CHAPTER III

THE BEAUTY OF ART, OR THE IDEAL

In our consideration of the beauty of art we will confine our attention

to three fundamental points of view:

_First_, the Ideal in its essential import.

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

_Thirdly_, the creative subjectivity of the artist.

A. THE IDEAL SIMPLY, OR AS SUCH

1. The most general conclusion which may be gathered from the

examination we have already made in a merely formal way of the Ideal

of art may be thus summarized. Truth, in its unravelment as external

reality, is only fully in possession of a true and determinate

existence, however much it may combine and retain in embracing unity

a manifold content, in so far as every portion of the content thus

unfolded permits this unity, which may be called either the animating

soul or the unified totality, freely to appear. To take the human form

once more under review as the most direct illustration of this, we have

already remarked that it is a totality of organic members each of which

is penetrated by the notion, differentiated thus in every particular

organ by some particular mode of activity and the specific motion

congenial to it. If we ask ourselves now in which particular organ the

soul appears as such in its entirety we shall at once point to the eye.

For in the eye the soul concentrates itself; it not merely uses the eye

as its instrument, but is itself therein manifest. We have, however,

already stated, when referring to the external covering of the human

body, that in contrast with the bodies of animals, the heart of life

pulses through and throughout it. And in much the same sense it can

be asserted of art that it has to convert every point of the external

appearance into the direct testimony of the human eye, which is the

source of soul-life, and reveals Spirit. Take the famous adjuration of

Plato to the stars in the lines:

When thou gazest forth at the stars, my star,

Would that I were the heavens and thence on thee

Could gaze forth out of a thousand eyes.

Conversely we may exclaim that art gives to her forms the dilation

of a thousand-eyed Argus, through which the inward life of Spirit at

every point breaks into view. And not merely is it the bodily form,

the expression of countenance, the attitude and demeanour which thus

avails; the same appearance is everywhere visible in actions and

events, speech and voice-modulation, in short, under every condition of

life through which it passes, and under which it is possible for soul

to make itself recognized in its freedom and ideal infinity.

(_a_) And, in close connection with this inquiry into the

interpenetration through all parts of the animating soul, we may justly

ask ourselves, what precisely we understand under this conception

of a soul which is throughout visible: or to restrict attention to

definite limits we may inquire what are the specific characteristics

of the soul whereof art reveals to us the truest manifestation. For in

ordinary parlance one refers to the animating principle[271] peculiar

to metals, stones, wild animals, to say nothing of that belonging

to every kind of human character and its expressions. To natural

objects, however, such as stones and plants, the expression "soul" in

the complete acceptation of the term above mentioned is not strictly

applicable. Such soul as purely natural objects possess is entirely

finite, transitory, and rather a specific nature than a soul. The

determinate individuality of such existences is consequently completely

exposed in their finite existence; and, inasmuch as all that is

present there is a positive limit of restriction, such appearance as

there may be of a further claim to independence and freedom is only

an appearance; ideal characteristics which may indeed be imported

into them from without by means of art, but are not in the nature of

the objects by themselves. In the same way the soul of sense-feeling,

through which Nature manifests first the Life-principle only betrays

a subjective individuality, which still remains shut within itself,

unable to assert its reality in the further sense of a return upon

itself in a consciousness which shall attach to it the form of

infinity. Its content is, therefore, of a restricted nature, and its

manifestation in part the unrest, power of motion, sexual impulse,

anxiety or fear of the dependent life; and, in part, it is the mere

expression of an _inwardness_ capable of overcoming its finitude. The

animating life of Spirit (mind) brings us first into contact with the

free infinity capable within its own external and determinate existence

of remaining constant to the inner principle of unity, and, in the

act of expression, still reflected back upon its ideal substance. To

Spirit consequently is it alone permitted to impress the hall-mark of

its infinity and free self-recurrence on its external expression, even

though by such expression it enters the realm of narrow boundaries.

At the same time we may observe that Spirit, too, is only free and

infinite in so far as it truly apprehends its universality, and

deliberately posits for itself and accepts those ends which are

adequate to its own notion. Consequently, in so far as it fails to

grasp its own freedom it can only exist in a restricted content,

a character that is stunted, a temperament at once crippled and

superficial. In combination with nullity of this kind the manifestation

of Spirit must perforce remain wholly formal. We shall only find here

the abstract crust of self-conscious Spirit, whereof the content

contradicts the infinity of its freedom. Only by virtue of a genuine

and essentially substantive content through which the restricted and

mutable particularity derives its essential self-subsistency--so

that definite structure and intrinsic worth, determined limit and

substantial content, are realized in one totality--is such existence

thereby able, through the very mode of expression which confines it,

to proclaim itself also in its universal substance of self-contained

soul-life. It is, in short, the province of art to comprehend and

enunciate determinate and rational existence in its _truth_, that is to

say, in the form adequate to its substance, the truly explicit content.

And, consequently, the truth of art cannot consist in a mere conformity

such as that to which we restrict the so-called imitation of Nature;

external form must express harmoniously an internal content which is in

itself harmonious throughout, and consequently can express itself as

such.

(_b_) Art then, by comparing what is otherwise stained and rent

through the contingent elements of external existence with the harmony

that is essential to its notional truth, rejects that in the world

of appearance which it is unable to combine in such a unity, and for

the first time through this _purification_ reveals the Ideal. It

is possible to regard such a result as the flattery of art, as we

sometimes hear it said, for example, that portrait-painters flatter.

But even the portrait-painter, a type of art in which the Ideal is

less prominent than in many others, should at least flatter in this

sense, that he is bound to treat with indifference all that is merely

the external detail of form, texture, and colour, the mere adjuncts,

that is to say, of physical life such as hairs, pores, scars, and other

external accidents, in his undivided effort both to apprehend and

deliver the subject selected in its universal character and permanent

spiritual individuality. It is one thing to imitate a physiognomy in

the general outlines of purely superficial repose apparent at any time;

it is quite another to detect and delineate the particular features

which reveal the fundamental soul-life or character of the sitter.

As already remarked, the Ideal is only truly found when the external

presentment is in itself a vehicle of the soul. It is one of our latest

fashions to attempt, by means of those so-called "living pictures," an

intentional and gratifying imitation of famous masterpieces. In these

we find a fair reproduction of general accessories, such as grouping

and draping; but, instead of the spiritual expression of the figures,

have only too often to put up with faces absolutely commonplace. Such

a defect mars the entire reproduction. The Madonnas of Raphael, on the

contrary, in every detail of their countenance--whether it be cheeks,

eyes, nose, or mouth--exhibit with harmonious consistency one supreme

type of sacred joy, the pious, modest love of a devoted mother. We may

affirm, if we will, that all women are capable of such emotion; but, at

any rate, not every formal shape of feminine countenance is capable of

expressing the depth of the same so consummately.

(_c_) This reference, then, of all points of external existence to

their spiritual significance, so that the external appearance unveils

in adequate measure the spirit thereof, is just what constitutes the

nature of the Ideal. It is, however, a "carrying back" into inwardness,

in which we do not find the universal thus carried back to its

extremest limit to the form of abstract _thought_, that is to say, but

is rather suffered to rest halfway at the point in which we find the

purely external and the purely inward meet together harmoniously. The

Ideal is consequently the reality selected out of the mass of chance

particulars, in so far as the inner core in this external totality thus

raised in opposition to universality is itself manifested as _living

individuality._[272] For the individual subjectivity, which not only

carries in itself a substantive content, but permits the same to appear

in its own external appearance, stands in this central position, that

in it all that is substantially the content is not suffered in its

universal aspect to appear as an abstraction of itself, but still

remains enclosed within the sphere of individuality, and consequently

appears associated with a determinate existence, which now for its

part, freed from mere finitude and transitory condition, is gathered

up in a free and harmonious expression of most intimate soul-life.

Schiller, in his poem "The Ideal and Life," contrasts the reality and

its pains and struggles with "the still shadowland of Beauty." Such

a land of shadow is the Ideal. The _spirits_ which rise up here have

lost in death immediate existence, are released from the hunger of

Nature, freed from the claims which fettered them in subjection to

external forces and all the changes and confusions which are linked

together with finite appearance. But however much the Ideal treads

under foot the mere object of sense and natural form, it draws at the

same time the very wealth of it to itself, for it is art that is able

to assign the very limits to all that the external appearance required

for its self-preservation within which the external thing may appear

as the manifestation of spiritual freedom. For this reason it is the

Ideal which alone among things envisaged to sense presents a free and

self-contained content reposing on its own resources, in complete

sensuous enjoyment and satisfaction with itself. The music of this

rapture may be heard through every embodiment of the Ideal. However far

the external form may be carried the soul of the Ideal is never wholly

absorbed in it. And in truth such manifestation is only beautiful in so

far as its beauty not merely permeates the whole, but is a subjective

unity, by virtue of which the subject-matter of the Ideal must appear

emergent from all the fracture of its former individual parts and their

respective ends and energies, raised in the Ideal itself to a higher

totality and self-subsistence.

(_α_) We may in this respect point to the blessed repose[273], this

self-contentment in its own self-secure consummation, as the crown of

the Ideal. The ideal form of art stands like some blissful god before

us. For the blessed gods are ultimately above and beyond the grim

earnest of actual necessity, anger, and interest in finite existence

and purely finite ends; and this positive withdrawal involved in the

negation of all isolated particularity give them the characteristics of

cheerfulness and repose. In this sense we may interpret that phrase of

Schiller: "Life is earnest, Art is _cheerful._" Pedants, no doubt, have

often enough cracked a joke over it, inasmuch as poetry in general,

and Schiller's in particular, is a serious matter; and in truth no

ideal art is without such a quality; but for all that in this very

earnestness the essential character of cheerfulness[274] remains. This

force of individuality, this triumph of self-concentrated freedom, is

that which we recognize in an exceptional degree in ancient works of

art and the blithesome repose of their figures. And this is not merely

the case when we face a satisfaction that involves no struggle, but

even in an example where the subject is rent by some breach in the

entire content of its existence. For when the heroes of tragedy are

represented as subject to Fate we find that the demeanour they present,

which may be summed up in the words, "It is so!" still remains a simple

withdrawal into personality[275]. The subject thus depicted remains

throughout true to himself. He surrenders that which is seized from

him, but the aims he pursued are not simply taken away; he suffers them

to lapse and consequently does not lose his initiative. The man who is

the bondman of Destiny may lose his life, but not his freedom. This

repose on the essential birthright of Spirit is that which is able to

preserve and reveal the blithe atmosphere of repose in grief itself.

