We have now arrived at the point where romantic art itself for the present terminates. It is the standpoint of our most modern outlook, whose distinctive characteristic we shall find to be mainly this, that the individual personality[313] of the artist stands supreme above both the material he informs and his creation. He is no longer dominated by the conditions of an essentially restricted sphere, in which he must accept as given both the content and form of his work; it now lies in his power to choose either as he wills, and to retain both on similar terms.
(c) The End of the Romantic Type of Art
Art, in so far as it has hitherto been the subject of our inquiry, had for its fundamental basis the unity of significance and form, and, as a further type of it, the unity of the personality of the artist with the work he embodies and creates[313]. More closely defined we may say that it was the specific type of this union, which supplied the content and its appropriate artistic presentment with the substantive and directive principle running through all the images therein.
We found at the commencement of our inquiry with reference to the origins of art that in the Eastern world Spirit was not as yet independently free. It still sought that which it conceived to be the Absolute in the domain of Nature, and apprehended the natural as itself essentially Divine. At a further stage the outlook of classical art set before itself the vision of the Greek Pantheon as unconstrained and inspired beings, but still in all essential features formed as our humanity, as individuals charged with a positive physical process[314]. Finally it was romantic art which first permitted Spirit to penetrate the depths of its own world, in contrast to which flesh, the external reality and frame of this world generally, albeit the fact that the spiritual and absolute could alone manifest itself in this world, in the first instance was divested of all claim to reality[315], but for all that afterwards asserted such a positive claim with increasing strength and urgency.
(α) These distinctive views of the world process constitute religion, the substantive Spirit or genius of peoples and eras; they not merely influence art, but are threads of life which permeate every other domain or province of the living present to which they belong. As every man, in every sphere of activity, whether it be on the field of politics, religion, art, or science, is a child of his own age, and receives the task to elaborate the essential content and consequently the inevitable plastic form of that age, so, too, the aim that determines the content of art is no other than that of finding in its own medium and resources some adequate expression for the spirit of a nation. So long as the artist is in immediate identity and unshaken faith inextricably one with the determinate content of such a view of the world and the religion where it culminates, to that extent this content and the mode of its presentation will call forth his most serious powers; in other words this content remains for him the infinite substance and truth of his own consciousness, a content, with which he lives, down to the inmost recesses of his spiritual nature, in original unity; and, moreover, the embodied presence in which he reveals the same is for him as such an artist[316] the final, necessary, and highest type of such a form, namely that of bringing before the aesthetic sense the absolute being[317] and the ideal significance[318] of the subject-matter of his art. It is through that aspect of his material which is no other than his own immanent substance[319] that he finds that which binds him to the specific mode of his exposition. For the material, and with it the form that appertains to it, carries the artist directly into himself[320], as being the real essence of his determinate being, which he does not imagine but rather actually is, and consequently has only to make this essential part of him an objective fact to himself, to conceive and elaborate such in a vital form from his own resources. Only under such conditions is the enthusiasm of the artist fully awakened for either the content or manifestation of his art; only thus his creations become no mere product of caprice, but spring up within him, out of him, out of this living field of his substance, this spiritual capital, whose content never ceases to be active, until, through the efforts of the master, it has attained a defined form adequate to its own ideal notion. When, however, we of to-day would seek to make a Greek god or, as our own Protestants try to do, a Virgin Mary the object of a piece of sculpture or a picture, it is impossible for us to treat such a material with entire seriousness. It is the faith of our inmost heart which fails us here, albeit even in ages of absolute belief the artist was by no means necessarily what is commonly understood as a pious mart, any more than at any time artists generally come in an exceptional sense under that category. The demand is rather simply this that in the view of the artist his content should be no other than the substantive significance, the most spiritual truth of its own conscious life, and that it should unfold the necessary laws of its mode of presentation. For an artist is, in his creative activity, a child of Nature; his ability is in one aspect a talent he receives from her. His method of working is not the pure activity of rational apprehension, which places itself in direct opposition to its material, and unites with it in the medium of free thoughts and pure thinking. Rather, as one not yet released from the natural aspect, it[321] coalesces immediately with the object, in full faith, and is identical with it heart and soul. The artistic personality reposes frankly in the object, the work of art proceeds in like manner absolutely from the unimpaired spiritual depth and power of genius; the product is ferme, unwavering, and its entire intensive effect preserved. And this it is which supplies the fundamental condition of the final demand that Art be presented us in its flawless totality.
