Chapter II: The Ideal of the Classical Type of Art (1)

We have already seen what the essence of the Ideal is in our general consideration of the beauty of art. Here we are to take it merely in the special sense appropriate to the _classic_ Ideal, whose notion has already presented itself in its general features in its association with the notion of the _classical_ art-type. For the Ideal, of which we have now to speak, consists simply in this, that classical art in very truth attains to and sets before us that which exposes its most intimate notion. As content it grasps on this particular plane the spiritual, in so far as this Spirit attracts Nature and her powers to its own appropriate realm, and sets itself before us in exposition not as mere inwardness and dominion over Nature, but furthermore accepts as its proper form, human shape, deed, and action, through which the spiritual shines forth clearly in perfect freedom, and the form penetrates with its life into the sensuous material not merely as into a mode of externality symbolically significant, but as actually into a determinate existence, which is the adequate existence of Spirit.

We may divide up, then, the present chapter into the following sections:

We have in the _first_ place to consider the _general_ character of the classic Ideal, which possesses what is pertinent to humanity in its form no less than its content, and elaborates both sides in the completest consistency one with the other. _Secondly_, however, forasmuch as here the human is absorbed wholly into the bodily shape and external appearance, it becomes the _definite_ external shape, which in its conformity is merely a defined content. Since, therefore, we have the Ideal before us at the same time as _particularity_, there arises a definite number of _particular_ gods and powers in the shape of human existence. _Thirdly_, this particularity does not persist in the abstraction of _one_ type of definition, whose essential character would constitute the entire content and the one-sided principle for its representation; but rather it is quite as much essentially a totality and the _individual_ unity and congruity which is applicable to such. Without this repletion such particularity would remain cold and empty; the vitality of Life would fail it, a contingency which is impossible to the Ideal in any relation whatever.

We have now to consider more narrowly the Ideal of classical art according to these three aspects of universality, particularity, and individual singularity.

1. THE IDEAL OF CLASSICAL ART GENERALLY

The questions which arise relatively to the origins of the Greek gods, in so far as the real centre for ideal reproduction results from them, we have already touched upon, and seen that they belong to the elaborated tradition of art. The modification that is incidental to that treatment can only proceed by means of the twofold degradation, on the one hand, of the universal powers of Nature and their personification, and, on the other, of the animal constituents and its form, in order that thereby it may win the spiritual as its true determinate substance, and also the human mode of appearance as its true form.

(_a_) We have described how the classical Ideal first really becomes actual through such a remodelling of that which came before the earliest aspect of it. Along with this we have above all to draw attention to just this fact, that it is generated from mind (Spirit), and consequently has originated in the most intimate and personal resources of the poets and artists, who brought it into the presence of conscious life with the aid of a thoughtful consideration as clear as it was unfettered and with the distinct object of artistic production. In opposition to this creation we have, however, apparently the fact that Greek mythology reposes on earlier traditions, and contains distinct references to foreign, that is Oriental, matter. Herodotus, for example, although specifically asserting in the passage already cited that Homer and Hesiod created for the Greeks their gods, nevertheless in other passages associates closely these very Greek gods with other divinities such as those of Egypt. For in the second book[180] he expressly narrates that Melampus gave the name of Dionysos to the Greeks, further introduced the Phallus and the entire sacrificial festival, adding, however, this discrepant detail, that Melampus had learnt the religious service from the Tyrian Kadmus and the Phoenicians, who came with Kadmus to Boeotia. These contradictory statements have roused interest in our own times, more particularly as associated with Creuzer's researches, who endeavours to discover in Homer, for example, ancient mysteries and the sources which flowed in together towards Greece, whether they be Asiatic, Pelasgian, Dodonian, Thracian, Samothracian, Phrygian, Indian, Buddhistic, Phoenician, Egyptian, or Orphic, to say nothing of the infinitely varied peculiarities of specific localities and other details. No doubt it appears at first sight wholly inconsistent with these many sources of tradition that those poets should have supplied either the names or the substantial form of the gods. It is possible, however, to harmonize entirely both factors, tradition, and individual creation. The tradition comes first; it is the point of departure, which hands down the mere ingredients; but for all that it does not contribute the real content and the genuine form of the gods. This substantive presence is the product of the genius of those poets, who discovered by a process of free elaboration the true substantive form of these very gods and are consequently in fact become the creators of that mythology which awakes our admiration of Greek art. Yet for this reason the Homeric gods, in one aspect of them, are not to be taken as the result merely of the poetic phantasy, or nothing more than capricious invention. They have their roots in the genius and beliefs of the Greek folk and the religious basis of that nation. They are the absolute potencies and powers, the highest stretch of the Greek conception, the central point of the beautiful regarded universally, presented, so to speak, by the Muses themselves to the poet.