(_β_) In romantic art, it is true, the breach or dissonance of the

subjective principle is carried further, inasmuch as in it the

exposed contradictions are emphasized and their division can be

preserved. Thus, to take an example, we find the art of painting, in

its representation of the Passion, not unfrequently dallies round

the expression of ribaldry visible in the hideous contortions and

grimaces of tormenting common soldiers; and, in its attachment to

such discordant emotions, especially when depicting what is criminal,

shameless, or evil, permitting the glad serenity of the Ideal to pass

away. Even when such disruption loses its force, we find frequently

that ugliness, or, at least, the absence of real beauty, is set up in

its place. In another school of the earlier Flemish art of painting

the downright directness and truth of the representation, no less than

the inextinguishable confidence of the faith to which it testifies,

tend to assert, in despite of itself, a reconciliation in the feelings

of all who behold it[276]. But such an unyielding result falls[277]

short of the entire cheerfulness and satisfaction appropriate to the

Ideal. However, it is possible also in romantic art, albeit here

the representation of suffering and grief penetrates the soul and

its emotions more deeply than is the case with antique art, that

the delineation may reveal to us a spiritual intimacy, a delight in

resignation, a blessedness in pain, a rapture in sorrow, nay, even

a voluptuous ecstasy in martyrdom[278]. Not only in painting but in

the profoundly religious music of Italian composers, we find this

ecstasy and illumination of grief abundantly expressed. We may, as a

summary definition in romantic art, call it "the smile through tears."

The tears have their origin in affliction, the smile in blithesome

serenity, and consequently this smile through weeping indicates, as it

were, the point of self-repose in the midst of pain and suffering. It

is hardly necessary to add that the smile indicated here is no mere

sentimental emotion, no mere vanity of the subject treated or dabbling

with beauty[279] over painful effects and insignificant traits of

subjective feeling; rather (on its artistic side) it must appear as the

firm delineation and freedom of beauty in defiance of all pain, in the

spirit of what was said of Ximenes in the romances of the Cid, "how

beautiful she was in tears." In contrast to this emotional abandonment

in men is either ugly and repellent, or actually ridiculous. Children,

for example, break into tears at the slightest provocation, and we can

only laugh at them. The tears, however, in the eyes of a man of earnest

and self-contained character, under stress of deep feeling, betray a

very different type of emotion. Laughter and tears can, however, very

readily fall apart as unrelated, and are, as such, falsely utilized as

a vehicle of art in such abstraction; the laughter chorus in Weber's

"Freischütz" may be cited as an example. Laughter, after all, is a kind

of explosion, which it is impossible to exercise without restraint and

preserve the Ideal. Another example of this laughter, which is nothing

but laughter, occurs in a duet of Weber's "Oberon," throughout which

we are in a continual state of anxiety for the prima donna's throat

and lungs. How very differently the inextinguishable laughter of the

gods affects us in Homer, a sound which breaks from the blessed repose

of divinity, and rather expresses gladsome serenity than abstract

and wanton abandonment. Just as little ought weeping, devoid of all

restraint, to be introduced into the ideal work of art, of such a kind

as that we may hear in all its comfortlessness in another part of the

"Freischütz." And speaking generally, in music singing must take to

itself the kind of joy and rapture which we catch from the lark in the

open sky. Shrieking, whether of pain or delight, is not music at all.

Even in the expression of suffering the sweet tones of the plaint must

penetrate and clarify the sorrows, so that it continually may seem to

us worth all the suffering to arrive at such sweetness of plaint in its

expression. And this is the sweetness of melody, the singing of every

kind of art.

(_γ_) Regarded in a certain relation to this fundamental axiom of art

we may find some justification for the principle of irony in its modern

sense; but it must not be overlooked that irony is frequently destitute

of all real seriousness, and is particularly prone to expatiate over

bad subject-matter; and, in another aspect of it, it is apt to run to

seed in the mere yearning of emotion rather than actively participate

in practical life, as is proved by the case of Novalis, one of the

finer temperaments who have made this point of view their own, and

for lack of definite interest, or through shrinking from the real

world, are driven up and down, and cajoled into this sort of spiritual

consumption. This is the kind of yearning which will not descend

to mere practical business and production, because it is afraid of

soiling itself with the contact of finite things, although it already

secretly feels the defects of such exclusion. No doubt we find in

irony that absolute principle of negativity, in which the subject of

consciousness becomes self-centred through the annihilation of definite

relations and particulars; but in this case the act of annihilation

of definite relations and particulars, as we have already pointed out

when discussing the principle, is not, as in comedy, essentially in

its right place, simply exposing its own want of substance, but is

directed quite as often against everything else excellent in itself

and of sterling worth. Whether we regard irony, then, as this art of

universal destruction, or as the yearning of which we have spoken in

contrast with the true Ideal, it betrays a secret lack of proportion

and restraint which is detrimental to the artist. Substantive form is

what the Ideal demands, which, owing to the fact that it is clothed in

the form and figure of external things, is unquestionably qualified

by particularity no less than limitation; but this limitation of its

form is at the same time included in such a way that everything merely

external in its appearance is annulled and abolished. Only through

this negation of mere externality is the determinate form of the Ideal

a real exposition of the substantive content which belongs to it in a

mode of appearance susceptible to sense-perception and the imagination.

2. The plastic presentment of form, which is as much a constituent

feature of the Ideal as it is of the essentially homogeneous character

of its content, and the way these two aspects are fused together,

render necessary an inquiry into the relation obtaining between the

ideal representation of art and Nature. For this external aspect and

its embodiment is closely associated with that which we generally

call Nature. In this connection we once more come upon that old and

ever-renewed and still unsettled dispute, whether the representation

of art should follow the objects of Nature as they appear strictly to

sense, or should rather ennoble and illumine them. The right of Nature,

the rule of beauty, the Ideal and the truth of Nature--with indefinite

conceptions such as these arguments for and against may be bandied

about for ever. A work of art, we are told, should unquestionably be

natural, but there is such a thing as a mean or ugly Nature, we must

not of course imitate _that_; on the other hand--and so our disputants

wrangle on and never come to a satisfactory conclusion.

In recent times the opposition between the Ideal and Nature has once

more been emphasized and received an exceptional significance through

the writings of Winckelmann. Winckelmann's enthusiasm, as already

pointed out[280], was first awakened by his study of the antique and

its ideal forms. This insight into the peculiar excellence of classic

art he thoroughly mastered and only ceased from his labours after

making all that he had learned through his study of such masterpieces

famous throughout Europe. From this recognition, however, originated a

kind of craze for ideal representation, which, despite all its belief

in the discovery of beauty, was really a relapse into flatness, absence

of vitality, and superficiality. It is this kind of emptiness more

particularly in the art of painting, which Herr von Rumohr had before

him in the polemical writings I have already noticed.

The theory of art has to solve this difficulty. As for its interest, on

the practical side of art, we shall do well to pass it wholly by. We

may formulate principles as we please for mediocrity and the talents

that express it, the result is always the same. Whether our theory

is a distorted one or unexceptionable all we shall get is something

commonplace or weak. At the same time Art and more particularly

painting has unquestionably received a stimulus other than that we have

deprecated from this very quest of so-called Ideals; and, through the

renewed interest thereby excited in old Italian and German painters,

has at least made an effort to secure a profounder and more vital

content in its work.

The world is quite as tired of hearing the praises of that equally

exclusive Ideal in the opposite camp, namely, that of undiluted realism

in art. Theatregoers are, to take an example close at hand, heartily

sick of the realistic type of domestic drama. The old story over and

over again--disputes between husband and wife, sons and daughters, the

source of our income, the inventory of our expenses, the servility of

ministers and the intrigues of their lackeys and secretaries, down to

the question of the last sixpence between the dame of the house and

her kitchen-maid, or up to the last gossip of the daughters over their

touching love-affairs in the parlour--such tales of woe most of us will

prefer to take where, we may at least get them without adulteration--at

home.

In this opposition between Ideal and Nature writers have been inclined

to regard one type of art to the exclusion of others, with an especial

predilection, however, for painting, whose subject-matter is the

particularity of sense-perception. We will test our problem by putting

the question to start with wholly in general terms, thus: "Is art to

be prose or poetry?" Now what is truly poetical in art is just that

which we have called the Ideal. If the question of difficulty in

question is a mere matter of terminology we are quite prepared to call

the Ideal something else. But, however called, the question remains

what it is which constitutes poetry or prose in art. And although the

adherence to what is in itself poetical in the determination of it by

certain crafts may lead those arts into confusion, and, indeed, has

already done so, it is contended that in so far as any subject has an

express affinity with poetry, such has been also the subject of genuine

pictorial treatment, genuine for the simple reason that such a content

is unquestionably of a true poetical nature.

Well, let us examine a concrete case. The present exhibition of art

(1818) contains several pictures, all of which are of one school, the

so-called Düsseldorf. Every one of these have borrowed subjects from

poetry, and indeed from the emotional side of poetry peculiarly adapted

to pictorial representation. The more often and carefully we examine

these pictures, the more complete will be our impression of their

excessive sweetness and insipidity[281].

In the foregoing contradiction there are present the following general

characteristics[282]:

(_a_) First, there is the formal ideality of the work of art, that is

to say, the element of poetry in its general signification, which is,

as the term implies, something composed and brought together by man,

which he has taken into his imagination[283] and then actively worked

into the artistic composition.

(_α_) The nature of the content of such a translation may however, be

a matter of indifference or, apart from the artistic representation we

thus obtain of common life, may only interest us indirectly for the

moment. In this way the Dutch school of painting, for example, has

recreated, as it were, by means of human workmanship, the evanescent

everyday appearances of natural objects in countless new artistic

effects. Velvet, armour, light, horses, work-folk, old cronies,

peasants puffing their smoke from old pipe stumps, the glitter of wine

in transparent tumblers, rustics in soiled jackets playing with cards

as ancient--such and a hundred other subjects like them which trouble

us little enough in everyday life, for the best of reasons, that

although we too may have our game at cards, our drink, and our gossip

we are really occupied with quite another class of interests--all this

medley of objects is brought before us in their pictures. Now the claim

of art in the representation of such things is precisely this external

show, or reappearance of them as a product of spiritual activity,

which has transmuted that which was purely external and sensuously

material into a new medium supplied by mind. For instead of wool or

silk that are tangible, instead of actual hair, glasses, flesh, and

metals, all we see now is colour; instead of the three dimensions which

are essential to external Nature, we have only superficies; and yet,

despite all our losses, we have a representation identical with that of

reality.

(_β_) In opposition to the immediate and prosaic reality of objects,

then, this _show_ of things which is effected by the mind is the

wonder of ideality, a jest, if anyone cares to put it so, and an

irony directed against purely external existence. Only contrast with

it the preparations Nature or man has to make in ordinary life, the

countless instruments of every kind they have to employ to effect the

same result. What opposition the material of such objects--take a

metal for example--may offer to any active effect upon it. The world

of ideas, on the contrary, out of which art creates its products, is

a malleable and simple element, which readily converts everything,

which either Nature or man in his purely natural existence is forced

to leave bluntly just as they are, to the uses which are appropriate

to it. In the same way the objects of ordinary apprehension and man

as we meet him in everyday life are of no incommensurable wealth, but

subject to limitations--precious stones, plants, animals, etc., by

themselves are of a certain positive and particular character. But

man in his creative capacity is an entire world of content, which

he has filched from Nature, and piled together in the comprehensive

treasure-house of his world of images, and which he is now free to give

forth again simply and without the restraint of external conditions and

the detailed processes of actual phenomena. In this idealization art

stands midway between the purely objective and restricted existence and

the entirely subjective world of idea. It gives indeed objects, but

they are supplied from the life of mind; it offers them for uses other

than those which belong to them; it concentrates their entire interest

in the abstract form of the ideal show which it therewith manifests to

aesthetic contemplation, and to that alone.

