hexameters, a description not wanting in rhetorical beauty, but as the presentation of an emotion, which rouses little interest, itself equally lacking in interest.
We may find many examples of this style of comparison in Calderon, although a halt, by the way, of this kind is more suitable to lyrical emotion simply, and fetters the march of drama far too insistently, if it is not actually motived by the subject-matter. Don Juan, for instance, during the progress of the action, describes at length in this way the beauty of a veiled lady whom he had followed. This is what he says to a third person: /$ Natheless in despite and often Through the gross and barriered darkness Of that intranslucent veil, Flashed a hand of sheen most splendid, Mistress pure of rose and lily, Princess, to whose matchless glory E'en the snow's gleam paid obeisance, Slave all murk of Aethiop moulding.
$/ The matter is wholly different, however, when any one capable of _profound_ emotion, expresses his life through images and similes, in which the most secret folds of spiritual feeling are unveiled, the soul here either identifying itself with some scene of external Nature, or making such a scene the counterfeit of a spiritual content.
We may cite Ossian once again in illustration of this better use of image and comparison, although the range of objects which serve him in such similitude is jejune, mainly restricted to clouds, mists, storms, trees, streams, thistles, grasses, and other facts equally obvious. Here is one of them: "The Present[105] brings joy to us, O Fingal; it is as the sun on Kromla, when the hunter has mourned its absence a whole year long and now it breaks forth from the clouds." In another passage of the same writer we find these words: "Did not Ossian hearken but now to a voice? Is it then the voice of the days that are no longer? Ofttimes, oft as the evening suns, comes the memory of times that are gone into my soul." And for another instance take this bit of narration: "Pleasant are the words of song, saith Kuchullin, and dear to the heart are the tales of times far away. They are as the quiet dew of the morning on the hill of the roe-deer, when the sun trembles faintly on his flank, and the pool lies motionless and blue in the dale." In the case of Ossian this halting by the same emotions, and their similitudes expresses the attitude of an old age which out of weariness and exhaustion turns to sorrowful and painful memories. And generally a recourse to comparisons is evidence of an inclination to melancholy and effeminate emotion. The desire and interest of such a soul lies far away and foregone; and for this reason we find as a rule that, instead of bracing itself up manfully, it yields to its longing to lose itself in something else. Many of the figurative expressions of Ossian consequently are quite as much a response to this wholly personal mood as they are a reflection of ideas mostly of a mournful colour, and of the restricted circle beyond which he is unable to pass.
But, conversely, it is quite possible that _passion_, in so far as it is able to concentrate its forces on one content, despite its own unrest, with the object of finding a counterfeit of the soul in the natural world around it, may fluctuate to and fro in a variety of images and similitudes, which are all purely conceits of the fancy over one and the same object. A fine example of this we have in that monologue of Juliet from "Romeo and Juliet," in which she apostrophizes the night as follows: /$ Come, night; come Romeo; come, thou day in night; For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night Whiter than new snow on a raven's back: Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night, Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun.
$/ (_ββ_) The similes of epic poetry as they come before us over and over again in Homer stand out in a marked contrast to the above type of almost purely lyrical simile in which sentiment is absorbed in the heart of its content. In the former case the aim of the poet, when he may by any chance wish to dally with the comparative mode around some specific object, is, on the one hand, interested in raising us over the active curiosity, expectancy, hope, and fear, by which we are moved relatively to the several situations and exploits of his heroes during the actual progress of events over, that is to say, the general concurrencies of cause, action, and consequence, and in fixing our attention upon the images which he places before us in their plastic repose, purely for our contemplation, serene as the works of sculpture.
This repose, this absolution from the merely practical interest that we may enter into that which he places visibly before our eyes comes upon us with all the more force in so far as everything with which he compares the object is taken from a field entirely remote from it. Moreover, this halting round the simile possesses the further significance that by virtue of this kind of twofold painting of the same object its importance is emphasized, and is thus not permitted to be whirled away in the mere shifting stream of the song and the events it celebrates. Take, for example, what Homer says of Achilles, when that hero, fired with anger, confronts Aeneas ("Iliad," XX, vv.
