(b) Together with this way of looking at the relation in contrast to that of symbolic art we may add that thecontentof both sides is altered, as they now stand in opposition. To put it thus we may say that, in the symbolic type of art,it is abstractions more or less, general thoughts, or at least definite phrases in the form of generalities peculiar to reflective thought, which, by means of the symbolic type of art, receive a sensuous embodiment replete with suggestion. In the form, however, which makes itself predominant in this transition to romantic art the content, it is true, is made up of a similar abstraction of general thoughts, opinions, and maxims of reflective reason, but in this case it is not these abstractions in themselves, but rather their presence in theindividual'smind and his self-subsistent identity which furnish the content for one side of the opposition. For the primary requirement of this mediating stage consists in this, that the spiritual which has attained the Ideal, shall stand forth in its entire independence. Already in classical art we found that spiritual individuality was of chief importance, albeit on the side of its realization it remained reconciled with a determinate existence as immediately presented. What is of importance now is to declare a mode of subjectivity which strives to acquire the mastery over the form that is no longer adequate to it, in a word, over external reality. In this way the world of Spirit becomes liberated as independent. It recovers itself from bondage to the sensuous material and manifests itself thereby through this return upon its own resources as the subject of a self-consciousness which only finds contentment in the secret wealth of its own domain. This subject, however, which repels externality from itself, is not in respect to its ideal aspect yet the truly concrete totality which encloses as content the Absolute under the mode of self-conscious spiritual life; rather it is, as still fettered by its opposition to reality, a purely abstract, finite, and unsatisfied form of subjectivity. In opposition to this we have confronting it an equally finite mode of reality, which on its part is also independent, but just for that very reason—forasmuch, that is, as the truth of Spirit has withdrawn from it into its own ideality and henceforward neither will nor can identity itself with it, appears as a reality void of all gods and an existence fallen into rottenness. In this manner and at this point art brings forward a Spirit that thinks, that is, to repeat our former analysis, the individual consciousness of our humanity, which, supporting itself on its own possession of the abstractknowledge and volition of goodness and virtue, confronts with hostility therewith the corruption of its present environment. That aspect of this opposition which remains unresolved, and in which the ideal and external modes of its antithesis persist in their disruption, constitutes the element of prose in the mutual relation of the two sides. A noble mind or a virtuous soul to whom the realization of self-conscious life is denied in a world of vice and folly, turns away from the existence which thus confronts him with passionate indignation, or more subtle wit and more frosty bitterness, and either is wroth with or scorns a world which gives the lie direct to his abstract notions of virtue and truth.
The type of art which accepts this sudden outburst of opposition between a subjectivity still finite in its mode and a degenerate world outside it as its matter is theSatire, the ordinary theories as to which have little to commend them, for the simple reason that they break down precisely where we look for their assistance. Satire has nothing to do with epic poetry, and it has just as little affinity with lyric. In the Satire it is not the life of the emotional nature which is expressed; rather the general conception of goodness and what is essentially needful, which it no doubt blends with the particular aspect of soul-life[205], appears as the virtuousness of this or that individual; but this does not suffer itself to be enjoyed in the open and unhampered beauty of imaginative conception or let that enjoyment issue freely. Rather with discontent it retains the existing discord between the writer's own state of mind and its abstract principles and the empirical reality which mocks them. To this extent satire is neither a genuine creation of the poet nor a real work of art. For these reasons the point of view of the satirical poem can never be reached satisfactorily through those other types of poetry just mentioned; it must be apprehended in a more general way as the example of this very transitional form we referred to from the classic Ideal.
