical composition is concerned we may, relatively speaking at any rate, exclude the external world of natural fact. It is spiritual interests rather than the sun, mountains, landscape, or the bodily human form, and the like, which are its proper subject-matter. For, although it naturally embraces the element of sensuous impression and perception, it remains none the less, even in this respect, an activity of mind. Its main object is an intuition of ideality, to which it stands as spiritual activity in closer relation and affinity than is possible for external objects, as presented in their concrete substance to the senses. The world of Nature therefore only enters into the content of poetry in so far as mind discovers therein a stimulus or a material upon which to exercise its own energy; as, for example, where it is regarded as the environment of man, merely possessing essential worth in its relation to the ideality of conscious life, which moreover can put forward no claim to be itself the independent object of poetry. The object, in short, which fully corresponds to its appeal is the infinite realm of Spirit. For the medium of language, the most plastic medium possessed immediately by conscious life, and the one most competent to grasp its interests and movements in their ideal vitality, precisely as is the case with the material of the other arts, such as stone, colour, and tone, must necessarily and above all be employed to express that which it is most qualified to express. It is consequently the pre-eminent task of poetry to bring before our vision the energies of the life of Spirit, all that surges to and fro in human passion and emotion, or passes in tranquillity across the mind, that is the all-embracing realm of human idea, action, exploit, fatality, the affairs of this world and the divine Providence. It has been the most universal and cosmopolitan instructor of the human race and is so still. Instruction and learning are together the knowledge and experience of what is. Stars, animals and plants are ignorant of their law — it does not come into their experience; but man only then exists conformably to the principle of his being when he knows what he is and by what he is surrounded. He must recognize the powers by which he is driven or influenced; and it is just such a knowledge which poetry, in its original and vital2 form, supplies.

(b) It is, however, also a content of the same character which belongs to man’s ordinary conscious life. This too instructs him in general laws, as such at least are interpreted by the motley crowd of human life, in their distinction, coordination, and significance. The question therefore arises, as previously observed, as to the nature of the distinction between the mode of conception severally adopted by prose and poetry, a similarity in the content of each being assumed as possible.

(α) Poetry is of greater antiquity than speech modelled in the artistic form of elaborate prose. It is the original imaginative grasp of truths a form of knowledge, which fails as yet to separate the universal from its living existence in the particular object, which does not as yet contrast law land phenomena, object and means, or relate the one to the other in subordination to the process of human reason, but comprehends the one exclusively in the other and by virtue of the other. For this reason it does not merely, under the mode of imagery, express a content already essentially apprehended in its universality; on the contrary it lingers, conformably to its unmediated notion, in the unity of concrete life itself, which has not as yet effected such a separation or such an association of mere relationship.

(αα) Under the above forms of envisualization, poetry posits all that it comprehends as an exclusive and consequently independent totality, which, despite its capacity for a rich content and an extensive range of condition, individuals, actions, events, emotions and ideas of every kind, nevertheless is forced to exhibit the same in all their wide complexity as an essentially self-determined whole, as displayed and motived by the unity, whose individual expression this or that fact in its singularity actually is. And consequently the universal or rational principle is not expressed in poetry in its abstract universality, or in the complexus which lies open to philosophical exposition or under the relation of its varied aspects apprehended by science, but on the contrary as a vital union, in its phenomenal presence, possessed with soul and self-determined throughout; and it is further expressed in such a way that the all-embracing unity, the real soul of its vitality, is only suffered to be operative in mysterious guise from within outwards.

(ββ) The character of this mode of apprehending, reclothing and expressing fact is throughout one of construction. It is not the fact itself and its contemplative3 existence, but reconstruction and speech which are the object of poetry. Its entrance on the scene dates from the first efforts of man at self-expression. What is expressed is simply made use of to satisfy this desire. The instant man, in the midst of his practical activities and imperative duties, seeks to summarize this effect for mind and to communicate himself to others, then we have some kind of artistic expression, some accord with what is poetical. To mention one from a host of examples, there is that distich which we read in Herodotus referring to the slain heroes of Thermopylae. As for its content it is simply the fact, the bare announcement that four thousand Peloponesians on a certain spot fought the battle with three hundred myriads. The main interest is, however, the composition of an inscription which communicates to contemporary life and posterity the historical fact, and is there exclusively to do so. In other words, the expression of this fact is poetical; it testifies to itself as a deed (εἱν ποιείν) which leaves the content in its simplicity, but expresses the same with a definite purpose. The language, in which the idea is embodied, is to that extent of such increased value that an attempt is made to distinguish it from ordinary speech; we have a distich in lieu of a sentence.

(γγ) For this reason, even from the point of view of language, poetry makes an effort to keep its domain singular and distinct from ordinary parlance, and to accomplish this elevates its expression to a higher virtue than that of merely articulate expression. We must, however, not only in this particular respect, but for the purposes of our present inquiry generally, make an essential distinction between a primitive poetry, which arises previous to the creation of ordinary artificial prose, and that mode of poetical composition and speech the development of which is effected where already the conditions of our everyday life and prosaic expression exist. The first is poetical without intention, in idea no less than speech; the latter, on the contrary, is fully conscious of the sphere, from which its task is to detach itself, in order that it may establish itself on the free basis of art. It is consequently quite aware of the distinction and contrast implied in its self-creation to the world of prose.

(β) Secondly, the kind of prose life, from which poetry has to separate itself, postulates an entirely different nature of conception and speech.

(αα) In other words, looked at from one point of view, such a consciousness regards the wide expanse of reality according to that association of cause and effect, object and means, and all other categories of the mode of reflection which deals with finite conditions and the objective world generally, that is, the limited categories of science or the understanding. It is a feature of such thought that every particular trait should at one moment appear with a false subsistency, at another should be placed in the position of bare relation to something else, that as such it should be so apprehended in its relativity and dependence that no unity of a free nature whatever is possible, no unity, that is, which remains essentially throughout, and in all its branches and separate filaments, a complete and free totality, no unity, in short, where we find that the individual aspects are simply the appropriate explication and phenomenal presence of one content which constitutes the point of focus, the soul that unites all together, and which also finds its vital principle in this all-pervading centre of animation. Rather the type of conception we above refer to as that of science goes no further than the discovery of particular laws in phenomena, and persists for this reason in the separation, or bare relation, of the particular existence with its general law, the laws themselves under this view tending to harden from each other in their isolate singularity; that their relation is, in fact, conceived exclusively under external and finite conditions.

(ββ) And, furthermore, man’s ordinary consciousness has nothing to do with what we call the ideal principle of association, the essential core of facts, their bases, causes, ends, and so forth. It rests satisfied with the acceptance of the mere fact that something exists or happens as distinct from something else; or, in other words, with its insignificant contingency. It is no doubt true that the unity of life is not, in such a case, deliberately cancelled by any express separation; that unity, I mean, in which the intuition of the poet arrests the ideal rationale of the fact, its expression and determinate existence. What, however, is absent here, is just that flash of insight into this core of reason and significance, which becomes consequently for our intelligence a thing essentially vacant, possessing no further claim on our minds to a rational interest. The comprehension of a rational cosmos; and its relations is exchanged then and there for a mere flux and contiguity of indifference, which it is true may possess a large expanse of external animation, but which none the less suffers the profounder impulse of reason4 to remain unsatisfied. True vision, no less than soul-life in its full vigour, can only obtain satisfaction, where such are made aware in phenomena, through feeling no less than contemplation, of the reality in its essence and truth which is compatible with such a world. The life which is a mere external show is defunct to our deeper sense, if all that is ideal and intrinsically rich in significance fails to shine through as the very soul thereof.

(γγ) These defects, thirdly, in the conceptions of science and our ordinary conscious life speculative thought effaces. It stands, therefore, in one respect in affinity with the imagination of the poet. The cognizance of reason5 is not solely, or even mainly, concerned with contingent singularity, nor does it overlook in the phenomenal world the essence of the same. It does not rest satisfied with the differentiations and external relations proper to the conceptions and deductions of the understanding; it unites them in a free totality, which in the apprehension of our finite faculty in part fails to preserve its self-consistency, and in part is posited in a relation that possesses no synthetic unity. Pure thought, however, can have but one result, namely thoughts. It evaporates the mode of reality in that of the pure notion. And although it grasps and comprehends actual things in their essential separation and their actual existence, it does also nevertheless translate this particularity into the ideal element of the universal, in which alone thought is at home with itself. Consequently there arises, in contrast to the world of phenomena, a world that is new in this sense, that though the truth of the Real is present, it is not displayed in reality itself as the power itself which gives it form and the veritable soul thereof. Thinking is simply a reconciliation of truth with reality in Thought. The creations and reconstruction, however, of the poet is a reconciliation under the mode of phenomenal reality itself, albeit such a real appearance is merely ideally conceived.

(γ) We have, therefore, two distinct spheres of consciousness, that of poetry and prose. In former times, in which there is neither present a deliberate outlook on the world elaborated, in respect to its religious belief and its general knowledge, under the co-ordinated form of scientific ideas and cognition, nor an actual world of human condition regulated conformably to such a standard, poetry is confronted with a lighter task. Prose is not in such a case opposed to it as an essentially independent field of ideal and external existence, which it has first to overcome. Its problem is for the most part simply limited to deepening all that is significant or transparent in the forms of ordinary consciousness. If, on the contrary, the prose of life has already appropriated within its mode of vision the entire content of conscious life, setting its seal on all and every part of it, the art of poetry is forced to undertake the task of melting all down again and re-coining the same anew. In every direction it finds itself involved in difficulties by the unresponsive nature of prosaic existence. It has, in short, not only to wrest itself from the adherence of ordinary consciousness to all that is indifferent and contingent, and to raise the scientific apprehension of the cosmos of fact to the level of reason’s profounder penetration, or to translate speculative thought into terms of the imagination, giving a body to the same in the sphere of intelligence itself; it has further to convert in many ways the mode of expression common to the ordinary consciousness into that appropriate to poetry; and, despite of all deliberate intention enforced by such a contrast and such a process, to make it appear as though all such purpose was absent, preserving the original freedom essential to all art.

(c) We have now summarized in its most general terms that in which the content of poetry consists. We have further distinguished the form of poetry from that of prose. In conclusion, it is of importance to draw attention to the particularization which the art of poetry, to a degree unattained by the other arts, whose development is not nearly so rich in results, admits of. We find, no doubt, architecture illustrated in the arts of very varied peoples, and continuous through many centuries. But of sculpture, at least, it is true that it reaches its culminating point in the ancient world of Greece and Rome, just as painting and music have done more recently in Christendom. The art of poetry celebrates its epochs of brilliancy and bloom among all nations and in all ages almost that present any real artistic activity at all. It embraces the collective Spirit of mankind, and it is differentiated through every kind of variation.

(α) Furthermore, inasmuch as poetry does not accept the universal in scientific abstraction from its object, but seeks to represent what is rational under the mode of individuality,6 the specific traits of national character are essential to its growth; the content and the particular mode of its presentation are in fact conditioned by the nature of these and the general outlook in each case. We find it consequently adapting itself to every variety of form and peculiarity. It matters not what the poetry may be, whether Oriental, Italian, Spanish, English, Roman, Hellenic, or German, each and all differ totally in their spirit, emotional impulse, general outlook and expression.

A similar distinctive variety asserts itself in particular epochs as they are favourable to the art of poetry or the reverse. The results secured, for example, by our German poetry were impossible in the Middle Ages, or the times of the thirty years’ war. The particular motives, which in our own day excite the greatest interest, are inseparable from the entire evolution of contemporary life. And in the same way every age has its own wider or more restricted, more exalted and liberal, or more depressed phase of emotional life, in short its specific outlook on the world, which it is the express aim of poetry to bring home to the artistic consciousness in the most intelligible and complete manner, inasmuch as language is the one medium capable of expressing the human spirit wherever and in whatever form it may be manifested.

(β) Among these national characteristics, or views and opinions peculiar to particular epochs, some have closer affinity with the poetic impulse than others. The Oriental consciousness is, for example, in general more poetic than the Western mind, if we exclude Greece. In the East the principle predominant is always that of coherence, solidity, unity, substance. An outlook of this nature is intrinsically most penetrative, even though it may fail to reach the freedom of the Ideal. Our Western point of view, especially that of modern life, is based on the endless breaking up and division of its boundless material into fragments, in virtue of which process, the extreme emphasis laid here on particular facts, what is merely finite becomes substantive for the imagination, and despite of this must be once more subsumed under the converse action of relativity. For the Oriental nothing persists as really substantive, but everything appears as contingent, discovering its supreme focus, stability and final justification in the One, the Absolute, to which it is referred.

(γ) By means of this diversity of national traits and the evolutionary process of the centuries we find that what is shared by all mankind alike, no less than all that claims to be artistic, is drawn as a common element within the reach of other nations and epochs, intelligible and enjoyable to the same. It is in this twofold connection that of late years to an exceptional degree Hellenic poetry has roused the admiration and imitation of most diverse nationalities. And this is so because in the content of it no less than in the artistic form it receives the simply human is disclosed with most beauty. The literature of India itself, however, despite all the difficulties attendant on an outlook and artistic expression so alien to our own, is not wholly outside our sympathy; and the boast is no empty one that in our modern era pre-eminently a keen sense for all that art and the human spirit embraces in every direction has begun to unfold itself.

Were we in our present investigation of this impulse toward individualization, pursued so persistently by poetry, under the aspects we have already described, to restrict the same to a general treatment of the art of poetry, such a generalization, however established, could not fail to be abstract and devoid of content. It is therefore of first importance, if our object be to consider poetry of a really genuine type, that we include in our survey the forms of the creative spirit as presented in their national form, the unique product of one age; and further we must not overlook the individuality which creates, the soul of the poet. Such, then, are the main points of view to which I would draw attention by way of a general introduction to poetical creation and conception.

Poetry is not, however, exhausted by the imaginative idea alone: it must necessarily proceed to make itself articulate and complete in the poetical work of art.

Such an object of study opens a large field of investigation. We may conveniently arrange and classify the course of our discussion as follows:

First, we shall endeavour to point out what is of most importance relatively to the poetical composition generally.

Secondly, we shall distinguish it from the principal types of prose composition, in so far as the same are compatible with artistic treatment.

We shall then, finally be in a position to deduce with some completeness the notion of the free art-product.

(a) In respect to the poetical work of art under its generic aspect all that is necessary is once more to enforce our previous contention that it must, no less than any other production of an unfettered imagination, receive the form and independence of an organic whole. This demand can only receive satisfaction as follows:

(α) In the first place that which constitutes a homogeneous content, whether it be a definite object of action and event, or a specific emotion and passion, must before everything else possess intrinsic unity.

(αα) All else must be posited under relation to this bond of unity, and thereby combine to form a freehand concrete coherence of all parts. This is only possible under the condition, that the content selected is not conceived as abstract universal, but as the action and emotion of men, as the object and passion which are actually present in the mind, soul, and volition of definite individuals, arising as such from the distinctive basis of an individual nature in each case.

(ββ) The universal, which is to receive representation, and the individuals, in whose character events and actions the manifestation of poetry is asserted must not consequently fall into fragments, or be so related that the individuals are merely of service as an abstract universal; both aspects must combine in vital coalescence. In the Iliad, for example, the contest of Greeks and Trojans, and the victory of the former is inseparably bound up with the wrath of Achilles, which for this reason becomes the common focus welding all together. No doubt we also find poetical works in which the fundamental content is partly more abstract in its generalization, and also partly is executed in a way that expresses a universal of more significance. Dante’s great epic poem is an illustration, which not only embraces the world divine throughout, but displays individuals of the most varied character in their relation to the punishments of hell, purgatory and the blessedness of Paradise. But even here we find no entirely abstract separation, of the two points of view, no mere relation of service between the particular objects. For in the Christian world the focus of conscious life is not conceived as nothing more than an accident of Godhead, but as essential and infinite cause or end itself, so that here the universal purpose, that is the divine justice in condemnation and salvation can verily appear as immanent fact, the eternal interest and being of the individual himself. In this divine world the individual is throughout of pre-eminent importance. In that of the State he can of course be sacrificed in order to save the universal, that is the State. In his relation to God, however, and in the kingdom of God he is essentially and exclusively the end.

(γγ) We must, however, thirdly, conceive the universal, which supplies the content of human emotion and action as self-subsistent, intrinsically complete where it is, and constituting as such in itself a definitive and exclusive world. When, for instance, in our contemporary life mention is made of any officer, official, general, professor, and so forth, and we try to imagine what kind of action such a man or personality is likely to attempt or carry out under his own particular conditions of environment, we place before ourselves simply a content of interest and activity, which in part is not itself a rounded and self-substantive whole, but one which stands in infinitely manifold external connections, relations and conditions, in part also, if we regard it as abstract totality, one which can receive the form of a universal concept in its separation from the individuality of the, in other respects, entire personality, as for instance that of personal obligation. Conversely we may have no doubt a content of sterling character, making, that is to say, an essentially independent whole, which, despite of this, and without further development and advance, is complete in one sentence. It is really impossible to say whether a content of this nature belongs more properly to poetry or prose. The grand affirmation of the old Testament, “God said Let their be Light and there was Light,” is at once in its penetration, no less than the precision of its embrace,7 as much essentially sublime poetry as it is ordinary prose. Of a similar nature is the command, “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods but me”; or that, “Honour thy father and thy mother.” The golden epigrams of a Pythagoras and the wise sayings of Solomon are of the same type. Phrases, so rich in content as the above, have their origin in a world where the distinction between poetry and prose is as yet absent. We can, however, hardly affirm of such that they are a poetical work of art, even though many such phrases may be combined together. The independence and rounding off of a genuine poetical work must be assumed at the same time to be of the nature of a process, and a differentiation of parts: we assume it therefore to be a unity, the true character of which is only made explicit by emphatic insistence upon its diversity. This process, absolutely essential in the plastic arts, regarded at least according to the requirements of their form, is also more generally of the greatest moment in a poetical composition.

(β) This introduces us, then, to a second feature of the work of art, namely, the organic differentiation of its several parts, essential to it not merely that it may be presented as an organic unity, but that the elaboration of all it implies may be rendered complete.

(αα) The most obvious reason of this necessity is referable to the fact that Art in general tends instinctively to particularization. The effect of the scientific faculty is that what is particular and singular fails to receive its complete vindication. And this is so not merely because the understanding apprehends the manifold, as such theoretic faculty, starting from its principles of generalization, causing the particular fact thereby to evaporate in its abstract deductions and categories; but also because it makes this manifold subserve ends of purely practical import. Severe adherence to that purely relative value, which strictly belongs to the nature of the process, appears to the understanding as useless and tedious. To the conception and composition of poetry on the contrary every part, every phase in the result must remain of essential interest and vital. It dallies therefore with delight in detail, depicts the same with enthusiasm, and treats every part as an independent whole. However great, therefore, in addition the content may be of a poetical work in its central interest, the organic completeness is equally asserted in subordinate detail, precisely as in the human organism every member, every finger is rounded with exquisite delicacy in its unified completeness, and as a rule, we find in Nature that every particular existence is enclosed within a perfect world of its own. The advance of poetry is therefore more slow than that compatible with the judgments and conclusions of the understanding, where we find that, whether regarded theoretically as science or with reference to practical conduct and action, the main stress is on the final result, this rather than on the path by which it is reached. As for the degree in which poetry approaches realization in its tenderness for such detail we have already pointed out that it is not its vocation to describe with excessive diffuseness what is exterior in the form of its sensuous appearance. If it therefore undertakes extensive descriptions without making them reflect at the same time the claims and interests of soul-life it becomes heavy and tedious. Above all it must take care not to enter into deliberate rivalry with the actual detail, in its exact completeness, presented by natural fact itself. Even painting in this respect should aim at circumspection and restriction. We have therefore here and in the case of poetry a twofold point of view to consider. On the one hand we must remember that the impression is on our mental vision; and on the other the art can only place before the mind the object, which in Nature we can survey and comprehend in a single glance in a series of separate traits. For this reason it is important that poetry does not carry its elaboration of detail so far, that the vision of the whole in its entirety becomes inevitably disturbed, confused, or lost. It is obvious therefore that difficulties of an exceptional nature have to be overcome when the attempt is made to place an action or event of varied nature before our vision, and where in actual life such happen in a single moment of time, and in close connection with such immediacy, for all it can do is to present the same in a continuous series. As respects this difficulty, no less than the general way in which poetry, as already described, approaches the detail of Nature, we find the demand of the several generic types of the art differs very considerably. Epic poetry, for instance, attaches itself to the particularity of the external world with an emphasis totally different from that of dramatic poetry, with its rapidity of forward movement, or from that of lyrical poetry with its exclusive insistence on the ideally significant.

(ββ) It is through an elaboration of this kind that the several parts of a composition secure subsistency. No doubt this appears to stand in direct contradiction to the unity which we established as a primary condition: as a matter of fact the opposition is merely apparent. This independence should not, that is to say, assert itself in such a way that the several parts are placed in absolute separation from each other: it must on the contrary only be carried so far that the several aspects and members of the whole are clearly seen on their own account to be asserted in the vital form peculiar to each, and to stand on their own free basis of independence. If, on the contrary, this individualized life is absent from the several parts, the composition becomes, precisely as Art generally can only invest the universal with determinate existence under the form of actual particularity, cold and defunct.

(γγ) Despite of this self-subsistency, however, these several parts must remain likewise in conjunction to the extent that the one fundamental motive or purpose, made explicit and manifest in and through them, must declare itself as the unity which pervades the whole, and in which the parts coalesce and to which they return. This is the condition of art, and pre-eminently so of poetry, where it falls short of its noblest reach, upon which it most readily is wrecked, and the work of art declines from the realm of a free imagination into that of mere prose. To put it in another way, the connexion into which the parts fall must not merely be one of final cause and effect. For in the relation of teleology the end is the universal as essentially presupposed and willed, which it is true succeeds in making the several aspects tally with the process, yet employs them none the less as means and to this extent robs them of all really free stability and thereby of every sort of vitality. In such a case the parts merely fall under a relation of purpose to one end, which is asserted imperiously to the disadvantage of all else, and which accepts the same in abstraction as subservient and subordinate to itself. The freedom and beauty of art contradict flatly this servile relation of the abstract faculty of science.

(γ) On these grounds the unity, asserted in the several parts of the composition, must be of another character. The definition of this may be stated under two aspects of conception, as follows.

(αα) In the first place, the vital presence we have already referred to as peculiar to every part separately must be maintained. If we direct our attention, however, to that which in fact justifies the introduction of any detail whatever into the composition, we find the point of departure to be one fundamental idea which the same as a whole is undertaken to manifest or interpret. Consequently everything defined and particular must announce that as the source of its own specific appearance. In other words, the content of a poetical work must not be itself intrinsically abstract, but concrete, one that by reason of its own wealth conducts us to a rich unravelment of its varied aspects. And when this variety, even assuming that in its realization it falls to every appearance into plain contradictions, yet is as a matter of fact rooted in the essentially unified content we have adverted to, in that case we may affirm that by necessity the content itself, in a form agreeable to its notion and being, comprises what is fundamentally an exclusive and harmonious totality of particular characteristics, which it possesses as its own, and in the continuous expatiation of which what it is in its real significance is in truth rendered explicit. It is only these several parts, which originally belong to the content, and which consequently should be carried into the composition under the mode of actual and essentially sound and vital existence. In this respect, therefore, despite all appearance the display of particular characteristics present of opposition to others, they are throughout combined in a union of mysterious accord, rooted in its own nature.

(ββ) Secondly, since the composition is presented under the form of natural phenomena, the unity must, in order to preserve the vital appearance of such reality, only be the ideal bond, which to all appearance without intention holds together the parts and includes them in an organic whole. It is just this animating union of organic life which alone is able to bring into being true poetry as contrasted with the expressed intention of plain prose. That is to say whenever particularity exclusively appears as means to a definite end, it does not possess and cannot conceivably possess an independent and unique vitality of its own; what it does testify to, on the contrary, is that it exists for the sake of something else, that is the end proposed. Purpose of this type declares its sovereignty over the objective facts through which it is fulfilled. An artistic composition should, however, confer upon all that is particular within it, all in the expatiation of which it displays continuously the central and fundamental content selected, the appearance of an unfettered stability. This is absolutely necessary, because what we here comprise under the term particularity is just that content itself under the mode of the reality which corresponds with it. We may therefore recall to our minds the analogous task of speculative thought, which in the same way has on the one side to develop the particular to the point of self-subsistency or freedom from that which is at first an indefinite universality; and likewise, too, it is called on to demonstrate how within this totality of what is particular, in which that and that only is divulged which essentially reposes in the universal, the unity is on this very account once more asserted, and indeed then and only then is truly concrete unity, established through its own differences and their mediation. Speculative philosophy is thus, in the same way, through the method of dialectic above adverted to, responsible for works which resemble in this respect those of poetry, containing, that is, by virtue of the content, an essential identity of self-seclusiveness and a revelation of differentiated material in accord with it. We must, however, despite this similarity between these two activities, and apart from the obvious difference between the evolution of pure thinking and creative art, draw attention to a further essential distinction. The deduction of philosophy no doubt vindicates the necessity and actuality of particularity, but none the less, in virtue of the dialectic process in which this aspect of reality is asserted, it is expressly demonstrated of this particularity and all of it, that it for the first time discovers its truth and its stability in the concrete unity.8 Poetry, on the contrary, does not proceed to any such express demonstration. The concordant unity must no doubt be completely vindicated in every one of its creations, and be operative there in all their manifold detail as the soul and vital core of the whole; but this presence remains for Art an ideal bond which is implied rather than expressly posited, precisely as the soul is immediately made vital in all the bodily members, without robbing the same of the appearance of an independent existence. We have the same truth illustrated by colour and tone. Yellow, blue, green and red are different colours which admit of the most absolute contrast; but none the less, on account of the fact that as colour they all essentially belong to one totality, they maintain a harmony throughout; and it is not, moreover, necessary that this union as such should be expressly declared in them. In a similar way the dominant, the third and the fifth remain independent as tones, and yet for all that give us the harmony of the trichord; or, rather, we should put it that they only produce this harmony so long as each tone is permitted to assert its own essentially free and characteristic sound.

(γγ) In connection with this organic unity and articulate synthesis of a poetical composition we have further to consider essential features of distinction which are due to the particular artistic form appropriate to the composition under review, no less than the particular type of poetry in which we discover the specific character of its working out. Poetry, for example, of symbolic art is unable, owing to the more abstract and indefinite traits which constitute its essential and significant content, to attain to a fully organic fusion in the degree of transparency possible to the works of the classical art-form. In symbolism generally, as we have already established in the first part of this enquiry, the conjunction of general significance and the actual phenomenon, in association with which Art embodies its content, is of a less coherent character: as a result of this we find that what is particular in one direction preserves a greater consistency; in another, as in the case of the Sublime, only so far asserts this quality in order, through the negation thus implied, to render more intelligible the one supreme power and substance, or merely to advance the process to a condition of mysterious association of particular, but at the same time heterogeneous no less than related traits and aspects of natural and spiritual facts. Conversely, in the romantic type, wherein the ideality of truth reveals itself in essential privacy to soul-life only, we find a wider field for the display of the detail of rational reality in its self-subsistency; in this latter case the conjunction of all parts and their union must necessarily be present, but the nature of their elaboration can neither be so clear or secure as in the products of classical art.

In a similar way the Epic gives us a more extensive picture of the external world; it even lingers by the way in episodical events and deeds, whereby the unity of the whole, owing to this increased isolation of the parts, appears to suffer diminution. The drama, in contrast to this, requires a more strenuous conjunction, albeit, even in the drama, we find that romantic poetry permits the introduction of a type of variety in the nature of episode and an elaborate analysis of characteristic traits in its presentation of soul-life no less than that of external fact. Lyric poetry, as it changes conformably to the fluctuation of its types, adapts itself to a mode of presentment of the greatest variety: at one time it is bare narration; at another the exclusive expression of emotion or contemplation; at another it restricts its vision, in more tranquil advance, to the central unity which combines; at another it shifts hither and thither in unrestrained passion through a range of ideas and emotions apparently destitute of any unity at all.

This, then, must suffice us on the general question of a poetical composition.

(b) In order now, — this is our second main head in the present discussion, — to examine more closely the distinction which obtains between the organic poem as above considered and the prose composition, we propose to direct attention to those specific types of prose which, despite their obvious limitations, do none the less come into closest affinity with art. Such are, without question, the arts of history and oratory.

(α) As regards history, there can be no doubt that we find ample opportunity here for one aspect of genuine artistic activity.

(αα) The evolution of human life in religion and civil society, the events and destinies of the most famous individuals and peoples, who have given emphasis to life in either field by their activity, all this presupposes great ends in the compilation of such a work, or the complete failure of what it implies. The historical relation of subjects and a content such as these admits of real distinction, thoroughness and interest: and however much our historian must endeavour to reproduce actual historical fact, it is none the less incumbent upon him to bring before our imaginative vision this motley content of events and characters, to create anew and make vivid the same to our intelligence with his own genius.9 In the creation of such a memorial he must, moreover, not rest satisfied with the bare letter of particular fact; he must bring this material into a co-ordinated and constructive whole; he must collectively conceive and embrace single traits, occurrences and actions under the unifying concept; with the result that on the one hand we have flashed before us a clear picture of nationality, epoch of time, external condition and the spiritual greatness or weakness of the individuals concerned in the very life and characterization which belonged to them; and on the other that the bond of association, in which the various parts of our picture stand to the ideal historical significance of a people or an event, is asserted from such without exception. It is in this sense that we, even in our own day, speak of the art of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Tacitus, and a few others, and cannot cease to admire their narratives as classical products of the art of human language.

(ββ) It is nevertheless true that even these fine examples of historical composition do not belong to free Art. We may add that we should have no poetry even though we were to assume with such works the external form of poetry, the measure or rhyme of verse and so forth. It is not exclusively the manner in which history is written, but the nature of its content, which makes it prose. Let us look at this rather more closely.

Genuine history, both in respect to aim and performance, only begins at the point where the heroic age, which in its origination it is the part of poetry and art to vindicate, ceases, for the reason that we have here the moment when the distinct outlines and prose of life, in its actual conditions, no less than the way they are conceived and represented, come into being. Herodotus does not for instance describe the Greek expedition to Troy, but the Persian wars, and takes pains, in a variety of ways, with tedious research and careful reflection, to base the narrative proposed on genuine knowledge. The Hindoos, indeed we may say the Orientals generally, with almost the single exception of the Chinese, do not possess this instinct of prose sufficiently to produce a genuine history. They invariably digress either into an interpretation and reconstruction of facts of a purely religious character, or such as are fantastic inventions. The element of prose then native to the historical age of any folk may be briefly described as follows.

In the first place, in order that we may have history we must presuppose a common life, whether we consider the same on its religious side, or that of a polity, with its law, institutions, and the like, established on their own account, and possessing originally or in their subsequent modification a validity as laws or conditions of general application.

It is out of such a common life, secondly, that we mark the birth of definite activities for the preservation or change of the same, which may be of universal import, and in fact constitute the end or motive of their continuance, and to complete and carry into effect which we have to presuppose individuals fitted for such a task. These individuals are great and eminent in so far as they show themselves, through their effective personality, in co-operation with the common end, which underlies the ideal notion of the conditions which confront them: they are little when they fail to rise in stature to the demand thus made on their energy: they are depraved when, instead of facing as combatants of the practical needs of the times,10 they are content merely to give free rein to an individual force which is, with its implied caprice, foreign to all such common ends. Where, however, any of such conditions obtain we do not have either a genuine content or a condition of the world such as we established in the first part of our inquiry as essential to the art of poetry. Even in the case of personal greatness the substantive aim of its devotion is to a large or less extent something given, presupposed, and enforced upon it, and to that extent the unity of individuality is excluded, wherein the universal, that is the entire personality should be selfidentical, an end exclusively for itself, an independent whole in short. For however much these individuals discover their aims in their own resources, it is for all that not the freedom or lack of it in their souls and intelligence, in other words the vital manifestation of their personality, but the accomplished end, and its result as operative upon the actual world already there, and essentially independent of such individuality, which constitutes the object of history. And, moreover, from a further point of view we find manifested in the historical condition the play of contingency, that breach between what is implicitly substantive and the relativity of particular events and occurrences, no less than of the specific subjectivity of characters displayed in their personal passions, opinions and fortunes, which in this prosaic mode of life present far more eccentricity and variation than do the wonders of poetry, which through all diversity must remain constant to what is valid in all times and places.

And finally, in respect to the actual execution of affairs within the cognisance of history we find here again the introduction of a prosaic element, if we contrast it with the impulse of genuine poetry, partly in the division asserted by personal idiosyncracy from a consciousness of laws, principles, maxims and so forth, which is thereby necessarily absorbed in the universal condition or fact; and in part also the realization of the ends proposed involve much preparation and arrangement, the means to effect which extend far, and embrace many necessary or subservient relations, which have to be readjusted and adapted, in order to carry out the course proposed, with intelligence, prudence and prosaic circumspection. The work in short cannot be undertaken offhand, but only to a large extent after extensive introduction. The result of this is that the particular acts of execution, which, it is here assumed, come into effect for the one main purpose, are often either wholly contingent in respect to their content, and remain without ideal union, or are asserted under the form of a practical utility regulated by a mind dominated by the aims proposed; in other words, they do not proceed unmediated from the core of free and independent life itself.11

(γγ) The historian then has no right to expunge these prosaic characteristics of his content, or to convert them into others more poetical; his narrative must embrace what lies actually before him and in the shape he finds it without amplification,12 or at least poetical transformation. However much, therefore, it may become a part of his labours to make the ideal significance and spirit of an epoch, a people, or the particular event depicted, the ideal focus and bond which holds all together in one coherent whole, he is not entitled to make either the conditions presented him, the characters or events, wholly subordinate to such a purpose, though he may doubtless remove from his survey what is wholly contingent and without serious significance; he must, in short, permit them to appear in all their objective contingency, dependence and mysterious caprice. No doubt in biography the full animation of personality and an independent unity is conceivably possible, because in such a work the individual, no less than all which proceeds from him and is operative in moulding such a figure, is throughout the focus of the composition. A historical character is, however, exclusively one of two opposed extremes. For although we deduce a unity of subject from the same, none the less from another point of view various events and transactions obtrude, which in part are without any essential ideal connection, and in part come into contact with such individuality without any free co-operation on the part of the same, and to this extent involve the same within the contingency of such an external condition. So, for example, Alexander is without question a personality, pre-eminent above all others of his epoch, and one which, in virtue of its unique forces, falling as they do in accord with contemporary world conditions, becomes engaged in the Persian invasion. The continent of Asia none the less, which Alexander vanquishes, is in the capricious variety of its nationalities a whole united by no necessary bond.13 Historical events pass before him as the bare panorama of purely objective phenomena. And, finally, if the historian adds to his survey his private reflections as a philosopher, attempting thereby to grasp the absolute grounds for such events, rising to the sphere of that divine being, before which all that is contingent vanishes and a loftier mode of necessity is unveiled, he is none the less debarred, in reference to the actual conformation of events, from that exclusive right of poetry, namely, to accept this substantive resolution as the fact of most importance. To poetry alone is the liberty permitted to dispose without restriction of the material submitted in such a way that it becomes, even regarded on the side of external condition, conformable with ideal truth.

(β) Secondly, oratory appears to have a closer affinity with the freedom of art.

(αα) For although the orator avails himself of the opportunity for and content of his effort out of actual life and definite circumstances and opinions, all that he utters remains none the less, in the first place, subject to his free choice. His personal aims and views are immanent therein, in virtue of which he can make the same a complete and living expression of his personality. And, secondly, the development of the subject of his oration and the mode of delivery depends entirely on himself, so that the impression he makes is as though we received in his speech a wholly independent expression of mind. And, finally, it is his vocation not merely to address himself to the trained or ordinary intelligence of his hearers, but to work upon their entire humanity, their emotions, no less than their judgment. The substance of what he has to say and in which he strives to awake interest, is not merely the abstract aspect of it, nor is it this aspect of his main purpose, in the fulfilment of which he invites co-operation, but rather for the most part also a definite and very real thing. For this reason the substance of the orator’s address, while embracing what is essentially substantive in its character, ought equally to grasp his general principle under the form of its specific manifestation, and render the same intelligible to conscious life in the full concrete sense of the term. The orator then must not merely satisfy our understanding with the cogency of his deductions and conclusions, but has it in his power to address the soul itself, to rouse human passion and carry it captive, to absorb the whole attention, and by such means, through all the avenues of spirit, to ravish and convince his audience.

(ββ) Despite, however, such considerations, looked at rightly we find that it is just in the arts of oratory that this apparent freedom is almost wholly subordinate to the rule of practical utility. In other words what confers upon public speaking its unique motive force is not implied in the particular purpose, to promote which the speech is made; we must refer it to the general principle, the laws, rules, axioms which the particular case suggests, and which are already essentially present in this form of universality, partly, as actual laws of the State, partly too as ethical, juristic or religious maxims, emotions, dogmas, and so forth. The particular circumstance and end, which we find here as the point of departure, and this universal are in every respect separate from each other, and this separation is the relation maintained throughout. No doubt the orator intends to make these two aspects unite: what, however, in poetry, in so far as poetry is really present, attests as already from the first accomplished, is present in oratory merely as the personal aim of the orator, the fulfilment of which lies outside the speech itself altogether.

The only alternative we have left us is a process of subsumation, whereby the phenomenon, the actual and defined thing, here the concrete case or end, is not unravelled in immediate unity with the universal as such, and freely from its own substance, but only receives validity by virtue of its dependence upon general principles and in its relation to legislative acts, morality, customs, and the like, which on their own account possess independent stability. It is not the spontaneous life of the fact in its concrete manifestation, but the prosaic division between notion and reality, a mere relation of both to each other and a mere demand for their union, which constitutes the fundamental type under consideration.

Such a process of thought is frequently adopted by the religious teacher. For him religious doctrines, in their widest connotation, and the principles of morality or of philosophy, political or otherwise, which follow in their train, are in fact precisely the object whereto he can refer cases of every conceivable variety; and they are this for the reason that these doctrines have to be accepted, believed and recognized by the religious consciousness as essentially and in their own worth the substance of all particular appearance. No doubt the preacher may at the same time appeal to our heart, may suffer the divine laws to unveil from the depth of soul-life as their source, and face to face with his audience may refer them to such a source. But it is not in their absolutely individual guise that he must necessarily present and assert them; on the contrary, he must bring effective universality to consciousness under precisely this form of commands, promises and maxims of faith. The oratory of courts of law is even a better illustration. Here we find in addition the twofold point of view, that while on the one hand all turns most obviously on the particular case, yet conversely the subsumation of this case to general considerations and laws is equally a necessity. As regards the first aspect, we may remark that the element of prose is already implied in the enforced investigation of the actual facts and the collocation and able reconstruction of all singular circumstances and accidents; a process such as this at once opens our eyes to the poverty involved in this investigation of the truth of such a legal case, no less than the tedious ingenuity engaged in its display, if we contrast it at least with the free creations of poetry. We have in fact to carry our analysis of the concrete facts to a yet further point. Such must not merely be traced in a series that does justice to all features, but every one of such features, no less than the whole case, have to be referred back to the statute accepted from the first as of independent validity. At the same time, even in this prosaic affair, we still have considerable scope for an impression on the heart and emotions. For it is possible so to present the rightness or wrongness of the case under discussion to the imagination that we are no longer bound to acquiesce in the bare knowledge of the facts and a general conviction; on the contrary, the case in its entirety is capable of becoming, by virtue of the style adopted in its exposition, so marked with the characteristics of personality to everyone who hears it, that no one can fail to discover there a personal interest as of something which concerns himself.

Secondly, in the oratorical art, artistic delivery and elaboration is not that which constitutes the ultimate and highest interest of the speaker; he possesses in addition and beyond his art an ulterior aim, that the entire form and working out of his discourse should rather be used exclusively as the most effective means to promote an interest which is outside. From this point of view the audience too have to be influenced not on their own independent account, but the effort is rather to excite emotion and conviction exclusively as a means toward the attainment of the purpose, the fulfilment whereof the orator has proposed from the first. The mode of presentation, therefore, ceases to be an end for itself even to the listener; its claim becomes exclusively that of a means to some particular conviction, or an incentive to definite conclusions or activities.

For these reasons from this point of view also the art loses its freedom of form; it becomes a means to a purpose, to a further demand,14 which, this is a third point, in relation to the consequence, is not satisfied in the actual speech itself and its artistic handling. The composition of poetry on the contrary has no other object than the manifestation and enjoyment of beauty. End and accomplishment reposes here immediately and essentially in the independent work, which for that reason is complete; artistic activity is no means to an essentially ulterior result, but an end which at once is rounded in itself by virtue of its own execution. In oratory art receives merely a position of service to something collateral; the genuine end is therefore not as such consonant with art, but of a practical character, that is to say, instruction, edification, judgment of legal matters or political affairs, and therewith a reference to some matter which has first to happen, or to a decision not yet carried out, but which, however, are in neither case terminated or completed through the resultant effect of the art in question, but can only be so in various ways after a contact with quite other activities. A speech in fact may often conclude with a dissonance, which the hearer has first to resolve as judge, and only then is able to act agreeably with such a verdict. Just as, for example, the oratory of the pulpit starts from the point of the unconverted soul, and in the result makes the hearer pass judgment over his own self and his soul’s condition. In such a case religious conversion is the object of the preacher; but whether such a conversion follows as a result of all the edification and excellence of his eloquent exhortations, and thus the end proposed is carried out, is a point of view which the sermon itself cannot deal with; it must be perforce relegated to subsequent conditions.

(γγ) In all these directions the notion of eloquence will fall rather under the main principle of utility than maintain itself within the free and organized whole of the poetical art-product. In short the orator must necessarily and above all make it his mark to subordinate the whole, no less than the parts, to that purpose in his mind, from which his effort proceeds, a process in which the self-consistent independence of his exposition disappears, and in lieu of which we must assume a relation of service to a definite end that ceases to be of artistic significance. And above all, inasmuch as the object in view is one of practical influence upon human life, he must keep throughout before his mind the nature of the place in which he speaks, the degree of education, the receptive powers, and, in short, the general atmosphere of his audience, that he may not fall short of the practical success desired through an inability to meet the local conditions of the moment, and the idiosyncrasies of his audience. By reason of this very attachment to external conditions it is impossible that either the entirety of his address or its parts can any longer originate in a free artistic activity;15 it will constantly tend in its detailed elaboration to appropriate utilitarian points of association, and be dominated by conceptions of cause and effect, and other categories more proper to science.

(c) And, thirdly, we may, as flowing from the above distinction between what is really poetical and the creations of the historian and the orator, establish the following points pertinent to the poetical composition itself.

(α) We found that in history the element of prose consisted above all in this that however much the content thereof could be ideally substantive and possessed of a downright penetrative power, the actual form of the same was, however, invariably accompanied with many conditions of relative validity, massed together with much that was contingent, and finally often referable to caprice simply as its ground, aspects of immediate objective fact which the historian was not entitled to translate into the terms of a reality of profounder grasp.

(αα) The effort of such a transfiguration is in fact a fundamental desideratum of the poetical art when it, so far as its material is concerned, steps into the arena of history. It is its business in short in such a case to discover the mere ideal core and significance of an event, action, or a national type, a famous historical personality, and as decisively to brush aside aspects of contingency, everything in fact purely incidental or indifferent, which plays round such types or individuals, and stands to them in a purely relative connection. It has then to establish, in the place of the circumstances and traits it rejects, others which reveal the ideal essence of the facts in their clarity, to the intent that in this transfigured presence such shall so discover concrete truth in its fulness that the reason, which has hitherto lain concealed, though implied in them, shall now for the first time assert itself as evolved and declared in complete realization. By this means alone poetry is able in the proposed work to make its content coalesce in the secure unity of a centre, able as such to round and unfold itself in a whole. And this is possible because it not only is operative as a more effective bond between the parts, but also because, without compromising the unity of the whole, all its varied particularity is suffered to assert its claim to an independent impression.

(ββ) Poetry may in this respect make a yet further advance, when, it accepts as its main content, in lieu of the material and significance of the historical fact, some fundamental idea, some human collision in general associated with it in a close or more remote affinity, and employs the historical factum and personages, everything local in short, merely in the guise or garment of individualization. The difficulty to be encountered here is twofold: either the historically ascertained data, when appropriated by the composition, may fall out of line with the fundamental idea; or, conversely, it may be that the poet in some measure retains these data, but also too in essential features moulds them conformably to his purposes, and by doing this work fails to harmonize the element of stability with that of original design which were both essential to our conception of the poetical product. To dispel such an opposition and to reassert the accordant note able to do this is a difficult matter; it is none the less necessary, for objective reality has itself too an unquestionable title to what is essential in the character of its appearance.

(γγ) We may extend the reach of poetry yet further and we shall still find that the demand to be met is the same. In other words, all that the art of poetry represents in external local condition, characterization, actions, passions, situations, conflicts, events, and human destiny, all this material is borrowed, far more so in fact than is generally credited, from the facts of life itself. This being so, poetry here too is on the historical arena; and, consequently, its deviations or variations of such data must, in this field also, find their point of departure in the rational core of the facts in question and the demand of the art to discover for this ideal essence a form that exhibits it with greatest adequacy and life. And this must not be sought for in the poverty of a superficial knowledge, an inability to penetrate what is really vital in fact, or in the moods of caprice and with the craving after the quaint or perverse ingenuities of a spurious originality.

(β) And further, as already stated, oratory is allied to prose on account of the practical end which is thereby proposed, and, to carry out which, it is forced to admit to the full the claims of utility.

(αα) In this respect poetry must take care to detach itself from any end of this kind outside Art’s domain, and the claim of artistic enjoyment simply; that it may not fall into the sphere of prose. For if any purpose of this sort is made to appear of essential importance, as part of the entire conception and presentation, the composition at once descends from that loftier region, in whose free atmosphere it floats on its own account and on no other, and is drawn into that of relation merely. As a result of this we have either a breach made between the fundamental aim of art and the ends of ulterior intendments; or art is used as a means simply, contradicts its substantive notion, and becomes the menial of utility. The edifying effusions of many church hymns are of this character. Particular ideas are simply admitted on religious grounds, and receive a style of composition which is alien to the beauty of poetry. And, speaking generally, poetry, simply as poetry, has no right to edify in a religious sense, or at least exclusively in this sense. If it does so we are carried into a region, which no doubt possesses relationship with both poetry and art, but is for all that distinct from it. We may say the same of teaching generally, ethical instruction, political treatises, or writings of all kinds written for our momentary recreation and enjoyment. All these are objects, to whose attainment the art of poetry is, or can be more than any other, contributory. But such contributions must not enter into the purpose, if the spirit of the work is to assert itself freely in its own character. In the poetical effort it is only what is really poetic, eliminated from all that is foreign to this quality, which must remain paramount as the end proposed and accomplished. And in fact such ulterior aims as the above can be carried out far more appropriately by quite other means.

(ββ) The art of poetry, however, from the converse point of view, should strive to assert no absolute and isolated position; it ought, as a part of life itself, to enter freely into life. Already in the first part of this inquiry we found how many points of contact there were between art and ordinary existence, whose content and phenomenal appearance are repeated in its content and form. In poetry this vital relation to actual existence and its specific circumstances, private or public events, appears with most obvious variety in the so-called poems d’occasion. With a broader interpretation of the expression we may define as such most poetic compositions; in the more narrow and correct meaning of the term, however, we should restrict it to those productions whose origin is traceable to a single event of present time, which it is the express aim of the poet to emphasize, adorn, and celebrate. In this weaving together of the actual threads of life, however, poetry tends once more to decline to a position of dependence; it is therefore by no means unusual for writers on aesthetic to attach a purely subordinate value to poetry of this class in general, although as to a part of it, notably in the case of the lyric, we find here the most famous compositions.

(γγ) The question consequently arises by virtue of what poetry may be enabled to still maintain its independence even in the conflict above described. The answer is simple. It must regard and assert the occasional facts it borrows from life not as its essential aim, while it is itself merely accepted as a means. Rather the reverse process is the right one, which absorbs the material of such reality within its own substance, and informs and elaborates the same conformably to the claims of an unfettered imagination. In other words poetry has nothing to do with the accidental or incidental fact as such. This material supplies the external opportunity, that is the stimulus which prompts the poet to draw upon his own profounder penetration and more transparent mode of presentment: by this means he creates from his own resources, as something newborn, that which, without such mediation, would have, in the plain and blunt particular case, wholly failed to impress us with the free spirit he communicates.

(γ) In conclusion then we may affirm that every genuine work of poetry is an essentially infinite organism.16 In content rich, it unfolds this content under a mode of appearance which is adapted to it. It is permeated with a principle of unity, but not one referable to the form of utility, which subordinates the particular to itself in an abstract relation, but rather one that absorbs the same in the singularity relevant to one identical and entirely vital self-consistency, in which the whole, without any visible intention, is sphered within one rounded and essentially self-enclosed completeness. It is indeed replete with the materia of the visible world, but is not on that account placed, either in relation to its content or determinate existence, under a condition of dependence to any one circle of life. Rather it freely creates out of its own plenitude, striving to clothe the ideal notion of its material in its genuine manifestation as truth, and to bring the world of external fact into reconciled accord with its own most ideal substance.

I have already discussed at considerable length, in the first part of this work, the talent and genius, the enthusiasm and originality of the artist. I will consequently merely touch upon one or two points in the present reference to the art of poetry which appear of importance, if we contrast this activity as effective here with that operative in the plastic arts and music.

(a) The architect, sculptor, painter and musician have to deal with an entirely concrete and sensuous material, in and through which each has to elaborate his creations. The limitations of this material condition the specific form that the type of the conception no less than the mode of artistic execution assume. The more fixed and predetermined the general lines of his definition are upon which the artist has to concentrate himself, the more specialized becomes the talent required for the assertion of the same in any one and no other mode of presentment; and we may add in the powers of technical execution which accompany it. The talents adapted to the poetic art, regarding the same from the point of view of an ideal envisagement in a specific materia, is subordinated in a less degree to such conditions; it is consequently more open to universal practice, and in this respect more independent. The need here at least is merely that of a gift for imaginative creation. Its limitation is confined merely to this, namely, that for the reason that this art is expressed in language, it has to guard itself on the one hand from deliberate rivalry with external objects in their sensuous completeness, in the form, that is, where we find the plastic artist apprehends his subject-matter in its external configuration: and, from a further point of view, it is unable to rest in the unspoken ideality, the emotional tones of which constitute the realm of music. In these respects the problem proposed to the poet, if we contrast him with artists in other arts, is at once more facile and more difficult It is more easy, because, although the poet, in the poetical elaboration of speech, must possess a trained talent, he is spared the relatively more manifold task of triumph over technical difficulties necessary in the other arts. It is more difficult because, just in proportion as poetry is less able to complete the objective envisagement, it is compelled to seek some compensation for this loss on the side of sense in the genuine core of Art’s own ideality, in the depth of imagination and a really artistic mode of conception.

(b) For this reason the poet is, in the second place, constrained to penetrate into all the wealth of the spiritual content, and to lay bare to the vision of mind what is concealed in its depths. For however much in the other arts, too, the ideal must shine forth through its corporeal manifestation, and does so in life itself shine forth, yet the medium of speech remains that most open to intelligence, and the means most adequate to its revelation. It is the one medium able to grasp and declare everything whatever that flows through or is present in consciousness, whether regarded in its ascent or profundity. In consequence of this the poet finds himself confronted with difficulties which the other arts are not called upon to overcome or satisfy to the like degree. In other words, for the very reason that poetry is actually operative in the world of idea or imagination itself, and is not concerned with fashioning for its images an objective existence independent of such ideality, it is placed in an element or sphere in which the religious, scientific and everyday consciousness are active; it must therefore take care to make no excursion into the domain or mode of conception proper to any of these, or to get mixed up with them. No doubt in the case of every art we find points of contact with other arts. Artistic creation of every kind proceeds from one mind or spirit, which comprehends in itself all spheres of self-conscious life. But with the other arts the distinction of conception in each case is in its mode complete, for the reason that this, in its ideal creation, persists throughout in permanent relation to the execution of its images in a definite sensuous material, and consequently is absolutely distinct, no less from the forms of the religious consciousness, than it is from the thinking of science and the intelligence of ordinary life. Poetry, on the contrary, avails itself, in its manner of objective communication, of the very means adopted in these spheres of mental activity, that is to say, human speech; it finds itself, consequently, otherwise placed than are the plastic arts and music, which occupy a different field of conception and expression.

(c) Thirdly, we have the final demand made upon the poet for the most profound and manifold transfusion of the subject-matter of his creations with the animating soul of life, because it is his art which is capable of absorbing most profoundly the entire fulness of the spiritual content. The plastic artist, in a similar way, must apply himself to a transfusion of ideal expression in the external form of architectonic, plastic and the forms peculiar to painting. The musician must likewise rivet his attention on the inner soul concentrated in emotion and passion and their outpouring in melodic expression. In both cases the artist must be steeped in the most ideal intention and substance of his content. But the sphere of the poet’s creative activity extends yet further, for the reason that he has not merely to elaborate an ideal world of soul-life and the self-conscious mind. He has, in addition, to discover for this ideal realm an external mode of envisagement fitted thereto, a mode by virtue of which that ideal totality shines through in more irresistible perfection than is possible in the case of other arts. It is incumbent upon him to know human existence, both as soul-life and objective life, to receive into his inmost being the full breadth of the world and its shows, and to have felt through it there, penetrated, enlarged, deepened and revealed to himself all it implies. Only after that, and in order that he may find it in his power to create, as from his own spiritual experience outwards, a free whole, — ay, even in the case where he restricts his effort to a comparatively narrow and particular range, — he must have liberated himself from all embarrassment with his subject-matter, whether of a technical18 character or otherwise, able in short to survey the ideal and external aspects thereof with the same free glance. From the point of view of instinctive creative vigour19 we may in this respect pre-eminently praise the Mahomedan poets of the East. The starting-point in such compositions is a freedom which, even in the moment of passion, remains aloof from such passion, and in all the variety of its interests retains exclusively throughout the one substance as its veritable core, in contrast to which everything else appears small and transitory, and nothing of finality is left either to passion or lust. This is a philosophical outlook, a relation of spirit to the facts of the world, which comes more readily to age than youth. For in old age no doubt the interests of life are still present; but they are not there with the urgency of youthful passion, but rather in the guise of shadows, and to this extent are more readily conformable to ideal relations such as Art demands. In opposition to the ordinary view that youth with its warmth and vigour is the fairest season for poetic creation, we may rather, at least from this point of view, maintain just the opposite, that the ripest season belongs to the autumn of old age, provided that it is able to preserve its energies of outlook and emotion. It is only to a blind old man, Homer, that we ascribe those miraculous poems which have come down to us under that name. And we may also affirm of our Goethe that only in old age, after he had fully succeeded in liberating his genius from all restricting limitations of sense, that he gave us his most exalted creations.20

1 That is, the essential notion (Begriff) of Art generally.

2 Substantiellen, i.e., the form that most corresponds to its essence.

3 Theoretisch. Hegel doubtless has the Greek word in his mind. It is a Bildung for the mind rather than with a view to action. It assumes contemplation rather than volition.

4 It is not quite clear whether Hegel means by Bedürfniss the need of spiritual life, or the profounder demand of reality. It might stand for either.

5 That is, the Vernünft.

6 Das individualisirte Vernünftige, i.e., reason as realized in concrete personality.

7 In seiner Gediegenheit und schlagenden Fassung. Gediegenheit here thorough grasp. Schlagenden may possibly mean arresting character of the conception rather than definite, precise.

8 That is, the notion.

9 By aus dem Geiste it is quite possible that there is no reference to individual genius. In that case the translation would be “in terms of human intelligence,” i.e., from the resources of human reason.

10 This seems to be the meaning of die Sache der Zeit.

11 Lit., “They do not come forth from self-substantive and immediately free vitality (Lebendigkeit).” Lebendigkeit is here the ideal and creative force or bond of soul-life as above described.

12 The German word would imply here an interpretation of symbolic or at least ideal significance.

13 This I presume is the general meaning of the sentence: Asien aber, das er besiegt, ist in der vielfachen Willkühr seiner Einzelnen Völkerschaften nur ein zufälliges Ganzes.

14 Ein Sollen.

15 It is possible that too much stress is laid on this line of difference. The fundamental difference between oratory and poetry is that of form. At least it can hardly be denied that the power of the orator to meet the demands of local conditions is a vital feature of his art, that in this respect a Demosthenes is greater than Burke. It is surely a mistake to assume that such limitations in themselves or necessarily are an obstacle to creative genius. It is rather the sign of supreme oratorical power that it can mould them and command them in conjunction with its more majestic spirit. In this lies an essential part of the art itself, just as a sculptor or a painter, such as Tintoret in the S. Rocco Scuola, dominates the defects of local condition.

16 Infinite, that is, not in the temporal sense, but as a complete and self-realized whole.

17 Hegel calls it “the poetising subjectivity”; that is, the personal activity essential to poetic composition.

18 Practischen.

19 This appears to be the meaning of des Naturells.

20 This is perhaps less true of Goethe than it is of either Milton or Shakespeare. It is possible that Hegel thought more highly of the second part of “Faust” as art than do the majority of modern critics. But the truth is there, if subject to a good deal of qualification in respect to certain aspects of poetry. As Meredith says:

“Verily now is our season of seed,

Now in our Autumn.”

And Meredith was not one to do less than justice to the superb Dream of imaginative youth.

THE EXPRESSION OF POETRY

The field of vision which first will occupy our attention, but the boundless expanse of which we can only traverse with a few general observations, is that which concerns the poetic generally, the content no less than the mode of conception and organic association adapted to the poetic work of art. This background will help to emphasize the second aspect of our subject, which is poetic expression more strictly, the idea in the ideal objectivity of the word appropriated by it as symbol of the image, and the melodious vehicle of its speech.

We may infer the nature of the relation between poetic expression generally and the mode of presentment proper to the other arts from our previous examination of the characteristics of the poetic art. Language and the sounds of words are neither a symbol of spiritual conceptions, nor an adequate mode of projecting ideality under the condition of spatial objectivity in the sense applicable to the corporeal forms of sculpture and painting, nor yet an intonation in musical sound of the entire soul. They are an abstract sign simply. As the vehicle of the poetic image or conception, however, it is necessary that this side also, in theory no less than deliberate elaboration, appear as distinct from the kind of expression appropriate to prose.

We may for this purpose emphasize with more detail three main points of distinction.

Our first point is this, that although poetic expression is throughout exclusively embodied in articulate words, and apparently as such is simply related to human speech, yet in so far as the words themselves are merely abstract signs representative of ideas, the true source of poetic speech is not to be discovered in the selection of particular words, and in the manner they are associated in sentences and elaborated phrases, nor in harmonious rhythm, rhyme and so forth, but in the type of conception employed. We have, in short, to look for our point of departure for the constructive use of expression in the choice of the idea or image, find our first and foremost question will be what kind of conception will give us an expression suitable to poetry. Secondly, however, it remains the fact that the imaginative idea essentially pertinent to poetry is exclusively made objective in language. We have consequently to investigate the expression of speech according to its purely verbal aspect, in the light of which poetic words are distinguishable from those of prose, poetic phrases from those of our ordinary life and prosaic thought, abstracting in the first instance the mere sound of them to our sense of hearing.

Finally, we have to recognize the fact that poetry is a mode of articulate speech, the sounding word, which in its temporal duration no less than its actual sound, must receive a definite configuration, one that implies the presence of time-measure, rhythm, melodious sound and rhyme.

What in the plastic arts the sensuous visible form expressed by means of stone and colour is, or what in the realm of music animating strains of harmony and melody are, this — we must repeatedly insist on the fact — can only be, in respect to poetic expression — the idea or image itself. The force of the poet’s creation centres consequently, in the fact that the art moulds a content in an ideal medium, and without bringing before us the actual forms of external Nature and the progressions of musical sound; by doing so, therefore, it translates the objective presence accepted by the other arts into an ideal form, which Spirit or intelligence expresses for the imagination under the mode which is and must remain that of our conscious life.

A distinction of this very character was already insisted on when we had occasion previously to establish a distinction between the earliest type, of poetry and its later modes of reconstruction from the data of prose.

(a) Imaginative poetry in its origin is not as yet a consciously distinct form from those extremes of ordinary conscious life, one of which brings everything to vision under the mode of immediate and therewith contingent singularity, without grasping the ideal essence implied therein, and the manifestation of the same; while the other, in one direction, differentiates concrete existence into its various characteristics, making use of abstract generalization, and in another avails itself of the scientific faculty as the correlating and connecting focus of such abstractions. The idea is only poetical in so far as it holds these extremes in unviolable mediation, and thereby is able to maintain a position of genuine stability midway between the vision of ordinary consciousness and that of abstract thought.

In general terms we may define the poetic imagination as plastic1 in so far as it brings before our vision concrete reality rather than the abstract generalization, and in the place of contingent existence an appearance of such a kind that we recognize what is substantive immediately in it by virtue of its embodiment itself and its individuality, and as inseparable from it, and by virtue of this are able to grasp the concrete conception-of the fact in question no less than its determinate existence as one and the same vital whole reposing in the ideal medium of the imagination. In this respect we find a fundamental distinction between that whereof the plastic or constructive idea is the source and all that is otherwise made vivid to us through other means of expression. The same truth will appear to us, if we analyse what we mean, by mere reading. We understand what the letters mean, which are indicative points for articulate utterance, by the mere act of sight, and without being further obliged to listen to their sound. Only the illiterate reader will find it necessary to speak aloud the separate words that he may understand their sense. But in the case of poetry just what seems to be here the mark of stupidity is an indication of beauty and excellence. Poetry is not satisfied with an abstract effort of apprehension, nor does it bring objects before us as we find them in the form of reflection and in the unimaginative generalization of our memory. It helps us to approach the essential notion in its positive existence, the generic as clothed in its specific individuality. In the view of ordinary common sense I understand by language, both in its impression on my hearing or sight, the meaning in its immediacy, in other words, without receiving its image before the mind. The phrases, for instance, “the sun,” or “in the morning,” possess each of them no doubt a distinct sense; but neither the Dawn or the Sun are themselves made present to our vision. When, however, the poet says: “When now the dawning Eos soared heavenwards with rosy fingers,” here without question we have the concrete fact brought home to us. The poetical expression adds, however, yet more, for it associates with the object recognized a vision of the same, or we should rather say the purely abstract relation of knowledge vanishes, and the real definition takes its place. In the same way take the phrase, “Alexander conquered the Persian empire.” Here, no doubt, so far as content is concerned, we have a concrete conception; the many-sided definition of it, however, expressed here in the word “victory,” is concentrated in a featureless and pure abstraction, which fails to image before us anything of the appearance and reality of the exploit accomplished by Alexander. This truth applies to every kind of similar expression. We recognize the bare fact; but it remains pale and dun, and from the point of view of individual existence undetermined and abstract. The poetic conception consequently embraces the fulness of the objective phenomenon as it essentially exists, and is able to elaborate the same united with the essential ideality of the fact in a creative totality.

What follows as a primary result of this is that it is of interest to the imagination to linger near the external characteristics of the fact, to the extent at least that it seeks to express the same in its positive reality, deems this as essentially worthy of contemplation and insists on this very attitude.

Poetry is consequently in its manner of expression descriptive Description is, however, not the right word for it. We are, in fact, accustomed to accept as descriptive, and in contrast to the abstract definition, in which a content is otherwise brought home to our intelligence, much that the poet passes by, so that from the point of view of ordinary speech poetic composition can only appear as a roundabout way and a useless superfluity. The poet must, however, manage to bring his imagination to bear upon the explication of the actual phenomenon he is attempting to depict with a vital interest.2 In this way, for instance, Homer adds a descriptive epithet to every hero. So Achilles is the swift-footed, the Achaeans bright-greaved, Hector as of the glancing helm, Agamemnon the lord of peoples, and so forth. The name is no doubt descriptive of a personality, but the name alone brings nothing further to our vision. To have some distinct idea of this we require further attributes. We have in fact similar epithets attached by Homer to other objects, which are essential to our vision of the epic, such as sea, ships, sword and others, epithets which seize and place before us an essential quality of the particular object, depicting it more precisely, and which enable us to apprehend the fact in its concrete appearance.

Secondly, we must distinguish such reconstruction of actual facts from definition wholly imagined. This offers a further point of view for discussion. The real image merely places before us the fact in the reality it possesses. The expression of the poet’s imagination, on the contrary, does not restrict itself to the object in its immediate appearance; it proceeds to depict something over and above this, by means of which the significance of the former picture is made clear to our mind. Metaphors, illustrations, similes become in this way an essential feature of poetic creation. We have thereby a kind of veil attached to the content, which concerns us, and which, by its difference from it, serves in part as an embellishment, and in part as a further unfolding of it, though it necessarily fails to be complete, for the reason that it only applies to a specific aspect of this content. The passage in which Homer compares Ajax, on his refusing to fly, to an obstinate ass is an illustration. To a pre-eminent degree oriental poetry possesses this splendour and wealth in pictorial comparisons. There are two main reasons of this. First, its symbolic point of view makes such a search for aspects of affinity inevitable, and in the universality of its centres of significance it offers a large field of concrete phenomena capable of comparison; secondly, on account of the sublimity of its predominant outlook there is a tendency to apply the entire variety of all that is most brilliant and glorious in its motley show to the embellishment of the One Supreme, which is held before the mind as the sole One to be exalted. This object of the imagination, moreover, is not to be apprehended as merely the work of fanciful caprice or comparison, possessing as such nothing in it essentially actual and present. On the contrary the transmutation of all particular existence into further existence in this central idea grasped and clothed by the imagination is rather to be understood as equivalent to the assertion that there is nothing else essentially present, nothing that otherwise can put forward a claim to substantive reality. The belief in the world as we apprehend it with the vision of ordinary common sense is converted into a belief in the imagination, for which the only world that verily exists is that which the poetic consciousness has created. Conversely we have the romantic imagination, which is ready enough to express itself in metaphor, because in its vision what is external is for the essentially secluded life of the soul only accepted as something incidental, something that is unable adequately to express its own reality. To reclothe this consequently unreal externality with profound emotion, with all the fulness of detail envisioned, or with the play of humour upon the conjunction of such opposites is an impulse, which constrains and charms romantic poetry to ever novel discoveries. The object of importance here is not so much to make the fact clear and distinct to the vision; on the contrary the metaphorical employment of these outlying phenomena is itself the aim proposed. The emotion of the poet concentrates itself as the centre, which the environment enriches with its wealth; it absorbs this as part of itself, adapts it with genius and wit to its adornment, steeps it in its own life, and finds in this movement to and fro, this elaboration and self-reflection of its creation its own source of delight.

(b) Secondly, we have the contrast present between the poetic mode of conception and that of prose. The thing of importance in the latter case is not that which is imaged, but the significance as such which constitutes the content. It is on account of the latter that the idea or image becomes a mere means to bring the content before the mind. The composition of prose is therefore neither compelled to place the more detailed reality of its objects before our vision, nor to summon before us, as is the case with the metaphorical mode of expression previously described, another idea which carries us beyond the immediate object to be expressed. No doubt it is also necessary in prose to indicate in firm and distinct outlines the positive appearance of objects; but this is so not on account of their figurative character,3 but to meet a specific and practical purpose. Generally speaking we may therefore affirm accuracy to be from one point of view the ruling principle of prose composition, and from another a clear definition and intelligibility of statement. In contrast to this the language of metaphor and imagery is in general and relatively less clear and more inaccurate. For in that mode of direct expression, such as we have presented by our first form of the poetic conception, the fact in its simplicity is carried away from our immediate apprehension of it as a mere object into the actual world of concrete fact, and we have to recognize it as a part of this, while in that second and more oblique form some phenomenon of affinity merely and one even aloof from the essential significance of our subject is made present to us. We do not, therefore, wonder that prosaic commentators of our poets have no easy task when they seek to separate, by means of their scientific analyses, the image from the significance, to extract their abstract content from the vital form, and thereby expound poetic modes of composition to the prosaic mind.

In poetry this accuracy, this rigour in unfolding the content as we find it in its simplicity, is not alone the essential principle. On the contrary, though prose is forced to confine its ideas on parallel lines of almost mathematical precision with the nature of its content, poetry introduces us to a different sphere altogether, that is, the visible appearance of the content itself, or other natural phenomena related to it. For it is just this objective reality which in poetry ought to appear, and while unquestionably from one point of view revealing that content, yet at the same time from another it has to liberate itself from the purely abstract content, it being essentially an object of the art to direct attention to its actual existence in the visible world, and to arouse the interest of mind in the forms of life itself.

