2. But in a still more intimate way the art of poetry constitutes a third or final term in its relation to painting and music regarded as the romantic arts.
(a) One reason of this is that its principle is that generally of an intelligence which has nothing further to do with gross matter as such, seeking, as is the case with architecture, to transform it through symbolism to an environment related analogically to spiritual life, or as in the case of sculpture in order to implant upon material substance the natural form congenial to such life under the spatial condition of its expression. What the end is now is to express immediately for mind the manifestations of Spirit with all its ideas of imagination and art, without setting forth their external and visible bodily presence. And a further reason consists in this, that poetry is able to grasp in the form of ideality itself and with a far greater wealth than is possible for music or painting, not merely the innermost actuality of conscious life, but also what is particular and individual in external existence, and equally able to contrast such facts in the complete diversity of their specific traits and accidental peculiarities.
(b) The art of poetry is, however, as totality, also again, from another point of view, essentially to be distinguished from the above-mentioned arts whose fundamental qualities it thus in a measure combines.
(α) In this respect, if we compare it with painting, the latter art is throughout at an advantage, where it is of importance to bring before our senses a content under the condition of its external appearance. It is true no doubt that poetry is able by various means to envisualize objects precisely in the way that for the imagination generally the principle of objectification is made real to our intuitive sense. But in so far as conceptive power, in the element of which poetry pre-eminently moves, is of a spiritual nature and implies the presence of the universality of thought, it is incapable of attaining the definition of sensuous perception. On the other hand, the varied traits which poetry brings together, in order to make the concrete form of a content visible, do not fall as with painting into one and the same totality, which is set before us wholly as a simultaneous appearance of all its details, but they break apart, inasmuch as the imagination can only give us the complexity it contains under the form of succession. This is, however, only a defect from the sensuous point of view, a defect which reason is able in its own way to rectify. That is to say, inasmuch as human speech, even in the case where it endeavours to summon before our sight a concrete object, is not concerned with the sensuous apprehension of an immediate external object, but always with the ideal relation, the mental intuition, for this reason the particular characteristics, albeit they are set before us in a series, are nevertheless fused together in the element of one essentially homogeneous spirit, which is able to qualify the effect of succession, to bring the varied array into one picture, and to secure and enjoy this picture in imaginative contemplation. Moreover, this deficiency of sensuous realization and objective definition, when we contrast poetry with painting, brings as a contrary result the possibility of an incalculable superfluity of material. For inasmuch as the poetic art in painting restricts itself to a determinate space, and even more to a distinct moment in a situation or action, for this reason it is prevented from portraying an object in its entire ideal profundity no less than in the extension of its temporal development. But what is true is throughout concrete in the sense that it comprises within its embrace a unity of essential determinations. In its phenomenal appearance, however, these are not merely unfolded as a co-existent spatial phenomenon but in a temporal series as a history, whose course painting is only able to present in a relatively inadequate manner. Even in the case of every stalk, every tree, each has in this sense its history, a change, sequence, and exclusive whole of varied conditions. And this is even more true of the sphere of spirit, which can only be exhaustively portrayed as veritable spirit in phenomenal guise when it is set before our imagination as such a process.
(β) We have already seen that poetry possesses for its external medium that of tone in common with music. The wholly external, or, as we might say in the false sense of the expression, the objective material in the progressive series of the particular arts finally vanishes in the subjective medium of sound, which is divested of all visibility, and which suffers an ideal content only to be apprehended by a conscious state independent of sight.[3] For music, however, the configuration of musical tone as such is the essential end. For although the soul in the course and movement of melody and its harmonic relations presents what is ideal in objects, or its own ideal content, to the emotional life; yet the ideality thus presented is not pure ideality, but the human soul interwoven in the closest way with the musical tone as its expression, and the configuration of such musical expression which confers on music its true character. So much is this the case that music receives its independent position as an art just in proportion as the animation given by it to the emotional life is more emphasized in the world of pure music than in that of man's ordinary spiritual activity.[4] But for this very reason it is only to a relative degree capable of reproducing the variety of spiritual ideas and intuitions, the entire extension of the ideal wealth of conscious life: it remains restricted to the more abstract universality of all that it grasps as content, and the more indefinite manifestations of our emotion.
