(γ) In somewhat the same way as we thus have seen chivalry, even in respect to its most momentous interests, overturned in comedy, Shakespeare, too, either places the characters and scenes of comedy in juxtaposition to his downright and stable individualities, and tragic situations and conflicts, or exalts the essential figures of his drama through a profound humour above themselves and their uncouth, limited, and false purposes. Falstaff, the fool in "Lear," the musician scene in "Romeo and Juliet," will sufficiently illustrate the first alternative, and Richard III the second.
(c) The dissolution of romance, in the sense we have hitherto regarded it, introduces us finally and in the third place to the spirit of the novel[295], in our modern sense of the term, which historically the knight-errantry and pastoral romances precede. This spirit of modern fiction is, in fact, that of chivalry, once more taken seriously and receiving a true content. The contingent character of external existence has changed to a stable, secure order of civic society and state-life, so that now police administration, tribunals of justice, the army and political government generally take the place of those chimerical objects which the knight of chivalry proposed to himself. For this reason the knightly character of the heroes who play their parts in our modern novels is altered. Confronted by the existing order and the ordinary prose of life they appear before us as individuals with personal aims of love, honour, ambition, and ideals of world reform, ideals in the path of which that order presents obstacles on every side. The result is that personal desires and demands unroll themselves[296] before this opposition to unfathomable heights. Every man finds himself face to face with an enchanted world that is by no means all that he asks for, which he must contend with for the reason that it contends with himself, and in its tenacious stability refuses to give way before his passions, but interposes as an obstacle the will of some one else whoever it may be, his father's, his aunt's, or social conditions generally. For the most part such a knighthood will consist of young people, who feel it incumbent upon them to hew their way through a world which makes for its own realization rather than that of their ideals, and who hold it a misfortune that there should be family ties, civic society, state laws, professions, and all the rest of such things at all, because conditions of such solidity and so inevitably restricted are so cruelly opposed to their ideal dreams and the infinite claims of their souls. The main object now is to drive a breach through this wall of facts, to change, to improve, or at least carve for themselves in despite of it some little heaven on earth such as they seek for, their ideal maiden, discover her, win her from the clutches of her wicked relations or her evil circumstances, carry her off and lay the balm of love on her wounds. Conflicts of this kind, however, in our modern world are the apprentice years, the education of individuality in the actual world; they have no further significance, but the significance has, nevertheless, a real value. The object and consummation of such apprenticeship consists in this, that the individual drops his horns and finds his own place, together with his wishes and opinions in social conditions as they are and the rational order which belongs to them, that he enters, in short, upon the varied field of life, and secures that position within it which is appropriate to his powers. However soundly he may have rated the world and have been shoved on one side, the day comes at last with the most of us when the maiden is discovered and some kind of place in the world, he marries, and is as much a Philistine as the rest of his neighbours. His wife takes charge of his domestic arrangements; children do not fail to put in an appearance; the adorable wife who was so unique, an angel, acts very much as other wives do; the profession supplies its toils and vexations, the married tie its domestic sorrows, and, in short, we have the entire process of marital caterwauling once more illustrated. In this history we may see the same old type of the adventurous spirit with this distinction, that here that spirit discovers its real significance, and all that is wholly fantastic in it receives its necessary correction.
3. THE DISSOLUTION OF THE ROMANTIC TYPE OF ART
The last point which we have to establish still more closely is that relatively to which the romantic spirit, for the reason that it already is intrinsically the principle of the dissolution of the classic Ideal, manifests, in fact, this dissolution clearly as such a process. In this connection it is of the first importance to consider the ultimately complete contingent and external character of the material, which the activity of the artist seizes on and informs. In the plastic material of the plastic arts the spiritual conception is so related to the external medium that this external show is the embodiment which uniquely belongs to that spiritual significance itself, and possesses no real independence apart from it. In romantic art, on the contrary, in which we find the inwardness of Spirit withdraws within its own domain, the entire content of the external world secures the freedom of unfettered independence and the assured subsistency of its own peculiar character and particularity. Conversely, as we have seen, if the personal life of soul forms the essential feature in the artistic product, it is a question of similar indifference with what specific content of external reality and the spiritual world the soul is vitally connected. The romantic Idea can therefore assert itself through every sort of condition; can embrace every conceivable position, circumstance, relation, aberration, confusion, conflict, and means of satisfaction; it is simply its own personal and self-subsistent mode of conformation, the expression and receptive form of the soul rather than any objective independently valid form which is the object of search and is made good. In the representation of romantic art therefore everything has its due place, all the departments and phenomena of life, the greatest and the least, the highest and most insignificant, what is moral with that which is immoral and evil. And we may further note in particular that the more secular the art becomes, the more it amasses the finite wealth of the world, the more it takes to it with, delight, bestows upon it a validity that is without reserve and exists for the artist in such a world under the sole condition that it is reproduced in its naked reality, so much the more is art at home