(c) If these three essential requirements of poetry are conditioned by an age, in which the accuracy of the prosaic mind is become the ordinary type of conscious life, the art, so far as its figurative characteristics are concerned, is placed in a more difficult position. That is to say, in such an epoch the type of penetration exercised by conscious life is generally a separation of emotion and the ordinary outlook from scientific thought, which either converts the ideal and external material of feeling and perception into a stimulus of knowledge and volition simply, or into a plastic medium subservient to observation and action. In such a sphere poetry calls for energies of more definite purpose in order that it may free itself from the abstraction of the prevailing mental attitude and enter into the world of concrete life. Where, however, such a goal is realized, not only do we find that this breach between thinking, which makes for generalization, and perception and feeling, which grasp the particular, vanishes, but these last-mentioned modes of conscious life are, together with their subject-matter and content, at the same time freed from their exclusive relation of service; and the process culminates in a victorious reconciliation of such modes with what is essential universality. Inasmuch, however, as both the modes of poetic and prosaic thought and general outlook are united in one and the same conscious life, we find in it indications of trouble and derangement, even possibly an actual conflict between the two, one which, as the poetry of our times testifies, only genius of the highest order is able successfully to deal with. Added to this there are other collateral hindrances, which I only propose to define now, and that briefly, in their relation to the figurative aspect already discussed. In other words, if the prosaic intelligence takes the place of that creative imagination which previously obtained, then and in that case the rejuvenescence of the poetic faculty, both in all that is associated with the positive expression of facts and what is metaphorical, readily offers the semblance of artificiality, which even where it falls short of actual purpose, is only with great difficulty reconciled with that directness of immediate truth which is demanded. Much in fact which was still fresh in former times, through repeated usage, and the habits thus originated, has itself become gradually a custom and a part of prosaic life. Moreover, where poetry strives after novelties in its composition, we often find that, despite of itself, in its figurative expressions and descriptions, even where it escapes the charge of exaggeration and an excess of such material, it none the less leaves an impression of artificiality, over nicety, a straining after what is piquant and select, work incompatible with a simple and healthy outlook and state of feeling. Such work tends to regard objects in an artificial light and reckons on mere effect. Consequently it will not permit their natural lighting and colour. Defects of this nature are still more obvious in cases where, as a rule, the metaphorical type of imaginative composition is exchanged4 for the more direct, and our poet is driven to outbid the forces of prose; and, in order to assert an originality, plunges into the subtleties of or the fishing for effects which have still some appearance of freshness.

Inasmuch as the poetic imagination is distinct in its operation from that of all other artists in virtue of the fact that it necessarily clothes its images in words, and communicates the same through human speech, it becomes imperative that throughout this process it should endeavour to co-ordinate all its ideas, in the form which with most completeness will disclose them, through the means articulate speech thus places at its disposal. And, in short, we may affirm that the poetic content only assumes the form of poetry in its restricted sense after it has been actually embodied and rounded off in the vehicle of words.

This literary aspect of the art of poetry would readily supply us with a boundless field of discursive observation and logical argument, which I must, however, pass over in order that I may reserve space for more weighty problems which lie before us. I merely propose, therefore, to touch very briefly on a few fundamental points.

(a) Human art should in all its associations place us on a ground quite other than that we confront in ordinary life, or indeed in our religious consciousness, active life, or the speculations of philosophy. This is possible on the side of literary or verbal expression only in so far as another mode of speech is adopted than that obtaining in those other spheres. Art has therefore not only, from one point of view, to avoid that in its instrument of expression which will fail to rise above the trivialities of ordinary speech and ordinary prose, but it must, furthermore, avoid falling into the tone and manner of religious edification and philosophical research. Above all it must keep aloof from the precise analyses and methods of the scientific faculty, the categories of pure thinking as we find these illustrated in the logical forms of judgment and deduction. These at once remove art from the imaginative realm to another region altogether. But in all these respects it still remains a difficult matter to determine the lines of boundary on which we may actually affirm that poetry ends and prose begins. And in fact we may admit absolute precision and confidence of statement to be impossible from the nature of the case.

(b) If we pass now to a discussion of the particular means which poetic-speech can appropriate as instrumental to its task the following points appear to me pregnant and suggestive.

(α) First, we find particular words and exclamations5 that are obviously peculiar to poetry, whether they be used to ennoble it, or to introduce the vulgarity and excess of comedy. We find a similar novelty in the specific collocation of various words or turns of expression. In such a field poetry is no doubt entitled on the one hand to borrow from an obsolete nomenclature, obsolete at least in everyday speech, and on the other to declare itself as pre-eminently an innovator, moulding novel modes of speech. Such a field, provided only the vital genius of the language is preserved, supplies material for astonishing boldness of invention.

(β) Secondly, we have the problem of verbal order. It is here that we meet with those so-called figures of speech, in so far as, we should add, the same have reference to verbal embodiment as such. The use of these, however, easily degenerates into rhetoric and declamation in the bad sense of these terms; the vitality of individual character is destroyed where we find that such forms substitute a fixed and artificial mode of expression for the genuine impulse of feeling or passion, and thereby offer the very opposite to the personal, laconic and broken utterance required, the utterance whose emotional depth is incapable of saying much, and for this reason, in romantic poetry especially, is of great effect as a presentment of suppressed6 states of soul. But generally speaking we may admit that the relative order of words is an instrument of the external form of poetry of quite extraordinary resource.

(γ) Thirdly, we have still to draw attention to the construction of periods,7 which essentially embrace all the other aspects of composition and which, by means of either their simple or more involved course, their restless dislocations and distortions, or their quick onward motion, their acceleration and their flood contribute so materially to the reflection of such soul experience. And, in short, it is essential that the external presentment in speech should mirror and assume a character similar to the ideality of such experience in all its variety.

(c) In the application of the means of speech above considered it will be useful to distinguish once more the several stages of poetic thought to which they correspond and to which we drew attention when we considered the nature of poetic conception or composition.

(α) Poetic diction can, in the first instance, appear with real vitality among a people and at an epoch when the general speech is not as yet perfected, but in fact only by virtue of its poetry receives its real development. At such a time the utterance of the poet, as generally expressive of soul-life, is from the first a real novelty, which stirs admiration on its own account by revealing in its speech what remained previously unveiled. This new creation appears as the marvel of a gift and personal power. The weight of custom has not as yet fallen upon it. It enables that which is buried in the depths of the human heart for the first time to freely unfold itself before the amazement of men. Under such conditions it is the native force of the expression, the creation of the fact of speech, not so much the varied and craftful elaboration of the same, which is the main point. Diction here remains exceedingly simple. In such early times it is indeed impossible that we should have either much fluency of idea or any varied versatility of expression. The subject-matter of such poetry is depicted with an artless directness, which has not yet attained the delicate nuances, transitions, mediatory matter and other advantages of a later artistic culture. In such an age the poet is in fact the first person to give an utterance to the national voice, to express ideas in speech, and thereby to encourage the imagination itself. Speech is, if we may so express it, not yet inseparable from ordinary life, and poetry can still freely, with an effect of freshness, avail itself of all that in later times, as the speech of common life, gradually is severed from art. In this respect, for example, Homer’s type of expression is to the modern man barely distinguishable from ordinary speech. For every idea we have the direct word8; metaphorical expressions are comparatively rare; and although the poem is composed with a close attention to detail, the speech itself remains very simple indeed. In a similar way Dante was able to create for his own nation a vital form of poetic expression, and asserted in this, as in other respects, the dauntless energy of his creative genius.

(β) When, however — this is a further point — the circle of ideas enlarges with the appearance of methodical modes of thought the ways in which idea is associated with idea increase, and in this very process the ability to use it increases also, and the expression of speech is elaborated in all the fluency of which it is capable. When this is so the position of poetry on the side of verbal expression is wholly changed. In other words, we have now a nation possessing the fully developed prose speech of everyday life, and poetic expression must now, in order to retain its interest, swerve aside from ordinary parlance, and receive a resurrection under the re-moulding energy of genius.9 In our daily life the contingency of the moment is the motive of speech. In the creation of a work of art, however, we must have deliberate circumspection10 in the place of instantaneous feeling; even the spirit of enthusiasm must be judiciously restrained. The creation of genius should be permitted to unfold itself from the artistic repose,11 and become informed under the prevailing temper of an intelligence12 that surveys the whole with clarity. In former times this spirit of concentration and tranquillity is to be inferred from the fact and utterance of poetry itself. In a more recent age, on the contrary, the nature of the composition and execution has itself to enforce the distinction which obtains between the expression of poetry and prose. In this respect poems which belong to epochs in which we find already an elaborated prose diction differ essentially from those of times and peoples in which the art originates.

The executive talent of a poet can be carried so far in this direction that the elaboration of formal expression becomes the main thing, and the aim is less directed to ideal truth than to formal construction, a polished elegance and mere effect of the composition under its literary aspect. We have then a situation, in which, as already observed, rhetoric and declamation are elaborated in a manner destructive to the ideal vitality of the poetic spirit. The formative intelligence asserts itself under the principle of purposiveness, and a selfconsciously regulated art disturbs that more genuine effect, which ought to present the appearance of ingenuous openness and simplicity. Entire nations have, with the rarest exceptions, failed to produce any type of poetic creation other than this rhetorical one. The Latin language, even in Cicero, still preserves a genuine ring of naïveté and naturalness. With the Latin poets, however, such as Virgil, Horace and the rest, we already feel that Art is to a real extent nothing but artifice, elaboration of effect on its own account. We recognize a prosaic content, which is merely set off with an external embellishment. We find a poet who, in the absence of original genius, endeavours to discover, in the sphere of literary versatility and rhetoric effects, some compensation for that which in genuine power and effect of creation and composition he fails to possess. France too, in the so-called classical period of its literature, has produced poetry very similar, a poetical style to which didactic poems and satires are singularly appropriate. Rhetorical figures of speech in all their variety are here in their rightful place. The exposition remains for all that, as a whole, prosaic; and the literary expression is at its best rich in image and embellishment, much in the style of Herder’s or Schiller’s diction. These last-mentioned writers, however, availed themselves of this style of literary expression mainly in the interests of prose composition; and by the weightiness of their reflections and the happy use of such a style knew how to win both a critical assent and a hearty approval. The Spanish poets also are not wholly free from the ostentation inseparable from the too self-conscious diction of art. And, as a general rule, Southern nations, such as the Spaniards and the Italians, and previously to them the Mohammedan Arabs and Persians, are conspicuous for a wealth and tedious prolixity of image and simile. With the ancients, more especially in the case of Homer, the flow of expression is characterized by smoothness and tranquillity. With the nations above mentioned, on the contrary, we have a vision of life gushing forth13 in a flood which, even where the emotions are in other respects at rest, is ever intent upon expatiation, and owing to this expressly volitional effort of the will is dominated by an intelligence which at one time is visible in abrupt parentheses, at another in subtle generalization, at another in the playful conjunction of its sallies of wit and humour.

(γ) Genuine poetic expression in short is as far removed from all rhetorical declamation as above described as it is from all ostentation and witty conceits of diction, in so far at least as such defects do injury to the ideal truth of Nature, and the claims of the content are forgotten in the verbal form and expression of the composition. It is, however, possible, despite of this, that the author’s free enjoyment in his work declare itself with real beauty. In a word that aspect of the composition we define as formal diction ought not to be treated on its own and independent account alone, or as an aspect of first and even exclusive importance. And, generally speaking, in this analysis of the composition of poetry under its formative aspect, we repeat that what is the product of careful thought must not lose the appearance of genuine spontaneity: everything should impress us as though it had of itself blossomed from the ideal germ or heart of the subject-matter.

Our third and final aspect of poetic expression is necessitated by the fact that the imagination of the poet does not merely invest ideas in words, but does so in the form of the uttered speech; and by doing so he consequently enters the domain wherein our senses are made aware of the actual sounds and music of speech. We are thus introduced to versification. Versified prose may give us verses, but that is not necessarily poetry. We have a parallel case in the merely poetic expression of a composition in other respects prosaic with its result of poetic prose simply. Yet for all that metre or rhyme is an essential demand of poetry, bringing, as it were, a perfume of its own to the senses; nay, it is even more essential than a richly imaginative and so-called beautiful diction.

And in truth the artistic elaboration of this sensuous medium14 unfolds to us — it is the very demand of the art itself — another realm, another field, which we only really enter after having left behind us the prose of ordinary life, whether viewed as action or as literary composition. The poet is thereby compelled to move in a literary atmosphere outside the boundary of everyday speech, and to shape his compositions with an exclusive regard to the rules and requirements of Art. It is therefore only a superficial theory which would banish all versification on the ground that it contradicts natural expression. It is true that Lessing, in his hostility to the false pathos of the French Alexandrine metre, attempted, more particularly in tragedy, to introduce a form of prose speech as most appropriate. Both Schiller and Goethe have, in the more stormy works of their youth, and under the natural impulse of compositions carrying a greater surfeit of content, adopted the same principle. But Lessing himself, in his Nathan, finally returns once more to the iambic. And in the same way with his Don Carlos Schiller deserted the old path. Goethe too was so little satisfied with the earlier prosaic treatment of his Iphigeneia and Tasso, that he transferred them to art’s more proper domain, remoulding them both from the point of view of expression and prosody in that purer form, wherein these compositions continue and will continue to excite our admiration.

No doubt the artificiality of the verse measure or the recurrent echoes of rhyme has the appearance of an unyielding15 bond between spiritual ideas and the sensuous medium, more rigorous indeed than colour in painting. External objects and the human form are coloured in Nature, and the colourless is an arbitrary abstraction. The idea, on the contrary, in association with the sounds of human speech, which are employed in the wholly capricious symbols of their utterance, possess only a distant or no ideal thread of connection at all. This being so, the exacting demand of the prosodical rules will very readily appear as a fetter to the imagination, in virtue of which it is no longer possible for the poet to communicate his ideas in the precise form in which they float upon his phantasy. The inference is natural that although the stream of rhythm and the music of rhyme exercises upon us as an unquestionable fascination, it is nevertheless not unfrequently and too much so the demand of this very charm to our senses that the finest poetic feeling and idea should be sacrificed. But the objection for all that will not hold water. In other words it is not true that versification is simply an obstruction to spontaneous movement. A genuine artistic talent throughout moves in its sensuous material as in its native element, which so far from being oppressive or a hindrance acts as a stimulus and a support. And in fact we find that all really great poets move with freedom and confidence in the measure, rhythm or rhyme they have created; and it is only when they are translated that our artistic sense is frequently pained or shocked at the attempt to retrace their rhythm and melody. Moreover it is part of the liberality of the art that the very circumstances of the restraint, involving much change, concentration or expansion of the ideas expressed, should suggest to our poet new thoughts, incidents and creations, which, apart from such difficulties, had never crossed his mind. But in truth quite apart from this relative advantage this sensuous and determinate form of being — in the case of poetry the melodious chain of words — is once for all essential to art. It is absolutely necessary that the result should not remain in the formless and undefined stream that we have in the immediate contingency of ordinary conversation. It must appear in the vital design and elaboration of art. And although this form no doubt in the music of poetry may sound too as a purely external instrument, it has nevertheless to be treated as an end on its own account, and as such as an essentially harmonious self-defined whole. This attention, which is due to the medium of sense, contributes, as in Art universally, and in the interest of seriousness,16 yet another point of view where we find this very austerity vanishes; both poet and listener feel it no more. They are lifted into a region of exhilarating charm and grace.

In painting and sculpture the artist is given the form in its material and spatial limitations for the portrayal and colouring of human limbs, rocks, trees, clouds and flowers. In architecture also the requirements and objects of the buildings proposed dictate more or less the defined shape given to walls, towers and roofs. In the same-way music already possesses stable definition in the fundamental laws of harmony. In the art of poetry, however, the sound of language to our aural sense is, in the first instance, unbridled;17 the poet has consequently to regulate such absence of rule within objective limits, and to outline a more stable conture, a more definite framework of sound for his conceptions, their structure and their objective beauty.

Just as in musical declamation the rhythm and melody should accept and adapt itself to the nature of the content, versification is also a kind of music, which, at its own distance, is capable of essentially re-echoing the mysterious, but none the less definite, course and character of the ideas. Agreeably with this the verse-measure ought to reflect the general tone and, as it were, the spiritual perfume of an entire poem, and it is by no means a question of no consequence whether the external form is one of iambics, trochaics, stanzas, alcaics or any other metre.

In the heads of discussion we propose to follow of most importance are two systems, whose distinction from each other we shall endeavour to explain. The first is rhythmical versification, which depends upon the actual length or shortness of the verbal syllables, whether we regard such in the association of varied figures of speech, or under the relation of their time-movement.

The second is that which is responsible for tonal quality as such, not merely in the case of isolated letters, consonants or vowels, but also in that of entire syllables and words, the configuration of which is in part regulated by the laws of the uniform repetition of identical or similar sounds, and in part by those of symmetrical change. It is to this system that we refer the alliteration, assonance and rhyme.

Both systems stand in intimate connection with the prosody of speech. This is so whether such systems are rather based throughout on the actual length or shortness of syllables, or on the accent which the mind requires,18 as attached to the obvious importance of such syllables.

And, finally, we have also to unite together this general rhythmical movement with the music of the independent formal structure as rhyme.19 And in this effort, inasmuch as the repeated echo of the rhyme strikes the ear with a marked emphasis, which asserts itself predominantly over the purely temporal condition of duration and advance, the rhythmical aspect will, in such a conjunction, tend to fall back, and arrest our attention with less force.

(a) Rhythmical Versification.

In discussing the rhythmical system which is without rhyme the following points are of the most importance:

First, we have the firm and fast time-measure of syllables in their plain distinction of long and shorty as well as their manifold association with definite conditions and metres of poetry.

Secondly, we have the animation of rhythm in accent, caesura and opposition between the verse accent and that of separate words.

Thirdly, there is the aspect of euphonious sounds which, within this movement, is forthcoming from the sound of the words, without any further concentration in rhyme.

(a) For that rhythmical movement which the time duration and the movement itself makes of first importance rather than the melodic sound as such and singled in its isolated effect, (αα) we find our starting point in the natural length and shortness of syllables to the obvious distinctions of which the sound of the actual words, the expression of their letters, in consonants and vowels, contribute the essential basis.

Pre-eminently long by nature are the diphthongs ai, oi, ae, and the rest, for the reason that essentially — whatever our modern schoolmaster may say to the contrary — they are themselves a twofold, concrete tone, which combines, much as green does among the colours. The long-sounding vowels are equally so. As a third principle, which obtains already in Sanscrit, no less than the Greek and Latin languages, we have associated with them peculiar conditions of position. In other words, if two or more consonants are placed between two vowels the relation constitutes what is unquestionably a difficult transition in speech. The organ of articulate utterance requires a longer period to pass over the consonants; this necessitates a pause which, despite of the presence of the short vowel, makes the syllable sound in its rhythm long, though it is not actually lengthened. If I speak the words for example — mentem nec secus — the movement from the one vowel to the other in mentem and nec is neither as simple or easy as in secus. More modern languages do not retain this last distinction with such stringency, but rather give effect, in the matter of long and short accent, to other criteria. But for all that syllables which are treated as short, despite of the position referred to, at least will not unfrequently create a harsh impression, because they obstruct the quicker movement our ear demands.

In contradistinction to the long quantity we have in diphthongs, long vowels and length created by position, we have the vowels which are by nature short, that is, those which are short, or which are not placed in words, where one of them and another immediately following are separated by two or more consonants.

(ββ) For the reason, then, that words, partly on their own account, as of several syllables, include a number of long and short beats, and in part, although of one syllable, are nevertheless associated with other words, we have thereby to start with a definite, but accidental interchange of various syllables and words without any stable measure. To regulate this accidental relation is just the function of poetry, precisely as it was that of music to define with accuracy the unregulated duration of particular tones by means of the unity of time-measure. Poetry therefore establishes specific combinations of long and short syllables as the law, by virtue of which, under the aspect of time-duration, it has to arrange the series of syllables. What we therefore get in the first instance are the different successions of time. The simplest is the mutual relation of pure equality, as, for example, we find it in the dactyl and anapaest, in which the two short syllables may coalesce according to definite rule in two long syllables (the spondee). Secondly, a long syllable may be placed next one short; in that case we have a profounder distinction of derivation, though under its simplest form. Such are the iambus and the trochee. We find a more complicated combination, when a short syllable is interposed between two long ones, or one short precedes two long, as in the cretic and bacchius.

(γγ) Such isolated time-relations would, however, open the door to unregulated contingency if they were permitted to follow one another anyhow in their motley differences. In fact the entire aim of such regulation would vanish under such conditions, in other words the regulated series of long and short syllables. From another point of view we should wholly fail to secure a definite beginning, conclusion, and central position, so that the caprice which here once again asserted itself would entirely contradict that which we previously established, when considering musical time-measure and beat, as to the relation in which the percipient ego stood to the duration of tones. In other words, the ego requires a combination on its own account,20 a return out of the continuous forward movement in time; and only seizes on the same in virtue of definite unities of time and their, as such, emphasized commencement,21 regulated in their entire series and terminations. This is the reason why, in the third place, poetry also sets out the particular time-relations in a series of verse-lines,22 which in respect to the type and number of their feet, no less than in that of their commencement, progress, and conclusion, are subject to rule. The iambic trimeter, for instance, consists of six iambic feet, of which any two constitute an iambic dipody. The hexameter consists of six dactyls, which again, in certain positions, may coalesce in spondees.

Moreover, as it is no objection to such lines of verse-writing that they are repeated over and over again in the same or practically under the same mode, we find in respect to the entire series, on the one hand, a lack of definition so far as the one final conclusion is concerned, and on the other a monotony, which creates perceptibly a sense of deficiency in the ideal aspect of their manifold composition. In order to mitigate such defects poetry makes a final advance in its creation of the strophe and its varied organization, more particularly with a view to lyric expression. As an illustration we have the elegiac measure of the Greeks; there is also the alcaic and sapphic strophe, not to mention the modes of lyric art elaborated by Pindar and the famous Greek dramatists in their choric effusions or interludes.

However much, in their relation to time-measure, music and poetry partake of similar conditions, we ought not, therefore, to fail to draw attention to their dissimilarity. The most important feature of this is that of the beat. The question whether there is any real repetition measurable in time-beats of identical length in the metre of the ancients has been the subject of strenuous controversy. Generally speaking I think it may be affirmed that poetry, which uses language in its words as a mere means of communication, is unable, in respect to the time-length of its utterances, to subordinate the same to an absolutely fixed measure of its movement in the abstract form that is present in the time-beat of music. In music tone is simply sound, without pause as such, and it essentially requires a stability such as we find in the time-beat. Human speech does not require such security, for one reason because it already possesses something fixed and substantive in the idea, and for another because it is not thus wholly committed to the objective medium of sound or resonance; rather this very ideality of conscious life is the medium in which it consists as art. For this reason poetry in fact discovers the more substantive means of defining its arrest, continuance, pause or delay immediately in the ideas and emotions which it clearly enunciates in language. Music, too, in its recitatives, marks the beginning of a similar process of separation from the immutable equality of the time-beat. It follows from this that, if poetical metre were wholly subjugate to the regularity of the time-beat, the distinction between music and poetry, in this sphere at least, would vanish altogether, and the element of time would receive a more predominant significance than is compatible with the essential characteristics of poetry. Supported by such a conclusion we may therefore insist that, though a time-measure is of imperative value in poetry, there is no such necessity for the abstract time-beat; meaning and signification23 of the actual words must here remain the relatively speaking more controlling force. If we examine in this respect more closely the particular verse-measures of the ancients the hexameter will no doubt appear most nearly attached to a forward movement compatible with the stringency of the time-beat. The elder Voss in fact assumed this, though, as a matter of fact, such an assumption is already excluded by the catalexis of the last foot. When in addition to this Voss proceeded to place the time-measure of the alcaic and sapphic strophes on a similar basis of abstract equality, we can only regard such a theory as a wilful caprice which does violence to the poetry. The contention throughout is apparently due to the habit of treating our German iambic in identical lengths of syllable measure and time-measure. As a matter of fact the beauty of the iambic trimeter of the ancients consisted above all in this, that it was not composed of six iambic feet of identical lengths of time; but quite the contrary in order that, in the first position of every dipody, spondees, or, in their resolution, also dactyls and anapaests were permissible; and, by reason of this, the monotonous repetition of the same time-measure, and thereby all that is consistent with the time-beat, vanishes. We may add that the possibility of change is yet more obvious in lyric strophes, so that if we wish to establish such a thesis at all it must be on the à priori principle, that the time-beat is essentially necessary. As a deduction from the plain facts we see nothing of the kind.

(β). With the introduction of the accent and the caesura we have for the first time the animation of the time-measure; we may parallel with this that rhythm in music, which we have discussed as the time-beat.

(αα) In short in poetry also every definite time relation has, in the first instance, its particular accent; in other words, regularly defined intervals are asserted, which attract others and only in this way are rounded off in a whole. Owing to this fact much play is given to the manifold possibilities of the value of syllables. On the one hand generally long syllables appear emphasized in their contrast to short, so that now, if the ictus falls upon them, their significance is doubled as against the shorter, and in fact stand out themselves as distinct from long syllables not thus accented. On the other hand, however, it may also happen that shorter syllables receive the ictus or accent, so that a similar emphasis is created to the one described in the converse case.

Above all, as already observed, the beginning and termination of the particular feet ought not with abstract precision to be identical with the beginning and conclusion of single words. For, in the first place, the reach forward24 of the essentially exclusive word over the termination of the foot of the line affects the connection of the otherwise disparate rhythms. Secondly, when the verse accent falls on the final sound of a word carried forward as above described, we get on account of this in addition a distinct interval of time, the conclusion of a word having already come to a pause in something else, so that it is in fact this pause, which, in virtue of the accent united with it, is expressly made perceptible as a segment of time in the otherwise unbroken current. Caesuras of this sort are inevitable with every kind of verse. For although the distinct accent already confers on particular feet a more intimate and essential distinction, and thereby a certain variety, this sort of animation, especially in the case of verses, in which the same feet repeat each other without a break, as, for example, in our iambic, remain for all that in a measure entirely abstract and monotonous, and furthermore allow the particular feet to fall apart without a common bond. It is this gray monotony which the caesura checks, introducing a connection and more genuine animation within what was otherwise, with its undifferentiated regularity, the halting flow of verse, a life which, by virtue of the various positions in which the caesura may assert itself, is itself as manifold as is possible agreeably with the condition that its regulated definition is held free from any approach to lawless caprice.

A third accent is furthermore attached to the verse accent and caesura, which the words in other respects and independently possess, apart from their metrical employment. By this means the mode and degree in which the particular syllables are emphasized or the reverse increases in its variety. This verbal accent may, on the one hand, no doubt appear in conjunction with the accent of the verse and the caesura; and, if this is the case, the strength of the accents respectively is increased. But from another point of view it may stand independently of them on syllables which do not receive any further emphasis, and which we may say, in so far as they moreover require an accentuation to bring out their particular significance as verbal syllables, assert an effect counter to the verse rhythm, an effect which confers on the whole a novel and unique vitality.

To appreciate the beauty of rhythm in all the above aspects is for our modern ears a very difficult matter, because in modern languages the elements which combine to produce. this kind of metrical effect are no longer in some measure present in the sharp and secure insistence they possessed for the ancient world; rather we have other means substituted for them, in order to satisfy other demands of artistic taste.

(ββ) But over and above all this, paramount over all valid claims of syllables and words within their metrical position, there is, secondly, the worth of that significance we gather from the line or verse as poetical idea. It is in relation to this, which the language implies, that its other metrical effects are either emphasized or, comparatively speaking, are restrained as void of significance; and it is by this means alone that the finest perfume of spiritual vitality is instilled through the poetry. But notwithstanding this fact, such poetical effect is not to be carried so far that it directly contradicts in this respect the rules of metrical rhythm.

(γγ) Moreover, a definite type of content corresponds with the entire character of a particular verse measure, particularly from the point of view of rhythmical movement, and above all that particular kind implied in the movement of our feelings. Thus, for example, the hexameter, in the tranquil wave of its forward stream, is particularly adapted to the even flow of epic narration. Where, however, it is more in the nature of the strophe in its association with the pentameter and its symmetrically consistent caesura, it is, in its none the less generally simple regularity, fitted to express elegiac emotion. The iambic again moves forward with rapidity, and as such is peculiarly suitable to dramatic dialogue. The anapaest indicates the clear-slipping march of joyful exultation. Other characteristics may readily be associated with other modes of verse-measure.

(γ) Thirdly, this province of rhythmical versification is not confined to the mere configuration and vivication of time-intervals; it embraces the actual musical sound of syllables and words. In respect to such sound, however, the classic languages, in which rhythm is retained, as above described, as an essential feature, offer a real contrast to other more recent ones more conspicuously adapted to rhyme.

(αα) In the Greek and Latin languages, for example, the stem syllable is modified, by virtue of its modes of inflexion, through an abundance of variously toned syllables, which of course possess an independent meaning, but only as a modification of such syllable; this consequently, it is true, asserts its force as the substantive significance of that variously expanded sound, but it does not, so far as its sound is concerned, stand forth as such in pre-eminent and unique ascendancy. When we hear, for example, the word amaverunt, three syllables are attached to the word, and the accent is already substantially differentiated throughout the number and extension of these syllables in direct relation to the stem syllable, even assuming no naturally long ones had been included, by which means the fundamental significance and the emphasis of accent are separated from each other. In such a case consequently, and in so far as the accentuation is not identical with the main syllable, but falls on another, which merely expresses an incidental significance, the ear can from this basis at once listen to the sound of the different syllables and follow their movement, retaining, as it does, perfect liberty to attend to that prosody peculiar to the word or phrase, and finding itself then invited to incorporate within its rhythm these naturally long and short syllables.

(ββ) The case of our modern German language is wholly different. That which in the Greek and Latin languages is expressed, as above described, by means of the prefix and suffix, and other modifications, is in more modern languages for the most part resolved in verbs of the stem syllable; the result of this is that the inflexion syllables that have been in the former case unfolded in one and the same word, with collateral meanings of a varied character, are now split up and isolated in separate words. As illustrations of this we have the constant employment of many subsidiary words denoting time, the independent indication of the optative by means of distinct verbs, the separation of pronouns, and other examples. By such means, on the one hand, the word — which in the previous case adduced was expanded in all the variety of tone which attached to its many syllables, under which every accent of the root, that is the root idea, was cancelled — persists as a simple totality concentrated in itself, without appearing as a series of tones, which being, as they are, mere modifications, do not, by virtue of their specific sense, assert an influence with such a strength that the ear is unable to attend to their independent tonal quality and its temporal movement. And, on the other hand, on account of this concentration the main significance is moreover of such a force that it attracts the fall of the accent upon itself exclusively; and just because the emphasis is thus fastened upon the fundamental sense this very coalescence does not suffer the quantity of the other syllables, whether long or short ones, to appear; they are simply overwhelmed. The roots of the majority of words are unquestionably as a general rule short, compact,25 of one or two syllables. If thus, as is for instance pre-eminently the case with our mother tongue, these root-stems appropriate almost invariably the accent to themselves, such an accent is to an overwhelming degree one of the sense, significance’, not a definition, however, in which the medium — that is, the utterance as sound — would be free, or could assert the relation of the length, shortness, or accentuation of syllables independently of the intelligible content of the words. Consequently a rhythmical configuration of time-movement and emphasis liberated from the stem syllable and its meaning can here no longer be maintained. We have merely left us, in contradistinction to the former hearing of the ample sound and duration of such long and short beats in their varied juxtaposition, a general impression of sound,26 which is apprehended. entirely aloof from the accented fundamental syllable with its weight of significance. And, indeed, apart from this, as we have seen, the ramification of the stem into syllables as modified into particular words is also an independent process. Such words receive thereby an independent worth, and, while preserving their own significance, they make us at the same time hear the identical coalescence of meaning and accent, which we have observed in the case of the stem or root word around which they are ranged. We are therefore forced to restrict our attention to the sense of every word; and, instead of being occupied with the natural length and shortness of syllables and their sensuous27 accentuation, are only able to hear the accent asserted by the main and substantive meaning.

(γγ) In such modern languages the element of rhythm has little room for its display, or at least the soul has little freedom left to expatiate within it, because, as observed, time and the equable stream of syllabic sound as emitted from its movement is superseded28 by a more ideal relation — that is to say, by the sense and meaning of the words, and thereby the force of the more independent configuration of rhythm is suppressed. We may in this connection compare the principle of rhythmical versification with the plastic arts. We find in both that the ideal significance is not as yet asserted in its independence, nor does the former expressly define the length and accent of syllables, but rather the meaning of the words is wholly blended with the sensuous medium of the inherent time duration and sound, with a result that does complete justice to the claim of such externality, wholly absorbed in the ideal form and movement of the same. If, however, such a principle is renounced, and yet despite of this, but in accordance with the necessary demand of art, the sensuous medium is permitted to retain a certain force of resistance as against the exclusive assertion of ideal content,29 in order to this end to divert the ear’s attention, — in the case that is, where what we may call the plastic moment of that more ancient mode of syllabic quantity, as it is on its own account, and the tonal quality inseparable from the general rhythm rather than independently asserted — when this, as I say, has been destroyed, then we have no other means30 at hand save the express and artistically configurated sound of articulate speech simply, and retained as such in its isolation. And this leads us to our second main type of versification — in other words, rhyme.

(b) Rhyme

From an objective standpoint it is possible to seek to explain the need of a novel treatment of language from the deterioration into which the classical languages fell through their contact with foreign relations. Such a development, however, lies in the nature of the facts themselves. The earliest example of conformity with the ideality of its content attempted by poetry is to be traced in the length and shortness of syllables in independence from their significance, for the mutual relations of which, caesurae and so forth, art elaborates its rules, rules which it is true generally coincide with the character of the content in its broad outlines, but which none the less, in matters of individual detail, do not suffer either the length or shortness of a syllable, nor its accent, to depend exclusively on the intelligible significance making such a formal aspect subordinate, to the point of entire detachment, to the same.31 The more ideal, however, and spiritual the represented idea becomes, the more it tends to detach itself from this objective aspect, which increasingly fails to present such ideality in plastic guise, and finally reaches a point of self-concentration in which the, so to speak, corporeal element of speech is in a measure wholly wiped away, and for the rest merely asserts that wherein the intelligible significance is reposed as necessary to its communication; all else is only admitted, by way of by-play, as insignificant. Now romantic art, in respect to the entire type of its conception and presentation, effects a similar passage over to this concentrated synthesis of ideality, when it sets out in search for the material which corresponds to this subjective content in audible sound.32 Following these lines romantic poetry also, inasmuch as it generally lays most stress on the ideal tones33 of feeling, becomes absorbed in its preoccupation34 with the distinct and independent ring and tones of letters, syllables, and words; perfecting such a process to its final satisfaction, as it learns, either in their association with ideality, or in their connection with the architectonically intelligible penetration35 of such music, to separate such syllabic and other verbal sounds or to relate or interlace them one with another. From this point of view we may affirm that it is not simply by way of accident that rhyme is elaborated in romantic poetry. It is a necessary feature of it. The requirement of soul-life, to discover itself again, is thereby more fully asserted, and finds a real source of satisfaction in the identity of the rhyme, which declares an indifference36 to the unyielding laws of the time-measure, and, by virtue of its recurrence of similar sounds, gives exclusive effect to an effort which conducts the conscious self back to itself. It is by this means that versification is made to approach more closely the musical art as such, that is, the vivid tones of soul-life itself, and is, from this point of view, liberated from the, relatively speaking, gross material of human speech, in other words from what we have referred to as the natural measure of quantity.

With regard to points of special interest in this subject, I will confine myself to the following general observations:

First, upon the origin of rhyme.

Secondly, upon a few more definite features by which we may distinguish the sphere of rhyme from that of rhythm in verse.

Thirdly, upon the types under which we may classify rhyme generally.

(α) We have already seen that rhyme belongs in its form to the art of romantic poetry, which requires such a more pronounced emphasis of its configurated syllabic sound posited thus on its own account. And it is thus effected to the extent that the ideal activity of volition37 discovers its own presence by this means in the objective medium of tone. Where such a need is asserted we have a mode of speech in part meeting absolutely the conditions of form I outlined above when discussing the necessity of rhyme; and in addition it makes use of the old forms of language at hand, the Latin for example, which, though of other constitution and mainly applicable to rhythmical versification, it employs agreeably to the character of the new principle, or reconstructs the same so far into a new language that the element of rhythm disappears, and rhyme becomes, as in the Italian and French languages, the matter of all importance.

(αα) In this respect we find throughout Christendom that rhyme is introduced into Latin versification at a very early date with much insistence, although, as observed, it rested on other principles. These principles, however, are rather adapted from the Greek language; and, so far from testifying to the fact that they originated from the Latin speech itself, rather prove, under the modified character they possess, a tendency which itself approaches the romantic type. In other words, the poetry of Rome, on the one hand and in its earliest days, discovered its source not in the natural length and shortness of syllables, but rather measured the value of syllables relatively to their accent; and in consequence of this it was only through a more accurate knowledge and imitation of Greek poetry that the prosodical principle of this was received and followed. And, moreover, the Romans rendered more obdurate the flexible, joyous sensuousness of Greek metres, more particularly by their use of more insistent pauses at the caesura, as we find such not only in the hexameter, but also in the alcaic and sapphic metres, hardening the effect thus to a structure of more stringent outline and more severe regularity. And indeed, apart from this, even in the full bloom of Latin literature, and from their poets of finest culture, we have already plenty of rhymes. Thus from Horace, in his Ars poetica (verses 99-100), we get the following:

Non satis est, pulchra esse poemata: dulcia sunto,

Et quocunque volent, animum auditoris agunto.

Though the poet was probably quite unconscious of the fact, it is none the less a strange coincidence that, in the very passage in which Horace enforces the obligation that poems should be dulcia, we discover a rhyme. Similar rhymes occur in Ovid with still more frequency. Even assuming such to be accidental, the fact remains that they appear to have been not offensive to Roman ears, and might consequently be permitted, although as isolated exceptions, to slip into the composition. Yet the profounder significance of romantic rhyme is absent from such playful exceptions. The former does not assert the recurrent sound merely as sound, but the ideal content or meaning implied in it. And it is precisely this which constitutes the fundamental difference between modern rhyme and the very ancient rhyme of the Hindoos.

As for the classical languages, it was after the invasion of barbarism, and on account of the destruction of accentuation and the assertion of that uniquely personal note of emotion referable to Christianity, that the rhythmical system of verse passed into that of rhyme. Thus, in his hymn to the Holy Spirit, Ambrosius entirely regulates the versification according to the accent of the meaning expressed, and breaks into rhyme. The first work of St. Augustine against the Donatists is in the same way a rhymed song; and also the so-called Leonine versicles, as expressly rhymed hexameters and pentameters, are easily distinguishable from the accidental exceptions of rhyme previously noticed. These and other examples like them mark the point of departure of rhyme from the more ancient rhythmical system.

(ββ) Certain writers have no doubt attempted to trace the origin of the new principle of versification in Arabian literature. The artistic education, however, of the famous poets of the East is of later date than the appearance of rhyme in western Christendom; and any Mohammedan art of a more early time exercised no real influence on the West. We should, however, add that we find from the first in Arabian poetry essential affinities with the romantic principle, in which the knights of Europe, at the time of the crusades, very readily made themselves at home; and consequently it is not difficult to understand how, in the affinity of spiritual tendencies38 which they shared, and in which the poetry of Eastern Mohammedanism no less than Western Christianity finds its source, though removed in the world from each other, we meet for the first time and on its own independent footing a novel type of verse writing.

(γγ) A third source, to which again, independently of either the influence of the classic languages or the Arabic, we may trace the origins of rhyme and all that it implies, are the Germanic languages, as we find them in their earliest Scandinavian development. As illustration of this we have the songs of the ancient Edda, which, though only in more recent times, collected and edited, unquestionably date from a former age. In these, as we shall see later on, it is not, it is true, the genuine rhyme-sound which is elaborated in its perfection, but rather an effective emphasis upon particular sounds of language, and a regularity defined by rule, with a definite repetition of both aspects.

(β) Yet more important than the question of origin is the characteristic difference between the new system and the old. I have already adverted to the fundamental feature of importance here; it only remains to establish it more narrowly.

Rhythmical versification attained its most beautiful and richest development in the field of Hellenic poetry, in which we may discover the most eminent features of the type wherever it obtains. Briefly they are as follows:

First, the sound, as such, of letters, syllables, or words does not here constitute its material, but rather the syllabic sound in its temporal duration, so that attention must neither exclusively be directed to particular syllables or words, nor to the purely qualitative similarity or identity of their sound. On the contrary, the sound still remains in inseparable union with the static time-measure of its specific duration; and in the forward movement of both the ear has to follow the value of every separate syllable no less than the principle which obtains in the rhythmical progression of all equally together. Secondly, the measure of long and short syllables, no less than that of rhythmical rise and fall, and varied animation derived from more deliberate caesurae and moments of pause, depends upon the natural element of the language, without permitting any introduction of that type of accentuation, by virtue of which the actual meaning of the word leaves its impress on a syllable or a word. The versification asserts itself in its collocation of feet, its verse accent, its caesurae, and so forth in this respect as fully independent as the language itself, which also, outside the domain of poetry, already accepts accentuation from the natural quantity of syllables and their relations of juxtaposition, and not from the significance of the root-syllable. On this account, thirdly, we have as the vital emphasis of certain syllables, first, the verse accent and rhythm, and, secondly, all other accentuation, both of which aspects, in their twofold contribution to the varied character of the whole, pass in and out of one another without any mutual derangement or suppression; and in like manner respectively they satisfy the claim of the poetical imagination in fully admitting the expressiveness due, by virtue of the nature of their position and movement, to words which, in respect to their intelligible meaning, are of a greater importance than others.

(αα) The first alteration, then, effected by rhymed verse in the previous system is this indisputable validity of natural quantity,39 If, therefore, any time-measure at all is permitted to remain, it is compelled to seek for a basis for such quantitative pause or acceleration, which it refuses any longer to find in the natural quantity, of syllables, in some other province. And this, as we have seen, can be no other than the intrinsic meaning of syllables and words. It is this significance which in the final instance determines the quantitative measure of syllables, so long as such is still regarded as essential at all, and by doing so transfers the criterium from the purely objective medium40 and its natural structure to the ideal subject-matter.

(ββ) A further result follows from this of yet more importance. As I have already pointed out, this collocation of the emphasis on the significant stem-syllable dissipates that other independent diffusion of it in manifold forms of inflexion, which our rhythmical system is not yet forced to treat as negligible, in contrast to the stem, because it deduces neither the natural quantity of syllables nor the accent which it asserts from the intelligible significance. In the case, however, where such an explication,41 with its co-ordination in verse-feet according to the quantity of syllables in their natural stability, falls away the entire system therewith necessarily collapses, which reposes on the time-measure and its laws. Of this type, for example, is French and Italian poetry, the metre and rhythm of which are absolutely non-existent as understood by the ancients. The entire question is here merely one of a definite number of syllables.

(γγ) For such a loss there is only one possible compensation — that of rhyme. In other words, if — this is one aspect — it is no longer time-duration which receives objective expression, by means of which the sound of syllables flows on freely in the even movement that intrinsically belongs to them; if, furthermore, the intelligible significance dominates over the stem-syllables, and coalesces with the same without further organic expatiation into a determinate unity, we have no sensuous medium, such as is able to maintain itself independently of the time-measure, no less than this accentuation of the stem-syllables, finally left to us other than just this syllabic sound.

Such a sound, however, if it is to secure an independent attention, must, in the first place, be of a far more insistent kind than the interchange of different tones, such as we met with in the older verse metres; and its assertion must be of a far more overwhelming character than the stress of syllables can lay claim to in ordinary speech. What we now require has not only to compensate us for the loss of the articulate time-measure, but it further undertakes to reassert the sensuous medium in its opposition to that unqualified predominance of the accentuated significance. For when once the conceptive content has essentially attained the ideality and penetration of mind,42 for which the sensuous aspect of speech is of no importance, the verbal sound must enforce itself still more positively and coarsely as distinct from this ideality in order to arrest our attention at all. In contrast, therefore, to the gentle movements of rhythmical euphony, rhyme is a crude expedient,43 which requires an ear by no means either so trained or sensitive as that presupposed by Greek verse. Secondly, though it is true that rhyme does not here assert itself so much as distinct from the meaning of the stem-syllables simply as it does from the entire ideal content, yet it does at the same time so far assist the natural verbal sound as to win for it a relatively secure stability. But this object can only be attained if the sound44 of particular words affirms itself in exclusive distinction from the resonance of other words, and thus secures an independent existence, by virtue of which isolation it satisfies the claims of the formative aspect of the verbal medium in forceful beats of sound. Rhyme is therefore, at least in its contrast to the evenly transfused movement of rhythmic euphony, a detached exhibition of exclusive tonal expression. Thirdly, we found that it was the ideality of the conscious self which, by virtue of its effort of ideal synthesis, came into its own, and discovered its personal satisfaction in such recurrences of sound. If, then, the means used in the older type of versification, with its copious variety of structure, disappear, there only remains, if we look at poetry, under the aspect of its medium, to support this principle of self-recovery, the more formal repetition of wholly identical or similar sounds, whereby again we are able to unite under an intelligible scheme45 the assertion and relation of closely associated meanings in the rhyme-sounds of expressive words. The metre of rhythmical verse we may regard as a variously articulate interrelation of manifold syllabic quantities. Rhyme, on the contrary, is from one point of view more material;46 yet, on the other hand, is itself more abstractly placed within this medium. In other words, it is the mere recollection of mind and the ear of the recurrence of identical or related sounds and significations — a recurrence in which the poet is conscious of his own activity, recognizes, and is pleased to recognize, himself therein as both agent and participant.

(γ) Finally, on the question of the particular types under which we may classify this more modern system of romantic poetry, I only propose to advert briefly to what appears to me of most importance in respect to alliteration, assonance, and ordinary rhyme.

(αα) The first, or at least the most thorough, example of alliteration is that we find elaborated in the earliest Scandinavian poetry, where it supplies the fundamental basis, whereas assonance and the terminal rhyme, albeit these two aspects play a by no means unimportant part, are, however, only present in certain particular kinds of such poetry. The principle of alliterative rhyme, letter rhyme, is rhyme in its most incomplete form, because it does not require the recurrence of the entire syllable, but only that of one identical letter, and primarily the initial letter only. Owing to the weakness of this type of recurrent sound it is, in the first place, therefore necessary that only such words should be used in its service, which already independently possess an express accent on their first syllable; and, secondly, these words must not be remote from one another, if the identity of their commencement is to make a real impression on the ear. For the rest, alliterative letters may be a vowel, no less than a double or single consonant; but it is primarily consonants which are of most importance in the scheme. Based on such conditions, we find in Icelandic poetry47 the fundamental rule that all alliterative rhymes require accentuated48 syllables, whose initial letters must not in the same lines occur in other substantives which have the accent on the first syllable; and, along with this, of the three words, the initial letters of which constitute the rhyme, two must be found in the first line, and the third, which supplies the dominant alliteration, must be placed at the commencement of the second line. We may add further that, in virtue of the abstract character of this identical sound of initial letters, words are generally made alliterative proportionally to the importance of their signification. We find, therefore, that here, too, the relation of accented sound to the meaning of words is not entirely absent. I cannot, however, pursue this subject into more detail.

(ββ) Secondly, assonance has nothing to do with initial letters, but makes a nearer approach to rhyme in so far as it is a recurrence in identical sound of the same letters in the middle or at the termination of different words. It is not necessary, of course, that these assonant words should in all cases come at the conclusion of a line; they may fall into other places. Mainly, however, it is the concluding syllables of lines which come into this mutual relation of assonance, as contrasted with alliteration which is effective rather at the line’s commencement. In its richest elaboration we may associate this assonance of language with the Romance nations, more especially the Spanish, whose full-toned language is peculiarly adapted to this recurrence of the same vowels. As a rule, no doubt assonance is here restricted to vowels. But the language further permits of other variety of assonance, not only that of vowels, but also that of identical consonants and consonants in association with one vowel.

(γγ) That which, as above described, alliteration and assonance are only able to establish with incompleteness is abundantly fulfilled by rhyme. In it, and expressly to the exclusion of initial letters, we have asserted the wholly equable sound of entire verb stems,49 which are, by virtue of this equability, brought into an express relation with their tonal utterance. We have no mere question now of the number of the syllables. Words of one syllable, no less than others of two or more, may be rhymed. By this means we not only get the masculine rhyme, which is restricted to words of one syllable, but also the feminine rhyme, which embraces words of two syllables, as also the so-called gliding rhyme, which reaches to three or even more syllables. It is in particular the languages of Northern Europe which incline to the first type, Southern languages to the second, such as the Italian and Spanish. The German and French languages would appear to lie between these two extremes. Rhymes of more than three syllables are rarely to be met with in any language.

The position of the rhyme is at the conclusion of the lines, in which the rhyming word, although there is certainly no reason that it should ever concentrate in itself the ideal expressiveness of the significance, nevertheless does attract attention to itself so far as the verbal sound is concerned; and, furthermore, it makes the different verses or stanzas follow one another either in accordance with the principle of a wholly abstract recurrence of the same rhyme, or by uniting, separating, and mutually relating them in a more elaborate mode of regulated change, and variously symmetrical interweaving of different rhymes with correspondent relations, sometimes more near, at others more remote, of every degree of complexity. In such a process the particular rhymes will at one point stare us in the face at once, or they will appear to have a game of hide-and seek; so that in this way our ear, as it listens, will at one time receive instant satisfaction, at another it will only find it after considerable delay, wherein the expectation will, as it were, be coquetted with, deceived, and kept on the stretch, until the assured end from point to point of artistically arranged recurrence is reached, and with it the hearer’s approval.

Among the various types of the poetic art it is pre-eminently lyric poetry, which, by virtue of its ideality and personal quality of expression, most readily avails itself of rhyme, and thereby converts language itself into a music of emotion and melodic symmetry, a symmetry not merely of time-measure and rhythmical movement, but of the kind of resonance which finds a responsive echo in the inner life itself. To promote this, therefore, the art elaborates in its use of rhyme a more simple or complex system of strophes, every one of which is part of one organic whole. Examples of such an interplay of melodic sound, whether steeped in emotion or rich in ingenuity, are the sonnet, canzonet, triolet, and madrigal. Epic poetry, on the contrary, so long as it does not mingle lyrical subject-matter with its more native character, preserves a more equable advance in its construction, which does not easily adapt itself to the strophe. We have an obvious illustration of this in the triplet stanzas of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” as contrasted with the lyrical canzonets and sonnets of the same poet. However, I must not permit myself to go further into detail.

(c) Now that we have in the above investigation separated rhythmical versification from rhyme, and contrasted the same, we may now proceed, thirdly, to ask ourselves whether a combination of the two is not also intelligible, and, indeed, actually employed. The existence of certain more recent languages will render exceptional and important aid to the solution; in other words, we cannot deny to these either a partial reassertion of our former rhythmical system, or, in certain respects, an association of the same with rhyme. We will, for example, confine our attention to our mother tongue, and, in reference to the first-mentioned aspect, it will be sufficient to recall Klopstock, who would have as little of rhyme as possible; who not merely in epic, but also in lyrical poetry, set himself to imitate the ancients with the greatest enthusiasm and persistency. Voss and others have followed in his steps, ever striving to enforce with increased strictness principles upon which to base this rhythmical treatment of our language. Goethe, on the contrary, never felt quite himself in his classical syllabic measures. He asks himself, not without reason:

Stehn uns diese weiten Falten

Zu Gesichte, wie den Alten?50

(α) I will in this connection merely reiterate what I already have observed upon the distinction which exists between ancient and more modern languages. Rhythmical versification is based upon the natural quantity of syllables, possessing therein an essentially stable criterion, which the ideal expression can neither limit, alter, or weaken. Such a natural measure is, however, abhorrent to more recent languages; in these it is only the verbal accent of the ideal significance, which makes one syllable long in its contrast to others, which are defective in such significance. Such a principle of accentuation, however, does not supply any audible compensation for the absence of the natural quantity, or rather it adds to the actual uncertainty of such a measure. For the more strongly emphasized significance of a word can at the same time make another short, despite the fact that, taken by itself, it possesses a verbal accent, so that the criterion accepted is wholly one of mutual relation. Du liebst, can, for instance, according to the stress of the emphasis which is thrown, according to the sense intended, either on both words, or one or the other, be a spondee, iambus or trochee. No doubt the attempt has been made, even in our own tongue, to return to the natural quantity of syllables, and to create rules with this intent; but in the presence of the overwhelming importance that the intelligible significance and the accent it asserts has secured such a reference to theory is quite impracticable. And in truth this agrees with the state of the facts. If the natural measure is really to constitute the essential basis, the language ought not as yet to have become such an instrument of soul expression as it is of necessity in our own times. Once allow, however, that it has already in its course of development thus secured such a mastery of the intelligible purport over the sensuous or native material, and it follows that the fundamental test for the value of syllables is not to be deduced from the objective quantity itself, but rather from that whereof words are themselves indicative as means. The emotional impulse of a free intelligence refuses to allow the temporal activity of language, as such, to establish itself in the independent form of its native and objective reality.

(β) Such a conclusion, however, does not necessarily imply that we are forced to oust altogether from our German language the rhymeless rhythmical treatment of the syllabic measure; it merely in essential respects points to this, that it is not possible, conformably with the character of the structure of our modern speech, to retain the plastic consistency of the metrical medium as it was secured by the ancient world. We must consequently seek for and elaborate some further element in poetical composition by way of compensation, which on its own independent account is of a more ideal51 character than the stable natural quantity of syllables. Such an element is the accent of the verse, no less than the caesura, which as now constituted, instead of moving independently of the verbal accent, coalesce with the same, and thereby receive a more significant, albeit a more abstract assertion, in virtue of the fact that the variety of that previous threefold accentuation, which we discovered in the rhythmical type of classical poetry, on account of this very coalescence necessarily disappears. It, however, equally follows as a result that we only retain the power with conspicuous success to imitate the rhythmic movement of such poetry where its impression on our ear is most emphatic. We no longer possess, that is to say, the stable quantitative basis for its more subtle distinctions and manifold connections, and the more crude mode of accentuation, which we do possess in its place, to emphasize our measure, is intrinsically no sufficient substitute.

(γ) To state, then, finally, what this actual association of the rhythmical mode of verse with rhyme is, we may go so far as to affirm that it is the absorption, although to a limited extent, by the more modern form of versification of the more ancient one.

(αα) The predominant distinction of the natural syllabic quantity by means of the verbal accent is in fact not an entirely satisfactory principle of the mere medium. It does not arrest the ear’s attention, even on the side of sense simply, so far as to make it appear, absolutely and everywhere unnecessary, where the ideal aspect of the poetical content is paramount, to summon the complementary assistance of the sound and response of syllables and words.

(ββ) It is, however, at the same time necessary in the interest of metre that an equally strong contrasting force should be set up to that of the rhyme sound. In so far, however, as it is not the distinction of syllables in their natural quantity and its variety, which has to be co-ordinated and made predominant, we have, in respect, to this temporal relation, no other expedient left but the identical repetition of the same time-measure; in this the element of accented beat will tend to assert itself in a far more emphatic degree, than is compatible with the rhythmical system. As an illustration we have our German rhymed iambics and trochaics, in the recitation of which far more beat stress is admitted than is proper to the scansion of the unrhymed iambics of the ancients, although the caesura pause is capable of bringing into emphatic relief isolated words whose accent is mainly referable to their meaning, and is capable of further making all that remains dependent upon them a resisting effect to the abstract equality of the verse, and by so doing introduces a varied animation. And as in such a particular case, so we may assert generally, the time-beat cannot be of actual service in poetry with the force that is required of it in most musical compositions.

(γγ) Although, however, we may affirm it as a general rule that rhyme should be associated merely with such verse metres, which, by virtue of their simple changes of the syllabic quantity and their continuous recurrence of similar verse feet, do not on their own independent account give sufficiently effective modality to the element of sensuous medium in modern languages which admit at all of rhythmical treatment, yet the application of rhyme to the more profuse syllabic metres imitated from classical models, as, for instance, to borrow one example only, the alcaic and sapphic strophe, will not merely appear superfluous, but even an unresolved contradiction. Both systems repose on opposed principles, and the attempt to unite them in the way suggested, can only involve us in a like opposition, which can produce nothing but a contradiction we are unable to mediate, and which is therefore untenable. It follows, therefore, that we ought only to make use of rhyme in cases where the principle of the older versification merely makes itself effective in more remote implication, and through a transitional process essentially deducible from the system of rhyme.

The above, then, are the points which we have sought to establish as, in a broad sense, of most vital concern to poetical expression in its contradistinction from prose.

1 Bildlich, here not so much creative as simply plastic or constructive.

2 Vorliebe. His interest must be already centred in it.

3 Bildlichkeit, i.e. their claims as images of something else.

4 Vertauscht. I have translated “exchanged,” but Hegel may mean “mistaken for.”

5 It is not very clear what Hegel means by the word Bezeichnungen. “Turns of expression,” which first occurred to me, appears to be covered by Flexionsformen lower down.

6 Gedrungenen. The idea is suppression into a compact mass — a cloud unable to burst save in occasional flashes.

7 I presume Hegel refers here to the synthetic arrangement of genuine paragraphs rather than phrases, composition generally.

8 Das eigentliche Wort. The word, that is, which expresses the fact in its immediacy.

9 More literally, “being remoulded with the life and wealth of Spirit.”

10 Besonnenheit, i.e., real thought-fullness.

11 Der künstlerischen Ruhe. The personal predilection of Hegel for classic art here once more asserts itself.

12 The German word is Sinnen, but I think, though the emotional sense is partly implied, the main emphasis is on a presiding mind — or rather a wide-visioned genius.

13 Eine sprudelnde Anschauung. A view of things that bubbles forth like a fountain.

14 That is, the medium of literary form.

15 Ein hartes Band. The idea is not so much difficult as unyielding, unmalleable.

16 Zum Ernste des Inhalts. That is, the earnestness of a product of mind as such. Hegel seems to contrast with this the spontaneity of an art which, as inspired by genius, comes to us with the freshness of Nature herself, take Shakespeare’s songs for example.

17 Ungebunden. That is, it is contingent.

18 Hegel calls this the Verstandesaccent, and speaks of this importance (Bedeutsamkeit) as a product of the syllables.

19 I presume the words das für sich gestaltete Klingen refer to rhyme.

20 Eine Sammlung in sich, that is, an independent collection or aggregate.

21 Anheben may possibly mean appearance in the defined series generally.

22 By Versen Hegel means rather lines than a number of them.

23 The dative appears to be a misprint. The passage should be read der and die, instead of dem and der.

24 I am not quite sure what Hegel refers to in what he describes as das Hinübergreifen des Wortes. I presume he means what are known as weak endings to a line.

25 Gedrungen. I suppose this is the meaning. The entire passage is a difficult one to follow.

26 Ein allgemeines Hören.

27 That is, the accent of the syllables as a mere medium of uttered speech.

28 Lit., has its flank turned, überflügelt.

29 Die blosse Vergeistigung.

30 No other means to divert the ears attention. The sentence is rather involved, and I have not seen my way to simplify it.

31 Abstract unterworfen. Hegel apparently means abstract as detached from the natural medium of language — becoming thereby the abstract symbol of idea exclusively.

32 As in musical art.

33 Seelen-tonen, i.e., the wave and flow of the emotional life itself.

34 In das Spielen. Hegel repeats his use of the expression above, beiher Spielen, lit., the playing with not as a toy but as something serious.

35 I suppose this is the meaning here of Sharfsinn, but “subtlety” may be included.

36 Indifferent, that is, as asserting the creative freedom of the poet, he can select his own rhymes as he wills. Hegel, however, seems rather to miss the essential spontaneity of really good blank verse.

37 So I translate die innere Subjectivität, but it may refer perhaps to the entire creative personality.

38 That is, I presume, their relation to romantic art.

39 That is, the primary feature changed is that of the validity of natural quantity.

40 Dem Äusseren Daseyn. That is, of language.

41 Entfaltung. Such an explication of rhythmical euphony as the previous system discloses.

42 Geistes. All that pertains to conscious life.

43 Lit., a blunt or coarse sound, ein plumpes Klingen.

44 Tonen implies sound no less than accent. I have rendered it in various ways.

45 Von Seiten des Geistes. Perhaps rather “as aspects of the poet’s intelligence” — that is, with reference to the self-assertion above explained.

46 More nearly related to the natural medium of language.

47 Die Verslehre der Isländer v. Rask, verd. von Mohnike, Berlin, 1830, pp. 14-17.

48Betonte, see above note on Tonen.

49 Stämme, the stem of verbs, rather than the root of substantives, which would be more correctly stammwort.

50 “Do we moderns face broad reaches such as these, as did the ancients?” Falten, folds, expatiation of subject-matter. I presume, though I do not recall the context, that the allusion is mainly to elegiacs.

51 I.e., more related to active intelligence.

III

THE SEVERAL GENERIC TYPES OF POETRY

The two fundamental aspects, according to which we have hitherto examined the poetical art were, in the first instance, that of poetical significance or content in the broadest sense, the nature of the outlook of a poetical composition and the creative activity of the poet; secondly, poetical expression, not merely respectively to the ideas which have to be embodied in words, but also to the modes under which they are expressed and the character of versification.

I. What we, above all, in these respects endeavoured to enforce consisted in this, that poetry has to embrace the ideality of conscious life as its content; yet, in its artistic elaboration of the same, it cannot rest satisfied with the objective form of direct perception as other plastic arts; nor can it accept as its form the emotional ideality which alone reverberates through our soul-life, nor yet that of thinking and the relations of reflective thought. It has to maintain a mediate position between the extremes of immediate objectivity and the inner life of feeling and thought. This intermediate sphere of conception overlaps both sides. From thought it borrows the aspect of ideal universality, which binds together the immediate particularity of the senses in more definitive simplicity; while, on the other hand, its mode of envisagement shares with plastic art the haphazard1 juxtaposition of objects in space. The poetic imagination, moreover, is essentially distinct from thinking in that it permits, under the mode of sensuous apprehension from which it starts, particular ideas to remain in an unrelated series or contiguity; pure thinking, on the other hand, demands and promotes the reciprocal dependence of determinate concepts on each other, an interstructure of relations, consequential or conclusive judgments, and so forth. When, therefore, the poetical imagination in its art-products renders necessary an ideal unity of all particularity, such integration may easily meet with obstruction by virtue of the above-mentioned diffuseness2 which the nature of its content forbids it wholly to eschew; and it is just this which puts it in the power of poetry to embody and present a content in organic and vital inter-connection of successive aspects and divisions, yet impressed at the same time with the apparent independence of these. And by this means it is possible for poetry to extend the selected content at one time rather in the direction of abstract thought, at another rather under the condition of the phenomenal world, and consequently to include within its survey the most sublime thoughts of speculative philosophy, no less than the external objects of Nature, always provided that the former are not put forward in the logical forms of ratiocination and scientific deduction, or the latter as void of all vital or other significance. The function, in short, of poetry is to present a complete world, whose ideal or essential content must be spread before us under the external guise of human actions, events, and other manifestations of soul;life, with all the wealth and directness compatible with such art.

This explication, however, does not receive its sensuous embodiment in stone, wood, or colour, but exclusively in language, whose versification, accentuation, and the rest are in fact the trappings3 of speech, by means of which the ideal content secures an external form. If we ask ourselves now, to put the thing somewhat crudely, where we are to look for the material consistency of this mode of expression, we must reply that language is not essentially on all fours with a work4 of plastic art, independent, that is, of the artistic creator, but it is the life of our humanity itself the individual speaker alone who is the vehicle of the sensuous presence and actuality of a poetical work. The compositions of poetry must be recited, sung, acted, reproduced, in short, by living people, just as the compositions of music are so reproduced. We are no doubt accustomed to read epic and lyric poetry, and only to hear drama recited and to see the same accompanied by gesture. Poetry, however, is essentially and according to its notion, sonorous expression, and we may, in particular, not dispense with this, if a complete exposition of the art is our aim, for the reason that it is the aspect and the only aspect, under which it comes into genuine contact with objective existence. The printed or written letter is, no doubt, also in a sense objectively present, but it is merely as the indifferent symbol of sounds and words. We no doubt have in a previous passage regarded words as the purely external means which give us the signification of ideas. We must not, however, overlook the fact that poetry, at any rate, so informs the temporal element and sound of these signs, as to ennoble them in a medium suffused with the ideal vitality of that, whereof, in their abstractness, they are the symbols. The printing press merely makes visible to our eyes this form of animation under a mode which, taken by itself, is essentially indifferent and no longer coalescent with the ideal content; it consigns it, in its altered form of visibility, to the element of time-duration and the sound of ordinary speech,5 instead of giving us in fact the accented word and its determinate time-duration. When we, therefore, content ourselves with mere reading we do so partly owing to the ease with which we can thus picture to ourselves what is real as actually uttered in speech, partly because of the undeniable fact that poetry alone among the arts, in aspects of fundamental importance, is already completely at home in the life of spirit, and neither the impression of it on our sense of sight or hearing give us the root of the matter. Yet for all that, precisely by virtue of this ideality, poetry, as art, ought not wholly to divest itself of this aspect of objective expression, if at least it is anxious to avoid an incompleteness similar to that in which, for instance, the mere outlined drawing attempts to reproduce the picture of famous colourists.
As an artistically organic whole referred no longer to a specific type of exclusive execution on account of the onesided character of its medium, the art of poetry accepts in a general way for its determinate form various types of art-production, and it is consequently necessary to borrow the criteria of our classification of such poetical types or species from the general notion of artistic production.6

(A) In this respect it is, first, and from one point of view, the form of objective reality, wherein poetry reproduces the evolved content of conscious life in the ideal image, and therewithal essentially repeats the principle of plastic art, which makes the immediate object of fact visible. These plastic figures of the imagination poetry furthermore unveils as determined in the activities of human and divine beings, so that every thing, which takes place, issues in part from ethically self-subsistent human or divine forces, and in part also, by virtue of obstructive agencies, meets with a reaction, and thus, in its external form of manifestation, becomes an event, in which the facts in question disclose themselves in free independence, and the poet retires into the background. To grasp such events in a consequential whole is the task of Epic poetry, inasmuch as its aim is just to declare poetically, and in the form of the actual facts, either an essentially complete action, or the personalities, from which the same proceeds in its substantive worth or its eventful complexity amid the medley of external accidence. And by so doing it represents the objective fact itself in its objectivity.

And, moreover, the minstrel does not recite this positive world before conscious sense and feeling in a way that would seem to announce it as his personal phantasy, and his own heart’s passion; rather this reciter or rhapsodist recites it by heart, in a mechanical sort of way, and in a metre which, while it repeats something of this monotony with its uniformity of structure, rolls onward in a tranquil and steady stream. What, in short, the minstrel narrates must appear as a part of real life, which, in respect to content no less than presentation, stands in absolute independence aloof from himself, the narrator; he is throughout, in relation that is to the facts of his tale no less than the manner in which he unfolds them, not permitted wholly to identify his own personality with their substance.

(B) In direct contrast to epic poetry we have our second type, that namely of lyrical poetry. Its content is that within ourselves, the ideal world, the contemplative or emotional life of soul, which instead of following up actions, remains at home with itself in its own ideal realm, and, consequently, is able to accept self-expression as its unique and indeed final end. Here we have, therefore, no substantive totality, self-evolved as external fact or event, but the express outlook, emotion and observation of the individual’s self-introspective life shares in what is substantive and actual therein as its own, as its passion, mood or reflection; we have here the birth of its own loins. Such a fulfilment and ideal process is not adequately realized in a mechanical delivery such as we saw was conceded as appropriate to epic poetry. On the contrary the singer must give utterance to the ideas and views of lyrical art as though they were the expression of his own soul, his own emotions. And inasmuch as it is this innermost world, which the delivery has to animate, the expression of it will above all lean to the musical features of poetical reproduction; whether permitted as an embellishment or a necessity we shall here meet with the varied modulation of the voice, either in recitation or song, and the accompaniment of musical instruments.

(C) Our third and final mode of poetical composition unites the two previous ones in a new totality. In this we not only discover an objective exposition, but also can trace its source in the ideal life of particular people; what is objective here is therefore portrayed as appertinent to the conscious life of individuals.7 To put the case conversely, the conscious life of individuals is on the one hand unfolded as it passes over into actual life experience, and on the other as involved in the fatality of events, which brings about passion in causal and necessary connection with the individual’s own action. We have here, therefore, as in Epic poetry, an action expanded to our view in its conflicts and issues; spiritual forces come to expression and battle; the element of contingency is everywhere involved, and human activity is either brought into contact with the energy of an omnipotent destiny, or a directive and world-ruling Providence. Human action, however, does not here only pass before our vision in the objective form of its actual occurrence, as an event of the Past resuscitated by the narrative alone; on the contrary, it is made to appear as actually realized in the particular volition, morality or immorality of the specific characters depicted, which thereby become central in the principle of lyric poetry. Add to this, however, that such individuals are not merely disclosed in their inner experience as such; they also declare themselves in the execution of passion directed to ends; whereby they offer a criterion — in the way that epic poetry asserts what is substantive in its positive reality8 for the evaluation of those passions and the aims which are directed to the objective conditions and rational laws of the concrete world; and it is, moreover, by this very test of the worth and conditions, under which such individuals continue in their resolve to abide, that their destiny is discovered by implication. This objective presence, which proceeds from the personality itself, no less than this personal experience,9 which is reproduced in its active realization and all that declares its worth in the world, is Spirit in its own living totality; it is this which, as action, supplies both form and content to dramatic poetry.

Moreover, inasmuch as this concrete whole is itself no less essentially conscious life than it is, under the aspect of its external realization, also a self-manifestation, quite apart from all question of local or other artistic means of realization, we are bound, in respect to this representation of actual facts, to meet the claim of genuine poetry that we should have the entire personality of the individual envisaged; only as such the living man himself is actually that which is expressed. For though, on the one hand, in the drama, as in lyric poetry, a character ought to express the content of its own soul-life as a veritable possession, yet, from another point of view, it asserts itself, when, in its entire personality it is confronted with other personalities, as effective in its practical existence, and comes thereby into active contact with the world around it, by means of which it attaches itself immediately to an active disposition,10 which, quite as truly as articulate speech, is an expression of the soul-life, and requires its artistic treatment. Already we find in lyrical poetry some close approach to the apportionment of various emotions among different individual speakers, and the distribution of its subject-matter in acts or scenes.

