Chapter III

THE FORMAL SELF-SUBSISTENCY OF INDIVIDUAL PARTICULARITIES

If we take a glance back on the territory we have passed through, we see in the first instance that the object of our investigation was the life of the soul[256] in its most absolute capacity, in other words, consciousness in its mediation with God, the universal process of the self-reconciling spirit. The abstraction of this point of view consisted in this that the soul by an effort of abnegation withdrew itself from all that was secular, purely natural and human—even when the same had ethical features, and for this reason possessed a claim upon us—into its own distinctive domain in order to satisfy its yearning for the pure heaven of spirit. Secondly, we found ourselves able, it is true, to bring into view the human consciousness without this factor of abstract negation which was included in that mediation, in other words, positively in its independence and as related to others[257], but the content of this secular infinitude as such was none the less only the personal self-subsistency of honour, the intensiveness[258] of love and the vassalage of fidelity, a content which, no doubt, may appear before us in many relations, in a many-folded variety and many gradations of feeling and passion, subject to the most extensive changes of external condition, yet for all that only propounds just this personal independence and inwardness within such examples. The third aspect, then, which we have now left us to examine is the mode and manner in which that further material of human existence, both on the side of its inward and its external life, that is to say, Nature and its apprehension and significance for soul-life, is able to enter into the romantic type of art. We have here to deal with the world of particular objects, determinate existence generally, regarded in its unfettered independence, and which, in so far as it does not appear transparent to religion and spiritual synthesis, bringing it into unity with the Absolute, asserts itself on its own foothold and declares its self-subsistence in its own kingdom.

In this third province of the romantic type of art consequently the purely religious material and chivalry with those lofty views and aims that we found it brings to birth from its spiritual womb[259], but which were not directly concordant with anything visible in the reality of the existing world, have vanished. The new object of satisfaction is a thirst for this actual presence itself, a delight in the facts of existence, a contentment of the soul with the dwelling that confronts it, with the finitude of our humanity, and what is finite, particular, and the true counterfeit of such generally. Man is intent to recreate for his own world the world as he actually finds it, although such may imply a sacrifice of the Beauty and ideality of the content and manifestation will reflect it as it stands before him endowed with life in his art, will have that present life before his eyes as the work of his own mind. The religion of Christianity as we have already seen has not sprung up from the soil of the imagination as was the case with the divinities of the East and Greece, whether we consider them relatively to form or content. It is the imagination which fashions the vital significance out of its own resources in order to promote the unity between the reality of soul life with the perfected embodiment of the same. In classical art this complete coalescence is actually attained. In the Christian religion, on the other hand, the secular aspect in its exclusive character is from the first accepted for just that which it really is as an essential factor of the Ideal; and the soul of man finds satisfaction in the ordinary and contingent presence of the external world without the necessary interposition of beauty. But man is nevertheless in the first instance reconciled to God only by implication, and as a possible result. All men are called to the blessed condition, but few are chosen; and the soul for which both the kingdom of heaven and that of this world still remain as a "beyond" is constrained to renounce both that which is spiritual in the external world and its own presence therein. The point of departure is from a distance infinitely remote from that world; and to make this reality, which in the first instance is simply surrendered, a positive constituent of that which is man's own, in other words to bring about this rediscovery of himself and his volition in his own present life, from which all takes its rise, this it is which supplies us first with a terminating point in the elaboration of romantic art, and is the final outlook to which the spiritual penetration of man is carried and on which it is concentrated.

In so far as the form of this new content is concerned we have already observed that romantic art from its first initiation was infected with the contradiction that the essentially infinite mode of the self-conscious life is, in its independence, incapable of being united with the external material, and is bound to remain in such separation. This independent opposition of both aspects and the withdrawal of the inwardness of spirit into its own domain is that which constitutes the content of romance. These two aspects are continually separated anew by self-rehabilitation[260], until at length they fall entirely apart, and thereby demonstrate that we must search for some other field than Art to secure their absolute union. And by this falling apart we find that these aspects in their relation to art are formal; in other words they fail to appear as a totality in that complete type of unity which was secured to them by the Classic Ideal. Classical art is placed in a region of stable figures, that is in the midst of a mythology and its irresoluble types perfected by art. The resolution of the classical form is consequently brought about—as we found in discussing its transition to the romantic form—leaving out of our present consideration the generally more restricted territory of the comic and satyric modes—by an over-elaboration in the direction of all that pleases the senses or an imitation which loses itself in the deadly frost of a pedantic learning, till it at length entirely degenerates into a negligent and inferior technique. The objects of art remain, however, the same throughout the process, and merely play truant to the earlier intelligent mode of production with a presentation that is increasingly more spiritless and a purely traditional and mechanical technique. The progress and conclusion of romantic art on the contrary is the resolution of the material of art within its own boundaries[261] altogether, a material which falls apart into its elements, an increase of freedom in the several parts, along with which process and in contrast to the previous case, the individual craftsmanship and artistic mode of presentment is enhanced; and in proportion as the substantive content tends to break up to that extent attains a fuller perfection.

We may now attempt a more specific subdivision of this the final chapter of this part of our subject in the following terms.

In the first place we have before us the self-subsistency of character, which is, however, a particular one, that is, a definite individual self-absorbed in its world, its specific qualities and aims.

In opposition to this formal particularity of character we have the external conformation of situations, events, and actions. For the reason, moreover, that the inward spirituality of romance stands generally in an indifferent relation to that which is external the actual phenomenon[262] appears in the present case independently free, that is as neither permeated by the spiritual content of human aims and actions nor clothed in modes adequate to retain them. By reason of its unrelated and loose mode of manifestation it therefore enforces the contingency of natural processes[263], circumstances, the sequence of events, and manner of its realization as the unexpected.[264]

In the third place, and finally, the severation of the two factors asserts itself, the complete identity of which supplies us with the real notion of art. This is consequently the dismemberment and dissolution of art itself. On the one hand we find that art passes to a representation of wholly commonplace reality, to the reflection of objects precisely as they appear in their contingent isolation and its equally singular characteristics. Its interest is now wholly absorbed in reproducing this objective existence by means of the technical ability of the artist. On the other hand we have, in what is a mode of conception and representation entirely dependent on the accidental idiosyncracy of the artist himself, that is in humour, a complete reversal of the pictorial style above mentioned. For in humour we meet with the perversion and overthrow of all that is objectively solid in reality; it works through the wit and play of wholly personal points of view, and if carried to an extreme amounts to the triumph of the creative power of the artist's soul over every content and every form.

1. THE SELF-SUBSISTENCY OR INDEPENDENCE OF INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER

The fundamental determinant of our present subject-matter is once again that infinitude implied in the very nature of the human consciousness which was our point of departure in the romantic type of art. The new accretions we have now, however, to add to our conception of this mode of self-subsistent infinity consist partly in the particularity of content, which constitutes the world of the individual mind, as to a further aspect of it in the immediate coalescence of the ego with this its particularity, its wishes and objects, and thirdly, in the living individuality, in which the substantive character is self-determined. We are not, therefore, entitled to understand under the expression "character" as now employed that which the Italians represented in their masks. The Italian masks are also no doubt definite characters, but this definition is only presented by them in its abstraction and generality, without a personal individuality. The characters, on the other hand, of the type under discussion are each of them a character unique in itself, an independent whole, an individual person[265]. If we have, therefore, occasion here to refer to the formalism and abstraction of character, such an expression is entirely relative to the fact that the fundamental content, the world of such a character appears, on the one hand, as restricted and to that extent abstract, and, on the other, as qualified by accidental causes. What the individual is is not carried or sustained by virtue of what is substantive or essentially self-accredited[266] in its content, but through the naked personality asserted by the character, which consequently reposes formally on its own individual self-subsistency rather than on its content and its independently secured pathos.

Within the limits of this formalism we may now observe two main lines of distinction.

On the one hand we have the stability of character in the energy of its executive power, which restricts its line of action to specific aims, and entrusts the concentrated force of individuality thus restricted to the realization of such objects. On the other hand we have character under the aspect of a totality that is personal, which, however, persists not wholly articulated throughout the content of that inward life and in the unsounded[267] depths of the soul, and is unable to unravel itself wholly, or express itself with absolute clarity.

(a) What we have therefore before us, in the first instance, is the particular character which wills to be that its immediate presence proposes, Just as animals differ from each other and discover themselves as independent creatures in this difference, so, too, here we have different characters whose range and idiosyncracy remains subject to the element of contingency[268], and is not to be accurately determined by the mere notion.

