(c) For such reasons every insult to honour is regarded as essentially of an infinite significance. It can consequently only be repaired by means which possess that character. No doubt we may have many degrees of insult, and as many modes of satisfaction; what however at the stage we are now considering any man may take as an insult, how far he will feel himself as insulted and claim satisfaction therefore, such considerations depend once more wholly on the personal caprice of the particular person, which is justified in pursuing its object to the utmost point of scrupulosity and outraged feeling. In this process of satisfaction, which is here claimed, it is essential that the man who delivers the insult no less than he who receives it should be recognized as a man of honour. For the latter requires the free recognition of his honour from the former; but in order to have honour in his eyes and through his action that man must appear to the recipient of insult as a man of honour, in other words he must substantiate by virtue of his personality the infinite character of the insult which he has laid upon the outraged man and despite his personal enmity that is thereby directed against him.
It is, then, a fundamental determinant in the general principle of honour that no one through his actions can give to any one a right over himself; and consequently all that he has done and may have initiated will be regarded both previous to its commencement and after its conclusion as unalterably affiliated to infinity, and will be accepted and treated under such a qualitative relation.
Moreover, since honour, in its conflicts and its satisfaction in this respect, depends on personal independence, which is conscious of itself as subject to no limitation, but acts directly from its own resources, we find a fact recur to our attention, which we previously observed fundamentally characterized the heroic figures of the Ideal, namely the self-subsistence of individuality. In honour, however, we have not merely the secure self-dependence and action from personal resources, but this self-subsistence is in this case united with the idea of itself; and it is just this preconception which constitutes the real content of honour in the sense that it perceives what is its own in that which is presented exterior to it, and envisages itself therein to the full extent of its personal life. Honour is consequently a self-subsistence, which is a self reflection, and possesses in such a reflection its exclusive essence, and moreover leaves it wholly to accident whether its content be that which is essentially moral and necessary, or contingent and insignificant.
2. LOVE
The second emotional source which plays a predominant part in the productions of romantic art is love.
(a) We have found in honour that the individual conscious life, as it prefigures itself in its absolute independence, forms the fundamental determinant; in a similar way the highest attitude of love is the surrender of the personal life to some object of the opposed sex, a sacrifice of its independent consciousness and its personal isolation, which for the first time in the consciousness of another, is aware emotionally that it has thoroughly brought home to itself its own self-knowledge. In this respect we may contrast love and honour. Conversely, however, we are entitled to regard love as the realization of that which was already inherent in honour, in so far as honour claims recognition[247] that it should be received in another as the infinite significance of personality. This recognition is only true and complete when it is not merely my personality in the abstract, or in a concrete and consequently restricted case, is respected by another, but when I, in the' entire significance of my personal resources, with everything this either emphasizes or includes, as this particular person in all my past, present, and future relations, both penetrate the conscious life of another, and, in fact, constitute the object of his real volition and knowledge, his effort and his property. In this respect it is this same inward infinitude of the individual which makes love of such importance to romantic art, an importance which is materially enhanced by the exalted character of the wealth which the notion of love itself carries.
More closely, then, love does not subsist, as may frequently happen in the case of honour, upon the subject-matter of the mind and the casuistry of reflection, but originates in the emotions, and for the reason that here the distinctions of sex play an important part, possesses at the same time for its basis natural conditions as already related to spirit life. This basis is, however, only present in the sense that the individual comes into relation with such conditions by way of his soul-life, that essentially infinite aspect of himself.
This state of a man's losing his own consciousness in another, this appearance of disinterestedness and unselfishness, by virtue of which a man first really finds himself and comes to himself—this oblivion of his own, so that the lover no longer exists, or is careful for himself, but discovers the roots of that life in another, and yet only comes into the full enjoyment of himself in that other is what gives us the infinite relation of love; and we must look for beauty mainly in so far as this feeling does not persist as mere impulse and emotion, but through the imagination makes its world conform to such a condition, exalts everything which otherwise belongs by virtue of its interest, circumstances, and objects to real existence and life, into an adornment of this feeling, bears away all else into the charmed circle, and only attaches a value to it in this relation. More particularly it is in female characters that love appears in most beautiful guise because this sacrifice, this surrender, is with them as the culmination of everything else. It is these qualities, in fact, which concentrate and extend life in its spiritual breadth and reality to the wealth of this emotion, which alone discover within it a stay for existence, and if any misfortune sweeps across the path, vanish like a light which is extinguished by the first rude breath[248]. In this personal and intimate sense of feeling love is not presented in classical art, and only appears as a feature of quite secondary importance for the representation, or is only conspicuous under its aspect of physical enjoyment. In Homer, either we find it is not emphasized at all, or love appears in its most respected type as wedded love in the sphere of the domestic state, exemplified in the figure of Penelope, or as solicitude of wife and mother, exemplified in the case of Andromache, or in other ethical relations of a similar character. The tie, on the other hand, which unites Paris to Helen is recognized as