(c) The third presentment of this absolute world of Spirit is co-ordinated by man, in so far as he neither makes manifest the Absolute and Divine in its immediate and essential mode as such Divine, nor declares positively the process in which he is exalted to the Supreme Being, and reconciled with Him, but rather continues within the ordinary sphere of his human life. Here it is the purely finite aspect of that existence which constitutes the content, whether we regard it in the light of its spiritual purposes, its worldly interests, passions, collisions, suffering, and enjoyments, or from that point of view which is wholly external, that of Nature, its kingdom, and all its detailed phenomena. In order to apprehend this content with adequacy, however, we must take up two distinct positions relatively to it. In other words, it is true that Spirit, for the reason that it has secured the principle of self-affirmation, expatiates in this province, as one on which it has a just claim, and one which, as native to it, provides satisfaction, an element from which it merely extracts this positive character[219], and is permitted thereby itself to be reflected in its positive satisfaction and intimacy; yet, on the other hand, we have the fact that this content is brought down to the level of pure contingency, a contingency which is unable to claim any independent validity, for the reason that mind cannot discover therein it veritable existence, and consequently only preserves its substantial unity by independently on its own account breaking up again this finite aspect of Spirit and Nature as a thing of finitude and negation.
3. In conclusion, then, so far as the relation of this content in its entirety to its mode of presentation is concerned, it would appear, in the first place, agreeably to what we have above stated, that the content of romantic art, relatively to the Divine, at any rate, is very limited.
(a) For, first, as we have already indicated, Nature is divested of the Divine principle; in other words, the sea and mountains, valleys, Time, and Night, briefly all the general processes of Nature, have here lost the worth which they carry when related to the presentation and content of the Absolute. The images of Nature receive no further expansion in a symbolic significance. The thesis that their shapes and activities might possibly sustain traits of Divine import is taken away from them. For all the mighty questions in regard to the origin of the world, in regard to the Whence, Wherefore, and Whither, of created Nature and humanity, and all the symbolical and plastic experiments in the resolution and exposition of these problems disappear at once in the revelation of God in Spirit; and we may add that also in the spiritual sphere the world of variety and colour, with the characters, actions, and events, as they were envisaged by classical art, are now concentrated in one single light-focus of the Absolute and its eternal history of redemption. The whole content meets, therefore, at this single point of the Inmost of Spirit[220]—that is, of feeling, imagination, soul—all that strains after a union with truth, that seeks and wrestles to bring to birth the Divine in consciousness, and to maintain it; and, furthermore, is constrained to execute the world's aims and undertakings, not so much for the world's sake as to further the unique and essential undertaking of its heart by means of the spiritual conflict of man's inward nature and his reconciliation with God, presenting personality and its conservation no less than all that paves the way to them for this object, and this alone. The heroism, which makes its appearance as the result of such aspirations, is not the kind of heroism which prescribes laws by its own fiat, establishes new systems, creates and informs circumstances, but rather a heroism of submission, which accepts everything as predetermined and ordered above it, and whose energies are now wholly restricted to the task of regulating temporal events in line with such direction, and making that which is in keeping with the higher order and of independent stability a valid factor in the world as if is and in the Time-process. For the reason, however, that this absolute content appears as concentrated to a focus in the inward life of the soul, and the entire process is imported into the life of mankind, the range of this content is thereby also infinitely extended. It expands, in fact, to a manifold variety practically without limit. For although every objective history supplies what is substantive in that self-concrete soul-life, yet for all that the subject of the same reviews it in all its aspects, presents isolated features taken from it, or unfolds it as it appears in continually novel human traits by way of addition, and may very well into the bargain both import the entire expanse of Nature, as environment and locale of Spirit, and divert them to the one single object referred to. By this means the history of soul-life is infinitely rich, and can adapt its form to ever shifting conditions and situations in every possible way. And, further, if the individual at last steps forth from this absolute sphere and actively engages in worldly affairs, the range of interests, objects, and emotions will be difficult to count on the score in proportion as the spiritual self-possession is profound, agreeably to the principle in its fullest application; man is consequently distracted by an infinitely multiplied profusion of interior and exterior collisions, revolutions, and gradations of passion, and the most manifold degrees of satisfaction. The Absolute in its unqualified and essential universality, in so far, that is, as it is unfolded in the conscious life of the human soul, constitutes the spiritual content of romantic art; and for this reason his collective humanity, no less than its entire evolution, becomes its inexhaustible material.