(c) Inasmuch, then, as it is, relatively to its ideal content, the prosaic resolution of the Ideal, which asserts itself mainlyin satire, we do not find that Greece, which is pre-eminently the native land of Beauty, is the place where we must look for it. Satirical poems of the nature above described are the characteristic possession of Rome. The spirit of the Roman world is the sovereignty of the abstract Ideal, the law that is dead, the shipwreck of beauty and of the joyousness of civic life, the suppression of the family in the sense that it is the immediate and most natural form of morality, and generally the sacrifice of individuality, which surrenders itself wholly to the State, and in obedience to the abstract law is satisfied with the frost-like sense of political worth and critical satisfaction which it supplies. The principle of this civic virtue, the cold-blooded harshness of which subjects to its pleasure all alien peoples, while the formal rectitude of the personal life is elaborated to the furthest point of consistency on equally rigid lines, is wholly inconsonant with genuine art. We find, therefore, even in Rome no art that is at once conspicuous in its beauty, freedom, and greatness. It is from the Greeks that the Romans borrowed all that they mastered whether in sculpture or painting, epic, lyric, or dramatic poetry. It is a remarkable fact that all that we can point to as the native product of Latin art is comic farces, whereas the more cultivated types of comedy, not excluding those of Plautus and Terence, are borrowed from Greece, and are rather an affair of imitation than independent production. Even Ennius first exhausted the sources of Greek poetry before he made mythology prosaic. That type of art is alone native to the Latin genius, which was essentially itself prosaic, the didactic poem, for example, more particularly when it contains an ethical content, and endows its general reflections with the purely exterior adornment of metre, images, similes, and a rhetorically beautiful diction. But above all other forms thus excepted we place the satire. Here we find it is the mood of virtuous exasperation over the surrounding world which strives to air itself in what is, in some measure, hollow declamations. We can only call this essentially prosaic type of art poetical in so far as it brings before the vision the corrupted nature of real life in such a way that this corruption practically falls to pieces as the result of its own folly. Just as Horace, who as a lyric poet entirely identified himself by study with the artistic type andmanner of Greece, in his epistles and satires—where we have his originality more emphasized—traces for us a living picture of the morals of his age, by depicting follies which are self-destructive by virtue of the stupidity, that carries them into effect. Nevertheless, even this example only presents us with a kind of merriment that for all its keen and educated sense can barely be classed as poetry, the object in the main being to make ridicule out of that which is bad. Among others, on the contrary, we find that the abstract conception of rectitude and virtue is deliberately contrasted with vice; and in this case it is exasperation, anger, hate, and scorn, which in some measure expatiate in formal eloquence over virtue and wisdom, and in part give full rein to the indignation of a soul of more nobility against the dissolution and servility of the times, or hold up before the vices of the day the mirror of the old morality, the former liberty, the virtues of a state of the world which has passed away, without any genuine hope and belief in their recovery; or rather one which has nothing to oppose to the tottering gait, the dilemmas, the need and danger of an ignominious present, save a stoical equanimity and the unshakable conscience of a virtuous soul. Roman history and philosophy not unfrequently receive something of the same tone from a mood of this kind. Sallust must needs express himself strongly against the corruptions of morals, being himself very considerably affected by them. Livy, despite his rhetorical elegance, seeks for comfort and satisfaction in his picture of the good old days. Above all we have Tacitus, who, with a severe melancholy as grand in its scope as it was profound, without the baldness of declamation, indignantly exposes in the clearest relief the evils of his time. Among the satirists Persius is remarkable for his acerbity, with a bitter edge more keen than that of Juvenal. Later on we find bringing up the rear the Greek Syrian Lucian giving free vent to his witticisms and pleasantry against all things, whether heroes, philosophers, or gods; and with exceptional prominence passing in review the ancient gods of Greece on the score of their humanity and individuality. However, only too often he goes no further in his tittle-tattle than the mere external aspect of these godlike figures and their actions, and is for that reason wearisome to modern readers.For, on the one hand, so far as our convictions are concerned, we have already disposed of all that he would destroy, and on the other we are aware that, despite all his jests and mockery, these characteristic traits of Greek divinities, when contemplated under the aspect of beauty, still retain their eternal significance.
Nowadays satirical poems are not likely to prove a success. Cotta and Goethe have proposed competitions in this form of composition, but no poems of note are forthcoming. Certain fixed principles are bound up with it, with which the present age is not in harmony; a wisdom which is devoid of content, a virtue which adheres with inflexible obstinacy to its own resources and nothing beyond, may very possibly contrast itself with the actual world, but is quite unable to bring about the truly poetical resolution of what is false and repugnant, and effect the genuine reconciliation in the truth.
In one word, Art is unable to persist in this breach between the abstract conceptions of the inward life and the objective world around, without proving itself false to its own principle. The subjective realm of the soul must be conceived as that which is itself an essentially infinite and independent existence, which, albeit it is unable to suffer the finite reality to subsist as Truth itself, nevertheless does not merely assert itself negatively toward the same in a bare contradiction, but proceeds all the while on the path of reconciliation, and for the first time, in its opposition to the ideal individualities of the classical art-form, declares this very activity, being in fact the presentment of the absolute mode of self-conscious life.
[197]Lit. "the essentially-and-for-itself-necessary."
[197]Lit. "the essentially-and-for-itself-necessary."
[198]Hölderlin, and of course Goethe no less than Schiller, would be included. With our moderns such as Swinburne the admission is less obvious than the qualification.
[198]Hölderlin, and of course Goethe no less than Schiller, would be included. With our moderns such as Swinburne the admission is less obvious than the qualification.
[199]Die Aufklärung.That is, the end of the eighteenth century; usually translated as illumination or enlightenment.
