This positive aspect is precisely that which endows the Greek gods

with the charm of living humanity when the imagination elaborates it

anew. It is by this latter process that what is otherwise merely of

substantive import, or that of power, is thereby carried into the

individual present, which, speaking in general terms, is concentrated

to a point out of that which is truly explicit or independently actual,

and which is external and accidental, and thereby the indefinite,

which otherwise is always present in the conception of the gods, is

limited in its range and filled out in its content. We are unable to

attach any additional value to specific tales and particular traits

of characterization, for this material, which, in its earlier stage

is, when we look at its primary source, the symbolically significant,

has now only remaining the task to perfect the spiritual individuality

of the gods in their positive sensuous definition in contrast to the

human and to attach to it by virtue of a material which, in respect

to its content and envisagement, is undivine, the aspect of caprice

and chance, characteristics inseparable from concrete individuality.

Sculpture, in so far as it presents to our senses the pure ideals of

the gods, and is concerned to set before us character and expression

solely under the mode of living bodies, can least of all with

clearness make visible the final result of individualization. It does

nevertheless give real effect to it within the limits of its own

province, as we may see, for example, in the different treatment of

headdress, the mode in which the folds or locks of hair are arranged

in each particular case; and this is done not merely with a view to

symbolical interpretation but in order to individualize. In this way

Hercules has short locks, Zeus an abundant growth which rises above the

forehead, Diana quite a different folding of the hair to that of Venus.

Pallas, too, is distinguished by the Gorgo on the helmet, and the like

result is obtained by means of weapons, girdle, fillets, bracelets, and

all the variety of other external adornment.

(_γ_) We find as a _third_ and final source of the closer definition

of divine personality the relation which this occupies to the

concrete actual world and its numerous natural phenomena, human

deeds and events. For however much we have seen that this spiritual

individuality is in part respectively to their universal essence, and

partly in respect to their particular singularity, the visible result

of earlier natural foundations which have symbolical significance,

yet it also persists, if regarded as a spiritually self-subsistent

personality, in a relation of continuous, vitality with Nature and

human existence. It is under this point of view, as we have already

intimated at length, that we have before us the imaginative flow

of the poet, an ever fertile source of particular tales, traits of

character and exploits, such as are related us about the gods. The

artistic aspect of this stage of the process consists in this, that

the divine personalities are made to blend in a vital way with human

affairs, and that the isolated nature of events are without exception

conceived in association with the universality of the divine, just

as we ourselves, for example, are wont to say, if in another sense,

of course, that this or that eventuality comes from God. Even in the

reality of everyday life, in the natural process of his existence, in

his daily wants, fears, and hopes, the Greek took refuge in his gods.

At first it was external accidents, which the priesthood accepted as

omens, and interpreted relatively to his objects and circumstances. If

distress and misfortune appeared, the priest had to explain the cause

of the affliction, to recognize the anger and disposition of the gods,

and to suggest the means by which the misfortune might be faced. The

poets proceed yet further in their interpretations for this reason,

namely, that they ascribe everything, which is related to a pathos

universal and essential, that is, the moving force in human resolve

and action, to the gods themselves and their activity; so that the

activity of mankind appears likewise as the act of the gods, who fulfil

their own counsels by means of their instrument, man. The material in

these poetical expositions is taken from the circumstances of ordinary

life, in respect to which the poet lays it down, whether this or that

god has expressed his purpose in the event which he is expounding

and asserted himself actively therein. For this reason poetry to

an exceptional extent enlarges the range of many specific stories,

which have the gods for their principal subject-matter. We may in

this connection recall to our memories several examples which we have

already used as illustrations when considering another aspect of our

subject, namely, the relation of the universal powers to the practical

pursuits of human personality. Homer places Achilles before us as the

bravest among the Greeks before Troy. This pre-eminence of his hero he

expresses by means of the statement that Achilles is invulnerable in

every portion of his body with the single exception of his heel, which

his mother was compelled to take hold of when she dipped him in the

Styx. This tale has its origin in the imagination of the poet who thus

interprets the external fact. If we accept this bluntly as though an

actual fact purported to be expressed therein which the ancients would

have believed in the same sense that we believe in any fact on the

evidence of our senses such a conclusion is a very crude one indeed.

It in short amounts to this, that Homer no less than all the Greeks

and Alexander with them who admired Achilles and praised his fortunes,

which were the main theme of the song of Homer, were simpletons.

Such a glorification must inevitably carry such a consequence if

the reflection is to hold good that the bravery of Achilles was no

difficult matter since he was aware of his invulnerability. But the

bravery is, in truth, thereby in no way abridged, because he is equally

aware of his early death, and notwithstanding never evades danger,

however it may arise. The like relation is put before us in a very

different way in the "Niebelungenlied." In that the horned Siegfried

is likewise invulnerable, but he has also in addition to this his cap

which makes him invisible. When he assists King Gunther thus invisible

in the fight of the latter with Brunhilde it becomes simply an affair

of barbaric sorcery which does not enhance very much our opinion either

of the bravery of Siegfried or King Gunther. No doubt in Homer the gods

frequently lend assistance to particular heroes; but the gods merely

appear on such occasions as the universal concept of that which man

as an individual himself is and carries out, and to carry out which

he must actively employ the entire strength of his heroic endowment.

If it had been otherwise the gods would have only found it necessary

to decimate _en masse_ the Trojan host in battle in order to complete

at once the triumph of the Greeks. Homer gives us a picture just the

reverse of this when he describes the main fight as essentially a

contest between individuals, and it is only when the press and medley

in general, when the entire mass of combatants, the collective heart

of the host clashes in fury, that Ares at length storms over the field

and gods war against gods. And this is not only generally fine and

splendid as an enhancement of the effect, but we may find in it the

profounder significance that Homer recognizes the particular heroes in

what is singular and exceptional and the universal potencies and forces

in the collective effect and the general aspect. In another connection

Homer permits Apollo to appear on the scene, when the moment arrives

which is fatal to Patroclus who is bearing the invincible armour of

Achilles[195]. Three times had Patroclus plunged into the crowded host

of the Trojans, mighty as Ares, and three times he had already slain

nine men. When he stormed there for the fourth time then it was that

the god, enveloped in obscure night, made toward him among the medley

and smote him on the back and the shoulders, tore away from him his

helmet, so that it rolled on the ground, and rang out sharply as it

struck the hoofs of the chargers; and the plumes of it were besmirched

with blood and dust, which none ever wot of before. Apollo also breaks

the brazen spear in his hands, the shield drops from his shoulders, and

his armour is loosened on him by the god. This interference of Apollo

we may accept as the poetic explanation of the circumstance, that it

is exhaustion no less than natural death which seizes upon and subdues

Patroclus in the turmoil and heat of battle at the fourth encounter.

Then it was that Euphorbus was able to thrust his spear into his

back between the shoulders. Yet one more time Patroclus endeavoured

to withdraw from the battle; but Hector had already hastened to meet

him, and thrust his spear deep into his side. Then Hector rejoiced and

mocked the sinking hero. But Patroclus, speaking in low tones, replied

that it was Zeus and Apollo who had mastered him, and withal with no

trouble, because they had taken his weapons from off his shoulders.

"Twenty men such as thou art," he exclaims, "I could have laid low with

my spear, but I am slain by fateful necessity and the hand of Apollo.

Thou, Euphorbus, hast but slain me the second time, and thou, Hector,

but the third." Here, too, we may remark that the appearance of the

gods simply points to the fact that Patroclus, albeit protected by

the armour of Achilles, becomes faint, confounded, and despite of it

slain. And this is not by any means a superstitious freak or empty play

of the imagination, or rather a statement which amounts to this[196],

that Hector's fame will be detracted from by this interposition of

Apollo, and that even Apollo does not play in the entire affair a

part which entirely redounds to his honour, since we necessarily take

into account the might of the god--speculations of this kind merely

betray a superstition of the prosaic mind as destitute of taste as it

is devoid of reason. For in every case where Homer explains specific

events by means of such appearances of the gods the gods use that

which is already immanent in the conscious life of men, the power,

that is, of their own passion and observation, or the potentialities

of the general condition in which the man is placed, the force and the

foundation of that which befalls and happens to anyone as a consequence

of such conditions If it is true that at times traits that are wholly

external and absolutely positive assert themselves in the appearance

of the gods these in their turn have a comic aspect; as in the case

when the lame Hephaestos goes round as cup-bearer. And generally we may

say that Homer never treats the reality of such appearances from first

to last seriously. At one time we see the gods in action, at another

they occupy a station of complete tranquillity. The Greeks were

fully conscious that it was the poets who were responsible for such

apparitions; and if they believed in them their belief was connected

directly with that spiritual aspect which is equally the possession

of mankind, forasmuch as it is the universal, the very active and

motive principle in the events thus presented. From whatever point of

view, therefore, we consider the matter it is clear that it is totally

unnecessary to import superstition either in our own views or in those

of the Greeks before we can enjoy such poetical representations of

their gods.

(_b_) Such, then, is the general character of the classical Ideal,

whose broader development we shall have to consider more succinctly

when we examine the particular arts. Here we have only to add the

observation that to whatever extent either gods or men are carried

in their positive opposition to the particular and external, yet in

classical art the affirmative ethical substratum must assert itself

as maintained. The subjectivity remains throughout in union with the

substantive content of its powers. Just as in Greek art the natural

element is preserved in harmony with the spiritual and is likewise

subordinated to the ideal content, though it be as adequate existence,

the inward heart of our humanity ever presents itself also in a

thorough identity with the genuine objectivity of Spirit, in other

words, with the essential content of what is moral and true. Regarded

from this point of view, the classic Ideal is unaware of the separation

of ideality from external presentment and of the rending of the

subjective and consequently abstract individual caprice in its various

objects and passions, and it is no less so, on the other hand, of the

abstract universal as thereby created. The foundations of character

must, consequently, always be the substantive, and what is bad, sinful

and evil in the self-housed dwelling of subjectivity is excluded

from classical representations. And above all else the harshness,

wickedness, meanness, and hideousness which finds a place in romantic

art, will be wholly alien to it. It is true, we find many instances

of transgression, matricide, patricide and other crimes against the

love of family and piety treated as the subject-matter of Greek art;

but they are not here regarded simply as atrocities, or, as a little

while since it was the fashion among ourselves, as brought about by

the inscrutability of a so-called fatality which imports the appearance

of a necessary result. Rather, if such transgressions are committed

by mankind and in part ordered and defended by the gods themselves,

such actions are on every occasion presented to us from some point of

view at least in a light which declares a certain justification truly

arising out of the subject-matter itself.

