Chapter III: The Dissolution of the Classical Type of Art

The gods of classical art contain in themselves the germ of their overthrow; consequently, when this fatal defect which they include is brought to consciousness through the elaboration of art itself, they bring about the dissolution of the classical Ideal at the same time. We established as the principle of this, so far as we have here to deal with it, that kind of spiritual individuality which secures in every respect an adequate expression in bodily or external existence immediate to our senses. This individuality was enclosed within a complex of divine personalities, whose definition is not essentially and withal from the first given up to the contingent condition in which the everlasting gods receive the appearance of dissolution for man's conscious life no less than for his artistic creation.

1. FATE OR DESTINY

It is true that sculpture in its complete plastic perfection accepts the gods as substantive potencies, and endows them with a form in whose beauty they in the first instance repose in security, for the reason that the accidental character, of their external envisagement is to the least extent emphasized. Their _multiplicity_ and _distinction_ does in fact, however, constitute this element of contingency, and thought annuls this in the determinate conception of _one_ divinity, through whose inevitable power they are mutually at war with and to the detriment of each other. For however universal the power of every particular god is conceived as specific individuality, such is of a restricted range. Add to this the fact that the gods do not continue in their eternal repose; they are self-determined relatively to particular aims in actual movement through their being drawn hither and thither by the pre-existing conditions and collisions of concrete reality, in order at one time to afford assistance and at another to obstruct or destroy. These isolated relations in which the gods as active individuals participate contain within them an element of contingency, which impairs the substantive nature of the divine, however much the same may persist as the predominant substratum, and involves the gods in the contradictions and conflicts of a limited finitude. By reason of this finiteness immanent in the gods themselves they fall into contradiction with the loftiness, worth, and beauty of their existence, through which, too, they are eventually brought down to the level of mere caprice and chance. The genuine Ideal evades the complete appearance of this contradiction simply and in so far as--this is preeminently the case in true sculpture and its particular creations as we find them in temples--the divine personalities are represented as explicitly alone in the repose of blessedness, yet retain, as we have already above indicated, a certain aspect of lifelessness, somewhat aloof from all emotion, and withal that quiet characteristic of pathetic lament. It is just this mournfulness which exposes their fate by demonstrating that something of higher import stands above them, and the passage from the particularities of form to their comprehending unity is a necessary one. If, however, we fix our attention on the type and configuration of this loftier unity we shall find that it is, as contrasted with the individuality and relative determination of the gods, the essentially abstract and formless--the necessity, the fate, which under this mode of abstraction the higher can only in general terms be, and which constrains both gods and men, while remaining in itself incomprehensible and inconceivable. Fate is not as yet absolute and self-subsistent end, and thereby at the same time subjective, personal, divine purpose, but merely the one and universal Power which transcends the particularity of the different gods, and consequently is unable to be presented itself as individual entity; because otherwise it would simply appear as one among many individuals, and would stand above them. For this reason it remains without form and individuality, and is in this abstraction merely necessity and nothing more; with which gods no less than men, when they differentiate themselves as separate from one another, contend. And thus they give effect to their individual power condemned though it be to limitations, and would fain exalt themselves over the bounds and warrant of Fate, though they are, in fact, its subjects, and are forced to hearken to all that unalterably befalls them.

2. THE DISSOLUTION OF THE GODS THROUGH THEIR ANTHROPOMORPHISM

For the reason, then, that the principle of self-determinate Necessity[197] does not appertain to the particular gods, does not supply in other words the content of their self-determination, and only floats over them as an undefined abstraction, the aspect of their insularity as individuals has consequently free play and is unable to escape from Destiny, is moreover at liberty to branch out into the external fabric of the human condition, into the finite consistency of anthropomorphism, possibilities which convert the gods into the reverse of that condition which truly constitutes the notion of what they are essentially and in virtue of their divine nature. The overthrow of these gods of beauty is consequently quite inevitably brought about for art through their own nature. The human consciousness is at last quite unable to find repose in them, and is fain compelled to take leave of them. And, moreover, if we look more closely we shall find that the mode and type of Greek anthropomorphism supplies us with a general example of how the gods vanish away from the faiths of religion no less than those of poetry.