[199]Die Aufklärung.That is, the end of the eighteenth century; usually translated as illumination or enlightenment.
[200]Verstand, the faculty of science and common sense.
[200]Verstand, the faculty of science and common sense.
[201]What! doth this same stillness tell me sadlyAll I know of Him who voiced creation?Dark as e'en the veil that hides Him from meIs my heart's salute of resignation.
[201]
What! doth this same stillness tell me sadlyAll I know of Him who voiced creation?Dark as e'en the veil that hides Him from meIs my heart's salute of resignation.
[202]Since the gods were then more humanMen were more in image godlike.
[202]
Since the gods were then more humanMen were more in image godlike.
[203]Wrested from the flood of Time's abyssesSaved they float above high Pindus now;All that was immortal life within themLives in song, all other life must go.
[203]
Wrested from the flood of Time's abyssesSaved they float above high Pindus now;All that was immortal life within themLives in song, all other life must go.
[204]Zornloslit., without anger.
[204]Zornloslit., without anger.
[205]I think this is the meaning of the wordsmit subjectiver Besonderheit, but the interpretation "with other material peculiar to the writer" is not impossible.
[205]I think this is the meaning of the wordsmit subjectiver Besonderheit, but the interpretation "with other material peculiar to the writer" is not impossible.
The type of romantic art receives its definition, as we have hitherto throughout the present inquiry seen was always the case, from the ideal notion of the content, which it is the function of art to declare. We must consequently in the first place attempt to elucidate the distinctive principle of the new content, a content which now, in its significance as the absolute content of truth, opens up to our minds a new vision of the world no less than a novel configuration of art.
In thefirststage of our inquiry, the entrance chamber of art, the impulse of imagination consisted in the struggle from Nature to spiritual expression. In this strain Spirit never reached beyond what was still only an effort to find, an effort which, in so far as it was not yet able to supply a genuine content for art, could only maintain its position as an external embodiment of the significant aspects of Nature, or those abstractions of the ideal inwardness of substance which were destitute of a subjective character in the strict sense, and in which this type of art found its real centre. Thereverseof this point of view we discovered in classical art. Here it is spirituality—albeit it is only by virtue of the abrogation of the significances of Nature that it is enabled to struggle forth in its independent self-identity—which is the basis and principle of the content, with the natural phenomenon in the bodily or sensuous material for its external form. This embodiment, however, did not, as was the case in the first stage, remain superficial, indefinite, and unsuffusedby its content; but the perfection of art attained its culminating point by precisely this means, namely, that Spirit completely transpierced its exterior appearance, idealized the shell of Nature in this union of beauty, and drew round itself a reality adequate to its own nature as mind under the mode of substantive individuality. By this means classical art was a presentation of the Ideal which completely satisfied its notion, the consummation of the realm of beauty. More beautiful art than this can neither exist now nor hereafter.
But for all that we may have an art that is more lofty in its aim than this lovely revelation of Spirit in its immediate sensuous form, if at the same time one that is created by the mind as adequate to its own nature. For this coalition, which perfects itself in the medium of what is external, and thereby makes sensible reality its adequate and determinate existence, necessarily runs counter to the true notion of Spirit, and drives it forth from its reconciliation in the bodily shape upon its own essential substance to seek further reconciliation in that alone. The simple and unriven totality of the Ideal is dissolved, and breaks up into one of twofold aspect, namely, that of the essentially subjective life and its exterior semblance, in order to enable mind, by means of this severation, to win the profounder reconciliation in its own most proper element. In one word, Spirit, which has for its principle the mode of entire self-sufficiency, the union of its notion with its reality—is only able to discover an existence that wholly corresponds to such a principle in its own spiritual world of emotion, soul, that is to say, in the inward life where it feels at home. The human spirit becomes aware that it must possess its Other, itsexistence, as Spirit, which it appropriates as its own and what it verily is, and by doing so at length enjoys its own infinity and freedom.
1. This elevation of Spirit to itsown substance, through which it attains its objectivity—which it would otherwise be obliged to seek for in the external environment of its existence within its own self and in this union with itself both feels and knows itself—is what constitutes the fundamental principle of romantic art. With this truth we may join as a corollary thereto that for this concluding stage the beauty of the classic Ideal, or in other words beauty in its most uniquely consonant form and its most conformable content, is no longer regarded as ultimate. For in arriving at thepoint of romantic art, Spirit[206]becomes aware that its truth is not fully attained by a self-absorption in the material of sense. On the contrary, it only comes fully to the knowledge of that truth by withdrawing itself out of that medium into the inward being of its own substance, whereby it deliberately affirms the inadequacy of external reality as a mode of its existence. It is owing to this that when this new content is set the essential task of making itself an object of beauty, the beauty, in the meaning of the terms under which we have met with it before, only persists as a subordinate mode, and the new conception of it becomes thespiritualbeauty of what is its own ideality made fully explicit, in other words, the subjectivity of Spirit essentially infinite in its mode.