In this free handling, then, the artist takes up an entirely different position from that he occupies in the East. The Hindoo poets and sages have also to begin with material ready to work upon, such as the elements of Nature, the heavens, animals, streams, and so forth, or the pure abstraction of the formless and contentless Brahman. Their enthusiasm, however, is a confusion of the ideal character[181] of the subjectivity which accepts the difficult task of elaborating such an external material to it, an enthusiasm which, in the unmeasured expansion of its imagination, which excludes every secure and absolute[182] direction, is unable to mould its creations conformably to genuine freedom of expression and beauty, and remains the slave of that material in uncontrolled and roving productive activity. It resembles, in fact, a master-builder who has no firm foundation beneath him. Ancient ruins of half dismantled walls, mounds, and projecting rocks fetter him, quite apart from the particular aims according to which he desires to construct his building; and he can only create a wild, inharmonious, and fantastical fabric. In other words, that which he produces is not the result of his imagination freely acting under its own plastic genius. Conversely the Hebrew poets present us with revelations which, it is said, they deliver as the Lord's voice, so that here again the creative source is an enthusiasm not fully self-conscious; it is separated, that is, and distinct from individuality and the productive genius of the artist, as in the wisdom of the Sublime generally it is the abstract and eternal, essentially in its relation to something other than it and external, which is consciously or imaginatively conceived.

In classical art artists and poets are, it is true, also prophets and teachers, who declare and reveal to mankind the nature of the Absolute and Divine. But we must emphasize here the following distinctions:

(_α_) In the _first_ place the content of their gods is neither that appearance of Nature which is external to humanity nor the mere abstraction of one Godhead, whereby merely a superficial formulation or an inwardness that is without content is preserved. Their content is, on the contrary, deduced from human life and existence, and for this reason is that which is peculiar to the human breast; a content, in short, with which man himself can freely coalesce as at home with himself, while that which he thus produces is the fairest product of his own activity.

(_β_) _Secondly_, these artists are at the same time _poets_, that is, men of creative talent who work the aforesaid material and its content into a free and substantially independent form. As thus regarded Greek artists are in all essential respects creative poets. They have brought together all the varied original ingredients into the melting-pot, but they have produced thereby no mere broth, such as might come from a witches' cauldron; rather they did away with all that is troubled, purely natural, unclean, foreign, and without rational measure in the pure flame of this more profound spirit; they made all glow together and permitted the form to appear at last purified, albeit it still retained a distant accord with the ruder material from which it was fashioned. What mainly concerned them in this work consisted partly in the winnowing away of all that was in their inherited material destitute of form and beauty, distorted and symbolical, and partly in the prominence they gave to what was really spiritual, which they set themselves to render under modes of individuality, and in the interest of which they had to discover gradually the external appearance most appropriate. Here for the first time we find that it is the human form and human actions and events, not merely made use of under the mode of personification, which, as we have already seen, necessarily stand forth as the uniquely adequate reality. No doubt the artist discovers these forms, too, in the real world; but he has at the same time to eradicate all that is accidental and incongruent in them, before they are entitled to appear as commensurable with that humanity, which, as essentially apprehended, shall offer to us the image of the eternal powers and gods. And this is what we call the free and spiritual, and not merely capricious production of the artist.

(_γ_) And, _thirdly_, for the reason that the gods are not merely stable existences in their own world, but also are active within the concrete reality of Nature and human, events, the poet is further concerned to recognize the presence and activity of the gods in this relation to human, fact, to interpret, that is, the particularity of natural event and human actions and destiny wherein the divine powers are apparently interfused, and to share thus the duties of the priest and the seer. We, from the point of view of our everyday prosaic reflection, explain the phenomena of Nature according to universal laws and forces, and interpret the actions of mankind as the product of their subjective intentions and self-proposed aims. The Greek poets, however, have their eyes everywhere directed toward the Divine, and create, by giving to human activities the loftier colour and habit of divine actions, and by means of such interpretation, the various aspects under which the power of the gods is made visible. For a number of such interpretations results in a number of actions, in which we are made aware of the character of this or that god. We have but to open, for example, the Homeric poems, and we shall scarcely meet with a single event of importance which is not more closely elucidated as proceeding from the volition or actual assistance of the gods. These expositions are, in fact, the insight, the independently created belief, the intuitive conceptions of the poet, just as Homer often, too, gives expression to them in his own name, and in part also places such in the mouth of his characters, whether priest or hero. Quite at the opening of the "Iliad," for example, he has himself explained the pestilence in the Greek camp as the result of the indignation of Apollo over Agamemnon, who refused to release to Chryses his daughters[183]; and, in a passage that follows, he makes Calchas transmit this very interpretation to the Greeks[184].