(_a_) Spiritual individuality here makes its appearance in the human form, it is true, as Ideal; but for all that it is in the immediately visible, that is, the bodily presence, not within humanity in all its essential explication, under the mode in which it is conscious of itself in its own self-conscious world as distinct from God, while in the same breath it annuls the distinction, and is, by its own act, as one with God, essentially infinite and absolute self-consciousness.

(_α_) For this reason the plastic Ideal is unable to present itself as infinite self-conscious spirituality. These plastic shapes of beauty are not merely stone and bronze, but also the infinite form of subjective life vanishes from them in their content and expression. We may become as enthusiastic as we please over their beauty and art, but for all that our _enthusiasm_ is and remains something native to our own souls; it is not really at home in the objects which it thus contemplates, that is in the gods themselves. To complete the true totality a real reciprocity is required on this side also of the subjective, self-knowing unity and infinity; it is this, and only this, that unfolds our conception of a living God of knowledge, and of men who thus apprehend Him. If this totality is not also essentially and with adequacy conformable to the content and nature of the Absolute, then the Absolute will itself appear not as truly a subject of spiritual being, and its presentment will confront us merely in its objective form without the possession of self-conscious Spirit. It is quite true, no doubt, that the individuality of the gods retains the content of subjectivity, but merely under modes that are contingent, and in a process of development,' which moves independently outside that substantive repose and blessedness of the gods.

(_β_) On the other hand, the subjectivity which is opposed to the gods of plastic art is also not the form of conscious life which is essentially eternal and true. In other words, this latter is--as we shall see for ourselves more clearly in our consideration of the third type of art, the romantic--that which has before it the objectivity to which it is conformable under the mode of an essentially infinite and self-knowing God. Inasmuch, however, as the knowing subject, at the stage we are now discussing, does not consciously conceive itself as present in the perfections of these godlike figures, nor even in its contemplation of such objects is aware of itself as circumstantially objective, it is still wholly distinct and separate from its absolute object, and is consequently a purely contingent and finite subjectivity.

(_γ_) We might possibly suppose that the passage into a higher sphere of reality would have been emphasized by the imagination and art as a further war among the gods, in a way analogous, in fact, to the first transition from the symbolism of the gods of Nature to the spiritual Ideals of classical art. This is by no means the case. On the contrary, this translation is carried forward in a wholly different field, as a conflict brought home to consciousness between absolute reality and the present world. For this reason art, in its relation to the higher content, which it has to seize under new modes, occupies an entirely altered position. This new configuration does not assert its importance as revelation by means of Art, but is made manifest independently without it, and appears on the prosaic ground of controversial and rational discussion, and from thence is within the soul and its religious emotions, mainly by means of miracle, martyrdoms, and so on, carried into the world of subjective knowledge, together with a consciousness of the contradiction between all that is finite and the Absolute, which unfolds itself in actual history as the process of events toward a Present which is not merely imagined, but is the _fact_ we have before us. The Divine, God Himself, becomes flesh, is born, lives, suffers, dies, and rises from the dead. This is a content which heart did not discover, but which, quite apart from it, was a present fact, and which consequently it has not borrowed from its own domain, but merely supplies a form to it. That old transition and war of the gods, on the contrary, discovered its origins in the artistic or imaginative view of the world simply, which created its wisdom and plastic shapes from its inner life, and gave to astonished mankind his new gods. For this reason the classic gods also have only received their existence through the fiat of the imagination, and merely exist as such in stone and bronze, or in the world open to the senses, not, however, in flesh and blood, or in very and actual Spirit. The anthropomorphism of the Greek gods is therefore without real human existence, that of body no less than that of Spirit. It is Christianity which first introduces us to this reality in flesh and blood as the determinate existence, life, and activity of God Himself. Consequently this bodily form, this flesh, however much also the purely natural and sensuous is recognized as a negation therein, receives its due and honour, and that which partakes of anthropomorphism here is sanctified. Even as man originally was made in the image of God, God is an image of man; whoso beholdeth the Son beholdeth the Father, and whoso loveth the Son loveth the Father. In a word, God is acknowledged as present in the actual world. This new content, then, is not brought home to consciousness by means of the conceptions of art, but is presented from an exterior source as an actual occurrence, as the history of the God who became flesh. A transition such as this could not take its point of departure from Art; the contrast between the old and the new would have been too disparate. The God of revealed religion, in respect to content and form, is very God in truth, in contrast with whom all rivals would become mere creations of the imagination, whom it would be quite impossible to compare with Him on equal terms. The old and new gods of classical art, on the contrary, originate in both cases independently from the ground of the imagination. They have only such reality from the finite Spirit as enables them to be conceived and represented as potencies of Nature and Spirit; the contradiction and conflict they declare, is taken seriously. If, however, the transition from the Greek gods to the God of Christendom were portrayed in the first instance by Art, the representation of such a war of gods could not in this direct form be enforced in all seriousness.

