The reconciliation of God with His own substance, history in its

absolute significance, or, in one word, the process of realization, is

made visible to our senses and assured to our minds by the revelation

of God in the world. The content of this reconcilement as expressed

in the most direct way is the coalescence in unity of the absolute

essence of reality with the individual subject of human consciousness.

An individual man is God and God is an individual man. In this truth

is implied the fact that the human spirit _intrinsically_, that is,

relatively to its notion and essence, is Spirit in truth; and every

particular individual in virtue of the humanity he connotes possesses

the infinite vocation no less than the infinite significance of being

an object of God and in union with God. But along with this and of

a like importance the obligation is imposed on man to realize this

notion, which, in the first instance, he merely possesses under the

implication of his nature. In other words, he has to place before

himself and attain to this union with God as the seal of his existence.

Only when he has thus consummated his proper destiny does he become

essentially free and infinite Spirit. This he can only do in so far as

that unity is itself the origination, the eternal ground-root of the

human and Divine nature. The goal is here the explicit beginning of the

process, namely, the presupposition for the religious consciousness

exhibited in romantic art, that God is Himself man and flesh, that He

has become this particular human individual, in whom the reconciliation

consequently no longer remains as only implicit, so that it is merely

to be inferred from its _notional_ existence, but asserts itself in

_objective_ existence also before the perception of human sense as this

particular and actually existing man. The importance of this aspect of

_particularity_ consists in this that it enables all other individuals

to find in the same the picture of his own reconcilement with God;

it is now no longer a mere possibility, but a fact which has on this

very account appeared as really accomplished in this one person.

Inasmuch, however, as this unity, conceived as the ideal reconciliation

of opposed factors of one process, is no immediately unified mode of

being, it is inevitable, in the _second_ place, that the process of

Spirit as exemplified in this _one_ individual--the process, that

is, by means of which consciousness is for the first time Spirit in

Truth--should receive the form of its existence in the history of this

very person. This history of Spirit attaining its consummation in one

personal life consists simply in all that we have already adverted to;

that is to say, the particular man casts on one side his singularity

both in its bodily and spiritual presence, in other words he suffers

and dies, but furthermore through the agony of death rises again out of

death and ascends as glorified God, very and real Spirit, who now, it

is true, has entered actual existence as this particular person, yet is

with equal truth only very God as Spirit in His community.

(_a_) This history furnishes the fundamental material for the romantic

art of the religious consciousness, in its attitude to which, however,

art, taken simply as Art, is to some extent a superfluity. For the

main thing here is spiritual conviction, the feeling and conception

of this eternal truth, and _the faith_ which is essential evidence to

itself of the truth, and becomes in consequence a vital possession of

the ideality of that conception. In other words, faith in its developed

condition consists in the immediate conviction that it has confronting

soul, in the organic movement of this history, the _truth_ itself. If,

however, the consciousness of truth is the main point of importance it

follows that the _beauty_ of the artistic reflection and presentation

is of incidental value to which we may be comparatively indifferent,

for the truth is present to mind quite independently of art.

(_b_) From another point of view, however, the religious content

comprises at the same time within its compass a certain aspect of

this process, by virtue of which it not merely admits of artistic

treatment, but, in a specific relation, admits of it as _necessary._ In

the religious conception of romantic art, as we have more than once

explained it, it is an inseparable concomitant of the content that

it carries anthropomorphism to the verge of an extreme; and this is

so because it is precisely this content which possesses for its main

_centrum_ the complete coalescence of the Absolute and Divine with the

human consciousness as a visible part of sensuous reality, in other

words, as envisaged in the external bodily frame of man, and further,

is compelled to represent the Divine in the form of individuality such

as is associated with the deficiencies of Nature and the mode of finite

phenomena. In this respect Art supplies to the consciousness which

seeks to envisage the Divine manifestation, the definite presence of

an individual and real human figure, a concrete image, moreover, of

the exterior traits of events, in which the birth, life, sufferings,

death, resurrection and ascension of Christ are more widely circulated

to the glory of God; so that it is exclusively by Art that the real

and visible presence of the Divine is for ever renewed over again in a

permanent form.

(_c_) In so far as, in this Divine manifestation, an emphasis is laid

on this, namely, that God is essentially a particular individual to

the exclusion of others, and does not merely present to us the union

of Divine and human consciousness in its universal significance, but

rather as that of this _particular_ man, to that extent, the very

nature of the content makes it inevitable that all the features of

contingency and particularity incidental to finite existence assert

themselves, from which the beauty which characterized the consummation

of the classic Ideal had purified itself. That which the free notion

of beauty had removed from itself as unfitting, in other words, the

non-ideal, is in the present case accepted as a necessary aspect,

which actually originates in the movement of the content itself and is

consequently made explicit.

(_α_) And it follows from this that when the person of Christ is

selected for the object of art, as so frequently occurs, artists, no

matter when or where, have taken the very worst course of all who

create in their presentment of Christ an Ideal in the meaning and mode

of the classical Ideal. Such heads or figures of Christ may no doubt

display earnestness, repose, and ethical worth: but the true Christ

presentment should rather possess on the one hand soul-intensity

and pre-eminently spirituality in its _widest_ comprehension, on the

other, intimate personality and _individual_ distinction. Both these

contrasted aspects are inconsistent with that blissful repose in the

sensuous environment of our humanity. To combine these two _termini_

of artistic reproduction, expression and form, as above defined, is a

matter of the greatest difficulty, and painters especially have almost

always got themselves into difficulties when they diverged from the

traditional type[225].

Earnestness and depth of consciousness should no doubt be prominent

in the expression of such heads, but the specific features and lines

both of countenance and figure ought as little to be of a simply

ideal beauty as they are entitled to fall short in the direction of

the commonplace and the ugly, or erroneously to aspire after the

bare pretensions of the Sublime. The truest success in respect to

the external figure will be found in a mean between the directness

of Nature's detail and the ideal of beauty. Rightly to hit on this

just mean is difficult. It is pre-eminently in this that the ability,

taste, and genius of an artist will assert itself. And in general we

may assert that in all artistic execution of this character--putting

on one side entirely the different nature of the content, which is

inseparable from religious faith--there is more scope offered for the

exercise of the artist's private judgment than is the case when dealing

with the classic Ideal. In classical art the artist seeks to present

the spiritual and Divine immediately in the lines of the bodily shape

itself, in the organism of the human figure; the lines of the human

form, therefore, in this ideal divergence from what is ordinarily met

with in finite existence, are fundamentally necessary to the interest.

In the kind of art we are now discussing the configuration remains that

of ordinary experience; its specific lines are up to a certain point

unessential, detail, in short, that may indifferently be treated in

divers ways and with greater artistic licence. The supreme interest,

therefore, is concentrated, on the one hand, in the mode and manner

whereby our artist makes that which is spiritual and ideal within the

content under the mode of Spirit itself shine forth through this

envisagement of ordinary experience; and, on the other hand, in the

individual discretion exercised in the execution, the technical means

and shifts employed, by virtue of which he is able to impart to his

creations the breath of spiritual life and to bring home this finer

essence to our hearts and senses.

(_β_) With regard to the further aspect of the content we have already

pointed out that it is referable to the history of the Absolute under

the mode that the same is deducible from the notion of Spirit itself;

a history which makes objective in the real world bodily and spiritual

singularity as infused with its own essential and universal nature.

For the reconciliation of our individual consciousness with God

does not immediately appear as an original harmony, but rather as a

harmony which only is modulated from infinite pain, from resignation,

sacrifice, and the mortification of the finite, sensuous, and

particular. We see here the finite and the infinite brought into unity;

and this reconciliation only asserts itself in its true profundity,

intimacy, and power by means of the grossness and severity of the

contradiction which yearns for resolution. We may therefore without

fear assert that the entire asperity and dissonance of the suffering,

torture, and agony, which such a contradiction brings in its train,

is inseparable from the very nature of spiritual life, whose final

consolation constitutes here the content.

This process of Spirit is, if accepted frankly for all it implies and

unfolds, the essence, the notion of Spirit absolutely. It consequently

determines for conscious life that _universal history_[226] which is

for ever repeated in every individual consciousness. For it is nothing

less or more than this consciousness as the universal mind or Spirit

is explicated in the multiplicity of individual life, reality and

existence. In the first instance, however, for the reason that the

essential significance of the spiritual process is concentrated in that

mode of reality which is purely individual, this universal history

comes before us itself merely in the form of _one_ person, to which it

is conjoined as its own, as the history, that is, of his birth, his

suffering, death, and return from death; at the same time there is the

further significance attached to this personal history, namely, that it

is the history of universal and absolute Spirit itself.

The supreme turning-point of this life of God is the putting aside of

individual existence as the life of a _particular_ man simply--the

story of the Passion, the suffering on the Cross, the Calvary of

Spirit, the agony of death. In so far as the content here comprises

the fact that the external and bodily form--immediate existence in

its personal mode--is, in the pain of its inherent contradiction,

propounded in this aspect of negation in order that Spirit may secure

its truth and its blessedness by the sacrifice of the sensuous and its

individual singularity, to that extent we reach the extreme line of

division between it as an artistic creation and the classic or plastic

Ideal. From one point of view no doubt the earthly body and the frailty

of human Nature is expressly exalted and honoured in the fact that

it is God Himself who is made manifest within it. On the other hand,

however, it is just this human and bodily side which is posited as

negative, and declares itself in its pain. In the classic Ideal the

undisturbed harmony in no way vanishes before the co-essential Spirit.

The main incidents of that Passion, the mocking of Christ, the crowning

with thorns, the carrying of the cross, the final death on the same in

the agony of a torturing and tedious death, are wholly incompatible

with the presentment of the Greek type of beauty. The lofty aspect in

such situations as these is the essential holiness implied in them, the

depth of the Spirit's inmost, the eternal significance of the agony in

its relation to the spiritual process, the endurance and Divine repose.

The personal environment of this sublime figure is in part composed

of friends and in part of enemies. The friends are throughout no

ideal creations, but relatively to the notion[227], particular

individualities typical of ordinary men, which the impulse of Spirit

attaches to Christ: the enemies, on the other hand, by virtue of the

fact that they place themselves in hostility to God, judge, mock,

put to torture, and crucify Him, are presented to us as spiritually

evil, and this conception of their wickedness of heart and enmity

to God brings in its train on its exterior side ugliness, grossness,

barbarity, the rage and distortion of Spirit. In all these respects,

in contrast with the classical beauty we have before us in such

representations the non-beautiful as an inevitable concomitant.

(_γ_) The process of death, however, in the Divine nature is only

to be regarded as a point of transition, by means of which the

self-reconcilement of Spirit is effected; and the aspects of the Divine

and human, the out and out universal and the phenomenal individuality,

to mediate the division of which is the main object in view, are

positively suffered to coalesce. This positive affirmation, which is

the underlying root and origination of the process, is consequently

also forced to exhibit itself in a like positive way. As emphatic

situations in the Christ-history the resurrection and ascension supply

conspicuously the very means to put that affirmation in the clearest

light. In more isolated fashion we have over and above this for the

same purpose those occasions in which Christ appears to His own as

teacher. Here, however, plastic art is confronted with an exceptional

situation of difficulty. For in a measure it is Spirit in its purity,

which is to be presented in this very impalpable ideality, and in a

measure, too, it is nothing less than absolute Spirit, which in the

full pregnancy of its infinitude and universality is affirmatively

propounded in union with an individual consciousness and exalted above

immediate existence; and yet notwithstanding such preconceptions it has

undertaken the task to envisage for sense in the bodily configuration

of this person the entire expression of the infinite and innermost

spiritual profundity which it refers to him[228].