In a similar way Homer informs us in the concluding canto of the "Odyssey"--on the occasion when Hermes conducted the shades of the inanimate suitors to the meadows of Asphodel, and they find there Achilles and the other deceased heroes, who fought before Troy, and finally, too, Agamemnon joins them--how the last-mentioned describes the death of Achilles[185]:

"The whole day long had the Greeks fought; and when at last Zeus separated the combatants, they carried the noble body to the ships, and washed it, weeping often the while, and embalmed it. Then there arose a divine uproar on the sea, and the affrighted Achaeans would have been flung headlong into their hollow ships, had not an aged and much knowing man, Nestor to wit, restrained them, whose advice had also proved the wisest on former occasion." Nestor then interprets for them the phenomenon in the following terms: "The _mother_[186] comes forth from the sea with the immortal sea-goddesses, in order to meet her deceased son. And the great-hearted Achaeans at this word let their fear depart from them." That is to say, they knew then of what kind it was--of human origin--the mother in her grief comes toward him; what they shall see and hear is that which finds its response in themselves. Achilles is her son, she is herself full of grief. And in this vein Agamemnon, turning towards Achilles, continues his narrative with a description of the universal sorrow: "And around thee stood the daughters of the ancient of the sea, lamenting, and they robed themselves in ambrosial garments; and the Muses also, the nine in conclave, wailed by turns in beautiful song; and there was I ween no man of the Argives to be seen without tears, so greatly did the clear-toned song move all."

It is, however, another divine apparition in the "Odyssey" which has always in this connection most particularly fascinated me in my study of it. Odysseus in his sea-wanderings, insulted among the Phaeacians during the sports over which Euryalos presides, because he refused to take part in the rival throwing of the discus, makes answer indignantly with dark looks and hard words. He then stands up, seizes a disk, larger and heavier than the rest, and hurls it far and away over the mark. One of the Phaeacians marks down the throw and calls out: "Even a blind man could see the stone; it does not lie within the medley of the rest, but far beyond. Thou hast nothing to fear in this contest; there is no Phaeacian who will reach or surpass such a throw as thine is. So he spake; but the much-enduring divine Odysseus rejoiced to see a well-disposed friend in the lists." And this word, this friendly nod of the Phaeacian Homer interprets as the friendly apparition of Athene.

(_b_) Of what kind, then, we may further ask, are the _products_ of this classical mode of artistic activity, of what type are the new gods of Greek art?

(_α_) It is their concentrated individuality which presents to us the most general and at the same time most complete idea of their intrinsic character, in so far, that is, as this individuality is brought together out of the variety of accidental traits, isolated actions, and events into the one focus of their simple and self-exclusive unity.

(_αα_) What appeals to us in these gods is first of all the spiritual and _substantive_ individuality, which, withdrawn into itself as it is out of the motley show of the particular medium of necessity, and, the many-purposed unrest of the finite condition, reposes on its own inviolable universality, as on an eternal and intelligible foundation. It is only thus that the gods appear as the imperishable powers, whose untroubled rule is made visible to us not in the particular event in its evolution with somewhat else and external to it, but freely in its own unchangeableness and intrinsic worth.

(_ββ_) Conversely, however, they are not by any means the bare abstraction of spiritual generalities, and thereby so-called general Ideals, but in so far as they are individuals they appear as one Ideal, an essentially of itself determinate existence, and consequently one that is defined, in other words one that as Spirit possesses _characterization._ Without character we can have no individuality. From this point of view we find, as we have already indicated previously, that there is at the root of these spiritual gods a definite natural force, with which a definite ethical consistency[187] is blended, such as imposes on every particular god distinct bounds to the sphere of his activity. The manifold aspects and traits which are forthcoming by reason of this characterization as particular persons, being in this way concentrated in the point of a true self-identity, constitute the characters of the gods.

(_γγ_) In the true Ideal, however, this definition ought just as little to terminate in the blunt restriction of pure _one sidedness_, but must at the same time appear as withdrawn into the universality of the godhead. In just such a way, then, every god, by carrying in his own person this defined character as divine and as bound up with that as universal individuality, is in part of a definite type, and in part is all in all, and floats, as it were, precisely midway between mere universality and equally abstract singularity. And this is what gives to the genuine Ideal of classical art its infinite security and repose, its untroubled blessedness and unimpaired freedom.

(_β_) Add to this that as beauty of classical art the essentially self-articulate divine character is not only spiritual, but fully as much plastic form which appears externally in its bodily presence to the eye no less than to the mind.

(_αα_) This beauty, inasmuch as it possesses not merely the natural or animal aspect in its spiritual personification, but includes as its content that which is spiritual in its adequate mode of existence, can only take up what is _symbolical_ in its incidental aspect and under those relations in which it appears as purely natural. Its real external expression is the form that is peculiar to mind and only mind, in so far as its ideal character reveals itself as existent truth, and pours itself wholly through that form.

(_ββ_) From another point of view classical beauty is debarred from giving expression to the _Sublime._ For it is only the abstract universal, which attaches to itself no inclusion such as is self-defined, but merely a negative determinacy relatively to particularity in general, and along with this is resolute in its antagonism to every form of embodiment which presents us with the aspect of the Sublime. Classical beauty, on the contrary, carries spiritual individuality into the very heart of what is at the same time its natural existence, and elucidates the ideal content wholly in the material of its external appearance.