164-175): /$ As when the harmful king of beasts (sore threatened to be slain By all the country up in arms) at first makes coy disdain Prepare resistance, but at last when anyone hath led Bold charge upon him with his dart, he then turns yawning head, Fell anger lathers in his jaws, his great heart swells, his stern Lasheth his strength up, sides and thighs waddle with stripes to learn Their own power, his eyes glow, he roars, he leaps to kill, Secure of killing: so his power then rous'd up to his will Matchless Achilles, coming on to meet Anchises' son[106].
$/ Much in the same spirit he speaks of Pallas, when she averted the arrow which Pandaros had let fly against Menelaus ("Iliad," IV, vv. 130-131): "She did not forget him, and warded off the arrow e'en as a mother flicks away some fly from her son, as he lies in sweet slumber."
And again further on when the arrow, notwithstanding, wounds Menelaus (vv. 141-146): /$ Yet forth the blood flow'd, which did much his royal person grace, And show'd upon his ivory skin, as doth a purple dye Laid, by a dame of Caïra, or lovely Maeony, On ivory, wrought in ornaments to deck the cheeks of horse; Which in her marriage room must lie; whose beauties have such force, That they are wish'd of many knights, but are such precious things, That they are kept for horse that draw the chariots of kings; Which horse, so deck'd, the charioteer esteems a grace to him; Like these, in grace, the blood upon thy solid thighs did swim, $/ (_γ_) A _third_ motive cause of similes, quite distinct from that of purely imaginative riot as also the self-absorbed sentiment or, under its other aspect, the dallying round important objects with the figurative power of the fancy, we have now to emphasize with particular reference to dramatic poetry. The content of the drama is made up of the conflict of passions, activities, pathos, actions, and the accomplishment of the thing willed by the soul, a content which does not, as in the case of the epic, take the form of a narrative of past events, but the dramatic poet places the individuals themselves before our eyes and makes them unfold their emotions personally in an objective form, and their actions as taking place in the present: his mediate position between ourselves and the objects represented therefore ceases. Looked at from this point of view it would appear as though in order to make this presence in Nature clear to us a primary requirement of drama would be that the expression of passions and the vehemence of their grief, consternation, and delight should be painted as naturally as it was possible to paint it, and consequently the simile would be here out of place. To let individuals, on the very plane of their action, in the full storm of emotion, and in the continuous strain of the busy world, speak much in the language of metaphor or image is obviously, from the commonsense point of view, an unnatural proceeding and injurious to the directness aimed at.
We are by the simile diverted from the immediate situation, and the characters, whose actions and emotions are involved in it, to something external and strange to it, which in short does not strictly belong to it, as part of its own present; consequently the general course of the dialogue must unavoidably appear to lag under the interruption thus imposed. And for this reason it came about also in Germany when at last our young bloods were all for freeing themselves from the fetters of French rhetorical taste, that the Spaniards, Italians, and French were regarded as artists who did nothing more than place their own personal flights of fancy or witticism, their own conventional attitude to society and elegance of speech in the mouth of their dramatic characters in situations, too, when the very tempest of emotion cried out for Nature's most direct expression to the exclusion of all other.
We find as a result of such an insistence on the principle of realism that in many dramas, which hail from this time, the outcry of emotion, with all the exclamatory signs and hyphens which may render its nudity more visible, takes the place of a noble and dignified diction, rich in image and simile. In much the same sense even English critics have often charged Shakespeare with a superabundant and too varied recourse to the simile, some of which he not unfrequently will attach to characters in the full strain of personal bereavement, where the stress of emotion least of all admits of the tranquillity necessary to reflection, the attitude of mind which is indispensable to this type of comparison. We may no doubt admit that now and again we meet with in Shakespeare an exaggerated tendency to pile up image upon image, and that his diction is thereby overweighted. At the same time we shall see, if we examine the matter in all its bearings, that even in drama the simile is entitled to a position essential to this form of poetry and vital to its action.
