THE PHILOSOPHY OF
FINE ART
BY
G. W. F. HEGEL
TRANSLATED, WITH NOTES, BY
F. P. B. OSMASTON, B.A.
AUTHOR OF "THE ART AND GENIUS OF TINTORET," "AN ESSAY
ON THE FUTURE OF POETRY," AND OTHER WORKS
VOL IV
LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
1920
CONTENTS OF VOL. IV
SUBSECTION III
THE ROMANTIC ARTS—continued
CHAPTER III
POETRY
Introduction [3]
[Summary and contrast between poetry and the other particular arts. Its relation to the other two romantic arts. Absence of all external sensuous presence. Poetry appeals to imaginative vision. Not so direct as sense-perception. Advantage over painting through its ability to display facts in their historical succession or natural process. Far profounder and more extended embrace of world of idea than in music; due to its greater power of definition in speech and its use of tone merely as a subordinate instrument. The content of poetry is the ideal envisagement of imaginative content itself. Everything made intelligible by language may form part of content, subject to the condition that it is poetical. Analysis of what this condition implies. The imagination of artist must be Contributive; distinction from mere prose consciousness and thinking. In its entire independence of the material of sense it may be defined as the universal art. The material is the imagination, and as such conjoint with all the arts. It is, however, not the only art open to philosophical review on this ground. It marks, however, the commencement of the disintegration of Art, its bridge of passage to the notion of religion and philosophical thought] [3]
Subdivision of subject-matter [17]
I. Poetical composition as distinguished from that of Prose [19]
1. The poetical and prosaic composition [20]
(a) The world of natural or prosaic fact relatively excluded. Primarily what it deals with is the infinite domain of Spirit and the energies of its life [21]
(b) Distinction between poetical and prosaic conception [21]
[(α) Poetical anterior to the prosaic form of artistic speech. It is the original imaginative grasp of truth. Dates from first effort of man at self-expression. Endeavours to make that expression of a higher virtue than mere prose [22]
(β) The kind of prose life from which poetry is separate postulates a different kind of conception and speech. The finite categories of the understanding applicable to the former. The ideal rationale of fact is aimed at by poetry. Its affinity with and distinction from pure thought [23]
(γ) Difference between the relation of poetic conception to prosaic in early times and more modern, where the prosaic form of life has become stereotyped in a definite system] [26]
(c) The nature of the differentiation of poetical activity in different ages and nations [26]
[(α) It has no particular epoch of unique celebration. It embraces the collective Spirit of man. It is conditioned by the outlook of various nations and epochs [27]
(β) Some of these have closer affinity with its essential spirit, e.g., the Oriental in comparison with the Western nations, if we exclude Greece [27]
(γ) Modern interest in Hellenic and certain portions of Oriental poetry] [28]
2. The Art-product of poetry and prose [29]
(a) The artistic composition of poetry generally [29]
[(α) It must possess intrinsic unity. The action must be conceived as that of particular men or women. There must be vital coalescence of characters, events, and actions. Unity in the nature of a process and a differentiation of parts which coalesce therein [29]
(β) Nature of this organic differentiation and synthesis. Tendency of Art to particularization. Delight in detail. Nature of its treatment of such detail. Result, a secure self-subsistency [31]
(γ) Substantive unity preserved. Display of particular features, despite all opposition, must combine in a union of mysterious accord. The unity is essential and organic. It is the soul of the entirety. Parallel in musical trichord. Varied type of artistic form in the Epic, the Drama, and the Lyric] [34]
(b) History and oratory compared with the poetical product [38]
[(α) The arts of history and oratory come into closest affinity with poetical composition. History implies great ends, cannot rest content with mere chronicles. Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Tacitus. Products of the art of language, but not entirely free art. The nature of the historical content prohibits this. The prosaic element in the historical age and the historical treatment defined [38]
(β) Oratory appears to be closer to the freedom of Art. The orator appeals to the whole man. It is directed to the enunciation of principles. It is none the less almost wholly relative to the rule of practical utility. Religious oratory. It is in the service of a collateral purpose] [42]
(c) The free poetical work of Art [47]
[(α) The attitude of the poet in his work, to contingent and insignificant fact and local conditions, actions, events, etc. [47]
(β) The end of Art not practical as in oratory. Nor is it to edification. Poems d'occasion [49]
(γ) It is an essentially infinite (self-rounded) organism. Permeated with a principle of unity. Independent of any one particular condition of Life or Nature] [51]
3. The creative impulse of the Poet [51]
[(a) Less under restriction in respect to his medium. The problem proposed in one respect more easy, and in another more difficult than that of the other arts. Technical control of the medium which is easier makes the demand for imaginative penetration the greater [52]
(b) Being operative in the realm of imaginative idea itself poetry has to guard against encroaching upon the spheres of religion, philosophy, and the ordinary consciousness as such [53]
(c) To a greater extent than in the other arts the poet has transfused the external mode of envisagement, which he creates, with the vitality of soul-life. Mohammedan poetry. The creative energy must be absolutely free from all restrictions imposed by the material handled] [53]
II. The Expression of Poetry [56]
1. The poetical Conception [57]
(a) Poetical conception in its origins [58]
[In its origin not consciously distinct from the prosaic or scientific consciousness. In general terms the poetic imagination is plastic. Illustration of difference between the concrete poetical image and the abstract concept] [58]
(b) Distinction between poetic mode of conception and that of prose. Language of poetical metaphor and imagery less accurate than the definition of prosaic fact [61]
(c) Exceptional difficulties which confront the poet of a world where the distinction between ordinary prose life and imagination is emphasised. Artificial appearance of his creations. Difficulty of retaining spontaneous simplicity and freshness
2. Verbal Expression [63]
(a) Poetical speech generally [64]
[Another mode of speech necessitated by the fact that the world of poetry and art in general should not be identical with that of ordinary life, or that of science and religion] [65]
(b) The means by which this is realized [65]
[(α) Particular words and expressions only proper to poetry. Entitled to borrow from language forms obsolete in ordinary speech. The invention exercised in creating novel modes of utterance [66]
(β) The relative order of words admits of change; how the licence in this respect may be abused and degenerate into rhetoric and declamation [66]
(γ) The periods of poetical construction composed in accordance with the ideality of the soul-experience embodied] [66]
(c) Distinctions in the use of these means [66]
[(α) Poetry in the age where poetry is the one revealer of spiritual truth. Force of creative power and simplicity of diction most obvious features. Creation of a poetic diction by Dante [66]
(β) Distinction from above in an age where prose diction already elaborated. Expression of poetry becomes more elaborate and eventually more self-conscious and rhetorical. The poetry of Rome. The satire. Spanish poetry [67]
(γ) The nature of genuine poetical expression. Spontaneity above all essential] [69]
3. Versification.
[Only a superficial view would banish it. It is implied in the demand that the medium should be elaborated by Art and that the realm entered should be other than every-day life] [70]
(a) Rhythmical Versification (that is, without rhyme)
[(α) Made by time-duration and the movement. Starting point in the natural length and shortness of syllables. The distinctions of the sound of words in consonants and vowels contribute the basis of this. Description and illustration. Poetry regulates the accidental interchange of various syllables and words. Time-duration. Nature of dactyl, anapaest, etc. It further regulates the particular time-relations in a series of verse-lines. The iambic metre, etc. Problem of time-beats in the metre of the ancients. No necessity as in music for abstract time-beat [74]
(β) The accent and caesura. Every time-relation has its particular accent. Particular feet ought not with abstract precision to be identical with beginning and conclusion of single words. The caesura checks the monotony of measure. Further independent verbal accent. Fundamental influence on the measure of the poetical idea. Also a definite type of content corresponds with the entire character of a particular verse-measure. The use of hexameter, elegiacs, and iambics in this respect [78]
(γ) Rhythmical versification embraces the actual musical sound of syllables and words. The stem-syllable in the Greek and Latin languages. Aspects of the German language in this respect. In modern languages the element of rhythm less room for display. This in itself necessitates the alternative of rhyme as a resistant against the too exclusive assertion of ideal content] [81]
(b) Rhyme [84]
[(α) Rhyme a necessary feature of romantic poetry. Closer approximation to music. Reaction against the stringent character of Roman poetry. Source of rhyme in Germanic languages [86]
(β) Difference between two systems. Rhythmical versification supreme in Hellenic poetry. Most important change effected that of the validity of the national quantity in the older system. This replaced by the intrinsic meaning of syllables and words. French and Italian poetry an extreme example of the collapse of the former system. The necessity of rhyme and its character analysed [86]
(γ) The types of modern romantic poetry. Its alliteration, assonance, and ordinary rhyme. Scandinavian poetry. Not necessary for assonant words to come only at conclusion of line. Rhyme is the fulfilment of alliteration and assonance. Pre-eminently the form of lyric poetry. Examples] [92]
(c) The union of rhythm and rhyme
[(α) Attempt made in modern times to return to the natural quantity of syllables. Not generally successful. Overwhelming importance in modern verse of intelligible significance and the accent thus asserted [95]
(β) Not possible to retain the plastic consistency of the metrical medium as secured by classical poetry. Modern languages do not possess the stable quantitative basis [96]
(γ) The combination equivalent to the absorption by modern versification of the older system. The significance of the identical repetition of the same time-measure. Modern imitation of sapphics and alcaics based on a contradiction] [97]
III. The Several Generic Types of Poetry [99]
Introduction and Division of Subject [100]
A. Epic Poetry [106]
1. General character of Epic poetry [106]
(a) Epigrams and Gnomes [106]
(b) Philosophical didactic poems, Cosmogonies and Theogonies [108]
(c) The genuine Epopaea [110]
[(α) The saga, the bible of a folk. Not every national bible can rank as Epos. Greeks possess no ancient religious books resembling Hindoo literature [111]
(β) Not necessarily composed in the heroic time itself. Homer. Views expressed which belong to earlier times [112]
(γ) Position of the epic poet. His work a free creation. He must feel at home in the world he depicts. Objective independence of composition. The work of one artist] [115]
2. Particular Characteristics of true Epos [118]
(a) The general World-condition of the Epos [119]
[(α) A positive social state conjoined to primitive simplicity. Intuitive sense of right the support of moral order. Vital human association with nature and particular objects possessed. Heroic condition, e.g., that of free individuality. Examples. Expresses entire horizon of national condition [120]
(β) The mirror must be of one particular people. The Hellenic spirit in Homer. A foreign locale not necessarily prejudicial to artistic effect. The remoteness to present ideas of the "Niebelungen Lied" [125]
(γ) Main event of poem must be a deliberately conceived purpose. It must imply collisions. The belligerent condition most pertinent. The Odyssey not only an exception. Courage the fundamental interest. Justification of such attitude] [128]
(b) The individual Epic action [135]
[(α) Must be one of individual vitality. Must appropriate form of an event, and the happening of such. Analysis. Problem of an absolute Epos. Mere biography not most complete subject-matter. "The Divine Comedy" only partially an exception [134]
(β) Question of human personality implied. Epic character must be a totality. Achilles, the Cid, and other heroes, discussed. Circumstances as active as persons. Illustrations [139]
(γ) The form under which the intrinsic significance of the occurrence proclaims itself, whether as ideal Necessity or disclosed spiritual forces. Destiny. What it defines. General tone of sadness in the Epic. Different modes of appearance. Poems of Ossian, and others. Loss of original freshness in Latin poetry. Virgil] [143]
(c) The Epos as unified totality [152]
[(α) The unity of the assumed general background and the individuals therein. Humanity displayed in its entire collective relation of all interests and occupations. The individual event. The commencement of the Iliad and Odyssey [153]
(β) The difference between the epic mode of disclosure and that of the Lyric or drama. Greater extension of range. In the epic work character may give way to external condition. Objective nature of its exposition. Motivisation of drama and the Epic entirely different. Examples from Homer and modern poetry [157]
(γ) Nature of unity of Epos. Though not of most importance essential to artistic result. Insistence upon fundamental unity of the Homeric poems. Epic unity within a national whole. Distinction from dramatic action. The Idyll. The novel as the Epopaea of modern society] [164]
3. The historical development of epic Poetry [172]
(a) The Oriental Epos [174]
[(α) Epos of Hindoos and Persians. The sense of the unity of the One Substance [174]
(β) Contrast between Hindoo and Persian Epos. The Ramajana and Maha-Bharata [176]
(γ) Hebrew Epic poetry] [176]
(b) Epic poetry of Greece and Rome [178]
[(α) Essential unity of Iliad and Odyssey. The ne plus ultra of attainment. The cyclic poets [178]
(β) Roman Epos cannot compare in quality with the Greek prototype] [179]
(c) The Romantic Epos.
[The poems of Ossian. The Edda. National character of epic poems of Middle Ages. "The Cid." The peculiar nature of Dante's "Divine Comedy." The poems relating to Charlemagne, King Arthur, etc. The revolt against Chivalry in Ariosto and Cervantes. The "Lysiad" of Camoens. Milton's "Paradise Lost" and Klopstock's "Messias">[ [180]
B. Lyric Poetry [193]
1. General character of lyric poetry [195]
[(a) The content of lyric poetry [196]
(α) Not merely translation of content from immediacy of experience. Creation of object purified from the incidental mood. Deliverance thus effected. Self-expression not the development of objective action. We have the universal as such. The entire sphere of human belief, religion, art, and to some extent scientific thought comprised as they fall into a personal view of the world [190]
(β) Aspect of particularity. The Eumenides chorus in the "Cranes" of Ibicus. The Elegy and Epistle [197]
(γ) Emphasis throughout on personal feeling. Parallel with genre painting. Contingency of content. Growth of whole in temperament] [197]
(b) The form of the same
[(α) Unity different from that of Epos. Mysterious intimacy of personal mood. Approximates to Epos in heroic songs, ballads, and romances. The Greek Anthology [199]
(β) Poems d'occasion. Personal aspect. Pindaric Odes. Goethe. Individual soul supplied focus of unity rather than positive reality [201]
(γ) Point of departure an external occurrence either in personal experience or that of others. Element of narrative as in songs of Anacreon] [203]
(c) The external culture condition of the Lyric. [200]
[(α) Different from that of Epic. Not limited to one particular epoch, but exceptionally displayed in modern times. Folk-songs and the lyric poem [207]
(β) Possesses a power of free expansion into all kinds of subject-matter, a free recognition of imaginative conception no less than artistic activity [210]
(γ) The philosophical lyric poem. A false and a genuine style compared. Schiller's poetry] [212]
2. Particular aspects of the Lyric [213]
(a) The lyric poet [214]
[(α) The poet himself supplies the principle of combination. He is the focus of unity [214]
(β) Spontaneity of result. Sings because he cannot help it. His object himself. Self-respect. Pindar and Klopstock [215]
(γ) Creative in dealing with personal experience. Goethe a fine example] [217]
(b) The lyric work of art [217]
[(α) The unity of the Lyric. Springs from memory or vivid association of poet. The formal unity of self-conscious life. Mood must be defined in its concreteness, not tend too much to generalization [218]
(β) Nature of the progressive disclosure of content. The principle of the Lyric is assimilation. Poems limited to local description. Mainly a definition of emotional forces made vital in objects as seen by the "inward eye." Episodes permissible. Passionate intensity in its freedom [219]
(γ) External form of the Lyric. Variety of metres. Varied use of caesura. Strophes which admit of much alternation, both as to length of line, and their rhythmic structure. Musical sound of words and syllables. Free use of assonance, alliteration and rhyme, especially the diversified use of last-mentioned. Association with musical accompaniment] [221]
(c) Types of the genuine Lyric [225]
[(α) Hymns, dithyrambs, paeans and psalms. Personal religious emotion. Greek treatment of chorus. Psalms of Old Testament [225]
(β) Personal life of poet the subject-matter. Not so much the subject as the enthusiasm or personal note. Pindaric Odes. Horace. Klopstock [228]
(γ) The song as such. A field of blossom ever starting anew. The Oriental and Western type. Anacreon. Protestant hymns. Sonnet, elegy, epistle, etc. Dithyrambic emotion of Schiller] [230]
3. Historical evolution of the Lyric [235]
(a) Oriental lyrical poetry
[Vital absorption in the object. Objective character as compared with pure romantic. Hymns of exaltation. Metaphor, image, and simile particularly favoured. Present in Chinese, Hindoo, Hebrew, Arab and Persian poetry] [236]
(b) The Lyric of the Greeks and Romans
[General character that of classic individuality. Image and metaphor not so largely used. Emphasizes mainly on the sensuous verbal quantity in the rhythm of its movement. The dance not unfrequently attached. Point of departure hymns. Elegiac measure. The lyric of the chorus. Pindar. Roman lyric less original] [238]
(c) Romantic Lyric.
[In certain nations epic material treated as lyrical narrative. Lyric composition of modern nations still pagan. In the Christian Middle Ages. That based on the principle of Protestantism. Klopstock and his influence] [242]
C. Dramatic Poetry [248]
1. The Drama as a poetic work of art [249]
(a) The principle of dramatic poetry [249]
[(α) Depends on conditions of collision, human passion, and characters. Leads to action and resolution of conflict. Product of a condition of cultured life [250]
(β) Mediation between epic and lyric poetry. Has to bring before vision action or event, but it is self-conscious personality which is the vital force. Dramatic action must submit to a process of development. Has to exhibit not so much lyrical emotion as situation. Action the executed will recognized as such in its ultimate purpose. The external world only borrowed in so far as it is bound to this purpose. More concentrated than the Epic. Action so treated that it inevitably meets with opposition. Nature of the divine forces operative. The Drama propounds the vital energy of a principle of Necessity [250]
(γ) The nature of the demand on the dramatic poet in respect to the divine energy. The drama is the resolution of the one-sided aspect of these powers, the self-stability whereof is disclosed in dramatic character] [254]
(b) Dramatic Composition [255]
[(α) The unity as contrasted with the Epos and the Lyric. Unity of place, time, and action. First no support to from Aristotle. Nature of demand upon the imagination relative to fact of direct vision. Unity of action alone invariable. Romantic drama less consistent than classical. Examples from Shakespeare [256]
(β) Mode of dénouement. Embrace of material in Epos more extensive. Mean between that and lyrical poetry. True dramatic progression, a continuous movement onwards to catastrophe. Possesses a beginning, middle and end. Aristotle. Significance of acts and their number. In English, French, and German drama generally five [261]
(γ) Nature of means, e.g., dramatic diction, etc. Realistic mode of expression as contrasted with one conventional to the theatre. Must neither be too formal nor too unpolished or colloquial. Choral interlude, monologue, and dialogue. Verse-measure mainly iambic] [264]
(c) The relation of the dramatic composition to the Public [270]
[(α) Distinct Public to cater for and under obligation to it. Fashion of German writers to scorn the Public. Mistaken view. How far possible to reproduce foreign or ancient drama [272]
(β) Dramatis personae must be vital not merely personified interests. Real emphasis on the collision involved. Goethe's "Iphigeneia" [273]
(γ) Attitude of poet himself. The impression of the whole as the product of one original creative force most important. Necessity that the dramatic poet master the eternal and essential foundation of human character and action. Worst case where he seeks to flatter a popular prejudice. Reference to contemporary event. Aristophanes. Didactic matter only admissible in so far as it is no bar to the freedom of the entire artistic product] [275]
2. The external Technique of a dramatic Composition [278] (a) The reading or recitation of a dramatic work [280]
[(α) True sensuous medium of drama the human voice. Modern plays often impracticable in the theatre. Contrast of Greek drama in this respect [280]
(β) Plays written for perusal only. Theatrical reproduction a real test of dramatic vitality. Question whether dramatic works should be printed [281]
(γ) Perusal no sufficient test of the acting possibilities of a drama. Recitation subject to the serious restriction that it is the expression of one voice only] [283]
(b) The art of the Actor [284]
[(α) Among the Greeks acting affiliated to sculpture. Ancients added music to declamation. Means of interpretation in motion of the body. The dance. Plastic character of Greek performance [285]
(β) Speech used solely as spiritual expression in modern acting. Coalescence of actor's personality with his rôle. Facial expression. Increase particularisation in modern character. Illustrations. Increase of difficulties. Modern actor an artist] [286]
(c) The theatrical art which is more independent of Poetry 289
[(α) Plays written for the display of the particular talent of actors. The Italian commedia dell' arte. French attitude to audience [289]
(β) Modern opera. Luxurious display of scenic accessories. Schiller's "Maid of Orleans." Mozart's "Magic Flute" [291]
(γ) The Ballet. The proper subordination of the dance] [292]
3. Types of dramatic poetry and the chief phases of their historical development [292]
(a) The principle of Tragedy, Comedy, and the Play [293]
[(α) The principle as associated with tragedy in its essential and primitive form. The content of tragic action supplied by spiritual forces which carry with them their own justification, e.g., love of husband, wife, parents, or children, patriotism, social life, etc. The substance in which the greatness and stability of the tragic hero consists. Theme of primitive tragedy generally the godlike in its mundane character. Forces realized as the determinate aim of human pathos. A collision in which both aspects are justified from one point of view. Tragic resolution of division. Meaning of Aristotle's dictum that tragedy excites and purifies fear and pity. Sense of reconciliation [295]
(β) In Tragedy what is eternally substantive is vindicated under a mode of reconciliation. In Comedy the purely personal experience retains the mastery throughout. Nature of social basis of comedy. The comic. The conception of it in Molière and Aristophanes. Requires a resolution even more strongly than tragedy 301
(γ) The Satyric drama. Plautus. The modern dramatic play. Illustrations from classical drama. Boundary lines fluctuate more than in the case of genuine tragedy and comedy. Tendency to pass from poetic form altogether. Theatrical pieces exhibited for mere display of histrionic talent or psychological analysis, or as a mere social relaxation] [305]
(b) The difference between ancient and modern Drama [308]
[(α) No genuine Oriental dramatic art. Principle of individual freedom. Origins among Hindoos and Chinese [308]
(β) True beginning among the Hellenes. The universal and substantive content of the end, which individuals seek to achieve. Exceptional plot and intrigue and varied display of individual character not emphasized [309]
(γ) In modern drama it is rather the destiny of some particular character under exceptional circumstances which forms the subject-matter. Interest directed not so much to ethical vindication and destiny as to the isolation of the individual and his conditions. Crime as a motive not excluded. Formal greatness of character demanded. Variety of characterization, and maze of plot and intrigue. In tragedy further the paramount presence of a more exalted order of the world,—whether conceived as Providence or Fatality,—accepted] [310]
(c) The concrete development of dramatic poetry and its types [312]
[(α) Greek drama. Roman drama an attenuated reflection. Survey limited to Æschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes. Background of ancient tragedy the heroic condition. Analysis of modes under which ethical content of human action asserted. The unsevered consciousness of the godlike and the combating human action, presented under the form of chorus and heroic figures. Significance of chorus. Opposition between social obligation and private sense of duty. Antigone. Modern conception of guilt and innocence no place in Greek tragedy in strict sense. Final end reconciliation of forces of human action. Such a dénouement not merely an ethical issue. Contrast between such and the Justice of the Greek Epos. Illustrations. Antigone. Œdipus. Orestes. Conception of old classical Comedy. The laughter of the Olympian gods made present in man. Aristophanes] [312]
(β) Modern dramatic art
[(i) The ends which ought to come into the process of the action as the content of the characters. Borrowed from the concrete world of religious and social life. Not however, the particular ethical forces as of individuals which assert them, e.g., Christ, the saints, kings, vassals, and members of ruling families. Features of the private life accepted not within scope of ancient drama. Personal love, honour, etc. make an exclusive appeal. Faust. Wallenstein. Generally it is the inner experience of soul-life which demands satisfaction. Comparison of problem of Hamlet with that of the Choephorae.
