The music is finished; but now, that nothing may be wanting for perfect effect, we have the scenery added, and this in such word-painting as has never been surpassed. Who could ever weary of line 187—“While the still morn went out with sandals gray,”—either for its melody or for its subtle appeal to our senses of hearing and sight? And the slowly growing and dying day! Who else has ever so “touched the tender stops” of imagination?
But these woods and pastures are too full of haunting memories; we seek for newer ones, where the soul, relieved from the associations which perpetually call up the loss of the human and now lifeless embodiment of spirit, shall be free to think only of the eternal holding and possessing which can be sundered by no accident of time or space.
ANALYSIS OF HEGEL’S ÆSTHETICS.
[Translated from the French of M. Ch. Bénard, by J. A. Martling.]
Part II.
OF THE GENERAL FORMS OF ART AND ITS HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT.
The first part of Hegel’s Æsthetics contains the questions relating to the nature of art in general. The second unfolds its principal forms in the different historic epochs. It is a species of philosophy of the history of art, and contains a great number of views and descriptions which cannot appear in this analysis. We shall take so much the more care, without suffering ourselves to be turned aside by details, to indicate plainly the course of the ideas, and to omit nothing essential.
The idea of the Beautiful, or the Ideal, manifests itself under three essential and fundamental forms—the symbolic, the classic, and the romantic. They represent the three grand epochs of history—the oriental, the Greek, and the modern.
In the East, thought, still vague and indeterminate, seeks its true expression and cannot find it. In the presence of the phenomena of nature and of human life, spirit, in its infancy, incapable of seizing the true sense of things, and of comprehending itself, exhausts itself in vain efforts to express certain grand, but confused or obscure conceptions. Instead of uniting and blending together in a harmonious whole the content and the form, the idea and its image, it attains only a rude and superficial approximation, and the result is the symbol with its enigmatic and mysterious meaning.
In classic art, on the contrary, this harmonious blending of the form and the idea is accomplished. Intelligence, having taken cognizance of itself and of its freedom, capable of self-control, of penetrating the significance of the phenomena of the universe, and of interpreting its laws, finds here also the exact correspondence, the measure and the proportion which are the characteristics of beauty. Art creates works which represent the beautiful under its purest and most perfect form.
But spirit can not rest in this precise accord of the form and the idea, in which the infinite and the finite blend. When it comes to be reflected upon itself, to penetrate farther into the depths of its inner nature, to take cognizance of its spirituality and its freedom, then the idea of the infinite appears to it stripped of the natural forms which envelop it. This idea, present in all its conceptions, can no longer be perfectly expressed by the forms of the finite world; it transcends them, and then this unity, which constitutes the characteristic of classic art, is broken. External forms, sensuous images, are no longer adequate to the expression of the soul and its free spirituality.
I. Of Symbolic Art.
After these general considerations, Hegel treats successively the different forms of art. Before speaking of symbolic art, he furnishes an exposition of the symbol in general.