Читать книгу The Philosophy of Fine Art - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - Страница 7

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After these preliminaries we come to closer quarters with our actual subject-matter, namely, the philosophy of Fine Art32; and for the reason that we are undertaking to treat it scientifically, our commencement must be with the notional concept of the same. It is only after we have definitely ascertained this that we can map out the division of its parts, and with it the plan of the science as a whole. A division of this kind, if it is not to be, as is the case with non-philosophical inquiry, undertaken in a purely external way, must discover its principle in the notion of the subject treated itself.

Face to face with such a demand we are at once met by the question: "Whence do we arrive at such a conception?" If we begin with the notional concept of Fine Art itself the same at once becomes a pre-supposition and mere assumption. Mere assumptions, however, are excluded from the philosophical method; whatever here is allowed as valid must have its truth demonstrated, in other words must be established in its necessity.

We will endeavour to arrive at an understanding in a few words in the presence of this difficulty which invariably recurs in the introduction to every course of philosophical study if treated independently. The subject-matter of every science presents in the first instance two aspects for consideration: first, the fact that a given object is; secondly, the question what it is.

Upon the question of fact in ordinary scientific inquiry little difficulty is experienced. Indeed it might on a cursory view even appear ridiculous if the demand were made that we had to prove in geometry, for instance, that there were such objects as space, and geometrical figures, or in astronomy and physics that there was a sun, stars, and magnetic phenomena. In these sciences, which are concerned with what is actually presented to sense perception, objects are accepted from objective experience, and so far from it being regarded necessary to demonstrate (beweisen) them, it is deemed sufficient to point to (weisen) the bare facts. Yet even within the limits of non-philosophical instruction doubts may arise as to the existence of certain objects. In psychology, for example, the science of mind, the doubt is possible whether there is a soul, an intelligence, i.e., something distinct from material conditions, something immaterial33, independent and self-substantive, or in the theology whether a God actually exists. Moreover, assuming the objects of the science to be thus immaterial, in other words, merely present in the mind, and not a part of the objective world we perceive, we have to face the possible conviction that there is nothing in the mind, but that which it has evoked in virtue of its own activity. This brings up incidentally the question whether men have produced this idea or intuition which is inward to their minds or not, and even if we do actually accept the first alternative, whether they have not made such an idea once more to vanish, or depreciated, the same at any rate to an idea of wholly subjective validity, whose content possesses no independent or self-contained existence34. In this way, for example, the beautiful has been frequently regarded as possessing no necessarily essential and independent stability in the world of our ideas; rather it is accepted as a pleasure purely personal to ourselves, due to the caprice of our senses35. Even our external intuitions, observations and perceptions frequently deceive and lead us astray; but still more is this the case with those ideas that do not arise from sense-perception, even though they possess in themselves the greatest vitality, and are able to transport us into passion, we are powerless to resist.

This doubt, then, whether an object of the inward world of our ideas and intuitions actually exists as an independent fact or not, as also that further incidental problem, whether the particular consciousness in question has produced it in itself, and whether the particular mode or process, in which it objectified it to itself, is also adequate to the object thus envisaged in its essential and independent nature—these are precisely the kind of questions which have awakened in men the higher demand of philosophy, which is that, even if there is every appearance that an object is, or that we have before us such an object, yet none the less that object must be expounded or demonstrated on the basis of its necessity. A demonstration of this kind, if developed on truly philosophical lines, ought at the same time to supply a sufficient answer to the question: What a given object is. To work this out fully would, however, carry us further than is now possible. We propose to limit ourselves to the following general remarks.

If we are to propound the necessity of our subject-matter, in other words the beauty of art, we are bound to prove that art, or the beautiful, is a result of antecedents such as, when regarded relatively to their true notional concept, conduct us with scientific necessity to the similar notion of fine art itself. Inasmuch as, however, we propose to make art the point of departure, and its idea and the objective presence of the same, and do not propose to deal with the antecedent conditions which are essential to the necessary exposition of its notional concept, for this reason art, in our treatment of it as a particular object of scientific inquiry, involves a pre-assumption, which lies outside the boundary of our investigation; which, implying as it does a different content, belongs, as scientifically treated, to another course of philosophical inquiry. We have therefore now no other alternative than frankly to accept the notional idea of art, so to speak, provisionally36, which is inevitable with every one of the particular philosophical sciences, if regarded in their abstract isolation. For it is the entire body of philosophy, and that alone, which either is or can be the comprehension of the universe as one essentially single organic totality; and which, as such a totality, self-evolved from its own notional Idea, and returning into itself so as to form a whole in virtue of the necessary principle in which it is placed relatively to itself, encloses itself, and all that is itself, into one single world of truth. In the coronal of this scientific necessity is every particular member thereof a self-complete circle which returns into itself, while, at the same time, and as imperatively, it possesses a necessary bond of connection with other parts. This bond of coherence is a backward from which it is self-derived, no less than a forward to which it is self-impelled onward, in so far as it fruitfully begets fresh material from its own resources, and renders the same open and pervious to scientific cognition. It is not therefore our purpose to demonstrate the Idea of the beautiful, which is our point of departure, or, in other words, to deduce it in all its necessity from the assumptions which are its antecedents in philosophy, and from the womb of which it is born. This is the object appropriate to an encyclopaedic development of philosophy as a whole and in its specific branches. For ourselves the notional concept of the beautiful and art is a pre-supposition supplied us by the system of philosophy. Inasmuch, however, as we are not prepared to discuss this system, and the association of art with it in the present context37, we have not as yet the idea of the beautiful before us in a scientific form: what we have and are able to deal with are simply the phases and aspects of the same as we find them in the various conceptions of beauty and art of our everyday conscious life, or as they have been conceived by previous writers. Having made our start at this point we shall then at a later stage pass on to the more fundamental investigation of those views, in order thereby to secure the advantage of, in the first instance, working out a general idea of our subject-matter no less than obtaining a provisional acquaintance, as a result of our necessarily brief criticism, with its higher principles, which will occupy our thoughts in the inquiry which follows38. By this means our final introduction39 will supply a sort of overture to the exposition of the subject itself, and will aim at being a general concatenation and direction of our reflection on the real subject-matter before us. What in the first instance is known to us under current conceptions of a work of art may be subsumed under the three following determinations:

(1) A work of art is no product of Nature. It is brought into being through the agency of man.

(2) It is created essentially for man; and, what, is more, it is to a greater-or less degree delivered from a sensuous medium, and addressed to his senses40.

(3) It contains an end bound up with it.

1. With regard to the first point, that a work of art is a product of human activity, an inference has been drawn from this (a) that such an activity, being the conscious production of an external object can also be known and divulged, and learned and reproduced by others. For that which one is able to effect, another—such is the notion—is able to effect or to imitate41, when he has once simply mastered the way of doing it. In short we have merely to assume an acquaintance with the rules of art-production universally shared, and anybody may then, if he cares to do so, give effect to executive ability of the same type, and produce works of art. It is out of reasoning of this kind that the above-mentioned theories, with their provision of rules, and their prescriptions formulated for practical acceptance, have arisen. Unfortunately that which is capable of being brought into effect in accordance with suggestions of this description can only be something formally regular and mechanical. For only that which is mechanical is of so exterior a type that only an entirely empty effort of will and dexterity is required to accept it among our working conceptions, and forthwith to carry it out; an effort, in fact, which is not under the necessity to contribute out of its own resources anything concrete such as is quite outside the prescriptive power of such general rules.

This is apparent with most vividness when precepts of this kind are not limited to what is purely external and mechanical, but extend their pretensions to the activity of the artist in the sense that implies wealth of significance and intelligence. In this field our rules pass off to purely indefinite generalities, such as "the theme ought to be interesting, and each individual person must speak as is appropriate to his status, age, sex and situation." But if rules are really to suffice for such a purpose their directions ought to be formulated with such directness of detail that, without any further co-operation of mind, they could be executed precisely in the manner they are prescribed. Such rules being, in respect to this content, abstract, clearly and entirely fall short of their pretension of being able to complete42 the artistic consciousness. Artistic production is not a formal activity in accordance with a series of definitions; it is, as an activity of soul, constrained to work out of its own wealth, and to bring before the mind's eye a wholly other and far richer content, and a more embracing and unique43 creation than ever can be thus prescribed. In particular cases such rules may prove, of assistance, in so far, that is, as they contain something really definite and consequently useful for practice. But even here their guidance will only apply to conditions wholly external.