(α) An individuality of this kind built up entirely on itself consequently has no ready thought-out opinions and objects, which it has associated with any universal principle of pathos: all that it-possesses, does, and accomplishes it creates right away with no further reflection out of its own specific nature; which is just what it happens to be, and has no wish to be rooted in anything more exalted, to be resolved in that and to find its justification in something substantive. Rather it reposes unyielding and unmalleable on itself, and in this stability either goes on its way or goes to ground. A self-subsistency of character of this kind is only able to appear, where the secular or natural man[269], in other words, humanity in its particularity has secured its fullest claim. Pre-eminently the characters of Shakespeare are of this type. It is just this iron[270] steadfastness and exclusiveness which constitutes the aspect of them which most excites our wonder. We have no word here of religion for religion's sake, or action as the embodiment of human reconciliation, in the unqualified religious sense, or of morality pure and simple. On the contrary we are presented with individuals, conceived as dependent solely on themselves, possessed with aims that are their own exclusively, exclusively deducible from their individuality, and which they carry through as best satisfies them with the unmitigated consequences of passion, and with no incidental reflection on the principles involved. In particular the tragedies, such as "Macbeth," "Othello," "Richard III" and others contain one character of this type for their main interest surrounded by others less pre-eminent for such elemental energy. Macbeth is forced by his character, for example, into the fetters of his ambitious passion. At first he hesitates, then he stretches his hand to seize the crown; he commits a murder in order to secure it, and in order to maintain it storms on through the tale of horror. This regardless tenacity, this identity of the man with himself, and the object which his own personality brings to birth is the source to him of an abiding interest. Nothing makes him budge, neither the respect for the sacredness of kingship, nor the madness of his wife, nor the rout of his vassals, nor destruction as it rushes upon him, neither divine nor human claims—he withdraws from them all into himself and persists. Lady Macbeth is a character of the same mould, and it is merely the chatter of our latter-day tasteless criticism which can find in her the least flavour of affection. At her very first entrance, on reading Macbeth's letter reporting his meeting with the witches and their prophecy in the words[271]: "Hail to thee, thane of Cawdor! Hail to thee king that shall be!" she exclaims, "Glamis thou art and Cawdor; and shall be what thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature; it is too full o' the milk of human kindness, to catch the nearest way." She shows no affectionate trait, no joy over the happiness of her husband, no moral emotion, no sympathy, no pity of a noble soul; she simply fears lest the character of her husband will stand in the path of his ambition. She regards him simply as a means. With her there is no recoil, no uncertainty, no consideration, no retreating, as we find is at first the case with Macbeth, no repentance, but the pure abstraction and rigour of character, which perpetrates that which falls in with it, until it finally breaks. This collapse which comes in a tempest on Macbeth from the outside as he executes his object, becomes madness of the mind in Lady Macbeth. Of the same type is Richard III, Othello, the old Margaret and many another also. We have its opposite in the wretched coherence[272] of modern characters, such as those of Kotzebue, which are outwardly noble in the highest degree, great and excellent, yet in their soul-force are all rags and tatters. Later writers have done no better in other relations, despite their supreme contempt for Kotzebue. Heinrich von Kleish is an example with his Kätchen and Prince von Homburg[273], characters in which, in contrast to the alert condition of real causal effect, magnetism, somnambulism, and sleep-walking are depicted as that which is of highest and most effective moment. This Prince von Homburg is a most pitiable exhibition of a general; he is distracted when he makes his military dispositions, writes out his orders in a way none can decipher them, is engaged in the night previous to the battle with morbid forebodings, and acts on the day of battle like a fool. And despite such duality, raggedness, and lack of harmony in their characters these writers imagine that they tread in the footsteps of Shakespeare. Wide indeed is the distance which separates them, for the characters of Shakespeare are essentially consequent in what they do; they remain staunch to their master passion; in what they are and in what confronts them, nothing makes them veer round but what is in strict accord with their rigidly determinate character.

(β) The more particular, then, the character is, which relies purely on itself, and consequently readily approaches evil, to that extent it is forced in the concrete world of reality to maintain itself, not merely against the obstacles which lie in its path and prevent the realization of life's aims, but so much more by this very realization such is driven headlong to its downfall. In other words, on account of the fact that it achieves its object, the fate that has its origin in the specific nature of its character itself, deals it a blow in a mode of destruction it has itself prepared. The development of this fatality is, however, not merely a development from the action of the particular personality, but quite as much a growth of the soul[274], a development of the character itself in its headlong movement, its running wild, its shattering in pieces or exhaustion. Among the Greeks, for whom pathos, the substantive content of action, rather than the personal character, is the important feature, a destiny affects the character that is thus sharply defined to a less degree for this reason, that it is not further evolved within the sphere of its activities, but remains at their conclusion what it was at the start. In the compass of our present subject-matter, however, by the carrying through of the action itself, the inner life of the personality is evolved quite as much as the progress of the action; the advance is not simply on the outside. The action of Macbeth appears at the same time a descent of the soul into savagery, accompanied by a result which, when all irresolution is thrown to the winds, and the dice is cast, leaves nothing further able to restrain it. His wife is from the very first decided: development is shown here merely as the anxiety of the soul, which is carried to the point of physical and spiritual ruin, the madness, in short, which strikes her down. And this is the kind of process which we can follow in the majority of Shakespeare's characters, whether important or unimportant. The characters of ancient drama assert themselves, no doubt, also on fixed lines, and we find them even face to face with opposed forces, relief from which is no longer possible except through the advent of a deus ex machina. Yet this stability, as in the case of Philoctetes, is united to a content, and, on the whole, penetrated with a pathos which may be vindicated on ethical grounds.

(γ) In the sphere of presentation we are now considering, owing to the contingent nature of all that the characters which belong to it seize upon as their aim and the independence of their individuality, no objective reconciliation is possible. The environment of all that they are, and what opposes their progress, is in part without defined lines, but also in part we see that there is neither a "Whence" nor a "Whither" unriddled for themselves. Here we have once more presented to us that Fate which is the most abstract form of Necessity. The only reconciliation of the individual issues from the infinite mode of his soul-life, his own steadfastness, in which he stands supreme over his passion and his destiny. "Thus it came to pass,"[275] whatever falls in his way, whether it be due to a controlling destiny, necessity or accident, there is his "Wherefore"; he accepts it at once without further reflection. It is fact, and man adjusts himself thereto, and tries to make himself as stone toward its authority.

(b) In absolute contrast to the above, however, there is a further or second mode in which the formal aspect of character may find its seat within the innermost of soul-life, and in which the individual may remain fixed without being able to extend its range or execute its effects.

(α) Such are those spiritual natures of intrinsic substance, who, while self-absorbed in a complex whole, are only able in the simplicity of their compactness[276] to perfect that profound activity within the shrine of the soul without further development or explication in the world around them. The formalism which we have hitherto been examining was relative to the defined character of the content, the entire self-concentration[277] of the individual upon one object, which it makes to appear in all its unrelieved severity, a concentration which expressed itself, was carried out, and in which, just as circumstances fell out, either collapsed or held on to the end. This further mode of formalism is emphasized in a converse way by its undisclosed and formless character, and by its defect of expression and expository power. A soul of this type is like some precious jewel, which is only visible at certain points, a manifestation which is that of a lightning flash.

(β) And the reason that such state of self-seclusion should still be of worth and interest to us is due to the fact that it presupposes a secret wealth of the soul, which, however, only permits its infinite depth and fulness, and precisely, by means of this silence, to show itself in a few and so to speak half-muted ways of expression. Such simple natures, unconscious of what they possess, and without speech, may exercise an extraordinary fascination. But that this may be so their silence must be like the unruffled stillness of the sea upon its surface, over its unsounded depths, not the silence of all that is shallow, hollow, and stupid. It is quite possible sometimes for the dullest fellow to succeed by means of an external demeanour that manages very little to expose itself, and merely presents now and again something that is but half intelligible, to awake in others the opinion that it is the veil of a profound wisdom and spiritual depth, so that people wonder what in the world lies hidden in such a heart and soul, where we find in the end there is just nothing. The infinite content and profundity of silent souls of the genuine type is made clear to us—and to declare it makes the greatest demand on the intuitive powers and executive ability of the artist—by means of isolated, unrelated, naïve, and involuntary expressions of soul-life, which quite unintentionally make it plain to all who can grasp their significance that such a soul has seized upon the substantial import of all that confronts it with the richest quality of spiritual insight, that its reflective capacity, however, is not carried further by positive expansion into the general environment of particular interests, motives, and finite aims, but rather preserves its original purity that the fact it refuses to have its powers dissipated by the commonplace excitements of the heart and the serious quests and modes of sympathy which are thus inevitable, may remain unknown to the world.