(ii) Nature of characters and collisions. Conflict abides essentially in the character itself. Abstract characterization of French and Italian poetry, also Spanish. In contrast to this that of the English, and above all Shakespeare. Goethe and Schiller. Vacillation of character. "King Lear." **(iii) Nature of tragic issue. Justice of more abstract nature than in ancient tragedy. The issue as the effect of misfortune. "Romeo and Juliet," a kind of unhappy blessedness in misfortune. Social plays the link between tragedy and comedy. As a rule the triumph of ordinary morality celebrated. Modern comedy. Question whether folly is ridiculous only to others, or to the comic character also. The second type mainly that of Aristophanes, the first that of Molière. Invention of the intrigue or intricate plot. Comparison of Shakespeare's comedy with that of Aristophanes] [330]
Final Summary and Conclusion [348]
THIRD PART
THE SYSTEM OF THE PARTICULAR ARTS
SUBSECTION III
THE ROMANTIC ARTS
(CONTINUED)
[CHAPTER III]
POETRY
INTRODUCTION
I
The temple of classical architecture demands a god, who resides therein. Sculpture exhibits the same in plastic beauty, and confers forms on the material it employs for this purpose, which do not in their nature remain external to what is spiritual, but are the form itself immanent in the defined content. The corporeality, however, and sensuousness, no less than the ideal universality of the sculptured figure, are opposed on the one hand to subjective ideality, and in part to the particularity of the individual, in whose element the content of the religious, no less than also the worldly life, must secure reality by virtue of a novel form of art. This mode of expression, which is of subjective import, and at the same time particularized in its characterization, the art of painting itself contributes under the principle of the plastic arts. In other words it subordinates the realistic expression of form to the more ideal presentment of colour, and makes the expression of the ideality of soul the central point[1] of the presentment. The universal sphere, however, in which these arts are motived, the one in the ideal of symbolism, the other in the plastic ideal, the third in the romantic type, is the sensuous or external form of spirit and natural objects.
The spiritual content possesses, however, as essentially appertinent to the ideality of consciousness, a determinate existence which is for this ideality at the same time foreign to the medium itself of the external appearance and envisagement presented to it by material form. From this foreign element it is further necessary that it removes its conceptions in order to place them in a realm which, in respect to material no less than the mode of expression, is independently of an ideal or subjective character. This was the forward step which we saw music make, in so far as it embodied pure ideality and subjective emotion in the configurations of essentially resonant sound rather than in visible forms. It, however, passed by this very means into a further extreme, that is, an ideal mode of concentration not fully explicit, whose content in musical tones itself only found symbolic expression. For tone taken by itself is without content, and has its definition in the numerical relations, so that what is qualitative in the spiritual content no doubt generally corresponds to these quantitative relations which are expressed in essential differences, oppositions, and mediation, but in its qualitative determinacy is not entirely able to receive its impression in musical tone. If this aspect is not wholly to fail the art of music must, by reason of its onesidedness, summon to its assistance the more definite articulation of language, and requires for its more secure attachment to particularity and the characteristic expression of the content a text, without which it is unable to complete fully the ideality which is poured forth by means of musical tones.
By virtue of this expression of ideas and emotions, the abstract ideality of music receives a clearer and more secure exposition. At the same time what we have here unfolded by its means is, to a certain extent, not the point of view of idea and the artistic mode adapted to its expression, but merely the emotional life as it accompanies the same; also in part we find that here, too, music entirely divests itself of fusion with the verbal text in order to develop its own movement without restraint in the world of tone simply. For this reason the realm of idea, which is unable to remain under I such a more purely abstract mode of ideal intensity, and seeks a configuration in a world which embraces its one homogeneous and concrete reality, breaks away on its part likewise from the bond of music, and in the exclusive art of poetry discovers the adequate realization it demands.
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. And on the other hand it expatiates itself, under the modes of ideal conception, intuition, and feeling simply, in an objective world, which does not entirely destroy the defined forms of sculpture and painting, and is capable of unfolding all the conditions of an event, a succession or interchange of emotional states, passions, conceptions, and the exclusive course of human action with more completeness than any other art.
2. But in a still more intimate way the art of poetry constitutes a third or final term in its relation to painting and music regarded as the romantic arts.
(a) One reason of this is that its principle is that generally of an intelligence which has nothing further to do with gross matter as such, seeking, as is the case with architecture, to transform it through symbolism to an environment related analogically to spiritual life, or as in the case of sculpture in order to implant upon material substance the natural form congenial to such life under the spatial condition of its expression. What the end is now is to express immediately for mind the manifestations of Spirit with all its ideas of imagination and art, without setting forth their external and visible bodily presence. And a further reason consists in this, that poetry is able to grasp in the form of ideality itself and with a far greater wealth than is possible for music or painting, not merely the innermost actuality of conscious life, but also what is particular and individual in external existence, and equally able to contrast such facts in the complete diversity of their specific traits and accidental peculiarities.
(b) The art of poetry is, however, as totality, also again, from another point of view, essentially to be distinguished from the above-mentioned arts whose fundamental qualities it thus in a measure combines.
(α) In this respect, if we compare it with painting, the latter art is throughout at an advantage, where it is of importance to bring before our senses a content under the condition of its external appearance. It is true no doubt that poetry is able by various means to envisualize objects precisely in the way that for the imagination generally the principle of objectification is made real to our intuitive sense. But in so far as conceptive power, in the element of which poetry pre-eminently moves, is of a spiritual nature and implies the presence of the universality of thought, it is incapable of attaining the definition of sensuous perception. On the other hand, the varied traits which poetry brings together, in order to make the concrete form of a content visible, do not fall as with painting into one and the same totality, which is set before us wholly as a simultaneous appearance of all its details, but they break apart, inasmuch as the imagination can only give us the complexity it contains under the form of succession. This is, however, only a defect from the sensuous point of view, a defect which reason is able in its own way to rectify. That is to say, inasmuch as human speech, even in the case where it endeavours to summon before our sight a concrete object, is not concerned with the sensuous apprehension of an immediate external object, but always with the ideal relation, the mental intuition, for this reason the particular characteristics, albeit they are set before us in a series, are nevertheless fused together in the element of one essentially homogeneous spirit, which is able to qualify the effect of succession, to bring the varied array into one picture, and to secure and enjoy this picture in imaginative contemplation. Moreover, this deficiency of sensuous realization and objective definition, when we contrast poetry with painting, brings as a contrary result the possibility of an incalculable superfluity of material. For inasmuch as the poetic art in painting restricts itself to a determinate space, and even more to a distinct moment in a situation or action, for this reason it is prevented from portraying an object in its entire ideal profundity no less than in the extension of its temporal development. But what is true is throughout concrete in the sense that it comprises within its embrace a unity of essential determinations. In its phenomenal appearance, however, these are not merely unfolded as a co-existent spatial phenomenon but in a temporal series as a history, whose course painting is only able to present in a relatively inadequate manner. Even in the case of every stalk, every tree, each has in this sense its history, a change, sequence, and exclusive whole of varied conditions. And this is even more true of the sphere of spirit, which can only be exhaustively portrayed as veritable spirit in phenomenal guise when it is set before our imagination as such a process.
(β) We have already seen that poetry possesses for its external medium that of tone in common with music. The wholly external, or, as we might say in the false sense of the expression, the objective material in the progressive series of the particular arts finally vanishes in the subjective medium of sound, which is divested of all visibility, and which suffers an ideal content only to be apprehended by a conscious state independent of sight.[3] For music, however, the configuration of musical tone as such is the essential end. For although the soul in the course and movement of melody and its harmonic relations presents what is ideal in objects, or its own ideal content, to the emotional life; yet the ideality thus presented is not pure ideality, but the human soul interwoven in the closest way with the musical tone as its expression, and the configuration of such musical expression which confers on music its true character. So much is this the case that music receives its independent position as an art just in proportion as the animation given by it to the emotional life is more emphasized in the world of pure music than in that of man's ordinary spiritual activity.[4] But for this very reason it is only to a relative degree capable of reproducing the variety of spiritual ideas and intuitions, the entire extension of the ideal wealth of conscious life: it remains restricted to the more abstract universality of all that it grasps as content, and the more indefinite manifestations of our emotion.
In the like degree, then, that mind (Geist) elaborates the more abstract universality in a concrete whole of idea, ends, actions, and events, and no less contributes to its conformation the particularizing perception, it not only forsakes the subjective life of mere emotion and builds up that life into an unfolded realm of objective reality in this case, too, within the ideal world of the imagination itself, it is compelled, by virtue of the nature of such transformation, to forsake the attempt to express the new realm thus secured solely and exclusively by means of tone relations. Precisely as the medium of sculpture is too poor to express the more ample content that it is the function of the art of painting to call into life, so too the conditions of musical tone and melodic expression are unable to realize fully the imaginative pictures of the poet. For these in part possess the ideas more accurately defined to consciousness and, in part, the form of external appearance impressed on the inner sense of perceptive reason. Spirit consequently withdraws its content from musical tone as such, and declares itself through words, which it is true do not entirely forsake the element of sound, but sink to the purely external sign of the communication. In other words, by means of this repletion with spiritual ideas, musical tone becomes the voice of articulate words; language, in its turn, is diverted from an end in itself to a means of ideal expression which has lost its independent self-subsistancy. This constitutes in fact what we have already established as the essential difference between music and poetry. The content of the art of speech is the collective art of the world of ideas elaborated by the imagination, the spiritual which remains at home in its vision, which remains in this ideal realm, and, even in its movement toward an objective world, is only conscious of the same as a symbol that differs from its own conscious content. In music art reproduces the penetration of Spirit in a sensuously apparent and present form. In poetry it even forsakes the element of musical tone and articulation opposed to it, at least to the extent that this musical tone is no longer reclothed in fully adequate externality and the exclusive expression of that content. The ideal no doubt is expressed, but it fails to discover its real existence in the sensuous medium of tone, despite the fact that it is of a more ideal character; this it discovers exclusively in its own essential content, by virtue of which it expresses the content of mind as it is realized in the ideality of the imagination simply as such.
(c) In the third place, and finally, if we consider the specific character of poetry relatively to this distinction between music and painting, and we may include with it the other plastic arts, we shall find the same simply to consist in the subordination of the mode under which all poetical content is envisaged and configured by the medium of sense. In other words, when tone, as it does in the art of music, or for that matter, colour as in that of painting, no longer essentially recovers and expresses the entire content, in that case the musical treatment of the composition under its aspects of time, no less than those of harmony and melody, drops away; we have left us merely the generalized configuration of the time-measure of syllables and words, to which we may add rhythm, euphony, and the like. And further, it is to be noted that we have this, not in the sense of a genuine medium for the content, but rather as a mode of externality which is accidental, and which only receives an artistic form, because art cannot permit any mode of its external manifestation whatever to be entirely a question of accidental caprice.
(α) In connection with this withdrawal of the spiritual content from the sensuous medium we are at once met with the question what it is then which, under such a view, constitutes the actual externality or objectivity in poetry, that of tone being thus excluded. The answer to this is simple. It is the ideal envisagement and imaginative content itself. We have here spiritual forms substituted for sensuous, and supply a configurative material, such as we met with before in marble, bronze, colour, or musical tones. In other words, we must guard ourselves from such an inadequate statement of the facts as that ideas and imagery are nothing more or less than the content of poetry. This is unquestionably true in a sense, as we shall demonstrate more closely later on. Despite this, however, we are equally justified in asserting that idea, imagery, emotion, and the like are specific modes, under which every content in poetry is subsumed and manifested; and consequently, that is, owing to the fact that the sensuous aspect of the communication remains throughout a purely accidental one[5]—it is these forms which supply the real material which the poet has to elaborate artistically. No doubt the fact, the content, must in poetry, as in other arts, receive its due objectification for spirit; objectivity in this sense, however, is the exchange of what was previously an external reality for one that is ideal; one which receives an existence exclusively in conscious life itself, as something conceived or imagined exclusively by mind. Mind is here on its own ground objective to itself, and it suffers the medium of speech merely as a means, that is to say, partly as one of communication, and partly as one of immediate externality, from which, as from the pure symbol merely, it is withdrawn throughout from itself into itself. For this reason, in the case of genuine poetry, it is of no consequence whether a poetical work be read in private or listened to; and for the same reason it can also, without essential depreciation of its value, be translated into other tongues, be transferred from versification into prose, and thereby transmitted in tonal relations of an entirely different character.[6]
(β) In the second place the question presents itself as to the nature of the object for which the ideal concept is employed in poetry. We answer that it is thus used relatively to essential truth in everything of interest to Spirit; not merely, that is, relatively to what is substantive in the same in the universality of its symbolic significance or classical differentiation, but equally to all that is at the same time specific and particular, in short, to practically everything in and with which mind is in any way interested and concerned. The art of language, consequently, both in respect to its content and the mode under which that content is made explicit, possesses a field of immeasurable compass, wholly incomparable with that of the other arts. Every content, every sort of spiritual or natural fact, event, history, deed, action, all conditions, whether ideal or external, fall within the domain and configurative powers of poetry.
(γ) Material of this most varied character is not, however, made poetical merely by reason of the fact that it is in a general way the content of idea. Ordinary consciousness is able to elaborate precisely the same content in the field of ideas, and to particularize concepts without creating any poetical result. We recognized this fact when we called the concept of mind merely the material or medium, which only receives a form adapted for poetry, in so far as it partakes of a novel configuration by virtue of art. In precisely the same way mere colour and tone in their immediacy are not as such the colour or tone of a painter or a musician. We may in a general way describe the distinction by stating that it is not the idea as such, but the imagination of the artist which creates a poetical content, under conditions, that is, in which the imagination grasps the same content in such a way that it is itself therewith associated in language, words and their more beautiful conjunction as human speech, just as in the other arts we find it present in the architectonic form; the plastic of sculpture, that adapted to painting, or musical tones and harmony.
A further necessary limitation of the art's appearance is this that the content must, on the one hand, not be embraced in relations applicable to mere thinking, whether that of science or speculative philosophy, nor further in the form of inarticulate emotion, or with a clarity and self-sufficiency which appeals exclusively to the organs of sense;[6] neither, in another direction, must it suffer the idea to pass entirely into what we may in general terms describe as the contingency, divisions, and relativity of finite reality. The imagination of the poet in this respect must maintain a middle course between the abstract universality of pure thinking and the concrete corporeality of material objects, in so far as we are acquainted with the latter in the productions of the plastic arts. Furthermore such an art must generally conform to the requirements we have, in an early section of this work, insisted as essential to every art-product. In other words, the art itself must find in its content the adequate object of its appearance, must elaborate everything, which it embraces, so far as the interest appeals to the intelligence simply,[7] as an essentially independent and self-exclusive world. Only in so far as it does this is the demand of art satisfied, and the content thereof becomes, by virtue of the specific mode of its manifestation, an organic whole, which in its parts presents the appearance of a limited association and ideal synthesis, while at the same time, as contrasted with the world of accidental subordinations, its consistency is one of essential freedom, a whole made explicit through itself.
3. The last point to which we must in conclusion draw attention in respect to this distinction between poetry and the other arts is connected with the different mode under which the imagination of the poet substantiates its ideas in the objective medium of its exposition. The arts hitherto considered were entirely serious in their attachment to the material of sense, a medium in which they themselves were operative, in so far as they merely bestowed on their content a form, which could be throughout accepted and elaborated by means of conglomerations of material substance, whether bronze, marble, or wood, or the media of colour and tones.[8] In a certain sense, no doubt, poetry also has to meet a condition somewhat similar. That is to say, in poetical composition we must not overlook the fact that its results have to be intelligible to mind by means of the communication of human speech. But we shall find none the less that the situation in the two cases is essentially altered.
(a) Otherwise expressed, by reason of the importance pertaining to the material aspect in the plastic arts and music, we find that, as a result of the defined restrictions of this material, only a limited number of conceptions can be fully reproduced in a particularized form of reality such as stone, colour, and tone: the content therefore and the possibilities of artistic composition are narrowed within very definable limits. It was on account of this fact that we were able to associate closely and exclusively every one of these specific arts with one particular form of artistic creation pre-eminently adapted to it. In this way the form of symbolism was appropriate to architecture, the classical to sculpture, and the romantic to painting and music. It is no doubt true that the particular arts in both directions from and toward their proper domain tended to pass over into the other forms. We took account of this fact when we found it possible to refer to a classic and romantic style of architecture, a symbolical and Christian type of sculpture, and even used the term classic in connection with painting and music. Departures such as these from the prevailing type were, however, merely experimental essays which prepared the way in subordination to a new type rather than its culminating effort; or they showed us how one art tended to pass beyond its true limits in seeking to grasp a content or a relation to its material of a type that only a further art development could adequately elaborate. Generally speaking, we have seen that architecture has least resource in the expression of its content; in sculpture there is already an increase of possibility, which is further extended to its widest range[9] by painting and music. And the reason of this is that in proportion as the ideality and particularization under all its aspects by the external medium is made more explicit the variety of the content and of the forms it receives also increases.
Poetry, on the other hand, casts itself free of all subordination to the material of sense, at least to this extent, that in the definition of external or objective expression no reason whatever remains why it should restrict itself to specific content or any limitation to its power of composition and reproduction. It is therefore exclusively united to no specific art type; rather we may define it as the universal art, which is capable of reclothing and expressing under every conceivable mode every content that can possibly enter into or proceed from the imagination of man. And it can do this because its material is nothing more or less than the imagination itself, which is the universal root and ground of all the particular arts and their specific types.
We have already, in another connection, when concluding our discussion of the particular artistic types, come across what was practically the same thing. What we sought for, then, in our conclusion was that art in one of its types should make itself independent of that mode of representation properly called specific, remaining thereby predominant above the entire sphere in which such a totality of particularization is reproduced. An elaboration so comprehensive is among all the particular arts by the very nature of the case only possible to poetry. Its realization is effected through the development of poetical creation in part by means of the actual reconstitution of every particular type, and partly by the liberation of the mode of conception and its content from the boundaries fixed for it in the essentially exclusive types of conception, whose character we have severally defined as symbolical, classical, and romantic.
(b) The above considerations will further serve to justify the position, which, in the course of our inquiry, regarded as the development of a philosophy, we previously assigned to the art of poetry. In other words by reason of the fact that poetry is, to a degree quite impossible to any other mode of artistic production, concerned with the universal simply as such in Art, we might appear to have some reason for insisting that it marks the commencement of an investigation in the full sense of the word philosophical, and only from such a starting point can we enter into the sphere of particularization, in which we find the series of the other arts as limited and determined by their specific sensuous medium. Looking back, however, at the result arrived at in our investigation of the particular art types we shall find that the course of philosophical evolution consisted, first, in an increased penetration of the ideal content, and, from another point of view, in the demonstration that originally Art sets forth in the search, then in the discovery of and finally with an advance beyond that content compatible with its powers. This notion of the beautiful and Art must enforce itself in the arts themselves. The starting-point of our inquiry, therefore, was architecture, in which we found merely an impulse toward the complete representation of what pertains to Spirit in a material medium. This is so much the case that it is only through sculpture that art first attains to a genuine interfusion of ideality with the medium; and further that only in the arts of painting and music do we reach the stage where, by virtue of the ideal and subjective character of their content, we find the perfected fusion effected no less under the aspect of conception than that of practical execution in the medium accepted. This process culminates most decisively in poetry, by virtue of the fact that the very nature of its objective realization can only be apprehended as an effort to draw apart from and cancel the material of sense rather than one of reproduction which does not as yet venture to clothe itself and move in the objective medium of sense-perception. In order, however, to make this liberation intelligible in philosophical terms it is of importance that we have already disposed of the question what it is from which art undertakes to liberate itself. This question stands in close relation to the fact that poetry is essentially capable of embracing the entirety of intelligible content and artistic modes of expression. We may add further that we have viewed this as the acceptance of a totality, which can only be interpreted philosophically as the abrogation of limitation in particularity. Our previous consideration of what we mean by things that are one-sided would be involved in such an exposition, the self-exclusive character of such one-sidedness being cancelled by such a totality.
It is only through the course of such an exposition that we can effectively demonstrate that poetry is the specific art in which a point is reached which marks the beginning of the disintegration of art itself, a point at which the philosophical consciousness discovers its bridge of passage to the notion of religion as such, as also to the prose of scientific thought. The boundary lines of the realm of beauty are, as we have already seen, on the one hand the prose of finite condition and our ordinary conscious life, starting from which Art makes its effort in the direction of truth, and, on the other, of the loftier spheres of religion and science, from which it passes over into a comprehension of the Absolute till more emancipate from all material association.