(_b_) Consequently this strife and transition becomes also, in more recent times, primarily an accidental, isolated subject-matter of art, which can claim to create no true epoch, and has been able in this form to embody no fundamental phase in the line of the entire development of art. We will recall here in this connection, if incidentally, a few of the more famous examples of this nature. We frequently hear in more recent times the lament over the submergence of Greek art, and a yearning towards Greek gods and heroes is not infrequently the theme of our poets[198]. This lamentation is expressed emphatically as in direct opposition to Christendom; and though it is, no doubt, generally granted that it contains the higher truth, the qualification is added that, so far as art is concerned, the transition is only to be regretted. This is the theme of Schiller's "Gods of Greece"; and it is worth our while, even in the present inquiry, to consider this poem, not merely as poetry in the beauty of its exposition, its musical rhythm, its vivid pictures, or in the charm of its regretful mood, which was the motive force in its creation, but also in order to examine the content. Schiller's pathos is always true, no less than poignant, and the result of profound reflection.

It is perfectly true that the Christian religion contains, and may justly claim to accentuate, a certain phase of art; but in the due course of its development, at the time of the Aufklärung[199], it has also reached a point where we find that thought, or rather the Understanding[200], has driven into the background that element, which art pre-eminently requires, the actual human envisagement and revelation of God. For the human form and all that it expresses and declares, human events, actions, feeling, is the form under which art is forced to conceive and represent the content of Spirit. Inasmuch as the Understanding has converted God into a mere fact of thought, no longer crediting the appearance of His Spirit in concrete reality, and thus has alienated the God of Thought from all actual existence, this type of religious Illumination has necessarily accepted conceptions and requirements which are intolerable to Art. When, however, the Understanding is raised once more from the region of these abstractions into that of Reason, the need at once asserts itself for something more concrete, and withal for that kind of concreteness which Art itself unfolds. The period of the illuminating Understanding has, no doubt, possessed an art of its own, but only of very prosaic type, as we may even find it in Schiller, whose point of departure was precisely that of such a period of criticism; later on, however, owing to his realization how little reason, imagination, and passion were satisfied by the critical Understanding, he experienced a deep longing for art, in the fullest sense of the term, and primarily for the classical art of the Greeks and their gods, and general views of the world. It is from this kind of yearning, a reaction, in short, from the mere abstractions of the mind, that the poem referred to originated. According to the original draft of the poem, Schiller's attitude to Christianity is entirely polemical; afterwards he modified it considerably, no doubt realizing that its _animus_ was only directed against the critical aspect of the Illumination, which at a later time itself began to lose its importance. In the first instance he praises the Greek point of view as fortunate in that the whole of Nature was a thing of Life to it, and full of divinities. After that he reviews the Present and its prosaic conception of natural law, and the position man here takes relatively to God:

