Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“ These plastic shapes of beauty are not merely stone and bronze, but also the infinite form of subjective life vanishes from them in their content and expression. We may become as enthusiastic as we please over their beauty and art, but for all that our enthusiasm is and remains something native to our own souls; it is not really at home in the objects which it thus contemplates, that is in the gods themselves. To complete the true totality a real reciprocity is required on this side also of the subjective, self-knowing unity and infinity ”

“ Rather it is the realization and progress of art itself, which, by envisaging for present life the material in which it actually dwells, itself materially assists on this very path, in each step of its advance, to make itself free of the content that is presented. In the very fact that we have an object set before our ocular or spiritual vision, whether it be by Art or the medium of Thought, with a completeness which practically exhausts it, so that we have emptied it, and nothing further remains for our eyes to discover or our souls to explore, in that alone the vital interest disappears. ”

“ In passion soul-life is restricted and fettered to its own seclusion, narrowed down to the point of concentrated heat, either thereby a mute, an ejaculation of monosyllables, or the rage that vents itself at random. Greatness of soul and intellectual power alike refuse to submit to such limitations: they are wings which carry the soul in a fine tranquillity over and above the storm of pathos that moves it. ”

“ But to seize upon the flash of a metal, the gleam of light through the grape, a vanishing glance of the moon or the sun, a smile, the expressions of spiritual life which are no sooner seen than they vanish, or ludicrous movements, situations, and attitudes, to master such evanescent material as this is the difficult task of this type of work. ”

“ Here for the first time we find that it is the human form and human actions and events, not merely made use of under the mode of personification, which, as we have already seen, necessarily stand forth as the uniquely adequate reality. No doubt the artist discovers these forms, too, in the real world; but he has at the same time to eradicate all that is accidental and incongruent in them, before they are entitled to appear as commensurable with that humanity, which, as essentially apprehended, shall offer to us the image of the eternal powers and gods. ”

“ But for all that we may have an art that is more lofty in its aim than this lovely revelation of Spirit in its immediate sensuous form, if at the same time one that is created by the mind as adequate to its own nature. For this coalition, which perfects itself in the medium of what is external, and thereby makes sensible reality its adequate and determinate existence, necessarily runs counter to the true notion of Spirit, and drives it forth from its reconciliation in the bodily shape upon its own essential substance to seek further reconciliation in that alone. ”

“ Inasmuch as humour does not so much propose to itself the task of unfolding and informing an objective content according to its own essential character, and, by artistic means, of articulating and rounding it off in such a self-evolved process, as it consists in the artist's own self-manifestation in the material, he will be mainly concerned to let everything which tends to become an object and to secure the rigid lines of reality, or which appears in the external world, fall away and dissolve under the powerful solvent of his own fancies, flashes of thought and arresting modes of conception. ”

“ The negative aspect of pain is an object in itself for the true martyr, and the greatness of the revelation is such that it can treat with indifference the awful aspect of that which man has thus suffered, and the dreadful nature of that to which he submits himself. The first thing, then, which will be brought beneath the ruthless mace of negation in order that the individual who still experiences this drought of the soul may wean himself from the world and become sanctified, will be his natural existence, his life, the satisfaction of the most essential necessaries of his bodily existence. ”

“ The supreme turning-point of this life of God is the putting aside of individual existence as the life of a particular man simply—the story of the Passion, the suffering on the Cross, the Calvary of Spirit, the agony of death. ”

“ What appeals to us in these gods is first of all the spiritual and substantive individuality, which, withdrawn into itself as it is out of the motley show of the particular medium of necessity, and, the many-purposed unrest of the finite condition, reposes on its own inviolable universality, as on an eternal and intelligible foundation. It is only thus that the gods appear as the imperishable powers, whose untroubled rule is made visible to us not in the particular event in its evolution with somewhat else and external to it, but freely in its own unchangeableness and intrinsic worth. ”

“ The main object now is to drive a breach through this wall of facts, to change, to improve, or at least carve for themselves in despite of it some little heaven on earth such as they seek for, their ideal maiden, discover her, win her from the clutches of her wicked relations or her evil circumstances, carry her off and lay the balm of love on her wounds. ”

“ The powerful vassals pay, it is true, some appearance of respect to the king; but practically every man does as he pleases—robs, murders, oppresses the weak, betrays the king, finds a way somehow to the favours of the queen, so that if the community just holds together that is about all. Such is the human content, which by this fable is preserved, not in a mere abstract proposition but in an entire complexus of conditions and characters, and by reason of its baseness fits in with the animal nature exactly, under the forms of which it is unfolded. ”

“ No doubt resignation is an essential characteristic in the evolution of the Christian life; but it is only in the monkish conception of it that it requires he should cut off from himself his soul, his emotions, the so-called impulses of his Nature, and should not incorporate his life in the moral, rational, actual world, the family and the State; and it does so precisely as the Illumination and its Deism, which presupposes that God is unknowable, imposes on mankind the extremest form of resignation, namely, that of abandoning all effort either to know or conceive Him. ”