2. RELIGIOUS LOVE

Mind in its ultimate and most complete explication as reason is, as

such, not the immediate object of art. Its highest and most essentially

realized reconciliation can only find such satisfied consummation in

the intellectual medium as such, that is to say, the ideal medium which

is withdrawn from the reach of artistic expression; for absolute Truth

stands on a higher level than the show of beauty, which is unable

to break away from the sensuous and phenomenal. If, then, Spirit is

to receive an existence as _Spirit_ in its positive reconciliation

through the medium of art, an existence which is apprehended not merely

as ideal, in other words, as pure thought, but can be _felt_ and

_envisaged_, it follows that the only mode left to us, which supplies

this two-fold condition of spirituality on the one hand and of its

capability of being conceived and presented by art on the other, is

that of the inner realm of Spirit itself, what we understand by the

soul and its emotional experience. And the condition of that kingdom

which alone fully answers to the notion of free Spirit brought into

peace and joy with itself is _Love._

(_a_) In other words, if we look at the content, we shall see that its

articulation is in its important features similar to the fundamental

notion of absolute Spirit, the return of a reconciled presence from

its Other to itself. This Other in the sense of the Other, in which

Spirit continues by itself, can only be itself something spiritual,

or rather a spiritual personality. The true essence of love consists

in the surrender of the self-consciousness, in the forgetting oneself

in another self, yet for all that to have and possess oneself for the

first time in this very act of surrender and oblivion. This mediation

of Spirit with itself and surcharge of its own to the unit of totality

is the Absolute, not, however, of course, under the mode in which the

Absolute coalesces with itself as merely singular and thereby finite

individuality in another finite subject; rather the content of the

spiritual individuality which is here self-mediated in another is the

Absolute itself. It is, in short, Spirit which is only the knowledge

and volition of its own substance as the Absolute by being in another,

and which receives therewith the fruition of such knowledge.

(_b_) More closely regarded this content as love has the form of

self-concentrated emotion, which, instead of making its content more

explicit, that is to say, presenting it to consciousness in its

definite terms and universality, rather converges the infinite breadth

of the same directly to one focus in the clear profundity of the soul,

without further unfolding in other directions for the imagination the

wealth which it essentially includes. By this means a content of equal

significance, which would be inconformable to artistic presentation,

is fresh from the mint of its pure and ideal universality, is none the

less capable of being the subject-matter of art in this individual

existence of subjective emotion; for while under a mode such as this it

is not on the one hand compelled to accept an articulation of perfect

clarity by reason of its still undisclosed depth, which is the obvious

characteristic of soul-life, yet on the other hand it receives under

this mode a medium that it is possible for art to make use of. For

soul-life, heart, feeling, however self-contained and spiritual they

may remain, have none the less a bond of affiliation with the sensuous

and material, so that they are able also on the outside show of things

through the bodily members themselves, through a look, the facial

expression, or in a still more spiritual way through the voice tones

or a word to disclose the inmost life and existence of Spirit. But

this exterior medium is in such a case only acceptable in so far as it

strictly expresses this most intimate life of soul in ways that reflect

the inward nature of the soul itself.

(_c_) We defined the notion of the Ideal to be the reconciliation of

the inward life with its reality; we may now in like manner point

to the emotion of love as _the Ideal_ of romantic art in the sphere

of the religious consciousness. It is _spiritual_ beauty in its

pure emanation. The classic Ideal also exhibited the mediation and

reconcilement of Spirit with its Other. But here the opposing factor

of Spirit was the exterior medium suffused with that Spirit, it was

its bodily organism. In love, on the contrary, the opposing presence

of that which is spiritual is not the phenomenon of Nature, but a

spiritual consciousness itself, another subject of such; and the

realization of Spirit is consequently effected by Spirit itself in its

own kingdom, in that medium which is uniquely its own. It follows from

this that love in this its positive self-fruition and essentially

tranquillized and blessed realization is ideal, but before everything

else _spiritual_ beauty, which can only be expressed for the sake of

the ideal virtue it possesses and further only in and as a part of

the inmost shrine of the soul. For that Spirit, which is present in

_spirit_ to itself and is immediately aware of its own, which withal

possesses what is spiritual for the substance and bottom of its very

existence, abides in intimacy with itself, and, best definition of all,

is the inward being of Love.

(_α_) God is Love; and consequently it is this most profound essence

which, in this form native to artistic presentation, is thus

apprehended and presented in the person of Christ. Christ is, however,

_Divine love_ in the sense that from one aspect of it declares God

Himself as its object, that is, God in the mode of His invisible

essence, and from another it as truly reveals humanity under the seal

of its redemption; and for this reason it is not so much in Him[229]

that the passage of one individual into another particular individual

is made manifest in His love, as the fact that we have here the _idea_

of Love itself in its universality, in other words, the Absolute,

the spirit of Truth in the medium and mode of emotion. With the

universality of its object the expression of Love is also universalized

in pursuance of which the purely individual concentration of heart and

soul is not made the important point, just as among the Greeks in the

ancient Titan Eros and Venus Urania we find, though, of course, in an

entirely different connection, that it is the universal idea rather

than the individual side of personal form and feeling which is the

factor emphasized. Only when Christ is, in the presentation of romantic

art, rather conceived as at the same time the isolate self-absorbed

personality himself, is the expression of love clothed in the form of

individual inwardness, and even then it is, of course, always exalted

and uplifted by the universality of the content.

(_β_) The kind of love, however, which in this sphere of art is most

within its reach and is generally the most successful object of the

romantic and religious imagination, is the love of Mary, the mother's

love. It stands closest to Nature's reality, is very human, and yet

entirely spiritual, without either the interest or the egotism of

sensual desire, not sensuous and yet present inward bliss in its

absolute condition of fruition. It is a love that has no longing

in it, not friendship, for friendship, albeit also so rich in soul

quality, requires a substantive content, an essential material as the

associating object. A mother's love, on the contrary, possesses without

any mutuality[230] of aim or interests an immediate basis in the

natural maternal bond. But in this particular case the mother's love

is just as little restricted to the purely natural affiliation. Mary

possesses in the child which she has carried under her heart and borne

with travail the perfected knowledge and feeling of her very self, and

this selfsame child, the blood of her blood, is also in equal degree

exalted above her, and yet for all that she is conscious that this

higher belongs to herself, and is precisely that she gains in her act

of self-oblivion and possession. The natural intimacy of the mother's

love is absolutely spiritualized, it receives for its very embodiment

the Divine; but this spiritual coherence remains lowly and unaware,

permeated in a wonderful manner with the unity of Nature and the

emotion of womanhood. It is the _blessed_ mother's love, and pertains

only to the _one_ mother, who first was recipient of its joy[231]. It

is quite true that even this love is not without its pain, but the pain

is merely the grief of loss, the lament over the suffering, dying, and

dead son, and, as we shall find it at a later stage[232], has nothing

to do with the injustice and torture suffered from a force without, or

with the infinite conflict with sin, still less with agonies and pangs

that arise in the soul. The inwardness of soul such as we have analysed

is the beauty of Spirit, the Ideal, the human identification of man

with God, with Spirit, with Truth; oblivion in its pure selflessness,

the surrender of the ego, which, however, in this surrender, is from

beginning to end at unity with that in which it is absorbed, and it is

in this coalescence that the feeling of blessedness is consummated.

Under such a fair aspect we have maternal love embodied in romantic

art, and it is at the same time a picture of Spirit itself, because

Spirit is only apprehensible by art in the form of feeling; and the

feeling of that union of the individual with God in its most original,

most real, and most vivid form is only present in the mother's love of

the Madonna. It must inevitably form the subject-matter of art, if in

the representation of this, the sphere of the religious imagination,

the Ideal, the affirmative reconciliation in its joy is not to

fall short of its aim. There has consequently been a time when the

maternal love of the Blessed Virgin has been placed as the highest

and holiest of Earth's possessions, and as such has been revered and

presented to mankind. When, however, Spirit is brought before the human

consciousness in its own native element, separated, that is, from all

underlying emotion, the free mediation of Spirit that is built up on

such a foundation can alone be regarded as the free road to Truth;

and consequently we find that in Protestantism, as contrasted to this

worship of Mary whether in art or belief, it is the Holy Spirit, and

the inmost mediation of Spirit which has become the loftier truth.

(_γ_) _Thirdly_, and in conclusion, the positive reconciliation of

spiritual life is embodied in the feelings of Christ's own disciples,

the women and friends who follow him. Such are for the most part

characters who have personally taken on themselves the severity of the

idea of Christianity, hand iii hand with their Divine friend, by virtue

of the friendship, teaching, and sermons of Christ, without passing

through the external and inward pangs of spiritual conversion, who have

carried it forward, made themselves masters both of it and themselves,

and in the depth of their hearts remain strong in the same. From such,

no doubt, the immediate unity and intimacy of that mother's love in a

measure vanishes; but they still possess as the bond which unites them

the presence of Christ, the common service to a great life which they

share, and the direct impulse of Spirit[233].

3. THE SPIRIT OF THE COMMUNITY

In making our passage over to a concluding stage of the subject under

discussion we can hardly do better than associate it with that which we

have already touched upon in connection with the history of Christ.

The immediate existence of Christ, as this particular man, who is God,

is assumed to be wiped out, in other words, the truth itself asserts

itself that in the manifestation of God as man, the true reality of

God thus envisaged is not immediate sensuous existence but Spirit.

The reality of the Absolute regarded as infinite subjectivity[234] is

simply Spirit itself; God is in knowledge, in the element of the inner

life, and only there. This absolute existence of God, as absolutely

ideal to the same extent as it is subjective[235] _universality_, does

not therefore admit of the limitations of this particular individual,

who has in the story of his life made manifest the reconciliation

between the Divine and human self-consciousness, but on the contrary

is enlarged to the full measure of the human consciousness which is

reconciled to God, that is, in general terms to our _humanity_, which

exists as an aggregate of many individuals. In his independence,

however, taken, that is, as a specific personality, man is not under

any immediate mode the Divine, but on the contrary finite and human,

which only in so far as it really propounds itself as a negation, which

it essentially is, and thereby annuls itself in this negative aspect,

can attain to the reconcilement with God. It is only by virtue of this

deliverance from the frailty of finitude that our humanity declares

itself as the vehicle of the existence of the absolute Spirit, as the

spirit of the community, in which the union of the human and Divine

Spirit within the bounds of human reality itself, in the sense of its

realized mediation, carries into fulfilment what essentially, if we

look at it in the light of the notion of Spirit, it is from the first

in that very union.

The principal modes which are of importance in respect to this new

content of romantic art may be distinguished as follows:

The individual, who in his separation from God lives in a condition

of sinfulness and conflict with the immediacy and frailty of finite

existence, possesses the eternal destiny to come into reconciliation

with himself and God. Inasmuch, however, as we find that in the

redemption-history of Christ the negative relation of immediate

singularity is affirmed and declared an essential feature in the

spiritual process, so, too, every particular individual is only through

a conversion from the natural state and his finite personality uplifted

to the free condition and into the peace of God.

This abrogation of finitude asserts itself in a threefold manner as

follows:

_First_, as the repetition in _actual life_ of the history of the

Passion, a repetition of real bodily suffering--martyrdom.

_Secondly_, the above conversion is removed to the _inmost_ life of

soul, as spiritual mediation by means of repentance, penance, and

conversion.

_Thirdly_, and finally the manifestation of the Divine is so conceived

in the world of Nature's reality that the ordinary course of Nature

and the natural mode of occurrences as they otherwise take place is

arrested, in order to display the might and presence of the Divine.

