The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 4 (of 4) / Hegel's Aesthetik

The spiritual content possesses, however, as essentially appertinent to the ideality of consciousness, a determinate existence which is for this ideality at the same time foreign to the medium itself of the external appearance and envisagement presented to it by material form. From this foreign element it is further necessary that it removes its conceptions in order to place them in a realm which, in respect to material no less than the mode of expression, is independently of an ideal or subjective character. This was the forward step which we saw music make, in so far as it embodied pure ideality and subjective emotion in the configurations of essentially resonant sound rather than in visible forms. It, however, passed by this very means into a further extreme, that is, an ideal mode of concentration not fully explicit, whose content in musical tones itself only found symbolic expression. For tone taken by itself is without content, and has its definition in the numerical relations, so that what is qualitative in the spiritual content no doubt generally corresponds to these quantitative relations which are expressed in essential differences, oppositions, and mediation, but in its qualitative determinacy is not entirely able to receive its impression in musical tone. If this aspect is not wholly to fail the art of music must, by reason of its onesidedness, summon to its assistance the more definite articulation of language, and requires for its more secure attachment to particularity and the characteristic expression of the content a text, without which it is unable to complete fully the ideality which is poured forth by means of musical tones.
By virtue of this expression of ideas and emotions, the abstract ideality of music receives a clearer and more secure exposition. At the same time what we have here unfolded by its means is, to a certain extent, not the point of view of idea and the artistic mode adapted to its expression, but merely the emotional life as it accompanies the same; also in part we find that here, too, music entirely divests itself of fusion with the verbal text in order to develop its own movement without restraint in the world of tone simply. For this reason the realm of idea, which is unable to remain under I such a more purely abstract mode of ideal intensity, and seeks a configuration in a world which embraces its one homogeneous and concrete reality, breaks away on its part likewise from the bond of music, and in the exclusive art of poetry discovers the adequate realization it demands.