Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art, vol. 2, sels.

AUTHOR OF “THE ART AND GENIUS OF TINTORET,” “AN ESSAY ON THE FUTURE OF POETRY,” AND OTHER WORKS

ALL that has hitherto been the object of our examination in the first part of this inquiry referred to the reality of the Idea of the beautiful as Ideal of art. In whatever direction, however, we developed the notion of the ideal art-product, we throughout applied to it a meaning of purely general signification. But the idea of the beautiful implies a totality likewise of essential differences, which as such must in veritable form assert themselves. These differences we may broadly describe as the particular modes of art, as the evolved content of that which is implied in the notion of the Ideal, and which secures actual form through art. When, however, we speak of these forms of art as of distinct species or grades¹ of the Ideal, we do not accept the term in the ordinary usage of it as though we found here in external guise particular classes of objects related to and modifying the Ideal respectively as their common genus. Species in the sense used here simply expresses the various and continuously expanding determination of the idea of the beautiful and the Ideal of art itself. The universality of the ideal representation is in the case posited not determined on the side of external existence, but is assumed to be the closer determination of itself in the explication of its own notion; or, in other words, it is the notion itself which unfolds itself in a totality of particular types of art.

¹ Art. Hegel takes the ordinary scientific sense to describe the meaning. The word “type” would more truly express it.

More closely regarded, then, the specific types of art have 2their origin, as the unfolded realization of the Idea of the beautiful, in the very nature of the Idea itself, which by means of them presses forward to real and concrete appearance. Moreover, just in so far as it ceases to expand¹ in the abstract determination or concrete fulness of any one of them, it manifests itself in some other form of realized expression. For the Idea is only Idea in its essential truth in so far as it proceeds in this self-evolution by means of its own activity. And inasmuch as it is, as Ideal, immediate appearance, and moreover with each mode thereof is still identical as the idea of the beautiful, we find that in every particular phase which reveals the Ideal in its process of self-explication we have another actual manifestation which is immediately related to the essential characterization of those diverse types of yet further expansion. It really is a matter of no consequence whether we regard this process as a process of the Idea within its own substance, or that of the form under which it attains determinate existence, inasmuch as both aspects are immediately bound up with each other, and the perfecting of the Idea as content, and the perfecting of its form are but two ways of expressing the same process. Or, to put the matter in the reverse way, the defects of a given form of art of this kind betray themselves as a defect of the Idea, in so far as such defects give a limited significance to the essential nature of the Idea in external form, and as such invest it with reality. When we consequently compare such still inadequate forms of art with what most obviously presents itself for comparison, that is, the true Ideal, we must be careful not to use expressions commonly applicable to works of art that are failures, which either express nothing at all, or have discovered an incompetence to express what ought to have been expressed. Rather for every form of the Idea there is a definite mode of appearance, which clothes it precisely in one of those particular forms of art to which we have adverted, adequate in every respect thereto, and the defective or perfected character of which consists entirely in the relative truth or untruth of the determinate form, under which and through 3which the Idea is actually realized. For the content must first be clothed with reality and concreteness before it can attain to the form wholly adequate to its essential truth. As we have already indicated in the previous division of our subject-matter, we have three fundamental forms or types of art to examine.

¹ Für sich selber ist. That is, having arrived at one form of determination, returns upon itself and throws off another form, just as the plant germ after arriving at the leaf expands into the bud, and so on.

First, we have the symbolical. In this the Idea is still seeking for its true artistic expression, because it is here still essentially abstract and undetermined, and consequently has not mastered for itself the external appearance adequate to its own substance, but rather finds itself in unresolved opposition to the external objects in physical Nature and the world of mankind. And inasmuch as in this crude relation to objective existence it immediately surmises its own isolation, or is carried into some form of concrete existence by means of universal characteristics which are void of all true definition, it vitiates and falsifies the actual forms of reality which it has found, and which it seizes in a wholly capricious way.¹ And, consequently, instead of being able to identify itself completely with the object, it can only assert a kind of accord, or rather a still abstract reflection of significance and figure, a mode of representation which, being neither complete in its artistic fusion, nor capable of being completed, suffers the object to emerge as reciprocally external, strange, and inadequate to itself as it was before.

¹ That is, with no reference to intelligent principle.

Secondly, we have the form in which the Idea, here in accordance with its true notional activity, is carried beyond the abstraction and indeterminacy of general characterization,² is conscious of itself as free and infinite subjectivity, and grasps that self-conscious life in its real existence as Spirit (Mind). Spirit, as the free subject of consciousness, is self-determined through its own resources, and even in this its conscious grasp of self-determination possesses a form of externality adequate to express it, and one in which the essential import of that consciousness can be united with an explicit reality entirely appropriate. This second type of art, the classical, is based upon such absolutely homogeneous unity of content and form. In order, however, to make 4this unity complete the human spirit, in so far as it makes itself the object of art, must not be taken as Spirit in the absolute significance we refer to it, where it discovers its adequate subsistence wholly in the spiritual resources of its own essential domain, but rather as a still individualized spirit, and as such charged with a certain aspect of isolation. In other words, the free individual which classical art unites to its forms appears, it is true, as essentially universal, and consequently freed from all the mere contingence and particularity both of the subjective world of mind and the external world of Nature. But it is at the same time permeated by a universality which is itself essentially individualized. For the external form is necessarily both defined and singular by virtue of its externality, which it is only capable of completely fusing with an artistic content by representing that content as itself defined, and consequently of a limited character; and, moreover, it is only Spirit that is thus particularized which can pass into an objective shape and unite itself with the same in an inseparable unity.

² Allgemeiner Gedanken. Hegel means the bare generalizations or abstract conceptions of thought.

In this form Art has reached the fulness of its own notion to this extent, namely, that the Idea, which is here spiritual individuality, brought into immediate accord with itself in the form of its bodily presence, receives from it a presentation so complete, that external existence is no longer able to preserve its consistency as against the ideal significance which it serves to express; or, to put it in the reverse way, the spiritual content is exclusively manifested in the elaborated form within which Art clothes it for sensuous perception, and thereby affirmatively asserts itself in the same.

Thirdly, we have the form in which the Idea of beauty grasps its own being as absolute Spirit, Spirit, that is to say, in the full consciousness of its untrammelled freedom. But for this very reason it is unable any more to obtain complete realization in forms which are external; its true determinate existence is now that which it possesses in itself as Spirit. That unity of the life of Spirit and its external appearance which we find in classical art is unbound, and it flees from the same once more into itself. It is this recoil which presents to us the fundamental type of the romantic type of art. Here we find, by reason of the free spirituality 5which pervades the content, such content makes a more ideal demand upon expression than the mere representation through an external or physical medium is able to supply; the form on its external side sinks therefore to a relation of indifference; and in the romantic form of art we consequently meet with a separation between content and form as we previously found it in the symbolic form, with this difference that it is now due to the subordination of matter to spiritual expression rather than the predominance of externality over ideal significance. It is in this way that symbolic art seeks after that perfected unity of ideal significance and external form, which classical art in its representation of substantive individuality succeeds in communicating to sensuous perception, and which romantic art passes over and beyond through its overwhelming insistence on the claims of Spirit.

SYMBOL, in the signification we here attach to the word, is not merely the beginning of art from the point of view of its notional development, but marks also its first appearance in history. We may consequently regard it as only the forecourt of art, which is principally the possession of the East, and through which, after a variety of transitional steps and mediating passages, we are at last introduced to the genuine realization of the Ideal in the classical type of art. We must therefore from the very first take care to distinguish symbol where its unique characteristics provide it with an independent sphere of its own, in which it determines the radical and effective type of a certain form of art’s exposition and presentment from that kind of symbolic expression which amounts to no more than a purely external aspect of form entirely without such independent significance. In the latter sense we, in fact, come across it in the classical and romantic forms of art just as certain aspects of symbolical art are not wholly without the characteristic features of the classical Ideal, or present to us the origins of romantic art. Such reciprocal interplay between the fundamental forms of art attaches, however, merely to subsidiary images or isolated traits; it has no power whatever to modify, still less to expunge, the animating principle which essentially determines the character of the entire work of art.

8In such cases where we find symbol elaborated in its entirely unique and independent form it is as a general rule characterized by the quality of the sublime, because its main impression is to show us the Idea still united to measureless dimension rather than rounded in a free and self-defined content; it would fain clothe itself with form, and yet is unable to secure in the substantial appearances of the world a definite form which is entirely adequate to express the abstractness and universality of its longing. On account of this inability to attain its purpose the Idea passes over and beyond the external existence which surrounds it instead of penetrating to the core or completely making its home therein. And this flight beyond the limits of the finite and visible world is precisely that which constitutes the general character of the sublime.

But before we proceed further it will be convenient, by way of elucidating the formal aspect of our subject, to explain at once, if in quite general terms, what we understand by the expression symbol.

Generally speaking, symbol is some form of external existence immediately presented to the senses, which, however, is not accepted for its own worth, as it lies thus before us in its immediacy, but for the wider and more general significance which it offers to our reflection. We may consequently distinguish between two points of view equally applicable to the term; first, the significance, and secondly, the mode in which such significance is expressed. The first is a conception of the mind, or an object which stands wholly indifferent to any particular content, the latter is a form of sensuous existence or a representation of some kind or other.

1. Symbol, then, is in the first place a sign. When we speak of the significant and nothing more there is no necessary connection between the thing signified and its modus of expression whatever. This manner of its expression, this sensuous thing or image, so far from being immediately called up by that for which it is the sign, rather presents itself to the imagination as a wholly foreign content to it, by no means necessarily associated with it in a unique way. So, for example, in language tones are signs of specific conditions of idea or emotion. By far the greater number 9of the tones of any language are, however, associated with the ideas, which are thereby expressed entirely by chance, so far as the content of those ideas is concerned, even though the history of the development of language may show us that the original connection between the two was of a different nature, and that an essential element in the difference between one language and another consists in this, that the same idea is expressed through a different sound. Another example of such bare signs are colours,¹ which we used in cockades or flags in order to express the nationality of an individual or vessel. Such colours by themselves alone carry no particular quality which can be immediately related to the thing they signify, that is, the nation which they represent. In a sense such as this, where the bond between the signification and the sign is one of indifference, symbol must not be understood when we connect the expression with art. For art consists precisely in the reciprocal relation, affinity, and substantive fusion of significance and form.

¹ So the French expression des couleurs, and our English “the colours.”

2. We must consequently interpret sign in a different sense when we speak of it as equivalent to symbol. The lion is, for example, a symbol of magnanimity, the fox symbolizes cunning, the circle eternity, the triangle the Triune God. Here we find that the lion and the fox themselves possess the qualities whose import they serve to express. In the same way the circle points beyond the mere indefinite extension, or the capriciously fixed limit of a straight line, or any other line that does not return upon itself, and which at the same time is suitable as the expression of a definite period of time; and the triangle regarded as a totality possesses the same number of sides and angles as is involved in the idea of God, when the determinations under which the religious consciousness defines the Supreme Being are expressed numerically.

In the latter forms of symbol therefore the objects presented to the senses have already in their own existence that significance, to represent and express which they are used; symbol as employed in this expanded sense is consequently no purely indifferent mark for something other 10than itself, but a significant fact which in its own external form already presents the content of the idea which it symbolizes. At the same time it is not the concrete thing it is itself, which it should bring before the imagination, but simply that general quality of significance which attaches to it.

3. We would, thirdly, draw attention to the fact that although symbol may not, as is the case with the purely external and formal sign, be wholly inadequate to the significance derived from it, yet, in order that it may retain its character as symbol, it must on the other hand present an aspect which is strange to it. In other words, though the content which is significant, and the form which is used to typify it in respect to a single quality, unite in agreement, none the less the symbolical form must possess at the same time still other qualities entirely independent of that one which is shared by it, and is once for all marked as significant, just as the content¹ need not necessarily be a bare abstract quality such as strength or cunning, but rather a concrete substance, which on its side, too, possesses a variety of characteristics which distinguish it from the primary quality in which its symbolic character consists, and in the same way, but to a still greater degree, from everything else that characterizes the symbolical form. The lion, for example, possesses other qualities than mere strength, the fox than mere cunning, and the apprehension of God is not necessarily bound up with conceptions which imply number. The content, therefore, as thus viewed, is also placed in a relation of indifference to the symbolical form, which represents it, and the abstract quality which it typifies may quite possibly be present in countless other existing objects. In the same way a content which is thus varied in its composition may possess many qualities, to symbolize any of which other forms will equally serve where a similar correspondence with such is apparent. The same reasoning is also applicable to the external object in which any particular content² is symbolically expressed. Such an 11object, in its concrete natural existence, possesses a number of characteristics for all of which it may stand as the symbol. The most obvious symbol for strength is unquestionably the lion, but the ox and the horn of the ox may equally serve as such, and from other points of view the ox possesses many other qualities as significant. But few objects, if any, have been brought home to the imagination with such a prodigal wealth of symbolic form and imagery as that of the Supreme Being. We may conclude, then, from the above remarks that the use of the term symbol is necessarily¹ and essentially open to ambiguity.

^{1 p. 10} Hegel uses the technical term Inhalt in this passage to signify either (a) the quality of significance, or (b) the object which is symbolized by virtue of some selected quality. The use of it in both senses makes the passage somewhat difficult to follow.

^{2 p. 10} Inhalt here evidently is the abstract quality.

^{1 p. 11} Necessarily because such ambiguity is implied in the idea (seinem Begriff nach).

(a) For, in the first place, no sooner do we look for some symbol than the doubt almost invariably arises whether a particular form is to be accepted as a symbol or no; and this is so, though we set on one side the further ambiguity with reference to the particular nature of the content, which a given form under all the variety of its aspects may be held to symbolize, many of which may be employed symbolically through associating links that do not appear on the surface.²

² This, I think, is the sense. The language literally is, “Which a form under several possible significations, as symbol of any of which (deren) it can be employed often through connecting links (Zusammenhänge) more remote, may be taken to symbolize.”

Now what a symbol primarily offers us is generally speaking a form, an image, which of itself is the presentment of an immediate fact. Such immediate existence, or its image, a lion for example, an eagle, or a particular colour, stands there before us as it is, a valid existing fact. The question consequently arises whether a lion, whose image is set before us, merely is set there to express the natural fact, or whether in addition to this it carries a further significance, that is the more abstract connotation of mere strength, or the more concrete one of a hero or a period of the year, husbandry and anything else we choose to infer from it; whether in fact, as we say, the image is to be taken literally, or with a further ideal significance, or possibly only with the latter. The last case finds its illustration in symbolical expressions of speech and particular words such as comprehension, con12clusion¹ and others of the same kind. When such signify mental activities we have simply set before us the immediate import of a mental activity and no more without any recall to our memory of the material acts, which originally were implied in the meaning of these words. When on the contrary the picture of a lion is presented us we have not merely the significance to consider which it may bear as symbol, but also the bodily shape and presence of the king of beasts before our eyes. An ambiguity of this nature can only fully disappear when the sense attached to both aspects, namely, symbolical import, and its external form, is expressly stated, and we learn by this means the exact relation which exists between them. In that case, however, the concrete fact which is set before us ceases to be a symbol in the real meaning of the term, and becomes simply an image, the relation of which to significance is expressed by the well-known form of comparison, namely, simile. In the simile, that is to say, both factors are immediately presented to us, the general conception and its concrete image. When on the contrary reflection has not proceeded so far as to hold general conceptions in assured independence, and consequently to set them forth by themselves, in that case we find that the sensuous image to which they are cognate, and in which a significance of more general² import is able to find its expression is not yet conceived as separate from such a significance, but both are still immediately held together in unity. And this it is which, as we shall see more closely as we proceed, constitutes the distinction between symbol and comparison. An illustration of the latter kind may be found in that exclamation of Karl Moor, as he gazes on the setting sun: “Thus dies a hero!” Here we see that the ideal significance is expressly separated from the sensuous impression while at the same time it is associated with the picture. In other cases, it is true even of similes this act of separation 13in relation is not so clearly marked, and the association appears to be more immediate; in such cases it must already appear manifest from the general content of the narrative, from the position assigned to the picture, or other circumstances, that viewed as merely a statement of fact, such an image is not justified, but that some special significance or other, which cannot fail to arrest our attention, is intended by it. When, for example, Luther says:

we can have no doubt whatever upon the implied significance, whether it be of a protection suggested by “stronghold,” the world of hopes and life-plans symbolized in the picture of the ocean and the thousand masts; or the narrowed aims and possessions with the assured plot of ground at the end, which is reflected from the boat and the haven. In the same way when we read in the Old Testament: “May God break their teeth in their mouth, may the Lord shatter the hindermost teeth of the young lions,” it is obvious that neither the words “mouth,” “teeth,” nor “hindermost teeth of the young lions” are used in the literal sense, but are utilized as images and sensuous ideas, which carry a significance only present to the mind, and that such significance is all that matters.