(_γ_) Art consequently, through the ideality above explained, _exalts_

objects otherwise unimportant, determining them, despite their ordinary

character, in a fixed relation to her own medium and essential aim,

and by so doing secures from us a sympathy in subject-matter which

otherwise would not have enlisted our serious attention. We find the

same transformation in the relation of art to Time. Its position is

here too frankly ideal. That which in Nature rapidly passes by in art

is secured with permanence; the flash of a smile, the sudden curve of

roguish merriment on the lips, a glance, a gleam of sunshine, together

with all those evanescent traits of human life, events and accidents

which come and are gone, and are as quickly lost to memory. There is

nothing which she cannot wrest from momentary existence, and in this

respect even becomes the vanquisher of Nature herself.

In this formal ideality of art, however, it is not the content itself

which makes the pre-eminent claim upon us, but the satisfaction we

derive from the act of artistic reproduction. The representation must

certainly strike us as natural, but it is not the reality of Nature

that we require; it is rather that of the process of reproduction, this

very deposition, in fact, of material conditions which is the poetical

and ideal element of the work in the formal sense above indicated[284].

We delight in a manifestation, which appears to us a product of Nature,

and which is nevertheless a product of mind without the means at

Nature's disposition. The objects charm us not so much by virtue of

their approach to Nature, but rather because the _artist_ has been able

to effect that approach.

(_b_) A further and still profounder reason for our interest in

artistic products consists in this, that the content is not brought

before us in those forms in which it is found in immediate existence,

but, being itself minted by the mind, is capable of considerable

extension and modification within such forms. All that exists in

Nature is particular, and, indeed, limited in every direction by

such particularity. The creative faculty[285], however, contains an

intrinsic determination of universal import. And all that it produces

possesses forthwith a character of universality distinct from the

particularity of Nature. The creative faculty thereby secures this

advantage; that being of a wider range it is more qualified to grasp

ideal significance, and to insist on that explicitly in all that it

shows us.

It is quite true that a work of art is not entirely the imaginative

concept in its universal aspect, but rather the determinate form of

its envisagement. It is for all that bound, emanating as it does from

the creative medium and operations of mind, and despite the living

resemblance to real things we may find upon it, to permeate the whole

with this universal quality. And in this we have that higher ideality

of the poetical product as contrasted with the purely formal ideality

of the art of production. From this point of view it is the task of

a work of art to grasp the object in its universal relations, and in

the envisagement it presents to let fall everything which stands in a

wholly external or indifferent relation to the content. An artist for

this reason will refuse to accept all forms and means of expression

offered him by the external world, on the mere ground that he finds

them there. His main effort will be, if at least his aim be a real

poetical creation, to secure that which will appropriately work in

with his own imaginative conception; and, if he looks to Nature for

assistance in supplying him with details, or, generally, as material

to translate into his work, he will utilize such, not because he finds

them so in Nature, but because they fall in their _right_ place as a

part of his composition and are rightly made for him. This "right" of

the artist is a higher one than the mere right of immediate _fact._

In his representation of the human form, for instance, an artist will

not attempt such imitation as we find attempted by those restorers of

ancient pictures, who reproduce old cracks, which through the swelling

of either paint or varnish have involved all the older parts of the

picture in a kind of arabesque, even on the portions restored. The

portrait-painter will rather permit the tracery of the flesh, and _a

fortiori_ such incidents as freckles, pustules, warts, and so forth,

to disappear entirely. In this respect the painter Denner, so famous

for his close realization of Nature, is by no means an ideal master.

For the same reason indications of muscles and veins may be given,

but their distinction and relief should be far slighter than that we

observe in Nature. In all such impressions little or nothing of spirit

is manifested, and the expression of spirit is what is essential in

the human form[286]. I cannot think it therefore wholly a disadvantage

that we moderns have less to do with the nude in sculpture than

the ancients. On the other hand the general style of our dress in

comparison with the ideal drapery of classical times is less artistic

and more commonplace. The object in both cases is to cover the form.

The drapery, however, we find in the antique is, taken by itself, a

more or less formal smooth surface only so far determinate in its

adjustment to the frame by its attachment to the shoulder. In other

respects the garment remains entirely formal[287], hanging down simply

and freely by virtue of its own immanent weight, or only determined

through the position of the body and the pose and motion of the limbs.

In the determination thus implied we find the external shape entirely

reflecting the mutable expression of the spirit which animates the

body. The particular form of the garment, the folds of it, the motion

of it either up or down is clothed in the shape dictated direct from

the inward impulse, and as each may momentarily appear appropriate to

the particular pose or movement--and it is this form of determination

which constitutes the ideality of such drapery. In the clothing we

have adopted nowadays, on the contrary, the entire material is, from

the first, cut out and worked up stiffly into the forms of particular

limbs, so that anything approaching spontaneity in its rise and

fall is impossible. Even the character of the folds is determined by

previous models, and generally both cut and fall are worked out wholly

by the technical rules and craftsmanship of the tailor. It is true,

of course, that the configuration of the limbs determines generally

the form of such clothing; but in this arrangement of the bodily form

we merely have either a perverse imitation, or an enveloping of human

limbs according to the convention of fashion and the accidental taste

of the times. The cut of our cloth once made is irrevocably made,

and neither the position of the body nor the motion of the limbs can

appreciably affect it. We may move our arms and legs about as much

as we please, the sleeves of our jackets and our trousers remain

unalterable. Folds or creases may perhaps appear in them, but even

then only on the lines of the original cutting out, as we see them,

for example, on the statue of Scharnhorst. Our modern way of clothing

is consequently, as an external cover, not sufficiently differentiated

from the inner life to appear on its reverse side as the formal

expression of that life; instead of this we have a false imitation of

the human form stereotyped in the preordained and unalterable cut of

our tailor.

A criticism similar to that we have directed to the representation by

art of the human form and its exterior clothing might be applied to a

whole multitude of things which make up the external show of life, or

minister to its wants, such as eating, drinking, and sleeping--things

necessary enough in themselves and useful to all men, which, however

much in their manifold variety, as constituent features of the physical

life of mankind, they may blend with those activities more directly

related to its spirit, do not themselves form part of such activities,

or stand in essential relation either to their determinations or

their interests, and thereby contribute to what is the truly ideal or

universal element in the content of human life. Physical aspects of

life such as these may no doubt receive poetical treatment in art;

and it is generally admitted that the descriptions of a poet such

as Homer in this direction adhere very closely to Nature. Yet we

find that even Homer, despite all his _ἐνέργεια_, all the vividness

of his presentment, is forced to limit his descriptions to general

observations; no one expects to find in him an entirely accurate

picture of the facts in all their detail as they actually would occur

in life. He may give us, no doubt, in his delineation of the bodily

presence of Achilles, the lofty brow, the prominent nose, the long

and stalwart legs, but he is not likely to include in the picture

every detail of the veritable existence of limbs point for point, and

the relation in which they stand to one another in colour, size, and

so forth, in other words to offer us Nature's reality instead of an

artist's portrait. And the reason is obvious inasmuch as in the art of

poetry the type of expression is always the universal concept of the

imagination as distinguished from the bare particularity of Nature.

Instead of the fact the poet always gives us the denominant, the word,

in which the particular thing is universalized; for the word is a

product of mental conception, and as such already carries in itself

the nature of a universal. One is entitled to say, of course, that

it is _natural_ in the formation of concepts and speech to employ a

nomenclature, the word, as such an infinite[288] abridgment of the

existence we find in Nature; but if we do so the Nature to which we

refer it would not merely be opposed to the natural existence with

which we compare it, but would be just that which cancels it. We are

therefore confronted with the question in what sense we use the word

Nature when we contrast it with the characteristic of poetry. The mere

undefined use of the word Nature by itself tells us nothing at all.

What poetry should always give us is the energetic, the essential,

the truly characteristic; and this fundamental expressiveness is

precisely the Ideal and not the merely immediate, to enumerate all the

details of which in the narration of an event or the portrayal of a

scene will render either of these simply dull, spiritless, tedious,

and intolerable. In the manifestation of this universality, however,

one type of art will reveal more clearly its ideal characteristics;

another will rather emphasize, by a restricted use of material form,

the infinite detail of external reality. Sculpture, for example, is

in its presentments more abstract than painting; in poetry the epic

type, in its realization of the external appearance of life itself,

will not be so complete as a dramatic poem should be. On the other

hand it will surpass the latter in its portrayal of the fulness of

its imaginative vision, the epic poet being most indebted to concrete

pictures his imagination borrows from past history. In contrast with

him the dramatist is mainly restricted to the motives of an action, the

attitude of the will to it, the psychological problem in short.

(_c_) It is, then, _Mind_ (Spirit), which gives external realization in

a particular form to the inward world of content which is of essential

interest to it; and it is in close relation to this fact that we should

consider the question, what precise significance we are to infer from

the opposition above discussed between the Ideal and _naturalness._

And first we must observe that from such a point of view the word

_natural_ is not employed in the most genuine signification of the

term. As a description of the external form imposed upon facts by mind

it obviously is neither the immediate naturality we find in animal

life, nor that presented in Nature's landscape. Rather its very form

of determination, in so far, that is to say, as we see the mind here

giving to itself an embodiment, will show us that it is an expression

of mind, an expression moreover suffused with ideality. For this

taking up into the mind, this plastic recreation of form on the part

of mind is nothing less than idealization. It is sometimes remarked

of the countenances of dead people that they take on themselves once

more the lineaments of childhood. The obdurate expression of passion,

custom and strife, the characteristic seal of their life of strenuous

action, passes off, and the indeterminacy of the features of a child's

face reappears. In life, however, all traits whatsoever, the entire

presentment in fact, receive their characteristic expression from the

world of soul; and in much the same way the different races and classes

of mankind reflect the distinguishing features of their spiritual

tendencies and activities in their external manifestation. In all such

organizations that which is outward is visibly permeated with mind;

and, by virtue of its energy, already confronts _mere_ Nature as an

idealized creation. Only a clear perception of this truth will enable

us to sift this significant question of an opposition between Nature

and the Ideal to the bottom. If we do not possess this we shall find

ourselves maintaining that the forms in which Spirit is visualized as

a part of Nature have already lost in that real appearance, which is

independent of art's imitative action, such an intrinsic completeness,

beauty, and excellence, that it is quite impossible that there can be

another and more exalted type of beauty, which presents itself as the

Ideal in contradistinction to this immediate reality, and this all

the more for the reason that art is unable entirely to attain even to

that which is present in Nature herself. Or, if our thoughts lean to

the opposite extreme, we shall look to art to supply us independently,

in opposition to Nature's reality, with more ideal modes of

representation. The polemics of Herr von Rumohr, which we have already

criticized, are well worthy of attention in this connection. This

writer, at any rate, whatever others may say who have the word Ideal so

frequently on their lips in depreciation of the vulgarity of Nature,

refers to the Idea and the Ideal in phrases of respect and contempt

with absolute impartiality.

