The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
1. THE GENERAL WORLD-CONDITION
Generally speaking, we shall find that the ills of life and its evil, war, battles, and revenge, are not excluded from the subject-matter of the Ideal, but are frequently the very source and substance of the heroic age and its myths, whose form grows all the wilder and sterner in proportion to the remoteness of such a period from a fully developed society of law and moral order. In the chivalrous adventures of knight-errantry we find the heroes of such tales themselves often enough sharing the savage and dissolute characteristics of the times, and in much the same way the martyrdom of the heroes of the Church presupposes a condition of ferocious cruelty around them. At bottom, however, the Christian ideal, which is based on the depth and inwardness of man's spiritual nature, stands in a relation of entire indifference to the external world.
We have demonstrated that the condition of particular centuries is more applicable to the Ideal; in the same way Art selects pre-eminently a particular class of society for the form under which the Ideal shall appear, the order, that is to say, of _princes._ And the selection is made not because art is necessarily aristocratic, or has any predilection for gentility[308], but simply on account of the perfection in which free will and its products may be exemplified imaginatively through the highly placed class. We have in the chorus of ancient tragedy the characteristics and universal background of general maxims, modes of imaginative thought, and emotion, before which the definite movements of the action proceed. In contrast to this appear the more clearly defined individualities of the personages immediately concerned in the action, men and women of authority, and belonging for the most part to royal families. On the other hand, the main impression forced upon us, when seeing representatives of a lower class carrying on pursuits which are of a narrower range, is one of subjection; and, indeed, in an artificial[309] state of society the freedom of action of such a class is fettered in every direction, and is necessarily involved with all its passions and interests in all the medley and despotic forces of external circumstance.
It is, in fact, held closely behind the invincible power of the social order, which it is unable to come out of, and is an alien from the authority of the dominant order, even when that is asserted in accordance with just principle. In this limitation of outlook through the hard conditions of life all real independence is wrecked. For this reason both the circumstances and characters which we find in such a sphere of life are more appropriate to the treatment of comedy, everybody being permitted in comedy to rate themselves as they please, and to lay claims to a self-sufficiency in all that they will and think, which is none the less immediately negatived by the spiritual no less than the external dependence of their lives. As a rule, such a false and second-hand self-subsistency must inevitably fall to pieces when confronted with the actual conditions of life and the distorted view which is formed of them. The force of circumstances is presented to the lower orders of society on a totally different level from that in which it acts upon rulers and princes. In Schiller's "Braut von Messina" Don Caesar is able to exclaim, and justly: "there stands no higher judge than myself!" And when he has to be punished he must himself give judgment and execute it. He is, in fact, subject to no external necessity of right and law, and even when punishment is the question is wholly dependent on himself. The characters in the Shakespearean drama do not entirely belong to the princely order and only partially are taken from mythical sources, but they are placed in the era of civil wars, in which the ties of social order and legislative enactment are either weakened or shattered, and they secure from such a condition the exceptional independence and self-sufficiency we are looking for.
Such ideals inevitably lack the depth of a fuller content, and the most significant feature of them is that of the attitude of the individual mind to their realization; for we find here the content is already presented by existing social institutions, and consequently the essential interest we take in it depends on the particular way in which that content is realized and appears in the _personal life_, its moral and inward significance. For this reason it is not possible, as in the case of former times, to create ideals from the positions of judgeship and kingship. If a man carries out his judicial functions nowadays in accordance with duty and the requirements of his office, he merely is acting within the bounds already marked out for him by legislative enactments in the social order as the sphere of his responsibilities. All that may characterize his tenure of office beyond this, as proceeding from personal qualities, such as suavity of demeanour or acuteness of judgment, is not the main point or the substantial content, but rather an aspect of it which it is possible to dispense with as something accidental.
In the same way the monarchs of our own day are no longer, as was the case with the heroes of mythical times, in themselves the embodying and culminating unity of society itself, but rather a more or less unsubstantial _centrum_ around which all legal and social institutions, however moulded in the course of time, group themselves in independent relations. All the most important functions of the executive have nowadays been separated from the royal prerogative. Kings do not lay down the law, control finance; the preservation of social order is not one of their most characteristic functions. Peace and war are determined through the particular circumstances of international politics, which it is not within their power exclusively either to direct or control; and, if it happens that any important decision with regard to either depends in the last resort on their judgment, such a decision is not generally so much in the nature of its substance the result of any personal preference, as it is the formal seal of monarchical authority on what is already determined on public grounds, the mere imposition of that which is strictly official rather than personal in its character.