Wonder or miracle is consequently the form of presentation.

(_a_) _The Martyrs_

The earliest mode under which the spirit of the community makes itself

actively present in the human consciousness is effected when man forms

a mirror in himself of the Divine process and so makes himself a new

form of existence for the eternal Life[236] of God. Here we find once

more that the expression of that immediate and positive reconciliation

disappears, inasmuch as man can only attain to this by abrogating his

finite existence. Everything, therefore, that was of central importance

in the first stage returns to us again here only in an aggravated

degree, because the incompatibility and unworthiness of our humanity

is here presupposed, and to remedy this defect is assumed to be man's

supreme and unique duty.

(_α_) The specific content of this phase is consequently the endurance

of torments, and along with such the individual's willing renunciation,

sacrifice, and self-imposed renunciation with the express aim of

arousing sufferings, tortures, and anguish of every kind in order that

Spirit may reveal itself therein, and feel itself in union with the

fruition and blessedness of its heaven[237]. The negative aspect of

pain is an object in itself for the true martyr, and the greatness of

the revelation is such that it can treat with indifference the awful

aspect of that which man has thus suffered, and the dreadful nature of

that to which he submits himself. The first thing, then, which will

be brought beneath the ruthless mace of negation in order that the

individual who still experiences this drought of the soul may wean

himself from the world and become sanctified, will be his _natural_

existence, his life, the satisfaction of the most essential necessaries

of his bodily existence. The main subject-matter therefore of the

type we are now dealing with will be torments of the body, sufferings

which have been perpetrated on the believer either by his enemies and

persecutors out of hatred and persecution, or have been deliberately

accepted by himself on principle by way of expiation. In both cases

the individual accepts them in the full fanaticism of his readiness

to endure, not, that is to say, as an injustice to himself, but as a

blessing through which alone he is enabled to break down the walls of

what he feels to be his sinful flesh, heart, and soul, and so obtain

reconcilement with his God.

In so far, however, as this conversion of the soul can only manifest

itself in such situations, in atrocities and awful treatment of the

bodily frame the beauty of the presentation of such subjects may be

very readily impaired; and, in fact, we may say that the treatment

of all subjects of this kind is a perilous undertaking for art. For,

on the one hand, it is obvious that individuals here, impressed as

they are wholly with the hall-mark of finite existence, and its

inevitable blemishes and defects, will have to be represented in an

entirely different atmosphere from that we claimed for the history of

Christ's Passion; and, from a further point of view, we unfortunately

meet with unheard of agonies and horrors in such cases, distortion,

and dislocation of limbs, bodily torments, scaffolds, decapitation,

burning or roasting in oil, flaying alive, and every other sort of

frightful, repugnant, and loathsome abuse of the body, such as lie

much too remote from beauty for any sane art to think of selecting

them for its subject-matter. The artistic dexterity of the artist may,

in such cases, no doubt, so far as execution is concerned, be of the

highest class; but, at best, such manual dexterity will merely possess

a personal interest, we may indeed find before us the technique of an

admirable painter; but it will be equally obvious that all his efforts

have been unable to produce out of such material a harmonious work of

art.

(_β_) For these reasons it will be necessary that the artistic

presentation of this negative process should emphasize another aspect

of it, which stands out thereby above this agony of the body and soul,

and establishes in relief the positive presence of reconciliation.

This is just that essential reconcilement of Spirit which is finally

won as the result sought for of the pain suffered. Under an aspect

such as this the martyrs may be depicted as the guardians of the

Divine in conflict with the grossness of material force and barbarism

of unbelief. For the sake of their heavenly treasure they endure pain

and death, and this courage, steadfastness, endurance, and consolation

must consequently, with equal truth, appear upon them. And yet for all

that this intimate possession of their faith and love in its spiritual

beauty is no sanity of soul which brings to them a sense of the sanity

of their body; rather it is a sense of inward life, which has worked

its way through their pain itself, or at least is made manifest in

their suffering, and which, even in the moment of their ecstasy,

retains the experience of pain as an essential condition of their

beatitude. The art of painting has, in particular, made this attitude

of saintly humiliation the object of its efforts. What this art mainly

should strive after here is to delineate the bliss of such torments in

the pure and simple lines of the countenance and its expression, as

contrasted with the offensive laceration of the flesh; and to present

such an ecstasy as may reflect the surrender and victory over pain,

the fruition, in short, of the Divine Presence in the temple of the

soul. If, on the contrary, the art of sculpture seeks to give a visible

form to such a content, it will inevitably find itself less qualified

to depict this ecstasy of soul-life at this strain of its intensity

with such a concentrated power, and will consequently be compelled to

emphasize that aspect of pain and laceration in so far as it declares

itself in its full force on the bodily frame.

(_γ_) _Thirdly_, it is to be observed that in the kind of examples

with which we are now dealing it is not merely the existence of Nature

and immediate finite conditions which is affected by this attitude

of self-abnegation and endurance, but the impulse of the soul is

transported by such feelings to an extreme point of this heavenly

rapture to such an extent, in fact, that what is merely human and of

the world, even when it is essentially beyond reproach on ethical or

rational grounds, is none the less thrust behind and scorned. In other

words, just in proportion as the Spirit, which here makes vivid to

itself the idea of its conversion, is in the first instance deficient

in an educated sense, to that extent it will with so much the more

uncontrollable and logical frenzy--the entire force of its piety being

concentrated on this one object--turn its back on everything which

as finite opposes this bare and abstract infinitude of its religious

fanaticism, that is to say, on every definite human emotion, all

the manifold ethical impulses, relations, and obligations of the

heart. For the moral life of the family, the bonds of friendship, of

blood, of love, of the State, and a man's calling, every one of them

belong to the things of the world; and all that is of the world, in

so far as it is not as yet suffused with the absolute conceptions of

faith and developed in unity and harmony with the same, appears to

this form of abstract spiritual intensity of the soul of faith so

far from being something acceptable to its emotional life and sense

of obligation, that it is, on the contrary, a thing of no worth at

all, and therefore both hostile and hurtful to its religious state.

The moral organism of the human world is consequently not as yet

respected, because its significant features and duties are not as

yet recognized as necessary, integrated members in the concatenation

of an essentially rational reality, in which nothing, it is true,

ought to assert itself in a one-sided and independent isolation, yet,

none the less, as an essential factor in the organic process, must

be maintained as such and not be sacrificed. In this respect the

religious reconciliation remains itself _one-sided_, and declares

itself in the truly simple heart as an intensity of belief which

is deficient in comprehensiveness, that is, as the piety of the

self-secluded soul, which has not yet attained in its growth to the

fully expanded self-reliance of maturity, and to conviction based on

genuine insight and circumspection. When the force of a soul deficient

in these qualities maintains its opposition to the world which is

thus treated in a purely negative way, and forcefully breaks loose

from all human ties, even though they may originally be the very

closest, we can only characterize such conduct as the rawness of Spirit

and a barbaric result of the power of abstraction, which is simply

repulsive. So we may say that though from the point of view of the

religious consciousness, as we find it to-day, it is indeed possible

to honour, and to honour highly, this opening germ of religiosity in

such representations, if, however, such a pious tendency proceeds to

such lengths that we find it advancing to lay siege to what is both

essentially rational and moral, then, so far from sympathizing with

such a fanaticism of sanctity, we can only protest that a kind of

abnegation such as this, which casts off from itself, shatters and

treads upon that which is independently justifiable, and even sacred,

appears to us both immoral in itself and subversive of the very type

of religion it represents. There are many legends, tales, and poems

which deal with this extreme form of the pious craze. We have, for

example, the tale of a man who, though full of tenderness for his wife

and family, and, moreover, beloved by all his friends, leaves his home

and makes a pilgrimage. When at last he returns home in the guise of

a beggar he refuses to disclose his identity. Alms are given him,

and out of compassion a permanent lodging provided under the stairs.

In this plight he lives for twenty years; he sees the grief of his

family on his account, and only declares who he is on his death-bed.

This kind of thing, which we are asked to revere as sanctity, is, of

course, merely the egotism of a fanatic which revolts us. This long

endurance of renunciation may remind us of the distrait nature of

those penances, which the Hindoos voluntarily impose on themselves

on religious grounds. But the endurance of the Hindoo has a very

different significance. In that case a man deliberately places himself

in a condition of vacuum and unconsciousness; in the case which we

are now considering the _pain_, and the deliberate consciousness and

feeling of the same is the real object, which it is assumed will be

attained with just so much more purity as the suffering is associated

with the consciousness of the value of and devotion to the severities

which are accepted, and is, moreover, united with a vision for ever

concentrated on the renunciation thus made. The richer the heart which

takes on itself the burden of such ordeals, the nobler the content

of its own possessions, and yet withal believes that it is bound to

condemn them as of no merit, just so much the more difficult grows the

task of reconciliation, and the more prone it is to bring about the

most terrible convulsions and the most raving distraction. Indeed, to

our vision, it is clear enough that a soul such as this, which is only

at home in a world which, however full of ideas, is not the world of

common experience, and which consequently only feels its grasp slipping

from the stable and paramount centres of activity and aims of this our

actual world, ay, and although it be with heart and soul held in and

associated with that world, yet regards all that is moral there simply

as something which contradicts its absolute destination--we can only

say that such a soul, both in its self-inflicted sufferings and its

renunciations, is from the rational point of view simply mad, so mad

that we can neither feel any profound compassion for it, nor propose

any means of liberation. What is lamentably lacking to a mode of life

of this kind is an object of real substance and valid significance;

what it proposes to secure is an aim wholly personal, an object sought

for by the individual for himself alone, for the salvation of his own

soul, for his own blessedness. Few are likely to concern themselves

very deeply whether an individual, at any rate one of this type, is or

ever will be happy[238].

(_b_) _The inward Penance and Conversion_

The kind of representation, in the same general class of cases which

we shall now contrast with the one above examined, turns aside from

the extremity of merely bodily suffering, as it is also from a further

point of view more indifferent to the purely negative impulse directed

against what is essentially just and right in the actual conditions of

the world; the material of such representations consequently, both in

respect to its content and its form, opens up a ground which is more

conformable with ideal art. And this ground is the conversion of the

_inner_ life of the soul, which only here seeks to express itself in

its _spiritual_ pain, and its change of heart. Here, therefore, we

find in the first place that we have no more of those ever repeated

horrors and barbarities of pain inflicted on man's poor body: and,

secondly, that which we have referred to as the barbarian religiosity

of the soul no longer holds fast to its antagonism as against the

purely ethical aspects of humanity in order to trample under iron foot

in the abstraction of its purely conceptive satisfaction[239], and

in the pain of an absolute renunciation that other kind of sensuous

enjoyment; for the most part its attention is now solely directed

against what is in fact sinful, criminal, and evil in human Nature.