(γ) A time must, however, arrive for a soul of this type in which it becomes uniquely affected at one definite point of attachment in that inward worlds it concentrates the whole of its undivided powers in one supreme form of emotion that dominates its life-current; it adheres to this with a force that refuses to be diverted, and secures happiness therein, or goes to ground from lack of support. To retain a hold on life a man requires a constantly expanding breadth of ethical sustenance, which alone supplies an objective stability. To this type of character belong some of the most fascinating figures in romantic art, whose full perfection of beauty we shall find among the creations of Shakespeare. As an illustration we may take the Juliet in his "Romeo and Juliet." It is possible at this moment to see a reproduction of this play in this city[278]. It is well worth going to. The picture we have given us there of this character is a moving, lifelike, passionate, talented, highly finished and noble one. But for all that it is possible to entertain a somewhat different conception of the part. In other words, we may figure for ourselves a maiden in the first instance simple as a child, of only fourteen or fifteen years of age, who, it is quite clear, has as yet no self-knowledge or world wisdom, no emotional activity, no strong inclination or wishes of the heart, but has rather glanced into the motley show of the world as into some laterna magica without learning anything from it, or reflecting upon what is seen there. All in a twinkling we behold the development of the entire strength of this soul, of its artfulness[279], its circumspection, its force; it is prepared to sacrifice everything and to submit itself to the severest ordeals, so that in its entirety it now suddenly appears to be the first breaking forth of the full rose in all its petals and folds, an infinite outburst of the innermost purity which gushes from the spring source of the soul, in which it had held itself back previously as yet undiscerned, unmoulded and undeveloped; which moreover, as the now existing creation of one awakened interest, betrays itself unpremeditated in the fulness and strength of its beauty from the previous seclusion of spirit. It is a brand which one spark has kindled, a bud which at the first bare touch of love breaks unawares before us in full bloom. And yet the faster it unfolds the more rapidly it also sinks, and its petals fall from it. An impetuous progress is still more conspicuous in the case of Miranda. Brought up in seclusion we have her portrayed for us by Shakespeare at the critical moment when she first makes the acquaintance of manhood[280]. He depicts her in a few scenes, but in those we get a picture that is complete and unforgettable. We may also include Schiller's Thecla under the same type, despite the fact that it is rather the creation of a reflective kind of poetry[281]. Though placed in the midst of a life of such amplitude and richness she remains unaffected by it; she remains within it without vanity, without reflection, purely absorbed by the one interest which alone dominates her soul. And as a general rule it is chiefly the beautiful and noble natures of women, in which the world and their own heart-life blossoms for the first time in love, so that it is as though their spiritual birth here takes its rise.

Under the same type of spiritual intensity, which is unable fully to unfold itself, we may for the most part classify those folksongs, more particularly our German ones, which, in the copious compactness of the soul-life therein reflected, and however much such is displayed to us as carried away by any one absorbing interest, are yet unable to express the same except in broken flashes, and thereby fully reveal just this very depth. It is a mode of artistic presentment, which in its reserve is apt to fall back on the effects of symbolism. What it offers us is not so much the open, transparent display of the entire inward life as it is purely a sign and indication of that life. But we do not get, however, from it a symbol, the significance of which, as was the case previously, remains a general abstraction, but an expression the inward content of which is nothing more nor less than this personal, living, and actual soul. In times like our own, dominated by a critical reflectiveness, which lies so far removed from a self-absorbed naïveté of this kind, such presentations are of the greatest difficulty, and if successful, are a sure proof of an original creative genius. We have already seen that Goethe, more particularly in his lyrics, has shown himself a master in this respect, namely, that he can depict and unfold to us in a symbolical way, in other words with a few simple, apparently external and insignificant traits, the entire truth and infinite wealth of a soul. His poem, "The King of Thule," one of his most lovely bits of poetical work, is of this class. The king here makes us aware of his love by just one thing only, namely, the drinking cup which the old man preserved as a gift of his beloved. The old carouser stands up there on the point of death in his lofty palace hall; his knights, his kingdom, his possessions are around him; and he bequeaths them all to his heir, but the goblet he flings into the waves; no one shall have that.

Er sah ihn stürzen, trinken, Und sinken tief in's Meer, Die Augen thäten ihm sinken, Trank nie ein Tropfen mehr[282].

A soul, however profound and still of this kind, which retains its energy of spirit pent up like the spark in the flint, unopened to form, which does not elaborate its existence and reflection beyond its own boundaries, has also failed to free itself by such expansion. It remains exposed to the remorseless contradiction that, if the false note of unhappiness ring through its life, it possesses no remedial aptitude, no bridge as a way of passage between the heart and reality; it is equally unable to ward off external conditions from itself, and by so doing to preserve an independent ground of vantage in its own self-reliance. When the collision comes therefore it is helpless; it acts hastily and without circumspection, or bows passively to the movement of events. So, for example, we have in Hamlet a beautiful and noble soul; one not so much spiritually weak, but one that wanders astray without a strong grasp of life's realities, moving in an atmosphere of dejection, a sombre and half articulate melancholy. Gifted with a finely intuitive sense he feels that all is not well with him, that things are not as they should be though he has no external sign, no single ground for suspicion; nevertheless he surmises the atrocious deed that has been perpetrated. The ghost of his father gives yet closer embodiment to his feelings. He is at once ready in spirit to revenge, his sense of duty is always before him reflecting the innermost craving of his heart, but he is not carried away with the flood, as Macbeth; he cannot either kill, rage, or strike with the directness of a Laertes; he persists in the inactivity of a beautiful, introspective soul, which can neither realize its aims nor make itself at home in the conditions of actual life. He dallies, seeks for more positive certainty buoyed up by the fair integrity of his soul; he can, however, come to no firm decision, much as he has sought it, and permits himself to follow the course of external events. In this atmosphere of unreality he goes yet further astray in matters that lie directly in his path; he kills the old Polonius instead of the king; he acts in a hurry where he should have been more circumspect, yet persists in his self absorption, where decided action is essential; until at length, without any action on his part, the fated dénouement of the entire drama, including that of his own persistently self-retiring personality, has unravelled itself on the broad highway of Life's external incidents and accidents.

We are particularly presented with this attitude in modern times among men of the lower levels of life, who are without an education which extends to aims of universal significance, or are devoid of the variety of objective interests. Consequently when some particular aim of their life fails they are unable to secure any further stay of their spiritual forces and a centre of control for their activities. This lack of education tends to make reserved natures, in proportion as it is undeveloped, adhere with the more rigidness and obstinacy to that which, through its appeal to their entire individuality, makes a claim upon them however limited in its range it may be. We find pre-eminently such a monotonous attitude incidental to this class of self-absorbed and speechless men among German characters, who for this reason appear in their seclusion inclined to stubbornness, ready to bristle up, crabbed, inaccessible, and in their dealings and expressions wholly unreliable and contradictory. As a master in the delineation and exposition of such obtuse characters of the poorer classes we will mention but one example, Hippel, the author of "Life's Careers in the Line of Ascent,"[283] one of our few German works stamped with original humour. He keeps himself wholly removed from Jean Paul's sentimentality and want of taste in plot construction, and possesses moreover an astonishing individuality, freshness, and vitality. He understands, in quite an exceptional way, and one that seizes on our interest at once, how to depict the thickset type of people who are unable to breathe freely and who consequently, when they do give themselves the rein, do so with a violence that is simply fearful. They put an end of their own accord to the infinite contradiction of their spiritual life and the unhappy circumstances in which they are involved in an appalling manner; and bring about by such means that which is otherwise the result of an external fate, as we find, for instance, in "Romeo and Juliet," where external accidents mar all the wise and able offices of the holy father's intervention and cause the death of the lovers.

(c) We find, then, that characters of this formal quality generally either expose merely the infinite volitional force of the individual's personality, which asserts itself frankly just as it is and storms ahead in the bare impulse of the will; or, to take the further aspect, present to us an essential self-contained[284], if not wholly articulate soul, which, affected as it becomes by one specific aspect of its spiritual experience, concentrates the entire breadth and depth of its personality on this point, yet, owing to the fact of its possessing no development externally, is unable to find its proper place or to act with practical sense when it comes into collision with that world. We have yet a third point[285] to mention, which consists in this, that when characters of this type, wholly one-sided and restricted as they are in respect to their aims if at the same time fully developed in mental power, awake in us not merely a formal, but also a substantial interest, we cannot fail to receive the impression that this limitation of their personal life is itself only a condition that is inevitable; in other words it is a result which grows out of the particular way in which their character is defined along with the profounder content of their personal life. Shakespeare in fact enables us to see this depth and wealth in such characters. He presents them to us as men of imaginative power and genius by showing how their reflective faculty commands them and lifts them above that which their condition and definite purpose would make them, so that they are all the while as it were forced by the misfortune of circumstances and the obstacles of their position into doing that which they accomplish. At the same time we do not mean this to the extent of asserting, for example, that the bad witches were to blame for all that Macbeth dared after consulting them. These witches are rather to be looked at as the reflex of his own obstinate will. All that the characters of Shakespeare execute, that is the particular purpose they propose, originates and finds the taproot of its force in their own personality. But along with this they maintain in one and the same individuality a loftiness, which brushes aside that which they actually are, so far as their aims, interests, and actions are concerned, and which amplifies them and exalts them above themselves. In like manner Shakespeare's more vulgar characters, such as Stephano, Trinculo, Pistol, and that hero among them all, Falstaff, though saturated with their own debasement, assert themselves as fellows of intelligence, whose genial quality is able to take in everything, to possess a large and open atmosphere of its own, and in short makes them all that great men are. In the tragedies of the French on the contrary even the greatest and most worthy characters only too frequently, if viewed critically, assert themselves as so many evil offshoots of the brute creation, whose only intelligence consists in this that it can furnish dialectical arguments in its vindication. In Shakespeare we find neither vindication nor damnation, but merely a review of the general condition of destiny, which inevitably places such characters uncomplaining and unrepentant where they are, and from the starting-point of which they see everything, themselves included; and yet as independent spectators of themselves decline and fall.