(b) This above indicated tendency has consequently been wholly given up; but writers in doing so have only fallen as unreservedly into the opposite extreme. A work of art came to be looked upon, and so far rightly, as no longer the product of an activity shared by all men, but rather as a creation of a mind gifted in an extraordinary degree. A mind of this type has in this view merely to give free vent to its peculiar endowment, regarded as a specific natural power. It has to free itself absolutely from a pursuit of rules of universal application, as also from any admixture of conscious reflection with its creative and, as thus viewed, wholly instinctive powers, or rather it should be on its guard therefrom, the assumption being that such an exercise of conscious thought can only act on its creations as an infection and a taint. Agreeably to such a view the work of art has been heralded as the product of talent and genius; and it is mainly the aspect of natural gift inseparable from the ordinary conception of talent and genius, which has been emphasized. There is to some extent real truth in this. Talent is specific, genius universal capacity. With neither44 of these can a man endow himself simply by the exercise of his self-conscious activity. We shall consider this at greater length in a subsequent chapter45.

In the present context we would merely draw attention to the false assumption in this view that in artistic production every kind of self-reflection upon the artist's own activity was regarded as not merely superfluous, but actually injurious. In such a view the process of creation by talent or genius simply is taken to be a general state; or we may define it more precisely as a condition of inspiration. To such a condition, it is said, genius is in some measure exalted by the subject-matter itself; it is also to some extent voluntarily able to place itself under such a condition, a process of self-inhibition in which the genial service of the champagne bottle is not forgotten46. An idea of this kind was in vogue during the so-called "Epoch of Genius," which originated with the early poetical work of Goethe, receiving subsequent illustration in those of Schiller. These poets by their rejection of all rules hitherto fabricated made as it were an entirely new start; with deliberate intention they ran counter to such rules, and while doing so distanced all competitors by many lengths. I do not, however, propose to discuss with more detail the confusions which have prevailed over the conception of inspiration and genius, and the notion, which even at the present day finds advocates, that inspiration simply by itself can effect anything and everything. The real and indeed sole point to maintain as essential is the thesis that although artistic talent and genius essentially implies an element of natural power, yet it is equally indispensable that it should be thoughtfully cultivated, that reflection should be brought to bear on the particular way it is exercised, and that it should be also kept alive with use and practice in actual work. The fact is that an important aspect of the creating process is merely facility in the use of a medium47; that is to say, a work of art possesses a purely technical side, which extends to the borders of mere handicraft. This is most obviously the case in architecture and sculpture, less so in painting and music, least of all in poetry. A facility here is not assisted at all by inspiration; what solely indispensable is reflection, industry, and practice. Such technical skill an artist simply must possess in order that he may be master over the external material, and not be thwarted by its obstinacy.

Add to this that the more exalted the rank of an artist the more profoundly ought he to portray depths of soul and mind; and these are not to be known by flashlight, but are exclusively to be sounded, if at all, by the direction of the man's own intelligence on the world of souls and the objective world. In this respect, therefore, once more study is the means whereby the artist brings to consciousness such a content, and appropriates the material and structure of his conceptions. At the same time no doubt one art will require such a conscious reception and cognitive mastery of the content in question more than another. Music, for example, which has exclusively to deal with the entirely undefined motion of the soul within, with the musical tones of that which is, relatively, feeling denuded of positive thought, has little or no need to bring home to consciousness the substance of intellectual conception48. For this very reason musical talent declares itself as a rule in very early youth, when the head is still empty and the emotions have barely had a flutter; it has, in fact, attained real distinction at a time in the artist's life when both intelligence and life are practically without experience. And for the matter of that we often enough see very great accomplishment in musical composition and execution hung together with considerable indigence of mind and character. It is quite another matter in the case of poetry. What is of main importance here is a presentation of our humanity rich in subject-matter and reflective power, of its profounder interests, and of the forces which move it. Here at least mind and heart must themselves be richly and profoundly disciplined by life, experience, and thought before genius itself can bring into being the fruit that is ripe, the content that has substance, and is essentially consummate. The early productions of Goethe and Schiller are characterized by an immaturity, we may even call it a rawness and barbarity, which really are appalling. This phenomenon, that in the majority of those experiments we find a preponderating mass of features which are absolutely prosaic, or at least uninspired and commonplace, is a main objection to the ordinary notion that inspiration is inseparable from youth and its sirocco season. These two men of genius were the first beyond question to give our nation true works of poetry, are, in fact, our national poets; but for all that it was only their mature manhood, which made it a present of creations profound, sterling of their kind, creations of genuine inspiration, and no less technically complete in their artistic form49. We naturally recall the case of the veteran Homer, who only composed and uttered his immortal songs in his old age.

(c) A third view, held relatively to the idea of a work of art as a product of human activity, concerns the position of such towards the phenomena of Nature. The natural tendency of ordinary thinking in this respect is to assume that the product of human art is of subordinate rank to the works of Nature. The work of art possesses no feeling of its own; it is not through and through a living thing, but, regarded as an external object, is a dead thing. It is usual to regard that which is alive of higher worth than what is dead. We may admit, of course, that the work of art is not in itself capable of movement and alive. The living, natural thing is, whether looked at within or without, an organization with the life-purpose of such worked out into the minutest detail. The work of art merely attains to the show of animation on its surface. Below this it is ordinary stone, wood, or canvas50, or in the case of poetry idea, the medium of such being speech and letters. But this element of external existence is not that which makes a work a creation of fine art. A work of art is only truly such in so far as originating in the human spirit, it continues to belong to the soil from which it sprang, has received, in short, the baptism of the mind and soul of man, and only presents that which is fashioned in consonance with such a sacrament. An interest vital to man, the spiritual values which the single event, one individual character, one action possesses in its devolution and final issue, is seized in the work of art and emphasized with greater purity51 and clarity than is possible on the ground of ordinary reality where human art is not. And for this reason the work of art is of higher rank than any product of Nature whatever, which has not submitted to this passage through the mind. In virtue of the emotion and insight, for example, in the atmosphere of which a landscape is portrayed by the art of painting, this creation of the human spirit assumes a higher rank than the purely natural landscape. Everything which partakes of spirit is better than anything begotten of mere Nature. However this may be, the fact remains that no purely natural existence is able, as art is, to represent divine ideals.

And further, all that the mind borrows from its own ideal content it is able, even in the direction of external existence, to endow with permanence. The individual living thing on the contrary is transitory; it vanishes and is unstable in its external aspect. The work of art persists. At the same time it is not mere continuation, but rather the form and pressure thereon of the mintage of soul-life which constitutes its true pre-eminence as contrasted with Nature's reality.

But this higher position we have thus assigned to the work of art is yet further contested by another prevalent conception of ordinary ideas. It is contended that Nature and all that proceeds from her are a work of God, created by His goodness and wisdom. The work of art is on the contrary merely a human product fashioned by human hands according to human design. The fallacy implied in this contrast between the products of Nature viewed as a divine creation and human activity as of wholly finite energy consists in the apparent assumption that God is not operative in and through man, but limits the sphere of His activity to Nature alone. We must place this false conception entirely on one side if we are desirous of penetrating to the true idea of art; or rather, as opposed to such a conception we ought to accept the extreme opposite thereto, namely, that God is more honoured by that which mind makes and creates than by everything brought into being and fashioned in the natural process. For not only is there a divinity in man, but it is actually effective in him in a form which is adequate to the essential nature of God in a far higher degree than in the work of Nature. God is a Spirit, and it is only in man that the medium, through which the Divine passes, possesses the form of spirit fully conscious of the activity in which it manifests its ideal presence. In Nature the medium correspondent to this is the unconscious sensuous52 and external materia, which is by many degrees inferior to consciousness in its worth. In the products of art God works precisely as He works through the phenomena of Nature. The divine substance, however, as it is asserted in the work of art has secured, being begotten of spirit life itself, a highway commensurable to its existence; determinate existence in the unconscious sensuousness of Nature is not a mode of appearance adequate to the Divine Being.

(d) Assuming, then, that the work of art is a creation of man in the sense that it is the offspring of mind or spirit we have still a further question in conclusion, which will help us to draw a more profound inference still from our previous discussion. That question is, "What is the human need which stimulates art-production?" On the one hand the artistic activity may be regarded as the mere play of accident, or human conceits, which might just as well be left alone as attempted. For, it may be urged, there are other and better means for carrying into effect the aims of art, and man bears within himself higher and more weighty interests, than art is capable of satisfying. In contrast to such a view art appears to originate in a higher impulse, and to satisfy more elevated needs, nay, at certain times the highest and most absolute of all, being, as it has been, united to the most embracing views of entire epochs and nations upon the constitution of the world and the nature of their religion.

This inquiry, however, concerning a necessity for art which shall not be merely contingent, but absolute, we are not as yet able to answer with completeness; it demands, in fact, a concreter mode of exposition than is compatible with the form of this introduction. We must accordingly deem it sufficient for the present merely to establish the following points.

