(γ) We may conclude, then, that it is the essentially positive and substantive powers in the spiritual world which supply the real content of the ideal action. These sources of energy, however, in their artistic embodiment, must not appear in their inherent universality, albeit within the reality of the action they are essential phases of the Idea. Rather they must receive the form of independent individuals. If this were not so they would remain as merely the universals of thought or abstract conceptions which do not properly fall within the province of art. Though in their origin they should be held as intact as it is possible to hold them from mere caprices of the fancy, it is equally necessary that in their development they should acquire determinacy no less than self-consistency[337], and in this way appear as essentially particularized. Such definition as they possess ought not to be carried to the point of the particularity of external objects, nor should their concentration be carried to that of the subjective self-consciousness[338]. Otherwise the individuality of those universal powers is necessarily involved in all the developments of finite existence. In this respect we may say, then, that the determinacy of their individuality is not to be taken too seriously. The gods of the Greek Pantheon are the most conspicuous example of this manifestation and sway of the universal forces we have just discussed in their self-subsistent form. However they may be brought before us, their blessedness and cheerfulness remains unaffected. Regarded separately as particular gods no doubt they engage in conflict, but in all their battles we shall ultimately find they are not really serious in the sense that they concentrate themselves on any definite object with the entire consequential energy of their character and passion, fully prepared to stake their existence upon the result. They engage in this affair or that wherever it may take place, identify particular interests in concrete examples with their own; they are, however, equally ready to leave the matter at any point and wing their way back happily to Olympus. Such is the view we get of the gods when they engage in warfare on the pages of Homer. The determinacy of their characterization is capable of conflict, but they remain for all that the purely universal determinations which at bottom they are. A battle begins to rage; heroes advance singly one against another; then we lose sight of individuals altogether in the universal storm and crush; it is no longer the specific qualities of individuals which are now set in relief against each other—it is the universal rush of the fight, the daemon of war loosed and roaring, and now it is that the universal powers, the gods themselves, step forth on the scene of battle. From such a temporary display of the contrasts of their characterization they ever withdraw themselves into the solitude of their self-subsistency and repose. For though the individuality of their form carries them perforce into the region of time and contingency, nevertheless inasmuch as the universal they claim as gods is that which ultimately must prevail, the individual characteristic shrinks away into the determination of external form only; they are unable in their personality to penetrate the true arcana of conscious spirit[339].
Their physical definition is, in fact, either more or less only the accommodating form of their divinity. But this self-subsistency and careless repose is precisely that which gives to them their plastic individuality, and relieves them of any anxiety and constraint[340] in relation to earthly objects and events[341]. For this reason we find in the gods of Homer no final result when actively occupied with the concrete facts of human life, although such activity is displayed for us in many and diverse directions. The material and interest of human events which happen in time is that which gives them something to do and nothing more. And in like manner we may remark other peculiar characteristics attached to the Greek gods, which we can only regard as essentially unrelated to the general notion of divinity which each god respectively connotes. Mercury is, for example, the slayer of Argus; Apollo that of the hydra; of the love affairs of Zeus we have countless tales, and, among other things, he hangs his wife on an anvil. These and many other stories like them are merely supplementary additions, which attach to the gods in their aspect of natural forces by virtue of symbol and allegory, the origin of which we propose to discuss more fully later on. In modern art we shall, it is true, find certain indications which point to a conception of definite and at the same time universal powers. These are, however, for the most part simply cold and frost-like allegories of hate, envy, hope, love, faithfulness, that is to say, generally of virtues and vices in the actual truth of which we can retain no belief. For with us moderns it is the concrete subjectivity alone, for which we, in the representations of art, feel that profounder interest, wherein abstractions such as these do not appear in their isolation, but are made to appear merely as phases or aspects of human character, whether we regard it in its particularity or as a concrete whole. In much the same way the angels possess no essential universality and self-subsistency such as characterize Mars, Venus, and Apollo, or even Oceanus and Helios. They are, it is true, objects of imaginative conception, but their specific character is that of vassals of the one Divine and essential substance, which is not in this case broken up into self-subsistent individualities, as we find it in the Greek Pantheon. For this reason we have here no imaginative vision of many objective powers dwelling in a state of tranquillity, which may be represented as essentially Divine personalities. We find, on the contrary, the essential content of such either as subsisting in the Godhead, or realized in a mode which is both particular and subjective in wholly human characters and actions. Nevertheless it was precisely in the conception[342] of self-subsistency and individualization that the ideal representation of the gods originated.
