Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“ We have presented us, as the result of such a gallery, the world-history itself, and what is more, we have it in its beautiful, free, and emphasized vitality, manifestation, and deed. From no source, either so impregnate with life or simplicity, can we, for example, better understand the Hellenic spirit and Greek history, or at least grasp the principle of that content, which this people embodied, and which it brought with it when it first set forth to engage in the conflict of its wholly authentic history, than from this of the poet Homer. ”

“ To a still less extent can our more modern dramatic writing, in its effort to portray a more extensive field of collision, dramatis personae of whatever kind and incidental event, and, in a word, an action the ideal explication of which requires, too, an external environment of greater breadth, subject itself to the yoke of a rigid identity of scene. Modern poetry, in so far, that is, as its creations are in harmony with the romantic type, which as a rule displays more variety and caprice in its attitude to external condition, has consequently freed itself from any such demand. ”

“ Moreover, the epic poem, if a true work of art, is the exclusive creation of one artist. However much an epic may express the affairs of the entire nation, it remains the fact that it is the individual who is the poet, not the nation as a whole. The spirit of an age, of a people, is no doubt the essential operative cause; but realization is only secured in the work of art as conceived by the constructive genius of a particular poet, who brings before our vision and reproduces this universal spirit and its content as his own experience and his own product. ”

“ Destiny, in short, defines what is and inevitably must be, and in the result success, misadventure, life, and death are plastic precisely in the sense that individuals are plastic. What does actually unfold before us is a condition of universal expanse, in which the actions and destinies of mankind appear as something isolated and evanescent. This fatality is the great justice, and is not tragic in the dramatic sense of the term, in which the individual appears judged as a personality, but in the epic sense in which judgment is passed on man in all that concerns him. ”

“ What is most glorious is seen very early to pass away. In the fulness of his life Achilles mourns over his death; and at the conclusion of the Odyssey we view him and Agamemnon as spirits that have passed away as shades, with the consciousness that they are shades. Troy, too, falls; old Priam is slain hard by the altar of the home; women and maidens become slaves. Æneas, in obedience to the divine command, departs to found a new kingdom in Latium, and the victorious heroes only return after manifold suffering to the happiness or bitterness that awaits them at home. ”

“ It is therefore by no means simply an accident that we find epic poetry, no less than the art of sculpture, assert itself pre-eminently among the Greeks in its original and unsurpassed perfection. Stages of development, no doubt, are to be met with on either side of this culminating point, stages which are neither intrinsically subordinate or insignificant, but are necessary conditions of the art's growth, inasmuch as all nations are essentially within the sphere of poetic creation, and it is above all the Epos which brings before us the heart and core of the national life. ”

“ But in the background of Hamlet's soul, death is already present from the first. The sandbank of finite condition will not content his spirit. As the focus of such mourning and weakness, such melancholy, such a loathing of all the conditions of life, we feel from the first that, hemmed within such an environment of horror, he is a lost man, whom the surfeit of the soul has wellnigh already done to death before death itself approaches him from without. ”

“ But it would be a mistake to think that any action that is without genuine content is therefore comic because it is void of substance. People only too often in this respect confound the merely ridimlous with the true comic. Every contrast between what is essential and its appearance, the object and its instrument, may be ridiculous, a contradiction in virtue of which the appearance is absolutely cancelled, and the end is stultified in its realization. A profounder significance is, however, implied in the comic. There is, for instance, nothing comic in human crime. ”

“ And although, apart from this, pain and desire, as conceived, described, and expressed in speech, may lighten the heart, and poetic ebullition is unquestionably permissible for such a purpose, yet its function is not restricted to such domestic service. Rather it has a nobler vocation, which is not so much to liberate the human spirit from emotion, but in the medium of the same. The blind tumult of passion surges on in a union with the entire soul-life unenlightened, unawakened to the grasp of mind. In such a state the soul cannot assert itself in idea and expression. ”

“ He has, in addition, to discover for this ideal realm an external mode of envisagement fitted thereto, a mode by virtue of which that ideal totality shines through in more irresistible perfection than is possible in the case of other arts. It is incumbent upon him to know human existence, both as soul-life and objective life, to receive into his inmost being the full breadth of the world and its shows, and to have felt through it there, penetrated, enlarged, deepened and revealed to himself all it implies. ”