In order, however, that mind may attain the infinity which belongs to it it must transcend at the same time purely formal andfinitepersonality and rise into the measure of theAbsolute.That is to say, Spirit must declare itself as fulfilled with that which is out and out substantive, and in doing so proclaim itself as a self-knowing and self-willing subject. Conversely, therefore, what is substantive and true is no longer to be apprehended as a mere "beyond" relatively to our humanity, and the anthropomorphism of the Greek view of things can be struck out; and in the place of this we have humanity as very and real subjectivity affirmed as the principle, and by virtue of this change, as we have already seen, anthropomorphism for the first time reflects a truth of complete and final validity.
2. We have now in a general way to develop the range of subject-matter, no less than its form, from the earliest phases in the evolution of this principle, whose configuration, as it thus changes, is conditioned by the new content of romantic art.
The true principle of the romantic content is absolute inwardness[207], and the form which corresponds to it, the subjectivity of mind, meaning by this the comprehension of its self-subsistence and freedom. This intrinsically infinite principle and explicitly enunciated universal is the absolute negation of all particularity[208]; it is simple unity at home withitself, which consumes all that is separable, all processes of Nature and its succession of birth, passing away, and reappearance, all the limitations of spiritual existence, and dissolves all particular gods in its pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all gods are dethroned; the flame of the subjective essence has destroyed them; instead of the plastic polytheism art recognizes nowoneGod only,oneSpirit,oneabsolute self-subsistence, which as the absolute knowledge and volition of itself remains in free union with it, and no longer falls to pieces in the particular characters and functions we have reviewed above, whose single unit of cohesion was the force of an obscure Necessity. Absolute subjectivity, however, in its purity would escape from art altogether, and only be present in the apprehension of Thought, unless it could enter into external existence in order that it might be a subjectivity which wasactualif also conformable to its notion, and further could recollect itself in its own province from out of this reality. And, what is more, this moment of reality is pertinent to the Absolute, because the Absolute, as infinite negativity, contains this self-relation—as simple unity of knowledge at home with itself, and therewith asimmediacy—for the final consummation of its activity. On account also of this its immediate existence, which is rooted in the Absolute itself, the Absolute declares itself not as the one jealous God, who merely annuls the aspect of Nature and finite human existence, without revealing itself verily therein under the mode of actual divine subjectivity; rather the very Absolute unfolds itself, and takes to itself an aspect, relatively to which it is also within the grasp and presentation of art.
The determinate existence of God, however, is not the natural and sensuous in its simplicity, but the sensuous as brought home to that which is not sensuous, in other words to the subjectivity of mind which, instead of losing the certainty of its own presence as the Absolute, in its external envisagement, for the first time, and by no other means than this its reality, is made aware of its actual presence as such. God in His Truth is consequently no mere Ideal begotten of the imagination, but He declares Himself in the heart of finite condition and the external mode of contingent existence, and is, moreover, made known to Himself therein as divine subjective life, which maintains itself thereas essentially infinite and creating this infinity for itself. Inasmuch, then, as the actual subject[209]is the manifestation of God, Art for the first time secures the superior right to apply the human figure and its mode of externality generally as a means to express the Absolute, although the new function of art can only consist in making the external form not a means whereby the ideality of man's inward condition is absorbed in exterior bodily shape, but rather conversely to make the consciousness of the Divine mind visible in the subject of consciousness. The distinguishable phases, which combine to make up the totality of this apprehension of the world-condition as, that is to say, the concrete totality of truth, are consequently made manifest to mankind from this point onwards under such a mode that it is neither the Natural in its simplicity, such as sun, heavens, stars, and so forth, nor the Greek conclave of the gods of beauty, nor the heroes and practical exploits in the field of the family cultus and political life—it is neither one nor any of these which supplies us with either content or form. Rather it is the actual and isolated individual subject who receives in the inward[210]substance of his living experience this infinite worth, for it is in him alone that the eternal characters of absolute Truth—which is made actual only as Spirit—expand out of their fulness within, and are concentrated to the point of determinate existence.