In the drama, then, subjective emotion passes on likewise to the expression of action; and, by so doing, renders necessary the manifestation to our senses of the play of gesture which concentrates the universality of language in a closer relation with the expression of personality,11 and by means of position, demeanour, gesticulation and other ways is individualized and completed. If, however, this aspect of deportment is carried forward by artistic means to a degree of expression, that it can dispense with speech, we have the art of pantomime, which resolves the rhythmical movement of poetry in a harmonious and picturesque motion of limbs, and in this, so to speak, plastic music of bodily position and movement gives animated life in the dance to the tranquil and cold figures of sculpture, that it may essentially unite by such means music and the plastic art.

1 Gleichgültige, that is, the impressions of sense are received from without, from a manifold indifferent to ourselves.

2 Losheit. A word coined by Hegel to denote this relation of poetry to external objects in their independence.

3 Die Gebehrden, lit., gestures, in which sense it is used in a subsequent passage.

4 We should rather have expected “the material of plastic art.” The contrast is rather between the nature of the medium in each case than the finished product. So far as the latter is concerned the musical composition is as dependent, even more dependent for its presentment on human activity as poetical composition.

5 Des Klingens unseres Gewohnheit. It is not quite clear what the meaning is here. The meaning may be as in the interpretation above. But it is rather difficult to see how, so far as mere print goes, we can be conscious of actual sound at all, unless it is intended here to include at least the act of reading; an alternative interpretation would be the “habitual verbal accent,” but we should in that case have rather expected the substantive Nachdrucks for Klingens.

6 Hegel means of course that as that notion stands midway between the objectivity of sense-perception and the concept of thought, so too this classification will be based on the attitude of the art either to the personal life, or the objects of sense, as the one aspect is more strongly represented or the other.

7 Dem Subject. That is, I understand, the individual subject generally, not merely the conscious life of the poet or the singer.

8 In seiner Gediegenheit, i.e., as concrete.

9 Dies Subjektive. The realization of self in the world is part of that world regarded as a rational and self-conscious process, Spirit.

10 Sich die Gebehrde anschliesst, i.e. a practical attitude to the world, involving gesture and other actions.

11 Hegel’s expression is “the personality of expression,” i.e., the personal aspect of expression.

A. EPIC POETRY

The Epos, word, saga, states simply what the fact is which is translated into the word. It acquires an essentially self-consistent content in order to express the fact that it is and how it is. What we have here brought before consciousness is the object regarded as object in its relations and circumstances, in their full compass and development, the object, in short, in its determinate existence.

We propose to treat our subject-matter as follows:

First, we shall attempt to describe the general character of what is Epical:

Secondly, we shall proceed to some particular features, which in respect to the real Epos are of exceptional importance:

Thirdly, we shall enumerate by name certain specific methods of treatment, which have been actually in use in particular epic compositions within the historical elaboration of the type.

(a) The most simple, but nevertheless in its abstract concentration, still one-sided and incomplete mode of epic exposition consists in the assertion of that which is essentially fundamental and necessary among the facts of the concrete world and the wealth of mutable phenomena, and in the expression of such on their own account, as focussed in epic phraseology.

(α) We may begin our consideration of the type with the epigram i, in so far as it really remains an epigram, that is an inscription on columns, effects, monuments, gifts and so forth, and at the same time points with an ideal finger to something else, and by doing so explains through words, inscribed on an object, somewhat otherwise plastic, local, something present outside the words expressed. In such an example the epigram states simply what a definite fact is. The individual does not as yet express his concrete self; he attaches a concise interpretation to the object, the locality, which he has immediate perception of and which claims his interested attention, an interpretation which goes to the heart of the fact in question.

(β) A yet further advance may be discovered in the case where the twofold aspect of the object in its external reality and the fact of inscription disappears, in so far, that is, as poetry, without any actual representation on the object, expresses its idea of the fact. To this class belong the gnomes of the ancients, ethical sayings, which concentrate in concise language that which is more forceable than material objects, more permanent and universal than the monument of some definite action, more perdurable than votive offerings, columns, and temples. Such are duties in human existence, the wisdom of life, the vision of that which constitutes in action and knowledge the firm foundations and stable bonds for human kind. The epic character of such modes of conception consists in this, that such maxims do not declare themselves as exclusively personal emotion and reflection, and also, in the matter of their impression, are quite as little directed with the object even of affecting our emotions, but rather with the purpose to emphasize what is of sterling validity, whether as the object of human obligation or the sense of honour and propriety. The ancient Greek elegiacs have in some measure this epic tone. We have still extant a few verses of Solon of this kind, though the transition here into a hortatory tone and style is easily made. Such include exhortations or warnings with reference to the common social life, its laws and morality. We may also mention the gold sayings, which tradition ascribes to Pythagoras. Yet all such are of a hybrid nature, and referable to this, that though in general we may associate with them the tone of our distinct type, yet, owing to the incompleteness of the object, it is not fully realized, but rather there is a distinct tendency to involve with it that of another poetical type, in the present case the lyrical.

(γ) Such dicta may, however, thirdly, as already suggested, by being divested of this fragmentary and self-exclusive isolation, go to form a larger whole, be rounded off, that is, in a totality, which is altogether of the Epic type; we have here neither a purely lyrical frame of mind nor a dramatic action, but a specific and veritable sphere of the living world whose essential nature, as emphasized in its general characteristics, no less than as situated to particular aspects, points of view, occurrences or obligations, supplies us with an integrating unity and a genuine focal centre. In complete agreement with this type of epical content, which displays what is of permanent and universal import along with, as a rule, a distinct ethical purpose of admonishment, instruction or exhortation to an, in all essentials, ethically stable life, compositions of this kind receive a didactic flavour. Nevertheless, by reason of the novelty of their wise sayings, the freshness of their general outlook and the ingenuousness of their observation we must keep them quite distinct from more recent didactic poetry. They wholly justify, inasmuch as they give the necessary play to matter entirely descriptive, the conclusion that these two aspects taken together, instruction and description, are directly deduced as the substantive summary of facts which have been throughout experienced. As an obvious illustration I will merely mention the “Works and Days” of Hesiod, the teaching and descriptive power of which, in its primitive style and as a poetical composition, exercises a fascination upon us wholly different from the pleasure we experience in the colder elegance, the scientific or systematic conclusions of Virgil’s poems on agriculture.

(b) The above described modes of epigram, gnome, and didactive poem accept their specific provinces of Nature or human life as their subject-matter, while endeavouring to fix attention in concise language, with more or less limitation of survey, on that which is of permanent worth and essential truth in this or that object, condition, or activity; and even under the still more restricted condition which the art of poetry imposes on such a task the practical result upon human effort is still maintained. There is, however, a further or second type of such compositions, which is, on the one hand, profounder in its penetration, and, on the other, lays less stress on instruction and reform. Such are the cosmogonies and theogonies, no less than those most ancient works of philosophy, which are still unable entirely to liberate themselves from the poetical form.

(α) In this way the exposition of the Eleatic philosophy in the poems of Xenophanes and Parmenides still remains poetic in form; and this is exceptionally so in the introduction prefaced by the latter to his work. The content is here the One, which, in its contrast to the Becoming or the already Become, all particular phenomena in short, is eternal and imperishable. No particularity is permitted to bring content to the human spirit, which strives after truth, and, in the first instance, is cognizant of the same in its most abstract unity and concreteness. Expatiating in the greatness of this object, and wrestling with the might of the same, the impulse of soul inclines instinctively to the lyrical expression, although the entire explication of the truths into which the writer’s thought here penetrates carries on its face a wholly practical and thereby epic character.

(β) It is, secondly, the becoming of objective things, in particular natural objects, the press and conflict of activities operative in Nature, which supplies the matter of the cosmogonies, and impels the poetic imagination to disclose in the still more concrete and opulent mode of actions and events real eventuality. And the way this faculty does this is by clothing the forces of Nature in relatively more or less personified or figurative images placed in distinct stages, and through the symbolical form of human events and actions. Such a type of epic content and exposition pre-eminently belongs to Oriental Nature-religions; and above all among them the poetry of India is to an excessive degree prolific in the invention and portrayal of such modes of conception, frequently of an unbridled and extravagant type, concerning the origin of the world and the powers that are active therein.

(γ) We find, thirdly, similar characteristics in theogonies. Such occupy their true position mainly in so far as, on the one hand, the many particular gods are not suffered exclusively to possess the life of Nature as the more essential content of their power and creation, nor, conversely, is it one god that creates the world out of thought and spirit, and who, in the jealous mood of monotheism, will tolerate no other gods beside himself. This fair mean is alone exemplified in the religious outlook of the Greeks. It discovers an imperishable subject-matter for theogony-building in the forceful emancipation of the family of Zeus from the lawlessness of primitive natural forces, no less than in the conflict waged against them. It is a process and a strife which we may indeed affirm gives us the historical origins of the immortal gods of poetry itself. The famous example of such an epic mode of conception we possess in the theogony known to us under the name of Hesiod. In this composition the entire course of event is throughout wedded to the form of human occurrences; it becomes less and less symbolical just to the extent that the gods, who are summoned to a spiritual dominion, are themselves liberated through an intelligent and ethical individuality adequate to their essential nature, and consequently are rightfully claimed and depicted as acting like human beings. What is, however, still absent from this type of Epic composition is, in the first place, a genuinely complete result1 as poetry. The acts and events, which are within the scope of the survey of such poems, are no doubt an essentially necessary succession of occurrence, but they are not an individual action which issues as from a centre, wherein it discovers its unity and independence. From a further point of view the content of such poetry does not, and in virtue of its character cannot, present to us an essentially complete whole. It does, and for the above reason must, exclude the real activities of mankind, which are indispensable as the truly concrete material for the active display of the Divine forces. Epic poetry, therefore, is bound to free itself from such defects, if it is to receive its most perfect expression.

In the types hitherto discussed, which as a rule are wholly passed over, what we call the epic tone is unmistakably present, but the content is not as yet poetical in the concrete sense. Particular ethical maxims and philosophemata still persist as part of the material. What is, however, poetical in the full sense is concrete ideality in individual guise; and the epos, inasmuch as it makes what actually exists its object, accepts as such the happening of a definite action, which, in the full compass of its circumstances and relations must be brought with clarity to our vision as an event enriched by its further association with the organically complete world of a nation and an age. It follows from this that the collective world-outlook and objective presence of a national spirit, displayed as an actual event in the form of its self-manifestation, constitutes, and nothing short of this does so, the content and form of the true epic poem. As one aspect of such a totality we have the religious consciousness in every degree of profundity attained by the human spirit; it furthermore embraces the particular concrete life, whether political or domestic, not excluding all the detail of external existence, and the means by which human necessities are satisfied. All such material the epos makes of vital account as a growth in close contact with individuals; and for this reason, that for poetry the universal and substantive is only realized in the living presence of spirit life.

Such a comprehensive world, together with the human characterization it embraces, must then pass before us as real in a tranquil stream, without any undue haste, either as positive history or dramatic action, towards its aim and conclusion. We must thereby be permitted to linger round isolated facts, to penetrate into the different pictures of its movement and to enjoy them in all their detail. And by this means the entire panorama receives in its objective mode of realization the form of an external series of events, the basis and limitations of which must be implied in the essential ideality of the particular epic content, and of which the positive assertion is alone absent. If, consequently, the epic poem is, in its links of connection, more diffuse, and, by virtue of the relatively greater independence of portions of it, inclined to suffer from lack of coherency, we must not allow ourselves the impression that it could ever have been actually sung throughout in this manner. Rather it is an imperative in its case, as in that of any other artistic production, that it should be finished off in an essentially organic whole, which, however, moves forward in apparent tranquillity, in order that the particular fact and the images of actual life it contains may engage our interest.

(α) Such a primitive whole is the epic composition, whether known as the saga, the book, or the bible of a people. We may add every great and important nation can claim to have such primitive books, in which we find a mirror of the original spirit of a folk. To this extent these memorials are nothing less than the real foundations of the national consciousness; and it would be of profound interest to make a collection of such epic bibles. Such a series of Epopees, however much they fell short of artistic compositions in the modern sense, would at least present to us a gallery of the genius of nations. At the same time it is doubtless the fact that it is not every national bible which can claim the poetic form of the epopœa; nor do all nations which have embodied their most sacred memorials, whether in relation to religion or secular life, in the form of comprehensive compositions of the epic type, possess religious books. The Old Testament, for example, contains no doubt much epic narrative and genuine history, no less than incidental poetic compositions; but despite of this the whole is not a work of art. In a similar way the New Testament, as also the Koran, are mainly limited to a religious subject-matter, starting from which the life of the world at large is to some extent and in later times a consequence. Conversely, though the Hellenes have a poetic bible in the poems of Homer, they are without ancient religious books in the sense the Hindoos and the Parsees possess such. Where, however, we meet with the primitive epopoea, we must essentially distinguish between primitive poetic books and the more recent classic compositions of a nation, which do not any longer offer us a mirror of the national spirit in all its compass but do no more than reflect it partially and in particular directions. The dramatic poetry of the Hindoos, for example, or the tragedies of Sophocles present no such exhaustive picture as we find in the Ramajana and the Maha-Bharata, or the Iliad and the Odyssey.

(β) And insomuch as in the genuine Epos the naïve national consciousness is expressed for the first time in poetic guise, the real epic poem will appear for the most part in that midway stage in which, though no doubt a people is aroused from its stupidity, and its life is to that extent essentially strengthened to the point of reproducing its own world and of feeling itself at home therein, yet, for all that, everything which at a later stage becomes fixed religious dogma or civic law and ethical rule, still remains in the fluency of life as mere opinion, inseparable from the individual as such. And along with this volition and feeling are not as yet held distinct from one another.

(αα) It is only after the separation of the individual’s personal self from the concrete national whole, with its conditions, modes of opinion, exploits and destiny; it is only, further, after the division in man himself between his emotion and volition, that the lyric and dramatic types of poetry in turn replace the epic type and attain their richest development. This consummation is only reached in the later life-experience of a people, in which the general lines laid down by men for the due regulation of their affairs are no longer inseparable from the sentiments and opinions of the nation as a whole, but already have secured an independent structure as a co-ordinated system of jurisprudence and law, as a prosaic disposition of positive facts, as a political constitution, as a body of ethical or other precepts; and being so, individuals are now confronted with material obligations rather as a necessary force external to themselves than one which their own inner life asserts, and which it compels them to substantiate as its fulfilment. As opposed to such an already actual and independent system, the individual life will seek in part to find expression in an equally independent world and growth of personal vision, reflection and emotion, which are not carried further into the sphere of action, and will further give lyrical utterance to its selfabsorption, its pre-occupation with the content of such a soul-experience. And, in part also, it will make its active passion of main importance, and will seek to assert itself independently in action, in so far as it is able to divest external conditions, the event and its concomitants of any claim to truly epic self-subsistency. It is just this increase to the strength and stability of individual character and aims in their relation to action which opens the way to dramatic poetry. To return, however, to the epic, we repeat that it is the above-mentioned unity of feeling and action which it demands, that unity between the self-fulfilled object of the personal life and the external accident and event; a unity which, as observed, is only present without blemish as it first appears in the earliest periods of the national life or the national poetry.

(ββ) At the same time, we must not yield ourselves, therefore, to the impression that a people in its heroical time simply as such, and as the home of its epos, there and then was in possession of art, or could necessarily depict its life in the mirror of poetry. As a matter of fact, an essentially poetical nationality in its actual world-presence is one thing; the art of poetry regarded as the imaginative consciousness of poetical material, and the artistic presentment of such a world is quite another. The felt want to express oneself as idea in terms of the latter, the trained knowledge of art, are later acquisitions than the life and spirit itself, which discovers itself in all simplicity at home in its unreservedly poetical existence. Homer and the poems under his name are centuries later than the Trojan war, which is to myself quite as much an historical fact as the personality of Homer. In the same way we may affirm of Ossian, always assuming that the poems ascribed to him are really his, that he celebrates an heroic past, the sunset splendour of which inspires him to recall and reclothe the same in poetical form.

(γγ) Despite, however, such a separation, some intimate bond of association must exist between the poet and his subject-matter. The poet must still stand on even terms with the conditions, the general point of vision, the beliefs which he depicts. All he should find it necessary to do is to attach to these the poetic consciousness and the art capable of portraying them; in other respects they are still essential factors in his own life. If such an affinity as that above described is absent in our poet’s epic creation, his poem must infallibly contain disparate and irreconcilable features. For both these aspects — namely, the content, the epic world, which it is the intention to portray, and the world of the poet’s conscious life and imagination, which is in other respects independent of the above — are of spiritual derivation; they each of them possess intrinsically a definite principle, in which particular traits of characterization are involved. If, then, the personal life of the artist is essentially of a different order to that by virtue of which the historical and national life depicted came into actual being, we must necessarily become conscious of a cleft in the artistic result which will disturb and injure its effect. We shall have, in short, scenes placed before us of a previous condition of history, combined with modes of thought, opinions, and views more pertinent to other periods; and, in consequence of this, the configuration of primitive beliefs will, in its contact with the more developed reflection of a later time, lose the warmth of conviction, become, in short, a mere superstition, an empty embellishment of the mere poetical instrumentation, from which all the vitality of its actual life has vanished.

(γ) And this brings us to the general question what position the poet himself of genuine epic poetry really ought to take up.

(αα) Now, however much the Epos ought also to be positive in the sense that it is the objective presentment of a world based upon its own foundations, and realized in virtue of its own necessary laws, a world, moreover, with which the personal outlook of the poet must remain in a connection that enables him to identify himself wholly with it; yet it is equally true that his artistic product, which reproduces this world, is throughout the free creation of himself. In this connection we shall do well to recall that fine expression of Herodotus: “Homer and Hesiod have created the gods of the Hellenic race.” And, in truth, this free and audacious spirit of creation, which Herodotus attaches to the abovementioned poets, already is some testimony to the fact that although the Epopœa belongs to the early age of a nation, it is not its function to depict the most primitive condition of all. In other words, every nation possesses in its earliest origins more or less an alien culture of some kind, is confronted with a religious cult of foreign importation to which it submits, or which it regards as sacrosanct. And, indeed, we find that the minstrelsy, the superstition, the barbarous elements in human life, no less than the most exalted have their source just in this, that instead of being entirely at home with themselves, they are experienced as something aloof from themselves, that is not the natural product of their own national and individual consciousness. In this way, for example, the Hindoos must certainly, long before the date of their great Epopees, have experienced many an important revolution of religious beliefs and secular condition. The Greeks no less, as previously remarked, had to transform much material of an Egyptian, Phrygian, and Asiatic descent. The Romans, in their turn, were confronted with much of a Greek origin; and the barbarians, in the period of national invasion, with Christian or Roman antecedents, and so on. Not until the poet is able with a free hand to cast from him such a yoke, is able to take stock of what he really possesses, is conscious of his own worth, and we are thereby released from all perturbed state of mental vision, will the dawn break of a genuine epic creation. In contrast to such an outlook we have the age and the society modified by a cult abstract in its origin, with its elaborate dogmas, established political and moral maxims, all of which take us away from the concrete life at home with itself. The world of the truly epic poet maintains its opposition to such conditions. Not merely in respect to universal forces, passions, and aims which are operative in the soul-life of individuals, but also in such a poet’s attitude to all external facts, be his creation never so independent, he is entirely as one in his own province. In just this way Homer is at home in all that he sings to us of his world, and where we are conscious of such intimacy in another we are infected with a like feeling, for we are here face to face with truth, with that spirit which lives in its world, and discovers therein its true being; and it does us good to feel this, inasmuch as the poet is himself present therein heart and soul. Such a world may, indeed, belong to a less advanced stage of evolution and culture than our own; but at least it does remain faithful to that of a poetry and beauty which is open to all, so that we essentially recognize and understand here everything which our higher life, our humanity in its fundamental demands, whether it be the honour, the opinions, the emotions, the exhortation, or the exploits of each and every hero; and we are able to enjoy such characters, in all the detail of their portraiture, as themselves united to such a life and the richness of its actual presence.

(ββ) But on account of the emphasis upon the objective independence of this whole, it is a further necessary contrast that the poet fall into the background and become lost in his subject. What is to appear is the creation, not the poet; and yet withal, that which the poem expresses belongs to him. He has imagined all in his mind’s eye; he has implanted there his soul, his genius. All this, however, is not expressly asserted. So we find, for instance, that at one time a Calchas will give the outline of events; at another, a Nestor. Yet, for all that, such interpretative matter is the gift of the poet himself. Nay, actual changes in the soul-life of his heroes he explains in objective fashion as an entrance of gods upon the scene, as in the case where Athene appears before Achilles in his rage, counselling self-restraint. And inasmuch as the Epos does not disclose the soul-life of the creator, save indirectly, but the positive facts of external life, the subjective aspect of his creations must completely fall into the background, no less than the creator himself vanish behind the world he unfolds to our vision. From this point of view a great epic style makes the work appear to be itself its own minstrel. It seems to pass before us self-begotten, a work of independent birth.

(γγ) Moreover, the epic poem, if a true work of art, is the exclusive creation of one artist. However much an epic may express the affairs of the entire nation, it remains the fact that it is the individual who is the poet, not the nation as a whole. The spirit of an age, of a people, is no doubt the essential operative cause; but realization is only secured in the work of art as conceived by the constructive genius of a particular poet, who brings before our vision and reproduces this universal spirit and its content as his own experience and his own product. Poetical composition is a real spiritual birth, and spirit or intelligence only exist as this or that actual and individual conscious and self-conscious life. When we have already an artistic creation in a particular style,2 we have no doubt something to start from; and others are then able to copy with more or less success something like it, just as we have to listen nowadays to some scores of poems written in the Goethesque manner. To continue to sing many compositions in the same kind of key, however, will never create the unified creation, which is throughout the work of one inspiring genius. This is a point of real importance not only in our attitude to the Homeric poems, but also the Niebelungen Lied. For the last-mentioned work we are unable to determine an author with any historical certainty; and as for the Iliad and Odyssey, the opinion of some critics is notorious that the Homer of tradition — that is, the sole author of these books — never existed at all. They are the production in different parts of various authors, parts which have finally been patched together in the two larger works we possess. With regard to such a theory the question of most importance is whether either or both of these extant works constitute an independent organic whole in the epic sense, or, as is the view fashionable nowadays, they possess no inevitable beginning or conclusion, but rather might be continued on present lines for ever. We may, of course, admit that the unity of the Homeric poems is, as part of their essential form, less compact than that we associate with the terse concentration of a dramatic work. Inasmuch as every separate portion may be and may appear as relatively independent, they give free play to many interpolations and abrupt transitions; but, despite of this, they do unquestionably constitute throughout a true, ideally organic, and epic totality. Such a whole can only be the composition of one author. This notion of a conglomerate without essential unity, of a mere patching together of various rhapsodies composed in a similar strain, is a wild sort of idea opposed to all artistic canons. Of course, if such a view merely amounts to this, that the poet, in his bare individuality, vanishes in his creation, it is the highest form of praise. This is merely a statement that we are unable to recognize any positive traces of wholly personal opinions and feeling. So much is certainly true of the Homeric poems. What we have before us, and we have only this, is the positive fact, the objective outlook of a people. But the song of a people requires a voice, a voice which can sing forth the contents of heart and soul, as harvested from the national granary; and an essentially self-integrated work of art calls for yet more than this from the unique genius of its creator.

We have previously in our consideration of the general character of epic poetry briefly drawn attention to certain incomplete types, which, although of an epical strain, are not epopees in their completeness. They, in short, neither represent a national condition, nor a concrete event, within the boundaries of such a sphere. It is these latter features, which were then excluded, which offer us for the first time a content wholly equal to the perfected Epos, whose fundamental traits and conditions are thus stated.

Having recalled these points it becomes necessary now to investigate more closely what it is we require by way of completing our notion of the epic work of art. We are, however, on the threshold of this enquiry confronted with the difficulty that we have little or nothing to say on features of specific interest, if we confine our attention to generalities; Ave must rivet our attention on historical evidence, and those varied epic and national compositions, works which on account of the extraordinary diversity of the times and peoples to which they refer do not make us very hopeful of securing either a definite or a congruous result. We find, however, some compensation in the fact, that from among all the many epic bibles of the past we can place our finger on one at least, in which we have the clearest evidence of all which it is possible to establish as the true and fundamental character of the genuine epos. Such are the Homeric poems. These, then, above all, will be the source from which I shall borrow the characteristics, which, in my view, essentially determine the nature of such poetry, whether from the point of view of fact or theory. We propose to summarize our enquiry under the following heads:

First, we have to deal with the question, of what structure the general world condition ought to be, on the basis of which the epic event is permitted to receive an adequate reproduction.

Secondly, we shall investigate the quality of this specific type of historical event itself.

Lastly, we shall direct attention to the form in which these two aspects of our subject-matter coalesce and are completed in the unity of a single work of art, that is, in the epic poem.

(a) The General World-condition of the Epic Poem

We have already, when Ave started on this subject, seen that it is not a single isolated action which is accomplished in the true epic event; the subject of the narrative is not, in short, a wholly accidental occurrence, but an action which is dove-tailed into the entire complexus of a particular age and national circumstances, which in consequence can only be placed before us with success as a constituent part of an extensive world, demanding as it does the reflection of such a world in its entirety. In respect to the actual poetical content of this background I shall be brief, inasmuch as I have already indicated the fundamental points of interest when, in the first part of this work, I discussed the general world-condition which the ideal action presupposed. In the present context therefore I shall restrict myself to the question what is of most importance to the Epos simply.

(α) That which is most adapted, as the all-embracing condition of human society, to form the background of the Epos consists in this, that it already possesses for particular individuals the form of a positive condition actually present, and yet continues with them in closest association with the simplicity of primitive life. For if the heroes who are placed as the crowning fact of all, are first to found a collective condition the determination of what is or ought to come into existence falls into the more personal sphere of character to a greater extent than is compatible with the nature of the Epos, and therewith all appearance of the same as objective reality is impossible.

(αα) The relations of ethical life, the aggregate of the family, of the people regarded as a complete nation, not merely with a view to war, but also in their peaceful security, must have become a positive fact in their evolution; yet along with this their organization cannot as yet have assumed the settled form of co-ordinate regulations, obligations, and laws independent in their validity of the direct personal and private activities of individuals, and possessive of the power to maintain themselves against such particular wills. Rather it is the intuitive sense of right and fairness, the moral habit, the temperament, the personality, which supply the support, as they are the source, of such a social order; we have, in short, no theoretic intelligence in its precipitated form of prosaic reality able to establish and secure such a resistance to the heart, the opinions and passions of individuals. We may dismiss the thought that a community with a fully organized constitution and an elaborate system of law, judicial courts, government officials and police, would supply the environment of a really epic action.3 The conditions of positive morality must, no doubt, be present in the general will and conduct, but the instruments of its realization can only be the action and personality of individuals, and a determinate mode of its existence, of universal application and independent stability, is necessarily absent. We find, in short, in the Epos no doubt the substantive reciprocity of objective life and action, but we find no less a freedom in this world of life and action, which has all the appearance of originating exclusively from the isolated volition of individuals.

(ββ) The same considerations apply to the relation of the individual to the natural environment, from which he borrows the means to satisfy his wants, no less than discovers the best way to do so. In this respect, too, I would refer the reader back to what I have observed at greater length, when discussing the external definition of the Ideal.

What mankind requires in its external life, house and farm, tent, settle, bed, sword, lance, the ship, in which he crosses the sea, the chariot, which bears him into battle, his soup, his roast of meat, and drink — not one of these things need perforce become to him a lifeless instrument; he ought still to communicate to the same something of his entire life and substance, his essential self, and thereby leave the stamp of his own human individuality, by his active association on that which is otherwise wholly external. Our present life with its machinery and factory-made products, no less than the kind of way we seek to satisfy generally the needs of our external life, is in this respect quite as much as that of our political organization, wholly unfit to form the background which the Epos in its primitive guise demands. For just as the scientific faculty with its generalizations, its imperious conclusions, delivered independently of all personal views, can never have asserted its claim under the world-condition of the poetic type we are considering, so, too, we may assume that man did not yet appear divested of his vital connection with Nature, and the fresh and vigorous comradeship, whether as friends or opponents, which is therein implied.

(γγ) Such is the world-condition which, in a previous passage, and in contrast to the idyllic, I have called the heroic. We find it depicted in Homer with the noblest poetry, and with all the wealth of entirely human characterization. We have no more here, whether in domestic or public life, a barbarous state of things, than we have the wholly conventional prose of a regulated family and political organization; what we do find is that primitive mean of poetry much as I have already described it. A fundamental feature in such a condition is unquestionably the free individuality of all the principal personages. In the Iliad, for example, Agamemnon is, no doubt, a king of kings — all other chieftains are subject to his sceptre — but his superiority is no merely formal mutual relation of command and submission of the lord, that is, to his vassals. On the contrary, much circumspection is required of him; he must be shrewd enough to know where he ought to give way, for each particular chieftain is independent even as himself; they are not merely governors or generals summoned by him. They have assembled around him of their own free will, or are induced to follow his lead in a variety of ways. He must take counsel with them; and if they disagree with his judgment they are at liberty, as Achilles did, to remain aloof from the battle. It is this freedom of acceptance, no less than this free right to assert disapproval, which secures the absolute independence of such individuality, and attaches its poetical atmosphere to every situation. We find much the same thing in the poetry of Ossian, as also in the relation of the Cid to the princes, whom this poetical hero of romantic and national chivalry serves as vassal. In Ariosto and Tasso this free relation is still unimpaired; and indeed in Ariosto the individual heroes set forth in practically unqualified independence on their own path of adventure. And the mass of the folk stand in much the same relation to their leaders as that of the separate chieftains to Agamemnon. These too follow voluntarily. There is still no paramount legal obligation by which they are constrained. Honour, reverence, humility in the presence of men more mighty than themselves, ever able to enforce that might, the imposing presence of the heroic character in short and all it implies, such are the essential grounds of their obedience. The order of domestic life is maintained in a similar way. It is not enforced as an accepted rule of service, but as dependent on personal inclination or ethical habit. All is made to appear as though it had grown up spontaneously. Homer, for example, tells us of the Greeks, when narrating one of their battles with the Trojans, that they had lost many valiant fighters, but not so many as the Trojans; and the reason given is that they were always mindful to ward off from one another the extreme of necessity. In other words, they assisted each other. And if we, in our own days, had occasion to define the difference between a well-disciplined and an uncivilized army we could not express it more directly than by laying stress on this very coherence and spirit of cameraderie, this unity enforced by all in a felt association, which distinguished the former. Barbarians are simply human mobs, in which no individual can rely on his neighbour. What, however, in our modern example, being as it is the final result of a stringent and tedious military discipline, rather appears as the exercise and command of an established regime, in Homer’s case is still an ethical habit asserted of its own accord, springing from the vital strength of the individual in his private capacity.

We may explain in a similar way Homer’s great variety in his descriptions of Nature and external condition. In the prose romances of our own day we do not find much stress laid on the natural aspects of things. Homer, on the contrary, gives us every detail in his portrayal of a staff, sceptre, bedstead, armour, clothing, doorpost; he does not even omit to mention the hinges on which the door turns. Such things appear to us wholly outside our attention and insignificant; or rather we may say that it is the tendency of our education to affect an extremely severe superiority to a whole number of objects, matters, and expressions, and we deliberately classify in their claim to our notice such things as various kinds of dress, furniture, implements, and so on. Add to this the fact that in our day all the means supplied or prepared for the satisfaction of our wants are so split up into every kind of machinery product from work-shop and factory, we come to regard the medley of supply as something beneath us, neither deserving enumeration or respectful attention. The heroic existence is, on the contrary, confronted with a primitive simplicity of objects and inventions; it readily lingers on their description. All these possessions are, in short, regarded as of one standard of value, as chattels or instruments in which man still discovers evidence of his craftsmanship, his positive wealth and interest whereof he may be justly proud. His entire life is not abstracted from such material things, nor exclusively occupied with a purely intellectual sphere. To slaughter oxen and prepare their flesh for the table, to pour out wine and things of that sort are part of the heroic life, carried out with purpose and delight; with us a meal, if it is not to be a very commonplace affair, must not merely carry with it something of the culinary art, but is incomplete without really good conversation. Homer’s detailed descriptions in these matters must not therefore be looked upon as a purely poetical embellishment of things of little moment; such a copious attention is nothing more or less than the actual spirit of the men and circumstances depicted. We find just the same prolixity of speech on external things in the case of our own peasants; and for that matter do not the dandies of our own day dilate without limit upon their stables, horses, top-boots, spurs, pants, and the like. In contrast to a life of profounder intellectual interest such things will doubtless appear somewhat jejune.

Such a world ought not merely to embrace the limited universality of the particular event, which occurs on the definite background presupposed; it must coalesce in its expansion with the entire horizon of the national vision. We have a supremely fine example of this in the Odyssey, which not only brings us into contact with the domestic life of the Greek chieftains, their servants and subordinates, but also unfolds the richest variety with its tales of the many opinions of foreign peoples, the hazards of sea-life, the dwellings of distant lands, and so forth. But in the Iliad also, though the nature of its subject restricts to some extent the horizon of our vision, and not unnaturally on its battle-fields has comparatively little to tell us of more tranquil scenes, Homer, at least, has on the shield of Achilles managed in a wonderful way to give us a view of the entire compass of terrestrial existence, no less than human life, in marriages, judicial affairs, agriculture, the might of armies, the private wars of cities, and much else. And these descriptions we ‘shall do well not to regard as a wholly incidental feature of the poem. In contrast to such a treatment the poems we identify with the name of Ossian introduce us to a world that is too limited and indefinite. It has for this very reason rather a lyrical character; and as for Dante we may say that his angels and devils inhabit no truly positive world open to our detailed approach; it exists solely as instrumental to the final fruition or due punishment of mankind. And above all in the Nibelungenlied the absence is complete of any definite realization of a visible world or environment, so that the narrative tends in this respect to assume the strain or tone of the mere balladsinger. The narrative is, no doubt, diffusive enough; but it is all much as if some journeyman had picked it up first as gossip, and then retailed it as such afterwards. We are not brought to close quarters with the facts, but are merely made aware of the impotence and tedious effort of the poet. This wearisome expanse of poetical debility becomes of course even more pronounced in the Book of Heroes, until finally the whole business is handed over to the true poetical journeyman, in other words, the Master singers.

(β) Furthermore, for the reason that the Epos has to embody in art a specific world, in all its separate characteristics carefully defined, one, in short, for this reason itself essentially individual, the mirror of such a world must be that of a one particular people.

(αα) In this respect all truly primitive Epopees present to our view a national spirit in the ethical structure of its family life, its public dispositions in times of peace or war, its wants, arts, usages, and interests — in a word, a picture of the relative type and stage of the national consciousness. What the epic poem reveres more than anything else, observes most narrowly, that which, as previously noted, it expatiates upon, is the power to let our inward eye see as in a mirror the individual genius of nations. We have presented us, as the result of such a gallery, the world-history itself, and what is more, we have it in its beautiful, free, and emphasized vitality, manifestation, and deed. From no source, either so impregnate with life or simplicity, can we, for example, better understand the Hellenic spirit and Greek history, or at least grasp the principle of that content, which this people embodied, and which it brought with it when it first set forth to engage in the conflict of its wholly authentic history, than from this of the poet Homer.

(ββ) Now the national substance in its realization is of a twofold nature. First, we have an entirely positive world of specialized usage or custom peculiar to the nation in question, a definite period of history, a definite environment, whether geographical in its streams, hills and forests, or in its climatic situation. Secondly, we have that ideal substance of its spiritual life, whether in the religious sphere, the family or the community generally. If thus an Epos of the primitive type is, under the conditions already indicated, to be and remain a permanently effective bible, the nation’s Book, in that case that which is positive in the reality of the Past can only claim such a continuously vital interest in so far as the characteristic features accepted are placed in an ideal connection with the actually substantive aspects and tendencies of the national life. Otherwise what claims to be of positive value will be entirely contingent and a matter of indifference. Native geographical conditions, for instance, enter into the conception of nationality. But if they do not confer on a folk its specific character, the addition of other natural environment, provided that does not contradict national character, is not in certain cases prejudicial to the effect, but may even prove attractive to the imagination. No doubt the sensitive experience of youth is interwoven with the immediate presence of its native hills and streams; but where the deeper bonds of the entire spiritual outlook are absent, such an association assumes a more or less external character. And, apart from this, where we have, as in the Iliad, a warlike expedition, it is impossible to preserve the locale of the fatherland. In such a case the scenery of a foreign land in itself fascinates and attracts. The enduring vitality of an Epos is, however, more seriously impaired, where, in the course of centuries, the spiritual consciousness and life has so entirely changed that the links between the more recent Past and the original point of departure already adverted to are completely severed. This is actually the case with the poet Klopstock in another province of poetry, where he attempts to establish a national religion, and, in order to do so, gives us his Hermann and Thusnelda. We may affirm the same kind of defect of the Nibelungenlied. The Burgundians, the revenge of Chriemhilda, the exploits of Siegfried, the entire social condition, the fated downfall of an entire race and many like facts — all this is no longer vitally held together with the domestic, civil, and judicial life, the institutions and constitutions of the present day. The biography of Jesus Christ, with its Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Roman jurisdiction, even the Trojan war itself, come home to ourselves far more nearly than the events of the Niebelungen; the latter are for present consciousness a state of things wholly gone for ever, swept away once and for all with a besom. To attempt to compose of such something of national significance, to say nothing of a national bible, betokens the extreme limit of folly and superficiality. In times when it was rashly4 assumed that the flame of youthful enthusiasm had flashed up anew, such a conceit was taken as a proof of the sere leaf of an age once more become childlike in the approach of death; and it refreshed itself with a past that was dead, and deemed it possible to associate others with a similar refreshment and renewed presence.

(γγ) If, however, a national Epos is to secure in addition the permanent interest of foreign nations the world which it depicts must not merely be of a particular nationality, but of a type that is, in this specific folk, its heroism and exploits, equally impressed with the stamp of our common humanity. In the poems of Homer, for example, the superb directness with which he deals with matters of divine or ethical import, the nobility of the characters and of everything living therein embraced, the pictorial quality of their presentment to the reader, all this insures an undying truth for succeeding ages. In this respect we find a remarkable contrast in the creation of different peoples. We cannot deny, for instance, that the Ramajana reflects with the essential directness of life the national spirit of the Hindoos, more particularly from the religious point of view; but the character of the entire Hindoo race is so overpoweringly of a unique type, that the essential features of our common humanity are unable to assert themselves through the veil of this national idiosyncracy. A remarkable contrast to this is the way in which the entire Christian world, from the earliest times, has found itself at home in those epic passages of Old Testament narrative, above all in the pictures of the patriarchal state, and able to repicture for itself to the life the events portrayed over and over again with the greatest enjoyment. The testimony of Goethe is unequivocal. Here was the one focal centre, he assures us, on which, in his young days, amid much that he learned of a miscellaneous and unconnected character, his intellect no less than feeling concentrated itself. Even in later life he still remarks upon them that “after all our wanderings through the East we always returned in the end to these writings as the most invigorating spring of waters: here and there they might be troubled; not unfrequently they hid themselves in the earth; but it was only to rise up again pure and fresh as ever.”

(γ) Finally, the general condition of a particular people must not in this tranquil universality of its individual character wholly oust what is more directly the object of the Epos, in other words, be described with no reference to that. It ought only to appear as the foundation, upon which an event throughout its entire process is transacted, one which is in contact with all aspects of the national life, and one which illustrates the same as it proceeds. Such an eventuality must not be a purely external incident; it must imply a deliberately conceived purpose executed by equally deliberate effort. If, however, these two aspects, namely, the general condition and the particular action, do not coalesce, then the event in question must seek its justification in the particular circumstances, the causal conditions which dominate its movement. That is practically to say the world of Epos which is reproduced must be conceived under a specific situation which is so concrete that the definite objects which it is the function of the epic narrative to realize, are necessarily made explicit by it. We have already, when discussing the ideal action,5 pointed out on general lines that this realization presupposes situations and circumstances which bring about collisions, actions that do injury and consequently necessary reactions. The particular situation, therefore, in which the epic world-condition of a nation is made actual to us, must of itself be essentially one implying such collisions. In this respect, therefore, epic poetry enters the field already occupied by dramatic poetry; and we may find it convenient at once to determine in what respects the collisions of these two types of poetry differ.

(αα) Under the broadest review of this question we may say that the conflict of the belligerent condition is that which supplies the Epos with its most pertinent situation. In war it is obviously the entire nation which is set in activity, and which, as a whole placed under similar conditions, is moved and stimulated in a novel way, in so far at least as it possesses any claim, as such a whole, to participate in it. We may admit that the above conclusion stands in apparent contradiction not merely with Homer’s Odyssey, but also the subject-matter of many poems that are epic in an otherwise intelligible sense. It finds, however, ample corroboration in the majority of the most famous Epopees. Moreover, the collision of operations in the events of which the Odyssey informs us, derives part of its source from the Trojan war; and even under the aspect of domestic life in Ithaca, no less than that of the home-returning Odysseus, although the narrative is no actual account of conflicts between Greeks and Trojans, yet it deals with facts which are the immediate consequence of that war. Nay, it is itself war under a new aspect, for many chieftains are forced to reconquer their homes, which after their ten years’ absence they find under wholly altered conditions. We have practically but one example of the religious Epos, Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Even here, too, the fundamental collision is deducible from that original Fall of the evil angels from heaven, which brings in its train and within the sphere of human experience the ever active external and ideal conflict between the Divine Father and the conduct of men, whether hostile or well-pleasing to Him, a conflict eternally perpetuated in condemnation, purification, and blessedness, or in other words, hell, purgatory, and paradise. Also, too, in the Messias it is the former war against the Son of God which supplies the focal centre. At the same time the most vital and truly pertinent examples are those which actually describe the belligerent state. We have already drawn attention to such in the Ramajana, and, most instructive of all, in the Iliad; further examples are the famous poems of Ossian, Tasso, Ariosto, and Camoens. In war courage is and remains the fundamental interest; and warlike courage is a state of the soul and an activity, which is neither so suitable for lyrical expression nor for dramatic action, but is pre-eminently adapted to the descriptive power of the Epos. In dramatic poetry it is rather the ideal strength or weakness of spiritual life, the ethically justified or reprehensible pathos which is the main thing: in the Epos, on the contrary, it is rather the native characteristics of a personality. For this reason, where it is national exploits which are undertaken, bravery is in its right place; it is in fact not an ethical state,6 in which the will is determined through its own initiative as an intelligent consciousness and volition. It rather depends on natural temperament, unites in direct equilibrium, as by fusion, with the sphere of self-conscious life, and, in order to bring into effect practical ends, which can be more fitly expressed in epic description than under the conceptions of lyrical emotion and reflection. And these conclusions with regard to bravery in war apply with equal force to the exploits of war and their consequences. The activities of personal volition and the accidents of the external event supply the two scales of the balance. The bare event, with its wholly material obstructions, is excluded from the drama, inasmuch as here what is exclusively external is not permitted to retain an independent right, but is causally related to the aim and ideal purposes of individuals, so that as to all contingent matter, if by any chance it appears to arise and to determine the result, we are none the less compelled to look for the real operative cause and justification thereof in the spiritual nature of human character and its objects, no less than in that of its collisions and their necessary resolution.

(ββ) A basis of the epic action such as this of active hostilities is obviously the source of a very varied subject-matter. We may have placed before the imagination a host of interesting actions and events, in which bravery in action supplies the leading rôle, and the claim of external forces, whether asserted in circumstance or incident, is maintained unimpaired. At the same time we must not overlook a respect in which the possibilities of epic narration is essentially restricted. It is only wars waged between one foreign nation and another which partake of a truly epic character. In contrast to this conflicts between dynasties, civil wars and social revolution, are more suited to dramatic exposition. And in fact Aristotle long ago7 advises the tragic poet to select subject-matter which is concerned with the conflicts of brother against brother. Of this type is the war of the Seven against Thebes. It is Thebes’ own son who storms the city; and its defender is the actual brother of the aggressor. Hostility of this type is something more than that of a mere foe; its significance is bound up with the individuality of the opposed brothers. We have similar examples with every kind of variety in Shakespeare’s historical tragedies. In these, almost without exception, agreement between particular individuals is what might be legitimately looked for, and it is only the private motives of individual passion and a personality absorbed in its own aims and satisfaction which bring about collisions and wars. As an example of an action of this kind treated in the epic manner, and therefore defectively, I will mention the “Pharsalia” of Lucan. However indisputably important the conflicting aims in this poem may appear to be, yet for all that the opposing parties are here too closely related on the common ground of one fatherland: their conflict, consequently, instead of being a war between two national entities, is nothing more than a strife of parties, either of which, by the very fact that it splits asunder the substantive national unity, points in one direction, namely, that of tragic guilt and demoralization. Held to this the objective facts are not placed before us in their clearness and simplicity, but are inweaved with one another in a confused manner. The same objections are equally pertinent to Voltaire’s Henriad. In contrast to this the hostility of foreign nations is something substantive. Every nation constitutes a totality essentially distinct from and in opposition to that of another. When these come into conflict we do not feel that any positive ethical connection is shattered, nothing at least of essential value to either is violated,8 no necessary whole broken into fragments. Rather it is a conflict waged in order to maintain such a totality unimpaired and to justify its claim to be so. Hostility therefore of this type is suited in every way to the essential character of epic poetry.

(γγ) Not every war, however, waged under ordinary conditions between two hostile nations is necessarily on that account of an epic character. We must have a further condition satisfied, namely, the justification on broad historical grounds for the bellicose attitude thus adopted. Only when we have this do we obtain a picture of an enterprise at once novel and more exalted, which does not present the appearance of something apart from universal history, the purely capricious subjugation of one state by another, but is absolutely and essentially rooted in a profounder principle of necessity, however much at the same time the more superficial and obvious motive of the undertaking may assume from one point of view the aspect of deliberate wrong,9 and from the other that of a private revenge. We have something analogous to such a situation in the Ramajana. But the supreme example is that of the Iliad, where the Greeks invade an Asiatic people, and in doing so fight out as it were the preludic conflict of a tremendous opposition, the wars of which practically constitute the turning point of Greek history as we see it on the stage of universal history. Of the same type is the struggle of the Cid against the Moors, or in Tasso and Ariosto the battles of the Christians against the Saracens, or in Camoens the strife of the Portuguese against the Indians. And indeed we may assert that in all the greatest Epopees we find nations which differ from each other in moral customs, religion, and language, in a word, in all that concerns their spiritual and external life, brought into collision; and we are ready to contemplate such without any revulsion on account of the triumph we find asserted there of a nobler principle of world-evolution over a less exalted, a victory assured by a bravery that is simply annihilating. If any one should, in this sense, and in emulation of past Epopees, which have sought to depict the triumph of the West over the East, of the European principle of moderation, of the individually articulate and truly organic type of beauty over Asiatic splendour, over the magnificence of a patriarchal unity, which does not attempt to secure such organic completeness, or is at least merely held together by abstract and superficial conjunctions, if such, I say, should aspire to write the Epopee of the future, he will be necessarily restricted to the portrayal of the victory of some future and intensely vital rationality of the American nation over the prison-house of the spirit which for ever pursues its monotonous task of self-adjustment and particularization.10 In the Europe of our day every nation finds itself conditioned11 by its neighbour, and cannot venture on its own account to wage any war with another European nation. If we lift our eyes beyond Europe, there can be only one direction, America.

(b) The Individual Epic Action

It is on such an essentially limited foundation then of conflict between entire nationalities that the epic event is realized, the leading characteristics of which we have now to determine. We may summarize the form we propose our investigation should take as follows:

Firsts what actually takes place consists essentially in this that the object of the epic action ought necessarily to be of individual vitality and definition, however much it may rest on a basis of the most general extension.

Secondly, for the reason that it is only of individuals that we can predicate actions we have the problem to solve of the general nature of the epic character or personality.

Thirdly, in the epic eventuality the form of objectivity is not exclusively that of external appearance: it consists quite as much in the significance of all that is itself intrinsically necessary to and substantive in the exposition. We have consequently to determine the form in which this intrinsic significance of the occurrence proclaims itself as effective, either in part as the ideal necessity which is therein concealed, or as the disclosed direction12 of eternal and providential forces.

(α) We have postulated as a necessary background of this epic world an enterprise of national significance, in which the entire compass of a national spirit can express itself in the bloom and freshness of its heroic condition. From this fundamental substratum in its simplicity we now further assume the apparition of a particular end, in the realization of which all other aspects of the national character, whether in belief or action, can be represented to our vision. The original postulate is in fact bound up in the closest way with such an all-embracing actuality.

(αα) This purposed object, which is infused with the vital principle of individuality on the lines of which, regarded in its particularized content, the entire process moves forward, must further, as already ascertained, appropriate to itself in the Epos the form of an event. It will be therefore above all important to recall at once the specific character of the mode, under which human volition and action generally combine in what we designate as the event. Now, in the first place, action and adventure are the outcome of conscious life, the content of which is not only ideally expressed in emotions, reflections, and thoughts, but also quite as much in a practical way. We may regard such realization from two distinct points of view. First, we have the ideal substance of the end presupposed and purposed, the general character of which the individual must recognize, will, calculate and accept. Secondly, there is the external reality of the spiritual or human and the natural environment, within which he is only able to act, and the accidental features of which at one time obstruct and at another assist his path; so that either in the one case he is carried forward by virtue of this favour to a successful issue, or, if in the other he is not prepared wholly to give way to such opposition, he finds it necessary to overcome them with his individual energy. If now the world covered by this volitional power is conceived as the indivisible unity of these two aspects, with the result that the right of assertion by both is equally asserted, in that case what is most pertinent to conscious life likewise enters into the formal structure of the event, the form, that is, which confers on all human action the configuration of events, in so far as the conscious or subjective will, with its purposes, motives of passion, principles and aims, can no longer appear the fact of most importance. Or, in other words, in human action everything is referred back to human personality, personal obligation, opinion and intention. In the case of the event, on the contrary, the external constitution of things is permitted to assert its inviolable claim. Here it is objective reality itself, which constitutes either the form assumed by the whole, or from another point of view a fundamental part of the content. In agreement with such a view I have already stated that it is the function of epic poetry to demonstrate the happening of an action, and thereby not only to establish the external disposition of the execution of ends, but also to meet as readily the claims of external condition, natural occurrences, and all else of a contingent character, which, in action taken simply as such, the ideal element of conscious life claims exclusively as its province.

(ββ) With regard to the particular end, the carrying out of which the Epos unfolds under the mode of the event, it follows from our previous conclusions that it must be no mere mental abstraction, but on the contrary of wholly concrete definition. At the same time, inasmuch as it is realized within the substantive actuality of the national unity, such a process must exclude the notion of merely capricious activity. The political state as such — the fatherland, let us say — or the history of a State and country, are essentially something universal, which, regarded in the light of such universality, does not appear under the mode of a subjectively individual existence, or, in other words, in inseparable and exclusive coalition with one definite living individual. For this reason the history of a country, the development of its political life, its constitution and destiny may also no doubt be narrated as event; if, however, the facts thus described are not placed before us as the concrete deed, the conscious aim, the passion, the suffering and accomplishment of particular heroes, whose individuality supplies the form and content of the realization in all its parts, the event merely assumes the rigid form of its independent forward movement in the prosaic history of a people or an empire. In this respect no doubt the most exalted action of Spirit would be the history of the world itself. We can conceive it possible that our poet might in this sense undertake to elaborate in what we may call the absolute Epos this universal achievement on the battlefield of the universal spirit, whose hero would be the spirit of man, the humanus, who is drawn up and exalted from the clouded levels13 of conscious existence into the clearer region of universal history. But in virtue of the very fact of its universality a subject-matter of this kind would so be quite unfitted for artistic treatment. It would not adapt itself sufficiently to individualization. For on the one hand we fail altogether to find in such a subject a clearly fixed background and world-condition, not merely in relation to external locale, but also in that of morality and custom. In other words, the only basis for all we could possibly presuppose would be the universal World-Spirit or intelligence, whom we are unable to bring visibly before us as a particular condition, and who is possessed of the entire Earth as his local environment. And in like manner too the one end fulfilled in such an Epos could only be the end proposed by the World-Spirit himself,14 who can only be apprehended and explicitly disclosed in his true significance through the processes of thought. If he is, however, to be represented in the form of poetry, or, at least, if the whole is to receive its proper meaning and coalescence from such a source, it is necessary that his presence should be expressed as that which acts independently from its own resources. This could only be possible for poetry, in so far as the ideal Taskmaster of history, the eternal and absolute Idea, which is realized in humanity, either was envisioned as a directive, active, perfecting individual person, or was merely made effective under the concealing veil of an ever-operative Necessity. In the first case, however, the infinity of such a content must shatter the necessarily limited artistic vessel of determinate individuality, or, as the only way of avoiding such a defect, must assume the inadequate form of a dispassionate allegory of general reflections over the destination of the human race and its education, over the final purpose of mankind, its moral consummation, or over whatever result the end of this World-history might establish. In the alternative case it is the genius of the various peoples which has in each example to be presented (in the heroic figure) in the conflicting existence of whom history expands and moves forward in progressive evolution. If, however, the genius of nations is really to appear in poetical form this can be carried out in only one way, namely, by placing before us the actual world-historical figures as operative through their deeds. We should, however, then merely have a series of particular characters, which emerged and again disappeared in a wholly external succession, the objects of which lacked individual unity and connection; and this would be so for the reason that the controlling World-Spirit, under our conception of it, as the ideal essence and destiny, could not, in the case supposed, be set forth as itself an active individual and the culminating agent in the process. And if, further, anyone was desirous of appropriating the spirits of different nationalities in their universality, and of displaying them as agents in such a substantive form, we should still only have a similar series, the individuals whereof, apart from the fact that they would merely possess an appearance of positive existence similar to Hindoo incarnations, would, in the fictitious form of the imagination they received pale into nothingness when contrasted with the truth of the World-Spirit as realized in actual history.

(γγ) We may consequently lay it down as a general principle that the particular epic event is only able to secure a vital form in poetry when it is united in the closest state of fusion with one individual. Precisely as it is one poet who thinks out and executes the whole, so too one individual must crown the edifice, with whom the event is associated and in connection with whose single identity it is continued and completed.

We must point out, however, that here too we are limited by essential conditions. For just as in our previous discussion it was the world-history, so too now, from the converse point of view, it is possible that the biographical treatment in a poetic composition of a definite life-history may appear to supply the most complete and adequate subject-matter of the Epos. This, however, is not the case. No doubt in biography the individual is one and the same throughout; but the events, through which the life-development proceeds, may entirely fall apart, and only retain the subject of the same in a wholly formal and accidental bond of relation. If, on the other hand, the Epos is essentially homogeneous, the event also, in the form of which the content of the poem is disclosed, must itself possess intrinsic unity. Both aspects, in short, the unity of the individual and that of the objective event, as it is evolved, must coalesce and be united. In the life and exploits of the Cid it is unquestionably true that on the field of the Fatherland it is only one great personality which without intermission remains true to himself, and in his development, chivalry and end constitutes the interest. His deeds pass before him, much as if he were the sculptured god; and finally all is gone and vanished for us, no less than for himself.15 But the poems of the Cid are also as rhymed chronicles no genuine example of the Epos; and, in their later form of romances, they are, as their specific type necessitates, merely isolated situations split off from this national hero’s life, which do not necessarily coalesce in the unity of a particular event.

The finest examples, however, of the observance of the above rule are to be met with in the Iliad and Odyssey, where Achilles and Odysseus are respectively the prominent figures. The Ramajana, too, resembles these poems in this respect. Dante’s “Divine Comedy” is an illustration, but in quite a unique way. In other words, it is the Epic poet himself with whose single personality, in his wanderings through hell, purgatory, and paradise, all and everything is so associated that he is able to recount the picture of his imagination as a personal experience, and is consequently entitled to interweave with the general substance of his composition his private emotions and reflections to a larger extent than is possible for other epic poets.

(β) However much then, speaking generally, epic poetry informs us of actual fact and its occurrence, and thereby makes the objective world its content and form, yet on the other hand, inasmuch as what happens is an action, which passes in successive views before us, it is rather, and for this reason, to individuals, and their deed and suffering that the main emphasis is attached. For it is only individuals, be they gods or men, who can veritably act; and just in proportion as they are interwoven in the vividness of life with such a panorama, to that extent they are entitled to attract the main interest to the fulness of their exposition. From this point of view epic poetry stands on level terms with lyric no less than dramatic poetry. It is therefore of some importance that we attempt to define more closely what the specific features are which distinguish the portrayal of personality in the epic composition.

(αα) Now, first, what is essential to the objective aspect of an epic character — I am speaking mainly of the leading personages — is that they should be themselves essentially a totality of such traits, in other words complete men, and thereby display in themselves all aspects of emotional life, or to put it better, should represent in a typical way, national opinion and its active pursuits. In this respect I have already in the first part drawn attention to the heroic characters of Homer; and, in particular, to the variety of genuinely human and truly national qualities which Achilles unites in himself so vitally, the hero of the Odyssey supplying an admirable companion picture. The Cid is similarly presented us with much variety of characterization and situation, as son, hero, lover, husband, father, householder, and in his relations to king, friends, and foes. Other Epopees of the Middle Ages are a great contrast, far more abstract in their type of personification, particularly so where their heroes merely champion the cause of chivalry as such, and are removed from the sphere of the true and actual life of the nation.

It is then the fundamental characteristic of the exposition of epic personality that it should unfold itself as such a totality in the most diverse scenes and situations. The characters of tragedy and comedy may no doubt also possess a similar wealth of ideality; for the reason, however, that in their case the sharp contrast between a pathos that is never other than one-sided and a passion opposed to it is within very definable limits and ends the thing of most importance, such a varied character is in part, where it is not entirely superfluous, at least more in the nature of a prodigality which is incidental, and in part is also, as a rule, overpowered by the one passion, its motives and ethical considerations, and thus forced by the type of presentation into the background. In the whole of the epic composition, on the contrary, all aspects assert an equal right to assert themselves, and expand with freedom and breadth. That they should do so is indeed fundamental to the principle of epic composition; and from a further point of view the personality here, in virtue of the entire world-condition he presupposes, possesses a right to be, and to make all that valid wherein his existence is realized, and for the good reason that he lives in an age to which precisely this objective being, this immediate individuality is appropriate. It is, of course, for instance, quite possible for us, with regard to the wrath of Achilles, to point out, as moral reflection may suggest, the injury and loss which that wrath entailed, and therefrom to conclude that the superiority and greatness of Achilles is very appreciably removed from any approach to ideal perfection, whether as hero or man, having no power apparently on a single occasion to moderate his anger or exercise self-restraint. But for all that we do wrong in blaming Achilles. And this is not because we may overlook the wrath in virtue of his other great qualities. Achilles is, in other words, simply nothing more or less than this portrait. So far as Epic poetry is concerned, that is the end of the matter. The same observations apply to his ambition and his love of glory. The main justification of these great characters is the energy of their achievement; they carry, in fact, a universal principle in their particularity. Conversely, ordinary morality tends to depreciate its native personality, and hold in reserve the resources of its life-force, and discovers its essential being in this attitude. What an astonishing self-esteem, for instance, an Alexander asserted over his friends and the life of I know not how many thousands. Self-revenge, even traits of brutality, testify to an energy of the same type in heroic times; and even in this respect Achilles, in his rôle of epic hero, has little to learn.

(ββ) And it is just on account of this fact that such preeminent figures are complete individuals, who have in resplendent degree all that concentrated in them which otherwise is diffused and separate in the national character, and thereby are throughout great, free, and humanly beautiful characters that they are rightly set in the chief place; and we find that the event of most significance is inviolably linked with such individuality. The nation is, as it were, focussed as a single living soul in them, and as such they fight out its main enterprise, and suffer the hazards of its resulting experience. In this respect Gottfried von Bouillon, in Tasso’s “Jerusalem Liberated,” is no such overpowering figure as Achilles, this typical youthful bloom and perfection of the entire Grecian host; nor is he even an Odysseus, although he is selected as the wisest, bravest, and most just of leaders to command the entire army. The Achæans are unable to win a victory if Achilles stands aloof from the contest; it is he alone who, by means of his triumph over Hector, carries victory into Troy itself; and in the return home of Odysseus we find a mirror of the return of all the Greeks from Troy, only with the difference that it is just in that which it is his destiny to endure we have placed exhaustively before our vision the entire compass of the sufferings, life experience, and conditions which are implied in the whole subject-matter. The characters of the drama, on the other hand, are not so represented as in themselves the absolute crowning point of all the rest, which becomes objective in and through them. They rather are set forth independently and for themselves in their purpose, which they accept as the outcome of their character, or as the result of definite principles which have grown up in conjunction with their more isolate personality.

(γγ) There is a third distinguishing feature in epic characterization due to the fact that the Epos does not portray an action simply as action, but an event. In drama the matter of importance is that the individual manifests himself as operative for his specific purpose, and is expressly represented in such activity and its consequences. This undeviating consideration for the realization of a distinct purpose is absent in the Epic. No doubt in this case, too, heroes have desires and aims, but the main thing here is all that they may happen to experience while fulfilling it, not the nature of their conduct in the carrying it out. The circumstances are just as active as themselves, frequently more active. The return to Ithaca, for example, is the actual project of Odysseus. The Odyssey, however, does not merely display this character in the active execution of his predetermined end, but expands its account into all the variety of occurrence which he happens to experience in his wanderings, what he suffers, what obstructions meet him in the way, what dangers he has to overcome, and all, in fact, that moves him. And this varied experience is not, as would be necessary in the drama, a direct result of his action, but is in great measure rather incidental to his journey, in the main even independent of the concurrent action of the hero. After his adventures with the Lotophagi, Polyphemus, and the Laestrygones, the godlike Circe detains him for a full year. Further, after he has visited the lower world and suffered shipwreck, he dallies with Calypso, until he falls into home-sickness, wearies of the damsel, and stares with tearful eyes over the solitary sea. Thereupon it is Calypso herself who finally provides him with the means wherewith he builds his boat, who provides him with food, wine and raiment, and takes her right anxious and kindly farewell of him. Finally, after his sojourn among the Phæacians, he is carried in sleep — he knows not how — to the shores of his island. To carry out a purposed end in this sort of way would not be possible for dramatic poetry. Again, in the Iliad, the wrath of Achilles, which, along with all else that results from this compelling force, constitutes the specific object of the narrative, is throughout not an end, but rather an emotional state. When Achilles is insulted he rages. In this condition, so far from doing anything truly dramatic, he withdraws apart, does nothing with Patroclus by the ships on the seashore, sullenly angry that he is not honoured by the lord of the folk. Then follow the consequences of his retirement, and only at last, when his friend has been slain by Hector, do we find Achilles once more plunge into the conflict. In another way, again, is the end prescribed to Æneas, which he has to carry out, where Virgil recounts all the events as the result of which its realization is in such varied ways postponed.

(γ) We have just one further important feature to mention in respect to the form of the event in the Epos. I have already observed that in the drama the conscious will, and that which the same demands and wills, is essentially the determining factor, and constitutes the permanent foundation of the entire presentation. All that is carried out appears throughout as posited already by the personal character and its aims; and the main interest above all turns upon the justification or its absence of what is done within the situations presupposed and the conflicts they bring about. If consequently it so happens also that in the drama the external conditions are themselves active, they nevertheless only retain their validity by virtue of that which conscious feeling and volition makes of them, and the ways and means under which character reacts upon them. In the Epos, however, the circumstances and external accidents are effective on level terms with the personal will itself. All that man accomplishes passes before us precisely as any other event of the world outside him, so that the human exploit is in this case likewise and equally conditioned, and must be shown to be carried forward by the development of such an environment. The individual, in short, in epic poetry does not merely act freely of himself and independently. He is placed in the midst of an assemblage of facts, whose end and actuality in its wide correlation with an essentially unified world of conscious life or objective existence supplies the irremovable foundation of the life of each separate individual. This typical system is, in fact, predominant in the Epos through all its content, whether in that of passion, determined result, or general achievement. It is true that at first sight we might expect that, on account of an equal cogency being accorded to external condition in its independent eventualities, we should find indisputable opportunity given for every shade of contingency. And yet we have seen that it is the function of the Epos to present what is truly objective — what is, in short, essentially substantive existence. The solution of this contradiction is to be found in this, that the principle of necessity is involved in the events, whether taken in detail or generally.

(αα) In this connection we may affirm of the Epos — not, however, as is generally assumed of the drama — that Destiny is a predominant force. No doubt the dramatic character by the kind of end accepted, which he endeavours to carry out despite all obstruction under the circumstances given and recognized, makes of himself his Destiny; but in the Epos, on the contrary, it is made for him, and this force of circumstances, which stamp their particular form on the deed, apportions to each individual his lot, determines the result of his actions — is, in short, the genuine control of Destiny. What happens is appertinent to itself. It is so, and only thus; it is the fiat of necessity. In lyric poetry we are conscious of emotion, reflection, the personal interest, and yearning. The drama converts the ideal claim of human action into an objective presence. The presentation of epic poetry, on the other hand, moves, as it were, within the element itself of essentially necessary existence. Therefore, the individual has no choice but to follow this particular substantive condition; and, in its process of being, to adapt himself to it or not, and then to suffer as he is able and is forced to suffer. Destiny, in short, defines what is and inevitably must be, and in the result success, misadventure, life, and death are plastic precisely in the sense that individuals are plastic. What does actually unfold before us is a condition of universal expanse, in which the actions and destinies of mankind appear as something isolated and evanescent. This fatality is the great justice, and is not tragic in the dramatic sense of the term, in which the individual appears judged as a personality, but in the epic sense in which judgment is passed on man in all that concerns him.16 The tragic Nemesis consists in this, that the greatness of his concerns is too great for the individual concerned. Consequently a certain tone of sadness17 prevails over the whole. What is most glorious is seen very early to pass away. In the fulness of his life Achilles mourns over his death; and at the conclusion of the Odyssey we view him and Agamemnon as spirits that have passed away as shades, with the consciousness that they are shades. Troy, too, falls; old Priam is slain hard by the altar of the home; women and maidens become slaves. Æneas, in obedience to the divine command, departs to found a new kingdom in Latium, and the victorious heroes only return after manifold suffering to the happiness or bitterness that awaits them at home.

(ββ) This necessity of events may, however, be represented in very different ways.

The most obvious and least elaborate is the bare exhibition of such events without any further explanation of the poet of a necessary element existing in the particular occurrences and their general consequence by his addition of a controlling world of gods disclosed in the decision, interference, and co-operation of eternal powers. In such a case we must, however, have the feeling brought home from the entire atmosphere of the exposition, that in the recounted events and great life-destinies of single individuals and entire families or races, we are not merely confronted with what is mutable and contingent in human existence, but with destinies which have an essential foundation, whose necessity remains, however, the obscure operation of a power which is not placed before us poetically as such a power in its divine controlling energy to the point of defined individualization and in its explicit activity. The Niebelungenlied retains this general tone strongly, albeit it does not ascribe the direction of the blood-stained final result of all committed deed either to Christian Providence or the pagan world of gods. For in regard to Christendom, we merely hear of churchgoing and mass. We have, indeed, the remark of the bishop of Spejevs to the beautiful Ute, when the heroes withdraw into king Etzel’s country: “Please God, He will keep them there!” We have also no doubt dreams of warning, the prophecy of the Danube maidens to Hagen, and other examples of a similar kind, but no really conclusive witness to the control and interference of gods. This leaves an impression on this poetry as of a something unriddled, unyielding, a mournfulness that is at the same time objective, and consequently wholly epic in its tone. It is a great contrast to the poems of Ossian, in which in the same way no gods appear, yet in which, on the other hand, we find lamentation over the death and downfall of the entire heroic stock presented under the form of the private sorrow of the dismayed minstrel, and as the yearning of a woe-begone recollection.

Essentially distinct from the above type of conception is the complete interlacement of all human destiny and natural event with the resolution, volition and action of a many-sided world of gods such as we find in the great Hindoo Epopees, and in Homer, Virgil, and others. I have already expressly drawn attention to the varied poetic interpretation which the poet himself supplies of events, which are apparently accidental, through his assumption of the co-operation and apparition of gods, and attempted to enforce the same by particular examples from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Here we may observe that the condition of most importance to the poetry in question is that in this reciprocal action of gods and men the relative independence of both aspects is maintained, so that neither the gods fall into lifeless abstractions, nor the human individuals become purely subservient vassals. How such a danger is to be avoided I have already discussed at length in a previous passage. The Hindoo Epos is in this respect unable to force its way fully to the truly ideal relation between gods and mankind; on such a stage of imaginative symbolism the human aspect still remains aloof in its free and beautiful actuality, and the activity of individuals in part appears as the incarnation of gods, and in part, as something of more incidental merit, vanishes, or is depicted under the guise of ascetic exaltation to the condition and power of gods. Conversely the variously personified powers, passions, genii, angels, and so forth, that we meet with in Christendom possess for the most part too little individual independence, and consequently tend only to affect us in a cold and abstract sort of way. The case is much the same in Mohammedanism. Through the deification of Nature and the world of mankind, through the conception of a prosaic co-ordination of reality, it is hardly possible to avoid the danger, more particularly where we enter a region of fairyland, wherein a miraculous interpretation is given to that which is essentially contingent and indifferent in external circumstances, which are themselves only present as a simple occasion for human action and as the ordeal of individual character, without possessing therewith an ideal consistency and foundation. By reason of this no doubt the infinitely extensible connection of cause and effect is broken, and the many sections in this prosaic concatenation of circumstances, which cannot be throughout made clearly distinct, are brought all of a sudden into one union. If, however, such a result is secured without the principle of necessity and ideal reasonableness, such a mode of elucidation, as, for example, frequently in “The Thousand and one Nights,” appears as little more than the sport of an imagination, which endeavours to unfold as causality possible and actual, by means of such inventions, what is otherwise incredible.