The real truth of the matter is rather this. There is in the spiritual

world, both outwardly and inwardly regarded, a Nature of vulgar type,

which testifies to its meanness outwardly for the simple reason that

its inward content is mean, that is to say, when all that it can

realize externally in its activities are the aims of envy, jealousy,

and avarice in every detail of sensuous life. Such a poverty-stricken

Nature can no doubt form part of the subject-matter of art, and has

been treated as such. When this is the case, however, as we have

already explained, it is not the subject-matter, but wholly the

artistic handling of it, which creates an interest of any permanent

character; and the artist will look in vain for sympathy in his

subject, or rather the mere material of his subject from the true

connoisseur. A particularly pertinent illustration of this type of

art is the so-called _genre_ painting, which has not shown itself

above accepting subjects of this character, the artistic treatment

of which has been carried by the Dutch school to the extreme limit

of perfection. It may, however, be as well to ask ourselves,

first, what the precise contribution of the Dutch has been to this

_genre_-painting, what, in short, is the nature of content their

dainty pictures express, pictures which at least have asserted an

extraordinary power of attraction and obviously cannot be shelved right

away beneath the common stigma of vulgarity. We shall not improbably

find, on closer examination, that the subject-matter of these pictures

is not so contemptible as it is often taken to be[289].

The Dutch have selected the subject-matter of their artistic production

out of their own substance, out of the actual presence of their daily

life. To have once for all realized that presence even in art is no

matter of reproach to them. To estimate the character of their artistic

interest we must view them in close connection with the actual panorama

of their own times. This is a problem of history. The Dutchman has

in great measure himself created the ground wherein he lives and

finds a home, and has been forced continuously to preserve and defend

that home against the invasion of the sea. The citizens of the towns

no less than the rural population have together, through courage,

endurance, and bravery, repulsed the power of Spain in the hands of

Philip II, son of Charles V, the sovereign of a world-wide empire,

and in fighting their battle for civic freedom, they were fighting

that of religious liberty. This staunch sense of citizenship, this

passionate love of enterprise in the narrow limits of their fatherland,

no less than abroad on the high seas, this careful and at the same

time clean and dainty mode of life, together with the geniality and

invincible self-respect which distinguishes them, all this is as much

the fruit of their own actions as it is the general content of their

artistic production. Such a content as this is no common material,

though obviously it is not of the kind we must suppose we can approach

with the supercilious superiority of critics for whom the exalted

taste of courts and fine society is everything. From a sterling

national self-consciousness of this sort Rembrandt painted his famous

"Night-Watch" now in Amsterdam, Van Dyck so many of his portraits,

Wouvermans so many of his battle-pieces; nor should even those

reflections of rustic drinking-bouts, jovialities, and other scenes of

merriment be wholly excluded from the category. And in illustration of

its excellence we would point, by way of contrast, to a work in this

year's exhibition, which, though not downright bad _genre_-painting,

is much inferior to the handling by old Dutch masters of similar

subject-matter, coming nowhere near to their freedom and joy of life.

In this picture a housewife is seen entering an alehouse to give her

husband a good scolding. Here we have just a scene of cantankerous and

waspish human-kind and nothing more. These Dutchmen painted their folk

very differently; whether we find them among their cups, at weddings

or dances, feasting or drinking, nay, even when the matter proceeds to

ribaldry and blows, liveliness and lustiness is the prevailing temper.

Young maids and women laugh with the rest, and a feeling of free and

abandoned merriment carries all before it. This intimate delight in all

enjoyment justifiably human, which will even absorb itself wholly in

animal life and crop up at times as mere satiety and grossness; this

freshly awakened sense of freedom and life, fully grasped and embodied

in composition and colour, is what constitutes the higher spiritual

import[290] of these Dutch pictures.

On much the same grounds the beggar boys of Murillo, in the central

gallery of the Munich collection, are excellent. Superficially

regarded, the subject here, too, is of a vulgar character. The mother

is scolding one of the youngsters, as he quickly munches a piece of

bread; two others hard by, ragged and poor, are eating melons and

grapes[291]. But in this very poverty of half-nakedness what gleams

forth from the entire composition as the soul of that beggar life is

its complete carelessness and spontaneity. No dancing dervish himself

could give it us more frankly in its impression of entire health and

jubilant vitality. This freedom from all external care, this inward

liberty reflecting itself in that which is visible, is precisely that

which the notion of the Ideal demands. There is in Paris a certain

portrait of a boy by Raphael; the head leans propped at leisure on

one arm, and gazes with such ecstasy of careless contentment into the

open landscape that we are loth to turn away from a picture expressive

of such health and exuberant animation. We receive a delight of very

much the same nature from these lads of Murillo. It is obvious enough

that neither their objects nor their interests aim high, but this is

no result of stupidity; there they chaffer on God's earth with, we may

almost say, the bliss and contentment of the Olympian gods themselves.

They, too, have their business; but though we hear little about it

they are a genuine sample of humanity, neither morose nor discontented

with their lot. Feeling this ground-root in them of all sterling

performance we can readily imagine that in favourable conditions youth

such as this might be capable of most things. A composition of this

kind is entirely on a different level from the one above mentioned of

the scolding housewife, or two others we might also contrast with it,

of a certain peasant mending his whip and a postillion sleeping on a

straw pallet[292]. Such paintings of _genre_ should unquestionably be

of small size; and, indeed, in their total impression on the sense,

they must be made to appear of comparative insignificance, that we may

not feel the character of their subject-matter and its presentment

has received undue prominence. It would be intolerable to have such

subjects painted life size as though the fulness of the reality were

sufficiently attractive to claim our attention.

Such are the principles which should regulate our artistic treatment

of and sympathy with that which it is usual to stigmatize as mean or

vulgar in ordinary life.

There is, no doubt, plenty of material for art to appropriate of

higher grade than the representation of animal spirits and downright

citizenship in all their essentially insignificant detail. Man has

clearly more serious interests and objects than these, interests which

have unfolded as his own spirit has widened and deepened, and in

harmony with which it is his truest interest to remain. An art will

take highest rank which sets before itself the task of giving adequate

representation to this more vital, or at least more profound, content.

And here at once we are confronted with the old question, what is

the source which will supply us with the forms most fitting to such

creations of mind. On the one side theorists maintain the opinion that,

inasmuch as the artist creates these lofty ideas, which he desires to

clothe in artistic form, he must, also supply their artistic forms,

create, for example, from his imagination the ideal figures of Greek

gods, Christ, his apostles, saints, and so on. In strenuous opposition

to this view Herr von Rumohr has entered the lists. This writer is

of opinion that art is on a false track in supposing that the artist

discovers the forms of his production in himself rather than in Nature,

and it is under this conviction that he has reviewed the masterpieces

both of Italian and Dutch painters. On this head he finds it a matter

of censure ("Italian Investigations," i, p. 105) "that the theory

of art, during the sixty years which have elapsed, should be at the

pains to prove that it is an object, or rather the main object, of

art to improve upon creation as it is particularised, and by doing so

to substitute forms which have no particular relation to anything,

which would ape Nature's creation by going several points beyond her,

and release mortal man from all responsibility for the fact that

Nature has not known how to make her appearance more beautiful." And

consistently with such a point of view he further advises the artist

"to have nothing to do with the gigantic task of attempting to ennoble

or elucidate the natural form, or attempt any such exalted function

of the human Spirit under what name soever it may be written down in

works upon art" (_ibid._ p. 63). He is, in short, wholly convinced

that, however exalted and spiritual[293] the subject to be treated may

be, completely adequate forms are to be found in Nature as immediately

perceived, and consequently maintains (p. 83), "that the exposition of

Art, even in the case of subject-matter as highly _spiritual_ as it is

possible to conceive, is never indebted to a symbolism capriciously

created by man[294], but depends wholly for its consistency upon what

is presented as significant by Nature in organic form." No doubt in

advancing this Herr von Rumohr has particularly under review the ideal

types of antique art as they are expounded by Winckelmann. It is for

all that the abiding service of Winckelmann to have pointed out and

set forth in harmonious relation these very types, although he may

doubtless have, committed errors of judgment with regard to particular

masterpieces while carrying through the same. As a possible example

of such an oversight Herr von Rumohr thinks he has made out (p. 115)

that the increase of length in the lower half of the body, which

Winckelmann has characterized as an ideal feature of the antique,

is really borrowed from Roman statuary. And naturally enough, as an

opponent of the Ideal, improves the occasion by insisting that the

artist should unreservedly take Nature into his confidence in the

study of form. Here, and here alone, he will find the presence of true

beauty. To quote this writer once more it is affirmed (p. 144), "that

the beauty of most importance depends on a symbolic of forms rooted in

Nature rather than human caprice, a beauty through which these forms

are nourished into their characteristic and symbolic relations, in

the vision of which we necessarily have brought back to our memory

definite images and conceptions, and are made more definitely conscious

of previously dormant feeling.[295]" I And so finally it appears that

in this writer's view (p. 105) "a mysterious trait of our spiritual

life, what many would perhaps call Idea, seems to bind together the

artist and the appearances of Nature, in which latter he is constantly

and continuously learning to recognize the true character of his own

artistic purpose[296], and to find himself in a position through them

to give expression to it."

There can be no question, of course, that ideal art has no business at

all with "a symbolism capriciously created;" and, if it really is the

case that these ideal types of the ancients have been composed only to

reduce the veritable forms of Nature to false and empty abstraction,

we may freely admit that Herr von Rumohr is justified in his most

trenchant opposition.

For our own part we would emphasize the points of fundamental

importance to be grasped in this antithesis between the ideal of art

and Nature as follows:

The forms which are borrowed from immediate Nature to determine an

ideal content must be assumed to be thus taken symbolically in the

usual sense of the term, namely, that they are not thus immediately

significant in themselves, but only as the external embodiment of that

which is inward and spiritual, the content, in fact, they express. It

is only Spirit, even in the reality which they possess outside the

limits of art, which constitutes their ideality in its contrast with

that they entirely owe to Nature simply as such, and which is unable

to reveal to us what is essentially mind. It is the object of art, on

its more noble plane, to give external shape to the inward content of

Spirit. This content we discover in the conscious life of men realized

in the world. As such it possesses--we include with it our conscious

human experience generally--an external semblance directly presented in

and through which it finds expression. So much may readily be conceded.

At the same time from a philosophical point of view it is simply futile

to inquire whether we ought to look to the direct facts of Nature alone

for objects and physiognomical traits of beauty and expression to serve

as entirely adequate materials for art's representation, shall we say,

of the majesty, repose, and power of a Jupiter or of a Juno, Venus,

Peter, Christ, Madonna, or any other divinity, or saint. Arguments may

be supported on either side, and the question can only remain finally

undecided, being wholly empirical. For the only sufficient way of

deciding the matter would be to contrast what is borrowed with the

realities it purports to represent, and this, in the assumed case of

the Greek gods, might be matter of some difficulty; and, to take the

present day, one man will see traits of beauty in their perfection

where another a thousand times more acute will see nothing. But over

and above such considerations we must observe that the mere beauty

of form will never give us that we have named the Ideal, inasmuch as

the individuality of the content is a constituent part of it, and

therein form is necessarily included. A human face, for example, may

be both regular and beautiful in its outlines and yet remain cold and

devoid of all expression. The ideal figures of the Greek gods are,

on the contrary, true individualizations; the universality of their

ideal conception does not exclude the characteristic determination

which belongs to each of them. And the vitality of the Ideal consists

just in this, that this determinate and fundamental spiritual

significance, which it is the function of art to exhibit, should

wholly transfuse by appropriate artistic treatment all the particular

aspects of the external embodiment, such as composition, pose, motion,

physiognomy, and configuration of limbs, so that nothing empty or

insignificant should be left, but the entire work should reflect that

ideal significance. All that we have learned from Greek sculpture in

recent times of a quality which, in fact, emanates from the school

of Pheidias, is characterized by nothing so much as this penetrative

vitality. The Ideal is preserved in all its severity without any lapse

in the direction of mere grace, softness, elegance, and exuberance,

yet retains the form in close relation to the ideal significance which

should be embodied throughout the whole. This supreme vitality is the

distinguishing mark of the great artist.

