If we cast, meanwhile, a glance at the external causes which have brought about this decadence, it is easy to discover them in the situations of ancient society, which prophesy the downfall of both art and religion. We discover the vices of that social order where the state was everything, the individual nothing by himself. This is the radical vice of the Greek state. In such an identification of man and the state, the rights of the individual are ignored. The latter, then, seeks to open for himself a distinct and independent way, separates himself from the public interest, pursues his own ends, and finally labors for the ruin of the state. Hence the egoism which undermines this society little by little, and the ever-increasing excesses of demagoguism.
On the other hand, there arises in the souls of the best a longing for a higher freedom in a state organized upon the basis of justice and right. In the meantime man falls back upon himself, and deserting the written law, religious and civil, takes his conscience for the rule of his acts. Socrates marks the advent of this idea. In Rome, in the last years of the republic, there appears, among energetic spirits, this antagonism and this detachment from society. Noble characters present to us the spectacle of private virtues by the side of feebleness and corruption in public morals.
This protest of moral consciousness against the increasing corruption finds expression in art itself; it creates a form of poetry which corresponds to it, satire.
According to Hegel, satire, in fact, belongs peculiarly to the Romans; it is at least the distinctive and original characteristic, the salient feature, of their poetry and literature. “The spirit of the Roman world is the dominance of the dead letter, the destruction of beauty, the absence of serenity in manners, the ebbing of the domestic and natural affections—in general, the sacrifice of individuality, which devotes itself to the state, the tranquil greatness in obedience to law. The principle of this political virtue, in its frigid and austere rudeness, subdued national individualities abroad, while at home the law was developed with the same rigor and the same exactitude of forms, even to the point of attaining perfection. But this principle was contrary to true art. So one finds at Rome no art which presents a character of beauty, of liberty, of grandeur. The Romans received and learned from the Greeks sculpture, painting, music, epic lyric and dramatic poetry. What is regarded as indigenous among them is the comic farces, the fescennines and atellanes. The Romans can claim as belonging to them in particular only the forms of art which, in their principle, are prosaic, such as the didactic poem. But before all we must place satire.”
III. Of Romantic Art.
This expression, employed here to designate modern art, in its opposition to Greek or classic art, bears nothing of the unfavorable sense which it has in our language and literature, where it has become the synonym of a liberty pushed even to license, and of a contempt for all law. Romantic art, which, in its highest development, is also Christian art, has laws and principles as necessary as classic art. But the idea which it expresses being different, its conditions are also; it obeys other rules, while observing those that are the basis of all art and the very essence of the beautiful.
Hegel, in a general manner, thus characterizes this form of art, contrasting it with antique art, the study of which we have just left.
In classic art, the spirit constitutes the content of the representation; but it is combined with the sensuous or material form in such a manner that it is harmonized perfectly with it, and does not surpass it. Art reached its perfection when it accomplished this happy accord, when the spirit idealized nature and made of it a faithful image of itself. It is thus that classic art was the perfect representation of the ideal, the reign of beauty.
But there is something higher than the beautiful manifestation of spirit under the sensuous form. The spirit ought to abandon this accord with nature, to retire into itself, to find the true harmony in its own world, the spiritual world of the soul and the conscience. Now, that development of the spirit, which not being able to satisfy itself in the world of sense, seeks a higher harmony in itself, is the fundamental principle of romantic art.
Here beauty of form is no longer the supreme thing; beauty, in this sense, remains something inferior, subordinate; it gives place to the spiritual beauty which dwells in the recesses of the soul, in the depths of its infinite nature.