[204] Zornlos lit., without anger.
[205] I think this is the meaning of the words mit subjectiver Besonderheit, but the interpretation "with other material peculiar to the writer" is not impossible.
SUBSECTION III
THE ROMANTIC TYPE OF ART
INTRODUCTION
OF THE ROMANTIC GENERALLY
The type of romantic art receives its definition, as we have hitherto throughout the present inquiry seen was always the case, from the ideal notion of the content, which it is the function of art to declare. We must consequently in the first place attempt to elucidate the distinctive principle of the new content, a content which now, in its significance as the absolute content of truth, opens up to our minds a new vision of the world no less than a novel configuration of art.
In the first stage of our inquiry, the entrance chamber of art, the impulse of imagination consisted in the struggle from Nature to spiritual expression. In this strain Spirit never reached beyond what was still only an effort to find, an effort which, in so far as it was not yet able to supply a genuine content for art, could only maintain its position as an external embodiment of the significant aspects of Nature, or those abstractions of the ideal inwardness of substance which were destitute of a subjective character in the strict sense, and in which this type of art found its real centre. The reverse of this point of view we discovered in classical art. Here it is spirituality—albeit it is only by virtue of the abrogation of the significances of Nature that it is enabled to struggle forth in its independent self-identity—which is the basis and principle of the content, with the natural phenomenon in the bodily or sensuous material for its external form. This embodiment, however, did not, as was the case in the first stage, remain superficial, indefinite, and unsuffused by its content; but the perfection of art attained its culminating point by precisely this means, namely, that Spirit completely transpierced its exterior appearance, idealized the shell of Nature in this union of beauty, and drew round itself a reality adequate to its own nature as mind under the mode of substantive individuality. By this means classical art was a presentation of the Ideal which completely satisfied its notion, the consummation of the realm of beauty. More beautiful art than this can neither exist now nor hereafter.