(c) Despite therefore the completeness with which the art of poetry reproduces, under a mode of objectification that is most ideal, the entire totality of Beauty, nevertheless intelligence is able to discover even here too in this final domain of art a residue of defect. We may for this purpose within our art-system directly contrast the poetic art with that of architecture. In other words architecture was still unable to subordinate the external material to the ideal content sufficiently to clothe the same in a form adequate to mind; poetry on the other hand carries the process of negating its sensuous medium so far that instead of transforming that which stands in opposition to gross spatial matter, namely tone, as architecture does with its material into a significant symbol, it rather reduces it to a mere sign of no significance. But by doing so it destroys the fusion of spiritual ideality with external existence, so thoroughly that to this extent it ceases to be compatible with the original notion of Art. In other words it comes dangerously near to bidding goodbye to the region of sense altogether, remaining wholly absorbed in that of ideality. The fair mean between these extremes of architecture and poetry is secured by sculpture, painting, and music. Every one of these arts not merely still reproduces the spiritual content completely in a medium borrowed from the objective world, but also leaves us with that which lies open to our senses, no less than our intelligence. For although painting and music, regarded as romantic arts, attach themselves to a medium already more ideal, they do none the less supply the immediacy of objective existence, which, however, in this increase of ideality, shows indications of disappearance, while again from the opposite point of view they prove themselves, through their media of colour and tone, more profuse in fulness of particularization and manifold configuration than is required from the material of sculpture.
No doubt the art of poetry in its turn also endeavours, as a set-off to this defect, to place the objective world before us with a breadth and variety which even painting, at least in a single composition, fails to secure: none the less this comprehensiveness remains throughout merely a realization confined to consciousness itself; and, if it so happens that poetry, in response to a demand for more material artistic realization, attempts to increase the impression on our senses, it is only able to do this by either borrowing these effects from music and painting, in order to secure artistic means otherwise foreign to it; or it is forced, if it seeks retain its genuine character, to employ these sister arts only under a subordinate relation of service, while the main stress is laid on the ideas of conscious life, the imagination which appeals to the imagination, with which it is above all concerned.
This will suffice for discussion of the general relation under which poetry is placed to the other arts. We shall now proceed to a closer examination of the art of poetry itself, and with a view to this propose to co-ordinate the same as follows.
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. It is necessary that it should clothe the same in expressive language. It has therefore a twofold task confronting it. On the one hand it is called upon so to arrange this world of constructed idea that it may admit of complete translation into speech: on the other it must take care not to leave this medium of language in the form appropriated by ordinary conscious life. In other words such must be treated poetically in order that the expression of art may be distinguishable in the selection of words no less than their position, and even their sound from that of ordinary prose.
Furthermore, on account of the fact that, though poetry avails itself of language as a means of expression, it secures by far the most unqualified freedom from those conditions and restrictions imposed on the other arts by virtue of the particularization of their material, it is possible for a poetical composition in a pre-eminent degree to elaborate every one of the various modes of expression, otherwise adopted unaffected by the onesidedness incidental to their application to a particular art. The subdivision of such modes of expression in all their variety is consequently by far the most complete in the works of poetry.
The further course of our investigation may now be epitomized as follows:
First, we have to elucidate what is in general terms poetical, and the poetical composition in particular.
Secondly, poetry will be examined as a means of expression.
Thirdly, we shall deal with the subdivision of the art into Epic, Lyric, and Dramatic poetry.
[1] Mittelpunkt. We should rather say the unifying significance of the creation.
[2] It would be perhaps better to translate geistigen Innerlichkeit with the words "the self-conscious life of the human reason." This is developed and explained, however, in the next paragraph.
[3] Hegel expresses this as "making the inner or ideal content perceptible to the ideal faculty," that is, prima facie, consciousness, or at least that sense which is nearest related to it, viz., hearing.
[4] By statt des Geistigen Hegel clearly contrasts pure music with music related as accompaniment to human speech in song.
[5] Lit., "one that merely plays by the way."
[6] Such a statement is obviously one which would be strongly resisted. The stress laid here on the purely ideal content as contrasted with the beauty of rhythm and modal arrangement would certainly suggest that Hegel was deficient in a sense for the musical possibilities of language I presume he does use gebunden in the sense of verse.
[7] Hegel's expression is in rein theoretischen Interesse.
[8] The medium of music is not of course strictly on all fours with the others.
[9] That is under the limits of these four arts.
[I]
POETICAL COMPOSITION AS DISTINGUISHED FROM THAT OF PROSE
We find it difficult to recall a single writer among all who have written on the subject of poetry who has not evaded the attempt to describe what is poetical as such, let alone a clear definition. And in fact if any one begins a discussion upon poetry, regarded as an art, without previously having investigated the nature of the content and mode of conception appropriate to Art in its most general terms, he will find it an extremely difficult matter to determine where we must look for that in which the essential character of poetry consists. To an exceptional degree is this failure to tackle this problem visible in those cases where a writer takes as his point of departure the actual execution in particular works of art, and seeks to establish, by means of this connoisseurship, some general principle which he may apply as relevant to every sort and kind of composition. In this way works of the most heterogeneous character come to rank as genuine poetry. If we once start from such assumptions, and then proceed to the inquiry by virtue of what productions of this nature can be reasonably classed together as poems we are at once confronted with the difficulty I have above adverted to. Happily our own position here is not that of these inquirers. In the first place we have by no manner of means arrived at the general notion of our subject-matter through an examination of any particular examples of its display; we have on the contrary sought to evolve the actual constitution of the same by a reference to the fundamental notion.[1] Agreeably with this it is not part of our demand that everything in ordinary parlance regarded as poetry should in our present inquiry fall into the general notion we have accepted. At least this is certainly not so in so far as the decision whether any particular work is or is not poetical is only deducible from the notion itself. Furthermore it is unnecessary now to expound more fully what we understand by the notion of poetry. To do this we should simply have to repeat again the course of our inquiry into the nature of Beauty and the Ideal as developed in general terms in the first part of this work. The intrinsic character of what is poetical stands in general agreement with the generic notion of artistic beauty and the art-product. That is to say, the imagination of the poet is not, as is the case with the plastic arts and music by reason of the nature of the materia, through which they are reproductive, constrained in its creative activity in many directions, and forced to accept many others of a onesided or very partial completeness; it is on the contrary merely subservient to the essential requirements and general principle of an ideal and artistic presentation.
From the many different points of view applicable to our present purpose, I will attempt to emphasize merely those of most importance, as for example, firsts that which relates to the distinction between the mode of composition employed respectively by poetry and prose; secondly, that which contrasts a poetical work as completed with one of prose; and, finally, I propose to add a few observations relative to the subjective faculty which creates, or, shall we say, the poet himself.
I. THE COMPOSITION OF POETRY AND PROSE
(a) In so far as the content appropriate to poetical composition is concerned we may, relatively speaking at any rate, exclude the external world of natural fact. It is spiritual interests rather than the sun, mountains, landscape, or the bodily human form, and the like, which are its proper subject-matter. For, although it naturally embraces the element of sensuous impression and perception, it remains none the less, even in this respect, an activity of mind. Its main object is an intuition of ideality, to which it stands as spiritual activity in closer relation and affinity than is possible for external objects, as presented in their concrete substance to the senses. The world of Nature therefore only enters into the content of poetry in so far as mind discovers therein a stimulus or a material upon which to exercise its own energy; as, for example, where it is regarded as the environment of man, merely possessing essential worth in its relation to the ideality of conscious life, which moreover can put forward no claim to be itself the independent object of poetry. The object, in short, which fully corresponds to its appeal is the infinite realm of Spirit. For the medium of language, the most plastic medium possessed immediately by conscious life, and the one most competent to grasp its interests and movements in their ideal vitality, precisely as is the case with the material of the other arts, such as stone, colour, and tone, must necessarily and above all be employed to express that which it is most qualified to express. 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. It has been the most universal and cosmopolitan instructor of the human race and is so still. Instruction and learning are together the knowledge and experience of what is. Stars, animals and plants are ignorant of their law—it does not come into their experience; but man only then exists conformably to the principle of his being when he knows what he is and by what he is surrounded. He must recognize the powers by which he is driven or influenced; and it is just such a knowledge which poetry, in its original and vital[2] form, supplies.
(b) It is, however, also a content of the same character which belongs to man's ordinary conscious life. This too instructs him in general laws, as such at least are interpreted by the motley crowd of human life, in their distinction, coordination, and significance. The question therefore arises, as previously observed, as to the nature of the distinction between the mode of conception severally adopted by prose and poetry, a similarity in the content of each being assumed as possible.
(α) Poetry is of greater antiquity than speech modelled in the artistic form of elaborate prose. It is the original imaginative grasp of truths a form of knowledge, which fails as yet to separate the universal from its living existence in the particular object, which does not as yet contrast law land phenomena, object and means, or relate the one to the other in subordination to the process of human reason, but comprehends the one exclusively in the other and by virtue of the other. For this reason it does not merely, under the mode of imagery, express a content already essentially apprehended in its universality; on the contrary it lingers, conformably to its unmediated notion, in the unity of concrete life itself, which has not as yet effected such a separation or such an association of mere relationship.
(αα) Under the above forms of envisualization, poetry posits all that it comprehends as an exclusive and consequently independent totality, which, despite its capacity for a rich content and an extensive range of condition, individuals, actions, events, emotions and ideas of every kind, nevertheless is forced to exhibit the same in all their wide complexity as an essentially self-determined whole, as displayed and motived by the unity, whose individual expression this or that fact in its singularity actually is. And consequently the universal or rational principle is not expressed in poetry in its abstract universality, or in the complexus which lies open to philosophical exposition or under the relation of its varied aspects apprehended by science, but on the contrary as a vital union, in its phenomenal presence, possessed with soul and self-determined throughout; and it is further expressed in such a way that the all-embracing unity, the real soul of its vitality, is only suffered to be operative in mysterious guise from within outwards.
(ββ) The character of this mode of apprehending, reclothing and expressing fact is throughout one of construction. It is not the fact itself and its contemplative[3] existence, but reconstruction and speech which are the object of poetry. Its entrance on the scene dates from the first efforts of man at self-expression. What is expressed is simply made use of to satisfy this desire. The instant man, in the midst of his practical activities and imperative duties, seeks to summarize this effect for mind and to communicate himself to others, then we have some kind of artistic expression, some accord with what is poetical. To mention one from a host of examples, there is that distich which we read in Herodotus referring to the slain heroes of Thermopylae. As for its content it is simply the fact, the bare announcement that four thousand Peloponesians on a certain spot fought the battle with three hundred myriads. The main interest is, however, the composition of an inscription which communicates to contemporary life and posterity the historical fact, and is there exclusively to do so. In other words, the expression of this fact is poetical; it testifies to itself as a deed (εἱν ποιείν) which leaves the content in its simplicity, but expresses the same with a definite purpose. The language, in which the idea is embodied, is to that extent of such increased value that an attempt is made to distinguish it from ordinary speech; we have a distich in lieu of a sentence.
(γγ) For this reason, even from the point of view of language, poetry makes an effort to keep its domain singular and distinct from ordinary parlance, and to accomplish this elevates its expression to a higher virtue than that of merely articulate expression. We must, however, not only in this particular respect, but for the purposes of our present inquiry generally, make an essential distinction between a primitive poetry, which arises previous to the creation of ordinary artificial prose, and that mode of poetical composition and speech the development of which is effected where already the conditions of our everyday life and prosaic expression exist. The first is poetical without intention, in idea no less than speech; the latter, on the contrary, is fully conscious of the sphere, from which its task is to detach itself, in order that it may establish itself on the free basis of art. It is consequently quite aware of the distinction and contrast implied in its self-creation to the world of prose.
(β) Secondly, the kind of prose life, from which poetry has to separate itself, postulates an entirely different nature of conception and speech.
(αα) In other words, looked at from one point of view, such a consciousness regards the wide expanse of reality according to that association of cause and effect, object and means, and all other categories of the mode of reflection which deals with finite conditions and the objective world generally, that is, the limited categories of science or the understanding. It is a feature of such thought that every particular trait should at one moment appear with a false subsistency, at another should be placed in the position of bare relation to something else, that as such it should be so apprehended in its relativity and dependence that no unity of a free nature whatever is possible, no unity, that is, which remains essentially throughout, and in all its branches and separate filaments, a complete and free totality, no unity, in short, where we find that the individual aspects are simply the appropriate explication and phenomenal presence of one content which constitutes the point of focus, the soul that unites all together, and which also finds its vital principle in this all-pervading centre of animation. Rather the type of conception we above refer to as that of science goes no further than the discovery of particular laws in phenomena, and persists for this reason in the separation, or bare relation, of the particular existence with its general law, the laws themselves under this view tending to harden from each other in their isolate singularity; that their relation is, in fact, conceived exclusively under external and finite conditions.
(ββ) And, furthermore, man's ordinary consciousness has nothing to do with what we call the ideal principle of association, the essential core of facts, their bases, causes, ends, and so forth. It rests satisfied with the acceptance of the mere fact that something exists or happens as distinct from something else; or, in other words, with its insignificant contingency. It is no doubt true that the unity of life is not, in such a case, deliberately cancelled by any express separation; that unity, I mean, in which the intuition of the poet arrests the ideal rationale of the fact, its expression and determinate existence. What, however, is absent here, is just that flash of insight into this core of reason and significance, which becomes consequently for our intelligence a thing essentially vacant, possessing no further claim on our minds to a rational interest. The comprehension of a rational cosmos; and its relations is exchanged then and there for a mere flux and contiguity of indifference, which it is true may possess a large expanse of external animation, but which none the less suffers the profounder impulse of reason[4] to remain unsatisfied. 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.
(γγ) These defects, thirdly, in the conceptions of science and our ordinary conscious life speculative thought effaces. It stands, therefore, in one respect in affinity with the imagination of the poet. The cognizance of reason[5] is not solely, or even mainly, concerned with contingent singularity, nor does it overlook in the phenomenal world the essence of the same. It does not rest satisfied with the differentiations and external relations proper to the conceptions and deductions of the understanding; it unites them in a free totality, which in the apprehension of our finite faculty in part fails to preserve its self-consistency, and in part is posited in a relation that possesses no synthetic unity. Pure thought, however, can have but one result, namely thoughts. It evaporates the mode of reality in that of the pure notion. And although it grasps and comprehends actual things in their essential separation and their actual existence, it does also nevertheless translate this particularity into the ideal element of the universal, in which alone thought is at home with itself. Consequently there arises, in contrast to the world of phenomena, a world that is new in this sense, that though the truth of the Real is present, it is not displayed in reality itself as the power itself which gives it form and the veritable soul thereof. Thinking is simply a reconciliation of truth with reality in Thought. The creations and reconstruction, however, of the poet is a reconciliation under the mode of phenomenal reality itself, albeit such a real appearance is merely ideally conceived.
(γ) We have, therefore, two distinct spheres of consciousness, that of poetry and prose. In former times, in which there is neither present a deliberate outlook on the world elaborated, in respect to its religious belief and its general knowledge, under the co-ordinated form of scientific ideas and cognition, nor an actual world of human condition regulated conformably to such a standard, poetry is confronted with a lighter task. Prose is not in such a case opposed to it as an essentially independent field of ideal and external existence, which it has first to overcome. Its problem is for the most part simply limited to deepening all that is significant or transparent in the forms of ordinary consciousness. If, on the contrary, the prose of life has already appropriated within its mode of vision the entire content of conscious life, setting its seal on all and every part of it, the art of poetry is forced to undertake the task of melting all down again and re-coining the same anew. In every direction it finds itself involved in difficulties by the unresponsive nature of prosaic existence. It has, in short, not only to wrest itself from the adherence of ordinary consciousness to all that is indifferent and contingent, and to raise the scientific apprehension of the cosmos of fact to the level of reason's profounder penetration, or to translate speculative thought into terms of the imagination, giving a body to the same in the sphere of intelligence itself; it has further to convert in many ways the mode of expression common to the ordinary consciousness into that appropriate to poetry; and, despite of all deliberate intention enforced by such a contrast and such a process, to make it appear as though all such purpose was absent, preserving the original freedom essential to all art.
(c) We have now summarized in its most general terms that in which the content of poetry consists. We have further distinguished the form of poetry from that of prose. In conclusion, it is of importance to draw attention to the particularization which the art of poetry, to a degree unattained by the other arts, whose development is not nearly so rich in results, admits of. We find, no doubt, architecture illustrated in the arts of very varied peoples, and continuous through many centuries. But of sculpture, at least, it is true that it reaches its culminating point in the ancient world of Greece and Rome, just as painting and music have done more recently in Christendom. The art of poetry celebrates its epochs of brilliancy and bloom among all nations and in all ages almost that present any real artistic activity at all. It embraces the collective Spirit of mankind, and it is differentiated through every kind of variation.
(α) Furthermore, inasmuch as poetry does not accept the universal in scientific abstraction from its object, but seeks to represent what is rational under the mode of individuality,[6] the specific traits of national character are essential to its growth; the content and the particular mode of its presentation are in fact conditioned by the nature of these and the general outlook in each case. We find it consequently adapting itself to every variety of form and peculiarity. It matters not what the poetry may be, whether Oriental, Italian, Spanish, English, Roman, Hellenic, or German, each and all differ totally in their spirit, emotional impulse, general outlook and expression.
A similar distinctive variety asserts itself in particular epochs as they are favourable to the art of poetry or the reverse. The results secured, for example, by our German poetry were impossible in the Middle Ages, or the times of the thirty years' war. The particular motives, which in our own day excite the greatest interest, are inseparable from the entire evolution of contemporary life. And in the same way every age has its own wider or more restricted, more exalted and liberal, or more depressed phase of emotional life, in short its specific outlook on the world, which it is the express aim of poetry to bring home to the artistic consciousness in the most intelligible and complete manner, inasmuch as language is the one medium capable of expressing the human spirit wherever and in whatever form it may be manifested.
(β) Among these national characteristics, or views and opinions peculiar to particular epochs, some have closer affinity with the poetic impulse than others. The Oriental consciousness is, for example, in general more poetic than the Western mind, if we exclude Greece. In the East the principle predominant is always that of coherence, solidity, unity, substance. An outlook of this nature is intrinsically most penetrative, even though it may fail to reach the freedom of the Ideal. Our Western point of view, especially that of modern life, is based on the endless breaking up and division of its boundless material into fragments, in virtue of which process, the extreme emphasis laid here on particular facts, what is merely finite becomes substantive for the imagination, and despite of this must be once more subsumed under the converse action of relativity. For the Oriental nothing persists as really substantive, but everything appears as contingent, discovering its supreme focus, stability and final justification in the One, the Absolute, to which it is referred.
(γ) By means of this diversity of national traits and the evolutionary process of the centuries we find that what is shared by all mankind alike, no less than all that claims to be artistic, is drawn as a common element within the reach of other nations and epochs, intelligible and enjoyable to the same. It is in this twofold connection that of late years to an exceptional degree Hellenic poetry has roused the admiration and imitation of most diverse nationalities. And this is so because in the content of it no less than in the artistic form it receives the simply human is disclosed with most beauty. The literature of India itself, however, despite all the difficulties attendant on an outlook and artistic expression so alien to our own, is not wholly outside our sympathy; and the boast is no empty one that in our modern era pre-eminently a keen sense for all that art and the human spirit embraces in every direction has begun to unfold itself.
Were we in our present investigation of this impulse toward individualization, pursued so persistently by poetry, under the aspects we have already described, to restrict the same to a general treatment of the art of poetry, such a generalization, however established, could not fail to be abstract and devoid of content. It is therefore of first importance, if our object be to consider poetry of a really genuine type, that we include in our survey the forms of the creative spirit as presented in their national form, the unique product of one age; and further we must not overlook the individuality which creates, the soul of the poet. Such, then, are the main points of view to which I would draw attention by way of a general introduction to poetical creation and conception.
2. THE ART-PRODUCT OF POETRY AND PROSE
Poetry is not, however, exhausted by the imaginative idea alone: it must necessarily proceed to make itself articulate and complete in the poetical work of art.
Such an object of study opens a large field of investigation. We may conveniently arrange and classify the course of our discussion as follows:
First, we shall endeavour to point out what is of most importance relatively to the poetical composition generally.
Secondly, we shall distinguish it from the principal types of prose composition, in so far as the same are compatible with artistic treatment.
We shall then, finally be in a position to deduce with some completeness the notion of the free art-product.
(a) In respect to the poetical work of art under its generic aspect all that is necessary is once more to enforce our previous contention that it must, no less than any other production of an unfettered imagination, receive the form and independence of an organic whole. This demand can only receive satisfaction as follows:
(α) In the first place that which constitutes a homogeneous content, whether it be a definite object of action and event, or a specific emotion and passion, must before everything else possess intrinsic unity.
(αα) All else must be posited under relation to this bond of unity, and thereby combine to form a freehand concrete coherence of all parts. This is only possible under the condition, that the content selected is not conceived as abstract universal, but as the action and emotion of men, as the object and passion which are actually present in the mind, soul, and volition of definite individuals, arising as such from the distinctive basis of an individual nature in each case.
(ββ) The universal, which is to receive representation, and the individuals, in whose character events and actions the manifestation of poetry is asserted must not consequently fall into fragments, or be so related that the individuals are merely of service as an abstract universal; both aspects must combine in vital coalescence. In the Iliad, for example, the contest of Greeks and Trojans, and the victory of the former is inseparably bound up with the wrath of Achilles, which for this reason becomes the common focus welding all together. No doubt we also find poetical works in which the fundamental content is partly more abstract in its generalization, and also partly is executed in a way that expresses a universal of more significance. Dante's great epic poem is an illustration, which not only embraces the world divine throughout, but displays individuals of the most varied character in their relation to the punishments of hell, purgatory and the blessedness of Paradise. But even here we find no entirely abstract separation, of the two points of view, no mere relation of service between the particular objects. For in the Christian world the focus of conscious life is not conceived as nothing more than an accident of Godhead, but as essential and infinite cause or end itself, so that here the universal purpose, that is the divine justice in condemnation and salvation can verily appear as immanent fact, the eternal interest and being of the individual himself. In this divine world the individual is throughout of pre-eminent importance. In that of the State he can of course be sacrificed in order to save the universal, that is the State. In his relation to God, however, and in the kingdom of God he is essentially and exclusively the end.