The universal and absolute want from which art on its side of essential form53 arises originates in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, in other words that he renders explicit to himself and from his own substance54, what he is and all in fact that exists. The objects of Nature exist exclusively in immediacy and once for all.55 Man, on the contrary, as mind reduplicates himself. He is, to start with, an object of Nature as other objects; but in addition to this, and no less truly, he exists for himself; he observes himself, makes himself present to his imagination and thought, and only in virtue of this active power of self-realization is he actually mind or spirit. This consciousness of himself man acquires in a twofold way; in the first instance theoretically. This is so in so far as he is under a constraint to bring himself in his own inner life to consciousness—all which moves in the human heart, all that surges up and strives therein—and generally, so far as he is impelled to make himself an object of perception and conception, to fix for himself definitively that which thought discovers as essential being, and in all that he summons out of himself, no less than in that which is received from without, to recognize only himself. And secondly, this realization is effected through a practical activity. In other words man possesses an impulse to assert himself in that which is presented him in immediacy, in that which is at hand as an external something to himself, and by doing so at the same time once more to recognize himself therein. This purpose he achieved by the alteration he effects in such external objects, upon which he imprints the seal of his inner life, rediscovering in them thereby the features of his own determinate nature. And man does all this, in order that he may as a free agent divest the external world of its stubborn alienation from himself—and in order that he may enjoy in the configuration of objective fact an external reality simply of himself. The very first impulse of the child implies in essentials this practical process of deliberate change in external fact. A boy throws stones into the stream, and then looks with wonder at the circles which follow in the water, regarding them as a result in which he sees something of his own doing. This human need runs through the most varied phenomena up to that particular form of self-reproduction in the external fact which is presented us in human art. And it is not merely in relation to external objects that man acts thus. He treats himself, that is, his natural form, in a similar manner: he will not permit it to remain as he finds it; he alters it deliberately. This is the rational ground of all ornament and decoration, though it may be as barbarous, tasteless, entirely disfiguring, nay, as injurious as the crushing of the feet of Chinese ladies, or the slitting of ears and lips. For it is among the really cultured alone that a change of figure, behaviour, and every mode and manner of self-expression will issue in harmony with the dictates of mental elevation56.

This universal demand for artistic expression57 is based on the rational impulse in man's nature to exalt both the world of his soul experience and that of Nature for himself into the conscious embrace of mind as an object in which he rediscovers himself. He satisfies the demand of this spiritual freedom by making explicit to, his inner life all that exists, no less than from the further point of view giving a realized external embodiment to the self made thus explicit. And by this reduplication of what is his own he places before the vision and within the cognition of himself and others what is within him. This is the free rationality of man, in which art as also all action and knowledge originates. We shall investigate at a later stage the specific need for art as compared with that for other political and ethical action, or that for religious ideas and scientific knowledge.

2. We have hitherto considered the work of art under the aspect that it is fashioned by man; we will now pass over to the second part of our definition, that it is produced for his sense-apprehension, and consequently is to a more or less degree under obligations to a sensuous medium.

(a) This reflection has been responsible for the inference that the function of fine art is to arouse feeling, more precisely the feeling which suits us—that is, pleasant feeling. From such a point of view writers have converted the investigation of fine art into a treatise on the emotions and asked what kind of feelings art ought to excite—take fear, for example, and compassion—with the further question how such can be regarded as pleasant, how, in short, the contemplation of a misfortune can bring satisfaction. This tendency of reflection dates for the most part from the times of Moses Mendelssohn, and many such trains of reasoning may be found in his writings. A discussion of this kind, however, did not carry the problem far. Feeling is the undefined obscure region of spiritual life. What is felt, remains cloaked in the form of the separate personal experience under its most abstract persistence58; and for this reason the distinctions of feeling are wholly abstract; they are not distinctions which apply to the subject-matter itself. To take examples—fear, anxiety, care, dread, are of course one type of emotion under various modifications; but in part they are purely quantitative degrees of intensity, and in part forms which reflect no light, on their content itself, but are indifferent to it. In the case of fear, for instance, an existence is assumed, for which the individual in question possesses an interest, but sees at the same time the negative approach which threatens to destroy this existence, and thereupon discovers in immediate fusion within himself the above interest and the approach of that negative as a contradictory affection of his personal life. A fear of this sort, however, does not on its own account condition any particular content; it may associate with itself subject-matter of the most opposed and varied character. The feeling merely as such is in short a wholly empty form of a subjective state. Such a form may no doubt in certain cases itself be essentially complex, as we find it is with hope, pain, joy, and pleasure; it may also in this very complexity appropriate various modes of content, as, for example, we have a feeling of justice, an ethical feeling, a sublime religious feeling, and so forth; but despite the fact that a content of this kind is present in different modes of feeling, no light whatever is thereby thrown on such content which will disclose its essential and definite character. The feeling throughout remains a purely subjective state which belongs to me, one in which the concrete fact vanishes, as though contracted to a vanishing point in the most abstract of all spheres59. For this reason an inquiry over the nature of the emotions which art ought or ought not to arouse, comes simply to a standstill in the undefined; it is an investigation which deliberately abstracts from genuine content and its concrete substance and notion. Reflection upon feeling is satisfied with the observation of the personal emotional state and its singularity, instead of penetrating and sounding the matter for study, in other words the work of art, and in doing so bidding good-bye to the wholly subjective state and its conditions. In feeling, however, it is just this subjective state void of content which is not merely accepted, but becomes the main thing; and that is precisely why people are so proud of having emotions. And for no other reason that is why such an investigation is tedious owing to its indefinite nature and emptiness, and even repellent in its attention to trivial personal idiosyncrasies.

(b) Inasmuch, however, as the work of art is not merely concerned with exciting some kind of emotion or other—for this is an object it would share without any valid distinction with eloquence, historical composition, religious edification and much else—but is only a work of art in so far as it is beautiful, it occurred to reflective minds to discover a specific feeling for beauty, and a distinct sense faculty correspondent with it. In such an inquiry it soon became clear that a sense of this kind was no definite and mere60 instinct rigidly fixed by Nature, which was able by itself and independently to distinguish the beautiful. As a consequence the demand was made for culture as a condition precedent to such a sense, and the sense of beauty as thus cultivated was called taste, which, albeit an instructed apprehension and discovery of the beautiful, was none the less assumed to persist in the character of immediate feeling. We have already discussed the way in which abstract theory attempted to form such a sense of taste, and how external and one-sided that sense remained. While the critical sense generally of the time when such ideas were in currency was lacking in the universality of its principles, as a specific critique of particular works of art it was less concerned to substantiate a judgment more decisive than hitherto—indeed the material to effectuate this was not as yet forthcoming—than to promote in a general way the cultivation of such a taste61. Consequently this educative process also came to a halt in the region of the more indefinite, and merely busied itself by its reflections in the fitting out of feeling as a sense of beauty in such a way that beauty could immediately be discovered whenever and wherever it might chance to appear. The real depth of the subject-matter remained notwithstanding a closed book to such a taste. Profundity of this kind demands not merely sensitive reception and abstract thought, but the reason in its concrete grasp and the most sterling qualities of soul-life. Taste on the contrary is merely directed to the outside surfaces, which are the playground of the feelings, and upon which one-sided principles may very well pass, as currency. But for this very reason our so-called good taste is scared by every kind of profounder artistic effect, and is dumb where the ideal significance62 is in question, and all mere externalities and accessories vanish. For when great passions and the movements of a profound soul assert themselves, we do not bother ourselves any more with the finer distinctions of taste and its retail traffic in trifles. It is63 conscious that genius leaves such ground far behind it in its stride; and shrinking before that power feels on its part far from comfortable, not knowing very well which way to turn.

(c) Thus it is the further change has come about that critics of art-production no longer have an eye simply to the education of taste, or are intent upon the illustration of such a sense. The connoisseur, or art-scholar, has taken the place of the man, or judge of artistic taste. The positive side of art-scholarship, in so far as it implies a sound and exhaustive acquaintance with the entire embrace of what is distinctive and peculiar in a given work of art, we have already maintained to be a necessary condition of artistic research. A work of art, owing to its nature, which, if it is material from one point of view, is also related to a particular person, originates from specific conditions of the most varied kind, among which as exceptionally important we may mention the date and place of its origins, the characteristic personality of the artist, and, above all, the degree of executive accomplishment secured by the art. All these points of view have to be taken into consideration if we wish to obtain a view and knowledge of such a work which is clear in its outlines, and founded on a true basis, nay, even wish to enjoy it rightly. It is with these that our art-scholarship is mainly occupied; and all that it can do for us in this way should be gratefully accepted. Though it is quite true such art-scholarship must be reckoned as of essential importance, it ought not to be regarded as the sole, or indeed the highest, constituent in the relation of the contemplative spirit to a work of art and art generally. Such art-scholarship (this is the defective tendency) may restrict itself wholly to a knowledge of purely external characteristics, either on the side of technique or historical condition, or in other directions; it may continue to possess the barest inkling of the true nature of a given work, or simply no knowledge at all. It may even form a depreciatory verdict on the value of profounder inquiries as compared with purely matter of fact, technical, and historical knowledge. Yet even so an art-scholarship, assuming it to be really genuine and thorough, at least proceeds upon grounds and knowledge which are definite, and an intelligent judgment; and it is association with such that our more accurate review of the distinct, if also to some extent exterior, aspects of a work of art, and our estimate of their relative significance, is secured.