^{1 p. 12} The German words are Begreifen and Schliessen, which in their original sense are “to grasp with the hand” (prehendo) and “to shut” or “lock up.” The English words in a still fainter form carry the same significance through the Latin language. The symbolism of language at this stage is obviously only apparent to the student of language.

^{2 p. 12} That is, more abstract.

^{1 p. 13} Or in English:

Forth on the ocean is shipped Youth with his thousand sails:

Silent in bark barely saved steals into harbour old age.

This ambiguity, then, is all the more conspicuous in the case of symbolical representation for the reason that an image, which carries a particular significance, only receives the descriptive name of symbol when such significance ceases to be expressly marked by itself, or is otherwise clearly emphasized as it is in the case of the simile. No doubt the ambiguity of the genuine symbol is to this extent removed in that by virtue of this very uncertainty the fusion of the sensuous image and its significance becomes a matter more or less of convention and custom, a feature which is indis14pensably necessary in the case where mere signs are used, while on the other hand the simile asserts itself as something individual, discovered on the spur of the moment to assist the meaning, and is independently clear, because it emphasizes the significance alongside of that independence. At the same time, though no doubt the symbol may be clear enough to those who are habituated to its use, and whose imaginative life is at home in such a conventional atmosphere, it is a very different matter with all who are outside this native circle, or for whom it is now a thing of the Past; for such it is only the immediate sensuous representation which is in the first instance seized, and it remains for these in every way a question of doubt, whether they are to rest satisfied with that which lies openly before their eyes, or are to accept these as indicators to yet further imagery or ideas. When, for example, we gaze in Christian churches upon the triangle in some conspicuous position on the walls, we at once recognize that the intention is not to place before the view this geometrical figure simply as such, but rather to draw our attention to its spiritual significance. If, however, we were to find it elsewhere we should probably feel equally certain that such a figure had no reference whatever, either as sign or symbol, to the Trinity. On the other hand a folk strange to the ideas which have grown up in Christian countries might easily feel doubts in both cases, and it is by no means easy for ourselves to determine with equal certainty in all cases, whether a figure of this kind is to be understood as presenting us with its literal or symbolical interpretation.

(b) Moreover this ambiguity does not merely apply to isolated cases, but extends to vast areas of the entire domain of art, to the content of an almost unlimited material open to our inspection, to the content in full of all that Oriental art has ever produced. For this reason, as we enter for the first time the world of ancient Persian, Indian, or Egyptian figures and imaginative conceptions we experience a certain feeling of uncanniness, we wander at any rate in a world of problems. These fantastic images do not at once respond to our own world; we are neither pleased nor satisfied with the immediate impression they produce on us; rather we are instinctively carried forward by it to probe yet further into 15their significance, and to inquire what wider and profounder truths may lie concealed behind such representations. In other productions of the same kind it is apparent at the first glance that they are, just like so many fairy tales of children, merely an interplay of pictorial fancy, a strange texture of curiosities woven together at haphazard. For children delight in just such an even surface of pictures, a play of the fancy which makes no demand on effort or intelligence, but is simply a collection tumbled together. Nations on the contrary, even in their childhood, require as the food of their imaginative life a more essential content; and this is just what in fact we find in the figures of Indian and Egyptian art, although the interpretation of such problematical pictures is only dimly suggested, and we experience great difficulty in deciphering it.

Even in the province of classical art we meet now and again with a like uncertainty, though it is the essence of classical art to be throughout clear and intelligible on its own surface without the use of symbolism of any kind. And this clarity of classical art consists in this that it comprehends the true content of Art, in other words substantive¹ subjectivity, and thereby discovers at the same time the true form, which essentially expresses nothing less than this genuine content, so that what it appears to mind, the significance that is of it is just that, which is veritably expressed in the external form, both the ideal aspect and the plastic shape being entirely adequate to each other; in symbolical art, the simile, and other forms of that kind, the image always brings before perception something in addition to that significance, for which it merely serves as the picture. At the same time classical art, too, presents us with an aspect of ambiguity. In considering the mythological phantasies of antique art it is frequently a matter most difficult to decide, whether we do rightly in taking such plastic figures simply for what they are, contenting ourselves with mere wonder over the wealth and charm, which this happy play of imaginative vigour offers us, for the reason of course that mythology is generally accepted as nothing but an idle 16collection of fairy tales, or whether on the contrary we have still to seek for a significance of wider range and greater depth. We shall feel the insistence of such a doubt in exceptional force where the content of these fables refers directly to the life and activity of the Divine, in cases, that is, where the stories handed down to us can only be regarded as utterly unworthy of the Supreme Being, indicative of an invention as entirely inadequate as it is in the worst possible taste. When we read, for example, the twelve labours of Hercules, or, to take a stronger case, are informed that Zeus hurled Hephaestus from Olympus on to the island of Lemnos, with the result that Vulcan remained lame ever after, we are no doubt ready to believe that the entire story is nothing but a fairy tale of the imagination. It is just as possible to believe that all the love affairs of Zeus are mere freaks of a prodigal fancy. But, on the other hand, for the very reason that such stories are told about the Supreme Divinity, it is quite equally credible that meaning of more universal import is hidden under that which such myths immediately transmit to us.

¹ Substantielle, that is, an artistic consciousness which is aware of its own essential nature—Spirit, and the object of pure intelligence—the Ideal.

With regard to such facts as those above stated, there are two theories current of exceptional importance and contradictory to each other. The one accepts mythology as a collection of stories of purely external significance, which as such could not fail to be unworthy presentations of the Divine nature, though able, when regarded apart from such associations, to reveal to us much that is finely conceived, delightful, interesting, nay, even of great beauty. They offer us, however, no ground whatever for attempting to enlarge their significance. In this view mythology is in the form in which it is presented purely historical: under one aspect, that is, treating it as art, in its shapes, pictures, gods, together with all the practical activities and events it describes, it is amply self-sufficient, or rather by the way it brings before us that which is significant supplies its own elucidation; from another point of view, that is to say, its origin in history, we have to regard it as built up from local claims, no less than the chance caprice of priest, artist, and poet, the facts of history, foreign legends and traditions. The theory which is opposed to the above is unable to rest satisfied with the purely external husk of mythological form and 17narration, and insists on discovering beneath it a meaning of more universal and profounder import, to master which, as it breaks upon the surface, it conceives to be the main object of mythological inquiry regarded as the scientific examination of the mythos. In this view mythology must necessarily be apprehended as bound up with symbolism. And by symbolism all that is meant here is just this, that however bizarre, ridiculous, grotesque such myths appear to be, however much the adventitious caprice of a plastic imagination may contribute to their form, they are essentially a birth of Spirit; and in spite of it all contain in them significant ideas, that is, thoughts of universal significance upon the nature of God; they are, in short, Philosophemes.¹

¹ Perhaps we should rather say a Theosophy.

In this latter sense the recent work of Creuzer on symbolism is particularly noteworthy; this writer has once more taken up the review of the mythological conceptions of the ancient world, not, as is so frequently the fashion, from the external and prosaic standpoint, or simply with the object of determining this artistic merit, but rather expressly to elucidate the intrinsic rationality of their substance. Such an inquiry proceeds from the presupposition that myths and fabulous tales have their origin in the human spirit, which is capable, no doubt, of playing freely with its notions of gods, but in its religious interest marks the point where it enters a more exalted sphere, in which reason itself is the discoverer of form, albeit it is charged with the defect of being unable at this early stage to exhibit the core from which it grows with commensurate power. And this assumption is essentially just. Religion discovers its fountain-head in Spirit, which seeks after its truth, dimly discovers it, bringing the same to consciousness by means of any form, which displays an affinity with this form of truth, be it a form of narrower or wider borders. But once grant that it is reason which seeks after such forms, and the necessity is obvious to recognize the work of reason. Such a recognition is alone truly worthy of human inquiry. Whoever shelves this problem makes himself master of nothing but a motley show of unrelated learning. If we, on the other hand, probe into the truth of mythological conceptions as it presents itself to mind, without at the same time excluding from our 18grasp that other aspect of them, that is, the haphazard caprice therein exercised by the imagination, and all the external influences, local or otherwise, which have contributed to this creation, we shall then be in a position to justify the various systems of mythology. To justify the work of man in the imagery and forms that are the product of his spirit is a noble enterprise, of rarer worth than the mere heaping together of the external facts of history. The objection has no doubt been pressed against Creuzer that here, treading in the steps of the new Platonists,¹ the wider significance he elucidates from the myths is a creation he attaches to them himself; that, in short, he discovers conceptions in them which are not merely without any historical basis to uphold them, but which it can be positively shown he must have first introduced before he could have found them; in other words it is asserted that neither the people of such times nor the poets or priests—although from another point of view emphasis is frequently laid on the occult wisdom of the priesthood—could have possessed any knowledge of such ideas, which would have been wholly incompatible with the prevailing culture. Such objections, of course, are entitled to their full weight. These peoples, poets, and priests have not, in fact, been conscious of universal conceptions in the particular form of universality which the human mind now discovers at the root of their mythological ideas, in the sense that they could have deliberately clothed such conceptions in the forms of symbolism. And as a matter of fact this is never maintained even by Creuzer. But however true it may be that the reflections of the ancient world over its mythology were entirely different from those of the modern, we are by no means therefore entitled to conclude that the conceptions, of its mythology are not essentially symbolical, and as such must be fully accepted; rather our inference should be that in the times when these peoples created the poetry of their myths, from the midst of a life itself steeped in poetry, they would instinctively bring home to consciousness all that was most spiritual and profound in that life in the forms of the imagination rather than that of reflection, and fail to separate conceptions which were more universal or abstract 19from the concrete creations of their phantasy. That this really was the case is a fact which we have in this inquiry to accept as fundamentally established; we may, nevertheless, be equally prepared to admit that, in such a form of interpretation as the symbolical, theories are apt to slip in which are merely the product of artifice and ingenuity, much as is the case with etymological science.

¹ The Alexandrine School, of which Plotinus and Philo are leading names.

(c) At the same time, however much we may find ourselves in general agreement with the view that mythology, with its tales of the gods and its circumstantial pictures of a persistently poetic imagination, includes within its borders a content, that is to say rational and profound religious conceptions, it is still open to us to ask in our examination of the symbolical form of art whether for the same reason all mythology and art is to be interpreted in a symbolical sense, in accordance with that typical assertion of Freidrich von Schlegel, to the effect that we are bound to look for an allegory in every artistic representation. The symbolical or allegorical is then understood in the sense that a general conception is assumed to underlie every work of art as its motive principle and every mythological form, by bringing the universal character of which into prominence it should then be possible to expound the real significance of such a work or imaginative creation. This mode of treatment is, moreover, very commonly adopted in our own days. We find, for instance, in the more recent editions of Dante a marked tendency to interpret every canto in an exclusively allegorical sense, and no doubt the poetry of Dante contains many examples of such allegories. In the same way Heyne’s editions of the classical poets evince the same disposition in their commentaries to elucidate the general significance of every metaphorical expression by means of the abstract conceptions of the understanding. Nor is this to be wondered 20at; for it is just this faculty which is most ready to seize upon symbol and allegory, while at the same time it separates the sensuous image from its significance, and by so doing destroys the unity of the artistic form, an aspect over which it is, in its zeal for a symbolical interpretation, which aims exclusively at setting the universal characteristic as such in relief, wholly indifferent.

¹ Ein allgemeiner Gedanke. The reference throughout this paragraph to the universality of the ideas of reflection as contrasted with the sensuous image is rather a reference to the abstract conceptions of the analytical mind, that is, which are usually understood as universals in the sense of generic conceptions, than any fuller grasp of concrete reality such as possesses a truly ideal significance. So in its application to the metaphor I imagine what is meant is that we have here the process of dry analysis which merely destroys its significance as metaphor, that is, its synthetic unity for our aesthetic sense.

Such an extension of symbolism over every province of mythology and art is by no means that which we have in view in our present consideration of the symbolical form of art. It is not any part of our labours to ascertain to what extent a symbolical or allegorical significance, in this enlarged use of the term, is applicable to the forms of art. On the contrary we shall restrict ourselves entirely to the question how far symbolism itself is entitled to rank as a form of art; and the question is raised in order that we may finally determine the precise relation which subsists between artistic significance and artistic form in so far as such a relation is symbolical and stands in contrast to other modes of artistic presentation, in particular those of the classical and romantic art-forms. We must consequently endeavour before everything else expressly to limit the field of our review to that portion where we find the symbolical is independently portrayed in its essential character and is open to our consideration as such, rather than attempt to make a symbolical interpretation co-extensive with the entire domain of art. And it is consistently with such a purpose that we have already subdivided the Ideal of art under its respective symbolical, classical, and romantic forms.

In the signification we give to the expression the symbolical disappears at the point where we find that a free subjectivity rather than purely abstract conceptions determines the content of the artistic product. In this case the conscious subject is his own self-assured significance, his own self-manifestation. All that he feels, conceives, does, and perfects, his qualities, his actions, and his character, all this he actually is himself; the entire gamut of his spiritual and sensuous manifestation has no further significance than that of declaring his subjective unity, which, in this process of expansion and development of its own wealth, brings before the eyes of all the man himself as master over the entire 21field of objective reality thus presented to him, the world in which he discovers his existence. Significance and sensuous presentment, inward and outward reality, fact and picture, are here no longer separate from each other, assert themselves here no longer as merely cognate, the characteristic distinction of the symbolic relation, but rather as a totality, in which the manifestation possesses no other reality, the reality no other manifestation either outside of or alongside with itself. That which declares itself and that which is declared is here posited¹ in its concrete unity. In this sense the gods of Greece, in so far, that is to say, as the art of Greece was able to represent them as free, self-subsistent, and unique types of personality, are to be accepted from no symbolical point of view, but as self-sufficient in their own persons. The actions of Zeus, for example, of Apollo or Athene are actions appropriated by Art to themselves and only themselves, and must not be allowed to stand for anything but the might and passion of such personages. If we once attempt to abstract from free individualities of this kind some general conception as the essential core of their significance, setting it alongside their concrete particularity as an interpretation of their entire and individual manifestation, we let fall or annihilate all that we have failed to observe, and it is precisely all in these figures which art seeks most to secure. For this reason artists have been unable to take kindly to such symbolical interpretations of all works of art and the mythological figures we find in them. For all that is left us in the sphere of art we have just been considering which is really compatible with an interpretation based on symbolism or allegory only affects subsidiary aspects, and is for that reason expressly limited to the attribute and the representative signs; the eagle, for example, stands by Zeus, an ox is the companion of the evangelist Luke; the Egyptians, on the contrary, beheld in the form of Apis the Divine itself.