We find here a lofty assurance that faith, this spiritual impulse

towards God, is capable of converting the past action, even though it

be a sin or a crime, into something alien to the man who perpetrated

it, washing it away in fact. This withdrawal out of evil, that wholly

negative condition, which is realized in the individual by the

subjective volition and spirit at once scorning and confounding itself

under its former state of evil--this return to the positive which

is now self-established as the only real in contrast to the former

state of sinfulness, is the truly infinite content of religious love,

the presence and actuality of absolute Spirit in the individual soul

itself. The feeling of the stability and endurability of the personal

existence, which through God, to which it addresses itself, triumphs

over evil, and in so far as it is thus mediated with Him is aware

of itself as one with Him, produces as its effect the fruition and

blessedness of contemplating God, it is true, in the first instance

as the absolute Other in His opposition to the sin inherent in finite

existence, but further of knowing this Infinite Presence as identical

with me as this particular person, of knowing, in short, that I carry

this self-consciousness of God, as the seat of my own personality,

that is to say, my own self-consciousness, as certainly as I carry

the sense of my own self-identity. Such a revolution takes place no

doubt entirely within the shrine of the soul, and belongs, therefore,

rather to religion than art: for the reason, however, that it is the

intimate movement of the soul, which pre-eminently makes itself master

of this act of conversion, and also is able to throw a gleam of light

through the external embodiment, a plastic art such as painting can

also claim to make visible the history of such conversions. If it

attempts, however, to depict the entire course of events which belong

to such a transition, much that is very far from being beautiful may

readily appear in the result, because in such a case both that which is

sinful and repulsive requires to be depicted, as, for example, in the

story of the prodigal son. Painting, therefore, achieves its greatest

success when it concentrates the act of conversion into _one_ picture

where that is the prevailing motive, and pays little or no attention

to the previous course of events. The ordinary presentations of Mary

Magdelene may be noted as an admirable example of this kind of work,

and particularly in the hands of the old Italian masters has been

treated in a way both excellent in itself and throughout consistently

with fine Art. She is depicted here both in the characterization of her

soul and her external presence as the _fair sinner_, in whom the sin no

less than the sanctity is intended to exercise a sort of fascination

on the spectator. But at the same time neither sin nor sanctity are

treated with any great intensity. She is forgiven much because she has

loved much, and her forgiveness is in a measure the portion both of her

love and her beauty. And what affects us most of all in this picture

is this, that she makes for herself a conscience as it were out of

her love, and robed in the beauty of her sensitive soul pours forth

her sorrow in a flood of tears. We are not led to feel that the fact

that she has loved so much is her error, but rather that her fair and

fascinating folly is this, namely, that she _believes_ herself to be a

sinner,[240] for her exquisitely sensitive beauty only leaves us the

impression that in her love she is both noble and profound.

(_c_) _Miracles and Legends_

The final aspect, which is closely associated with the two above

considered, and is frequently asserted as a concomitant of both, is

that of miracle. It plays in fact an important part throughout this

stage of our inquiry. In this connection we may define miracle as the

conversion-history of the immediate existence of Nature. Such reality

lies before us as a commonplace, contingent existence. This finite

substance is touched by the hand of God, which, in so far as it strikes

upon what is purely external and particular, breaks it up, transmutes

it into something entirely different, interrupting what in ordinary

parlance we call the natural course of things. To bring before us the

soul arrested by such inexplicable phenomena, in which it imagines it

recognizes the presence of the Divine, vanquished, in short, in its

ordinary view of finite events, this is the main subject-matter of

a host of legends. In fact, however, the Divine can only touch and

dominate Nature as Reason, that is, in the unalterable laws of Nature

herself, as implanted therein by God, and the Divine has no occasion

to exploit Himself in the supreme sense of this term in particular

circumstances and modes of causation which run contrary to these

laws of Nature, for it is only the eternal laws and determinations

of reason which apply in any real sense to Nature. From another

point of view legends frequently carry with them quite unnecessarily

an amount of matter which is abstruse, out of taste, senseless, and

ridiculous, inasmuch as the intention is that both intellect and heart

should be stimulated to believe in the presence and activity of God

by precisely those things which are essentially irrational, false,

and heathenish. The consequent emotion, piety, and conversion of the

soul may even then awake our interest, but in that case it is only

on the _one_ side, namely, that of the soul: so soon as that enters

into relation with somewhat else outside it, and the idea is that this

external correlative shall effect the conversion of the heart, then we

inevitably require that such should not be wholly a meaningless and

irrational sequence of events.

Such, then, would be the fundamental divisions of the substantive

content at this particular stage of our inquiry, regarding that content

as the self-subsistent Nature of God, or in its aspect as a spiritual

process, through which and in which He is Spirit. We have here the

absolute object, which art neither creates nor reveals out of itself,

but which it has received from religion which it approaches with the

conviction that it is _essentially_ true that it may express and

represent the same conformably to its modes. It is the content of the

believing, yearning soul, which is intrinsically the infinite totality

itself, so that for it the external medium remains to a more or less

degree outside it, or a matter of indifference, and is unable to be

brought completely into harmony with that inner life. And for this

reason it frequently presents a repellent material which art finds

itself unable wholly to subdue to its aims.

[Footnote 224: _Nicht aufnehmend._ Not ready to absorb extraneous

matter.]

[Footnote 225: This of course is an opinion which may be strongly

contested in its application to particular artists.]

[Footnote 226: Hegel means not so much the history in which the whole

totality of events is comprised as that aspect of human history which

declares its universal significance as infinite spirit.]

[Footnote 227: That is, of self-consciousness in all that it

implies--the personality of Christ, for example.]

[Footnote 228: Hegel does not further dwell upon this relativity. But

the next paragraph explains what is really in his mind. The important

question, however, how far such events are worthy of credence as

objective history, to say nothing of the inadequacy of their artistic

presentation, one cannot but feel is deliberately evaded. What Hegel

would say no doubt was that the bare historical aspect was only of

relative importance. The main question was their significance in the

spiritual process. It is in this direction that much of our noblest

modern thought finds a certain indissoluble unreality of statement.]

[Footnote 229: That is in Christ.]

[Footnote 230: _Gleichkeit._ Equality, reciprocity.]

[Footnote 231: We are reminded of our treasures in Christian art such

as the Virgin and Child in Tintoret's "Flight into Egypt," Rafael's

San, Sisto Madonna and the rest.]

[Footnote 232: In other words as regarded at a later date by the

Church.]

[Footnote 233: This statement hardly does justice to the profound

idealism of the epistles of St. Paul.]

[Footnote 234: Perhaps "the infinite form of subjectivity" is better.

He means "the infinite form of individual self-consciousness."]

[Footnote 235: That is, characterized by personality.]

[Footnote 236: _Geschichte._ Life as an evolved Process.]

[Footnote 237: Compare the poem of Meredith, "Theodolinda," in his

ballads of the Tragic Life. It is, in another aspect, that iron crown

which that thoughtful contemporary writer, Mr. H. W. Nevinson, refers

to in his Essays on Rebellion.]

[Footnote 238: The elimination even of sympathy with such fanaticism

where it is quite sincere, a rare case no doubt, seems severe. The

best illustration in modern literature I know of the principle "all

or nothing," is Ibsen's great drama "Brandt." Readers of Carlyle will

doubtless recall from "Past and Present" and elsewhere that prophet's

repeated denunciations of the craze for personal happiness.]

[Footnote 239: By _intellectuellen Befriedigung_ Hegel does not mean

"intellectual" in a good sense, but merely that the man imagines his

happiness in his mind rather than feels it through the senses. The

psychology of religious ecstasy, however, is a rather involved problem.]

[Footnote 240: This analysis is rather surprising. Did Hegel, the

robust Swabian, really think the above the finest type of art's

presentations of the Magdalene? Does it not lean very closely to that

soft sentimentalism which a Carlo Dolci gives us in its decadence? At

any rate the idea that the Magdalene was not really a sinner flatly

contradicts the original references to her in the gospels, and to

my mind at any rate seems from the artistic point of view also to

destroy half the rare beauty of her repentance. The principle of

such an interpretation is surely the entirely pagan one, whether

Greek or French, that a great passion is its own justification

quite irrespective of moral considerations. She is the historical

impersonation of the frailty of a love too dependent on the senses,

not of one in which either nobility of bearing or extreme selflessness

is conspicuous. Hegel's analysis may be true enough of certain

pictures--but do they really present us the ideal; most assuredly not.]

CHAPTER II

CHIVALRY

The principle of the essentially infinite subjective consciousness

possesses for the content of faith and art in the first instance, as

we have already discovered, the Absolute itself, in other words the

Spirit of God as it is mediated and reconciled with the conscious

spirit of man and thereby is first itself independently free. This

romantic mysticism in its self-limitation to the sense of blessedness

in the Absolute Presence remains a mode of spiritual inwardness which

is abstract, because it confronts the things of the world in opposition

and rejects the same. Faith is, in an abstraction of this kind,

alienated from life, from the concrete reality of human existence,

removed from the positive relations of mankind to one another, who only

know and love each other in faith, and for the sake of their belief

as completely bound together in yet a third association, namely, the

spirit of the Christ community. This association is alone the clear

spring in which the image of that blessedness is reflected, without

it being necessary for man to look his brother first in the face, to

enter into any direct relation with another, or to experience the

unity of love, of trust, of confidence, of mutual aims and actions

in contact with the living concrete presence. That which constitutes

the hope and yearning of the inner life man here, in this sense of

exclusive religious intimacy, can only discover as actual life in the

kingdom of God, in the society of the Church. He has not as yet[241]

withdrawn this single identity in a third factor from his conscious

life in order that he may possess all that he is really himself in

his entire spiritual concreteness no less before his eyes directly

in the knowledge and volition of that other whole. The collective

religious content, it is true, assumes the mode of real existence, but

it is still an existence which is located in the ideal world of an

imagination which consumes the expanding boundaries of actual life. It

is still far away from attempting to satisfy its own life also in that

abundance which it receives from the world and its realization in the

world as the higher demand in the medium of life itself.

It follows that the soul which found its initial consummation in the

simple feeling of Divine blessedness must step forth from this heavenly

kingdom peculiar to the _religious_ sphere, must undertake the effort

of self-introspection and assimilate a content which is, as vitally

present, adequate to the demands of the individual consciousness in

its fullest extension. And in this process that which was before a

_religious_ coalescence of soul is changed to one of _secular_ type.

Christ indeed said; "Ye must leave father and mother, and follow Me."

And in the like spirit: "Brother shall hate brother; men shall crucify

you and persecute you." But as soon as the kingdom of God has secured

a foothold in the world, and is actively employed in transfusing with

its spirit and illumining the aims and interests of that world; when

father, mother, and brother are already numbered in the community,

then the things of the world on their side commence to assert their

just claim to recognition and furtherance. If this claim is not merely

fought for but vindicated then also the negative attitude of the

religious spirit, which was at first exclusively hostile to all that

was merely human, vanishes; the spirit of man enlarges, it explores

the full scope of its actual presence, and unfolds its heart in the

entire world of reality[242]. The fundamental principle suffers no

alteration; the substantive and infinite self-consciousness merely

directs its attention to another province of its own kingdom. We may

perhaps define this transition in the statement that the individual

singularity is now as such singularity independent of its mediation

with God and self-subsistently free. For precisely in that mediation,

whereby it divested itself of its purely finite limitation and natural

life, it has passed over the path of mere negation, and reappears

after having thus secured an essentially _affirmative_ position,

in the condition of a consciousness that is free and as such makes

the demand that it shall, in virtue of its own infinitude, though

the infinitude is here only in the first instance one of pure form,

secure complete recognition both for itself and others. In this the

religious mode of the individual consciousness is reposed the entire

spiritual wealth of the infinite soul, which it has hitherto filled

up with God. If we, however, made the inquiry, of what material the

heart of man is suffused in this its inward repletion, such a content

merely concerns the infinite relation of the subjective consciousness

in its active self-relation; it is simply replete with its own

formal medium, that is, as essentially infinite singularity without

further and more concrete expansion and significance as a content of

interests, aims, and actions which is itself essentially objective

and substantive[243]. If we further examine the matter, however, more

closely we shall see there are in the main _three_ emotions, which

in their independence rise up in the individual soul to the level of

this infinite mode, namely personal _honour, love_, and _fidelity._

They are not so much moral qualities and virtues as simply modes which

inform the intimate presence of the individual soul when fulfilled

with its own self-relation as such is recognized by romance. For the

personal self-subsistency for which _honour_ contends does not assert

itself as intrepitude on behalf of a communal weal, and the repute

of thoroughness in relation to it and integrity of private life.