(b) The Individuals in the Action
In the cases we have just discussed of the ideal gods it is not a difficult matter for art to secure the ideality she requires. But in approaching the concrete action, ideal representation is confronted with a real difficulty. For though it is here that the gods and, in general terms, the universal powers may be identified with a principle which stimulates and compels activity, we are not therefore on the plane of reality entitled to find in them the source of genuine individual action. Action is rather essentially the manifestation of human life. Consequently there are in this connection two distinct aspects of the problem to be considered. On the one hand we have these universal forces in their self-subsistent repose and for that reason more abstract substantiality; on the other there is the individuality of men, in which we must seek the final spring and determinating impulse to action no less than its actual accomplishment. It is, of course, only the simple truth that these eternally dominant powers are immanent in the identical nature of mankind, constituting, in fact, the substantive core of its character; but in so far as they are comprehended in their Divine nature themselves as individuals[343], and thereby in an exclusive way, their relation to the subject of human consciousness must remain an external one. And this fact enables us to see the essential difficulty we noticed above. There is, in truth, a contradiction immediately involved in this relation between the gods and men. It is quite true that the content of the gods is that which belongs to humanity, and announces itself as his passion, resolve, and will. It is, however, equally true that the gods must not only be assumed to be and comprehended as independent from man individually considered in their actual existence, but, furthermore, as the forces at the root of all his activity and determination. And this, too, in such a way that we are forced to consider the same determinations at one time as personified in the self-subsistent and Divine personality, and at another that which appears most essentially to belong to the human heart. And it is for this reason that the free self-subsistency of the gods no less than the freedom of human individuals in their activity is seriously compromised if, to the detriment of human independence, which we have already stated to be of most essential importance to the Ideal of Art, we ascribe an exclusive power of command to the gods. And we may observe this is precisely the same kind of difficulty which confronts us in the form of the religious conceptions of Christianity. It is stated in terms that the spirit of God leads up to God. Taken strictly such a phrase can only imply that the inward life of man is regarded as a purely passive ground, upon which the spirit of God labours. In such a conception the human will disappears as a free will, and at the same time the Divine purpose which motives the "in working" above mentioned can only appear to man as a kind of Fate, under which he fails to come by his own true personality[344].
(α) If, however, this question of mutual relation[345] is so understood that man in his action is conceived as standing in a purely external opposition to God, here posited as eternal substance, the relation of both is one of pure matter of fact[346]. God gives a command, and man is obliged to hearken. Even great poets have found themselves unable to dispense with this conception of external opposition between gods and men. In the "Philoctetes" of Sophocles, for example, we find that Philoctetes, after he has confounded the deceit of Odysseus, persists in his determination not to return to the Grecian camp until Heracles appears at length as Deus ex machina, and orders him to yield to the entreaty of Neoptolimus. The content of this apparition is, no doubt, sufficiently motived, and answers to our own expectation; the catastrophe itself, however, is for all that not rightly homogeneous, but rather outside the action; and in his noblest tragedies Sophocles makes no such use of this kind of representation, according to which, if we but carry it one step further, the gods are reduced to lifeless machines, and individual men simply to the instruments of a foreign caprice. In a similar way we constantly in epic poetry meet with the active intervention of the gods represented in a mode which is external to human freedom. Hermes, for example, conducts Priam to Achilles; Apollo gives Patroclus the blow between the shoulders which ends his life. We also frequently find mythological traits treated in such a way that they appear as wholly external to the actual lives of the individuals thus affected. Achilles, for example, is dipped by his mother in the Styx and thereby rendered invulnerable and invincible to the one point of his heels. If we reflect on this rationally it is obvious that all real bravery disappears, and all that is heroic in the character of Achilles is converted from a real trait of his essential manhood to a purely physical advantage. Such a mode of representation is, however, far more permissible to the epic than it is to the dramatic type of poetry, for the good reason that in the epic that aspect of spiritual life which is directly concerned with the intention implied in the execution of objects falls into the background and a larger field is, in general, offered for the play of external characteristics. Such a criticism of the prosaic understanding as the one above, which charges a poet with the absurdity that his heroes are no heroes at all, should only be advanced with the greatest caution, for it is partly in such traits as will appear shortly, that the poetical relation between gods and men is preserved. It is another matter, and we have nothing left us but prose, when in addition the powers, which are posited as substantive individuals, are mere empty shadows, the creations of the caprice of fancy and the arbitrariness of a false originality. They are then for the most part only the adjuncts of superstition or imbecility.