¹ Ist aufgehoben, here not in the sense of being cancelled, but raised to the expression of concrete unity.

The point so difficult to decide in connection with this manifestation of self-conscious freedom, otherwise so appropriate to artistic presentment, is just this, whether that which is placed before us as such a subject really possesses 22a subjective individuality of the above quality, or only carries the mere semblance of it in the form of a personified shadow.¹ In this latter case personality is nothing but a superficial form, which fails to express its vital substance in particular acts no less than bodily form, which would otherwise enable it to penetrate through all that is external in its appearance as its own possession, and instead of this still retains another inwardness for the external reality as its significance, which is not either true personality or subjective freedom. It is precisely at this point that we find the boundary which includes or excludes symbolic art.

¹ Als blosse Personification, that is, an individualization which impersonates the subjective identity without possessing its concrete substance, a personified shadow like the sphinx. Such appears to be the sense.

Our interest, then, in the consideration of the symbol consists in this, that we recognize thereby that process within itself where we find the beginnings of art, in so far as the same proceeds from the notion of that Ideal which unfolds itself gradually as art in its truth, and while doing so recognizes each stage of symbolical art as successive steps which conduct us to the same consummation. However intimate the connection between religion and art may be we are not here concerned to pass in review either symbols or religion under the range which is co-extensive with the wider signification of the word symbol or emblematical conceptions; we have exclusively to consider that aspect of them, according to which they belong to art in its own right, handing over their religious aspect to the historian of mythology and symbolism.

In proceeding now to a closer determination of the several divisions of symbolic art it will be necessary, in the first place, to fix the boundary lines within which the development of the successive grades of this type moves forward. Speaking generally, as we have already observed, the entire sphere we have now to define is in principle a forecourt of art. We have here, in the first instance, significant conceptions which are purely abstract, which are still in themselves destitute of essential individuality, the immediate artistic presentment of which may be as truly described either as adequate or inadequate.¹ Our first definition of boundary consists, therefore, in determining generally the earliest modes under which artistic perception and representation work themselves out² into actuality; on the further side of the line at the other extreme we have real art, in the direction of which symbolic art uplifts itself as to its truth.

¹ Because the content for which such shapes (Gestaltung) are given is itself incoherent, and therefore incompatible with adequate expression.

² Sichhervorarbeiten. Our word “elaborate” is here insufficient. Hegel means the mode in which the Idea of art works itself free from entirely potential obscurity into a living force, a real energeia. We cannot say “emerges into daylight,” however, because the highest grasp of symbolic art is still only a twilight. It is like the growth of the plant-germ, still underground, or partially so.

1. In discussing the origins of this appearance of symbolic art from the subjective point of view, we may draw attention to an observation made previously, that the artistic consciousness, no less than the religious, or rather we should say both in their essential unity, and we may even include the impulse of scientific inquiry, have originated in wonder. The man who is still unable to wonder at anything lives in a condition of crassness and obtuseness which is devoid of all interest, in which for him everything is as naught for the reason that he fails as yet to separate or unravel himself from objects around him and their own immediate and independent existence. The man, however, at the opposite extreme, whose wonder is no longer 24excited, is the man who contemplates the entire external world as somewhat which he has made himself clear about. It may be under the abstract conceptions of the commonsense understanding resulting in some general survey of knowledge attainable by the average mind, or it may be in the noble or profounder consciousness of his own absolute spiritual freedom and universality. In either case he has converted the bare fact of such objects and their existence into some spiritual insight of their truth brought home to himself. We may conclude, then, that wonder originates in the condition where we find that man, as conscious Spirit, torn away from his first most immediate association with Nature, and from his earliest and entirely active¹ relation to desire, steps back from Nature and his own individual existence, and seeks after and finds in the objects which surround him a universal, an essential and permanent principle. Then for the first time the facts of Nature astonish him, they become for him an other-than-himself he would fain appropriate, and within which he strives to rediscover his own substance, that is the universal, thoughts, reason. For the dim foretaste here of a higher and the consciousness of the external are still unsevered, and this though a contradiction between the objects of Nature and the Spirit which perceives them is already present, a contradiction in which these objects appear to repel him quite as much as they attract, and the feeling of which, in the force wherewith they thrust him away, is, in fact, the birth-pang of his very wonder.

¹ Pracktischen. Not matter-of-fact relation, but rather a relation that asserts itself exclusively in action.

The earliest result of this condition of wonder in man’s vision of Nature is that on the one hand he sets himself in opposition to Nature and her objective world as a principle,² and adores her as Power; on the other he is equally possessed with a desire, which craves satisfaction, to render objective to himself his intuition of a higher, essential, and universal somewhat, and to look upon its rehabilitated presence. In this two-fold aspect of his conscious life he is confronted by reality in the following way. The particular objects of Nature, and above all those elementary facts, 25sea, rivers, mountains, and constellations, are not received by him in the singularity of their immediate presentment to sense, but, carried up into the sphere of imaginative conception, assume for that faculty the form of universal and essentially self-subsistent existence. And we may trace the beginning of art in this, that it reflects these ideas of the imagination thus universalized and essentially independent, in visible representation for immediate perception, and sets them forth for mind in the individual form of the same as objects. The mere adoration of external facts, with its Nature-cult and fetish-cult, is not as yet on this account an art of any kind.

² Als Grund, that is, as a fundamental unity of the real.

Under the aspect in which it is related to the objective world, the beginnings of art are more intimately associated with religion. The earliest works of art are of the mythological order. In religion it is nothing less than the Absolute, which breaks to consciousness through its own impulse,¹ though the determinating factors of that consciousness be the most abstract and jejune conceivable. And the earliest phase in this evolution of the Absolute is the phenomenal presence of Nature, in whose existence man dimly forebodes the Absolute, and envisages the same for himself in the semblance of natural objects. In this striving Art discovers its source. We shall find, however, in this very effort art first made visible, not so much where the Absolute is descried by human eyes in the external world which immediately confronts them, a mode of Divine reality in which they rest content, but rather where man’s consciousness evolves from its own substance a mode of apprehending what it conceives as the Absolute in the form of a self-subsistent externality, no less than that objective presentation which he unites with it in more or less adequate fashion. For we must remember that Art possesses a substantial content which is grasped by mind (spirit), and which, it is true, appears in external guise, but for all that in a form of externality, which is not merely immediately visible to sense, but is primarily the product of mind regarded as the existing fact which intrinsically comprehends that content as a whole and then expresses it. Art is consequently and by virtue of 26its power to create forms cognate with its own substance the first interpreter of the religious consciousness; it, in fact, is the first to make the prosaic view of the objective world a thing valid to itself,¹ when our humanity has fought itself essentially free as the self-consciousness of Spirit from the immediacy of sense, and sets itself over against the same in the strength of the same freedom with which it accepts and understands that objectivity as simply external fact and no more. This complete separation of the subject and object of sense-perception is, however, indicative of a considerably later phase of man’s spiritual history. The first knowledge of truth, on the contrary, declares itself as an intermediate state between the purely unintelligent absorption of the individual in Nature and that spiritual condition which is entirely released from it. This intermediate state, however, in which Spirit merely envisages for itself its conceptions in the plastic forms of Nature’s objects because it still fails to master any form of higher significance, although it strives through such association to bring the two aspects of its experience into one homogeneous whole, is, to put it in its general terms, the attitude of art and poetry as contrasted with that of the prosaic understanding. And for this reason we find that the prosaic consciousness declares itself first in its full bloom, where, as is the case in the Roman and in later times throughout our own Christian world, the principle of the subjective freedom of Spirit is realized in its abstract and actually concrete form.

^{1 p. 25} Die erste näher gestaltende Dollmetcherin, lit., the first interpreter which supplies forms more nearly cognate with itself.

^{1 p. 26} It is valid (geltend) because it introduces there its own spiritual nature.

2. And, secondly, the final aim toward which the effort of symbolic art is directed, and with the attainment of which the symbolic type is dissolved, is classical art. But although we find in this latter form the true manifestation of art’s essence first elaborated, it is not the first type of art. Rather it presupposes within its content all the various mediating and transitional stages of the symbolic form itself. It is quite true that the essential aim of that content is to reveal the notion as a rounded and self-defined totality, that is in its concreteness and actuality as the individuality of Spirit; but the notion is only then able to declare itself in such concrete form to conscious life after it has passed through a 27variety of mediatory stages forced upon it by the abstract conceptions which the nature of its own initial impulse presupposes. It is classical art, however, which brings to a close all the mere preliminary experiments of art in the direction of symbolism and the sublime.¹ And it is able to do this inasmuch as the subjective spirit finds in it, as its essential possession, a form truly adequate to its substance, and in the same way that the self-determining notion creates from its own potency the individual existence that fully expresses it. When once Art has discovered its true content, and by doing so found its true form, its search and striving after both, wherein the defect of symbolical art consists, is therewith at an end.

¹ The previous statement of Hegel must not be overlooked, however, and it may be considerably amplified, that there is much in romantic art which is related to symbolism and the sublime. Take the case of the celebrated sculpture of Michael Angelo typifying Night, Day, Dawn, and Twilight, or such modern pictures as those of Watts’s “The Minotaur” and “The Spirit of Christianity.”

If we seek further for a closer principle of division of symbolic art within the limits of the boundaries on either extreme hitherto discussed, we shall find the same generally under the modes in accordance with which it contends with the genuine significances of art and their truly appropriate forms, the battle that is apparent in a content which is still striving in opposition to the truth of art, no less than in a form that is equally inadequate to express it. For both aspects, although externally united in the identity of one creation, are neither brought completely together themselves, nor permeated throughout with the notion of art in its truth; and for this reason they appear quite as much as contestants struggling to be free from the defects of their union. We may, in short, describe symbolic art throughout as a continuous war carried on between the comparative adequacy and inadequacy of its import and form;² and the varied gradations of symbolic art are not so much kinds of specific difference as they are stages and phases of one and the same incongruity between the spiritual idea and its sensuous medium.

² Or rather “between those aspects of its import and form which are reciprocally homogeneous and those which are not.”

At first, however, this contention is only potentially 28present, that is to say the incompatibility of these two sides, whose union is thus affirmed and enforced, is not yet openly present to consciousness. And this is so for the reason that it neither recognizes for itself in its universal nature the import which it seizes, nor is able to comprehend the realized form in its self-subsistent and self-exclusive existence; consequently, instead of representing to the senses both aspects in their difference, it is content to proceed upon the immediate appearance of identity which it enforces. In this original point of departure we have before us the as yet inseparable unity of the art-form and the symbolical expression it seeks after, fermenting, as it were, beneath the association of contradictory elements in mysterious guise—the unity, that is, of the real and primordial symbolism, whose plastic shapes are as yet not posited as symbols at all.

The termination of this process,¹ on the other hand, is the disappearance and dissolution of the symbolic type altogether. The strife which has hitherto been merely implied in it is now brought home to the artistic consciousness. The act of symbolization in consequence becomes the conscious severation of the transparent significance, which is now recognized for what it is from the sensuous image cognate with it. In this severation, however, there still remains an express relation of reciprocity, which, however, declares itself as such no longer in the mode of immediate identity, but rather as a mere comparison between the two, in which that differentiation and separation which in the previous type was not brought clearly to consciousness still remains as conspicuous a factor. And this is the sphere of that symbolism where the symbol is recognized as such. Here we find the artistic import recognized and presented in its independent universality, whose concrete embodiment is expressly placed in subordination as an image of that presentment, and no more, and as such a comparative medium is utilized for the purpose of artistic representation.

¹ This process of symbolic art.

Halfway between that starting-point above described and this termination of the symbolic type we find the art of the sublime. In this the essential import, posited as the universality of Spirit in its absolute self-exclusion, disengages itself in the first place from concrete existence, permitting 29the same to appear as a mere negative, external and subservient factor beside it, which it is unable to leave, in order that it may express itself in it, standing in its native self-subsistency. Rather it finds it necessary to declare it as that which is essentially defective and self-dissolving, and this, moreover, although it has naught beside as means for its expression than just this to which it opposes itself as external and nugatory. The splendour of this import of the sublime may be accepted in the order of the notional process as previous to that of the mode of genuine comparison for this reason, that the concrete particularity of natural and any other phenomena must necessarily be treated in the first place negatively, merely appropriated, that is to say, as the adornment and embellishment of the unreachable might of Spirit’s absolute significance, before that express severation and discriminating comparison of external shapes cognate with, and yet at the same time distinct from, the import, whose image they reproduce, can assert itself.

3. The three principal stages¹ above indicated break up naturally on closer inspection into the following subdivisions we now summarize in the chapters which include them.

¹ Hauptstufen. The word signifies either the phase or grade of a process of development, or to take the metaphor used by Hegel above (stadien) may perhaps be better translated by “stage,” as though indicating the successive stages of a journey.

A. The first stage which presents itself in this portion of our subject-matter is as yet neither to be described strictly as symbolical, nor as belonging strictly to art; it rather clears the road to both. It is the sphere of the immediately cognized and substantive unity of the Absolute regarded as spiritual significance with its unsevered sensuous existence in a form presented by Nature.

B. In the second stage we pass to the symbol in its real sense; the dissolution of the first unity above described here commences, and while, on the one hand, the significances assert themselves in their independent universality above the particular phenomena of Nature, on the other they are 30necessarily forced with a like insistency to present themselves to consciousness together with this preconceived universality in the concrete form of natural objects. In this primary and twofold struggle to spiritualize Nature, and to present that which is born of Spirit to sense, at this stage of the conflict between them, we meet with all the ferment and wild, tossed hither and thither medley, the entire fantastic and confused world that is to say of symbolic art, which half surmises, it is true, the incongruity of its manner of shaping, yet is unable to remedy the same save through the distortion of its figures, while straining after a purely quantitative sublimity that would fain devour all limits. In this phase consequently we find ourselves in a world steeped with poetic phantasies, incredibilities and miracle, yet fail to encounter one work of genuine beauty.

C. Owing to this strife between the spiritual significance and its sensuous presentation, we are conducted thirdly to the stage we may describe as that of the true symbol, on which the symbolic work of art for the first time appears in its complete character. The forms and shapes are here no longer those present to sense, which, as we saw on the first mentioned stage, were immediately coincident with the Absolute as their positive existence, without any further modification at the hands of art; neither, as in the second phase, are they intent on asserting their unreconciled material against the universality of the significance merely through extensions of the quantitative limits of Nature’s objects, the ebullitions of a rioting fancy. Rather the symbolic form, which is here throughout apparent, is Art’s own ceation, a work not merely capable of expressing its own individuality, but from another point of view possessed with the power of presenting at the same time both the particular object that it is and the further universal significance with which it is associated, and which it thereby discloses to the mind, so that these very shapes stand before us as problems which we are imperatively called upon to unriddle and probe to the inward charge which they carry.

We may at once further venture the general remark with reference to these more clearly defined types of a symbolism still to be ranked as elementary that they spring from the religious attitude to existence of entire nations; for which 31reason it will form part of our plan to recall their position in history. Not that complete identification of specific types with a given period is wholly feasible. Rather it would be truer to say that particular modes of conception and presentation, when we refer them generally to some kind of artistic type, are mingled up together, so that we find the specific type, which we have reason to regard as the fundamental one in any particular nation’s general view of existence, exemplified both in earlier and later peoples,¹ though its repetition may only be discovered in subordinate and isolated cases. In general, however, we may say that we possess the more concrete manifestations and visible proofs of the first stage in the ancient Persian religion, of the second in the Indian, of the third in that of Egypt.

¹ I think Völkern rather than Zeiten must be here understood, and the sense appears to be that the confusion indicated refers to a mingling of forms appropriate to a nation in one historical period with those that are more cognate with a people at any earlier or it may be later period. But unquestionably this attempt to identify a type as between different nations with historical periods that will harmonize with Hegel’s own classification is a difficult matter as we may see by the fact that Egypt, the oldest example of all, represents the third stage. On the other hand, if the confusion referred to is applied to the particular development of any one people, the examples given by Hegel do not bear on the difficulty they illustrate.