On the contrary it contends simply for the recognition and formal

inviolability of the individual person. The same principle applies to

_love_, which forms the central subject-matter of this sphere. It is

merely the adventitious passion of one individual for another; and

however much it may expand under the wand of imagination or may be

deepened by excess of emotion, it is for all that neither the ethical

relation of marriage or family. _Fidelity_ possesses no doubt more

the appearance of a moral character, inasmuch as it does not merely

will its own but holds fast to something higher, something shared

with itself, surrenders itself to another's will, whether it be the

wish or behest of a master, and thereby renounces the personal desire

and independence of its own particular volition. But the feeling of

loyalty does not concern the objective interest of the social weal

in its independent form, that is, in the concrete freedom of the

developed state life, but associates itself merely with the _person_

of a master, who, in his own fashion, acts with independence, or

concentrates himself in more general relations and is active on their

behalf[244]. These three modes of feeling taken together and as they

reciprocally affect one another constitute with the exception of the

religious relation, which also has its part to play here, the principal

content of _chivalry_, and furnish the necessary steps of advance

from the principle of purely religious enthusiasm to the entrance of

the individual soul into the concrete social life of the world, in

the kingdom of which romantic art now secures a platform on which it

can from its own resources work out its independence, and at the same

time embody a freer type of beauty. It stands here, so to speak, in

the free room midway between the absolute content of the independently

stable religious conceptions and the varied particularity and

restricted boundaries of the finite world. Among the various arts it is

pre-eminently poetry which has shown itself most qualified to master

such a material, its modes of expression being directed to the life of

the soul as wholly occupied with its own domain and as realized in its

aims and events.

Inasmuch as we now have before us a material which man takes possession

of in his own spiritual life, or rather, from the world of his pure

humanity, we might at first suppose that romantic art occupied the

same ground as that of classic art. This, therefore, is an excellent

opportunity for placing them together both in comparison and

contrast. We have already defined classical art the Ideal of humanity

certified as true in its objective self-subsistence. Its imaginative

vitality requires as its core a content which is substantive in type

and excludes an ethical pathos. The Homeric poems, the tragedies of

Sophocles and Aeschylus, are in the main concerned with interests

of an absolutely factual content, an austere treatment of the

passions reflected therein, a solid style of speech and execution in

conformity with the nature of the ideas expressed, and above this

domain of heroes and other figures which alone are in their individual

self-concentration at home in such an atmosphere of pathos we have

the realm of the gods at a still more advanced stage of objective

presentment. Even in the case where art, in more introspective fashion,

is occupied with the infinite experiments of sculpture, bas-reliefs and

similar forms, or the later elegies, epigrams, and other diversions

of lyrical poetry, we still have the same type before us, that is to

say, the type which portrays the object more or less as it finds it,

and obedient to the claim that it already has secured its constructive

presentment. We have, in short, represented figures of the imagination

already established and defined in their characterization such as

Venus, Bacchus, or the Muses. It is just the same with the later

epigrams, where we get the description of a material already to hand

or, as in the case of Meleager, a posy of well-known flowers, bound

together with the cords of exquisite feeling and taste. It is, in

short, an exhilarating mode of activity carried on in a wealthily

furnished house overflowing in its stores with every kind of bounty,

image and provision for every conceivable object. The poet and the

artist is simply the magician, who wafts them into use, collects and

groups them.

It is wholly different in romantic poetry. In so far as it is of the

world worldly, and is not directly associated with the story of our

Lord, the virtues and objects of its heroism are not those of the

Greek heroes, whose type of morality Christendom in its early days

simply regarded as a brilliant enormity. Greek morality presupposes

the presence of humanity in its complete configuration, in which

the volition then and there as it ought to act conformably to its

essential notion of independence has received a definite content and

the actual conditions of freedom imperatively valid such as belong to

that content. Such are the relations of parents and children, married

persons, or of citizens of city or State in the realized liberty of

such. Now inasmuch as this objective content of human affairs belongs

to the _evolution_ of man's spirit on the basis of Nature cognized

and insured as actual fact, it is unable any longer to satisfy that

self-absorbed introspection of the religious life, which seeks to

destroy the natural aspect of human life, and must deviate considerably

from the virtue of humility which opposes it, and the surrender of

human freedom and its staunch self-dependence. The virtues of Christian

piety simply prove the death of such a world-attitude if held in their

extreme of abstraction, and only make the individual free, when he

absolutely denies the human part of him. The individual freedom of our

present sphere is no doubt no longer conditioned by mere endurance

and self-sacrifice but essentially positive in the world arena; that

infinite self-relation of the individual has, however, as we have

already discovered, the inward realm of the soul as its content and

only that, the subjective soul, that is, whose movement is in its own

peculiar medium, as the secular ground of its own domain. In this

connection poetry does not draw from any objective material already

presented it, no mythology, for instance, no imaginative pictures

and embodiments, which already lie ready waiting for its expression.

It stands there wholly free, without any extraneous matter, purely

creative and productive. It is free as a bird that sings straight

from its breast. It follows, then, if this subjective activity

proceeds also from a noble will and a profound soul, we shall merely

have in its workings and relations and existence the evidence of

caprice and contingency, for the reason that freedom and its aims

proceed, relatively to a content which is throughout immaterial, from

internal self-reflection. And, consequently, we do not find so much in

individuals a particular pathos in the Greek conception of the term

and a vital self-subsistency of character associated with it by the

closest bonds, as that which is simply a grade of heroic conception in

its connection with love, honour, bravery, and fidelity; a grade into

which it is mainly the nobility or depravity of soul which imports the

distinguishing features. The characteristic trait, however, which the

heroes of the Middle Ages possess in common with those of antiquity

is that of _bravery._ Yet even this receives a totally different

complexion. It is not so much a natural courage, which reposes on the

character that is sane and sound, and flows forth from the growth of

an unimpaired robustness of body and will, assisting the execution of

objective interests. Rather it is the outcome of the secret wealth of

the soul, its honour and chivalry, and is in the main a creation of

the phantasy, which undertakes adventures that have their origin in

individual caprice and the chance intricacies of external circumstance

or the impulses of mystical piety, and we may add generally the

personal attitude of the individual.

This romantic type of art finds a home, then, in two hemispheres, in

the Western world as this penetration into the more intimate shrine of

Spirit, in the Eastern this its first expansion of the self-absorbed

consciousness as it frees itself from the finite environment. In the

West poetry reposes on a soul which is withdrawn upon its resources,

which has become the centre of its activity, yet possesses this flavour

of secularly merely as one part of its complexion, as one aspect, over

which is superposed a yet loftier world of belief. In the East it is

the Arab above all, who as a solitary,[245] who in the first instance

has nothing before his eyes but his dried-up desert and his heavens,

stands forth in the full strength of life as the proclaimer of the

splendour and primary extension of the world of Nature, and thereby

still preserves at the same time the freedom of his soul. And generally

we may say that in the Orient it is the Mohammedan religion, which

has cleared the ground, made an end of all idolatry in the service

of finite things or the imagination, and given the soul at the same

time the personal freedom, which wholly floods the same, so that the

secularity does not here only constitute another province, but runs

beyond it into the universal licence, where heart and mind, without

ascribing any objective reality to God, find their reconciliation in

the jubilant lust of living just like beggars by throwing the glory

of their fancy on the objects around them: enjoy their loves and are

happy, blessed, and contented.

1. HONOUR

The motive of honour was unknown to ancient classic art. In the "Iliad"

it is quite true that the wrath of Achilles constitutes both the

content and the motive principle, so that the entire series of events

is dependent upon it; but what we moderns understand by the term honour

is not grasped here at all. Achilles believes himself to be insulted

to all intents and purposes only in the fact that the share in the

booty which he considers justly to belong to him and the reward of

his personal merits, his _γέρας_, has been taken away by Agamemnon.

The insult here has a direct reference to something actual, a bounty,

in which no doubt a privilege, a recognition of fame and bravery was

reposed, and Achilles is enraged because Agamemnon meets him unworthily

and lets the Greeks know that they are not to pay any attention to

him. An insult of this kind is not driven home to the real centre

of personality in its abstract purity; in fact Achilles expresses

himself satisfied with the restitution of the abducted slave and the

addition of other goods and bounties, and Agamemnon finally makes this

reparation although from our point of view they have both insulted one

another in the grossest fashion. Maledictions of this kind, however,

have only made them angry; and, after all, the particular insult, which

has reference to a matter of fact, is done away with in the same matter

of fact fashion.

(_a_) The honour of romance is, on the contrary, of another kind.

Insult has no reference here to the factual values of real things,

property, status, obligation, etc., but to personality simply, and

its idea of its own importance, the work which the individual claims

as his right. This worth is in the cases we are now discussing of

an infinite significance equal to that of personality itself. In

honour, therefore, man possesses the earliest positive consciousness

of his infinite spiritual medium, independent of the content. What

the individual has, what in him something peculiar creates, after

the loss of which it may yet subsist precisely as it did before--in

this elusive something the absolute validity of the entire subjective

life is reposed and apprehended in it both for itself and others.

The determining measure of honour therefore does not depend on what

the individual really is, but on what is contained in this personal

self-regard. This regard, however, raises all particularity to the

level of the universal conception that the personal core in its full

significance resides in this particularity which it claims as its own.

Honour is merely an outward show it is sometimes said. No doubt this is

so: but from our present point of view we must, if we look at it more

narrowly, accept it as the appearance and reappearance of the personal

medium self-reflected, which as the semblance of an entity essentially

infinite is itself infinite. And through this infinitude it is just

this show or semblance of honour which is the real existence of the

individual, its highest actuality; and every particular quality, into

which honour is reflected and appropriates as its own is by virtue of

this show exalted itself to an infinite worth. This type of honour

constitutes a fundamental determinant in the romantic world, and

presupposes that man has not merely passed beyond the limits of purely

religious conception and inward life, but actually entered the arena

of the great world and makes itself vital in the material of the same

simply by virtue of the pure medium of its personal self-subsistence

and absolute intension[246].

The _content_ of honour may be of the most varied kind. For everything

that I am, do, or is done to me by others affects my honour. We may

consequently reckon within its boundaries the out and out substantive

itself, loyalty towards princes, fatherland, a man's profession,

fulfilment of obligations, marital fidelity, integrity in business

affairs and conscientiousness in scientific research. For the point

of view of honour, however, all these essentially valid and veritable

relations are neither sanctioned nor recognized in and through

themselves, but only so far as the individual reposes in them his

personal relation and makes them thereby matters affecting his honour.

A man of honour consequently always thinks first of all about himself,

and the question for him is not if anything is on principle right

or not, but whether it is the right thing for him to do, whether it

becomes him then as a man of honour to make himself master in it and to

stand by it. And consequently he may also perpetrate the worst actions

and still be a man of honour. He creates at the same time objects at

will, imagines himself of a specific character, and appropriates to

himself, both as he sees himself and is seen by others, that which

in the natural order of things has nothing to do with him at all.