(_c_) Despite this substantive foundation we have seen the general

elaboration of the gods of classical art manifest itself out of the

repose of the Ideal within the variety of the individual and external

embodiment, in all the detail of events, occurrences, and actions,

which become ever and ever more human. By this means classical art

finally, if we consider its content, carries yet further the process

of _articulating_ the accidental individualization, when we consider

it as a mode of making the same _pleasurable_ and attractive. In other

words that which pleases is the elaboration of the particular aspect of

the external phenomenon at every point of the same; by this means the

work of art no longer arrests the spectator merely in its connection

with his own concrete soul-life, but also contains many affiliating

links with the finite aspect of his subjectivity. For it is precisely

in the finiteness of the art-creation that the closer association

subsists with that aspect of the individual which is itself finite, and

which rediscovers itself once more with satisfaction in every respect

as mobile and stable existence in the art-product. The seriousness of

the gods becomes a grace, which does not agitate with violence or lift

a man over his ordinary existence, but suffers him to persist there

tranquil, and simply claims to bring him content. Just as we generally

find that the imagination when it masters religious conceptions, and

endows them with a form appropriate to its notions of beauty, has a

tendency to make the earnest character of devotion disappear, and in

this respect destroys religion strictly as religion; so, too, this very

process moves forward at the stage we are discussing for the most part

by the addition of that which is agreeable and pleases. For it is not

by any means the substantial aspect, the significance of the gods, or

their universal character, which is evolved by virtue of what delights.

Rather it is the finite side, their sensuous existence and subjective

inward life, which purports to awake interest and provide satisfaction.

The more, therefore, the charm of the existence reproduced is the

dominant factor in its beauty to that extent the gracefulness is

disentwined from the embrace of the universal and removed from the

content, through which alone the profounder penetration could rest

satisfied.

The transition to another province of the forms of art is closely

united with this externality and articulate definition. For under the

mode of externality reposes the manifold of the finite condition; a

manifold which, so soon as it secures a free field, asserts itself

finally in opposition to the spiritual Idea, its universality and

truth, and begins to rouse up the dissatisfaction of thought in a

reality which is no longer adequate to express it.

[Footnote 180: Chapter XLIX.]

[Footnote 181: I presume this is the sense of that difficult word _des

Inneren_ here.]

[Footnote 182: By "absolute" I presume Hegel means here absolute in

the sense of predominant, masterful--activity such as the Greek artist

possessed.]

[Footnote 183: "Iliad," I, vv. 9-12.]

[Footnote 184: _Ibid._ vv. 94-100.]

[Footnote 185: "Odyssey," XXIV, vv. 41-63.]

[Footnote 186: That is, Thetis.]

[Footnote 187: _Bestimmte sittliche Substanz._]

[Footnote 188: _Das reine Insichseyn._]

[Footnote 189: _Ein ewiger Ernst._]

[Footnote 190: I presume this refers to some drapery or curtains round

the bust as exhibited.]

[Footnote 191: This is the meaning of _Heiterkeit_ here rather than

"cheerfulness," though _Seligkeit_ is the usual word.]

[Footnote 192: _Göttliche Universum._ A rather curious expression for,

I presume, the ideal totality of the Divine Being.]

[Footnote 193: _Der geistigen absoluten Innerlichkeit._ Lit., "the

spiritual and absolute mode of the inward life." He refers, of course,

to Christianity, with its life of the pure in heart and the pure

reason.]

[Footnote 194: _Besonnenheit._]

[Footnote 195: "Iliad," XVI, vv. 783-849.]

[Footnote 196: I very much doubt whether the words _Sondern das Gerede

allein_ can have this meaning, but the obvious meaning, "but only the

gossip," hardly makes sense. I think the sentence requires revision.]

CHAPTER III

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE CLASSICAL TYPE OF ART

The gods of classical art contain in themselves the germ of their

overthrow; consequently, when this fatal defect which they include is

brought to consciousness through the elaboration of art itself, they

bring about the dissolution of the classical Ideal at the same time.

We established as the principle of this, so far as we have here to

deal with it, that kind of spiritual individuality which secures in

every respect an adequate expression in bodily or external existence

immediate to our senses. This individuality was enclosed within a

complex of divine personalities, whose definition is not essentially

and withal from the first given up to the contingent condition in which

the everlasting gods receive the appearance of dissolution for man's

conscious life no less than for his artistic creation.

1. FATE OR DESTINY

It is true that sculpture in its complete plastic perfection accepts

the gods as substantive potencies, and endows them with a form in whose

beauty they in the first instance repose in security, for the reason

that the accidental character, of their external envisagement is to

the least extent emphasized. Their _multiplicity_ and _distinction_

does in fact, however, constitute this element of contingency, and

thought annuls this in the determinate conception of _one_ divinity,

through whose inevitable power they are mutually at war with and to

the detriment of each other. For however universal the power of every

particular god is conceived as specific individuality, such is of a

restricted range. Add to this the fact that the gods do not continue

in their eternal repose; they are self-determined relatively to

particular aims in actual movement through their being drawn hither

and thither by the pre-existing conditions and collisions of concrete

reality, in order at one time to afford assistance and at another

to obstruct or destroy. These isolated relations in which the gods

as active individuals participate contain within them an element of

contingency, which impairs the substantive nature of the divine,

however much the same may persist as the predominant substratum, and

involves the gods in the contradictions and conflicts of a limited

finitude. By reason of this finiteness immanent in the gods themselves

they fall into contradiction with the loftiness, worth, and beauty of

their existence, through which, too, they are eventually brought down

to the level of mere caprice and chance. The genuine Ideal evades the

complete appearance of this contradiction simply and in so far as--this

is preeminently the case in true sculpture and its particular creations

as we find them in temples--the divine personalities are represented as

explicitly alone in the repose of blessedness, yet retain, as we have

already above indicated, a certain aspect of lifelessness, somewhat

aloof from all emotion, and withal that quiet characteristic of

pathetic lament. It is just this mournfulness which exposes their fate

by demonstrating that something of higher import stands above them, and

the passage from the particularities of form to their comprehending

unity is a necessary one. If, however, we fix our attention on the type

and configuration of this loftier unity we shall find that it is, as

contrasted with the individuality and relative determination of the

gods, the essentially abstract and formless--the necessity, the fate,

which under this mode of abstraction the higher can only in general

terms be, and which constrains both gods and men, while remaining in

itself incomprehensible and inconceivable. Fate is not as yet absolute

and self-subsistent end, and thereby at the same time subjective,

personal, divine purpose, but merely the one and universal Power which

transcends the particularity of the different gods, and consequently is

unable to be presented itself as individual entity; because otherwise

it would simply appear as one among many individuals, and would stand

above them. For this reason it remains without form and individuality,

and is in this abstraction merely necessity and nothing more; with

which gods no less than men, when they differentiate themselves as

separate from one another, contend. And thus they give effect to their

individual power condemned though it be to limitations, and would fain

exalt themselves over the bounds and warrant of Fate, though they

are, in fact, its subjects, and are forced to hearken to all that

unalterably befalls them.

2. THE DISSOLUTION OF THE GODS THROUGH THEIR ANTHROPOMORPHISM

For the reason, then, that the principle of self-determinate

Necessity[197] does not appertain to the particular gods, does not

supply in other words the content of their self-determination, and

only floats over them as an undefined abstraction, the aspect of their

insularity as individuals has consequently free play and is unable to

escape from Destiny, is moreover at liberty to branch out into the

external fabric of the human condition, into the finite consistency of

anthropomorphism, possibilities which convert the gods into the reverse

of that condition which truly constitutes the notion of what they are

essentially and in virtue of their divine nature. The overthrow of

these gods of beauty is consequently quite inevitably brought about for

art through their own nature. The human consciousness is at last quite

unable to find repose in them, and is fain compelled to take leave of

them. And, moreover, if we look more closely we shall find that the

mode and type of Greek anthropomorphism supplies us with a general

example of how the gods vanish away from the faiths of religion no less

than those of poetry.

(_a_) Spiritual individuality here makes its appearance in the human

form, it is true, as Ideal; but for all that it is in the immediately

visible, that is, the bodily presence, not within humanity in all its

essential explication, under the mode in which it is conscious of

itself in its own self-conscious world as distinct from God, while in

the same breath it annuls the distinction, and is, by its own act, as

one with God, essentially infinite and absolute self-consciousness.

(_α_) For this reason the plastic Ideal is unable to present itself

as infinite self-conscious spirituality. These plastic shapes of

beauty are not merely stone and bronze, but also the infinite form of

subjective life vanishes from them in their content and expression.

We may become as enthusiastic as we please over their beauty and art,

but for all that our _enthusiasm_ is and remains something native

to our own souls; it is not really at home in the objects which it

thus contemplates, that is in the gods themselves. To complete the

true totality a real reciprocity is required on this side also of the

subjective, self-knowing unity and infinity; it is this, and only this,

that unfolds our conception of a living God of knowledge, and of men

who thus apprehend Him. If this totality is not also essentially and

with adequacy conformable to the content and nature of the Absolute,

then the Absolute will itself appear not as truly a subject of

spiritual being, and its presentment will confront us merely in its

objective form without the possession of self-conscious Spirit. It is

quite true, no doubt, that the individuality of the gods retains the

content of subjectivity, but merely under modes that are contingent,

and in a process of development,' which moves independently outside

that substantive repose and blessedness of the gods.

(_β_) On the other hand, the subjectivity which is opposed to the

gods of plastic art is also not the form of conscious life which is

essentially eternal and true. In other words, this latter is--as we

shall see for ourselves more clearly in our consideration of the third

type of art, the romantic--that which has before it the objectivity to

which it is conformable under the mode of an essentially infinite and

self-knowing God. Inasmuch, however, as the knowing subject, at the

stage we are now discussing, does not consciously conceive itself as

present in the perfections of these godlike figures, nor even in its

contemplation of such objects is aware of itself as circumstantially

objective, it is still wholly distinct and separate from its absolute

object, and is consequently a purely contingent and finite subjectivity.

(_γ_) We might possibly suppose that the passage into a higher sphere

of reality would have been emphasized by the imagination and art as a

further war among the gods, in a way analogous, in fact, to the first

transition from the symbolism of the gods of Nature to the spiritual

Ideals of classical art. This is by no means the case. On the contrary,

this translation is carried forward in a wholly different field, as a

conflict brought home to consciousness between absolute reality and

the present world. For this reason art, in its relation to the higher

content, which it has to seize under new modes, occupies an entirely

altered position. This new configuration does not assert its importance

as revelation by means of Art, but is made manifest independently

without it, and appears on the prosaic ground of controversial and

rational discussion, and from thence is within the soul and its

religious emotions, mainly by means of miracle, martyrdoms, and so

on, carried into the world of subjective knowledge, together with a

consciousness of the contradiction between all that is finite and

the Absolute, which unfolds itself in actual history as the process

of events toward a Present which is not merely imagined, but is the

_fact_ we have before us. The Divine, God Himself, becomes flesh, is

born, lives, suffers, dies, and rises from the dead. This is a content

which heart did not discover, but which, quite apart from it, was a

present fact, and which consequently it has not borrowed from its own

domain, but merely supplies a form to it. That old transition and war

of the gods, on the contrary, discovered its origins in the artistic

or imaginative view of the world simply, which created its wisdom and

plastic shapes from its inner life, and gave to astonished mankind his

new gods. For this reason the classic gods also have only received

their existence through the fiat of the imagination, and merely exist

as such in stone and bronze, or in the world open to the senses,

not, however, in flesh and blood, or in very and actual Spirit. The

anthropomorphism of the Greek gods is therefore without real human

existence, that of body no less than that of Spirit. It is Christianity

which first introduces us to this reality in flesh and blood as the

determinate existence, life, and activity of God Himself. Consequently

this bodily form, this flesh, however much also the purely natural and

sensuous is recognized as a negation therein, receives its due and

honour, and that which partakes of anthropomorphism here is sanctified.