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Diese traur'ge Stille
Kündigt sie mir meinen Schöpfer an?
Finster wie er selbst ist seine Hülle,
Mein _Entsagen_, was ihn feiern kann[201].
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No doubt resignation is an essential characteristic in the evolution of the Christian life; but it is only in the monkish conception of it that it requires he should cut off from himself his soul, his emotions, the so-called impulses of his Nature, and should not incorporate his life in the moral, rational, actual world, the family and the State; and it does so precisely as the Illumination and its Deism, which presupposes that God is unknowable, imposes on mankind the extremest form of resignation, namely, that of abandoning all effort either to know or conceive Him. In any true exposition of Christian doctrine, resignation is, on the contrary, merely a phasal moment of mediation, a point of transition, in which that which is purely natural, sensuous, and in general terms finite, strips off this its incompatible nature in order to permit Spirit to attain the loftier freedom and reconciliation of its own possessions, a freedom and blessedness which was unknown to the Greeks. In Christianity as thus understood we are not entitled to speak of the celebration of the one God, of the bare seclusion of Himself, and the cutting ourselves adrift from an ungodly world, for it is precisely in this spiritual freedom and reconciliation of Spirit that God is immanent, and from this point of view the famous lines of Schiller:

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Da die Göttes menschlicher noch waren,
Waren Menschen göttlicher[202].
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is absolutely false. We must for this very reason emphasize the later alteration made in the concluding lines which refer thus to the Greek gods:

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Aus der Zeitfluh weggerissen schweben
Sie gerettet auf des Pindus Höhn;
Was unsterblich im Gesang soll leben,
Muss im Leben untergehn[203].
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These words support entirely the assertion we have made above that the Greek gods could only be localized in the mental conception and imagination; they were neither able to affirm such a position in the reality of life, nor satisfy in the long run finite spirit.

Of another sort is the opposition of Parny to Christianity--a poet named the French Tibullus on account of his successful elegies--which is conspicuous in a prolix poem of ten cantos, a kind of epic poem entitled "La Guerre des Dieux," as an attempt made to bring ridicule upon Christian conceptions in the interests of jest and comedy carried out in a tone of unrestrained frivolity, yet withal marked by good humour and considerable talent. The sallies of wit here are not, however, carried beyond the point of levity; we have few traces of the wanton disregard of things that are sacred and of the highest excellence such as marks the period of Frederick von Schlegel's "Lucinde." The Virgin Mary no doubt is treated very badly in this poem. The monks, Dominicans and Franciscans, yield to the seductions of wine and Bacchanals, and the nuns do much the same with Fauns, and the result is sufficiently shocking. Finally, however, the gods of the old world are vanquished and withdraw from Olympus to Parnassus.

As a concluding illustration Goethe in his "Bride of Corinth" has more profoundly depicted in a vivacious picture the banishment of love, not so much as the result of any true principle of Christianity as the misconceived interpretation of resignation and sacrifice. The poet here contrasts that false asceticism which seeks to condemn the determination of a woman to be wife and rates that enforced celibacy as something more holy than marriage with the natural feelings of mankind. Just as we find in Schiller the opposition between the Greek imagination and the critical abstractions of our modern Enlightenment, so we may detect here the Hellenistic ethical and sensuous justifications in the matter of love and marriage, placed in direct contrast to ideas which can only claim to belong to the Christian religion when regarded from a wholly one-sided and therefore incorrect point of view. With the greatest art a really horrible tone dominates the entire work; and the principal reason is this, that it remains quite uncertain whether the action has reference to a real maiden, or a dead one, a living reality or a ghost; and in the metre of the verse itself in an equally masterly way the threads of light foolery and seriousness are so interwoven as to make the uncanniness still more effective.

(_c_) Before, however, we attempt to gauge in its profundity the new type of art, whose opposition to the old does not come into the course of Art's development, so far, at least, as we here have undertaken to follow it along its fundamental lines, we must in the first instance make clear for ourselves that other transition in its earliest form, which attaches to antique art itself. The principle of this transition consists in this, that the Spirit whose individuality hitherto has been contemplated as in harmony with the true subsistency of Nature and human life, and which, in respect to its own life, volition, and acts, was consciously at home in that accord, begins now to withdraw itself into the infinite subjectivity of its essence, but instead of the true infinity is only able to secure a purely formal and indeed still finite return upon itself.

