Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“ What he feels is at once wafted into melody, just as the life of a painter is impressed upon form and colour, or that of a poet is transmuted into the creations of his imagination, that poetry which clothes his ideas in the beauty and music of the written word. And this gift of vital form the artist does not merely possess as an imaginative power, a phantasy, an emotional impulse "that leaves not a wrack behind," but as a direct stimulus of feeling to active enterprise, as a gift, that is, of real executive accomplishment. ”

“ What must first of all occur to us is the question whether Fine Art in itself is truly susceptible to a scientific treatment. It is a simple fact that beauty and art pervade all the affairs of life like some friendly genius, and embellish with their cheer all our surroundings, mental no less than material. They alleviate the strenuousness of such relations, the varied changes of actual life; they banish the tedium of our existence with their entertainment; and where nothing really worth having is actually achieved, it is at least an advantage that they occupy the place of actual vice. ”

“ If such fellow-feeling is not forthcoming we find the very heart of us troubled to its depths and infinitely bruised. We have lost at one stroke all humanity, friendship, and love. We are unable to put away with whatever act of pedantry or rudeness may be in question, some trivial circumstance or stupidity over which the vision of any character of breadth or strength would pass without a tremor. It whirls away the thought of everything else, and that which is by itself of least significance proves to be that which finally most reduces us to despair. ”

“ No dancing dervish himself could give it us more frankly in its impression of entire health and jubilant vitality. This freedom from all external care, this inward liberty reflecting itself in that which is visible, is precisely that which the notion of the Ideal demands. There is in Paris a certain portrait of a boy by Raphael; the head leans propped at leisure on one arm, and gazes with such ecstasy of careless contentment into the open landscape that we are loth to turn away from a picture expressive of such health and exuberant animation. ”

“ The human body, in virtue of its more exalted station, presents us with a striking contrast. In this we are everywhere reminded that man is in possession of a unity of feeling, a soul. The human skin is not covered over plant-like with an apparently lifeless sheath; the pulsation of the blood is visible throughout the entire surface; the beating heart of life is everywhere at the same time apparent; and we have in this outward manifestation, as it were, the real fount Of life made visible, the turgor vitae as it streams from its centre. ”

“ The ideal work of art does not merely embrace the outward semblance of the inward spirit as clothed in the forms of its actual existence, but should rather succeed in manifesting the essential truth and reason of the real itself. This element of reason, as determined in the particular object the artist has selected, must not merely be pressed in his own consciousness, as an active influence, but must already have been reflected upon in that essential and rich significance which brings it into relation with the entire breadth and depth of reality. ”

“ This is the prose of the world, as presented to our own consciousness no less than to that of others; a world of finitude and change, a world immeshed in relation and submerged beneath the pressure of necessity, a world from which no individual can extricate himself. The central paradox of life confronts every unit of the living whole. On the one hand there is the impulse of individuality to perfect its isolated unity in self-exclusion ”

“ Agreeably to this view art is a spiritual dominion, whose sole object is to exalt us above the sphere of material wants, necessities, and dependence, and to liberate us from the logic, and we may add the comedy, of facts, which in this field claim the exclusive attention of our humanity. For, apart from any other consideration, all that meets us upon this terra firma of life's prose is for the most part of a purely conventional character, and, conditioned as it is by time, space, and custom, simply a congeries of contingent facts, which it is derogatory to the nature of art to accept. ”

“ To sum up, then, though it is true that under the present condition of the civilized world a man may act independently for himself in many directions, the fact remains that in whatever direction he may turn he is still only a member of a fixed order of society and appears as such limited in his range rather than the vital representative and individual embodiment of society itself. He acts necessarily under such a condition of restriction, and our interest in such a personality, no less than in the content of his aims and activity, is entirely devoid of completeness. ”

“ Thus, to take an example, we find the art of painting, in its representation of the Passion, not unfrequently dallies round the expression of ribaldry visible in the hideous contortions and grimaces of tormenting common soldiers; and, in its attachment to such discordant emotions, especially when depicting what is criminal, shameless, or evil, permitting the glad serenity of the Ideal to pass away. Even when such disruption loses its force, we find frequently that ugliness, or, at least, the absence of real beauty, is set up in its place. ”