(β) The situation, however, has entirely changed in view of the position we have been forced to indicate as that occupied by Art in this its final stage of evolution. We have, however, no reason to regard this simply as a misfortune which the chance of events has made inevitable, one, that is to say, by which art has been overtaken through the pressure of the times, the prosaic outlook and the dearth of genuine interests. Rather it is the realization and progress of art itself, which, by envisaging for present life the material in which it actually dwells, itself materially assists on this very path, in each step of its advance, to make itself free of the content that is presented. In the very fact that we have an object set before our ocular or spiritual vision, whether it be by Art or the medium of Thought, with a completeness which practically exhausts it, so that we have emptied it, and nothing further remains for our eyes to discover or our souls to explore, in that alone the vital interest disappears. Our interest only continues where our faculties are kept fresh and alive. Spirit only concerns itself actively with objects so long as there is still a mystery unsolved, a something unrevealed. And this is so so long as the material remains identical with our own substance. A time comes, however, when Art has displayed, in all their many aspects, these fundamental views of the world, which are involved in its own notion, no less than every province of the content that is bound up with such world-views: when that time arrives such art is necessarily cast loose of that which has been its previous specific content for any particular people or age; in such a case the renewed craving for material to work upon only fully awakes when it is accepted as inevitable that we must first bid farewell to all that its activity has previously substantiated: just as in Greece, for example, Aristophanes opposed a resolute face to his age, and Lucian to the entire historical Past of his country; or in Italy and Spain, in the decline of the Middle Ages, both Ariosto and Cervantes opened the attack on Chivalry.
In opposition to the age, then, in which the artist, by virtue of the concrete content of his nationality and times, stands within a definite outlook upon the world and its modes of embodiment, we become aware of a point of view diametrically antagonistic, which, so far as its complete enunciation is concerned, has only in the most modern times received its due significance. It is only in our own days that we find the artist no less than the man of science among pretty nearly all civilized nations, has mastered the cultivation of his reflective faculty, the art of criticism, and among us Germans the absolute freedom of thought, and has made this critical apparatus, both relatively to the material and the form of its production, having already run through all the necessary phases or types of romantic art, a kind of tabula rasa.[322] The specific mode of association for any particular context, and a manner of presentment exclusively pertinent to that and no other material, are things which the artist of to-day looks upon as obsolete. Art has become a free instrument which is qualified to exercise itself relatively to every content, no matter what kind it may be, agreeably to the principles or criteria of the artist's own peculiar craftsmanship. The artist stands superior to all specific modes and conformations, however much hallowed in the usage, and moves forward free and independent, untrammelled by either form or presentment such as previously have brought before man's vision and mind the one holy and eternal substance. No content, no form is any longer identical directly with the inmost soul of the artist[323], his nature, his unaware[324] and substantive essence; every material he may treat with indifference, if he only keep true to the formal principle that he make his work consonant with beauty and a really artistic execution. There is, in short, no material nowadays which we can place on its own independent merits as superior to this law of relativity; and even if there is one thus sublimely placed beyond it there is at least no absolute necessity that it should be the object of artistic presentation. For these reasons the artist is situated relatively to the content of his work much as the dramatist who places before us and develops other and alien characters. It is quite true that even our poet of to-day interposes the atmosphere of his genius within his delineations, and the warp that he weaves is in fact that of his own substance; but this only applies to what is universal there or wholly accidental. The closer traits of individualization are not his own, but rather he makes use of in this respect his stores of images, modes of metaphor, earlier types of art, which by themselves he does not care for, and whose significance is exclusively dependent on the fact that they turn out to be the most suitable for this or that matter in hand. In most of the arts, and particularly in the plastic types, the subject-matter is, apart from this, supplied from outside to the artist. He works to order, and when occupied with whatever tales, scenes, and portraits thus come in his way, whether sacred or profane, has merely to look to it that he can make something out of them. For, however much he leaves the impress of his genius