It follows that the soul which found its initial consummation in the simple feeling of Divine blessedness must step forth from this heavenly kingdom peculiar to the religious sphere, must undertake the effort of self-introspection and assimilate a content which is, as vitally present, adequate to the demands of the individual consciousness in its fullest extension. And in this process that which was before a religious coalescence of soul is changed to one of secular type. Christ indeed said; "Ye must leave father and mother, and follow Me." And in the like spirit: "Brother shall hate brother; men shall crucify you and persecute you." But as soon as the kingdom of God has secured a foothold in the world, and is actively employed in transfusing with its spirit and illumining the aims and interests of that world; when father, mother, and brother are already numbered in the community, then the things of the world on their side commence to assert their just claim to recognition and furtherance. If this claim is not merely fought for but vindicated then also the negative attitude of the religious spirit, which was at first exclusively hostile to all that was merely human, vanishes; the spirit of man enlarges, it explores the full scope of its actual presence, and unfolds its heart in the entire world of reality[242]. The fundamental principle suffers no alteration; the substantive and infinite self-consciousness merely directs its attention to another province of its own kingdom. We may perhaps define this transition in the statement that the individual singularity is now as such singularity independent of its mediation with God and self-subsistently free. For precisely in that mediation, whereby it divested itself of its purely finite limitation and natural life, it has passed over the path of mere negation, and reappears after having thus secured an essentially affirmative position, in the condition of a consciousness that is free and as such makes the demand that it shall, in virtue of its own infinitude, though the infinitude is here only in the first instance one of pure form, secure complete recognition both for itself and others. In this the religious mode of the individual consciousness is reposed the entire spiritual wealth of the infinite soul, which it has hitherto filled up with God. If we, however, made the inquiry, of what material the heart of man is suffused in this its inward repletion, such a content merely concerns the infinite relation of the subjective consciousness in its active self-relation; it is simply replete with its own formal medium, that is, as essentially infinite singularity without further and more concrete expansion and significance as a content of interests, aims, and actions which is itself essentially objective and substantive[243]. If we further examine the matter, however, more closely we shall see there are in the main three emotions, which in their independence rise up in the individual soul to the level of this infinite mode, namely personal honour, love, and fidelity. They are not so much moral qualities and virtues as simply modes which inform the intimate presence of the individual soul when fulfilled with its own self-relation as such is recognized by romance. For the personal self-subsistency for which honour contends does not assert itself as intrepitude on behalf of a communal weal, and the repute of thoroughness in relation to it and integrity of private life. On the contrary it contends simply for the recognition and formal inviolability of the individual person. The same principle applies to love, which forms the central subject-matter of this sphere. It is merely the adventitious passion of one individual for another; and however much it may expand under the wand of imagination or may be deepened by excess of emotion, it is for all that neither the ethical relation of marriage or family. Fidelity possesses no doubt more the appearance of a moral character, inasmuch as it does not merely will its own but holds fast to something higher, something shared with itself, surrenders itself to another's will, whether it be the wish or behest of a master, and thereby renounces the personal desire and independence of its own particular volition. But the feeling of loyalty does not concern the objective interest of the social weal in its independent form, that is, in the concrete freedom of the developed state life, but associates itself merely with the person of a master, who, in his own fashion, acts with independence, or concentrates himself in more general relations and is active on their behalf[244]. These three modes of feeling taken together and as they reciprocally affect one another constitute with the exception of the religious relation, which also has its part to play here, the principal content of chivalry, and furnish the necessary steps of advance from the principle of purely religious enthusiasm to the entrance of the individual soul into the concrete social life of the world, in the kingdom of which romantic art now secures a platform on which it can from its own resources work out its independence, and at the same time embody a freer type of beauty. It stands here, so to speak, in the free room midway between the absolute content of the independently stable religious conceptions and the varied particularity and restricted boundaries of the finite world. Among the various arts it is pre-eminently poetry which has shown itself most qualified to master such a material, its modes of expression being directed to the life of the soul as wholly occupied with its own domain and as realized in its aims and events.
