Under the same type of spiritual intensity, which is unable fully to unfold itself, we may for the most part classify those folksongs, more particularly our German ones, which, in the copious compactness of the soul-life therein reflected, and however much such is displayed to us as carried away by any one absorbing interest, are yet unable to express the same except in broken flashes, and thereby fully reveal just this very depth. It is a mode of artistic presentment, which in its reserve is apt to fall back on the effects of symbolism. What it offers us is not so much the open, transparent display of the entire inward life as it is purely a sign and indication of that life. But we do not get, however, from it a symbol, the significance of which, as was the case previously, remains a general abstraction, but an expression the inward content of which is nothing more nor less than this personal, living, and actual soul. In times like our own, dominated by a critical reflectiveness, which lies so far removed from a self-absorbed naïveté of this kind, such presentations are of the greatest difficulty, and if successful, are a sure proof of an original creative genius. We have already seen that Goethe, more particularly in his lyrics, has shown himself a master in this respect, namely, that he can depict and unfold to us in a symbolical way, in other words with a few simple, apparently external and insignificant traits, the entire truth and infinite wealth of a soul. His poem, "The King of Thule," one of his most lovely bits of poetical work, is of this class. The king here makes us aware of his love by just one thing only, namely, the drinking cup which the old man preserved as a gift of his beloved. The old carouser stands up there on the point of death in his lofty palace hall; his knights, his kingdom, his possessions are around him; and he bequeaths them all to his heir, but the goblet he flings into the waves; no one shall have that.
Er sah ihn stürzen, trinken,
Und sinken tief in's Meer,
Die Augen thäten ihm sinken,
Trank nie ein Tropfen mehr[282].
A soul, however profound and still of this kind, which retains its energy of spirit pent up like the spark in the flint, unopened to form, which does not elaborate its existence and reflection beyond its own boundaries, has also failed to free itself by such expansion. It remains exposed to the remorseless contradiction that, if the false note of unhappiness ring through its life, it possesses no remedial aptitude, no bridge as a way of passage between the heart and reality; it is equally unable to ward off external conditions from itself, and by so doing to preserve an independent ground of vantage in its own self-reliance. When the collision comes therefore it is helpless; it acts hastily and without circumspection, or bows passively to the movement of events. So, for example, we have in Hamlet a beautiful and noble soul; one not so much spiritually weak, but one that wanders astray without a strong grasp of life's realities, moving in an atmosphere of dejection, a sombre and half articulate melancholy. Gifted with a finely intuitive sense he feels that all is not well with him, that things are not as they should be though he has no external sign, no single ground for suspicion; nevertheless he surmises the atrocious deed that has been perpetrated. The ghost of his father gives yet closer embodiment to his feelings. He is at once ready in spirit to revenge, his sense of duty is always before him reflecting the innermost craving of his heart, but he is not carried away with the flood, as Macbeth; he cannot either kill, rage, or strike with the directness of a Laertes; he persists in the inactivity of a beautiful, introspective soul, which can neither realize its aims nor make itself at home in the conditions of actual life. He dallies, seeks for more positive certainty buoyed up by the fair integrity of his soul; he can, however, come to no firm decision, much as he has sought it, and permits himself to follow the course of external events. In this atmosphere of unreality he goes yet further astray in matters that lie directly in his path; he kills the old Polonius instead of the king; he acts in a hurry where he should have been more circumspect, yet persists in his self absorption, where decided action is essential; until at length, without any action on his part, the fated dénouement of the entire drama, including that of his own persistently self-retiring personality, has unravelled itself on the broad highway of Life's external incidents and accidents.
We are particularly presented with this attitude in modern times among men of the lower levels of life, who are without an education which extends to aims of universal significance, or are devoid of the variety of objective interests. Consequently when some particular aim of their life fails they are unable to secure any further stay of their spiritual forces and a centre of control for their activities. This lack of education tends to make reserved natures, in proportion as it is undeveloped, adhere with the more rigidness and obstinacy to that which, through its appeal to their entire individuality, makes a claim upon them however limited in its range it may be. We find pre-eminently such a monotonous attitude incidental to this class of self-absorbed and speechless men among German characters, who for this reason appear in their seclusion inclined to stubbornness, ready to bristle up, crabbed, inaccessible, and in their dealings and expressions wholly unreliable and contradictory. As a master in the delineation and exposition of such obtuse characters of the poorer classes we will mention but one example, Hippel, the author of "Life's Careers in the Line of Ascent,"[283] one of our few German works stamped with original humour. He keeps himself wholly removed from Jean Paul's sentimentality and want of taste in plot construction, and possesses moreover an astonishing individuality, freshness, and vitality. He understands, in quite an exceptional way, and one that seizes on our interest at once, how to depict the thickset type of people who are unable to breathe freely and who consequently, when they do give themselves the rein, do so with a violence that is simply fearful. They put an end of their own accord to the infinite contradiction of their spiritual life and the unhappy circumstances in which they are involved in an appalling manner; and bring about by such means that which is otherwise the result of an external fate, as we find, for instance, in "Romeo and Juliet," where external accidents mar all the wise and able offices of the holy father's intervention and cause the death of the lovers.