If we look more closely at the concrete conditions which correspond to the principle indicated, we shall see, we have already done so, that the Greek gods possess as their content the substantive _materiae_ of real human life and action. Over and above the vision of the gods we have now the highest mode of determination, the universal interest and the end in determinate life, that is to say, presented at the same time as an existing fact. Just as it was essential to the spiritual configuration of Greek art to appear both as external and real, so, too, the spiritual growth of mankind in its absolute significance has elaborated itself in a reality that both externally appears and is real, with whose substance and universality the individual has put forward a claim to be in accordant fusion. This highest end was in Greece the life of the State, the collective body of citizens and their morality and living patriotism. Outside this supreme interest there was no other more lofty or true. The life of the State, however, as an external phenomenon of the world, fades into the Past, as do the conditions of the entire reality of the outside world. It is not difficult to demonstrate that a State under the type of such a freedom, so immediately identical with all its citizens, which as such already possess in their grasp the highest activity in all public transactions, is inevitably small and weak, and in part must prove suicidal to itself, in part fall into ruins in the natural course of the history of nations. In other words, by reason of this immediate coalescence of individual life with the universality of State-life, on the one hand we find that the peculiar idiosyncrasies of spiritual experience and its particular aspects as private life do not receive their full dues, nor do they receive sufficient opportunity for a development innocuous to society at large. Rather, as distinct from the concrete substance, into which it has not been accepted, such a nature remains simply the limited and natural egoism, which goes on its own way independently, pursues its interests however much they are alien to the true interest of the whole, and, consequently, is an instrument to the ruin of the State, against which, in the last resort, it strains to oppose its individual forces. On the other hand within the circle of this freedom itself the need of a higher personal liberty is roused, which not merely in the State, as the substantive totality, nor merely in the accepted code of morals and law, but in the very soul of the man himself asserts its claim to exist, in so far as he is ready to give life to goodness and rectitude out of the wealth of his own nature and in the light of his own personal knowledge, and to recognize the same at its real worth. The individual subject demands of consciousness that it should be, in virtue of its claim as self-identity, a substantive whole. Consequently there arises in this freedom a new breach between the end of the State and that of the man's own personal welfare as essentially free himself. Such a conflict as this had already begun in the time of Socrates, while on the other side the vanity, self-seeking and unbridled character of democracy and demagogy corrupted the true State to such a degree that men like Plato and Xenophon experienced a loathing for the internal condition of their mother-city, where the direction of all public transactions lay in the hands of those who were either frivolous, or those who sought nothing but personal aims.

The spirit of this transition, therefore, depends in the first instance on the general line of severation between Spirit in its unfolded self-subsistency and external existence. The spiritual in this separation from its reality, in which it no longer finds itself reflected, is then the abstract mode of Spirit; it is not, however, the one Oriental god, but on the contrary the actual self-knowing conscious subject, which brings to the fore and retains within the clasp of its ideal subjectivity all that is universal in thought, truth, goodness, and morality, and possesses therein not so much the knowledge of a pre-existing reality as simply the content of its thoughts and convictions. This relation, in so far as it persists in this opposition, and sets up the two aspects of the same as purely opposites to one another, would be of an entirely prosaic character. We do not, however, at this stage as yet arrive at this point of bare prose. In other words it is true that on the one hand we have a consciousness present, which as self-secure, wills the Good, the fulfilment of its desires, conceives the reality of its notion in the virtue of its emotional life, much as we find it thus imaged in the ancient gods, morals, and laws. At the same time, however, this consciousness is split up in opposition to its existence as part of existing Life, in other words the actual political life of the time, the dissolution of the old modes of conception, the former type of patriotism and political wisdom, and adheres thereby unquestionably to that opposition between the inward life of soul and the real environment outside it. And the reason of this hesitancy is this that the bare conceptions of genuine ethical truth which it derives from its own inner world are unable to fully satisfy it; it consequently faces that which is exterior to this, to which it relates itself in a negative and hostile spirit with the object of changing it. This consciousness is, as already stated, on the one hand no doubt an inward and present content, which, self-determined and at the same time deliberately articulate, is concerned with a world that confronts it, to which this content is opposed, and which receives the task to depict this same reality in the semblance of the very traits of the corruption peculiar to that world, and which form such a contrast with its own ideas of goodness and truth. From another point of view this very contrast is cancelled by art itself. In other words, another type of art arises, in which the conflict of this opposition is not emphasized through the medium of mere thoughts, remaining thus in its disunion; but this reality in the very folly of its corruption is itself submitted to a mode of artistic presentation, which exposes it as self-destructive, and exposes it in such a way that it is precisely in and through this self-destructive process of what is of no weight that truth is enabled to assert itself upon this mirror as the secure and endurable power, and thereby all the force of a direct opposition to what is essentially true is removed from that side represented by folly and unreasonableness. This art is comedy, of the type Aristophanes dramatized for his fellow-citizens, connecting it closely with all that was essential in the world around him, and doing so with equanimity[204], in a mood of pure and hearty joviality.