(_γγ_) For this very reason, however, it is essential that the external form quite as much as the spiritual, which creates for itself therein its home and dwelling, should be liberated from all dependence on Nature and derangement, all finitude, all that is of fleeting character, all that is exclusively concerned with the sensuous presence, and should purify and exalt that definition of it which discloses affinity with the determinate character of the god into free commerce with the universal forms of the human figure. The stainless externality alone, from which every hint of weakness and relativity has been removed, and every flick of capricious particularity wiped off, is able to represent the Spirit's ideality, which should sink itself in it and secure an embodiment from it.

(_γ_) For the reason, however, that the gods are forced once more from the defined limits of character into the universal wave, the self-subsistency of Spirit as repose on itself, and as the security of itself in its external form has to discover a real reflection also in its manifestation.

(_αα_) Consequently we observe in the concrete individuality of the gods--when we have before us the genuine classic Ideal, on equal terms with all else--this nobility and loftiness of Spirit, in which, despite the entire absorption within the bodily and sensuous presence, we are made conscious of the absolute removal of all the indigence of what is wholly finite. Pure self-absorption[188] and the abstract liberation from every kind of determinacy is the highway to the Ideal of the Sublime. The classical Ideal, on the contrary, is made visible in an existence which entirely is its own, that is, the specific manifestation of Spirit itself; yet for all that we shall find that here, too, the Sublimity of the same is blended with the beauty, and that the one aspect passes over immediately into the other. And this it is which constitutes the expression of loftiness in these figures of the gods, making inevitable the Sublime of classical beauty. An immortal seriousness[189] makes its throne on the forehead of these gods, and is poured forth over their entire presentment.

(_ββ_) In their beauty these gods appear, therefore, as exalted over their individual bodily shape; we have consequently a kind contradiction or contention between their lofty blessedness, which is, in fact, their spiritual self-exclusiveness and their beauty, which pertains to their external bodily presence. Spirit appears wholly lost in its external form, and yet for all that appears quite as much absorbed in itself from out that form. It is precisely as though we had the moving to and fro of an immortal god among mortal men.

In this relation the Greek gods make on us an impression which, despite all difference, resembles that which the bust of Goethe by Rauch made upon me when I first saw it. Many will have doubtless seen it, the high brow, the powerful, commanding nose, the free eye, the round chin, the affable, finely-cut lips, the pose of the head, so suggestive of genius, with its glance a bit on one side and uplifted: add to this the entire fulness and breadth of an emotional and genial humanity, and further, those carefully articulated muscles of the forehead, of the entire countenance, of all that gives evidence of passion and emotion; and in all this house of Life, the repose, stillness, and loftiness of advanced age; and we may add withal the fading ebb of the lips, which retreat back into the teethless mouth, the slackness of the neck and cheeks, whereby the bridge of the nose appears yet more dominant, and the reach of the forehead yet more towering. The force of this firmly set figure, which to an extraordinary degree brings before us the notion of immutability, appears all the more so in the loose environment which surrounds it[190], just as the sublime head and form of the Oriental in his wide turban, but flapping over-garment and trailing slippers. It is the secure, powerful, timeless spirit, which, in the mask of encircling mortality, is just ready to let this husk fall away, and yet suffers it to linger around it freely and without restraint.

In much the same way the gods appear to us in their aspect of lofty freedom and spiritual repose to be exalted over their bodily presence, so that they seem to feel their form, their limbs, despite all the beauty that is there, as at the same time a superfluous appanage. And yet withal the entire presentment is suffused with vitality, identical with their spiritual being, inseparable, without the disunion of what is essentially subsistent, and those parts which are more loosely put together, the spirit in short neither escaping nor coming forth from the body, but both firmly moulded together into a whole, out of which, and in no other way, the self-absorption of Spirit looks forth in silence in its amazing and secure self-possession.