immoral, and the cause of the horror and fatal course of the Trojan war. The love, too, of Achilles for Briseis has little depth of sentiment or spiritual flavour, for Briseis is a slave entirely at his disposition. In the odes of Sappho it is true that the language of love receives the dramatic emphasis of lyrical enthusiasm; yet it is rather the insinuating and devouring flame of the blood which is here expressed than the profound emotion of the singer's heart and soul. From another aspect we find in the short and charming odes of Anacreon a wider and more jovial sense of enjoyment, which sports with delight on the immediate sense of enjoyment as over something to be simply accepted as it falls without troubling itself with infinite heartaches, without this overmastering of the entire life or the pious submission of a burdened, yearning, and yielding soul; in this type the point of infinite importance whether it is precisely this or that girl which you possess is as absolutely disregarded as the monkish notion that you should shun maidenhood altogether. The lofty tragedy of the ancients does not recognize the passion of love in its romantic significance. Pre-eminently in the case of both Aeschylus and Sophocles we find that it makes no pretension to contribute to the main interest of the drama. For although Antigone is the accepted lover of Haemon, and Haemon claims her before his father, nay, goes to the length of committing suicide because he is unable to deliver her, yet it is the external aspects of the case rather than the power of his own personal passion, which, we may also note, is not that of a modern lover, which he emphasizes before Creon. As a more essential type of pathos love is treated by Euripides in the "Phaedra." But here, too, it rather makes itself felt as a criminal aberration of the blood, as a passion of the senses, initiated by Aphrodite, who is desirous of slaying Hippolytus, because he refuses to sacrifice to her. In the same way we have, no doubt, in the Medicean Aphrodite a plastic figure of love, whose exquisite pose and lovely elaboration of bodily form is quite consummate; but any profound expression of soul-life such as romantic art demands is wholly absent. On the other hand, the immortality of Petrarca, although he himself treated his sonnets in the light of recreation, and it was rather through his Latin poems and other works that he appealed to posterity, is due to this very love of the fancy which, under an Italian sky, joined sisterly hands with religion in the medium of a somewhat artificial outpouring of the heart. Dante's exaltation, too, originated in his love for Beatrice, which was transfigured in his soul to the white fervour of religious ecstasy, while the courage and boldness of his genius created energetically a religious outlook on the world, in which he dared, an attempt impossible without such gifts, to constitute himself the judge of mankind, and to apportion to individuals hell, purgatory, or paradise. In contrast to an exaltation of this kind love is placed before us by Boccaccio in those romances of his, in which he brings before our eyes the morals and life of his country, partly in all its impetuosity of passion, partly, too, in the spirit of frivolity without any ethical aim whatever. In the songs of the German Minnesingers we find a type of love, sensitive, tender, without much generosity of imagination, sportive, melancholy, and monotonous. Among the Spaniards it is copious in imaginative expression, chivalrous, somewhat casuistical in its discovery and defence of rights and duties, so far as they relate to private affairs of honour; and in this respect also possesses all the richest splendour of enthusiasm. In contrast to this among Frenchmen of more modern times love is more an affair of gallantry with a distinct bias toward vanity, an artificial state of feeling converted to the uses of poetry with a kind of sophistry of the senses often marked with the finest wit, at one time expressing a kind of sensuous enjoyment which is devoid of passion, at another a passion that brings with it no enjoyment, a sublimated condition of feeling and sensibility which feeds upon the maxims of reflection. But I must here break off these general indications which our subject does not permit me now to carry further.
(b) More closely looked at the secular interest may be treated under two general divisions. We have on the one side secularity as actually organized, such as family life, the tie of citizenship and politics, law, justice, morality, and the rest; and in opposition to this[249] independent and assured existence love springs up in noble and impetuous spirits; this world-religion of hearts, which at one time we find joining hands with religion in every respect, while at another it supersedes it, forgets it, and by constituting itself the single essential, or rather the unique and supreme condition of life, is not only prepared to renounce all else, and to fly for refuge to a desert with the beloved, but proceeds in this extremity of its passion, which we can only exclude from the domain of beauty, to sacrifice all the worth of humanity in a manner at once servile, degrading, and despicable. An example of this we have in "Kätchen von Heilbronn." On account of this cataclysm of life's essential interests the objects of love cannot be realized without collisions in the theatre of the world. For despite of love the general conditions of life make their demand and assert their claims and the despotism of love's passion is unable to maintain itself against them with impunity.
(α) The first and most frequently exemplified type of collision we may draw attention to is that between honour and love. In other words, honour possesses just as love possesses in its own right this infinitude of claim, and may accept a content, which may confront love as a positive obstacle in its path. The obligations of honour may require the sacrifice of love. From a certain point of view it would be, for example, dishonourable for a man of high rank to wed one of the lower classes. The distinction between class and class is a necessary fact of natural condition as ordinarily presented[250]. And so long as our secular life has not been emancipated through the infinite notion of true freedom, whatever may be the class or profession from which that life in the particular individual and his free choice takes its rise, to that extent it will always be Nature, that is, the birth condition, which to a greater or less degree will, on the one hand, determine the social position; and, on the other, these distinctions of status, as they thus originate, and quite independently of general grounds of honour, in so far as social position is made an affair of honour, will maintain themselves as of absolute and infinite stability.