Inasmuch as we now have before us a material which man takes possession of in his own spiritual life, or rather, from the world of his pure humanity, we might at first suppose that romantic art occupied the same ground as that of classic art. This, therefore, is an excellent opportunity for placing them together both in comparison and contrast. We have already defined classical art the Ideal of humanity certified as true in its objective self-subsistence. Its imaginative vitality requires as its core a content which is substantive in type and excludes an ethical pathos. The Homeric poems, the tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus, are in the main concerned with interests of an absolutely factual content, an austere treatment of the passions reflected therein, a solid style of speech and execution in conformity with the nature of the ideas expressed, and above this domain of heroes and other figures which alone are in their individual self-concentration at home in such an atmosphere of pathos we have the realm of the gods at a still more advanced stage of objective presentment. Even in the case where art, in more introspective fashion, is occupied with the infinite experiments of sculpture, bas-reliefs and similar forms, or the later elegies, epigrams, and other diversions of lyrical poetry, we still have the same type before us, that is to say, the type which portrays the object more or less as it finds it, and obedient to the claim that it already has secured its constructive presentment. We have, in short, represented figures of the imagination already established and defined in their characterization such as Venus, Bacchus, or the Muses. It is just the same with the later epigrams, where we get the description of a material already to hand or, as in the case of Meleager, a posy of well-known flowers, bound together with the cords of exquisite feeling and taste. It is, in short, an exhilarating mode of activity carried on in a wealthily furnished house overflowing in its stores with every kind of bounty, image and provision for every conceivable object. The poet and the artist is simply the magician, who wafts them into use, collects and groups them.
It is wholly different in romantic poetry. In so far as it is of the world worldly, and is not directly associated with the story of our Lord, the virtues and objects of its heroism are not those of the Greek heroes, whose type of morality Christendom in its early days simply regarded as a brilliant enormity. Greek morality presupposes the presence of humanity in its complete configuration, in which the volition then and there as it ought to act conformably to its essential notion of independence has received a definite content and the actual conditions of freedom imperatively valid such as belong to that content. Such are the relations of parents and children, married persons, or of citizens of city or State in the realized liberty of such. Now inasmuch as this objective content of human affairs belongs to the evolution of man's spirit on the basis of Nature cognized and insured as actual fact, it is unable any longer to satisfy that self-absorbed introspection of the religious life, which seeks to destroy the natural aspect of human life, and must deviate considerably from the virtue of humility which opposes it, and the surrender of human freedom and its staunch self-dependence. The virtues of Christian piety simply prove the death of such a world-attitude if held in their extreme of abstraction, and only make the individual free, when he absolutely denies the human part of him. The individual freedom of our present sphere is no doubt no longer conditioned by mere endurance and self-sacrifice but essentially positive in the world arena; that infinite self-relation of the individual has, however, as we have already discovered, the inward realm of the soul as its content and only that, the subjective soul, that is, whose movement is in its own peculiar medium, as the secular ground of its own domain. In this connection poetry does not draw from any objective material already presented it, no mythology, for instance, no imaginative pictures and embodiments, which already lie ready waiting for its expression. It stands there wholly free, without any extraneous matter, purely creative and productive. It is free as a bird that sings straight from its breast. It follows, then, if this subjective activity proceeds also from a noble will and a profound soul, we shall merely have in its workings and relations and existence the evidence of caprice and contingency, for the reason that freedom and its aims proceed, relatively to a content which is throughout immaterial, from internal self-reflection. And, consequently, we do not find so much in individuals a particular pathos in the Greek conception of the term and a vital self-subsistency of character associated with it by the closest bonds, as that which is simply a grade of heroic conception in its connection with love, honour, bravery, and fidelity; a grade into which it is mainly the nobility or depravity of soul which imports the distinguishing features. The characteristic trait, however, which the heroes of the Middle Ages possess in common with those of antiquity is that of bravery. Yet even this receives a totally different complexion. It is not so much a natural courage, which reposes on the character that is sane and sound, and flows forth from the growth of an unimpaired robustness of body and will, assisting the execution of objective interests. Rather it is the outcome of the secret wealth of the soul, its honour and chivalry, and is in the main a creation of the phantasy, which undertakes adventures that have their origin in individual caprice and the chance intricacies of external circumstance or the impulses of mystical piety, and we may add generally the personal attitude of the individual.