(_γγ_) For the reason, then, that the contention we have indicated is present, without appearing, however, as a difference or separation of the ideal spirituality from its external form, the negative which is therein contained, is for this very reason immanent in this inseparable totality and is thereby expressed. This is within the sphere of this spiritual loftiness the breath and atmosphere of melancholy, which men of genius have felt in the godlike figures of antique art even where the beauty of the external presentment is consummate. The repose of divine blessedness[191] is unable to split itself up into the passions of joy, pleasure, and satisfaction, and the _peace_ of immortality stands aloof from the smile of self-satisfaction and genial contentedness. Contentment is the emotion of the agreement of our singular subjectivity with the condition of that environment which is defined for or given to us or brought about through our own agency. Napoleon, for example, never expressed more thorough contentment than when he happened to obtain some success at the cost of making all the world discontented. For contentment is only the approval of my own being, action, and engagements, and the extreme of it is readily recognizable in that state of feeling of the Philistine to which every man of practical ability necessarily extends it. This feeling and its expression is, however, no expression appropriate to the prefigured immortal gods. Free and perfected beauty is not satisfied with joining the concordant temper of a particular finite existence; rather its individuality, in its aspect as Spirit no less than in that of form, albeit it is self-defined with characterization, only finds itself fully in union with its true nature when it is at the same time free universality and spirituality in repose upon itself. This universality is just that which people are wont to point to as the frigidity of the Greek gods. They are only cold, however, to our modern intimacy with the temporal. Independently regarded they possess warmth and life; that peaceful blessedness, which is reflected in their external presentment, is essentially an abstraction from particularity, a mode of being indifferent to the Past, a surrender of that which is external, a giving up which, albeit neither full of trouble nor pain, is for all that a giving up of what is earthly and evanescent, just as their cheerfulness of spirit looks far away and over death, the grave, loss and temporality, and for the very reason that it is profound inherently contains this negative we are discussing. And the more this earnestness and spiritual freedom is prominent in the vision of these godlike figures the more we feel the contrast between this loftiness and the determinate corporality in which they are enclosed. The blessed gods mourn quite as much over their blessedness as their bodily environment. In the letters of their form we read the destiny which lies before them, and whose development, as actual manifestation of that contradiction between this very loftiness and that particularity, spirituality, and sensuous existence classical art itself sets face to face with its final overthrow.

(_c_) If we ask ourselves, then, _thirdly_, what is the nature of the external representation, which is adequate to this notion of the classic Ideal we have just indicated, we shall find in this connection, too, that the essential points of view have already in our general consideration of the Ideal been furnished us with considerable detail. We have consequently here only further to remark, that in the genuine classic Ideal the spiritual individuality of the gods is not conceived in their relation to something else, or brought about by virtue of their particularity in conflict, and battle, but rather is made visible in their eternal self-tranquillity, in this painfulness of the godlike peace itself. The determinate character is not, therefore, made active in the way that it stimulated the gods to the sense of particular emotions and passions, or compelled them to adopt specific aims of conduct. On the contrary, it is precisely out of that collision and development, nay, out of that very relation to the finite and all that is essentially discordant that they are brought back to that condition of pure self-absorption. This repose in its most austere severity, not inflexible, cold, or dead, but sensitive and immutable, is the highest and most adequate form of representation for the classic gods. When they make their appearance consequently in specific situations, it is not necessary that there should be conditions or actions which give rise to conflicts, but rather such which, as themselves harmless, so, too, leave the gods in a like condition. It is, therefore, sculpture which among the arts is above all adapted to portray the classic Ideal in its simple self-possession, in which what is rather the universal divinity receives more obvious emphasis than the particular character. Chiefly it is the more ancient and more austere type of sculpture which maintains its firm hold of this aspect of the Ideal, and only in the later forms we find a movement towards increased dramatic vividness of situations and characterization. Poetry, on the contrary, ranges the gods in vigorous action, that is, in an attitude of negation to a definite mode of life, and brings them thereby into conflict and strife. The repose of plastic art, where it remains in the sphere which is uniquely its own, can only express the aforesaid negative phase of spirit face to face with particular facts in that serious strain of melancholy, which we have already attempted to define more nearly.

2. THE SPHERE OF THE PARTICULAR GODS

As individuality in visible form, represented under the mode of immediate existence, and withal both definite and particular, godhead necessarily is divided into a number of figures. In other words, Polytheism is unquestionably essential as the principle of classical art, and it would be the undertaking of a fool to think of embodying the one God of the Sublime and of Pantheism or the absolute religion, which comprehends God purely as Spirit and essential personality, in the plastic type of beauty, or to entertain the idea that the classical forms could have arisen among the Jews, Mohammedans, or Christians, as adapted to the content of their religious beliefs, from their own original views of the world, as they did in the case of the Greeks.

(_a_) In this multiplicity the divine universe[192] at this stage is broken up into a sphere of particular gods, of which each individual stands by himself alone in contrast to all the others. These individualities are not, however, of the kind that they can be taken merely as allegorical presentations of universal qualities, as if Apollo, for example, were the god of wisdom, Zeus of dominion. Zeus is also quite as much wisdom, and in the "Eumenides" Apollo, as we have seen, protects Orestes, the son and the royal son to boot, whom he himself has stimulated to an act of vengeance. The sphere of the Greek gods is a multiplicity of individuals, of which every particular god, albeit also in the specific character of a particular person, is at the same time a self-exclusive totality, which itself possesses essentially also the quality of another god. For every such presentment, viewed as divine, is always, too, a whole. It is only by this means that the divine personalities of Greek religion include an abundance of traits; and although their blessedness consists in their universal and spiritual self-repose no less than in their abstraction from the direct movement which Time is for ever defeating in the sphere of the disintegrating manifold of natural fact and condition, yet for all that they possess the power in a like degree to assert themselves as energetic and active in many of its aspects. They are neither the abstract particular nor the abstract universal, but the universal which is the source of particularity.