In all these respects the realm which is peopled by such individual characters is an infinitely rich one, a kingdom, however, which very easily collapses in hollowness and dulness, so that only quite a few masters have received the gifts of poetical and intuitional power sufficient to enable them to reveal its truth.

2. THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE

Now that we have examined the aspect of the inward soul-life, which may, at this stage of our inquiry, be presented by art, we must direct our attention to that which lies without it, to the particularity of circumstances and situations which affect character, also to the collisions in which its development proceeds, and finally review the entire collective form, which this inward life assumes within the boundaries of concrete reality.

It is, as we have more than once pointed out, a fundamental determinant of romantic art, that the spiritual sense, in other words, the soul in its aspect of self-reflection, should constitute a whole, and relates itself for this reason to the external world, not, in its own reality, inter-penetrated by this world, but as though related to something purely external and separated from it, which goes on its way independently disjoined from Spirit, is thus evolved, and thus disposes of itself as a finite and continuously fluid, changing, and complicate object of contingent causality[286]. To the self-absorbed soul it is as wholly a matter of indifference what particular circumstances it confronts, as it is an affair of chance what those circumstances are which appear before it. For in its action it is less a matter of importance that it should carry out a work whose essential basis is rooted in itself and owes its subsistency to its own character than that it should generally make itself effective in action.

(a) We have, in short, before us here a process which we may from one point of view describe as the rejection of the Divine from Nature. Spirit has here withdrawn itself from the externality of phenomena, which, for the reason that the inward life no longer sees itself reflected in this sphere[287], is now independently clothed on its part under a relation of indifference exterior to the subject of consciousness. Relatively to its truth Spirit is, no doubt, in its own medium mediated and reconciled with the Absolute: but in so far as we now take up our position on the ground of self-subsistent individuality, which proceeds from itself as it discovers itself in its immediacy, this divesting of the Divine[288] affects character in its active capacity. It moves forward, that is to say, with its own contingent aims into a world equally subject to chance, with which it fails to unite itself in an essentially harmonious whole. This relative character of purpose in an environment which is relative, whose determination and development does not subsist in the individual mind, but is defined externally and contingently and is responsible for collisions equally adventitious, which appear as offshoots that are unexpectedly interwoven with it, creates that to which we give the name of "the adventurous," which supplies the fundamental type of romance for the mode of its events and actions.

It is necessary that the action and dramatic event in so far as they apply strictly to the Ideal and classic art, should be referable to an essentially true or, in other words, independently explicit and necessary end, in whose conformation that which is also the determinating factor for the external form, for the particular type and mode of execution, is an object of real existence. In the case of the acts and events of romantic art this is not the case. For, although essentially universal and substantive ends are also presented in their manner of realization by this type, the definition of the action which is referable to such ends, and the principle of co-ordination and articulation which appears in its progress on its spiritual side[289] is not the direct result of those ends themselves; this aspect of realization is inevitably left independent and subject to the operation of contingency.

(α) The romantic world had one and only one absolute work to accomplish, namely, the extension of Christendom, and the bringing into manifest performance the spirit of the community[290]. Situated in the midst of a hostile world consisting in part of the unbelieving ancient régime, and in part of a human life which was barbarous and coarse, the character of its actual accomplishment, in so far as it passed from mere theory to deeds, was, in the main, the passive endurance of pain and torture, the sacrifice of its own temporal existence for the eternal salvation of the soul. A further product of its energies, which is equally a portion of the same essential content, is, in the Middle Ages, that carried out by Christian Chivalry, the driving forth of the Moors, Arabs, and Mohammedans generally from Christian countries, and, above all, along with it, the conquest of the Holy Sepulchre in the Crusades. This, however, was not an object which affected man simply as human[291], but one which a mere collection of isolated individuals had to accomplish under conditions in which the individuals which composed it streamed together at their own free will and pleasure as such. From such a point of view we may call the Crusades the collective adventure of the Christian Middle Ages; an adventure, which was essentially subject to lapses[292], and fantastical, of a spiritual tendency, and yet devoid of a truly spiritual aim, and in its relation to action and character delusive. For in its relation to the processes of religion, the supreme object of the Crusades is in the highest degree empty and external. Christianity purported to secure its salvation solely in Spirit, in Christ, who is raised to the right hand of God; it finds its living reality and stay in Spirit, not in the grave of Spirit, or in the sensuous, immediately present localities of its former temporal abiding-place. The impulse and religious yearning of the Middle Ages, however, was centred on the spot, the external locality of the Passion and the Holy Sepulchre. In just the same direct contradiction with the religious object we find that wholly worldly one which was bound up with conquest; a possession, which in its relation to the secular world, carried a totally different character to that of a truly religious purpose. Men would fain win for themselves what was spiritual and health to their souls, and they set before them as an aim a purely material locality, from which Spirit had vanished; they strained after a gain that was temporal, and united this which was of the world to the pure substance of religion. It is this distraction which gives us the discordant and fantastic note in such enterprises in which we find that which is of the world confound the life of soul, or the latter prove the confounding of the former instead of a harmony which is the result of both. And for the same reason much that is contradictory appears in the execution unresolved. Piety is carried to the point of rawness and barbarous cruelty. And this rawness permits every kind of selfishness and passion to break forth, or casts itself conversely once more upon the eternal depths which either move or bruise the human spirit, and which are, in truth, the heart and substance of the matter. In the medley of elements so discrepant, there is also an absence of all unity in the object proposed by the exploits and events themselves, or in the consequential power of authority. The host of men is diverted and split up in single adventures, victories, defeats, and a variety of accidents; and the outcome of it all fails to correspond to the means and enormous preparations which were involved. Nay, the object itself is stultified in the execution. For the Crusades would once again bring truth to the sentence: "Thou couldst not leave him in peace in the grave, thou didst not suffer thy holy one to see corruption." But it is precisely this longing to find Christ and spiritual content in such places and spaces, even the grave itself, the place of death, which is itself, whatever essential worth even a Chateaubriand may make out of it, a corruption of Spirit, out of which Christianity must rise in resurrection in order to return once more to the fresh and abundant life of the concrete world.

An object of much the same kind, mystical from one point of view, equally fantastical from another, and adventurous in its undertaking, is the search of the Holy Grail.

(β) A more exalted emprise is that which every man has to go through in his own domain, his life, in the course of which he determines his eternal destiny. It is this object which Dante has, consistently with the catholic standpoint, seized upon in his "Divine Comedy" as he conducts us in turn through hell, purgatory, and paradise. In this poem, too, despite the strenuous co-ordination of the whole, we have abundant evidence of conceptions which are fantastic[293], aspects that are suffused with the spirit of adventure, in so far, at any rate, as this work in its blessing and cursing is not carried through merely in the explicit form of universal statement, but as referable to an almost innumerable company of distinct personalities, not to mention the fact that the poet takes upon himself the fiat of his church, seizes the keys of heaven in his hand, adjudicates both bliss and damnation, and so constitutes himself the judge of the v world, who places the best known individuals both of the ancient and Christian eras, whether poets, citizens, cardinals, or popes, respectively in hell, purgatory, or paradise.

(γ) The remaining material, on the basis of the worldly life, which leads up to action and event, consists in the infinitely manifold and venturesome experiments of imaginative idea, all that element of chance in what arises either without or within the soul from love, honour, and fidelity. At one time we may see men thus affected box the compass for their own reputation's sake, at another leap to help persecuted innocence, carry out amazing exploits in defence of the honour of their lady, or vindicate some right that is invaded with the strength of their own arm, and the able use of their own weapons; and this albeit the innocence which is delivered prove only a company of knaves. In the majority of such cases there is absolutely no condition, no situation, no conflict before us in virtue of which we can assert that action follows as a necessary result. The soul simply wills it and intentionally looks out for adventure. The exploits of love, for instance, in such cases have for the most part, if we look at their more specific content, no other real principle of determination beyond the effort to give proof of the steadfastness, fidelity, and constancy of love, to testify that all the surrounding world, together with the entire complexus of its relations, is merely of value as so much material in which love may be brought to light. For this reason the specific act of such manifestation, since the only thing that matters is the proof, is not determined by its own course, but is left dependent on a freak of chance, the mood of the lady, the caprice of external accidents. The same principle holds where the objects are honour or bravery. They are proper to an individual who holds himself far aloof from all further content of a more substantive character, who is perfectly able to enter into any and every content as it may chance to occur, to find himself the object of insult therein, or to look for an opportunity in which he may display his courage and shrewdness. As we have here absolutely no criterion as to what should or what should not form part of this content, in the same way also we have no principle in accordance with which we can fix what in each case is really an attack upon honour or the true subject-matter of bravery. It is just the same with the treatment of right, which is likewise an object of chivalry. In other words, right and law are here not as yet asserted as a condition and object which is of essentially independent stability, or as a system which is continuously made more perfect in accordance with law and its necessary content, but as themselves purely the product of individual caprice, so that their interposition, no less than the judgment passed upon that which in every particular case is held to be right or wrong, is throughout relegated to the entirely haphazard criteria of individual judgment.