We may call a typical significance of this kind, in contrast to the

particularity of the external world, essentially abstract. This is

pre-eminently the case in sculpture and painting, arts which illuminate

but a momentary state, without proceeding to such a varied development

of exposition as we find, for example, in that where Homer is able to

depict the character of Achilles as mild and courteous no less than

severe and terrible, to say nothing of all his other characteristics.

No doubt it is possible to find such a significance expressed in

purely immediate reality. There are, for instance, few countenances

which cannot reflect the moods of piety, devotion, and cheerfulness;

but such faces also express countless other moods which either are

quite inappropriate to that ideal significance, or are only indirectly

related to it. For this reason it is by virtue of its particular

realization that a portrait acquaints us of the fact that it is a

portrait. In many old German and Flemish pictures we find the patron

of the picture included in the composition with his entire family of

sons and daughters. All are necessarily painted as though taken in

an act of devotion, and this spirit illuminates every countenance;

but at the same time we have quite as clearly set before us in the

men stalwart warriors, men of vigorous action, disciplined on the

strenuous field of life and commerce, and in the women dames of an

equally doughty life-experience. If we compare with such faces--and

we may restrict our comparison wholly to these very pictures, which

are famous for their close approach to Nature in their delineation of

physiognomy--those of the Virgin Mary, and the saints and apostles

who surround her, we shall find in these latter one preponderating

expression; and all the physical lineaments, whether we look at build

of bone, structure, or muscle, traits of that express motion or

repose, are concentrated upon this one artistic effect. That which is

felt to be appropriate to the one class and not to the other exactly

differentiates the distinction between the genuine Ideal and mere

portraiture.

Some may imagine it possible for the artist to compose the ideal

content of genuine types by a process of sifting and selection from

the facts of immediate Nature, or quite possibly from the various

physiognomies and compositions which collections of engravings from

the copper-plate or the wood may furnish. But a process such as this

of mere collection and sifting is not the end of the matter. An artist

must maintain the creative impulse alert throughout. He must himself,

in the strength of his own imagination, already impregnated with the

knowledge of appropriate form and made vital with profound experience

and emotion, give such an embodiment to the significance, which is the

inspiring motive of the work, as will make it appear throughout as

metal cast at one time and is one state of fusion.

B. THE DETERMINACY OF THE IDEAL

To comprehend the Ideal in its intrinsic significance, that is to say,

according to its fundamental notion, was a comparatively easy task. But

the beauty of art, in so far as it is the Idea, is not to be restricted

to the purely universal standpoint of its notional concept; even as

so comprehended it must necessarily include within it determination

and particularity, and is compelled to take definite embodiment as

external reality. The question consequently arises in what way is the

Ideal able still to assert itself in this process of objectification

in the medium of external things and their finitude, and despite all

that is antagonistic to ideality; and as a corollary to this we have to

inquire how finite and determinate existence is enabled to attach to

itself the ideality of the beauty of all art.

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

subject matter.

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

_Secondly_, the determination of it, in so far as it proceeds by virtue

of its particularity to a condition of _discordant parts_ within itself

and to their resolution, a condition we may generally, define as

_action_[297].

_Thirdly_, the determination of the Ideal from the point of view of it

as an _external object._

I. THE IDEAL DEFINITION AS SUCH

1. We have already observed that it is the function of art to make the

Divine the focus or centre of its entire exposition. It is, however,

only possible for thought in its pure medium, that is to say, apart

from all the sensuous material of the figurative imagination, to

comprehend the Divine in its essential significance of _unity_ and

_universality._ To attempt to do otherwise, by imagining a picture of

God more readily grasped by the perception of the senses, is, as we

know, forbidden both Jews and Mahommedans. This cuts away the ground of

the figurative arts, which absolutely require form as their medium in

all its concreteness of actual life; and we have only lyrical poetry

left us to celebrate in its exaltation the praise of His power and

glory.

2. Considered, however, from the reverse point of view, we must equally

assert that however much unity and universality are predicable of the

Divine, He is in His essential substance determined, and, so far as He

withdraws Himself from the pure quality, of such predicates in their

abstraction, is thereby an object for the figurative sense and external

perception. If the Divine is consequently apprehended and figuratively

embodied for us through the forms of the imagination, we are at once

confronted with a possible variety in such determination; and it is at

this point that the actual realm of ideal art finds its commencement.

For, in the _first_ place, the one Divine substance disunites and

breaks itself up into a multiplicity of self-subsistent gods, such as

we find presented by the polytheistic system of Grecian art; and even

in the religious consciousness of Christianity God is, in opposition to

His purely spiritual unity, immediately revealed on Earth and in the

world-process as man. And, _secondly_, the Divine, regarded generally

in its determinate appearance and reality, is both present and realized

in emotional feeling, will, and the education[298] of mankind. For this

reason and in this sphere men who are filled with the Spirit of God,

saints, martyrs, and, in short, all who share in the religious life,

are equally the appropriate subject of ideal art. With this principle

of the individuality of the Divine and its determinate existence

realized necessarily in the world-process, we are face to face

with--and this is the _third_ point to be considered--the particularity

of human existence. For the entire world of human emotion, with all

that stirs it most profoundly--and what a power is implied in that

open sea of feeling and passion, everything of deepest interest to the

human heart--this entire content is nothing less than its exposition

and expression. If it is true, then, that the Divine in its purest

essence of reason is only the object of the thinking consciousness,

it is equally true that Spirit, which takes to itself an actively

bodily presence, so far, that is to say, and only so far as we find it

reverberate in the heart of humanity, all this lies within the sphere

of art. Once admit this, and we must admit the content of particular

interests and actions, specific characters, and momentary situations,

in short, the entire process of development in the external order; and

it becomes of first importance to indicate under a general principle

in what the relation between the Ideal and this positive determination

consists.

3. In conformity with what we have already advanced it is clear

that here, too, the Ideal will be most purely manifested in the

representation--whether it be of gods, Christ, apostles, saints, or

any other type of devout persons--which brings most clearly before

us the qualities of beatified repose and satisfaction, a peace

undisturbed with that which is earthly, and subject to the storms of

life's manifolded complexities, struggles, and contradictions. We are

therefore not surprised to find that both the arts of sculpture and

painting have been peculiarly fitted to incorporate under ideal form

not merely the ancient gods, but Christ as saviour of the world, and

individual apostles and saints. That which is the most essential truth

in actual life is concentrated to a focus on itself in the determinate

embodiment of art, rather than continually forced from its serenity

through dependence upon finite conditions. This essential concentration

is not destitute of particularity, but the divergent separation, which

is a feature of the external and finite state, is purified to one

simple definition, so that it appears as though all traces of external

influence and the relation thus created were overcome. This deedless

and infinite self-repose, this "taking a rest," as we find it, for

example, in certain statues of Hercules, is just what constitutes the

significance of the Ideal. If the gods are represented in contact with

the process of Nature, they must still carry with them their immortal

and unapproachable majesty. Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, Mars, and their

like are, it is true, definite personalities, but they are at the same

time unyielding potentates and powers, which preserve within them

their self-subsistent liberty, even when they are actively related

to the world. And for this reason it is not merely that a specific

particularity must characterize the determinacy of the Ideal, but

spiritual freedom must be manifested thereby as totality, and in this

state of repose suggest the potency of unfettered freedom of action.

If we turn now from the gods to the less exalted plane of temporal

existence and human life, we shall find the Ideal active in its

representation of the substantial content of such humanity, and its

dominant repression of wholly subjective particularity. By this we mean

that all that is entirely isolate in feeling and action is wrested from

the element of contingency, and particularity is represented in its

concreteness, that is to say in its wider bond of relation with what

most truly and intimately belongs to its life. When, for instance,

we speak of the nobility, excellence, or perfection in particular

men, we assert in so many words that the substantial core of what is

spiritual, ethical, and divine has announced itself as prevailing in

the individual, and man has submerged his active life, his volitions,

his interests, and passions wholly in this substantive basis, that he

may thereby give full satisfaction to the most authentic necessities of

his soul.

At the same time, however much in the case of the Ideal the

determination of Spirit and its external presence appears to be

absorbed in the simple self-relation, the principle of _development_

is likewise directly associated with the particularity unfolded[299]

in determinate existence, and along with this in that relation to

environment which necessitates both the opposition and conflict

of clashing forces. This fact necessitates a closer examination

of the determination of the Ideal regarded in this very aspect of

differentiation and process, an aspect which we may in a general way

define as _action_.

II. THE ACTION

The gracious innocence of beatific enjoyment, the inactive repose, the

majesty of power in self-reliant tranquillity, as also the concentrated

compactness generally of that which is most substantial in a given

content--all these are essentially ideal modes of determination. That

which is inward, however, and spiritual is in an equal degree active

movement and development. One-sidedness and division are inseparable

from development. Spirit that is wholly itself and a totality will,

expanding into all particularity, step forth out of its repose,

in despite of all satisfaction therein, and involve itself in the

contradictions of the broken and confused medley of earthly existence,

and is by so doing unable in this divided world to withdraw itself from

the ill-fortune and ill-health that clings to finite existence.

Even the immortal gods of Polytheism do not dwell in eternal peace,

but take sides in mighty conflicts wherein contending passions and

interests are roused, being subject themselves to Destiny; nay,

more, even the God of Christians is, not delivered from a passage

of humiliation endured through suffering and shame of death, is not

spared the bitterness of soul, which perforce cried aloud: "My God, my

God, why hast thou forsaken me." And the mother of Christ experienced

an agony of the same poignant character, and human life in every

direction is a life of struggle, battle, and pain. For greatness and

force of character is evolved in the greatness and force of contending

elements, out of which Spirit concentrates itself again and again

upon its unity. The intensity and depth of subjectivity is only the

more emphasized, the more unbroken and unexampled the resistance

of circumstances to its unity grows, and the more irreconcilable

the contradictions appear under which it has to preserve its own

self-centred equilibrium. In this development and through this alone

the might of the Idea and the Ideal is preserved, for power consists

precisely in this self-preservation through a process of self-negation.

Inasmuch as it is the fact, then, that the particularity of the

Ideal passes into a relation with the external world through such

development, and by so doing is made partaker in a world, which, so

far from manifesting the ideally free association of the notion and

its external reality, presents an existence which is just that which

it ought not to be, in apprehending the true nature of this relation

we have to consider how far the determinations which affect the Ideal

either in themselves contain immediately the principle of Ideality, or

are to a more or less degree susceptible of it.