Even then it is not the natural fact, but the personal view of it

which places difficulties and devolutions in the path, because it has

become an affair of honour to maintain that character. So, to take

an example, Donna Diana conceives it to be derogatory to her honour

to confess in any way the love she feels, because she has pledged

herself not to listen to love. In general we may say, then, that the

content of love is at the mercy of accident, because its validity

depends purely on the personal attitude, and is not directed by that

which is the essential mode of the inner life itself. For this reason

we may observe that in romantic representations on the one hand that

which is on principle justifiable is expressed as the _law_ of honour,

the individual associating with the consciousness of right at the

same time the infinite self-conscious unit of his personality. What

is then expressed by the statement that honour makes such and such a

demand, or forbids it, is this that the entire personal attitude of

consciousness implants itself within the content of such a demand or

prohibition so that no trespass in any transaction can fail to attract

its attention without a repair and restoration being effected; and

we may add the individual is unable to attend to any other content.

Conversely, however, honour may resolve itself into something wholly

formal and contentless, in so far as it contains nothing but the shell

of the Ego, which is formally infinite, or only accepts an entirely

bad content as obligatory upon it. In this case, more particularly

in dramatic representations, honour remains but a wholly frosty and

unvitalized object: its aims express no longer an essential content

but simply an abstract form of consciousness. But it is only an

essentially substantive content which possesses the contingency of law,

and is capable of explication in its multifold environment, and can be

apprehended in its imperative sequence of consequences. This defect

in profound content especially rises to the surface when casuistry of

reflection includes within the embrace of honour matter which is purely

accidental and insignificant which the individual comes in contact

with. There is never a lack of material, because this casuistical

tendency analyses with great subtlety in its modes of distinction,

and many aspects may be elicited and made the subject of honour which

in themselves are quite unimportant Above all the Spaniards have

elaborated this casuistry of reflection over matters of honour in their

dramatic poetry, and made their particular heroes of honour deduce all

their consequences in their speeches. In this way the fidelity of the

married woman may form a subject of investigation into the minutest

details, and the mere suspicion of another, nay, the possibility of

such even when the husband is aware that the suspicion is false may

be an affair of honour. If this leads to collisions we can derive no

real satisfaction from the process, because we have nothing of material

moment to arrest us, and consequently instead of the resolution of an

antagonism which is causally inevitable we can only extract from it a

painfully contracted feeling. Also in French plays we frequently find

that it is an honour which is barren, that is entirely abstract, which

is made the essential fulcrum of interest Still more extreme is this

essentially frostlike and lifeless type of it apparent in the drama

"Alarcos" of Herr Friedrich von Schlegel. The hero here murders his

noble and loving wife. And we ask why. Simply for honour's sake; and

this honour consists in this that he may marry the king's daughter, for

whom he entertains no affection, and thus become the king's son-in-law.

Such a pattern is of course contemptible and an ignoble conception

which merely prides itself as something lofty and of infinite intension.

(_b_) Inasmuch, then, as honour is not only a semblance in me myself,

but must also exist in the mind and recognition of _another_, which

again on its part makes a claim to a similar honourable recognition,

honour is the extreme embodiment of _vulnerability._ For it is purely

a matter of personal caprice how far I choose to extend the claim

and to what material I care to relate it. The smallest offence may

be in this respect of significance; and inasmuch as man is placed

relatively to concrete reality in the most manifold relations with a

thousand things, and is able to extend practically without limit the

sphere of that which he conceives to affect him, and to which he

is placed in the relation of honour it follows that when we come to

deal with the independence of mankind and the obstinate isolation of

their units, aspects for which the principle of honour is in the main

responsible, there is no end to the strife and contention to which

they give rise. Moreover, in the case of insult also no less than in

that of honour generally, the important matter is not the content, in

which I necessarily feel myself insulted; for that which is negated

has reference to the personality which has appropriated such a content

as its own, and now conceives itself as this ideal centrum of infinity

attacked.

(_c_) For such reasons every insult to honour is regarded as

essentially of an infinite significance. It can consequently only

be repaired by means which possess that character. No doubt we may

have many degrees of insult, and as many modes of satisfaction; what

however at the stage we are now considering any man may take as an

insult, how far he will feel himself as insulted and claim satisfaction

therefore, such considerations depend once more wholly on the personal

caprice of the particular person, which is justified in pursuing its

object to the utmost point of scrupulosity and outraged feeling. In

this process of satisfaction, which is here claimed, it is essential

that the man who delivers the insult no less than he who receives it

should be recognized as a man of honour. For the latter requires the

free recognition of his honour from the former; but in order to have

honour in his eyes and through his action that man must appear to

the recipient of insult as a man of honour, in other words he must

substantiate by virtue of his personality the infinite character of the

insult which he has laid upon the outraged man and despite his personal

enmity that is thereby directed against him.

It is, then, a fundamental determinant in the general principle of

honour that no one through his actions can give to any one a right over

himself; and consequently all that he has done and may have initiated

will be regarded both previous to its commencement and after its

conclusion as unalterably affiliated to infinity, and will be accepted

and treated under such a qualitative relation.

Moreover, since honour, in its conflicts and its satisfaction in this

respect, depends on personal independence, which is conscious of

itself as subject to no limitation, but acts directly from its own

resources, we find a fact recur to our attention, which we previously

observed fundamentally characterized the heroic figures of the Ideal,

namely the self-subsistence of individuality. In honour, however, we

have not merely the secure self-dependence and action from personal

resources, but this self-subsistence is in this case united with _the

idea of itself_; and it is just this preconception which constitutes

the real content of honour in the sense that it perceives what is its

own in that which is presented exterior to it, and envisages itself

therein to the full extent of its personal life. Honour is consequently

a self-subsistence, which is a _self reflection_, and possesses in such

a reflection its exclusive essence, and moreover leaves it wholly to

accident whether its content be that which is essentially moral and

necessary, or contingent and insignificant.

2. LOVE

The second emotional source which plays a predominant part in the

productions of romantic art is _love._

(_a_) We have found in honour that the individual conscious life,

as it prefigures itself in its absolute _independence_, forms the

fundamental determinant; in a similar way the highest attitude of

love is the _surrender_ of the personal life to some object of the

opposed sex, a sacrifice of its independent consciousness and its

personal isolation, which for the first time in the consciousness of

another, is aware emotionally that it has thoroughly brought home to

itself its own self-knowledge. In this respect we may contrast love

and honour. Conversely, however, we are entitled to regard love as the

_realization_ of that which was already inherent in honour, in so far

as honour claims recognition[247] that it should be received in another

as the infinite significance of personality. This recognition is only

true and complete when it is not merely my personality in the abstract,

or in a concrete and consequently restricted case, is respected by

another, but when I, in the' entire significance of my personal

resources, with everything this either emphasizes or includes, as this

particular person in all my past, present, and future relations, both

penetrate the conscious life of another, and, in fact, constitute the

object of his real volition and knowledge, his effort and his property.

In this respect it is this same inward infinitude of the individual

which makes love of such importance to romantic art, an importance

which is materially enhanced by the exalted character of the wealth

which the notion of love itself carries.

More closely, then, love does not subsist, as may frequently happen

in the case of honour, upon the subject-matter of the mind and the

casuistry of reflection, but originates in the emotions, and for the

reason that here the distinctions of sex play an important part,

possesses at the same time for its basis natural conditions as already

related to spirit life. This basis is, however, only present in the

sense that the individual comes into relation with such conditions by

way of his soul-life, that essentially infinite aspect of himself.

This state of a man's losing his own consciousness in another, this

appearance of disinterestedness and unselfishness, by virtue of which

a man first really finds himself and comes to himself--this oblivion

of his own, so that the lover no longer exists, or is careful for

himself, but discovers the roots of that life in another, and yet

only comes into the full enjoyment of himself in that other is what

gives us the infinite relation of love; and we must look for beauty

mainly in so far as this feeling does not persist as mere impulse

and emotion, but through the imagination makes its world conform to

such a condition, exalts everything which otherwise belongs by virtue

of its interest, circumstances, and objects to real existence and

life, into an adornment of this feeling, bears away all else into the

charmed circle, and only attaches a value to it in this relation.

More particularly it is in female characters that love appears in

most beautiful guise because this sacrifice, this surrender, is with

them as the culmination of everything else. It is these qualities, in

fact, which concentrate and extend life in its spiritual breadth and

reality to the wealth of this emotion, which alone discover within

it a stay for existence, and if any misfortune sweeps across the

path, vanish like a light which is extinguished by the first rude

breath[248]. In this personal and intimate sense of feeling love is

not presented in classical art, and only appears as a feature of quite

secondary importance for the representation, or is only conspicuous

under its aspect of physical enjoyment. In Homer, either we find it is

not emphasized at all, or love appears in its most respected type as

wedded love in the sphere of the domestic state, exemplified in the

figure of Penelope, or as solicitude of wife and mother, exemplified

in the case of Andromache, or in other ethical relations of a similar

character. The tie, on the other hand, which unites Paris to Helen is

recognized as immoral, and the cause of the horror and fatal course of

the Trojan war. The love, too, of Achilles for Briseis has little depth

of sentiment or spiritual flavour, for Briseis is a slave entirely at

his disposition. In the odes of Sappho it is true that the language

of love receives the dramatic emphasis of lyrical enthusiasm; yet it

is rather the insinuating and devouring flame of the blood which is

here expressed than the profound emotion of the singer's heart and

soul. From another aspect we find in the short and charming odes of

Anacreon a wider and more jovial sense of enjoyment, which sports with

delight on the immediate sense of enjoyment as over something to be

simply accepted as it falls without troubling itself with infinite

heartaches, without this overmastering of the entire life or the pious

submission of a burdened, yearning, and yielding soul; in this type

the point of infinite importance whether it is precisely this or that

girl which you possess is as absolutely disregarded as the monkish

notion that you should shun maidenhood altogether. The lofty tragedy

of the ancients does not recognize the passion of love in its romantic

significance. Pre-eminently in the case of both Aeschylus and Sophocles

we find that it makes no pretension to contribute to the main interest

of the drama. For although Antigone is the accepted lover of Haemon,

and Haemon claims her before his father, nay, goes to the length of

committing suicide because he is unable to deliver her, yet it is the

external aspects of the case rather than the power of his own personal

passion, which, we may also note, is not that of a modern lover, which

he emphasizes before Creon. As a more essential type of pathos love

is treated by Euripides in the "Phaedra." But here, too, it rather

makes itself felt as a criminal aberration of the blood, as a passion

of the senses, initiated by Aphrodite, who is desirous of slaying

Hippolytus, because he refuses to sacrifice to her. In the same way we

have, no doubt, in the Medicean Aphrodite a plastic figure of love,

whose exquisite pose and lovely elaboration of bodily form is quite

consummate; but any profound expression of soul-life such as romantic

art demands is wholly absent. On the other hand, the immortality of

Petrarca, although he himself treated his sonnets in the light of

recreation, and it was rather through his Latin poems and other works

that he appealed to posterity, is due to this very love of the fancy

which, under an Italian sky, joined sisterly hands with religion in

the medium of a somewhat artificial outpouring of the heart. Dante's

exaltation, too, originated in his love for Beatrice, which was

transfigured in his soul to the white fervour of religious ecstasy,

while the courage and boldness of his genius created energetically

a religious outlook on the world, in which he dared, an attempt

impossible without such gifts, to constitute himself the judge of

mankind, and to apportion to individuals hell, purgatory, or paradise.

In contrast to an exaltation of this kind love is placed before us by

Boccaccio in those romances of his, in which he brings before our eyes

the morals and life of his country, partly in all its impetuosity of

passion, partly, too, in the spirit of frivolity without any ethical

aim whatever. In the songs of the German Minnesingers we find a type

of love, sensitive, tender, without much generosity of imagination,

sportive, melancholy, and monotonous. Among the Spaniards it is copious

in imaginative expression, chivalrous, somewhat casuistical in its

discovery and defence of rights and duties, so far as they relate to

private affairs of honour; and in this respect also possesses all the

richest splendour of enthusiasm. In contrast to this among Frenchmen

of more modern times love is more an affair of gallantry with a

distinct bias toward vanity, an artificial state of feeling converted

to the uses of poetry with a kind of sophistry of the senses often

marked with the finest wit, at one time expressing a kind of sensuous

enjoyment which is devoid of passion, at another a passion that brings

with it no enjoyment, a sublimated condition of feeling and sensibility

which feeds upon the maxims of reflection. But I must here break off

these general indications which our subject does not permit me now to

carry further.