In the like degree, then, that mind (Geist) elaborates the more abstract universality in a concrete whole of idea, ends, actions, and events, and no less contributes to its conformation the particularizing perception, it not only forsakes the subjective life of mere emotion and builds up that life into an unfolded realm of objective reality in this case, too, within the ideal world of the imagination itself, it is compelled, by virtue of the nature of such transformation, to forsake the attempt to express the new realm thus secured solely and exclusively by means of tone relations. Precisely as the medium of sculpture is too poor to express the more ample content that it is the function of the art of painting to call into life, so too the conditions of musical tone and melodic expression are unable to realize fully the imaginative pictures of the poet. For these in part possess the ideas more accurately defined to consciousness and, in part, the form of external appearance impressed on the inner sense of perceptive reason. Spirit consequently withdraws its content from musical tone as such, and declares itself through words, which it is true do not entirely forsake the element of sound, but sink to the purely external sign of the communication. In other words, by means of this repletion with spiritual ideas, musical tone becomes the voice of articulate words; language, in its turn, is diverted from an end in itself to a means of ideal expression which has lost its independent self-subsistancy. This constitutes in fact what we have already established as the essential difference between music and poetry. The content of the art of speech is the collective art of the world of ideas elaborated by the imagination, the spiritual which remains at home in its vision, which remains in this ideal realm, and, even in its movement toward an objective world, is only conscious of the same as a symbol that differs from its own conscious content. In music art reproduces the penetration of Spirit in a sensuously apparent and present form. In poetry it even forsakes the element of musical tone and articulation opposed to it, at least to the extent that this musical tone is no longer reclothed in fully adequate externality and the exclusive expression of that content. The ideal no doubt is expressed, but it fails to discover its real existence in the sensuous medium of tone, despite the fact that it is of a more ideal character; this it discovers exclusively in its own essential content, by virtue of which it expresses the content of mind as it is realized in the ideality of the imagination simply as such.
(c) In the third place, and finally, if we consider the specific character of poetry relatively to this distinction between music and painting, and we may include with it the other plastic arts, we shall find the same simply to consist in the subordination of the mode under which all poetical content is envisaged and configured by the medium of sense. In other words, when tone, as it does in the art of music, or for that matter, colour as in that of painting, no longer essentially recovers and expresses the entire content, in that case the musical treatment of the composition under its aspects of time, no less than those of harmony and melody, drops away; we have left us merely the generalized configuration of the time-measure of syllables and words, to which we may add rhythm, euphony, and the like. And further, it is to be noted that we have this, not in the sense of a genuine medium for the content, but rather as a mode of externality which is accidental, and which only receives an artistic form, because art cannot permit any mode of its external manifestation whatever to be entirely a question of accidental caprice.
(α) In connection with this withdrawal of the spiritual content from the sensuous medium we are at once met with the question what it is then which, under such a view, constitutes the actual externality or objectivity in poetry, that of tone being thus excluded. The answer to this is simple. It is the ideal envisagement and imaginative content itself. We have here spiritual forms substituted for sensuous, and supply a configurative material, such as we met with before in marble, bronze, colour, or musical tones. In other words, we must guard ourselves from such an inadequate statement of the facts as that ideas and imagery are nothing more or less than the content of poetry. This is unquestionably true in a sense, as we shall demonstrate more closely later on. Despite this, however, we are equally justified in asserting that idea, imagery, emotion, and the like are specific modes, under which every content in poetry is subsumed and manifested; and consequently, that is, owing to the fact that the sensuous aspect of the communication remains throughout a purely accidental one[5]—it is these forms which supply the real material which the poet has to elaborate artistically. No doubt the fact, the content, must in poetry, as in other arts, receive its due objectification for spirit; objectivity in this sense, however, is the exchange of what was previously an external reality for one that is ideal; one which receives an existence exclusively in conscious life itself, as something conceived or imagined exclusively by mind. Mind is here on its own ground objective to itself, and it suffers the medium of speech merely as a means, that is to say, partly as one of communication, and partly as one of immediate externality, from which, as from the pure symbol merely, it is withdrawn throughout from itself into itself. For this reason, in the case of genuine poetry, it is of no consequence whether a poetical work be read in private or listened to; and for the same reason it can also, without essential depreciation of its value, be translated into other tongues, be transferred from versification into prose, and thereby transmitted in tonal relations of an entirely different character.[6]
(β) In the second place the question presents itself as to the nature of the object for which the ideal concept is employed in poetry. We answer that it is thus used relatively to essential truth in everything of interest to Spirit; not merely, that is, relatively to what is substantive in the same in the universality of its symbolic significance or classical differentiation, but equally to all that is at the same time specific and particular, in short, to practically everything in and with which mind is in any way interested and concerned. The art of language, consequently, both in respect to its content and the mode under which that content is made explicit, possesses a field of immeasurable compass, wholly incomparable with that of the other arts. Every content, every sort of spiritual or natural fact, event, history, deed, action, all conditions, whether ideal or external, fall within the domain and configurative powers of poetry.