(c) We find, then, that characters of this formal quality generally either expose merely the infinite volitional force of the individual's personality, which asserts itself frankly just as it is and storms ahead in the bare impulse of the will; or, to take the further aspect, present to us an essential self-contained[284], if not wholly articulate soul, which, affected as it becomes by one specific aspect of its spiritual experience, concentrates the entire breadth and depth of its personality on this point, yet, owing to the fact of its possessing no development externally, is unable to find its proper place or to act with practical sense when it comes into collision with that world. We have yet a third point[285] to mention, which consists in this, that when characters of this type, wholly one-sided and restricted as they are in respect to their aims if at the same time fully developed in mental power, awake in us not merely a formal, but also a substantial interest, we cannot fail to receive the impression that this limitation of their personal life is itself only a condition that is inevitable; in other words it is a result which grows out of the particular way in which their character is defined along with the profounder content of their personal life. Shakespeare in fact enables us to see this depth and wealth in such characters. He presents them to us as men of imaginative power and genius by showing how their reflective faculty commands them and lifts them above that which their condition and definite purpose would make them, so that they are all the while as it were forced by the misfortune of circumstances and the obstacles of their position into doing that which they accomplish. At the same time we do not mean this to the extent of asserting, for example, that the bad witches were to blame for all that Macbeth dared after consulting them. These witches are rather to be looked at as the reflex of his own obstinate will. All that the characters of Shakespeare execute, that is the particular purpose they propose, originates and finds the taproot of its force in their own personality. But along with this they maintain in one and the same individuality a loftiness, which brushes aside that which they actually are, so far as their aims, interests, and actions are concerned, and which amplifies them and exalts them above themselves. In like manner Shakespeare's more vulgar characters, such as Stephano, Trinculo, Pistol, and that hero among them all, Falstaff, though saturated with their own debasement, assert themselves as fellows of intelligence, whose genial quality is able to take in everything, to possess a large and open atmosphere of its own, and in short makes them all that great men are. In the tragedies of the French on the contrary even the greatest and most worthy characters only too frequently, if viewed critically, assert themselves as so many evil offshoots of the brute creation, whose only intelligence consists in this that it can furnish dialectical arguments in its vindication. In Shakespeare we find neither vindication nor damnation, but merely a review of the general condition of destiny, which inevitably places such characters uncomplaining and unrepentant where they are, and from the starting-point of which they see everything, themselves included; and yet as independent spectators of themselves decline and fall.
In all these respects the realm which is peopled by such individual characters is an infinitely rich one, a kingdom, however, which very easily collapses in hollowness and dulness, so that only quite a few masters have received the gifts of poetical and intuitional power sufficient to enable them to reveal its truth.
2. THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE
Now that we have examined the aspect of the inward soul-life, which may, at this stage of our inquiry, be presented by art, we must direct our attention to that which lies without it, to the particularity of circumstances and situations which affect character, also to the collisions in which its development proceeds, and finally review the entire collective form, which this inward life assumes within the boundaries of concrete reality.
It is, as we have more than once pointed out, a fundamental determinant of romantic art, that the spiritual sense, in other words, the soul in its aspect of self-reflection, should constitute a whole, and relates itself for this reason to the external world, not, in its own reality, inter-penetrated by this world, but as though related to something purely external and separated from it, which goes on its way independently disjoined from Spirit, is thus evolved, and thus disposes of itself as a finite and continuously fluid, changing, and complicate object of contingent causality[286]. To the self-absorbed soul it is as wholly a matter of indifference what particular circumstances it confronts, as it is an affair of chance what those circumstances are which appear before it. For in its action it is less a matter of importance that it should carry out a work whose essential basis is rooted in itself and owes its subsistency to its own character than that it should generally make itself effective in action.
(a) We have, in short, before us here a process which we may from one point of view describe as the rejection of the Divine from Nature. Spirit has here withdrawn itself from the externality of phenomena, which, for the reason that the inward life no longer sees itself reflected in this sphere[287], is now independently clothed on its part under a relation of indifference exterior to the subject of consciousness. Relatively to its truth Spirit is, no doubt, in its own medium mediated and reconciled with the Absolute: but in so far as we now take up our position on the ground of self-subsistent individuality, which proceeds from itself as it discovers itself in its immediacy, this divesting of the Divine[288] affects character in its active capacity. It moves forward, that is to say, with its own contingent aims into a world equally subject to chance, with which it fails to unite itself in an essentially harmonious whole. This relative character of purpose in an environment which is relative, whose determination and development does not subsist in the individual mind, but is defined externally and contingently and is responsible for collisions equally adventitious, which appear as offshoots that are unexpectedly interwoven with it, creates that to which we give the name of "the adventurous," which supplies the fundamental type of romance for the mode of its events and actions.