(_b_) More closely looked at the secular interest may be treated

under two general divisions. We have on the one side secularity as

actually organized, such as family life, the tie of citizenship and

politics, law, justice, morality, and the rest; and in opposition to

this[249] independent and assured existence love springs up in noble

and impetuous spirits; this world-religion of hearts, which at one

time we find joining hands with religion in every respect, while at

another it supersedes it, forgets it, and by constituting itself the

single essential, or rather the unique and supreme condition of life,

is not only prepared to renounce all else, and to fly for refuge to a

desert with the beloved, but proceeds in this extremity of its passion,

which we can only exclude from the domain of beauty, to sacrifice all

the worth of humanity in a manner at once servile, degrading, and

despicable. An example of this we have in "Kätchen von Heilbronn." On

account of this cataclysm of life's essential interests the objects

of love cannot be realized without _collisions_ in the theatre of the

world. For despite of love the general conditions of life make their

demand and assert their claims and the despotism of love's passion is

unable to maintain itself against them with impunity.

(_α_) The first and most frequently exemplified type of collision we

may draw attention to is that between _honour_ and _love._ In other

words, honour possesses just as love possesses in its own right this

infinitude of claim, and may accept a content, which may confront love

as a positive obstacle in its path. The obligations of honour may

require the sacrifice of love. From a certain point of view it would

be, for example, dishonourable for a man of high rank to wed one of the

lower classes. The distinction between class and class is a necessary

fact of natural condition as ordinarily presented[250]. And so long

as our secular life has not been emancipated through the infinite

notion of true freedom, whatever may be the class or profession from

which that life in the particular individual and his free choice takes

its rise, to that extent it will always be Nature, that is, the birth

condition, which to a greater or less degree will, on the one hand,

determine the social position; and, on the other, these distinctions

of status, as they thus originate, and quite independently of general

grounds of honour, in so far as social position is made an affair of

honour, will maintain themselves as of absolute and infinite stability.

(_β_) Quite apart, however, from questions of honour we must add as

a further example of collision that the eternal and _substantive_

powers themselves, the interests of the State, love of country, family

obligations, and the rest, come into conflict with love and preclude

its realization. Particularly in modern representations, in which the

objective conditions of life have been already elaborated in all their

available stringency, this is a favourite type of collision. Love is in

such cases, as itself an important right of the personal soul, either

set forth in opposition to other rights and duties, or despite of its

own recognition of such it enters upon a conflict with them reliant

upon itself and with the power of its private passion. The "Maid of

Orleans"[251] is an example of a drama which rests upon a collision of

this kind.

(_γ_) And in the _third_ case we may find in a general way that

_external_ condition and its impediments oppose obstacles in the path

of love. Such are the ordinary course of events, the prose of ordinary

existence, misfortunes, passion, prejudice, follies, the selfishness

of others, occurrences of every conceivable complexity and kind. Much

will here present itself that is hateful, terrible, and mean, for

it is mainly the evil, ruthless, and savage aspects of other forms

of human passion which work contrary to the tender spiritual beauty

of love. More particularly in later times we frequently come across

external collisions of this sort in dramas, narratives, and romances,

works whose main interest centres in a sympathy for the sufferings,

expectations, and ruined prospects of unhappy lovers and affect or

satisfy us by means of their bad or happy endings, or merely provide

entertainment. This type of conflict, however, on the ground that it

merely depends upon accidental matters, is a subordinate one.

(_c_) No doubt love, from whatever of these points of view you choose

to regard it, possesses a lofty quality, in so far as it does not

merely remain an impulse of sex-attraction, but emphasizes the bounty

of a really rich, beautiful, and noble soul, and is a living, active,

courageous, and disinterested bond of union between one person and

another. But romantic love is also not without its _limitation._

That which disappears from its content is the essentially realized

_universality._[252] It is merely the _personal_ feeling of one

particular individual, which does not attest itself as fulfilled

with interest of eternal import and the actual content of organic

human life, as made up of family, political aims, one's own country,

obligations of profession, status, freedom, and religion, but merely

with the personal consideration which is intent upon receiving again

such private feeling as reflected back from some one else. Such

a content of what is itself still but a formal mode of spiritual

life does not correspond in full truth to the totality, which the

essentially complete personality[253] ought to be. In the family,

marriage, duty, and the State the personal feeling simply as such and

the unity which issues from it with some particular person and no other

is not the main point of interest. In the love of romance, however,

all centres in the fact that this man or woman loves that woman or man

and _no one else._ Yet it is precisely this fact that it is only this

or that person, which is solely based upon personal idiosyncracy, in

other words, the contingency of caprice. There is no lover who does

not think his beloved, no maiden who does not fancy her lover, as the

fairest and most supreme, to the exclusion of all others, although

they may appear very ordinary mortals in the eyes of other folk. But

in just this fact that all the world or, let us say, a large number,

act thus exclusively, and will not make an exception in favour of the

unique Aphrodite herself, but rather possess an Aphrodite of their

own, and very easily somewhat more than Aphrodite, we can only very

obviously conclude that there are many who pass for the same fairy

Princess, as no doubt every one knows well enough, that there are a

whole bevy of pretty or good and excellent girls in the world, all

of whom, or let us hope the majority, will secure their own lovers,

adorers, and husbands, to whom they doubtless appear as gifted in like

manner with all the beauty and virtue of Christendom. To bestow in

every case our preference on one, and only one, is obviously a wholly

private affair of the heart and of the separate individuality of each

person, and the incommensurable obstinacy in discovering as though by

a law of necessity one's life and supremest sense of such in just that

one individual is proof that it is a caprice no less infinite in its

significance than it is inevitable. We have without question in this

attitude the loftier freedom of the personal life and its absolute

power of choice recognized, the power to be, not merely as we find

in the "Phaedra" of Euripides, under the constraint of a pathos, a

divinity; but in regard to the absolutely individual volition, from

which such a liberty proceeds, such a choice appears at the same time

to be a mere idiosyncrasy, an inflexibility of that which is wholly

self-exclusive.

For this reason the collisions of love, more particularly when it is

set in hostile opposition to substantive interests, retain an aspect of

contingency and lack of authorization, because it is the personal life

as such which confronts in opposition with a demand not independently

justifiable that which for its own essential sake has a claim to

recognition. The personalities in the lofty tragedy of the ancients

such as Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, Oedipus, Antigone, and

Creon have, it is true, among other things a personal object; but the

substantive thing, the pathos, which as the content of their action is

the compelling force behind them, is of absolute authority, and for

this very reason, is also itself essentially of universal interest.

The destiny which affects them on account of their action does not

therefore move us on the ground that it is a fate of misfortune,

but because it is a misfortune which affects or redounds to their

honour. In other words the pathos, which will not rest until it is

satisfied, possesses an essentially necessary content. When the guilt

of Clytemnestra, in this concrete case of it, receives no punishment,

when the insult which Antigone receives as sister[254] is not removed,

in both cases we have a substantial wrong. These sufferings of love,

however, these shattered hopes, this being in love generally, these

infinite pains experienced by lovers, this measureless happiness and

bliss which such imagine, are no such essential interest but rather

something that merely affects themselves. All men, it is true, should

be sensitive to love and may claim satisfaction in this respect. But

when a man fails to secure that object in some particular place, in

precisely this or that association, under just these circumstances

and in respect to one unique maiden we can admit no absolute wrong.

There is nothing essentially inevitable in the fact that a man should

capriciously select any particular young woman, and that we should

interest ourselves consequently for that which is in the highest degree

accidental, a caprice of his own conscious life, which carries with it

no impersonal expansion or universal significance. We have here the

source of that tendency to cool which we cannot help feeling in the

representation of the passion of romantic love however that passion may

be emphasized.

3. FIDELITY

The third type of soul-life which is of importance to the romantic

consciousness on the field of its activity in the world is _fidelity._

By fidelity in the sense we are now using it we do not mean either

the permanent adherence to the avowal of love once given, nor yet the

stability of friendship in the beautiful image of the same such as we

have left us by the ancients in that of Achilles and Patroclus, or with

yet more intimacy, that of Orestes and Pylades. Youth is pre-eminently

both the soil and the occasion from which friendship of this

latter type originates. Every man has to construct his path of life

independently, to work out and sustain a given mode of realization. The

time of youth, when individuals still live in an undefined atmosphere

of external relations which they share, is the one in which they

associate closely, and are bound together so nearly in _one_ mode of

thought, volition, and activity, that everything that any one of them

undertakes becomes at the same time the undertaking of another. When

men attain maturity this is no longer the case. The circumstantial

life of the grown man pursues its independent course and will not

admit of so close an affiliation with that of another that we can

affirm of it that one cannot accomplish it without the other. Men make

acquaintances and then separate; their interests and business are at

one time disjoined, at another they coalesce; friendship, intimacy of

mutual opinions, of principles, and the general trend of their life may

remain; but this is not the friendship of youth, in which no individual

unit either makes a decision or carries it into effect without

inevitably making it a matter in which another is concerned. It is an

essential principle at the very root of our life that in general every

man must look after himself, must, in other words, prove by himself his

capacity to confront the reality which affects him.

(_a_) Fidelity in friendship and love, then, subsists solely between

equals. The fidelity which we have now to consider is relative to a

superior, one more highly placed, a _master._ A fidelity of this type

is to be found even among the ancients in that of servants to the

family, the house of their lord. The most beautiful example of such a

relation is supplied us by the swine-herd of Odysseus, who sweats by

night and through tempest in order that he may look after his swine;

who is full of anxiety on his master's account, to whom he finally

gives loyal assistance against the suitors. Shakespeare offers us a

picture of fidelity no less moving, though it is here shown entirely

on the side of the feelings, in his "King Lear."[255] Lear asks Kent,

"Dost thou know me, fellow?" And Kent replies: "No, sir; but you have

that in your countenance which I would fain call master." This borders

as close as possible on that which we would make clear as romantic

fidelity. Fidelity at this stage is not the loyalty of slaves and

churls, however true and pathetic such unquestionably may be, which is

none the less devoid of the free independence of individuality and its

unrestricted aims and actions, and is consequently of subordinate rank.

What we, in short, have before us is the liege-service of chivalry, in

which each vassal preserves intact his own free self-dependence as an

essential element in the attitude of subordination to one of higher

rank, whether lord, king, or emperor. This type of fidelity, however,

is a principle of supreme importance in chivalry for the reason that it

forms the fundamental bond of union in a common society and its social

co-ordination at least in the original form of its appearance.

(_b_) The object which thus receives a fuller content and is made

apparent in this new type of association between individuals is not,

however, by any means patriotism regarding that as an objective and

universal interest, but a bond merely with one person, the lord, and

for this reason conditioned by private honour, personal advantage

and opinion. In its fullest brilliancy we find fidelity of this kind

in a surrounding world that is unregulated and uncouth, beyond the

control of right and law. Within a lawless reality of this kind the

most powerful and commanding spirits stand out as fixed points of

attraction, as leaders and nobles, and the rest rally round them of

their own free will. Such a condition is later on elaborated into a

legalized co-ordination of fealty, in which every vassal has his own

claim to rights and privilege. The fundamental principle, however, upon

which the entire system reposes is in its primary origins free choice,

no less in relation to the dependent vassal than to the conditions

under which he remains faithful to his vassalage. For this reason the

fidelity of chivalry is quite prepared to maintain property, right, and

personal independence and honour, and is on this account not simply

recognized as an _obligation_ which may be enforced to the entire

disregard of the private inclinations of the vassal however they may

arise. Quite the contrary. Every subordinate unit only continues there

and helps to establish the general social order so long as the same

falls in with his own wishes, inclinations, and opinions.