In this connection we would direct attention to three fundamental

points of view.

In the _first_ place we have the _actual condition_ of the _world

generally_, which is assumed as involved in individual action and

its specific character. _Secondly_, we have the _particularity_ of

condition, the determination of which introduces difference and tension

within the substantive unity, which is the motive-spring of the action,

in other words the _situation._

Thirdly, we have to consider the situation from the side of

subjectivity, and furthermore the reaction by virtue of which the

conflict and resolution of the element of difference is expressly

asserted, in other words, the _action_ in its strict sense.

1. THE GENERAL WORLD-CONDITION

The ideal subjectivity is as such essentially a personal relation,

a relation, that is to say, of self to every aspect of motion or

activity, in which the self has to assert or perfect its own

substance. And to effect this a world environment is necessary as the

universal ground of its realization. When in reference to this we speak

of _condition_ we understand by this the universally prevailing mode,

under which, within the sphere of spiritual reality, that which is the

_substantive_ and essentially coalescing fabric of the same is present.

In this sense we refer to a _condition_ of education, the sciences,

the religious sense, or even of finance, administration of justice,

family life, and similar examples. All these objects of reference are,

however, merely aspects of one and the same spiritual content, which

is thus in and through them rendered explicit and real. In further

considering the general condition of the world as the universal mode of

the reality of Spirit it will be necessary to pursue our examination

from the point of view of the _Will._ It is through the exercise of

volition that Spirit generally unites itself to-determinate existence;

and the substantial _nexi_ which are immediately present in reality

betray themselves in the specific modes in which the determinations of

Will, ethical and legal conceptions, and, indeed, all that belongs to

that which we are accustomed, in a general way, to define as justice,

actively asserts itself.

The question consequently arises how such a universal condition must be

characterized in order that it may appear adequate to the individuality

of the Ideal.

(_a_) Pursuant to the foregoing considerations we may, to begin with,

emphasize the following points:

(_α_) The Ideal is essential unity; not a purely formal and external

unity, but the immanent unity of the content in itself. This

substantive repose on its own resources we have already characterized

as the self-sufficiency, rest, and beatitude of the Ideal. We will, in

direct relation to the plane of discussion we have now reached, develop

this characteristic of _self-subsistency_[300], making it a primary

demand of our argument that what we have termed the general condition

of the world appear in such a self-subsistent form as will enable it to

accept the embodiment of the Ideal.

(_αα_) Now self-subsistency is an equivocal expression to start with.

In ordinary parlance that which is essentially substantial is called

simply self-subsistent by virtue of the element of causation being

implied within this substantiality; we are wont to use it in this sense

when describing the intrinsically divine and absolute. But as retained

in this universality of substance merely as such it is not declared

as itself subjective, and consequently meets with its irresolvable

contradiction in the particularity of concrete individuality. In this

bare antithesis all true self-subsistency disappears.

(_ββ_) On the other hand, it is not uncommon to find such subsistency

ascribed to purely formal individuality, consisting solely in

its self-reliance upon the fixed determinacy of its subjective

characteristics. This subjectivity, however, in so far as the actual

content of life drops away from it, so that the forces and substances

which lie without it acquire in themselves an independent stability,

and as such confront the subject and the inward life as a content

wholly unrelated, lapses through this, too, into unequivocable

contradiction with the actual substantiality of determinate existence,

and forfeits all claim to self-subsistency and freedom of content.

True self-subsistence consists alone in the unity and interpenetration

of both individuality and universality with each other. The universal

acquires through the individual a concrete existence; the subjectivity

of the particular thing discovers for the first time in the universal

the unassailable basis and the most genuine form of its realized

totality.

(_γγ_) Consequently in making this demand of the universal

world-condition we must ask for a form of self-subsistency in the same

sense, namely, that the substantially universal in such a condition

must contain within itself as the vehicle of its self-subsistence

the form of subjectivity. The most obvious presentment of this

identity is that of thought. For if thought is, in one aspect of it,

subjective, in another it possesses universality as the product of its

inherent activity, and encloses both universality and subjectivity

in unfettered unity. The universal of thought is, however, not that

of art, whose object is the beautiful. And, indeed, apart from this

distinction, particular individuality as confronted by thought in its

natural envisagement, or form, no less than in its active effects and

complete realization, stands in no necessary correspondence with the

universality of thought. There is, for example, a clear distinction

between the subject apprehended in its concrete content of the actual

world and that which is simply the thinking subject, or at least it is

open to such a distinction. The same kind of cleavage affects the form

of the universal itself. In other words the moment the universal begins

to assert itself in distinction from its otherwise related reality by

that act it has in _objective_ existence separated itself from all the

varied play of its phenomenal particularity, and, in opposition to

the same, has already established an independent position assured and

powerful.

In the Ideal, however, it is precisely the particular individuality

which ought to persist in inseparable co-ordination with the

substantive reality, and to the full extent that freedom and the

self-subsistency of the subjective principle may attach to the Ideal

the world-environment of conditions and relations should possess no

essential objectivity independent of the individual in the subjective

aspect above referred to or already presupposed. For the ideal

individual is a self-enclosed totality, which already includes the

objective principle, and it must not be permitted to have independent

motion and development apart from the individuality of the subject;

otherwise the subject falls back into a purely subordinate position

in contrast to a world whose independence is already assured.

Consequently the universal must indeed be actual in the individual as

that which is in a unique sense its own, but not so as the property

of the individual, as a _thinker_, but as that of his _character_ and

_temperament._ To put the same truth in another way, what is required

for this unity of the universal and individual in art as opposed to the

mediation and differentiation of thought, is the form of _immediacy_;

and the self-subsistency which we claim here is the form of immediate

self-subsistency. With that, however, the element of _contingency_ is

associated. That is to say, so long as the universal and effective[301]

constituents of spiritual life, such as the self-subsistency of

individuals exhibits, are only presented to us in the immediate guise

of subjective feeling, temperament, and disposition of character, and

debarred any other category of existence, such are thereby already

given over to the contingency of volition and its realization. All

we have left us, then, is what is peculiar to each individual viewed

as such and his sensuous experience. Such a possession of what is

nothing more than personal idiosyncracy is unable to assert for itself

any further potency or necessity; it appears simply as inclusion of

content, fixed achievement and at the same time arbitrary commitment

of the wholly self-dependent subject to the influence of feeling,

disposition, energy, general ability, cunning, and talents, instead

of carrying out its realization over and over again according to a

principle of universal import and acknowledged stability.

This type of contingency, then, is the characteristic quality of the

condition which we required for the ground upon which all the varied

wealth of the Ideal is to appear.

(_β_) In order to make more clear the actual character of the reality

which is most adapted to artistic treatment we will contrast it with

that aspect of existence which is not so adapted.

(_αα_) We find this pre-eminently where the ethical notion, that is,

justice and rational freedom, have already won for themselves and

maintain a fixed position in the social _order_ regulated by _law_,

so that, even in the external world, it appears as a positive and

necessary power, which is quite independent of the individuality and

subjectivity of specific temperament and characters. This is the

case in the life of the _State_, where that life is manifested in a

form adequate to the true notion of citizenship. For obviously it is

not every chance association of human beings, any more than every

patriarchal community, that will fulfil the requisites of State-life.

In the true State laws, customs, and rights, in so far as they

constitute the determinations of freedom applicable to all, are of

paramount force even in this _universal_ and abstract relation, and

are not conditioned in their applicability by the chance requirements

of any individual's idiosyncracy. As the consciousness of society has

issued for itself commands and laws in a mode of statement of general

application, in the same way these are externally valid as such

universal fiat, which proceeds in the path of order thereby indicated,

armed with powers of restraint and compulsion against any individual

who may attempt to assert his caprice in an injurious opposition to

such regulations.

(_ββ_) Such a condition at once assumes a dividing line between the

universal ordinances of the regulative understanding and the immediate

life, connoting by this latter term the unity in which all that is

substantive and essential in morals and the conduct of justice only

finds a form for its existence in the experience of _individuals_,

their ethical feeling and opinion, that is to say, and thereby alone

is exercised. In the civilized State right and justice, even religion

and science, or, at any rate, provident interest in religious and

scientific education, are subject to _public_ control, which directs

and co-ordinates the same.

(_γγ_) The position, then, that isolated individuals occupy in the

State is one which contracts them within a fixed and organized order,

and subordinates them thereto; and they stand in this relation for

the reason that the character and disposition of each is not the only

embodiment of ethical forces; but, if the State to which they belong is

a genuine example, they are on the contrary compelled to regulate all

the external detail of their actions, opinions, and feelings with a due

regard to what is legally permissible, and to bring the same into line

with it. This dependence upon the objective rationality of the State

in its power of self-assertion above all subjective caprice may either

be regarded as a mere subjection, inasmuch as laws and institutions

possess, as the paramount power, a constraining force, or we may see

in it merely the free recognition and acceptance of the reason that

underlies such a necessity of fact, an acknowledgment through which the

individual finds himself again in that objective order.

But even in the latter case isolated individuals continue to remain

as merely incidental facts, and apart from the organic reality of the

State possess no real substantiality in themselves. For substantiality,

in the sense we here use the term, is by no means only the _particular_

property of this or that individual, but a fully _explicit_

reality[302], minted, as it were, in all aspects of it, and down to the

merest detail in a mode universally applicable and _necessary._ All

that mere individuals can effect with _volition_ and _accomplishment_

even in actions right, moral, and legal in themselves in the interest

of and attendant upon the progress of the whole, remains and must

always remain, in contrast with that whole, insignificant and a mere

example. Their actions are always only an entirely partial realization

of a single case; and, moreover, the realization of the same has no

universal significance in the sense that the particular example of it

is thereby of objective validity as law, or, as such law, makes its

appearance. And for the same reason, to put the matter the other way,

it is wholly unimportant whether the validity of right and justice

is acknowledged by private individuals judging as individuals. The

validity is a vital fact of State life which holds whether it be

acknowledged or no. No doubt it is a matter of interest to the general

public that every one should fall in with the order established and

desire it; but the wishes of isolated individuals have no influence

upon that interest in the sense that it is only by virtue of the assent

of this or that person that right and a moral order is preserved. Such

require no such isolated example of assent; and a breach of either is

followed by punishment.

The subordinate position of private persons in the civilized State

is finally emphasized in the fact that, whatever share any one may

have in the general civic life, it is of a definite and in every

case restricted character. In the real State work must have some

relation to the general good[303], just as the active enterprise of

the bourgeoisie in the commercial business is subdivided in the most

varied way, so that the entire life of the State shall not appear as

the concrete achievement of any _single_ person, or in general can be

entrusted to the arbitrary wishes, enterprise, courage, resources,

and discretion of such, but on account of the fact that it comprises

activities and trades of countless complexity, and must be carried out

by associations of business men at least as varied. The punishment of

a criminal is no longer an affair of personal heroism or the virtue

of any _one_ individual, but is throughout the entire process, in the

investigation and discovery of the felonious act, in the pronouncement

of judicial sentence and its execution, contributed to by different

persons; nay, every important phase of such a process is in the same

way subject to some kind of division of labour. To see that the laws

are properly administered, then, is not within the special province of

any _one_ man, but results from an organized effort of great variety

and the rules which direct it. Add to this every man who assists in

such a process is bound to follow certain general principles which are

laid down for his guidance, and all that is carried out under their

direction is further subject to the criticism and control of yet higher

officials.