(_b_) On account of this type of individuality, however, Greek polytheism is unable to make up an essentially systematic and self-integrated totality. At the first glance, it is true, it appears imperative to require of the Olympus of the gods, that the numerous gods that are there assembled, should, as thus collected together, and if their separable unities have real truth in them, and their content is to be classic in the true sense, also express essentially the totality of the Idea, should exhaust the entire sphere of the necessary forces of Nature and Spirit, and give to themselves therefore constructive completeness, in other words, manifest themselves as subject to a principle of necessity. This demand, however, would be liable from the first to the qualification that those forces present in the emotions and, generally speaking, assertive in the sphere of spiritual life in the absolute significance[193] which becomes operative first in the later and higher religion, must remain excluded from the sphere of the classic gods, so that the range of content, the particular aspects of which succeed in making an appearance in Greek mythology, would be already thereby curtailed. Moreover, apart from this, we have also on the one hand, necessarily introduced by virtue of the essentially varied character of this individuality, the accidental incidents of a definition, which avoids the rigorous articulation of the differences inherent in the notion, and does not suffer these divinities to maintain the abstraction of merely _one_ mode of determination. And, on the other hand, the universality, in the elemental medium of which the divine personalities secure their blessed state, abolishes any hard and fast particularity, and the loftiness of the eternal powers exalts itself jubilant over the cold seriousness of finite fact, wherein, if this inconsequence did not prevail, the divine presences would be evolved through the medium of their limitations.

However much, therefore, even the principal forces of the world, as the totality of Nature and Spirit, are reproduced in Greek mythology, this aggregation, quite as much in the interests of the universal Divine as in those of the individuality of particular gods, cannot assert itself as a _systematic_ whole. If this were not so, instead of _individual_ characters the gods would approximate rather to allegorical beings, and instead of being _divine_ personalities would be characters wholly limited to finite and abstract modes.

(_c_) When we consequently consider the circle of the Greek divinities--that is all within the range of the so-called presiding divinities--more nearly according to their fundamental character, inquiring how that character appears firmly delineated by sculpture in its most general and at the same time sensuously concrete presentment, we find no doubt the essential distinctions and their totality explicitly set before us, but also in their detail also ever again obliterated, and the severity of the execution tempered to a result which is inconsistent with either their beauty or their individuality. So for example Zeus bears in his hands the dominion over gods and men, without, however, thereby essentially endangering the free independence of the other gods. He is the supreme god; his power, however, does not absorb that of the others. We find in the conception of him no doubt an association with the heavens, with lightning and thunder, and the generative vitality of Nature; but he is yet more truly the might of the State, of the order of fact which is conformable to law, the binding nexus in contracts, oaths, and hospitality, and generally the substantial bond that gives subsistence to the human condition, whether in its practical or ethical aspect, the potency, in short, both of knowledge and spirit. The dominion of his brothers is directed toward the sea or the lower world. Apollo is known as the god of knowledge, as the mouthpiece and fair presentment of spiritual interests, as the teacher of the Muses. "Know thyself" is the inscription over his temple at Delphi, a behest which is not so much concerned with the failings and defects, as the essential import of spirit, that is with art and the truth of consciousness. Subtlety and eloquence, mediation in fact generally as we also find it in subordinate spheres, which, albeit immoral elements are therein commingled, nevertheless are appurtenant to the complete range of spiritual life--such is the most important province of the activity of Hermes, who also leads the shades of the dead to the underworld. The might of war is what mainly distinguishes Ares. Hephaestos is conspicuously capable in the technical crafts. The enthusiasm which still carries with it a natural element, the strong emotions which wine, sport, and dramatic performances naturally produce are the native province of Dionysos. The spheres allotted to the feminine divinities very much correspond to the above series. In Here the ethical bond of marriage is the most dominant trait. Ceres is the instructress and developer of agriculture, and as such has presented mankind with both those adjuncts to its cultivation, that is to say, first, the care for the nurture of natural products, which satisfy man's immediate wants, and, secondly, the spiritual accessories of property, marriage, right, the beginnings of civilization and moral order. In the same way Athene is the representative of moderation, good sense[194], legality, the power of wisdom, technical capacity in the arts and courageousness, and comprises within her intelligent and warlike maidenhood the concrete spirit of the folk, the free and substantive spirit which uniquely belongs to the Athenian state, and places the same before us in positive shape as sovereign and godlike power to be revered. Artemis on the contrary, wholly distinct from the Ephesian Diana, possesses the more inflexible independence of maiden modesty for her most essential characteristic. She loves the chase, and is generally not so much the quietly pensive, as the severe and eager-striving maiden. Aphrodite, together with the charming Cupid, who in his descent from the ancient Titan Eros became a boy, is the interpreter of all that the attractions and sexual passion effect in our humanity. This, then, is the kind of content of the spiritually informed individual gods. In so far as we are concerned with their external representation we can only repeat that sculpture is the most important art in this respect, and it is carried to the point of this detail of their particularity. If, however, it is permitted to express that individuality in its more specific determination, it at once passes beyond its primary severe loftiness, although even in that case it unites the variety and wealth of such individuality under _one_ mode of definition, namely that which we distinguish as character, and establishes this character in its more simple clarity for the envisagement of the senses, in other words for the completest and most final determination of the external presentment of these divinities. For the imagination always remains relatively to the external and real existence less distinct, when it elaborates, as it also does, as poetry the same content in a number of tales, occurrences, and events which concern the gods. For this reason sculpture is on the one hand more ideal, while on the other it individualizes the character of the gods in perfectly clear human outlines, and perfects the anthropomorphism of the classic Ideal. As this presentation of the Ideal in its mode of externality, entirely adequate as it unquestionably is to the essentially ideal content it declares, these figures of Greek sculpture are the Ideals in their absolutely explicit realization; they are the self-subsistent, eternal forms, the centre of the plastic beauty of classical art, whose type persists as the foundation, even there too, where these figures step forth on the planes of definite activity, and appear as affected by the revolutions of particular events.

