[222] The German words are das Innerliche and die Innigkeit.
[223] This is obviously not wholly independent of form.
CHAPTER I
THE RELIGIOUS DOMAIN OF ROMANTIC ART
Inasmuch as romantic art, in the representation of the consciousness of absolute subjectivity, understanding this as the comprehension of all truth, the coalescence of mind with its essence—receives its substantive content in the satisfaction of soul-life, in other words the reconciliation of God with the world and therein with Himself, it follows that at this stage the Ideal for the first time is completely at home. For it was blessedness and self-subsistency, contentment, repose, and freedom which we declared as most fundamentally defining the Ideal. Of course, we cannot therefore on this account deduce the Ideal simply from the notion and reality of romantic art; but relatively to the classic Ideal the form it receives is entirely altered. This relation, already in general terms indicated, we must now before everything else establish in its fully concrete significance, in order to elucidate the fundamental type of the romantic mode of presentation. In the classical Ideal the Divine is in one aspect of it restricted to pure individuality; in another aspect the soul and spiritual blessedness of particular gods find their exclusive discharge through the physical medium; and as a third characteristic, for the reason that the inseparable unity of each individual both essentially and in its exterior form supplies the principle of the same, the negativity of the dismemberment implied in human life, that is the pain of both body and soul, sacrifice, and resignation are unable to appear as essentially pertinent to these godlike figures. The Divine of classical art falls, it is true, into an aggregation of gods, but there is no organic and essential self-division, no universally proclaimed essence such as we find in the particular presentment of man whether in form and spirit, whether empirically or subjectively considered; and just as little has it confronting it, as being itself the Absolute in invisible form, a world of evil, sin, and ignorance, together with the task of resolving such contradictions in harmony, and only by thus growing on level terms with the very truth and divine out of this reconciliation. In the notion of the absolute subjectivity, on the contrary, this opposition between substantive universality and personality is inherent, an opposition, whose consummated mediation the subjective ideality perfects with its substance, exalting thereby the substantive presence to the articulate and absolute subject of self-knowledge and volition. But there is, secondly, appertinent to the reality of the subjective condition conceived as mind the profounder contradiction of a finite world, through whose abrogation as finite, and by whose resultant reconciliation with the Absolute the Infinite by virtue of its own absolute activity makes its proper being self-subsistent, and so for the first time exists as absolute Spirit. The appearance of this actuality on the terrain, and in the configuration of the human spirit receives consequently, in respect to its beauty, a totally different mode of relation to that presented by classical art. Greek beauty unfolds the inward aspect of spiritual individuality solely as it is envisaged by means of its bodily shape, actions, and events, wholly expressed in what is exterior, and living wholly therein. For romantic art, on the contrary, it is absolutely necessary that the soul, albeit envisaged in the exterior medium, should at the same time demonstrate its capacity of self-withdrawal from the tenement of the body and self-substantive life. The bodily frame can therefore now only express the inwardness of mind, in so far as it makes it plain that it is not in this material existence, but in itself, that the soul discovers its congruent reality. On account of this beauty is now no longer an idealization in respect to the objective form, but rather the ideal and essential configuration of the soul itself; it is in short a beauty of spiritual ideality, that is the specific mode of such, as every content is informed and elaborated within the temple of the subjective world, and without retaining the external medium in this its permeation with Spirit. For the reason, then, that by this means the interest disappears, which consists in clarifying real existence to the point of our classical unity, and is concentrated in the contrary direction of wafting a new breath of beauty through the unseen content of the spiritual itself, art ceases to retain the old solicitude for what is exterior at all. It accepts the same directly as it may chance to find it, leaving it to take whatever form may happen to please it. The reconciliation with the Absolute is in the Romantic an act of the inward life, which no doubt is embodied externally, but which does not retain that exterior in its material realization as its essential content and object. We may observe that in close association with this indifference towards the idealizing union of soul and body, and in its relation to the external treatment of the more predominant individuality of a sitter, we find the art of portraiture, which does not entirely erase particular traits and lines, as they are found in Nature, and her inevitable deficiencies—defects inseparable from finite effects—in order to replace them with something more adequate. Generally speaking even here there is a certain limit to the licence given to Nature in this respect; but to the general aspect of form in the first instance it is quite indifferent; and no attempt is made to exclude wholly from it the accidental impurities of finite and sensuous existence.