(d) Following the above observations upon the modes of inquiry which were suggested by that aspect of a work of art in which, as itself an object with a material medium, it possessed an essential relation to man as himself receptive through sense, we will now examine this point of view in its more essential connection with art itself. We propose to do this partly (α) in respect to the art-product viewed as an object, partly (β) as regards the personal characteristics of the artist, his genius, talent, and so forth. We do not, however, propose to enter into matter which can in this connection exclusively proceed from the knowledge of art according to its universal concept64. The truth is we are not as yet in the full sense on scientific ground; we have merely reached the province of external reflection.

(α) There is no question, then, that a work of art is presented to sensuous apprehension. It is submitted to the emotional sense, whether outer or inner, to sensuous perception and the imaged sense, precisely as the objective world is so presented around us, or as is our own inward sensitive nature. Even a speech, for example, may be addressed to the sensuous imagination and feeling. Notwithstanding this fact, however, the work of art is not exclusively directed to the sensuous apprehension, viewed, that is, as an object materially conditioned. Its position is of the nature, that along with its sensuous presentation it is fundamentally addressed to the mind. The mind is intended to be affected by it and to receive some kind of satisfaction in it.

This function of the work of art at once makes it clear how it is that it is in no way intended to be a natural product or, on the side where it impinges on Nature, to possess the living principle of Nature. This, at least, is a fact whether the natural product is ranked lower or higher than a mere work of art, as people are accustomed to express themselves in the tone of depreciation.

In other words the sensuous aspect of a work of art has a right to determinate existence only in so far as it exists for the human mind, not, however, in so far as itself, as a material object, exists for itself independently.

If we examine more closely in what way the sensuous materia is presented to man we find that what is so can be placed under various relations to the mind.

(αα) The lowest in grade and that least compatible with relation to intelligence is purely sensuous sensation. It consists primarily in mere looking, listening, just as in times of mental overstrain it may often be a relaxation to go about without thought, and merely listen and have a look round. The mind, however, does not rest in the mere apprehension of external objects through sight and hearing; it makes them objective to its own inward nature, which thereupon, is impelled itself to give effect to itself in these things as a further step under a sensuous mode, in other words, it relates itself to them as desire. In this appetitive relation to the external world man, as a sensuous65 particular thing, stands in a relation of opposition, to things in general as in the same way particulars. He does not address himself to them with open mind and the universal ideas of thought; he retains an isolated position, with its personal impulses and interests, relatively to objects as fixed in their obduracy as himself, and makes himself at home in them by using them, or eating them up altogether, and, in short, gives effect to his self-satisfaction by the sacrifice he makes of them. In this negative relation desire requires for itself not merely the superficial show of external objects, but the actual things themselves in their material concrete existence. Mere pictures of the wood, which it seeks to make use of, or of the animals, which it hopes to eat up, would be of no service to desire. Just as little is it possible for desire to suffer the object to remain in its freedom; its craving is just this to force it to annihilate this self-subsistency and freedom of external facts, and to demonstrate that these things are only there to be destroyed and devoured. But at the same time the particular person is neither himself free, begirt as he is by the particular limited and transitory interests of his desires, for his definite acts do not proceed from the essential universality and rationality of his will, neither is he free relatively to the external world, for desire66 remains essentially determined by things and related to them.

This relation, then, of desire is not that in which man is related to the work of art. He suffers it to exist in its free independence as an object; he associates himself with it without any craving of this kind, rather as with an object reflective of himself67, which exists solely for the contemplative faculty of mind. For this reason, as we have said, the work of art, although it possesses sensuous existence, does not require sensuous concrete existence, nor yet the animated life of such objects. Or, rather, we should add, it ought not to remain on such a level, in so far as its true function is exclusively to satisfy spiritual interests, and to shut the door on all approach to mere desire. Hence we can understand how it is that practical desire rates the particular works of Nature in the organic or inorganic world, which are at its service, more highly than works of art, which are obviously useless in this sense, and only contribute enjoyment to other capacities of man's spirit.

(ββ) A second mode under which the externally present comes before the conscious subject is, as contrasted with the single sensuous perception and active desire, the purely theoretical relation to the intelligence. The theoretic contemplation of objects has no interest in consuming the same in their particularity and satisfying or maintaining itself through the sense by their means; its object is to attain a knowledge of them in their universality, to seek out their ideal nature and principle, to comprehend them according to their notional idea. Consequently this contemplative interest is content to leave the particular things as they are, and stands aloof from them in their objective singularity, which is not the object of such a faculty's investigation. For the rational intelligence is not a property of the particular person in the sense that desire is so; it appertains to his singularity as being itself likewise essentially universal. So long as it persists in this relation of universality to the objects in question, it is his reason in its universal potency which is attempting to discover itself in Nature, and thereby the inward or essential being of the natural objects, which his sensuous existence does not present under its mode of immediacy, although such existence is founded therein. This interest of contemplation, the satisfaction of which is the task of science, is, however, shared in this scientific form just as little by art as it shared in the common table of those impulses of the purely practical desire. Science can, it is true, take as its point of departure the sensuous thing in its singularity, and possess itself of some conception, how this individual thing is present in its specific colour or form. But for all that this isolated thing of sense as such possesses no further relation to mind, inasmuch as the interest of intelligence makes for the universal, the law, the thought and notion of the object, and consequently not only does it forsake it in its immediate singularity, but it actually transforms it within the region of idea68, converting a concrete object of sense into an abstract subject-matter of thought, that is converting it into something other than the same object of its sensuous perception actually was. The artistic interest does not follow such a process, and is distinct from that of science for this reason. The contemplation of art restricts its interest simply in the way in which the work of art, as external object, in the directness of its definition, and in the singularity wherein it appears to sense, is manifested in all its features of colour, form, and sound, or as a single isolated vision of the whole; it does not go so far beyond the immediately received objective character as to propose, as is the case with science, the ideal or conceptive thinking of this particular objectivity under the terms of the rational and universal notion which underlies it.

The interest of art, therefore, is distinguishable from the practical interest of desire in virtue of the fact that it suffers its object to remain in its free independence, whereas desire applies it, even to the point of destruction, to its own uses. The contemplation of art, on the other hand, differs from that of a scientific intelligence in an analogous way69 in virtue of the fact that it cherishes an interest for the object in its isolated existence, and is not concerned to transform the same into terms of universal thought and notion.

(γγ) It follows, then, that, though the sensuous materia is unquestionably present in a work of art, it is only as surface or show of the sensuous that it is under any necessity to appear. In the sensuous appearance of the work of art it is neither the concrete material stuff, the empirically perceived completeness and extension of the internal organism which is the object of desire, nor is it the universal thought of pure ideality, which in either case the mind seeks for. Its aim is the sensuous presence, which, albeit suffered to persist in its sensuousness, is equally entitled to be delivered from the framework of its purely material substance. Consequently, as compared with the immediately envisaged and incorporated object of Nature, the sensuous presence in the work of art is transmuted to mere semblance or show, and the work of art occupies a midway ground, with the directly perceived objective world on one side and the ideality of pure thought on the other. It is not as yet pure thought, but, despite the element of sensuousness which adheres to it, it is no longer purely material existence, in the sense at least that stones, plants, and organic life are such. The sensuous element in a work of art is rather itself somewhat of ideal intension70, which, however, as not being actually the ideal medium of thought, is still externally presented at the same time as an object. This semblance of the sensuous presents itself to the mind externally as the form, visible appearance, and harmonious vibration of things. This is always assuming that it suffers the objects to remain in their freedom as objective facts, and does not seek to penetrate into their inward essence by abstract thought, for by doing so they would (as above explained) entirely cease to exist for it in their external singularity.

For this reason the sensuous aspect of art is only related to the two theoretical71 senses of sight and hearing; smell, on the other hand, taste, and the feeling of touch are excluded from the springs of art's enjoyment. Smell, taste, and touch come into contact with matter simply as such72, and with the immediate sensuous qualities of the same; smell with the material volatization through the air; taste with the material dissolution of substance, and touch or mere bodily feeling with qualities such as heat, coldness, smoothness, and so forth. On this account these senses cannot have to do with the objects of art, which ought to subsist in their actual and very independence, admitting of no purely sensuous or rather physical relation. The pleasant for such senses is not the beauty of art. Thus art on its sensuous side brings before us deliberately merely a shadow-world of shapes, tones, and imaged conceptions73, and it is quite beside the point to maintain that it is simply a proof of the impotence and limitations of man that he can only present us with the surface of the physical world, mere schemata, when he calls into being his creative works. In art these sensuous shapes and tones are not offered as exclusively for themselves and their form to our direct vision. They are presented with the intent to secure in such shape satisfaction for higher and more spiritual interests, inasmuch as they are mighty to summon an echo and response in the human spirit evoked from all depths of its conscious life. In this way the sensuous is spiritualized in art, or, in other words, the life of spirit comes to dwell in it under sensuous guise.