3. THE PARTICULAR INDIVIDUALITY OF THE GODS

Individuality and its representation is, however, unable to acquiesce in that which is still an ever relative and abstract articulation of character. A star is exhaustively summarized in the simple laws that control it. A few definite traits may sufficiently characterize the external formation of the world of rocks; but already in the vegetable world we are aware of an infinite variety of manifold structure, transition, interfusion, and anomaly. Animal organizations are distinguished by a still greater range of difference, and constantly shifting interaction with the external environment to which they are related. And finally, as we rise to the spiritual realm and its manifestation, we are conscious of a yet more infinitely embracing multiplicity, both of its internal and external existence. Inasmuch, then, as the classic Ideal does not rest content with purely self-possessed individuality, but is further concerned to place the same in motion, to bring the same into relation with something else, and to exhibit it as active in such relation--for these reasons the character of the gods does not rest stationary in the possession of what itself is an essentially still substantive determination, but secures further particular traits of wider extension. The self-exclusive movement in the direction of external existence, and the change which is inseparable from it supplies the more intimate traits that constitute the singularity of any particular god, as is meet and fit and withal necessary to complete a living personality. The accidental nature of these particular traits is, however, associated at the same time with such a type of _singularity_, traits, that is, we are no longer able to refer back to the universal aspect of the substantive significance. For this reason this particular aspect of the separate divinities approximates to something positive, which can consequently also merely stand about it and continue to resound as an external accessory.

(_a_) We are therefore at once confronted with the question: "From what source is the _material_ secured for this mode of the appearance of singularity, and in what manner is this forward process of particularization maintained?" For the ordinary individual man, for his character out of which he brings his actions to a conclusion, for the events in which he is involved, for the destiny which awaits him, this closest and more positive material is supplied by his external conditions, such as the date of his birth, the situation he inherits, parents, education, environment, temporal relations, the entire province, that is, of the conditions of his life as they affect his spiritual nature or bodily existence. The present world contains this material, and the records of life furnished by different individuals are from this point of view characterized by every conceivable difference. It is another matter altogether, however, with the free shapes of godlike individuality, which possess no determinate existence in the concrete world of Nature, but have their birth in the cradle of the imagination. For this very reason it is an obvious assumption that poets and artists, who, speaking in general terms, have created the Ideal out of their free spiritual bounty, have merely borrowed the material for these accidental particular traits from the caprice of their own innate powers of imagination. This assumption is, however, false. For we assigned in general terms to classical art, the position that its construction in the first instance is, by means of the reaction active in its opposition to the assumptions necessarily requisite to its own peculiar province, carried forward to that which as genuine Ideal it is. It is from these presuppositions as their source that the specific traits of particularity are to be looked for, which supply to the gods their closer individual vitality. The fundamental features of these assumptions have already been submitted, and we have only here to remind our readers shortly of what has been already advanced.