Even as man originally was made in the image of God, God is an image

of man; whoso beholdeth the Son beholdeth the Father, and whoso loveth

the Son loveth the Father. In a word, God is acknowledged as present

in the actual world. This new content, then, is not brought home to

consciousness by means of the conceptions of art, but is presented from

an exterior source as an actual occurrence, as the history of the God

who became flesh. A transition such as this could not take its point of

departure from Art; the contrast between the old and the new would have

been too disparate. The God of revealed religion, in respect to content

and form, is very God in truth, in contrast with whom all rivals would

become mere creations of the imagination, whom it would be quite

impossible to compare with Him on equal terms. The old and new gods of

classical art, on the contrary, originate in both cases independently

from the ground of the imagination. They have only such reality from

the finite Spirit as enables them to be conceived and represented as

potencies of Nature and Spirit; the contradiction and conflict they

declare, is taken seriously. If, however, the transition from the Greek

gods to the God of Christendom were portrayed in the first instance by

Art, the representation of such a war of gods could not in this direct

form be enforced in all seriousness.

(_b_) Consequently this strife and transition becomes also, in more

recent times, primarily an accidental, isolated subject-matter of art,

which can claim to create no true epoch, and has been able in this form

to embody no fundamental phase in the line of the entire development

of art. We will recall here in this connection, if incidentally, a

few of the more famous examples of this nature. We frequently hear

in more recent times the lament over the submergence of Greek art,

and a yearning towards Greek gods and heroes is not infrequently the

theme of our poets[198]. This lamentation is expressed emphatically

as in direct opposition to Christendom; and though it is, no doubt,

generally granted that it contains the higher truth, the qualification

is added that, so far as art is concerned, the transition is only

to be regretted. This is the theme of Schiller's "Gods of Greece";

and it is worth our while, even in the present inquiry, to consider

this poem, not merely as poetry in the beauty of its exposition, its

musical rhythm, its vivid pictures, or in the charm of its regretful

mood, which was the motive force in its creation, but also in order to

examine the content. Schiller's pathos is always true, no less than

poignant, and the result of profound reflection.

It is perfectly true that the Christian religion contains, and may

justly claim to accentuate, a certain phase of art; but in the due

course of its development, at the time of the Aufklärung[199], it

has also reached a point where we find that thought, or rather the

Understanding[200], has driven into the background that element,

which art pre-eminently requires, the actual human envisagement and

revelation of God. For the human form and all that it expresses and

declares, human events, actions, feeling, is the form under which art

is forced to conceive and represent the content of Spirit. Inasmuch as

the Understanding has converted God into a mere fact of thought, no

longer crediting the appearance of His Spirit in concrete reality, and

thus has alienated the God of Thought from all actual existence, this

type of religious Illumination has necessarily accepted conceptions

and requirements which are intolerable to Art. When, however, the

Understanding is raised once more from the region of these abstractions

into that of Reason, the need at once asserts itself for something

more concrete, and withal for that kind of concreteness which Art

itself unfolds. The period of the illuminating Understanding has, no

doubt, possessed an art of its own, but only of very prosaic type,

as we may even find it in Schiller, whose point of departure was

precisely that of such a period of criticism; later on, however,

owing to his realization how little reason, imagination, and passion

were satisfied by the critical Understanding, he experienced a deep

longing for art, in the fullest sense of the term, and primarily for

the classical art of the Greeks and their gods, and general views of

the world. It is from this kind of yearning, a reaction, in short,

from the mere abstractions of the mind, that the poem referred to

originated. According to the original draft of the poem, Schiller's

attitude to Christianity is entirely polemical; afterwards he modified

it considerably, no doubt realizing that its _animus_ was only directed

against the critical aspect of the Illumination, which at a later time

itself began to lose its importance. In the first instance he praises

the Greek point of view as fortunate in that the whole of Nature was a

thing of Life to it, and full of divinities. After that he reviews the

Present and its prosaic conception of natural law, and the position man

here takes relatively to God:

/$

Diese traur'ge Stille

Kündigt sie mir meinen Schöpfer an?

Finster wie er selbst ist seine Hülle,

Mein _Entsagen_, was ihn feiern kann[201].

$/

No doubt resignation is an essential characteristic in the evolution

of the Christian life; but it is only in the monkish conception of it

that it requires he should cut off from himself his soul, his emotions,

the so-called impulses of his Nature, and should not incorporate his

life in the moral, rational, actual world, the family and the State;

and it does so precisely as the Illumination and its Deism, which

presupposes that God is unknowable, imposes on mankind the extremest

form of resignation, namely, that of abandoning all effort either to

know or conceive Him. In any true exposition of Christian doctrine,

resignation is, on the contrary, merely a phasal moment of mediation, a

point of transition, in which that which is purely natural, sensuous,

and in general terms finite, strips off this its incompatible nature in

order to permit Spirit to attain the loftier freedom and reconciliation

of its own possessions, a freedom and blessedness which was unknown

to the Greeks. In Christianity as thus understood we are not entitled

to speak of the celebration of the one God, of the bare seclusion of

Himself, and the cutting ourselves adrift from an ungodly world, for it

is precisely in this spiritual freedom and reconciliation of Spirit

that God is immanent, and from this point of view the famous lines of

Schiller:

/$

Da die Göttes menschlicher noch waren,

Waren Menschen göttlicher[202].

$/

is absolutely false. We must for this very reason emphasize the later

alteration made in the concluding lines which refer thus to the Greek

gods:

/$

Aus der Zeitfluh weggerissen schweben

Sie gerettet auf des Pindus Höhn;

Was unsterblich im Gesang soll leben,

Muss im Leben untergehn[203].

$/

These words support entirely the assertion we have made above that

the Greek gods could only be localized in the mental conception and

imagination; they were neither able to affirm such a position in the

reality of life, nor satisfy in the long run finite spirit.

Of another sort is the opposition of Parny to Christianity--a poet

named the French Tibullus on account of his successful elegies--which

is conspicuous in a prolix poem of ten cantos, a kind of epic poem

entitled "La Guerre des Dieux," as an attempt made to bring ridicule

upon Christian conceptions in the interests of jest and comedy carried

out in a tone of unrestrained frivolity, yet withal marked by good

humour and considerable talent. The sallies of wit here are not,

however, carried beyond the point of levity; we have few traces of

the wanton disregard of things that are sacred and of the highest

excellence such as marks the period of Frederick von Schlegel's

"Lucinde." The Virgin Mary no doubt is treated very badly in this poem.

The monks, Dominicans and Franciscans, yield to the seductions of wine

and Bacchanals, and the nuns do much the same with Fauns, and the

result is sufficiently shocking. Finally, however, the gods of the old

world are vanquished and withdraw from Olympus to Parnassus.

As a concluding illustration Goethe in his "Bride of Corinth" has

more profoundly depicted in a vivacious picture the banishment of

love, not so much as the result of any true principle of Christianity

as the misconceived interpretation of resignation and sacrifice. The

poet here contrasts that false asceticism which seeks to condemn the

determination of a woman to be wife and rates that enforced celibacy

as something more holy than marriage with the natural feelings of

mankind. Just as we find in Schiller the opposition between the Greek

imagination and the critical abstractions of our modern Enlightenment,

so we may detect here the Hellenistic ethical and sensuous

justifications in the matter of love and marriage, placed in direct

contrast to ideas which can only claim to belong to the Christian

religion when regarded from a wholly one-sided and therefore incorrect

point of view. With the greatest art a really horrible tone dominates

the entire work; and the principal reason is this, that it remains

quite uncertain whether the action has reference to a real maiden, or

a dead one, a living reality or a ghost; and in the metre of the verse

itself in an equally masterly way the threads of light foolery and

seriousness are so interwoven as to make the uncanniness still more

effective.

(_c_) Before, however, we attempt to gauge in its profundity the new

type of art, whose opposition to the old does not come into the course

of Art's development, so far, at least, as we here have undertaken to

follow it along its fundamental lines, we must in the first instance

make clear for ourselves that other transition in its earliest form,

which attaches to antique art itself. The principle of this transition

consists in this, that the Spirit whose individuality hitherto has been

contemplated as in harmony with the true subsistency of Nature and

human life, and which, in respect to its own life, volition, and acts,

was consciously at home in that accord, begins now to withdraw itself

into the infinite subjectivity of its essence, but instead of the true

infinity is only able to secure a purely formal and indeed still finite

return upon itself.

If we look more closely at the concrete conditions which correspond to

the principle indicated, we shall see, we have already done so, that

the Greek gods possess as their content the substantive _materiae_ of

real human life and action. Over and above the vision of the gods we

have now the highest mode of determination, the universal interest and

the end in determinate life, that is to say, presented at the same

time as an existing fact. Just as it was essential to the spiritual

configuration of Greek art to appear both as external and real, so,

too, the spiritual growth of mankind in its absolute significance

has elaborated itself in a reality that both externally appears and

is real, with whose substance and universality the individual has

put forward a claim to be in accordant fusion. This highest end was

in Greece the life of the State, the collective body of citizens and

their morality and living patriotism. Outside this supreme interest

there was no other more lofty or true. The life of the State, however,

as an external phenomenon of the world, fades into the Past, as do

the conditions of the entire reality of the outside world. It is not

difficult to demonstrate that a State under the type of such a freedom,

so immediately identical with all its citizens, which as such already

possess in their grasp the highest activity in all public transactions,

is inevitably small and weak, and in part must prove suicidal to

itself, in part fall into ruins in the natural course of the history

of nations. In other words, by reason of this immediate coalescence of

individual life with the universality of State-life, on the one hand

we find that the peculiar idiosyncrasies of spiritual experience and

its particular aspects as private life do not receive their full dues,

nor do they receive sufficient opportunity for a development innocuous

to society at large. Rather, as distinct from the concrete substance,

into which it has not been accepted, such a nature remains simply the

limited and natural egoism, which goes on its own way independently,

pursues its interests however much they are alien to the true interest

of the whole, and, consequently, is an instrument to the ruin of

the State, against which, in the last resort, it strains to oppose

its individual forces. On the other hand within the circle of this

freedom itself the need of a higher personal liberty is roused, which

not merely in the State, as the substantive totality, nor merely in

the accepted code of morals and law, but in the very soul of the man

himself asserts its claim to exist, in so far as he is ready to give

life to goodness and rectitude out of the wealth of his own nature and

in the light of his own personal knowledge, and to recognize the same

at its real worth. The individual subject demands of consciousness that

it should be, in virtue of its claim as self-identity, a substantive

whole. Consequently there arises in this freedom a new breach between

the end of the State and that of the man's own personal welfare as

essentially free himself. Such a conflict as this had already begun in

the time of Socrates, while on the other side the vanity, self-seeking

and unbridled character of democracy and demagogy corrupted the true

State to such a degree that men like Plato and Xenophon experienced a

loathing for the internal condition of their mother-city, where the

direction of all public transactions lay in the hands of those who were

either frivolous, or those who sought nothing but personal aims.