(γγ) We must, however, thirdly, conceive the universal, which supplies the content of human emotion and action as self-subsistent, intrinsically complete where it is, and constituting as such in itself a definitive and exclusive world. When, for instance, in our contemporary life mention is made of any officer, official, general, professor, and so forth, and we try to imagine what kind of action such a man or personality is likely to attempt or carry out under his own particular conditions of environment, we place before ourselves simply a content of interest and activity, which in part is not itself a rounded and self-substantive whole, but one which stands in infinitely manifold external connections, relations and conditions, in part also, if we regard it as abstract totality, one which can receive the form of a universal concept in its separation from the individuality of the, in other respects, entire personality, as for instance that of personal obligation. Conversely we may have no doubt a content of sterling character, making, that is to say, an essentially independent whole, which, despite of this, and without further development and advance, is complete in one sentence. It is really impossible to say whether a content of this nature belongs more properly to poetry or prose. The grand affirmation of the old Testament, "God said Let their be Light and there was Light," is at once in its penetration, no less than the precision of its embrace,[7] as much essentially sublime poetry as it is ordinary prose. Of a similar nature is the command, "I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods but me"; or that, "Honour thy father and thy mother." The golden epigrams of a Pythagoras and the wise sayings of Solomon are of the same type. Phrases, so rich in content as the above, have their origin in a world where the distinction between poetry and prose is as yet absent. We can, however, hardly affirm of such that they are a poetical work of art, even though many such phrases may be combined together. The independence and rounding off of a genuine poetical work must be assumed at the same time to be of the nature of a process, and a differentiation of parts: we assume it therefore to be a unity, the true character of which is only made explicit by emphatic insistence upon its diversity. This process, absolutely essential in the plastic arts, regarded at least according to the requirements of their form, is also more generally of the greatest moment in a poetical composition.
(β) This introduces us, then, to a second feature of the work of art, namely, the organic differentiation of its several parts, essential to it not merely that it may be presented as an organic unity, but that the elaboration of all it implies may be rendered complete.
(αα) The most obvious reason of this necessity is referable to the fact that Art in general tends instinctively to particularization. The effect of the scientific faculty is that what is particular and singular fails to receive its complete vindication. And this is so not merely because the understanding apprehends the manifold, as such theoretic faculty, starting from its principles of generalization, causing the particular fact thereby to evaporate in its abstract deductions and categories; but also because it makes this manifold subserve ends of purely practical import. Severe adherence to that purely relative value, which strictly belongs to the nature of the process, appears to the understanding as useless and tedious. To the conception and composition of poetry on the contrary every part, every phase in the result must remain of essential interest and vital. It dallies therefore with delight in detail, depicts the same with enthusiasm, and treats every part as an independent whole. However great, therefore, in addition the content may be of a poetical work in its central interest, the organic completeness is equally asserted in subordinate detail, precisely as in the human organism every member, every finger is rounded with exquisite delicacy in its unified completeness, and as a rule, we find in Nature that every particular existence is enclosed within a perfect world of its own. The advance of poetry is therefore more slow than that compatible with the judgments and conclusions of the understanding, where we find that, whether regarded theoretically as science or with reference to practical conduct and action, the main stress is on the final result, this rather than on the path by which it is reached. As for the degree in which poetry approaches realization in its tenderness for such detail we have already pointed out that it is not its vocation to describe with excessive diffuseness what is exterior in the form of its sensuous appearance. If it therefore undertakes extensive descriptions without making them reflect at the same time the claims and interests of soul-life it becomes heavy and tedious. Above all it must take care not to enter into deliberate rivalry with the actual detail, in its exact completeness, presented by natural fact itself. 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. It is obvious therefore that difficulties of an exceptional nature have to be overcome when the attempt is made to place an action or event of varied nature before our vision, and where in actual life such happen in a single moment of time, and in close connection with such immediacy, for all it can do is to present the same in a continuous series. As respects this difficulty, no less than the general way in which poetry, as already described, approaches the detail of Nature, we find the demand of the several generic types of the art differs very considerably. Epic poetry, for instance, attaches itself to the particularity of the external world with an emphasis totally different from that of dramatic poetry, with its rapidity of forward movement, or from that of lyrical poetry with its exclusive insistence on the ideally significant.
(ββ) It is through an elaboration of this kind that the several parts of a composition secure subsistency. No doubt this appears to stand in direct contradiction to the unity which we established as a primary condition: as a matter of fact the opposition is merely apparent. This independence should not, that is to say, assert itself in such a way that the several parts are placed in absolute separation from each other: it must on the contrary only be carried so far that the several aspects and members of the whole are clearly seen on their own account to be asserted in the vital form peculiar to each, and to stand on their own free basis of independence. If, on the contrary, this individualized life is absent from the several parts, the composition becomes, precisely as Art generally can only invest the universal with determinate existence under the form of actual particularity, cold and defunct.
(γγ) Despite of this self-subsistency, however, these several parts must remain likewise in conjunction to the extent that the one fundamental motive or purpose, made explicit and manifest in and through them, must declare itself as the unity which pervades the whole, and in which the parts coalesce and to which they return. This is the condition of art, and pre-eminently so of poetry, where it falls short of its noblest reach, upon which it most readily is wrecked, and the work of art declines from the realm of a free imagination into that of mere prose. To put it in another way, the connexion into which the parts fall must not merely be one of final cause and effect. For in the relation of teleology the end is the universal as essentially presupposed and willed, which it is true succeeds in making the several aspects tally with the process, yet employs them none the less as means and to this extent robs them of all really free stability and thereby of every sort of vitality. In such a case the parts merely fall under a relation of purpose to one end, which is asserted imperiously to the disadvantage of all else, and which accepts the same in abstraction as subservient and subordinate to itself. The freedom and beauty of art contradict flatly this servile relation of the abstract faculty of science.
(γ) On these grounds the unity, asserted in the several parts of the composition, must be of another character. The definition of this may be stated under two aspects of conception, as follows.
(αα) In the first place, the vital presence we have already referred to as peculiar to every part separately must be maintained. If we direct our attention, however, to that which in fact justifies the introduction of any detail whatever into the composition, we find the point of departure to be one fundamental idea which the same as a whole is undertaken to manifest or interpret. Consequently everything defined and particular must announce that as the source of its own specific appearance. In other words, the content of a poetical work must not be itself intrinsically abstract, but concrete, one that by reason of its own wealth conducts us to a rich unravelment of its varied aspects. And when this variety, even assuming that in its realization it falls to every appearance into plain contradictions, yet is as a matter of fact rooted in the essentially unified content we have adverted to, in that case we may affirm that by necessity the content itself, in a form agreeable to its notion and being, comprises what is fundamentally an exclusive and harmonious totality of particular characteristics, which it possesses as its own, and in the continuous expatiation of which what it is in its real significance is in truth rendered explicit. It is only these several parts, which originally belong to the content, and which consequently should be carried into the composition under the mode of actual and essentially sound and vital existence. In this respect, therefore, despite all appearance the display of particular characteristics present of opposition to others, they are throughout combined in a union of mysterious accord, rooted in its own nature.
(ββ) Secondly, since the composition is presented under the form of natural phenomena, the unity must, in order to preserve the vital appearance of such reality, only be the ideal bond, which to all appearance without intention holds together the parts and includes them in an organic whole. It is just this animating union of organic life which alone is able to bring into being true poetry as contrasted with the expressed intention of plain prose. That is to say whenever particularity exclusively appears as means to a definite end, it does not possess and cannot conceivably possess an independent and unique vitality of its own; what it does testify to, on the contrary, is that it exists for the sake of something else, that is the end proposed. Purpose of this type declares its sovereignty over the objective facts through which it is fulfilled. An artistic composition should, however, confer upon all that is particular within it, all in the expatiation of which it displays continuously the central and fundamental content selected, the appearance of an unfettered stability. This is absolutely necessary, because what we here comprise under the term particularity is just that content itself under the mode of the reality which corresponds with it. We may therefore recall to our minds the analogous task of speculative thought, which in the same way has on the one side to develop the particular to the point of self-subsistency or freedom from that which is at first an indefinite universality; and likewise, too, it is called on to demonstrate how within this totality of what is particular, in which that and that only is divulged which essentially reposes in the universal, the unity is on this very account once more asserted, and indeed then and only then is truly concrete unity, established through its own differences and their mediation. Speculative philosophy is thus, in the same way, through the method of dialectic above adverted to, responsible for works which resemble in this respect those of poetry, containing, that is, by virtue of the content, an essential identity of self-seclusiveness and a revelation of differentiated material in accord with it. We must, however, despite this similarity between these two activities, and apart from the obvious difference between the evolution of pure thinking and creative art, draw attention to a further essential distinction. The deduction of philosophy no doubt vindicates the necessity and actuality of particularity, but none the less, in virtue of the dialectic process in which this aspect of reality is asserted, it is expressly demonstrated of this particularity and all of it, that it for the first time discovers its truth and its stability in the concrete unity.[8] Poetry, on the contrary, does not proceed to any such express demonstration. 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; but none the less, on account of the fact that as colour they all essentially belong to one totality, they maintain a harmony throughout; and it is not, moreover, necessary that this union as such should be expressly declared in them. In a similar way the dominant, the third and the fifth remain independent as tones, and yet for all that give us the harmony of the trichord; or, rather, we should put it that they only produce this harmony so long as each tone is permitted to assert its own essentially free and characteristic sound.
(γγ) In connection with this organic unity and articulate synthesis of a poetical composition we have further to consider essential features of distinction which are due to the particular artistic form appropriate to the composition under review, no less than the particular type of poetry in which we discover the specific character of its working out. Poetry, for example, of symbolic art is unable, owing to the more abstract and indefinite traits which constitute its essential and significant content, to attain to a fully organic fusion in the degree of transparency possible to the works of the classical art-form. In symbolism generally, as we have already established in the first part of this enquiry, the conjunction of general significance and the actual phenomenon, in association with which Art embodies its content, is of a less coherent character: as a result of this we find that what is particular in one direction preserves a greater consistency; in another, as in the case of the Sublime, only so far asserts this quality in order, through the negation thus implied, to render more intelligible the one supreme power and substance, or merely to advance the process to a condition of mysterious association of particular, but at the same time heterogeneous no less than related traits and aspects of natural and spiritual facts. Conversely, in the romantic type, wherein the ideality of truth reveals itself in essential privacy to soul-life only, we find a wider field for the display of the detail of rational reality in its self-subsistency; in this latter case the conjunction of all parts and their union must necessarily be present, but the nature of their elaboration can neither be so clear or secure as in the products of classical art.
In a similar way the Epic gives us a more extensive picture of the external world; it even lingers by the way in episodical events and deeds, whereby the unity of the whole, owing to this increased isolation of the parts, appears to suffer diminution. The drama, in contrast to this, requires a more strenuous conjunction, albeit, even in the drama, we find that romantic poetry permits the introduction of a type of variety in the nature of episode and an elaborate analysis of characteristic traits in its presentation of soul-life no less than that of external fact. Lyric poetry, as it changes conformably to the fluctuation of its types, adapts itself to a mode of presentment of the greatest variety: at one time it is bare narration; at another the exclusive expression of emotion or contemplation; at another it restricts its vision, in more tranquil advance, to the central unity which combines; at another it shifts hither and thither in unrestrained passion through a range of ideas and emotions apparently destitute of any unity at all.
This, then, must suffice us on the general question of a poetical composition.
(b) In order now,—this is our second main head in the present discussion,—to examine more closely the distinction which obtains between the organic poem as above considered and the prose composition, we propose to direct attention to those specific types of prose which, despite their obvious limitations, do none the less come into closest affinity with art. Such are, without question, the arts of history and oratory.
(α) As regards history, there can be no doubt that we find ample opportunity here for one aspect of genuine artistic activity.
(αα) The evolution of human life in religion and civil society, the events and destinies of the most famous individuals and peoples, who have given emphasis to life in either field by their activity, all this presupposes great ends in the compilation of such a work, or the complete failure of what it implies. The historical relation of subjects and a content such as these admits of real distinction, thoroughness and interest: and however much our historian must endeavour to reproduce actual historical fact, it is none the less incumbent upon him to bring before our imaginative vision this motley content of events and characters, to create anew and make vivid the same to our intelligence with his own genius.[9] In the creation of such a memorial he must, moreover, not rest satisfied with the bare letter of particular fact; he must bring this material into a co-ordinated and constructive whole; he must collectively conceive and embrace single traits, occurrences and actions under the unifying concept; with the result that on the one hand we have flashed before us a clear picture of nationality, epoch of time, external condition and the spiritual greatness or weakness of the individuals concerned in the very life and characterization which belonged to them; and on the other that the bond of association, in which the various parts of our picture stand to the ideal historical significance of a people or an event, is asserted from such without exception. It is in this sense that we, even in our own day, speak of the art of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Tacitus, and a few others, and cannot cease to admire their narratives as classical products of the art of human language.
(ββ) It is nevertheless true that even these fine examples of historical composition do not belong to free Art. We may add that we should have no poetry even though we were to assume with such works the external form of poetry, the measure or rhyme of verse and so forth. It is not exclusively the manner in which history is written, but the nature of its content, which makes it prose. Let us look at this rather more closely.
Genuine history, both in respect to aim and performance, only begins at the point where the heroic age, which in its origination it is the part of poetry and art to vindicate, ceases, for the reason that we have here the moment when the distinct outlines and prose of life, in its actual conditions, no less than the way they are conceived and represented, come into being. Herodotus does not for instance describe the Greek expedition to Troy, but the Persian wars, and takes pains, in a variety of ways, with tedious research and careful reflection, to base the narrative proposed on genuine knowledge. The Hindoos, indeed we may say the Orientals generally, with almost the single exception of the Chinese, do not possess this instinct of prose sufficiently to produce a genuine history. They invariably digress either into an interpretation and reconstruction of facts of a purely religious character, or such as are fantastic inventions. The element of prose then native to the historical age of any folk may be briefly described as follows.
In the first place, in order that we may have history we must presuppose a common life, whether we consider the same on its religious side, or that of a polity, with its law, institutions, and the like, established on their own account, and possessing originally or in their subsequent modification a validity as laws or conditions of general application.
It is out of such a common life, secondly, that we mark the birth of definite activities for the preservation or change of the same, which may be of universal import, and in fact constitute the end or motive of their continuance, and to complete and carry into effect which we have to presuppose individuals fitted for such a task. These individuals are great and eminent in so far as they show themselves, through their effective personality, in co-operation with the common end, which underlies the ideal notion of the conditions which confront them: they are little when they fail to rise in stature to the demand thus made on their energy: they are depraved when, instead of facing as combatants of the practical needs of the times,[10] they are content merely to give free rein to an individual force which is, with its implied caprice, foreign to all such common ends. Where, however, any of such conditions obtain we do not have either a genuine content or a condition of the world such as we established in the first part of our inquiry as essential to the art of poetry. Even in the case of personal greatness the substantive aim of its devotion is to a large or less extent something given, presupposed, and enforced upon it, and to that extent the unity of individuality is excluded, wherein the universal, that is the entire personality should be selfidentical, an end exclusively for itself, an independent whole in short. For however much these individuals discover their aims in their own resources, it is for all that not the freedom or lack of it in their souls and intelligence, in other words the vital manifestation of their personality, but the accomplished end, and its result as operative upon the actual world already there, and essentially independent of such individuality, which constitutes the object of history. And, moreover, from a further point of view we find manifested in the historical condition the play of contingency, that breach between what is implicitly substantive and the relativity of particular events and occurrences, no less than of the specific subjectivity of characters displayed in their personal passions, opinions and fortunes, which in this prosaic mode of life present far more eccentricity and variation than do the wonders of poetry, which through all diversity must remain constant to what is valid in all times and places.
And finally, in respect to the actual execution of affairs within the cognisance of history we find here again the introduction of a prosaic element, if we contrast it with the impulse of genuine poetry, partly in the division asserted by personal idiosyncracy from a consciousness of laws, principles, maxims and so forth, which is thereby necessarily absorbed in the universal condition or fact; and in part also the realization of the ends proposed involve much preparation and arrangement, the means to effect which extend far, and embrace many necessary or subservient relations, which have to be readjusted and adapted, in order to carry out the course proposed, with intelligence, prudence and prosaic circumspection. The work in short cannot be undertaken offhand, but only to a large extent after extensive introduction. The result of this is that the particular acts of execution, which, it is here assumed, come into effect for the one main purpose, are often either wholly contingent in respect to their content, and remain without ideal union, or are asserted under the form of a practical utility regulated by a mind dominated by the aims proposed; in other words, they do not proceed unmediated from the core of free and independent life itself.[11]
(γγ) The historian then has no right to expunge these prosaic characteristics of his content, or to convert them into others more poetical; his narrative must embrace what lies actually before him and in the shape he finds it without amplification,[12] or at least poetical transformation. However much, therefore, it may become a part of his labours to make the ideal significance and spirit of an epoch, a people, or the particular event depicted, the ideal focus and bond which holds all together in one coherent whole, he is not entitled to make either the conditions presented him, the characters or events, wholly subordinate to such a purpose, though he may doubtless remove from his survey what is wholly contingent and without serious significance; he must, in short, permit them to appear in all their objective contingency, dependence and mysterious caprice. No doubt in biography the full animation of personality and an independent unity is conceivably possible, because in such a work the individual, no less than all which proceeds from him and is operative in moulding such a figure, is throughout the focus of the composition. A historical character is, however, exclusively one of two opposed extremes. For although we deduce a unity of subject from the same, none the less from another point of view various events and transactions obtrude, which in part are without any essential ideal connection, and in part come into contact with such individuality without any free co-operation on the part of the same, and to this extent involve the same within the contingency of such an external condition. So, for example, Alexander is without question a personality, pre-eminent above all others of his epoch, and one which, in virtue of its unique forces, falling as they do in accord with contemporary world conditions, becomes engaged in the Persian invasion. The continent of Asia none the less, which Alexander vanquishes, is in the capricious variety of its nationalities a whole united by no necessary bond.[13] Historical events pass before him as the bare panorama of purely objective phenomena. And, finally, if the historian adds to his survey his private reflections as a philosopher, attempting thereby to grasp the absolute grounds for such events, rising to the sphere of that divine being, before which all that is contingent vanishes and a loftier mode of necessity is unveiled, he is none the less debarred, in reference to the actual conformation of events, from that exclusive right of poetry, namely, to accept this substantive resolution as the fact of most importance. To poetry alone is the liberty permitted to dispose without restriction of the material submitted in such a way that it becomes, even regarded on the side of external condition, conformable with ideal truth.
(β) Secondly, oratory appears to have a closer affinity with the freedom of art.
(αα) For although the orator avails himself of the opportunity for and content of his effort out of actual life and definite circumstances and opinions, all that he utters remains none the less, in the first place, subject to his free choice. His personal aims and views are immanent therein, in virtue of which he can make the same a complete and living expression of his personality. And, secondly, the development of the subject of his oration and the mode of delivery depends entirely on himself, so that the impression he makes is as though we received in his speech a wholly independent expression of mind. And, finally, it is his vocation not merely to address himself to the trained or ordinary intelligence of his hearers, but to work upon their entire humanity, their emotions, no less than their judgment. The substance of what he has to say and in which he strives to awake interest, is not merely the abstract aspect of it, nor is it this aspect of his main purpose, in the fulfilment of which he invites co-operation, but rather for the most part also a definite and very real thing. For this reason the substance of the orator's address, while embracing what is essentially substantive in its character, ought equally to grasp his general principle under the form of its specific manifestation, and render the same intelligible to conscious life in the full concrete sense of the term. The orator then must not merely satisfy our understanding with the cogency of his deductions and conclusions, but has it in his power to address the soul itself, to rouse human passion and carry it captive, to absorb the whole attention, and by such means, through all the avenues of spirit, to ravish and convince his audience.
(ββ) Despite, however, such considerations, looked at rightly we find that it is just in the arts of oratory that this apparent freedom is almost wholly subordinate to the rule of practical utility. In other words what confers upon public speaking its unique motive force is not implied in the particular purpose, to promote which the speech is made; we must refer it to the general principle, the laws, rules, axioms which the particular case suggests, and which are already essentially present in this form of universality, partly, as actual laws of the State, partly too as ethical, juristic or religious maxims, emotions, dogmas, and so forth. The particular circumstance and end, which we find here as the point of departure, and this universal are in every respect separate from each other, and this separation is the relation maintained throughout. No doubt the orator intends to make these two aspects unite: what, however, in poetry, in so far as poetry is really present, attests as already from the first accomplished, is present in oratory merely as the personal aim of the orator, the fulfilment of which lies outside the speech itself altogether.
The only alternative we have left us is a process of subsumation, whereby the phenomenon, the actual and defined thing, here the concrete case or end, is not unravelled in immediate unity with the universal as such, and freely from its own substance, but only receives validity by virtue of its dependence upon general principles and in its relation to legislative acts, morality, customs, and the like, which on their own account possess independent stability. It is not the spontaneous life of the fact in its concrete manifestation, but the prosaic division between notion and reality, a mere relation of both to each other and a mere demand for their union, which constitutes the fundamental type under consideration.
