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 obligation[47] 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 deepening[48] 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

ideal[55] 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 pathos[56] of his tragic hero, such an

abstraction impairs by no fraction the full breadth of the personality.

Despite of this restriction of analysis[57] 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 contradictory[58]

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 adjustment[61] 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 abstract[63] 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.

[Footnote 1: _Diess treibende Pathos._ Pathos is here used to signify

the emotional state. This "motive force" would give the sense.]

[Footnote 2: _Als konkretes Daseyn zur Existence gebracht._]

[Footnote 3: _In der äusseren Objektivität._]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 6: Poet. c. 5.]

[Footnote 7: _Einem colliderenden Handeln._]

[Footnote 8: As lyric poetry is.]

[Footnote 9: Poet., c. 7.]

[Footnote 10: The fact should be noted, however, that in the

illustration each division is a complete whole in itself.]

[Footnote 11: Hegel apparently means this by his reference to _die

beiden ersten Elemente_, but the passage is not very clear.]

[Footnote 12: _Gehalt_. That is, an imaginative personality, which

seizes the type and our general humanity.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 15: It is not very clear to what Hegel here refers unless to

the fact that female parts were played by youths.]

[Footnote 16: We should say rather "stunned as by a blow,"

_zerschmettert,_ rather than _zerschnitten._]

[Footnote 17: _Eines grossen Gemüths._ It is not clear how far the

reference is to the poet or the characters. It applies to both.]

[Footnote 18: Poet., c. 4.]

[Footnote 19: Vol. I, pp. 355-379.]

[Footnote 20: Poet., c. 6.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 23: _Rollenfächer._ Hegel may possibly mean "the professional

adjustment of harmonious castes."]

[Footnote 24: See vol. III, pp. 427-430.]

[Footnote 25: _Unmittelbaren Individualität._ Hegel means the

individuality that is abstract, not soldered into the substance of

concrete human life.]

[Footnote 26: _Das Göttliche._]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 28: _Das Sittliche_, _i.e.,_ concrete ethical condition.]

[Footnote 29: Hegel appears to understand by pathos here little more

than a psychological state.]

[Footnote 30: _Element_, _i.e.,_ apparently, "this primitive impulse of

realization."]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 33: Hegel here uses the word _einig_ rather in its secondary

sense than in its primary one of _unique._]

[Footnote 34: _Als das zu Erhaltende,_ viz., the consistency of

concrete life.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 36: _Wohlgemuthkeit und Zuversicht_.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 38: _Der in der Menschenbrust waltenden Götter._]

[Footnote 39: In no religious or even strictly ethical sense of course.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 41: Formal as contrasted with really ethical content.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 44: It is perhaps best to repeat Hegel's own phrase.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 46: That is, the content of the dramatic action in Greek

drama.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 48: By _die subjektive Vertiefung der Persönlichkeit_ Hegel

would seem to mean the psychological analysis of character on its own

account.]

[Footnote 49: _Blosser Ausgleichung._ The metaphor seems to be that of

a final settlement of accounts, a general settlement would be perhaps a

better translation.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 53: Hegel means the conflict between the universal social

interest and the private interest, between the concrete social life and

the wholly private life.]

[Footnote 54: I think this gives the nearest approach I can make to the

self-coined word _Grundwohlseyns_, lit., "the at bottom well being."]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 57: _In dieser Bestimmtheit_, lit., in this particular

definition of their content.]

[Footnote 58: Hegel may mean that the passions are opposed to each

other. The nett result is the same.]

[Footnote 59: Lit., "Is made the tragic lever."]

[Footnote 60: The epithet might mean also "suggestive of personal

irritation," but the other epithets rather negative this rendering.]

[Footnote 61: _Räderwerk._ The whole of this passage, in its

theoretical analysis, is extremely difficult not merely to translate,

but to follow clearly.]

[Footnote 62: I presume this is the meaning of _Pursche_ or _Bursche_,

and not merely "youngster."]

[Footnote 63: Abstract in the sense that the vices are detached in

their extreme from concrete human nature.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 65: That is, self-conscious life. The Absolute here seems to

be identified with man's self-conscious activity.]

[Footnote 66: I think this is what Hegel must mean here by _im Elemente

der Wirklichkeit_, in the element, that is, of material reality.]