This romantic type of art finds a home, then, in two hemispheres, in the Western world as this penetration into the more intimate shrine of Spirit, in the Eastern this its first expansion of the self-absorbed consciousness as it frees itself from the finite environment. In the West poetry reposes on a soul which is withdrawn upon its resources, which has become the centre of its activity, yet possesses this flavour of secularly merely as one part of its complexion, as one aspect, over which is superposed a yet loftier world of belief. In the East it is the Arab above all, who as a solitary,[245] who in the first instance has nothing before his eyes but his dried-up desert and his heavens, stands forth in the full strength of life as the proclaimer of the splendour and primary extension of the world of Nature, and thereby still preserves at the same time the freedom of his soul. And generally we may say that in the Orient it is the Mohammedan religion, which has cleared the ground, made an end of all idolatry in the service of finite things or the imagination, and given the soul at the same time the personal freedom, which wholly floods the same, so that the secularity does not here only constitute another province, but runs beyond it into the universal licence, where heart and mind, without ascribing any objective reality to God, find their reconciliation in the jubilant lust of living just like beggars by throwing the glory of their fancy on the objects around them: enjoy their loves and are happy, blessed, and contented.
1. HONOUR
The motive of honour was unknown to ancient classic art. In the "Iliad" it is quite true that the wrath of Achilles constitutes both the content and the motive principle, so that the entire series of events is dependent upon it; but what we moderns understand by the term honour is not grasped here at all. Achilles believes himself to be insulted to all intents and purposes only in the fact that the share in the booty which he considers justly to belong to him and the reward of his personal merits, his γέρας, has been taken away by Agamemnon. The insult here has a direct reference to something actual, a bounty, in which no doubt a privilege, a recognition of fame and bravery was reposed, and Achilles is enraged because Agamemnon meets him unworthily and lets the Greeks know that they are not to pay any attention to him. An insult of this kind is not driven home to the real centre of personality in its abstract purity; in fact Achilles expresses himself satisfied with the restitution of the abducted slave and the addition of other goods and bounties, and Agamemnon finally makes this reparation although from our point of view they have both insulted one another in the grossest fashion. Maledictions of this kind, however, have only made them angry; and, after all, the particular insult, which has reference to a matter of fact, is done away with in the same matter of fact fashion.
(a) The honour of romance is, on the contrary, of another kind. Insult has no reference here to the factual values of real things, property, status, obligation, etc., but to personality simply, and its idea of its own importance, the work which the individual claims as his right. This worth is in the cases we are now discussing of an infinite significance equal to that of personality itself. In honour, therefore, man possesses the earliest positive consciousness of his infinite spiritual medium, independent of the content. What the individual has, what in him something peculiar creates, after the loss of which it may yet subsist precisely as it did before—in this elusive something the absolute validity of the entire subjective life is reposed and apprehended in it both for itself and others. The determining measure of honour therefore does not depend on what the individual really is, but on what is contained in this personal self-regard. This regard, however, raises all particularity to the level of the universal conception that the personal core in its full significance resides in this particularity which it claims as its own. Honour is merely an outward show it is sometimes said. No doubt this is so: but from our present point of view we must, if we look at it more narrowly, accept it as the appearance and reappearance of the personal medium self-reflected, which as the semblance of an entity essentially infinite is itself infinite. And through this infinitude it is just this show or semblance of honour which is the real existence of the individual, its highest actuality; and every particular quality, into which honour is reflected and appropriates as its own is by virtue of this show exalted itself to an infinite worth. This type of honour constitutes a fundamental determinant in the romantic world, and presupposes that man has not merely passed beyond the limits of purely religious conception and inward life, but actually entered the arena of the great world and makes itself vital in the material of the same simply by virtue of the pure medium of its personal self-subsistence and absolute intension[246].
