The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. I, Nos. 1-4, 1867

by Various

Action, if one considers it more closely, includes the following conditions: 1st. A world which serves it as a basis and theatre, a form of society which renders it possible, and is favorable to the development of ideal figures. 2d. A determinate situation, in which the personages are placed who render necessary the conflict between opposing interests and passions, whence a collision may arise. 3d. An action, properly so called, which develops itself in its essential moments, which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This action, in order to afford a high interest, should revolve upon ideas of an elevated order, which inspire and sustain the personages, ennobling their passions, and forming the basis of their character.

Hegel treats, in a general manner, each of these points, which will appear anew, under a more special form, in the study of poetry, and particularly of epic and dramatic poetry.

1. The state of society most favorable to the ideal is that which allows the characters to act with most freedom, to reveal a lofty and powerful personality. This cannot be a social order, where all is fixed and regulated by laws and a constitution. Nor can it be the savage state, where all is subject to caprice and violence, and where man is dependent upon a thousand external causes, which render his existence precarious. Now the state intermediate between the barbarous state and an advanced civilization, is the heroic age, that in which the epic poets locate their action, and from which the tragic poets themselves have often borrowed their subjects and their personages. That which characterizes heroes in this epoch is, above all, the independence which is manifested in their characters and acts. On the other hand, the hero is all of a piece; he assumes not only the responsibility of his acts and their consequences, but the results of actions he has not perpetrated, of the faults or crimes of his race; he bears in his person an entire race.

Another reason why the ideal existences of art belong to the mythologic ages, and to remote epochs of history, is that the artist or the poet, in representing or recounting events, has a freer scope in his ideal creations. Art, also, for the same reason, has a predilection for the higher conditions of society, those of princes particularly, because of the perfect independence of will and action which characterizes them. In this respect, our actual society, with its civil and political organization, its manners, administration, police, etc., is prosaic. The sphere of activity of the individual is too restricted; he encounters everywhere limits and shackles to his will. Our monarchs themselves are subject to these conditions; their power is limited by institutions, laws and customs. War, peace, and treaties are determined by political relations independent of their will.

The greatest poets have not been able to escape these conditions; and when they have desired to represent personages nearer to us, as Charles Moor, or Wallenstein, they have been obliged to place them in revolt against society or against their sovereign. Moreover, these heroes rush on to an inevitable ruin, or they fall into the ridiculous situation, of which the Don Quixote of Cervantes gives us the most striking example.

2. To represent the ideal in personages or in an action, there is necessary not only a favorable world from which the subject is to be borrowed, but a situation. This situation can be either indeterminate, like that of many of the immobile personages of antique or religious sculpture, or determinate, but yet of little earnestness. Such are also the greater number of the situations of the personages of antique sculpture. Finally, it may be earnest, and furnish material for a veritable action. It supposes, then, an opposition, an action and a reaction, a conflict, a collision. The beauty of the ideal consists in absolute serenity and perfection. Now, collision destroys this harmony. The problem of art consists, then, in so managing that the harmony reappears in the denouement. Poetry alone is capable of developing this opposition upon which the interest, particularly, of tragic art turns.

Without examining here the nature of the different collisions, the study of which belongs to the theory of dramatic art, we must already have remarked that the collisions of the highest order are those in which the conflict takes place between moral forces, as in the ancient tragedies. This is the subject of true classic tragedy, moral as well as religious, as will be seen from what follows.

Thus the ideal, in this superior degree, is the manifestation of moral powers and of the ideas of spirit, of the grand movements of the soul, and of the characters which appear and are revealed in the development of the representation.

3. In action, properly so-called, three things are to be considered which constitute its ideal object: 1. The general interests, the ideas, the universal principles, whose opposition forms the very foundation of the action; 2. The personages; 3. Their character and their passions, or the motives which impel them to act.

In the first place, the eternal principles of religion, of morality, of the family, of the state—the grand sentiments of the soul, love, honor, etc.—these constitute the basis, the true interest of the action. These are the grand and true motives of art, the eternal theme of exalted poetry.