(b) What we have before us generally, more particularly on the secular field, in chivalry and the formalism of character above indicated, is not merely, to a more or less degree, the contingency of the circumstantial conditions of human action, but also that of the soul in its attitude of volition. For individuals of this one-sided characterization are capable of accepting as the substance of their life that which is wholly contingent, conduct that is only sustained by virtue of the energy of their character, and is carried out, or fails in its contact with the inevitable collisions which the condition of the world opposes to it. The same thing is true of the chivalry which receives in honour, love, and fidelity a more lofty ground of justification, and one entitled to rank with a truly ethical basis. On the one hand, it is still emphatically a matter of chance on account of the particular aspect of the circumstances on which it reacts; we find that here the object is to carry out aims peculiar to some particular person, instead of some work of general significance, and the modes of its attachment with the rest of life fail to possess independent stability. On the other hand, precisely at the point where we consider such action as part of the personal life of individuals, we are aware of the presence of caprice and illusion in respect to all that it either projects, originates, or undertakes. The net result of such a spirit of enterprise consequently, through all that it performs or enters upon, no less than in its ultimate effects, is no other than a world of events and fatalities which is self-dissolvent, a world of comedy for this very reason.

This self-dissolution of Chivalry we find set before us and artistically reproduced, pre-eminently and with unsurpassed adequacy, by Ariosto and Cervantes, and, so far as it affects the fate of such highly individual characters as those above described in their isolation, by Shakespeare.

(α) In Ariosto, more particularly, an attempt is made to delight the reader with the infinitely varied developments of personal destiny and aims, the fabulous complexity of fantastic relations and ludicrous situations over which the adventurous fancy of the poet plays to the point of absolute frivolity. The heroes of these dramas are seriously engaged in what is often unadulterated folly and the wildest eccentricity. And, to note especial points, love is frequently degraded from the Divine love of a Dante, or the romantic tenderness of a Petrarca, to sensual tales and ludicrous collisions; or heroism appears to be screwed up to a pitch that is so incredible it ceases to amaze, and merely excites a smile over the fabulousness of such exploits. By virtue, however, of this indifference in respect to the particular manner in which dramatic situations are brought about, astonishing complications and conflicts are introduced, broken off and once more interwoven, chopped about, and finally resolved in a surprising way; yet, despite his ludicrous treatment of chivalry, Ariosto is as able to secure and display to us the true nobility and greatness which we may find in chivalry, or the exhibition of courage, love, honour, and bravery, as he can on occasion excellently depict other passions, cunning, subtlety, presence of mind, and much else.

(β) Just as Ariosto inclines more to the fabulous element in this spirit of adventure, Cervantes develops that aspect of it which is appropriate to romantic fiction. We find in his Don Quixote a noble nature in whose adventures chivalry goes mad, the substance of such adventures being placed as the centre of a stable and well-defined state of things whose external character is copied with exactness from nature. This produces the humorous contradiction of a rationally constituted world on the one hand, and an isolated soul on the other, which seeks to create the same order and stability entirely through his own exertions and the knight-errantry which could only destroy it. Despite, however, this ludicrous confusion we have still in Don Quixote that which we have already eulogized in Shakespeare. Cervantes has created in his hero an original figure of noble nature endowed with varied spiritual qualities, and one which at the same time throughout retains our full interest. In all the madness of his mind and his enterprise he is a completely consistent[294] soul, or rather his madness lies in this, that he is and remains securely rooted in himself and his enterprise. Without this unreflecting equanimity respectively to the content and result of his actions he would fail to be a truly romantic figure; and this self-assuredness, if we look at the substantive character of his opinions, is throughout great and indicative of his genius, adorned as it is with the finest traits of character. And, further, the entire work is a satire upon the chivalry of romance, ironical from beginning to end in the truest sense. In Ariosto this genius of adventure is merely the butt of frivolous jest. From another point of view, however, the exploits of Don Quixote are merely the central thread around which a succession of genuinely romantic tales are intertwined in the most charming way, in order to unfold the true worth of that which the romance in other respects scatters to the winds with the genius of comedy.

(γ) In somewhat the same way as we thus have seen chivalry, even in respect to its most momentous interests, overturned in comedy, Shakespeare, too, either places the characters and scenes of comedy in juxtaposition to his downright and stable individualities, and tragic situations and conflicts, or exalts the essential figures of his drama through a profound humour above themselves and their uncouth, limited, and false purposes. Falstaff, the fool in "Lear," the musician scene in "Romeo and Juliet," will sufficiently illustrate the first alternative, and Richard III the second.

(c) The dissolution of romance, in the sense we have hitherto regarded it, introduces us finally and in the third place to the spirit of the novel[295], in our modern sense of the term, which historically the knight-errantry and pastoral romances precede. This spirit of modern fiction is, in fact, that of chivalry, once more taken seriously and receiving a true content. The contingent character of external existence has changed to a stable, secure order of civic society and state-life, so that now police administration, tribunals of justice, the army and political government generally take the place of those chimerical objects which the knight of chivalry proposed to himself. For this reason the knightly character of the heroes who play their parts in our modern novels is altered. Confronted by the existing order and the ordinary prose of life they appear before us as individuals with personal aims of love, honour, ambition, and ideals of world reform, ideals in the path of which that order presents obstacles on every side. The result is that personal desires and demands unroll themselves[296] before this opposition to unfathomable heights. Every man finds himself face to face with an enchanted world that is by no means all that he asks for, which he must contend with for the reason that it contends with himself, and in its tenacious stability refuses to give way before his passions, but interposes as an obstacle the will of some one else whoever it may be, his father's, his aunt's, or social conditions generally. For the most part such a knighthood will consist of young people, who feel it incumbent upon them to hew their way through a world which makes for its own realization rather than that of their ideals, and who hold it a misfortune that there should be family ties, civic society, state laws, professions, and all the rest of such things at all, because conditions of such solidity and so inevitably restricted are so cruelly opposed to their ideal dreams and the infinite claims of their souls. The main object now is to drive a breach through this wall of facts, to change, to improve, or at least carve for themselves in despite of it some little heaven on earth such as they seek for, their ideal maiden, discover her, win her from the clutches of her wicked relations or her evil circumstances, carry her off and lay the balm of love on her wounds. Conflicts of this kind, however, in our modern world are the apprentice years, the education of individuality in the actual world; they have no further significance, but the significance has, nevertheless, a real value. The object and consummation of such apprenticeship consists in this, that the individual drops his horns and finds his own place, together with his wishes and opinions in social conditions as they are and the rational order which belongs to them, that he enters, in short, upon the varied field of life, and secures that position within it which is appropriate to his powers. However soundly he may have rated the world and have been shoved on one side, the day comes at last with the most of us when the maiden is discovered and some kind of place in the world, he marries, and is as much a Philistine as the rest of his neighbours. His wife takes charge of his domestic arrangements; children do not fail to put in an appearance; the adorable wife who was so unique, an angel, acts very much as other wives do; the profession supplies its toils and vexations, the married tie its domestic sorrows, and, in short, we have the entire process of marital caterwauling once more illustrated. In this history we may see the same old type of the adventurous spirit with this distinction, that here that spirit discovers its real significance, and all that is wholly fantastic in it receives its necessary correction.