In the same way, a general or field-marshal of our times has unquestionably great authority; objects and interests of profound importance are under his control and his circumspection; his courage, his determination, and his intelligence are involved in the weightiest decisions; nevertheless, whatever may be definitely traced to the essentially personal characteristics of the man has little opportunity for display in such a result. For, in the first place, the objects upon which his decisions turn are not of his own selection, and arise out of circumstances which lie beyond the sphere of his influence rather than are spontaneously fixed by himself; secondly, the means adopted to carry out such objects are not the sole result of his initiative. On the contrary, they are supplied him from sources which are not immediately under his authority or personal influence, but stand rather quite apart from the sphere of his individual powers as a general.
To sum up, then, though it is true that under the present condition of the civilized world a man may act independently for himself in many directions, the fact remains that in whatever direction he may turn he is still only a member of a fixed order of society and appears as such limited in his range rather than the vital representative and individual embodiment of society itself. He acts necessarily under such a condition of restriction, and our interest in such a personality, no less than in the content of his aims and activity, is entirely devoid of completeness. In the end we are invariably driven to concentrate our attention on the purely personal interest, how far, that is to say, he attained success, what was the nature of the obstacles and complications which, in either, through untoward chance or necessity, confronted or distracted his progress. And if it is, moreover, true that our modern personality is of infinite significance when we estimate the character thus manifested as a spiritual product, in its actions, sufferings, moral opinions, and conduct that is to say, it is also true that the moral content which is realized in such an individual is of a restricted character, rather than, as is the case in the heroic times, the realization of universal right, custom, and legality. The individual is no longer the exclusive vehicle and actual embodiment of these powers as in the previous times.
None the less, how insignificant and isolated must a private revenge of this kind appear, if we estimate it from the practical point of view, according to the probability of its success; and, in fact, in one aspect of it, it already contains the germ of wrong which can only lead to the criminal act on which it will fall to pieces. No doubt, as personal to Karl Moor himself, this is a misfortune, a fatality, however, which, despite the tragical element in it, can only engraft on mere boys the blight of such a "robber-ideal." In much the same way the characters depicted in "Kabale und Liebe" suffer wrong under prevailing conditions of life, absorbed in the trivial facts and passions wholly personal to themselves. It is not until we come to the dramas of "Fiesco" and "Don Carlos" that we find characters of nobler significance and more substantive content, heroes, for example, resolved to liberate their country, or assert the liberty of religious conviction. With a nobility still more striking Wallenstein places himself at the head of his army that the crisis in the political situation may come to a focus.
He is fully cognisant of the nature of the political forces upon which his only means of control, his army, is dependent; consequently he hesitates for long whether to follow his private inclination or his duty. He has barely arrived at a decision when he finds the instrument on which he most depended slip from his grasp; his means of action is gone. For that which in the last instance unites the leading officers and generals is no gratitude for anything that may be due to him on the ground of past services rendered; his fame as a general has nothing to do with it, but rather the duty they owe to the universally recognized seat of government, the oath they have sworn to the head of the State, the emperor of the Austrian monarchy. He finds himself consequently in the end isolated, and is not so much fought with and overcome by an external foe as he is stripped of all means of executing his purpose. He is deserted by his army and from that moment is a lost man. The "Götz"[310] of Goethe starts from a dramatic situation of an analogous though somewhat inverse type.
The times of Götz and Franz von Sickingen belong to the interesting epoch in which knight-errantry and the self-reliant individuality of the class of nobility is being superseded by the new creation of an external and legally constituted social order. To have selected precisely this critical time where we find the heroic characteristics of the Middle Ages and the legalized fabric of modern society meet and collide for the subject of his first artistic production shows much penetration on the part of Goethe. For Götz and Sickingen are still heroes in the genuine sense, who are resolved to exercise their influence over circumstances, whether immediately affecting them or of wider range, out of the resources of their own personalities, their courage, and their private sense of right. The new order of things involves Götz in acts of illegality and brings about the catastrophe of his life. It is only in the Middle Ages that knight-errantry and the relations of feudalism will supply a field entirely open to this type of self-reliant manhood. When we find, moreover, the legalized order co-ordinated more completely in its prosaic form, the predominant authority in fact, the adventurous self-dependence of knighthood is left outside it as an unrelated excrescence; and if an attempt is made to assert it as though it were still a valid means of attacking wrong, and assisting the oppressed, it becomes simply an object of ridicule, such as Cervantes illustrates for us in his "Don Quixote." In this allusion to the opposition which exists between two differently constituted _régimes_ of society and the collision which results from action in defiance of their particular character we have already indicated what we have above defined generally as the closer determination and differentiation of the universal state of the world, that is to say, the _situation_ as generally expressed.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.