Such a process of thought is frequently adopted by the religious teacher. For him religious doctrines, in their widest connotation, and the principles of morality or of philosophy, political or otherwise, which follow in their train, are in fact precisely the object whereto he can refer cases of every conceivable variety; and they are this for the reason that these doctrines have to be accepted, believed and recognized by the religious consciousness as essentially and in their own worth the substance of all particular appearance. No doubt the preacher may at the same time appeal to our heart, may suffer the divine laws to unveil from the depth of soul-life as their source, and face to face with his audience may refer them to such a source. But it is not in their absolutely individual guise that he must necessarily present and assert them; on the contrary, he must bring effective universality to consciousness under precisely this form of commands, promises and maxims of faith. The oratory of courts of law is even a better illustration. Here we find in addition the twofold point of view, that while on the one hand all turns most obviously on the particular case, yet conversely the subsumation of this case to general considerations and laws is equally a necessity. As regards the first aspect, we may remark that the element of prose is already implied in the enforced investigation of the actual facts and the collocation and able reconstruction of all singular circumstances and accidents; a process such as this at once opens our eyes to the poverty involved in this investigation of the truth of such a legal case, no less than the tedious ingenuity engaged in its display, if we contrast it at least with the free creations of poetry. We have in fact to carry our analysis of the concrete facts to a yet further point. Such must not merely be traced in a series that does justice to all features, but every one of such features, no less than the whole case, have to be referred back to the statute accepted from the first as of independent validity. At the same time, even in this prosaic affair, we still have considerable scope for an impression on the heart and emotions. For it is possible so to present the rightness or wrongness of the case under discussion to the imagination that we are no longer bound to acquiesce in the bare knowledge of the facts and a general conviction; on the contrary, the case in its entirety is capable of becoming, by virtue of the style adopted in its exposition, so marked with the characteristics of personality to everyone who hears it, that no one can fail to discover there a personal interest as of something which concerns himself.
Secondly, in the oratorical art, artistic delivery and elaboration is not that which constitutes the ultimate and highest interest of the speaker; he possesses in addition and beyond his art an ulterior aim, that the entire form and working out of his discourse should rather be used exclusively as the most effective means to promote an interest which is outside. From this point of view the audience too have to be influenced not on their own independent account, but the effort is rather to excite emotion and conviction exclusively as a means toward the attainment of the purpose, the fulfilment whereof the orator has proposed from the first. The mode of presentation, therefore, ceases to be an end for itself even to the listener; its claim becomes exclusively that of a means to some particular conviction, or an incentive to definite conclusions or activities.
For these reasons from this point of view also the art loses its freedom of form; it becomes a means to a purpose, to a further demand,[14] which, this is a third point, in relation to the consequence, is not satisfied in the actual speech itself and its artistic handling. The composition of poetry on the contrary has no other object than the manifestation and enjoyment of beauty. End and accomplishment reposes here immediately and essentially in the independent work, which for that reason is complete; artistic activity is no means to an essentially ulterior result, but an end which at once is rounded in itself by virtue of its own execution. In oratory art receives merely a position of service to something collateral; the genuine end is therefore not as such consonant with art, but of a practical character, that is to say, instruction, edification, judgment of legal matters or political affairs, and therewith a reference to some matter which has first to happen, or to a decision not yet carried out, but which, however, are in neither case terminated or completed through the resultant effect of the art in question, but can only be so in various ways after a contact with quite other activities. A speech in fact may often conclude with a dissonance, which the hearer has first to resolve as judge, and only then is able to act agreeably with such a verdict. Just as, for example, the oratory of the pulpit starts from the point of the unconverted soul, and in the result makes the hearer pass judgment over his own self and his soul's condition. In such a case religious conversion is the object of the preacher; but whether such a conversion follows as a result of all the edification and excellence of his eloquent exhortations, and thus the end proposed is carried out, is a point of view which the sermon itself cannot deal with; it must be perforce relegated to subsequent conditions.
(γγ) In all these directions the notion of eloquence will fall rather under the main principle of utility than maintain itself within the free and organized whole of the poetical art-product. In short the orator must necessarily and above all make it his mark to subordinate the whole, no less than the parts, to that purpose in his mind, from which his effort proceeds, a process in which the self-consistent independence of his exposition disappears, and in lieu of which we must assume a relation of service to a definite end that ceases to be of artistic significance. And above all, inasmuch as the object in view is one of practical influence upon human life, he must keep throughout before his mind the nature of the place in which he speaks, the degree of education, the receptive powers, and, in short, the general atmosphere of his audience, that he may not fall short of the practical success desired through an inability to meet the local conditions of the moment, and the idiosyncrasies of his audience. By reason of this very attachment to external conditions it is impossible that either the entirety of his address or its parts can any longer originate in a free artistic activity;[15] it will constantly tend in its detailed elaboration to appropriate utilitarian points of association, and be dominated by conceptions of cause and effect, and other categories more proper to science.
(c) And, thirdly, we may, as flowing from the above distinction between what is really poetical and the creations of the historian and the orator, establish the following points pertinent to the poetical composition itself.
(α) We found that in history the element of prose consisted above all in this that however much the content thereof could be ideally substantive and possessed of a downright penetrative power, the actual form of the same was, however, invariably accompanied with many conditions of relative validity, massed together with much that was contingent, and finally often referable to caprice simply as its ground, aspects of immediate objective fact which the historian was not entitled to translate into the terms of a reality of profounder grasp.
(αα) The effort of such a transfiguration is in fact a fundamental desideratum of the poetical art when it, so far as its material is concerned, steps into the arena of history. It is its business in short in such a case to discover the mere ideal core and significance of an event, action, or a national type, a famous historical personality, and as decisively to brush aside aspects of contingency, everything in fact purely incidental or indifferent, which plays round such types or individuals, and stands to them in a purely relative connection. It has then to establish, in the place of the circumstances and traits it rejects, others which reveal the ideal essence of the facts in their clarity, to the intent that in this transfigured presence such shall so discover concrete truth in its fulness that the reason, which has hitherto lain concealed, though implied in them, shall now for the first time assert itself as evolved and declared in complete realization. By this means alone poetry is able in the proposed work to make its content coalesce in the secure unity of a centre, able as such to round and unfold itself in a whole. And this is possible because it not only is operative as a more effective bond between the parts, but also because, without compromising the unity of the whole, all its varied particularity is suffered to assert its claim to an independent impression.
(ββ) Poetry may in this respect make a yet further advance, when, it accepts as its main content, in lieu of the material and significance of the historical fact, some fundamental idea, some human collision in general associated with it in a close or more remote affinity, and employs the historical factum and personages, everything local in short, merely in the guise or garment of individualization. The difficulty to be encountered here is twofold: either the historically ascertained data, when appropriated by the composition, may fall out of line with the fundamental idea; or, conversely, it may be that the poet in some measure retains these data, but also too in essential features moulds them conformably to his purposes, and by doing this work fails to harmonize the element of stability with that of original design which were both essential to our conception of the poetical product. To dispel such an opposition and to reassert the accordant note able to do this is a difficult matter; it is none the less necessary, for objective reality has itself too an unquestionable title to what is essential in the character of its appearance.
(γγ) We may extend the reach of poetry yet further and we shall still find that the demand to be met is the same. In other words, all that the art of poetry represents in external local condition, characterization, actions, passions, situations, conflicts, events, and human destiny, all this material is borrowed, far more so in fact than is generally credited, from the facts of life itself. This being so, poetry here too is on the historical arena; and, consequently, its deviations or variations of such data must, in this field also, find their point of departure in the rational core of the facts in question and the demand of the art to discover for this ideal essence a form that exhibits it with greatest adequacy and life. And this must not be sought for in the poverty of a superficial knowledge, an inability to penetrate what is really vital in fact, or in the moods of caprice and with the craving after the quaint or perverse ingenuities of a spurious originality.
(β) And further, as already stated, oratory is allied to prose on account of the practical end which is thereby proposed, and, to carry out which, it is forced to admit to the full the claims of utility.
(αα) In this respect poetry must take care to detach itself from any end of this kind outside Art's domain, and the claim of artistic enjoyment simply; that it may not fall into the sphere of prose. For if any purpose of this sort is made to appear of essential importance, as part of the entire conception and presentation, the composition at once descends from that loftier region, in whose free atmosphere it floats on its own account and on no other, and is drawn into that of relation merely. As a result of this we have either a breach made between the fundamental aim of art and the ends of ulterior intendments; or art is used as a means simply, contradicts its substantive notion, and becomes the menial of utility. The edifying effusions of many church hymns are of this character. Particular ideas are simply admitted on religious grounds, and receive a style of composition which is alien to the beauty of poetry. And, speaking generally, poetry, simply as poetry, has no right to edify in a religious sense, or at least exclusively in this sense. If it does so we are carried into a region, which no doubt possesses relationship with both poetry and art, but is for all that distinct from it. We may say the same of teaching generally, ethical instruction, political treatises, or writings of all kinds written for our momentary recreation and enjoyment. All these are objects, to whose attainment the art of poetry is, or can be more than any other, contributory. But such contributions must not enter into the purpose, if the spirit of the work is to assert itself freely in its own character. In the poetical effort it is only what is really poetic, eliminated from all that is foreign to this quality, which must remain paramount as the end proposed and accomplished. And in fact such ulterior aims as the above can be carried out far more appropriately by quite other means.
(ββ) The art of poetry, however, from the converse point of view, should strive to assert no absolute and isolated position; it ought, as a part of life itself, to enter freely into life. Already in the first part of this inquiry we found how many points of contact there were between art and ordinary existence, whose content and phenomenal appearance are repeated in its content and form. In poetry this vital relation to actual existence and its specific circumstances, private or public events, appears with most obvious variety in the so-called poems d'occasion. With a broader interpretation of the expression we may define as such most poetic compositions; in the more narrow and correct meaning of the term, however, we should restrict it to those productions whose origin is traceable to a single event of present time, which it is the express aim of the poet to emphasize, adorn, and celebrate. In this weaving together of the actual threads of life, however, poetry tends once more to decline to a position of dependence; it is therefore by no means unusual for writers on aesthetic to attach a purely subordinate value to poetry of this class in general, although as to a part of it, notably in the case of the lyric, we find here the most famous compositions.
(γγ) The question consequently arises by virtue of what poetry may be enabled to still maintain its independence even in the conflict above described. The answer is simple. It must regard and assert the occasional facts it borrows from life not as its essential aim, while it is itself merely accepted as a means. Rather the reverse process is the right one, which absorbs the material of such reality within its own substance, and informs and elaborates the same conformably to the claims of an unfettered imagination. In other words poetry has nothing to do with the accidental or incidental fact as such. This material supplies the external opportunity, that is the stimulus which prompts the poet to draw upon his own profounder penetration and more transparent mode of presentment: by this means he creates from his own resources, as something newborn, that which, without such mediation, would have, in the plain and blunt particular case, wholly failed to impress us with the free spirit he communicates.
(γ) In conclusion then we may affirm that every genuine work of poetry is an essentially infinite organism.[16] In content rich, it unfolds this content under a mode of appearance which is adapted to it. It is permeated with a principle of unity, but not one referable to the form of utility, which subordinates the particular to itself in an abstract relation, but rather one that absorbs the same in the singularity relevant to one identical and entirely vital self-consistency, in which the whole, without any visible intention, is sphered within one rounded and essentially self-enclosed completeness. It is indeed replete with the materia of the visible world, but is not on that account placed, either in relation to its content or determinate existence, under a condition of dependence to any one circle of life. Rather it freely creates out of its own plenitude, striving to clothe the ideal notion of its material in its genuine manifestation as truth, and to bring the world of external fact into reconciled accord with its own most ideal substance.
3. THE CREATIVE IMPULSE OF THE POET[17]
I have already discussed at considerable length, in the first part of this work, the talent and genius, the enthusiasm and originality of the artist. I will consequently merely touch upon one or two points in the present reference to the art of poetry which appear of importance, if we contrast this activity as effective here with that operative in the plastic arts and music.
(a) The architect, sculptor, painter and musician have to deal with an entirely concrete and sensuous material, in and through which each has to elaborate his creations. The limitations of this material condition the specific form that the type of the conception no less than the mode of artistic execution assume. The more fixed and predetermined the general lines of his definition are upon which the artist has to concentrate himself, the more specialized becomes the talent required for the assertion of the same in any one and no other mode of presentment; and we may add in the powers of technical execution which accompany it. The talents adapted to the poetic art, regarding the same from the point of view of an ideal envisagement in a specific materia, is subordinated in a less degree to such conditions; it is consequently more open to universal practice, and in this respect more independent. The need here at least is merely that of a gift for imaginative creation. Its limitation is confined merely to this, namely, that for the reason that this art is expressed in language, it has to guard itself on the one hand from deliberate rivalry with external objects in their sensuous completeness, in the form, that is, where we find the plastic artist apprehends his subject-matter in its external configuration: and, from a further point of view, it is unable to rest in the unspoken ideality, the emotional tones of which constitute the realm of music. In these respects the problem proposed to the poet, if we contrast him with artists in other arts, is at once more facile and more difficult It is more easy, because, although the poet, in the poetical elaboration of speech, must possess a trained talent, he is spared the relatively more manifold task of triumph over technical difficulties necessary in the other arts. It is more difficult because, just in proportion as poetry is less able to complete the objective envisagement, it is compelled to seek some compensation for this loss on the side of sense in the genuine core of Art's own ideality, in the depth of imagination and a really artistic mode of conception.
(b) For this reason the poet is, in the second place, constrained to penetrate into all the wealth of the spiritual content, and to lay bare to the vision of mind what is concealed in its depths. For however much in the other arts, too, the ideal must shine forth through its corporeal manifestation, and does so in life itself shine forth, yet the medium of speech remains that most open to intelligence, and the means most adequate to its revelation. It is the one medium able to grasp and declare everything whatever that flows through or is present in consciousness, whether regarded in its ascent or profundity. In consequence of this the poet finds himself confronted with difficulties which the other arts are not called upon to overcome or satisfy to the like degree. In other words, for the very reason that poetry is actually operative in the world of idea or imagination itself, and is not concerned with fashioning for its images an objective existence independent of such ideality, it is placed in an element or sphere in which the religious, scientific and everyday consciousness are active; it must therefore take care to make no excursion into the domain or mode of conception proper to any of these, or to get mixed up with them. No doubt in the case of every art we find points of contact with other arts. Artistic creation of every kind proceeds from one mind or spirit, which comprehends in itself all spheres of self-conscious life. But with the other arts the distinction of conception in each case is in its mode complete, for the reason that this, in its ideal creation, persists throughout in permanent relation to the execution of its images in a definite sensuous material, and consequently is absolutely distinct, no less from the forms of the religious consciousness, than it is from the thinking of science and the intelligence of ordinary life. Poetry, on the contrary, avails itself, in its manner of objective communication, of the very means adopted in these spheres of mental activity, that is to say, human speech; it finds itself, consequently, otherwise placed than are the plastic arts and music, which occupy a different field of conception and expression.
(c) Thirdly, we have the final demand made upon the poet for the most profound and manifold transfusion of the subject-matter of his creations with the animating soul of life, because it is his art which is capable of absorbing most profoundly the entire fulness of the spiritual content. The plastic artist, in a similar way, must apply himself to a transfusion of ideal expression in the external form of architectonic, plastic and the forms peculiar to painting. The musician must likewise rivet his attention on the inner soul concentrated in emotion and passion and their outpouring in melodic expression. In both cases the artist must be steeped in the most ideal intention and substance of his content. But the sphere of the poet's creative activity extends yet further, for the reason that he has not merely to elaborate an ideal world of soul-life and the self-conscious mind. 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. Only after that, and in order that he may find it in his power to create, as from his own spiritual experience outwards, a free whole,—ay, even in the case where he restricts his effort to a comparatively narrow and particular range,—he must have liberated himself from all embarrassment with his subject-matter, whether of a technical[18] character or otherwise, able in short to survey the ideal and external aspects thereof with the same free glance. From the point of view of instinctive creative vigour[19] we may in this respect pre-eminently praise the Mahomedan poets of the East. The starting-point in such compositions is a freedom which, even in the moment of passion, remains aloof from such passion, and in all the variety of its interests retains exclusively throughout the one substance as its veritable core, in contrast to which everything else appears small and transitory, and nothing of finality is left either to passion or lust. This is a philosophical outlook, a relation of spirit to the facts of the world, which comes more readily to age than youth. For in old age no doubt the interests of life are still present; but they are not there with the urgency of youthful passion, but rather in the guise of shadows, and to this extent are more readily conformable to ideal relations such as Art demands. In opposition to the ordinary view that youth with its warmth and vigour is the fairest season for poetic creation, we may rather, at least from this point of view, maintain just the opposite, that the ripest season belongs to the autumn of old age, provided that it is able to preserve its energies of outlook and emotion. It is only to a blind old man, Homer, that we ascribe those miraculous poems which have come down to us under that name. And we may also affirm of our Goethe that only in old age, after he had fully succeeded in liberating his genius from all restricting limitations of sense, that he gave us his most exalted creations.[20]
[1] That is, the essential notion (Begriff) of Art generally.
[2] Substantiellen, i.e., the form that most corresponds to its essence.
[3] Theoretisch. Hegel doubtless has the Greek word in his mind. It is a Bildung for the mind rather than with a view to action. It assumes contemplation rather than volition.
[4] It is not quite clear whether Hegel means by Bedürfniss the need of spiritual life, or the profounder demand of reality. It might stand for either.
[5] That is, the Vernünft.
[6] Das individualisirte Vernünftige, i.e., reason as realized in concrete personality.
[7] In seiner Gediegenheit und schlagenden Fassung. Gediegenheit here thorough grasp. Schlagenden may possibly mean arresting character of the conception rather than definite, precise.
[8] That is, the notion.
[9] By aus dem Geiste it is quite possible that there is no reference to individual genius. In that case the translation would be "in terms of human intelligence," i.e., from the resources of human reason.
[10] This seems to be the meaning of die Sache der Zeit.
[11] Lit., "They do not come forth from self-substantive and immediately free vitality (Lebendigkeit)." Lebendigkeit is here the ideal and creative force or bond of soul-life as above described.
[12] The German word would imply here an interpretation of symbolic or at least ideal significance.
[13] This I presume is the general meaning of the sentence: Asien aber, das er besiegt, ist in der vielfachen Willkühr seiner Einzelnen Völkerschaften nur ein zufälliges Ganzes.
[14] Ein Sollen.
[15] It is possible that too much stress is laid on this line of difference. The fundamental difference between oratory and poetry is that of form. At least it can hardly be denied that the power of the orator to meet the demands of local conditions is a vital feature of his art, that in this respect a Demosthenes is greater than Burke. It is surely a mistake to assume that such limitations in themselves or necessarily are an obstacle to creative genius. It is rather the sign of supreme oratorical power that it can mould them and command them in conjunction with its more majestic spirit. In this lies an essential part of the art itself, just as a sculptor or a painter, such as Tintoret in the S. Rocco Scuola, dominates the defects of local condition.
[16] Infinite, that is, not in the temporal sense, but as a complete and self-realized whole.
[17] Hegel calls it "the poetising subjectivity"; that is, the personal activity essential to poetic composition.
[18] Practischen.
[19] This appears to be the meaning of des Naturells.
[20] This is perhaps less true of Goethe than it is of either Milton or Shakespeare. It is possible that Hegel thought more highly of the second part of "Faust" as art than do the majority of modern critics. But the truth is there, if subject to a good deal of qualification in respect to certain aspects of poetry. As Meredith says:
"Verily now is our season of seed,
Now in our Autumn."
And Meredith was not one to do less than justice to the superb Dream of imaginative youth.
[II]
THE EXPRESSION OF POETRY
The field of vision which first will occupy our attention, but the boundless expanse of which we can only traverse with a few general observations, is that which concerns the poetic generally, the content no less than the mode of conception and organic association adapted to the poetic work of art. This background will help to emphasize the second aspect of our subject, which is poetic expression more strictly, the idea in the ideal objectivity of the word appropriated by it as symbol of the image, and the melodious vehicle of its speech.
We may infer the nature of the relation between poetic expression generally and the mode of presentment proper to the other arts from our previous examination of the characteristics of the poetic art. Language and the sounds of words are neither a symbol of spiritual conceptions, nor an adequate mode of projecting ideality under the condition of spatial objectivity in the sense applicable to the corporeal forms of sculpture and painting, nor yet an intonation in musical sound of the entire soul. They are an abstract sign simply. As the vehicle of the poetic image or conception, however, it is necessary that this side also, in theory no less than deliberate elaboration, appear as distinct from the kind of expression appropriate to prose.
We may for this purpose emphasize with more detail three main points of distinction.
Our first point is this, that although poetic expression is throughout exclusively embodied in articulate words, and apparently as such is simply related to human speech, yet in so far as the words themselves are merely abstract signs representative of ideas, the true source of poetic speech is not to be discovered in the selection of particular words, and in the manner they are associated in sentences and elaborated phrases, nor in harmonious rhythm, rhyme and so forth, but in the type of conception employed. We have, in short, to look for our point of departure for the constructive use of expression in the choice of the idea or image, find our first and foremost question will be what kind of conception will give us an expression suitable to poetry. Secondly, however, it remains the fact that the imaginative idea essentially pertinent to poetry is exclusively made objective in language. We have consequently to investigate the expression of speech according to its purely verbal aspect, in the light of which poetic words are distinguishable from those of prose, poetic phrases from those of our ordinary life and prosaic thought, abstracting in the first instance the mere sound of them to our sense of hearing.
Finally, we have to recognize the fact that poetry is a mode of articulate speech, the sounding word, which in its temporal duration no less than its actual sound, must receive a definite configuration, one that implies the presence of time-measure, rhythm, melodious sound and rhyme.
[I. THE POETIC CONCEPT OR IDEA]
What in the plastic arts the sensuous visible form expressed by means of stone and colour is, or what in the realm of music animating strains of harmony and melody are, this—we must repeatedly insist on the fact—can only be, in respect to poetic expression—the idea or image itself. The force of the poet's creation centres consequently, in the fact that the art moulds a content in an ideal medium, and without bringing before us the actual forms of external Nature and the progressions of musical sound; by doing so, therefore, it translates the objective presence accepted by the other arts into an ideal form, which Spirit or intelligence expresses for the imagination under the mode which is and must remain that of our conscious life.
A distinction of this very character was already insisted on when we had occasion previously to establish a distinction between the earliest type, of poetry and its later modes of reconstruction from the data of prose.
(a) Imaginative poetry in its origin is not as yet a consciously distinct form from those extremes of ordinary conscious life, one of which brings everything to vision under the mode of immediate and therewith contingent singularity, without grasping the ideal essence implied therein, and the manifestation of the same; while the other, in one direction, differentiates concrete existence into its various characteristics, making use of abstract generalization, and in another avails itself of the scientific faculty as the correlating and connecting focus of such abstractions. The idea is only poetical in so far as it holds these extremes in unviolable mediation, and thereby is able to maintain a position of genuine stability midway between the vision of ordinary consciousness and that of abstract thought.