on a given content, it remains throughout for all that a material which is not itself directly the substance of his own conscious life. Nor is it of any real assistance to him, that he further appropriates, so to speak, with his soul and substance views of the world that belong to the Past, in other words, tries to root himself in one of such, and, let us say, turns Roman Catholic, as not a few have done in recent times for Art's sake, in order to give their soul some secure foundation, and enable the definite lines of their artistic product to become themselves something which shall appear to have an independently valid growth. It is not a prime condition of the artistic state that the artist should come completely to terms with his own soul, or should be obliged to look after his own salvation. What is important is that his soul in its greatness and freedom should from the first, before it thinks of creating, both know and possess that whereof it is, should stand fast by it and reliant within it; and, above all, is it indispensable that the spirit and mind of the great artist of to-day should have a liberal education, one in which every kind of superstition and belief which remains limited to circumscribed forms of outlook and presentment, should receive their proper subordination as merely aspects or phasal moments of a larger process; aspects which the free human spirit has already mastered when it once for all sees that they can furnish it with no conditions of exposition and creative effort which are, independently for their own sake, sacrosanct; and only ascribes to them value in virtue of the loftier content, which itself, as creator and worker, he reposes in them, making them thus what they ought to be[325].
It is somewhat in this way nowadays that any and every form and material may prove of service to and under the control of the artist whose executive talents and genius have been liberated in their independence from the former limitation to a specific mode of artistic work.
(γ) If we ask, then, in conclusion what are the content and the modes which may be considered peculiar to the present sphere of our inquiry, the result will be approximately as follows.
The universal types of art were pre-eminently related to the absolute truth to which Art attains, and they discovered the source of their differentiation in the specific grasp they respectively supplied of that which passed for the Absolute in the human consciousness, and which itself carried the principle of its manner of embodiment. In this respect we have already seen in symbolism Nature's significances pass before us as content, and her facts and human personification as the mode of presentation; similarly in the classical type, we have passed in review spiritual individuality, but as bodily presence which carried no memory with it[326], and over which the abstract necessity of Fate stood paramount. In the romantic the intellectual being of the personal consciousness was asserted inherent in its own substance, and for the inmost content of which the external form remained entirely contingent. In this concluding type as in the earlier ones the object of art was the Divine in its explicitly unfolded nature. This Divine had however to make itself an object, to define itself, and in the process to pass from its own immediate substance to the secular content of the personal consciousness. In the first instance the infinite essence of personality was reposed in honour, love, and fidelity; after that in the particular individuality, the specific character which happened to coalesce with the particular mode of human life in question. This coalescence, together with the specific limitation of content appropriate to such, was finally put an end to by humour, which proved itself capable of dissolving or making pliable to its purpose any or every line of stable definition, and by so doing made it possible for art to transcend its own limitations. In this passing away of Art beyond itself, however, Art is quite as truly the return of man upon himself, a descent into his own soul-depths, by which process art strips off from itself every secure barrier set up by a determinate range of content and conception, and unfolds within our common humanity[327] its new holy of holies, in other words the depths and heights of the human soul simply, the universal shared of all men in joy and suffering, in endeavour, action, and destiny. From this point onwards it is from himself that the artist receives his content, is in truth the Spirit of man assigning to himself his own boundaries, contemplating, experiencing and giving utterance to the infinitude of his emotions and situations, a spirit to which nothing is any more alien which can possibly emanate as life from the human soul. A content of this nature is one which cannot persist under the defined modes of art independent and apart from the activity of the artist. Rather the definition of content and its elaboration is transferred by it to the caprice of his invention. But, despite of this, it excludes no vital interest, because Art is no longer under constraint to represent that, and only that, which is completely at home in one of its specific grades. Everything is now possible as its subject-matter, in which man, on whatever plane of life he may be, possesses either the need or the capacity of making his abode.