3. SATIRE

We may, however, observe that this resolution of art, despite its adequacy, tends to disappear to this extent, that the contradictory antithesis persists in the form of its _opposition_, and, consequently, instead of the poetic reconciliation a prosaic relation is imported, by means of which the classical type of art appears to be annulled, and the gods of plastic shape no less than the entire world of human beauty vanish with it. We have, then, now to look about us for a form of art, which is able to reclothe itself from the ruins of this overthrow in a loftier configuration and to extract the real significance which it implies. We discovered as the terminating point of symbolic art in the same way that the separation of pure form from its significance was emphasized in a variety of modes such as simile, fable, parable, riddle, and the like. Inasmuch as the severation above adverted to is causally responsible for the dissolution of that art-type, in a similar way the question arises what is the nature of the distinction between our present example of transition as contrasted with the previous one. The distinction is as follows:

(_a_) In the truly symbolic and comparative type of art the form and significance are from the very first, despite the affinity of their relationship, alien to one another; they are placed, however, in no mere negative, but rather in amicable relationship; for it is precisely the qualities and traits which are identical to or resemble each other on the two sides which assert themselves as the causal basis of their conjunction and comparison. Their persistent separation and hostility is consequently within the bounds of this union neither, relatively to the separated aspects, of a _hostile_ character, nor is a blending of the same, within essentially narrow limits, thereby removed from them. The Ideal of classical art, on the contrary, proceeds from the perfect interfusion of significance and form, the ideal individuality of spirit and its external conformation; and when the composite aspects which have been brought together in such a consummated unity are disrupted, this disruption takes place simply because they are unable any longer to cohere one with the other, and are absolutely compelled to start forth from their peaceful state of harmony in disunion and hostility.

(_b_) Together with this way of looking at the relation in contrast to that of symbolic art we may add that the _content_ of both sides is altered, as they now stand in opposition. To put it thus we may say that, in the symbolic type of art, it is abstractions more or less, general thoughts, or at least definite phrases in the form of generalities peculiar to reflective thought, which, by means of the symbolic type of art, receive a sensuous embodiment replete with suggestion. In the form, however, which makes itself predominant in this transition to romantic art the content, it is true, is made up of a similar abstraction of general thoughts, opinions, and maxims of reflective reason, but in this case it is not these abstractions in themselves, but rather their presence in the _individual's_ mind and his self-subsistent identity which furnish the content for one side of the opposition. For the primary requirement of this mediating stage consists in this, that the spiritual which has attained the Ideal, shall stand forth in its entire independence. Already in classical art we found that spiritual individuality was of chief importance, albeit on the side of its realization it remained reconciled with a determinate existence as immediately presented. What is of importance now is to declare a mode of subjectivity which strives to acquire the mastery over the form that is no longer adequate to it, in a word, over external reality. In this way the world of Spirit becomes liberated as independent. It recovers itself from bondage to the sensuous material and manifests itself thereby through this return upon its own resources as the subject of a self-consciousness which only finds contentment in the secret wealth of its own domain. This subject, however, which repels externality from itself, is not in respect to its ideal aspect yet the truly concrete totality which encloses as content the Absolute under the mode of self-conscious spiritual life; rather it is, as still fettered by its opposition to reality, a purely abstract, finite, and unsatisfied form of subjectivity. In opposition to this we have confronting it an equally finite mode of reality, which on its part is also independent, but just for that very reason--forasmuch, that is, as the truth of Spirit has withdrawn from it into its own ideality and henceforward neither will nor can identity itself with it, appears as a reality void of all gods and an existence fallen into rottenness. In this manner and at this point art brings forward a Spirit that thinks, that is, to repeat our former analysis, the individual consciousness of our humanity, which, supporting itself on its own possession of the abstract knowledge and volition of goodness and virtue, confronts with hostility therewith the corruption of its present environment. That aspect of this opposition which remains unresolved, and in which the ideal and external modes of its antithesis persist in their disruption, constitutes the element of prose in the mutual relation of the two sides. A noble mind or a virtuous soul to whom the realization of self-conscious life is denied in a world of vice and folly, turns away from the existence which thus confronts him with passionate indignation, or more subtle wit and more frosty bitterness, and either is wroth with or scorns a world which gives the lie direct to his abstract notions of virtue and truth.