(β) For this reason, however, a product of art is only possible in so far as it has received its passage through the mind, and has originated from the productive activity of mind. This brings us to another question we have to answer, and it is this: "How is the sensuous or material aspect, which is imperative as a condition of art, operative in the artist as conjoined to his personal productive activity74?" Now this mode or manner of artistic production contains, as an activity personal to the artist, in essentials just the same determinants which we found posited in the work of art. It must be a spiritual activity, which, however, at the same time possesses in itself the element of sensuousness and immediacy. It is neither, on the one hand, purely mechanical work, such as is purely unconscious facility in sleight of hand upon physical objects, or a stereotyped activity according to teachable rule of thumb; nor, on the other hand, is it a productive process of science, which tends to pass from sensuous things to abstract ideas and thoughts, or is active exclusively in the medium of pure thought. In contrast to these the two aspects of mental idea and sensuous material must in the artistic product be united. For example, it would be possible in the case of poetical compositions to attempt to embody what was the subject-matter in the form of prosaic thought in the first instance, and only after doing so to attach to the same imaginative ideas rhymes and so on, so that as a net result such imagery would be appendent to the abstract reflections as so much ornament and decoration. An attempt of this kind, however, could only lead us to a poor sort of poetry, for in it we should have operative a twofold kind of activity in its separation, which in the activity of genuine artistic work only holds good in inseparable unity. It is this true kind of creative activity which forms what is generally described as the artistic imagination. It is the rational element, which in its import as spirit only exists, in so far as it actively forces its way into the presence of consciousness, yet likewise, and only subject to this condition, displays all its content to itself under a sensuous form. This activity possesses therefore a spiritual content, but it clothes the same in sensuous image, and for this reason that it is only able to come to a knowledge of the same under this sensuous garb. We may compare such a process with that of a man of experience in life, a man, shall we add, of real geniality and wit, who—while at the same time being fully conscious in what the main importance of life consists, what are the things which essentially bind men together, what moves them and is the mainspring of their lives—nevertheless has neither brought home this content in universal maxims, nor indeed is able to unfold it to others in the generalities of the reflective process, but makes these mature results of his intelligence without exception clear to himself and others in particular cases, whether real or invented, or by examples and such like which hit the mark. For in the ideas of such a man everything shapes itself into the concrete image determinate in its time and place, to which therefore the addition of names and any other detail of external condition causes no difficulty. Yet such a kind of imagination rather rests on the recollection of conditions, he has lived through, actual experience, than it is a creative power of itself. Memory preserves and renews the particularity and external fashion of such previous events with all their more distinct circumstances, but on the other hand does not suffer the universal to appear independently. The creative imagination of an artist is the imagination of a great mind and a big heart; it is the grasp and excogitation of ideas and shapes, and, in fact, nothing less than this grasp of the profoundest and most embracing human interests in the wholly definite presentation of imagery borrowed from objective experience. A consequence of this is, that imagination of this type75 is based in a certain sense on a natural gift, a general talent for it, as we say, because its creative power essentially implies an aspect of sense presentation. It is no doubt not unusual to speak in the same way of scientific "talent." The sciences, however, merely presuppose the general capacity for thought, which does not possess, as imagination does, together with its intellectual activity, a reference to the concrete testimony of Nature, but rather precisely abstracts from the activity that form in which we find it in Nature. It would be, therefore, truer to the mark if we said there is no specific scientific talent in the sense of a purely natural endowment. Imagination76, on the other hand, combines within it a mode of instinct-like creativeness. In other words the essential plasticity and material element in a work of art is subjectively present in the artist as part of his native disposition and impulse77, and as his unconscious activity belongs in part to that which man receives straight from Nature. No doubt the entire talent and genius of an individual is not wholly exhausted by that we describe as natural capability. The creation of art is quite as much a spiritual and self-cognized process; but for all that we affirm that its spirituality contains an element of plastic or configurative facility which Nature78 confers on it. For this reason, though almost anybody can reach a certain point in art, yet, in order to pass beyond this—and it is here that the art in question really begins—a talent for art which is inborn and of a higher order altogether is indispensable.

Considered simply as a natural basis a talent of this kind asserts itself for the most part in early youth, and is manifested in the restless persistency, ever intent with vivacity and alertness, to create artistic shapes in some particular sensuous medium, and to make this mode of expression and utterance the unique one or the one of main importance and most suitable. And thus also a virtuosity up to a certain point in the technique of art which is arrived at with ease is a sign of inborn talent. A sculptor finds everything convertible into plastic shape, and from early days takes to modelling clay; and so on generally whatever men of such innate powers have in their minds, whatever excites and moves their souls, becomes forthwith a plastic figure, a drawing, a melody, or a poem.

(γ) Thirdly, and in conclusion: the content of art is also in some respects borrowed from the objective world perceived in sense, that is Nature; or, in any case, if the content is also of a spiritual character, it can only be grasped in such a way, that the spiritual element therein, as human relations, for example, are displayed in the form of phenomena which possess objective reality.

3. There is yet another question to solve, namely, what the interest or the End is, which man proposes to himself in the creation of the content embodied by a work of art. This was, in fact, the third point of view, which we propounded relatively to the art-product. Its more detailed discussion will finally introduce us to the true notional concept of art itself.

If we take a glance at our ordinary ideas on this subject, one of the most prevalent is obviously

(a) The principle of the imitation of Nature. According to this view the essential aim or object of art consists in imitation, by which is understood a facility in copying natural forms as present to us in a manner which shall most fully correspond to such facts. The success of such an exact representation of Nature is assumed to afford us complete satisfaction.

(α) Now in this definition there is to start with absolutely nothing but the formal aim to bring about the bare repetition a second time by man, so far as his means will permit of this, of all that was already in the external world, precisely too in the way it is there. A repetition of this sort may at once be set down as

(αα) A superfluous task for the reason that everything which pictures, theatrical performances represent by way of imitation—animals, natural scenery, incidents of human life—we have already elsewhere before us in our gardens or at home, or in other examples of the more restricted or extended reaches of our personal acquaintance. Looked at, moreover, more closely, such a superfluity of energy can hardly appear otherwise than a presumptuous trifling; it is so because

(ββ) It lags so far behind Nature. In other words art is limited in its means of representation. It can only produce one-sided illusions, a semblance, to take one example, of real fact addressed exclusively to one sense. And, moreover, if it does wholly rely on the bare aim of mere imitation, instead of Nature's life all it gives us ever is the mere pretence of its substance. For some such reason the Turks, who are Mohammedans, will not put up with any pictures or copies of men and other objects. When James Bruce, in his travels through Abyssinia, showed a painted fish to a Turk, that worthy was at first astonished; but, quickly recovering himself, he made answer as follows: "If this fish shall rise up against you at the last day, and say, 'You have certainly given me a body, but no living soul,' how are you going to justify yourself against such a complaint?" The prophet himself, moreover, if we may believe the Sunna, said to the two women Ommi Hubiba and Ommi Selma, who told him of certain pictures in the Aethiopian churches: "These pictures will rise up in judgment against their creators on the Last Day." There are, no doubt, no less examples of completely deceptive imitation. The painted grapes of Zeuxis, have been accepted from antiquity and long after as an instance of art's triumph, and also of that of the principle of imitation, because, we are told, actual doves pecked at them. We might add to this ancient example that more modern one of Bültner's monkey, which bit to pieces a painted cockchafer in Rösel's "Diversions of Insects," and was consequently forgiven by his master, although he destroyed by this means a fine copy of the precious work, because he proved thus the excellence of its illustrations. But if we will only reflect a moment on such and other instances we can only come to the conclusion that instead of praising works of art, because they have deceived even doves and monkeys, the foolish people ought to be condemned who imagine that the quality of a work of art is enhanced if they are able to proclaim an effect of the same so miserable as the supreme and last word they can say for it. In short, to sum up, we may state emphatically that in the mere business of imitation art cannot maintain its rivalry with Nature, and if it makes the attempt it must look like a worm which undertakes to crawl after an elephant.