3. THE DISSOLUTION OF THE ROMANTIC TYPE OF ART

The last point which we have to establish still more closely is that relatively to which the romantic spirit, for the reason that it already is intrinsically the principle of the dissolution of the classic Ideal, manifests, in fact, this dissolution clearly as such a process. In this connection it is of the first importance to consider the ultimately complete contingent and external character of the material, which the activity of the artist seizes on and informs. In the plastic material of the plastic arts the spiritual conception is so related to the external medium that this external show is the embodiment which uniquely belongs to that spiritual significance itself, and possesses no real independence apart from it. In romantic art, on the contrary, in which we find the inwardness of Spirit withdraws within its own domain, the entire content of the external world secures the freedom of unfettered independence and the assured subsistency of its own peculiar character and particularity. Conversely, as we have seen, if the personal life of soul forms the essential feature in the artistic product, it is a question of similar indifference with what specific content of external reality and the spiritual world the soul is vitally connected. The romantic Idea can therefore assert itself through every sort of condition; can embrace every conceivable position, circumstance, relation, aberration, confusion, conflict, and means of satisfaction; it is simply its own personal and self-subsistent mode of conformation, the expression and receptive form of the soul rather than any objective independently valid form which is the object of search and is made good. In the representation of romantic art therefore everything has its due place, all the departments and phenomena of life, the greatest and the least, the highest and most insignificant, what is moral with that which is immoral and evil. And we may further note in particular that the more secular the art becomes, the more it amasses the finite wealth of the world, the more it takes to it with, delight, bestows upon it a validity that is without reserve and exists for the artist in such a world under the sole condition that it is reproduced in its naked reality, so much the more is art at home with itself. Thus we may observe in Shakespeare, on account of the fact that with him the action as a rule runs its course in the most realistic association with objective life, and is isolated and broken up in a mass of purely accidental relations, and conditions of every kind, the least important and most incidental no less than the most sovereign flights and most weighty interests of poetry are each and all substantiated. So in "Hamlet" we have the sentry on watch no less than the royal court; in "Romeo and Juliet" the domestic ménage; in other pieces, not to mention clowns, swashbucklers, and all the vulgarities of ordinary life, we have pot-houses, carriers, chamber-pots and fleas, much as in the representations by romantic art of the birth of Christ and the adoration of the kings we do not fail to find oxen and asses, mangers and straw[297]. And this is the kind of thing throughout, that the scriptural text may receive its fulfilment, too, in art, "they that are of low estate shall be exalted." It is from out this contingent sphere of its subject-matter, which in a measure asserts itself as merely the environment of a content intrinsically more important and in part also in absolute independence, that the downfall of romantic art issues, to which we have already above adverted. In other words we have, on the one hand, objective reality placed before us in what is from the point of view of the Ideal its prosaic objectivity, that is, the content of everyday life, which is not grasped in the substantive form in which it adumbrates what is both moral and divine, but rather in that which is for ever changing and which as temporal passes away. And, in the further aspect of it, it is also the subjective condition, which, with its emotion and insight, with the principle and authority of its wit or humour, is able to exalt itself in mastery over the entire world of the real, a mastery which leaves nothing in the ordinary connections and significance where the commonsense consciousness finds it, and is not fully satisfied until it has proved that everything which is a part of that world is, by virtue of the form and relative position which it receives from the view of it, mood and supreme gifts of the artist[298], itself intrinsically capable of being broken up, and, as such, is for the artistic vision and feeling dissolved. We have now, in this connection, first, to add a few words on the principle contained in those very varied works of art whose level of representation approximates closely to the ordinary appearance of objective or external reality, what in common parlance is called the imitation of Nature.

Secondly, we shall have to discuss humour as a personal quality in the artist. It plays a very considerable part in modern art, and is that which in the case of many poets distinctively supplies the fundamental character of their work.

Thirdly, it remains for us to offer a few suggestions, in conclusion, on the point of view from which it is still possible for the art of to-day to find a field for its activities.

(a) The Artistic Imitation of what is Immediately presented by Nature

The realm of subjects which may be included in this sphere v of artistic activity may be extended indefinitely for the reason that Art takes for its content here not that which is by its own inherent law necessary[299], the range of which is essentially self-contained, but the contingent phenomena of reality in their unlimited modifications of form and relation, Nature and her kaleidoscopic play of separate pictures, the everyday action and affairs of man in his dependence on natural conditions and their means of his satisfaction, in his accidental habits also, attitudes, activities of family life, his business as a citizen, and, generally, the incalculable variety of all that shifts and changes in the world around us. And for this reason this art is not merely, in the broad sense that applies more or less to the romantic spirit in all its manifestations, a type of portraiture: rather it tends to lose itself completely in the mode of its portrayal, whether it be in sculpture, painting, or in the descriptions of poetry. The tendency is to return to the exact imitation of Nature, in other words, to the intentional approach to the contingent aspects of what is immediately before the vision and independently thus presented, prosaic existence in all its ugliness no less than its beauty. The question, therefore, at once suggests itself whether productions of this character have any right to be called art at all. No doubt, if we simply fix before our attention the notion of artistic work which fully corresponds to the Ideal, work which from one point of view it is of the first importance that their content shall not be thus intrinsically accidental or evanescent, and from another point of view that their mode of presentation must be adequate in all respects to such a content, then such artistic productions as we are now considering will unquestionably appear to fall short. On the other hand, there is another fundamental aspect of art which assumes here an exceptional importance. This is the conception and execution of a work of art which are personal to the artist, the aspect, that is, of an individual talent, which is able to remain true to the inherently substantive life of Nature no less than the embodiments of spiritual experience though carried to the very limits of contingent condition with which they may be involved, and which is further competent through the vividness of its truth to import a significance into that which is by itself insignificant, no less than by the amazing ability of the technical execution itself. We have consequently to consider here the degree in which the soul, that is, the genius and vitality of the artist, is able to enter into the very being of such objects—whether we consider their dominant idea[300], or the purely external form of their appearance—and thus makes them visible in his art to our eyes. And if we look at it from this point of view it will be found impossible to deny that such creations have a genuine claim to the name of art-products.

If we approach such more closely we shall find that among the particular arts poetry and painting are the ones which are most occupied with their subject-matter. For, on the one hand, we see here that it is that which is itself essentially particular which supplies their content, and on the other hand it is the accidental though in this type of art the genuine peculiarities of the objective appearance which is sought for as the mode of the reproduction. Neither the arts of architecture, sculpture, or music are adapted to the fulfilment of such a task.

(α) In poetry it is ordinary domestic life—the main source, that is, of the probity, commonsense spirit, and the morality of everyday[301] life—which is presented by art in the usual developments of civic life, in scenes and characters selected from the middle and lower classes. Among the French Diderot stands out conspicuous for the way in which he has thus insisted on natural effects and the imitation of the bluntness of fact. Among Germans it was Goethe and Schiller who, with more lofty aim, struck out a path somewhat similar in their youth, but rather, within this naturalness of life itself and its particular detail, sought after a profounder content and conflicts of essential significance. And in contrast to them we have Kotzebue and Iffland, both of whom, in their several ways, the first with a superficial rapidity of conception and execution, the second with a more conscientious accuracy of detail and a homely kind of morality, gave us the counterfeit of the daily life of their time in the prosaic picture of its more limited aspects, with but a limited sense, either of them, for genuine poetry. And generally, we may say, that it is German art more than any other, and particularly that of our own times, which has fastened with delight on this kind of treatment till it has reached a sort of. virtuosity in it. In fact for a long period back Art was more or less something of a stranger and a guest in our country, not the child of our own loins.

Further, we may observe that in this attraction to the reality that lies actually before us it is essential that the material assimilated by such an art be cognate with such reality and at home in it[302]; it must be the national life of the poet and his immediate public. It is on this very point of the kind of appropriation suited to an art such as our own, which carried the purpose both in its content and its methods of representation of making us feel at home in it, even to the extent of sacrificing both beauty and ideality, that the impulse originated which led to such a type of artistic production. Other nations have been inclined to reject such material with scorn, or only in more recent times have taken a more vital interest in such opportunities as the ordinary course of human life offers.