The fairest mean, on the other hand, in this respect is that retained by Greek poetry, inasmuch as it is able to bestow both on gods and men a reciprocally indestructible power and freedom of independent individuality. And such is harmonious with its fundamental standpoint.

(ββ) There is, however, particularly in the epic conception of it, a point of view relative to the collective world of gods, which I have already referred to above in another connection. This is the contrast which the primitive Epopee presents to the artificial composition of later times. This difference is very pronounced if we compare Homer and Virgil. The level of education, from which the Homeric poems originated, still continues in a fair harmony with the poetic subject-matter. With Virgil, on the contrary, we are reminded by every single hexameter that the general outlook of the poet is totally different from the world, which it is his endeavour to depict; and the gods more particularly have lost the freshness of their original vitality. Instead of being living persons in their own selves, actual witnesses to us of their existence, they have rather the appearance of being mere creations of the poet and external instruments, which it is neither possible for the poet or his audience to take quite seriously, although there is an open pretence made that they have been taken thus seriously. Throughout the whole of the Virgilian Epic we feel ourselves in the atmosphere of ordinary life; the old tradition, the saga, the fairyland of poetry enters with prosaic distinctness into the frame of our common-sense faculties. What we have in the Æneid is very much what we find in the Roman history of Livy, where ancient kings and consuls make speeches, precisely as an orator made his speech in the Agora of Rome, or the school of the rhetoricians in the days of Livy himself. And, on the other hand, in what is really retained from tradition, as an example of primitive speech, such as the fable of Menenius Agrippa18 about the functions of the belly, we find a contrast which is almost repulsive. In Homer, however, the gods are wafted in a magical light between poetry and reality: they are not permitted to approach the imagination so nearly, that the apparition of them confronts us with all the detail of ordinary life; nor are they left so undefined, that they lose all appearance of vital reality as we look at them. All that they do is readily explained by the soul-life and activities of men; and that which supports our faith in them is the substance and content upon which they essentially repose. From this point of view the poet, too, is thoroughly in earnest with his creations, though he treats with irony their form and external reality. In agreement with this it appears that the ancients themselves believed in this external form merely as works of art, which receive their confirmation and significance as a gift of the poet. This light-hearted and human freshness of presentment, in virtue of which the gods appear human and natural, is one of the pre-eminent qualities of the Homeric poems. The divine figures of Virgil float before our vision as so many invented wonders, as members of an artificial system. Virgil has not wholly escaped the charge of mere travesty, despite his earnestness; nay, this earnest mien of his is rather the cause of it, and Blumauer’s Mercury with his boots and spurs and riding-whip is not without its justification. There is no necessity for any one else to make the Homeric gods ridiculous. His own picture of them makes them quite ridiculous enough. Nay, in his own story the gods themselves have their laugh over the lame Hephestus, and over the cunning net in which Mars lies in company with Venus, to say nothing of the box on the ear that Venus gets, and the howl of Mars as he collapses. By means of these touches of natural lustiness and gaiety the poet at once liberates us from the external form which he set up, and enforces all the more emphatically our common human nature, which he values, and which suffers, however, the necessary and substantive power involved therein, and the faith in the same, to remain. But one or two more examples of similar detail. The tragic episode of Dido is so entirely to the modern colour, that it was able to inspire a Tasso with emulation, nay, even in part to a literal translation. Even nowadays the French are moved to something like ecstasy over it. And yet how totally different in their human naïveté, simplicity and truth are the Homeric narratives of Circe and Calypso. The contrast is the same in Homer’s account of the descent of Odysseus into Hades. This obscure and twilight like retreat of the shades is shown us through a dusky cloud, in an intermingling of imagination and reality, which takes hold of us with astonishing force. Homer does not suffer his hero to descend into any Underworld ready to hand. Odysseus himself digs a pit, and pours therein the blood of a ram he has killed; he summons the shades, which are then under constraint to circle round him, and bids some of them drink fresh blood that they may address him, and give him news, and drives away others with the sword as they throng round him in their thirst for life. Everything that happens here is bound up with the life of the hero, whose general demeanour is the reverse of the humble attitude of Æneas and Dante. In Virgil’s account Æneas descends in the ordinary way; and the flight of steps, Cerberus, Tantalus, and all the rest leaves us with the impression of a definitely organized family establishment, quite to the pattern of an orthodox compendium of mythology.

With yet more force will this artificial compôte of the poet appear as such rather than a work that springs naturally from the subject where we are already cognisant of the substance of the tale that is told us in its fresh and primitive form, or as actual history. Examples of this are Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” the “Noachid” of Bodmer, Klopstock’s “Messias,” Voltaire’s “Henriade,” and others. In all these poems we cannot fail to detect a real cleft between the content and the reflection of the poet which modifies his description of the events, characters and circumstances. In Milton’s case, for example, we find emotions and observations obviously the growth of an imagination and ethical ideas inseparable from his own age. In the same way with Klopstock we have God the Father, the history of Jesus Christ, patriarchs and angels combined with our German education of the eighteenth century, and the ideas of Wölffian metaphysic. This twofold aspect asserts itself in every line. No doubt in these cases the content itself offers many difficulties. For God the Father, the heaven of the angels, and the angelic host are far less adapted to the individualization of a free imagination than are the Homeric gods, which, in a manner similar to the in part fantastic creations in Ariosto, in their external mode of appearance, and so far as they do not epitomize19 human action, but rather independently confront each other as individuals, do of themselves suggest the gibe over such a presentment.20 Moreover Klopstock, so far as a religious outlook is concerned, introduces us to a world devoid of foundation, which he crowds with the brilliant effects of a rather exhausting imagination, and compels us to take everything as seriously as he means it himself. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of his angels and devils. Such creations only really have substance and can be brought home to us in their individuality in so far as the material of their actions, as with the Homeric gods, is rooted in the spiritual experience of humanity, or in a reality already known to us, as in cases where they claim importance as being the guardian spirits or angels of men or cities, but who, apart from such a concrete significance, assert what is just so much the more merely the vacancy of imagination in proportion as a serious actuality is ascribed to them. Abbadona, for instance, the repentant devil,21 possesses neither a truly allegorical meaning — for in the abstract notion of devil there can be no inconsistency of guilt which can be converted into virtue — nor is such a figure one that is essentially and truly concrete. If Abbadona were a man, a conversion to God would no doubt be reasonable; but where we have evil regarded as something independently substantive, which is not an individual human evil, such a conversion is merely a triviality of sentimental emotion. It is in fact a distinguishing characteristic of Klopstock’s invention that it creates such unreal personages, conditions and events, which have nothing in common with the actual world and its poetical content. And he fares no better in the machinery of his judicial condemnation of riotous living in high places, least of all in the contrast he presents to Dante, who condemns the famous personalities of his time to hell with a power of detailed realization of another type altogether. Equally destitute of real content as poetry is the joy of the resurrection among the assembled spirits of Adam, Noah, Shem, Japhet, and the rest, as depicted by Klopstock, who, in the 11th canto of the Messias, at the command of Gabriel, once more revisit their graves. Reason and rational ground are alike absent here. The souls have lived in the Divine Presence; they now behold the Earth, but they enter into no renewed relation with it. We may presume that they could not do better than appear to men; but of this there is not a single example. No doubt we find here beautiful emotions, endearing situations; and above all the moment in which the soul is once more united to a body is depicted in a way that arrests us; but the content remains none the less an invention that possesses no real claim to credibility. In contrast to such abstract ideas the blood-drinking of the phantoms in Homer, their reanimation in memory and speech, possess for us infinitely more the truth and realization of ideal poetry. And though from the point of view of imaginative resource these pictures of Klopstock are decorative enough, what is most essential in them is throughout the lyrical rhetoric of angels, who appear merely as instruments of service, or of patriarchs and other Biblical figures whose speeches and harangues have little in harmony with their historical characters as we have received the same from tradition. Mars, Apollo, War, Knowledge, and so forth — powers of this kind are neither in respect to their content wholly inventions, as the angels are, nor are they simply historical persons borrowed from historical sources, as are the patriarchs; they are on the contrary permanent forces, whose form and mode of appearance is alone the poet’s creation. In the “Messias,” however, admitting its excellence in certain directions — its purity of feeling, the brilliancy of its phantasy — yet it cannot be denied that by reason of the very type of such a phantasy we have here very, very much indeed that is hollow, without definite substance, and utilized simply as machinery for something else, all of which, combined with the absence of continuity in the content and its mode of conception, has even already covered the entire poem with oblivion. Things only live and remain green, which, essentially vital in themselves, unfold to us original life and activity in their pristine mould. For this reason we must hold fast to the primitive Epopees, and keep aloof, not only from modes of conception which are antagonistic to the actual presence which is vindicated in such, but also and above all from false aesthetic theory and predilection, at least if we are really anxious to enjoy and study the original world-outlook of nations, that great and spiritual22 natural history. We have every reason to congratulate recent times, and our German nation in particular, that it is now on the road to the attainment of this object; that it has, in short, broken through the former obtuseness, of ordinary methods of thinking, and by its liberation of the mind from restricted views made it more receptive to ideas of the world which it is imperative that we as individuals enter into, and which alone are able to restore to us, to the full extent of their claim, the resurrected spirits of nations, whose ideal significance and deed thus appear struck into life in these their own Epopees.

Hitherto, in considering the necessary qualifications of a genuine Epos, we have on the one hand discussed the general world-environment and from a further point of view the nature of the particularized event transacted on such a background by individuals either acting under the direction of gods or subject to destiny. These two fundamental aspects have yet further to coalesce in one and the same epic totality. In respect to this I will merely confine the reader’s attention to the following points of interest:

In the first place we propose to consider the collective aggregate of objects, a satisfactory exposition of which is necessary to disclose the connection between the particular action and the substantive ground referred to.

Secondly, we have to examine the nature of the difference which obtains between the epic mode of disclosure and that of lyric or dramatic poetry.

Thirdly we have to deal with the unity in which an epic composition is rounded off despite all its breadth of extension.

(α) The content of the Epos, as already observed, is the entirety of a world in which an individual action is eventuated. In such a world the greatest variety of objects appear necessarily appertinent to the general views, deeds, and conditions of such a world.

(αα) Lyrical poetry is, no doubt, involved in definite situations, within which the subject of the lyric is permitted to import a great variety of content into its emotion and reflection. In this type of poetry, however, it is throughout the form of conscious life itself which characterizes such content; and for this reason excludes the outlook on the objective world in all its breadth of extension. Conversely the dramatic composition presents us characters and the carrying out of the action itself with all the animated appearance of life, so that here, too, the portrayal of local accessories, the external form of the active personages and all that happens, in the nature of the case tends to disappear. As a rule, what we have to express is the soul-motive and purpose rather than its extensive relations with the surrounding world of objects, or a description of individuals in their positive appearance as part of them. In the Epos, however, quite apart from the national actuality in the widest sense, upon which the action is based, we must find room for the ideal or soul aspect no less than the external or world aspect. We have in this type, therefore, under review and in coalescence the entire totality of all that we may reckon as comprised in the poetic presentation of our human existence. In this content we must not merely include on the one side the natural environment in the sense of this or that specific locality in which the action takes place, but also the more universal objective outlook such as I have already pointed out is a feature we find illustrated in the Odyssey, enabling us to understand how the Greeks in the times of Homer regarded the shape of the Earth, the configuration of the seas, and similar geographical facts. At the same time these natural aspects are not the object of most importance in the poem; they are merely the foundation; there is, in short, the further and more essential aspect of the composition unfolded in the existence, activities, and co-operation of the entire world of divinities; and between these two extremes we have humanity simply as such in its collective relation to domestic, public, peaceful, and warlike situations, ethical habit, customs, characters and events. And, moreover, throughout we have to assume in both directions, whether that is from the point of view of the individual event, or the general condition, the all-embracing national and other actual complexus.

Finally, if we consider the nature of this intelligible content it is not merely an external événement that is presented us, but in conjunction with such we must have, too, placed before us the ideal world of emotion, the aims and purposes of mind, all that may contribute to justify or condemn a deliberate line of conduct. In short, the real subject-matter of lyric and dramatic poetry is not wholly excluded, although in the epic type these aspects merely are valid as subordinate features; they do not, as in the former cases, constitute the essential form of the exposition, nor do they deprive the Epos of its distinctive character. We may consequently affirm that the distinctive note of the Epic is absent, when lyric expression determines both tone and colour, as is the case, for example, in Ossian, or when passages are emphasized in which the execution of the poet is made as consummate as possible, as is to some extent the case with Tasso, and to a still more marked degree characteristic of Milton and Klopstock. Emotions and reflections ought rather, no less than the portrayal of objective fact, to be transmitted as something done, already spoken and thought, and not interrupt the tranquil course of the Epic narrative. The incoherent exclamation of emotion, the direct outcry of the soul mainly intent with its utterance upon self-revelation, is out of place in such poetry. It will for the same reason and as strongly abstain from an imitation of the animation of dramatic dialogue, in which individuals carry on a conversation as though face to face with each other, where the aspect of most importance throughout is the contrast presented by different types of character in their interchange of speech as they strive to convince, command, impose upon, or passionately unravel their motives to one another.

(ββ) And, secondly, the Epos has not merely to bring before our vision the manifold content above described in its actually independent and subsistent objective form, but also the form in which it essentially becomes the Epos is, as I have more than once already described it, an individual event. If this essentially limited action is to remain united with all other material introduced, this additional accretion of fact, must throughout be brought into definite relation with the course of the individual event, that is to say, it must not fall outside it as independent. We could not find a more perfect illustration of this interweaving of all threads than that of the Odyssey. The domestic arrangements of the Greeks, for instance, no less than the ideas we get of foreign and barbarous folk and countries, or of the realm of the shades, and much else, are so closely interwoven with the personal wanderings of the home-returning Odysseus and the fortunes of Telemachus on his journey after his father, that not one of these aspects of the tale is held in a loose and independent position apart from the main event, or, as with the chorus of tragedy, which does not usually enter into the action and merely deals with generalized reflections, is able to relapse inactive into retrospection, but co-operates in the actual progress of the event. In a similar manner Nature also and the world of gods for the first time receives, not so much on their own account as in their relation to the particular events, which it is the function of the godlike to direct, an individual representation and one of rich vitality. Only when such a condition is fulfilled, or, in other words, when the narrative throughout informs us of the progressive movement of the event, which the poet has selected as the unifying material of his composition, can it never appear as a mere portrayal of independent objects. On the other hand, the particular event for its part should not be involved in and absorb the substantive national basis and totality upon which it moves forward to such a degree, that these are themselves divested of all independent existence, and fall by necessity into a relation simply of service. In this respect the expedition of Alexander against the East would not supply satisfactory subject-matter for the true Epopee. An heroic exploit of this kind not merely in respect to the original resolve, but also to its manner of execution, depends so entirely on this one single individual, his personality and character is so exclusively that which supports it, that we lose altogether the independent existence and self-assertion of the national basis, the host and its leaders, which we have shown to be a necessary condition. Alexander’s army is his people, wholly bound up with him and his command: it follows him rather in the relation of vassalage than that of free will. In contrast to this the true vitality of the epic consists in this, that both these fundamental aspects, the particular action with its individual agents and the general world-condition, while no doubt continuing under a mediated relation, yet in this relation of reciprocity no less preserve their necessary independence and thereby enforce themselves as one existing whole, at the same time securing and possessing an independent entity.

(γγ) In a previous passage we laid it down generally that in order to have an individual action the substantive basis of epic poetry must offer the opportunity of collisions, and furthermore observed, that the general foundation must not appear as wholly independent but under the form of a specific event; we may now add that it is in this individual événement that we must seek the point of departure for the entire epic poem. This is pre-eminently of importance for the situations connected with its commencement. Here, too, we may take the Iliad and Odyssey for models. In the first the Trojan war is placed before us as the general background of contemporary life, but only so far as it comprises the particular events connected with the wrath of Achilles. And for this reason the poem commences without any possible confusion with situations which excite the passion of the principal hero against Agamemnon. In the Odyssey there are two classes of subject-matter which determine the content of its opening, that is to say, the wanderings of Odysseus and the domestic complications at Ithaca. Homer brings them together by giving us briefly information concerning Odysseus on his home-journey to the effect that he is detained by Calypso, and then at once passes to the sorrows of Penelope and the voyage of Telemachus. We are, consequently, able to review at one glance what obstacle stands in way of the return, and what is consequently rendered necessary for those left behind at home.

(β) The advance, then, of the epic poem from a commencement such as this is totally different from that of lyric or dramatic poetry.

(αα) In the first place we should draw attention to the possibilities of extension within the range of the Epos. These are quite as much due to the form as they are to the content. We have already seen what a variety of objects may be comprised in the world of the Epic as fully elaborated, not merely in its ideal capacities, motives, and aim, but also in respect to its objective situation and environment. Inasmuch as all these aspects assume an objective form, an appearance of reality, each one of them takes to itself a form of essentially independent ideality and externality, in which the epic poet, either in his exposition or description, is permitted freely to linger, and to disclose in its positive appearance. The lyric, on the contrary, concentrates all that it lays hold of within the ideal realm of the emotions, or refines it away in the generalized vision of reflection. In the objective world it is the immediate complex in juxtaposition, or the varied wealth of manifold characteristics, which is presented us. In this respect we find that in no other type of poetry is the claim to introduce episodical matter, even to the point of to all appearance absolute independence, more indisputable than in the Epos. The delight, however, in actual fact for its own sake and in its natural form must, as already observed, not be carried so far as to import into the poem circumstances and facts which have no real connection with the important action. Such episodes must assert themselves as effective in the advance of such action, whether as events which are obstructive to its course, or assistant in their mediation. Yet, despite of this, the particular portions of the epic poem will be somewhat loosely bound together. This is a necessary result of the mode of its objectivity. For in what is objective mediation persists as the ideal essence; what in contrast to this confronts the external aspect is the independent existence of particular aspects. This defect in the direction of a stringent unity and the emphasized relation of specific portions of the epic poem, which, according to its primitive form, possesses moreover a primitive period of origination, has this result, that it lends itself more readily than lyric or dramatic compositions to subsequent additions and continuations; and, further, it is enabled to appropriate under its more recent and embracing whole even examples of the saga which have already received artistic expression of a definite, if not so exalted character.

(ββ)Secondly, if we look at the way in which epic poetry may be justified in its motivisation of the progress and course of events, we shall find that it ought not either exclusively to take the ground of what happens from the individual mood, nor yet from what is purely personal character. In other words, it should not encroach upon what is the proper sphere of the lyric and drama; it must, in this respect too, adhere to the form of objectivity which constitutes the fundamental epic type. We have, in fact, seen more than once previously that external conditions were of no less importance, for an exposition that takes the form of narrative, than states of soul which revealed character. In the Epos character and the necessary rational condition coalesce completely on terms of equality, and the epic character may therefore give way to external conditions, without impairing his poetic individuality, may be, in short, in his action, the result of relations in such a way that these appear as the predominant factor rather than the exclusively effective character as we find it in the drama. We find in the Odyssey that the progress of events is almost entirely motived in this way. We find the same thing in the adventures of Ariosto and other Epopees, where the material of the song is borrowed from the the Middle Ages. The divine command, too, which induces Æneas to found Rome, no less than the varied episodes which extend its embrace over a wide field, would involve a type of motivisation wholly uncongenial to the drama. A further illustration of this is Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered,” in which, quite apart from the brave antagonism of the Saracens, many a natural event is opposed to the object of the Christian host. Such examples might be indefinitely multiplied from almost all the more famous Epopees. And, indeed, it is precisely material of this kind, in which an exposition of this type is possible and necessary, that the epic poet ought to select.

The same thing is effected where it is bound to appear as the result of the actual decision of individuals. Here, too, we have neither to assert nor to express that which the character in the dramatic sense of the term — that is, according to his aim and the individual passion which uniquely animates him — makes of the circumstances and relations, in order to maintain his personality against this external resistance no less than against other individuals. Rather the epic character excludes this action viewed simply in reference to its personal character, just as it excludes the tumult of purely subjective states and feelings. Instead of this it cleaves fast, on the one hand, to the circumstances and their reality; and on the other that, whereby its movement is effected, must necessarily render explicit all that is essentially valid, universal, and ethical. In Homer, as in no other writer, we shall find inexhaustible material for pertinent thought on this head. The lament of Hecuba over Hector, for instance, or of Achilles over the death of Patroclus — episodes which, so far as content is concerned, would lend themselves admirably to lyric treatment — are in Homer held throughout within the epic temper. And to quite as little extent do we find this poet handle in dramatic style situations which would primarily adapt themselves to dramatic exposition, such as the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles in the council of the chiefs, or the parting of Hector and Andromache. Only to glance at the last-mentioned scene, this belongs unquestionably to one of the finest conceivable efforts of epic poetry. Even in Schiller’s dialogue between Amalia and Carl in “The Robbers,” where the same subject ought to be treated in the lyric vein throughout, we distinctly hear an epic reverberation from the Iliad. How consummately epic in its effect, however, is Homer’s description in the sixth book of the Iliad of the way in which Hector vainly seeks for Andromache at home, then at last meets her on the way to the Scæan gate, how she hurries toward him, and when close to him, as he looks with a peaceful smile on his little boy lying on the arm of his nurse, exclaims: “Amazing man, thy courage will destroy thee, and thou compassionest neither thy infant boy nor me, hapless wight, who will soon be widowed of thee. Ay, for soon the Achaeans will slay thee, storming against thee together. And if I lose thee it were better for myself to pass beneath the earth. No other comfort is left for me, but only sorrow, if thou art stricken by fate! Neither have I my father any more, nor yet my lady mother.” After which she narrates at length all the story about her father and the death of her seven brothers, all of whom Achilles had slain, also the captivity, ransom, and decease of her mother. Then at length she turns with earnest plea to Hector, who is henceforward to her father and mother, brothers, and spouse in the bloom of life, and implores him to remain on the walls, and not to make his son an orphan and his wife a widow. Hector replies in much the same spirit: “All this is also a care to me, wife; but I fear too much the Trojans, if I avoid the battle here, like a coward; the eddy, too, of the moment worries me not, who am wont to be ever dauntless, and to fight in the foremost ranks of the Trojans, protecting the high fame of my father and mine own. Ay, well indeed I wot, both in mind and soul, that the day will come in which sacred Troy shall fall, as also Priam and the folk of the king cunning with the spear. But I sorrow not so much for the Trojans, nor yet for Hecuba herself and Priam, nor the brothers of my flesh, who shall fall beneath the foe, as for thee, when some bronze-greaved Achæan shall bear thee away, robbing thee of thy day of freedom, and thou shalt spin from the flax of another in Argos, or wearily draw water, loth indeed, but the might of necessity will be upon thee; and I doubt not there will be someone who will say, as he sees thee weeping: ‘See yonder Hector’s wife, the bravest of all who fought among the Trojans when the fight was over Ilium.’ Thus perchance shall someone speak; and woe will come upon thee, that thou hast no longer such a husband, to fend thee from such serfdom. As for myself, may the earth cover me, or ever I hear thy bitter cry and thy carrying off.” All that Hector says here is full of feeling, pathetic enough, yet not merely expressed in a lyrical or dramatic manner, but in the epic vein, inasmuch as the picture which he outlines of suffering, and which brings pain to himself, in the first place depicts circumstantially objective conditions as such, and in the second place because all that affects and moves him does not appear as personal volition, or individual resolve, but rather as a necessity which is not at the same time his own aim and will. Of much the same epic effect are the pleas with which the vanquished plead, as they may on various grounds, for their life with their victors; for a movement of the soul, which proceeds merely from circumstances, and only attempts to affect us through the causative effect of objective relations and situations, is not dramatic, although modern tragedians from time to time also make use of such a type of effect. The scene, for example, in Schiller’s “Maid of Orleans,” on the battle-field between the English knight Montgomery and Joan,23 is, as others have already justly observed, rather epic than dramatic. In the moment of danger all courage forsakes the knight; yet, for all that, when pressed by the fierce Talbot, who punishes cowardice with death, and the Maid, who conquers even the bravest, he is unable to have recourse to flight, and exclaims:

O, wär ich nimmer über Meer hieher geschifft,

Ich unglücksel’ger! Eitler Wahn bethörte mich,

Wohlfeilen Ruhm zu suchen in dem Frankenkrieg,

Und jetzo führt mich das verderbliche Geschick

In diese blut’ge Mordschlacht. Wär ich weit von hier

Daheim noch an der Savern’ bluhendem Gestad

Im sichern Vaterhause, we die Mutter mir.

In Gram zurückblieb und die zarte süsse Braut.24

Expressions such as these are unmanly, and make the figure of this knight neither fit for the genuine Epos nor the tragic drama, are in fact rather suggestive of comedy. And when Joan, after exclaiming,

Du bist des Todes! Eine britt’sche Mutter zeugte dich!25

advances towards him, he throws away sword and shield and pleads at her feet for his life. The reasons he gives at length in order to arouse her sympathy: his defencelessness; the wealth of his father, who would ransom him with gold; the gentleness of the sex to which Joan belongs as maid; the love of his sweet bride, who waits for his return home in tears; the grief of the parents whom he has left at home; the grievous fate of death unwept for in a foreign land — all these motives are themselves, in one aspect of them, essentially objective conditions, effective and of value as such, and on the other hand, the tranquil exposition of them is itself in the epic vein. In the same way the poet motives the condition, that Joan must hearken to him, through the external circumstance of the defencelessness of the pleader, although from the dramatic point of view she ought without delay and at the bare sight to have slain him, being as she was the relentless foe of all Englishmen, and in fact expresses such destructive hatred with every resource of rhetoric, justifying her action by the statement that she is bound with most fearful vow to the spirit-world.

Mit dem Schwert zu tödten alles Lebende, das ihr

Der Schlachten Gott verhängnissvoll entgegenschickt.26

If the point of importance to the maid were merely that Montgomery ought not to die defenceless, he possessed apparently an excellent means in his grasp of retaining his life; in other words he had merely to refuse to take up his weapons. This view is supported by the fact that Joan has already listened to him so long. Yet when she demands that he should fight for his life with her, of mortal flesh like himself, he again takes up his sword and falls by her hand. Such a development of the scene had been more in keeping with the drama had it dispensed with all this varied epic exposition.

(γγ) In general, then, we may characterize the type in which we have the poetic passage of epic events set before us in the following way, namely, that the epic presentation does not merely linger over the picture of objective reality and ideal conditions, but over and above this provides obstacles to a final solution. This not only applies to its relation to the wide field of external condition, to which the more immediate vision enforces us, but also in respect to the culminating movement of the action, more especially in its contrast to dramatic poetry. For this reason above all it diverts us from the execution of the fundamental purpose, the connected course of whose evolved conflict a dramatic poet ought never to lose sight of, into much digressive matter; and, moreover, by this means avails itself of the opportunity, to bring before our vision the complex unity of a world of circumstances, which otherwise could not have been expressed in speech. We have an illustration of such an obstacle in the beginning of the Iliad. Homer here at once tells us about the fatal sickness, which Apollo had spread throughout the Greek camp, and connects with it the strife between Achilles and Agamemnon. This wrath is the second impediment. Even more obviously in the Odyssey is every adventure that Odysseus has to pass through, a delay to his home return. More particularly, however, the distinct episode serves to interrupt the unimpaired progression of the story, and is to a great extent an obstacle to this. Such, for instance, is the shipwreck of Æneas, his love for Dido, the appearance of Armida in Tasso, and we may add as a rule the many independent love affairs of particular heroes in the romantic Epos, which, in the poetry of Ariosto, accumulate and interlace with such profusion, that the conflict between Christian and Saracen is thereby entirely hidden. In the “Divine Comedy” of Dante we do not find such definite examples of obstruction to the plot or narrative. In this case we must associate the slow advance of the Epic denouement partly with the generally pausing manner of the description, and in part with the many little episodical histories and conversations with particular characters, whether damned or otherwise, about whom the poet permits himself more detailed information.

In this connection it is above all things necessary that impediments of this description, which interfere with the flow of narrative to its final end, should not be presented as though they were merely means directed to objects of an objective character. For inasmuch as already the general condition, on the basis of which the movement of the epic world is carried forward, is only truly poetical where it appears as a self-constructed growth, so too its entire course, either in virtue of circumstances or the inherent destiny, must also appear self-originated without our being able to detect thereby the personal views of the poet; and this is all the more so because, in the form of its objectivity — not merely under its aspects of phenomenal reality, but also in respect to the substantive character of its content — it claims for the whole no less than its divisible content that it is a positive growth, spontaneous in its origin and independent. If, however, a directive world of gods is its apex, controlling the course of events, it is even more necessary that the poet himself should possess a lively and vivid faith in them, because in that case it is generally through the instrumentality of these that obstructions such as we have referred to are asserted; consequently where these divine forces are treated merely as some lifeless mechanism, it is inevitable that everything for which they are responsible must equally become so in a poetic composition which is artificial even in intention.

(γ) Having thus briefly adverted to the totality of objects, which the Epos is able to unfold by interweaving a particular event with a universal national world-condition, and, further, having discussed the manner in which the course of events is developed, we have now, thirdly, and in conclusion, to examine the problem as to the nature of the unity and rounding off of an epic composition.

(αα) This is a point all the more important for the reason that in our own day people are ready to take up the view that we may end an Epic as we like, or continue it just as capriciously. Although this is the opinion of men of talent and learning — it is in fact the contention of F. N. Wolff — it remains none the less a crude and illiterate view. It in fact amounts to nothing less than excluding from the finest ethic compositions any genuine character of artistic composition. For it is only in virtue of the fact that an Epos depicts an essentially exclusive, and thereby, for the firs time independent world, that it is at all a work of fine art in contrast to what is, in part, the diffuse, and, in part, the finite, series of independent sections, causes, effects, and other modes of self-causative reality. One can, of course, so far admit that for the genuine and primitive Epos the wholly aesthetic review of the design and organization of the parts, of the position and completion of the episodes, of the kind of similes employed, and so forth, this is not the point of most importance, inasmuch as here, more than in lyrical poetry of a later date, and its artificial elaboration of the drama, the general world-outlook, the faith in divine beings, and, in a word, what is most essential in such national Bibles, must be expressed as the aspect of most weight. Nevertheless, these great national books, such as are the Ramajana, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and even the “Song of the Nibelings,” ought not to lose that quality which alone, in respect to both their beauty and their art, can endow them with the worth and freedom of artistic works, the quality, that is, whereby they bring before our vision a complete sphere of action. What we have simply to do, therefore, is to discover the appropriate form of this exclusive unity.

(ββ) The term Unity, if employed in this general sense, has become a very commonplace one even for tragedy, one capable of much misuse. For every event, in its causes and effects, creates an infinite chain, which, in the direction of the past no less than the future, and in a way that is in both directions incalculable, leads to a further series of particular circumstances and actions, it being impossible to determine all that may form part of the circumstances and detail in other respects, or the mode of their coalescence. If we merely confine our attention to this series, no doubt an Epos may be extended backwards and forwards indefinitely; and, over and above this such always offers opportunity for digression. But it is just such a series as this which makes the composition prosaic. To adduce an example the Greek cyclic poets have celebrated the entire cyclus of the Trojan war, and in doing so continue at the point where Homer stops, with a beginning, too, from the egg of Leda. But it is precisely on account of this that they degenerate into prose, if we contrast them with Homer’s compositions. Just as little — I have already drawn attention to this — can an individual as such surrender the central focus of his unity, inasmuch as it is from this that the most varied events issue, and are able to effect a union in the same, though they may be entirely without connection regarded simply as events. We have consequently to seek for another type of unity. In this respect we must briefly determine the distinction between a mere event, and a definite action, which accepts the form of event in the epic narrative. We may define a mere event as the external aspect and realization of every human action, without involving with it the execution of a particular end; or, in general terms, we may call it every external modification in the form and appearance of what actually exists. When anyone is struck by lightning, that is a mere event, an external occurrence. More is implied in the sack of a hostile city; we have here the fulfilment of a predeterminate purpose. An essentially distinct object of this kind, such as the liberation of the Holy Land from the yoke of the Saracens and heathen, or better still the satisfaction of a specific impulse, such as the wrath of Achilles, must, under the mode of the epic eventuality, constitute the synthetic unity of the Epopaea; and by this I mean that the poetic narrative must restrict itself to that which is uniquely the effect of this conceived purpose or specific impulse, and in this co-operation be rounded off in an essentially exclusive unity. Action and execution of this type is, however, only possible to human agency; so that, as the culminating point of our composition, we must have in progressive conjunction with purpose and impulse a human personality. Furthermore, if the action and satisfaction of the entire heroic character, from which both purpose and impulse proceed, are merely the result of wholly definite situations and motives, which are dissipated as we look back in an extensive complexity of relation, and if, further, the execution of the purpose, as we look forward, carries with it a variety of result, then in that case on the one hand no doubt a large number of presuppositions will be involved with such a specific action, and on the other hand we shall have many effects of reaction, which, however, will not be placed in any more intimate poetic connection with just this determinate character of the end under exposition. In this sense, for instance, the wrath of Achilles has as little connection with the rape of Helen or the judgment of Paris, although the one fact is presupposed in the other, as it has with the actual sack of Troy. When, therefore, it is contended that the Iliad neither possesses a necessary beginning, nor an appropriate conclusion, such a verdict is due to an inability to see distinctly that it is the wrath of Achilles which is the main subject of the Iliad, and which consequently should supply the focus-point of unity. If, on the contrary, we form a stable conception of the heroic figure of Achilles, and assume that this, as asserted in the wrath aroused in him by Agamemnon, is the connecting thread of the whole, we shall be unable to conceive either a beginning or termination of greater beauty. It is, as I have already pointed out, the direct motive of this anger, which forms the poem’s commencement; the consequences of the same are comprised in all that follows. Against this critics have attempted to enforce the view that in such a case the last cantos are irrelevant, and might just as well be omitted. Such an opinion, if we look at the poem itself, is untenable. For just as the dallying of Achilles himself by the ships and his abstinence from the conflict are purely the result of his indignant wrath, and are in this inactivity bound up closely with the almost immediate success of the Trojans over the Grecian host, no less than with the fight and death of Patroclus, so, too, the lament and revenge of the noble Achilles and his victory over Hector is closely linked with this fall of his brave friend. If in the previous opinion it is implied that death is the end of everything, and after that we may as well pack and be off, such a view merely indicates extreme crudity of imaginative conception. With the idea of death it is merely Nature that is brought to a standstill; man is not so, nor yet are the obligations of his ethical life and habit,27 with their claim of honourable recognition for the fallen hero. In this sense the sports that form part of the funeral rites of Patroclus, the heartrending pleas of Priam, the reconciliation of Achilles, who returns the father the corpse of his son, in order that in this case, too, honour to the dead may not be absent, each and all are connected with the previous events, and contribute to the supreme and satisfying beauty of the narrative’s conclusion.

(γγ) Inasmuch, however, as we have attempted above to make a specifically individual action, which issues in accordance with a deliberate purpose or heroic impulses, conform to the type of an epic whole in which focal points are ascertainable that bind it together and round off its completeness, the view is at least possible that we have made the unity of the Epos too nearly identical with that of the drama. For in the drama also it is one particular line of action issuing from self-conceived purpose and character with its conflict which constitutes the focal centre. In order, therefore, not to involve these two types of poetry, the epos, that is, and the drama, in confusion, though the confusion merely appear to be such, I will yet again draw the reader’s attention emphatically to my previous explanation of the distinction between human action and event. And quite apart from this the epic interest is not simply confined to those characters, objects, and situations which have their ground in the particular action as such, whose progress is the subject of the epic narrative, but this action possesses the further stimulus to its opposed factors and their resolution, and in fact is directed throughout its course and exclusively within a national and collective whole, or substantive content, which claims on its own account to assert a variety of characters, conditions, and events. In this respect the final consummation of the Epos does not merely consist in the particular content of the predominant action selected, but quite as much in the entire synthesis of the general world-survey whose objective reality it undertakes to depict; in fact, the epic unity is only then fully complete when the particular action, from one point of view no doubt, in its independent character, but also from another, regarded in its progression as the essentially rounded world within the sphere of which it moves, is placed before us as one indissoluble totality; and both of these spheres, or aspects of one sphere, repose together in the mediating fulness and unimpaired unity of very life.

Such, then, are the most essential characteristics we find it possible, within the limits accepted, to draw attention to in respect to the genuine Epos.

It is, however, possible to apply the same form of objectivity to other subject-matter, whose content does not carry with it the true significance of genuine objectivity. It is very possible that a theorist in Art will feel embarrassment when, with such modes of speech before him, he is asked to make a classification adapted to all poems without distinction; and we must not forget that under the generic term of poem these hybrid forms have also to be reckoned. In any really just classification, however, we ought only to include that which only conforms with a definition of the generic notion.28 All that is, on the contrary, incomplete in content or form, or both, precisely for the reason that it is not as it ought to be, is only subsumed defectively under the notion, or in other words under the definition, which gives us the thing as it ought to be, and in truth actually is. I only propose, therefore, in conclusion and by way of supplement, to add a few observations upon such subordinate and collateral branches of the true epic composition.

To this class of poetry above all the idyll belongs in the modern sense of that term, viz., that in which poetry stands aloof from the profounder interests of spiritual and ethical life, and depicts mankind in its innocence. Innocent life in this sense amounts to little more than an ignorance of everything except eating and drinking. We may add that what we eat and drink here is extremely simple, it is goat’s milk merely, or sheep’s milk, or at the most cow’s milk, roots, acorns, vegetables, and cheese made from milk. I should say that bread is no longer in the truly idyllic sphere; we must, however, allow to it flesh-eating; for it is hardly possible that our idyllic shepherds and shepherdesses could have wished to sacrifice their herds exclusively to the gods. Their occupation will consist in looking the whole day long after their beloved herds with their faithful hound, in providing their food and drink, and along with this giving vent, with as much sentimental feeling as possible, to every kind of mood which does not disturb this condition of repose and contentment. In a word, they are satisfied with their peculiar piety and gentleness, piping away on their reed or oat-pipes, warbling to each other, and above all making love with the greatest tenderness and innocence.

The Greeks, on the contrary, possessed in their plastic representations a more jubilant world, with its attendants of Bacchus, Satyrs and Fauns, who, in their harmless service of a god, stimulated animal life and human joviality with a vivacity and truth totally different from the above pretentious innocence, piety, and emptiness. We may also recognize the same essentially animated outlook on the world as illustrated in lively pictures of national condition, in the Greek Bucolic poets such as Theocritus; this is so whether our poet lingers over actual situations of the life of fisher-folk, or shepherds, or extends the mode in which he expresses this, or similar spheres of life, to a yet wider circle, either depicting such states in an epic form, or treating them in lyric form and that of the objective drama. Virgil already sings to us with less warmth in his Eclogues. Most tedious of all, however, is Gessner, so tedious that I suppose no one reads him nowadays. We can only wonder that the French ever had so much taste for him that they even ranked him highest among German poets. Their morbid sensibility on the one hand, which evades the tumult and changes of life, while yearning also for some kind of movement, and on the other the absence of all true interest in such poetry, so that the otherwise disturbing influences of our culture were not represented — both of these factors, no doubt, contributed to this preference.

We may reckon as a further class of this hybrid type of Epic those poems which are half description and half lyrics, a favourite type with the English, and one which for the most part accepts for its subject-matter Nature, the Seasons, and similar subjects. We may also associate with this type the various didactic poems concerned with physical science, astronomy, medicine, chess, fishing, and hunting — in short, the art which loves to elaborate in a poetic form what is really the content of prose, an art which has been cultivated with much talent in later Greek poetry, and after that by the Romans, and, in our time, pre-eminently by the French. Such poetry, despite its general epic temper, will very readily pass over into the lyric treatment.

The romances and ballads, which we find both in the Middle Ages and modern times, are no doubt poetry of a kind, though it is impossible to define accurately their type; so far as their content is concerned they are in part epic. If we look at the form of their composition, however, they are for the most part lyrical, so that we have perforce to reckon them from different points of view to different types.

The romantic novel, that Epopaea of modern society, opens a different field altogether. In this we possess, on the one hand, in all its completeness and variety, an epic prodigality of interests, conditions, characters, and living relations, the extensive background in fact of an entire world. We have also the epic exposition of events. What fails us here is the primitive world-condition as poetically conceived, which is the source of the genuine Epos. The romance or novel in the modern sense pre-supposes a basis of reality already organized in its prosaic form, upon which it then attempts, in its own sphere, so far as this is possible from such a general point of view, both in its treatment of the vital character of events and the life of individuals and their destiny, to make good once more the banished claims of poetical vision. For this reason one of the most common collisions in the novel, and one most suitable to it, is the conflict between the poetry of the heart and the prose of external conditions antagonistic to it, including with such the contingency such imply. This is a conflict which may be resolved on the lines of tragedy or comedy, or finds its settlement in the twofold conclusion, first, that the characters which in the first instance contend with the ordinary course of life are taught to recognize in it what is the genuine heart of things, becoming thereby reconciled to their conditions and ready to cooperate with them; and, secondly, that they learn how to brush away the purely prosaic aspect of all that they do and accomplish, and thereby replace the prose which they have found there with a reality allied and congenial to beauty and art. In so far as the form of the exposition is concerned, the genuine romance pre-supposes, precisely as the Epos does, the synthesized purvey of the world and life as one whole, the manifold contents of which are manifested within the reach of the individual event which supplies the focal centre of the entire complexus. In his attitude to detail, however, the poet must here permit himself a freer play both of conception and execution, and all the more so because he is here less able to avoid the prose of actual life in his descriptions, though this freedom should not make him any more inclined to dwell exclusively in such an atmosphere of prose and ordinary occurrence.

In looking back upon the course of our previous consideration of the other arts, we find that we reviewed the different stages of the art of building throughout in their historical development as successively in symbolic, classic, and romantic architecture. In the case of sculpture, on the contrary, we accepted the Greek type, by virtue of its complete identity with the notion of this classic art, as the real focal centre, from which we proceeded to develop the specific characteristics of importance, so that here we did not find it necessary to extend so far as in the previous case the range of our historical survey. This contrast is further illustrated in our treatment of the romantic art-character of painting, which, however,29 not merely in respect to the fundamental notion of its content, but also in that of the mode of its presentation, embraces an equally wide and important range of development in different nations and through different schools, so that in this case it was necessary to make our reference to history more extensive and varied. The nature of the art of music invited us to historical comparisons of the same kind. Inasmuch, however, as I have neither obtained access to the foreign literature dealing with the history of this art, nor can claim personally to possess the adequate knowledge, I have been forced to restrict myself to the mere outlines of what is required incidentally. With regard to our immediate subject, that is, epic poetry, the course of our enquiry will be very much that followed in the case of sculpture. In other words, though the mode of exposition branches off in several direct or collateral divisions, and embraces many historical periods and peoples, yet we have already recognized in the Epos of Greek literature the genuine type of it in its consummate form and most artistic mode of realization. And the reason of this is that in general the Epos possesses the closest affinity with the plastic of sculpture and its objective presence; and, not merely in respect to its substantive content, but equally so in the form of its presentation as that of phenomenal reality. It is therefore by no means simply an accident that we find epic poetry, no less than the art of sculpture, assert itself pre-eminently among the Greeks in its original and unsurpassed perfection. Stages of development, no doubt, are to be met with on either side of this culminating point, stages which are neither intrinsically subordinate or insignificant, but are necessary conditions of the art’s growth, inasmuch as all nations are essentially within the sphere of poetic creation, and it is above all the Epos which brings before us the heart and core of the national life. And for this reason, the historical development of the Epic is of greater importance than was the case with sculpture.

We may then classify the entire compass of epic poetry, or, to express ourselves more accurately, of the Epopaea, in three fundamental stages; and these, speaking generally, constitute the course of the art’s evolution.

Firsts we have the Oriental Epos, which makes the symbolic type its focal centre.

Secondly, there is the classical Epos of the Greeks, with its imitation in Roman authors.

Finally, we have the abundant and many-sided unfolding of epic-romantic poetry among Christian peoples; which, however, in the first instance appears in Teutonic paganism; and again, from another point of view, that is quite apart from what we may style the chivalrous poetry of the Middle Ages, we find the old classic world active in another province of life as instrumental to the purification of literary taste or style, or still more directly utilized as a model, until finally the modern romance replaces the Epos altogether.

We may now proceed to some review of single epic compositions: in this it will only be possible to emphasize what is of most importance; and, generally speaking, I can only pretend to give a rapid outline of this field in the space at my disposal.

(a) In the case of Oriental peoples the art of poetry is, as we have already observed, generally of a more primitive type, inasmuch as it remains more closely related to what we may style the essential30 mode of envisagement, and the diffusion of the individual consciousness in the sublime Unity of the One. And because of this, as a further aspect, and relatively to the specific divisions of poetic composition, it is unable to work out individual personality in the self-subsistency of determinate characterization, with its aims and collisions, an elaboration which is of first importance in the composition of genuine dramatic poetry. The most essential result therefore we meet with here is limited — if we exclude from attention an endearing, sweet-scented, and delicate type of lyric, or one that uplifts itself to the one unutterable God — to poems, which are to be counted of the epic mould. Nevertheless it is only among the Hindoos and the Persians that we come across the genuine Epopaea; but here at least we do meet it in colossal proportions.

(α) The Chinese, on the contrary, possess no national Epos. The prosaic basis of their imaginative vision, which even to the earliest origins of history offers the jejune form of a prosaically organized historical reality, opposes from the first to this the most noble type of epic composition an insuperable obstruction. The religious conceptions of this people, little adapted as they are to artistic configuration, contribute to the same result. We find, however, at a later date and as some compensation, for their elaboration is most profuse, little narratives, and romances spun out to great length, which astound us by the vividness in which situations are realized, the accuracy with which private and public relations are depicted, the variety, fine breeding, or rather I should say frequently the fascinating tenderness they display, more particularly in their female characters, and in short by the art in every respect which succeeds in making works so consummate.

(β) A world of great contrast to the above presents itself in the Hindoo Epopaea. We find already in the most primitive compositions, if we may form an opinion from the little made known to the general public up to the present time from the Veda, most fruitful germs for a mythology fitted to epic exposition; and these, associated with the heroic exploits of men many centuries before Christ — for chronological accuracy is still impossible — are elaborated into genuine Epopaea, works, however, which are still composed in part from the wholly religious point of view, and in part from that of unfettered poetry and art. Pre-eminently do the two most famous of these poems, namely the Ramajana and the Maha-Bharata, place before us the entire world-outlook of the Hindoo race in all its splendour and glory, its confusion, fantastical absurdity and dissolution, and withal, from the reverse point of view, in the exuberant loveliness and the here and there fine traits of heart and emotion, which characterize the profuse vegetation of its spiritual growth. Mythical exploits of men are expanded into the actions of incarnate gods, whose deed hovers vaguely between the divine and human nature, and the determinate outlines of personality and exploit are dissolved in an infinitude of extension. The substantive bases of the whole are of a type such as our Western world-outlook, assuming that it does not choose to surrender the higher claims of freedom and morality, is neither able to find itself truly at home in or to sympathize with. The unity of the particular parts is of an extremely unstable kind; and layers upon layers of episodical matter, consisting of tales of the gods, narratives of ascetic penances, and the powers they create, tediously long expositions of philosophical doctrines and systems, so entirely impair the collective unity that we are forced to regard many of them as later accretions. But, however this may be, the spirit from which these stupendous poems have originated bears constant witness to an imagination, which is not only anterior to all prosaic culture, but as a rule is wholly incompatible with the faculty of ordinary common sense, and is capable in fact of endowing the fundamental tendencies of this national consciousness, in its essentially unique and collective conception of the universe, with an original artistic form. The later Epics, on the contrary, which are called Puranas, in the more restricted sense of the term, that is, poems of the Past, appear rather to be compiled in the prosaic and dull style similar to that adopted by post-Homeric cyclic poets, and pursue their downward course at great length from the creation of the gods and the universe to the genealogies of human heroes and princes. Finally the epic care of the old myths dissolves into vapour and artificial elegance of a purely external poetic form and diction, while on the one hand the phantasy, which exhausted itself in a dreamy wonderland, becomes the wisdom of fables whose most important function is to instruct us in morality and worldly wisdom.

(γ) We may compare side by side in a third division of epic Oriental poetry that respectively belonging to Hebrews, Arabs, and Persians.

(αα) The sublimity of the Jewish imagination no doubt in its conception of the Creation, in the histories of the Patriarchs, the wandering in the wilderness, the conquest of Canaan, and in the further historical course of national event, full as such a vision is of sterling content and natural truth, possesses many elements of primitive epic poetry; the religious interest is here, however, so predominant, that, instead of being genuine Epopaea, they merely approximate either to religious myths in the guise of poetry, or to religious narratives which are wholly didactic.

(ββ) The Arabs have always possessed a poetic nature, and from very early days we find genuine poets among them. Even their heroic songs of lyric narrative, styled the moallakat, which in part originate in the century immediately previous to Mahomet, depict either with a few bold and detached strokes and vehement ostentation, or at other times with more tranquil self-possession, or a melting softness, the original conditions of the still pagan Arabs. Here we find the honour of the clan, the passion of revenge, the rights of hospitality, love, delight in adventure, benevolence, sorrow, and yearning, in undiminished strength, and in traits which remind us of the romantic character of Spanish chivalry. Here, too, we meet with in the East for the first time a real poetry, without fantastic elements, or prose, without mythology, without gods, demons, fairies, genii, and everything else of the kind common to the East, but rather with solid and self-sufficient characters and, however unique and marvellous in the play of its images and similes, yet for all that humanly real and self-contained. We have the vision of a similar pagan world also set before us by a later age in the collected poems of Hamasa, as also in the not yet edited “Divans of the Hudsilites.” After the extensive and successful conquests of the Mohammedan Arabs this primitive heroic character gradually disappears; and, in the course of the centuries, the province of Epic poetry is replaced in part by the instructive fable and the witty proverb, in part by the fairy-like narratives, of which the “Thousand and One Nights” is an example, or in those tales of adventures which Rückert, through a translation which reproduces for us the equally witty and artistically elaborate Macamen of the Hariri in their metre, rhymes, and articulate meaning, has unveiled in a manner deserving thoughtful attention.

(γγ) In some contrast to this the efflorescence of Persian poetry falls in the period of that reconstructed culture effected by the change of language and nationality under the influence of Mohammedanism. We, however, come across, in the very first opening of this lonely springtime, an epic poem which, at least in its material, takes us back to the remotest Past of ancient Persian saga and myth, and carries forward its narrative through the heroic age right down to the last days of the Sussanides. This comprehensive work is the Shahnameh of Firdusi, the son of the gardener of Tus, a work the origins of which are traceable to the Bastanameh.31 We are, however, unable to call even this poem a genuine Epopaea, because it does not make any specific and individual line of action its focal centre. On account of the lapse of centuries we lose our hold of the costume appropriate to an age or a locality, and in particular the most ancient mythical figures and gloomy intricate traditions hover in a world of the phantasy, among the indefinite outlines of which we are often at a loss to know whether we are face to face with persons or entire clans; and then again we are often suddenly confronted with really historical characters. As a Mohammedan the poet was no doubt able to handle his subject-matter more freely; but it is just in this type of freedom that we fail to meet with the stability in definite characterization, as it was present in the design of the primitive heroic songs; and, on account of the great gulf which separates him from that long-buried world of saga, the freshness and breath of its immediate life vanish, though absolutely necessary to the national Epos.

In its further course the epic art of the Persians expands into Love-epopees of excessive softness and sweetness, as an author of which Risami is pre-eminently distinguished. It further makes use of its rich stores of life-experience in the interest of the teacher. In this sphere the far-travelled Saadi was master. Finally, it plunges into that pantheistic Mysticism, which Dschelaleddin Rumi recommends and teaches in tales and legendary narrative.

I must, I fear, restrict myself to the above sketch.

(b) In the poetry of Greece and Rome we find ourselves for the first time in the genuine sphere of epic art.

(α) Among these above all are included of course the Homeric poems, which we have already noted as the culminating point of all.

(αα) Either of these poems, despite all that may be advanced to the contrary, is essentially self-complete, so definite and sensitive to its construction as a whole, that in my own opinion the very view which regards the present form of both as merely that in which they were sung and handed down to posterity by rhapsodists, simply amounts to little more than the just eulogy of such works in virtue of the fact that they are, with regard to the entire atmosphere of their content, national and realistic, and even in their particular parts are so consummately finished, that all and each of them may be taken as a whole in itself. Whereas in the East what is substantive32 and universal in the poet’s survey still impairs the individuality of character, and its aims and exploits by its symbolism or deliberate instruction, and thereby injures the definite articulation and unity of the whole. Here for the first time in these poems33we find a world beautifully suspended as it were between the general life-conditions of morality in family, state and religious belief, and the individuality of distinctive character, and in this fair balance between the claims of spirit and Nature, intentional action and objective event, between a national basis of enterprise and particular aims and deeds, even though individual heroes appear as the predominant feature in their free and animated movement, yet this too is so mediated by the distinctiveness of the aims proposed and the severe presence of destiny, that the entire exposition can only remain even for ourselves the ne plus ultra of all attainment that we can either enjoy or admire in epic composition. For we find no difficulty here in recognizing the real significance of even the gods who withstand or assist these primitive masculine heroes in their bravery, their straightforward and noble actions: nor can we fail to return the merry smiles of an art which depicts them as we see them here in all the naïveté of their very human, if also godlike impersonations.

(ββ) The cyclic poets of an age subsequent to the Homeric poems depart more and more from this genuine type of epic poetry. On the one hand the tendency here is to break up the completeness of the national world-survey into its petty provinces and aspects; and from another point of view, instead of retaining a firm grasp of the poetic unity and distinctive character of an individual action, to insist more exclusively on the completeness of events as an historical series, or on the unity of the personality, and by so doing to assimilate epic poetry with the already emphasized historical impulse of the logographers in their historical compilations.

(γγ) Finally Epic poetry of a still later date after the time of Alexander either turns aside to the more limited province of bucolic poetry, or introduces more learning and artifice than is compatible with the truly poetic Epopaea being at last wholly didactic, a type which increasingly suffers to escape every vestige of the primitive freshness, simplicity and animation.

(β) This characteristic, with which the Epos of the Greeks terminates, is from the first predominant among the Romans. An epic Bible, such as are the Homeric poems, we shall therefore seek for here in vain, however much critics have attempted, even quite recently, to resolve the most ancient Roman history into national Epopaea. On the other hand, even from the earliest times, along with genuine epic art, of which our finest extant example here is the Æneid, the historical Epos and the didactic poem supplies us with a proof that it is the Romans who are mainly responsible for the elaboration of that province of poetry which is already half prose; just as also it was in their hands that the satire received its most perfect form, being also that most congenial to their character.

(c) For this reason epic poetry could only be infused with a fresh breath and spirit through a change in its outlook on the world and in its religious belief, and through the actions and destinies of new nationalities. This is what we have in the case of the Germans, not only as we see them in their primitive paganism, but also after their conversion to Christianity. It may be further illustrated by the Romance nations and all the more strongly, in proportion as their subdivision into groups is more complete, and the principle of the Christian view of life and reality is unfolded in all its various phases. Yet it is precisely this many-sided expansion and subdivision which oppose to a brief survey great difficulties. I will consequently only draw attention to and emphasize fundamental tendencies.

(α) In our first group we may reckon the residue of genuine poetry, which later nationalities have still retained from an age previous to Christianity, for the most part by means of oral tradition, and consequently not wholly unimpaired.

We may include above all among these the poems which are usually ascribed to Ossian. Although English critics of repute, such as Johnson and Shaw, have been blind enough to publish them as the sole composition of Macpherson, it is none the less wholly impossible that a poet of our own time could create from his own resources alone such ancient social conditions and events; consequently we must presuppose here previous poems as the foundation of such a work, although too in their entire atmosphere, and the mode of conception and feeling expressed in them, many changes more in accord with our modern life may have been introduced in the course of so many centuries. It is true their actual date is not established; they may, however, very well have retained a vital form in the mouth of the folk for one thousand or even fifteen hundred years. Taking them as a whole their form appears to be predominantly lyric. Ossian is here presented as the old minstrel and hero, who has lost his sight, and suffers in a retrospect of lament, the days of glory to rise before him. Yet although his songs originate in woe and mourning they nevertheless are in themselves fundamentally epic; for even these lamentations refer to what has been, and depict this world which has now just vanished, with its heroes, its love-adventurers, its exploits, its expeditions aver sea and land, its chance of arms, its destiny and its downfall, in just the same epic and realistic way — although broken here and there with lyrics — as we find in Homer the heroes Achilles, Odysseus, or Diomede, talking of their exploits, expeditions, and mischances. Yet the development of spiritual emotion, and indeed of the entire national existence, despite the fact that here heart and sentiment have a more exacting rôle to play, is not carried so far as in Homer’s case. Most of all we miss the assured plastic form of his characterization and the daylight clarity of his presentment. We are, in short, so far as locale is concerned, exiled in the tempestuous mists of the North, with its gloomy sky and heavy clouds, upon which the spirits ride or appear to heroes, raimented in their form. We may add that it is only quite recently that other Gaelic minstrels of olden time have been discovered, rather connected, so Wallis informs us, with England than Scotland or Ireland, minstrelsy having been for a long time continuous in that country, which already must have possessed a considerable literature.

In these poems we have among other things reference to emigrations to America. Mention is also made of Caesar; but the reason here given for his invasion is a private passion for some king’s daughter, whom he saw in Gaul and followed to England. As a striking characteristic of their form triads are worthy of attention, which combine in three organic parts three events of similar character, though dating from different periods of time.

Finally, and more famous than these poems, are on the one hand the heroic songs of the more ancient Edda, and on the other the myths with which for the first time in this cycle of song along with the narrative of human destinies we also come across various histories concerning the origin, exploits, and downfall of the gods. I must, however, confess I have been unable to acquire a taste for the empty exuberance of these origins of a natural philosophy of symbolism, which, however, are further attached to the appearance of particular human form and physiognomy, such as Thor with his hammer, the Werewolf, the wild mead-carousals, and in a word, the savagery and troubled confusion of such a mythology. We must admit, of course, that all that intimately concerns this folk of the North lies nearer to ourselves than, say, the poetry of the Persians and Mohammedanism; but to press upon the educated man among us such an admission to the point that it has still at this time of day a claim upon his sympathy, and indeed ought to pass for us as something national — such an assumption, though often ventured, means not merely to overrate conceptions, which are to a great extent misshapen and barbarous, but also to wholly misunderstand the significance and spirit of our own times.

(β) If we, secondly, cast a glance over the poetry of the Christian Middle Ages, what we ought in the first instance and above all to consider are those works which have, without more direct and penetrating influence of the old literature and culture, sprung up from the fresh spirit of the Middle Ages and consolidated Catholicism. Here we find the most multifold elements ready to supply the material and stimulus of epic poetry.

(αα) We may in the first place draw retention to that truly epic subject-matter which comprises in its content interests, exploits, and characters of the period mentioned of a wholly national character. Among these the Cid is pre-eminently worthy of our notice. The significance of this blossom of national heroism in the Middle Ages to the Spanish, this is set before us in epic guise in the poem Cid, and then at a later date with more attractive excellence in a succession of narrative romances, which Herder first brought to the notice of Germany. We have here a string of pearls, every single picture entirely complete in itself, and yet all so admirably in tune with each other that they make a consistent whole; though throughout composed in the spirit of chivalry, yet at the same time Spanish and national; eminently rich in the content of their varied interests, whether these concern love, marriage, honour, or the mastery of kings in wars waged between Christians and Moors. All this material is voiced in so epic and plastic a style, we have set before us the pertinent fact so simply in the purity of its exalted content, and withal with such a wealth of the noblest pictures of human life displayed in a panorama of the most glorious exploit, and all this bound together in a wreath so fair and fascinating, that we moderns may compare it with the most beautiful creations of the ancient world.34

As a matter of fact it is as impossible to compare the Nibelungenlied, as it is the Iliad and Odyssey, with this world of romance, which, however dissevered in fragments it maybe, is none the less epic in its fundamental type. For although in the former precious and truly German work we have no lack of a national and substantive content, in respect to family, matrimonial affection, duty of vassalage, loyalty of service, heroism, and, in a word, genuine marrow and substance, yet the entire collision, despite all its epic breadth of vision, is rather one of a dramatic type, than truly epic, and the exposition, with all its detail, neither tends towards the individualization of its abundance, nor to a presentment that is wholly lifelike; and from a further point of view it is frequently squandered in pure harshness, savagery and ferocity, so that the characters, although we find them compactly braced and robust in action, yet in their abstract ruggedness rather resemble coarse images of wood, than are comparable to the humanely evolved, genial individuality of the Homeric heroes and women.

(ββ) A second fundamental source of such literature is to be traced in the religious poems of the Middle Ages, which take as their subject the life of Christ, or those of the Madonna, the Apostles, the saints and martyrs and the Last Judgment. The most essentially complete and rich composition, however, the genuine art-Epic of Catholic Christianity in the Middle Ages, the greatest subject-matter and the greatest poem is in this sphere Dante’s Divine Comedy. It is true that we cannot call even this severely, rather I should systematically organized poem, an Epopaea in the ordinary sense of the term. For we have not here one progressive action, individual and exclusive, on the broad basis of the entire poem: what, however, we do get in a conspicuous degree in this Epos is the most secure articulation and consummate finish. Instead of a particular event it has for its subject-matter the eternal event, the absolute end, the Divine Love in its imperishable eventuality, and in its unalterable circles’ of relation to the object. Possessing further Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise for its locality, it plunges the living world of human action and suffering or, more closely, that of individual acts and destinies in this changeless existence. Everything single and particular in human interests and aims here vanishes before the absolute greatness of the purpose and end of all things; at the same time, however, what is otherwise most perishable and evanescent in the living world receives here a completely epic form objectively based on its own innermost life, and adjudged in its worth and unworth by the supreme notion of all, that is God. For as individuals were in their life and suffering, their opinions and accomplishment on Earth, so are they here set before us for ever consolidated, as it were, into images of bronze. It is in this way that the poem embraces the totality of the most objective life, that is, the eternal condition of Hell, of Purification, and of Paradise; and it is on these indestructible foundations that the characters of the actual world move in their particular personalities, or rather they have already moved, and are henceforward rendered moveless, together with their action and being, in the everlasting righteousness, and are themselves eternal. The Homeric heroes indeed endure in our memories through the song of the Muse. These characters assert their condition on their own account, and in the cause of their own individuality: they do not so much exist in our imagination; they are themselves essentially eternal. The perpetuation through the Mnemosyne of the poet has here the objective force of the very judgments of God, in whose Name the most dauntless spirit of his time has damned or beatified the entire present and past.

The exposition also must perforce follow the above character of an object, which is received rather than given. It can only be a wandering through a world that is for ever determined; which, although it is discovered, organized, and peopled with the freedom of the imagination wherewith Hesiod and Homer created their gods, nevertheless undertakes to give us a picture and a report of what has actually happened, an account full of energetic movement, yet plastic in the rigidity of its pains; rich in the flashes of its horror, yet mitigated pitifully in Hell through Dante’s own sympathy; more gracious in purgatory, but none the less fully and completely elaborated; and, finally, translucent as light in Paradise, and for ever without materia form in the eternal ether of thought.

The ancient world no doubt peers into this world of the Catholic poet, but only as the guiding star and companion of human wisdom and culture; for, where it is a question of doctrine and dogma, it is the scholasticism of Christian theology and love which speaks.

(γγ) A third fundamental subject-matter, which arrests the interest of the poetry of the Middle Ages, is that of chivalry. This interest is not merely limited to its worldly and romantic association with love-adventure and tilting matches, but is occupied with religious objects in virtue of the mysticism of Christian knighthood. The actions and events of such compositions have no relation to national interests; they are matters effected by individuals, which only concern the personal agent as such; they are generally similar to what I have described in my previous reference to romantic chivalry. Individuals are consequently placed in a position of complete freedom and independence. A novel form of heroism is thereby created within a social environment that is not as yet stereotyped to the prosaic mode and temper; a heroism, however, which, on account of interests which in part are due to religious phantasy, and in part — that is from the worldly point of view — are wholly personal and imaginary, eschews that substantive Real, upon the basis of which the Greek heroes are united, or as units contend, are victorious or are vanquished. Despite all the varied epic compositions, which such a course as the above occasions, the adventurous character of the situations, conflicts and plots rather tends, on the one hand, in the direction of a treatment usually met with in romances, where the various examples of adventure are loosely interwoven in no more stringent bond of unity, and on the other to that which, while sharing the general features of such works, is not evolved on the background of a consistently organized civic order and a truly prosaic condition of general life. Moreover the imagination is not content with the mere invention of knightly characters and adventures outside the pale of the ordinary world of things; it furthermore associates the exploits of the same with important legendary centres of interest, pre-eminent historical personages, decisive conflicts of the age, and receives by doing so, if we view its broader lines, at least a foundation such as we found indispensable to epic creation. Such a basis, however, we shall find is as a rule commingled with fantastic elements, and is unable to secure the clarity of objective vision in its elaboration, which above all distinguishes the Homeric Epos. Add to this the fact that on account of the very similar treatment accorded to the same subject-matter by Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, and to some extent even Spaniards, we fail to find here relatively at least, and if we contrast it with that of the Hindoo, Persian, Greek, and Celt, the essentially national temper, which in the last-mentioned cases constitutes in its security the epic core of the content and its execution. I must, however, excuse myself here from entering further into the detail of this aspect, either by way of illustration or critical judgment. It will be sufficient if I merely draw attention to the larger circle, within which the most important of these Epopaea of knight-errantry are to be met with if we estimate them relatively to their subject-matter.

As a leading figure in this respect we have first Charles the Great with his peers in the conflict fought against Saracens and pagans. In this Frankish circle of legend feudal chivalry forms a background of prime importance, and branches off into poems of every description, whose most significant material is concerned with the exploits of one of the twelve heroes, such as Roland or Doolin, of Maintz and others. More particularly in France during the reign of Philip Augustus many of such Epopees were composed. We have a further garland of legend with an English source, one which aims at reproducing the exploits of King Arthur and the Round Table. Legendary tale, the chivalry of Normans and Englishmen, service to woman, the fealty of the vassal, are all here involved together in melancholy or fantastic combination with Christian mysticism. The search for the Holy Grail, that chalice containing the sacred blood of Christ, is, indeed, one main object of all knightly exploit, and every description of fantastic adventure originates in this source, until, finally, the entire company takes flight to Abyssinia. The above two subjects of legendary story are worked out with most completeness in Northern France, England, and Germany. And as a last illustration we have a third circle of chivalrous poetry, composed with yet more caprice and less substantive content, which ever tends to emphasize knightly heroism to an excess with ideas of fairyland and fable; this rather points to Portugal or Spain as its original nursery. In this the family of the Amadi are accepted as principal heroes.

The great allegorical poems, so much beloved mainly in Northern France in the thirteenth century, are more nearly prose compositions in their abstract type. I will only mention one example of these, that is, the famous Roman de la Rose. We may compare or rather contrast such with the many anecdotes and still lengthier narratives, the so-called fabliaux and contes, which rather borrow their subject-matter from contemporary life, tales of knights, priests, citizens, and above all amours, lawful and the reverse, retailed to us sometimes in the comic vein, at others in the tragic, now in prose, and again in verse. Such was the type of writing which the clear intellect and trained culture of a Boccaccio carried to its perfection.

There is a final class of such compositions, which, turning to the ancients — with a casual knowledge of the Epic of Homer and Virgil, or ancient legend, celebrates also, in precisely the manner of the Epopaea of chivalry, the exploits of Trojan heroes, the foundation of Rome by Æneas, the conquests of Alexander, and other like subjects.

And this will conclude what I have to say upon the Epic poetry of the Middle Ages.

(γ) In a third principal group of which I have still to speak, the rich and pregnant study of ancient literature marks a point of departure for the purer artistic taste of a new culture, in whose learning, assimilation, and blending of diverse elements, however, we frequently miss that primitive creative power, which we admire in the Hindoos, Arabs, as also in Homer and writers of the Middle Ages. In the many-sided development in which, dating from this age of the re-awakened sciences and their influence on national literatures, the actual conditions of mankind undergo a reform in religion, political condition, morals, and social relations, epic poetry also seizes hold of the most varied content, as also the most manifold forms, the historical course of which I can only direct attention to in its most essential characteristics.

(αα) First, we may remark that it is still the Middle Ages, which now, as previously, supplies the material for the Epos, although the same is conceived and presented in a new spirit, namely, one permeated with the culture of classic literature> We find here pre-eminently two directions in which the art of epic poetry displays itself.