In general terms we may define the poetic imagination as plastic[1] in so far as it brings before our vision concrete reality rather than the abstract generalization, and in the place of contingent existence an appearance of such a kind that we recognize what is substantive immediately in it by virtue of its embodiment itself and its individuality, and as inseparable from it, and by virtue of this are able to grasp the concrete conception-of the fact in question no less than its determinate existence as one and the same vital whole reposing in the ideal medium of the imagination. In this respect we find a fundamental distinction between that whereof the plastic or constructive idea is the source and all that is otherwise made vivid to us through other means of expression. The same truth will appear to us, if we analyse what we mean, by mere reading. We understand what the letters mean, which are indicative points for articulate utterance, by the mere act of sight, and without being further obliged to listen to their sound. Only the illiterate reader will find it necessary to speak aloud the separate words that he may understand their sense. But in the case of poetry just what seems to be here the mark of stupidity is an indication of beauty and excellence. Poetry is not satisfied with an abstract effort of apprehension, nor does it bring objects before us as we find them in the form of reflection and in the unimaginative generalization of our memory. It helps us to approach the essential notion in its positive existence, the generic as clothed in its specific individuality. In the view of ordinary common sense I understand by language, both in its impression on my hearing or sight, the meaning in its immediacy, in other words, without receiving its image before the mind. The phrases, for instance, "the sun," or "in the morning," possess each of them no doubt a distinct sense; but neither the Dawn or the Sun are themselves made present to our vision. When, however, the poet says: "When now the dawning Eos soared heavenwards with rosy fingers," here without question we have the concrete fact brought home to us. The poetical expression adds, however, yet more, for it associates with the object recognized a vision of the same, or we should rather say the purely abstract relation of knowledge vanishes, and the real definition takes its place. In the same way take the phrase, "Alexander conquered the Persian empire." Here, no doubt, so far as content is concerned, we have a concrete conception; the many-sided definition of it, however, expressed here in the word "victory," is concentrated in a featureless and pure abstraction, which fails to image before us anything of the appearance and reality of the exploit accomplished by Alexander. This truth applies to every kind of similar expression. We recognize the bare fact; but it remains pale and dun, and from the point of view of individual existence undetermined and abstract. The poetic conception consequently embraces the fulness of the objective phenomenon as it essentially exists, and is able to elaborate the same united with the essential ideality of the fact in a creative totality.
What follows as a primary result of this is that it is of interest to the imagination to linger near the external characteristics of the fact, to the extent at least that it seeks to express the same in its positive reality, deems this as essentially worthy of contemplation and insists on this very attitude.
Poetry is consequently in its manner of expression descriptive Description is, however, not the right word for it. We are, in fact, accustomed to accept as descriptive, and in contrast to the abstract definition, in which a content is otherwise brought home to our intelligence, much that the poet passes by, so that from the point of view of ordinary speech poetic composition can only appear as a roundabout way and a useless superfluity. The poet must, however, manage to bring his imagination to bear upon the explication of the actual phenomenon he is attempting to depict with a vital interest.[2] In this way, for instance, Homer adds a descriptive epithet to every hero. So Achilles is the swift-footed, the Achaeans bright-greaved, Hector as of the glancing helm, Agamemnon the lord of peoples, and so forth. The name is no doubt descriptive of a personality, but the name alone brings nothing further to our vision. To have some distinct idea of this we require further attributes. We have in fact similar epithets attached by Homer to other objects, which are essential to our vision of the epic, such as sea, ships, sword and others, epithets which seize and place before us an essential quality of the particular object, depicting it more precisely, and which enable us to apprehend the fact in its concrete appearance.
Secondly, we must distinguish such reconstruction of actual facts from definition wholly imagined. This offers a further point of view for discussion. The real image merely places before us the fact in the reality it possesses. The expression of the poet's imagination, on the contrary, does not restrict itself to the object in its immediate appearance; it proceeds to depict something over and above this, by means of which the significance of the former picture is made clear to our mind. Metaphors, illustrations, similes become in this way an essential feature of poetic creation. We have thereby a kind of veil attached to the content, which concerns us, and which, by its difference from it, serves in part as an embellishment, and in part as a further unfolding of it, though it necessarily fails to be complete, for the reason that it only applies to a specific aspect of this content. The passage in which Homer compares Ajax, on his refusing to fly, to an obstinate ass is an illustration. To a pre-eminent degree oriental poetry possesses this splendour and wealth in pictorial comparisons. There are two main reasons of this. First, its symbolic point of view makes such a search for aspects of affinity inevitable, and in the universality of its centres of significance it offers a large field of concrete phenomena capable of comparison; secondly, on account of the sublimity of its predominant outlook there is a tendency to apply the entire variety of all that is most brilliant and glorious in its motley show to the embellishment of the One Supreme, which is held before the mind as the sole One to be exalted. This object of the imagination, moreover, is not to be apprehended as merely the work of fanciful caprice or comparison, possessing as such nothing in it essentially actual and present. On the contrary the transmutation of all particular existence into further existence in this central idea grasped and clothed by the imagination is rather to be understood as equivalent to the assertion that there is nothing else essentially present, nothing that otherwise can put forward a claim to substantive reality. The belief in the world as we apprehend it with the vision of ordinary common sense is converted into a belief in the imagination, for which the only world that verily exists is that which the poetic consciousness has created. Conversely we have the romantic imagination, which is ready enough to express itself in metaphor, because in its vision what is external is for the essentially secluded life of the soul only accepted as something incidental, something that is unable adequately to express its own reality. To reclothe this consequently unreal externality with profound emotion, with all the fulness of detail envisioned, or with the play of humour upon the conjunction of such opposites is an impulse, which constrains and charms romantic poetry to ever novel discoveries. The object of importance here is not so much to make the fact clear and distinct to the vision; on the contrary the metaphorical employment of these outlying phenomena is itself the aim proposed. The emotion of the poet concentrates itself as the centre, which the environment enriches with its wealth; it absorbs this as part of itself, adapts it with genius and wit to its adornment, steeps it in its own life, and finds in this movement to and fro, this elaboration and self-reflection of its creation its own source of delight.
(b) Secondly, we have the contrast present between the poetic mode of conception and that of prose. The thing of importance in the latter case is not that which is imaged, but the significance as such which constitutes the content. It is on account of the latter that the idea or image becomes a mere means to bring the content before the mind. The composition of prose is therefore neither compelled to place the more detailed reality of its objects before our vision, nor to summon before us, as is the case with the metaphorical mode of expression previously described, another idea which carries us beyond the immediate object to be expressed. No doubt it is also necessary in prose to indicate in firm and distinct outlines the positive appearance of objects; but this is so not on account of their figurative character,[3] but to meet a specific and practical purpose. Generally speaking we may therefore affirm accuracy to be from one point of view the ruling principle of prose composition, and from another a clear definition and intelligibility of statement. In contrast to this the language of metaphor and imagery is in general and relatively less clear and more inaccurate. For in that mode of direct expression, such as we have presented by our first form of the poetic conception, the fact in its simplicity is carried away from our immediate apprehension of it as a mere object into the actual world of concrete fact, and we have to recognize it as a part of this, while in that second and more oblique form some phenomenon of affinity merely and one even aloof from the essential significance of our subject is made present to us. We do not, therefore, wonder that prosaic commentators of our poets have no easy task when they seek to separate, by means of their scientific analyses, the image from the significance, to extract their abstract content from the vital form, and thereby expound poetic modes of composition to the prosaic mind.
In poetry this accuracy, this rigour in unfolding the content as we find it in its simplicity, is not alone the essential principle. On the contrary, though prose is forced to confine its ideas on parallel lines of almost mathematical precision with the nature of its content, poetry introduces us to a different sphere altogether, that is, the visible appearance of the content itself, or other natural phenomena related to it. For it is just this objective reality which in poetry ought to appear, and while unquestionably from one point of view revealing that content, yet at the same time from another it has to liberate itself from the purely abstract content, it being essentially an object of the art to direct attention to its actual existence in the visible world, and to arouse the interest of mind in the forms of life itself.
(c) If these three essential requirements of poetry are conditioned by an age, in which the accuracy of the prosaic mind is become the ordinary type of conscious life, the art, so far as its figurative characteristics are concerned, is placed in a more difficult position. That is to say, in such an epoch the type of penetration exercised by conscious life is generally a separation of emotion and the ordinary outlook from scientific thought, which either converts the ideal and external material of feeling and perception into a stimulus of knowledge and volition simply, or into a plastic medium subservient to observation and action. In such a sphere poetry calls for energies of more definite purpose in order that it may free itself from the abstraction of the prevailing mental attitude and enter into the world of concrete life. Where, however, such a goal is realized, not only do we find that this breach between thinking, which makes for generalization, and perception and feeling, which grasp the particular, vanishes, but these last-mentioned modes of conscious life are, together with their subject-matter and content, at the same time freed from their exclusive relation of service; and the process culminates in a victorious reconciliation of such modes with what is essential universality. Inasmuch, however, as both the modes of poetic and prosaic thought and general outlook are united in one and the same conscious life, we find in it indications of trouble and derangement, even possibly an actual conflict between the two, one which, as the poetry of our times testifies, only genius of the highest order is able successfully to deal with. Added to this there are other collateral hindrances, which I only propose to define now, and that briefly, in their relation to the figurative aspect already discussed. In other words, if the prosaic intelligence takes the place of that creative imagination which previously obtained, then and in that case the rejuvenescence of the poetic faculty, both in all that is associated with the positive expression of facts and what is metaphorical, readily offers the semblance of artificiality, which even where it falls short of actual purpose, is only with great difficulty reconciled with that directness of immediate truth which is demanded. Much in fact which was still fresh in former times, through repeated usage, and the habits thus originated, has itself become gradually a custom and a part of prosaic life. Moreover, where poetry strives after novelties in its composition, we often find that, despite of itself, in its figurative expressions and descriptions, even where it escapes the charge of exaggeration and an excess of such material, it none the less leaves an impression of artificiality, over nicety, a straining after what is piquant and select, work incompatible with a simple and healthy outlook and state of feeling. Such work tends to regard objects in an artificial light and reckons on mere effect. Consequently it will not permit their natural lighting and colour. Defects of this nature are still more obvious in cases where, as a rule, the metaphorical type of imaginative composition is exchanged[4] for the more direct, and our poet is driven to outbid the forces of prose; and, in order to assert an originality, plunges into the subtleties of or the fishing for effects which have still some appearance of freshness.
2. VERBAL EXPRESSION
Inasmuch as the poetic imagination is distinct in its operation from that of all other artists in virtue of the fact that it necessarily clothes its images in words, and communicates the same through human speech, it becomes imperative that throughout this process it should endeavour to co-ordinate all its ideas, in the form which with most completeness will disclose them, through the means articulate speech thus places at its disposal. And, in short, we may affirm that the poetic content only assumes the form of poetry in its restricted sense after it has been actually embodied and rounded off in the vehicle of words.
This literary aspect of the art of poetry would readily supply us with a boundless field of discursive observation and logical argument, which I must, however, pass over in order that I may reserve space for more weighty problems which lie before us. I merely propose, therefore, to touch very briefly on a few fundamental points.
(a) Human art should in all its associations place us on a ground quite other than that we confront in ordinary life, or indeed in our religious consciousness, active life, or the speculations of philosophy. This is possible on the side of literary or verbal expression only in so far as another mode of speech is adopted than that obtaining in those other spheres. Art has therefore not only, from one point of view, to avoid that in its instrument of expression which will fail to rise above the trivialities of ordinary speech and ordinary prose, but it must, furthermore, avoid falling into the tone and manner of religious edification and philosophical research. Above all it must keep aloof from the precise analyses and methods of the scientific faculty, the categories of pure thinking as we find these illustrated in the logical forms of judgment and deduction. These at once remove art from the imaginative realm to another region altogether. But in all these respects it still remains a difficult matter to determine the lines of boundary on which we may actually affirm that poetry ends and prose begins. And in fact we may admit absolute precision and confidence of statement to be impossible from the nature of the case.
(b) If we pass now to a discussion of the particular means which poetic-speech can appropriate as instrumental to its task the following points appear to me pregnant and suggestive.
(α) First, we find particular words and exclamations[5] that are obviously peculiar to poetry, whether they be used to ennoble it, or to introduce the vulgarity and excess of comedy. We find a similar novelty in the specific collocation of various words or turns of expression. In such a field poetry is no doubt entitled on the one hand to borrow from an obsolete nomenclature, obsolete at least in everyday speech, and on the other to declare itself as pre-eminently an innovator, moulding novel modes of speech. Such a field, provided only the vital genius of the language is preserved, supplies material for astonishing boldness of invention.
(β) Secondly, we have the problem of verbal order. It is here that we meet with those so-called figures of speech, in so far as, we should add, the same have reference to verbal embodiment as such. The use of these, however, easily degenerates into rhetoric and declamation in the bad sense of these terms; the vitality of individual character is destroyed where we find that such forms substitute a fixed and artificial mode of expression for the genuine impulse of feeling or passion, and thereby offer the very opposite to the personal, laconic and broken utterance required, the utterance whose emotional depth is incapable of saying much, and for this reason, in romantic poetry especially, is of great effect as a presentment of suppressed[6] states of soul. But generally speaking we may admit that the relative order of words is an instrument of the external form of poetry of quite extraordinary resource.
(γ) Thirdly, we have still to draw attention to the construction of periods,[7] which essentially embrace all the other aspects of composition and which, by means of either their simple or more involved course, their restless dislocations and distortions, or their quick onward motion, their acceleration and their flood contribute so materially to the reflection of such soul experience. And, in short, it is essential that the external presentment in speech should mirror and assume a character similar to the ideality of such experience in all its variety.
(c) In the application of the means of speech above considered it will be useful to distinguish once more the several stages of poetic thought to which they correspond and to which we drew attention when we considered the nature of poetic conception or composition.
(α) Poetic diction can, in the first instance, appear with real vitality among a people and at an epoch when the general speech is not as yet perfected, but in fact only by virtue of its poetry receives its real development. At such a time the utterance of the poet, as generally expressive of soul-life, is from the first a real novelty, which stirs admiration on its own account by revealing in its speech what remained previously unveiled. This new creation appears as the marvel of a gift and personal power. The weight of custom has not as yet fallen upon it. It enables that which is buried in the depths of the human heart for the first time to freely unfold itself before the amazement of men. Under such conditions it is the native force of the expression, the creation of the fact of speech, not so much the varied and craftful elaboration of the same, which is the main point. Diction here remains exceedingly simple. In such early times it is indeed impossible that we should have either much fluency of idea or any varied versatility of expression. The subject-matter of such poetry is depicted with an artless directness, which has not yet attained the delicate nuances, transitions, mediatory matter and other advantages of a later artistic culture. 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. For every idea we have the direct word[8]; metaphorical expressions are comparatively rare; and although the poem is composed with a close attention to detail, the speech itself remains very simple indeed. In a similar way Dante was able to create for his own nation a vital form of poetic expression, and asserted in this, as in other respects, the dauntless energy of his creative genius.
(β) When, however—this is a further point—the circle of ideas enlarges with the appearance of methodical modes of thought the ways in which idea is associated with idea increase, and in this very process the ability to use it increases also, and the expression of speech is elaborated in all the fluency of which it is capable. When this is so the position of poetry on the side of verbal expression is wholly changed. In other words, we have now a nation possessing the fully developed prose speech of everyday life, and poetic expression must now, in order to retain its interest, swerve aside from ordinary parlance, and receive a resurrection under the re-moulding energy of genius.[9] In our daily life the contingency of the moment is the motive of speech. In the creation of a work of art, however, we must have deliberate circumspection[10] in the place of instantaneous feeling; even the spirit of enthusiasm must be judiciously restrained. The creation of genius should be permitted to unfold itself from the artistic repose,[11] and become informed under the prevailing temper of an intelligence[12] that surveys the whole with clarity. In former times this spirit of concentration and tranquillity is to be inferred from the fact and utterance of poetry itself. In a more recent age, on the contrary, the nature of the composition and execution has itself to enforce the distinction which obtains between the expression of poetry and prose. In this respect poems which belong to epochs in which we find already an elaborated prose diction differ essentially from those of times and peoples in which the art originates.
The executive talent of a poet can be carried so far in this direction that the elaboration of formal expression becomes the main thing, and the aim is less directed to ideal truth than to formal construction, a polished elegance and mere effect of the composition under its literary aspect. We have then a situation, in which, as already observed, rhetoric and declamation are elaborated in a manner destructive to the ideal vitality of the poetic spirit. The formative intelligence asserts itself under the principle of purposiveness, and a selfconsciously regulated art disturbs that more genuine effect, which ought to present the appearance of ingenuous openness and simplicity. Entire nations have, with the rarest exceptions, failed to produce any type of poetic creation other than this rhetorical one. The Latin language, even in Cicero, still preserves a genuine ring of naïveté and naturalness. With the Latin poets, however, such as Virgil, Horace and the rest, we already feel that Art is to a real extent nothing but artifice, elaboration of effect on its own account. We recognize a prosaic content, which is merely set off with an external embellishment. We find a poet who, in the absence of original genius, endeavours to discover, in the sphere of literary versatility and rhetoric effects, some compensation for that which in genuine power and effect of creation and composition he fails to possess. France too, in the so-called classical period of its literature, has produced poetry very similar, a poetical style to which didactic poems and satires are singularly appropriate. Rhetorical figures of speech in all their variety are here in their rightful place. The exposition remains for all that, as a whole, prosaic; and the literary expression is at its best rich in image and embellishment, much in the style of Herder's or Schiller's diction. These last-mentioned writers, however, availed themselves of this style of literary expression mainly in the interests of prose composition; and by the weightiness of their reflections and the happy use of such a style knew how to win both a critical assent and a hearty approval. The Spanish poets also are not wholly free from the ostentation inseparable from the too self-conscious diction of art. And, as a general rule, Southern nations, such as the Spaniards and the Italians, and previously to them the Mohammedan Arabs and Persians, are conspicuous for a wealth and tedious prolixity of image and simile. With the ancients, more especially in the case of Homer, the flow of expression is characterized by smoothness and tranquillity. With the nations above mentioned, on the contrary, we have a vision of life gushing forth[13] in a flood which, even where the emotions are in other respects at rest, is ever intent upon expatiation, and owing to this expressly volitional effort of the will is dominated by an intelligence which at one time is visible in abrupt parentheses, at another in subtle generalization, at another in the playful conjunction of its sallies of wit and humour.
(γ) Genuine poetic expression in short is as far removed from all rhetorical declamation as above described as it is from all ostentation and witty conceits of diction, in so far at least as such defects do injury to the ideal truth of Nature, and the claims of the content are forgotten in the verbal form and expression of the composition. It is, however, possible, despite of this, that the author's free enjoyment in his work declare itself with real beauty. In a word that aspect of the composition we define as formal diction ought not to be treated on its own and independent account alone, or as an aspect of first and even exclusive importance. And, generally speaking, in this analysis of the composition of poetry under its formative aspect, we repeat that what is the product of careful thought must not lose the appearance of genuine spontaneity: everything should impress us as though it had of itself blossomed from the ideal germ or heart of the subject-matter.
3. VERSIFICATION
Our third and final aspect of poetic expression is necessitated by the fact that the imagination of the poet does not merely invest ideas in words, but does so in the form of the uttered speech; and by doing so he consequently enters the domain wherein our senses are made aware of the actual sounds and music of speech. We are thus introduced to versification. Versified prose may give us verses, but that is not necessarily poetry. We have a parallel case in the merely poetic expression of a composition in other respects prosaic with its result of poetic prose simply. 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 poet is thereby compelled to move in a literary atmosphere outside the boundary of everyday speech, and to shape his compositions with an exclusive regard to the rules and requirements of Art. It is therefore only a superficial theory which would banish all versification on the ground that it contradicts natural expression. It is true that Lessing, in his hostility to the false pathos of the French Alexandrine metre, attempted, more particularly in tragedy, to introduce a form of prose speech as most appropriate. Both Schiller and Goethe have, in the more stormy works of their youth, and under the natural impulse of compositions carrying a greater surfeit of content, adopted the same principle. But Lessing himself, in his Nathan, finally returns once more to the iambic. And in the same way with his Don Carlos Schiller deserted the old path. Goethe too was so little satisfied with the earlier prosaic treatment of his Iphigeneia and Tasso, that he transferred them to art's more proper domain, remoulding them both from the point of view of expression and prosody in that purer form, wherein these compositions continue and will continue to excite our admiration.
No doubt the artificiality of the verse measure or the recurrent echoes of rhyme has the appearance of an unyielding[15] bond between spiritual ideas and the sensuous medium, more rigorous indeed than colour in painting. External objects and the human form are coloured in Nature, and the colourless is an arbitrary abstraction. The idea, on the contrary, in association with the sounds of human speech, which are employed in the wholly capricious symbols of their utterance, possess only a distant or no ideal thread of connection at all. This being so, the exacting demand of the prosodical rules will very readily appear as a fetter to the imagination, in virtue of which it is no longer possible for the poet to communicate his ideas in the precise form in which they float upon his phantasy. The inference is natural that although the stream of rhythm and the music of rhyme exercises upon us as an unquestionable fascination, it is nevertheless not unfrequently and too much so the demand of this very charm to our senses that the finest poetic feeling and idea should be sacrificed. But the objection for all that will not hold water. In other words it is not true that versification is simply an obstruction to spontaneous movement. A genuine artistic talent throughout moves in its sensuous material as in its native element, which so far from being oppressive or a hindrance acts as a stimulus and a support. And in fact we find that all really great poets move with freedom and confidence in the measure, rhythm or rhyme they have created; and it is only when they are translated that our artistic sense is frequently pained or shocked at the attempt to retrace their rhythm and melody. Moreover it is part of the liberality of the art that the very circumstances of the restraint, involving much change, concentration or expansion of the ideas expressed, should suggest to our poet new thoughts, incidents and creations, which, apart from such difficulties, had never crossed his mind. But in truth quite apart from this relative advantage this sensuous and determinate form of being—in the case of poetry the melodious chain of words—is once for all essential to art. It is absolutely necessary that the result should not remain in the formless and undefined stream that we have in the immediate contingency of ordinary conversation. It must appear in the vital design and elaboration of art. And although this form no doubt in the music of poetry may sound too as a purely external instrument, it has nevertheless to be treated as an end on its own account, and as such as an essentially harmonious self-defined whole. This attention, which is due to the medium of sense, contributes, as in Art universally, and in the interest of seriousness,[16] yet another point of view where we find this very austerity vanishes; both poet and listener feel it no more. They are lifted into a region of exhilarating charm and grace.