(γγ) Having regard, then, to this invariable failure, that is, relative failure of human imitation as contrasted with the natural prototype, we have no end left us but the pleasure offered by sleight of hand in its effort to produce something which resembles Nature. And it is unquestionably a fact that mankind are able to derive enjoyment from the attempt to reproduce with their individual labour, skill, and industry what they find around them. But a delight and admiration of this kind also becomes, if taken alone79, indeed just in proportion as the copy follows slavishly the thing copied, so much the more icily null and cold, or brings its reaction of surfeit and repugnance. There are portraits which, as has been drily remarked, are positively shameless in their likeness80; and Kant brings forward a further example of this pleasure in imitation pure and simple to the effect that we are very soon tired of a man—and there really are such—who is able to imitate the nightingale's song quite perfectly; for we no sooner find that it is a man who is producing the strain than we have had enough of it. We then take it to be nothing but a clever trick, neither the free outpouring of Nature, nor yet a work of art. We expect, in short, from the free creative power of men something quite other than a music of this kind, which only retains our interest when, as in the case of the nightingale's note, it breaks forth in unpremeditated fashion, resembling in this respect the rhythmic flood of human feeling, from the native springs of its life. And as a general rule this delight we experience in the skill of imitation can only be of a restricted character; it becomes a man better to derive enjoyment from that which he brings to birth from himself. In this respect the invention of every insignificant technical product is of higher rank; and mankind may feel more proud at having invented the hammer, nail, and so forth, than in making themselves adepts as imitators. For this abstract zest in the pursuit of imitation is on the same lines as the feat of the man who had taught himself to throw lentils through a small aperture without missing. He made an exhibition of this feat to Alexander, and Alexander merely made him a present as a reward for this art, empty and useless as it was, of a bushel of lentils.

(β) Inasmuch as, moreover, the principle of imitation is purely formal, objective beauty itself disappears, if that principle is accepted as the end. For the question is then no longer what is the constitution of that which is to be imitated, but simply whether the copy is correct or no. The object and the content of the beautiful comes to be regarded as a matter of indifference. When, in other words, putting the principle of mere imitation on one side, we speak, in connection with animals, human beings, places, actions, and characters, of a distinction between beauty and ugliness, it remains none the less the fact that relatively to such a principle we are referring to a distinction which does not properly belong to an art for which we have appropriated this principle of imitation to the exclusion of all others. In such a case, therefore, whenever we select objects and attempt to distinguish between their beauty and ugliness, owing to this absence of a standard we can apply to the infinite forms of Nature, we have in the final resort only left us the personal taste, which is fixed by no rule, and admits of no discussion. And, in truth, if we start, in the selection of objects for representation, from that which mankind generally discover as beautiful and ugly, and accept accordingly for artistic imitation, in other words, form their particular taste, there is no province in the domain of the objective world which is not open to us, and which is hardly likely to fail to secure its admirer. At any rate, among men we may assume, that, though the case of every husband and his wife may be disputed, yet at least every bridegroom regards his bride as beautiful, very possibly being the only person who does so; and that an individual taste for a beauty of this kind admits of no fixed rules at all may be regarded as a bit of luck for both parties. If, moreover, we cast a glance wholly beyond mere individuals and their accidental taste to that of nations, this again is full of diversity and opposition. How often we hear it repeated that a European beauty would not please a Chinaman, or even a Hottentot—a Chinaman having a totally distinct notion of beauty from that of a black man, and the black man in his turn from that of a European. Indeed, if we consider the works of art of those extra-European peoples, their images of gods, for instance, which have been imaginatively conceived as worthy of veneration and sublime, they can only appear to us as frightful idols; their music will merely ring in our ears as an abominable noise, while, from the opposite point of view, such aliens will regard our sculptures, paintings, and musical compositions as having no meaning or actually ugly.

(γ) But even assuming that we abstract from an objective principle of art, and retain the beautiful as established on the subjective and individual taste, we shall soon discover, from the point of view of art itself, that the imitation of natural objects, which appeared to be a universal principle, and indeed one secured by important authorities, is not to be relied upon, at least under this general and wholly abstract conception of it. If we look at the particular arts we cannot fail to observe that, albeit painting and sculpture portray objects which resemble those of Nature, or the type of which is essentially borrowed from Nature, the works of architecture on the contrary—and this, too, is one of the fine arts—quite as little as the compositions of poetry, to the extent at least that these latter are not restricted to mere description, cannot justly be described as imitations of Nature. At any rate, if we are desirous of maintaining such a thesis with respect to the arts thus excluded, we should find ourselves forced to make important deviations from the track, in order to condition our proposition in various ways, and level down our so-called truth at least to the plane of probability. But once accept probability, and we should again be confronted with a great difficulty in determining precisely what is and what is not probable; and in the end no one could really think of or succeed, even if he did so, in excluding from poetry all compositions of an entirely capricious and completely imaginative81 character.

The end or object of art must therefore consist in something other than the purely formal82 imitation of what is given to objective sense, which invariably can merely call into being technical legerdemain and not works of art83. It is no doubt an essential constituent of a work of art that it should have natural forms as a foundation, because the mode of its representation is in external form, and thereby along with it in that of natural phenomena. In painting it is obviously an important study to learn to copy with accuracy colours in their mutual relations, such as light effects and reflections, and so forth, and, with no less accuracy, the forms and shapes of objects carried into their most subtle gradations of line. It is in this respect that in modern times more particularly the principle of the imitation of Nature and naturalism generally has come into vogue. The object has been to recall an art, which has deteriorated into weakness and nebulosity, to the strength and determinate outlines of Nature, or, in yet another direction, as against the purely arbitrary caprice and convention of a studio, which is in truth as remote from Nature as it is from art, and merely indicates the path of art's declension, to assert the claim of the legitimate, direct, and independent, no less than coherent stability of natural fact. But while admitting that from a certain point of view such an effort is reasonable enough, yet for all that the naturalism which it demands, taken by itself, is neither the substantive thing, not yet of primary importance, in the true basis of art; and although the external fact in its natural appearance constitutes an element of essential value, yet the objective fact alone does not supply the standard of rightness, nor is the mere imitation of external phenomena, in their external shape that is, the end of art.

(b) And as a consequence of this we have the further question—"What is the true content of art, and with what aim is that content brought before us?" On this head we are confronted by the common opinion that it is the task and object of art to bring before our sense, feeling, and power of emulation84 every thing that the spirit of man can perceive or conceive. Art has in short to realize for us the well-known saying, "Nihil humani a me alienum puto." Its object is therefore declared to be that of arousing and giving life to slumbering emotions, inclinations, passions of every description, of filling the heart up to the brim; of compelling mankind, whether cultured or the reverse, to pass through all that the human soul carries in its most intimate and mysterious chambers, all that it is able to experience and reproduce, all that the heart is able to stir and evoke in its depths and its countlessly manifold possibilities; and yet further to deliver to the domain of feeling and the delight of our vision all that the mind may possess of essential and exalted being in its thought and the Idea—that majestic hierarchy of the noble, eternal, and true; and no less to interpret for us misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime; to make the hearts of men realize through and through85 all that is atrocious and dreadful, no less than every kind of pleasure and blessedness; and last of all to start the imagination like a rover among the day-dream playing-fields of the fancy, there to revel in the seductive mirage of visions and emotions which captivate the senses. All this infinitely manifold content—so it is held—it is the function of art to explore, in order that by this means the experience of our external life may be repaired of its deficiencies, and yet from a further point of view that the passions we share with all men86 may be excited, not merely that the experiences of life may not have us unmoved, but that we ourselves may thereafter long to make ourselves open channels of a universal experience. Such a stimulus is not presented on the plane of actual experience itself87, but can only come through the semblance of it, that is to say through the illusions which art, in its creations, substitutes for the actual world. And the possibility of such a deception, by means of the semblances of art, depends on the fact that all reality must for man pass through the medium of the vision and imaginative idea; and it is only after such a passage that it penetrates the emotional life and the will. In such a process it is of no consequence whether it is immediate external reality which claims his attention, or whether the result is effected by some other way, in other words by means of images, symbols, and ideas, which contain and display the content of such actuality. Men are able to imagine things, which do not actually exist, as if they did exist. Consequently it is precisely the same thing for our emotional life, whether it is the objective world or merely the show of the same, in virtue of which a situation, a relation, or any content of life, in short, is brought home to us. Either mode is equally able to stir in us an echo to the essential secret which it carries, whether it be in grief or joy, in agitation or convulsion, and can cause to flow through us the feelings and passions of anger, hate, pity, anxiety, fear, love, reverence and admiration, honour and fame.

The awakening of every kind of emotion in us, the drawing our soul through every content of life, the realization of all these movements of soul-life by means of a presence which is only external as an illusion—this it is which, in the opinion described, is pre-eminently regarded as the peculiar and transcendent power of artistic creation.

We must not, however, overlook the fact that in this view of art as a means to imprint on the soul and the mind what is good and evil alike, to make man more strong in the pursuit of what is noblest, no less than enervate his definite course88, by transporting his emotional life through the most sensuous and selfish desires, the task as yet proposed to art remains throughout of an entirely formal character; without possessing independently an assured aim all that art can offer is the empty form for every possible kind of ideal and formative content.