On the one side the awakening consciousness of the age shows a necessary tendency to treat as ridiculous all that is capricious in the adventurous feats of the Middle Ages, all that is fantastic and exaggerated in chivalry, all that is merely formal in the independence and personal isolation of the heroes, and which is now contained within a social reality embracing more abundance of national conditions and interest; a consciousness which further brings this entire world before our vision in the light of comedy, which does this, however much what is really genuine within it is also asserted, with seriousness and delight. As the culminating points of this genial conception of the entire world of chivalry I have already pointed to Ariosto and Cervantes. I will therefore in the present passage merely draw attention to the brilliant facility, the charm and wit, the loveliness and intense ingenuousness, with which Ariosto, whose poem still hovers among the poetic aims of the Middle Ages, merely in a more veiled and humorous fashion makes what is fantastic vanish away by means of the incredibility of his nonsense, while the profounder romance of Cervantes already assumes knight-errantry to be a Past behind it; which, consequently, can only enter into the real prose and presence of life as vanity in its isolation and fantastic folly; yet at the same time it gives equal prominence to its great and noble aspects in their contrast to what is awkward, stupid, devoid of reason and order in this very prosaic reality, making the defects of the same live before our eyes.

Among writers who have contributed to a second phase in this type of epic development I will merely mention the representative name of Tasso. In his “Jerusalem Delivered” this poet, in contrast to the poetry of Ariosto, selects for his central theme, without any admixture of the humorist’s temper whatever, the great and common aims of Christian chivalry, the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, the victorious pilgrimage of the Crusades, and, after the model of Homer and Virgil, creates an Epos with enthusiasm and study, which may even be compared with the great prototypes abovementioned. And no doubt we do discover in this work, quite apart from a genuine, and, in part, too, national and religious interest, a type of unity, development, and elaboration of the whole such as we have previously fixed as a primary condition. We may add to this a fascinating music in the verse, which makes the same still harmonious to living speech. What, however, is pre-eminently wanting in this poem is just that kind of primitive origin which is alone able to create the real Bible of an entire nation. In other words, instead of having, as in Homer’s case, a work which, as true Epos, expresses once for all in language, and with direct simplicity, that which the nation is through its actions, the epic in question rather appears simply a poem, that is, a poetically constructed event. We are mainly pleased and satisfied with it in virtue of the artistic effect of its beautiful speech and form, whether we consider its more lyrical aspects, or its epic descriptions. Consequently, however much Tasso may have taken Homer for his model in the collective arrangement of his material, in the entire spirit of the conception and presentation it is rather and in chief the influence of Virgil that we actually discover in the work, and of course do so not to the poem’s advantage.

Finally, among the great Epopaea, which are constructed upon the basis of a classic culture, we must include the “Lysiad” of Camoens. In the subject-matter of this entirely national composition, which celebrates the bold sea-faring of the Portuguese, we are already beyond the true Middle Ages, and have interests unfolded, which inaugurate a new era. But here, too, despite the glow of its patriotism, despite the life-like character of the descriptive matter, based for the most part upon the author’s own experience, we are still conscious of a real barrier between the subject that is national and an artistic culture which is partly borrowed from the ancients and in part from the Italians, and which impairs its impression as a truly original epic.

(ββ) The essentially new manifestations in the religious belief and actual composition of modern life originate in the principle of the Reformation. The whole tendency of this general change of outlook is, indeed, rather favourable to lyric and dramatic, than epic poetry. But we do find nevertheless, even in the latter sphere, an autumnal blossoming of the religious Epopaea, of which the pre-eminent examples are Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Klopstock’s “Messias.” In breadth of culture, gained through study of the ancients, and the correct elegance of his language, Milton is no doubt an admirable master of his age. In the profundity of his content, in energy, original invention and execution, and, above all, in the epic objectivity of his presentment, however, he is in every respect inferior to Dante. For not only does the conflict and the catastrophe of “Paradise Lost” take a direction which is contrary to its dramatic character; but, as I have above incidentally observed, it is, in a unique way, supported by a lyrical impulse and ethical or didactic predilections, which lie far enough away from the subject in its original form.35 I have already, in discussing Klopstock, referred to a similar cleft between the material and the form, which a particular age gives to it in its epic reflection. In the case of Klopstock, moreover, an endeavour is throughout apparent through a rhetoric, which is little more than the caricature of the Sublime, to infuse the reader with that recognition of the worth and solemnity of his subject, which the poet has himself experienced. From a somewhat different point of view we arrive at very much the same conclusion in the case of Voltaire’s “Henriade.” At any rate here too the poetry is an artificial production, and all the more so, inasmuch as the material, as already observed, is not adapted to the truly primitive Epos.

(γγ) If we try to discover really epic compositions in our own day we shall find ourselves in an atmosphere totally different from that of the genuine Epopaea. The general condition of the world to-day has assumed a form, which, in its prosaic character, is diametrically opposed to everything which we found indispensable to the genuine Epos, while the revolutions, which have been imposed upon the actual social conditions of states and nations, are still too strongly riveted in our memory as actual experiences that they should be able to receive an epic type of art. Epic poetry has consequently taken refuge from the great national events in the narrow circle of the domestic life of individuals in the country and in the small town, striving to find here the material adapted to epic composition. In this way, more particularly among us Germans, the Epic has become idyllic, after the genuine Idyll, of the sweet sentimentality and wishy-washy type, died out.

As an example lying close to hand of an idyllic Epos I will merely mention the “Luise” of Voss, as also and above all Goethe’s masterpiece, “Herman and Dorothea.” In the latter work we have no doubt our attention directed to the background of the greatest world-event of our age, with which the circumstances of the innkeeper and his family, of the pastor and the apothecary, are directly associated. And inasmuch as the little country town is not placed before us in its political relations we at once remark a gap in the narrative which is not explained or mediated by any connecting link. Yet it is precisely through this omission of the intermediate link that the whole keeps its unique character. For with the stroke of a master Goethe has removed the revolution into the background, despite the fact that he has known how to make the most happy use of it in the enlargement of his poem. He only interweaves such circumstances with the action as, in their simple humanity, connect themselves absolutely without constraint with domestic and civic conditions. The main point, therefore, is that Goethe in this work has succeeded in detaching from the reality of our modern life traits, descriptions, conditions, and developments, and depicting the same, which in their province once more make that alive which contributes to the imperishable charm of those primitive human conditions of the Odyssey and the patriarchal picture of the Old Testament.

In respect to other spheres of our present national and social life I would observe in conclusion that in the field of epic poetry there are practically unlimited opportunities for the romance, the narrative, and the novel. I am, however, unable, even in the most general outline, to follow the history of these in the breadth of their development from their first appearance until the present time.

1 Die echt poetische Abrundung. Not, however, merely literary finish, but complete ideal totality.

2 Einem bestimmten Tone. Perhaps more truly “a particular strain or atmosphere.” But both aspects are suggested.

3 There is a misprint here eine recht for einer echt, and also I should prefer eight lines lower down die for das agreeing with Freiheit rather than Leben.

4 This sentence is obviously ironical, but the sense intended is not very clear. The words die sic are clearly a misprint for die sick, and I presume kindisch is not used in its more common depreciatory sense of childish. I am, however, not very confident of my translation. War es ein Zeichen would apparently refer back to the general intention of the previous sentence, i.e., the attempt of Klopstock and others to make a national book.

5 See vol. I, pp. 240-289, and particularly pp. 270-289.

6 Eine Sittlichkeit.

7 Poet., c. 14.

8 That is to say, that the whole remains intact in its opposition. The question of international ethics is not directly considered, though reference is here made to historical evolution in its widest sense.

9 Wrong that is inflicted on a state which is, as a whole, innocent.

10 I presume the reference is mainly to the United States. Hegel’s sentence is so möchten diese nur den Sieg dereinstiger Americanischer lebendiger Vernünftigkeit über die Einkerkerung in ein ins Unendliche fortgehendes Messen und Particularisiren darzustellen haben. It may be doubted, perhaps, whether he would have expressed himself with equal confidence in our own day. At least the position of the German States of his own time no doubt was strongly present in his mind.

11 Von einem anderen beschränkt. Curtailed, I imagine, as a spontaneous and free power.

12 That is acting in subservience to eternal forces, not directing those forces. Hegel conceives the event as supplying the lines of direction through which the forces are effective.

13 Aus der Dumpfheit des Bewusstseyns. Out of the confusions of consciousness.

14 I have adopted the masculine gender in accordance with the text, though of course it does not imply personality in the ordinary sense.

15 I suppose the meaning is that it is a purely objective panorama.

16 Seiner Sache, Somewhat vague and difficult to translate. It means more than his affair or business.

17 Trauer. Mournfulness or gloom is perhaps better.

18 Liv., ii, c. 32.

19 Lit., so far as they do not emphasize essential phases in (Momente).

20 I presume the allusion is to the way, already illustrated, the Homeric gods do not take themselves seriously.

21 Messias, Canto II, w, 627-850.

22 It is possible Hegel means by geistige intelligible.

23 Act II, sc. 6.

24 “O, that I had never shipped hither over the sea, unhappy that I am! Vain was the fancy which befooled me to seek an empty fame in France; and now a fatal destiny carries me to this bloody field of death. O that I were far from here housed at home on the banks of the blue Severn, where the mother remained behind and the gentle sweet bride mourning for me.”

25 “To Death thou art decreed! A British matron it was that conceived thee!”

26 “With vow to slay at everything alive with the sword that the fateful god of battles confronts her with.”

27 Sitte und Settlichkeit.

28 That is of the Epos.

29 The course of painting is similar to that of sculpture in virtue of the fact that it is wholly of one type, viz., romantic, but it differs from it in being less objective and requiring more historical illustration.

30 Substantiellen, i.e., an outlook which concentrates attention on the one Divine substance, the essence beneath the phenomenal.

31 I presume this is another Persian composition, but it may be a cult of some kind.

32 Substantive as contrasted with phenomenal.

33 That is the Iliad and Odyssey.

34 What Hegel means to say by this and the following paragraph is by no means clear. He first seems to state as a fact that a rivalry may be asserted, or at least has been asserted by others, between the Spanish romances and the finest Greek and Latin epic literature, and then immediately afterwards denies the fact so far as the Iliad and Odyssey is concerned. The confusion and indeed uncertainty seems to be due to the fact that while explaining the disadvantage in which the German work is placed as compared with the Spanish romances, he merely contrasts the Homeric poems with the former. What he apparently means us to infer is that the latter are as superior as the German work is, at least as an Epos, inferior. The words “we moderns” are apparently ironical. In any case the entire passage is, I think, clearly one which needed revision, and it is possible that the two paragraphs have been tacked together by Hegel’s editors from different connections.

35 As we find it, presumably, in Genesis.

(B.) LYRIC POETRY

The poetic imagination does not, as the plastic arts do, present the objects of its creation before our vision in an objective shape, but only envisages them to the inward vision and emotions. No doubt from the first, relatively to certain aspects of this universal type of composition, it is the personal quality of ideal creation and construction which pre-eminently asserts itself in the presented work, and as such is to be contrasted with plastic construction. But when epic poetry offers to our contemplation its object either in its substantive universality, or under a mode comparable with that of sculptor and painter — in other words, in its living presence — in that case, at least where the art is most consummate, the individual mind and soul of the creator involved in the creation disappears before the objective result created. The above personal or subjective aspect of mind can only completely be discarded in so far as, in the first place, the entire world of objects and relations are essentially absorbed by it and then permitted to stand forth freely from the veiled presence of the individual consciousness, and, further, in so far as the self-centred soul unbars its doors, opens wide its ears and eyes, extends the purely unenlightened feeling to vision and idea, and attaches to this wealth of hidden content word and speech as the vehicle of its intimate self-expression. And just in proportion as this kind of communication persists in shutting itself away from the objective manifestation of epic art, to that extent, and precisely for that reason, the subjective type of poetry is bound to find its own forms, in a province of its own, wholly independent of the Epos. In other words, the human spirit descends from the objectivity of the object into its own private domain; it peers into its particular conscious life; it endeavours to satisfy the desire to reproduce the presence and reality of that, as displayed in soul, in the experience of heart and reflected idea, and in doing so to unfold the content and activity of the personal life rather than the actual presence of the external fact. But, again, inasmuch as this expression, if it is not simply to remain the chance expression of mere individuality1 in its immediate feeling and conception, must assert itself in speech as the reflection of an inner life that is poetic, all that is thus envisaged of feeling or otherwise — and however much, too, it may be a part of the poet’s unique personality, and be presented by him as such — must nevertheless possess a universal validity, in other words, it must essentially include feelings and reflections for which the art of poetry is able to discover the vital and adequate means of expression. And although, apart from this, pain and desire, as conceived, described, and expressed in speech, may lighten the heart, and poetic ebullition is unquestionably permissible for such a purpose, yet its function is not restricted to such domestic service. Rather it has a nobler vocation, which is not so much to liberate the human spirit from emotion, but in the medium of the same. The blind tumult of passion surges on in a union with the entire soul-life unenlightened, unawakened to the grasp of mind. In such a state the soul cannot assert itself in idea and expression. It is the function of poetry no doubt to free the heart from such a prison house, in so far as it presents that life as an object to it. But it does more than this mere translation of content from the immediacy of emotional experience; it creates therefrom an object which is purified from all mere contingency of the passing mood; an object in which the soul-life in this deliverance returns once more to itself freely and with self-conscious satisfaction, and remains there at home. Conversely, however, this primary objectivisation ought not to be carried to the point of a reflection that actually discloses the individual activity of the soul-life and its passions as it is carried forward in practical impulse and action; in other words, in the self-return of the individual upon himself in veritable deed. For the most pertinent reality of our inner life is still itself an inward something, and consequently this passage from itself can only give us the sense of deliverance from the immediate concentration of heart in its blind and formless presence, which now unbars itself in self-expression, and in doing so grasps and expresses what was previously merely felt in the form of a self-conscious vision and ideas. And with these remarks I think we have determined in their essential features both the sphere and function of lyric poetry as contrasted with the epic and dramatic types.

As regards the more detailed examination and classification of our new subject-matter, we cannot do better than follow the course previously adopted in our examination of epic poetry.

First, we have to discuss the general character of lyric composition.

Secondly, we shall consider the particular characteristics which make the lyric work of art and the types of the same worthy of attention in their more direct relation to the lyric poet.

Thirdly, we shall conclude the survey with a few remarks upon the historical development of this class of poetic work.

Generally I may remark that this survey will be extremely restricted, and for two reasons — first, because I am compelled to reserve the necessary space for the discussion of the dramatic field; secondly, because I must limit myself exclusively to general considerations, inasmuch as the detail embraced by it possesses far more incalculable resources of manifold complexity than in the case of the Epos, and could only be treated in greater fulness and completeness if viewed historically, which is not within the aim of the present work.

In the stimulus of epic poetry is the desire to hear the thing or matter which is unfolded on its own account, and independently of the poet,2 as an objective and essentially exclusive totality. In the lyric, on the contrary, it is the converse need which finds its satisfaction in self-expression and the coming to a knowledge of the soul in this expression of itself. With regard to the nature of this effusion,3 we may enumerate its most important constituents as follows:

First, there is the content in which soul-life is aware of itself and reflects itself in idea.

Secondly, there is the form, in virtue of which the expression of this content becomes lyric poetry.

Thirdly, there is the stage of conscious life and culture from which the person thus lyrically viewed discloses his feelings and ideas.

(a) The content of the lyric work of art cannot comprise the development of an objective action in its possibilities of expansion into all the breadth and wealth of a world. It is the single person, and along with him the isolated fact of situation and objects, no less than the mode and manner in which the soul is made aware of itself in such content, with its private judgments, its joy, its wonder, its pain, and its feeling, which it presents to our vision. Through this principle of division and particularity, as present in the Lyric, the content may be of the greatest variety, associated with every tendency of national life. There is, however, this essential distinction, that whereas the Epos combines in one and the same work the spirit of a people in all its breadth, and in its actual deed and fashion, the more definite content of lyrical poetry limits itself to one particular aspect, or at least is unable successfully to attain to the explicit completeness and exposition which the Epos ought at least to possess. The entire wealth of lyrical poetry in a nation may, therefore, no doubt embrace the collective exuberance of national interest, idea, and purpose; but it is not the single lyrical poem that can do this.

The Lyric is not called upon to produce Bibles such as we have discovered in Epic poetry. It does, however, enjoy the advantage of being able to touch upon every conceivable aspect of national development; whereas the true Epos is limited to distinct epochs of a primitive age, and its success in our more recent times of prosaic culture is very jejune.

(α) Within this field of particularization we have, to start with, the universal as such — the supreme height and depth of human belief, imagination, and knowledge — the essential content of religion, art, ay, even of scientific thought, in so far as the same is adaptable to the form of imagination and creation, and can enter the sphere of emotions. Consequently general opinions, what is of permanent substance in a view of the world, the profounder grasp of far-reaching social conditions are all not excluded from the Lyric; and a considerable part of the material I have referred to4 when discussing the more incomplete types of the Epic falls rightly, and with pertinency into the sphere now under review.

(β) And along with such essentially universal topics we have associated the aspect of particularity, which can be so interwoven with what is thus substantive that any specific situation, feeling, or idea is thereby seized in its profounder significance and expressed in a way wholly accordant thereto. This is, for example, almost always the case in Schiller’s lyrical work, as also in his ballads; in this connection I will merely recall the superb description of the Eumenides chorus in the Cranes of Ibicus, which is neither dramatic nor epic, but lyrical. From a further point of view we may have this combination so asserted that a variety of particular traits, moods, occurrences are introduced by way of testimony to comprehensive views and maxims, interlaced in vital coalescence by virtue of the general principle. This style of writing is frequently employed in the elegy and epistle, and generally in reflections upon life of a comprehensive character.

(γ) In conclusion, inasmuch as in lyrical composition what is self-expressed is the individual person, a content, which is extremely slight, will primarily suffice for this purpose. It is, in other words, the soul itself, subjective life simply, which is the true content. The emphasis is therefore throughout upon the animation of feeling, rather than upon the more immediate object. The most fleeting moods of the moment, the overjoyment of the heart, the swiftly passing gleams or clouds of careless merriment and jest, sorrow, melancholy, and complaint, in a word, all and every phase of emotion are here seized in their momentary movement or isolated occurrence, and rendered permanent in their expression. What we find here in the domain of poetry may be paralleled with what I previously referred to when describing genre paintings. The content, the subject-matter, is here the wholly contingent, and what is over and above this important is exclusively the character of the individual conception and mode of presentment, the charm of which in the Lyric will either consist in the aroma of exquisite feeling, or in the novelty of arresting points of view, and the genial suggestion of literary phrases and turns which surprise.

(b) In the second place we may observe in general with respect to the form, wherein the Lyric is composed, that here too it is the individual person, in the intimacy of his ideas or emotion that constitutes the focal centre. The growth of the whole is rooted in the heart and temperament; it starts, to be more precise, from a particular mood and situation of the poet. By virtue of this fact the content and conjunction of the particular aspects of its growth are not inferred from it objectively as a substantively independent content, or from its external manifestation as some really self-exclusive event, but are borrowed from the individual subject as such. But for this reason it is essential that the individual in question should himself appear poetical, rich in fancy and feeling, or imposing and profound in his views and reflections, and above all should be essentially independent, the possessor of a unique ideal world, from which the servility and caprice of a prosaic nature is excluded.

The lyric poem, then, retains a mode of unity wholly different from that of the Epos, in other words, the mysterious intimacy of the mood or reflection, which expatiates upon itself, mirrors itself in the objective world, describes itself, or concerns itself as it wills with any other matter, always, however, retaining the right in the pursuit of such an interest to begin and break off very much as it pleases. Horace, for instance, very frequently comes to a stop at the very point, where, in the commonplace view of its literary treatment, we might suppose he had only just started with his subject. In other words, what he describes is simply his feelings, commands or arrangements for a banquet, say, without giving us further information as to how it went off. In the same way we have every conceivable mode of progression and combination supplied by the nature of the mood, the actual condition of the individual soul-life, the degree of passion, its excitement or rapid transition of conflicting emotion, or the tranquillity of the heart or the mind in some long-drawn process of contemplation. As a rule, in respect to all such subject-matter, we are able to determine very little that is fixed, owing to the repeated changes in the ever varied facets of the soul. I will therefore restrict myself to a few salient points of distinction.

(α) Just as we met with several specific kinds of epic poetry which showed a tendency to adopt a lyric vein of expression, so, too, the Lyric may accept as its subject-matter and its form an occurrence, which, so far as content and external appearance are concerned, are epic, and to this extent it will approximate to the latter type. Heroic songs, romances, and ballads belong to such a class. The form of the whole is in such examples narrative, inasmuch as it is the progressive advance of a situation or event, as among other instances, a particular direction in the fate of a nation, which is communicated. And yet at the same time the fundamental temper is wholly lyric, inasmuch as the main object is not to give us a description and representation of the actual fact apart from all relation to the narrator, but rather to disclose his personal attitude to it in the way he conceives and feels it, whether with delight or complaint, whether as a stimulus to good or depressed spirits, the mood in short that rings throughout it. And similarly the nature of the impression which the poet endeavours to produce thereby is entirely that of the province of the lyric. In other words, what the poet seeks to effect in his audience is precisely that state of emotion, which the recounted event has produced in himself, and which he therefore has attached to his composition. He expresses his dejection, mourning, merriment, his fire of patriotism, and so forth, in an appropriate occurrence in such a way that it is not this fact so much which contributes, as it were, the focus, but rather the state of his emotional life we find reflected therein. And for this reason he, above all emphasizes those traits, and depicts the same with feeling, which are in accord with his own personal impulses; and in the degree of vivacity with which these are expressed by them the same feelings are likely to be excited in his audience. And thus, though the content may be epic, the treatment is lyrical.

(αα) To come yet more directly to detail there is, first, the example of the epigram, in such a case where it is not merely an inscription which states concisely the bald nature of some fact, but further associates with this an emotional state; where, in short, the content, regarded as the bare statement of external fact, is merged in a condition of the soul. In other words, the writer here ceases to surrender himself wholly to the object: rather he makes his own personality expressive in it; he records his desires with regard to it; he attaches to it his own sportive fancies, his acute or unexpected suggestions and associations. The Greek Anthology contains many such witty epigrams which have lost the epic manner. In more recent times we find similar examples in the piquante couplets of the French, abundantly illustrated in their Vaudevilles. We Germans have much the same thing in our didactic distiches, Xenien, and the like. Even tomb inscriptions frequently approximate to this lyrical character in virtue of the strong emotions expressed.

(ββ) In much the same way the Lyric accepts a wider range in descriptive narrative. I will merely mention, as a composition of this class, the romance. It is the most obvious and simple form of it, in so far that is as it isolates the different scenes of an event, and then depicts rapidly and with the full force of their most important characteristics each on its own account, in descriptions marked throughout by sympathetic feeling. Such a consistent and well-defined grasp of the characteristic features of a situation, together with an emphatic assertion of the writer’s absolute sympathy with his subject, is above all nobly represented in Spanish literature and makes such romances strikingly impressive. A peculiar clarity of atmosphere surrounds these lyrical representations which rather identifies them with the clear-cut definition of objective vision, than with the ideal world of the imagination.

(γγ) The class of the ballad, in contrast to the above, includes for the most part, if in less degree than the truly epic poem, the completeness of an independent event, whose reflection, of course, it merely embodies in the most conspicuous of its phases, while it seeks at the same time to give full, if concentrated and ideal emphasis, to the depth of the sentiment with which it is throughout interwoven, and therein the plaint, dejection, joy, and so forth, of the soul. English literature above all contains many such poetic compositions in the early and more primitive epoch of its history; and, generally, popular poetry delights in the narration of such histories and collisions, usually unfortunate, with a true and emotional emphasis calculated to make both heart and voice thrill and falter with anguish. But in more recent times also among ourselves Bürger and, most famous of all, Goethe and Schiller, have composed masterpieces in this field; Bürger in virtue of his sombre tone of naïveté; Goethe through the impeccable clarity of his emotional, no less than imaginative vision, which forms the lyrical thread throughout; and Schiller, on account of his superb emotional emphasis on the fundamental thought which he seeks, in a wholly lyrical manner, to express under the form of an event, in order thereby to affect the hearts of his readers with a similar lyric movement of feeling and contemplation.

(β) The purely personal element of lyric poetry is rightly emphasized in those cases, when the fact of a given situation is taken by the poet as an effective means of expressing his own individuality therein. Such is the case in the so-called poems of occasion. So far back as the poems of Callinus and Tyrtaeus we find elegies of battle based on conditions regarded as real, which are made the stimulus of a personal enthusiasm, albeit the poet’s own individuality, his purely private affections and feelings, are as yet not so much in evidence. The Pindaric Odes also bring to light in their panegyrics of particular contests, victors, and circumstances, a vein or impulse that is more private; and yet more in some of the odes of Horace we mark a definitely personal motive, or rather expressed thought to the effect, “I will as myself a man of culture and fame, write a poem on this subject.” But the best illustration of all we have in our own Goethe, whose partiality for such a style was due to the fact that he discovered a poem in every incident of his life.

(αα) If, however, the lyric work of art is to be divested of all dependence of external occasion and purpose, that may be implied in it, and to be composed as a self-subsistent whole on its own account, it is obviously essential that the poet also only make use of such external stimulus as an opportunity to express himself, his mood, delight, sorrow, or modes of thought and reflection generally. The condition of most importance to such an intimate mode of personal expression consists in the poet’s ability to absorb the real content absolutely, converting it thereby into his own possession. The true lyric poet lives a life of introspection, he grasps relations in the light of his poetic individuality; and, however in varied fashion his inner life may be blended with the world around him, in its conditions and destiny, what he presents to us exclusively in such material is the unique and independent animation of his own emotions and observations. When, to take our former example, Pindar was invited to celebrate a victor of the Hellenic games, or undertakes this uninvited, he made himself so entirely master of his subject-matter, that his composition no longer so much appears a poem on the victor as an effusion of song created from his own resources.

(ββ) If we consider more closely the manner of presentment of such a poem d’occasion, we shall, no doubt, be ready to admit that the same can to a real extent borrow its more defined material and character, no less than its conceived organization as an artistic work, from the actual features of the occurrence or individual which constitute its content. It is, in fact, precisely from this content that the emotional movement of the poet proceeds. As the most illuminating, though an extreme example, I will merely mention Schiller’s “Song of the Bell,” which makes out of the varied stages of bell-foundry the significant and arresting moments in the composition of the entire poem, and only subject to this introduces the emotional element relevant thereto, as also the various observations upon human life and the description of its conditions. In a somewhat different manner, too, Pindar makes use of the place of birth of the victor, the exploits of the family to which he belongs, or other relations of life as an opportunity in his own person to exalt certain gods to the exclusion of others, or to mention these particular exploits and results alone, or to emphasize exclusively the observations or maxims he has interpolated. From a further point of view, however, the lyric poet is absolutely free, inasmuch as it is not the external occasion as such, but rather the poet’s own soul-life which is here the subject; and consequently it entirely depends on the particular views of the poet and the character of his general mood, what aspects of the subject-matter and in what threads of connection and sequence they shall be composed. In other words, we are unable to predict decisively and a priori the degree in which the objective occasion with its given content, or the purely personal factor of poet, shall be predominant, or whether both aspects shall on equal terms coalesce.

(γγ) Furthermore, it is not the incentive and its positive reality, but the ideal movement and conception of the individual soul which supplies the focus of unity. The particular mood or general review, which is aroused poetically by the occasion, these constitute the centre, radiating from which not merely the colour of the whole, but also the embrace of the particular features unfolded, the very mode of the execution and construction, and therewith the build and coalescence of the poem as a work of art are determined. In this way, to return to our previous example, Pindar possesses in the life-conditions of his victors a genuine core of reality for differentiation or amplification. In the particular poems, however, which he has written it is invariably other points of view, another mood altogether, whether it be of warning, comfort, or exaltation, which he makes most pervasive, and which, although such exclusively belong to the poet in his creative capacity, do none the less give him precisely that grasp of all he wishes to touch upon, execute, and hand to posterity in those historical facts, while unfolding therewith the illuminating and constructive power of genius, without which he would fail to secure the lyric effect intended.

(γ) But, thirdly, it is not absolutely necessary for the genuine lyrical poet to start from the external occurrence, which he recounts in a medium rich with emotion, or, indeed, from any such objectively real stimulus of his efforts. He is, let us repeat, a truly exclusive world in himself. He may find there both the original incentive and content, and consequently go no further than this ideal world of condition, event, and passion discovered in his own heart and soul. This is that domain in which man becomes, in virtue of his private inner life, himself the work of art; while the epic poet avails himself exclusively of the hero and his exploits and experiences for this purpose.

(αα) And yet in this field, too, an element of narrative may enter, where, as in the case of the songs of Anacreon, bright little pictures of adventure with Eros and the like receive the finish of delightful miniatures. Such an event, however, must obviously rather resemble the unveiling of a condition of personal soul-life. In a somewhat different mode of the same thing Horace, in his Integer vitæ makes use of the fact of his meeting a wolf, not to the extent that we can, therefore, call his poem the verse occasion, but rather regarding this fact as the prompting force of his first sentence and the serenity of the feelings of affection with which he concludes.

(ββ) As a rule we may also observe that the situation under which the poet depicts himself should not restrict itself merely to the inner personal life as such. It must rather attest itself as concrete, and thereby we may even say external totality. The poet, in short, reveals himself not merely in that inward personal life, but as one of the objects of the external world. In the example just cited of the Anacreon odes the poet depicts himself among roses, fair maidens, and youths in the merry enjoyment of wine and dance, without regret or yearning, without obligation, and yet without dislike of loftier aims, which, indeed, are not present at all; reveals himself rather as a hero, who freely and without reserve, and consequently without hesitation or loss, is just this unity, is what he is, a man of his own type, and figures as such in this intimate artistic presentment. In the love-songs of Hafis also we may observe the entire vital individuality of the poet in all its changes of content, pose, and an expression which approaches close to self-conscious humour. And yet his poetry is without any specific theme, any objective picture, any god, or mythology; or, rather, when we peruse these light-hearted ebullitions, one feels as though it would be impossible for the Oriental to possess any such definite picture and constructive art. He passes easily from one object to another; he takes his walks abroad, but it is a scene in which the entire man, with his wine, his damsels, his court-life, and all the rest of it, is placed before us with delightful unreserve, without passion or self-seeking in the simplicity of his enjoyment eye to eye and soul to soul. Improvisations of this type adapt themselves in the most various ways not merely to a reflection of the soul-life, but also to external condition. If, however, the poet is absorbed in his own individual experience, we are not so much concerned to hear his particular fancies, love affairs, domestic arrangements, and the history of his uncles and aunts. We are so invited, for instance, in Klopstock’s Eidli and Fanny, as to nave some vision given us of what is of universal human interest, in order that our sympathies may be roused. From this point of view, therefore, such lyrical poetry can readily degenerate into the spurious assumption that what is essentially private and particular must necessarily awaken interest. On the contrary, it would be no incorrect description of many songs of Goethe if we called them “Songs of Comradeship,” although they are not exactly executed by the poet under such a category. In other words, it is not so much himself that a man offers in society; rather he places his particularity in the background, and converses with the help of something else, whether it be a story or an anecdote, seizing its specific features in some particular mood, and communicating them agreeably to such a temper. In a case like this it is not exactly the poet, and yet it is himself for all that. It is not himself he gives us, but something else as best he can. He is, in short, an actor, who runs through an infinite variety of parts. First he lingers on this, then on that; he reviews momentarily a scene, then maybe a group of people. But whatever he may endeavour to reproduce, it is throughout his individual artistic soul-life, his own experience, his own feeling, which is vitally interwoven with it.

(γγ) But, further, in so far as the individuality of self-conscious life is the true source of the Lyric, the poet is justified in limiting his expression to his own moods and reflections without any further combination of them in a concrete situation that includes a truly objective character. It is in this direction that examples of what is little more than an empty fluting for fluting’s sake, the song and trill simply on its own account, will yet give us genuine lyrical satisfaction. In such the words are to a more or less extent merely the vehicle of cheerfulness or sorrow, whose effect, moreover, very readily serves as an invitation to musical accompaniment. Folk-songs especially very often amount to little more than this. In the songs of Goethe, too, though we may no doubt discover here a more defined and abundant mode of expression, it is not unfrequently simply a single and transitory bit of merriment that is vouchsafed, a passing mood that the poet does not attempt to throw aside, but on the tune of which he pipes for a moment in his tiny song. In others, of course, his treatment of similar moods is on a larger scale, even systematic, as, for instance, in the poem: “Ich hab mein Sach’ auf nichts gestellt,” in which the poet passes before us as things that come and vanish, first, money and property, then women, travel, fame, honour, and, last of all, fight and war, retaining throughout as the ever-recurring refrain of stability his own free and careless cheerfulness. Conversely, however, the intimate individual life may from the same point of view grow in depth and expansion, in conditions of the soul of the most imposing proportions and ideas that embrace the world itself. A considerable number of Schiller’s poems are of this type. What is great, what opens to intelligence, this is the incentive of his heart. But he will neither celebrate in hymn fashion a religious or otherwise profound subject; nor will he be the minstrel who looks for inspiration without him to the pertinent fact or occasion. He sings in the presence of, and inspired by, his own soul-life, the highest interest of which are the ideals of life, beauty, and the imperishable claims and thoughts of our humanity.

(c) There is a third consideration we have to deal with in connection with the general character of lyric poetry. It is the nature of the general stage of human development and culture from which the isolated poem originates.

In this respect, too, the Lyric occupies a position which is to be contrasted with Epic poetry. In other words, while we regarded as necessary for the full bloom of the true Epos a phase in the nation’s growth which was, speaking generally, undeveloped, at least in the sense that it had not ripened in the prosaic acceptance of its actual life, the times which favour most of all lyrical composition are those which already are in possession of a more or less fixed organization of social condition. It is in such a period that the individual seeks a reflection of his intimate personal life in contrast to this outer world, creating from it and within its limits an independent whole of emotion and idea. For in the Lyric it is not, we repeat, the objective solidarity and individual action, but the individual person as self-conscious life which supplies both content and form. This, however, must not be understood in such a way as though the individual, in order to express himself in lyrical form, must perforce disjoin himself from every connection with national interests and the opinions, and with rigid and exclusive severity remain as he stands.

On the contrary, with such an abstract self-subsistency we should only have left us for content the wholly contingent and particular passion, the mere caprice of concupiscence and affection, false idiosyncrasies and distorted originality would have unlimited opportunities. Genuine lyrical poetry, like all other poetry, has no doubt to express the content of the human heart in its truth. Yet none the less, regarded as the content of the Lyric, what is most a matter of fact and substantial must appear absorbed in personal feeling, vision, imagination, and thought. And, in the second place, the question here is not so much simply expression of the personal inner life, is not so much concerned with a primary and direct statement in the epic fashion, what the facts are, as with an expression of the poetical nature in a manner both artistically fruitful and wholly different from chance and ordinary modes. It follows that the Lyric requires, precisely on account of the fact that the concentrated life of the heart unfolds itself in manifold feelings and comprehensive views, and the individual is conscious of the poetry of his most intimate life as nested in a world that is already more prosaically organized — an artistic culture already secured, which must assert itself as the flower and independent product of the individual’s natural endowment thus trained to a perfect result. For these reasons the Lyric is not limited to particular epochs of the spiritual development of a people, but is the rich blossom of the most varied. To an exceptional degree is it favoured in more recent times, in which everybody is entitled to have and express his own views and emotions.

I will, however, draw attention, in the interest of really important distinction, to the following general considerations.

(a) In the first place, we have the type of lyrical expression peculiar to folk-songs.

(αα) In these above all we have witness to the varied and distinct qualities of national character. It is on account of this, and consonant with the widely-prevailing curiosity of our generation, that great efforts are made to collect folk-songs of every kind, in order to increase our acquaintance with the peculiarities of every national spirit, and therewith our sympathies and vital contact with such. Already Herder has done much in this direction. Goethe, too, with the help of his own more independent imitations, has materially assisted an approach to very different examples of this style of poetry. Complete sympathy is, however, only possible for the songs of one’s own people; and however much we Germans are able to make ourselves at home in the work of foreign lands, the fact remains that the ultimate aroma in song5 of the intimate life of another folk can only appear as alien, that we shall only catch the echo of the tone of feeling that truly belongs to it, with the assistance of a more native reflection of its content.6 This Goethe has imported into his songs of a foreign subject-matter, stamped as they are with the finest sympathy and beauty. We may take as an example the lament of the noble spouse of Asan Aga, imitated from the Icelandic — only so far as to retain throughout the unique spirit of such poems unimpaired.

(ββ) The general character of the lyrical folk-song is comparable to the primitive Epos in virtue of the fact that here too the poet does not make himself his subject-matter, but is absorbed in his selected material. Although, therefore, intensity of soul in its extreme concentration may express itself in the folk-song, it is nevertheless not a single person with the artistic expression of whose private experience we are made acquainted. It is rather a national state of feeling, which the author completely assimilates, in so far as it possesses, when taken by itself, no intimate form of idea or feeling wholly independent of the nation’s existence and interests. And a condition is necessary, as the presupposition for such an inseparable union, in which independent personal reflection and culture is not yet awakened, so that the poet is simply in his creative capacity merely the vehicle in the background, by means of whom the national life is expressed in its lyrical emotion and general outlook. This directly primitive character no doubt communicates to the folk-song an unconscious freshness of downright grasp and striking veracity, which is often very effective; but it receives thereby along with it very readily a fragmentary appearance; it is defective in the continuity of its exposition, which may amount to actual obscurity. The feeling dives into depth, but cannot and will not attain to full utterance. Moreover, as before observed, what is absent from such a point of view throughout, however much the form in general is wholly lyric, in other words subjective, is just the lyrical individuality, which expresses this form and its content as the possession of its own heart and mind, and the creation of its own artistic resources.

(γγ) Peoples, therefore, which confine themselves to poetry of this type, and do not combine such composition with that of the further stages of lyrical, epic, or dramatic work, are as a rule in great measure barbarous nations, uncultured, characterized by transitory feud and catastrophes. If they themselves, in such heroic ages, really combined to form a truly pregnant whole, whose particular aspects were already fused together in an independent and withal harmonious objective union, which could supply the ground for essentially concrete and individually distinct exploits, we should find in them, along with such primitive poetry, epic poets as well. The condition, out of which such songs assert themselves as the single and ultimate mode of poetic expression, is therefore rather limited to the field of family life and the association of clans, without any further organization such as belongs already to the riper perfection of the heroic community. If we are reminded here and there of national exploits, such are for the most part conflicts waged against foreign aggressors, expeditions of pillage, reprisals of savagery with savagery, or deeds of one individual against another in the same people, in the narration of which lament and dejection or ecstatic jubilation over one conqueror after another, are the moods throughout prevailing. The national life as it actually is, as yet unfolded in its wholly free development, is relegated to the background in contrast with the world of more personal feeling, which also, on its own account, betrays an immaturity; and, however much thereby we gain in concentration of effect, the result only too frequently remains, so far as content is concerned, rude and barbarous. The question then, whether folk-songs should possess for us a poetic interest, or on the contrary repel us to some extent, depends on the kind of situation and emotion they portray. That which appears admirable to the imagination of one people, will readily strike another as wanting in taste, horrible, and offensive. There is, for example, a folk-song which tells us the story of a wife who was immured at the command of her husband, and all that her plea for mercy could effect was that apertures should be left open for her breasts, in order that she might suckle her child; we are told that she remained alive until her child was weaned. This is a barbarous and frightful situation. And in the same way tales of robbery, exploits of the bluster or sheer savagery of individuals, possess nothing in them in which alien peoples of a higher culture can sympathize. Folksongs, consequently, very often run into great detail as to the quality of which there is no fixed standard of comparison, because such is too far removed from our common humanity. When we consequently, in more recent times, are made acquainted with the songs of the Iroquois, the Esquimaux, and other wild nationalities, the circle of a true poetic enjoyment is in no wise thereby enlarged.

(β) Further, inasmuch as the Lyric is the entire expression of the inward life of Spirit, it can neither restrict itself to the mode of expression nor the content of the genuine folksong, or of later poems composed in a similar spirit.

(αα) In other words, on the one hand, it is of essential importance, as already remarked, that the wholly self-absorbed soul should detach itself from this absolute concentration and its direct introspection, and should pass on instead to the free grasp of itself which, in the conditions above described, is only incompletely the case. On the other, it is necessary that it should expand in a world abundant in ideas, passions, varied conditions, and conflicts, in order to endow with ideal expression everything that the human heart is essentially able to apprehend, and then communicate as the birth of its own spirit. For the collective wealth of lyrical poetry should express in poetic form all that the inner life comprises, so far as the same can pass into poetry, and therefore finds itself at home alike in all phases of spiritual culture.

(ββ) And, secondly, with the advent of a free self-consciousness is bound up the freedom of an assured art of its own. The folk-song sings forth, just as any natural song, straight from the heart. A free art, however, is aware of itself; it requires a knowledge and desire of that which it produces; and requires culture to promote this knowledge, as also an executive power, which is expert in the finest composition. When, consequently, genuine epic poetry has to conceal the individual creative power of the poet, or rather it lies with the entire character of the age of its origin that such should not yet be visible, this result is merely because of the fact that the Epos deals with the nation’s positive existence rather than that which issues from the personal life of the poet himself, and that it is not present in poetry in such a close personal relation, but rather appears as a self-evolved product essentially independent. In lyrical poetry, on the contrary, the creative activity no less than the content are inseparable from the inner life, and are bound to declare themselves as such in actual fact.

(γγ) In this respect, later forms of lyric art are expressly distinguishable from the folk-song. There are, no doubt, folk-songs which originate contemporaneously with the works of a genuine lyrical art. These latter, however, belong to a range and type of individuals such as — far from participating in more modern stages of artistic culture — are, in the entire nature of their general outlook, not yet liberated from the immediate popular sense. We must, however, not regard this distinction between the Lyric of the folk-song and the artistic poem as though it was only when reflection and the artistic consciousness, in union with deliberate executive ability, appear with all the elegance of such a union, that the Lyric attains to its perfection. Such a notion would really amount to this — that a Horace, for instance, and the Roman lyric poets generally, were to be reckoned among the finest writers of this type, or even in their own range that the Master Singers were preferable to the preceding epoch of the genuine Minnesong. Such an extreme deduction from our previous statement is not justified. What we ought to conclude is this, that individual imagination and art directed to the service of this very self-consistent personal life, which in fact constitutes its principle, presupposes also, for the basis of their true perfection, a free and self-trained recognition of imaginative idea no less than artistic activity.

(γ) We have our final phase of composition to distinguish from those already discussed. The folk-song appears before the true elaboration of a prosaically organized condition of actual conscious life. Lyric poetry of the truly artistic type, on the other hand, wrests itself away from the prosaic coordination which surrounds it, and creates from the poet’s imagination, in its acquired independence, a new poetic world of inward observation and emotion, by means of which, for the first time, the true content and type of expression truly adequate to the human soul, as seen from within, becomes the object of vital art. There is, however, over and above this, a form of intelligence which, from this point of view, stands in a more exalted position than the imagination of the emotional or conceptive life, inasmuch as it is able, with more penetrative universality and more necessary coalescence to bring its content before our free cognition than is ever possible to art. This is philosophical thought. Conversely, however, this form is attached to the abstract condition of being exclusively evolved in the medium of thought, posited as wholly ideal universality; and, in consequence, the concrete man may find himself also constrained to express the content and the results of his philosophical consciousness in a concrete way, that is, as permeated by his temperament and sensuous perception, his imagination and feeling, in order thereby to possess and exhaust the absolute expression of all that engages either soul or intellect.

From such a standpoint we may distinguish between two principal types of conceptive activity. It may, in short, either be the imagination which, straining beyond its own domain, struggles with the movement of pure thinking, without successfully attaining the clarity and secured exactness of philosophical exposition. In this case the Lyric is for the most part the ebullition of a soul engaged in strife and contention, which in its fermentation does violence both to art and abstract thought. It transgresses one province without the ability to make itself at home in another. Or we may find that it is rather the tranquil movement of philosophical thought in its essential medium, which may seek to animate its clearly grasped and systematically developed thoughts with emotion, to make them perceptible to sensuous apprehension, and to exchange the explicit scientific process and sequence in its causal necessity for that free play of particular aspects, beneath the apparently loose connection of which art is the more compelled to conceal their ideal bonds of association in proportion as it is disinclined to narrow itself to the jejune style of purely didactic exposition. As an illustration of this latter tendency, we may point to many of Schiller’s poems.

Having thus considered the general character of the content of lyric poetry, and the mode of its expression, as also the varied grades of culture which are more or less consonant with its fundamental principle, it will be our further task to examine these general points of view more nearly in the detail of their more important features and relations.

Here, too, I ought at starting once again to emphasize the distinction which obtains between epic and lyrical poetry. In our consideration of the former we directed our attention above all to the primitive national Epos, and merely referred incidentally to the inadequate collateral branches, as also to the poet in his creative capacity. This we are unable to do in the case of the type under discussion. On the contrary, we shall find that subjects of the greatest importance invite our review as respects the individual creative power; and, on the other hand, in respect to the classification of the several types in which lyrical poetry, whose general principle it is to disintegrate and isolate the content and its configurations, is respectively differentiated. We may define the subsequent course of our investigation as follows:

First, our attention will be directed to the lyrical poet himself.

Secondly, we propose to examine the lyrical work of art as the creation of the individual poet’s imagination.

Thirdly, we shall classify the types which are deducible from the general notion of lyrical composition.

(a) The Lyric Poet

(α) Now the content of the Lyric embraces, as we have seen, first, a type of contemplation, which connects the universal quality of determinate being with its conditions, and, secondly, the manifold character of its detailed aspects. Regarded, however, as pure generalizations and particular points of view of emotional condition these constituents, both of them, are nothing more than abstractions. In order that these may acquire a vital lyrical individuality, a principle of combination is necessary which can only be of an ideal, in other words really personal7 character. Consequently the creatively concrete person, the poet himself, must be further presupposed as the focus and in fact realized content of lyrical poetry. He must be there, however, in a form which is not carried to the point of definitive act and deed, or to that of the evolved movement of dramatic conflicts. His exclusive expression and activity is on the contrary restricted to the fact that he endows his inner experience with an articulate speech such as portrays the spiritual significance of himself as subject in his self-expression, whatever the material selected may be, and endeavours to arouse in and keep the hearer alive to the like meaning and spirit, the same soul-state, the similar course of reflection.

(β) But, furthermore, the expression cannot rest alone in this result, however successful, in so far as it is for others a free overflooding of buoyant delight, or the resolution and reconciliation of grief in song and lyric, or the yet profounder impulse, which issues in the most serious emotions of heart and the most far-reaching views of intelligence. The man who sings and can write poetry has a necessary vocation thereto. He composes because he cannot do otherwise. At the same time the external incentive, the direct invitation and the like are by no means excluded. The great lyric poet, however, in such a case soon swerves aside from such an external stimulus. His supreme object is himself. To take the example once more to which we have constantly recurred, Pindar was frequently invited to celebrate this or that laurel-crowned victor, nay, he frequently accepted payment therefor; and yet, for all that, it is he himself, the minstrel, who changes places with his hero. He combines freely his own unfettered imagination with his praise of the exploits of ancestors, or it maybe his memory of myths; or, when he gives voice to his profound views of life, of wealth, of mastery, of all that is great and deserving, of the supremacy and loveliness of the Muses, and above all of the high vocation of the singer. It is not so much the hero in the renown that he spreads far and wide, that he honours in his poems. We are invited to listen to him, the poet. The honour is not to him in that he celebrates the victor, but rather to the victor that he is celebrated by Pindar. And it is this emphatic personal sense of greatness which constitutes the nobility of the lyric poet. Homer, as an individual person, is in his Epos so entirely sacrificed that people nowadays are loth to admit that he ever existed at all. His heroes live on for ever. Pindar’s heroes are for us little better than empty names. He himself, however, the self-celebrated and self-honoured, remains before us immortal as the poet. The fame which his heroes claim is merely an appanage to that of the lyric singer. Even among the Romans the lyric poet to some extent aspires to such an independent position. Suetonius tells us, for instance, that Augustus wrote these works to Horace; an vereris, ne apud posteros tibi infame sit, quod videaris familiaris nobis esse. Horace, however, with the exception of those times, easily demonstrable, where he writes in an ex officio manner of Augustus, betrays for the most part a precisely similar proud self-consciousness. His fourteenth ode of the third book, for example, opens with a reference to the return of Augustus from Spain after his victory over the Cantabrians. But the poet goes on to celebrate the fact, that on account of the tranquillity, which the emperor has given the world, he himself as poet is able quietly to enjoy his easy-going leisure and his muse; he calls for garlands, unguents, and venerable wine to celebrate the occasion, and invites in all haste his mistress — in a word, he is simply preoccupied with the arrangements for his own banquet. We hear, however, at this time less of his love difficulties than in his youth, when Plaucus was consul, an occasion where he expressly says to the messenger he despatches:

Si per invisum mora janitorem

Fiet, abito.

We may regard it as an even more honourable trait of Klopstock, that he felt in his day the independent worth of the singer, and by his free expression of this and his regulation of his behaviour consonantly thereto, disengaged the poet from his subservience to a court and any or every patron,8 as also from a tedious and useless toying with trifles, which is the ruin of a man. However, the fact remains that it was no other than this very Klopstock whom, in the first instance, the bookseller regarded as his poet. It was Klopstock’s publisher in Halle who paid him one or two thaler, it appears, for the manuscript of his Messias, adding over and above this, however, an order for a waistcoat and breeches, and introduced him thus set up into society, letting it clearly be seen from the nature of such a get up that he was responsible therefor. In some contrast to this, so at least we are informed at a later date on evidence, however, that is not irreproachable,9 the Athenians erected a statue to Pindar, because he had celebrated them in one of his poems, and sent him, moreover, twice the amount of the fine10 the Thebans refused to exempt him from on account of the inordinate praise he had lavished on an alien city. Indeed we have the statement that Apollo himself declared through the mouth of the Pythian prophetess that Pindar was worthy of receiving half of all the gifts which the whole of Hellas, as in custom bound, brought to the Pythian games.

(γ) Throughout the entire compass of lyric poetry the synthetic unity of a single personality asserts its presence in virtue of its poetic soul-movement. The lyric poet is, in fact, moved to express everything that assumes a poetic form either in his emotional or intelligent life in the song. In this type of composition Goethe is pre-eminently noteworthy, who in all the variety of his full life was thus continuously creative. He was unquestionably in this respect a quite exceptional model. It is rarely that we find an artistic personality, who, while retaining as Goethe’s did, an interest so active on all sides and is able to live a life, despite all such self-expansion, so entirely self-possessed, so ready to transmute everything it touches into the poetic vision. His life in its public relations, the peculiar nature of his heart, which rather impressed with its reserve than the ease of its approach, the indefatigable effort of his scientific pursuits and enquiry, the general conclusions of his trained and practical experience, his ethical maxims, the impressions, which the varied and conflicting facts of his times made upon him, the inferences he deduced from such, the effervescent joy of life and courage of his youth, the well-organized force and ideal beauty of his manhood, the comprehensive genial wisdom of his old age — all this passed into the magic crucible of his lyrics, where the most delicate play of emotion, no less than the most severe and painful conflicts of spirit, alike find their expression and by this means their deliverance.

(b) The Lyric Work of Art

Secondly, in respect to the lyric poem as a poetic work of art, we are no doubt in general not able to advance much. The fortuitous character of the abundance of its many modes of expression, and the forms of its equally varied and incalculable content make this inevitable. The peculiarly personal nature of this class of work, however much the same is imperatively subject to the general principles of beauty and art, none the less brings with it the necessary result, that the range of the formal and melodious possibilities of its exposition admit of no theoretic definition. For our purpose, therefore, the only question of importance is the nature of the distinction of artistic type that obtains between the lyric and the epic product.

Upon this I will briefly draw attention to the following points of importance:

First, the unity of the lyric composition.

Secondly, the nature of its progressive disclosure.

Thirdly, the external aspect of its verse-measure and general exhibition.

(α) The importance, which the Epos possesses for art lies, as already observed, and pre-eminently so, in the case of the primitive Epopaea, in the consummate elaboration of the perfected artistic form, which as from the repository of the full embrace of the national spirit, places before our vision one and the same composition in all the wealth of a completely evolved content.

(αα) The true lyric work of art will not undertake to present thus before us a synthesized whole of such extension. The principle of personality can no doubt proceed to a comprehension of subject-matter of universal pretensions. To be able truly to enforce itself, however, in its individual independence, it necessarily implies the collateral principle of disintegration and isolation. At the same time a variety of truth, phenomenal or ideal, derived from natural environment, the memory of one’s own or another’s experience, from mythical and historical events, and the like, is not therefore excluded: but such an extension of view must not be permitted, as with the Epos, on the ground that it belongs to the unified complexus of a given sphere of reality, but is rather solely justifiable for the reason that it springs to renewed life in the memory of the poet, and in his impulse and gift of vivid association.

(ββ) We must consequently regard the intimate personal life as the true integrating principle of the lyric poem. This inward life, taken simply, is in part the wholly formal unity of the self-conscious self; in part also it is split up and dispersed in the most varied particularity, and the most diverse content of ideas, feelings, impressions, and perceptions, whose power of combination is solely due to the fact that it is one and the selfsame personal identity which serves essentially as their vehicle. In order therefore that this selfidentical subject may form the focal centre of the work of art, it must, on the one hand, have reached the point where the mood or situation is defined in its concreteness, and on the other it must affiliate itself with this isolation of its own possessions as with itself to the extent that it feels and pictures itself in the same. It is only by this means that it becomes an essentially defined whole of such a personal character, and exclusively expresses that which is emphasized by reason of such definition, and is yet coalescent with it.

(γγ) Lyrical in the most pertinent sense is in this connection the emotional mood or colour as concentrated in a concrete condition, inasmuch as the sensitive heart is that which is the most vital and personal factor of the subjective lips. Reflection and a contemplation which is mainly absorbed in generalization very readily tend to the didactic, or are likely to assert what is substantive and positive in the content under an epic mode.

(β) With respect to our second point, viz., the progressive disclosure of the lyric subject-matter, speaking generally, exact definition is here too out of the question. I shall, therefore, restrict myself to a few searching observations.

(αα) The progressive exposition of the Epos is of a dilatory description, and it expands throughout in the display of an actual world of diversified character. In the Epos the poet projects himself into the objective world, which is set before us in the independent form and movement of its own reality. In contrast thereto it is the emotions and reflection which in the lyric composition absorb the given world into themselves, animate the same within this ideal element, and, only after it is itself converted into a constituent of this personal life, give form and expression to it in language. In contrast to the epic principle of extension we have therefore in the Lyric that of assimilation,11 and have above all to seek for our effect by means of the implied ideal depth of expression rather than the diffuseness of descriptive or explanatory detail. None the less, however, between the extremes of an almost speechless conciseness and the idea worked out into absolute lucidity of speech every conceivable sort of nuance and degree of clarity is still possible. To as little extent is it necessary that a ban be placed on all reflection of external objects. On the contrary genuinely concrete lyric compositions disclose the individual in his external conditions; they accept, therefore, as an essential feature of their content, natural and local environment. In fact there are poems entirely limited to such descriptions. In such cases, however, it is not so much the reality in its objective presence and its plastic presentment, as the accord with which such objects affect the soul, the mood excited by them, the feelings of the heart under such positive conditions, which are, in fact, the lyric result. It is in short not this or that object as presented to our eyes, in its several features, which ought mainly to impress our inward vision, but the emotional forces which are made vital in the same, and which have for their aim a similar state of feeling and contemplation in ourselves. Romances and ballads are perhaps the most obvious illustration of this, which, as I have previously maintained, approach the lyrical type in proportion as they exclusively emphasize those characteristics of a given event which are consistent with the state of the inner life, in which the poet writes, and disclose the course of his narrative in such a way, that we receive a distinct and life-like echo back again of this personal temper. For such reasons all out and out reproduction of material objects, even though stamped with considerable emotion, nay, even the diffuse characterization of emotional states, can only be of subordinate effect in lyrical effort, if compared with concise concentration of effect and the vivid and significant expression.

(ββ) We may add that episodes are permissible as well to the lyric poet; but he ought to employ them on other grounds than those which justify their epic use. In the latter case they are implied in the notion of the externally independent collocation of the different aspects contained; and, in respect to the advance of the epic action, they also are significant as points of retardation and hindrance. Their lyrical justification is rather subjective in its character. The living personality in short surveys his private world more rapidly; his memory recurs to the most varied subjects on equally various occasions; he combines material of the most divergent nature; and, without departing from his true and fundamental emotional state, or the object of his thought, gives free play on all sides to his imagination and contemplation. An animating spirit of the same kind pervades the inner poetical life, although for the most part it is impossible to say whether this or that feature in a lyric poem is to be understood as episodical or not. As a general rule, however, digressions, so long as they do not violate the unity, and above all unexpected changes, witty combinations and sudden, or even violent transitions are peculiarly appropriate to the Lyric.

(γγ) On account of this the nature of the forward movement and bond of connection in this domain of poetry may be various, and in some measure marked by excessive contrast. Generally no doubt the Lyric, quite as little as the Epos, adopts the caprices of ordinary conscious life, or the purely scientific consequences, or the speculative process of philosophical thought in its necessary development. It requires indeed a freedom and self-subsistency in its single features. But whereas, in the case of the Epos, this relative isolation is referable to the form of the phenomenal reality, in the type of which its realization is centered, the lyric poet, on the contrary, communicates to the particular emotions and ideas, in which he is himself expressed, the character of a free self-assertion. Each and all, although equally distrained from similar modes of feeling and observation, nevertheless, as viewed separately, absorb his spirit, which remains concentrated upon each severally, until it is diverted to other points of view or other emotional states. The movement of the whole may therefore have little to arrest its tranquil flow, but with equal right we may find it pass without any mediation, and in one bound to material of a totally different character. The poet, instead of following the logical current of his thought, becomes, it would seem, in this sudden flight of ecstatic intoxication mastered by a force, the pathos of which rules and carries him away in spite of himself. The impulse and conflict of such passionate intensity is so characteristic a feature of certain forms of lyric composition, that, for example, Horace in many of his poems is at pains to harmonize with deliberate artistic means such apparently dislocating breaks in the poem’s connection. For the rest I must entirely pass over the various intermediate phases of treatment, which fall between the extremes of the most lucid connection and most even flow on the one side, and that of the unrestrained impetuosity of passion and enthusiasm on the other.

(γ) Finally, of our above three divisions of the immediate subject, we have left us to discuss the external form and actual presentment of the lyric composition. Above all we shall have to deal with metre and the musical accompaniment.

(αα) It is obvious enough that the hexameter in its even, sustained and none the less life-like forward movement is most exceptionally fitted as the measure of the Epic. The demand of the Lyric is rather for an extreme variety of metres with every kind of co-ordination in their form. The material of the lyric poem in short is not the object in the form wherein it unveils itself in Nature, but the movement of the poet’s own soul, the regularity or change of which, its perturbation or repose, its peaceful flow or tumultuous wave and leap, must find expression in the time-movement of the word-length, in which such inward life is asserted. The nature of the prevailing mood and the mode of imaginative conception throughout ought to meet with an echo in the verse-measure itself. The lyric effusion indeed is placed in a far more intimate relation to time, regarded as the external medium of its communication, than the epic narrative, which consigns its phenomenal facts to the past, and associates or interweaves them under a mode of extension more analogous to that of spatial condition. The Lyric, in contrast to this, displays the momentary emergence of emotion and idea in the temporal juxta-position of their origin and elaboration. It has therefore to clothe in artistic form the varied temporal movement itself. To this distinctive character belongs, in the first place, the more diverse sequence of long and short syllables in a more strongly emphasized inequality of rhythmical feet; and, secondly, the more varied use of the caesura verse — and thirdly the rounding off of the strophes, which not only admit of abundant alternation in respect to the comparative length of particular lines, but also relatively to the rhythmic configuration of these on their own account and in their immediate sequence to each other.

(ββ) Yet more lyrical in its effect — a second feature this — is the musical sound of words and syllables simply. The most important examples of this are alliteration, rhyme and assonance. In the system of versification under discussion what is predominant, as I have already explained in a previous passage, is, on the one hand, the ideal significance of syllables, the accent of the meaning, which disjoins itself from the purely natural element, as taken by itself, of their assured quantity, and then defines under the direction of the mind their duration, emphasis and subordination; which, from a further point of view, asserts itself in isolation as the expressly concentrated sound of definite letters, syllables, and words. The Lyric is pre-eminently associated with this spiritualizing process effected by ideal significance, no less than this emphatic insistence of sound. It in fact not merely restricts its acceptance and expression of all that positively is or appears to the meaning which such possesses for the inward life, but also lays hold of sound and musical tone as the significant medium of its communication. No doubt in this sphere, too, the element of rhythm may associate with rhyme; but even here this is effected in a manner which is closely related to the time-beat of music. Strictly speaking, therefore, the poetic use of assonance, alliteration and rhyme is limited to the province of the Lyric. For although the Epos of the Middle Ages is, in accordance with the nature of more modern languages, unable to keep itself aloof from these forms, this is mainly permitted for the reason that here, too, the lyrical element is throughout more insistently active within the domain of epic poetry itself, and effects a more forceful entrance where the subject-matter consists of heroic songs, romances, ballads, tales, and the like. And we find the same thing in dramatic poetry. What, however, is the peculiar possession of the Lyric, is the diversified configuration of rhyme, which is elaborated and perfected by means of the recurrence of similar or the alternation of different letters, syllables and verbal quantity in variously organized and alternated strophes of rhyme. Such differentiation is also of undoubted service both to epic and dramatic poetry, but only on the same ground that rhyme itself is not excluded altogether. The Spaniards, for instance, in the most cultured epoch of their dramatic development, gave the freest play to such craft in the expression of passion by no means appropriate to the genuine drama, interweaving octave rhymes, sonnets and the like with more usual verse-measures. By so doing they at least testify, in the continuity of such assonances and rhymes, their predilection for the musical element in language.

(γγ) Finally, lyric poetry, to a far more considerable extent than is possible with the unassisted aid of rhyme, avails itself of music, by means of which the uttered word becomes veritable melody and song. Such a leaning may, moreover, be completely justified. Or, in other words, the less lyric subject-matter and content possess on their own account independence and objective stability, but are rather, above all, of an ideal character, rooted exclusively in the personal life, while at the same time an external medium of articulate arrest is essential, to that extent is the demand for a decisive medium of communication more insistent. Precisely for the reason that it remains of ideal intention, the means it employs as a stimulus to others must be the more effective. Such an excitant of our emotional life can only be music.

We find consequently, even in respect to external execution, that lyric poetry is almost invariably associated with musical accompaniment. At the same time we should note an essential gradation in this power of combination. The romantic and above all the modern lyric, no doubt more exceptionally so in such songs, in which the temper, the emotional mood is predominant, and the function of music is to emphasize and expand this inner beat of soul-life in actual melody — are no doubt most readily adapted to such melodic fusion. The folk-song is an obvious example which both delights in and demands a musical accompaniment. We shall find in modern times more rarely a composer for the canzonet, elegy, epistle, or even the sonnet. The reason of this is that in cases where idea, reflection, nay, even emotion are made completely explicit in the poetry, and increasingly liberated from the bare point of spiritual selfconcentration, and, further, from the sensuous medium of the art, the Lyric already secures, in its deliverance as speech, a greater self-stability, and lends itself less simply to a free association with the vague definition of music. On the other hand in proportion as the inner life expressed is not made explicit to that extent the aid of melody is required. How it came about, however, that the ancients, despite the pellucid clarity of their diction, availed themselves of music in its actual delivery, and the measure in which they did thus make use of it, I shall have occasion to deal with subsequently.

With regard to specific types, in which we may classify lyrical composition, I have already referred with more detail to some which form the transition step from the narrative form of the Epos to the more subjective mode of exposition. From a contrary point of view it might seem desirable in the same way to demonstrate the beginnings of the dramatic. This inclination, however, of passage to the animation of the drama is exclusively and in essentials restricted to the circumstance that the lyric poem too as conversation, without, however, carrying the movement of action to the point of actual conflict, may itself accept the external form of dialogue. We shall nevertheless omit further allusion to these intermediate and hybrid stages, and restrict our cursory examination to those forms in which the real principle of the Lyric fully asserts itself. The main cause of this distinction is to be found in the attitude, which the artistic consciousness assumes relatively to its object.

(α) To be more definite the poet — this at least is one direction — annuls the particularity of his emotion and idea, and is absorbed in the general contemplation of God or gods, whose greatness and might permeates the whole of the personal life, and causes the poet as an individual person to vanish. Hymns, dithyrambs, paeans, psalms, all belong to this class, which are moreover quite differently treated by different peoples. I propose merely to draw general attention to the following characteristic of such poetry.

(αα) The poet, who is raised above the narrow limitation of his own purely personal life and external conditions, or the ideas which are therewith associated, replacing these with that which appears to him and his people as absolute and divine, may, in the first instance, completely depict the divine in an objective presentment, and set forth this, as thus projected and executed for the spiritual vision of others, to the honour and power of the glorified god. The hymns which are ascribed to Homer are of this character. They contain above all mythological situations and histories of the divine Being, in whose celebration they are composed, which are not merely conceived in the ideas of symbolism, but are clothed in the downright objectivity of the Epos.

(ββ) In contrast to this, secondly, the dithyrambic impulse, in its more personal aspect of an exalted divine service — overwhelmed, as it is, by the power of its object, shattered and stunned to its soul-foundations — cannot, by reason of the general diffusion of its emotional state, go so far as to present an objective image and form. It is more akin to the lyrical absorbtion. We have here simply ecstatic rapture of soul. The singer breaks out and forth from himself; he is so exalted directly into the Absolute, steeped in the being and might of whom he exultantly sings his praise of the Infinite, into the depth whereof he plunges, or that of the natural world, in whose splendour the profound wealth of the Godhead is declared.

The Greeks, in the solemnities of their worship, have not limited themselves for long to such mere outcries and appeals. They have sought to intermingle with such ecstasies the narrative of, definite mythical situations and actions. Such expositions interposed between the effusion of lyric poetry, became gradually of most importance, and created the drama, such narratives being asserted as action in its lifelike form, and independently on its own account, a drama, which again in its turn received as a constituent feature the lyrics of its choruses.

Even more searching in its utterance is this impulse of exultation, this adoration, jubel and outcry of soul to the One; wherein the individual discovers the end of conscious life and the true object of all might and truth, no less than glory and praise, as we meet it in many of the sublime psalms of the Old Testament. Take the words of the thirty-third psalm, for example:

“Rejoice in the Lord, O ye righteous, for praise is comely for the upright.

“Praise the Lord with harp: sing unto him with psaltery and an instrument of ten strings.

“Sing unto him a new song; play skilfully with a loud noise.

“For the word of the Lord is right; and all his works are done in truth.

“He loveth righteousness and judgment: the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.

“By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.”12

Or take the twenty-ninth psalm: “Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty, give unto the Lord glory and strength.

“Give unto the Lord the honour due unto his name: worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.

“The voice of the Lord is upon the waters: the God of glory thundereth: the Lord is upon great waters.

“The voice of the Lord is powerful, the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.

“The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars; yea, the Lord breaketh the cedars of Lebanon.

“He maketh them to skip like a calf; Lebanon and Sirion like a young unicorn.

“The voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire.

“The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness; the Lord shaketh the wilderness of Kadesh,” etc.

An exaltation and lyric sublimity such as the above contain a power of personal detachment,13 and is consequently less adapted to self-absorbtion in the concrete content, wherein the imagination can lay hold of the fact in tranquil satisfaction. It is rather inclined to soar up in an indefinite enthusiasm, which strains to make present to feeling and perception what is unutterable for the intelligence. In this atmosphere of indeterminacy the individual soul is unable to envisage its unreachable object in quiescent beauty, or enjoy its self-expression in a work of art. Instead of a tranquil picture the imagination sets forth external phenomena without co-ordination and in fragments; and, inasmuch as it does not succeed with emotional effort in any consistent articulation of its separate ideas, in its positive artistic form, too, it employs a somewhat arbitrary and insurgent rhythm.

The prophets, who oppose the mass of the community, partly in the fundamental tones of grief and lamentation over the condition of their people, partly, too, in this feeling of alienation and decadence, carry to yet a further extreme this type of paranetic lyric in the sublime flame of their emotion and political indignation.

In a more modern age of imitation this sublime passion, however, is exchanged for a more artificial warmth, which easily cools and becomes abstract. Thus, for example, we have much hymn and psalm-writing of Klopstock, which possesses neither depth of thought, nor the tranquil development of any religious content whatever. What is expressed is, above all, an effort of this exaltation to the Infinite, which, agreeably with modern scientific ideas, merely discloses the empty incommeasurability and inconceivable might, greatness, and splendour of God, in its contrast to the very intelligible impotence and finitude of the poet.

(β) From a second point of view, we have those types of lyric poetry which may be described generally as odes, in the more modern meaning of the term. In these, as distinguished from the type above described, it is the personal life of the poet, in its independence, which asserts itself as a fundamental feature. It is, indeed, the culmination, which may be enforced in a twofold manner.