In painting and sculpture the artist is given the form in its material and spatial limitations for the portrayal and colouring of human limbs, rocks, trees, clouds and flowers. In architecture also the requirements and objects of the buildings proposed dictate more or less the defined shape given to walls, towers and roofs. In the same-way music already possesses stable definition in the fundamental laws of harmony. In the art of poetry, however, the sound of language to our aural sense is, in the first instance, unbridled;[17] the poet has consequently to regulate such absence of rule within objective limits, and to outline a more stable conture, a more definite framework of sound for his conceptions, their structure and their objective beauty.
Just as in musical declamation the rhythm and melody should accept and adapt itself to the nature of the content, versification is also a kind of music, which, at its own distance, is capable of essentially re-echoing the mysterious, but none the less definite, course and character of the ideas. Agreeably with this the verse-measure ought to reflect the general tone and, as it were, the spiritual perfume of an entire poem, and it is by no means a question of no consequence whether the external form is one of iambics, trochaics, stanzas, alcaics or any other metre.
In the heads of discussion we propose to follow of most importance are two systems, whose distinction from each other we shall endeavour to explain. The first is rhythmical versification, which depends upon the actual length or shortness of the verbal syllables, whether we regard such in the association of varied figures of speech, or under the relation of their time-movement.
The second is that which is responsible for tonal quality as such, not merely in the case of isolated letters, consonants or vowels, but also in that of entire syllables and words, the configuration of which is in part regulated by the laws of the uniform repetition of identical or similar sounds, and in part by those of symmetrical change. It is to this system that we refer the alliteration, assonance and rhyme.
Both systems stand in intimate connection with the prosody of speech. This is so whether such systems are rather based throughout on the actual length or shortness of syllables, or on the accent which the mind requires,[18] as attached to the obvious importance of such syllables.
And, finally, we have also to unite together this general rhythmical movement with the music of the independent formal structure as rhyme.[19] And in this effort, inasmuch as the repeated echo of the rhyme strikes the ear with a marked emphasis, which asserts itself predominantly over the purely temporal condition of duration and advance, the rhythmical aspect will, in such a conjunction, tend to fall back, and arrest our attention with less force.
(a) Rhythmical Versification.
In discussing the rhythmical system which is without rhyme the following points are of the most importance:
First, we have the firm and fast time-measure of syllables in their plain distinction of long and shorty as well as their manifold association with definite conditions and metres of poetry.
Secondly, we have the animation of rhythm in accent, caesura and opposition between the verse accent and that of separate words.
Thirdly, there is the aspect of euphonious sounds which, within this movement, is forthcoming from the sound of the words, without any further concentration in rhyme.
(a) For that rhythmical movement which the time duration and the movement itself makes of first importance rather than the melodic sound as such and singled in its isolated effect, (αα) we find our starting point in the natural length and shortness of syllables to the obvious distinctions of which the sound of the actual words, the expression of their letters, in consonants and vowels, contribute the essential basis.
Pre-eminently long by nature are the diphthongs ai, oi, ae, and the rest, for the reason that essentially—whatever our modern schoolmaster may say to the contrary—they are themselves a twofold, concrete tone, which combines, much as green does among the colours. The long-sounding vowels are equally so. As a third principle, which obtains already in Sanscrit, no less than the Greek and Latin languages, we have associated with them peculiar conditions of position. In other words, if two or more consonants are placed between two vowels the relation constitutes what is unquestionably a difficult transition in speech. The organ of articulate utterance requires a longer period to pass over the consonants; this necessitates a pause which, despite of the presence of the short vowel, makes the syllable sound in its rhythm long, though it is not actually lengthened. If I speak the words for example—mentem nec secus—the movement from the one vowel to the other in mentem and nec is neither as simple or easy as in secus. More modern languages do not retain this last distinction with such stringency, but rather give effect, in the matter of long and short accent, to other criteria. But for all that syllables which are treated as short, despite of the position referred to, at least will not unfrequently create a harsh impression, because they obstruct the quicker movement our ear demands.
In contradistinction to the long quantity we have in diphthongs, long vowels and length created by position, we have the vowels which are by nature short, that is, those which are short, or which are not placed in words, where one of them and another immediately following are separated by two or more consonants.
(ββ) For the reason, then, that words, partly on their own account, as of several syllables, include a number of long and short beats, and in part, although of one syllable, are nevertheless associated with other words, we have thereby to start with a definite, but accidental interchange of various syllables and words without any stable measure. To regulate this accidental relation is just the function of poetry, precisely as it was that of music to define with accuracy the unregulated duration of particular tones by means of the unity of time-measure. Poetry therefore establishes specific combinations of long and short syllables as the law, by virtue of which, under the aspect of time-duration, it has to arrange the series of syllables. What we therefore get in the first instance are the different successions of time. The simplest is the mutual relation of pure equality, as, for example, we find it in the dactyl and anapaest, in which the two short syllables may coalesce according to definite rule in two long syllables (the spondee). Secondly, a long syllable may be placed next one short; in that case we have a profounder distinction of derivation, though under its simplest form. Such are the iambus and the trochee. We find a more complicated combination, when a short syllable is interposed between two long ones, or one short precedes two long, as in the cretic and bacchius.
(γγ) Such isolated time-relations would, however, open the door to unregulated contingency if they were permitted to follow one another anyhow in their motley differences. In fact the entire aim of such regulation would vanish under such conditions, in other words the regulated series of long and short syllables. From another point of view we should wholly fail to secure a definite beginning, conclusion, and central position, so that the caprice which here once again asserted itself would entirely contradict that which we previously established, when considering musical time-measure and beat, as to the relation in which the percipient ego stood to the duration of tones. In other words, the ego requires a combination on its own account,[20] a return out of the continuous forward movement in time; and only seizes on the same in virtue of definite unities of time and their, as such, emphasized commencement,[21] regulated in their entire series and terminations. This is the reason why, in the third place, poetry also sets out the particular time-relations in a series of verse-lines,[22] which in respect to the type and number of their feet, no less than in that of their commencement, progress, and conclusion, are subject to rule. The iambic trimeter, for instance, consists of six iambic feet, of which any two constitute an iambic dipody. The hexameter consists of six dactyls, which again, in certain positions, may coalesce in spondees.
Moreover, as it is no objection to such lines of verse-writing that they are repeated over and over again in the same or practically under the same mode, we find in respect to the entire series, on the one hand, a lack of definition so far as the one final conclusion is concerned, and on the other a monotony, which creates perceptibly a sense of deficiency in the ideal aspect of their manifold composition. In order to mitigate such defects poetry makes a final advance in its creation of the strophe and its varied organization, more particularly with a view to lyric expression. As an illustration we have the elegiac measure of the Greeks; there is also the alcaic and sapphic strophe, not to mention the modes of lyric art elaborated by Pindar and the famous Greek dramatists in their choric effusions or interludes.
However much, in their relation to time-measure, music and poetry partake of similar conditions, we ought not, therefore, to fail to draw attention to their dissimilarity. The most important feature of this is that of the beat. The question whether there is any real repetition measurable in time-beats of identical length in the metre of the ancients has been the subject of strenuous controversy. Generally speaking I think it may be affirmed that poetry, which uses language in its words as a mere means of communication, is unable, in respect to the time-length of its utterances, to subordinate the same to an absolutely fixed measure of its movement in the abstract form that is present in the time-beat of music. In music tone is simply sound, without pause as such, and it essentially requires a stability such as we find in the time-beat. Human speech does not require such security, for one reason because it already possesses something fixed and substantive in the idea, and for another because it is not thus wholly committed to the objective medium of sound or resonance; rather this very ideality of conscious life is the medium in which it consists as art. For this reason poetry in fact discovers the more substantive means of defining its arrest, continuance, pause or delay immediately in the ideas and emotions which it clearly enunciates in language. Music, too, in its recitatives, marks the beginning of a similar process of separation from the immutable equality of the time-beat. It follows from this that, if poetical metre were wholly subjugate to the regularity of the time-beat, the distinction between music and poetry, in this sphere at least, would vanish altogether, and the element of time would receive a more predominant significance than is compatible with the essential characteristics of poetry. Supported by such a conclusion we may therefore insist that, though a time-measure is of imperative value in poetry, there is no such necessity for the abstract time-beat; meaning and signification[23] of the actual words must here remain the relatively speaking more controlling force. If we examine in this respect more closely the particular verse-measures of the ancients the hexameter will no doubt appear most nearly attached to a forward movement compatible with the stringency of the time-beat. The elder Voss in fact assumed this, though, as a matter of fact, such an assumption is already excluded by the catalexis of the last foot. When in addition to this Voss proceeded to place the time-measure of the alcaic and sapphic strophes on a similar basis of abstract equality, we can only regard such a theory as a wilful caprice which does violence to the poetry. The contention throughout is apparently due to the habit of treating our German iambic in identical lengths of syllable measure and time-measure. As a matter of fact the beauty of the iambic trimeter of the ancients consisted above all in this, that it was not composed of six iambic feet of identical lengths of time; but quite the contrary in order that, in the first position of every dipody, spondees, or, in their resolution, also dactyls and anapaests were permissible; and, by reason of this, the monotonous repetition of the same time-measure, and thereby all that is consistent with the time-beat, vanishes. We may add that the possibility of change is yet more obvious in lyric strophes, so that if we wish to establish such a thesis at all it must be on the à priori principle, that the time-beat is essentially necessary. As a deduction from the plain facts we see nothing of the kind.
(β). With the introduction of the accent and the caesura we have for the first time the animation of the time-measure; we may parallel with this that rhythm in music, which we have discussed as the time-beat.
(αα) In short in poetry also every definite time relation has, in the first instance, its particular accent; in other words, regularly defined intervals are asserted, which attract others and only in this way are rounded off in a whole. Owing to this fact much play is given to the manifold possibilities of the value of syllables. On the one hand generally long syllables appear emphasized in their contrast to short, so that now, if the ictus falls upon them, their significance is doubled as against the shorter, and in fact stand out themselves as distinct from long syllables not thus accented. On the other hand, however, it may also happen that shorter syllables receive the ictus or accent, so that a similar emphasis is created to the one described in the converse case.
Above all, as already observed, the beginning and termination of the particular feet ought not with abstract precision to be identical with the beginning and conclusion of single words. For, in the first place, the reach forward[24] of the essentially exclusive word over the termination of the foot of the line affects the connection of the otherwise disparate rhythms. Secondly, when the verse accent falls on the final sound of a word carried forward as above described, we get on account of this in addition a distinct interval of time, the conclusion of a word having already come to a pause in something else, so that it is in fact this pause, which, in virtue of the accent united with it, is expressly made perceptible as a segment of time in the otherwise unbroken current. Caesuras of this sort are inevitable with every kind of verse. For although the distinct accent already confers on particular feet a more intimate and essential distinction, and thereby a certain variety, this sort of animation, especially in the case of verses, in which the same feet repeat each other without a break, as, for example, in our iambic, remain for all that in a measure entirely abstract and monotonous, and furthermore allow the particular feet to fall apart without a common bond. It is this gray monotony which the caesura checks, introducing a connection and more genuine animation within what was otherwise, with its undifferentiated regularity, the halting flow of verse, a life which, by virtue of the various positions in which the caesura may assert itself, is itself as manifold as is possible agreeably with the condition that its regulated definition is held free from any approach to lawless caprice.
A third accent is furthermore attached to the verse accent and caesura, which the words in other respects and independently possess, apart from their metrical employment. By this means the mode and degree in which the particular syllables are emphasized or the reverse increases in its variety. This verbal accent may, on the one hand, no doubt appear in conjunction with the accent of the verse and the caesura; and, if this is the case, the strength of the accents respectively is increased. But from another point of view it may stand independently of them on syllables which do not receive any further emphasis, and which we may say, in so far as they moreover require an accentuation to bring out their particular significance as verbal syllables, assert an effect counter to the verse rhythm, an effect which confers on the whole a novel and unique vitality.
To appreciate the beauty of rhythm in all the above aspects is for our modern ears a very difficult matter, because in modern languages the elements which combine to produce. this kind of metrical effect are no longer in some measure present in the sharp and secure insistence they possessed for the ancient world; rather we have other means substituted for them, in order to satisfy other demands of artistic taste.
(ββ) But over and above all this, paramount over all valid claims of syllables and words within their metrical position, there is, secondly, the worth of that significance we gather from the line or verse as poetical idea. It is in relation to this, which the language implies, that its other metrical effects are either emphasized or, comparatively speaking, are restrained as void of significance; and it is by this means alone that the finest perfume of spiritual vitality is instilled through the poetry. But notwithstanding this fact, such poetical effect is not to be carried so far that it directly contradicts in this respect the rules of metrical rhythm.
(γγ) Moreover, a definite type of content corresponds with the entire character of a particular verse measure, particularly from the point of view of rhythmical movement, and above all that particular kind implied in the movement of our feelings. Thus, for example, the hexameter, in the tranquil wave of its forward stream, is particularly adapted to the even flow of epic narration. Where, however, it is more in the nature of the strophe in its association with the pentameter and its symmetrically consistent caesura, it is, in its none the less generally simple regularity, fitted to express elegiac emotion. The iambic again moves forward with rapidity, and as such is peculiarly suitable to dramatic dialogue. The anapaest indicates the clear-slipping march of joyful exultation. Other characteristics may readily be associated with other modes of verse-measure.
(γ) Thirdly, this province of rhythmical versification is not confined to the mere configuration and vivication of time-intervals; it embraces the actual musical sound of syllables and words. In respect to such sound, however, the classic languages, in which rhythm is retained, as above described, as an essential feature, offer a real contrast to other more recent ones more conspicuously adapted to rhyme.
(αα) In the Greek and Latin languages, for example, the stem syllable is modified, by virtue of its modes of inflexion, through an abundance of variously toned syllables, which of course possess an independent meaning, but only as a modification of such syllable; this consequently, it is true, asserts its force as the substantive significance of that variously expanded sound, but it does not, so far as its sound is concerned, stand forth as such in pre-eminent and unique ascendancy. When we hear, for example, the word amaverunt, three syllables are attached to the word, and the accent is already substantially differentiated throughout the number and extension of these syllables in direct relation to the stem syllable, even assuming no naturally long ones had been included, by which means the fundamental significance and the emphasis of accent are separated from each other. In such a case consequently, and in so far as the accentuation is not identical with the main syllable, but falls on another, which merely expresses an incidental significance, the ear can from this basis at once listen to the sound of the different syllables and follow their movement, retaining, as it does, perfect liberty to attend to that prosody peculiar to the word or phrase, and finding itself then invited to incorporate within its rhythm these naturally long and short syllables.
(ββ) The case of our modern German language is wholly different. That which in the Greek and Latin languages is expressed, as above described, by means of the prefix and suffix, and other modifications, is in more modern languages for the most part resolved in verbs of the stem syllable; the result of this is that the inflexion syllables that have been in the former case unfolded in one and the same word, with collateral meanings of a varied character, are now split up and isolated in separate words. As illustrations of this we have the constant employment of many subsidiary words denoting time, the independent indication of the optative by means of distinct verbs, the separation of pronouns, and other examples. By such means, on the one hand, the word—which in the previous case adduced was expanded in all the variety of tone which attached to its many syllables, under which every accent of the root, that is the root idea, was cancelled—persists as a simple totality concentrated in itself, without appearing as a series of tones, which being, as they are, mere modifications, do not, by virtue of their specific sense, assert an influence with such a strength that the ear is unable to attend to their independent tonal quality and its temporal movement. And, on the other hand, on account of this concentration the main significance is moreover of such a force that it attracts the fall of the accent upon itself exclusively; and just because the emphasis is thus fastened upon the fundamental sense this very coalescence does not suffer the quantity of the other syllables, whether long or short ones, to appear; they are simply overwhelmed. The roots of the majority of words are unquestionably as a general rule short, compact,[25] of one or two syllables. If thus, as is for instance pre-eminently the case with our mother tongue, these root-stems appropriate almost invariably the accent to themselves, such an accent is to an overwhelming degree one of the sense, significance', not a definition, however, in which the medium—that is, the utterance as sound—would be free, or could assert the relation of the length, shortness, or accentuation of syllables independently of the intelligible content of the words. Consequently a rhythmical configuration of time-movement and emphasis liberated from the stem syllable and its meaning can here no longer be maintained. We have merely left us, in contradistinction to the former hearing of the ample sound and duration of such long and short beats in their varied juxtaposition, a general impression of sound,[26] which is apprehended. entirely aloof from the accented fundamental syllable with its weight of significance. And, indeed, apart from this, as we have seen, the ramification of the stem into syllables as modified into particular words is also an independent process. Such words receive thereby an independent worth, and, while preserving their own significance, they make us at the same time hear the identical coalescence of meaning and accent, which we have observed in the case of the stem or root word around which they are ranged. We are therefore forced to restrict our attention to the sense of every word; and, instead of being occupied with the natural length and shortness of syllables and their sensuous[27] accentuation, are only able to hear the accent asserted by the main and substantive meaning.
(γγ) In such modern languages the element of rhythm has little room for its display, or at least the soul has little freedom left to expatiate within it, because, as observed, time and the equable stream of syllabic sound as emitted from its movement is superseded[28] by a more ideal relation—that is to say, by the sense and meaning of the words, and thereby the force of the more independent configuration of rhythm is suppressed. We may in this connection compare the principle of rhythmical versification with the plastic arts. We find in both that the ideal significance is not as yet asserted in its independence, nor does the former expressly define the length and accent of syllables, but rather the meaning of the words is wholly blended with the sensuous medium of the inherent time duration and sound, with a result that does complete justice to the claim of such externality, wholly absorbed in the ideal form and movement of the same. If, however, such a principle is renounced, and yet despite of this, but in accordance with the necessary demand of art, the sensuous medium is permitted to retain a certain force of resistance as against the exclusive assertion of ideal content,[29] in order to this end to divert the ear's attention,—in the case that is, where what we may call the plastic moment of that more ancient mode of syllabic quantity, as it is on its own account, and the tonal quality inseparable from the general rhythm rather than independently asserted—when this, as I say, has been destroyed, then we have no other means[30] at hand save the express and artistically configurated sound of articulate speech simply, and retained as such in its isolation. And this leads us to our second main type of versification—in other words, rhyme.
(b) Rhyme
From an objective standpoint it is possible to seek to explain the need of a novel treatment of language from the deterioration into which the classical languages fell through their contact with foreign relations. Such a development, however, lies in the nature of the facts themselves. The earliest example of conformity with the ideality of its content attempted by poetry is to be traced in the length and shortness of syllables in independence from their significance, for the mutual relations of which, caesurae and so forth, art elaborates its rules, rules which it is true generally coincide with the character of the content in its broad outlines, but which none the less, in matters of individual detail, do not suffer either the length or shortness of a syllable, nor its accent, to depend exclusively on the intelligible significance making such a formal aspect subordinate, to the point of entire detachment, to the same.[31] The more ideal, however, and spiritual the represented idea becomes, the more it tends to detach itself from this objective aspect, which increasingly fails to present such ideality in plastic guise, and finally reaches a point of self-concentration in which the, so to speak, corporeal element of speech is in a measure wholly wiped away, and for the rest merely asserts that wherein the intelligible significance is reposed as necessary to its communication; all else is only admitted, by way of by-play, as insignificant. Now romantic art, in respect to the entire type of its conception and presentation, effects a similar passage over to this concentrated synthesis of ideality, when it sets out in search for the material which corresponds to this subjective content in audible sound.[32] Following these lines romantic poetry also, inasmuch as it generally lays most stress on the ideal tones[33] of feeling, becomes absorbed in its preoccupation[34] with the distinct and independent ring and tones of letters, syllables, and words; perfecting such a process to its final satisfaction, as it learns, either in their association with ideality, or in their connection with the architectonically intelligible penetration[35] of such music, to separate such syllabic and other verbal sounds or to relate or interlace them one with another. From this point of view we may affirm that it is not simply by way of accident that rhyme is elaborated in romantic poetry. It is a necessary feature of it. The requirement of soul-life, to discover itself again, is thereby more fully asserted, and finds a real source of satisfaction in the identity of the rhyme, which declares an indifference[36] to the unyielding laws of the time-measure, and, by virtue of its recurrence of similar sounds, gives exclusive effect to an effort which conducts the conscious self back to itself. It is by this means that versification is made to approach more closely the musical art as such, that is, the vivid tones of soul-life itself, and is, from this point of view, liberated from the, relatively speaking, gross material of human speech, in other words from what we have referred to as the natural measure of quantity.
With regard to points of special interest in this subject, I will confine myself to the following general observations:
First, upon the origin of rhyme.
Secondly, upon a few more definite features by which we may distinguish the sphere of rhyme from that of rhythm in verse.
Thirdly, upon the types under which we may classify rhyme generally.
(α) We have already seen that rhyme belongs in its form to the art of romantic poetry, which requires such a more pronounced emphasis of its configurated syllabic sound posited thus on its own account. And it is thus effected to the extent that the ideal activity of volition[37] discovers its own presence by this means in the objective medium of tone. Where such a need is asserted we have a mode of speech in part meeting absolutely the conditions of form I outlined above when discussing the necessity of rhyme; and in addition it makes use of the old forms of language at hand, the Latin for example, which, though of other constitution and mainly applicable to rhythmical versification, it employs agreeably to the character of the new principle, or reconstructs the same so far into a new language that the element of rhythm disappears, and rhyme becomes, as in the Italian and French languages, the matter of all importance.