If we contrast this definition of romantic art with that which was proposed to the classical—that is to say, as Greek sculpture completed the latter under the mode most conformable to it—it is obvious that the plastic figure of the god does not express the motion and activity of Spirit, in so far as the same has retired from its actual bodily shape, and has penetrated to the inner shrine of independent self-identity. That which is mutable and contingent in the empirical aspect of individuality is no doubt removed from those lofty, godlike figures: what, however, fails them is the actualization of the subjective condition in its self-subsistent being as shown in self-knowledge and self-volition. This defect makes itself felt on the exterior side in the notable fact that the direct expression of soul in its simplicity, the light of the eye, is absent from the sculpturedfigure. The most exalted works of beautiful sculpture are sightless. The inward life does not look forth from them as self-conscious inwardness such as this concentration of Spirit to the point of light made visible in the human eye offers us. This light of the soul falls outside of them, and is the possession of the beholder alone: he is unable to look through these figures as soul direct to soul, and eye to eye. The God of romantic art, however, is made known with sight, that is, self-knowing, subjective on the side of soul, and that soul or divine intimacy disclosing itself to soul. For the infinite negativity, the withdrawal of the spiritual into itself, cancels its discharge in the bodily frame. This subjectivity is the light of Spirit, which reveals itself in its own domain, in the place which was previously obscure, whereas the natural light can only give light on the face of an object, is in fact thisterrainand object, upon which it appears, and which it is aware of as itself[211]. Inasmuch as, however, this absolute intimacy of the soul expresses itself at the same time as the mode of human envisagement in its actual existing shape, and our humanity is bound up with the entire natural world, we shall find that there is no less a wide field of variety in the contents of the subjective world of mind than there is in that external appearance, to which Spirit is related as to its own dwelling-place.
The reality of absolute subjectivity, as above described, in the mode of its visible manifestation, possesses the following modes of content and appearance.
(a) Our first point of departure we must deduce from the Absolute itself, which as very and actual mind endows itself with determinate existence, is self-knowing in its thought and activity. Here we find the human form so represented that it is known immediately as the wholly self-possessed Divine. Man does not appear as man in his solely human character, in the constraint of his passions, finite aims, and achievements, or as merely conscious of God, but rather as the self-knowing one and only universal God Himself, in whose life and sufferings, birth, death, and resurrection He reveals openly also to finite consciousness, what Spirit, what the Eternal and Infinite in their veritable truth are[212]. Romanticart presents this content in the history of Christ, his mother, and his disciples, with all the rest of those in whom the Holy Spirit and the perfected Divine is manifested. For in so far as God, who is above all the essential Universal, exists in the manifestation of human existence, this reality is not, in the Divine figure of Christ, limited to isolate and immediate existence, but unfolds itself throughout the entire range of that humanity, in which the Spirit of God is made present, and in this actuality continues in unity with itself. The diffusion of this self-contemplation, this essential self-possession of mind[213], is peace, in other words the reconciled state of Spirit with its own dominion in the mode of its objective presence—a divine world, a kingdom of God, in which the Divine, which has for its substantive notion from the first reconciliation with itself, consummates this result in such a condition, and thereby secures its freedom.
(b) However much, we must fain add, this identification asserts itself as grounded in the essence of the Absolute itself, as spiritual freedom and infinity it is no reconciliation which immediately is visible from the first in either the real worlds of Nature or Spirit; on the contrary, it is only accomplished as the elevation of Spirit from the finitude of its immediate existence to its truth. As a corollary of this it follows that Spirit, in order to secure its totality and freedom, must effect an act of self-severation, and set up on the one side itself as the finitude of Nature and Spirit to its opposed self on the other as that which is essentially infinite. Conversely with this act of disruption the necessity is conjoined that from out of this retirement from its unity—within the bounds of which the finite and purely natural, the immediacy of existence, the "natural" heart in the sense of the negative, evil and bad, one and all are defined—a way is at last found by virtue of the subjugation of all that has no substantive worth within the kingdom of truth and consolation. In this wise the reconcilement of Spirit can only be conceived as an activity, a movement of the same, can only be presented as a process, in whose course ariseboth strain and conflict, and the appearance and reappearance, as an essential feature of it, of pain, death, the mournful sense of non-reality, the agony of the soul and its bodily tenement. For just as God in the first instance disparts finite reality from Himself, so, too, finite man, who starts on his journey outside the divine kingdom, receives the task to exalt himself to God, to let loose from him the finite, to do away with the nothing-worth, and by means of this decease of his immediate reality to become that which God in His manifestation as man accomplished as very truth in the actual world. The infinite pain of this sacrifice of the most personal subjectivity, sufferings, and death, which for the most