(b) Romantic art does not, however, as art educe this content in the way we found was the case for the most part in symbolic art, and, above all, in the classical type and its ideal gods. Romantic art, as we have seen already, is not, in its specific capacity, the instructive revelation, which, merely in the form of art, makes the content of truth visible to the senses. The content is already present in the conceptive mind, and the emotions independently and outside the sphere of art. Religion, as the consciousness of truth in its universality, is here an essential premiss of art to a degree totally different from what it was in the previous cases; and, even if we look at the position in its wholly exterior aspect for the consciousness that is actual in the reality of the material world, it lies before us as the prosaic fact of the very present. That is to say, inasmuch as the content of revelation to mind is the eternal absolute nature of mind[221] itself, which breaks itself loose from Nature in its bareness and subordinates the same, its manifestation in the immediacy of present life is such that the external material, in so far as it consists and is existent, only continues as a contingent world, out of which the Absolute recollects itself in the secret wealth of Spirit, and only by such means attains independence and truth. The external show receives thus the imprimatur of an indifferent medium, in which Spirit can repose no ultimate trust, and in which it can find no dwelling-place. The more it conceives the conformation of external reality as unworthy of its fulness the less it becomes able to seek consolation therein, or to discover its task of self-reconcilement consummated by a union therewith.
(c) The manner in which, therefore, romantic art gives to itself a real embodiment agreeably to the spirit of the principle above indicated, and on the side of its external appearance, is not one which essentially overleaps the ordinary presentment of reality: it is by no means averse to accept as cover for itself real existence in its finite defects and definition. That beauty therefore disappears from it, which tended to raise the outside envisagement above the soilure of Time, and the traces that unite it with a Past, in order to declare the beauty of existence in its blossom in the room of what had otherwise been a dismantled image. Romantic art has no longer for its aim the freedom and life of existence in its infinite tranquillity and absorption of the soul in the bodily presence; no more a life such as this arrests it. It turns its back on this pinnacle of beauty. It interweaves the threads of its soul experience with the contingent material of Nature's workshop, and gives unfettered play to the emphatic features of ugliness itself. We have, in short, two worlds included in the Romantic, a spiritual realm essentially complete in itself, the soul-kingdom, which finds reconciliation in its own sphere, and therewith the otherwise straightforward repetition of birth, death, and resurrection now for the first time perfected in the true circular orbit, doubled back in the return upon itself, the genuine Phoenix life of Spirit. On the other hand, there is the realm of external Nature simply as such, which, released as it is from its secure association and union with Spirit, becomes now a completely empirical reality, concerning the form of which the soul cares little or nothing. In classical art Spirit controlled the empirical phenomenon and transpierced it through and through, because it was the very thing which it had to accept as its completed reality. But now the ideal kingdom is indifferent to the mode of configuration in the world of immediate sense, because this immediacy is beneath the sphere of the blessedness of essential soul-life. The external phenomenon is no longer able to express this inward life; and if any call is made upon it for this purpose, it merely is utilized to make plain that the external show is an existence which does not satisfy, and is forced to point back by suggestion to the spiritual content, the soul and its emotions, as the truly essential medium. Precisely for the same reason romantic art suffers externality on its own part to go on its way freely; and in this respect permits all and every material, flowers, trees, and so on, down to the most ordinary domestic utensils, to appear in its productions just as they are, and as the chance of natural circumstance may arrange them. Such a content as this, however, carries at the same time with it the result, that as purely exterior matter, its worth is of no validity and insignificant; it only receives its genuine worth when the soul has made itself a home in it, and it is taken to express not merely the ideal, but spiritual inwardness[222] itself, which, instead of blending itself with the exterior thing, appears simply to have attained its own reconciliation with itself. The ideality thus brought home to a point is that mode of expression which is without externality, invisibly declaring itself, and only itself, in other words, a tone of music simply, which is neither an object nor possesses form, a wavelet over waters[223], a ringing sound over a world, which, in sounds such as this, and the varied phenomena which are united with it, can only receive and reflect one reverberation of this self-absorption of the soul.
To sum up, then, in a word, this relation of content and form in the romantic type, where it remains true to its distinctive character, we may affirm that the fundamental note of the same, for this very reason that its principle constitutes an ever expanding universality and the restlessly active depths of heart and mind, is that of music, and when combined with the definite content of imagination, lyrical. This lyrical aspect is likewise the primary characteristic of romantic art, a tone which gives the key-note also to the epic poem and drama, and which is wafted as a breath of soul even around the works of the plastic arts, since here, too, spirit and soul are desirous of speaking by means of the plastic shape to soul and mind.
As regards the division of our subject, which we must now in conclusion determine for the examination of this our third extensive domain of artistic production on the lines of its development, we shall find that the basic notion of the romantic relatively to its substantive and progressive articulation is comprised most conveniently in three branches of division we may define as follows.
The first sphere is the province of religion strictly, in which the redemption history, the life, death, and resurrection of Christ constitute the central interest. The principle which is emphasized as all-important here is that self-involution which mind accomplishes by negating its immediacy and finitude, overcoming the same, and by means of this liberation secures its own self-possessed infinity and absolute self-subsistence in its own kingdom.
This self-subsistence passes, then, in the second place from the Divine dwelling of essential Spirit, surrenders its pure exaltation of finite man to God, in order to enter the temporal world. Here it is, in the first instance, the subject of consciousness simply, which has become self-affirmative, and which possesses as the substantive material of its content, no less than as the interest of its existence, the virtues of this positive subjectivity, such as honour, love, fidelity, and bravery, the aims and obligations, in short, of romantic chivalry.