The type of art which accepts this sudden outburst of opposition between a subjectivity still finite in its mode and a degenerate world outside it as its matter is the _Satire_, the ordinary theories as to which have little to commend them, for the simple reason that they break down precisely where we look for their assistance. Satire has nothing to do with epic poetry, and it has just as little affinity with lyric. In the Satire it is not the life of the emotional nature which is expressed; rather the general conception of goodness and what is essentially needful, which it no doubt blends with the particular aspect of soul-life[205], appears as the virtuousness of this or that individual; but this does not suffer itself to be enjoyed in the open and unhampered beauty of imaginative conception or let that enjoyment issue freely. Rather with discontent it retains the existing discord between the writer's own state of mind and its abstract principles and the empirical reality which mocks them. To this extent satire is neither a genuine creation of the poet nor a real work of art. For these reasons the point of view of the satirical poem can never be reached satisfactorily through those other types of poetry just mentioned; it must be apprehended in a more general way as the example of this very transitional form we referred to from the classic Ideal.

(_c_) Inasmuch, then, as it is, relatively to its ideal content, the prosaic resolution of the Ideal, which asserts itself mainly in satire, we do not find that Greece, which is pre-eminently the native land of Beauty, is the place where we must look for it. Satirical poems of the nature above described are the characteristic possession of Rome. The spirit of the Roman world is the sovereignty of the abstract Ideal, the law that is dead, the shipwreck of beauty and of the joyousness of civic life, the suppression of the family in the sense that it is the immediate and most natural form of morality, and generally the sacrifice of individuality, which surrenders itself wholly to the State, and in obedience to the abstract law is satisfied with the frost-like sense of political worth and critical satisfaction which it supplies. The principle of this civic virtue, the cold-blooded harshness of which subjects to its pleasure all alien peoples, while the formal rectitude of the personal life is elaborated to the furthest point of consistency on equally rigid lines, is wholly inconsonant with genuine art. We find, therefore, even in Rome no art that is at once conspicuous in its beauty, freedom, and greatness. It is from the Greeks that the Romans borrowed all that they mastered whether in sculpture or painting, epic, lyric, or dramatic poetry. It is a remarkable fact that all that we can point to as the native product of Latin art is comic farces, whereas the more cultivated types of comedy, not excluding those of Plautus and Terence, are borrowed from Greece, and are rather an affair of imitation than independent production. Even Ennius first exhausted the sources of Greek poetry before he made mythology prosaic. That type of art is alone native to the Latin genius, which was essentially itself prosaic, the didactic poem, for example, more particularly when it contains an ethical content, and endows its general reflections with the purely exterior adornment of metre, images, similes, and a rhetorically beautiful diction. But above all other forms thus excepted we place the satire. Here we find it is the mood of virtuous exasperation over the surrounding world which strives to air itself in what is, in some measure, hollow declamations. We can only call this essentially prosaic type of art poetical in so far as it brings before the vision the corrupted nature of real life in such a way that this corruption practically falls to pieces as the result of its own folly. Just as Horace, who as a lyric poet entirely identified himself by study with the artistic type and manner of Greece, in his epistles and satires--where we have his originality more emphasized--traces for us a living picture of the morals of his age, by depicting follies which are self-destructive by virtue of the stupidity, that carries them into effect. Nevertheless, even this example only presents us with a kind of merriment that for all its keen and educated sense can barely be classed as poetry, the object in the main being to make ridicule out of that which is bad. Among others, on the contrary, we find that the abstract conception of rectitude and virtue is deliberately contrasted with vice; and in this case it is exasperation, anger, hate, and scorn, which in some measure expatiate in formal eloquence over virtue and wisdom, and in part give full rein to the indignation of a soul of more nobility against the dissolution and servility of the times, or hold up before the vices of the day the mirror of the old morality, the former liberty, the virtues of a state of the world which has passed away, without any genuine hope and belief in their recovery; or rather one which has nothing to oppose to the tottering gait, the dilemmas, the need and danger of an ignominious present, save a stoical equanimity and the unshakable conscience of a virtuous soul. Roman history and philosophy not unfrequently receive something of the same tone from a mood of this kind. Sallust must needs express himself strongly against the corruptions of morals, being himself very considerably affected by them. Livy, despite his rhetorical elegance, seeks for comfort and satisfaction in his picture of the good old days. Above all we have Tacitus, who, with a severe melancholy as grand in its scope as it was profound, without the baldness of declamation, indignantly exposes in the clearest relief the evils of his time. Among the satirists Persius is remarkable for his acerbity, with a bitter edge more keen than that of Juvenal. Later on we find bringing up the rear the Greek Syrian Lucian giving free vent to his witticisms and pleasantry against all things, whether heroes, philosophers, or gods; and with exceptional prominence passing in review the ancient gods of Greece on the score of their humanity and individuality. However, only too often he goes no further in his tittle-tattle than the mere external aspect of these godlike figures and their actions, and is for that reason wearisome to modern readers. For, on the one hand, so far as our convictions are concerned, we have already disposed of all that he would destroy, and on the other we are aware that, despite all his jests and mockery, these characteristic traits of Greek divinities, when contemplated under the aspect of beauty, still retain their eternal significance.