part were excluded from the representation of classical art, or rather only are presented there as natural suffering, receive their adequate treatment necessarily for the first time in romantic art. It is, for example, impossible to affirm that among the Greeks death was ever conceived in its full and essential significance. Neither that which was purely natural, nor the immediacy of Spirit in its union with the bodily presence, was held by the Greeks as something in itself essentially negative. Death was consequently to them purely an abstract passing over, unaccompanied by horror or fearsomeness, a cessation without further immeasurable consequences for the deceased. If, however, conscious life in its spiritual self-possession is of infinite worth then the negation, which death enfolds, is a negation of this exaltation and worth, and it is consequently fearful, a death of the soul, which is in the position of finding itself thereby as itself now this negative in explicit appearance, excluded for evermore from happiness, absolutely unhappy, delivered over to eternal damnation[214]. Greek individuality, on the contrary, does not, regarded as spiritual self-consciousness, attach this worth to itself; it is able, consequently, to surround death with more cheerful images. Man only fears theloss of that which is of great worth to him[215]. Life possesses, however, only this infinite worth for mind if the subject thereof, as spiritual and self-conscious, is reality in its absolute unity, and is compelled with an apprehension, in this way justified, to image itself as doomed to negation by death. From another point of view, however, death also fails to secure from classical art thepositivesignificance which it receives from romantic art. The Greeks never treated with real seriousness what we understand by immortality. It was only in later times that the doctrine of immortality received at the hands of Socrates a profounder significance for the introspective reflection of human intelligence. When, for example, Odysseus[216]praises the happiness of Achilles in the lower world as one excelling that of all others who were before or came after him on the ground that he, once revered as a god, is now greatest chief among the dead, Achilles in the well-known words rates this fortune at a very low rank indeed, and makes answer that Odysseus had better utter no word of comfort to him on the score of death; nay, he would rather be a mere serf of the soil, and poor enough serve a poor man for wage, than rule as lord over all the ghosts of the dead who have vanished to Hades. In romantic art, on the contrary, death is merely a decease of the natural soul and finite consciousness, a decease, which only proclaims itself as negative as against that which is itself essentially negative and abolishes what has no real substance, and is consequently the deliverance of Spiritfrom its finitude and division, mediating at the same time the spiritual reconciliation of the individual subject with the Absolute[217]. Among the Greeks life in its union with the existence of Nature and the external world was the only life about which you could affirm anything, and death was consequently pure negation, the dissolution of immediate reality. In the romantic view of the world, however, death receives the significance due to its negativity, in other words the negation of the negative[218], and returns back to us thereby equally as the affirmative, as the resurrection of Spirit from the bare husk of Nature and the finiteness which it has outgrown. The pain and death of the extinguished light of individual being awakes again in its return upon itself in fruition, blessedness, and in short that reconciled existence which Spirit is unable to attain to save through the dying of its negative state, in which it is shut off from its most veritable truth and life. This fundamental principle does not therefore merely affect the fact of death as it approaches man in his relation to the world of Nature, but it is bound up with a process, which Spirit has to sustain in itself, quite independently of this external aspect of negation, if life and truth are to join hands.
(c) Thethirdpresentment of this absolute world of Spirit is co-ordinated by man, in so far as he neither makes manifest the Absolute and Divine in its immediate and essential mode as suchDivine, nor declares positively the process in which he is exalted to the Supreme Being, and reconciled with Him, but rather continues within the ordinary sphere of his human life. Here it is the purelyfiniteaspect of that existence which constitutes the content, whether we regard it in the light of its spiritual purposes, its worldly interests, passions, collisions, suffering, and enjoyments, or from that point of view which is wholly external, that of Nature, its kingdom, and all its detailed phenomena. In order toapprehend this content with adequacy, however, we must take up two distinct positions relatively to it. In other words, it is true that Spirit, for the reason that it has secured the principle of self-affirmation, expatiates in this province, as one on which it has a just claim, and one which, as native to it, provides satisfaction, an element from which it merely extracts this positive character[219], and is permitted thereby itself to be reflected in its positive satisfaction and intimacy; yet, on the other hand, we have the fact that this content is brought down to the level of pure contingency, a contingency which is unable to claim any independent validity, for the reason that mind cannot discover therein it veritable existence, and consequently only preserves its substantial unity by independently on its own account breaking up again this finite aspect of Spirit and Nature as a thing of finitude and negation.
3. In conclusion, then, so far as the relation of this content in its entirety to its mode of presentation is concerned, it would appear, in the first place, agreeably to what we have above stated, that the content of romantic art, relatively to the Divine, at any rate, is verylimited.