“ If an action is to be represented with all the facts that condition it, poetry is the only real art that can attempt this. Such a complete exposition of historical fact has already become, as a certain proverb reminds us, rather a wearisome business; it is, in fact, more within the province of simple prose, and, in contrast with such completeness, poetry will rather consider its true function to be that of taking its audience at once into the heart of the matter. ”

“ All art, however, which is true to its essential notion, should reflect on us the vision of a harmony. Meanness, above all, is despicable, for it is a quality which arises from the envy and hatred of all that is noble, and does not shrink from distorting even a power that is essentially based upon the good into a means conformable to its own perverse and shameless passion. The great poets and artists of the classical world have in consequence never presented us with the vision of absolute evil and depravity. ”

“ Indeed, if we look at yet better examples of art than Kotzebue's, such as those we have already glanced at in the youthful productions of Goethe, we shall find that this realistic type of objectivity can be made essentially living in its expression, and by virtue of this quality prove highly attractive to ourselves, and yet, on account of the fact that the artistic form remains defective, fail to arrive at the real beauty of art. Purely external objectivity, therefore, which still lacks the abiding and substantial significance, is not that for which an artist should strive. ”

“ The use of words of vital significance, an imagination which can associate itself with all the world, can restore the Past to the Present, can transform the entire external environment of man's life to a symbolical expression of his spirit, can bravely adventure into the depths of comprehensive thought, and, while doing so, reveal an exuberant, capacious, clear, exalted, and noble nature—a wealth of character such as this, freely expressing such a world, is a prize indeed for the Lyric Muse. ”

“ The truth is that the reflection of the formal logic is sure to emphasize one aspect of a character, and conclude that the entire man is minted under its impression to the exclusion of all others. To such everything that asserts itself as alien to the hallmark of its beggarly mintage can only appear as an inconsequence. In the truely rational contemplation of the whole as distinct from the parts, and thereby of the living thing, that which appears as inconsequent will be precisely that which brings all into fit co-ordination. For our humanity is just this very paradox. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That I find it necessary to provide myself with nourishment, food and drink, a house to live in, and clothing to wear, seats to sit upon, and everything else incidental to domestic life is no doubt an inevitable concomitant of the fact that I live in the world; but the life that only I myself experience within me permeates, this external aspect of my life so completely, that men are fain to clothe and arm the very gods themselves, and to picture them under conditions inseparable from a variety of things they seek to possess, and find their satisfaction in obtaining. ”

“ The horrible, unfortunate, the harshness of dominion, and the obduracy of superior power may form part of the content and burden of the imagination when such characteristics are exalted and carried by the abundant greatness of a particular character or object. Evil, however, taken simply for what it is, envy, cowardice, and meanness, is merely repulsive. The devil, if we take him for what he really ought to be, is consequently a bad subject, or rather a figure for which Art has no uses at all. He is just a falsehood and nothing more, and consequently an extremely prosaic personality. ”

“ If love is, as in the case assumed, the one and only bond of a union, and is associated with nothing else throughout the entire sphere of all that men and women have to live through in just accordance with that which a particular status requires from their intelligence and experience, it must necessarily remain devoid of content and is simply a union of the senses. Love, to be wholly complete, is nothing less than a real harmony of the entire conscious life, in which the full nobility of sentiment can be shared and appreciated. ”

“ We are contented enough on a mere reading, but in the theatre our enjoyment ceases. Critics and men of learning no doubt stick fast to their idea that such exquisite scraps of genuine history should be presented on the stage on their own merits and come down severely upon the wretched taste of the public, when it lets us see how bored it is over such things. Unfortunately a work of art and the direct enjoyment we receive from it is in no sense particularly for critics or savants, but for this very public. Critics have really no reason to give themselves such airs. ”

“ Conversely we may exclaim that art gives to her forms the dilation of a thousand-eyed Argus, through which the inward life of Spirit at every point breaks into view. And not merely is it the bodily form, the expression of countenance, the attitude and demeanour which thus avails; the same appearance is everywhere visible in actions and events, speech and voice-modulation, in short, under every condition of life through which it passes, and under which it is possible for soul to make itself recognized in its freedom and ideal infinity. ”