In other words if the emotion makes a pause in similes for the reason that it is absorbed in its object and is unable to free itself therefrom, there is also on the plane of _active life_ a distinct purpose subserved by it, namely, to indicate that the individual is not thus so exclusively preoccupied with the particular situation or state of the emotions then uppermost, but possesses a fine and noble nature superior to such conditions and able to assert its independence.
In passion soul-life is restricted and fettered to its own seclusion, narrowed down to the point of concentrated heat, either thereby a mute, an ejaculation of monosyllables, or the rage that vents itself at random. Greatness of soul and intellectual power alike refuse to submit to such limitations: they are wings which carry the soul in a fine tranquillity over and above the storm of pathos that moves it. It is this deliverance of the soul, which the simile primarily expresses by the very mode under which it is asserted. In other words it is only a really profound composure and strength which is able to make itself the object of its pain and suffering, to compare itself with something else, and by doing so to view itself impartially[108] in a strange material; or it may be in a mood of the most terrible scorn to set forth in the external thing the confronting image of its own annihilation, and still persist in the repose of its own obdurate forces. In epical poetry, as we before observed, it was the poet's undoubted function to transmit to his audience, by means of those halts by the way which his picturesque similitudes offered, that sense of tranquillity which is essential to fine art. In dramatic art, on the contrary, the _dramatis personae_ appear as themselves the _poets_ and _artists._ Here it is the characters who objectify their own soul-life in that which they are powerful enough to imagine and inform, thereby further manifesting to us the nobility of their receptive faculties and the inherent force of their emotional resources[109].
For this absorption into something else that is external is now[110] the deliverance of the world within from a purely practical interest, or at least is that which lifts the immediacy of emotion to the level of forms the soul may contemplate in freedom; and for this reason every comparison instituted simply for the comparison's sake in the way we have already observed it under the first aspect of the simile discussed, is vindicated now in a much profounder sense than was then possible; it can now only appear as a victory over the exclusive obsession of passion and the release from its masterdom. In following up the course of this liberating process we will now emphasize several important distinctions to illustrate which we shall borrow exclusively from Shakespeare.
(_αα_) Now in the first place we would observe that when we have a soul set before us about to meet with a grave misfortune, by which it will be shaken to its depths, and the pain of this inevitable cataclysm is at length actually entered upon, it would be nothing less than an indication of a nature essentially commonplace if it were there and then to break out into the cry of horror, pain, and desperation, and so make a clean breast of it. A strong and noble spirit on the contrary holds its lamentation as such in reserve, keeps a hand of iron upon its pain, and by this means preserves a free power to embody in far-distant material imaginatively presented the profound sense of its anguish, and to express its own tragic state under the image of that which is remote. Thus man rises superior to his suffering; he is not utterly with all that is in him bondman to it; rather he is as wholly distinct from it as he is one with it; and consequently he can still pause before that which is outside and beyond him, which he relates to his emotion as an independent force cognate with his own. This will explain to us those words of the old Northumberland in Shakespeare's "Henry IV," when he inquires of the messenger who comes to inform him of the death of Percy, what news he brings him of his son and his brother, and, on receiving no reply, gives utterance to the composure of the most poignant grief as follows: /$ Thou tremblest; and the whiteness of thy cheek Is apter than thy tongue to tell thy errand.
Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless, So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone, Drew Priam's curtain in the dead of night, And would have told him half his Troy was burnt; But Priam found the fire ere he his tongue, And I my Percy's death ere thou report'st it[111].
$/ This attitude of the soul, which spins about itself as it were the garments of its pain, and yet retains the power throughout to image itself under new modes of comparison, receives a particularly striking illustration in the character of Richard II, where we find him repentant over the youthful frivolity of his days of prosperity.
In fact there is no trait in this royal grief that is more touching or suggestive of a child's simplicity than the fact that he always expresses himself under the objective form of most pertinent images, and in the play of this type of self-expression preserves his suffering all the more profoundly. When, for example, Henry demands of him the crown, he replies: /$ Give me the crown. Here, cousin, seize the crown; Here cousin; On this side my hand, and on that side yours.