(a) For, first, as we have already indicated, Nature is divested of the Divine principle; in other words, the sea and mountains, valleys, Time, and Night, briefly all the general processes of Nature, have here lost the worth which they carry when related to the presentation and content of the Absolute. The images of Nature receive no further expansion in a symbolic significance. The thesis that their shapes and activities might possibly sustain traits of Divine import is taken away from them. For all the mighty questions in regard to the origin of the world, in regard to the Whence, Wherefore, and Whither, of created Nature and humanity, and all the symbolical and plastic experiments in the resolution and exposition of these problems disappear at once in the revelation of God in Spirit; and we may add that also in the spiritual sphere the world of variety and colour, with the characters, actions, and events, as they were envisaged by classical art, are now concentrated inonesinglelight-focusof the Absolute and its eternalhistory of redemption. The whole content meets, therefore, at this single point of the Inmost of Spirit[220]—that is, of feeling, imagination, soul—all that strains after a union with truth, that seeks and wrestles to bring to birth the Divine in consciousness, and to maintain it; and, furthermore, is constrained to execute the world's aims and undertakings, not so much for theworld'ssake as to further the unique and essential undertaking of its heart by means of the spiritual conflict of man's inward nature and his reconciliation with God, presenting personality and its conservation no less than all that paves the way to them for this object, and this alone. The heroism, which makes its appearance as the result of such aspirations, is not the kind of heroism which prescribes laws by its own fiat, establishes new systems, creates and informs circumstances, but rather a heroism of submission, which accepts everything as predetermined and ordered above it, and whose energies are now wholly restricted to the task of regulating temporal events in line with such direction, and making that which is in keeping with the higher order and of independent stability a valid factor in the world as if is and in the Time-process. For the reason, however, that this absolute content appears as concentrated to a focus in the inwardlife of the soul, and the entire process is imported into the life of mankind, the range of this content is thereby also infinitely extended. Itexpands, in fact, to a manifold variety practically without limit. For although every objective history supplies what is substantive in that self-concrete soul-life, yet for all that the subject of the same reviews it in all its aspects, presents isolated features taken from it, or unfolds it as it appears in continually novel human traits by way of addition, and may very well into the bargain both import the entire expanse of Nature, as environment andlocaleof Spirit, and divert them to the one single object referred to. By this means the history of soul-life is infinitely rich, and can adapt its form to ever shifting conditions and situations in every possible way. And, further, if the individual at last steps forth from this absolute sphere and actively engages in worldly affairs, the range of interests, objects, and emotions will be difficult to count on the scorein proportion as the spiritual self-possession is profound, agreeably to the principle in its fullest application; man is consequently distracted by an infinitely multiplied profusion of interior and exterior collisions, revolutions, and gradations of passion, and the most manifold degrees of satisfaction. The Absolute in its unqualified and essential universality, in so far, that is, as it is unfolded in the conscious life of the human soul, constitutes the spiritual content of romantic art; and for this reason his collective humanity, no less than its entire evolution, becomes its inexhaustible material.
(b) Romantic art does not, however,as arteduce this content in the way we found was the case for the most part in symbolic art, and, above all, in the classical type and its ideal gods. Romantic art, as we have seen already, is not, in itsspecificcapacity, the instructiverevelation, which, merely in the form of art, makes the content of truth visible to the senses. The content is already present in the conceptive mind, and the emotions independently and outside the sphere of art.Religion, as the consciousness of truth in its universality, is here an essentialpremissof art to a degree totally different from what it was in the previous cases; and, even if we look at the position in its wholly exterior aspect for the consciousness that is actual in the reality of the material world, it lies before us as the prosaic fact of the very present. That is to say, inasmuch as the content of revelation to mind is the eternal absolute nature ofmind[221]itself, which breaks itself loose from Nature in its bareness andsubordinatesthe same, its manifestation in the immediacy of present life is such that the external material, in so far as it consists and is existent, only continues as a contingent world, out of which the Absolute recollects itself in the secret wealth of Spirit, and only by such means attains independence and truth. The external show receives thus the imprimatur of an indifferent medium, in which Spirit can repose no ultimate trust, and in which it can find no dwelling-place. The more it conceives the conformation of external reality as unworthy of its fulness the less it becomes able to seek consolation therein, or to discover its task of self-reconcilement consummated by a union therewith.