(c) As a matter of fact art does not possess this formal side, namely, that it is able to bring before our senses and feeling and artistically adorn every possible kind of material, precisely as the thoughts of ordinary reflection89 elaborate every possible subject-matter and modes of action, supplying the same with its equipment of reasons and vindications. In the presence, however, of such a variety of content we cannot fail to observe that these diversified emotions and ideas, which it is assumed art has to stimulate or enforce, intersect each other, contradict and mutually cancel each other. Indeed, under this aspect, the more art inspires men to emotions thus opposed, to that extent precisely it merely enlarges the cleavage in their feelings and passions, and sets them staggering about in Bacchantic riot, or passes over into sophistry and scepticism precisely as your ordinary free thinkers do. This variety of the material of art itself compels us, therefore, not to remain satisfied with so formal a determination. Our rational nature forces its way into this motley array of discord, and demands to see the resurrection of a higher and more universal purpose from these elements despite their opposition, and to be conscious of its attainment. Just in a similar manner the social life of mankind and the State are no doubt credited with the aim that in them all human capacities and all individual potencies should meet with expansion and expression in all their features and tendencies. But in opposition to so formal a view there very quickly crops up the question in what unity these manifold manifestations are to be concentrated, and what single end they must have for their fundamental concept and ultimate end. Just as in the case of the notional concept of the human State so too there arises in that of human art the need, as to a part thereof, for an end common to the particular aspects, no less than in part for one which is more exalted and substantive in its character90.

As such a substantive end the conclusion of reflection is readily brought home to us that art possesses at once the power and function to mitigate the savagery of mere desires.

(α) With regard to this first conception we have merely to ascertain what characteristic peculiar to art implies this possibility of eliminating this rawness of desire, and of fettering and instructing the impulses and passions. Coarseness in general has its ground-root in an unmitigated self-seeking of sensuous impulses, which take their plunge off and are exclusively intent on the satisfaction of their concupiscence. Sensual desire is, however, all the more brutal and domineering, in proportion as, in its isolation and confinement, it appropriates the entire man, so that he does not retain the power to separate himself in his universal capacity from this determinacy and to maintain the conscious presence of such universality91. Even if the man in such a case exclaims, "the passion is mightier than myself," though it is true no doubt that for that man's mind the abstract ego is separate from the particular passion, yet it is purely so in a formal way. All that such a separation amounts to is that as against the force of the passion the ego, in its universal form or competency, is of no account at all. The savageness of passion consists therefore in the fusion92 of the ego as such a universal with the confined content of its desire, so that a man no longer possesses volitional power outside this single passion. Such savageness and untamed force of the possibilities of passion art mitigates in the first instance to the extent that it brings home to the mind and imagination of man what he does actually feel and carry into effect in such a condition. And even if art restricts itself to this that it places before the vision of the mind pictures of passion, nay, even assuming such to be flattering pictures, yet for all that a power of amelioration is contained therein. At least we may say, that by this means is brought before a man's intelligence what apart from such presentment he merely is. The man in this way contemplates his impulses and inclinations; and whereas apart from this they whirl him away without giving him time to reflect, he now sees them outside himself and already, for the reason that they come before him rather as objects than a part of himself, he begins to be free from them as aliens. For this reason it may often happen that an artist, under the weight of grief, mitigates and weakens the intensity of his own emotions in their effect upon him by the artistic representation of them. Comfort, too, is to be found even in tears. The man who to start with is wholly given up to and concentrated in sorrow, is able thus, at any rate, to express that which is merely felt within in a direct way. Yet more alleviating is the utterance of such inner life in words, images, musical sound, and shapes.

It was therefore a good old custom in the case of funerals and layings-out to appoint wailing women, in order to give audible expression to grief, or generally to create an external sympathy. For manifestations of sympathy bring the content of human sorrow to the sufferer in an objective form; he is by their repetition driven to reflect upon it, and the burden is thereby made lighter. And so it has from of old been considered that to weep or to speak oneself out are equally means whereby freedom is secured from the oppressing burden, or at least the heart is appreciably lifted. Consequently the mitigation of the violence of passions admits of this general explanation that man is released from his unmediated confinement93 in an emotion, becomes aware of it as a thing external to himself, to which he is consequently obliged to place himself in an ideal relation. Art, while still remaining within the sphere of the senses, faces man from the might of his sensitive experience by means of its representations. No doubt we frequently hear that pet phrase of many that it is man's duty to remain in immediate union with Nature. Such union is in its unmediated purity nothing more or less than savagery and wildness; and art, precisely in the way that it dissolves this unity for human beings, lifts them with gentle hands over this inclosure in Nature. The way men are occupied with the objects of art's creation remains throughout of a contemplative94 character; and albeit in the first instance it educates merely an attention to the actual facts portrayed, yet over and beyond this, and with a power no less decisive, it draws man's attention to their significance, it forces him to compare their content with that of others, and to receive without reserve the general conclusions of such a survey and all the ramifications95 such imply.

(β) To the characteristic above discussed adheres in natural sequence the second which has been predicated of art as its essential aim, namely, the purification of the passions, an instruction, that is, and a building to moral completeness. For the defining role that art has to bridle savage nature and educate the passions remained one wholly formal and general, so that the further question must arise as to a specific kind and an essential and culminating point of such an educative process.

(αα) The doctrine of the purification of the passions shares in the defect previously noted as adhering to the mitigation of desires. It does, however, emphasize more closely the fact that the representations of art needed a standard, by means of which it would be possible to estimate their comparative worth and unworth. This standard is just their effectiveness to separate what is pure from that which is the reverse in the passions. Art, therefore, requires a content which is capable of expressing this purifying power, and in so far as the power to assert such effectiveness is assumed to constitute the substantive end of art, the purifying content will consist in asserting that effective power before consciousness in its universality and essentiality.96

(ββ) It is a deduction from the point of view just described that it is the end of art to instruct. Thus, on the one hand, the peculiar character of art consists in the movement of the emotions and in the satisfaction which is found in this movement, even in fear, compassion, in painful agitation and shock—that is to say, in the satisfying concern of the feelings and passions, and to that extent in a complacent, delighted, or enthusiastic attitude to the objects of art and their presentation and effect: while, on the other hand, this artistic object is held to discover its higher standard exclusively in its power to instruct, in the fabula docet, and thereby in the usefulness, which the work of art is able to exercise on the recipient. In this respect the Horatian adage

Et prodesse volunt et delectare poetae97

contains, concentrated into a few words, all that in after times has been drawn out as a doctrine of art through every conceivable grade of dilution to the last extreme of insipidity.

In respect, then, to such instruction we have to ask whether the idea is that the same ought to be direct or indirect in the work of art, explicit or implicit.

Now if the question at issue is one of general importance to art about a universal rather than contingent purpose, such an ultimate end, on account of the essential spirituality of art, can only be itself of spiritual import; in other words, so far from being of accidental importance it must be true in virtue of its own nature and on its own account. An end of this kind can only apply to instruction in so far as a genuine and essentially explicit content is brought before the mind by means of the work of art. From such a point of view we are entitled to affirm that it is the function of art to accept so much the more of a content of this nature within its compass in proportion to the nobility of its rank, and that only in the verity of such a content will it discover the standard according to which the pertinency of or the reverse of what is expressed is adjudged. Art is in truth the primary98 instructress of peoples.

But, on the other hand, if the object of instruction is so entirely treated as an end that the universal nature of the content presented cannot fail to be asserted and rendered-bluntly and on its own account explicit as abstract thesis, prosaic reflection or general maxim, rather than merely in an indirect way contained by implication in the concrete embodiment of art, then and in that case, by means of such a separation, the sensuous, plastic configuration, which is precisely that which makes the artistic product a work of art, is merely an otiose accessory, a husk, a semblance, which are expressly posited as nothing more than shell and semblance. Thereby the very nature of a work of art is abused. For the work of art ought not to bring before the imaginative vision a content in its universality as such, but rather this universality under the mode of individual concreteness and distinctive sensuous particularity. If the work in question does not conform to such a principle, but rather sets before us the generalization of its content with the express object of instruction pure and simple, then the imaginative no less than the material aspect of it are merely an external and superfluous ornament, and the work of art is itself a shattered thing within that ornament99, a ruin wherein form and content no longer appear as a mutually adherent growth. For, in the case supposed, the particular object of the senses and the ideal content apprehended by the mind100 have become external to one another.

Furthermore, if the object of art is assumed to consist in utilitarian instruction of this kind, that other aspect of delight, entertainment, and diversion is simply abandoned on its own account as unessential; it has now to look for its substance to the utility of the matter of instruction, to which it is simply an accompaniment. But this amounts to saying, that art does not carry its vocation and purpose in itself, but that its fundamental conception is in something else, to which it subserves as a means. Art becomes, in short, merely one of the many means, which are either of use, or may be employed to secure, the aim of instruction. This brings us to the boundary line where art can only cease to be an end on its own independent account; it is deliberately deposed either to the mere plaything of entertainment, or a mere means of instruction.