with itself. Thus we may observe in Shakespeare, on account of the fact that with him the action as a rule runs its course in the most realistic association with objective life, and is isolated and broken up in a mass of purely accidental relations, and conditions of every kind, the least important and most incidental no less than the most sovereign flights and most weighty interests of poetry are each and all substantiated. So in "Hamlet" we have the sentry on watch no less than the royal court; in "Romeo and Juliet" the domestic ménage; in other pieces, not to mention clowns, swashbucklers, and all the vulgarities of ordinary life, we have pot-houses, carriers, chamber-pots and fleas, much as in the representations by romantic art of the birth of Christ and the adoration of the kings we do not fail to find oxen and asses, mangers and straw[297]. And this is the kind of thing throughout, that the scriptural text may receive its fulfilment, too, in art, "they that are of low estate shall be exalted." It is from out this contingent sphere of its subject-matter, which in a measure asserts itself as merely the environment of a content intrinsically more important and in part also in absolute independence, that the downfall of romantic art issues, to which we have already above adverted. In other words we have, on the one hand, objective reality placed before us in what is from the point of view of the Ideal its prosaic objectivity, that is, the content of everyday life, which is not grasped in the substantive form in which it adumbrates what is both moral and divine, but rather in that which is for ever changing and which as temporal passes away. And, in the further aspect of it, it is also the subjective condition, which, with its emotion and insight, with the principle and authority of its wit or humour, is able to exalt itself in mastery over the entire world of the real, a mastery which leaves nothing in the ordinary connections and significance where the commonsense consciousness finds it, and is not fully satisfied until it has proved that everything which is a part of that world is, by virtue of the form and relative position which it receives from the view of it, mood and supreme gifts of the artist[298], itself intrinsically capable of being broken up, and, as such, is for the artistic vision and feeling dissolved. We have now, in this connection, first, to add a few words on the principle contained in those very varied works of art whose level of representation approximates closely to the ordinary appearance of objective or external reality, what in common parlance is called the imitation of Nature.
Secondly, we shall have to discuss humour as a personal quality in the artist. It plays a very considerable part in modern art, and is that which in the case of many poets distinctively supplies the fundamental character of their work.
Thirdly, it remains for us to offer a few suggestions, in conclusion, on the point of view from which it is still possible for the art of to-day to find a field for its activities.
(a) The Artistic Imitation of what is Immediately presented by Nature
The realm of subjects which may be included in this sphere v of artistic activity may be extended indefinitely for the reason that Art takes for its content here not that which is by its own inherent law necessary[299], the range of which is essentially self-contained, but the contingent phenomena of reality in their unlimited modifications of form and relation, Nature and her kaleidoscopic play of separate pictures, the everyday action and affairs of man in his dependence on natural conditions and their means of his satisfaction, in his accidental habits also, attitudes, activities of family life, his business as a citizen, and, generally, the incalculable variety of all that shifts and changes in the world around us. And for this reason this art is not merely, in the broad sense that applies more or less to the romantic spirit in all its manifestations, a type of portraiture: rather it tends to lose itself completely in the mode of its portrayal, whether it be in sculpture, painting, or in the descriptions of poetry. The tendency is to return to the exact imitation of Nature, in other words, to the intentional approach to the contingent aspects of what is immediately before the vision and independently thus presented, prosaic existence in all its ugliness no less than its beauty. The question, therefore, at once suggests itself whether productions of this character have any right to be called art at all. No doubt, if we simply fix before our attention the notion of artistic work which fully corresponds to the Ideal, work which from one point of view it is of the first importance that their content shall not be thus intrinsically accidental or evanescent, and from another point of view that their mode of presentation must be adequate in all respects to such a content, then such artistic productions as we are now considering will unquestionably appear to fall short. On the other hand, there is another fundamental aspect of art which assumes here an exceptional importance. This is the conception and execution of a work of art which are personal to the artist, the aspect, that is, of an individual talent, which is able to remain true to the inherently substantive life of Nature no less than the embodiments of spiritual experience though carried to the very limits of contingent condition with which they may be involved, and which is further competent through the vividness of its truth to import a significance into that which is by itself insignificant, no less than by the amazing ability of the technical execution itself. We have consequently to consider here the degree in which the soul, that is, the genius and vitality of the artist, is able to enter into the very being of such objects—whether we consider their dominant idea[300], or the purely external form of their appearance—and thus makes them visible in his art to our eyes. And if we look at it from this point of view it will be found impossible to deny that such creations have a genuine claim to the name of art-products.
If we approach such more closely we shall find that among the particular arts poetry and painting are the ones which are most occupied with their subject-matter. For, on the one hand, we see here that it is that which is itself essentially particular which supplies their content, and on the other hand it is the accidental though in this type of art the genuine peculiarities of the objective appearance which is sought for as the mode of the reproduction. Neither the arts of architecture, sculpture, or music are adapted to the fulfilment of such a task.