(β) If we desire, however, to see what is most worthy of our admiration in such productions, we must turn our attention to the later genre-painting of the Dutch. We have already in the first part of this work, when examining the intrinsic character of the Ideal, indicated, so far as the general spirit of it is concerned, what we take to be the substantial basis of such work[303]. That contentment in life under its presentment of direct experience down to the most ordinary and most insignificant detail is mainly due to the fact that this people was obliged to work out for itself only after severe struggles and hard labour that which Nature supplies with far less reserve to other peoples. Further, circumscribed as it is by local conditions, it has become great in this very concern for and appreciation of the least things. From another point of view it is a people of fishermen, sailors, citizens, and peasants, and for this reason is forced from the start to rate highly all that may be useful and necessary both in matters of greatest and least importance which it knows how to secure with the most assiduous industry. As a further essential feature of its development the religion of this Dutch folk was Protestantism, and it is an exclusive characteristic of this form of religion that it seeks to find a home in the prose of life and suffers the same to remain just as it is by itself, and independently of religious associations, and to retain its forms of growth in unrestricted freedom. It would be quite impossible for any other nation, situated in other external conditions, to create works of art of such pre-eminent quality from the kind of material which we have placed before us in the Dutch school of painting. And, moreover, despite the peculiar nature of this artistic interest, the Dutch have not by any means discovered their whole life-in what was necessitous or barren in the conditions of their existence and what tended to oppress their vitality: on the contrary, they have reformed their church itself, have overcome a religious despotism precisely as they overcame the world-power and majesty of Spain, and have finally through their exertions, their industry, their bravery and thrift secured for themselves, in the consciousness of their self-attained liberty, prosperity, comfort, rectitude, courage, joviality, nay, even a superabundant sense of the joys of ordinary existence. Herein lies the vindication of the typical subject-matter of their art. The material of such an art will not, however, satisfy that profounder significance which is due to a content that is essentially true. If, however, neither our emotional nor our critical faculties are wholly content with it the more we consider it closely the more we shall feel reconciled to such defects. It is an essential part of the art of painting and the man who paints that they should please and carry us away with that sense of pleasure. And, to put it bluntly, if we would really know what painting is, in looking at any particular canvas we must be, at least, able to say of the master in question: "Ah, this man can paint." The main point, therefore, does not turn on the question how far the artist in his work is able to give us an exact transcription of the object he presents before us. We have already the completest vision of grapes, flowers, stags, sand-hills, sea, sun, sky, the finery and decoration of ordinary life, horses, warriors, peasants, smokers, teeth-extraction, and every kind of domestic scene. We have only to go to Nature for such things and others like them. What ought to captivate us is not the content in its bare reality. Rather it is the appearance, which in comparison with the object is wholly without interest[304]. This appearance is, moreover, by itself fixed independently of the beautiful[305], and art consists in the mastery of its reproduction of all the mysteries of the ever self-deepening appearance of external phenomena[306]. And, above all, the function of art consists in this that, armed with an exceptionally fine sense for such things, it lies in ambush for the momentary and wholly transient traits which it finds upon the surrounding world observed in its individual aspects of life, aspects which, however, completely coincide with the universal laws that dominate the appearance, and can retain true and secure the most fading apparition. A tree, a landscape, is something of independent and permanent stability. But to seize upon the flash of a metal, the gleam of light through the grape, a vanishing glance of the moon or the sun, a smile, the expressions of spiritual life which are no sooner seen than they vanish, or ludicrous movements, situations, and attitudes, to master such evanescent material as this is the difficult task of this type of work. If classic art in its Ideal has essentially confined its embodiment to that which is purely substantive so here we have opened to our vision the changes of Nature in their fleeting forms of expression, a stream of water, a waterfall, waves of foam on the sea, still life with the accidental flashes of glass, plate, and things of like nature, the outward appearance of man in the most exceptional situations, a wife, for instance, threading her needle by candle-light, a halt of robbers suddenly surprised, the most instantaneous fraction of some human posture, the smile or sneer of a peasant, all the things, in fact, in which men like Ostade, Teniers, or Steen are masters. It is the triumph of art over the Past, in which the substantive is likewise filched of its power over that which is accidental and transitory.

And just as the appearance simply as such reflects the real content of objects, so we may say that Art, in giving a permanent form to the evanescent show of things, goes a step further. In other words, quite apart from the objective realization, the means adopted in the reproduction are themselves independently an end, in the sense that the individual ability of the artist, and his use of the means his art supplies, may itself rank as one of the objects aimed at by the art product. In quite the early days of the school the artists of the Netherlands studied profoundly the qualities of colour in its relation to material substances[307]. Van Eyck, Hemling, and Schoreel[308] were all of them capable of imitating in the most realistic way the sheen of gold and silver, the varied light effects of jewels, silk, velvet, and fur-stuffs. A mastery of this kind which, by the magic of colour and the mysteries of its enchantment, is able to bring about artistic results so entirely surprising requires no further vindication; it justifies itself. As Spirit in thought and in its grasp of the world by means of ideas and thoughts reproduces itself, so what is most important here is the individual recreation of the external world, independently of the bare object itself, in the sensuous medium, of colours under effects of light and shade. It is in fact a kind of objective music, a system of colour tones. In music the single tone is of no value and only produces the musical effect in its relation to some other, in its opposition, concord, modulation, and unison. It is precisely the same thing with the music of colour. If we consider the appearance of painted colour closely such as the gleam of gold or the flash from the steel of battle we shall only see a number of white or yellow dashes, points, coloured surfaces. The single colour alone does not possess this gleam which we gather from the picture. It is only by its association with other tints that we get the effect of glitter and flash. Take for example the Atlas of Terburg; every individual strip of colour here alone is simply a dull gray, more or less whitish, bluish, or inclining to yellow: only when we take in the entire effect from a distance, which gives us the relative contrast of each part to the rest, dawns upon us the beautiful soft sheen which is true of the genuine Atlas. And it is just the same with our velvet effect, play of light, exhalation of cloud and so on through all pictorial effect whatsoever. It is not so much the reflex of the artist's mood[309], which, as is no doubt frequently the case with landscape, transfers itself to the objects delineated, as it is the entire ability of the artist, which seeks to make itself felt in this objective way as the use of the means at his disposal in such a vital interaction that they themselves straightway of their own cunning bring to birth a world of objects.

(γ) And consequently the interest in the objects delineated tends to revert to the fact that it is the unique powers of the artist himself which are thus consciously displayed, and for which the embodiment of a work of art, independently complete and self-composed, is not of so much importance as a production in which the creative artist unveils to us simply his genius. In so far as this personal aspect is no longer concerned with the external means of presentation but affects the content itself of the work, the art becomes thereby the art of caprice and humour.

(b) The Humour of Personality[310]

In humour it is the personality of the artist, which so reproduces itself both in its particular idiosyncrasies and profounder content, that the main thing of importance is the spiritual value of this personality.

(α) Inasmuch as humour does not so much propose to itself the task of unfolding and informing an objective content according to its own essential character, and, by artistic means, of articulating and rounding it off in such a self-evolved process, as it consists in the artist's own self-manifestation in the material, he will be mainly concerned to let everything which tends to become an object and to secure the rigid lines of reality, or which appears in the external world, fall away and dissolve under the powerful solvent of his own fancies, flashes of thought and arresting modes of conception. By this means every appearance of self-subsistency in such a content, the embodiment of which is secured in its coalescence through means of a given fact, is entirely destroyed, and the product is now simply a play with certain objects, a derangement or a turning upside down of a given material, the enterprise of a rover throughout such, the interwoven woof of the artist's own expression; views and moods, through which he gives free scope to himself quite as much as to his immediate subject-matter.

(β) The illusion which readily springs from such a type of art consists in this, that though it is a very easy matter to make either oneself or the object given the butt of drollery and wit, and for this reason the form of humorous composition is that frequently adopted, yet quite as often as not we find that the humour is dull enough when our artist gives free rein to any chance conceits or jest which may occur, which in their loose and patchy connections range to excess beyond all reasonable limits, and with intentional eccentricity bind up frequently together the most alien matter. Some nations have proved themselves indulgent to such artistic experiments, others are more severe. Among the French such attempts at humorous composition have not as a rule been successful; we Germans have done better, and we are more tolerant to the defects of such a style. Jean Paul, for instance, is a much admired humourist among us; and yet it would be difficult to point to any writer who is more eccentric in the way he brings to the common fund what is most remote from his subject, and patches together an incredibly motley assemblage of subjects, whose sole bond of relationship is one of the artist's own fancy. The story, the matter and progress of events are the features of least interest in his romances. The main attraction throughout is the sportive procession of his humour which uses everything in its course as a means to establish his own triumph as a humourist. In this subordination to itself and concatenation of every conceivable stuff that can be raked out of the four quarters of the world, or the realm of the real, the material of humour approximates once more to that of symbolism, wherein significance and conformity likewise are disjoined, with this difference, however, that in the former it is purely the personality of the poet which commands the material no less than the significance, co-ordinating them according to his own caprice[311]. Such a series of freaks and fancies soon tires us, more particularly when we are expected to live as best we can in the not unfrequently barely decipherable combinations which have passed somehow or another in the clouds of the poet's brain. With Jean Paul, as with scarce another, one metaphor, sally of wit, drollery, or simile proves the death of its neighbour. Nothing grows; there is an explosion, that is all. A plot, however, which purports to have a dénouement must first be unfolded and prepared for such solution. From another point of view, when the artist in question is essentially devoid of the solid core and support of a mind and heart overflowing with the real actualities of existence, his humour very readily lapses into what is sentimental and morbid. And in this respect Jean Paul is no less an example.

(γ) In a humour of the best kind, which keeps itself aloof from such excrescences, we must therefore have a genuinely spiritual depth and wealth, able to exalt that which issues as the emanation of a personality to the rank of real expression, and capable of making that which is truly substantive arise from that which the chance suggestions, the mere caprices of the artist, dictate. The self-abandonment of the poet in the course of his exposition must be, as it is with humourists such as Sterne or Hippel, a wholly unembarrassed, easy-going, scarce perceptible kind of saunter[312], which, insignificant though it appear, manages precisely by that means to strike at the root of the main idea; and, for the reason that what thus bubbles up in haphazard fashion are matters of detail, it is essential that the conception, which binds the whole ideally together, should have the deeper foundation, and that such detail should simply flash forth the focal spark of genius.

We have now arrived at the point where romantic art itself for the present terminates. It is the standpoint of our most modern outlook, whose distinctive characteristic we shall find to be mainly this, that the individual personality[313] of the artist stands supreme above both the material he informs and his creation. He is no longer dominated by the conditions of an essentially restricted sphere, in which he must accept as given both the content and form of his work; it now lies in his power to choose either as he wills, and to retain both on similar terms.