(_γ_) In all such civic relations, then, we find that in a truly

regulated State the public authority is not impressed with the

imprimatur of any single person, but it is the general Will which

prevails here in its universality, a condition under which the

particular life of the individual has the appearance of vanishing or,

at least, of becoming of a quite subsidiary importance. In a condition

of things such as this the self-subsistency we were seeking for is

out of the question. And for this reason we required for the free

embodiment of individuality conditions which are precisely the reverse

of this, in which the validity of the ethical principle derives its

support from individuals, and only from individuals, men who make for

themselves a great place in the arena of life through the activity

of exceptional volitional power and the inherent greatness and

effectiveness of their character. With such right is simply that which

they choose to accept as such; and if that which is essentially moral

is compromised by their action, there is no all-constraining public

might which brings them to judgment and exacts punishment, but only

the right of that inner voice of necessity, which accentuates itself

as vital in particular character and through external circumstance

and condition and only thus is actually existent. This is what

differentiates _punishment_ from _revenge._ The punishment exacted by

law asserts the validity of the generally applicable and carefully

defined right against the violation of that right, and makes use of

the public power according to a definite process as its instrument, in

other words, it employs a tribunal and a judge, an instrument to which

personality is attached as something accidental. Even revenge may in a

similar way find a justification; but such as it has is based entirely

on the _subjective conscience_ of those who deal with the criminal act,

and, in pursuance of their own _private_ convictions, avenge themselves

on the unrighteous act and its perpetrator. The revenge of Orestes

is, for example, justifiable; but he exacted it under the direction

of the law which his own virtue prescribed, not as the execution of a

judgment and a right. In the condition, then, that we claim as the most

suitable for artistic treatment, that which is moral and just must be

throughout personal, in the sense that its source is exclusively in the

individual life, and it only is actual in such dependence. Moreover,

to proceed with our contrasted conditions, in regulated States the

external environment of man is made secure, and properly is protected,

and he is only permitted to retain in absolute independence for himself

his private views and opinions. But in that condition where the

essential features of a State are not found the protection of life and

property depends on the isolated energy and courage of each individual

by himself, who is compelled to look after his own security and that of

everything which belongs to him. Such a condition we are accustomed to

identify with the _heroic age._ It is not, of course, our province here

either to discuss or decide which of these two contrasted conditions

of life is the worthier; suffice it to say that, so far as the Ideal

of art is concerned, it is imperatively necessary that this hard and

fixed line between the universal as an independent existence and

individuality should be removed, however much this distinction may be

necessary in other directions for the realization of human existence.

The reason of this is that Art and its Ideal is just that universal,

in so far as it may be presented to the perception of the senses, and

by such presentment is permitted to enter into the variety and living

forms of the world of objects.

(_αα_) What we were looking for, therefore, is supplied us by the

heroic age, for it is here that virtue, _ἀρετὴ_ in the full sense of

that Greek word, creates the root-basis of actions. In this connection

it would appear that we must distinguish between _ἀρετὴ_ and _virtus_

as understood by the Roman themselves. The Romans had already their

State, Fatherland, and legal institutions, and as contrasted with

the State, as the controlling object of all, they had surrendered

personality. To be simply a citizen of Rome, to have one object for

the imagination and for every other personal energy to centre itself

upon, namely, the fatherland and its sovereign majesty, therein lies

the earnestness and grit of Roman virtue. Heroes, on the contrary,

are individuals who undertake and accomplish a complete enterprise

in consistent reliance upon their personal resources and initiative,

and with whom it is consequently a purely arbitrary act of their own

when they execute anything in accordance with the moral principle.

This immediate unity, however, of what we may call the substantive

import and individuality of inclination, impulse, and will is the

characteristic of Greek virtue. According to this view personality is

a law to itself without any further subjection to a law, judgment,

and tribunal of independent subsistence. The Greek heroes make their

appearance in an epoch anterior to legal enactment, or they are

themselves the founders of States, so that right and social order,

law and ethical custom, emanate from them, and persist as their own

creation in an indefeasible relation to them. In this way Hercules was

regarded so highly by the ancients themselves, and represents an Ideal

of original and heroic virtue. His free and self-reliant virtue, with

which he championed the right and battled against the monstrosities

of men and Nature is not a prevailing characteristic of the age, but

belongs to him as an exclusive and unique possession. And we may add he

was not strictly a moral hero, as his reception of the fifty daughters

of Thespius in one night[304] clearly shows us; neither would it

appear from the tale about the Augaean stables is he pre-eminent for

gentility. He is rather the general type of self-reliant strength and

resource in its championship of right and justice, to exemplify which

he elected summarily and from a free choice to undergo countless toils

and labours. It is true that some of his deeds were carried out at the

instigation of Eurystheus, but this submission is, after all, rather

a formal association than a real one, no connection at least of legal

validity or inevitable necessity through which the strength of his

self-reliant personality was diverted from its independent course.

The Homeric heroes are of a similar type. No doubt they have their

clan chieftain; but the associating bond is no fixed relation already

determined by law, which enforces their submission; of their own free

will it is that they follow Agamemnon, who is no monarch in the modern

sense of the term. Consequently every hero volunteers his own advice,

the enraged Achilles acts independently for himself in his separation,

and, speaking generally, each and all come and go, act, or take

their leisure as they please. In much the same independent position,

that is to say, united in no fixed organization, to which they are

as individuals entirely subordinate, we find the heroes of Arabian

poetry portrayed, and even the Shah-Rameh of Ferdusi furnishes us

with similar examples. In latter-day Christendom the age of feudalism

and knighthood supplies a fertile field for the free growth of heroic

enterprise and the type of individuality which belongs to it. Of such

are the heroes of the round table, no less than the heroic circle of

which Charles the Great is the focus. Charles is, much like Agamemnon,

surrounded with independent chieftains of heroic mould, a union which

as such is powerless[305]. He is consequently always compelled to

take counsel with them, however much each of them may be influenced

by private passions; he may bluster like a very Olympian Jupiter,

and none the less find himself and his undertakings suddenly left in

the lurch while his confederates are off on some adventures of their

own. The Cid is perhaps the most complete example of the type. He,

too, is the ally of a confederacy, the dependent of a king, and is

bound to render duty as vassal; but in opposition to this obligation

he is pre-eminently influenced by the principle of honour, the purely

personal consideration of his own glory, nobility, and reputation[306].

And so in this case also the king can only determine a fixed line of

action and make war after consulting and obtaining the consent of his

vassals. If this is not given they do not fight, and, moreover, a

mere majority of votes is not sufficient to compel them. Every man is

independent of his neighbour, and exercises his will and steers his own

course as such. We find in the accounts given us of Saracen heroes an

equally brilliant picture of self-reliant and still more inflexible

personality. Even the Reinecke Fuchs fable is a fresh example of this

state of things. Here, it is true, the lion is master and king, but

the wolf and the bear sit in council. Even Reinecke and the rest do

just what they like; and when there is a general outcry, the sly fellow

either gets out of the mess with his story-telling, or manages to make

some particular interest of king and queen work to his own advantage,

and in his own cunning way talks over his sovereign somehow.

(_ββ_) Moreover, in much the same way that each individual example of

this heroic type of _personality_ persists in immediate unity with

all that he may will, act, and accomplish, a similar unity is further

maintained in all the consequences which flow from such initiative.

When we ourselves, on the contrary, act or estimate a particular

action, we assume that only full responsibility can attach where the

individual under consideration is in complete possession of the true

nature of his action and its attendant circumstances. If the content of

those surrounding conditions is otherwise than that which is present

to the agent's consciousness in such a case a man nowadays will not

take upon himself the burden of all that is implied in his action. He

will thrust on one side that part of it which he would not have done

had he known completely or not misconceived the circumstances, and he

only accepts that which was fully under his cognisance and carried out

with deliberate intention in conformity thereto. The heroic character

makes no such distinction. He adheres simply to all the consequences

and makes good his personal responsibility for the whole. Œdipus on

his way to consult the oracle meets a certain man, quarrels with him

and strikes him. In those days such an act was not a crime at all.

He only returned a blow after being vigorously attacked. But the

stranger was his father. Œdipus further marries a royal lady. His

wife is his mother. Without knowing it he commits an act of shame.

On learning the truth he acknowledges such enormities to their full

extent, inflicts a punishment on himself as murderer of his father and

a man of incest, and this although he was entirely ignorant of the

true nature of these acts, or had any intention of doing them. The

self-reliant stubbornness and entirety of the heroic character refuses

to parcel out responsibility and knows nothing of such distinctions

as personal intention and the objective act and its consequences. In

the evolution and ramification of an action as we moderns regard it

these opposed points of view constantly recur, and guilt is thrown into

the background as far as possible. No doubt our view of the matter

is more in accordance with _ethical principle_, in so far as the

condition of a personal knowledge of the particular circumstances, or

the consciousness of an object good in itself, in short, generally the

intent of an act, is what materially assists us in our judgment. But in

the heroic age, where we find the individual essentially indivisible

and the objective act proceeding from himself as entirely his own, each

person claims absolutely all that he may do, and refuses to surrender

one jot or tittle of responsibility therefor.

To an extent equally minute the heroic figure is separated from the

ethical whole, to which he belongs, and his self-consciousness is bound

up wholly in substantial unity with that whole. According to the views

in vogue now we draw a line of distinction as private individuals

between objects which are wholly personal and those which affect the

community. The individual acts in all that he does from his own private

personality as distinct from others, and views even his actions rather

as relative to this than as part of all that is farmed out by the

organic whole to which he belongs. We consequently make a distinction

between individuals and their families. Such is unknown in the heroic

age. The guilt of ancestors adheres to their descendants, and an

entire family will suffer for the original defaulter. Men inherit

the fatality of guilt and transgression. A condemnation such as this

appears to us unjust as an irrational subjection to a blind fate. With

us the achievements of ancestors reflect no more honour on children and

descendants than the punishments and crimes of such contaminate those

that follow after them, and least of all is their private character

thus affected; nay, modern opinion is already close to the view that

the confiscation of family property is a punishment which violates the

profounder conception of liberty. But in the ancient and more plastic

totality the individual is not so isolated, but rather a member

of his family and race. For this reason the character, action, and

fortunes of the family continue to be the private affair of each member

of it; and so far from denying the actions of his parents, each man

voluntarily accepts them as his own; they live in him, and he is just

that which his fathers were, suffered, or transgressed. This appears to

us a hardship, but that which we replace it with, this standing alone

on our own possessions[307], and the more subjective self-stability

thus acquired is also from another point of view only the abstract

self-sufficiency of each. The individuality of heroic times is none

the less of a more ideal type, because it does not declare itself as

satisfied with the mere form of freedom and infinity, but remains in

unalterable and immediate unity with all that is most substantial

in the relations of spirit which it of itself endows with living

actuality. In such an individuality the substantial is immediately

individual, and the individual thereby himself essentially substantive.