In the second chapter that significance, which has hitherto been more or less obscured by its particular sensuous form, has at last wrested its way to freedom, and its independent character is brought clearly to consciousness. With this victory the relation of real symbolism is dissolved; we have instead, through the way in which the absolute significance² is cognized as the universal substance interpenetrating the entire extension of the visible world, the art of the absolute essence³ in the form of a symbolism of the sublime; and this now takes the place of purely symbolical and fantastic suggestions, deformities, and riddles.

² Or rather “the import of the Absolute.”

³ Substantialität, called below die Substanz; the word signifies the real essence of the Absolute.

32We have here mainly two points of view to distinguish which are based upon differences in the relation of the substantive essence, that is the Absolute and Divine, to the finitude of the apparent. Or rather we may say that this relation is capable of being twofold, both positive and negative, although in both forms, inasmuch as it is in either case universal substance, which has to appear, it is not the particular form and import of the objective facts, but their general principle of animation and their position relatively to this substance which is made visible to sense.

A. In the first phase or type this relation is so conceived, that substance, here the All and the One delivered from every form of particularity, is immanent in the determinate phenomena as the animating principle which brings them into being and is their life; and moreover, it is affirmatively and immediately present to the vision in this immanence, and is comprehended, and made the object of representation by the individual who surrenders himself to its presence through the adoring self-absorption in this indwelling essence of the entire world of contingent and material things. In this point of view we have the art of the Pantheism which possesses the Sublime as its inherent principle, an art such as we find it in its elementary stage in India, then elaborated in all its splendour in Mohammedanism and its artistic mysticism, and finally with still profounder significance reappearing in certain manifestations of Christian mysticism.

B. The negative relation on the other hand of true Sublimity we must look for in Hebraic poetry. In this poetry of the Glorious, which is only concerned to celebrate and exalt the unimaginable Lord of the heavens and the earth that it may employ His entire creation as the passing instrument of His Power, as the messengers of His Glory, as the delight and ornament of His Greatness, this service of His Creation, be it never so magnificent,¹ is deliberately posited as negative, and this for the reason that it is unable to discover any adequate or positively sufficient expression for the Power and Dominion of the Highest, and is only able to attain a genuine satisfaction by means of the subjec33tion of the creature, which in the feeling and admission of its unworthiness is alone able with adequacy to express its insignificance.¹

^{1 p. 32} The principal clause of this sentence has no end as printed. The auxiliary must be omitted either before in diesem Dienste or eine positive. I prefer the first alternative.

1 p. 33 The relative here agrees, I think, with die Dienstbarkeit rather than die Kreatur or die Poesie. Hegel says “compatible with itself and its significance,” we should rather say “its sense of its own insignificance.”

Through this independent self-assertion of significance, made thus transparent to consciousness in its isolated simplicity, the severation of the same from the imaged appearance, whose incommensurability over against it has already been accepted, is now essentially complete; and albeit, along with the fact of this conscious separation, both form and import may still persist in the relation of an intimate affinity, a necessity which is implied in the fact of their being symbolical art, yet this relation no longer attaches to either import or form, but is placed now in a third mode of conception, which according to its own point of view, carries relations of similarity with both these sides,² and in reliance on these relations makes visible and declares the independently transparent significance by means of the cognate and particular image.

² Hegel’s words are sondern in einem subjectiven Dritten, welches in beiden Seiten nach seiner subjectiven Anschauung, etc. This “subjective third” is, as explained below, the way in which the relation between the image and the absolute significance ceases to be regarded as identical.

Owing to this change the image, instead of remaining as it was previously the unique expression of the Absolute, becomes now merely an ornament, and we thereby discover a relation which ceases to correspond with the notion of beauty. In other words image and significance, instead of being moulded one within the other, confront each other as opposites, precisely, in fact, as was the case in genuine symbolism, though then the process remained incomplete. Consequently works of art which are based on this form are of subordinate rank, and their content is unable to comprise the Absolute itself, and is necessarily restricted to circumstances and occurrences of narrower range. For this reason 34the forms which are now under discussion are for the most part merely used occasionally and by way of diversion.

More closely considered we have in this chapter to distinguish between three principal stages of our process.

A. To the first we appropriate those types of presentation commonly known as Fable, Parable, and Apologue. In these the severation of form and significance, which constitutes the characteristic trait of the entire sphere to which this chapter refers, is not as yet expressly recognized; that is to say, the subjective aspect of the comparison is not yet fully emphasized; consequently also the representation of the particular and concrete phenomenon, through which the universal significance is finally to declare itself, still remains the predominant factor.

B. In the second stage, on the contrary, the universal import asserts its independent mastery over the elucidating form, which now appears merely as attribute, or, under the guise of an image, capriciously selected by the mind which makes the contrast. To this type belong the Allegory, Metaphor, and Simile.

C. In the third stage we meet with the visible and complete collapse of those related aspects in the symbol which previously had either been immediately joined in union, despite the fact of their relative incongruity, or in their independent severation had still persisted under a relation of affinity.¹ Out of this arises that form of content which is cognized as independent in its prosaic² universality, to which the art-form has become wholly an external relation; on the one hand we find it represented by the didactic poem, on the other that very aspect of its external form is accepted for what it is, and exemplified in so-called descriptive poetry. Here we find that every association and relation of symbolism has vanished; we have to look round us for some more comprehensive union of form and content, and one more truly adequate to the notion of art.

¹ This sentence as it stands is ungrammatical; there is a change in the construction as it proceeds.

² The prosaic universality is the prose of its form separated from content. It is prosaic because it is unrelated to the vitality of the notion.

THE central point¹ of art’s evolution is the union, in a self-integrated totality, carried to the point of its freest expression, of content and form wholly adequate thereto. This realization, coinciding as it does with the entire notional concept of the beautiful, towards which the symbolic form of art strove in vain, first becomes apparent in classical art. We have already, in our previous consideration of the idea of the beautiful and of art, outlined the general character of classic art. The Ideal supplies a content and form to classical art, which in this adequate mode in which it is embodied reveals that which true art is according to its notion.

¹ The central point, that is, in the entire evolution of the types of art, classical art being intermediate between symbolic and romantic art and in a certain sense marking a point of culmination.

To perfect this result, however, all the various phases of art, whose evolution is the subject-matter of our previous investigations, are contributive. For classical beauty has for its ideal substance² free and independent significance, that is to say, not the significance of any particular thing, but a significance which declares itself, and thereby points to its substance. This is the spiritual substance, which in 170general terms is that which makes of itself an object. In this objectification of itself it possesses the form of externality, which, as identical with its ideal character, is consequently also on its own part the significance of itself, and is made conscious of itself by this self-knowledge. It is true that in our consideration of the symbolical our point of departure was that of the unity of the significance and its mode of envisagement in the art product; but this unity was purely immediate, and for this reason inadequate.

² Zu ihrem Inneren, i.e., that which unites it as a whole rather than is the purely external form. The Inward of man is the notion of man, not the mere fact that he has a head and arms, etc.

For the real content either remained essentially the natural according to its substance and abstract universality, and consequently the isolated thing in the objective world of Nature,¹ although it was regarded as the real determination of that universality, was not able to present the same in a mode adequate to it, or that which is purely ideal, and only to be apprehended by spirit, in so far as it was received in the artistic content, carried with it in that which was foreign to its essential nature, namely the immediate individual and sensuous thing, the mode of its appearance that was in fact incongruent with it. And generally here significance and form only stood in the relation of mere affinity and suggestion; and however much in certain respects they could be brought together homogeneously, they as clearly fell apart again in other directions. This original unity was therefore torn asunder; this simple and abstract inwardness or ideality was imaged for the Hindoo conception of the world on the one side in the manifold reality of Nature, and on the other in finite human existence; and the imagination, in the unrest of its impetuous motion, was carried from the one to the other by turns, without being either able to deliver the ideal in its essentially pure and absolute self-subsistency, or to thoroughly infuse it with the phenomenal matter as it was presented and informed, and so reproduce it throughout that material in undisturbed union. The disorder and grotesque appearance, which arose in the commingling of elements opposed to one another, no doubt again vanished, but only to make way for an enigmatical condition equally unsatisfying, which, instead of solving the problem, was only able to prevent the problem’s solution. For here, too, still was lacking the freedom and self-subsistency of content, which 171only thereby is rendered explicit in that the Inward is presented to consciousness as in itself a whole, and by this means as that which overlaps the externality which in the first instance is other than itself and foreign to itself. This essential self-subsistency, cognized as free and absolute significance, is self-consciousness, which has for its content the Absolute, and for its form the subjectivity of Spirit. In contradistinction to this self-determining, thinking, willing power everything else is self-subsistent in merely a relative and momentary sense. The material phenomena of Nature such as the sun, the heavens, stars, plants, animals, stones, streams and sea have only an abstract relation to themselves, and are in the eternal process of Nature bound up with other facts of natural existence, so that they can only pass as self-subsistent for the finite perception. The real significance of the Absolute is not presented in them. Nature is indeed under a mode expressed,¹ but only under the mode of what is outside itself; its inwardness is not as such for itself, but poured forth into the varied show of its appearances, and consequently devoid of self-subsistency. Only in Spirit, as the concrete, free and infinite self-relation, is the true and absolute significance actually disclosed, and self-subsistent under the mode of its determinate existence.

^{1 p. 170} The “Nature-existence,” as Hegel calls it.

^{1 p. 171} Die Natur ist freilich heraus. Nature is there explicitly before us, but not all that is implied in Nature is made explicit in the material world.

On the way to this emancipation of the Idea from the immediately sensuous medium and to its self-establishment we are confronted by the Sublime and the consecration of the imagination. The absolute significance is, that is to say, in the first instance the thinking, absolute and senseless² One, which is self-related as the Absolute, and in this relation affirms that which it creates, Nature and finitude generally, as the negative thing, that which is essentially in itself devoid of stability. It is the explicit and essential Universal, conceived as the objective power over collective existence, whether it be that this One be brought now to consciousness and represented in its expressly negative attitude to the created thing, or in its positively pantheistic 172inherence in the same. The twofold defect of this point of view, so far as it is connected with art, consists first in this that this One and Universal which constitutes the fundamental significance has not yet in itself arrived at the closer determination and distinction, and by this means just as little at the point of real individuality and personality in which it could be apprehended as Spirit, and could be set before the sensuous perception in a form which would be applicable to its spiritual content, according to its own notion, and duly conformable therewith. The concrete idea of Spirit on the contrary requires, that it both defines and distinguishes itself in itself; and by the very act of making itself an object discovers through this reduplication an external phenomenon, which although material and present, nevertheless is throughout permeated by Spirit, and consequently taken by itself expresses nothing at all, simply permitting Spirit to declare itself as its inner core, the expression and reality of which it is. Secondly, from the point of view of the objective world the defect is bound up with this abstraction of an Absolute to which the principle of self-determination is lacking that now also the real phenomenon, being that which is essentially without substance, is unable to set forth under any true mode the Absolute in concrete shape. In contrast to those songs of praise and glory, those celebrations of the abstract and universal majesty of God, we have now in the passage we are making to a higher form of art to recall to our minds that phase of negativity, change, pain, and progress through life and death, which we discovered among other matter in the conceptions of the East. We have here set before us the principle of self-distinction in its essential character under a mode which is unable to unite with its conception the unity and self-subsistency of that subjective principle. Both aspects, however, both the essential and self-substantive unity, and the differentiation of that unity by virtue of a self-defined content, are equally necessary to unfold a true and free self-subsistency in its concrete and mediate totality.

² Sinnlichkeitslos, “senseless” as devoid of or abstracted from all sense.

In this connection we may incidentally, together with this reference to the Sublime, mention that further conception which at the same time entered on its process of explication in the East. It is that apprehension, in opposition to the 173substantiality of the one God, of internal freedom, self-subsistency and innate independence of the individual, so far as the elaboration of this impulse was permitted to Eastern nations. The main source of this attitude we must seek for among the Arabs, who in their deserts, upon the infinite sea of these expanses, with the clear heavens over their heads, in a nature such as this have emphasized their own courage and the bravery of their hand, as also the means of their self-preservation, whether it be camel, horse, lance, or sword. Here we find the more stubborn independence of personal character asserting itself in its contrast to the Hindoo softness and lack of individuality, as also to the more recent pantheism of Mohammedan poetry, and opposing also to the objective world its circumscribed, securely defined and immediate reality. With this incipient stage of the independence of the individual we must also associate free friendship, hospitality, and august nobility, but at the same time an insatiable lust of revenge and the inextinguishable memory of a hate, which is insistent and will have satisfaction with an unsparing passion and an absolutely remorseless cruelty. None the less all that happens on this soil is wholly within the circle of humanity. We have here deeds of revenge, conditions of love, traits of self-sacrificing nobility from which the fantastic and the wonderful have vanished; everything is carried forward in the secure and determinate shape which the causative connection of the facts necessitate. A similar conception of real objects which are referred to their determinate basis of actuality,¹ and are made visible in their free power, not merely in that which conserves an exterior purpose,² we discovered in an earlier stage of our investigations among the Hebrews. The more assured independence of character, the savagery of revenge and hate lie, too, at the root of the original Jewish nationality. But the difference is at once pronounced, that in this case even the most powerful images of Nature are depicted less for their own sake than for that of the glory of God, as related to which they at once again lose their self-subsist174ency; and furthermore even hate and persecution are not merely a personal matter affecting persons, but are embraced in the service of God as national vengeance against whole peoples. As, for example, the later Psalms and yet more the prophets frequently only are able to desire and plead for the misfortune and overthrow of other nations, and not unfrequently find the main strength of their utterance in curses and imprecations.

¹ Auf ihr festes Maas zurückgeführt. To their own proper standard or measure that strictly applies to them.

² I think this must be the meaning of nützlich here. But the passage is not an easy one.

No doubt the elements of true beauty and art are presented to each of these points of view above noticed; but they are in the first instance brought together in haphazard and confused fashion, and are set in a false relation to each other, instead of being referred to a genuine principle of identity. For this reason the purely ideal and abstract unity of the Divine is unable to bring forth any entirely adequate art-product in the form that is characterized by real individuality; and at the same time Nature and human individuality either are manifestly not, whether we consider their inward principle, or their external mode of appearance, permeated by the Absolute, or at least not positively pervaded by it. This externality of significance, which is thus made the essential content, and the determinate mode of appearance under which it is generally reproduced is finally and in the third place exemplified in the comparative activity of art.¹ In this type both sides have become wholly independent, and the unity that binds them together is merely the invisible subjectivity which compares. For this very reason that which is defective in such an external presentment returned in ever more emphatic degree and betrayed itself as that which was for the genuine art representation merely negative or, rather, entirely subversive. And when this dissolution is really effected the significance can no longer remain the inherently abstract ideal, but the inherently determinate and self-defined ideal principle, which in this its concrete totality possesses quite as essentially the other aspect thereof, that is, the form of an inherently exclusive and determinate appearance; and consequently in its external existence, as that which is its very own, merely expresses and signifies itself.

¹ That is, the comparative type of art discussed at the conclusion of the preceding section.