(c) The End of the Romantic Type of Art

Art, in so far as it has hitherto been the subject of our inquiry, had for its fundamental basis the unity of significance and form, and, as a further type of it, the unity of the personality of the artist with the work he embodies and creates[313]. More closely defined we may say that it was the specific type of this union, which supplied the content and its appropriate artistic presentment with the substantive and directive principle running through all the images therein.

We found at the commencement of our inquiry with reference to the origins of art that in the Eastern world Spirit was not as yet independently free. It still sought that which it conceived to be the Absolute in the domain of Nature, and apprehended the natural as itself essentially Divine. At a further stage the outlook of classical art set before itself the vision of the Greek Pantheon as unconstrained and inspired beings, but still in all essential features formed as our humanity, as individuals charged with a positive physical process[314]. Finally it was romantic art which first permitted Spirit to penetrate the depths of its own world, in contrast to which flesh, the external reality and frame of this world generally, albeit the fact that the spiritual and absolute could alone manifest itself in this world, in the first instance was divested of all claim to reality[315], but for all that afterwards asserted such a positive claim with increasing strength and urgency.

(α) These distinctive views of the world process constitute religion, the substantive Spirit or genius of peoples and eras; they not merely influence art, but are threads of life which permeate every other domain or province of the living present to which they belong. As every man, in every sphere of activity, whether it be on the field of politics, religion, art, or science, is a child of his own age, and receives the task to elaborate the essential content and consequently the inevitable plastic form of that age, so, too, the aim that determines the content of art is no other than that of finding in its own medium and resources some adequate expression for the spirit of a nation. So long as the artist is in immediate identity and unshaken faith inextricably one with the determinate content of such a view of the world and the religion where it culminates, to that extent this content and the mode of its presentation will call forth his most serious powers; in other words this content remains for him the infinite substance and truth of his own consciousness, a content, with which he lives, down to the inmost recesses of his spiritual nature, in original unity; and, moreover, the embodied presence in which he reveals the same is for him as such an artist[316] the final, necessary, and highest type of such a form, namely that of bringing before the aesthetic sense the absolute being[317] and the ideal significance[318] of the subject-matter of his art. It is through that aspect of his material which is no other than his own immanent substance[319] that he finds that which binds him to the specific mode of his exposition. For the material, and with it the form that appertains to it, carries the artist directly into himself[320], as being the real essence of his determinate being, which he does not imagine but rather actually is, and consequently has only to make this essential part of him an objective fact to himself, to conceive and elaborate such in a vital form from his own resources. Only under such conditions is the enthusiasm of the artist fully awakened for either the content or manifestation of his art; only thus his creations become no mere product of caprice, but spring up within him, out of him, out of this living field of his substance, this spiritual capital, whose content never ceases to be active, until, through the efforts of the master, it has attained a defined form adequate to its own ideal notion. When, however, we of to-day would seek to make a Greek god or, as our own Protestants try to do, a Virgin Mary the object of a piece of sculpture or a picture, it is impossible for us to treat such a material with entire seriousness. It is the faith of our inmost heart which fails us here, albeit even in ages of absolute belief the artist was by no means necessarily what is commonly understood as a pious mart, any more than at any time artists generally come in an exceptional sense under that category. The demand is rather simply this that in the view of the artist his content should be no other than the substantive significance, the most spiritual truth of its own conscious life, and that it should unfold the necessary laws of its mode of presentation. For an artist is, in his creative activity, a child of Nature; his ability is in one aspect a talent he receives from her. His method of working is not the pure activity of rational apprehension, which places itself in direct opposition to its material, and unites with it in the medium of free thoughts and pure thinking. Rather, as one not yet released from the natural aspect, it[321] coalesces immediately with the object, in full faith, and is identical with it heart and soul. The artistic personality reposes frankly in the object, the work of art proceeds in like manner absolutely from the unimpaired spiritual depth and power of genius; the product is ferme, unwavering, and its entire intensive effect preserved. And this it is which supplies the fundamental condition of the final demand that Art be presented us in its flawless totality.

(β) The situation, however, has entirely changed in view of the position we have been forced to indicate as that occupied by Art in this its final stage of evolution. We have, however, no reason to regard this simply as a misfortune which the chance of events has made inevitable, one, that is to say, by which art has been overtaken through the pressure of the times, the prosaic outlook and the dearth of genuine interests. Rather it is the realization and progress of art itself, which, by envisaging for present life the material in which it actually dwells, itself materially assists on this very path, in each step of its advance, to make itself free of the content that is presented. In the very fact that we have an object set before our ocular or spiritual vision, whether it be by Art or the medium of Thought, with a completeness which practically exhausts it, so that we have emptied it, and nothing further remains for our eyes to discover or our souls to explore, in that alone the vital interest disappears. Our interest only continues where our faculties are kept fresh and alive. Spirit only concerns itself actively with objects so long as there is still a mystery unsolved, a something unrevealed. And this is so so long as the material remains identical with our own substance. A time comes, however, when Art has displayed, in all their many aspects, these fundamental views of the world, which are involved in its own notion, no less than every province of the content that is bound up with such world-views: when that time arrives such art is necessarily cast loose of that which has been its previous specific content for any particular people or age; in such a case the renewed craving for material to work upon only fully awakes when it is accepted as inevitable that we must first bid farewell to all that its activity has previously substantiated: just as in Greece, for example, Aristophanes opposed a resolute face to his age, and Lucian to the entire historical Past of his country; or in Italy and Spain, in the decline of the Middle Ages, both Ariosto and Cervantes opened the attack on Chivalry.

In opposition to the age, then, in which the artist, by virtue of the concrete content of his nationality and times, stands within a definite outlook upon the world and its modes of embodiment, we become aware of a point of view diametrically antagonistic, which, so far as its complete enunciation is concerned, has only in the most modern times received its due significance. It is only in our own days that we find the artist no less than the man of science among pretty nearly all civilized nations, has mastered the cultivation of his reflective faculty, the art of criticism, and among us Germans the absolute freedom of thought, and has made this critical apparatus, both relatively to the material and the form of its production, having already run through all the necessary phases or types of romantic art, a kind of tabula rasa.[322] The specific mode of association for any particular context, and a manner of presentment exclusively pertinent to that and no other material, are things which the artist of to-day looks upon as obsolete. Art has become a free instrument which is qualified to exercise itself relatively to every content, no matter what kind it may be, agreeably to the principles or criteria of the artist's own peculiar craftsmanship. The artist stands superior to all specific modes and conformations, however much hallowed in the usage, and moves forward free and independent, untrammelled by either form or presentment such as previously have brought before man's vision and mind the one holy and eternal substance. No content, no form is any longer identical directly with the inmost soul of the artist[323], his nature, his unaware[324] and substantive essence; every material he may treat with indifference, if he only keep true to the formal principle that he make his work consonant with beauty and a really artistic execution. There is, in short, no material nowadays which we can place on its own independent merits as superior to this law of relativity; and even if there is one thus sublimely placed beyond it there is at least no absolute necessity that it should be the object of artistic presentation. For these reasons the artist is situated relatively to the content of his work much as the dramatist who places before us and develops other and alien characters. It is quite true that even our poet of to-day interposes the atmosphere of his genius within his delineations, and the warp that he weaves is in fact that of his own substance; but this only applies to what is universal there or wholly accidental. The closer traits of individualization are not his own, but rather he makes use of in this respect his stores of images, modes of metaphor, earlier types of art, which by themselves he does not care for, and whose significance is exclusively dependent on the fact that they turn out to be the most suitable for this or that matter in hand. In most of the arts, and particularly in the plastic types, the subject-matter is, apart from this, supplied from outside to the artist. He works to order, and when occupied with whatever tales, scenes, and portraits thus come in his way, whether sacred or profane, has merely to look to it that he can make something out of them. For, however much he leaves the impress of his genius on a given content, it remains throughout for all that a material which is not itself directly the substance of his own conscious life. Nor is it of any real assistance to him, that he further appropriates, so to speak, with his soul and substance views of the world that belong to the Past, in other words, tries to root himself in one of such, and, let us say, turns Roman Catholic, as not a few have done in recent times for Art's sake, in order to give their soul some secure foundation, and enable the definite lines of their artistic product to become themselves something which shall appear to have an independently valid growth. It is not a prime condition of the artistic state that the artist should come completely to terms with his own soul, or should be obliged to look after his own salvation. What is important is that his soul in its greatness and freedom should from the first, before it thinks of creating, both know and possess that whereof it is, should stand fast by it and reliant within it; and, above all, is it indispensable that the spirit and mind of the great artist of to-day should have a liberal education, one in which every kind of superstition and belief which remains limited to circumscribed forms of outlook and presentment, should receive their proper subordination as merely aspects or phasal moments of a larger process; aspects which the free human spirit has already mastered when it once for all sees that they can furnish it with no conditions of exposition and creative effort which are, independently for their own sake, sacrosanct; and only ascribes to them value in virtue of the loftier content, which itself, as creator and worker, he reposes in them, making them thus what they ought to be[325].