The spirit of this transition, therefore, depends in the first

instance on the general line of severation between Spirit in its

unfolded self-subsistency and external existence. The spiritual in

this separation from its reality, in which it no longer finds itself

reflected, is then the abstract mode of Spirit; it is not, however, the

one Oriental god, but on the contrary the actual self-knowing conscious

subject, which brings to the fore and retains within the clasp of

its ideal subjectivity all that is universal in thought, truth,

goodness, and morality, and possesses therein not so much the knowledge

of a pre-existing reality as simply the content of its thoughts

and convictions. This relation, in so far as it persists in this

opposition, and sets up the two aspects of the same as purely opposites

to one another, would be of an entirely prosaic character. We do not,

however, at this stage as yet arrive at this point of bare prose. In

other words it is true that on the one hand we have a consciousness

present, which as self-secure, wills the Good, the fulfilment of its

desires, conceives the reality of its notion in the virtue of its

emotional life, much as we find it thus imaged in the ancient gods,

morals, and laws. At the same time, however, this consciousness is

split up in opposition to its existence as part of existing Life, in

other words the actual political life of the time, the dissolution

of the old modes of conception, the former type of patriotism and

political wisdom, and adheres thereby unquestionably to that opposition

between the inward life of soul and the real environment outside it.

And the reason of this hesitancy is this that the bare conceptions

of genuine ethical truth which it derives from its own inner world

are unable to fully satisfy it; it consequently faces that which is

exterior to this, to which it relates itself in a negative and hostile

spirit with the object of changing it. This consciousness is, as

already stated, on the one hand no doubt an inward and present content,

which, self-determined and at the same time deliberately articulate,

is concerned with a world that confronts it, to which this content is

opposed, and which receives the task to depict this same reality in

the semblance of the very traits of the corruption peculiar to that

world, and which form such a contrast with its own ideas of goodness

and truth. From another point of view this very contrast is cancelled

by art itself. In other words, another type of art arises, in which the

conflict of this opposition is not emphasized through the medium of

mere thoughts, remaining thus in its disunion; but this reality in the

very folly of its corruption is itself submitted to a mode of artistic

presentation, which exposes it as self-destructive, and exposes it in

such a way that it is precisely in and through this self-destructive

process of what is of no weight that truth is enabled to assert itself

upon this mirror as the secure and endurable power, and thereby all the

force of a direct opposition to what is essentially true is removed

from that side represented by folly and unreasonableness. This art is

comedy, of the type Aristophanes dramatized for his fellow-citizens,

connecting it closely with all that was essential in the world around

him, and doing so with equanimity[204], in a mood of pure and hearty

joviality.

3. SATIRE

We may, however, observe that this resolution of art, despite its

adequacy, tends to disappear to this extent, that the contradictory

antithesis persists in the form of its _opposition_, and, consequently,

instead of the poetic reconciliation a prosaic relation is imported,

by means of which the classical type of art appears to be annulled, and

the gods of plastic shape no less than the entire world of human beauty

vanish with it. We have, then, now to look about us for a form of art,

which is able to reclothe itself from the ruins of this overthrow in

a loftier configuration and to extract the real significance which it

implies. We discovered as the terminating point of symbolic art in

the same way that the separation of pure form from its significance

was emphasized in a variety of modes such as simile, fable, parable,

riddle, and the like. Inasmuch as the severation above adverted to is

causally responsible for the dissolution of that art-type, in a similar

way the question arises what is the nature of the distinction between

our present example of transition as contrasted with the previous one.

The distinction is as follows:

(_a_) In the truly symbolic and comparative type of art the form and

significance are from the very first, despite the affinity of their

relationship, alien to one another; they are placed, however, in no

mere negative, but rather in amicable relationship; for it is precisely

the qualities and traits which are identical to or resemble each other

on the two sides which assert themselves as the causal basis of their

conjunction and comparison. Their persistent separation and hostility

is consequently within the bounds of this union neither, relatively to

the separated aspects, of a _hostile_ character, nor is a blending of

the same, within essentially narrow limits, thereby removed from them.

The Ideal of classical art, on the contrary, proceeds from the perfect

interfusion of significance and form, the ideal individuality of spirit

and its external conformation; and when the composite aspects which

have been brought together in such a consummated unity are disrupted,

this disruption takes place simply because they are unable any longer

to cohere one with the other, and are absolutely compelled to start

forth from their peaceful state of harmony in disunion and hostility.

(_b_) Together with this way of looking at the relation in contrast

to that of symbolic art we may add that the _content_ of both sides

is altered, as they now stand in opposition. To put it thus we may

say that, in the symbolic type of art, it is abstractions more or

less, general thoughts, or at least definite phrases in the form of

generalities peculiar to reflective thought, which, by means of the

symbolic type of art, receive a sensuous embodiment replete with

suggestion. In the form, however, which makes itself predominant in

this transition to romantic art the content, it is true, is made up

of a similar abstraction of general thoughts, opinions, and maxims of

reflective reason, but in this case it is not these abstractions in

themselves, but rather their presence in the _individual's_ mind and

his self-subsistent identity which furnish the content for one side of

the opposition. For the primary requirement of this mediating stage

consists in this, that the spiritual which has attained the Ideal,

shall stand forth in its entire independence. Already in classical

art we found that spiritual individuality was of chief importance,

albeit on the side of its realization it remained reconciled with a

determinate existence as immediately presented. What is of importance

now is to declare a mode of subjectivity which strives to acquire the

mastery over the form that is no longer adequate to it, in a word, over

external reality. In this way the world of Spirit becomes liberated as

independent. It recovers itself from bondage to the sensuous material

and manifests itself thereby through this return upon its own resources

as the subject of a self-consciousness which only finds contentment

in the secret wealth of its own domain. This subject, however, which

repels externality from itself, is not in respect to its ideal aspect

yet the truly concrete totality which encloses as content the Absolute

under the mode of self-conscious spiritual life; rather it is, as still

fettered by its opposition to reality, a purely abstract, finite,

and unsatisfied form of subjectivity. In opposition to this we have

confronting it an equally finite mode of reality, which on its part is

also independent, but just for that very reason--forasmuch, that is,

as the truth of Spirit has withdrawn from it into its own ideality and

henceforward neither will nor can identity itself with it, appears as

a reality void of all gods and an existence fallen into rottenness. In

this manner and at this point art brings forward a Spirit that thinks,

that is, to repeat our former analysis, the individual consciousness

of our humanity, which, supporting itself on its own possession of the

abstract knowledge and volition of goodness and virtue, confronts

with hostility therewith the corruption of its present environment.

That aspect of this opposition which remains unresolved, and in which

the ideal and external modes of its antithesis persist in their

disruption, constitutes the element of prose in the mutual relation of

the two sides. A noble mind or a virtuous soul to whom the realization

of self-conscious life is denied in a world of vice and folly, turns

away from the existence which thus confronts him with passionate

indignation, or more subtle wit and more frosty bitterness, and either

is wroth with or scorns a world which gives the lie direct to his

abstract notions of virtue and truth.

The type of art which accepts this sudden outburst of opposition

between a subjectivity still finite in its mode and a degenerate world

outside it as its matter is the _Satire_, the ordinary theories as to

which have little to commend them, for the simple reason that they

break down precisely where we look for their assistance. Satire has

nothing to do with epic poetry, and it has just as little affinity

with lyric. In the Satire it is not the life of the emotional nature

which is expressed; rather the general conception of goodness and what

is essentially needful, which it no doubt blends with the particular

aspect of soul-life[205], appears as the virtuousness of this or that

individual; but this does not suffer itself to be enjoyed in the open

and unhampered beauty of imaginative conception or let that enjoyment

issue freely. Rather with discontent it retains the existing discord

between the writer's own state of mind and its abstract principles

and the empirical reality which mocks them. To this extent satire

is neither a genuine creation of the poet nor a real work of art.

For these reasons the point of view of the satirical poem can never

be reached satisfactorily through those other types of poetry just

mentioned; it must be apprehended in a more general way as the example

of this very transitional form we referred to from the classic Ideal.

(_c_) Inasmuch, then, as it is, relatively to its ideal content, the

prosaic resolution of the Ideal, which asserts itself mainly in

satire, we do not find that Greece, which is pre-eminently the native

land of Beauty, is the place where we must look for it. Satirical

poems of the nature above described are the characteristic possession

of Rome. The spirit of the Roman world is the sovereignty of the

abstract Ideal, the law that is dead, the shipwreck of beauty and of

the joyousness of civic life, the suppression of the family in the

sense that it is the immediate and most natural form of morality, and

generally the sacrifice of individuality, which surrenders itself

wholly to the State, and in obedience to the abstract law is satisfied

with the frost-like sense of political worth and critical satisfaction

which it supplies. The principle of this civic virtue, the cold-blooded

harshness of which subjects to its pleasure all alien peoples, while

the formal rectitude of the personal life is elaborated to the furthest

point of consistency on equally rigid lines, is wholly inconsonant

with genuine art. We find, therefore, even in Rome no art that is at

once conspicuous in its beauty, freedom, and greatness. It is from

the Greeks that the Romans borrowed all that they mastered whether

in sculpture or painting, epic, lyric, or dramatic poetry. It is a

remarkable fact that all that we can point to as the native product of

Latin art is comic farces, whereas the more cultivated types of comedy,

not excluding those of Plautus and Terence, are borrowed from Greece,

and are rather an affair of imitation than independent production.

Even Ennius first exhausted the sources of Greek poetry before he

made mythology prosaic. That type of art is alone native to the Latin

genius, which was essentially itself prosaic, the didactic poem, for

example, more particularly when it contains an ethical content, and

endows its general reflections with the purely exterior adornment of

metre, images, similes, and a rhetorically beautiful diction. But above

all other forms thus excepted we place the satire. Here we find it is

the mood of virtuous exasperation over the surrounding world which

strives to air itself in what is, in some measure, hollow declamations.