(β) The truly poetic relation of ideality consists, then, in the identity of gods and men; and this must assert itself even though the universal powers are presented as independent and free from the particularity of human beings and passions. In other words, all that we attribute to the gods must at the same time establish itself as that which is essentially cognate with the spiritual life of particular men in this sense, that while the dominating powers appear as essentially personified, yet at the same time all that is thus posited in an external relation to man is none the less clearly that which is immanent in his own spirit and character. The true function of the artist is, therefore, to introduce a mediating link between the difference involved in these two aspects, to bind them, in short, by a finely conceived thread of relation which, while clearly emphasizing their springs in the spiritual life of man, shall make no less visible the universal and essential element which is therein implied and present such to the imagination in individual form. The emotional life of man must reveal itself in the gods, who, in fact, are the self-subsistent and universal embodiments of that which is active and dominant in his own spiritual experience. Then alone are the gods at the same time gods in cognate relation with his own heart and emotions. When, for example, we are told by the ancients that Venus or Amor has put a constraint upon the heart, no doubt in the first place these divinities are apprehended as external powers; but human love is equally a stimulus and a passion, which is implanted in the heart and is part of that it independently contains.
In much the same sense is the frequent reference to the Eumenides. We have to picture in the first instance no doubt these avenging maidens as Furies, who pursue the transgressor in an external form. But this pursuit is but another aspect of the Fury which drives through the soul of the perpetrator of crime; and Sophocles in the Œdipus Colonus (I. 1434) actually refers to them in this sense of inward spiritual forces, as the Eumenides of Œdipus himself, that is to say, who signify the father's curse as the result of the stress of emotion caused by the conduct of his sons. We have, then, and equally have not reason on our side whether we identify the gods with powers external to man, or find in them that which belongs exclusively to his spiritual life. They are in fact both. In Homer, for example, the activity of gods and men is a constantly involved skein[347]. The gods appear to accomplish what is foreign to human activity, and yet for all that execute only that which is in vital co-ordination with his own emotional life. In the "Iliad," for example, when Achilles, in the stress of controversy, is about to raise his sword against Agamemnon, Athene steps forth behind him and takes hold of his head of flaxen hair, visible only to himself. Hero, who is equally anxious over Achilles and Agamemnon, sends for them from Olympus, and their admission there appears to be wholly independent of the desire of Achilles. On the other hand we have no difficulty in seeing that the sudden appearance of Athene, the wisdom which puts constraint upon the hero's wrath, is simply a reflection of internal conflict, that the entire description but states in imaginative form what was experienced in the heart of our hero. In fact Homer himself points this out a few verses previously ("Iliad," I, v, 190), when he relates about the debate that took place in his heart in the following terms:
ἢ ὅγε φάσγανον ὀξὺ ἐρυσσάμενος παρὰ μηροῦ
τοὺς μὲν ἀναστήσειεν, ὃ δ᾽ Ἀτρέιδην ἐναρίξοι,
ἡὲ χόλον πάυσειεν ἐρητύσείε τε θυμὀν.[348]
This inward breaking up of anger into a divided self, this constraint, for it is in opposition to the anger, and Achilles appears at first to be wholly filled with wrath, the epic poet has a perfect right to represent at the same time as an external event. In a similar case in the "Odyssey" we find Minerva acting the part of escort for Telemachus. This attendance is rather more difficult to grasp as a personal experience of the emotional life of Telemachus, although we can readily fix on certain points of contact between the external image and the emotion experienced. And this it is we may generally say which constitutes the cheerful buoyancy of the Homeric gods, and the irony implied in the honour paid to them. Their self-consistency and seriousness are characteristics which tend to dissolve like a cloud, precisely to the extent that they unfold themselves as the very powers which are native to man's emotional life, and thereby, in their manifestation, leave humanity alone with its own possessions.
However, it is not necessary to look so far abroad for a complete example of the conversion of a purely mechanical conception of Divine activity into the atmosphere of the subjective consciousness, the sphere, that is, of freedom and ethical beauty. In his Iphigenia in Tauris Goethe has in this connection carried the process through with a beauty that we cannot sufficiently admire. In the drama of Euripides Orestes in complicity with Iphigenia carries off the statue of Diana. This is simply an act of stealing. Then Thoas comes on the scene, and orders their pursuit, and the recovery of the bust of the goddess. Finally, in very prosaic fashion, Athene appears and orders Thoas to stay his hand on the ground that she has independently commended Orestes to the charge of Poseidon, and he, in deference to her wishes, has already carried Orestes far over seas. Thoas submits to her advice and replies to it in the following terms (v, 1442, 43): "Lady Athene, whoever, on hearing the words of the gods, does not obey them is but a fool. For how could it be right and fit to contend with the mighty gods."