“ On the contrary all material whatsoever, it matters not from what age or nation it hails, only retains its truth for art as part of this vital and actual Present, in which [Pg 397] it floods the human heart with the reflected image of its own life, and brings truth home to man's senses and mind. It is just this revelation and renewed activity of that humanity which is immortal in all its varied significance and infinite reconstruction, which, in this its receptacle of human situations and emotions, forms the possible no less than the absolute content of the art of our time. ”

“ When, however, we of to-day would seek to make a Greek god or, as our own Protestants try to do, a Virgin Mary the object of a piece of sculpture or a picture, it is impossible for us to treat such a material with entire seriousness. It is the faith of our inmost heart which fails us here, albeit even in ages of absolute belief the artist was by no means necessarily what is commonly understood as a pious mart, any more than at any time artists generally come in an exceptional sense under that category. ”

“ Earth, brightness in flame, in all Being Life, meditation in all who repent. In that which has Life the Power of Life, in the wise Wisdom, in the glorious Glory. Everything that is true of its kind, and everything that is specious and obscure proceeds out of me. ”

“ If we listen to the nightingale it is but to follow the bird with our own emotions; we think of the grape-juice, and call it "the breaker of our cares." Among the Persians, however, the rose is no mere image or ornament, no symbol, but itself appears to the poet as possessed with a soul, as loving bride, and he transpierces with his spirit the rose's very heart. Precisely the same character of a gorgeous Pantheism is still impressed on the most modern Persian poems. ”

“ With this incipient stage of the independence of the individual we must also associate free friendship, hospitality, and august nobility, but at the same time an insatiable lust of revenge and the inextinguishable memory of a hate, which is insistent and will have satisfaction with an unsparing passion and an absolutely remorseless cruelty. None the less all that happens on this soil is wholly within the circle of humanity. We have here deeds of revenge, conditions of love, traits of self-sacrificing nobility from which the fantastic and the wonderful have vanished ”

“ That old transition and war of the gods, on the contrary, discovered its origins in the artistic or imaginative view of the world simply, which created its wisdom and plastic shapes from its inner life, and gave to astonished mankind his new gods. For this reason the classic gods also have only received their existence through the fiat of the imagination, and merely exist as such in stone and bronze, or in the world open to the senses, not, however, in flesh and blood, or in very and actual Spirit. ”

“ For it is precisely in the finiteness of the art-creation that the closer association subsists with that aspect of the individual which is itself finite, and which rediscovers itself once more with satisfaction in every respect as mobile and stable existence in the art-product. The seriousness of the gods becomes a grace, which does not agitate with violence or lift a man over his ordinary existence, but suffers him to persist there tranquil, and simply claims to bring him content. ”

“ In this primary and twofold struggle to spiritualize Nature, and to present that which is born of Spirit to sense, at this stage of the conflict between them, we meet with all the ferment and wild, tossed hither and thither medley, the entire fantastic and confused world that is to say of symbolic art, which half surmises, it is true, the incongruity of its manner of shaping, yet is unable to remedy the same save through the distortion of its figures, while straining after a purely quantitative sublimity that would fain devour all limits. ”

“ We find, therefore, even in Rome no art that is at once conspicuous in its beauty, freedom, and greatness. It is from the Greeks that the Romans borrowed all that they mastered whether in sculpture or painting, epic, lyric, or dramatic poetry. It is a remarkable fact that all that we can point to as the native product of Latin art is comic farces, whereas the more cultivated types of comedy, not excluding those of Plautus and Terence, are borrowed from Greece, and are rather an affair of imitation than independent production. ”

“ It is possible, however, to harmonize entirely both factors, tradition, and individual creation. The tradition comes first; it is the point of departure, which hands down the mere ingredients; but for all that it does not contribute the real content and the genuine form of the gods. This substantive presence is the product of the genius of those poets, who discovered by a process of free elaboration the true substantive form of these very gods and are consequently in fact become the creators of that mythology which awakes our admiration of Greek art. ”

“ That beauty therefore disappears from it, which tended to raise the outside envisagement above the soilure of Time, and the traces that unite it with a Past, in order to declare the beauty of existence in its blossom in the room of what had otherwise been a dismantled image. Romantic art has no longer for its aim the freedom and life of existence in its infinite tranquillity and absorption of the soul in the bodily presence ”

“ We have no word here of religion for religion's sake, or action as the embodiment of human reconciliation, in the unqualified religious sense, or of morality pure and simple. On the contrary we are presented with individuals, conceived as dependent solely on themselves, possessed with aims that are their own exclusively, exclusively deducible from their individuality, and which they carry through as best satisfies them with the unmitigated consequences of passion, and with no incidental reflection on the principles involved. ”

“ Mind in its ultimate and most complete explication as reason is, as such, not the immediate object of art. Its highest and most essentially realized reconciliation can only find such satisfied consummation in the intellectual medium as such, that is to say, the ideal medium which is withdrawn from the reach of artistic expression; for absolute Truth stands on a higher level than the show of beauty, which is unable to break away from the sensuous and phenomenal. ”

“ We have here the absolute object, which art neither creates nor reveals out of itself, but which it has received from religion which it approaches with the conviction that it is essentially true that it may express and represent the same conformably to its modes. It is the content of the believing, yearning soul, which is intrinsically the infinite totality itself, so that for it the external medium remains to a more or less degree outside it, or a matter of indifference, and is unable to be brought completely into harmony with that inner life. ”