(_α_) It is the symbolical natural religions which constitute in the first instance the abundant source which supplies Greek mythology with the primary substratum that we find then modified within it. But inasmuch as the traits that are borrowed from such a source have to be distributed among gods that are represented as individuals possessing the life of Spirit, they inevitably lose the essential feature of their character, in which they passed as symbolical; they have now no longer to retain a significance, which would differ from that which the individual himself presents and makes visible. The previous symbolical content becomes now, therefore, converted into the content of a divine subject itself, and for the reason that it implies no substantive relation of the god, but is merely an incidental feature, material of this sort falls together into an external tale, some deed or event, which is ascribed to the gods in this or that particular situation. Consequently we find under this head all the symbolical traditions of the earlier sacred poems, which receive, under the modified shape of actions proper to a truly self-conscious individuality, the form of human events and histories, which purport to be accomplished in concert with the gods, and are not merely the inventions of poets as the mood dictates. When Homer tells us, for instance, that the gods went off on a journey to feast for twelve days among the blameless Ethiopians, such would be a poor enough example of inventiveness regarded as the poet's invention alone. It is much the same with the tale of the birth of Zeus. Kronos, we are told, had devoured all his sons; for this reason Rhea, his spouse, when she was big with her youngest child Zeus, went off to Crete, where she brought forth her son, presenting to Kronos a stone to devour instead of her child, whom she swaddled in fur. Later on Kronos brought up again all his children, his daughters, and along with them Poseidon. This story, regarded as mere invention, would be foolish enough. The remnants of symbolical significance still peer, however, through it, albeit on account of their having lost their original character, they come down to us in the guise of external history. The history of Ceres and Proserpina is on similar lines. Here we have the ancient symbolic significance of the disappearance and budding forth of the seed of corn. The myth presents this to us under the image as though Proserpina played one day in a valley with flowers, and plucked the fragrant narcissus, which from one root opened in a hundred blossoms. Then the Earth thunders; Pluto ascends from the depths, lifts the lamenting maiden into his golden car, and bears her off to the underworld. Thereon Ceres wandered over the Earth for a long time vainly stricken with a mother's sorrow. Finally Proserpina returned to the upper world; Zeus, however, had only suffered her to do this subject to the command that she must never partake of the food of the gods. Unfortunately she had on one occasion tasted a pomegranate, and was therefore only able to remain in the upper world during spring and summer. In this tale, too, we find that the symbolical content has not been retained, but has been converted into a human event, which suffers only the more general sense to penetrate through many external traits. In the same way the supplementary names of the gods point frequently to symbolical ground-strata of a similar character, from which, however, the symbolical form has vanished, and which only serve now to give individuality a more complete characterization.

(_β_) Local conditions supply a further source for the positive particularities of individual divinities, no less by presenting us with the origin of the conceptions of godhead, than by pointing to the modes under which their services were originally obtained and secured, and the particular places which were in a special sense devoted to their worship.

(_αα_) Although, however, the demonstration of the Ideal and its universal beauty is exalted over the particular locality and its unique claims for recognition, and, moreover, has drawn together the specific external aspects in the more general range of the artistic imagination into one comprehensive picture which is throughout adequate to the substantive significance, yet for all that, when the art of sculpture associates the gods, regarded as individuals, with isolated relations and conditions, these particular traits and local colours come frequently also to the fore, in order to reproduce something of that individuality, although it is only thus more defined in its external aspect. An illustration of this is the way Pausanias adduces a mass of ideas, images, pictures, and myths, which he met with in temples, public places, temple treasuries, in any place where anything of importance was to be found or otherwise was in the range of his experience. In the same way and on the same lines the ancient traditions and local suggestions which have been borrowed from foreign sources run along with the home ones in Greek myth; and to all of them more or less a relation has been attached which unites them to the history, creation, and foundations of States, more particularly by means of colonization. Forasmuch, however, as this many-sided and specific material in the universality of the gods has lost its original significance, we necessarily come across stories, which in their motley and intricate character fail to convey any meaning whatever. As an example we may instance the case where Aeschylus in his "Prometheus" presents to us the wanderings of Io in all their severity and external garb without admitting the least suggestion of an ethical or traditional story, or a natural significance. We find just the same difficulty when we approach the stories of Perseus, Dionysos, and others. The most varied and confused kind of material is also run into the tales about Hercules, which forthwith, in such tales, assume an entirely human aspect under the guise of chance events, exploits, passions, misfortunes, and other untoward occurrences.

(_ββ_) In addition to all this the eternal powers of classical art are the universal constituents of the actual embodiment of the existence and actions of Greek _humanity_, from whose national origins consequently in their earliest form, that is, out of the heroic times and other traditions, still a very considerable residue of detail remains appendant to the gods even in later days. In this way, too, many characteristic features in the intricate tales of their gods unquestionably must be referred to historic personages, heroes, older folk-races, natural facts and circumstances attributable to wars, battles, and other matters of a public character. And just as the family and the distinction of clans is the point of departure of the State, the Greeks possessed also their family gods, penates, clan-gods, and furthermore the guardian divinities of particular cities and states. In this excessive leaning towards the point of view of history the thesis, however, is apt to be maintained that the origin of the Greek gods generally is deducible from such historical facts, heroes, and earlier kings. This is a plausible but none the less superficial view. Heyne quite in recent times has also given currency to it. In a way analogous to this a Frenchman, by name Nicholas Fréret, has, for example, accepted the quarrels of different priestly guilds as the general principle underlying the war of the gods. That such a historical phase in the life of a people may contribute something, that definite clans may have given some effect to their peculiar notions of deity, that likewise different local aspects may have afforded further matter in the process of divine individualization--all this may be admitted, no doubt. The real origin of the gods is for all that not to be traced to such external material of history, but resides in the spiritual potencies of Life, under the guise of which they were conceived. We are consequently only entitled to accept the more extensive play of all that is positive, local, and historical, in so far as it makes more definite the formal presentation of each particular individuality.