1751. This essentially free totality which remains constant to itself throughout each successive self-determination in something other than itself, this ideal principle, which in its objectivity is self-related is the essentially true, free, and self-subsistent, which in its determinate existence unfolds nothing other than itself. In the realm of art, however, this form is not present in its form of infinitude, is not, that is, the thinking of itself as the essential, absolute, which is made an object for itself in the form of ideal universality, and makes itself wholly explicit, but is still in immediate natural and sensuous existence. In so far, however, as significance is self-substantive, it must in art borrow its form from its own resources and inherently possess the principle of its externality. It must consequently, it is true, repair to Nature, but as predominant over that which is external, which, in so far as it is itself an aspect of the totality of this ideal realm, no longer exists as purely natural objectivity, but being without its own self-subsistence, simply serves as the expression of Spirit. In this interpenetration consequently the natural form and externality, which is modified by Spirit contains out and out on its part, as immediately given, its significance in itself, and no longer points to this as to something separate and different from the corporeal appearance. And this is that identification of the spiritual and natural which is appropriate to the notion of Spirit, which, that is, does not merely proceed no further than the neutralization of the two opposed aspects, but raises that which is spiritual into the higher totality, in which it is able to preserve itself in its own Other, to bring the natural within its own ideal range and to express itself in and relatively to the natural. It is on this type of unity that the notion of classical art is based.

(a) This identity of significance and bodily form may be approached yet more closely under the view of it that no separation of these opposed aspects¹ takes place within their consummated union; and consequently the ideal principle does not, as purely inward spirituality, return upon itself from out of the corporeal and concrete reality, under a process which would give us once more the distinction of 176these aspects in opposition. And inasmuch as the objective and external, in which Spirit is made visible as an object of sense, according to the very notion of it, is at once throughout defined and separate, mind which is free, and which it is the function of art to elaborate in the form of reality truly commensurate with it, can only be that spiritual individuality which is not merely defined but essentially self-consistent in its natural form. For this reason it is the human which constitutes the centre and content of true beauty and art; but as content of art—we have already developed the subject in discussing the notion of the Ideal—it is brought under the essential determination of concrete individuality and the external appearance adequate thereto, which in its objectivization has been thus purified from the imperfection of the finite condition.

¹ That is, the inward or ideal principle and the natural externality.

(b) Under such a consideration of the matter it is at once obvious that the classical mode of representation, if we take it for what it essentially is, can no longer be of the symbolic type in the strict sense of the term, however much now and again we may find along with it the play of that which belongs to symbolism. Greek mythology, for example, which, in so far as art asserts its mastery over it, belongs to the classical Ideal, is, if we grasp it in its fundamental character, not of a beauty which is symbolical, but unfolded under the genuine character of the Art-ideal, albeit there may be certain remnants of symbolism which adhere to it, as we shall shortly see.

If we now proceed to ask ourselves what, then, is the nature of the determinate form, which can thus enter into this unity with Spirit without offering merely the suggestion of its content, we shall find it determined for us in the conception that in classical art both content and form must be adequate, must, that is, in the aspect of form meet the demands of totality and essential self-subsistency. For it is a prime condition of the free self-subsistence¹ of the whole, which constitutes the fundamental determination of classical art, that either of these aspects, the ideal form no less than its external embodiment, should be essentially a totality which goes to make the notion of the whole. Only by this 177meansis either side essentially identical with the other, and consequently their difference reduced to the purely formal differences of one and the same, through which also the totality appears now as free, the adequacy of both of its aspects being now fully displayed, inasmuch as it declares itself in either of them and is one and the same in both.

¹ Selbstständigkeit. Self-consistency or independence are perhaps better words here.

The lack of this free reduplication of itself within the same unity carried with it in the symbolic type precisely this absence of freedom in the content and with it also in the form. Spirit was here not clear to itself, and for this reason declared its external reality not as that which belonged to itself, set forth in its explicit significance through and in it. Conversely the form had no doubt to be significant, but its significance only lay partly and on one side in it. The external existence gave here primarily to what passed for its ideal aspect, though still under a mode that was external, merely itself instead of a significance which declared an ideal content; and in attempting to show that there was something further which it suggested its power was necessarily put under a constraint. In this distortion it neither remained true to itself, nor was it the Other, that is significance, but declared nothing save that which was a problematical connection and confusion between incompatible things, or tended to be the purely coadjutant attire and external adornment of what was simply the glorification of the one absolute significance of all things whatever, until it was finally obliged to surrender itself to the purely subjective caprice of comparison with a significance which was far removed from it and indifferent to it. If this relation of unfreedom is to find a release the form must already inherently possess its significance, or, to speak more definitely, must possess the significance of mind or Spirit itself. This form is essentially the human form because the externality of this form is alone capable of revealing the spiritual in sensuous guise. Human expression in countenance, eye, pose, and carriage is, it is true, material and therein not that which the spirit is; but within this corporeal frame itself the human exterior is not merely alive and a part of Nature as the animal is, but it is the bodily presence which reflects Spirit to itself. Through the human eye we look into the soul of a man just as through the entire presentment of him 178his spiritual character is expressed. When consequently the body belongs to Spirit, as its determinate presence, Spirit is also that ideal principle which is appropriate to the body, and is no form of ideality which is foreign to the external form in the sense that materiality still inherently possesses a significance other than that to which it testifies or suggests. It is quite true that the human form still carries within it much of the universal animal type, but the fundamental distinction between the human and the animal body consists simply in this, that the human is obviously, by virtue of its entire conformation, declared as the dwelling, nay, we may add the only possible dwelling-place of Spirit. And for this reason also it is only in the body that Spirit is immediately present to others. This is, however, not the place to discuss the necessity¹ of this association and the peculiar reciprocity of soul and body. We must here assume this necessity. We have, of course, many indications on the human figure of death and ugliness, that is, of other influences and defects which are traceable to their source. When we find this to be the case it is the function of art to expunge the divergence between the purely natural and the spiritual, to exalt the external bodily appearance to a form of beauty, that is, a form throughout dominated and suffused with the animation of Spirit.

¹ That is, I suppose, the causal necessity as part of natural evolution.

We have seen, then, that in this type of representation symbolism is no longer presented by the external relation, and everything that partook of effort, strain, distortion, and perversion is eliminated. For when Spirit has grasped itself as Spirit it is at once explicit and clear; and on the same ground is also its association with the form adequate to it from the side of externality, something which is essentially ready to the hand and a free gift, which does not require, as a means for its declaration, a bond of connection introduced by the imagination, and contrasting with that which is immediately presented. Just as little is the classical form of art exhibited as a purely material and superficial personification. It is Spirit in its entirety, in so far as it is intended to make it the content of the art-product, which passes into that bodily shape, and is able to identify itself completely with it. From this point of view we may con179sider the conception that art has followed the human figure by means of imitation. According to the common view, however, this acceptance of the human figure as the model of imitation appears as a matter of accident, whereas we should rather maintain the art which has arrived at its maturity is obliged to reveal its substance by a necessary law in the form of man as he appears to sense perception, because Spirit alone obtains in it the existence fitting to it in the sensuous material of Nature.

All that we have here observed relatively to the human body and its expression applies also to human emotions, impulses, actions, experiences, and occupations. The externalization of these is also, in classical art, not merely characterized as a part of Nature’s life, but as that of Spirit; and this ideal aspect is brought into full and adequate identity with that which is external appearance.

(c) Inasmuch, then, as classical art comprehends free spirituality as determinate individuality, and immediately envisages the same in its bodily presentment, it frequently falls under the reproach of anthropomorphism. Even among the Greeks, to take an example, Xenophanes ridiculed the presentation of Gods by means of the sensuous image in his famous remark, that if lions had been sculptors they would have given their gods the external shape of lions. Of a similar tendency is that piece of French wit: God made men according to His image, but man has returned Him the compliment by creating God in the image of man. If we consider the matter relatively to the form of art that follows, the romantic, we may in this respect observe that the content of the classical form of beauty is no doubt defective precisely as the religion of art is so; but so little does the defect consist in anthropomorphism as such, that we may rather maintain, on the contrary, that though classical art is certainly sufficiently anthropomorphic for art, for the higher form of religion it is not enough so. Christianity has carried anthropomorphism to far greater lengths; for, according to Christian doctrine, God is not merely individuality in a human form, but a real and singular individual entirely God, and entirely a real man who has entered into all conditions of existence, and is no mere Ideal of beauty and art created by man. If our 180conception of the Absolute is limited to an abstract Being essentially without any characterization then, no doubt, every kind of representation vanishes, but if God is Spirit he must appear as man, as individual subject, not as ideal human being, but as actual participator in the entire externality of temporal conditions¹ which pertain to immediate and natural existence. In other words, from the Christian point of view, the infinite movement is carried to the extremest verge of opposition, and only returns to the absolute unity as the resolution of this separation. The man-becoming of God is incident to this phase or significant moment of separation; as real and individual subjectivity it is involved in the difference between unity and substance in its bare extension, and in this common sphere of temporal and spatial condition creates the consciousness in and pain of division in order through the ultimate resolution of such contradiction by the same means to arrive at eternal reconciliation. And this essential point of passage in the process, according to the Christian conception, is inherent in the nature of God Himself. As a matter of fact, God is here apprehended as absolute and free Spirit, in which Nature and immediate singularity is indeed proferred us as a phasal moment of a process, but, at the same time, as one which is necessarily transcended.² In classical art, on the contrary, the material medium is neither killed nor suffers death, but for this reason also we cannot wholly find in it the resurrection of Spirit. Classical art and its religion of beauty does not consequently wholly satisfy the depths of Spirit. However essentially concrete it may be, it still remains abstract for humanity because, instead of movement and reconciliation obtained by the contradiction we have adverted to of that infinite subjective process, it merely possesses as its life that undisturbed harmony of the free individuality determined in its adequate existence, this 181repose in its reality, this happiness, this content and greatness in itself, this eternal blitheness and bliss which even in unhappiness and pain does not lose its secure reliance on itself. Classical art has not worked its way to the full contradiction which is fundamentally involved in the notion of the Absolute and overcome that contradiction. For this reason it does not recognize the aspect which is in close relation to this contradiction, that is the essential obduracy of the subject as opposed to that which is ethical and of absolute significance, namely, sin and evil, no less than the waste of individual life in its own subjective aims, the dissolution and incontinence of that world which we may summarily describe as that of the entire sphere of its divisions, which is productive on the side both of sense and spirit of distortion, ugliness, and the repulsive. Classical art fails to cross the pure territory of the genuine Ideal.

¹ Bis zur zeitlichen gänzlichen Aüzerlichkeit.

² These words contain no doubt the epitome of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Religion” and are involved in its difficulties. The reference to the historical facts of Christianity under ideal conceptions is obvious. I have translated the words das Moment des Naturlichen … zwar vorhanden seyn as a phasal moment of “a process,” but I am well aware that no mere amplification of this sort can in itself make the words clear.

2. In so far as the historical realization of classical art is concerned, it is hardly necessary to observe that we must seek for that among the Greeks. Classical beauty, with its infinite range of content, material and form, is the gift bestowed on the Greek people; and this folk is entitled to our respect on the ground that it has produced art in its highest form of vitality. The Greeks, if we regard the form of their realized life immediately presented us, lived in that happy middle sphere of self-conscious and subjective freedom and substantive ethical life. They did not persist, on the one hand, in the unfree Oriental unity, which is necessarily bound up with a religious and political despotism for the reason that the individuality of the subject is overwhelmed in a universal substance, or, in some particular aspect of the same, because it has essentially as personality no right, and consequently no ground to stand on; neither, on the other, did the pass beyond to that subjective penetration, in which the particular subject separates itself from the whole and the universal, in order to make itself more explicit in its ideality; and only through a higher return to the ideal totality of a purely spiritual world, succeeds in its final purification of the substantive and essential. On the contrary, in the ethical life of Greece, the individual was self-substantive and essentially free, without disengaging himself from the general interests of the realized State 182immediately visible to him and the positive immanence of spiritual freedom in the temporal condition The universal of morality and the abstract freedom of personality, both in its ideal and external aspect, remains in accordance with the principle of Greek life in undisturbed harmony, and during the time in which, even in real existence, this principle asserted itself in still unimpaired purity, the self-substantiality of the citizen did not stand forth in relief in contrast to a morality which was to be distinguished from it: the substance of political life was so far merged in the, individual, as he on his part sought his own liberty absolutely in the universal ends of the entire civic life. The feeling for beauty, the significance and spirit of this joyous harmony interpenetrates all productions, in which the freedom of Greece is self-conscious, and in which she has made visible to herself her being. Consequently her view of the world is just the midway ground on which beauty commences its true life and breaks open its serene dominion; the intermediate realm, that is, of free vitality, which is not merely a fact at once immediate and natural, but one which is the creation of a spiritual point of view revealed by art, the realm, that is, of a culture of reflection, and at the same time of an absence of reflection, which neither isolates the individual nor on the other hand is competent to bring back again its negativity, pain, and unhappiness to a positive unity and reconciliation—a realm, however, which, just as in the case of Life itself, is at the same time only a point of passage, however true it be that it scales at this point the summit of beauty, and in the form of its plastic individuality is so spiritually concrete and rich, that all tones have their interplay within it, and also, too, that which is for its own standpoint what lies behind it, albeit it is no longer present as an absolute and unqualified principle, is nevertheless felt as that which accompanies it—a kind of background to it. In this sense the Greek nation has also, in the representation of its gods, made its spirit visible to the perceptions and the imaginative consciousness, and bestowed on them by means of art a determinate existence, which is entirely conformable with their true content. By virtue of this homogeneous form, which is alike consistent with the fundamental notion of Greek art and Greek mythology, art became in Greece 183the highest expression for the Absolute, and Greek religion is the religion of art itself, whereas romantic art, which appeared later, although it is undoubtedly art, suggests a more exalted form of consciousness than art is in a position to supply.

3. In establishing the position, as we have just done, on the one hand, that essentially free individuality is the content of classical art, and, on the other, that a like freedom is the equally requisite determinant of the form, we have already assumed that the entire blending of both together, however much it may be presented in the immediate form, is nevertheless no original unity such as Nature’s, but is necessarily an artificial association made possible by the subjective spirit. Classical art, in so far as its content and its form is spontaneity,¹ originates in the freedom of the Spirit that is clear to itself. And for this reason also we may say that in the third place the artist occupies a position different from that of his predecessors. That is to say his production declares itself as the spontaneous product of a man in the full possession of his senses,² who as truly knows what he wills as he is able to accomplish such a purpose; who is consequently obscure to himself neither in respect to the significance and substantive content of that which he has resolved to make visible in the form of art, nor finds himself hindered by any defects of technique from executing the result aimed after.

¹ Das Freie.

² Des besonnenen Menschen, i.e., the man of clear intelligence, sound sense, as we say.

(a) If we look more closely at this change in the position of the artist we shall in the first place find this freedom announced to us relatively to the content in this way, that he does not feel compelled to seek for it with the restless process of symbolical fermentation. Symbolic art remains the captive of its travail to bring to birth and make clear its form to its own vision, and this embodiment is itself only the original form,³ that is, on the one side Being in the immediate guise of Nature, and on the other the ideal 184abstraction of the universal, unity, conversion, change, be coming, origination, and passing away. In this original form of the artistic process, however, art does not come to its rightful possessions. Consequently, these representations of symbolic art, which should be expositions of content, remain still themselves riddles and problems, and merely testify to the struggle after clarity and the effort of Spirit, which on and on seeks to discover without obtaining the rest and repose of discovery. In contrast to this troublous search the content must for the classic artist be presented him as something already there in the sense that as a thing essentially positive, as belief, popular opinion, or as an actual event either of myth or tradition, it is determined for his imagination in all its essential character. Relatively to this objectively determined material the artist is placed in the freer relation that he does not himself undertake the process of production and fermentation, and has no further than the impulse after the real significances of his art, but rather that for him a completely explicit and unfolded content lies before him which he accepts and freely reproduces from himself. The Greek artists received their material from the popular religion in which already that which had been brought over to Greece from the Orient had begun to receive a form of its own. Pheidias borrowed his Zeus from Homer, and other tragedians also did not create the fundamental groundwork of that they represented. In the same way the artists of Christianity, Dante and Raphael, have only reclothed what was already to hand in the doctrines of their faith and their religious conceptions. This is also, it is true, from a certain point of view in like manner the case in the art of the Sublime, but with this difference, that here the relation to the content, as the one substance, does not permit subjectivity to come by its just claims, and allows to it no self-substantive finality. The comparative form of art, on the other hand, no doubt starts with the selection of significances as images which it makes use of, but this initiative of selection remains at the disposition of subjective caprice, and on its part dispenses with all substantive individuality, which constitutes the notion of classical art, and for this reason must rest with the personality which creates it.