(αα) From one point of view the poet may, within this new mode of expression, select, as he previously did, a subjective matter itself of essential importance, such as the glory and celebration of gods, heroes, princes, love, beauty, art, friendship, and the like, while he displays his inner life as so completely steeped and carried away by this content and its concreteness, that it appears as though, in this impulse of enthusiasm, the subject has wholly mastered his soul, and is present in it now, as the one predominant power. If this was entirely so the facts which master him might secure, in their independence, the plastic form, motion, and stability of an epic sculpturesque image.

Or, as a converse case, it is just the personal life of the poet himself and its greatness which he seeks to express and make real on its own account. As for the object itself, it is that whereof he makes himself master; he assimilates this in his own life, expresses himself in and through this. By so doing he freely and without reserve breaks up the more positive course of his subject with his own emotion or reflection; he illuminates it from within; he changes it; and the final result is that it is not so much the subject, but rather the personal enthusiasm in which it has steeped him, which is most effective. In this connection, however, we have two distinct aspects to consider. First, there is the compelling force of the subject-matter; secondly, we have that independent freedom of the poet which flashes into view in its conflict with that which would otherwise master it. It is above all the stress of this opposition, which renders inevitable the swing and the boldness of utterance and image, the apparent absence of order in the ideal construction and course of the poem, its digressions, lacunae, and sudden transitions, and which preserves the ideal elevation of the poet, by means of the mastery with which he is enabled, through the artistic perfection of his work, to overcome this disunion, and to produce an’ essentially harmonious whole, which places him, as his work, in relief above the greatness of his subject.

It is to such a type of lyric enthusiasm that many of the Pindaric odes are referable, whose triumphant, albeit personal glory is disclosed in a mode of rhythm equally conspicuous for its varied movement, and yet for all that stringently regulated measure. Horace, on the contrary, more especially where he aims most at self-assertion, is rather lacking in warmth and insipid. We detect here an imitative artificiality, which vainly endeavours to conceal the purely technical preciosity of his composition. The enthusiasm of Klopstock in the same way is never entirely genuine. It too frequently gives the impression of laboured artifice, despite the fact that many of his odes are rich in true and genuine emotion, and stamped with an engaging masculine worth and force of expression.

(ββ) From another point of view, however, it is not at all necessary that the content itself should be substantial or important. The poet is himself, in his own personality, of such weight that he can attach to even the more trifling objects worth, nobility, or at least in a general way a more exalted interest owing to the fact that they are embodied in his poetic work. Many of the Odes of Horace are of this type. Klopstock, too, with many another, may be included in such a category. In such cases it is not the importance of the material itself, which engages the poet’s effort, but on the contrary that of the process in virtue of which he exalts what is on its own account insignificant, either in external facts or petty occurrences, to the height of the emotion and idea they excite in himself.

(γ) In conclusion, the entire infinite multiplicity of lyrical mood and reflection reaches its fullest compass in the sphere of the song, in which consequently differences of national custom and creative individuality have their freest play. Characteristics of every extreme of diversity meet together here, and the task of adequate classification is beset with difficulty. We will restrict ourselves to pointing out a few of the most general character.

(αα) We have, then, first, the genuine song intended for singing or purely musical practice,14 whether in private or before others. Much intelligible content, ideal greatness and loftiness is not necessary. On the contrary, worth, nobility, weight of thought can only prove an obstacle to the desire of direct self-expression. Imposing ideas or reflections, or sublime emotions compel the artist to detach himself from his immediate personality and its interests. And yet it is precisely this immediacy of joy and sorrow, what we may call the unrestricted and momentary personal experience, which ought to find its expression in the song. And it is on this account that every folk is in a peculiar way at home and at ease in its songs. Despite the unlimited variety of content and of melodic exposition that offers itself here, every song is without exception distinct from types previously considered by virtue of the simplicity of its subject-matter, movement, metre, verbal expression, and images. The point of departure is direct from the soul; the movement of inspiration is not so much from one object to another, but is, generally speaking, centered exclusively in one and the same content, whether it be a single emotional state, or any definite expression of delight or sorrow, that mood, in short, the effect of which carries the heart with it. In this emotion or temper the song persists with no interruption in its flight and impression, quietly and simply abiding therein without any strikingly bold contrast or transitions of idea; and it creates thereby in the even flow of its images this one perfected whole, sometimes without any interruption or disunion, at others in a more expansive and consequential survey, employing therewith rhythms adapted to song or the recurrence of rhymes easily intelligible and without any considerable complexity. Inasmuch, however, as it possesses for the most part as its content what is essentially transitory we are not to suppose that a nation is likely to sing the same songs over and over again, for a hundred or a thousand years. A people which can at all claim progressive development is neither so poor nor so so barren as only to possess poets of the song at one period of its life. It is just the poetry of the song, which, in contrast to the Epopaea, does not so much die as it is forever being awakened anew. This field of blossom starts up afresh every spring; and it is only in the case of oppressed peoples, peoples precluded from every advance, which are unable to experience the ever requickened delight in poetic composition, that the old and the oldest songs are retained. The particular song, just like the particular mood, arises, and then passes; it animates, delights, and is forgotten. Whoever knows or sings, for example, the songs which fifty years ago were everywhere known and beloved? Every century strikes its own particular keynote; the previous one sounds out of tune, until it stops altogether. None the less, however, must every song possess not so much a revelation of the personality of the singer as a certain community of sentiment, which meets with response from all sides; which excites in others a like emotion and so, too, passes from mouth to mouth. Songs which are not generally current as such in their time are seldom of the genuine stamp. As an essential distinction in the composition of song I will merely emphasize two main aspects which I have already referred to. On the one hand the poet may express his inner life in its emotions quite openly and without reserve, more especially the feelings and state of joyfulness, and so that he communicates completely all that he experiences. On the other hand, and in extreme contrast to this, he may only suffer us to surmise through his very speechlessness, what is brought to a focus in the unopened chamber of his heart. The first type belongs mainly to the East, and more especially to the careless hilarity and contented expansiveness of Mohammedan poetry, the splendid outlook of which loves to dilate itself hither and thither in all the breadth of sensuous perception and witty conceit. The second type, on the contrary, applies with more force to our Northern self-concentration and intimacy of soul-life, which in its compressed tranquillity is often only able to seize hold of objects which are wholly external and to put suggestions in them, while the essentially suppressed spirit is unable to express itself or find a bent, but rather, like the child with whom that father in the Erl King rides through the night and the wind, dies away with its glow on the wick. The distinction above noticed applies also in a broader sense to other forms of lyrical composition such as the folk-song and more elaborate poetry; it recurs again in the simple song with many shades and intermediate links in its variety. With regard to particular forms applicable to this class of composition I will restrict myself to the following examples.

We may mention, to start with, the folk-song, which, on account of its direct appeal, is mainly of the nature of the simple song, being also generally adapted to singing, or, rather, requiring the musical accompaniment. Its subject-matter is in part national exploit and event, in which the nation is emotionally made aware of and recalls again its most essential life; in part, too, feelings and situations are directly expressed which relate to particular classes. It associates, in short, civic life with its natural condition and its closest human relations, and it does so with every variety of note, whether of exultation or sorrow, which may duly harmonize with such. In contrast to the above, we have, secondly, songs of a more various and enriched culture, a culture which finds its entertainment in the companionable amusement of all kinds of pleasantry, graceful turns of phrase, casual occurrences, or polite modes of address, or, with more intensity of feeling, recurs to the pathos or necessities of less favoured conditions of life, describing therein both the facts and the consequent feelings they excite, the poet always making his appeal from his own breast and the facts of his own sympathetic experience. If such songs go no further than the bare narrative, more particularly of natural phenomena, the result is likely to be trivial and to betray the lack of imaginative resources. The bare description of emotional states, moreover, not unfrequently fares little better. The truth is that our poet in such descriptions, whether of objective facts or emotions, must not restrict his survey to the narrow outlook of direct wishes and desires, but must already in the freedom of his intelligence have raised himself into a more serene atmosphere wherein the main thing of importance to himself is the satisfaction which the exercise of his imagination has afforded. An undisturbed sense of freedom such as this, through expansion of heart and delight in conceptive idea on its own account, confers on many songs of Anacreon, as also certain poems of Hafis and the Westöstliche Divan of Goethe the rarest charm of an unfettered creative gift.

There is a yet further type of composition of this general class, to which we must concede a more exalted or, at least, a more widely embracing content. The large majority of Protestant hymns composed for spiritual edification are essentially songs. They express the yearning after God, the plea for His grace, repentance, hope, trust, doubts, faith, and the like of the religious heart; no doubt, in the first instance, to meet the importunity of the individual soul, but at the same time in a manner of general significance, wherein such feelings and states of soul may or ought to apply, to a greater or less extent, to every member of the Christian Church.

(ββ) We may further return to another division of this class, the sonnet, sestine, elegy, epistle, and a few other such modes. These latter assert themselves as distinct from the ordinary sphere of song previously discussed. The immediacy of feeling and expression is emphasized in this class as a mediating bond with reflection, and a contemplation which, while remaining alert to many features of its subject, conceives the particular detail of perception and soul-experience under more general points of view. Science, learning, and, in short, a wide culture may be here effective; and if also in all the relations thus established the personal life, which connects and mediates in itself the particular fact with the general concept, is and remains the insistent and predominant factor, yet the standpoint presupposed is of a wider and more universal import than that of the ordinary song. The Italians in particular have given us splendid examples of a highly sensitive type of feeling and reflection in their sonnets and sestines. Such not only directly expresses in a given situation states of yearning, grief, longing, and the like, or the counterfeit of external objects, with a peculiarly intimate concentration, but includes many a diversion, many a shrewd glance into mythology and history, whether past or present, while remaining throughout able to return upon itself, true to the fundamental demand of selfrestriction and concentration. The simplicity of the song is incompatible with a culture of this kind. The exalted character of the ode is equally disallowed. As a primary consequence of this the possibility of actual musical delivery vanishes; but, on the other hand, as some set-off to the absence of musical accompaniment, the verbal expression itself, in its sound and composed rhymes, becomes a melodic flow of speech. The Elegy, moreover, may, in the measure of its syllables, its meditation, its comments, and the descriptive display of emotional life, assume the form of the Epic.

(γγ) The third type of composition in this class is characterized by a mode of treatment which in recent times is most clearly represented among us Germans in the work of Schiller. The majority of his lyrical poems, such as those named by him Resignation, the Ideals, the realm of Shades, Artists, the Ideal and Life, are just as little songs in the true sense as they are odes or hymns, epistles, or elegies in the classic sense. Their position, on the contrary, is distinct from all these types. Their significance consists above all in the imposing fundamental thought of their content by the force of which, however, the poet neither appears to be carried away as a dithyrambic poet might be, nor in the press of his enthusiasm is there any appearance of conflict with the greatness of his subject. He remains rather throughout completely master of the same, and unfolds all that is therein implied from every point of view with his own poetic reflection. And he does this in the full impulse of genuine feeling, no less than with the comprehensive breadth of his intelligence, expressed with a compelling force in the most admirable and full-toned utterance and image, and yet, withal, for the most part in quite simple, if really arresting rhythms and rhymes. These great thoughts and fundamental interests, to which his entire life was dedicate, appear consequently as the most intimate possession of his spirit. But he does not sing so much as one tranquilly self-absorbed,15 or to a circle of companions, as the rich-songed mouth of Goethe was wont to do, but as a singer who delivers himself of what is on its own account intrinsically of worth in a storehouse of all that is most excellent and distinguished. His songs ring out, in fact, much as he says of his bell:

Hoch über’m niedern Erdenleben

Soll sie im blauen Himmelszelt,

Die Nachbarin des Donners, schweben

Und grenzen an die Sternen weit,

Soll eine Stimme seyn von oben,

Wie der Gestirne helle Schaar,

Die ihren Schöpfer wandelnd toben

Und führen das bekränzte Jahr.

Nur ewigen und ernsten Dingen

Sei ihr metall’ner Mund geweiht,

Und stündlich mit den schnellen Schwingen

Berühr’ im Fluge sie die Zeit.16

It will already have sufficiently appeared from what I have pointed out in relation to the general character, as also the more detailed features discussed with reference to the poet, the lyrical composition and the several types of the art that to a singular degree in this province of poetry a concrete treatment is only possible which accepts the historical narrative as a constituent feature. The universal, which can be set forth in its independence, does not merely remain restricted in its compass, but is also abstract in its valid worth. And this is so because in no other art to the like extent does the particularity of the time, condition, and nationality, no less than the specific idiosyncracy of individual genius, supply the determinating factor of the content and form of the artistic product. But in proportion as the strength of the demand forces itself on our attention that such an historical exposition should be avoided, I feel myself obliged, in the interests of the very variety of material comprised in the embrace of lyric composition, to limit myself exclusively to a very partial survey of all that I am acquainted of in this particular class of work, and in which my lively interest could have been extended.

As the basis of our general classification of the varied national and more personal lyric compositions, as in the case of epic poetry, we cannot do better than follow the order of those radical types under which artistic creation generally is unfolded, and which we now know as symbolic, classic, and romantic art. As the main division, therefore, of our present subject-matter, we may, in other words, adopt a similar sequence from Oriental compositions to the Lyric of the Greeks and Romans, and then from this to the Slavonic, Romance, and German peoples.

(a) Taking, then, the Oriental lyric first, we may observe that it differs essentially from the lyrical composition of the West through its inability to attach to it the independent personality and free spirit of the poet, or that unity which characterizes every content of romantic art, its essential infinity, reflecting, in fact, the potential depth of the romantic soul. Such a distinction is only in keeping with the universal principle of the East. The individual conscious life is here, referably to its content, directly absorbed in the detail of external fact, expressing itself under the condition and specific relations of this inseparable unity. And, from a further point of view, it asserts itself, without being able to secure a firm ground of stability in itself, as opposed to what it conceives to be of potency and substance in Nature and the conditions of human existence, which it wrestles to reach whether through emotion or imagination, at one time situated towards it rather in the relation of pure opposition, at another with more freedom, but in either case with ultimate failure. What we find here, therefore, if we confine our attention to form, is not so much the poetic expression of independent ideas over objects or their connections, as it is the bare mirror of this unreflecting absorption,17 wherein the individual consciousness does not disclose itself in its own self-concentration as free personality,18 but rather in its self-annulment19 before the external object or condition. Thus regarded, the Oriental lyric frequently, particularly in its contrast to the romantic, assumes a more objective tone. Here we shall often enough find that the poet does not so much express facts and conditions as they affect him, but rather as they are in themselves, a disclosure which frequently bestows on them an independent soul of vitality of their own. For illustration we may take that exclamation of Hafis:

“Come, O come! The nightingale passeth from the soul of Hafis once again over the scent of the roses of delight.”

Regarded in another light, the tendency of this lyrical poetry, by freeing the poet from the limitations of his private individuality, is to replace this with a kind of primitive expansion of soul, which, however, very easily loses itself in mere boundlessness, or is merged in a deliberate effort to express that which it accepts as object but cannot fully penetrate, because this content is itself the formless substance. For this reason, speaking generally, the lyric of the East, more especially among the Hebrews, Arabs, and Persians, possesses the character of hymns of exaltation. With spendthrift prodigality all greatness, might, and glory are lavished upon the creature, in order to make all such transitory splendour vanish before the unspeakable majesty of God; or, at least, it never is tired of stringing together in some precious chain everything that is lovable or fair, in order to present the same as a thankoffering to the object, be it Sultan, the beloved, or the wine-shop, which the poet has set himself above all things to celebrate.

In conclusion, if we look more closely at form of expression in this type of poetry, we shall find that it is mainly the metaphor, the image, and the simile which are favoured. For, in the first place, on account of the fact that he is not himself wholly free to express his own personal life, the poet can only disclose himself in something else, something external to himself, with the aid of life that can compare with himself. And also we may observe that what is here universal and substantive remains abstract; that is to say, it is unable to merge itself in the definite form of a free individuality, so that now, even on its own account, it is only in comparisons with the varied phenomena of the world that it is able to envisage itself; and we may add that both these cases, in the last instance, only possess the worth of being able to assist some comparable approach to that One which alone possesses significance, and is worthy of honour and praise. These metaphors, images, and similes, however, in which the individual soul, as it asserts itself, is exclusively identified almost to the point of visibility, are not the actual feeling and spiritual state itself, but rather a mode of expression which is wholly personal and of the poet’s composition. What, therefore, the lyrical artist here loses in the concreteness of his spiritual freedom, this we find is replaced by the freedom of his expression, which moves forward through all the most manifold phases; that is, from the naïve simplicity of its images and similes to every conceivable audacity and the acutest ingenuity of novel and surprising combinations. As regards particular nations in which we find this Oriental type of lyric represented, we may mention, first, the Chinese; secondly, the Hindoos; thirdly, and to a pre-eminent degree, the Hebrews, Arabs, and Persians. I cannot, however, enter into any closer description of these.

(b) In the case of the second principal division of our present poetic type, that is in the Lyric of the Greeks and Romans, it is the principle of classic individuality which, above all, distinguishes its character. In accordance with this principle, the artistic consciousness, which seeks for lyrical expression, neither loses itself in the facts of the natural world, nor exalts itself over itself to the height of that Sublime outcry to all creation: “Let all that hath breath praise the Lord!” Nor is it absorbed, after divesting itself joyfully from all the bonds of finite existence, in that One Being in which all live and move. Rather the poet here is freely merged in the Universal, regarded as the very substance of his own spirit; and in this personal union within himself attains his self-conscious poetic activity.

And just as the Lyric of the Greeks and Romans is distinct from that of the Orientals, so too, from another point of view, it differs from the romantic. In other words, instead of unveiling its depths in the intimacy of particular moods and states of feeling, it rather elaborates, to the point of the most explicit definition, this inward life of its individual passion and meditation. And by doing so it even retains, even as the expression of this inward spirit, so far as this is permitted to the Lyric, the plastic type of classic art. All that it communicates, in short, of the views and maxims of life and wisdom, despite all the penetration of its general principle, nevertheless does not dispense with the free individuality of independent thought and conception. It expresses itself less in the wealth of image and metaphor, than directly and categorically. At the same time, also, the personal feeling, at one time in more general relations, at another in the form of vision itself, is on its own account objective. In the same mode of individuality the particular types may be classified as distinct from each other in conception, expression, phraseology, and verse-measure, until they reach the culminating point of their independent elaboration. And as we have found it true of the soul itself and its ideas, so, too, the external presentment is of more plastic type. In other words, from a musical point or view, it emphasizes less the ideal soul-melody of emotion than the sensuous verbal quantity in the rhythmical measure of its movement, to which it may further attach the complex mazes of the dance.

(α) With the richest originality this artistic form of Greek lyric poetry is perfected. In the first instance we may trace it in those hymns possessing a content as yet more akin to the epic mode, which do not so much express in their epic metre a personal enthusiasm as they set before us a plastic image of gods in deliberately objective outlines. The next step, so far as metre is concerned, we mark in the elegiac syllabic measure, which associates the pentameter with the hexameter, which, in the regular recurrence of its ending after the hexameter, and with its two equally divided sections, opens the way to the complete singularity of the verse strophe. The elegy is also throughout in its tone of the lyric type. This is so in the case of the political elegy no less than the erotic, although, particularly as gnomic elegy, it still closely approaches the epic insistence upon and expression of the substantive as such, and for this reason almost exclusively belongs to the Ionians, with whom the objective point of view was generally predominant. In respect also to its musical side, it is primarily the aspect of rhythm which is here successfully worked out. And, on parallel lines with it, we may observe, thirdly, the development of the Iambic poem in a novel verse-measure. This, however, is, by reason of the keenness of its invectives, from the first of a more subjective or personal tendency. The genuine mode of lyrical reflection and passion, however, receives for the first time its full development in the so-called Melisian20 lyric. The metres are more varied, more capable of change; the strophes are more rich; the suggestions of musical accompaniment are more complete in virtue of the nature of the accepted modulation. Each poet creates a syllabic measure which corresponds with his or her lyrical nature. Thus Sappho adapts one to a type of composition which is sensuous, inspired with the glow of passion and expressed with an effect which works up to a supreme crisis. Alcaeus moulds one in harmony with his masculine and bolder odes. To an exceptional degree, too, the Scoliasts supply many indications of the finer nuances of diction and metre by reason of the variety of their content and melodic utterance.

Last of all, the lyric of the chorus is richest of all in the wealth of what it unfolds, and not merely so in what concerns idea and thought, boldness of transition and connection or the like, but also relatively to its external presentment. The choral song may be interchanged for the single voice, and the ideal movement is not merely satisfied with the bare rhythm of speech and the modulations of music, but summons as its associate the plastic pose and movement of the dance. The ideal aspect of the Lyric is consequently balanced to perfection with the sensuous character of its delivery. The subject-matter of this type of inspired verse is the most substantive and weighty. Such poems celebrate the power and glory of the gods, or that of victors in the games. Greeks, who not unfrequently were divided in their political relations, found in them the positive vision of their national unity. And, partly for this reason, aspects of their ideal construction are not wanting which approach the objective standpoint of the Epic. Pindar, for example, who reaches the highest point of attainment in this type of composition, moves with ease, as I have already pointed out, from the external motives of his compositions to profound observations upon the general nature of ethical principle and divine matters, or it may be upon heroes, heroic exploit, the foundations of States, and the like. His creative gift possesses, in short, the plastic sense of realization quite as much as the individual sweep of imaginative energy. On this very account, however, it is not so much the facts which follow their independent course in the epic manner, as the personal enthusiasm, carried away by its object so completely that the latter appears to be the burden and product of the soul.

Later lyric verse of the Alexandrines is less an independent development and more a mere scholastic imitation and affectation of elegance and correctness of expression, until finally it dissipates itself in trifling graces and pleasantries, or seeks to bind up afresh flowers of art and life already to hand in a garland of tender feeling and conceit, and the witty experiment of eulogy or satire.

(β) Among the Romans lyric poetry finds a soil no doubt fashioned for it in various ways, but of less original productive qualities. The period of its splendour is limited mainly to the age of Augustus, in which it is cultivated as the elaborate expression and relaxation of cultured society; or indeed, to a considerable degree, it is rather an affair of the clever translator or copyist, and the fruit of taste and research, than that of spontaneous feeling and really original conception. At the same time it must be admitted that, despite the learning and an alien mythology, to say nothing of the preferred imitation of Alexandrine models, where the warmth of life is least apparent, yet as a rule the characteristics of Roman personality no less than the individual genius of particular poets, do assert an independent position, and, so long as we put entirely on one side the most intimate soul and expression of the art of poetry, have accomplished sterling and consummate results, not merely in the province of the ode, but also in that of epistles, satires, and elegy. On the other hand, the later type of satire, which follows as a kind of supplement, in its bitterness toward the decadence of the times, its goaded indignation and virtuous declamation, fails to represent the genuine sphere of an unperturbed poetical vision just in the degree that it possesses nothing whatever to oppose to its picture of a demoralized present save this very indignation and abstract rhetoric of virtuous excitement.

(c) For this reason, consequently, it is only after more modern nationalities have appeared that a really original content and spirit are communicated to lyrical composition, as we have previously seen, was the case, too, with the Epic. This is due to the German, Romance, and Slavonic peoples, which already, in their previous pagan days, but principally after their conversion to Christianity, both in the Middle Ages and in more recent times, have brought into being, and continuously elaborated in various ways, a third fundamental revival of lyrical creation in what we may generally characterize as the romantic art-type.

In this third branch of its activity, lyric poetry is of so overwhelming an importance that its principle is enforced, more — especially in the first instance, relatively to the Epos, but consequently in its more modern development and relatively to the drama, with a far profounder significance than was possible with either Greek or Roman. Indeed, among certain nations, even genuine epic materials are treated exclusively under the type of the lyric narrative; in this way we have compositions as to which we may find real difficulty in deciding the class to which they more truly belong. The cause of this conspicuous tendency towards lyric composition is mainly due to the fact that the entire evolution of the life of these nations is based on this very principle of subjectivity, which is constrained to assert and clothe what is substantive and objective as its own from its own resources, and grows more and more self-conscious of this penetration into its own personal wealth. Such a principle declares its vigour in its least perturbed and most complete character among the German peoples. The Slavonic races have, on the contrary, first to wrestle forth from the Oriental absorption in the substantive One and Universal. Between the two we may place the Romance stock, which are confronted, in the conquered provinces of the Roman Empire, not merely with the residue of Roman science and culture, but a social system more elaborate from every point of view. In the process of self-fusion with such conditions, they inevitably lose a part of their original character. As for the subject-matter of this poetry, we may describe it as dealing with pretty nearly every phase of national or individual development, capable of expressing either the religious or secular life of these nations as it expands in ever widening range, and through the process of the centuries reflects in varied condition and emotional state the heart of its spiritual substance. And the fundamental type of it is either the expression of an emotional state, concentrated to the most intimate self-possession, whether the immediate object of attraction be national and other events, Nature and external environment, or simply and solely itself, or whether it be of the nature of reflection, both searching and self-introspective, upon all that is implied for itself in such an extension of culture. Regarded on its formal side, the plastic character of rhythmical versification is exchanged for the music of alliteration, assonance, and manifold alternations of rhyme. These novel elements it makes use of sometimes in a quite simple and unassuming manner; in other connections with much art and invention of modes of versification wholly distinct in character. At the same time the external delivery becomes increasingly more elaborate in its powers of adaptation to the accompaniment of vocal and instrumental music.

In our classification of the extensive compass of this group, we cannot do better than follow that we accepted in the case of epic poetry.

Firsts we have the lyric composition of these modern nations while still in the state of primitive paganism.

Secondly, there is the richer development of this type in the Christian Middle Ages.

Thirdly, there is that lyric art based in some measure on the reawakened study of ancient art, and in part on the fundamental principle of modern Protestantism, a principle essential to its final elaboration.

In the present work, however, I shall be unable to discuss with more detail the characteristics of the above development. I will, by way of conclusion, merely draw attention to one German poet, whose influence has given in modern times a quite extraordinary impetus to the lyric poetry of our own fatherland, and whose services in this respect are by no means appreciated by contemporary criticism as they deserve to be. I refer to the poet of the Messias. Klopstock is among the great Germans, who have inaugurated the new artistic epoch of their people. He is a great figure, who, by means of courageous enthusiasm and superb self-respect, wrested our poetry from the stupendous insignificance of the Gottsched21 period, which with its blockish superficiality had completely destroyed the life of all that is noble and of worth in the genius of our race; who has, in short, given us poems fully awake to the highest demand of the poet’s vocation, in a form of thorough artistic excellence, if also somewhat austere, the majority of which are stamped with the permanency of a classic. Some of the odes of his youth are dedicated to a generous friendship, which was to him at once symbolic of nobility, staunchness, honour, the pride of his soul, a temple of his spirit. Others have reference to a personal attachment of real emotional depth, although it is precisely in this field that we meet with many compositions which a critical sense can only regard as so much prose. “Selmar and Selma” is a poem of this class, a gloomy and tedious altercation between lovers, which, not without many tears, woe, empty yearning, and useless feats of melancholy emotion, revolves round the one mouldy and musty question, which of the two, Selmar or Selma, is first to die. But in Klopstock we find at least a genuine impulse of patriotism alive in every pore. As a good Protestant the Christian mythology, with its sacred legends and so forth — we must except the angels, for whom he retained as a poet a profound respect, although they can only appear abstract and lifeless in a type of poetry such as his, which claimed the realism of life — neither satisfied his sense of the ethical seriousness of art, nor yet the vigour of life and an intelligence, which aspired to something more than blind wailing and self-abasement, was, in short, both self-respecting and actively religious. The need of some mythology, however, and one connected with Germany impressed him strongly as a poet, in order that he might have definite names and characters ready to hand as a stable basis of his imaginative creation. It is impossible to associate such patriotic sentiments with the gods of Greece. Consequently Klopstock attempted, we may justly say from genuine national pride, to give a renewed life to the old mythology of Wodan, Hertha and the rest. He was unfortunately as little able to carry his aim to the point of objective effect and sufficiency by this adoption of names of gods, which are no longer really Germanic, however much they may have been so, as, let us say, the imperial museum in Regensburg is qualified to stand for the ideal of our present political life. However strongly, then, he may have felt the need to be able to realize in poetry and as fact in a national form a general folk-mythology, the truth of Nature and conscious life, these twilight gods remain entirely devoid of essential truth; we may add there is a kind of childish self-flattery in the belief that either reasonable people or the national faith could take such an attempt seriously. Apart from this, as objects of interest to the imagination, the figures of Greek mythology are elaborated in ways with incomparably more variety, infinitely stronger appeal to our aesthetic taste, our sense of delight and freedom. In lyric poetry, however, it is the self-revelation of the poet that is all-important. We ought at least to honour in our patriotic poet this his solicitude and effort, an effort which was sufficiently effective to bear subsequent fruit, and, even in the field of poetry, to stimulate by its suggestion composition on similar subjects. We have, however, to conclude our review, no word to say against the purity, excellence, and admirable influence of this patriotic sentiment of Klopstock as expressed in his enthusiasm for the honour and value of our German speech, and certain characters of our former history, that of Herrmann, for example, and above all particular German Kaisers, who in some instances have even been self-celebrated in song. Vital in him throughout is his justifiable pride in the German muse, and his faith in her increasing courage to contend on equal terms and in high-spirited self-reliance with that of the Greek, the Roman, and the Englishman. And no less a genuine reflection of his patriotism is the nature of his survey of the royal princes of Germany, the expectations which their character have or had it in their power to arouse on all that generally concerns honour, art, and science, questions of public import and spiritual objects of essential value. On the one hand we find him expressing his contempt of our princes, who, as he tells us, remain on their comfortable chairs, surrounded with the tobacco smoke of courtiers, buried in present obscurity and yet deeper to be buried in the future. Or he may express his feelings in the lament that even Frederick II

Nicht sah, dass Deutschland’s Dichtkunst sich schnell erhob,

Aus fester Wurzel daurendem Stamm, und weit,

Der Æste Schalten wurf!22

With pain of a like quality those vain hopes, too, return back to him, in which he saw in Kaiser Joseph the uprise of a new world of spiritual effort and poetry. And, finally, it is an honour to the heart of the old veteran at least as great that he sympathizes with the present fact that a people had shattered its fetters of every kind, had trodden under foot the injustice of a thousand years, and for the first time sought to found its political life on reason and right.

He greets this new

Labende, selbst nicht geträumte Sonne.

Geseegnet sei mir du, das mein Haupt bedeckt,

Mein graues Haar, die Kraft, die nach sechzigen

Fortdauert; denn sie war’s, so weithin

Brachte sie mich, dass diess Erlebte!23

Nay, he will even express his gratitude to France:24

Verzeiht, O Franken (Namen der Bruder ist

Der edle Name) dass ich den Deutschen einst

Zurufte, das zu fliehen, warum ich

Ihnen jetzt flehe, euch nachzuahmen.

And, naturally, the acerbation of the poet was all the more bitter, when this fair dawn of freedom changed to a day that was steeped in horror and blood, one that murdered liberty. Klopstock, however, was unable to give poetical expression to such painful feelings. What he did find the opportunity to say was all the more prosaic, without definite structure and logical consequence on account of the fact that he had no higher purpose,25 veiled in such facts, to set off against his disappointed hope. His genius was in short entirely blind to any more profound demand of reason in the facts of such a revolution.

The greatness of Klopstock consists then essentially in his national sympathies, his keen sense of freedom, friendship, love, and his staunch Protestantism. We may justly honour him for his noble character and his noble art, for his effort and achievement. And if, too, in many directions he shares the limitations of his own times, and in truth is responsible for many odes that are solely of interest to the critic, the grammarian, the metrist, odes deficient in all poetic vitality, we may affirm, nevertheless, that with the single exception of Schiller, we shall find in our subsequent literature no more noble figure, no disposition of such serious and masculine independence.

We have, indeed, to compare with him Schiller and Goethe, who are not merely the poetic exponents of their own times in a spirit resembling his own, but in their experience as poets are of course far more comprehensive. And, above all, in the songs of Goethe we Germans unquestionably possess the most consummate, profound, and influential poetic compositions of modern times. If they are wholly an expression of the poet they are equally the treasure of his people; and, in fact, as the genuine growth of his native soil, are completely in accord with the fundamental tones of our national life and genius.

1 Subjectivität. Individual self-conscious life.

2 Das Subject, here the individual consciousness which composes.

3 Ergusses, the pouring out into a mould.

4 Vol. iv, pp. 169-172.

5 This appears to be the meaning of the words die letzte Music eines nationalen Inneren.

6 I presume by Nachhülfe Hegel practically means imitation rather than translation. It may be very much doubted whether any composition, involving a change of language, can give anything but the faintest knowledge of the original folk-song. Goethe’s genius could produce poetry out of strange materials, but he could not reproduce the music of another medium.

7 Subjektiver Art.

8 Or as the text runs, “and as everybody’s poet.”

9 Pausanias, I, c. 8.

10 Æschines, ep. 4.

11 Zusammengezogenheit. The idea of concentration is also present.

12 I have taken the revised translation.

13 Äussersichseyn. The being beside or aloof from oneself, not so much in the sense of infatuation as ecstasy.

14 I presume Hegel means this by the words nur zum Trällern; it might mean “merely to be hummed.”

15 Still in sich.

16 High above the life of earth beneath it shall wave in the blue band of heaven, neighbour to the thunder, on the boundary of the starry world. It shall be a voice from above, ay, as the bright choir of the stars, who praise their Creator in their motion and conduct the garlanded year. Its voice of bronze is dedicate to eternal and earnest matters alone, and, hour by hour, as it swiftly swings backwards and forwards, it is one with Time in its flight.

17 Einlebung. This vital fusion with the object.

18 In seiner in sich Zurückgenommenen Innerlichkeit.

19 In seinem Aufgehohenseyn.

20 That is, of the isle of Melos, Sappho’s birthplace.

21 Readers of the Xenien of Goethe and Schiller will recall the unsparing attacks which were directed against this formalist and pedant.

22 Even Frederick II “did not see that the art of German poesy was raising itself swift on high from the enduring stock of a stable root, and spread the shade of its branches far abroad.”

23 He greets this new “reawakened sun, no mere dream at least of mine. Verily I bless thee, who sweepest over my head, my grey hairs, the strength of me that still endures after its sixty years. Ay, for was it not this strength which has carried me so far to see this very vision!”

24 “Forgive me, brother of France, and brotherhood is the noblest tie after all, that I once cried to my Germans to flee from that, which I now implore them to follow — imitation of you.” The reference is of course to the French Revolution.

25 Hegel may mean that Klopstock was unable to see the real benefits which would result from the French Revolution despite its apparent failure. The sentence which follows would, however, suggest an alternative interpretation that the poet was unable to see the higher demand which the facts of Revolution made upon the French people, and which from the first, that is, even when Klopstock admired them, they did not either frankly face or successfully respond to. I think, indeed, this latter is most probable.

The reason that dramatic poetry must be regarded as the highest phase of the art of poetry, and, indeed, of every kind of art, is due to the fact that it is elaborated, both in form and substance, in a whole — that is the most complete. For in contrast to every other sort of sensuous materia, whether it be stone, wood, colour, or tone, that of human speech is the only medium fully adequate to the presentation of spiritual life; and further, among the particular types of the art of articulate speech, dramatic poetry is the one, in which we find the objective character of the Epos essentially united to the subjective principle of the Lyric. In other words it presents directly before our vision an essentially independent action as a definite fact, which does not merely originate from the personal life of character under the process of self-realization, but receives its determinate form as the result of the substantive interaction in concrete life of ideal intention, many individuals and collisions. This mediated form of epic art by means of the intimate personal life of an individual viewed in the very presence of his activity does not, however, permit the drama to describe the external aspects of local condition and environment, nor yet the action and event itself in the way that they are so described in the epic. Consequently, in order that the entire art-product may receive the full animation of life, we require its complete scenic representation. And, finally, the action itself, regarded in the full complexus of its ideal and external reality, is adapted to two distinct types of composition of the most opposite character, the predominant principles of which, regarded severally as the tragic and comic type, create in their turn also a further fundamental and specific point of view in our attitude to the dramatic art.

Starting then from the vantage of these general observations we may indicate the course of our inquiry as follows:

Firsts we propose to consider the dramatic composition, both in its general and more detailed features, in the contrast it presents to epic and lyrical poetry.

Secondly, our attention will be directed to its scenic presentation and the conditions of this necessity.

Thirdly, we shall pass under review the different types of dramatic poetry as we find them realized in the concrete facts of past history.

What we have, in the first instance, to define more emphatically is the poetic aspect of the dramatic composition as such, that is to say in its independence of the fact that the same is necessarily presented to our direct vision on the stage. Our investigation of this will do well to concentrate itself on the following points:

Firsts there is the general principle of dramatic poetry.

Secondly, we have the several specific types of dramatic composition.

Thirdly, there is the relation which obtains between these and the public audience.

(a) The Principle of Dramatic Poetry

The demand of the drama, in the widest sense, is the presentation of human actions and relations in their actually visible form to the imaginative consciousness, that is to say, in the uttered speech of living persons, who in this way give expression to their action. Dramatic action, however, is not confined to the simple and undisturbed execution of a definite purpose, but depends throughout on conditions of collision, human passion and characters, and leads therefore to actions and reactions, which in their turn call for some further resolution of conflict and disruption. What we have consequently before us are definite ends individualized in living personalities and situations pregnant with conflict; we see these as they are asserted and maintained, as they work in co-operation or opposition — all in a momentary and kaleidoscopic interchange of expression — and along with this, too, the final result presupposed and issuing from the entirety of this interthreading and conflicting skein of human life, movement, and accomplishment, which has none the less to work out its tranquil resolution. The mode of poetical composition adapted to this novel type of content can be, as already suggested, no other than a mediating union of the principles of epic and lyrical art respectively.

(α) The first point of importance we have to settle to our satisfaction is that of the time at which dramatic poetry is able to assert itself in all its predominance. Drama is the product of an already essentially cultured condition of national life. It already presupposes as essentially a feature of past history not only the primitive poetic period of the genuine Epos, but also the independent personal excogitation of lyrical rapture. The bare fact that, while combining these two points of view, it is satisfied with neither sphere in its separation proves that this is so. And in order that we may have this poetic combination the free self-consciousness of human aims, developments and destinies must be already fully alert and awake, must have attained, in short, a degree of culture such as is only possible in the intermediate and later epochs of a nation’s development. For this reason, too, the greatest exploits and events of a nation’s primitive history are rather of an epic than a dramatic type. Such are features of the national existence for the most part related to communities outside it, such as the Trojan war, or the wave of popular migration, as illustrated in the Crusades, or the national resistance to a common enemy, as was the case in the war of Greece against Persia. It is only at a later stage that we meet with the more stable independence of single heroes, who create for themselves and out of themselves in their isolation definite ends, and carry through the undertakings they imply.

(β) We may add the following remarks upon the nature of this mediation between the opposed principles of epic and lyric poetry.

The Epos already makes an action visible to our imaginative sense. It is, however, here presented as the substantive entirety of a national spirit under the form of definite events and exploits of external life, in which personal volition, the individual aim and the externality of vital conditions, together with the obstructions which such external facts present, are retained in an equal balance. In the Lyric, on the contrary, it is the individual person, which is emphasized in the independence of his subjective life and as such expressed.

(αα) In combining these two points of view drama has in the first place, following in this respect the Epos, to bring before our vision an event, action, or practical affair. But above all in everything that is thus presented the factor of bare externality must be obliterated, and in, its place the self-conscious and active personality is posited as the paramount ground and vital force. The drama, in short, does not take exclusive refuge in-the lyric presence of soul-life, as such stands in contrast to an external world, but propounds such a life in and through its external realization. And in virtue of this the event does not appear to proceed from external conditions, but rather from personal volition and character; it receives in fact its dramatic significance exclusively in its relation to subjective aims and passions. At the same time the individual is not left exclusively rooted in his self-exclusive independence; he comes to his own through the peculiar nature of the conditions in which he is placed, and subject to which his character and purpose become the content of his volitional faculty, quite as much so in fact as in virtue of the nature of the particular purpose itself in its opposition to and conflict with other ends. Consequently the dramatic action in question must submit to a process of development and collision with other forces, which themselves, on their own account, and even in a contrary direction to that willed and intended by the active personality, effect the ultimate course of the events through which the personal factor, in its essential, characteristics of human purpose, personality, and spiritual conflict, is asserted. This substantive or objective aspect, which is enforced along with the individual character, in other respects acting independently from its own ideal resources, is no other than the very point of view which we find effective and vital in the principle of dramatic poetry, when it coincides with that of the epic composition.

(ββ) However much, therefore, we may have as a centre of attraction the intimate soul-life of particular men and women, nevertheless dramatic composition cannot rest content with the purely lyrical conditions of the emotional life; nor can the poet of such merely limit his sympathy to the dusty record of exploits that are already complete, or, speaking generally, merely describe the experience of enjoyment or other states of emotional or contemplative life. The drama, on the contrary, has to exhibit situations and the spiritual atmosphere that belongs to them as definitely motived by the individual character, which is charged with specific aims, and which makes these an effective part of the practical content of its volitional self-identity. The definition of soul-life, therefore, in the drama passes into the sphere of impulse, the realization of personality by means of active volition, in a word, effective action; it passes out of the sphere of pure ideality, it makes itself an object of the outer world, and inclines itself to the concrete facts of the epic world. The external phenomenon, however, instead of attaining existence in the bare fact of an event, is here, in the view of the acting character himself, charged with the opinions and aims he forms on his own account. Action is here the executed will, which as such is at the same time recognized, recognized, that is, not merely in its origin and point of departure from the soul-life, but also in respect to its ultimate purpose. In other words, all that issues from the action, issues, so far as the personality in question is concerned, from himself, and reacts thereby on his personal character and its circumstances. This constant relation of the entire complexus of external condition to the soul-life itself of the self-realized and self-realizing individuality, who is at once the basis and assimilating force of the entire process, marks the point where dramatic poetry falls in line with the truly lyrical principle.

(γγ) It is only when thus regarded that human action asserts itself as action in the supreme sense, that is, as actual execution of ideal intentions and aims with the realization of which the individual agent associates himself as with himself, discovers himself and his satisfaction therein, and thereupon further takes his stand with his entire being in all that proceeds from it as a constituent of the objective world. A character which is dramatic plucks for himself the fruit of his own deeds.

Inasmuch, however, as the interest, in a dramatic sense, restricts itself to the personal aim, whose hero the active personality is, and it is only necessary in the artistic work to borrow from the external world so much as is bound in an essential relation to this purpose, which originates in self-conscious life, for this reason the drama is primarily of a more abstract nature than the epic poem. For on the one hand the action, in so far as it reposes in the self-determination of character, and is deducible from this vital source and centre, does not presuppose the epic background of an entire world through all the varied aspects and ramifications of its positive realization, but is concentrated in the simpler definition of circumstance subject to which the individual man is absorbed in his immediate purpose and carries the same to accomplishment. And from a further point of view we have not here the type of personality which asserts its development to our vision in the entire complexity of national qualities as such are displayed by the epic, but rather character viewed in direct relation to its action, character which possesses a definite end directed to spirit life in its universality. This end or purpose, this eventual fact on which it depends, is placed in a more exalted position than is possible to the extension of the purely individual life, which appears inclusively as living organ and animating vehicle of the same. A more widely extended unveiling of character under the most varied aspects which are present either in no connection at all or only in a more remote one to its action, as we find it concentrated on one single point of interest would be a superfluity; consequently in this respect, too, that is, in its relation to the active personality, dramatic poetry ought to be more simply concentrated than epic poetry. The same generalization is applicable to the number and variety of the characters represented. For in virtue of the fact, as previously insisted, that the movement of the drama is not thrown upon the background of a national existence essentially complete in its envisagement of every conceivable variety of class, age, sex, activity, and so forth, but on the contrary, rivets our attention throughout on one fundamental purpose and its achievement, a realization of objective fact so extended and intricate as this would not merely be ineffective, but would actually impair the result proposed. At the same time, however, and secondly, the end and content of an action is only dramatic by reason of the fact that on account of its defined character, in the distinctive qualities of which the particular personality itself can alone lay hold of it under equally definite conditions, it calls into being in other individuals other objects and passions opposed to it, This pathetic excitant1 may, no doubt, in each separate active agent, assume the form of spiritual, ethical, and divine forces, such as duty, love to fatherland, parents, wife, relations, and the like. If, however, this essential content of human feeling and activity is to assert itself as dramatic it must in its specialization confront us as distinct ends, so that in every case the action will inevitably meet with obstruction in its relation to other active individuals, and fall into subjection to changing conditions and contradictions, which alternately prejudice the success of their own particular fulfilment. The genuine content, the essential operative energy throughout may therefore very well be the eternal forces, the essentially explicit ethical State, the gods of vital reality, in a word the divine and the true, but it is not these in the might of their tranquillity, in that condition, so to speak, wherein the unmoved gods abide, saved from all action, as some serene figures of sculpture self-absorbed in a state of blessedness. What we have here is the divine in its community, as content, that is, and object of human personality, as concrete existence in its realization,2 invited to act and charged with movement.

If, however, as above described, the godlike presence constitutes the most vital objective truth in the external precipitate3 of human action, then, thirdly, the deciding factor in the course and original departure of such an evolution and conflict cannot reside with particular individuals, which are placed in a relation of opposition to one another; it must be referred to the divine presence itself, regarded as essential totality: and for this reason, the drama, it matters not in what form it may be shaped, will have to propound to us the vital energy of a principle of Necessity which is essentially self-supporting, and capable of resolving every conflict and contradiction.

(γ) Consequently, we have before everything else the demand made on the dramatic poet in his creative capacity, that to the fullest extent his intelligence is awake to that ideal and universal substance which is at the root of human ends, conflicts, and destinies. He must fully acquaint himself with all the contradictions and developments which the particular action will, under the proposed conditions, necessarily involve and display. He must not merely be aware of them in so far as they originate in personal passion and the specific characterization of particular individuals, or as he finds such related to the actual content of human designs and resolves; but also in so far as they are simply referable to the external relations and circumstances of concrete life. And, along with this, it should be within his powers to recognize what the real nature of these paramount forces are, which apportion to man the just guerdon of his achievements. The rightful claim, no less than the wrongful misuse of the passions, which storm through the human heart, and excite to action, must lie disclosed to him with equal clarity, in order that precisely in those cases where the ordinary vision can only discover the ascendancy of obscurity, chance, and confusion, he, at least, will find revealed the actual selfaccomplishment of what is the essence of reason and truth itself. It follows, therefore, that the dramatic poet ought as little to confine his efforts to the indefinite exploration of the depths of emotional life, as the one-sided retention of any single exclusive mood of soul-life, or any limited partiality in the type of his sense-perception and spiritual outlook generally. He ought, rather, to exclude nothing from his vision that may be embraced by the widest expansion of Spirit conceivable. And this is so because the spiritual powers which are exclusively distinct in the mythological Epos, and which, by virtue of the many-sided aspects of actual individualization4tend to lose the clear definition of their significance, assert themselves in dramatic poetry in consonance with their simple substantive content as pathos altogether, and as apart from individual characters. The drama is, in fact, the resolution of the one-sided aspect of these powers, which discover their self-stability in the dramatic character. And this is so whether, as in tragedy, they are opposed to such in hostility, or, as in comedy, they are displayed within these characters themselves, without further mediation, in a condition of resolution.

(b) Dramatic Composition

In discussing the drama as a concrete work of art, I propose to emphasize, briefly, the following fundamental points:

First there is the unity of the same viewed in contrast to that of the Epos and the lyric poem.

Secondly, we have to consider the articulation of its parts, of its separate parts and their development.

Thirdly, there is the external aspect of diction, dialogue, and verse-measure.

(α) What we have in the first instance to observe and, from the broadest point of view, to establish with regard to the unity of the drama, is connected with a remark made in a previous passage to the effect that dramatic poetry, in contradistinction to the Epos, must be more strenuously self-concentrated. For, although the Epic makes a specific event its centre of unity, this is none the less expanded over a wide and manifold field of the national existence, and may break up into very various episodes and the independent presentation which belongs to each as parts of the entire panorama. An analogous appearance of merely general connection, on grounds which are converse to the above, is permissible to certain types of lyrical poetry. Inasmuch, however, as in dramatic poetry, from one point of view, that epic foundation, as we have seen, falls away — and as, otherwise regarded, the individual characters do not find their expression under the insulation proper to lyric expression, but rather assert in such a way their mutual relations to one another, by means of the opposed features of their characterization and aims, that it is just this personal relation which constitutes the ground of their dramatic realization — it follows, as by a law of necessity, that the synthetic unity of the entire composition is of a more stringent character. Now this more restricted homogeneity is quite as much objective as it is ideal in its nature. It is objective relatively to the features of the practical content of the objects, which the different characters carry out in a condition of conflict. It is ideal or subjective in virtue of the fact that this essentially substantive content appears in dramatic work as the passion of particular characters, so that the ill-success or achievement, fortune or misfortune, victory or defeat, essentially affect the individuals, whom such concern, in their actual intention.5

The more obvious laws of dramatic composition may be summarized in the time-honoured prescription of the so-called unities of place, time, and action.

(αα) The inalterability of one exclusive locale of the action proposed belongs to the type of those rigid rules, which the French in particular have deduced from classic tragedy and the critique of Aristotle thereupon. As a matter of fact, Aristotle merely says6 that the duration of the tragic action should not exceed at the most the length of a day. He does not mention the unity of place at all; moreover, the ancient tragedians have not followed such a principle in the strict sense adopted by the French. As examples of such a deviation, we have a change of scene both in the Eumenides of Æschylus and the Ajax of Sophocles. To a still less extent can our more modern dramatic writing, in its effort to portray a more extensive field of collision, dramatis personae of whatever kind and incidental event, and, in a word, an action the ideal explication of which requires, too, an external environment of greater breadth, subject itself to the yoke of a rigid identity of scene. Modern poetry, in so far, that is, as its creations are in harmony with the romantic type, which as a rule displays more variety and caprice in its attitude to external condition, has consequently freed itself from any such demand. If, however, the action is in truth concentrated in a few great motives, so that it can avoid complexity of external exposition, there will be no necessity for considerable alternation of scene. Indeed, the reverse will be a real advantage. In other words, however false such a rule may be in its purely conventional application, it contains at least the just conception that the constant transition of scene, without any particular reason why we should have one more than another, is obviously quite inadmissible. The dramatic concentration of the action ought necessarily to assert itself also in this external aspect, and thus present a contrast to the Epos, which is permitted in the most varied way to adapt itself to the fresh expatiation in the form of the spatial condition and its changes. Moreover, from a further point of view, the drama is not, as the Epos, composed exclusively for the imaginative sense, but for the direct vision of our senses. In the sphere of the pure imagination we can readily pass from one scene to another. In a theatrical representation, however, we must not put too great a strain on the imaginative faculty beyond the point which contradicts the ordinary vision of life. Shakespeare, for example, in whose tragedies and comedies there is a very frequent change of scene, had posts put up with notices attached to them indicating the particular scene on view. A device of this kind is a poor sort of affair, and can only impair the dramatic effect. For this reason the unity of place is at least commendable to the extent that its intelligibility and convenience are primâ facie assured, in so far, that is, that all confusion is thus avoided. But after all, no doubt, much may still be trusted to the imagination, which would conflict with our ordinary perception and notion of probability. The most convenient course in this, as in other matters, is a happy mean; in other words, while not wholly excluding the claim of purely natural fact and perception, we may still permit ourselves considerable license in our attitude to both.

(ββ) The unity of time is a precisely similar case. In the pure realm of imaginative idea we may no doubt, with no difficulty, combine vast periods of time; in the direct vision of perception we cannot so readily pass over a few years. If the action is, therefore, of a simple character, viewed in its entire content and conflict, we shall do best to concentrate the time of such a conflict, from its origin to its resolution, in a restricted period. If, on the contrary, it demands character richly diversified, whose development necessitates many situations which, in the matter of time, lie widely apart from one another, then the formal unity of a purely relative and entirely conventional duration of time will be essentially impossible. To attempt to remove such a representation from the domain of dramatic poetry, on the primâ facie ground that it is inconsistent with the strict rule of time-unity would simply amount to making the prose of ordinary facts the final court of appeal, as against the truth of poetic creation. Least of all need we waste time in discussing the purely empirical probability that as audience we could, in the course of a few hours, witness also, directly through our sense, merely the passage of a short space of time. For it is precisely in the case where the poet is most at pains to illustrate this conclusion that, from other points of view, he wellnigh invariably perpetrates the most glaring improbabilities.

(γγ) In contrast to the above examples of unity, that of action is the one truly inviolable rule. The true nature, however, of this unity may be a matter of considerable dispute. I will therefore develop my own views of its significance at greater length.

Every action must without exception have a distinct object which it seeks to achieve. It is through his action that man enters actively into the concrete actual world, in which also the most universal subject-matter is in its turn accepted in the poetic work and defined under more specific manifestation. From this point of view, therefore, the unity will have to be sought for in the realization of an end itself essentially definite, and carried under the particular conditions and relations of concrete life to its consummation. The circumstances adapted to dramatic action are, however, as we have seen, of a kind that the individual end meets with obstructions at the hands of other personal agents, and this for the reason that a contradictory end stands in its path, which in its turn equally strives after fulfilment, so that it is invariably attached to the reciprocal relation of conflicts and their devolution. Dramatic action in consequence rests essentially upon an action that is involved with resistance;7 and the genuine unity can only find its rationale in the entire movement which consists in the assertion of this collision relatively to the definition of the particular circumstances, characters, and ends proposed, not merely under a mode consonant to such ends and characters, but in such a way as to resolve the opposition implied. Such a resolution has, precisely as the action itself has, an external and an inside point of view. In other words, on the one side, the conflict of the opposed ends is finally composed; and on the other the particular characters, to a greater or less extent, have committed their entire volitional energy and being to the undertaking they strive to accomplish. Consequently the success or misadventure of the same, to complete or partial execution, the inevitable disaster or the secure union effected with intentions that are apparently opposed to their extent, also determine the destiny of the character in question, that it is inextricably involved with that which it was impelled to commit to such activity. A true end is therefore only then consummated, where the object and interest of the action, around which all revolves, are identified with the individuals concerned, and absolutely united to them. And whether the difference and opposition of the dramatic character assumes a simple form or branches out in various accessory episodes and individuals, the unity in either case may be of a more severe or less stringent nature. Comedy, for instance, in the many-sided features of its worked-out intrigue does not require such deliberate self-concentration as tragedy does, which is as a rule motived on grandiose and simple lines. Romantic tragedy, however, is also in this respect more varied and less consistent in its unity than is classic tragedy. And even where there is more licence the relation of the episodes and supplementary characters must be throughout recognizable; and the entirety of the piece should also naturally and without strain fit in with and help to complete the conclusion. So, for example, in “Romeo and Juliet,” the discord between the families, which lies outside the lovers and their object and destiny, is no doubt the base on which the action is shaped, though not the actual matter on which all actually depends. Shakespeare consequently devotes the necessary, if also wholly subordinate attention to the final issue of this conflict in his conclusion. In the same way in “Hamlet” the fortunes of Denmark remain a subsidiary interest, though with the entrance of Fortinbras they are apparently considered, and are settled at last satisfactorily.

No doubt in the particular end, which resolves the colliding factors, the possibility of fresh interests and conflicts may be presented; it is, however, the one collision with which the action is concerned, which has to discover its final adjustment in the essentially independent composition. Of this type are the three tragedies of Sophocles borrowed from the Theban cycle of myths. The first contains the discovery by Œdipus of the murderer of Laius; the second his peaceful death in the home of the Eumenides; the third the fate of Antigone. And, despite of this connection, every one of the three is equally an intrinsically complete whole independent of the other two.

(β) With regard to our second point, namely, that of the mode of denouement in a dramatic composition, we have three main features of distinction to consider between it and epic composition or the song, namely, the size of its extension, the nature of its progression and its division into scenes and acts.

(αα) We have already seen that the embrace of a drama — is not so extensive as the demand of the epos implies. I propose, therefore — over and above the two features already discussed of that world-condition, which is necessarily implied in the complete picture of the epic, and the more simple collision which is an equally essential constituent of the content of drama — merely to advert to the further ground, that in the drama the greater part of everything that the muse of the epic poet has to describe and linger over as servant of our imaginative vision, is omitted altogether from the scenic reproduction. And, further, in the case of drama it is not actual exploit, but the exposition of personal passions which is here the main thing. This personal life, however, in contrast to the expanse of the phenomenal world, is concentrated in simple emotions, sentences, decisions, and the like; and here, too, as distinct from the collateral display of epic narration and its historical part, it gives effect to the principle of lyric absorption and the origination and expression in present time of passion and idea. Dramatic poetry is, however, not satisfied with merely one situation;8 it presents the ideal world of emotional life or intelligence in active self-assertion as a totality of circumstances and ends of very various character, which expresses taken together, all that, if viewed relatively to its activity, passes in such an inward world. In comparison with the lyrical poem, the drama reaches out to and is completed in a far more extensive embrace of subject-matter. To summarize this comparative relation we may say, perhaps, that dramatic poetry stands as a mean between the wide embrace of the Epopaea and the concentrated compression of the Lyric.

(ββ) Yet more important than this aspect of external extension is the nature of the dramatic progression as opposed to the mode of the epic’s devolution The form of the epic objectivity demands throughout, as we have seen, a lingering style of description, which may along with this become more intense and pointed in its display of active obstruction. It is possible that we may at first blush incline to the view that, inasmuch as other ends and characters resist the main end and principal character in dramatic exposition, dramatic poetry is entitled to accept this sort of pause and obstacle as an essential feature of its principle. As a matter of fact just the reverse is the case. The true dramatic progression is a continuous movement onwards to the final catastrophe. This is clear from the simple fact that it is in collision that we find the emphatic turning point. In consequence of this we have the twofold view of, in the first place, a general strain towards the outbreak of this conflict, and, secondly, the necessity implied in this discord and contradiction of views, ends, and activities, that they should find some resolution to which they are driven forwards. By this we by no means assert that mere celerity of forward movement is simply in itself beautiful in the dramatic sense. On the contrary, the dramatic poet should have himself room to supply every situation on its own account with all the motives which it truly implies. Episodical scenes, however, which only impede the action are contrary to the nature of the drama.

(γγ) As a final point, we may divide the course of the dramatic work most naturally by simply following the stages implied in the notion of dramatic movement itself. In this connection Aristotle9 long ago remarks that a whole is that which possesses a beginning, a middle, and a conclusion. He further defines a beginning ‘as that which, of itself necessary, does not issue from something else, and out of which something other than itself issues and proceeds. The end is the reverse of this, namely, that which originates from something else, either of necessity, or mainly so at least, but which does not itself lead to further consequence. The middle is that which both issues from something else, and also is that from which something else proceeds.

Now no doubt in the reality of our experience every action includes many presuppositions which make it a difficult matter to decide the exact point where we may find the true commencement. In so far, however, as dramatic action rests essentially on a definite state of collision, the right point of departure will lie in the situation, out of which the future devolution of that conflict, despite the fact that it has not as yet broken out, will none the less in its further course issue. The end, on the contrary, will then be attained, when the resolution of the discord and its development is secured in every possible respect. In the midway condition between origination and end we have the conflict of ends, and the struggle of individual persons in collision. These different section’s are in dramatic composition, so to speak, the phases or moments of the action of what are also actions, and the definition of this is admirably indicated by the acts of the piece. They are now of course more or less equivalent to pauses of time, and a prince on one occasion, who was either in a hurry, or wished the action to proceed without interruption, blamed his chamberlain openly that such a pause occurred. With regard to their number three such acts for every kind of drama is the number that will adapt itself most readily to intelligible theory. Of these the first discloses the appearance of the collision, which is thereupon emphasized in the second with all the animation of conflicting interests as the positive difference of such discord and its progression, until, finally, driven as it were upon the very apex of its contradiction, it is necessarily resolved. We may cite — as some kind of illustration of this division which the nature of such an action suggests — from ancient drama, in which no doubt the dramatic articulation is as a rule less distinct, the trilogies of Æschylus, in which each single play combines with the others to form a single and completely exclusive whole.10 In modern poetry the Spaniards mainly follow such a division into three acts. The English, French, and Germans, on the contrary, for the most part divide the entire play into five acts, in which the initial exposition is assigned to the first, the three next are occupied with the various aggressions and reactionary effects, the complex intentions and conflicts of the opposed parties; and it is not until the fifth that we reach the entire resolution of such contending forces.

(γ) The third and final important aspect we have to investigate in our present connection is the nature of the external means, in so far as the employment of the same by dramatic art can be held distinct from and independent of the actual scenic representation that is otherwise essential to its complete display. An account of the specific nature of diction which is frequently dramatic generally, secondly, of the distinguishing features of the monologue, dialogue, and the like, and, lastly, of verse measure, will be all that is necessary here. As we have more than once insisted in the drama the fact of the action is not the external aspect to which we refer, but the exposition of the ideal spirit of the action, not merely in respect to the dramatis personae and their passion, pathos, resolve, interaction, and mediation, but also relatively to the universal essence of the action in its conflict and destiny. It is this ideally pregnant spirit, in so far as poetry gives embodiment to it in poetic form, which pre-eminently discovers an appropriate expression in the language of poetry, viewing this, as we should, as the most spiritual way of expressing emotions and ideas.

(αα) But, moreover, just as the drama combines the principles of the Epos and the Lyric, dramatic diction, too, is compelled both to carry and assert within itself elements that are lyrical and those that are epic. The lyrical approach is rather a special feature of modern drama, and as a rule in those cases where the personal life is or tends to be self-absorbed, and seeks in its decision and action throughout to retain the self-consciousness of its inward resources. But none the less this unveiling of the individual heart-life, if it is to remain dramatic, ought not merely to be the exploitation of a vague and variable cloud of emotions, memories, and visions; it should keep its relation to the action constant throughout, should make its result identical with that of the different phases of the same.

In contrast to this subjective pathos the epic character of the diction, which we may define as the objective pathos, is mainly concerned with the unfolding of what is substantive in dramatic relations, ends, and persons on lines rather directed to the vision of the audience. Such a point of view can also in part assume a lyrical tone, remaining when it does so dramatic only in so far as it does not more entirely in its independent force form the progress of the action and its asserted relation to the same. And over and above this, as a second residue, so to speak, of epic poetry, we may have the records of narrative, descriptions of battles and the like thrown in. But these also, in genuine dramatic composition, ought to be marked with greater compression and animated movement, and, relatively to their presentment as narrative, a necessary connection with the progress of the action should be evident.

In conclusion, genuine dramatic art consists in the expression of individuals in the conflict of their interests and the discord roused between their characters and their transitory passions. It is here that the twofold aspect of lyric and epic poetry11 will assert its power in true dramatic union: and we have then attached to this the aspect of positive external fact expressed likewise in the medium of language, as where we have, for instance, the departure and entrance of dramatis personae as a rule announced beforehand; not unfrequently also their external habit or demeanour is indicated by other persons.

A fundamental distinction over the entire field now under review is the so-called realistic mode of expression, as opposed to a conventional speech of the theatre and its rhetoric. Diderot, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller also in their youth addressed themselves in modern times above all to this attitude of direct and natural expression. Lessing did so with the powers of a trained and sensitive observation Schiller and Goethe did so with their predilection for the direct animation of unembellished robustness and force. That men should converse with one another as in the Greek, or with more insistance — and in this latter respect the criticism has a reasonable basis — as in French comedy and tragedy was scouted as contrary to Nature. This type of naturalism, however, may very readily, with its superfluity of merely realistic traits, fall into the other extreme of dryness and prose, in so far, that is, as the characters are not developed in the essential qualities of their emotional life and action, but only as they happen to express themselves in the literal accuracy of their individual life, without indicating therein any more significant self-consciousness or any further sense of their essential position. The more natural the characterization is allowed to remain in this sense the more prosaic it becomes. In actual life men converse and strive with one another before everything else on the mere basis of their distinct singularity. If our object is to depict them simply as such it is impossible that they should also be represented in their truly substantive significance.12 And, if we look at the essence of the matter, this question of crudeness and urbanity can only be in the last instance treated subject to the above considerations. In other words while, on the one hand, such crudeness or coarseness is made to issue from the particular personality, which is exclusively committed to the unmediated dictation of an imaginative type of outlook and feeling, in the converse treatment an urbanity is the outcome of a purely abstract and formal generalization of consideration for others, recognition of the claims of personality, love, honour, and the like, in which nothing that is suggestive of a rich and objective content can be expressed.13 Between these two extremes of a purely formal generality and this natural expression of unpolished peculiarities we have the true universal, which is throughout neither formal nor destitute of individuality, but finds its concrete realization in a twofold way from the defined content of character and the objective presence of opinions and aims. Genuine poetry will therefore consist in the assertion of what belongs to immediate and actual life as characteristic and individual in the purifying medium of universality,14 both aspects being permitted to mediate each other. In this case we are conscious, even in respect to diction, that without being wholly banished from the basis of reality and its actual traits of truth, we are nevertheless carried into another sphere, that is to say the ideal realm of art. Of this latter character is the diction of Greek dramatic poetry, the later diction of Goethe, and in part, too, that of Schiller, and in his own way Shakespeare’s also, although the Englishman, owing to the peculiar conditions of the contemporary stage, is forced in part now and again to accommodate his verbal language to the actual ability of the actor.15

(ββ) We may further classify the mode of dramatic expression as that of choral interlude, monologue, and dialogue. It is the ancient drama which has pre-eminently elaborated the distinction between chorus and dialogue. In our modern drama this falls away. What, in the classical composition, was presented by the chorus, is now rather placed in the mouths of the leading characters. The choric song expresses, among the ancients, by way of contrast to the particular characters and their more personal or more reciprocal conflict, the general or more impersonal view of the situation, and the emotions it excites, in a manner which at one time inclines to the objective style of epic narrative, at another to the impulsive movement of the Lyric. In the monologue, on the other hand, it is the isolated individual who, in a given situation of the action, becomes objective on his own account. Monologues are, therefore, dramatically in their right place at those moments chiefly when the emotional life is entirely self-concentrated as the result of previous events; when it sums up, as it were, the nature of the cleft between itself and others, or its own spiritual division; or when it arrives at some sudden decision, or comes to the final point of resolve on matters already long debated.

The third and complete form of the drama, however, is the dialogue. For in this the dramatis personae are mutually able to express their character and aims, not merely relatively to their personal attitude to each other, but also to the substantive character of the pathos disclosed; they engage in conflict, and thereby actually advance the movement of the action. We may further distinguish in the dialogue between the expression of a pathos that is subjective and one that is objective. The first rather appertains to a given passion of more accidental a nature, whether it be the case in which it is retained essentially in suppression, and is only expressed aphoristically, or that in which it finds a vent in the most complete and exhaustive explosion. Poets, who endeavour to arouse the full movement of personal emotion by means of poignant scenes, are exceptionally partial to this type of pathos. Nevertheless, despite all their endeavour to depict personal suffering and unrestrained passion, or the unreconciled inward dissension of soul-life, it remains the fact that the human soul, in its depth, is less effected thereby than it is through a pathos, wherein at the same time a genuine objective content is evolved. For this reason the earlier plays of Goethe, despite all the real penetration of their subject-matter and the natural force of their dialogue, make on the whole a weaker impression. And, in the same way, outbreaks of unrelieved distraction and unrestrained fury, effect a truly healthy sense only in subordinate degree; and, above all, what is wholly frightful rather chills us than makes the blood flow. The poet may describe passion with all the overwhelming power possible. It is ineffective; the heart is merely rent in pieces,16 and turns aside from it. What we fail to find here is that which art can least dispense with, the positive aspect of reconciliation. The ancient tragedians, therefore, mainly sought for their effect by means of the objective type of pathos; nor is there wanting here genuine human individuality, so far as this was compatible with their art. The plays, also, of Schiller possess this pathos of a great spiritual force,17 a pathos which is penetrative throughout, and is manifested and expressed everywhere as fundamental to the action. It is, above all, to this circumstance that we may ascribe the lasting effect which the tragedies of Schiller produce even in our own day; I refer in particular to their scenic reproduction. For that which produces a profound dramatic effect of universal and enduring appeal can be only the substantive in action — by which I mean, viewing it as definite content, the ethical substance therein, or, in its more formal aspect, the grandeur of ideal reach and character, in which respect, again, Shakespeare is supreme.

(γγ) I will, in conclusion, add merely a word or two on the point of verse-measure. Dramatic metre is best when it lies midway between the tranquil, uniform flow of the hexameter and the more interrupted and split-up syllabic metres congenial to the Lyric. In this respect the iambic metre is above all others commendable. For the iambus, with the rhythm of its onward movement, which may be either accelerated by anapaests, or be made more solemn and weighty with the spondee, forms a most fitting accompaniment to the march of the action; and in quite a peculiar way the senarius possesses a real tone of noble and restrained emotional force. Among modern authors the Spaniards, with an artistic purpose the reverse of this, adopt trochaeic tetrameters, the effect of which is one of tranquil retardation; a measure which, with its variety of interwoven rhymes and assonances, in part, too, with its alternative absence of rhyme, is admirably adapted to the imaginative exuberance of phantasy, and to the fine-drawn argumentative antitheses, which characterize this poetry and impede rather than advance the action. In a contrast of a similar kind, the French Alexandrine is harmonious with the formal carriage and the declamatory rhetoric of passions, sometimes held in restraint and at others expressed at full heat, the conventional expression of which the art of French drama has tasked itself to elaborate. The more realistic Englishman, whom we Germans too have followed in more recent times, has, on the contrary, retained the iambic metre, which Aristotle long ago defined as τὀ μάλιστα λεκτικὸν τῶν μἐτρων18 He has, however, not accepted the same in identical form with the Greek trimeter, but substituted a measure of less pathetic character, if capable of the greatest freedom of treatment.