(γγ) The line of this limit is most emphasized when the question is raised as to the end or object of highest rank for the sake of which the passions have to be purified or men have to be instructed. This goal has frequently in modern times been identified with moral improvement, and the end of art is assumed to consist in this that its function is to prepare our inclinations and impulses, and generally to conduct us to the supreme goal of moral perfection. In this view we find instruction and purification combined. The notion is that art by the insight it gives us of genuine moral goodness, in other words, through its instruction, at the same time summons us to the process of purification, and in this way alone can and ought to bring about the improvement of mankind as the right use they can make of it and its supreme object.

With reference to the relation in which art stands to the end of improvement, we may practically say the same thing as we did about the didactic end. It may readily be admitted that art as its principle ought not to make the immoral and its advance its end. But it is one thing deliberately to make immorality the aim of its presentation and another not expressly to do so in the case of morality. It is possible to deduce an excellent moral from any work of art whatever; but such depends, of course, on a particular interpretation and consequently on the individual who draws the moral. The defence is made of the most immoral representations on the ground that people ought to become acquainted with evil and sin in order to act morally. Conversely, it has been maintained that the portrayal of Mary Magdalene, the fair sinner, who afterwards repented, has seduced many into sin, because art makes repentance look so beautiful, and you must first sin before you can repent. The doctrine of moral improvement, however logically carried out, is not merely satisfied that a moral should be conceivably deducible from a work of art through interpretation; on the contrary, it would have the moral instruction clearly made to emerge as the substantive aim of the work101; nay, further, it would deliberately exclude from art's products all subjects, characters, actions, and events which fail to be moral in its own sense. For art, in distinction from history and the sciences, which have their subject-matter determined for them, has a choice in the selection of its subjects.

In order that we may be in a position to estimate this view of the moral end of art on the basis of principle, we ought above all to raise the question as to the precise standpoint of the morality which is recommended for our reception by this view. If we examine more closely the standpoint of morality such, as is submitted us to-day under an enlightened interpretation102, we soon discover that its conception does not immediately coincide with that which we describe in a general way as virtue, respectability103, uprightness, and so forth. To be a respectable honest man is not sufficient to make a man moral in the sense under discussion, for morality in this sense implies reflection and the definite consciousness of what is consonant with duty, and the acts which issue from such a consciousness. Now duty is itself the law of the will, which man, however, freely establishes out of himself, and thereon is taken to determine himself to this duty for duty's sake and its fulfilment's sake; in other words he only does good as acting under the conviction already secured that it is the good. This law—the duty which is selected and carried into effect for duty's sake to be the rule of conduct out of free conviction and the inner conscience—is, on its own account, the abstract universal of the will, which is the absolute antithesis to Nature, the impulses of sense, selfish interests, the passions and all that is commonly described collectively as emotional life and heart. In this opposition the one side is regarded as negating the other; and for the reason that both are present in the individual in their opposition, he is compelled, as determining himself from his own identity, to adopt the choice of one to the rejection of the other. Such a decision and the act carried out in accordance with it merely become moral from the standpoint now considered on the one hand in virtue of the free conviction of duty, and on the other by reason of the victory secured not only over the particular will, the natural motives, inclinations, passions and so on, but also in virtue of the noble feelings and higher impulses. For the modern ethic starts from the fixed opposition between the will in its spiritual universality and its sensuous natural particularity; it does not consist in the perfected mediation of these opposed aspects, but in their mutual conflict as opposed to one another, which carries with it the demand, that the impulses in their antagonism to duty ought to yield to it.

An opposition of this nature is not merely present to mind in the restricted confines of moral action; it asserts itself as a fundamental severation and antithesis between that which is actual essentially, and on its own account, and that which is external reality and existence104. Apprehended in entirely formal terms it is the contrast exposed by the universal, in so far as it is fixed in its substantive independence over against the particular, as the latter is also on its part rigidly exterior to it. In more concrete form it appears in Nature as the opposition of the abstract law to the wealth of particular phenomena, each of which possesses its specific characteristics. It appears in mind as that between the sensuous and spiritual in man, as the conflict of spirit with the flesh; it is that of duty for duty's sake; of the cold imperative with particular impulses, the warm heart, the sensuous inclinations and impulses, in a word with man simply as individual. Or it appears as the harsh antagonism between the inward freedom and the external necessity of natural condition, and, lastly, as the contradiction of the dead, essentially emptied, concept, when confronted with the fulness of concrete life, in other words, of theory and subjective thought as contrasted with objective existence and experience.

Such are antithetical points of view, the discovery of which is not to be ascribed either to the ingenuity of reflective minds, or the pedantry of a philosophical cult. They have in all ages, if in manifold guise, occupied and disquieted the human consciousness, although it is our more modern culture which has emphasized their opposition most deliberately, and forced it in each case to the keenest edge of contradiction. Intellectual culture, or rather the rapier edge of the modern understanding, creates in man this contrast, which converts him into some amphibious animal. He is compelled to live in two worlds mutually contradictory; and in this divided house consciousness, too, wanders aimlessly; tossed over from one side to the other it is unable to discover permanent satisfaction105 for itself in either one side or the other. For, on the one hand, we see mankind confined within common reality and earthly temporal condition, oppressed by necessity and want, in Nature's toils, entangled in matter, in sensuous aims and their enjoyment, dominated and whirled away by impulse and passion. On the other hand he lifts himself up to eternal idea's, to a realm of thought and freedom. As Will he legislates for himself universal laws and destinations106, he disrobes the world of the life and blossom of its reality; he dissolves it in abstractions, that the mind may vindicate its right and intrinsic worth by this very dissolution of Nature's rights and such maltreatment, a process in which he brings home to her again the necessity and violence he has experienced at her hands. Such a cleavage of life and mind is, however, accompanied for modern culture with the demand that a contradiction so deep-seated should be dissolved. The mere understanding of abstract reflection is unable to disengage itself from the obstinacy of such contradictions. The solution consequently remains here for consciousness a mere ought, and the present and reality is merely moved within the continuous unrest of a to and fro, which seeks for that reconciliation it is unable to find. The problem therefore arises whether such a many-sided and fundamental antagonism, which is unable to pass beyond the mere ought and postulate of its solution, can be the essential and wholly expressed truth, and107, indeed, the final and supreme consummation. If the culture of the civilized world has fallen into such a contradiction it becomes the task of philosophy to dissolve the same, in other words to demonstrate that neither the one side or the other, in its one sided abstractness, should be held to possess truth, but that they contain within themselves the principle of their dissolution. The truth only then comes before us in the reconciliation and mediation of both; and this mediation is no mere postulate, but is, in its essential nature, and in its actual presence the at the same time accomplished and self-accomplishing. And, in fact, this view agrees directly with unwitting108 faith and will, which always has before its conscious life this contradiction in its resolution, and in action accepts it as its aim and carries it into effect. All that philosophy achieves is to contribute the insight of thought into the essence of such cleavage. It demonstrates, or seeks to demonstrate, how that which truth really is is simply the resolution of the fracture, and, be it added, not in the sense that this antagonism and its alternative aspects in any way are not, but in the sense that they are there109 in reconciliation.

(d) When discussing moral improvement as the ultimate end accepted for art it was found that its principle pointed to a higher standpoint. It will be necessary also to vindicate this standpoint for art.

Thereby the false position to which we have already directed attention vanishes, namely, that art has to serve as a means for moral ends and the moral end of the world generally by means of its didactive and ameliorating influence, and by doing so has its essential aim not in itself, but in something else. If we therefore continue still to speak of an end or goal of art, we must at once remove the perverse idea, which in the question, "What is the end?" will still make it include the supplemental query, "What is the use?" The perverseness consists in this that the work of art would then have to be regarded as related to something else, which is presented us as what is essential and ought to be. A work of art would in that case be merely a useful instrument in the realization of an end which possessed real and independent importance outside the realm of art. As opposed to this we must maintain that it is art's function to reveal truth under the mode of art's sensuous or material configuration, to display the reconciled antithesis previously described, and by this means to prove that it possesses its final aim in itself, in this representation in short and self-revelation. For other ends such as instruction, purification, improvement, procuring of wealth, struggle after fame and honour have nothing whatever to do with this work of art as such, still less do they determine the fundamental idea110 of it.

It is then from this point of view, into which the reflective consideration of our subject-matter finally issues, that we have to grasp the fundamental idea of art in terms of its ideal or inward necessity, as it is also from this point of view that historically regarded the true appreciation and acquaintance with art took its origin. For that antithesis, to which we have drawn attention, did not merely assert its presence within the general thought of educated men, but equally in philosophy as such. It was only after philosophy was in a position to overcome this opposition absolutely that it grasped the fundamental notion of its own content, and, to the extent it did so, the idea of Nature and of art.

For this reason, as this point of view implies the reawakening of philosophy in the widest connotation of the term, so also it is the re-awakening of the science of art. We may go further and affirm that aesthetic as a science is in a real sense primarily indebted to this re-awakening for its true origination, and art for its higher estimation.