³ The words dieser Gehalt ist selber nur der Erste would seem to refer back to the expressions Keine Erste und somit natürliche Einheit. But the sense is not very clear.

(b) The more, however, an explicitly unfolded content is 185present for the artist in popular beliefs, myth, and other actual facts, the more his energy is concentrated upon the object of endowing such a content with the external embodiment of art fitting to it. While in this respect symbolic art dissipates its resources in a thousand forms, and with unbridled imaginative power lays about it for material that it fails either to measure or define in order to adapt forms that are never really conformable to the significance it is seeking after, the classical artist in this respect is possessed of an aim that is at once resolute and definite. That is to say, the free form is with the content itself defined through that content, and is essentially pertinent to such content, so that the artist only appears to execute what is already accordant with the fundamental conception of what is presented him. While, therefore, the symbolic artist strives in his imagination to suit the form to significance or vice versa, the classic artist adapts significance to plastic shape by means of the process of freeing the external phenomena which are already presented from that part of them which is merely an incidental product. In this activity, however, although all that is purely his caprice is excluded, his productive power not merely follows or is not merely limited to a bare type, but is at the same time creative throughout the whole. Art which, to start with, is forced to seek out and discover its true form neglects for that reason the very aspect of form; but where, on the contrary, the building up of form is made the essential interest and the main task there we find the content also receives its plastic shape by imperceptible degrees through the process of the reproduction, precisely as we have hitherto found in a general way that form and content proceed hand in hand during the process, wherein they are completed. In this respect the classic artist elaborates the result also where it is a religious world that is presented him; he throughout develops in the free and buoyant medium of his art the material and mythological ideas which he receives.

(c) The same applies to the technique of art. In the case of the classic artist the ingredients must be already to hand; the sensuous material through which the artist labours must already be disengaged from all brittleness and extreme stubbornness, and yield directly to the aims of the artist, in 186order that the content, conformably to the notion of the classic type, may make its free and unfettered way through this external medium. To classical art, consequently, belongs from the first a high level of technical ability, which has subjected the sensuous material to an apt subservience. Such a technical perfection, if it is really to carry out all that is required of Spirit and its conceptions, is presupposed by the complete elaboration of all that pertains to craftsmanship in art, that is, in especial degree of that which makes itself visible within the plastic forms of the religion to which we now refer. The religious view of things, such as the Egyptian, for example, discovers, that is, definite external forms, idols, colossal constructions whose type remains fixed, and, further, in the usual similarity of forms and shapes, supplies a considerable field for elaboration in the treatment of it by the steadily progressive executive powers. This adaptability to the talents of the craftsman must already have been presented in that which is of an inferior and distorted type before the genius of classical beauty can associate these powers of mechanical facility with the forms of technical perfection. Then, at last, when that which is purely mechanical work is confronted with no further insuperable difficulty, is art enabled to proceed in the elaboration of a form, the practice in working out which is at the same time an elaboration which is in the closest relationship to the progressive advance of both content and form.

So far as the division of classical art is concerned it is usual in the more general sense of the term to call every complete work of art classic, whatever the particular character it may otherwise carry, whether symbolic or romantic. We have no doubt thus accepted it in the particular sense of art perfection, but with this important qualification, that this perfection must be based on the thorough interpenetration of ideal and free individuality and external definition. We consequently differentiate the classic form expressly from the symbolic and romantic, whose beauty in content and form is entirely of another kind. And along with the classic, regarded in its usual and more indefinite significance, we have as little to do here at this early stage with the particular arts in which the classical ideal is represented, as, for example, sculpture, the Epic, definite forms 187of lyrical poetry and specific types of tragedy and comedy. These particular types of art, although classic art is imprinted upon them, will be first discussed in the third portion of the division of our subject in the explication of the several arts and their grades.¹ What we approach more immediately now is the classic in the sense we have secured for the term, and as bases of our subdivision we can only therefore seek out the grades of evolution, which proceed from this notion of the classical ideal itself. The essential phases of this development are as follows.

¹ Deren Galtungen, their specific types.

The first point to which we would direct our attention is this, that the classical type of art is not to be apprehended as was the case with the symbolic type as immediately primary, as art’s commencement, but, on the contrary, as its result. We have evolved it, consequently, in the first instance from the course of the symbolic modes of representation, which it presupposes. The essential feature on which this process turned was the concentration of content in the elucidation of an essentially self-conscious individuality, which can neither employ for its expression the mere natural form, whether it be that of the elements or animals, nor the defective and confused personification of the human figure with it, but receives its expression in the animation of the human body permeated throughout with the breath of Spirit. Inasmuch, then, as the essence of freedom consists in this, to be that which it is through its own resources, that which in the first place appeared purely as the presupposition and condition of its origin outside the sphere of classical art must take its place within the circle peculiar to the same in order to make really visible the true content and the genuine form by means of the subjection of what is unconformable to and the negation of the Ideal. This process of conformation through negation, this process by means of which, whether we view it relatively to content or form, the genuine type of classical beauty begets itself from its own substance is consequently our point of departure, and we shall treat of that in our first chapter.

In the second chapter, on the other hand, we have reached by means of this process the true Ideal of the classical type of art. We find here as the central fact the fair and novel 188world of the gods of Greece, which it will be incumbent on us to develop exhaustively from within, both in its aspects of spiritual individualization, and those which are related to the bodily form with which such individuality is immediately associated.

In the third place, however, the notion of classical art implies conversely, along with this becoming of the beauty which springs from itself, also the dissolution of that creation, which will carry us into a further sphere, namely, that of the romantic type of art. The gods and human individuals of classic beauty just as they rise so, too, pass away once more from the art-consciousness, which in part turns round in opposition to the aspect of Nature that still persists, in which Greek art, in fact, had elaborated itself in the full perfection of beauty, in part transcends an undeific,¹ defective, and vulgar mode of reality in order to reveal that which is false and purely negative therein. In this dissolution, whose artistic activity we shall take as the material of our third chapter, the specific phases in the process, which created the truly classical type in that harmony presented by the perfect fusion of immediate beauty, fall apart. The ideal essence is made explicit on the one side in its independence of the external mode of its existence on the other. Subjectivity withdraws into itself, for the reason that it fails now to find an adequate realization in the forms hitherto employed, and is constrained to enlarge itself with the fuller content of a new spiritual world of absolute freedom and infinity, looking about for novel means of expressing this profounder grasp of its substance.

¹ Entgöttert—a mode from which the Divine is removed.

THE type of romantic art receives its definition, as we have hitherto throughout the present inquiry seen was always the case, from the ideal notion of the content, which it is the function of art to declare. We must consequently in the first place attempt to elucidate the distinctive principle of the new content, a content which now, in its significance as the absolute content of truth, opens up to our minds a new vision of the world no less than a novel configuration of art.

In the first stage of our inquiry, the entrance chamber of art, the impulse of imagination consisted in the struggle from Nature to spiritual expression. In this strain Spirit never reached beyond what was still only an effort to find, an effort which, in so far as it was not yet able to supply a genuine content for art, could only maintain its position as an external embodiment of the significant aspects of Nature, or those abstractions of the ideal inwardness of substance which were destitute of a subjective character in the strict sense, and in which this type of art found its real centre. The reverse of this point of view we discovered in classical art. Here it is spirituality—albeit it is only by virtue of the abrogation of the significances of Nature that it is enabled to struggle forth in its independent self-identity—which is the basis and principle of the content, with the natural phenomenon in the bodily or sensuous material for its external form. This embodiment, however, did not, as was the case in the first stage, remain superficial, indefinite, and unsuf282fused by its content; but the perfection of art attained its culminating point by precisely this means, namely, that Spirit completely transpierced its exterior appearance, idealized the shell of Nature in this union of beauty, and drew round itself a reality adequate to its own nature as mind under the mode of substantive individuality. By this means classical art was a presentation of the Ideal which completely satisfied its notion, the consummation of the realm of beauty. More beautiful art than this can neither exist now nor hereafter.

But for all that we may have an art that is more lofty in its aim than this lovely revelation of Spirit in its immediate sensuous form, if at the same time one that is created by the mind as adequate to its own nature. For this coalition, which perfects itself in the medium of what is external, and thereby makes sensible reality its adequate and determinate existence, necessarily runs counter to the true notion of Spirit, and drives it forth from its reconciliation in the bodily shape upon its own essential substance to seek further reconciliation in that alone. The simple and unriven totality of the Ideal is dissolved, and breaks up into one of twofold aspect, namely, that of the essentially subjective life and its exterior semblance, in order to enable mind, by means of this severation, to win the profounder reconciliation in its own most proper element. In one word, Spirit, which has for its principle the mode of entire self-sufficiency, the union of its notion with its reality—is only able to discover an existence that wholly corresponds to such a principle in its own spiritual world of emotion, soul, that is to say, in the inward life where it feels at home. The human spirit becomes aware that it must possess its Other, its existence, as Spirit, which it appropriates as its own and what it verily is, and by doing so at length enjoys its own infinity and freedom.

1. This elevation of Spirit to its own substance, through which it attains its objectivity—which it would otherwise be obliged to seek for in the external environment of its existence—within its own self and in this union with itself both feels and knows itself—is what constitutes the fundamental principle of romantic art. With this truth we may join as a corollary thereto that for this concluding stage the beauty of the classic Ideal, or in other words beauty in its most uniquely consonant form and its most conformable content, is no longer regarded as ultimate. For in arriving at the 283point of romantic art, Spirit¹ becomes aware that its truth is not fully attained by a self-absorption in the material of sense. On the contrary, it only comes fully to the knowledge of that truth by withdrawing itself out of that medium into the inward being of its own substance, whereby it deliberately affirms the inadequacy of external reality as a mode of its existence. It is owing to this that when this new content is set the essential task of making itself an object of beauty, the beauty, in the meaning of the terms under which we have met with it before, only persists as a subordinate mode, and the new conception of it becomes the spiritual beauty of what is its own ideality made fully explicit, in other words, the subjectivity of Spirit essentially infinite in its mode.

¹ Throughout, of course, the German word translated in these paragraphs as mind or spirit is Geist.

In order, however, that mind may attain the infinity which belongs to it it must transcend at the same time purely formal and finite personality and rise into the measure of the Absolute. That is to say, Spirit must declare itself as fulfilled with that which is out and out substantive, and in doing so proclaim itself as a self-knowing and self-willing subject. Conversely, therefore, what is substantive and true is no longer to be apprehended as a mere “beyond” relatively to our humanity, and the anthropomorphism of the Greek view of things can be struck out; and in the place of this we have humanity as very and real subjectivity affirmed as the principle, and by virtue of this change, as we have already seen, anthropomorphism for the first time reflects a truth of complete and final validity.

2. We have now in a general way to develop the range of subject-matter, no less than its form, from the earliest phases in the evolution of this principle, whose configuration, as it thus changes, is conditioned by the new content of romantic art.

The true principle of the romantic content is absolute inwardness,² and the form which corresponds to it, the subjectivity of mind, meaning by this the comprehension of its self-subsistence and freedom. This intrinsically infinite principle and explicitly enunciated universal is the absolute negation of all particularity;³ it is simple unity at home with 284itself, which consumes all that is separable, all processes of Nature and its succession of birth, passing away, and reappearance, all the limitations of spiritual existence, and dissolves all particular gods in its pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all gods are dethroned; the flame of the subjective essence has destroyed them; instead of the plastic polytheism art recognizes now one God only, one Spirit, one absolute self-subsistence, which as the absolute knowledge and volition of itself remains in free union with it, and no longer falls to pieces in the particular characters and functions we have reviewed above, whose single unit of cohesion was the force of an obscure Necessity. Absolute subjectivity, however, in its purity would escape from art altogether, and only be present in the apprehension of Thought, unless it could enter into external existence in order that it might be a subjectivity which was actual if also conformable to its notion, and further could recollect itself in its own province from out of this reality. And, what is more, this moment of reality is pertinent to the Absolute, because the Absolute, as infinite negativity, contains this self-relation—as simple unity of knowledge at home with itself, and therewith as immediacy—for the final consummation of its activity. On account also of this its immediate existence, which is rooted in the Absolute itself, the Absolute declares itself not as the one jealous God, who merely annuls the aspect of Nature and finite human existence, without revealing itself verily therein under the mode of actual divine subjectivity; rather the very Absolute unfolds itself, and takes to itself an aspect, relatively to which it is also within the grasp and presentation of art.

² Absolute ideality may perhaps interpret the text more intelligibly.

³ It is so because as self-identity it distinguishes itself from everything to which it is related.

The determinate existence of God, however, is not the natural and sensuous in its simplicity, but the sensuous as brought home to that which is not sensuous, in other words to the subjectivity of mind which, instead of losing the certainty of its own presence as the Absolute, in its external envisagement, for the first time, and by no other means than this its reality, is made aware of its actual presence as such. God in His Truth is consequently no mere Ideal begotten of the imagination, but He declares Himself in the heart of finite condition and the external mode of contingent existence, and is, moreover, made known to Himself therein as divine subjective life, which maintains itself there 285as essentially infinite and creating this infinity for itself. Inasmuch, then, as the actual subject¹ is the manifestation of God, Art for the first time secures the superior right to apply the human figure and its mode of externality generally as a means to express the Absolute, although the new function of art can only consist in making the external form not a means whereby the ideality of man’s inward condition is absorbed in exterior bodily shape, but rather conversely to make the consciousness of the Divine mind visible in the subject of consciousness. The distinguishable phases, which combine to make up the totality of this apprehension of the world-condition as, that is to say, the concrete totality of truth, are consequently made manifest to mankind from this point onwards under such a mode that it is neither the Natural in its simplicity, such as sun, heavens, stars, and so forth, nor the Greek conclave of the gods of beauty, nor the heroes and practical exploits in the field of the family cultus and political life—it is neither one nor any of these which supplies us with either content or form. Rather it is the actual and isolated individual subject who receives in the inward² substance of his living experience this infinite worth, for it is in him alone that the eternal characters of absolute Truth—which is made actual only as Spirit—expand out of their fulness within, and are concentrated to the point of determinate existence.

¹ Das wirkliche Subjekt, Hegel means, of course, individual man.

² “Most intimate” would perhaps express the meaning more clearly.

If we contrast this definition of romantic art with that which was proposed to the classical—that is to say, as Greek sculpture completed the latter under the mode most conformable to it—it is obvious that the plastic figure of the god does not express the motion and activity of Spirit, in so far as the same has retired from its actual bodily shape, and has penetrated to the inner shrine of independent self-identity. That which is mutable and contingent in the empirical aspect of individuality is no doubt removed from those lofty, godlike figures: what, however, fails them is the actualization of the subjective condition in its self-subsistent being as shown in self-knowledge and self-volition. This defect makes itself felt on the exterior side in the notable fact that the direct expression of soul in its simplicity, the light of the eye, is absent from the sculp286tured figure. The most exalted works of beautiful sculpture are sightless. The inward life does not look forth from them as self-conscious inwardness such as this concentration of Spirit to the point of light made visible in the human eye offers us. This light of the soul falls outside of them, and is the possession of the beholder alone: he is unable to look through these figures as soul direct to soul, and eye to eye. The God of romantic art, however, is made known with sight, that is, self-knowing, subjective on the side of soul, and that soul or divine intimacy disclosing itself to soul. For the infinite negativity, the withdrawal of the spiritual into itself, cancels its discharge in the bodily frame. This subjectivity is the light of Spirit, which reveals itself in its own domain, in the place which was previously obscure, whereas the natural light can only give light on the face of an object, is in fact this terrain and object, upon which it appears, and which it is aware of as itself.¹ Inasmuch as, however, this absolute intimacy of the soul expresses itself at the same time as the mode of human envisagenient in its actual existing shape, and our humanity is bound up with the entire natural world, we shall find that there is no less a wide field of variety in the contents of the subjective world of mind than there is in that external appearance, to which Spirit is related as to its own dwelling-place.