(αα) In this respect we find throughout Christendom that rhyme is introduced into Latin versification at a very early date with much insistence, although, as observed, it rested on other principles. These principles, however, are rather adapted from the Greek language; and, so far from testifying to the fact that they originated from the Latin speech itself, rather prove, under the modified character they possess, a tendency which itself approaches the romantic type. In other words, the poetry of Rome, on the one hand and in its earliest days, discovered its source not in the natural length and shortness of syllables, but rather measured the value of syllables relatively to their accent; and in consequence of this it was only through a more accurate knowledge and imitation of Greek poetry that the prosodical principle of this was received and followed. And, moreover, the Romans rendered more obdurate the flexible, joyous sensuousness of Greek metres, more particularly by their use of more insistent pauses at the caesura, as we find such not only in the hexameter, but also in the alcaic and sapphic metres, hardening the effect thus to a structure of more stringent outline and more severe regularity. And indeed, apart from this, even in the full bloom of Latin literature, and from their poets of finest culture, we have already plenty of rhymes. Thus from Horace, in his Ars poetica (verses 99-100), we get the following:
Non satis est, pulchra esse poemata: dulcia sunto,
Et quocunque volent, animum auditoris agunto.
Though the poet was probably quite unconscious of the fact, it is none the less a strange coincidence that, in the very passage in which Horace enforces the obligation that poems should be dulcia, we discover a rhyme. Similar rhymes occur in Ovid with still more frequency. Even assuming such to be accidental, the fact remains that they appear to have been not offensive to Roman ears, and might consequently be permitted, although as isolated exceptions, to slip into the composition. Yet the profounder significance of romantic rhyme is absent from such playful exceptions. The former does not assert the recurrent sound merely as sound, but the ideal content or meaning implied in it. And it is precisely this which constitutes the fundamental difference between modern rhyme and the very ancient rhyme of the Hindoos.
As for the classical languages, it was after the invasion of barbarism, and on account of the destruction of accentuation and the assertion of that uniquely personal note of emotion referable to Christianity, that the rhythmical system of verse passed into that of rhyme. Thus, in his hymn to the Holy Spirit, Ambrosius entirely regulates the versification according to the accent of the meaning expressed, and breaks into rhyme. The first work of St. Augustine against the Donatists is in the same way a rhymed song; and also the so-called Leonine versicles, as expressly rhymed hexameters and pentameters, are easily distinguishable from the accidental exceptions of rhyme previously noticed. These and other examples like them mark the point of departure of rhyme from the more ancient rhythmical system.
(ββ) Certain writers have no doubt attempted to trace the origin of the new principle of versification in Arabian literature. The artistic education, however, of the famous poets of the East is of later date than the appearance of rhyme in western Christendom; and any Mohammedan art of a more early time exercised no real influence on the West. We should, however, add that we find from the first in Arabian poetry essential affinities with the romantic principle, in which the knights of Europe, at the time of the crusades, very readily made themselves at home; and consequently it is not difficult to understand how, in the affinity of spiritual tendencies[38] which they shared, and in which the poetry of Eastern Mohammedanism no less than Western Christianity finds its source, though removed in the world from each other, we meet for the first time and on its own independent footing a novel type of verse writing.
(γγ) A third source, to which again, independently of either the influence of the classic languages or the Arabic, we may trace the origins of rhyme and all that it implies, are the Germanic languages, as we find them in their earliest Scandinavian development. As illustration of this we have the songs of the ancient Edda, which, though only in more recent times, collected and edited, unquestionably date from a former age. In these, as we shall see later on, it is not, it is true, the genuine rhyme-sound which is elaborated in its perfection, but rather an effective emphasis upon particular sounds of language, and a regularity defined by rule, with a definite repetition of both aspects.
(β) Yet more important than the question of origin is the characteristic difference between the new system and the old. I have already adverted to the fundamental feature of importance here; it only remains to establish it more narrowly.
Rhythmical versification attained its most beautiful and richest development in the field of Hellenic poetry, in which we may discover the most eminent features of the type wherever it obtains. Briefly they are as follows:
First, the sound, as such, of letters, syllables, or words does not here constitute its material, but rather the syllabic sound in its temporal duration, so that attention must neither exclusively be directed to particular syllables or words, nor to the purely qualitative similarity or identity of their sound. On the contrary, the sound still remains in inseparable union with the static time-measure of its specific duration; and in the forward movement of both the ear has to follow the value of every separate syllable no less than the principle which obtains in the rhythmical progression of all equally together. Secondly, the measure of long and short syllables, no less than that of rhythmical rise and fall, and varied animation derived from more deliberate caesurae and moments of pause, depends upon the natural element of the language, without permitting any introduction of that type of accentuation, by virtue of which the actual meaning of the word leaves its impress on a syllable or a word. The versification asserts itself in its collocation of feet, its verse accent, its caesurae, and so forth in this respect as fully independent as the language itself, which also, outside the domain of poetry, already accepts accentuation from the natural quantity of syllables and their relations of juxtaposition, and not from the significance of the root-syllable. On this account, thirdly, we have as the vital emphasis of certain syllables, first, the verse accent and rhythm, and, secondly, all other accentuation, both of which aspects, in their twofold contribution to the varied character of the whole, pass in and out of one another without any mutual derangement or suppression; and in like manner respectively they satisfy the claim of the poetical imagination in fully admitting the expressiveness due, by virtue of the nature of their position and movement, to words which, in respect to their intelligible meaning, are of a greater importance than others.
(αα) The first alteration, then, effected by rhymed verse in the previous system is this indisputable validity of natural quantity,[39] If, therefore, any time-measure at all is permitted to remain, it is compelled to seek for a basis for such quantitative pause or acceleration, which it refuses any longer to find in the natural quantity, of syllables, in some other province. And this, as we have seen, can be no other than the intrinsic meaning of syllables and words. It is this significance which in the final instance determines the quantitative measure of syllables, so long as such is still regarded as essential at all, and by doing so transfers the criterium from the purely objective medium[40] and its natural structure to the ideal subject-matter.
(ββ) A further result follows from this of yet more importance. As I have already pointed out, this collocation of the emphasis on the significant stem-syllable dissipates that other independent diffusion of it in manifold forms of inflexion, which our rhythmical system is not yet forced to treat as negligible, in contrast to the stem, because it deduces neither the natural quantity of syllables nor the accent which it asserts from the intelligible significance. In the case, however, where such an explication,[41] with its co-ordination in verse-feet according to the quantity of syllables in their natural stability, falls away the entire system therewith necessarily collapses, which reposes on the time-measure and its laws. Of this type, for example, is French and Italian poetry, the metre and rhythm of which are absolutely non-existent as understood by the ancients. The entire question is here merely one of a definite number of syllables.
(γγ) For such a loss there is only one possible compensation—that of rhyme. In other words, if—this is one aspect—it is no longer time-duration which receives objective expression, by means of which the sound of syllables flows on freely in the even movement that intrinsically belongs to them; if, furthermore, the intelligible significance dominates over the stem-syllables, and coalesces with the same without further organic expatiation into a determinate unity, we have no sensuous medium, such as is able to maintain itself independently of the time-measure, no less than this accentuation of the stem-syllables, finally left to us other than just this syllabic sound.
Such a sound, however, if it is to secure an independent attention, must, in the first place, be of a far more insistent kind than the interchange of different tones, such as we met with in the older verse metres; and its assertion must be of a far more overwhelming character than the stress of syllables can lay claim to in ordinary speech. What we now require has not only to compensate us for the loss of the articulate time-measure, but it further undertakes to reassert the sensuous medium in its opposition to that unqualified predominance of the accentuated significance. For when once the conceptive content has essentially attained the ideality and penetration of mind,[42] for which the sensuous aspect of speech is of no importance, the verbal sound must enforce itself still more positively and coarsely as distinct from this ideality in order to arrest our attention at all. In contrast, therefore, to the gentle movements of rhythmical euphony, rhyme is a crude expedient,[43] which requires an ear by no means either so trained or sensitive as that presupposed by Greek verse. Secondly, though it is true that rhyme does not here assert itself so much as distinct from the meaning of the stem-syllables simply as it does from the entire ideal content, yet it does at the same time so far assist the natural verbal sound as to win for it a relatively secure stability. But this object can only be attained if the sound[44] of particular words affirms itself in exclusive distinction from the resonance of other words, and thus secures an independent existence, by virtue of which isolation it satisfies the claims of the formative aspect of the verbal medium in forceful beats of sound. Rhyme is therefore, at least in its contrast to the evenly transfused movement of rhythmic euphony, a detached exhibition of exclusive tonal expression. Thirdly, we found that it was the ideality of the conscious self which, by virtue of its effort of ideal synthesis, came into its own, and discovered its personal satisfaction in such recurrences of sound. If, then, the means used in the older type of versification, with its copious variety of structure, disappear, there only remains, if we look at poetry, under the aspect of its medium, to support this principle of self-recovery, the more formal repetition of wholly identical or similar sounds, whereby again we are able to unite under an intelligible scheme[45] the assertion and relation of closely associated meanings in the rhyme-sounds of expressive words. The metre of rhythmical verse we may regard as a variously articulate interrelation of manifold syllabic quantities. Rhyme, on the contrary, is from one point of view more material;[46] yet, on the other hand, is itself more abstractly placed within this medium. In other words, it is the mere recollection of mind and the ear of the recurrence of identical or related sounds and significations—a recurrence in which the poet is conscious of his own activity, recognizes, and is pleased to recognize, himself therein as both agent and participant.
(γ) Finally, on the question of the particular types under which we may classify this more modern system of romantic poetry, I only propose to advert briefly to what appears to me of most importance in respect to alliteration, assonance, and ordinary rhyme.
(αα) The first, or at least the most thorough, example of alliteration is that we find elaborated in the earliest Scandinavian poetry, where it supplies the fundamental basis, whereas assonance and the terminal rhyme, albeit these two aspects play a by no means unimportant part, are, however, only present in certain particular kinds of such poetry. The principle of alliterative rhyme, letter rhyme, is rhyme in its most incomplete form, because it does not require the recurrence of the entire syllable, but only that of one identical letter, and primarily the initial letter only. Owing to the weakness of this type of recurrent sound it is, in the first place, therefore necessary that only such words should be used in its service, which already independently possess an express accent on their first syllable; and, secondly, these words must not be remote from one another, if the identity of their commencement is to make a real impression on the ear. For the rest, alliterative letters may be a vowel, no less than a double or single consonant; but it is primarily consonants which are of most importance in the scheme. Based on such conditions, we find in Icelandic poetry[47] the fundamental rule that all alliterative rhymes require accentuated[48] syllables, whose initial letters must not in the same lines occur in other substantives which have the accent on the first syllable; and, along with this, of the three words, the initial letters of which constitute the rhyme, two must be found in the first line, and the third, which supplies the dominant alliteration, must be placed at the commencement of the second line. We may add further that, in virtue of the abstract character of this identical sound of initial letters, words are generally made alliterative proportionally to the importance of their signification. We find, therefore, that here, too, the relation of accented sound to the meaning of words is not entirely absent. I cannot, however, pursue this subject into more detail.
(ββ) Secondly, assonance has nothing to do with initial letters, but makes a nearer approach to rhyme in so far as it is a recurrence in identical sound of the same letters in the middle or at the termination of different words. It is not necessary, of course, that these assonant words should in all cases come at the conclusion of a line; they may fall into other places. Mainly, however, it is the concluding syllables of lines which come into this mutual relation of assonance, as contrasted with alliteration which is effective rather at the line's commencement. In its richest elaboration we may associate this assonance of language with the Romance nations, more especially the Spanish, whose full-toned language is peculiarly adapted to this recurrence of the same vowels. As a rule, no doubt assonance is here restricted to vowels. But the language further permits of other variety of assonance, not only that of vowels, but also that of identical consonants and consonants in association with one vowel.
(γγ) That which, as above described, alliteration and assonance are only able to establish with incompleteness is abundantly fulfilled by rhyme. In it, and expressly to the exclusion of initial letters, we have asserted the wholly equable sound of entire verb stems,[49] which are, by virtue of this equability, brought into an express relation with their tonal utterance. We have no mere question now of the number of the syllables. Words of one syllable, no less than others of two or more, may be rhymed. By this means we not only get the masculine rhyme, which is restricted to words of one syllable, but also the feminine rhyme, which embraces words of two syllables, as also the so-called gliding rhyme, which reaches to three or even more syllables. It is in particular the languages of Northern Europe which incline to the first type, Southern languages to the second, such as the Italian and Spanish. The German and French languages would appear to lie between these two extremes. Rhymes of more than three syllables are rarely to be met with in any language.
The position of the rhyme is at the conclusion of the lines, in which the rhyming word, although there is certainly no reason that it should ever concentrate in itself the ideal expressiveness of the significance, nevertheless does attract attention to itself so far as the verbal sound is concerned; and, furthermore, it makes the different verses or stanzas follow one another either in accordance with the principle of a wholly abstract recurrence of the same rhyme, or by uniting, separating, and mutually relating them in a more elaborate mode of regulated change, and variously symmetrical interweaving of different rhymes with correspondent relations, sometimes more near, at others more remote, of every degree of complexity. In such a process the particular rhymes will at one point stare us in the face at once, or they will appear to have a game of hide-and seek; so that in this way our ear, as it listens, will at one time receive instant satisfaction, at another it will only find it after considerable delay, wherein the expectation will, as it were, be coquetted with, deceived, and kept on the stretch, until the assured end from point to point of artistically arranged recurrence is reached, and with it the hearer's approval.
Among the various types of the poetic art it is pre-eminently lyric poetry, which, by virtue of its ideality and personal quality of expression, most readily avails itself of rhyme, and thereby converts language itself into a music of emotion and melodic symmetry, a symmetry not merely of time-measure and rhythmical movement, but of the kind of resonance which finds a responsive echo in the inner life itself. To promote this, therefore, the art elaborates in its use of rhyme a more simple or complex system of strophes, every one of which is part of one organic whole. Examples of such an interplay of melodic sound, whether steeped in emotion or rich in ingenuity, are the sonnet, canzonet, triolet, and madrigal. Epic poetry, on the contrary, so long as it does not mingle lyrical subject-matter with its more native character, preserves a more equable advance in its construction, which does not easily adapt itself to the strophe. We have an obvious illustration of this in the triplet stanzas of Dante's "Divine Comedy," as contrasted with the lyrical canzonets and sonnets of the same poet. However, I must not permit myself to go further into detail.
(c) Now that we have in the above investigation separated rhythmical versification from rhyme, and contrasted the same, we may now proceed, thirdly, to ask ourselves whether a combination of the two is not also intelligible, and, indeed, actually employed. The existence of certain more recent languages will render exceptional and important aid to the solution; in other words, we cannot deny to these either a partial reassertion of our former rhythmical system, or, in certain respects, an association of the same with rhyme. We will, for example, confine our attention to our mother tongue, and, in reference to the first-mentioned aspect, it will be sufficient to recall Klopstock, who would have as little of rhyme as possible; who not merely in epic, but also in lyrical poetry, set himself to imitate the ancients with the greatest enthusiasm and persistency. Voss and others have followed in his steps, ever striving to enforce with increased strictness principles upon which to base this rhythmical treatment of our language. Goethe, on the contrary, never felt quite himself in his classical syllabic measures. He asks himself, not without reason:
Stehn uns diese weiten Falten
Zu Gesichte, wie den Alten?[50]
(α) I will in this connection merely reiterate what I already have observed upon the distinction which exists between ancient and more modern languages. Rhythmical versification is based upon the natural quantity of syllables, possessing therein an essentially stable criterion, which the ideal expression can neither limit, alter, or weaken. Such a natural measure is, however, abhorrent to more recent languages; in these it is only the verbal accent of the ideal significance, which makes one syllable long in its contrast to others, which are defective in such significance. Such a principle of accentuation, however, does not supply any audible compensation for the absence of the natural quantity, or rather it adds to the actual uncertainty of such a measure. For the more strongly emphasized significance of a word can at the same time make another short, despite the fact that, taken by itself, it possesses a verbal accent, so that the criterion accepted is wholly one of mutual relation. Du liebst, can, for instance, according to the stress of the emphasis which is thrown, according to the sense intended, either on both words, or one or the other, be a spondee, iambus or trochee. No doubt the attempt has been made, even in our own tongue, to return to the natural quantity of syllables, and to create rules with this intent; but in the presence of the overwhelming importance that the intelligible significance and the accent it asserts has secured such a reference to theory is quite impracticable. And in truth this agrees with the state of the facts. If the natural measure is really to constitute the essential basis, the language ought not as yet to have become such an instrument of soul expression as it is of necessity in our own times. Once allow, however, that it has already in its course of development thus secured such a mastery of the intelligible purport over the sensuous or native material, and it follows that the fundamental test for the value of syllables is not to be deduced from the objective quantity itself, but rather from that whereof words are themselves indicative as means. The emotional impulse of a free intelligence refuses to allow the temporal activity of language, as such, to establish itself in the independent form of its native and objective reality.
(β) Such a conclusion, however, does not necessarily imply that we are forced to oust altogether from our German language the rhymeless rhythmical treatment of the syllabic measure; it merely in essential respects points to this, that it is not possible, conformably with the character of the structure of our modern speech, to retain the plastic consistency of the metrical medium as it was secured by the ancient world. We must consequently seek for and elaborate some further element in poetical composition by way of compensation, which on its own independent account is of a more ideal[51] character than the stable natural quantity of syllables. Such an element is the accent of the verse, no less than the caesura, which as now constituted, instead of moving independently of the verbal accent, coalesce with the same, and thereby receive a more significant, albeit a more abstract assertion, in virtue of the fact that the variety of that previous threefold accentuation, which we discovered in the rhythmical type of classical poetry, on account of this very coalescence necessarily disappears. It, however, equally follows as a result that we only retain the power with conspicuous success to imitate the rhythmic movement of such poetry where its impression on our ear is most emphatic. We no longer possess, that is to say, the stable quantitative basis for its more subtle distinctions and manifold connections, and the more crude mode of accentuation, which we do possess in its place, to emphasize our measure, is intrinsically no sufficient substitute.
(γ) To state, then, finally, what this actual association of the rhythmical mode of verse with rhyme is, we may go so far as to affirm that it is the absorption, although to a limited extent, by the more modern form of versification of the more ancient one.
(αα) The predominant distinction of the natural syllabic quantity by means of the verbal accent is in fact not an entirely satisfactory principle of the mere medium. It does not arrest the ear's attention, even on the side of sense simply, so far as to make it appear, absolutely and everywhere unnecessary, where the ideal aspect of the poetical content is paramount, to summon the complementary assistance of the sound and response of syllables and words.
(ββ) It is, however, at the same time necessary in the interest of metre that an equally strong contrasting force should be set up to that of the rhyme sound. In so far, however, as it is not the distinction of syllables in their natural quantity and its variety, which has to be co-ordinated and made predominant, we have, in respect, to this temporal relation, no other expedient left but the identical repetition of the same time-measure; in this the element of accented beat will tend to assert itself in a far more emphatic degree, than is compatible with the rhythmical system. As an illustration we have our German rhymed iambics and trochaics, in the recitation of which far more beat stress is admitted than is proper to the scansion of the unrhymed iambics of the ancients, although the caesura pause is capable of bringing into emphatic relief isolated words whose accent is mainly referable to their meaning, and is capable of further making all that remains dependent upon them a resisting effect to the abstract equality of the verse, and by so doing introduces a varied animation. And as in such a particular case, so we may assert generally, the time-beat cannot be of actual service in poetry with the force that is required of it in most musical compositions.
(γγ) Although, however, we may affirm it as a general rule that rhyme should be associated merely with such verse metres, which, by virtue of their simple changes of the syllabic quantity and their continuous recurrence of similar verse feet, do not on their own independent account give sufficiently effective modality to the element of sensuous medium in modern languages which admit at all of rhythmical treatment, yet the application of rhyme to the more profuse syllabic metres imitated from classical models, as, for instance, to borrow one example only, the alcaic and sapphic strophe, will not merely appear superfluous, but even an unresolved contradiction. Both systems repose on opposed principles, and the attempt to unite them in the way suggested, can only involve us in a like opposition, which can produce nothing but a contradiction we are unable to mediate, and which is therefore untenable. It follows, therefore, that we ought only to make use of rhyme in cases where the principle of the older versification merely makes itself effective in more remote implication, and through a transitional process essentially deducible from the system of rhyme.
The above, then, are the points which we have sought to establish as, in a broad sense, of most vital concern to poetical expression in its contradistinction from prose.
[1] Bildlich, here not so much creative as simply plastic or constructive.
[2] Vorliebe. His interest must be already centred in it.
[3] Bildlichkeit, i.e. their claims as images of something else.
[4] Vertauscht. I have translated "exchanged," but Hegel may mean "mistaken for."
[5] It is not very clear what Hegel means by the word Bezeichnungen. "Turns of expression," which first occurred to me, appears to be covered by Flexionsformen lower down.
[6] Gedrungenen. The idea is suppression into a compact mass—a cloud unable to burst save in occasional flashes.
[7] I presume Hegel refers here to the synthetic arrangement of genuine paragraphs rather than phrases, composition generally.
[8] Das eigentliche Wort. The word, that is, which expresses the fact in its immediacy.
[9] More literally, "being remoulded with the life and wealth of Spirit."
[10] Besonnenheit, i.e., real thought-fullness.
[11] Der künstlerischen Ruhe. The personal predilection of Hegel for classic art here once more asserts itself.
[12] The German word is Sinnen, but I think, though the emotional sense is partly implied, the main emphasis is on a presiding mind—or rather a wide-visioned genius.
[13] Eine sprudelnde Anschauung. A view of things that bubbles forth like a fountain.
[14] That is, the medium of literary form.
[15] Ein hartes Band. The idea is not so much difficult as unyielding, unmalleable.
[16] Zum Ernste des Inhalts. That is, the earnestness of a product of mind as such. Hegel seems to contrast with this the spontaneity of an art which, as inspired by genius, comes to us with the freshness of Nature herself, take Shakespeare's songs for example.
[17] Ungebunden. That is, it is contingent.
[18] Hegel calls this the Verstandesaccent, and speaks of this importance (Bedeutsamkeit) as a product of the syllables.
[19] I presume the words das für sich gestaltete Klingen refer to rhyme.
[20] Eine Sammlung in sich, that is, an independent collection or aggregate.