(_c_) On this account fidelity and obedience to the feudal lord can

very readily clash with private feelings, an exasperated sense of

honour, sensitiveness to insult, love, and many other chance incidents

of the personal or external life. It is consequently of a highly

precarious character. A knight, for example, is loyal to his lord,

but a friend of his happens to quarrel with him. He has now to choose

between the two objects of his fidelity, and, chief of all, he has to

consider himself, the claims of his personal honour and advantage.

The most beautiful example of such a conflict we have in the "Cid."

He remains as true to himself as he is to his king. If the king acts

wisely he assists him with his arm's strength; if his feudal lord acts

wrongly or the Cid feels touched on the point of honour this powerful

support is withdrawn. The paladins of Charles the Great exhibit

much the same attitude. It is a tie of chieftainship and obedience

not unlike that which we have already observed between Zeus and the

other gods. The superior lord commands, blusters, and scolds, but the

independent and powerful individualities resist him precisely when and

as they please. We find the most consistent and charming picture of the

conditional and easy terms under which this bond is maintained in the

"Reinecke Fuchs." Just as the magnates in this kingdom are most really

true to their own aims and independence, we find that the German barons

and knights in the Middle Ages were not at home when called upon to

act for the sake of the general weal and their emperor; and it really

looks as though our chief praise of the Middle Ages must consist in

this that no man is in such a period justified in his own eyes or a man

of honour, except in so far as he runs after his own inclinations, in

other words, does precisely that which he is not suffered to do in a

State which is organized on a rational basis.

In all these three stages of honour, love, and fidelity, we shall find

the soil on which the self-subsistency of personality, the soul, is

supported, an independence which, however, constantly unfolds in a

wider and more affluent content, remaining in the same self-reconciled.

Here stretches before us in romantic art the fairest strip of country

which we can find anywhere outside the enclosure of religion in its

strict sense, Its objects are concerned with that which is simply

human, a relation with which we can at least from one aspect of it,

namely, that of personal freedom, absolutely sympathize, and we do

not find here, as we do now and again in the religious field, both

a material and modes of representation which clash with our modern

notions. But at the same time we must add that our present subject

matter may very frequently be brought into direct relation to religion

so that religious interests are interwoven with those of the world

of chivalry; as, for example, was the case in the adventures of the

knights of the round table in their quest of the Holy Grail. In this

interfusion we find not only much that is mystical and fantastical,

but also much that is allegorical added to the poetry of chivalry. And

conversely this secular sphere of the interests of love, honour, and

fidelity may also be totally unconnected with the deepening of their

content with religious aims and opinions, and only bring to view the

earliest movement of soul-life in the secular aspect of its spiritual

intensity. That which, however, drops away from the present levels is

the repletion of this inner life with the concrete content of human

conditions, characters, passions, and realized existence generally. In

contrast to this variety the essentially infinite soul still remains

abstract and formal, and has therefore in front of it the task, to

accept as part of its own this further material with what it held

before, and to exhibit the same in the forms congenial to artistic

composition.

[Footnote 241: He has not in this exclusive sense of religiosity

identified himself with the spirit of the Christian community. _Der

Anderen_ refers to _Gemeinschaft._ Such appears to me the sense.]

[Footnote 242: _Zur Wirklichkeit entfaltetes Leben._]

[Footnote 243: Put more simply we may say in popular terminology that

it is filled up or amplified by virtue of the sense of individual

personality. This Hegel himself further elucidates below. Falstaff

undoubtedly possessed a strong personality, but in his famous soliloquy

on honour he deliberately emptied himself of any sense of it by

refusing to view himself under the self-relation, that is self-respect.]

[Footnote 244: I fail to appreciate this distinction, except in a very

qualified form. Even in the Middle Ages when the feudal relation was in

full force, the relation between the master and the servant was surely

one of the institutions of the State, though no doubt the rights of the

dependent were not always very readily enforced. Even in the case of

slavery in the Southern States of America the relation between master

and slave carried with it quite definite ethical obligations--there was

in general at least quite a distinct social if not actually political

status.]

[Footnote 245: I suppose Hegel means by _ein Punkt_ a centre or point

of life. The expression is rather unusual.]

[Footnote 246: _Absoluten Geltung_, that is its absolute validity in

its ideal character.]

[Footnote 247: The punctuation in text is defective.]

[Footnote 248: So runs the text. It comes from such a writer with a

shock. Why such qualities should vanish (_schwinden_) in the presence

of unhappiness it is not easy to see. It would rather appear that such

was the condition to evoke them. What is meant is, I suppose, that the

failure of _reciprocity_, especially in the love of women, often brings

complete collapse. We may illustrate it in several of Meredith's novels

such as "Diana" and "Sandra Belloni."]

[Footnote 249: The two sides would appear to be the secularity of the

social organism and "free" love.]

[Footnote 250: This I think is the meaning. Until the full notion of

liberty is apprehended the divisions of class will have the appearance

of natural necessity.]

[Footnote 251: Schiller's drama of that name.]

[Footnote 252: _Die an und für sich seyende Allgemeinheit._ The

universal notion as explicitly made actual in life.]

[Footnote 253: _Ein in sich konkretes Individuum._ The whole of this

analysis appears to me a rather abstract and professorial consideration

of romantic attachment, separating love from its reality of association

and relation in actual life. In so far as it is true it is purely

abstract truth, and must be regarded as such. In actual life it is no

more true that even in the average case misfortune blights the blossom

than it is true that the love of the individual concentrates itself

solely on the mere attachment between two persons. It is bound up with

the idea of family and continuation of the race, and so indirectly with

the State.]

[Footnote 254: As sister of her violated brother Polyneices.]

[Footnote 255: Act I, sc. 4.]

CHAPTER III

THE FORMAL SELF-SUBSISTENCY OF INDIVIDUAL PARTICULARITIES

If we take a glance back on the territory we have passed through, we

see in the first instance that the object of our investigation was

the life of the soul[256] in its most absolute capacity, in other

words, consciousness in its mediation with God, the universal process

of the self-reconciling spirit. The abstraction of this point of view

consisted in this that the soul by an effort of abnegation withdrew

itself from all that was secular, purely natural and human--even

when the same had ethical features, and for this reason possessed a

claim upon us--into its own distinctive domain in order to satisfy

its yearning for the pure heaven of spirit. _Secondly_, we found

ourselves able, it is true, to bring into view the human consciousness

without this factor of abstract negation which was included in that

mediation, in other words, positively in its independence and as

related to others[257], but the content of this secular infinitude as

such was none the less only the personal self-subsistency of honour,

the intensiveness[258] of love and the vassalage of fidelity, a

content which, no doubt, may appear before us in many relations, in a

many-folded variety and many gradations of feeling and passion, subject

to the most extensive changes of external condition, yet for all that

only propounds just this personal independence and inwardness within

such examples. The _third_ aspect, then, which we have now left us to

examine is the mode and manner in which that further material of human

existence, both on the side of its inward and its external life, that

is to say, Nature and its apprehension and significance for soul-life,

is able to enter into the romantic type of art. We have here to deal

with the world of particular objects, determinate existence generally,

regarded in its unfettered independence, and which, in so far as it

does not appear transparent to religion and spiritual synthesis,

bringing it into unity with the Absolute, asserts itself on its own

foothold and declares its self-subsistence in its own kingdom.

In this third province of the romantic type of art consequently the

purely religious material and chivalry with those lofty views and aims

that we found it brings to birth from its spiritual womb[259], but

which were not directly concordant with anything visible in the reality

of the existing world, have vanished. The new object of satisfaction

is a thirst for this actual presence itself, a delight in the facts of

existence, a contentment of the soul with the dwelling that confronts

it, with the finitude of our humanity, and what is finite, particular,

and the true counterfeit of such generally. Man is intent to recreate

for his own world the world as he actually finds it, although such

may imply a sacrifice of the Beauty and ideality of the content and

manifestation will reflect it as it stands before him endowed with

life in his art, will have that present life before his eyes as the

work of his own mind. The religion of Christianity as we have already

seen has not sprung up from the soil of the imagination as was the

case with the divinities of the East and Greece, whether we consider

them relatively to form or content. It is the imagination which

fashions the vital significance out of its own resources in order to

promote the unity between the reality of soul life with the perfected

embodiment of the same. In classical art this complete coalescence is

actually attained. In the Christian religion, on the other hand, the

secular aspect in its exclusive character is from the first accepted

for just that which it really is as an essential factor of the Ideal;

and the soul of man finds satisfaction in the ordinary and contingent

presence of the external world without the necessary interposition of

beauty. But man is nevertheless in the first instance reconciled to

God only by implication, and as a possible result. All men are called

to the blessed condition, but few are chosen; and the soul for which

both the kingdom of heaven and that of this world still remain as a

"beyond" is constrained to renounce both that which is spiritual in the

external world and its own presence therein. The point of departure is

from a distance infinitely remote from that world; and to make this

reality, which in the first instance is simply surrendered, a positive

constituent of that which is man's own, in other words to bring about

this rediscovery of himself and his volition in his own present life,

from which all takes its rise, this it is which supplies us first with

a terminating point in the elaboration of romantic art, and is the

final outlook to which the spiritual penetration of man is carried and

on which it is concentrated.

In so far as the form of this new content is concerned we have already

observed that romantic art from its first initiation was infected

with the contradiction that the essentially infinite mode of the

self-conscious life is, in its independence, incapable of being united

with the external material, and is bound to remain in such separation.

This independent opposition of both aspects and the withdrawal of the

inwardness of spirit into its own domain is that which constitutes the

content of romance. These two aspects are continually separated anew

by self-rehabilitation[260], until at length they fall entirely apart,

and thereby demonstrate that we must search for some _other field_ than

_Art_ to secure their absolute union. And by this falling apart we find

that these aspects in their relation to art are _formal_; in other

words they fail to appear as a totality in that complete type of unity

which was secured to them by the Classic Ideal. Classical art is placed

in a region of stable figures, that is in the midst of a mythology

and its irresoluble types perfected by art. The resolution of the

classical form is consequently brought about--as we found in discussing

its transition to the romantic form--leaving out of our present

consideration the generally more restricted territory of the comic and

satyric modes--by an over-elaboration in the direction of all that

pleases the senses or an imitation which loses itself in the deadly

frost of a pedantic learning, till it at length entirely degenerates

into a negligent and inferior technique. The objects of art remain,

however, the same throughout the process, and merely play truant to

the earlier intelligent mode of production with a presentation that is

increasingly more spiritless and a purely traditional and mechanical

technique. The progress and conclusion of romantic art on the contrary

is the resolution of the material of art within its own boundaries[261]

altogether, a material which falls apart into its elements, an

increase of freedom in the several parts, along with which process and

in contrast to the previous case, the individual craftsmanship and

artistic mode of presentment is enhanced; and in proportion as the

substantive content tends to break up to that extent attains a fuller

perfection.

We may now attempt a more specific subdivision of this the final

chapter of this part of our subject in the following terms.

In the first place we have before us _the self-subsistency of

character_, which is, however, a particular one, that is, a definite

individual self-absorbed in its world, its specific qualities and aims.