¹ Hegel here gives expression to what is perhaps not wholly defensible logic, though it may be truly poetic mysticism.

The reality of absolute subjectivity, as above described, in the mode of its visible manifestation, possesses the following modes of content and appearance.

(a) Our first point of departure we must deduce from the Absolute itself, which as very and actual mind endows itself with determinate existence, is self-knowing in its thought and activity. Here we find the human form so represented that it is known immediately as the wholly self-possessed Divine. Man does not appear as man in his solely human character, in the constraint of his passions, finite aims, and achievements, or as merely conscious of God, but rather as the self-knowing one and only universal God Himself, in whose life and sufferings, birth, death, and resurrection He reveals openly also to finite consciousness, what Spirit, what the Eternal and Infinite in their veritable truth are.² Ro287mantic art presents this content in the history of Christ, his mother, and his disciples, with all the rest of those in whom the Holy Spirit and the perfected Divine is manifested. For in so far as God, who is above all the essential Universal, exists in the manifestation of human existence, this reality is not, in the Divine figure of Christ, limited to isolate and immediate existence, but unfolds itself throughout the entire range of that humanity, in which the Spirit of God is made present, and in this actuality continues in unity with itself. The diffusion of this self-contemplation, this essential self-possession of mind,¹ is peace, in other words the reconciled state of Spirit with its own dominion in the mode of its objective presence—a divine world, a kingdom of God, in which the Divine, which has for its substantive notion from the first reconciliation with itself, consummates this result in such a condition, and thereby secures its freedom.

^{2 p. 286} I would refer any reader who is inclined to gasp at this interpretation of Christian revelation to some useful remarks of Professor Bosanquet in his Preface to his translation, p. xxviii.

^{1 p. 287} Die Ansbreitung dieses Selbstanschauens, In-sich-und-Bei-sich-seyns des Geistes ist der Frieden. One of Hegel’s terrors for the translator, though the sense is obvious enough.

(b) However much, we must fain add, this identification asserts itself as grounded in the essence of the Absolute itself, as spiritual freedom and infinity it is no reconciliation which immediately is visible from the first in either the real worlds of Nature or Spirit; on the contrary, it is only accomplished as the elevation of Spirit from the finitude of its immediate existence to its truth. As a corollary of this it follows that Spirit, in order to secure its totality and freedom, must effect an act of self-severation, and set up on the one side itself as the finitude of Nature and Spirit to its opposed self on the other as that which is essentially infinite. Conversely with this act of disruption the necessity is conjoined that from out of this retirement from its unity—within the bounds of which the finite and purely natural, the immediacy of existence, the “natural” heart in the sense of the negative, evil and bad, one and all are defined—a way is at last found by virtue of the subjugation of all that has no substantive worth within the kingdom of truth and consolation. In this wise the reconcilement of Spirit can only be conceived as an activity, a movement of the same, can only be presented as a process, in whose course arise 288both strain and conflict, and the appearance and reappearance, as an essential feature of it, of pain, death, the mournful sense of non-reality, the agony of the soul and its bodily tenement. For just as God in the first instance disparts finite reality from Himself, so, too, finite man, who starts on his journey outside the divine kingdom, receives the task to exalt himself to God, to let loose from him the finite, to do away with the nothing-worth, and by means of this decease of his immediate reality to become that which God in His manifestation as man accomplished as very truth in the actual world. The infinite pain of this sacrifice of the most personal subjectivity, sufferings, and death, which for the most part were excluded from the representation of classical art, or rather only are presented there as natural suffering, receive their adequate treatment necessarily for the first time in romantic art. It is, for example, impossible to affirm that among the Greeks death was ever conceived in its full and essential significance. Neither that which was purely natural, nor the immediacy of Spirit in its union with the bodily presence, was held by the Greeks as something in itself essentially negative. Death was consequently to them purely an abstract passing over, unaccompanied by horror or fearsomeness, a cessation without further immeasurable consequences for the deceased. If, however, conscious life in its spiritual self-possession is of infinite worth then the negation, which death enfolds, is a negation of this exaltation and worth, and it is consequently fearful, a death of the soul, which is in the position of finding itself thereby as itself now this negative in explicit appearance, excluded for evermore from happiness, absolutely unhappy, delivered over to eternal damnation.¹ Greek individuality, on the contrary, does not, regarded as spiritual self-consciousness, attach this worth to itself; it is able, consequently, to surround death with more cheerful images. Man only fears the 289loss of that which is of great worth to him.¹ Life possesses, however, only this infinite worth for mind if the subject thereof, as spiritual and self-conscious, is reality in its absolute unity, and is compelled with an apprehension, in this way justified, to image itself as doomed to negation by death. From another point of view, however, death also fails to secure from classical art the positive significance which it receives from romantic art. The Greeks never treated with real seriousness what we understand by immortality. It was only in later times that the doctrine of immortality received at the hands of Socrates a profounder significance for the introspective reflection of human intelligence. When, for example, Odysseus² praises the happiness of Achilles in the lower world as one excelling that of all others who were before or came after him on the ground that he, once revered as a god, is now greatest chief among the dead, Achilles in the well-known words rates this fortune at a very low rank indeed, and makes answer that Odysseus had better utter no word of comfort to him on the score of death; nay, he would rather be a mere serf of the soil, and poor enough serve a poor man for wage, than rule as lord over all the ghosts of the dead who have vanished to Hades. In romantic art, on the contrary, death is merely a decease of the natural soul and finite consciousness, a decease, which only proclaims itself as negative as against that which is itself essentially negative and abolishes what has no real substance, and is consequently the deliverance of Spirit 290from its finitude and division, mediating at the same time the spiritual reconciliation of the individual subject with the Absolute.¹ Among the Greeks life in its union with the existence of Nature and the external world was the only life about which you could affirm anything, and death was consequently pure negation, the dissolution of immediate reality. In the romantic view of the world, however, death receives the significance due to its negativity, in other words the negation of the negative,² and returns back to us thereby equally as the affirmative, as the resurrection of Spirit from the bare husk of Nature and the finiteness which it has outgrown. The pain and death of the extinguished light of individual being awakes again in its return upon itself in fruition, blessedness, and in short that reconciled existence which Spirit is unable to attain to save through the dying of its negative state, in which it is shut off from its most veritable truth and life. This fundamental principle does not therefore merely affect the fact of death as it approaches man in his relation to the world of Nature, but it is bound up with a process, which Spirit has to sustain in itself, quite independently of this external aspect of negation, if life and truth are to join hands.

^{1 p. 288} The analysis no doubt has its interest. But among other difficulties it is not easy to see how the argument, based as it is on rational grounds, makes for anything but annihilation. Death is a negation—it, according to the argument, puts an end to the “process”—what remains then is apparently the evanescence of the finite spirit. This reference to “happiness” assumes that conscious individual life continues, which is a mere petitio principii. If it continues the former dual aspect would seem to be implied in it. The analysis of the actual significance of death for Christendom and Greek paganism retains, of course, its validity.

^{1 p. 289} But surely in a sense personal life, if only limited to Earth’s existence, may be, I do not say necessarily is, all the more valuable. This is an important aspect of the matter which is not here adequately answered, and it suggests a real grievance against the extravagant follies of a certain type of Christendom. The present feeling of the wisest minds of our own time will be inclined to regard a good deal of Hegel’s remarks here as insufficient or lacking directness. One recalls those significant lines of a great writer but recently taken from us:

Sensation is a gracious gift

But were it cramped in station,

The prayer to have it cast adrift

Would spout from all sensation.

Hegel’s point of view seems neither to be that of mysticism nor mere absorption. [The source of the quotation is George Meredith, “The Question Whither” from A Reading of Earth (1888); Osmaston misquotes “to station.”]

^{2 p. 289} “Odyssey,” xi, vv. 481-91. But this illustration is at least evidence of the high value a Greek attached to life on Earth.

^{1 p. 290} True enough as an analysis of the Christian consciousness; but the difficulty above pointed out remains so far as the writer refers to a future life, which he sometimes appears to do, sometimes not. Conditions are assumed for human personality of which we can form no conception.

^{2 p. 290} He means it is the negation of that which is itself a negation, finite existence. The conclusion is of course, as above suggested, replete with difficulty.

(c) The third presentment of this absolute world of Spirit is co-ordinated by man, in so far as he neither makes manifest the Absolute and Divine in its immediate and essential mode as such Divine, nor declares positively the process in which he is exalted to the Supreme Being, and reconciled with Him, but rather continues within the ordinary sphere of his human life. Here it is the purely finite aspect of that existence which constitutes the content, whether we regard it in the light of its spiritual purposes, its worldly interests, passions, collisions, suffering, and enjoyments, or from that point of view which is wholly external, that of Nature, its kingdom, and all its detailed phenomena. In order to 291apprehend this content with adequacy, however, we must take up two distinct positions relatively to it. In other words, it is true that Spirit, for the reason that it has secured the principle of self-affirmation, expatiates in this province, as one on which it has a just claim, and one which, as native to it, provides satisfaction, an element from which it merely extracts this positive character,¹ and is permitted thereby itself to be reflected in its positive satisfaction and intimacy; yet, on the other hand, we have the fact that this content is brought down to the level of pure contingency, a contingency which is unable to claim any independent validity, for the reason that mind cannot discover therein its veritable existence, and consequently only preserves its substantial unity by independently on its own account breaking up again this finite aspect of Spirit and Nature as a thing of finitude and negation.

¹ That is, I presume, the positive character of natural conditions; but it may mean its own “affirmative “ relation.

3. In conclusion, ‘then, so far as the relation of this content in its- entirety to its mode of presentation is concerned, it would appear, in the first place, agreeably to what we have above stated, that the content of romantic art, relatively to the Divine, at any rate, is very limited.

(a) For, first, as we have already indicated, Nature is divested of the Divine principle; in other words, the sea and mountains, valleys, Time, and Night, briefly all the general processes of Nature, have here lost the worth which they carry when related to the presentation and content of the Absolute. The images of Nature receive no further expansion in a symbolic significance. The thesis that their shapes and activities might possibly sustain traits of Divine import is taken away from them. For all the mighty questions in regard to the origin of the world, in regard to the Whence, Wherefore, and Whither, of created Nature and humanity, and all the symbolical and plastic experiments in the resolution and exposition of these problems disappear at once in the revelation of God in Spirit; and we may add that also in the spiritual sphere the world of variety and colour, with the characters, actions, and events, as they were envisaged by classical art, are now concentrated in one single light-focus of the Absolute and its eternal 292history of redemption. The whole content meets, therefore, at this single point of the Inmost of Spirit¹—that is, of feeling, imagination, soul—all that strains after a union with truth, that seeks and wrestles to bring to birth the Divine in consciousness, and to maintain it; and, furthermore, is constrained to execute the world’s aims and undertakings, not so much for the world’s sake as to further the unique and essential undertaking of its heart by means of the spiritual conflict of man’s inward nature and his reconciliation with God, presenting personality and its conservation no less than all that paves the way to them for this object, and this alone. The heroism, which makes its appearance as the result of such aspirations, is not the kind of heroism which prescribes laws by its own fiat, establishes new systems, creates and informs circumstances, but rather a heroism of submission, which accepts everything as predetermined and ordered above it, and whose energies are now wholly restricted to the task of regulating temporal events in line with such direction, and making that which is in keeping with the higher order and of independent stability a valid factor in the world as it is and in the Time-process. For the reason, however, that this absolute content appears as concentrated to a focus in the inward life of the soul, and the entire process is imported into the life of mankind, the range of this content is thereby also infinitely extended. It expands, in fact, to a manifold variety practically without limit. For although every objective history supplies what is substantive in that self-concrete soul-life, yet for all that the subject of the same reviews it in all its aspects, presents isolated features taken from it, or unfolds it as it appears in continually novel human traits by way of addition, and may very well into the bargain both import the entire expanse of Nature, as environment and locale of Spirit, and divert them to the one single object referred to. By this means the history of soul-life is infinitely rich, and can adapt its form to ever shifting conditions and situations in every possible way. And, further, if the individual at last steps forth from this absolute sphere and actively engages in worldly affairs, the range of interests, objects, and emotions will be difficult to count on the score 293in proportion as the spiritual self-possession is profound, agreeably to the principle in its fullest application; man is consequently distracted by an infinitely multiplied profusion of interior and exterior collisions, revolutions, and gradations of passion, and the most manifold degrees of satisfaction. The Absolute in its unqualified and essential universality, in so far, that is, as it is unfolded in the conscious life of the human soul, constitutes the spiritual content of romantic art; and for this reason his collective humanity, no less than its entire evolution, becomes its inexhaustible material.

¹ Auf die Innerlichkeit des Geistes.

(b) Romantic art does not, however, as art educe this content in the way we found was the case for the most part in symbolic art, and, above all, in the classical type and its ideal gods. Romantic art, as we have seen already, is not, in its specific capacity, the instructive revelation, which, merely in the form of art, makes the content of truth visible to the senses. The content is already present in the conceptive mind, and the emotions independently and outside the sphere of art. Religion, as the consciousness of truth in its universality, is here an essential premiss of art to a degree totally different from what it was in the previous cases; and, even if we look at the position in its wholly exterior aspect for the consciousness that is actual in the reality of the material world, it lies before us as the prosaic fact of the very present. That is to say, inasmuch as the content of revelation to mind is the eternal absolute nature of mind¹ itself, which breaks itself loose from Nature in its bareness and subordinates the same, its manifestation in the immediacy of present life is such that the external material, in so far as it consists and is existent, only continues as a contingent world, out of which the Absolute recollects itself in the secret wealth of Spirit, and only by such means attains independence and truth. The external show receives thus the imprimatur of an indifferent medium, in which Spirit can repose no ultimate trust, and in which it can find no dwelling-place. The more it conceives the conformation of external reality as unworthy of its fulness the less it becomes able to seek consolation therein, or to discover its task of self-reconcilement consummated by a union therewith.

¹ Reason or Spirit are perhaps preferable.