We can only call this essentially prosaic type of art poetical in so

far as it brings before the vision the corrupted nature of real life

in such a way that this corruption practically falls to pieces as the

result of its own folly. Just as Horace, who as a lyric poet entirely

identified himself by study with the artistic type and manner of

Greece, in his epistles and satires--where we have his originality

more emphasized--traces for us a living picture of the morals of his

age, by depicting follies which are self-destructive by virtue of the

stupidity, that carries them into effect. Nevertheless, even this

example only presents us with a kind of merriment that for all its keen

and educated sense can barely be classed as poetry, the object in the

main being to make ridicule out of that which is bad. Among others, on

the contrary, we find that the abstract conception of rectitude and

virtue is deliberately contrasted with vice; and in this case it is

exasperation, anger, hate, and scorn, which in some measure expatiate

in formal eloquence over virtue and wisdom, and in part give full rein

to the indignation of a soul of more nobility against the dissolution

and servility of the times, or hold up before the vices of the day the

mirror of the old morality, the former liberty, the virtues of a state

of the world which has passed away, without any genuine hope and belief

in their recovery; or rather one which has nothing to oppose to the

tottering gait, the dilemmas, the need and danger of an ignominious

present, save a stoical equanimity and the unshakable conscience of a

virtuous soul. Roman history and philosophy not unfrequently receive

something of the same tone from a mood of this kind. Sallust must

needs express himself strongly against the corruptions of morals,

being himself very considerably affected by them. Livy, despite his

rhetorical elegance, seeks for comfort and satisfaction in his picture

of the good old days. Above all we have Tacitus, who, with a severe

melancholy as grand in its scope as it was profound, without the

baldness of declamation, indignantly exposes in the clearest relief

the evils of his time. Among the satirists Persius is remarkable for

his acerbity, with a bitter edge more keen than that of Juvenal. Later

on we find bringing up the rear the Greek Syrian Lucian giving free

vent to his witticisms and pleasantry against all things, whether

heroes, philosophers, or gods; and with exceptional prominence passing

in review the ancient gods of Greece on the score of their humanity

and individuality. However, only too often he goes no further in his

tittle-tattle than the mere external aspect of these godlike figures

and their actions, and is for that reason wearisome to modern readers.

For, on the one hand, so far as our convictions are concerned, we have

already disposed of all that he would destroy, and on the other we are

aware that, despite all his jests and mockery, these characteristic

traits of Greek divinities, when contemplated under the aspect of

beauty, still retain their eternal significance.

Nowadays satirical poems are not likely to prove a success. Cotta and

Goethe have proposed competitions in this form of composition, but no

poems of note are forthcoming. Certain fixed principles are bound up

with it, with which the present age is not in harmony; a wisdom which

is devoid of content, a virtue which adheres with inflexible obstinacy

to its own resources and nothing beyond, may very possibly contrast

itself with the actual world, but is quite unable to bring about the

truly poetical resolution of what is false and repugnant, and effect

the genuine reconciliation in the truth.

In one word, Art is unable to persist in this breach between the

abstract conceptions of the inward life and the objective world

around, without proving itself false to its own principle. The

subjective realm of the soul must be conceived as that which is itself

an essentially infinite and independent existence, which, albeit it

is unable to suffer the finite reality to subsist as Truth itself,

nevertheless does not merely assert itself negatively toward the same

in a bare contradiction, but proceeds all the while on the path of

reconciliation, and for the first time, in its opposition to the ideal

individualities of the classical art-form, declares this very activity,

being in fact the presentment of the absolute mode of self-conscious

life.

[Footnote 197: Lit. "the essentially-and-for-itself-necessary."]

[Footnote 198: Hölderlin, and of course Goethe no less than Schiller,

would be included. With our moderns such as Swinburne the admission is

less obvious than the qualification.]

[Footnote 199: _Die Aufklärung._ That is, the end of the eighteenth

century; usually translated as illumination or enlightenment.]

[Footnote 200: _Verstand_, the faculty of science and common sense.]

[Footnote 201:

/$

What! doth this same stillness tell me sadly

All I know of Him who voiced creation?

Dark as e'en the veil that hides Him from me

Is my heart's salute of resignation.

$/

]

[Footnote 202:

/$

Since the gods were then more human

Men were more in image godlike.

$/

]

[Footnote 203:

/$

Wrested from the flood of Time's abysses

Saved they float above high Pindus now;

All that was immortal life within them

Lives in song, all other life must go.

$/

]

[Footnote 204: _Zornlos_ lit., without anger.]

[Footnote 205: I think this is the meaning of the words _mit

subjectiver Besonderheit_, but the interpretation "with other material

peculiar to the writer" is not impossible.]

SUBSECTION III

THE ROMANTIC TYPE OF ART

INTRODUCTION

OF THE ROMANTIC GENERALLY

The type of romantic art receives its definition, as we have hitherto

throughout the present inquiry seen was always the case, from the ideal

notion of the content, which it is the function of art to declare.

We must consequently in the first place attempt to elucidate the

distinctive principle of the new content, a content which now, in its

significance as the absolute content of truth, opens up to our minds a

new vision of the world no less than a novel configuration of art.

In the _first_ stage of our inquiry, the entrance chamber of art,

the impulse of imagination consisted in the struggle from Nature to

spiritual expression. In this strain Spirit never reached beyond

what was still only an effort to find, an effort which, in so far as

it was not yet able to supply a genuine content for art, could only

maintain its position as an external embodiment of the significant

aspects of Nature, or those abstractions of the ideal inwardness

of substance which were destitute of a subjective character in the

strict sense, and in which this type of art found its real centre. The

_reverse_ of this point of view we discovered in classical art. Here

it is spirituality--albeit it is only by virtue of the abrogation of

the significances of Nature that it is enabled to struggle forth in

its independent self-identity--which is the basis and principle of

the content, with the natural phenomenon in the bodily or sensuous

material for its external form. This embodiment, however, did not,

as was the case in the first stage, remain superficial, indefinite,

and unsuffused by its content; but the perfection of art attained

its culminating point by precisely this means, namely, that Spirit

completely transpierced its exterior appearance, idealized the shell

of Nature in this union of beauty, and drew round itself a reality

adequate to its own nature as mind under the mode of substantive

individuality. By this means classical art was a presentation of the

Ideal which completely satisfied its notion, the consummation of the

realm of beauty. More beautiful art than this can neither exist now nor

hereafter.

But for all that we may have an art that is more lofty in its aim than

this lovely revelation of Spirit in its immediate sensuous form, if

at the same time one that is created by the mind as adequate to its

own nature. For this coalition, which perfects itself in the medium of

what is external, and thereby makes sensible reality its adequate and

determinate existence, necessarily runs counter to the true notion of

Spirit, and drives it forth from its reconciliation in the bodily shape

upon its own essential substance to seek further reconciliation in that

alone. The simple and unriven totality of the Ideal is dissolved, and

breaks up into one of twofold aspect, namely, that of the essentially

subjective life and its exterior semblance, in order to enable mind,

by means of this severation, to win the profounder reconciliation

in its own most proper element. In one word, Spirit, which has for

its principle the mode of entire self-sufficiency, the union of its

notion with its reality--is only able to discover an existence that

wholly corresponds to such a principle in its own spiritual world of

emotion, soul, that is to say, in the inward life where it feels at

home. The human spirit becomes aware that it must possess its Other,

its _existence_, as Spirit, which it appropriates as its own and what

it verily is, and by doing so at length enjoys its own infinity and

freedom.

1. This elevation of Spirit to its _own substance_, through which it

attains its objectivity--which it would otherwise be obliged to seek

for in the external environment of its existence within its own self

and in this union with itself both feels and knows itself--is what

constitutes the fundamental principle of romantic art. With this truth

we may join as a corollary thereto that for this concluding stage the

beauty of the classic Ideal, or in other words beauty in its most

uniquely consonant form and its most conformable content, is no longer

regarded as ultimate. For in arriving at the point of romantic art,

Spirit[206] becomes aware that its truth is not fully attained by a

self-absorption in the material of sense. On the contrary, it only

comes fully to the knowledge of that truth by withdrawing itself out

of that medium into the inward being of its own substance, whereby it

deliberately affirms the inadequacy of external reality as a mode of

its existence. It is owing to this that when this new content is set

the essential task of making itself an object of beauty, the beauty, in

the meaning of the terms under which we have met with it before, only

persists as a subordinate mode, and the new conception of it becomes

the _spiritual_ beauty of what is its own ideality made fully explicit,

in other words, the subjectivity of Spirit essentially infinite in its

mode.

In order, however, that mind may attain the infinity which belongs

to it it must transcend at the same time purely formal and _finite_

personality and rise into the measure of the _Absolute._ That is to

say, Spirit must declare itself as fulfilled with that which is out

and out substantive, and in doing so proclaim itself as a self-knowing

and self-willing subject. Conversely, therefore, what is substantive

and true is no longer to be apprehended as a mere "beyond" relatively

to our humanity, and the anthropomorphism of the Greek view of things

can be struck out; and in the place of this we have humanity as very

and real subjectivity affirmed as the principle, and by virtue of this

change, as we have already seen, anthropomorphism for the first time

reflects a truth of complete and final validity.

2. We have now in a general way to develop the range of subject-matter,

no less than its form, from the earliest phases in the evolution of

this principle, whose configuration, as it thus changes, is conditioned

by the new content of romantic art.

The true principle of the romantic content is absolute inwardness[207],

and the form which corresponds to it, the subjectivity of mind, meaning

by this the comprehension of its self-subsistence and freedom. This

intrinsically infinite principle and explicitly enunciated universal

is the absolute negation of all particularity[208]; it is simple

unity at home with itself, which consumes all that is separable, all

processes of Nature and its succession of birth, passing away, and

reappearance, all the limitations of spiritual existence, and dissolves

all particular gods in its pure and infinite self-identity. In this

Pantheon all gods are dethroned; the flame of the subjective essence

has destroyed them; instead of the plastic polytheism art recognizes

now _one_ God only, _one_ Spirit, _one_ absolute self-subsistence,

which as the absolute knowledge and volition of itself remains in

free union with it, and no longer falls to pieces in the particular

characters and functions we have reviewed above, whose single unit of

cohesion was the force of an obscure Necessity. Absolute subjectivity,

however, in its purity would escape from art altogether, and only be

present in the apprehension of Thought, unless it could enter into

external existence in order that it might be a subjectivity which was

_actual_ if also conformable to its notion, and further could recollect

itself in its own province from out of this reality. And, what is

more, this moment of reality is pertinent to the Absolute, because

the Absolute, as infinite negativity, contains this self-relation--as

simple unity of knowledge at home with itself, and therewith as

_immediacy_--for the final consummation of its activity. On account

also of this its immediate existence, which is rooted in the Absolute

itself, the Absolute declares itself not as the one jealous God, who

merely annuls the aspect of Nature and finite human existence, without

revealing itself verily therein under the mode of actual divine

subjectivity; rather the very Absolute unfolds itself, and takes to

itself an aspect, relatively to which it is also within the grasp and

presentation of art.