The content of honour may be of the most varied kind. For everything that I am, do, or is done to me by others affects my honour. We may consequently reckon within its boundaries the out and out substantive itself, loyalty towards princes, fatherland, a man's profession, fulfilment of obligations, marital fidelity, integrity in business affairs and conscientiousness in scientific research. For the point of view of honour, however, all these essentially valid and veritable relations are neither sanctioned nor recognized in and through themselves, but only so far as the individual reposes in them his personal relation and makes them thereby matters affecting his honour. A man of honour consequently always thinks first of all about himself, and the question for him is not if anything is on principle right or not, but whether it is the right thing for him to do, whether it becomes him then as a man of honour to make himself master in it and to stand by it. And consequently he may also perpetrate the worst actions and still be a man of honour. He creates at the same time objects at will, imagines himself of a specific character, and appropriates to himself, both as he sees himself and is seen by others, that which in the natural order of things has nothing to do with him at all. Even then it is not the natural fact, but the personal view of it which places difficulties and devolutions in the path, because it has become an affair of honour to maintain that character. So, to take an example, Donna Diana conceives it to be derogatory to her honour to confess in any way the love she feels, because she has pledged herself not to listen to love. In general we may say, then, that the content of love is at the mercy of accident, because its validity depends purely on the personal attitude, and is not directed by that which is the essential mode of the inner life itself. For this reason we may observe that in romantic representations on the one hand that which is on principle justifiable is expressed as the law of honour, the individual associating with the consciousness of right at the same time the infinite self-conscious unit of his personality. What is then expressed by the statement that honour makes such and such a demand, or forbids it, is this that the entire personal attitude of consciousness implants itself within the content of such a demand or prohibition so that no trespass in any transaction can fail to attract its attention without a repair and restoration being effected; and we may add the individual is unable to attend to any other content. Conversely, however, honour may resolve itself into something wholly formal and contentless, in so far as it contains nothing but the shell of the Ego, which is formally infinite, or only accepts an entirely bad content as obligatory upon it. In this case, more particularly in dramatic representations, honour remains but a wholly frosty and unvitalized object: its aims express no longer an essential content but simply an abstract form of consciousness. But it is only an essentially substantive content which possesses the contingency of law, and is capable of explication in its multifold environment, and can be apprehended in its imperative sequence of consequences. This defect in profound content especially rises to the surface when casuistry of reflection includes within the embrace of honour matter which is purely accidental and insignificant which the individual comes in contact with. There is never a lack of material, because this casuistical tendency analyses with great subtlety in its modes of distinction, and many aspects may be elicited and made the subject of honour which in themselves are quite unimportant Above all the Spaniards have elaborated this casuistry of reflection over matters of honour in their dramatic poetry, and made their particular heroes of honour deduce all their consequences in their speeches. In this way the fidelity of the married woman may form a subject of investigation into the minutest details, and the mere suspicion of another, nay, the possibility of such even when the husband is aware that the suspicion is false may be an affair of honour. If this leads to collisions we can derive no real satisfaction from the process, because we have nothing of material moment to arrest us, and consequently instead of the resolution of an antagonism which is causally inevitable we can only extract from it a painfully contracted feeling. Also in French plays we frequently find that it is an honour which is barren, that is entirely abstract, which is made the essential fulcrum of interest Still more extreme is this essentially frostlike and lifeless type of it apparent in the drama "Alarcos" of Herr Friedrich von Schlegel. The hero here murders his noble and loving wife. And we ask why. Simply for honour's sake; and this honour consists in this that he may marry the king's daughter, for whom he entertains no affection, and thus become the king's son-in-law. Such a pattern is of course contemptible and an ignoble conception which merely prides itself as something lofty and of infinite intension.
(b) Inasmuch, then, as honour is not only a semblance in me myself, but must also exist in the mind and recognition of another, which again on its part makes a claim to a similar honourable recognition, honour is the extreme embodiment of vulnerability. For it is purely a matter of personal caprice how far I choose to extend the claim and to what material I care to relate it. The smallest offence may be in this respect of significance; and inasmuch as man is placed relatively to concrete reality in the most manifold relations with a thousand things, and is able to extend practically without limit the sphere of that which he conceives to affect him, and to which he is placed in the relation of honour it follows that when we come to deal with the independence of mankind and the obstinate isolation of their units, aspects for which the principle of honour is in the main responsible, there is no end to the strife and contention to which they give rise. Moreover, in the case of insult also no less than in that of honour generally, the important matter is not the content, in which I necessarily feel myself insulted; for that which is negated has reference to the personality which has appropriated such a content as its own, and now conceives itself as this ideal centrum of infinity attacked.