(_γγ_) From considerations such as these we conclude that the ideal

figures of art must be sought for in the age of mythos, that is to say,

speaking generally, in past times, where we shall find the soil most

congenial to their growth. If such material is taken from the age we

live in, whose most native form, as we actually find it, is tightly

shut off from the imagination, it matters not how we regard it, then

the modifications which the poet can hardly avoid making in it will not

readily escape the appearance of a purely artificial and intentional

composition. The Past entirely belongs to memory, and memory perfects

the infolding veil of character, events, and actions in the vesture

of universality, through which the particular external or contingent

detail is unable to penetrate. Many trifling circumstances and

mediating conditions, many varied and isolated phases of activity, are

inseparable from the actual existence of an action or a character: in

the mirror of memory all these insignificant details are obliterated.

In this liberation of his work from what is accidental in the

external fact the artist has a freer hand for his artistic powers of

composition, when dealing with that which is individual and particular

in it, if the actions, histories, and characters are borrowed from

ancient times. He has, it is true, also historical memories, out of

which he must mould a content conformable to the universal; but the

picture of the Past possesses, as already observed, an advantage,

taken simply as a picture of greater universality, while the manifold

texture of mediating condition and circumstance, interwoven as it

is in the entire framework of finite existence which surrounds it,

offers him material ample enough to prevent his hand obliterating the

individuality, which is essential to his work of art. The more closely

we consider it, the clearer will be our conclusion that a heroic age

has the advantage over later and more civilized times in that the

isolated character and personality generally in such an age does not as

yet find what is substantive either in the sphere of ethical custom, or

moral obligation opposed to itself in the necessary embodiment of legal

institution, and thereby presents immediately to the poet all that the

form of the Ideal requires. Shakespeare has, for example, selected

much material for his tragedies from chronicles and earlier romances,

framed upon a condition of life which has not as yet received the

impression of a fully articulated social order, but in which the energy

of individuals, as emphasized in personal resolve and achievement, is

still the prevailing characteristic. His genuine historical dramas

have, on the contrary, a vein of historical substance running through

them in the strictest sense, and for this reason lean farther away from

an ideal exposition, although here, too, both circumstances and actions

are made to fall in with, or are removed to suit, the unyielding

self-sufficiency and wilfulness of particular characters. No doubt this

characteristic remains for the most part in their case a purely formal

self-inclusion, whereas if we contrast it with the self-subsistency of

heroic characters we find that here the essential _content_ of all such

have proposed to accomplish is bound up therewith.

It is on account of this contrast that we should find a reason for

repeating the general thesis in connection with the Ideal, to the

effect that the _Idyllic_ is exceptionally adapted for its expression,

inasmuch as where that is presented the cleavage between what is

determined by legal necessity and the living person is wholly absent.

To this we must reply that, however simple and original idyllic

situations may be, however far removed they may be from the artificial

prose-existence of society, such simplicity, if we consider the nature

of its content, has, in fact, too insignificant an interest to satisfy

the most substantial and essential requirements of the Ideal. Material

of this sort fails entirely to include the most weighty motives of

heroic character such as Fatherland, moral and family problems, and

their development; it is a kind of treatment which is apt to select

as the very core of its subject such a fact as the loss of a single

sheep or the falling in love of a girl. In this way the Idyllic not

unfrequently becomes merely the resource and recreation of our hearts,

to which poets such as Gessner, for example, will add their dose of

sickly sweetness and sentimentalism. The idyllic aspect of the days

we live in have, further, this defect, that this _naïveté_, this

domesticated or rural atmosphere in the emotional aspect of love or the

enjoyment of a good cup of coffee in the open and things of that sort

are not likely to awake much interest, when we find in them nothing but

the country parson flavour--find them cut off, that is to say, from

all wider relations with the outside world, and not a trace of the

profounder web of purposes with which that world is interwoven. It is

precisely here that we have reason to admire the genius of Goethe, when

he concentrated his poetic talent on material of this kind in his poem

of "Hermann and Dorothea." It is true that he selects from the life of

the Present a particular theme of very limited extension, but at the

same time he unfolds before us as the background and atmosphere of the

picture in which his characters are portrayed the great interests of

the revolution and his own native country, and, in short, associates

with a subject-matter necessarily narrow in its range facts of

world-history of the widest and most potent significance.

Generally speaking, we shall find that the ills of life and its evil,

war, battles, and revenge, are not excluded from the subject-matter

of the Ideal, but are frequently the very source and substance of

the heroic age and its myths, whose form grows all the wilder and

sterner in proportion to the remoteness of such a period from a fully

developed society of law and moral order. In the chivalrous adventures

of knight-errantry we find the heroes of such tales themselves

often enough sharing the savage and dissolute characteristics of the

times, and in much the same way the martyrdom of the heroes of the

Church presupposes a condition of ferocious cruelty around them. At

bottom, however, the Christian ideal, which is based on the depth and

inwardness of man's spiritual nature, stands in a relation of entire

indifference to the external world.

We have demonstrated that the condition of particular centuries is more

applicable to the Ideal; in the same way Art selects pre-eminently

a particular class of society for the form under which the Ideal

shall appear, the order, that is to say, of _princes._ And the

selection is made not because art is necessarily aristocratic, or has

any predilection for gentility[308], but simply on account of the

perfection in which free will and its products may be exemplified

imaginatively through the highly placed class. We have in the chorus of

ancient tragedy the characteristics and universal background of general

maxims, modes of imaginative thought, and emotion, before which the

definite movements of the action proceed. In contrast to this appear

the more clearly defined individualities of the personages immediately

concerned in the action, men and women of authority, and belonging for

the most part to royal families. On the other hand, the main impression

forced upon us, when seeing representatives of a lower class carrying

on pursuits which are of a narrower range, is one of subjection; and,

indeed, in an artificial[309] state of society the freedom of action

of such a class is fettered in every direction, and is necessarily

involved with all its passions and interests in all the medley and

despotic forces of external circumstance. It is, in fact, held closely

behind the invincible power of the social order, which it is unable to

come out of, and is an alien from the authority of the dominant order,

even when that is asserted in accordance with just principle. In this

limitation of outlook through the hard conditions of life all real

independence is wrecked. For this reason both the circumstances and

characters which we find in such a sphere of life are more appropriate

to the treatment of comedy, everybody being permitted in comedy to rate

themselves as they please, and to lay claims to a self-sufficiency

in all that they will and think, which is none the less immediately

negatived by the spiritual no less than the external dependence of

their lives. As a rule, such a false and second-hand self-subsistency

must inevitably fall to pieces when confronted with the actual

conditions of life and the distorted view which is formed of them. The

force of circumstances is presented to the lower orders of society

on a totally different level from that in which it acts upon rulers

and princes. In Schiller's "Braut von Messina" Don Caesar is able to

exclaim, and justly: "there stands no higher judge than myself!" And

when he has to be punished he must himself give judgment and execute

it. He is, in fact, subject to no external necessity of right and

law, and even when punishment is the question is wholly dependent on

himself. The characters in the Shakespearean drama do not entirely

belong to the princely order and only partially are taken from mythical

sources, but they are placed in the era of civil wars, in which the

ties of social order and legislative enactment are either weakened

or shattered, and they secure from such a condition the exceptional

independence and self-sufficiency we are looking for.

(_b_) If we transfer our attention now from the characteristic

conditions of society we have hitherto mainly considered to the actual

state of the world around us and its carefully articulated scheme

of ethical, judicial, and political institutions, we shall not fail

to observe that the material we have here offered us for figures of

truly ideal type is of a very restricted character. The province

here in which an entirely open field is presented for the display of

independent purpose in its fullest individuality is limited both in

its range and the measure of opportunity. The qualities that make a

man thorough in his relations to his own family and his business, the

ideals, in short, of honest citizens and excellent wives, in so far

as will and activity are concentrated on the field in which it is

still possible for a man to exercise his free personality, to carry

out, in short, all that he has a mind to do, this is the prevailing

feature of our modern society. Such ideals inevitably lack the depth

of a fuller content, and the most significant feature of them is

that of the attitude of the individual mind to their realization;

for we find here the content is already presented by existing social

institutions, and consequently the essential interest we take in it

depends on the particular way in which that content is realized and

appears in the _personal life_, its moral and inward significance.

For this reason it is not possible, as in the case of former times,

to create ideals from the positions of judgeship and kingship. If a

man carries out his judicial functions nowadays in accordance with

duty and the requirements of his office, he merely is acting within

the bounds already marked out for him by legislative enactments in

the social order as the sphere of his responsibilities. All that may

characterize his tenure of office beyond this, as proceeding from

personal qualities, such as suavity of demeanour or acuteness of

judgment, is not the main point or the substantial content, but rather

an aspect of it which it is possible to dispense with as something

accidental. In the same way the monarchs of our own day are no longer,

as was the case with the heroes of mythical times, in themselves the

embodying and culminating unity of society itself, but rather a more

or less unsubstantial _centrum_ around which all legal and social

institutions, however moulded in the course of time, group themselves

in independent relations. All the most important functions of the

executive have nowadays been separated from the royal prerogative.

Kings do not lay down the law, control finance; the preservation

of social order is not one of their most characteristic functions.

Peace and war are determined through the particular circumstances of

international politics, which it is not within their power exclusively

either to direct or control; and, if it happens that any important

decision with regard to either depends in the last resort on their

judgment, such a decision is not generally so much in the nature of

its substance the result of any personal preference, as it is the

formal seal of monarchical authority on what is already determined on

public grounds, the mere imposition of that which is strictly official

rather than personal in its character. In the same way, a general or

field-marshal of our times has unquestionably great authority; objects

and interests of profound importance are under his control and his

circumspection; his courage, his determination, and his intelligence

are involved in the weightiest decisions; nevertheless, whatever may

be definitely traced to the essentially personal characteristics of

the man has little opportunity for display in such a result. For, in

the first place, the objects upon which his decisions turn are not of

his own selection, and arise out of circumstances which lie beyond

the sphere of his influence rather than are spontaneously fixed by

himself; secondly, the means adopted to carry out such objects are not

the sole result of his initiative. On the contrary, they are supplied

him from sources which are not immediately under his authority or

personal influence, but stand rather quite apart from the sphere of his

individual powers as a general.

To sum up, then, though it is true that under the present condition of

the civilized world a man may act independently for himself in many

directions, the fact remains that in whatever direction he may turn

he is still only a member of a fixed order of society and appears as

such limited in his range rather than the vital representative and

individual embodiment of society itself. He acts necessarily under such

a condition of restriction, and our interest in such a personality, no

less than in the content of his aims and activity, is entirely devoid

of completeness. In the end we are invariably driven to concentrate

our attention on the purely personal interest, how far, that is to

say, he attained success, what was the nature of the obstacles and

complications which, in either, through untoward chance or necessity,

confronted or distracted his progress. And if it is, moreover, true

that our modern personality is of infinite significance when we

estimate the character thus manifested as a spiritual product, in

its actions, sufferings, moral opinions, and conduct that is to say,

it is also true that the moral content which is realized in such an

individual is of a restricted character, rather than, as is the case

in the heroic times, the realization of universal right, custom, and

legality. The individual is no longer the exclusive vehicle and actual

embodiment of these powers as in the previous times.