Although the advantages or defects of diction and metre are important, also, in epic and lyrical poetry, we must nevertheless ascribe a more emphatic effect to them in dramatic compositions, in virtue of the circumstance that we are in this case dealing with opinions, characters, and actions which have to appear before us in all the reality of life itself. A comedy of Calderon, for example, with all the interplay of fantastic wit we may assume, embodied, however, in the kind of diction we associate with this poet, with its logical niceties and its bombast — subject, also, to all the variations of his lyrical metres — would not, we may presume, on the simple ground of this manner of expression, be likely to arouse any general sympathy. It is on account of this visual presence and nearness of approach that the other aspects of the content, apart from that of purely dramatic form, are brought into a far more direct relation to the public before whom they are reproduced. We should like shortly to explain the nature of this.

Scientific compositions and lyrical or epic poems either possess a distinct public, whose interest in such works is associated with their profession, or it is a matter of chance into what hands compositions of this character may fall. If a book does not please anyone it can be neglected, just as a man passes by the picture or statue that he does not like; such works may, in fact, be held to carry to some extent with them the author’s admission that his book is not written for such. The case is somewhat otherwise with dramatic works. Here we have a distinct public for which the author has to cater, and he is under certain obligations towards it. Such a public possesses the right of applause no less than expressed displeasure; inasmuch as a work is represented before it in its entirety, and the appeal is made that it should be enjoyed, with sympathy in a given place and at a stated time. A public of this sort, as in the case of any — other public jury, is of a very varied character; it differs in its education, interests, accustomed tastes, and hobbies, so that to secure complete success in certain distinct respects a talent in the display of vulgar effect, or at least a relative shame-facedness in regard to the finest demand of genuine art, may be necessary. No doubt the dramatic poet has always the alternative left him to despise his public. But in that case he obviously fails to secure the very object for which dramatic writing exists. With us Germans, to an exceptional extent, it has become the fashion since the times of Tieck thus to scorn the public. Our German play-writer will express his own particular individuality, but takes no trouble to commend the result to his audience. The ideal of our German egotism is quite the reverse, namely, that every man must turn out something different to that of other people, in order that he may prove his originality. It was owing, in part, to this that Tieck and the brothers Schlegel, men who, from the very nature of their sentimental irony, were quite unable to master the emotional forces and intelligence of their nation and time, fell foul of Schiller, and tried to blacken his poetical reputation on the ground that he did among us Germans manage to strike the right key, and obtain a popularity unsurpassed. With our neighbours, the French, we find the opposite. Their authors write with the present effect on the public always in view, which further, on its own account, is capable of being a keener and less indulgent critic of the author, owing to the fact that a more definite artistic taste is already fixed in France: with us anarchy prevails, and everyone expresses his critical views, applauds or condemns just as he likes, or as his opinions, emotion, and mood may chance to dictate.

Inasmuch, however, as it is an essential part of the definition of the dramatic composition that it should possess the vitality able to command a favourable popular reception, the dramatic poet should submit to the conditions — quite apart, that is, from the accidental circumstances or tendencies of the time — which are likely to secure this result in an artistic form. What these are I will attempt to explain, at least in their more general features.

(a) Now, in the first place, the ends, which in a dramatic work come into conflict and are resolved out of such conflict, either possess a general human interest, or at least have at bottom a pathos, which is of a valid and substantive character for the people for whom the poet creates his work. In such a case, however, the universal human quality and what is more definitely national, in so far as either are connected with the substance of dramatic collisions, may lie very widely apart. Compositions, which stand in the national life, at the very summit of their dramatic art and development, may consequently quite fail to be appreciated by another age and nation. We find, for example, in Hindoo lyrical poetry, even in our own time, much that carries with it a real charm, tenderness, and fascinating sweetness. The particular collision, however, around which the action in the “Sakontala” revolves, in other words, the furious curse upon Sakontala of the Brahman, because she does not see him, and omits to make her obeisance, can only strike us as absurd, so much so in fact that, despite all other excellences in this quite exceptionally beautiful poem, we fail to discover any interest in the very culminating crisis of the action. We may affirm very much the same thing of the way in which the Spaniards treat the motive of personal honour with the abstract severity of a logic, the brutality of which outrages most deeply all our ideas and feelings. Let me recall, for example, the attempt made by our own theatrical management to bring upon the stage one of the less famous plays of Calderon entitled “Clandestine Revenge for Clandestine Insult,” an attempt condemned to failure from the first on this ground. Another tragedy, which on similar lines portrays a more profound human conflict, “The Physician of his own Honour,” under the changed title of “The Intrepid Prince,” has after some revision secured more leeway; but this, too, is handicapped by its abstract and unyielding Catholic principle. Conversely, and in an opposite direction, the Shakespearian tragedies and comedies are appreciated by a public that is constantly increasing. We find here that, despite all their nationality, the universal human interest is incomparably greater. Shakespeare has only failed to secure an entrance where the national conventions of art are so narrow and specific that they either wholly exclude or materially weaken works of the Shakespearian type. A similar position of advantage, such as that we allow to Shakespeare, would be attributable to the tragedies of the ancients, if we did not, apart from our changed habits in respect to scenic reproduction and certain aspects of the national consciousness, make the further demand of a profounder psychological penetration and a greater breadth of particular characterization. So far, however, as the subject-matter of ancient tragedy is concerned, it could never at any time fail in its effect. We may, therefore, broadly affirm that, in proportion as a dramatic work accepts for its content wholly specific rather than typical characters and passions, conditioned, that is, exclusively by definite tendencies of a particular epoch of history, instead of mainly concerning itself with human interests substantive in all times, to that extent, despite of all its other advantages, it will be more transitory.

(β) And, further, it is necessary that universal human ends and actions of this kind should emphasize their poetic individualization to the point of animated life itself. Dramatic composition does not merely address itself to our sense of vitality, a sense which even the public certainly ought to possess, but it must itself, in all essentials, offer a living actual presence of situations, conditions, characters, and actions.

(αα) I have already, in a previous passage of this work,19 entered into some detail relatively to the aspect of local environment, customs, usages and other matters which affect the visual representation of action. In this respect dramatic individualization ought to be either so thoroughly poetical, vital, and rich with interest that we can discount what is alien to our sense, and feel ourselves attracted to the performance by this vital claim on our attention, or it should not pretend to do more than present such characteristics as external form, which is entirely outshone by the spiritual and ideal characteristics which underlie it.

(ββ) More important than this external aspect is the vitality of the dramatis personae. Such ought not to be merely specific interests personified, which is only too frequently the case at the hands of modern dramatists. Such abstract impersonations of particular passions and aims are wholly destitute of dramatic effect. A purely superficial individualization is equally insufficient. Content and form in such cases, as in the analogous type of allegorical figures, fail to coalesce. Profound emotions and reflections, imposing ideas and language offer no real compensation. Dramatic personality ought to be, on the contrary, vital and self-identical throughout, a complete whole in short, the opinions and characterization of which are consonant with its aims and action. It is not the breadth of particular traits which is here of first importance, but the permeating individuality, which synthetically binds all in the central unity, which it in truth is, and displays a given personality in speech and action as issuing from one and the same living source, from which every characteristic, whether it be of idea, deed or manner of behaviour, comes into being. That which is merely an aggregate of different qualities and activities, even though such be strung together in one string, will not give us the vital character we require. This presupposes from the point of view of the poet himself a creative activity which is instinct with life and imagination. It is to the latter type, for instance, that the characters of the Sophoclean tragedies belong, despite the fact that they do not possess the variety of particular characteristics which distinguish the epic heroes of Homer. Among later writers Shakespeare and Goethe are pre-eminently famous for the vitality of their characterization. The French, on the contrary, particularly in their earlier dramatic compositions, appear to have been rather content to excogitate characters that are little more than the formal impersonations of general types and passions, than to have aimed at giving us true and living persons.

(γγ) But, thirdly, the task of dramatic creation is not completed with the presentment of vital characterization. Goethe’s Iphigeneia and Tasso throughout are good enough examples of this poetic excellence — and yet they are not, if we look at them more strictly, by any means perfect examples of dramatic vitality and movement. It is for this reason that Schiller long ago remarked of the Iphigeneia, that in it is the ethical content, the heart experience, the personal opinion which is made the object of the action, and is as such visually reproduced. And unquestionably the display and expression of the personal experience of different characters in definite situations is not by itself sufficient; we must also have real emphasis laid on the collision of the ultimate ends involved, and the forward and conflicting movement which such imply. Schiller is consequently of the view that the movement of the Iphigeneia is not sufficiently disturbed; we are permitted to linger within it too long and easily. He even maintains that it without question inclines to the sphere of epic composition, if we contrast it at least with any strict conception of tragedy. In other words, dramatic effect is action simply as action; it is not the exposition of personality alone, or practically independent of the express purpose and its final achievement. In the Epos play may be permitted to the breadth and variety of character, external conditions, occurrences and events; in the drama, on the contrary, the self-concentration of its principle is most asserted relatively to the particular collision and its conflict. It is thus that we recognize the truth of Aristotle’s dictum,20 that tragic action possesses two sources (αἴτια δὐo), opinion and character (διάνoια καὶ ἦδoς), but what is most important is the end (τέλoς), and individuals do not act in order to display diverse characters, but these latter are united with a common bond of imaginative conception to the former in the interest of the action.

(γ) As a matter for our final consideration in this place there is the relation in which the poet is placed to the general public. Epic poetry in its truly primitive state requires that the poet place wholly on one side his distinctive personality in its contrast to his actually objective work. He offers us the content of that and only that. The lyric poet, on the contrary, deliberately expresses his own emotional life and his personal views of the world.

(αα) We might imagine that the poet must perforce withdraw himself in the drama by reason of the very fact that he brings action before us in its sensuous presence, and makes the characters speak and active in their own names, to a greater extent than in the Epos, in which he appears at any rate as narrator of the events. Such an impression is only, however, very partially valid. For, as I have already contended, the drama is exclusively referable in its origin to those epochs, in which the personal self-consciousness, both relatively to the general outlook on life and artistic culture, has already reached a high degree of development. A dramatic composition therefore should not, as an epic one does, present the appearance as though it originated from the popular consciousness simply, for the display of which content the poet is merely an instrument of expression which possesses no reference to the poet’s personal life; rather what we seek to recognize in the complete work is quite as much the product of the self-aware and original creative force, and by reason of this the art and virtuosity of a genuine poetic personality. It is only thereby that dramatic productions attain to the genuine excellence of their artistic vitality and definition, as contrasted with the actions and events of natural life. It is on this account that where the authorship of dramatic works is a subject of controversy we find such to be nowhere more frequent than where it concerns the primitive Epopaea.

(ββ) From the opposite point of view the general public too, if it has itself preserved a true sense of meaning of art, will not submit to have placed before it in a drama the more accidental moods and opinions, the peculiar tendencies and the one-sided outlook of this or that individual, the expression of which is more appropriate to the lyric poet. It has a right to demand that in the course and final issue of the dramatic action, whether of tragedy or comedy, what is fundamentally reasonable and true should be vindicated. Being myself convinced of this I have in a previous passage given a place of first importance to the demand that the dramatic poet must in the profoundest sense make himself master of the essential significance of human action and the divine order of the world, and along with this of a power to unfold this eternal and essential foundation of all human characters, passions and destinies in its clarity as also in its vital truth. It is no doubt quite possible that a poet, in rising equal to this demand upon his powers of penetration and artistic achievement, may under particular circumstances find himself in conflict with the restricted and uncultured ideas of his age and nation. In such a case the responsibility for such a disunion does not rest with himself, but is a burden the public ought to carry. He has the single obligation to follow the lead of truth and his own compelling genius, the ultimate victory of which, provided it is of the right quality, is no less assured than that of ultimate truth itself universally. It is impossible to define closely the limits within which a dramatic poet is entitled to bring his actual personality before the public. I will therefore merely recall attention to the fact in a general way that in many periods of history dramatic poetry, no less than other kinds, is induced to disseminate with a vital impulse novel ideas upon politics, morals, poetry, religion, and the like. So early as Aristophanes we have polemics in those comedies of his youth against the domestic condition of Athens and the Peloponnesian war. Voltaire again frequently endeavours in his dramatic works to popularize his free thought principles. But above all worthy of notice is the effort of our Lessing in his “Nathan” to vindicate his ethical faith against the strait waistcoat of a blockish orthodoxy. In still more recent times too Goethe has in his earliest works challenged the prose of our German life and its defective views of art. Tieck has to some extent followed his lead in this respect. Where personal views of the above type are not only of superior worth, but are further not expressed in such deliberate separation from the action of the drama as to make the latter appear as a mere means for their exploitation, the claims of true art are not likely to suffer injury. If, however, the freedom of the composition is thereby impaired, though no doubt the poet may possibly produce no inconsiderable impression on the public by his introduction of his own predilections into his work; yet, however true they may be, if they are at the same time unable to coalesce with the work as an artistic whole the interest thereby aroused can only be limited to the matters thus handled; it is in fact no true artistic interest at all. The worst case of all is that, however, where a poet with similar deliberation seeks, out of pure flattery and in order to please, to give prominence to some popular prejudice which is entirely false. His sins of commission are in that case twofold, not merely against art, but truth no less.

(ββ) One further remark may be perhaps admitted in this connection to the effect that among the particular types of dramatic art a more limited measure of indulgence is permitted to tragedy than to comedy in this more free expatiation of the personality of the poet. In the latter type the contingency and caprice of individual self-expression is from the first agreeable to its main principle. Thus we find that Aristophanes frequently makes matters of immediate interest to his Athenian public the subject of his parabases. In portions of these he gives free utterance to his own views upon contemporary events and circumstances, and withal shrewd advice to his fellow citizens. He is at other times concerned to defend himself from the attacks of political opponents and his artistic rivals. Indeed there are passages in which he deliberately eulogizes himself and his peculiarities.

Poetry, alone among the arts, completely dispenses with the sensuous medium of the objective world of phenomena. Inasmuch moreover as the drama does not interpret to the imaginative vision the exploits of the past, or express an ideal personal experience to mind and soul, but rather is concerned to depict an action in all the reality of its actual presence, it would fall into contradiction with itself if it were forced to remain limited to the means, which poetry, simply as such, is in a position to offer. The present action no doubt belongs entirely to the personal self, and from this point of view complete expression is possible through the medium of language. From an opposite one, however, the movement of action is towards objective reality, and it requires the complete man to express its movement in his corporeal existence, deed and demeanour, as well as the physiognomical expression of emotions and passions, and not only these on their own account, but in their effect on other men, and the reactions which are thereby brought into being. Moreover, in the display of individuality in its actual presence, we require further an external environment, a specific locale, in which such movement and action is achieved. Consequently dramatic poetry, by virtue of the fact that no one of these aspects can be permitted to remain in their immediate condition of contingency, but have all to be reclothed in an artistic form as phases of fine art itself, is compelled to avail itself of the assistance of pretty well all the other arts. The surrounding scene is to some extent, just as the temple is, an architectonic environment, and in part also external Nature, both aspects being conceived and executed in pictorial fashion. In this locale the sculpturesque figures are presented with the animation of life, and their volition and emotional states are artistically elaborated, not merely by means of expressive recitation, but also through a picturesque display of gesture and of posture and movement, which, in its objective form, is inspired by the inward soul-life. In this respect we may have brought home to us a distinction which recalls a feature I have at an earlier stage indicated in the sphere of music as the opposition implied in the arts of declamation and melody. In other words, just as in declamatory music language in its spiritual signification is the aspect of most importance, to the characteristic expression of which the musical aspect is entirely subordinate, whereas the movement of melody is unfolded freely on its own account in its own specific medium, although it too is able to assimilate the content of language — so also dramatic poetry, on the one hand, avails itself of those sister arts merely as instrumental to a material basis and environment, out of which the language of poetry is in its free domination asserted as the commanding central focus, upon and around which all else really revolves. From the further point of view, however, that which in the first instance had merely the force of an assistant and accompaniment, becomes an object on its own account, and receives the appearance in its own domain of an essentially independent beauty. Declamation passes into song, action into the mimic of the dance, and scenery in its splendour and pictorial fascination itself puts forward a claim to artistic perfection.

In contrasting, then, a contrast frequently insisted upon, and more particularly in recent times, poetry in its simplicity with the external dramatic execution such as we have above described, we may continue the course of our review under the following heads of discussion.

Firsts there is the dramatic poetry, whose object is to restrict itself to the ordinary ground of poetry, and consequently does not contemplate the theatrical representation of its productions.

Secondly, we have the genuine art of the theatre, to the extent that is in which it is limited to recitation, play of pose and action, under the modes in which the language of the poet is able throughout to remain the definitive and decisive factor.

Lastly, there is that type of reproduction, which admits the employment of every means of scenery, music and dance, and suffers the same to assert an independent position as against the dramatic language.

(a) The Reading and Recitation of Dramatical Compositions.

The true sensuous medium or instrument of dramatic poetry is, as we have seen, not only the human voice and the spoken word, but the entire man, who not merely expresses emotions, ideas, and thoughts, but, as vitally absorbed in a concrete action, in virtue of all that he is influences the ideas, designs, the action and behaviour of others, experiences similar effects on himself, or maintains his independent opposition to them.

(α) In contrast to such a definite view, which is based upon the essential character of dramatic poetry itself, it is a feature of modern notions on the subject, particularly so among ourselves, to regard the organization of drama with a view to its theatrical reproduction as unessential and subsidiary, although as a fact all dramatic authors, even when they adopt this attitude of indifference and contempt, entertain the wish and hope to see their compositions on the stage. The result is that the greater number of more recent dramas are unable ever to find a stage, and the simple reason of this is that they are undramatical. We are not of course, therefore, in a position to deny that a dramatic composition may satisfy the conditions of genuine poetry in virtue of its intrinsic worth. What we affirm is that it is only to an action, the dramatic course of which is admirably adapted to theatrical representation, that we are to attribute such intrinsic dramatic worth. The best authority for such a statement is supplied by the Greek tragedies. It is true that we no longer see these on the contemporary stage, but they do nevertheless, if we regard the facts more closely, completely satisfy us to a real extent precisely on this ground that they were written without reserve for the theatre of their day. What has banished them from the theatre of today is not so much the character of their dramatic organization, which differs mainly from that of to-day in its employment of the chorus, as in the nature of national predilections and conditions, upon which for the most part, if we consider their content, they are based, and in which owing to the distance in which they are placed relatively to our own contemporary life we are unable now to feel ourselves at home. The malady of Philoctetes, for instance, the loathsome ulcer on his foot, his ejaculations and outcries, are as little likely to awaken the genuine interest of a modern audience as the arrows of Hercules, about which the main course of that drama revolves. In a similar way, though we may admit the barbaric cruelty of the human sacrifice in the Iphigeneia in Aulis and Tauris in an opera, we find it absolutely necessary in tragedy at any rate that this aspect should be wholly revised as Goethe has in fact done.

(β) The difference, however, thus indicated between ancient and modern customs, which effects the mere perusal of such works, no less than the complete and vital reproduction of them as a whole, has had the further effect of pointing out to us another by-way, in which poets to some extent deliberately fashion their work exclusively for the reader’s perusal, and in a manner by which the difficulty above indicated no longer affects the character of such compositions. There are no doubt in this connection isolated points of view, which merely refer to features of external form, which are implied in the so-called knowledge of the stage, and an indifference as to which does not lessen the poetical worth of a dramatical production. To these belong, for example, the careful regulation of the scenic arrangements, that one scene can follow without difficulty after another, though it requires great alterations in the scenery, or that the actor is given sufficient time to make the necessary change of costume, or to recover from his previous exertions. A knowledge and aptitude of this nature is neither indicative of any poetical superiority or the reverse; they rather depend upon the naturally varying and conventional arrangements of the theatre. There are, however, other features relatively to which the poet, in order to be truly dramatical, must have the animated reproduction visibly present in its substance, must make his dramatis personae speak and act conformably thereto, that is, in complete congruity with an actually present realization. Viewed in this light theatrical reproduction is a real test. For in the presence of the supreme court of appeal of a sound and artistic public the mere speeches and tirades of our so-called exquisite diction, if dramatic truth is not thereby asserted, will not hold water. There are periods, no doubt, in which the public also is corrupted by the culture it is the fashion so highly to praise, I mean by heads generally overstocked with the current opinions and fancies of the connoisseur and critic. Let it however only retain its own essentially sterling commonsense, and it will only be satisfied in those cases where characters express themselves and act precisely as the reality of life no less than art demands and necessitates. If the poet, on the contrary, writes exclusively for the single reader he very readily gets no further than making his characters speak and behave much as they might do in an epistolary correspondence. If any one thus gives us the reasons for his aims and what he does, or unbares his heart in any other respect, instead of that which we should at once remark thereupon we get between the receipt of the letter and our immediate reply time for all kinds of reflection and idea. The imagination opens in this case a wide field of possibilities. In the actually present speech and rejoinder we have to presuppose that as between man and man the volition and heart, the movement of feeling and decision are more direct, that in short the dialogue passes on without any such recourse to considerable reflection, but at once from soul to soul, as eye to eye, mouth to mouth, and ear to ear. Only in such a case the actions and speeches are expressed with life from the actual personality, who has no time left him to make a careful selection from one out of many possibilities. Under this view of the case it is not unimportant for the poet throughout his composition to keep his eye on the stage, which renders such a direct type of animation necessary. Nay, for myself I go to the length of maintaining that no dramatic work ought to be printed, but rather, as no doubt with the ancients, it should belong to the stage repertory in manuscript form,21 and only receive quite an insignificant circulation. We should at least in that case limit very considerably the present superabundance of dramas, which it is possible possess the speech of culture, fine sentiments, excellent reflections, and profound thoughts, but which are defective in the very direction which makes a drama dramatical, that is, in the display of action, and the vital movement which belongs to it.

(γ) In the mere perusal and reading aloud of dramatic compositions we find a difficulty in deciding whether they are of a type which would produce the due effect from the stage. Even Goethe, whose experience of stage management in his later years was exceptional, was far from being dependable on this head, a result no doubt mainly due to the extraordinary confusion of our public taste, which is able to accept with approval almost anything and everything. If the character and object of the dramatis personae are on their own account great and substantive the manner of composition no doubt presents less difficulty. But as regards the motive force of interests, the various phases in the progress of the action, the suspended interest and development of situations, the just degree in which characters assert their effect on each other, the appropriate force and truth of their demeanour and speech — in all such respects the mere perusal unassisted by a theatrical performance can only in the rarest cases arrive at a reliable decision. Reading a work aloud is only under great qualification a further assistance. Speech in drama requires the presence of separate individuals. The delivery of one voice, however artistically it may adapt itself to different shades of tone in alternate or varying change is insufficient. Add to this the fact that in reading aloud we are throughout confronted with the difficulty whether on every occasion the persons speaking should be mentioned or not. Both alternations are equally open to objection. If the delivery is that of one voice the statement of the names of the characters speaking becomes an indispensable condition of intelligibility, but by doing so the expression of pathos throughout suffers violence. If, on the other hand, the delivery is vitally dramatic, and we are carried thereby into the actual situation, a further kind of contradiction can hardly fail to appear. For with the satisfaction of our sense of hearing that of sight puts forward a certain claim of its own. For when we listen to an action we desire to see the acting persons, their demeanour and surroundings; the eye craves for a completed vision, and finds instead before it merely a reciter, who sits or stands peacefully in a private house with company. Reading aloud or recitation is consequently always an unsatisfying compromise between the unambitious pretensions of private perusal, in which the aspect of realization is absent entirely and all is left to the imagination, and the complete theatrical presentation.

(b) The Art of the Actor

In conjunction with actual dramatic reproduction there is along with music a second practical art, namely, that of acting, the complete development of which belongs entirely to more recent times. Its principle consists in this, that while it summons to its assistance dramatic posture, action, declamation, music, dance, and scenery, it accepts as the predominant mark of its effort human speech and its poetical expression. And this is for poetry in its simplest significance the exclusively just relation. For if mere mimicry or song or dance once begin to assume an independent position of their own, poetry viewed as a fine and creative art is degraded to the position of an instrument, and loses its ascendancy over the in other respects accompanying arts. We will venture to point out a few characteristic distinctions in this connection.

(α) The primary phase of the art of acting is to be found among the Greeks. Here, as one aspect of the matter, the art of speech is affiliated with that of sculpture. The acting dramatis personae stands before us as an objective figure in his entire bodily realization. In so far as here this statuesque figure is animated, assimilates and expresses the content of the poetry, enters into every movement of personal passion and at the same time asserts it through word and voice, this presentation is more animated and more spiritually transparent than any statue or picture.

As to this quality of living animation we may draw a distinction between two distinct ways of regarding it.

(αα) First, there is declamation in the sense of artistic speech. Declamation was not carried far among the Greeks; intelligibility is here what is of most importance. We desire to recognize in the tone of the voice and in the quality of the recitations the characterization of soul-life in its finest shades and transitions, as also in its oppositions and contrasts, in short, in its entire concreteness. The ancients, on the contrary, added a musical accompaniment to declamation, partly to emphasize rhythm, and in part to increase the modulation of the verbal expression. At the same time it is probable that the dialogue was either not at all or only very lightly accompanied. To the reproduction of the choruses, however, the lyric association of music was essential. It is highly probable that singing, by means of its more definite accentuation of the meaning of the language used in the choice strophes and antistrophes, made the same more intelligible; only under such an assumption can I myself understand how it was possible for a Greek audience to follow the choruses of either Æschylus or Sophocles. I admit that such choruses might not necessarily present to a Greek all the difficulties we ourselves experience; at the same time I confess that, though I know the German language well and am not wholly destitute of imagination, German lyrics written in the same style, if declaimed from the stage, even with the full accompaniment of song, would still be far from wholly intelligible.

(ββ) A further means of interpretation is supplied by the pose and movement of the body. In this respect it is worth noticing that with the Greeks the play of facial expression is entirely absent, by reason of the fact that their actors wore masks. The facial contour returned an unalterable sculpturesque image, the plastic outlines of which were as unable to assimilate the varied expression of particular states of soul, as to reproduce the acting characters, which fought through a pathos securely fixed and universal in the nature of its dramatic conflict, and neither deepened the substance of this pathos to the ideal intensity of our modern emotional life, nor suffered it to expand into all the particularization of the world of dramatic individualities now in vogue. The action was equally simple, for which reason we do not possess any tradition of famous Greek mimes. Sometimes the poet himself was actor; both Sophocles and Aristophanes are examples. To some extent the mere citizen, who was not strictly a professional actor at all, took a part in tragedy. As a set-off to such difficulties the choric songs were accompanied with the dance, a procedure which can only appear frivolous to us Germans in the view we generally take of the dance. With the Greeks it belonged as an essential feature to their theatrical performances.

(γγ) To summarize, then, we find that among the ancients not only was the poetical claim of language, and the intelligible expression of general emotional states, freely admitted, but also the external realization received the most complete elaboration by means of musical accompaniment and the dance. A concrete unity of this kind gives to the entire presentation a plastic character. What is spiritual is not on its own account idealized as part of a personal soul-life, nor is it expressed under such a mode of particularization; the main effect is to bring about its complete affiliation and reconciliation with the external aspect of sensuous appearance whose correspondent claim is equally recognized.

(β) In rivalry with music and the dance speech suffers injury, in so far as it ought to remain the spiritual expression of spirit. Our modern art of the theatre has consequently succeeded in liberating itself from such features. The poet is by this means exclusively placed in a relation to the actor simply, who, by his declamation, play of facial expression, and posture, has to represent to vision the poetical work. This relation of the author to the external material is, however, in its contrast to other arts, quite unique. In painting and sculpture it is the artist himself, who executes his conceptions in colour, bronze, or marble; and although musical execution is dependent upon the hands and voices of others, yet the feature thus added, albeit, of course, the element of soul in the delivery ought not to be absent, is none the less, to a more or less degree, overwhelmingly mechanical technique and virtuosity.22 The actor, on the contrary, appears before us in the entire personality which combines his bodily presence, physiognomy, voice, and so forth, and it is his function to coalesce absolutely with the character he portrays.

(αα) In this respect the poet has the right to demand of the actor that he enters with all his faculties into the part he receives, without adding thereto anything peculiar to himself, that, in short, he acts in complete consonance with the creative conception and means of its display supplied by the poet. The actor ought, in fact, to be the instrument upon which the author plays, an artist’s brush which absorbs all colours and returns the same unchanged. Among the ancients this was more easily achieved for the reason that declamation, as above stated, was mainly restricted to clarity of meaning, and music looked after the aspect of rhythm, while masks concealed the faces, and, moreover, not much scope was left to the action. Consequently, the actor could without real difficulty conform in his delivery to a universal tragic pathos; and although too, in comedy, portraits of living people such as Socrates, Nicias, Creon, and so forth, had to be represented, in a real measure the masks reproduced characteristic traits with sufficient force, and further we should note that a detailed individualization was less necessary, inasmuch as the comic poets, as a rule, merely introduced such characters in order to represent general tendencies of the time.

(ββ) The position is different in the modern theatre. Here, to start with, we have no masks or musical accompaniment, but have instead of these the play of facial expression, the variety of pose, and a richly modulated style of declamation. For, on the one hand, human passions, even when they are expressed by the poet in a more general and typical characterization, have none the less to be asserted as part of an inner and personal life; and for the rest our modern characters receive, for the most part, a far more extended compass of particularization, the distinctively appropriate expression of which has in the same way to be placed before us with all the animation of present life. The characters of Shakespeare are, above all, entire men, standing before us in distinctively unique personality, so that we require of our actors that they, for their part, give us back the entire impression of such complete creations. There is no specific rôle here that does not require a definite kind of expression fitted to it, and which covers in fact every feature of its display, whether we regard that which we cannot see or that which we do, whether it be in the tone of the voice, the mode of delivery, gesticulation, or facial expression. For this reason, apart from the nature of the dialogue, the varied character of the pose and gesture, through every possible shade, receives an entirely new significance. In fact, the modern poet leaves to the actor self-expression here much that the ancients would have expressed in words. Take the example of the final scene of Wallenstein. The old Octavio has assisted materially in the downfall of Wallenstein. He finds him treacherously murdered by the machinations of Buttler, and at the very moment when the Countess Terzky makes the announcement that she has taken poison, an imperial letter arrives. Gordon, after reading the same, hands it to Octavio with a glance of reproach, adding the words, “To the Lord Piccolomini.” Octavio is confounded, and, pained to the heart, glances heavenwards. That which Octavio experiences in this reward for a service, for the bloody issue of which he himself is mainly responsible, is in this passage not expressed in so many words, but is left solely to the gesture of the actor.

(γγ) Owing to demands of this kind made by our modern art of acting, poetry may, relatively to the material of its presentation, not unfrequently opens up difficulties unknown to the ancients. In other words, the actor, being the man he is, possesses, in respect to voice, figure, physiognomical expression, as everybody else, his native peculiarities, which he is compelled to set on one side, either owing to their incompatibility with a pathos of universal import and a really typical characterization, or to bring them into harmony with the more complete personalities of a type of poetry rich in its power of individualization.

Actors claim the title of artists, and receive all the honours of an artistic profession. According to our modern ideas, no taint of any sort, whether ethical or social, is implied in the fact of being a dramatic actor. This view is the right one. The profession demands conspicuous talent, intelligence, perseverance, energy, practice, knowledge, and, indeed, its highest attainment is impossible without the rare qualities of genius. The actor has not only to assimilate profoundly the spirit of the poet and the part he accepts, and to make his own individuality conform entirely to the same, both inwardly and outwardly; he has, over and above this, in many respects to supplement the part with his own creative insight, to fill in gaps, to discover modes of transition, and generally, by his performance, to interpret the poet by making visibly and vitally present and intelligible meanings which lie beneath the surface, or the less obvious touches of a master’s hand.

Finally, we shall have that further, or third aspect of the art in its actual employment, where it liberates itself from the exclusive precedency of articulate poetry, and accepts as an independent end what was previously, to a more or less extent, a mere accompaniment or instrument, and elaborates the same on its own account. To carry out this emancipation, music and the dance are quite as much essential features of the dramatic development as the art of the actor simply.

(α) In respect to this change in the art, there are broadly speaking two systems. The first, according to which the performer tends to be simply in spirit and body the living instrument of the poet, we have already referred to. The French, who make much of professional rôles23 and schools, and are, as a rule, more typical in their theatrical representations, have shown an exceptional fidelity to this system in their tragedy and haute comédie. What we may define here as the position of the art of acting reversed consists in this, that the entire creation of the poet now tends to be purely an appendage or frame to and for the natural endowment, technical ability, and art of the actor. It is by no means uncommon to hear actors make the demand that poets should write expressly for them. The soul function of poetical composition is, in this view, to give the artist an opportunity to display and unfold in all its brilliance his emotional powers and art, to let us see the final outcome of his particular individuality. Among the Italians, the commedia dell’ arte belongs to this type. Here, no doubt, we have certain definite types of character such as those of the arlecchino, dottore, and the like, with appropriate situations and series of scenes; the more detailed execution is, however, almost entirely left to the discretion of the actors. Among ourselves, the dramatic pieces of Iffland and Kotzebue, and many others besides, though in large measure regarded as poetry, unimportant or even bad compositions, nevertheless offer such an opportunity for the creative powers of the actor, who is compelled to initiate and shape something from such generally sketchy and artificial productions, which on account of a vital and independent performance of this kind receives a unique interest exclusively united to one and no other artist. It is here, more especially, that we find our much belauded realistic effects are displayed, a style carried to such lengths that a mere mumble and whisper of articulate speech, quite impossible to follow, will pass as an admirable performance. In protest to such a style, Goethe translated Voltaire’s “Tancred” and “Mahomet” for the Weimar stage, in order to compel its actors to drop this vulgar naturalism, and accustom themselves to a more noble exposition. And this is invariably the case with the French, who, even in all the animation of the farce, always keep the audience in view, and throughout address themselves to it. As a matter of fact, mere realism and imitation of our everyday expression is as little exhaustive of the real problem as the mere intelligibility and clever use made of characterization. If an actor seeks to produce a really artistic effect in such cases, he will have to extend his powers to a genial virtuosity similar to that I have described already in a previous passage when referring to musical execution.24

(β) A second province belonging to the type under consideration is that of the modern opera, in the direction, at least, which it more and more is inclined to take. In other words, although in opera, generally speaking, the music is of most importance, which of course possesses a content in partnership with the poetry and the libretto, albeit it treats and executes the same freely as it thinks best, yet in more recent times, and particularly among ourselves, it has become increasingly an affair of luxurious display. It has carried its accessoires, in the splendour of its decorations, the pomp of its costumes, the completeness of its choruses and their grouping, to a degree of independence that throws all else into the shade. It was a magnificence of this kind, sufficiently criticized among ourselves, which Cicero long ago complains of when referring to Roman tragedy. In tragedy, where the poetry is always the most essential thing, such a lavish display of the sensuous side of things is no doubt not in its right place, although Schiller, in his “Maid of Orleans,” shows a tendency here to run astray. In the opera, on the contrary, with its sensuous exuberance of song and the melodic, thundering chorus of voices and instruments, we may with more reason admit such an emphasized charm of external embellishment and display. If the decorations are splendid, then the groups and processions, to give point to them, must be equally gorgeous, and everything else must be adapted to the same scale. The subject most suited to a sensuous luxuriance of this kind, which, no doubt, is always some indication of the decline of genuine art, is that part of the entire performance which inclines to the wonderful, fantastic, or fairy tale. Mozart, in his “Magic Flute,” has supplied us with an example which is not too extravagant, and is worked out on completely artistic lines. At the same time, we may entirely exhaust all the arts of scenic display, costume, instrumentation and the rest, but the fact remains that, if we are not really in earnest with that part of the content which concerns real dramatic action, the impression upon us can be at the strongest merely that of a perusal of the fairy-tale of “The Thousand and One Nights.”

(γ) The same observations apply to the modern Ballet, which above all is most suited to fairy-land and miracle of all kinds. Here, too, we note as one supreme feature, quite apart from the picturesque beauty of the grouping and tableaux, the kaleidoscopic splendour and fascination of the decorations, costumes, and lighting, to an extent that ordinary persons find themselves transported into a world in which common sense and the laws and pressure of our daily life vanish altogether. As a further aspect of these performances, connoisseurs in such subjects will go into ecstacies over the elaborately trained dexterity and virtuosity of legs, which is nowadays an essential feature of the dance. If, however, any more spiritual significance is to flash athwart such mere physical agility, which we have reduced to the final ultimatum of senselessness and ideal poverty, we ought to have associated with the complete command over all the executive difficulties implied a real measure and euphony of movement, a freedom and grace such as finds a response in the soul; and it is only very rarely that we do so. As a further element in association with the dance here, which stands in the place of the choruses and solos of the opera, we find as real expression of action the Pantomime. This, however, in proportion as our modern dance has advanced in technical dexterity, has fallen from the rank which it once possessed, and, indeed, has so deteriorated that the very thing tends once more to drop out of the modern ballet altogether, which is alone able to lift the same into the free domain of art.

Viewing for a moment the course of our present inquiry in retrospect, it will be seen that we have, first, established the principle of dramatic poetry in its widest and more specific characteristics, and, further, in its relation to the general public. Secondly, we deduced from the fact of the drama’s presenting an action distinct and independent in its actually visible development the conclusion that a fully complete sensuous reproduction is also essential, such as is for the first time possible under artistic conditions in the theatrical performance. In order that the action, however, may adapt itself to an external realization of this kind, it is necessary that both in poetic conception and detailed execution it should be absolutely definite and complete. This is only effected, our third point, by resolving dramatic poetry into particular types, receiving their typical character, which is in part one of opposition and also one of mediatory relation to such opposition, from the distinction, in which not only the end but also the characters, as also the conflict and entire result of the action, are manifested. The most important aspects emphasized by such distinction and subject to an historical development are those peculiar to tragedy and comedy respectively, as also the comparative value of either mode of composition. This inquiry in dramatic poetry is for the first time so essentially important that it forms the basis of classification for the different types.

In considering more closely the nature of these distinctions we shall do well to discuss their subject-matter in the following order.

First, we must define the general principle of tragedy, comedy, and the so-called drama.

Secondly, we must indicate the character of ancient and modern dramatic poetry, to the contrast between which the distinctive relation of the above-named types is referable in their historical development.

Thirdly, we will attempt, in conclusion, to examine the concrete modes, which these types, though mainly comedy and tragedy, are able to exhibit within the boundary of this opposition.

(a) The Principle of Tragedy, Comedy, and the Drama, or Social Play

The essential basis of differentiation among the types of epic poetry is to be found in the distinction whether the essentially substantive displayed in the epic manner is expressed in its universality, or is communicated in the form of objective characters, exploits, and events. In contrast to this, the classification of lyric poetry, in its series of varied modes of expression, is dependent upon the degree and specific form in which the content is assimilated in more or less stable consistency with the soul experience, according as such content asserts this intimate life. And, finally, dramatic poetry, which accepts as its centre of significance the collision of aims and characters, as also the necessary resolution of such a conflict, cannot do otherwise than deduce the principle of its separate types from the relation in which individual persons are placed relatively to their purpose and its content. The definition of this relation is, in short, the decisive factor in the determination of the particular mode of dramatic schism and the issue therefrom, and consequently presents the essential type of the entire process in its animated and artistic display. The fundamental points we have to examine in this connection are, speaking broadly, those phases or features in the process, the mediation of which constitutes the essential purport of every true action. Such are from one point of view the substantively sound and great, the fundamental stratum of the realized divine nature in the world, regarded here as the genuine and essentially eternal content of individual character and end. And, on its other side, we have the personal conscious life simply as such in its unhampered power of self-determination and freedom. Without doubt, essential and explicit truth is asserted in dramatic poetry; it matters not in what form it may be manifested from time to time in human action. The specific type, however, within which this activity is made visible receives a distinct or, rather, actually opposed configuration, according as the aspect of substantive worth or in its opposition thereto, that of individual caprice, folly, and perversity is retained as the distinctive modus of operation either in individuals, actions, or conflicts.

We have therefore to consider the principle in its distinctive relation to the following types:

First, as associated with tragedy in its substantive and primitive form.

Secondly, in its relation to comedy, in which the life of the individual soul as such in volition and action, as well as the external factor of contingency, are predominant over all relations and ends.

Thirdly, in that to the drama, the theatrical piece in the more restricted use of the term, regarding such as the middle term between the two first-mentioned types.

(α) With respect to tragedy, I will here confine myself to a consideration of only the most general and essential characteristics, the more concrete differentiation of which can only be made clear by a review of the distinctive features implied in the stages of its historical process.

(αα) The genuine content of tragic action subject to the aims which arrest tragic characters is supplied by the world of those forces which carry in themselves their own justification, and are realized substantively in the volitional activity of mankind. Such are the love of husband and wife, of parents, children, and kinsfolk. Such are, further, the life of communities, the patriotism of citizens, the will of those in supreme power. Such are the life of churches, not, however, if regarded as a piety which submits to act with resignation, or as a divine judicial declaration in the heart of mankind over what is good or the reverse in action; but, on the contrary, conceived as the active engagement with and demand for veritable interests and relations. It is of a soundness and thoroughness consonant with these that the really tragical characters consist. They are throughout that which the essential notion of their character enables them and compels them to be. They are not merely a varied totality laid out in the series of views of it proper to the epic manner; they are, while no doubt remaining also essentially vital and individual, still only the one power of the particular character in question, the force in which such a character, in virtue of its essential personality, has made itself inseparably coalesce with some particular aspect of the capital and substantive life-content we have indicated above, and deliberately commits himself to that. It is at some such elevation, where the mere accidents of unmediated25 individuality vanish altogether, that we find the tragic heroes of dramatic art, whether they be the living representatives of such spheres of concrete life or in any other way already so derive their greatness and stability from their own free self-reliance that they stand forth as works of sculpture, and as such interpret, too, under this aspect the essentially more abstract statues and figures of gods, as also the lofty tragic characters of the Greeks more completely than is possible for any other kind of elucidation or commentary.

Broadly speaking, we may, therefore, affirm that the true theme of primitive tragedy is the godlike.26 But by godlike we do not mean the Divine, as implied in the content of the religious consciousness simply as such, but rather as it enters into the world, into individual action, and enters in such a way that it does not forfeit its substantive character under this mode of realization, nor find itself converted into the contradiction of its own substance.27 In this form the spiritual substance of volition and accomplishment is ethical life.28 For what is ethical, if we grasp it, in its direct consistency — that is to say, not exclusively from the standpoint of personal reflection as formal morality — is the divine in its secular or world realization, the substantive as such, the particular no less than the essential features of which supply the changing content of truly human actions, and in such action itself render this their essence explicit and actual.

(ββ) These ethical forces, as also the characters of the action, are distinctively defined in respect to their content and their individual personality, in virtue of the principle of differentiation to which everything is subject, which forms part of the objective world of things. If, then, these particular forces, in the way presupposed by dramatic poetry, are attached to the external expression of human activity, and are realized as the determinate aim of a human pathos which passes into action, their concordancy is cancelled, and they are asserted in contrast to each other in interchangeable succession. Individual action will then, under given conditions, realize an object or character, which, under such a presupposed state, inevitably stimulates the presence of a pathos29 opposed to itself, because it occupies a position of unique isolation in virtue of its independently fixed definition, and, by doing so, brings in its train unavoidable conflicts. Primitive tragedy, then, consists in this, that within a collision of this kind both sides of the contradiction, if taken by themselves, are justified; yet, from a further point of view, they tend to carry into effect the true and positive content of their end and specific characterization merely as the negation and violation of the other equally legitimate power, and consequently in their ethical purport and relatively to this so far fall under condemnation.

I have already adverted to the general ground of the necessity of this conflict. The substance of ethical condition is, when viewed as concrete unity, a totality of different relations and forces, which, however, only under the inactive condition of the gods in their blessedness achieve the works of the Spirit in enjoyment of an undisturbed life. In contrast to this, however, there is no less certainly implied in the notion of this totality itself an impulse to move from its, in the first instance, still abstract ideality, and transplant itself in the real actuality of the phenomenal world. On account of the nature of this primitive obsession,30 it comes about that mere difference, if conceived on the basis of definite conditions of individual personalities, must inevitably associate with contradiction and collision. Only such a view can pretend to deal seriously with those gods which, though they endure in their tranquil repose and unity in the Olympus and heaven of imagination and religious conception, yet, in so far as they are actual,31 viewed at least as the energic in the definite pathos of a human personality, participate in concrete life, all other claims notwithstanding, and, in virtue of their specific singularity and their mutual opposition, render both blame and wrong inevitable.

(γγ) As a result of this, however, an unmediated contradiction is posited, which no doubt may assert itself in the Real, but, for all that, is unable to maintain itself as that which is wholly substantive and verily real therein; which rather discovers, and only discovers, its essential justification in the fact that it is able to annul itself as such contradiction. In other words, whatever may be the claim of the tragic final purpose and personality, whatever may be the necessity of the tragic collision, it is, as a consequence of our present view, no less a claim that is asserted — this is our third and last point — by the tragic resolution of this division. It is through this latter result that Eternal Justice is operative in such aims and individuals under a mode whereby it restores the ethical substance and unity in and along with the downfall of the individuality which disturbs its repose. For, despite the fact that individual characters propose that which is itself essentially valid, yet they are only able to carry it out under the tragic demand in a manner that implies contradiction and with a onesidedness which is injurious. What, however, is substantive in truth, and the function of which is to secure realization, is not the battle of particular unities, however much such a conflict is essentially involved in the notion of a real world and human action; rather it is the reconciliation in which definite ends and individuals unite in harmonious action without mutual violation and contradiction. That which is abrogated in the tragic issue is merely the one-sided particularity which was unable to accommodate itself to this harmony, and consequently in the tragic course of its action, through inability to disengage itself from itself and its designs, either is committed in its entire totality to destruction or at least finds itself compelled to fall back upon a state of resignation in the execution of its aim in so far as it can carry this out. We are reminded of the famous dictum of Aristotle that the true effect of tragedy is to excite and purify fear and pity. By this statement Aristotle did not mean merely the concordant or discordant feeling with anybody’s private experience, a feeling simply of pleasure or the reverse, an attraction or a repulsion, that most superficial of all psychological states, which only in recent times theorists have sought to identify with the principle of assent or dissent as ordinarily expressed. For in a work of art the matter of exclusive importance should be the display of that which is conformable with the reason and truth of Spirit; and to discover the principle of this we have to direct our attention to wholly different points of view. And consequently we are not justified in restricting the application of this dictum of Aristotle merely to the emotion of fear and pity, but should relate it to the principle of the content the appropriately artistic display of which ought to purify such feelings. Man may, on the one hand, entertain fear when confronted with that which is outside him and finite; but he may likewise shrink before the power of that which is the essential and absolute subsistency of social phenomena.32 That which mankind has therefore in truth to fear is not the external power and its oppression, but the ethical might which is self-defined in its own free rationality, and partakes further of the eternal and inviolable, the power a man summons against his own being when he turns his back upon it. And just as fear may have two objectives, so also too compassion. The first is just the ordinary sensibility — in other words, a sympathy with the misfortunes and sufferings of another, and one which is experienced as something finite and negative. Your countrified cousin is ready enough with compassion of this order. The man of nobility and greatness, however, has no wish to be smothered with this sort of pity. For just to the extent that it is merely the nugatory aspect, the negative of misfortune which is asserted, a real depreciation of misfortune is implied. True sympathy, on the contrary, is an accordant feeling with the ethical claim at the same time associated with the sufferer — that is, with what is necessarily implied in his condition as affirmative and substantive. Such a pity as this is not, of course, excited by ragamuffins and vagabonds. If the tragic character, therefore, just as he aroused our fear when contemplating the might of violated morality, is to awake a tragic sympathy in his misfortune, he must himself essentially possess real capacity and downright character. It is only that which has a genuine content which strikes the heart of a man of noble feeling, and rings through its depths. Consequently we ought by no means to identify our interest in the tragic dénouement with the simple satisfaction that a sad story, a misfortune merely as misfortune, should have a claim upon our sympathy. Feelings of lament of this type may well enough assail men on occasions of wholly external contingency and related circumstance, to which the individual does not contribute, nor for which he is responsible, such cases as illness, loss of property, death, and the like. The only real and absorbing interest in such cases ought to be an eager desire to afford immediate assistance. If this is impossible, such pictures of lamentation and misery merely rack the feelings. A veritable tragic suffering, on the contrary, is suspended over active characters entirely as the consequence of their own act, which as such not only asserts its claim upon us, but becomes subject to blame through the collision it involves, and in which such individuals identify themselves heart and soul.

Over and above mere fear and tragic sympathy we have therefore the feeling of reconciliation, which tragedy is vouched for in virtue of its vision of eternal justice, a justice which exercises a paramount force of absolute constringency on account of the relative claim of all merely contracted aims and passions; and it can do this for the reason that it is unable to tolerate the victorious issue and continuance in the truth of the objective world of such a conflict with and opposition to those ethical powers which are fundamentally and essentially concordant.33 Inasmuch as then, in conformity with this principle, all that pertains to tragedy pre-eminently rests upon the contemplation of such a conflict and its resolution, dramatic poetry is — and its entire mode of presentation offers a proof of the fact — alone able to make and completely adapt its form throughout its entire course and compass to the principle of the art product. And this is the reason why I have only now found occasion to discuss the tragic mode of presentation, although it extends an effective force, if no doubt one of subordinate degree, in many ways over the other arts.

(β) In tragedy then that which is eternally substantive is triumphantly vindicated under the mode of reconciliation. It simply removes from the contentions of personality the false one-sidedness, and exhibits instead that which is the object of its volition, namely, positive reality, no longer under an asserted mediation of opposed factors, but as the real support of consistency.34 And in contrast to this in comedy it is the purely personal experience, which retains the mastery in its character of infinite self-assuredness.35 And it is only these two fundamental aspects of human action which occupy a position of contrast in the classification of dramatic poetry into its several types. In tragedy individuals are thrown into confusion in virtue of the abstract nature of their sterling volition and character, or they are forced to accept that with resignation, to which they have been themselves essentially opposed. In comedy we have a vision of the victory of the intrinsically assured stability of the wholly personal soul-life, the laughter of which resolves everything through the medium and into the medium of such life.

(αα) The general basis of comedy is therefore a world in which man has made himself, in his conscious activity, complete master of all that otherwise passes as the essential content of his knowledge and achievement; a world whose ends are consequently thrown awry on of their own lack of substance. A democratic folk, with egotistic citizens, litigious, frivolous, conceited, without faith or knowledge, always intent on gossip, boasting and vanity — such a folk is past praying for; it can only dissolve in its folly. But it would be a mistake to think that any action that is without genuine content is therefore comic because it is void of substance. People only too often in this respect confound the merely ridimlous with the true comic. Every contrast between what is essential and its appearance, the object and its instrument, may be ridiculous, a contradiction in virtue of which the appearance is absolutely cancelled, and the end is stultified in its realization. A profounder significance is, however, implied in the comic. There is, for instance, nothing comic in human crime. The satire affords a proof of this, to the point of extreme aridity, no matter how emphatic may be the colours in which it depicts the condition of the actual world in its contrast to all that the man of virtue ought to be. There is nothing in mere folly, stupidity, or nonsense, which in itself necessarily partakes of the comic, though we all of us are ready enough to laugh at it. And as a rule it is extraordinary what a variety of wholly different things excite human laughter. Matters of the dullest description and in the worst possible taste will move men in this way; and their laughter may be excited quite as much by things of the profoundest importance, if only they happen to notice some entirely unimportant feature, which may conflict with habit and ordinary experience. Laughter is consequently little more than an expression of self-satisfied shrewdness; a sign that they have sufficient wit to recognize such a contrast and are aware of the fact. In the same way we have the laughter of the scoffer, the scornful and desperation itself. What on the other hand is inseparable from the comic is an infinite geniality and confidence36 capable of rising superior to its own contradiction, and experiencing therein no taint of bitterness or sense of misfortune whatever. It is the happy frame of mind, a hale condition of soul, which, fully aware of itself, can suffer the dissolution of its aims and realization. The unexpansive type of intelligence is on the contrary least master of itself where it is in its behaviour most laughable to others.

(ββ) In considering with more detail the kind of content which characterizes and educes the object of comic action, I propose to limit myself to the following points of general interest.

On the one hand there are human ends and characters essentially devoid of substantive content and contradictory. They are therefore unable to achieve the former or give effect to the latter. Avarice, for example, not only in reference to its aim, but also in respect to the petty means which it employs, is clearly from the first and fundamentally a vain shadow. It accepts what is the dead abstraction of wealth, money simply as such, as the summum bonum, the reality beyond which it refuses to budge; and it endeavours to master this frigid means of enjoyment by denying itself every other concrete satisfaction, despite the fact too that, in the impotency of its end no less than the means of its achievement, it is helpless when confronted with cunning and treachery, and the like. In such a case then, if anyone identifies seriously his personal life with a content so essentially false, to the extent of a man confining the embrace of his soul-life to that exclusively, and in the result, if the same is swept away as his foot-hold, the more he strives to retain that former foot-hold, the more the life collapses in unhappiness — in such a picture as this what is most vital to the comic situation fails, as it does in every case where the predominant factors are simply on the one side the painfulness of the actual conditions, and on the other scorn and pleasure in such misfortune. There is therefore more of the true comic in the case where, it is true, aims intrinsically mean and empty would like to be achieved with an appearance of earnest solemnity and every kind of preparation, but where the individual himself, when he falls short of this, does not experience any real loss because he is conscious that what he strove after was really of no great importance, and is therefore able to rise superior with spontaneous amusement above the failure.

A situation which is the reverse of this occurs where people vaguely grasp at aims and a personal impression of real substance, but in their own individuality, as instruments to achieve this, are in absolute conflict with such a result. In such a case what substance there is only exists in the individual’s imagination, becomes a mere appearance to himself or others, which no doubt offers the show and virtue of what is thus of material import, but for this very reason involves end and personality, action and character in a contradiction, by reason of which the attainment of the imaged end or characterization is itself rendered impossible. An example of this is the “Ecclesiazusae” of Aristophanes, where the women who seek to advise and found a new political constitution, retain all the temperament and passions of women as before.

We may add to the above two divisions of classification, as a distinct basis for yet another, the use made of external accident, by means of the varied and extraordinary development of which situations are placed before us in which the objects desired and their achievement, the personal character and its external conditions are thrown into a comic contrast, and lead to an equally comic resolution.

(γγ) But inasmuch as the comic element wholly and from the first depends upon contradictory contrasts, not only of ends themselves on their own account, but also of their content as opposed to the contingency of the personal life and external condition, the action of comedy requires a resolution with even more stringency than the tragic drama. In other words, in the action of comedy the contradiction between that which is essentially true and its specific realization is more fundamentally asserted.

That which, however, is abrogated in this resolution is not by any means either the substantive being or the personal life as such.

And the reason of this is that comedy too, viewed as genuine art, has not the task set before it to display through its presentation what is essentially rational as that which is intrinsically perverse and comes to naught, but on the contrary as that which neither bestows the victory, nor ultimately allows any standing ground to folly and absurdity, that is to say the false contradictions and oppositions which also form part of reality. The masculine art of Aristophanes, for instance, does not turn into ridicule what is truly of ethical significance in the social life of Athens, namely genuine philosophy, true religious faith, but rather the spurious growth of the democracy, in which the ancient faith and the former morality have disappeared, such as the sophistry, the whining and querulousness of tragedy, the inconstant gossip, the love of litigation and so forth; in other words, it is those elements directly opposed to a genuine condition of political life, religion and art, which he places before us in their suicidal folly. Only in more modern times do we find in such a writer as Kotzebue the baseness possible which throws over moral excellence, and spares and strives to maintain that which only exists under a condition of sufferance. To as little extent, however, ought the individual’s private life suffer substantial injury in comedy. Or to put it otherwise, if it is merely the appearance and imagined presence of what is substantive, or if it is the essentially perverse and petty which is asserted, yet in the essential self stability of individual character the more exalted principle remains, which in its freedom reaches over and beyond the overthrow of all that such finite life comprises, and continues itself in its character of self-security and self-blessedness. This subjective life that we above all identify with comic personality has thus become master of all the phenomenal presence of the real. The mode of actual appearance adequate to what is, so to speak, substantive, has vanished out of it; and, if what is essentially without fundamental subsistence comes to naught with its mere pretence of being that which it is not, the individual asserts himself as master over such a dissolution, and remains at bottom unbroken and in good heart to the end.37

(γ) Midway between tragedy and comedy we have furthermore a third fundamental type of dramatic poetry, which is, however, of less distinctive importance, despite the fact that in it the essential difference between what is tragic and comic makes an effort to construct a bridge of mediation, or at least to effect some coalescence of both sides in a concrete whole without leaving either the one or the other in opposed isolation.

(αα) To this class we may, for example, refer the Satyric drama of the ancients, in which the principal action itself at least remains of a serious if not wholly tragic type, while the chorus of its Satyrs is in contrast to this treated in the comic manner. We may also include in such a class the tragic-comedy. Plautus gives an example of this in his “Amphitryo,” and indeed in the prologue, through verses given to Mercury, asserts this fact; the declamation runs as follows:

Quid contraxistis frontem? Quia Tragoediam

Dini futuram hanc? Deus sum: commutavero

Eamdem hanc, si voltis: faciam, ex Tragoedia

Comoedia ut sit, omnibus eisdem versibus.

Faciam ut conmista sit Tragicocomoedia.

He offers us as a reason for this intermixture the fact, that while gods and kings are represented among the dramatis personae, we have also in comic contrast to this the figure of the slave Sofia. With yet more frequency in modern dramatic poetry we have the interplay of tragic and comic situation; and this is naturally so, because in modern compositions the principle of an intimate personal life has its place too in tragedy, the principle which is asserted by comedy in all its freedom, and from the first has been predominant, forcing as it does into the background the substantive character of the content in which the ethical forces, I have referred to previously, are paramount.

(ββ) The profounder mediation, however, of tragic and comic composition in a new whole does not consist in the juxtaposition or alteration of these contradictory points of view, but in a mutual accommodation, which blunts the force of such opposition. The element of subjectivity, instead of being exercised with all the perversity of the comic drama, is steeped in the seriousness of genuine social conditions and substantial characters, while the tragic steadfastness of volition and the depth of collisions is so far weakened and reduced that it becomes compatible with a reconciliation of interests and a harmonious union of ends and individuals. It is under such a mode of conception that in particular the modern play and drama arise. The profound aspect of this principle, in this view of the playwright, consists in the fact that, despite the differences and conflicts of interests, passions and characters, an essentially harmonious reality none the less results from human action. Even the ancient world possesses tragedies, which accept an issue of this character. Individuals are not sacrificed, but maintained without serious catastrophe. In the “Eumenides” of Æschylus, for example, both parties there brought to judgment before the Areopagus, namely Apollo and the avenging Furies, have their claims to honorable consideration vindicated. Also in the “Philoctetes” the conflict between Neoptolemos and Philoctetes is disposed of through the divine interposition of Hercules and the advice he gives. They depart reconciled for Troy. In this case, however, the accommodation is due to a deus ex machinâ and the actual source of such is not traceable to the personal attitude of the parties themselves. In the modern play, however, it is the individual characters alone who find themselves induced by the course of their own action to such an abandonment of the strife, and to a reciprocal reconciliation of their aims and personalities. From this point of view the “Iphigeneia” of Goethe is a genuine model of a play of this kind, and it is more so than his “Tasso,” in which in the first place the reconciliation with Antonio is rather an affair of temperament and personal acknowledgment that Antonio possesses the genuine knowledge of life, which is absent from the character of Tasso, and along with this that the claim of ideal life, which Tasso had rigidly adhered to in its conflict with actual conditions, adaptability and grace of manners, retains its force throughout with an audience merely in an ideal sense, and relatively to actual conditions at most asserts itself as an excuse for the poet and a general sympathy for his position.

(γγ) As a rule, however, the boundary lines of their intermediate type fluctuate more than is the case with tragedy or comedy. It is also exposed to a further danger of breaking away from the true dramatic type, or ceasing to be genuine poetry. In other words, owing to the fact that the opposing factors, which have to secure a peaceful conclusion from out of their own division, are from the start not antithetical to one another with the emphasis asserted by tragedy; the poet is for this reason compelled to devote the full strength of his presentation to the psychological analysis of character, and to make the course of the situations a mere instrument of such characterization. Or, as an alternative, he admits a too extensive field for the display of the material aspect of historical or ethical conditions; and, under the pressure of such material, he tends to restrict his effort to keep the attention alive to the interest of the series of events evolved alone. To this class of composition we may assign a host of our more recent theatrical pieces, which rather aim at theatrical effect than claim to be poetry. They do not so much seek to affect us as genuine poetical productions as to reach our emotions generally as men and women; or they aim on the one hand simply at recreation, and on the other at the moral education of public taste; but while doing so they are almost equally concerned to provide ample opportunity to the actor for the display of his trained art and virtuosity in the most brilliant manner.

(b) The Difference between Ancient and Modern Dramatic Poetry

The same principle which offered us a basis for the classification of dramatic art into tragedy and comedy also will give us the essential points of arrest in the history of their development. The progress we find in this course of evolution can only appear after we have placed such particular phases in the process side by side for comparison and analysis. They subsist, in short, in the notion of dramatic action, with the result that on the one hand the entire composition and its theatrical execution emphasizes what is substantive in the ends, conflicts, and characters, and on the other that the personal factor of conscious and individual life constitutes the focal centre throughout.

(α) With regard to such an inquiry we may at once in the present work, which does not attempt to include an exhaustive history of art, leave out altogether those origins of dramatic art which we find among Oriental peoples. Despite the considerable progress made by Eastern poetry in the epic and certain types of lyrical composition the entire world-outlook of such peoples nevertheless from the first excludes an artistic development favourable to dramatic art. And the reason is that to genuine tragic action it is essential that the principle of individual freedom and independence, or at least that of self-determination, the will to find in the self the free cause and source of the personal act and its consequences, should already have been aroused; and we may observe that to a still more emphatic degree is this free claim of the personal life and its self-recognized imperium a necessary condition to the appearance of comedy. In the East we find in neither case such a condition satisfied. In particular remoteness from any and every attempt at real dramatic self-expression is that imposing sublimity of Mohammedan poetry, although from a certain point of view it is capable with real power of vindicating the claim of individual independence. But it necessarily fails, because it is an equally essential assumption of it that the One substantive Power overrules every created being and determines his irreversible destiny, and with all the more irresistible fatality in proportion as such a spirit is asserted. The justification of a particular content of individual action and of a personal life which explores its own most intimate substance, in the sense that dramatic art presupposes, is here impossible; indeed it is precisely in Mohammedanism that the subjugation of the individual self to the will of God is the more abstract in proportion as the One predominant Power, who rules the universe, is more abstractly conceived in his universality, and in the last instance will not tolerate one shred of particularity to remain. We consequently only find origins of dramatic composition among the Chinese and Hindoos. But here, too, so far as our present scanty evidence carries us, these do not so much amount to the execution of any free and individual action; they merely reflect the animated life of events and emotions under the mode of definite situations, which are displayed in their course as they actually happen.

(β) The true beginning of dramatic poetry we have consequently to seek among the Hellenes, with whom for the first time and in every respect the principle of free individuality renders the perfect elaboration of the classic type of art possible. Compatibly with this type of art, however, and in its relation to human action, individuality is only so far asserted as it directly demands the free animation of the essential content of human aims. That which pre-eminently is of valid force in ancient drama, therefore, whether it be tragedy or comedy, is the universal and essential content of the end, which individuals seek to achieve. In tragedy this is the ethical claim of human consciousness in view of the particular action in question, the vindication of the act on its own account. And in the old comedy, too, it is in the same way at least the general public interests which are emphasized, whether it be in statesmen and the mode in which they direct the State, questions of peace or war, the general public and its moral conditions, or the condition of philosophy and its decline. And it is owing to this that here neither the varied exposition of personal soul-life and exceptional character, nor the equally exceptional plot and intrigue can obtain the fullest play, nor does the main interest revolve so much around the fate of individuals. In the place of this interest for such particular aspects of the drama above all else sympathy is evoked and claimed for the simple conflict and issue of the essential powers of life, and for the godlike manifestations of the human heart,38 as distinctive representatives of which the heroes of tragedy are set before us in much the same way as that in which the figures of comedy make visible the general perversity of mankind, to the expression of which, in the reality of the actual present, even the fundamental institutions of public life have been corrupted.

(γ) In modern romantic poetry, on the contrary, it is the individual passion, the satisfaction of which can only be relative to a wholly personal end, generally speaking the destiny of some particular person or character placed under exceptional circumstances, which forms the subject-matter of all importance.

From such a point of view the poetic interest consists in that greatness of characters, which, in virtue of their imaginative power or their disposition and talents, display a spiritual39 elevation over their situations and actions no less than over the entire wealth of their soul-life, and show it as the real substance of political forces, though often, too, these may be obstructed and, indeed, annihilated in the stress of particular circumstances and the current of events; and we may add that in the greatness of such natures it is not infrequent to find that a power of recovery40 is further contained. With regard to the particular content of the action in this style of composition it is not therefore the ethical vindication and necessity, but rather the isolated individual and his conditions to which our interest is directed. From a standpoint such as this, therefore, a fundamental motive will arise in such qualities as love and ambition; indeed, crime itself is not excluded. But in the latter case we may easily find rocks ahead difficult indeed to clear. For an out and out criminal, and irrevocably so when he is weak and a thoroughly mean scamp, as is the hero in Milliner’s drama, “Crime,” is something more than a sorry sight. What we require therefore above all in such cases is at least the formal41 greatness of character and power of the personal life which is able to ride out everything that negates it, and which, without denial of its acts or, indeed, without being materially discomposed by them, is capable of accepting their consequences. And on the other side we find that those substantive ends, such as patriotism, family devotion, loyalty, and the rest, are by no means to be excluded, although for the individual persons concerned the main question of importance is not so much the substantive force as their own individuality. But in such cases as a rule they rather form the particular ground upon which such persons, viewed in the light of their private character, take their stand and engage in conflict, rather than have supplied what we may regard as the real and ultimate content of their volition and action.

And further, in conjunction with a personal self-assertion of this type we may have presented the full extension of individual idiosyncrasy, not merely in respect to the soul-life simply, but also in relation to external circumstances and conditions, within which the action proceeds. And it is owing to this that in distinctive form the simple conflicts which characterize more classical dramatic composition, we now meet with the variety and exuberance of the characters dramatized, the unforeseen surprises of the ever new and complicated developments of plot, the maze of intrigue, the contingency of events, and, in a word, all those aspects of the modern drama which claim our attention, and the unfettered appearance of which, as opposed to the overwhelming emphasis attached to what is essentially most fundamental in the content, accentuates the type of romantic art in its distinction from the classic type.

But again, even in the cases above indicated, and despite all this apparently untrammelled particularity, the whole ought to continue to be both dramatic and poetical. In other words, on the one hand, the harshness of the collision, which has to be fought through, ought to be visibly obliterated, and on the other, pre-eminently in tragedy, the predominant presence of a more exalted order of the world, whether we adopt the conception of Providence or Fatality, ought to plainly discover itself in and through the course and issue of the action.

Within the essential distinctions of conception and poetical achievement which we have just considered the different types of dramatic art assert themselves, and, for the first time in such association, and in so far as their development follows either one or the other direction, attain a really genuine completeness. We have, therefore, in concluding the present work, still to concentrate our inquiry upon the concrete mode under which they receive such a configuration.

(α) Excluding as we shall do for the reasons already given from our subject-matter the origins of such poetry in Oriental literature, the material of first and fundamental importance which engages our attention, as the most valuable phase of genuine tragedy no less than comedy, is the dramatic poetry of the Greeks. In other words, in it for the first time we find the human consciousness is illuminated with that which in its general terms the tragic and comic situation essentially is; and after that these opposed types of dramatic outlook upon human action have been securely and beyond all confusion separated from each other, we mark first in order tragedy, and after that comedy, rise in organic development to the height of their achievement. Of such a successful result the dramatic art of Rome merely returns a considerably attenuated reflection, which does not indeed reach the point secured by the similar effort of Roman literature in epic and lyrical composition. In my examination of the material thus offered my object will be merely to accentuate what is most important, and I shall therefore limit my survey to the tragic point of view of Æschylus and Sophocles, and to Aristophanes so far as comedy is concerned.

(αα) Taking, then, tragedy first, I have already stated that the fundamental type which determines its entire organization and structure is to be sought for in the emphasis attached to the substantive constitution of final ends and their content, as also of the individuals dramatized and their conflict and destiny.

In the tragic drama we are now considering, the general basis or background for tragic action is supplied, as was also the case in the Epos, by that world-condition which I have already indicated as the heroic. For only in heroic times, when the universal ethical forces have neither acquired the independent stability of definite political legislation or moral commands and obligations, can they be presented in their primitive jucundity as gods, who are either opposed to each other in their personal activities, or themselves appear as the animated content of a free and human individuality. If, however, what is intrinsically ethical is to appear throughout as the substantive foundation, the universal ground, shall we say, from which the growth of personal action arrests our attention with equal force in its disunion, and is no less brought back again from such divided movement into unity, we shall find that there are two distinct modes under which the ethical content of human action is asserted.