Now is this golden crown like a deep well That owes two buckets, filling one another, The emptier ever dancing in the air, The other down, unseen and full of water.
That bucket down and full of tears am I, Drinking my griefs while you mount up on high[112].
$/ (_ββ_) The other aspect to which we would now draw attention is this, namely, that a character which is already made one with its interests, its sorrow, and its destiny, endeavours by means of the simile to release itself from this immediate union, and makes this deliverance obvious to us by the very fact that it shows itself still able to deduce such similitudes. In "Henry VIII,"[113] for instance, the Queen Katherine, on being forsaken by her royal consort, expresses the depth of her desolation in the words: /$ I am the most unhappy woman living!
Alas, poor wenches, where are now your fortunes?
Shipwreck'd upon a kingdom, where no pity, No friends, no hope; no kindred weep for me; Almost no grave allow'd me: like the lily, That once was mistress of the field and flourish'd, I'll hang my head and perish.
$/ In a still more admirable manner in "Julius Caesar"[114] Brutus exclaims to Cassius, to whose want of spirit he has vainly striven to give the spur: /$ O Cassius, you are yoked with a lamb That carries anger as the flint bears fire; Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark, And straight is cool again.
$/ That Brutus in such a situation can find room for a simile is already an excellent proof that he himself has thrust his scorn into the background, and has begun to assert himself as master of it.
For the most part Shakespeare, by endowing his criminal characters with greatness of soul in crime no less than in misfortune, exalts them before he leaves them above their own evil passions: he will not let them rest in the purely abstract assertion of crimes they are for ever going to do, but never really commit, as is the French style, but actually infuses them with the imaginative power, by means of which they stand out before us as distinctly as any other personification that is new to us. Macbeth, for instance, when his last hour has struck[115], exclaims in the well-known words: /$ Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing.
$/ The same thing may be said of those last words of Cardinal Wolsey in "Henry VIII,"[116] uttered at the close of his career when struck down from the summit of his greatness: /$ Farewell! a long farewell to all my greatness!
This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hopes: to-morrow blossoms, And bears his blushing honours thick upon him; The third day comes a frost, a killing frost; And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root, And then he falls, as I do.
$/ (_γγ_) In this impersonal relation of objective fact and its expression of the comparative mode, the repose and substantial self-command of character returns to itself; it is the means whereby the pain of a great downfall is softened. So Cleopatra exclaims[117] to Charmian, after she has already put the mortal aspic to her breast: /$ Peace, peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep?
As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle-- $/ The bite of the serpent relaxes her members so gently that Death is himself deceived and holds himself to be Sleep. And this image may well pass as itself a counterfeit of the mild and allaying influence of such similitudes.
C. THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE SYMBOLIC TYPE OF ART _Didactic_, _descriptive poetry and the ancient epigram._ The conception we have in general terms formed of the symbolic type of art is such that within it significance and expression are unable to unite sufficiently to appear in complete and reciprocal fusion.
In unconscious symbolism the _incompatibility_ of these two aspects remained a fact throughout, if not actually _declared_ as such; in the Sublime on the contrary this inadequacy was _explicitly_ asserted: the absolute significance, God, no less than His external reality, the world, are expressly represented in this excluding relation to one another. On the other hand, however, in all these types that further aspect of symbolism, namely, the _affinity_ which obtains between the significance and the external form, in which it is visibly manifested, still retained its importance. In the original type of symbolism this was exclusively the case, a type which did not as yet set forth the significance in contrast to its concrete existence.