Nowadays satirical poems are not likely to prove a success. Cotta and Goethe have proposed competitions in this form of composition, but no poems of note are forthcoming. Certain fixed principles are bound up with it, with which the present age is not in harmony; a wisdom which is devoid of content, a virtue which adheres with inflexible obstinacy to its own resources and nothing beyond, may very possibly contrast itself with the actual world, but is quite unable to bring about the truly poetical resolution of what is false and repugnant, and effect the genuine reconciliation in the truth.

In one word, Art is unable to persist in this breach between the abstract conceptions of the inward life and the objective world around, without proving itself false to its own principle. The subjective realm of the soul must be conceived as that which is itself an essentially infinite and independent existence, which, albeit it is unable to suffer the finite reality to subsist as Truth itself, nevertheless does not merely assert itself negatively toward the same in a bare contradiction, but proceeds all the while on the path of reconciliation, and for the first time, in its opposition to the ideal individualities of the classical art-form, declares this very activity, being in fact the presentment of the absolute mode of self-conscious life.

[Footnote 197: Lit. "the essentially-and-for-itself-necessary."]

[Footnote 198: Hölderlin, and of course Goethe no less than Schiller, would be included. With our moderns such as Swinburne the admission is less obvious than the qualification.]

[Footnote 199: _Die Aufklärung._ That is, the end of the eighteenth century; usually translated as illumination or enlightenment.]

[Footnote 200: _Verstand_, the faculty of science and common sense.]

[Footnote 201:

/$
What! doth this same stillness tell me sadly
All I know of Him who voiced creation?
Dark as e'en the veil that hides Him from me
Is my heart's salute of resignation.
$/
]

[Footnote 202:

/$ Since the gods were then more human Men were more in image godlike. $/ ]

[Footnote 203:

/$
Wrested from the flood of Time's abysses
Saved they float above high Pindus now;
All that was immortal life within them
Lives in song, all other life must go.
$/
]

[Footnote 204: _Zornlos_ lit., without anger.]

[Footnote 205: I think this is the meaning of the words _mit subjectiver Besonderheit_, but the interpretation "with other material peculiar to the writer" is not impossible.]

SUBSECTION III

THE ROMANTIC TYPE OF ART