First we have the simple consciousness, which, in so far as it wills its substantive content42 wholly as the unbroken identity of its particular aspects, remains in undisturbed, uncriticized, and neutral tranquillity on its own account and as related to others. This undivided and, we may add, purely formal43 state of mind in its veneration, its faith, and its happiness, however, is incapable of attaching itself to any definite action; it has a sort of dread before the disunion which is implied in such, although it does, while remaining itself incapable of action, esteem at the same time that spiritual courage which asserts itself resolutely and actively in a self-proposed object, as of nobler worth, yet is aware of its inability to undertake such enterprize, and consequently considers that it can do nothing further for such active personalities, whom it respects so highly, than contrast with the energy of their decision and conflict the object of its own wisdom, in other words, the substantive ideality of the ethical Powers.

The second mode under which this ethical content is asserted is that of the individual pathos,44 which urges the active characters to their moral self-vindication into the opposition they occupy relatively to others, and brings them thereby into conflict. The individuals subject to this pathos are neither what, in the modern use of the term, we describe as characters, nor are they mere abstractions. They are rather placed in the vital midway sphere between both, standing there as figures of real stability, which are simply that which they are, without aught of collision in themselves, without any fluctuating recognition of some other pathos, and in so far — in this respect a contrast to our modern irony — elevated, absolutely determinate characters, whose definition, however, discovers its content and basis in a particular ethical power. Forasmuch as, then, the tragic situation first appears in the antagonism of individuals who are thus empowered to act, the same can only assert itself in the field of actual human life. It results from the specific character of this alone that a particular quality so affects the substantive content of a given individual, that the latter identifies himself with his entire interest and being in such a content, and penetrates it throughout with the glow of passion. In the blessed gods, however, it is the divine Nature, in its indifference, which is what is essential; in contrast to which we have the contradiction, which in the last instance is not treated seriously, rather is one which, as I have already noticed when discussing the Homeric Epos, becomes eventually a self-resolving irony. These two modes or aspects — of which the one is as important for the whole as the other — namely, the unsevered consciousness of the godlike, and the combating human action, asserted, however, in godlike power and deed, which determines and executes the ethical purpose — supply the two fundamental elements, the mediation of which is displayed by Greek tragedy in its artistic compositions under the form of chorus and heroic figures respectively.

In modern times, considerable discussion has been raised over the significance of the Greek chorus, and the question has been raised incidentally whether it can or ought to be introduced into modern tragedy. In fact, the need of some such substantial foundation has been experienced; but critics have found it difficult to prescribe the precise manner in which effect should be given to such a change, because they failed to grasp with sufficient penetration the nature of that in which true tragedy consists and the necessity of the chorus as an essential constituent of all that Greek tragedy implies. Critics have, no doubt, recognized the nature of the chorus to the extent of maintaining that in it we find an attitude of tranquil meditation over the whole, whereas the characters of the action remain within the limits of their particular objects and situations, and, in short, receive in the chorus and its observations a standard of valuation of their characters and actions in much the same way as the public discovers in it, and within the drama itself, an objective representative of its own judgment upon all that is thus represented. In this view we have to this extent the fact rightly conceived, that the chorus is, in truth, there as a substantive and more enlightened intelligence, which warns us from irrelevant oppositions, and reflects upon the genuine issue. But, granting this to be so, it is by no means a wholly disinterested person, at leisure to entertain such thoughts and ethical judgments as it likes as are the spectators, which, uninteresting and tedious on its own account, could only be attached for the sake of such reflections. The chorus is the actual substance of the heroic life and action itself: it is, as contrasted with the particular heroes, the common folk regarded as the fruitful heritage, out of which individuals, much as flowers and towering trees from their native soil, grow and whereby they are conditioned in this life. Consequently, the chorus is peculiarly fitted to a view of life in which the obligations of State legislation and settled religious dogmas do not, as yet, act as a restrictive force in ethical and social development, but where morality only exists in its primitive form of directly animated human life, and it is merely the equilibrium of unmoved life which remains assured in its stability against the fearful collisions which the antagonistic energies of individual action produces. We are made aware of the fact that an assured asylum of this kind is also a part of our actual existence by the presence of the chorus. It does not, therefore, practically co-operate with the action; it executes by its action no right as against the contending heroes; it merely expresses its judgment as a matter of opinion; it warns, commiserates, or appeals to the divine law, and the ideal forces imminent in the soul, which the imagination grasps in external guise as the sphere of the gods that rule. In this self-expression it is, as we have already seen, lyrical; for it does not act and there are no events for it to narrate in epical form. The content, however, retains at the same time the epic character of substantive universality; and its lyric movement is of such a nature that it can, and in this respect in contrast to the form of the genuine ode, approach at times that of the paean and the dithyramb. We must lay emphatic stress upon this position of the chorus in Greek tragedy. Just as the theatre itself possesses its external ground, its scene and environment, so, too, the chorus, that is the general community, is the spiritual scene; and we may compare it to the architectural temple which surrounds the image of the god, which resembles the heroes in the action. Among ourselves, statues are placed under the open sky without such a background, which also modern tragedy does not require, for the reason that its actions do not depend on this substantive basis, but on the personal volition and personality, no less than the apparently external contingency of events and circumstances.

In this respect it is an entirely false view which regards the chorus as an accidental piece of residuary baggage, a mere remnant from the origins of Greek drama. Of course, it is incontestable that its source is to be traced to the circumstance that, in the festivals of Bacchus, so far as the artistic aspect is concerned, the choral song was of most importance until the introduction and interruption of its course by one reciter, whose relation finally was transformed into and exalted by the real figures of dramatic action. In the blossoming season of tragedy, however, the chorus was not by any means merely retained in honour of this particular phase of the festival and ritual of the god Bacchus; rather it became continuously more elaborate in its beauty and harmonious measures by reason of the fact that its association with the dramatic action is essential and, indeed, so indispensable to it that the decline of tragedy is intimately connected with the degeneration of the choruses, which no longer remain an integral member of the whole, but are degraded to a mere embellishment. In contrast to this, in romantic tragedy, the chorus is neither intrinsically appropriate nor does it appear to have originated from choric songs. On the contrary, the content is here of a type which defeats from the first any attempt to introduce choruses as understood by Greek dramatists. For, even if we go back to the most primitive of those so-called mysteries, morality plays and farces of a similar character, from which the romantic drama issued, we find that these present no action in that original Greek sense of the term, no outbreak, that is, of opposing forces from the undivided consciousness of life and the god-like. To as little extent is the chorus adapted to the conditions of chivalry and the dominion of kings, in so far as, in such cases, the attitude of the folk is one of mere obedience, or it is itself a party, involved together with the interest of its fortune or misfortune in the course of the action. And in general the chorus entirely fails to secure its true position where the main subject-matter consists of particular passions, ends, and characters, or any considerable opportunity is admitted to intrigue.

In contrast to the chorus, the second fundamental feature of dramatic composition is that of the individuals who act in conflict with each other. In Greek tragedy it is not at all the bad will, crime, worthlessness, or mere misfortune, stupidity, and the like, which act as an incentive to such collisions, but rather, as I have frequently urged, the ethical right to a definite course of action.45 Abstract evil neither possesses truth in itself, nor does it arouse interest. At the same time, when we attribute ethical traits of characterization to the individuals of the action, these ought not to appear merely as a matter of opinion. It is rather implied in their right or claim that they are actually there as essential on their own account. The hazards of crime, such as are present in modern drama — the useless, or quite as much the so-called noble criminal, with his empty talk about fate, we meet with in the tragedy of ancient literature, rarely, if at all, and for the good reason that the decision and deed depends on the wholly personal aspect of interest and character, upon lust for power, love, honour, or other similar passions, whose justification has its roots exclusively in the particular inclination and individuality. A resolve of this character, whose claim is based upon the content of its object, which it carries into execution in one restricted direction of particularization, violates, under certain circumstances, which are already essentially implied in the actual possibility of conflicts, a further and equally ethical sphere of human volition, which the character thus confronted adheres to, and, by his thus stimulated action, enforces, so that in this way the collision of powers and individuals equally entitled to the ethical claim is completely set up in its movement.

The sphere of this content,46 although capable of great variety of detail, is not in its essential features very extensive. The principal source of opposition, which Sophocles in particular, in this respect following the lead of Æschylus, has accepted and worked out in the finest way, is that of the body politic, the opposition, that is, between ethical life in its social universality and the family as the natural ground of moral relations. These are the purest forces of tragic representation. It is, in short, the harmony of these spheres and the concordant action within the bounds of their realized content, which constitute the perfected reality of the moral life. In this respect I need only recall to recollection the “Seven before Thebes” of Æschylus and, as a yet stronger illustration, the “Antigone” of Sophocles. Antigone reverences the ties of blood-relationship, the gods of the nether world. Creon alone recognizes Zeus, the paramount Power of public life and the commonwealth. We come across a similar conflict in the “Iphigeneia in Aulis,” as also in the “Agamemnon,” the “Choephorae,” and “Eumenides” of Æschylus, and in the “Electra” of Sophocles. Agamemnon, as king and leader of his army, sacrifices his daughter in the interest of the Greek folk and the Trojan expedition. He shatters thereby the bond of love as between himself and his daughter and wife, which Clytemnestra retains in the depths of a mother’s heart, and in revenge prepares an ignominious death for her husband on his return. Orestes, their son, respects his mother, but is bound to represent the right of his father, the king, and strikes dead the mother who bore him.

A content of this type retains its force through all times, and its presentation, despite all difference of nationality, vitally arrests our human and artistic sympathies.

Of a more formal type is that second kind of essential collision, an illustration of which in the tragic story of Œdipus the Greek tragedians especially favoured. Of this Sophocles has left us the most complete example in his “Œdipus Rex,” and “Œdipus in Colonos.” The problem here is concerned with the claim of alertness in our intelligence, with the nature of the obligation47 implied in that which a man carries out with a volition fully aware of its acts as contrasted with that which he has done in fact, but unconscious of and with no intention of doing what he has done under the directing providence of the gods. Œdipus slays his father, marries his mother, begets children in this incestuous alliance, and nevertheless is involved in these most terrible of crimes without active participation either in will or knowledge. The point of view of our profounder modern consciousness of right and wrong would be to recognize that crimes of this description, inasmuch as they were neither referable to a personal knowledge or volition, were not deeds for which the true personality of the perpetrator was responsible. The plastic nature of the Greek on the contrary adheres to the bare fact which an individual has achieved, and refuses to face the division implied by the purely ideal attitude of the soul in the self-conscious life on the one hand and the objective significance of the fact accomplished on the other.

For ourselves, to conclude this survey, other collisions, which either in general are related to the universally accepted association of personal action to the Greek conception of Destiny, or in some measure to more exceptional conditions, are comparatively speaking less important.

In all these tragic conflicts, however, we must above all place on one side the false notion of guilt or innocence. The heroes of tragedy are quite as much under one category as the other. If we accept the idea as valid that a man is guilty only in the case that a choice lay open to him, and he deliberately decided on the course of action which he carried out, then these plastic figures of ancient drama are guiltless. They act in accordance with a specific character, a specific pathos, for the simple reason that they are this character, this pathos. In such a case there is no lack of decision and no choice. The strength of great characters consists precisely in this that they do not choose, but are entirely and absolutely just that which they will and achieve. They are simply themselves, and never anything else, and their greatness consists in that fact. Weakness in action, in other words, wholly consists in the division of the personal self as such from its content, so that character, volition and final purpose do not appear as absolutely one unified growth; and inasmuch as no assured end lives in the soul as the very substance of the particular personality, as the pathos and might of the individual’s entire will, he is still able to turn with indecision from this course to that, and his final decision is that of caprice. A wavering attitude of this description is alien to these plastic creations. The bond between the psychological state of mind and the content of the will is for them indissoluble. That which stirs them to action is just in this very pathos which implies an ethical justification and which, even in the pathetic aspects of the dialogue, is not enforced in and through the merely personal rhetoric of the heart and the sophistry of passion, but in the equally masculine and cultivated objective presence, in the profound possibilities, the harmony and vitally plastic beauty of which Sophocles was to a superlative degree master. At the same time, however, such a pathos, with its potential resources of collision, brings in its train deeds that are both injurious and wrongful. They have no desire to avoid the blame that results therefrom. On the contrary, it is their fame to have done what they have done. One can in fact urge nothing more intolerable against a hero of this type than by saying that he has acted innocently. It is a point of honour with such great characters that they are guilty. They have no desire to excite pity or our sensibilities. For it is not the substantive, but rather the wholly personal deepening48 of the individual character, which stirs our individual pain. These securely strong characters, however, coalesce entirely with their essential pathos, and this indivisible accord inspires wonder, but does not excite heart emotions. The drama of Euripides marks the transition to that.

The final result, then, of the development of tragedy conducts us to this issue and only this, namely, that the twofold vindication of the mutually conflicting aspects are no doubt retained, but the onesided mode under which they were maintained is cancelled, and the undisturbed ideal harmony brings back again that condition of the chorus, which attributes without reserve equal honour to all the gods. The true course of dramatic development consists in the annulment of contradictions viewed as such, in the reconciliation of the forces of human action, which alternately strive to negate each other in their conflict. Only so far is misfortune and suffering not the final issue, but rather the satisfaction of spirit, as for the first time, in virtue of such a conclusion, the necessity of all that particular individuals experience, is able to appear in complete accord with reason, and our emotional attitude is tranquillized on a true ethical basis, rudely shaken by the calamitous result to the heroes, but reconciled in the substantial facts. And it is only in so far as we retain such a view securely that we shall be in a position to understand ancient tragedy. We have to guard ourselves therefore from concluding that a dénouement of this type is merely a moral issue conformably to which evil is punished and virtue rewarded, as indicated by the proverb that “when crime turns to vomit, virtue sits down at table.” We have nothing to do here with this wholly personal aspect of a self-reflecting personality and its conception of good and evil, but are concerned with the appearance of the affirmative reconciliation and with the equal validity of both the powers engaged in actual conflict, when the collision actually took place. To as little extent is the necessity of the issue a blind destiny, or in other words a purely irrational, unintelligible fate, identified with the classical world by many; rather it is the rationality of destiny, albeit it does not as yet appear as self-conscious Providence, the divine final end of which in conjunction with the world and individuals appears on its own account and for others, depending as it does on just this fact that the highest Power paramount over particular gods and mankind cannot suffer this, namely, that the forces, which affirm their selfsubsistence in modes that are abstract or incomplete, and thereby overstep the boundary of their warrant, no less than the conflicts which result from them, should retain their self-stability. Fate drives personality back upon its limits, and shatters it, when it has grown overweening. An irrational compulsion, however, an innocence of suffering would rather only excite indignation in the soul of the spectator than ethical tranquillity. From a further point of view, therefore, the reconciliation of tragedy is equally distinct from that of the Epos. If we look at either Achilles or Odysseus in this respect we observe that both attain their object, and it is right that they do so; but it is not a continuous happiness with which they are favoured; they have on the contrary to taste in its bitterness the feeling of finite condition, and are forced to fight wearily through difficulties, losses and sacrifices. It is in fact a universal demand of truth that in the course of life and all that takes place in the objective world the nugatory character of finite conditions should compel attention. So no doubt the anger of Achilles is reconciled; he obtains from Agamemnon that in respect of which he had suffered the sense of insult; he is revenged upon Hector; the funeral rites of Patroclus are consummated, and the character of Achilles is acknowledged in all its glory. But his wrath and its reconciliation have for all that cost him his dearest friend, the noble Patroclus; and, in order to avenge himself upon Hector for this loss, he finds himself compelled to disengage himself from his anger, to enter once more the battle against the Trojans, and in the very moment when his glory is acknowledged receives the prevision of his early death. In a similar way Odysseus reaches Ithaca at last, the goal of his desire; but he does so alone and in his sleep, having lost all his companions, all the war-booty from Ilium, after long years of endurance and fatigue. In this way both heroes have paid their toll to finite conditions and the claim of nemesis is evidenced in the destruction of Troy and the misfortunes of the Greek heroes. But this nemesis is simply justice as conceived of old, which merely humiliates what is everywhere too exalted, in order to establish once more the abstract balance of fortune by the instrumentality of misfortune, and which merely touches and affects finite existence without further ethical signification. And this is the justice of the Epic in the field of objective fact, the universal reconciliation of what is simply accommodation.49 The higher conception of reconciliation in tragedy is on the contrary related to the resolution of specific ethical and substantive facts from their contradiction into their true harmony. The way in which such an accord is established is asserted under very different modes; I propose therefore merely to direct attention to the fundamental features of the actual process herein involved.

Firsts we have particularly to emphasize the fact, that if it is the onesidedness of the pathos which constitutes the real basis of collisions this merely amounts to the statement that it is asserted in the action of life, and therewith has become the unique pathos of a particular individual. If this one-sidedness is to be abrogated then it is this individual which, to the extent that his action is exclusively identified with this isolated pathos, must perforce be stripped and sacrificed. For the individual here is merely this single life, and, if this unity is not secured in its stability on its own account, the individual is shattered.

The most complete form of this development is possible when the individuals engaged in conflict relatively to their concrete or objective life appear in each case essentially involved in one whole, so that they stand fundamentally under the power of that against which they battle, and consequently infringe that, which, conformably to their own essential life, they ought to respect. Antigone, for example, lives under the political authority of Creon; she is herself the daughter of a king and the affianced of Haemon, so that her obedience to the royal prerogative is an obligation. But Creon also, who is on his part father and husband, is under obligation to respect the sacred ties of relationship, and only by breach of this can give an order that is in conflict with such a sense. In consequence of this we find immanent in the life of both that which each respectively combats, and they are seized and broken by that very bond which is rooted in the compass of their own social existence. Antigone is put to death before she can enjoy what she looks forward to as bride, and Creon too is punished in the fatal end of his son and wife, who commit suicide, the former on account of Antigone’s death, and the latter owing to Haemon’s. Among all the fine creations of the ancient and the modern world — and I am acquainted with pretty nearly everything in such a class, and one ought to know it, and it is quite possible — the “Antigone” of Sophocles is from this point of view in my judgment the most excellent and satisfying work of art.

The tragic issue does not, however, require in every case as a means of removing both over-emphasized aspects and the equal honour which they respectively claim the downfall of the contestant parties. The “Eumenides” does not end, as we all know, with the death of Orestes, or the destruction of the Eumenides, these avenging spirits of matricide and filial affection, these opponents of Apollo, who seeks to protect unimpaired the worth of and reverence for the family chief and king, the god who had prompted Orestes to slay Clytaemnestra, but will have Orestes released from the punishment and honour bestowed on both himself and the Furies. At the same time we cannot fail to see in this adjusted conclusion the nature of the authority which the Greeks attached to their gods when they presented them as mere individuals contending with each other. They appear, in short, to the Athenian of everyday life merely as definite aspects of ethical experience which the principles of morality viewed in their complete and harmonious coherence bind together. The votes of the Areopagus are equal on either side. It is Athene, the goddess, the life of Athens, that is, imagined in its essential unity, who adds the white pebble, who frees Orestes, and at the same time promises altars and a cult to the Eumenides no less than Apollo. As a contrast to this type of objective reconciliation the settlement may be, secondly, of a more personal character. In other words, the individual concerned in the action may in the last instance surrender his onesided point of view. In this betrayal by personality of its essential pathos, however, it cannot fail to appear destitute of character; and this contradicts the masculine integrity of such plastic figures. The individual, therefore, can only submit to a higher Power and its counsel or command, to the effect that while on his own account he adheres to such a pathos, the will is nevertheless broken in its bare obstinacy by a god’s authority. In such a case the knot is not loosened, but, as in the case of Philoctetes, it is severed by a deus ex machinâ.

But as a further and final class, and one more beautiful than the above rather external mode of resolution we have the reconciliation more properly of the soul itself, in which respect there is, in virtue of the personal significance, a real approach to our modern point of view. The most perfect example of this in ancient drama is to be found in the ever admirable “Œdipus Coloneus” of Sophocles. The protagonist here has unwittingly slain his father, secured the sceptre of Thebes, and the bridal bed of his own mother. He is not rendered unhappy by these unwitting crimes; but the power of divination he has of old possessed makes him realize, despite himself, the darkness of the experience that confronts him, and he becomes fearfully, if indistinctly, aware of what his position is.50 In this resolution of the riddle in himself he resembles Adam, losing his happiness when he obtains the knowledge of good and evil. What he then does, the seer, is to blind himself, then abdicate the throne and depart from Thebes, very much as Adam and Eve are driven from Paradise. From henceforward he wanders about a helpless old man. Finally a god calls the terribly afflicted man to himself,51 the man, that is, who refusing the request of his sons that he should return to Thebes, prefers to associate with the Erinnys; the man, in short, who extinguishes all the disruption in himself and who purifies himself in his own soul. His blind eyes are made clear and bright, his limbs are healed, and become a treasure of the city which received him as a free guest. And this illumination in death is for ourselves no less than for him the more truly visible reconciliation which is worked out both in and for himself as individual man, in and through, that is, his essential character. Critics have endeavoured to discover here the temper of the Christian life; we are told we have here the picture of a sinner, whom God receives into His grace; and the fateful misfortunes which expire in their finite condition, are made good with the seal of blessedness in death. The reconciliation of the Christian religion, however, is an illumination of the soul, which, bathed in the everlasting waters of salvation, is raised above mortal life and its deeds. Here it is the heart itself, for in such a view the spiritual life can effect this, which buries that life and its deed in the grave of the heart itself, counting the recriminations of earthly guilt as part and parcel of its own earthly individuality; and which, in the full assuredness of the eternally pure and spiritual condition of blessedness, holds itself in itself calm and steadfast against such impeachment. The illumination of Œdipus, on the contrary, remains throughout, in consonance with ancient ideas, the restoration of conscious life from the strife of ethical powers and violations to the renewed and harmonious unity of this ethical content itself.52

There is a further feature in this type of reconciliation, however, and that is the personal or ideal nature of the satisfaction. We may take this as a point of transition to the otherwise to be contrasted province of comedy.

(ββ) That which is comic is, as we have already seen, in general terms the subjective or personal state, which forces and then dissolves the action which issues from it by its own effect into and in contradiction, remaining throughout and in virtue of this process tranquil in its own self-assurance. Comedy possesses, therefore, for its basis and point of departure that with which it is possible for tragedy to terminate, that is, a soul to the fullest extent and eventually reconciled, a joyous state, which, however much it is instrumental in the marring of its volitional power, and, indeed, in itself comes to grief, by reason of its asserting voluntarily what is in conflict with its aim, does not therefore lose its general equanimity. A personal self-assurance of this character, however is, from a further point of view, only possible in so far as the ends proposed, and withal the characters include nothing that is on its own account essentially substantive; or, if they do possess such an intrinsic worth, it is adopted and carried out intentionally under a mode which is totally opposed to the genuine truth contained, in a form, therefore, that is destitute of such truth, so that in this respect, as in the previous case, it is merely that which is itself essentially of no intrinsic importance, but a matter of indifference which is marred, and the individual remains just as he was and unaffected.

Such a view is, too, in its general lines the conception of the old classic comedy, in so far as tradition reflects it in the plays of Aristophanes. We should, however, be careful to notice the distinction whether the individuals in the play are aware that they are comic, or are so merely from the spectator’s point of view. It is only the first class that we can reckon as part of the genuine comedy in which Aristophanes was a master. Conformably to such a type a character is only placed in a ridiculous situation, when we perceive that he himself is not serious in what is actually of such a quality in his purpose and voluntary effort, so that this constituent of either is throughout the means of his own undoing, inasmuch as throughout such a character is unable to enter into any more noble and universally valid interest, which necessarily involves it in a situation of conflict;53 and, even assuming that he does actually partake of it, merely does so in a way that shows a nature, which, in virtue of its practical existence, has already annihilated that which it appears to strive to bring into operation, so that after all one sees such a coalescence has never been really effected. The comic comes, therefore, rather into play among classes of a lower social order in actual conditions of life, among men who remain much as they are, and neither are able or desire to be anything else; who, while incapable of any genuine pathos, have no doubt whatever as to what they are and do. At the same time the higher nature that is in them is asserted in this that they are not with any seriousness attached to the finite conditions which hem them in, but remain superior to the same and in themselves essentially steadfast and self-reliant against mishap and loss. This absolute freedom of spirit, which brings its own essential comfort from the first in all that a man undertakes, this world of the blitheness of human soul-life is that to which Aristophanes conducts us. Without a reading of him it is hardly possible to imagine what a wealth of exuberance there is in the human heart.

The interests among which this type of comedy moves are not necessarily taken from the opposed spheres of religion, morality, and art. On the contrary the old Greek comedy remains no doubt within the limits of this positive and substantive content of human life; but it is the individual caprice, the vulgar folly and perversity, by reason of which the characters concerned bring to nought activities which in their aim have a finer significance. And in this respect an ample and very pertinent material is supplied Aristophanes partly by Greek gods, and partly by the life of the Athenian people. In other words, the configuration of the divine in human impersonation itself possesses, in its mode of presentation and its particularization, to the extent at least that it is further enforced in opposition to that which is merely one-sided and human, the contradiction that is opposed to the nobility of its significance; it is thus permitted to appear as a purely empty extension of this personal life which is inadequate wholly to express it. More particularly, however, Aristophanes revels in the follies of the common folk, the stupidities of its orators and statesmen, the blockheadedness of war, and is eager, above all, and with all the politeness of his satire and the full weight of his ridicule, but also not without the profoundest meaning, to hand over the new tendencies of the tragedies of Euripides to the laughter of his fellow-citizens. The characters he has imported into the substance of his amazing artistic creations he runs into the mould of fool from the start with a sportive fancy that seems inexhaustible, so that the very idea of a rational result is impossible. He treats all alike, whether it be a Strepsiades, who will join the ranks of philosophers in order to be rid of his debts, or a Socrates, who offers to instruct the aforesaid Strepsiades and his son, or Bacchus, whom he makes descend into the lower world, in order to bring up a genuine tragic poet, and in just the same way Cleon, the women and the Greeks, who would like to pump up the goddess of Peace from the well. The key-note that we find in all these various creations is the imperturbable self-assurance of such characters one and all, which becomes all the more emphatic in proportion as they prove themselves incapable of carrying into effect that which they project. Our fools here are so entirely unembarrassed in their folly, and also the more sensible among them possess such a tincture of that which runs contrary to the very course upon which they are set, that they all, the more sensible with the rest, remain fixed to this personal attitude of prodigious imperturbility, no matter what comes next or where it carries them. It is in fact the blessed laughter of the Olympian gods, with their untroubled equanimity, now at home in the human breast, and prepared for all contingences. And withal we never find Aristophanes merely a cold or evil-disposed mocker. He was a man of the finest education, a most exemplary citizen, to whom the weal of Athens was of really deep importance, and who through thick and thin shows himself to be a true patriot. What therefore is in the fullest sense resolved in his comedies is, as already stated, not the divine and what is of ethical import, but the thoroughgoing upside-down-ness which inflates itself into the semblance of these substantive forces, the particular form and distinctive mode of its manifestation, in which the essential thing or matter is already from the first no longer present, so that it can without restriction be simply handed over to the unconcerned play of unqualified personal caprice. But for the very reason that Aristophanes makes explicit the absolute contradiction between the essential nature of the gods, or that of political and social life, and the personal activities of individual persons or citizens, who ought to endow such substantive form with reality, we find in this very triumph of purely personal self-assertion, despite all the profounder insight which the poet displays, one of the greatest symptoms of the degeneracy of Greece. And it is on account of this that these pictures of a wholly unperturbed sense of “everything coming out right in the end” 54 are as a matter of fact the last important harvest which we have from the poetry created by the exuberant genius, culture, and wit of the Greek nation.

(β) I shall now direct attention to the dramatic art of the modern world, and here, too, I only propose to emphasize the more general and fundamental features which we find of importance, whether dealing with tragedy or the ordinary drama and comedy.

(αα) Tragedy, in the nobility which distinguishes it in its ancient plastic form, is limited to the partial point of view that for its exclusive and essential basis it only enforces as effective the ethically substantive content and its necessary laws; and, on the other hand, leaves the individual and subjective self-penetration of the dramatic characters essentially unevolved; while comedy on its part, to complete what we may regard as the reversed side of such plastic construction, exhibits to us the personal caprice of soul-life in the unfettered abandonment of its topsy-turvydom and ultimate dissolution.

Modern tragedy accepts in its own province from the first the principle of subjectivity or self-assertion. It makes, therefore, the personal intimacy of character — the character, that is, which is no purely individual and vital embodiment of ethical forces in the classic sense — its peculiar object and content. It, moreover, makes, in a type of concurrence that is adapted to this end, human actions come into collision through the instrumentality of the external accident of circumstances in the way that a contingency of a similar character is also decisive in its effect on the consequence, or appears to be so decisive.

In this connection we would subject to examination the following fundamental points:

Firsts the nature of the varied ends which ought to come into the executive process of the action as the content of the characters therein.

Secondly, the nature of the tragic characters themselves, as also of the collisions they are compelled to face.

Thirdly, the nature of the final issue and tragic reconciliation, as these differ from those of ancient tragedy.

To start with, we may observe that, however much in romantic tragedy the personal aspect of suffering and passions, in the true meaning of such an attitude, is the focal centre, yet, for all that, it is impossible in human activity that the ground basis of definite ends borrowed from the concrete worlds of the family, the State, the Church, and others should be dispensed with. In so far, however, as in the drama under discussion, it is not the substantive content as such in these spheres of life which constitutes the main interest of individuals. Such ends are from a certain point of view particularized in a breadth of extension and variety, as also in exceptional modes of presentment, in which it often happens that what is truly essential is only able to force itself on our attention with attenuated strength. And over and above this fact, these ends receive an entirely altered form. In the province of religion, for example, the content which pre-eminently is asserted is no longer the particular ethical powers exhibited imaginatively under the mode of divine individuals, either in their own person or in the pathos of human heroes. It is the history of Christ, or of saints and the like, which is now set before us. In the political community it is mainly the position of kingship, the power of vassal chiefs, the strife of dynasties, or the particular members of one and the same ruling family which forms the content of the varied picture. Nay, if we take a step further we find as the principal subject-matter questions of civic or private right and other relations of a similar character; and, further, we shall find a similar attention paid to features in the family life which were not yet within the reach of ancient drama. And the reason of this is that, inasmuch as in the spheres of life above-mentioned the principle of the personal life in its independence has asserted its claim, novel phases of existence make their inevitable appearance in each one of them, which the modern man claims to set up as the end and directory of his action.

And, from a further point of view in this drama, it is the right of subjectivity, as above defined, absolutely unqualified, which is retained as the dominating content; and for this reason personal love, honour, and the rest make such an exclusive appeal as ends of human action that, while in one direction other relations cannot fail to appear as the purely external background on which these interests of our modern life are set in motion, in another such relations on their own account actively conflict with the requirements of the more individual state of emotion. Of more profound significance still is wrong and crime, even assuming that a particular character does not deliberately and to start with place himself in either, yet does not avoid in order to attain his original purpose.

And, furthermore, in contrast to this particularization and individual standpoint, the ends proposed may likewise either in one direction expand to cover the universality and all-inclusive embrace of the content, or they are in another apprehended and carried into execution as themselves intrinsically substantive. In the first respect, I will merely recall to memory that typically philosophical tragedy, the “Faust” of Goethe, in which, on the one hand, a spirit of disillusion in the pursuit of science, and, on the other, the vital resources of a worldly life and earthly enjoyment — in a word, the attempted mediation in the tragic manner of an individual’s wisdom and strife with the Absolute in its essential significance and phenomenal manifestation, offers a breadth of content such as no other dramatic poet has hitherto ventured to include in one and the same composition. The “Carl Moor” of Schiller is something of the same fashion. He rebels against the entire order of civic society and the collective condition of the world and the humanity of his time, and fortifies himself as such against the same. Wallenstein in the same way conceives a great and far-reaching purpose, the unity and peace of Germany, an object he fails to carry into effect by the means which, in virtue of the fact that they are wielded together in an artificial manner, and one that lacks essential coherence, break in pieces and come to nought precisely in the direction where he is most anxious of their success; and he fails in the same way by reason of his opposition to the imperial authority, upon which he himself and his enterprise are inevitably shattered. Such objects of a world-wide policy, such as a Carl Moor or a Wallenstein pursue, are as a rule not accomplished at the hands of a single individual by the simple means that other men are induced to obey and co-operate; they are carried into effect by the commanding personality, partly acting in conjunction with the wills of many others, and in part in opposition to, or at least on lines of which they have no knowledge. As an illustration of a conception of objects viewed in their essential significance, I will merely instance certain tragedies of Calderon, in which love, honour, and similar virtues are respectively to the rights and obligations in which they involve the characters of the action, treated as so many unyielding laws of independent force with all the stringency of a code. We find also frequently much the same thing assumed in Schiller’s tragic characters, though the point of view is no doubt wholly different, at least to the extent that such individuals conceive and combat for their ends with the assumption they are universal and absolutely valid human rights. So in the early play of “Kabale und Liebe” Major Ferdinand seeks to defend the rights of Nature against the conveniences of fashionable society, and, above all, claims of the Marquis Posa freedom of thought as an inalienable possession of humanity.

Generally speaking, however, in modern tragedy it is not the substantive content of its object in the interest of which men act, and which is maintained as the stimulus of their passion; rather it is the inner experience of their heart and individual emotion, or the particular qualities of their personality, which insist on satisfaction. For even in the examples already referred to we find that to a real extent in those heroes of Spanish honour and love the content of their ultimate ends is so essentially of a personal character that the rights and obligations deducible from the same are able to fuse in direct concurrence with the individual desires of the heart, and to a large extent, too, in the youthful works of Schiller this continual insistence upon Nature, rights of man, and a converted world somewhat savours of the excess of a wholly personal enthusiasm. And if it came about that Schiller in later years endeavoured to enforce a more mature type of pathos, this was simply due to the fact that it was his main idea to restore once again in modern dramatic art the principle of ancient tragedy.

In order to emphasize still more distinctly the difference which in this respect obtains between ancient and modern tragedy, I will merely refer the reader to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” Here we find fundamentally a collision similar to that which is introduced by Æschylus into his “Choeporae” and that by Sophocles into his “Electra.” For Hamlet’s father, too, and the King, as in these Greek plays, has been murdered, and his mother has wedded the murderer. That which, however, in the conception of the Greek dramatists possesses a certain ethical justification — I mean the death of Agamemnon — relatively to his sacrifice of Iphigeneia in the contrasted case of Shakespeare’s play, can only be viewed as an atrocious crime, of which Hamlet’s mother is innocent; so that the son is merely concerned in his vengeance to direct his attention to the fratricidal king, and there is nothing in the latter’s character that possesses any real claim to his respect. The real collision, therefore, does not turn on the fact that the son, in giving effect to a rightful sense of vengeance, is himself forced to violate morality, but rather on the particular personality, the inner life of Hamlet, whose noble soul is not steeled to this kind of energetic activity, but, while full of contempt for the world and life, what between making up his mind and attempting to carry into effect or preparing to carry into effect its resolves, is bandied from pillar to post, and finally through his own procrastination and the external course of events meets his own doom.

If we now turn, in close connection with the above conclusions, to our second point of fundamental importance in modern tragedy — that is to say, the nature of the characters and their collisions — we may summarily take a point of departure from the following general observations.

The heroes of ancient classic tragedy discover circumstances under which they, so long as they irrefragably adhere to the one ethical state of pathos which alone corresponds to their own already formed personality, must infallibly come into conflict with an ethical Power which opposes them and possesses an equal ethical claim to recognition. Romantic characters, on the contrary, are from the first placed within a wide expanse of contingent relations and conditions, within which every sort of action is possible; so that the conflict, to which no doubt the external conditions presupposed supply the occasion, essentially abides within the character itself, to which the individuals concerned in their passion give effect, not, however, in the interests of the ethical vindication of the truly substantive claims, but for the simple reason that they are the kind of men they are. Greek heroes also no doubt act in accordance with their particular individuality; but this individuality, as before noted, if we take for our examples the supreme results of ancient tragedy, is itself necessarily identical with an ethical pathos which is substantive. In modern tragedy the peculiar character in its real significance, and to which it as a matter of accident remains constant, whether it happens to grasp after that which on its own account is on moral grounds justifiable, or is carried into wrong and crime, forms its resolves under the dictate of personal wishes and necessities, or among other things purely external considerations. In such a case, therefore, though we may have a coalescence between the moral aspect of the object and the character, yet, for all that, such a concurrence does not constitute, and cannot constitute — owing to the divided character of ends, passions, and the life wholly personal to the individual, the essential basis and objective condition of the depth and beauty of the tragic drama.

In view of the great variety of difference which further separates particular characters in this type of poetry, it is impossible to do much in the way of generalization. I will, therefore, restrict myself to a reference to the following fundamental points of view. A primary opposition which at once invites notice is that of an abstract, and consequently formal, characterization in its contrast with the actual individuals whom we are accustomed to meet in the concrete living world. As example of this type, we may with exceptional pertinency cite the tragic characters of the French and Italians, which, originating in the imitation of ancient drama, to a greater or less degree merely amount to pure personifications of specific passions, such as love, honour, fame, ambition, tyranny, and so forth, and which, while they present the motives of their actions, as also the gradation and quality of their emotions to the best advantage with a lavish display of declamation, and all the arts of rhetoric, none the less by doing so rather resemble the dramatic failures of Seneca than the dramatic masterpieces of the Greeks. Spanish tragedy also receives the stamp of this abstract style of character-drawing. In this case, however, the pathos of love, in its conflict with honour, friendship, royal prerogative, and the rest is itself of so abstract a subjective character that in the case where the intention is to make this equally ideal55 substantiality stand out as the genuine object of interest, a more complete particularization of characters is hardly feasible. The characters of Spanish drama, however, often possess a certain kind of solidity, and, if I may use the expression, inflexible personality, however wanting in content it may be, a feature that is absent from French work; and at the same time Spanish writers, here also in contrast to the cold simplicity which the movement of French tragedies exhibits even in their tragic composition, know how to make up with the cleverly invented abundance of interesting situations and developments the deficiency referred to in the matter of characterization.

In contrast to both these schools, and in their mastery of the exposition of fully developed human characters and personality, the English are exceptionally distinguished; and among them, and soaring above the rest at an almost unapproachable height, stands Shakespeare. For even in the cases where a purely formal passion, as for instance ambition in Macbeth, or jealousy in Othello, claims as its field the entire pathos56 of his tragic hero, such an abstraction impairs by no fraction the full breadth of the personality. Despite of this restriction of analysis57 the characters remain throughout entire men. In fact, the more Shakespeare on the infinite embrace of his world-stage, proceeds to develop the extreme limits of evil and folly, to that extent, as I have already observed, on these very boundaries — of course, not without real wealth of poetic embellishment — he concentrates these characters in their limitations. While doing so, however, he confers on them intelligence and imagination; and, by means of the image in which they, by virtue of that intelligence, contemplate themselves objectively as a work of art, he makes them free artists of themselves, and is fully able, through the complete virility and truth of his characterization, to awaken our interest in criminals, no less than in the most vulgar and weak-witted lubbers and fools. Of a similar nature is the style of expression he makes his tragic characters adopt. It is at once individual, realistic, emphatically vital, extraordinarily various, and, moreover, where it seems advisable, it can rise to sublimity and is marked by an overwhelming force of utterance. Its ideal intensity and its qualities of invention are displayed in images and simile that flash from each other with lightning rapidity. Its very rhetoric, here the barren child of no school, but the growth of genuine emotion and penetration into human personality, is such that, if we take into account this extraordinary union of the directness of life itself and ideal greatness of soul, we shall find it hard indeed to point to a single other dramatic poet among the moderns whom we are entitled to rank in his company. No doubt Goethe in his youth made a real effort to achieve some approach to a like natural truth and detailed characterization; but in the ideal force and exaltation of passion his rivalry collapses. The style of Schiller, again, has shown an increasing tendency to violent methods, the tempestuous expatiation of which lack the true core of reality for their basis.

Modern characters also differ in the nature of their constancy or their spiritual vacillation and distraction. We find, no doubt, the weakness of indecision, the fluctuations of reflection, the weighing of reasons, conformably to which a resolve should be directed, here and there in classic drama, and more particularly in the tragedies of Euripides. But Euripides is a writer whose tendency is already to forsake the wholly plastic completeness of characterization and action and to develop exceptional aspects of personal sensibility. In modern tragedy we meet yet more frequently such vacillating characters, more particularly on the ground that they are essentially under the sway of two opposed passions, which make them fluctuate from one resolve or one kind of deed to another. I have already made some observations on this attitude of vacillation in another context, and will now merely supplement this by stating that, although the tragic action must depend on colliding factors, yet where we find such a division in one and the same individual such a concurrence is always attended with precarious consequences. And the reason is that this disruption into interests, which are opposed to each other, is due in part to an obscurity and obtuseness of the intelligence, and in some measure, too, to weakness and immaturity. We come across characters of this type in the creations of Goethe’s younger days, notably Weisungen, Fernando in “Stella,” and above all Clavigo. They are, as we may say, double men, who are unable to secure a ready, and so stable, individuality. It is wholly another matter when two opposed spheres of life or moral obligation are equally sacred to a character which, on its own account, is not deficient in stability, and such a person is under the necessity of ranking himself on one side to the exclusion of the other. In a case of that kind, the vacillation is merely a moment of passage, and does not itself constitute, as it were, the nervous system of the character. Again, of a somewhat similar kind, is the tragic case where the spiritual life is seduced, despite its nobler purpose, into objects of passion which are contradictory58 to the same, as in the case of Schiller’s “Holy Maid,” and are then forced to seek a recovery from this division of the soul in their own intimate or objective life, or pay the penalty. At the same time, this personal tragedy of the distraction of soul-life, when it is made the pivot on which the tragic action revolves,59 contains, as a rule, what is merely pitiful and painful, or, from another standpoint, exasperating;60 and the poet will rather do better to avoid it than go out of his way to find it and develop it. The worst case is that, however, where such a vacillation and veering round of character and the entire personality is — the very dialectic of art being thrown awry for this purpose — made the principle of the entire presentation, as though the truth of all importance was to demonstrate that no character is in itself firmly rooted and self-assured. The one-sided ends of specific passions, it is true, ought not to bring about a realization which is secured without a battle; and also, in everyday life, they cannot fail to experience, through the reactionary power of conditions and individuals which oppose them, their finite character and lack of stability. An issue of this kind, however, before the appearance of which we are unable to get the pertinent conclusion, ought not to be introduced as a dialectical piece of wheel adjustment61 in the personality itself; if it is, the person concerned, viewed as this personal state of the soul, is a wholly empty and undefined form, whose collective living growth is found, no less in respect to its objects than in its character, to be wholly wanting in definition. In much the same way the case, also, is otherwise, where the change in the spiritual condition of the entire man itself appears as a direct consequent of just this, its own kind of self-detachment, so that only that is developed and emphasized which essentially and from the first lay secured in the character. As an example, we find in Shakespeare’s Lear that the original folly of the old man is intensified to the point of madness much in the same way that Gloster’s spiritual blindness is converted into actual physical blindness, in which for the first time his eyes are opened to the true distinction in the love he entertains for his two sons respectively. It is precisely Shakespeare who, as a contrast to that exposition of vacillating and essentially self-divided characters, supplies us with the finest examples of essentially stable and consequential characters, who go to their doom precisely in virtue of this tenacious hold upon themselves and their ends. Unsupported by the sanction of the moral law, but rather carried onward by the formal necessity of their personality, they suffer themselves to be involved in their acts by the coil of external circumstances, or they plunge blindly therein and maintain themselves there by sheer force of will, even where all that they do is merely done because they are impelled to assert themselves against others, or because they have simply come to the particular point they have reached. The rise of insurgent passion, one essentially consonant with a certain type of character, one which has not as yet fully emerged, but now secures its utmost expansion, this onward movement and process of a great soul, with all the intimate traits of its evolution, this picture of its selfdestructive conflict with circumstances, human and objective conditions and results, is the main content of some of Shakespeare’s most interesting tragedies.

The last of the subjects which we have still to discuss as proposed is the nature of the tragic issue which characters in our present drama have to confront, as also the type of tragic reconciliation compatible with such a standpoint. In ancient tragedy it is the eternal justice which, as the absolute might of destiny, delivers and restores the harmony of substantive being in its ethical character by its opposition to the particular forces which, in their strain to assert an independent subsistence, come into collision, and which, in virtue of the rational ideality implied in its operations, satisfies us even where we see the downfall of particular men. In so far as a justice of the same kind is present in modern tragedy, it is necessarily, in part, more abstract on account of the closer differentiation of ends and characters, and, in part, of a colder nature and one that is more akin to that of a criminal court, in virtue of the fact that the wrong and crime into which individuals are necessarily carried, in so far as they are intent upon executing their designs, are of a profounder significance. Macbeth, for instance, the elder daughters of Lear and their husbands, the president in “Kabale und Liebe,” Richard III, and many similar examples, on account of their atrocious conduct, only deserve the fate they get. This type of dénouement usually is presented under the guise that individuals are crushed by an actual force which they have defied in order to carry out their personal aims. Wallenstein, for example, is shattered on the adamantine wall of the imperial power; but the old Piccolomini, who, in order to maintain the lawful régime, betrays a friend and misuses the rights of friendship, is punished through the death and sacrifice of his son. Götz von Berlichingen, too, attacks a dominant and securely founded political order, and goes to ground, as also Weislingen and Adelheid, who range themselves, no doubt, on the side of this organized power, but, through wrongful deed and disloyalty, prepare the way to disaster. And along with this we have the demand emphasized, in virtue of the personal point of view of such characters, that these should of necessity appear themselves to acknowledge the justice of their fate. Such a state of acceptance may either be of a religious nature, in which case the soul becomes conscious of a more exalted and indestructible condition of blessedness with which to confront the collapse of its mundane personality; or it may be of a more formal, albeit more worldly, type, in so far, that is, as the strength and equanimity of the character persists in its course up to the point of overthrow without breaking asunder; and in this way, despite all circumstances and mischances, preserves with unimpaired energy its personal freedom. Or, as a final alternative, where the substance of such acceptance is of more real value, by the recognition that the lot which the individual receives is the one, however bitter it may be, which his action merits.

From another point of view, however, we may see the tragic issue also merely in the light of the effect of unhappy circumstances and external accidents, which might have brought about, quite as readily, a different result and a happy conclusion. From such a point of view we have merely left us the conception that the modern idea of individuality, with its searching definition of character, circumstances, and developments, is handed over essentially to the contingency of the earthly state, and must carry the fateful issues of such finitude. Pure commiseration of this sort is, however, destitute of meaning; and it is nothing less than a frightful kind of external necessity in the particular case where we see the downfall of essentially noble natures in their conflict thus assumed with the mischance of purely external accidents. Such a course of events can insistently arrest our attention; but in the result it can only be horrible, and the demand is direct and irresistible that the external accidents ought to accord with that which is identical with the spiritual nature of such noble characters. Only as thus regarded can we feel ourselves reconciled with the grievous end of Hamlet and Juliet. From a purely external point of view, the death of Hamlet appears as an accident occasioned by his duel with Laertes and the interchange of the daggers. But in the background of Hamlet’s soul, death is already present from the first. The sandbank of finite condition will not content his spirit. As the focus of such mourning and weakness, such melancholy, such a loathing of all the conditions of life, we feel from the first that, hemmed within such an environment of horror, he is a lost man, whom the surfeit of the soul has wellnigh already done to death before death itself approaches him from without. The same thing may be observed in the case of Romeo and Juliet. The ground on which these tender blossoms have been planted is alien to their nature; we have no alternative left us but to lament the pathetic transiency of such a beautiful love, which, as some tender rose in the vale of this world of accident, is broken by rude storms and tempests, and the frangible reckonings of noble and well-meaning devices. This pitiful state of our emotions is, however, simply a feeling of reconciliation that is painful, a kind of unhappy blessedness in misfortune.

(ββ) Much as poets present to us the bare downfall of particular people they are also able to treat the similar contingency of the development of events in such a way, that, despite of the fact the circumstances in all other respects would appear to give them little enough support, a happy issue of such conditions and characters is secured, in which they elicit our interest. No doubt the favour of such a destiny of events has at least an equal claim upon us as the disfavour. And so far as the question merely concerns the nature of this difference, I must admit that I prefer a happy conclusion. How could it be otherwise? I can myself discover no better ground for the preference of misfortune, simply on its own account as such, to a happy resolution than that of a certain condition of fine sensibility, which is devoted to pain and suffering, and experiences more interest in their presence than in painless situations such as it meets with every day. If therefore the interests are of such a nature, that it is really not worth the trouble to sacrifice the men or women concerned on their altar, it being possible for them either to surrender their objects, without making such surrender as is equivalent to a surrender of their individuality, or to mutually come to an agreement in respect thereof, there is no reason why the conclusion should be tragic. The tragic aspect of the conflicts and their resolution ought in principle merely to be enforced in the cases where it is actually necessary in order to satisfy the claim of a superior point of view. If this necessity is absent there is no sufficient ground for mere suffering and unhappiness. And it is simply due to this fact that social plays and dramas originate which form, as it were, an intermediate link between tragedies and comedies. I have already in a previous passage explained the poetical standpoint of this class of composition. Among us Germans we find it to some extent appropriating what readily moves us in the world of the citizen and family life; in another direction it is preoccupied with chivalry, a movement to which the Götz of Goethe has given a decided stimulus; mainly, however, we may call it the triumph of ordinary morality, which in the large majority of cases is the main thing celebrated. The subject-matter of such plays most in vogue are questions of finance or property, differences of status, unfortunate love affairs, examples of spiritual baseness in the more restricted conditions and affairs of life and so on. In one word, what we have here is that which otherwise is already before our eyes, only with this difference, that in such moral dramas, virtue and duty obtain the victory, and crime is shamed and punished, or betakes itself to repentance, so that in a moral conclusion of this kind the reconciliation ought to centre in this, namely, that whatever happens good is the result. Thereby the fundamental interest is concentrated in the personal or spiritual quality of views held and a good or evil heart. The more, however, the abstractly moral state of mind or heart supplies the pivot on which all turns, so much the less can it be the pathos of a particular matter, or an intrinsically essential object, to which the personality in question is attached. And add to this, from a further point of view, so much the less ultimately is the definite character able to maintain itself and persist in such self-assertion. If all is to be finally focussed in the purely moral aspects of the psychological state, or the condition of the heart, from a subjective point of view such as this, with its dominating emphasis on ethical reflection, no standing ground remains for any other definite characteristics, or at least specific ends to be proposed. Let the heart break and change its views. Such seems to be the idea. Pathetic dramas of this type, notably Kotzebue’s “Menschenhass und Reue,” and also too many moral offences in the dramas of Iffland, strictly speaking, have therefore an issue which we can neither call good or bad. I mean by this that the main thing is as a rule the question of pardon and the promise of moral improvement, and we are therefore confronted with that possibility of spiritual conversion and surrender of the self. No doubt in this fact we discover the exalted nature and greatness of Spirit. When, however, the jolly dog,62 as the heroes of Kotzebue are for the most part, and not unfrequently Iffland’s too, after being a scamp and a rascal, suddenly promises to turn over a new leaf, it is frankly impossible with a good-for-nothing chap of this sort that his conversion can be otherwise than mere pretence, or of so superficial a character that it merely affects his skin, and merely supplies a momentary conclusion to the course of events that has no substantial basis, but rather, by all ordinary reckoning, will take the knave to disreputable quarters, if we will only acquaint ourselves with his subsequent history.

(γγ) As regards our modern comedy I must draw particular attention to one point of difference, to which I have already alluded when discussing the old Attic comedy. The point is this — whether the folly and restricted outlook of the characters of the drama merely appears ridiculous to others, or is equally perceived as such by those persons themselves; whether in short the comic characters are an object of laughter only to the audience, or also to such characters. Aristophanes, that creator of genuine comedy, exclusively accepted as the main principle of his plays the latter alternative. Already, however, in Greek comedy of a later date, and subsequently in the hands of Plautus and Terence, the opposite principle came into vogue; and in our modern examples of comedy it has been carried to such a length that we find a large number of comic compositions the inclination of which is more or less the subject-matter which is ridiculous in a purely prosaic sense, or rather we might say matters that leave a sour taste in the mouth of and are repugnant to the comic characters. This is the standpoint of Molière in particular in his best comedies, which have no right to be regarded as farces. The prosaic quality here is justified on the ground that the objects aimed at by such characters are a matter of bitter earnest. They are deadly serious in the pursuit of it; they are therefore quite unable to join with satisfaction in the laughter, when they are finally deceived, or themselves are responsible for its failure. They are in short merely the disillusioned objects of a laughter foreign to themselves and generally damaging to themselves. As an example: Molière’s Tartuffe le faux dévot, viewed as the unmasking of a really damned rascal has nothing funny in it, but is a very earnest business, and the deception of the deluded Orgon amounts to a sheer intensity of misfortune, which can only be resolved by the Deus ex machina, in reference to whom the official of the court of justice utters the following exhortation:

Remettez-vous, monsieur, d’une alarme si chaude.

Nous vivons sous un prince, ennemi de la fraude,

Un prince dont les yeux se font jour dans les coeurs,

Et que ne peut tromper tout l’art des imposteurs.

We may add, too, that the odious abstract63 excess of characters so stable as, for example, Molière’s “Miser,” the absolutely stolid and serious subjection of whom to his idiotic passion renders any emancipation from such fetters impossible, contains in it nothing that is genuinely comic.

It is pre-eminently in this field that for compensation of such defects a fine artistic power in the accurate and exhaustive delineation of character is manifested, or a true mastery of the craft discovers its best opportunity for an admirably thought-out intrigue. As a rule the occasion for such an intrigue is supplied by the circumstance that some character or other endeavours to secure his objects by deluding some one else, such a course appearing to harmonize with these interests and advance them. As a matter of fact, however, it only results in the contradictory situation that it is through this pernicious demand they are self-destructive. In opposition to such a plot we find as a rule a similar plot of dissembled appearances put in motion, which has for its object the like confusion of the original plotter. Such a general scheme admits of an infinite number and degree of ups and downs in the interweaving of its situations which are adapted to every conceivable subtlety. The Spaniards are, in particular, the most consummate masters in the invention of such intrigues and developments, and have composed much that is delightful and excellent in this class of work. The subject-matter generally consists of the attractive incidents of love or affairs of honour and the like. In tragedy these bring about the profoundest collisions; in comedy, however, where such qualities as pride and love that has been long experienced do not assert themselves as such, but rather by doing the reverse and in the result give the lie to themselves, such interests can merely appear to us as entirely superficial and comic.64 A word in conclusion as to the characters who hatch and carry out such intrigues. Such are usually, following the example of the slaves in the Roman comedy, servants or menials, who have no respect for the objects of their superiors, but rather make them subordinate to their own advantage or bring them to nought, and merely present us with the amusing position, that the real masters are the servants and the masters the slaves, or at least give rise to all kinds of comic situation, which come about accidentally, or are directly the result of intention. We of course, as audience, are in the know of such mysteries, and can fortify ourselves against every sort of cunning and deceit, which often carries the most serious consequences to fathers, uncles, aunts, and the rest, all of the most respectable antecedents; and we may laugh as we please over the contradictory situations that appear before us, or are involved in such ingenious deceptions.

In this kind of way our modern comedy, generally speaking, gives play on the stage to private interests and personalities of the social life I have mentioned in their accidental vagaries, laughable features, abnormal habits and follies, partly by means of character delineation, and partly with the help of comic developments of situations and circumstances. A joviality so frank and genial as that which persists in the Aristophanic comedy as the mediating element of its resolution, does not animate this kind of comedy; or rather cases occur where it can be actually repulsive, that is to say, where that which is essentially evil, the tricks of menials, the treachery of sons and wards towards worthy men, fathers and guardians is triumphant, always assuming that the persons deluded have in no way themselves been influenced by false prejudices or eccentricities of such a kind that there is some reason why they should be made to appear ridiculous in their helpless stupidity and handed over as the sport of the aims of others.

In a converse way, however, and in contrast as such to the above generally prosaic type of treatment, the modern world, too, has elaborated a world of comedy which is both truly comic and poetical in its nature. The fundamental note here again is the cheeriness of disposition, the inexhaustible resources of fun, no matter what may be the nature of miscarriage or bad luck, the exuberance and dash of what is at bottom nothing better than pure tomfoolery, and, in a word, exploited self-assurance. We have here as a result, in yet profounder expatiation, and yet more intense display of humour, whether the sphere of it be more restricted or capacious, and whether the mode of it be more or less important, what runs on parallel lines with that which Aristophanes in the ancient world and in his own field created beyond all rivalry. As the master, who in a similar way outshines all others in his field, or rather the particular portion to which I now refer, I will, though without now further entering into detail, once again emphasize the name of William Shakespeare.

Having completed our review of the types under which comedy is elaborated we have at last reached the absolute conclusion of our scientific inquiry. We started with symbolical art, in which the ideality of the human soul struggles to discover itself as content and configuration, and, in a word, to become an object to itself. We passed on to the plastic of classical art, which displays to human vision that which has become unveiled to itself as substantive being in man’s vital personality. We reached our conclusion in the romantic art of the individual soul-life, that inward world united to the absolute medium of its self-conscious energy, which expatiates unfettered within its own ideal life of Spirit; and which, content with that realm, no longer unites itself with what is objective and particularized, and finally makes itself aware of the negative significance of such a resolution in the humour of the comic Spirit. Nevertheless we find that in this very consummation it is Comedy which opens the way to a dissolution of all that human art implies. For the aim of all art is nothing else than that identity asserted and displayed by the human Spirit, in which the eternal, the Divine, the essential and explicated truth is unfolded in the forms and phenomenal presence of the objective world to the apprehension of our external senses and our emotional life and imagination. If, however, as is the fact, comedy merely enforces this unity under a mode that annihilates it, inasmuch as the absolute substance,65 which strives here to enforce its realized manifestation, perceives that this realization is, — through the instrumentality of those interests which have now secured an independent freedom within the embrace of the objective world of Nature,66 and are as such exclusively directed to what is contingent and personal to the soul, — itself shattered, it follows that the presence and activity of the Absolute is no longer truly asserted in positive coalescence with the individual characters and ends of existing objective reality, but rather solely gives effect to itself in the negative form that everything which does not correspond with itself is thereby cancelled, and all that remains is the presence of this free personal activity of soul-life which is displayed in and along with this dissolution as aware of itself and self-assured.

By such a path, then, as this we have arrived at our goal; and with the aid of our philosophical method have gathered every essential type and determinant of the beauty and conformation of art into a garland, the task of arranging which in its associate completeness belongs to the most worthy of any within the range of human science to undertake. For in human Art we are not merely dealing with playthings, however pleasant or useful they may be, but with the liberation of the human Spirit from the substance and forms of finite condition. We are occupied with the presence and reconciliation of the Absolute in sense and the phenomenal, with a revelation of truth, which is not exhausted of its wealth in natural-history, but is unfolded in the history of the world, as a constituent part of which Art supplies us with the most beautiful point of view, the most generous reward for the severe labours of our contact with objective reality and the grievous pains of knowledge. And for this reason it was impossible that our inquiry should wholly restrict itself to the criticism of individual works of art, or any mere recipe or inducement to their production. Rather it could have but the one object, namely, that of following up, of seizing and retaining in and through the instrumentality of thought the fundamental notion of beauty and art through all the stages which it passes in its process of realization.

If I may be permitted to assume that from the above explained point of view my exposition has not been wholly inadequate to general expectation, and that the bonds of obligation with which I have throughout been united to my reader in the pursuit of an object which we hold in common are now released, I will merely add the wish, it is my last word, that a bond yet more exalted and indestructible with the idea of beauty and truth may rivet itself between us in place of that released, and establish an union which shall now and for good remain secure.

1 Diess treibende Pathos. Pathos is here used to signify the emotional state. This “motive force” would give the sense.

2 Als konkretes Daseyn zur Existence gebracht.

3 In der äusseren Objektivität.

4 The reference is of course to lyric composition. By reale Individualisirung Hegel seems to refer to the apprehension by the lyric poet of the individual subjective experience in its independent reality.

5 What Hegel means apparently by this statement is that the results of the action are in the view of the persons concerned primarily referred to their own act of volition and sense of responsibility, and as such they modify their future intention or conduct.

6 Poet. c. 5.

7 Einem colliderenden Handeln.

8 As lyric poetry is.

9 Poet., c. 7.

10 The fact should be noted, however, that in the illustration each division is a complete whole in itself.

11 Hegel apparently means this by his reference to die beiden ersten Elemente, but the passage is not very clear.

12 Gehalt. That is, an imaginative personality, which seizes the type and our general humanity.

13 In this obscure passage I have rather sought to emphasize what appears to me the general sense than adhere to literal accuracy. What is contrasted is clearly the naturalism of such a diction as Schiller’s “Robbers” and the French classic diction.

14 Der Allgemeinheit. We should say of “a more ideal or creative atmosphere.” The creative poet imports his own universality into the final result both of diction and imaginative conception. Hegel adheres to the philosophical term, which, apart from explanation, is certainly very bald, and even, as it stands, unintelligible.

15 It is not very clear to what Hegel here refers unless to the fact that female parts were played by youths.

16 We should say rather “stunned as by a blow,” zerschmettert, rather than zerschnitten.

17 Eines grossen Gemüths. It is not clear how far the reference is to the poet or the characters. It applies to both.

18 Poet., c. 4.

19 Vol. i, pp. 355-379.

20 Poet., c. 6.

21 Apart from the practical impossibility of enforcing such a condition in modern times, Hegel appears here rather to overlook the fact that the printing of a work is of great convenience, and may even involve less expense where its repetition in several theatres is possible, and, after all, important drama is literature. Where the art is bad it is no more possible to prevent its appearance, if the artist is able to afford the expense of publication, than in any other art. In the one case as in the other public taste and the law of supply and demand are here the sole and ultimate tests. Sophocles may have written his dramas, no doubt, with a particular stage in view, but we are not therefore entitled to conclude that either he or Aristophanes would have refused assent to the publication of any or all of their works had there been a publisher willing to accept responsibility. Most certainly we may suppose that Shakespeare would not have done so, at least after due representation and revision. I have, however, met with students of Shakespeare who maintain that no complete autograph manuscript of any single drama of this poet ever existed.

22 I think it is obvious that if we take the case of the finest musical reproduction by individual artists of the first rank this distinction is not so emphatic as Hegel would make it out to be. A really great musical performance is something much more than a reproduction of musical sound. The effect of personality plays here a part of real and essential importance.

23 Rollenfächer. Hegel may possibly mean “the professional adjustment of harmonious castes.”

24 See vol. iii, pp. 427-430.

25 Unmittelbaren Individualität. Hegel means the individuality that is abstract, not soldered into the substance of concrete human life.

26 Das Göttliche.

27 In Gegentheil seiner. Hegel means, apparently, that the principle asserts itself positively rather than as the mere negation of the finite, as in exclusive asceticism.

28 Das Sittliche, i.e., concrete ethical condition.

29 Hegel appears to understand by pathos here little more than a psychological state.

30 Element, i.e., apparently, “this primitive impulse of realization.”

31 Hegel’s language, wenn sie itzt aber wirklich, seems to go as far as my translation. The difficulty of the entire passage, and it is no doubt considerable, is primarily due to the fact that Hegel is here importing into the notion of classic divinities the profounder significance of what he calls sittlichen Mächte. By doing this he can more readily shelve the problem how we are to regard the nature of their existence as potential forces of the Divine Being; that is, apart from their operative energy in human life, as also the modus operandi of such Divine energy in its original participation with a real world. He avoids, no doubt, one of the most disputed aspects of his philosophy. But if it is urged in criticism that at least in part his present exposition tends rather to vagueness, or at least to accept a certain measure of symbolism rather than remain severely on the ground of genuine philosophical method and thought, to associate itself rather with Plato than Aristotle, in the present context, at any rate, I am inclined to agree with it.

32 Der Gewalt des Anundfürsichseyenden. Lit., of that which is or becomes explicit on its own account, i.e., essentially. Hegel refers, of course, to the ethical forces in the process of life.

33 Hegel here uses the word einig rather in its secondary sense than in its primary one of unique.

34 Als das zu Erhaltende, viz., the consistency of concrete life.

35 By ihrer unendlichen Sicherheit Hegel refers to the stability of the principle of self-conscious, and self-assured character, which in its weakness may be merely equivalent to cocksuredness.

36 Wohlgemuthkeit und Zuversicht.

37 Hegel seems to have in his mind characters in comedy of which Falstaff may be taken as a supreme example, and Shakespeare above all the creator of many such. Roy Richmond and Sancho Panza are of the same type.

38 Der in der Menschenbrust waltenden Götter.

39 In no religious or even strictly ethical sense of course.

40 I am not quite sure what Hegel means by his use here of the word Versühnung, lit., reconciliation. I presume he means a power of harmonious recovery, whether in a good sense is not quite clear.

41 Formal as contrasted with really ethical content.

42 Die Substanz. I presume this is the meaning, i.e., the substantive ideality of the ethical forces inherent in man. The entire passage is sufficiently difficult to translate, or indeed wholly to follow, or at least apart from its subsequent application to the chorus of Tragedy.

43 Allgemeine. Formal in the sense that such a state is not concretely realized in action, but restricts itself to the ideal homogeneity of its form.

44 It is perhaps best to repeat Hegel’s own phrase.

45 Die sittliche Berechtigung zu einer bestimmten That. The context shows that Hegel does not merely mean the justification in the individual conscience, which is demanded by and perfected in such activity, but the actual ethical claim which is vindicated in such action.

46 That is, the content of the dramatic action in Greek drama.

47 By Rechtfertigung Hegel here seems to mean not so much the vindicated right as the degree of responsibility which a certain attitude of mind involves. It is the nature of the subjection to the vindicated right, or its absence.

48 By die subjektive Vertiefung der Persönlichkeit Hegel would seem to mean the psychological analysis of character on its own account.

49 Blosser Ausgleichung. The metaphor seems to be that of a final settlement of accounts, a general settlement would be perhaps a better translation.

50 Hegel’s statement is hardly supported by the facts as they are narrated in the “Œdipus Rex.” It is the force of facts rather than a power of prevision, which arouse the knowledge of the terrible truth. But Hegel is here evidently most absorbed in the ideal and universal significance of the drama.

51 That is, of course, in death. Sophocles himself of course only very indefinitely, through the evidence of an eye-witness, refers to such a possible apotheosis.

52 The statement of the general contrast is no doubt true enough. It may be doubted, however, whether Hegel’s own interpretation of the reconciliation of Œdipus as one consummated in death can be wholly brought under the ancient conception. It would seem truer to admit that in the spirit at least of the “Œdipus Coloneus” we have, at least in so far as that reconciliation is objective, and not merely a reconciling influence on our minds, the spectators, as in the case of the deaths of King Lear or Cornelia, in the sense that “death makes all things sweet,” a mysterious approach to problems which Christianity first attempted seriously to solve, and which are usually regarded as insoluble without the assumption of a future state, or at least a divine absorption. Even admitting that Œdipus in his death became a real constituent of the harmonious unity of the civic life that received him, we cannot with truth say that such a reconciliation was one in which he shared personally, and whereof he was conscious, except in so far as he was aware of this by prevision; and to that extent the reconciliation was not in his death, but rather, as in the Christian view, a condition of the soul, a conviction that by his death he would live again, — almost identical in fact with some modern interpretations of immortality.

53 Hegel means the conflict between the universal social interest and the private interest, between the concrete social life and the wholly private life.

54 I think this gives the nearest approach I can make to the self-coined word Grundwohlseyns, lit., “the at bottom well being.”

55 Subjektiven Substantialität. Ideal, that is, as opposed to a substantive content based on the facts of living people. Impersonations of qualities imagined rather than portraits of living men, ideal therefore in a theoretic and bad sense.

56 As previously stated I adopt Hegel’s expression, being unable to express it otherwise better. The whole emotional condition is more or less the meaning, but it is rooted in Greek literature.

57 In dieser Bestimmtheit, lit., in this particular definition of their content.

58 Hegel may mean that the passions are opposed to each other. The nett result is the same.

59 Lit., “Is made the tragic lever.”

60 The epithet might mean also “suggestive of personal irritation,” but the other epithets rather negative this rendering.

61 Räderwerk. The whole of this passage, in its theoretical analysis, is extremely difficult not merely to translate, but to follow clearly.

62 I presume this is the meaning of Pursche or Bursche, and not merely “youngster.”

63 Abstract in the sense that the vices are detached in their extreme from concrete human nature.

64 I have made the best I can of a very badly expressed sentence, and, as I should add, a very meagre description of the aim of modern comic drama. I am, however, not quite satisfied that it is an adequate translation, or that I have grasped what Hegel means by the words nicht gestehen zu wollen. It would apply very aptly to such a character as Sir Willoughby Patterne, but the pertinency of such an epithet as lang empfunden I fail to see. I doubt myself if we have here anything more than a chance note of Hegel tacked in by editors. The whole of the present paragraph is a very jejune description of the treatment of the love passion or affairs of honour by modern drama. A pity we cannot supplement it with the substance of Meredith’s “Essay on Comedy.” The passage, however, must be read as qualified by the further note lower down on the exuberance of one aspect of modern comedy. But the reference to “Comedy” in the modern sense is a mere fragment.

65 That is, self-conscious life. The Absolute here seems to be identified with man’s self-conscious activity.

66 I think this is what Hegel must mean here by im Elemente der Wirklichkeit, in the element, that is, of material reality.

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