“ It is lastly a peculiar characteristic of the beauty of Nature that it should excite or exercise a harmonious influence over our emotional life. A mood of this kind is aroused by the stillness of moonlight, the peace of a valley, through which some brook or other meanders, the sublimity of the immeasurable storm-tossed sea, the tranquil depth of the star-strewn heavens. ”

“ No doubt there is a sense in which we can ascribe personality to a state, or nation, in the concrete unity of its life. But while admitting that unity such as this, which is not sensuous but ideal, can be "effective and actual," I find it difficult to conclude that Hegel did himself hold that the unity of the Divine Being was merely identical with the unity or totality of concrete human life as reflected upon by single individuals. How far is human life as a whole on this Earth a unity or totality at all? ”

“ In this way the originality of art absorbs every accidental trait peculiar to a given personality; but it only absorbs it that the artist may follow without reserve the impulse and bent of his genius as inspired through every fibre of the material he moulds, and instead of reflecting a purely barren wilfulness and caprice of his own may give an objective form to his true artistic individuality conjoined with consummate accomplishment. ”

“ However much we have finally arrived in our consideration of the action at a point where the definition and differentiation of the Ideal is of the first importance, nevertheless the very notion of art renders it necessary that in the sphere of true beauty, be the aspect of it whatsoever it may, it must still have upon it the stamp of the Ideal; it cannot, that is to say, maintain itself without rationality and the justification it implies. Interests of an ideal character must inevitably be in conflict with another, so that might is opposed to might. ”

“ The artist, therefore, in this initial stage of our analysis is not merely thrown back upon images of his own creation, but is rather compelled to turn aside from the dull level of ideals falsely so called and to boldly enter the fields of Nature and Life. To attempt art or poetry merely with fanciful ideas of our own is always a suspicious way of starting on our journey; for the artist must mould his creations from the abundance of his life and by no means from the overplus of abstract generalities. ”

“ We have already analysed this state of society in another connection under the description of the heroic and pre-eminently ideal world-condition. The heroic age is no longer restricted to that idyllic garden of spiritual attenuation, but includes within its borders passions and aims of deeper moment; and yet withal that which in the circle of the individual life touches closest the satisfaction of each man's immediate wants is still the entire product of his own activity. ”

“ Not only has art at its service the entire wealth of natural form in all their superabundant variety, but the creative imagination is able inexhaustibly to extend the realm of form by its own productions and modifications. In the presence of such an immeasurable depth of inspired creation and its free products, it may not unreasonably be supposed that thought will lose the courage to apprehend such in their apparent range, to pronounce its verdict thereon, and to appropriate such beneath its universal formulae. ”

“ A really first-rate artist has the lust [Pg 388] of work born in him and an imperative impulse akin to any other natural want to give artistic form to his emotional and imaginative life that is in him. His emotional life and his ideas irresistibly run into this artistic mould; he finds as it were the instrument already within him made to the hand, so fitted to express his soul-life that all the pains it takes him to learn it are as nothing. A musician can thus unfold to us in his melodies the depths of all that stirs and moves his soul and only by this means. ”

“ Here, for the first time, truth is lifted up from its environment of temporal conditions, from its running to and fro among the whirl of finite particularity, and attains repose; nay, more than this, discovers an external form, from which the hunger of Nature and the prose of life no longer stare at us. Here at last we have a form worthy of substantial truth, which is wholly self-contained and self-dependent, determining with freedom its own content, and not driven from such self-assertion by the weight of that of others. ”

“ Whoever has reached such a standpoint of god-like geniality consequently looks down in his superior fashion on all other mortals. They are ruled out as narrow and dull, in so far, that is, as law, morals, and the rest retain for them a validity that is assured, obligatory, and essential. And the individual who thus lives this artist life, which he does no doubt associate with others, whether friends or mistresses or I know not what, yet as man of genius sets no real stock on such relations as they stand to his individual personality and particular actions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We do not, of course, suggest that the artist must therefore comprehend in the form of philosophical thought this essential core of reason in his experience; albeit such is the fundamental rock upon which religion no less than philosophy and art is based. Philosophy is by no means essential to his outfit; and, in fact, if he once begins to think about things as a philosopher, he busies himself with modes of thought which are diametrically opposed to that which should engage an artist's attention. ”