The determinate existence of God, however, is not the natural and

sensuous in its simplicity, but the sensuous as brought home to that

which is not sensuous, in other words to the subjectivity of mind

which, instead of losing the certainty of its own presence as the

Absolute, in its external envisagement, for the first time, and by no

other means than this its reality, is made aware of its actual presence

as such. God in His Truth is consequently no mere Ideal begotten of the

imagination, but He declares Himself in the heart of finite condition

and the external mode of contingent existence, and is, moreover, made

known to Himself therein as divine subjective life, which maintains

itself there as essentially infinite and creating this infinity for

itself. Inasmuch, then, as the actual subject[209] is the manifestation

of God, Art for the first time secures the superior right to apply

the human figure and its mode of externality generally as a means to

express the Absolute, although the new function of art can only consist

in making the external form not a means whereby the ideality of man's

inward condition is absorbed in exterior bodily shape, but rather

conversely to make the consciousness of the Divine mind visible in the

subject of consciousness. The distinguishable phases, which combine to

make up the totality of this apprehension of the world-condition as,

that is to say, the concrete totality of truth, are consequently made

manifest to mankind from this point onwards under such a mode that

it is neither the Natural in its simplicity, such as sun, heavens,

stars, and so forth, nor the Greek conclave of the gods of beauty, nor

the heroes and practical exploits in the field of the family cultus

and political life--it is neither one nor any of these which supplies

us with either content or form. Rather it is the actual and isolated

individual subject who receives in the inward[210] substance of his

living experience this infinite worth, for it is in him alone that the

eternal characters of absolute Truth--which is made actual only as

Spirit--expand out of their fulness within, and are concentrated to the

point of determinate existence.

If we contrast this definition of romantic art with that which

was proposed to the classical--that is to say, as Greek sculpture

completed the latter under the mode most conformable to it--it is

obvious that the plastic figure of the god does not express the

motion and activity of Spirit, in so far as the same has retired from

its actual bodily shape, and has penetrated to the inner shrine of

independent self-identity. That which is mutable and contingent in

the empirical aspect of individuality is no doubt removed from those

lofty, godlike figures: what, however, fails them is the actualization

of the subjective condition in its self-subsistent being as shown in

self-knowledge and self-volition. This defect makes itself felt on the

exterior side in the notable fact that the direct expression of soul in

its simplicity, the light of the eye, is absent from the sculptured

figure. The most exalted works of beautiful sculpture are sightless.

The inward life does not look forth from them as self-conscious

inwardness such as this concentration of Spirit to the point of light

made visible in the human eye offers us. This light of the soul falls

outside of them, and is the possession of the beholder alone: he is

unable to look through these figures as soul direct to soul, and eye

to eye. The God of romantic art, however, is made known with sight,

that is, self-knowing, subjective on the side of soul, and that soul or

divine intimacy disclosing itself to soul. For the infinite negativity,

the withdrawal of the spiritual into itself, cancels its discharge

in the bodily frame. This subjectivity is the light of Spirit, which

reveals itself in its own domain, in the place which was previously

obscure, whereas the natural light can only give light on the face of

an object, is in fact this _terrain_ and object, upon which it appears,

and which it is aware of as itself[211]. Inasmuch as, however, this

absolute intimacy of the soul expresses itself at the same time as

the mode of human envisagement in its actual existing shape, and our

humanity is bound up with the entire natural world, we shall find

that there is no less a wide field of variety in the contents of the

subjective world of mind than there is in that external appearance, to

which Spirit is related as to its own dwelling-place.

The reality of absolute subjectivity, as above described, in the mode

of its visible manifestation, possesses the following modes of content

and appearance.

(_a_) Our first point of departure we must deduce from the Absolute

itself, which as very and actual mind endows itself with determinate

existence, is self-knowing in its thought and activity. Here we find

the human form so represented that it is known immediately as the

wholly self-possessed Divine. Man does not appear as man in his solely

human character, in the constraint of his passions, finite aims,

and achievements, or as merely conscious of God, but rather as the

self-knowing one and only universal God Himself, in whose life and

sufferings, birth, death, and resurrection He reveals openly also to

finite consciousness, what Spirit, what the Eternal and Infinite in

their veritable truth are[212]. Romantic art presents this content

in the history of Christ, his mother, and his disciples, with all

the rest of those in whom the Holy Spirit and the perfected Divine

is manifested. For in so far as God, who is above all the essential

Universal, exists in the manifestation of human existence, this

reality is not, in the Divine figure of Christ, limited to isolate and

immediate existence, but unfolds itself throughout the entire range

of that humanity, in which the Spirit of God is made present, and in

this actuality continues in unity with itself. The diffusion of this

self-contemplation, this essential self-possession of mind[213], is

peace, in other words the reconciled state of Spirit with its own

dominion in the mode of its objective presence--a divine world, a

kingdom of God, in which the Divine, which has for its substantive

notion from the first reconciliation with itself, consummates this

result in such a condition, and thereby secures its freedom.

(_b_) However much, we must fain add, this identification asserts

itself as grounded in the essence of the Absolute itself, as spiritual

freedom and infinity it is no reconciliation which immediately is

visible from the first in either the real worlds of Nature or Spirit;

on the contrary, it is only accomplished as the elevation of Spirit

from the finitude of its immediate existence to its truth. As a

corollary of this it follows that Spirit, in order to secure its

totality and freedom, must effect an act of self-severation, and set

up on the one side itself as the finitude of Nature and Spirit to

its opposed self on the other as that which is essentially infinite.

Conversely with this act of disruption the necessity is conjoined

that from out of this retirement from its unity--within the bounds of

which the finite and purely natural, the immediacy of existence, the

"natural" heart in the sense of the negative, evil and bad, one and

all are defined--a way is at last found by virtue of the subjugation

of all that has no substantive worth within the kingdom of truth and

consolation. In this wise the reconcilement of Spirit can only be

conceived as an activity, a movement of the same, can only be presented

as a process, in whose course arise both strain and conflict, and

the appearance and reappearance, as an essential feature of it, of

pain, death, the mournful sense of non-reality, the agony of the

soul and its bodily tenement. For just as God in the first instance

disparts finite reality from Himself, so, too, finite man, who starts

on his journey outside the divine kingdom, receives the task to exalt

himself to God, to let loose from him the finite, to do away with the

nothing-worth, and by means of this decease of his immediate reality

to become that which God in His manifestation as man accomplished as

very truth in the actual world. The infinite pain of this sacrifice of

the most personal subjectivity, sufferings, and death, which for the

most part were excluded from the representation of classical art, or

rather only are presented there as natural suffering, receive their

adequate treatment necessarily for the first time in romantic art.

It is, for example, impossible to affirm that among the Greeks death

was ever conceived in its full and essential significance. Neither

that which was purely natural, nor the immediacy of Spirit in its

union with the bodily presence, was held by the Greeks as something

in itself essentially negative. Death was consequently to them purely

an abstract passing over, unaccompanied by horror or fearsomeness, a

cessation without further immeasurable consequences for the deceased.

If, however, conscious life in its spiritual self-possession is of

infinite worth then the negation, which death enfolds, is a negation

of this exaltation and worth, and it is consequently fearful, a death

of the soul, which is in the position of finding itself thereby

as itself now this negative in explicit appearance, excluded for

evermore from happiness, absolutely unhappy, delivered over to eternal

damnation[214]. Greek individuality, on the contrary, does not,

regarded as spiritual self-consciousness, attach this worth to itself;

it is able, consequently, to surround death with more cheerful images.

Man only fears the loss of that which is of great worth to him[215].

Life possesses, however, only this infinite worth for mind if the

subject thereof, as spiritual and self-conscious, is reality in its

absolute unity, and is compelled with an apprehension, in this way

justified, to image itself as doomed to negation by death. From another

point of view, however, death also fails to secure from classical

art the _positive_ significance which it receives from romantic art.

The Greeks never treated with real seriousness what we understand

by immortality. It was only in later times that the doctrine of

immortality received at the hands of Socrates a profounder significance

for the introspective reflection of human intelligence. When, for

example, Odysseus[216] praises the happiness of Achilles in the lower

world as one excelling that of all others who were before or came after

him on the ground that he, once revered as a god, is now greatest chief

among the dead, Achilles in the well-known words rates this fortune

at a very low rank indeed, and makes answer that Odysseus had better

utter no word of comfort to him on the score of death; nay, he would

rather be a mere serf of the soil, and poor enough serve a poor man

for wage, than rule as lord over all the ghosts of the dead who have

vanished to Hades. In romantic art, on the contrary, death is merely

a decease of the natural soul and finite consciousness, a decease,

which only proclaims itself as negative as against that which is itself

essentially negative and abolishes what has no real substance, and is

consequently the deliverance of Spirit from its finitude and division,

mediating at the same time the spiritual reconciliation of the

individual subject with the Absolute[217]. Among the Greeks life in its

union with the existence of Nature and the external world was the only

life about which you could affirm anything, and death was consequently

pure negation, the dissolution of immediate reality. In the romantic

view of the world, however, death receives the significance due to

its negativity, in other words the negation of the negative[218],

and returns back to us thereby equally as the affirmative, as the

resurrection of Spirit from the bare husk of Nature and the finiteness

which it has outgrown. The pain and death of the extinguished light of

individual being awakes again in its return upon itself in fruition,

blessedness, and in short that reconciled existence which Spirit is

unable to attain to save through the dying of its negative state, in

which it is shut off from its most veritable truth and life. This

fundamental principle does not therefore merely affect the fact of

death as it approaches man in his relation to the world of Nature, but

it is bound up with a process, which Spirit has to sustain in itself,

quite independently of this external aspect of negation, if life and

truth are to join hands.

(_c_) The _third_ presentment of this absolute world of Spirit is

co-ordinated by man, in so far as he neither makes manifest the

Absolute and Divine in its immediate and essential mode as such

_Divine_, nor declares positively the process in which he is exalted

to the Supreme Being, and reconciled with Him, but rather continues

within the ordinary sphere of his human life. Here it is the purely

_finite_ aspect of that existence which constitutes the content,

whether we regard it in the light of its spiritual purposes, its

worldly interests, passions, collisions, suffering, and enjoyments,

or from that point of view which is wholly external, that of Nature,

its kingdom, and all its detailed phenomena. In order to apprehend

this content with adequacy, however, we must take up two distinct

positions relatively to it. In other words, it is true that Spirit,

for the reason that it has secured the principle of self-affirmation,

expatiates in this province, as one on which it has a just claim, and

one which, as native to it, provides satisfaction, an element from

which it merely extracts this positive character[219], and is permitted

thereby itself to be reflected in its positive satisfaction and

intimacy; yet, on the other hand, we have the fact that this content

is brought down to the level of pure contingency, a contingency which

is unable to claim any independent validity, for the reason that mind

cannot discover therein it veritable existence, and consequently only

preserves its substantial unity by independently on its own account

breaking up again this finite aspect of Spirit and Nature as a thing of

finitude and negation.