We may adjoin a further quite sufficient reason for the imperative character of this radical definition of romantic art from another point of view. The classic Ideal, where we find it at the culminating point of its very truth, is self-exclusive, self-subsistent, retiring and not susceptible[224] in its nature, an orbed individual totality, which repels all else from itself. Its conformation is uniquely its own; its life is bound up in that and that exclusively, and it will harbour no affinity with what is purely empirical and contingent. Whoever, therefore, approaches an ideal such as this as spectator, is unable to appropriate its existence as an embodiment strictly akin to that of his own presence. The figures of the eternal gods, albeit human, do not belong to our mortality, for these gods have not themselves experienced the infirmities of finite existence, but are directly exalted above them. Their affinity with what is empirical and relative is interrupted. The infinite subjectivity, what we call the Absolute of romantic art, is on the contrary not absorbed in its presentment; it is rather carried into its own domain, and for this very reason retains such external aspect as it possesses not so much for itself as for the contemplation of others, as, in short, an exterior presence which is freely offered for this purpose. This externality must further appear in the form of common fact, the human as our senses perceive it, since it is through that that God Himself descends to the level of finite and temporal existence, in order to mediate and reconcile the absolute antithesis, which is inherent in the notion of the Absolute. For this reason our empirical humanity also contains in its bodily presence an aspect, which unfolds to man a bond of affinity and kinship, by virtue whereof he is able to contemplate even his direct natural presence with assurance; and he can do so because the Divine incarnation does not, with the severity of the classical type, thrust on one side the particular and contingent, but presents to his vision that which he himself possesses, or that which he recognizes and loves in others around him. It is just this homeliness incidental to what we ordinarily meet with which attracts and enables romantic art to entrust itself to the external aspect of reality. Inasmuch, then, as the externality which is turned adrift is called upon, through this very abandonment, to suggest the beauty of soul, the lofty pretension of its spirituality and the sacred colour of the emotional life, so, too, at the same time, it is a condition of its doing so that it be absorbed itself within the ideal realm of mind and its absolute content, and that it appropriate the same.
To sum up finally what is implied in this act of surrender we may assert that it consists in the general conception, that in romantic art the infinite subjectivity does not abide in solitary self-sufficiency, as the Greek god did, living in the full perfection and blessedness of his self-exclusion; rather it moves out of itself in relation to somewhat else, which, however, is its own substance, in which it discovers itself again and continues all the time in union with itself. This condition of self-unity in some other that is yet its own is the real form of beauty appropriate to romantic art, the Ideal of the same, which receives for its mode and envisagement what is, in its essence, subjective ideality or inwardness, soul-life and its attendant emotions. The romantic Ideal expresses, therefore, the relation to another spiritual correlative, which is so closely associated with the ideal possessions of the first one, that it is only by virtue of this further one that the soul lives in the complete wealth of its own kingdom. This essential life of the soul in another is, when expressed in terms of emotion, the inwardness of love.
We may consequently affirm lave to be the general content of the romantic, so far as the sphere of religion is concerned. Love, however, only receives its truly ideal configuration when it expresses the positive reconcilement of Spirit in its immediacy. Before, however, we shall be in a position to examine this stage of the fairest and most ideal spiritual satisfaction, we must first pass in review the process of negation, which the absolute Subject enters in overcoming the finiteness and immediacy of its human envisagement, a process which is divulged in the life, death, and suffering of God for the world and humanity, and its possible reconcilement with God. And, secondly, we have on the other side, humanity, which is called upon conversely on its own account to pass through the very same process in order to make actual the reconciliation which is implicitly contained in its nature. Midway within the steps of this process, in which the negative aspect of the sensuous and spiritual passage 011 to death and the grave constitutes the central act of achievement, we shall find that the expression of affirmative blessedness is conspicuous, which in this sphere characterizes art's most beautiful creations. For the better division of this first chapter we may examine its subject-matter as it falls into three distinct heads of inquiry.