“ Instead of being living persons in their own selves, actual witnesses to us of their existence, they have rather the appearance of being mere creations of the poet and external instruments, which it is neither possible for the poet or his audience to take quite seriously, although there is an open pretence made that they have been taken thus seriously. Throughout the whole of the Virgilian Epic we feel ourselves in the atmosphere of ordinary life; the old tradition, the saga, the fairyland of poetry enters with prosaic distinctness into the frame of our common-sense faculties. ”

“ Even nowadays the French are moved to something like ecstasy over it. And yet how totally different in their human naïveté, simplicity and truth are the Homeric narratives of Circe and Calypso. The contrast is the same in Homer's account of the descent of Odysseus into Hades. This obscure and twilight like retreat of the shades is shown us through a dusky cloud, in an intermingling of imagination and reality, which takes hold of us with astonishing force. Homer does not suffer his hero to descend into any Underworld ready to hand. ”

“ In all these tragic conflicts, however, we must above all place on one side the false notion of guilt or innocence. The heroes of tragedy are quite as much under one category as the other. If we accept the idea as valid that a man is guilty only in the case that a choice lay open to him, and he deliberately decided on the course of action which he carried out, then these plastic figures of ancient drama are guiltless. They act in accordance with a specific character, a specific pathos, for the simple reason that they are this character, this pathos. ”

“ And as a rule it is extraordinary what a variety of wholly different things excite human laughter. Matters of the dullest description and in the worst possible taste will move men in this way; and their laughter may be excited quite as much by things of the profoundest importance, if only they happen to notice some entirely unimportant feature, which may conflict with habit and ordinary experience. Laughter is consequently little more than an expression of self-satisfied shrewdness; a sign that they have sufficient wit to recognize such a contrast and are aware of the fact. ”

“ In such an age the poet is in fact the first person to give an utterance to the national voice, to express ideas in speech, and thereby to encourage the imagination itself. Speech is, if we may so express it, not yet inseparable from ordinary life, and poetry can still freely, with an effect of freshness, avail itself of all that in later times, as the speech of common life, gradually is severed from art. In this respect, for example, Homer's type of expression is to the modern man barely distinguishable from ordinary speech. ”

“ The definition of soul-life, therefore, in the drama passes into the sphere of impulse, the realization of personality by means of active volition, in a word, effective action; it passes out of the sphere of pure ideality, it makes itself an object of the outer world, and inclines itself to the concrete facts of the epic world. The external phenomenon, however, instead of attaining existence in the bare fact of an event, is here, in the view of the acting character himself, charged with the opinions and aims he forms on his own account. ”

“ We are occupied with the presence and reconciliation of the Absolute in sense and the phenomenal, with a revelation of truth, which is not exhausted of its wealth in natural-history, but is unfolded in the history of the world, as a constituent part of which Art supplies us with the most beautiful point of view, the most generous reward for the severe labours of our contact with objective reality and the grievous pains of knowledge. ”

“ It is consequently the pre-eminent task of poetry to bring before our vision the energies of the life of Spirit, all that surges to and fro in human passion and emotion, or passes in tranquillity across the mind, that is the all-embracing realm of human idea, action, exploit, fatality, the affairs of this world and the divine Providence. ”

“ We started with symbolical art, in which the ideality of the human soul struggles to discover itself as content and configuration, and, in a word, to become an object to itself. We passed on to the plastic of classical art, which displays to human vision that which has become unveiled to itself as substantive being in man's vital personality. We reached our conclusion in the romantic art of the individual soul-life, that inward world united to the absolute medium of its self-conscious energy, which expatiates unfettered within its own ideal life of Spirit ”

“ In contrast to such an outlook we have the age and the society modified by a cult abstract in its origin, with its elaborate dogmas, established political and moral maxims, all of which take us away from the concrete life at home with itself. The world of the truly epic poet maintains its opposition to such conditions. Not merely in respect to universal forces, passions, and aims which are operative in the soul-life of individuals, but also in such a poet's attitude to all external facts, be his creation never so independent, he is entirely as one in his own province. ”

