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 haphazard[1] 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
diffuseness[2] 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.
2. 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 trappings[3]
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 work[4] 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.
3. 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 reality[8]
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.
[Footnote 1: _Gleichgültige_, that is, the impressions of sense are
received from without, from a manifold indifferent to ourselves.]
[Footnote 2: _Losheit._ A word coined by Hegel to denote this relation
of poetry to external objects in their independence.]
[Footnote 3: _Die Gebehrden_, lit., gestures, in which sense it is used
in a subsequent passage.]
[Footnote 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.]
[Footnote 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._]
[Footnote 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.]
[Footnote 7: _Dem Subject._ That is, I understand, the individual
subject generally, not merely the conscious life of the poet or the
singer.]
[Footnote 8: _In seiner Gediegenheit_, _i.e.,_ as concrete.]
[Footnote 9: _Dies Subjektive._ The realization of self in the world is
part of that world regarded as a rational and self-conscious process,
Spirit.]
[Footnote 10: _Sich die Gebehrde anschliesst_, _i.e._ a practical
attitude to the world, involving gesture and other actions.]
[Footnote 11: Hegel's expression is "the personality of expression,"
_i.e.,_ the personal aspect of expression.]