294(c) The manner in which, therefore, romantic art gives to itself a real embodiment agreeably to the spirit of the principle above indicated, and on the side of its external appearance, is not one which essentially overleaps the ordinary presentment of reality: it is by no means averse to accept as cover for itself real existence in its finite defects and definition. That beauty therefore disappears from it, which tended to raise the outside envisagement above the soilure of Time, and the traces that unite it with a Past, in order to declare the beauty of existence in its blossom in the room of what had otherwise been a dismantled image. Romantic art has no longer for its aim the freedom and life of existence in its infinite tranquillity and absorption of the soul in the bodily presence; no more a life such as this arrests it. It turns its back on this pinnacle of beauty. It interweaves the threads of its soul experience with the contingent material of Nature’s workshop, and gives unfettered play to the emphatic features of ugliness itself. We have, in short, two worlds included in the Romantic, a spiritual realm essentially complete in itself, the soul-kingdom, which finds reconciliation in its own sphere, and therewith the otherwise straightforward repetition of birth, death, and resurrection now for the first time perfected in the true circular orbit, doubled back in the return upon itself, the genuine Phoenix life of Spirit. On the other hand, there is the realm of external Nature simply as such, which, released as it is from its secure association and union with Spirit, becomes now a completely empirical reality, concerning the form of which the soul cares little or nothing. In classical art Spirit controlled the empirical phenomenon and transpierced it through and through, because it was the very thing which it had to accept as its completed reality. But now the ideal kingdom is indifferent to the mode of configuration in the world of immediate sense, because this immediacy is beneath the sphere of the blessedness of essential soul-life. The external phenomenon is no longer able to express this inward life; and if any call is made upon it for this purpose, it merely is utilized to make plain that the external show is an existence which does not satisfy, and is forced to point back by suggestion to the spiritual content, the soul and its emotions, as the truly essential medium. Precisely for 295the same reason romantic art suffers externality on its own part to go on its way freely; and in this respect permits all and every, material, flowers, trees, and so on, down to the most ordinary domestic utensils, to appear in its productions just as they are, and as the chance of natural circumstance may arrange them. Such a content as this, however, carries at the same time with it the result; that as purely exterior matter, its worth is of no validity and insignificant; it only receives its genuine worth when the soul has made itself a home in it, and it is taken to express not merely the ideal, but spiritual inwardness¹ itself, which, instead of blending itself with the exterior thing, appears simply to have attained its own reconciliation with itself. The ideality thus brought home to a point is that mode of expression which is without externality, invisibly declaring itself, and only itself, in other words, a tone of music simply, which is neither an object nor possesses form, a wavelet over waters,² a ringing sound over a world, which in sounds such as this, and the varied phenomena which are united with it, can only receive and reflect one reverberation of this self-absorption of the soul.

¹ The German words are das Innerliche and die Innigkeit.

² This is obviously not wholly independent of form.

To sum up, then, in a word, this relation of content and form in the romantic type, where it remains true to its distinctive character, we may affirm that the fundamental note of the same, for this very reason that its principle constitutes an ever expanding universality and the restlessly active depths of heart and mind, is that of music, and when combined with the definite content of imagination, lyrical. This lyrical aspect is likewise the primary characteristic of romantic art, a tone which gives the key-note also to the epic poem and drama, and which is wafted as a breath of soul even around the works of the plastic arts, since here, too, spirit and soul are desirous of speaking by means of the plastic shape to soul and mind.

As regards the division of our subject, which we must now in conclusion determine for the examination of this our third extensive domain of artistic production on the lines of its development, we shall find that the basic notion of the romantic relatively to its substantive and progressive 296articulation is comprised most conveniently in three branches of division we may define as follows.

The first sphere is the province of religion strictly, in which the redemption history, the life, death, and resurrection of Christ constitute the central interest. The principle which is emphasized as all-important here is that self-involution which mind accomplishes by negating its immediacy and finitude, overcoming the same, and by means of this liberation secures its own self-possessed infinity and absolute self-subsistence in its own kingdom.

This self-subsistence passes, then, in the second place from the Divine dwelling of essential Spirit, surrenders its pure exaltation of finite man to God, in order to enter the temporal world. Here it is, in the first instance, the subject of consciousness simply, which has become self-affirmative, and which possesses as the substantive material of its content, no less than as the interest of its existence, the virtues of this positive subjectivity, such as honour, love, fidelity, and bravery, the aims and obligations, in short, of romantic chivalry.

The content and form of the third chapter may be generally indicated as the formal consistency of character. In other words, if the subjective life has been so far concentrated, that spiritual independence is its essential characteristic, it follows also that the particular content, with which such independence is associated as with what is strictly its own, will also partake of such a character; this self-subsistence, however, inasmuch as it does not, as was the case in the sphere appertinent to essential and explicit religious truth, repose in the substantive core of its life, is only able to reach a formal type. Conversely the configuration of external conditions, situations, and events is now also independently free, and is involved consequently in every sort of capricious adventure. For this reason we find, to put it in general terms, as the termination of the romantic, the contingency of the exterior condition and internal life, and a falling asunder of the two aspects, by reason of which Art commits an act of suicide, and betrays the fact that conscious life must now secure forms of loftier significance, than Art alone is able to offer, in which to grasp and retain truth.

[1.	The artistic consciousness originates in wonder. The effects that result from such a state. Art the first interpreter of the religious consciousness. Conceptions envisaged in plastic forms of natural objects	23
2.	The final aim of symbolic art is classical art. Here it is dissolved. The Sublime lies between the two extremes	26
3.	The stages of symbolical art classified according to their subdivisions in the chapters of this Second Part of the entire treatise]	29

A.	Unity of Significance and Form in its immediacy			36
	1.	The religion of Zoroaster		37
	2.	No true symbolical significance in the above		42
	3.	Equally destitute of an artistic character		44
B.	Fantastic Symbolism			47
	1.	The Hindoo conception of Brahmâ		50
	2.	Sensuousness, measurelessness, and personifying activity of Hindoo imagination		51
	3.	Conception of purification and penance		64
C.	Genuine Symbolism			65
	1.	Nature no longer accepted in its immediate sensuous existence as adequate to the significance. Art and general outlook of ancient Egypt		75
		[(a)	The inward import held independent of immediate existence in the embalmed corpse	76
		(b)	Doctrine of immortality of the soul as held by Egyptians	76
		(c)	Superterranean and subterranean modes of Egyptian art. The Pyramids]	77
	2.	Worship of animals, as the vision of a secreted soul. Symbolical and non-symbolical aspects of this cult		78
	3.	Works of Egyptian art are objective riddles. The Sphinx symbolic of the genius of Egypt. Memnons, Isis, and Osiris		79

A.	Pantheism of Art		89
	1.	Hindoo poetry	90
	2.	Persian and Mohammedan poetry. Modern reflections of such poetry as in Goethe	92
	3.	Christian Mysticism	97
B.	The Art of the Sublime		97
	1.	God as Creator and Lord of a subject World. He is Creator, not Generator. His Dwelling not in Nature	100
	2.	Nature and the human form cut off from the Divine (entgöttert)	101
	3.	Nullity of objective fact a source of the enhanced self-respect of man. Man’s finiteness and immeasurable transcendency of God. No place for immortality. The Law	103

A.	Modes of Comparison originating from the side of externality		110
	1.	The Fable. Æsop	113
	2.	The Parable, Proverb, and Apologue	122
	3.	The Metamorphosis	125
B.	Comparisons, which in their imaginative presentation originate in the Significance		128
	1.	The Riddle	130
	2.	The Allegory	132
	3.	The Metaphor, Image, and Simile	137
C.	The Disappearance of the Symbolic Type of Art		161
	1.	The Didactic Poem	163
	2.	Descriptive Poetry	165
	3.	Relation of both aspects of internal feeling and external object in the ancient Epigram	165

Introduction and Division of subject				189
1.	The Degradation of Animalism as such			191
	(a)	The sacrifice of animals. How regarded by the Greeks		192
	(b)	The Chase, or examples of such in heroic times		194
	(c)	Tales of metamorphosis. Illustrations both from Greek and Egyptian traditions		194
2.	The Contest between the older and later Dynasties of Gods			201
	(a)	The oracles whereby the gods attest their presence through natural existences		205
	(b)	The ancient gods in contradistinction from the new		208
		[(α)	The Titan natural potences included among the older régime	208
		(β)	They are the powers of Earth and the stars ixwithout spiritual or ethical content. Prometheus. The Erinnyes	209
		(γ)	The order of these gods is a succession]	215
	(c)	The conquest of the older régime of gods		217
3.	The Positive Conservation of the conditions set up by Negation			220
	(a)	The Mysteries		220
	(b)	Preservation of old régime still more obvious in artistic creations. Illustrations from Greek poetry		221
	(c)	The Nature-basis of the later gods. Nature not in itself divine to the Greek. Illustrations of both points of view		223

[1.	Symbol as a sign simply in language, colours, etc.		8
2.	Not a mere sign to represent something else, but a significant fact which presents the idea or quality it symbolizes		9
3.	Thing symbolized must have other qualities than that accepted as symbol. Term symbol necessarily open to ambiguity		10
	(a)	Ambiguity in particular case whether the concrete fact is set before us as a symbol. Difference between a symbol and a simile. Illustrations	10
	(b)	Ambiguity extends to entire worlds of Art, e.g., Oriental art. Two theories with regard to mythos discussed and contrasted	14
	(c)	The problems of mythology in the present treatise limited to the question, “How far symbolism is entitled to rank as a form of Art?” Will only convisider symbol in so far as it belongs to Art in its own right and itself proceeds from the notion of the Ideal, the unfolding of which it commences]	19

1.	Self-subsistency of the Classical type viewed as the interfusion of the spiritual and its natural form		175
	[(a)	No return of the ideal principle upon itself. No separation of opposed aspects of inward and external	175
	(b)	Symbolism absent from this type except incidentally	176
	(c)	Reproach of anthropomorphism]	179
2.	Greek art as the realized existence of the classical type		181
3.	Position of the creative artist under such a type		183
	[(a)	His freedom no result of a restless process of fermentation. Receives his material as something assured in history or belief	183
	(b)	His plastic purpose is clearly defined	184
	(c)	High level of technical ability	185
		Classification of subject-matter]	186

Introduction and Division of subject-matter				229
1.	The Ideal of Classical Art generally			230
	(a)	The Classical Ideal is a creation of free artistic activity, though it reposes on earlier historical elements		230
		[(α)	The Greek gods are neither the appearance of mere external Nature, nor the abstraction from one Godhead	232
		(β)	The Greek artist is a poet. But his productive power is concretely spiritual, not merely capricious	233
		(γ)	The relation of the Greek gods to human life. Illustrations from Homer, etc.]	233
	(b)	What is the type of the new gods of Greek art?		235
		[(α)	Their concentrated individuality, or substantive characterization	236
		(β)	Their beauty not merely spiritual, but also plastic	237
		(γ)	Removal of them from all that is purely finite into a sphere of lofty blessedness exalted above mere sensuous shape]	238
	(c)	The nature of the external representation. Sculpture, in its secure self-possession, most suited as the medium		241
2.	The Sphere or Cycle of the Individual Gods			242
	(a)	What is called the “divine universum” is here broken up into particular deities		242
	(b)	Absence of an articulate system		243
	(c)	The general character of their distinguishing attributes		244
3.	xThe particular Individuality of the Gods			246
	(a)	The appropriate material for such individualization
		[(α)	The natural religions of symbolism a primary source. Illustrations	247
		(β)	That of local conditions	250
		(γ)	That of the world of concrete fact. Illustrations from Homer, etc.]	254
	(b)	Retention of a fundamental ethical basis		258
	(c)	Advance in the direction of grace and charm		259

1.	Fate or Destiny		261
2.	Dissolution through the nature of the anthropomorphism of the gods		263
	[(a)	Absence or defect of the principle of subjectivity as here asserted	263
	(b)	The transition to Christian conceptions only found in more modern art. The prosaic art of the Aufklarung. Illustrations	266
	(c)	The dissolution of classical art in its own province]	270
3.	Satire		273
	(a)	Distinction between the dissolution of classical and symbolic art	274
	(b)	The Satire	276
	(c)	The Roman world as the basis of the satire with illustrations ancient and modern	277

1.	The Principle of inward Subjectivity		282
2.	The steps in the Evolution of the content and form of the Romantic Principle		283
	[(a)	Point of departure deduced from the Absolute viewed as the determinate existence of a self-knowing subject of thought and volition. Man viewed as self-possessed Divine. History of Christ	286
	(b)	xiThis process of self-recognition and reconcilement viewed as a process in which strain and conflict arise. Death as viewed by Christian and Greek art contrasted	287
	(c)	The finite aspect of subjective life in the secular interests, the passions, collisions, and suffering, or enjoyment of the earthly life]	290
3.	The romantic mode of exposition in relation to its content		291
	[(a)	The content of romantic viewed relatively to the Divine extremely restricted. Nature divested of its association, symbolic or otherwise, with Divinity	291
	(b)	Religion the premiss of romantic art in a far more enhanced degree than in symbolic art. Influence of the romantic principle on the medium adopted	293
	(c)	Two worlds covered by the romantic principle, viz., the soul-kingdom of Spirit reconciled therein, and the realm of external Nature from which even the aspect of ugliness is not excluded. Latter world only portrayed in so far as soul finds a home therein]	293
		Division of subject-matter	295

1.	The Redemption history of Christ			302
	(a)	The principle of Love as paramount in this religious sphere. How far Art in such a sphere is a superfluity		303
	(b)	From a certain aspect the appearance of Art is necessary		303
	(c)	The aspect of contingency in the particularity of an individual Person as such Divine		304
		[(α)	The presentment by artists of the exterior personality of Christ	304
		(β)	The conflict inherent in the religious growth, viewed as a process, though determining that process universally, is concentrated in the history of one person in the first instance	306
		(γ)	The feature of death only regarded here as a point of transition to self-reconcilement]	308
2.	Religious Love			309
	(a)	Conception of the Absolute as Love		309
	(b)	Form of Love as self-concentrated emotion. Affiliation of such with sensuous presentment		310
	(c)	xiiLove as the Ideal of romantic art		310
		[(α)	Christ as Divine Love	311
		(β)	Form most compatible with Art the love of mother. Mary, mother of Jesus	311
		(γ)	Love of Christ’s disciples and the Christian community]	313
3.	The Spirit of the Community			313
	(a)	The Martyrs		315
	(b)	Penance and conversion within the soul		320
	(c)	Miracles and Legends		323

Introduction				325
1.	Honour			332
	(a)	Notion of same Contrast between Greek and modern art in this respect		332
	(b)	Vulnerability of same		335
	(c)	Reparation demanded. Honour a mode of self-subsistency which is self-reflective		336
2.	Love			337
	(a)	Fundamental conception of. Illustrations from poetry		337
	(b)	Collisions of the same		341
		[(α)	That between honour and love	341
		(β)	That between the supreme spiritual forces of state, family, etc., and love	342
		(γ)	Opposition between love and external conditions in the prose of life and the prejudice of others]	342
	(c)	Limitation of contingency inherent in the conception itself		343
3.	Fidelity			345
	(a)	Loyalty of service		346
	(b)	The nature of its co-ordination with a social order either in the world of Chivalry or the modern		347
	(c)	Nature of its collisions. Illustrations. The “Cid,” etc.		348

Introduction				350
1.	The Self-subsistence of individual Character			354
	(a)	The formal stability of character		355
	(b)	Character viewed as an inward but undisclosed totality. Illustrations from Shakespeare		359
	(c)	The substantial interest in the display of such formal character. Shakespeare’s vulgar characters, and the geniality of their presentment		365
2.	The Spirit of Adventure			367
	(a)	The contingent nature of ends and collisions		368
		[(α)	Christian Chivalry in its conflict with Moors, Arabs, and Mohammedans. Crusades. Holy Grail	369
		(β)	The universal spirit of adventure in the personal experience of individuals. Dante and the “Divine Comedy”	371
		(γ)	The contingency within the soul due to love, honour, and fidelity]	371
	(b)	The comic treatment of such contingency. Ariosto and Cervantes, contrast between		372
	(c)	The spirit of the novel or romance		375
3.	The Dissolution of the Romantic type			377
	(a)	The artistic imitation of what is directly presented by Nature		379
		[(α)	Naturalism in poetry. Diderot, Goethe, and Schiller	381
		(β)	Dutch genre painting	382
		(γ)	Interest in objects delineated related to artistic personality]	385
	(b)	Individual Humour		386
	(c)	The end of the romantic type of Art		388
		[(α)	Conditions under which it is possible for the artist to bring the Absolute before the aesthetic sense	389
		(β)	The position of Art at the present day. Analogous position of modern artist and dramatist	391
		(γ)	General review of previously evolved process of Art’s typical structure. What is possible for modern art and the conditions necessary. Illustration of the terminus of romantic art with the nature of the Epigram. Supreme function of Art]	394