3. In conclusion, then, so far as the relation of this content in its

entirety to its mode of presentation is concerned, it would appear,

in the first place, agreeably to what we have above stated, that the

content of romantic art, relatively to the Divine, at any rate, is very

_limited._

(_a_) For, first, as we have already indicated, Nature is divested of

the Divine principle; in other words, the sea and mountains, valleys,

Time, and Night, briefly all the general processes of Nature, have

here lost the worth which they carry when related to the presentation

and content of the Absolute. The images of Nature receive no further

expansion in a symbolic significance. The thesis that their shapes and

activities might possibly sustain traits of Divine import is taken away

from them. For all the mighty questions in regard to the origin of the

world, in regard to the Whence, Wherefore, and Whither, of created

Nature and humanity, and all the symbolical and plastic experiments

in the resolution and exposition of these problems disappear at once

in the revelation of God in Spirit; and we may add that also in the

spiritual sphere the world of variety and colour, with the characters,

actions, and events, as they were envisaged by classical art, are now

concentrated in _one_ single _light-focus_ of the Absolute and its

eternal history of redemption. The whole content meets, therefore, at

this single point of the Inmost of Spirit[220]--that is, of feeling,

imagination, soul--all that strains after a union with truth, that

seeks and wrestles to bring to birth the Divine in consciousness, and

to maintain it; and, furthermore, is constrained to execute the world's

aims and undertakings, not so much for the _world's_ sake as to further

the unique and essential undertaking of its heart by means of the

spiritual conflict of man's inward nature and his reconciliation with

God, presenting personality and its conservation no less than all that

paves the way to them for this object, and this alone. The heroism,

which makes its appearance as the result of such aspirations, is not

the kind of heroism which prescribes laws by its own fiat, establishes

new systems, creates and informs circumstances, but rather a heroism

of submission, which accepts everything as predetermined and ordered

above it, and whose energies are now wholly restricted to the task of

regulating temporal events in line with such direction, and making

that which is in keeping with the higher order and of independent

stability a valid factor in the world as if is and in the Time-process.

For the reason, however, that this absolute content appears as

concentrated to a focus in the inward _life of the soul_, and the

entire process is imported into the life of mankind, the range of this

content is thereby also infinitely extended. It _expands_, in fact,

to a manifold variety practically without limit. For although every

objective history supplies what is substantive in that self-concrete

soul-life, yet for all that the subject of the same reviews it in all

its aspects, presents isolated features taken from it, or unfolds it

as it appears in continually novel human traits by way of addition,

and may very well into the bargain both import the entire expanse of

Nature, as environment and _locale_ of Spirit, and divert them to the

one single object referred to. By this means the history of soul-life

is infinitely rich, and can adapt its form to ever shifting conditions

and situations in every possible way. And, further, if the individual

at last steps forth from this absolute sphere and actively engages in

worldly affairs, the range of interests, objects, and emotions will

be difficult to count on the score in proportion as the spiritual

self-possession is profound, agreeably to the principle in its fullest

application; man is consequently distracted by an infinitely multiplied

profusion of interior and exterior collisions, revolutions, and

gradations of passion, and the most manifold degrees of satisfaction.

The Absolute in its unqualified and essential universality, in so far,

that is, as it is unfolded in the conscious life of the human soul,

constitutes the spiritual content of romantic art; and for this reason

his collective humanity, no less than its entire evolution, becomes its

inexhaustible material.

(_b_) Romantic art does not, however, _as art_ educe this content

in the way we found was the case for the most part in symbolic art,

and, above all, in the classical type and its ideal gods. Romantic

art, as we have seen already, is not, in its _specific_ capacity, the

instructive _revelation_, which, merely in the form of art, makes

the content of truth visible to the senses. The content is already

present in the conceptive mind, and the emotions independently and

outside the sphere of art. _Religion_, as the consciousness of truth

in its universality, is here an essential _premiss_ of art to a degree

totally different from what it was in the previous cases; and, even

if we look at the position in its wholly exterior aspect for the

consciousness that is actual in the reality of the material world, it

lies before us as the prosaic fact of the very present. That is to say,

inasmuch as the content of revelation to mind is the eternal absolute

nature of _mind_[221] itself, which breaks itself loose from Nature

in its bareness and _subordinates_ the same, its manifestation in the

immediacy of present life is such that the external material, in so far

as it consists and is existent, only continues as a contingent world,

out of which the Absolute recollects itself in the secret wealth of

Spirit, and only by such means attains independence and truth. The

external show receives thus the imprimatur of an indifferent medium,

in which Spirit can repose no ultimate trust, and in which it can find

no dwelling-place. The more it conceives the conformation of external

reality as unworthy of its fulness the less it becomes able to seek

consolation therein, or to discover its task of self-reconcilement

consummated by a union therewith.

(_c_) The manner in which, therefore, romantic art gives to itself

a real embodiment agreeably to the spirit of the principle above

indicated, and on the side of its external appearance, is not one

which essentially overleaps the ordinary presentment of reality: it

is by no means averse to accept as cover for itself real existence in

its finite defects and definition. That beauty therefore disappears

from it, which tended to raise the outside envisagement above the

soilure of Time, and the traces that unite it with a Past, in order

to declare the beauty of existence in its blossom in the room of what

had otherwise been a dismantled image. Romantic art has no longer for

its aim the freedom and life of existence in its infinite tranquillity

and absorption of the soul in the bodily presence; no more a life

such as _this_ arrests it. It turns its back on this pinnacle of

beauty. It interweaves the threads of its soul experience with the

contingent material of Nature's workshop, and gives unfettered play

to the emphatic features of ugliness itself. We have, in short, two

worlds included in the Romantic, a spiritual realm essentially complete

in itself, the soul-kingdom, which finds reconciliation in its own

sphere, and therewith the otherwise straightforward repetition of

birth, death, and resurrection now for the first time perfected in

the true circular orbit, doubled back in the return upon itself, the

genuine Phoenix life of Spirit. On the other hand, there is the realm

of external Nature simply as such, which, released as it is from its

secure association and union with Spirit, becomes now a completely

empirical reality, concerning the form of which the soul cares little

or nothing. In classical art Spirit controlled the empirical phenomenon

and transpierced it through and through, because it was the very thing

which it had to accept as its completed reality. But now the ideal

kingdom is indifferent to the mode of configuration in the world of

immediate sense, because this immediacy is beneath the sphere of the

blessedness of essential soul-life. The external phenomenon is no

longer able to express this inward life; and if any call is made upon

it for this purpose, it merely is utilized to make plain that the

external show is an existence which does not satisfy, and is forced

to point back by suggestion to the spiritual content, the soul and

its emotions, as the truly essential medium. Precisely for the same

reason romantic art suffers externality on its own part to go on

its way freely; and in this respect permits all and every material,

flowers, trees, and so on, down to the most ordinary domestic utensils,

to appear in its productions just as they are, and as the chance of

natural circumstance may arrange them. Such a content as this, however,

carries at the same time with it the result, that as purely exterior

matter, its worth is of no validity and insignificant; it only receives

its genuine worth when the soul has made itself a home in it, and it is

taken to express not merely the ideal, but _spiritual inwardness_[222]

itself, which, instead of blending itself with the exterior thing,

appears simply to have attained its own reconciliation with itself. The

ideality thus brought home to a point is that mode of expression which

is without externality, invisibly declaring itself, and only itself,

in other words, a tone of music simply, which is neither an object nor

possesses form, a wavelet over waters[223], a ringing sound over a

world, which, in sounds such as this, and the varied phenomena which

are united with it, can only receive and reflect one reverberation of

this self-absorption of the soul.

To sum up, then, in a word, this relation of content and form in the

romantic type, where it remains true to its distinctive character, we

may affirm that the fundamental note of the same, for this very reason

that its principle constitutes an ever expanding universality and the

restlessly active depths of heart and mind, is that of _music_, and

when combined with the definite content of imagination, lyrical. This

_lyrical_ aspect is likewise the primary characteristic of romantic

art, a tone which gives the key-note also to the epic poem and drama,

and which is wafted as a breath of soul even around the works of the

plastic arts, since here, too, spirit and soul are desirous of speaking

by means of the plastic shape to soul and mind.

As regards the _division_ of our subject, which we must now in

conclusion determine for the examination of this our third extensive

domain of artistic production on the lines of its development, we

shall find that the basic notion of the romantic relatively to

its substantive and progressive articulation is comprised most

conveniently in three branches of division we may define as follows.

The _first_ sphere is the province of _religion_ strictly, in which

the redemption history, the life, death, and resurrection of Christ

constitute the central interest. The principle which is emphasized as

all-important here is that self-involution which mind accomplishes by

negating its immediacy and finitude, overcoming the same, and by means

of this liberation secures its own self-possessed infinity and absolute

self-subsistence in its own kingdom.

This self-subsistence passes, then, in the _second_ place from the

Divine dwelling of essential Spirit, surrenders its pure exaltation

of finite man to God, in order to enter the _temporal world._ Here it

is, in the first instance, the subject of consciousness simply, which

has become self-affirmative, and which possesses as the substantive

material of its content, no less than as the interest of its existence,

the virtues of this positive subjectivity, such as honour, love,

fidelity, and bravery, the aims and obligations, in short, of romantic

chivalry.

The content and form of the _third_ chapter may be generally

indicated as the _formal consistency of character._ In other words,

if the subjective life has been so far concentrated, that spiritual

independence is its essential characteristic, it follows also that the

_particular_ content, with which such independence is associated as

with what is strictly its own, will also partake of such a character;

this self-subsistence, however, inasmuch as it does not, as was the

case in the sphere appertinent to essential and explicit religious

truth, repose in the substantive core of its life, is only able

to reach a formal type. Conversely the configuration of external

conditions, situations, and events is now also independently free, and

is involved consequently in every sort of capricious adventure. For

this reason we find, to put it in general terms, as the termination of

the romantic, the contingency of the exterior condition and internal

life, and a falling asunder of the two aspects, by reason of which Art

commits an act of suicide, and betrays the fact that conscious life

must now secure forms of loftier significance, than Art alone is able

to offer, in which to grasp and retain truth.

[Footnote 206: Throughout, of course, the German word translated in

these paragraphs as mind or spirit is _Geist._]

[Footnote 207: Absolute ideality may perhaps interpret the text more

intelligibly.]

[Footnote 208: It is so because as self-identity it distinguishes

itself from everything to which it is related.]

[Footnote 209: _Das wirkliche Subjekt_, Hegel means, of course,

individual man.]

[Footnote 210: "Most intimate" would perhaps express the meaning more

clearly.]

[Footnote 211: Hegel here gives expression to what is perhaps not

wholly defensible logic, though it may be truly poetic mysticism.]

[Footnote 212: I would refer any reader who is inclined to gasp at

this interpretation of Christian revelation to some useful remarks of

Professor Bosanquet in his Preface to his translation, p. XXVIII.]

[Footnote 213: _Die Ausbreitung dieses Selbstanschauens,

In-sich-und-Bei-sich-seyns_ _des Geistes ist der Frieden._ One of

Hegel's terrors for the translator, though the sense is obvious enough.]

[Footnote 214: The analysis no doubt has its interest. But among

other difficulties it is not easy to see how the argument, based

as it is on rational grounds, makes for anything but annihilation.