“ The compositions of poetry must be recited, sung, acted, reproduced, in short, by living people, just as the compositions of music are so reproduced. We are no doubt accustomed to read epic and lyric poetry, and only to hear drama recited and to see the same accompanied by gesture. Poetry, however, is essentially and according to its notion, sonorous expression, and we may, in particular, not dispense with this, if a complete exposition of the art is our aim, for the reason that it is the aspect and the only aspect, under which it comes into genuine contact with objective existence. ”

“ Poetry, in other words the art of human speech, is the third or final step, the totality, which unites and embraces in a yet higher sphere, in the sphere of the very life of Spirit itself, [2] the two extremes of the plastic arts and music. For on the one hand poetry contains just as music does the principle which apprehends an ideal content in its ideality, the principle which in architecture, sculpture, and painting is lost, or at most incompletely asserted. ”

“ We have already seen that in poetry it is the ideal concept itself from which we derive content no less than medium. By reason, however, of the fact that we already find outside Art's domain the world of idea to be the most obvious mode of conscious life, it is above everything else important to distinguish the conception of poetry from that of prose. The art of poetry, however, is not complete in this ideal world of the imagination alone. ”

“ The concordant unity must no doubt be completely vindicated in every one of its creations, and be operative there in all their manifold detail as the soul and vital core of the whole; but this presence remains for Art an ideal bond which is implied rather than expressly posited, precisely as the soul is immediately made vital in all the bodily members, without robbing the same of the appearance of an independent existence. We have the same truth illustrated by colour and tone. Yellow, blue, green and red are different colours which admit of the most absolute contrast ”

“ Here, too, we meet with in the East for the first time a real poetry, without fantastic elements, or prose, without mythology, without gods, demons, fairies, genii, and everything else of the kind common to the East, but rather with solid and self-sufficient characters and, however unique and marvellous in the play of its images and similes, yet for all that humanly real and self-contained. We have the vision of a similar pagan world also set before us by a later age in the collected poems of Hamasa, as also in the not yet edited "Divans of the Hudsilites." ”

“ Yet for all that metre or rhyme is an essential demand of poetry, bringing, as it were, a perfume of its own to the senses; nay, it is even more essential than a richly imaginative and so-called beautiful diction.
And in truth the artistic elaboration of this sensuous medium [14] unfolds to us—it is the very demand of the art itself—another realm, another field, which we only really enter after having left behind us the prose of ordinary life, whether viewed as action or as literary composition. ”

“ The hazards of crime, such as are present in modern drama—the useless, or quite as much the so-called noble criminal, with his empty talk about fate, we meet with in the tragedy of ancient literature, rarely, if at all, and for the good reason that the decision and deed depends on the wholly personal aspect of interest and character, upon lust for power, love, honour, or other similar passions, whose justification has its roots exclusively in the particular inclination and individuality. ”

“ If, however, the poet is absorbed in his own individual experience, we are not so much concerned to hear his particular fancies, love affairs, domestic arrangements, and the history of his uncles and aunts. We are so invited, for instance, in Klopstock's Eidli and Fanny, as to nave some vision given us of what is of universal human interest, in order that our sympathies may be roused. From this point of view, therefore, such lyrical poetry can readily degenerate into the spurious assumption that what is essentially private and particular must necessarily awaken interest. ”

“ Over and above mere fear and tragic sympathy we have therefore the feeling of reconciliation, which tragedy is vouched for in virtue of its vision of eternal justice, a justice which exercises a paramount force of absolute constringency on account of the relative claim of all merely contracted aims and passions; and it can do this for the reason that it is unable to tolerate the victorious issue and continuance in the truth of the objective world of such a conflict with and opposition to those ethical powers which are fundamentally and essentially concordant. ”

“ Even painting in this respect should aim at circumspection and restriction. We have therefore here and in the case of poetry a twofold point of view to consider. On the one hand we must remember that the impression is on our mental vision; and on the other the art can only place before the mind the object, which in Nature we can survey and comprehend in a single glance in a series of separate traits. For this reason it is important that poetry does not carry its elaboration of detail so far, that the vision of the whole in its entirety becomes inevitably disturbed, confused, or lost. ”

“ True vision, no less than soul-life in its full vigour, can only obtain satisfaction, where such are made aware in phenomena, through feeling no less than contemplation, of the reality in its essence and truth which is compatible with such a world. The life which is a mere external show is defunct to our deeper sense, if all that is ideal and intrinsically rich in significance fails to shine through as the very soul thereof. ”