(c) The manner in which, therefore, romantic art gives to itself a real embodiment agreeably to the spirit of the principle above indicated, and on the side of its external appearance, is not one which essentially overleaps the ordinary presentment of reality: it is by no means averse to accept as cover for itself real existence in its finite defects and definition. That beauty therefore disappears from it, which tended to raise the outside envisagement above the soilure of Time, and the traces that unite it with a Past, in order to declare the beauty of existence in its blossom in the room of what had otherwise been a dismantled image. Romantic art has no longer for its aim the freedom and life of existence in its infinite tranquillity and absorption of the soul in the bodily presence; no more a life such asthisarrests it. It turns its back on this pinnacle of beauty. It interweaves the threads of its soul experience with the contingent material of Nature's workshop, and gives unfettered play to the emphatic features of ugliness itself. We have, in short, two worlds included in the Romantic, a spiritual realm essentially complete in itself, the soul-kingdom, which finds reconciliation in its own sphere, and therewith the otherwise straightforward repetition of birth, death, and resurrection now for the first time perfected in the true circular orbit, doubled back in the return upon itself, the genuine Phoenix life of Spirit. On the other hand, there is the realm of external Nature simply as such, which, released as it is from its secure association and union with Spirit, becomes now a completely empirical reality, concerning the form of which the soul cares little or nothing. In classical art Spirit controlled the empirical phenomenon and transpierced it through and through, because it was the very thing which it had to accept as its completed reality. But now the ideal kingdom is indifferent to the mode of configuration in the world of immediate sense, because this immediacy is beneath the sphere of the blessedness of essential soul-life. The external phenomenon is no longer able to express this inward life; and if any call is made upon it for this purpose, it merely is utilized to make plain that the external show is an existence which does not satisfy, and is forced to point back by suggestion to the spiritual content, the soul and its emotions, as the truly essential medium. Precisely forthe same reason romantic art suffers externality on its own part to go on its way freely; and in this respect permits all and every material, flowers, trees, and so on, down to the most ordinary domestic utensils, to appear in its productions just as they are, and as the chance of natural circumstance may arrange them. Such a content as this, however, carries at the same time with it the result, that as purely exterior matter, its worth is of no validity and insignificant; it only receives its genuine worth when the soul has made itself a home in it, and it is taken to express not merely the ideal, butspiritual inwardness[222]itself, which, instead of blending itself with the exterior thing, appears simply to have attained its own reconciliation with itself. The ideality thus brought home to a point is that mode of expression which is without externality, invisibly declaring itself, and only itself, in other words, a tone of music simply, which is neither an object nor possesses form, a wavelet over waters[223], a ringing sound over a world, which, in sounds such as this, and the varied phenomena which are united with it, can only receive and reflect one reverberation of this self-absorption of the soul.
To sum up, then, in a word, this relation of content and form in the romantic type, where it remains true to its distinctive character, we may affirm that the fundamental note of the same, for this very reason that its principle constitutes an ever expanding universality and the restlessly active depths of heart and mind, is that ofmusic, and when combined with the definite content of imagination, lyrical. Thislyricalaspect is likewise the primary characteristic of romantic art, a tone which gives the key-note also to the epic poem and drama, and which is wafted as a breath of soul even around the works of the plastic arts, since here, too, spirit and soul are desirous of speaking by means of the plastic shape to soul and mind.
As regards thedivisionof our subject, which we must now in conclusion determine for the examination of this our third extensive domain of artistic production on the lines of its development, we shall find that the basic notion of the romantic relatively to its substantive and progressivearticulation is comprised most conveniently in three branches of division we may define as follows.
Thefirstsphere is the province ofreligionstrictly, in which the redemption history, the life, death, and resurrection of Christ constitute the central interest. The principle which is emphasized as all-important here is that self-involution which mind accomplishes by negating its immediacy and finitude, overcoming the same, and by means of this liberation secures its own self-possessed infinity and absolute self-subsistence in its own kingdom.
This self-subsistence passes, then, in thesecondplace from the Divine dwelling of essential Spirit, surrenders its pure exaltation of finite man to God, in order to enter thetemporal world.Here it is, in the first instance, the subject of consciousness simply, which has become self-affirmative, and which possesses as the substantive material of its content, no less than as the interest of its existence, the virtues of this positive subjectivity, such as honour, love, fidelity, and bravery, the aims and obligations, in short, of romantic chivalry.
The content and form of thethirdchapter may be generally indicated as theformal consistency of character.In other words, if the subjective life has been so far concentrated, that spiritual independence is its essential characteristic, it follows also that theparticularcontent, with which such independence is associated as with what is strictly its own, will also partake of such a character; this self-subsistence, however, inasmuch as it does not, as was the case in the sphere appertinent to essential and explicit religious truth, repose in the substantive core of its life, is only able to reach a formal type. Conversely the configuration of external conditions, situations, and events is now also independently free, and is involved consequently in every sort of capricious adventure. For this reason we find, to put it in general terms, as the termination of the romantic, the contingency of the exterior condition and internal life, and a falling asunder of the two aspects, by reason of which Art commits an act of suicide, and betrays the fact that conscious life must now secure forms of loftier significance, than Art alone is able to offer, in which to grasp and retain truth.