Death is a negation--it, according to the argument, puts an end to

the "process"--what remains then is apparently the evanescence of the

finite spirit. This reference to "happiness" assumes that conscious

individual life continues, which is a mere _pelitio principii._ If it

continues the former dual aspect would seem to be implied in it. The

analysis of the actual significance of death for Christendom and Greek

paganism retains, of course, its validity.]

[Footnote 215: But surely in a sense personal life, if only limited

to Earth's existence, may be, I do not say necessarily is, all the

more valuable. This is an important aspect of the matter which is not

here adequately answered, and it suggests a real grievance against

the extravagant follies of a certain type of Christendom. The present

feeling of the wisest minds of our own time will be inclined to

regard a good deal of Hegel's remarks here as insufficient or lacking

directness. One recalls those significant lines of a great writer but

recently taken from us:

/$

Sensation is a gracious gift

But were it cramped in station,

The prayer to have it cast adrift

Would spout from all sensation.

$/

Hegel's point of view seems neither to be that of mysticism nor mere

absorption.]

[Footnote 216: "Odyssey," XI, vv. 481-91. But this illustration is at

least evidence of the high value a Greek attached to life on Earth.]

[Footnote 217: True enough as an analysis of the Christian

consciousness; but the difficulty above pointed out remains so far as

the writer refers to a future life, which he sometimes appears to do,

sometimes not. Conditions are assumed for human personality of which we

can form no conception.]

[Footnote 218: He means it is the negation of that which is itself

a negation, finite existence. The conclusion is of course, as above

suggested, replete with difficulty.]

[Footnote 219: That is, I presume, the positive character of natural

conditions; but it may mean its own "affirmative" relation.]

[Footnote 220: _Auf die Innerlichkeit des Geistes._]

[Footnote 221: Reason or Spirit are perhaps preferable.]

[Footnote 222: The German words are _das Innerliche_ and _die

Innigkeit._]

[Footnote 223: This is obviously not wholly independent of form.]

CHAPTER I

THE RELIGIOUS DOMAIN OF ROMANTIC ART

Inasmuch as romantic art, in the representation of the consciousness

of absolute subjectivity, understanding this as the comprehension of

all truth, the coalescence of mind with its essence--receives its

substantive content in the satisfaction of soul-life, in other words

the reconciliation of God with the world and therein with Himself, it

follows that at this stage the Ideal for the first time is completely

at home. For it was blessedness and self-subsistency, contentment,

repose, and freedom which we declared as most fundamentally defining

the Ideal. Of course, we cannot therefore on this account deduce

the Ideal simply from the notion and reality of romantic art; but

relatively to the classic Ideal the form it receives is entirely

altered. This relation, already in general terms indicated, we must now

before everything else establish in its fully concrete significance,

in order to elucidate the fundamental type of the romantic mode of

presentation. In the classical Ideal the Divine is in one aspect of

it restricted to pure individuality; in another aspect the soul and

spiritual blessedness of particular gods find their exclusive discharge

through the physical medium; and as a third characteristic, for the

reason that the inseparable unity of each individual both essentially

and in its exterior form supplies the principle of the same, the

negativity of the dismemberment implied in human life, that is the

pain of both body and soul, sacrifice, and resignation are unable to

appear as essentially pertinent to these godlike figures. The Divine

of classical art falls, it is true, into an aggregation of gods,

but there is no organic and essential self-division, no universally

proclaimed essence such as we find in the particular presentment of

man whether in form and spirit, whether empirically or subjectively

considered; and just as little has it confronting it, as being itself

the Absolute in invisible form, a world of evil, sin, and ignorance,

together with the task of resolving such contradictions in harmony, and

only by thus growing on level terms with the very truth and divine out

of this reconciliation. In the notion of the absolute subjectivity,

on the contrary, this opposition between substantive universality and

personality is inherent, an opposition, whose consummated mediation

the subjective ideality perfects with its substance, exalting thereby

the substantive presence to the articulate and absolute subject of

self-knowledge and volition. But there is, _secondly_, appertinent

to the reality of the subjective condition conceived as mind the

profounder contradiction of a finite world, through whose abrogation

as finite, and by whose resultant reconciliation with the Absolute

the Infinite by virtue of its own absolute activity makes its proper

being self-subsistent, and so for the first time exists as absolute

Spirit. The appearance of this actuality on the _terrain_, and in the

configuration of the human spirit receives consequently, in respect to

its _beauty_, a totally different mode of relation to that presented

by classical art. Greek beauty unfolds the inward aspect of spiritual

individuality solely as it is envisaged by means of its bodily shape,

actions, and events, wholly expressed in what is exterior, and living

wholly therein. For romantic art, on the contrary, it is absolutely

necessary that the soul, albeit envisaged in the exterior medium,

should at the same time demonstrate its capacity of self-withdrawal

from the tenement of the body and self-substantive life. The bodily

frame can therefore now only express the inwardness of mind, in so far

as it makes it plain that it is not in this material existence, but

in itself, that the soul discovers its congruent reality. On account

of this beauty is now no longer an idealization in respect to the

objective form, but rather the ideal and essential configuration of the

soul itself; it is in short a beauty of spiritual ideality, that is

the specific mode of such, as every content is informed and elaborated

within the temple of the subjective world, and without retaining the

external medium in this its permeation with Spirit. For the reason,

then, that by this means the interest disappears, which consists in

clarifying real existence to the point of our classical unity, and

is concentrated in the contrary direction of wafting a new breath of

beauty through the unseen content of the spiritual itself, art ceases

to retain the old solicitude for what is exterior at all. It accepts

the same directly as it may chance to find it, leaving it to take

whatever form may happen to please it. The reconciliation with the

Absolute is in the Romantic an act of the inward life, which no doubt

is embodied externally, but which does not retain that exterior in

its material realization as its essential content and object. We may

observe that in close association with this indifference towards the

idealizing union of soul and body, and in its relation to the external

treatment of the more predominant individuality of a sitter, we find

the art of _portraiture_, which does not entirely erase particular

traits and lines, as they are found in Nature, and her inevitable

deficiencies--defects inseparable from finite effects--in order to

replace them with something more adequate. Generally speaking even

here there is a certain limit to the licence given to Nature in this

respect; but to the general aspect of form in the first instance it is

quite indifferent; and no attempt is made to exclude wholly from it the

accidental impurities of finite and sensuous existence.

We may adjoin a further quite sufficient reason for the imperative

character of this radical definition of romantic art from another point

of view. The classic Ideal, where we find it at the culminating point

of its very truth, is self-exclusive, self-subsistent, retiring and not

susceptible[224] in its nature, an orbed individual totality, which

repels all else from itself. Its conformation is uniquely its own; its

life is bound up in that and that exclusively, and it will harbour

no affinity with what is purely empirical and contingent. Whoever,

therefore, approaches an ideal such as this as spectator, is unable

to appropriate its existence as an embodiment strictly akin to that

of his own presence. The figures of the eternal gods, albeit human,

do not belong to our mortality, for these gods have not themselves

experienced the infirmities of finite existence, but are directly

exalted above them. Their affinity with what is empirical and relative

is interrupted. The infinite subjectivity, what we call the Absolute

of romantic art, is on the contrary not absorbed in its presentment;

it is rather carried into its _own_ domain, and for this very reason

retains such external aspect as it possesses not so much _for itself_

as for the contemplation of others, as, in short, an exterior presence

which is freely offered for this purpose. This externality must further

appear in the form of common fact, the human as our senses perceive

it, since it is through that that God Himself descends to the level

of finite and temporal existence, in order to mediate and reconcile

the absolute antithesis, which is inherent in the notion of the

Absolute. For this reason our empirical humanity also contains in its

bodily presence an aspect, which unfolds to man a bond of affinity and

kinship, by virtue whereof he is able to contemplate even his direct

natural presence with assurance; and he can do so because the Divine

incarnation does not, with the severity of the classical type, thrust

on one side the particular and contingent, but presents to his vision

that which he himself possesses, or that which he recognizes and loves

in others around him. It is just this homeliness incidental to what we

ordinarily meet with which attracts and enables romantic art to entrust

itself to the external aspect of reality. Inasmuch, then, as the

externality which is turned adrift is called upon, through this very

abandonment, to suggest the beauty of soul, the lofty pretension of its

spirituality and the sacred colour of the emotional life, so, too, at

the same time, it is a condition of its doing so that it be absorbed

itself within the ideal realm of mind and its absolute content, and

that it appropriate the same.

To sum up finally what is implied in this act of surrender we may

assert that it consists in the general conception, that in romantic art

the infinite subjectivity does not abide in solitary self-sufficiency,

as the Greek god did, living in the full perfection and blessedness

of his self-exclusion; rather it moves out of itself in relation to

somewhat else, which, however, is its own substance, in which it

discovers itself again and continues all the time in union with itself.

This condition of self-unity in some other that is yet its own is the

real form of beauty appropriate to romantic art, the Ideal of the same,

which receives for its mode and envisagement what is, in its essence,

subjective ideality or inwardness, soul-life and its attendant

emotions. The romantic Ideal expresses, therefore, the relation to

another spiritual correlative, which is so closely associated with

the ideal possessions of the first one, that it is only by virtue of

this further one that the soul lives in the complete wealth of its own

kingdom. This essential life of the soul in another is, when expressed

in terms of emotion, the inwardness of love.

We may consequently affirm _lave_ to be the general content of the

romantic, so far as the sphere of religion is concerned. Love, however,

only receives its truly ideal configuration when it expresses the

_positive_ reconcilement of Spirit in its immediacy. Before, however,

we shall be in a position to examine this stage of the fairest and

most ideal spiritual satisfaction, we must first pass in review _the

process of negation_, which the absolute Subject enters in overcoming

the finiteness and immediacy of its human envisagement, a process which

is divulged in the life, death, and suffering of God for the world and

humanity, and its possible reconcilement with God. And, secondly, we

have on the other side, humanity, which is called upon conversely on

its own account to pass through the very same process in order to make

actual the reconciliation which is implicitly contained in its nature.

Midway within the steps of this process, in which the _negative_ aspect

of the sensuous and spiritual passage 011 to death and the grave

constitutes the central act of achievement, we shall find that the

expression of _affirmative_ blessedness is conspicuous, which in this

sphere characterizes art's most beautiful creations. For the better

division of this first chapter we may examine its subject-matter as it

falls into three distinct heads of inquiry.

_First_, we have the redemption-history of Christ; the phasal moments

of absolute Spirit presented in the person of God Himself, in so far as

He becomes man, and takes to Himself an actual existence in the world

of finitude and its concrete conditions, and in this to start with

isolated existence gives visible shape to the Absolute itself.

_Secondly_, we shall consider love in its positive presentment as the

feeling of reconciliation between the human and the Divine; in other

words the Holy Family, the maternal love of Mary, the love of Christ

and that of his disciples.

_Thirdly_, we have the community before us. Here it is the Spirit

of God as present by virtue of the conversion of soul and the

mortification of the natural and finite sense, in short, the return of

man to God, a return in which penances and pains mediate in the first

instance this union of God and man.

1. THE REDEMPTION-HISTORY OF CHRIST