But in the Sublime, too, it remained an _essential_ relation, a type which, in order to express the Supreme Being, if here under a wholly inadequate mode, required as its means the phenomena of Nature, and the events and exploits of God's chosen people. And finally it reappears in the comparative type of art a personal relation and one that is consequently amenable to _caprice._ This element of caprice, however, albeit it is an entirely present fact and particularly so in the case of the metaphor, image, and simile, is notwithstanding still hidden away behind the _affinity_ between the significance and the image utilized to express it, in so far as it selects the comparison simply out of a regard for their mutual resemblance, a fundamental aspect of which is not so much the _external_ form as just this _relation_ set up between them by the activity of the soul and consisting in subjective emotions, points of view and ideas and their cognate modes of configuration[118]. When, however, it is not the notion of the material itself, but simply a capricious use of the judgment, which brings together the content and its artistic form, both can only be conceived as posited in an entirely external relation to one another; their association is now a juxtaposition without essential relation, simply a dressing up, that is to say, of the one side by the other. For this reason we have here to treat these last-mentioned and subordinate types of art by way of supplement. They arise from the absolute collapse of the essential phases in all true art-production; they bring before us, in short, by their independence of the principle of relativity the suicide of the symbolic type.
If we view this stage generally as a whole we find on the one hand already as wholly independent the elaborate but formless significance, for the artistic shaping of which all that we can now supply is an external ornament selected at caprice to set it off. On the other side we have the external mode pure and simple. That is to say, instead of being mediated in its identity with that on which it is imposed by the fact that this is its own essentially cognate significance it can now only be accepted and described in the aspect of its self-subsistence over against this _centrum_ of significance, and consequently only as mere externality. From the above contrasted aspects we may differentiate in abstract terms _didactic_ from _descriptive_ poetry, a distinction which so far at least as the didactic is concerned is only to be made good under the poetic type for the reason that this alone is able to bring before us the significance in its abstract universality.
Inasmuch, however, as the notion of art does not consist in the dissociation, but the identification of significance and form we find even at this stage not only a complete separation, but also in line with that, a relation asserted between the sides thus opposed. This relation, however, now that the partition line of symbolism has already been _crossed_, is no longer of a symbolic nature, and is therefore an attempt to abolish the fundamental characteristics of that type, namely, the incompatibility, and at the same time the self-subsistence of form and content, a position that all the previous types were unable to transcend. Owing, however, to the separation of the two sides, which thus make for unity, being already presupposed by this type this attempt can only be looked upon as a mere aspiration[119], to completely satisfy which in all that it involves is reserved for a more perfect type of art, namely, the classical.
We will now briefly glance at these supplementary forms, in order to make our passage from them to the real type above mentioned more fully intelligible.
1. THE DIDACTIC POEM When a significance, which as such co-ordinates a homogeneous _complexus_ of relations, is apprehended exclusively as significance, yet does not receive the form strictly adequate to this content, but is merely invested with the external ornamentation of art, then we have before us the didactic poem. The didactic poem does not figure among the genuine types of art. For in it we find on the one hand a content already completely elaborated under a mode that is thereby necessarily prosaic, while on the other we have the artistic form, which is merely tacked to it in an external way, for this very reason that it had already been accepted by the mind in a form stamped with _prose_ throughout, and is merely exhibited to our common sense or reflective faculties as instruction under this prosaic aspect, that is to say, with an exclusive reference to the significance embodied in its abstract and general terms. Consequently art, in this its external relation to a content so essentially foreign to its real informing process, can only recognize in the didactic poem its external aspects, such as metre, exalted language, episodic matter, images, similes, ebullitions of sentiment, points of acceleration and transition in the march of ideas, aspects in short which do not give us the heart of the content as such, but rather surround it as an incidental accretion, with the object of alleviating and making more enjoyable the serious and dry tone of the didactic material by means of their more inspiriting atmosphere. That which is intrinsically, in the fundamental conception of it, relegated to prose, cannot receive the poet's mintage, though it may be the peg on which he may hang his mantle[120].
Just as we find, for example, that the art of gardening is in great measure a purely external rearrangement of what is already presented us by Nature, but not necessarily of that which is itself a truly lovely locality; or as the art of building ameliorates by its ornament and external decoration a locality which has been expressly devoted to prosaic purposes and affairs.
In this way Greek Philosophy made a start under the mode of the didactic poem. We may even adduce Hesiod as an example, albeit a prosaic treatment of this kind in its strict sense is only fully assured when the understanding is undisputed master of the subject with its train of reflections, consequences, and classifications, and instructs us from this standpoint alone in as pleasing and elegant a way as it can. Lucretius, too, in his relations to the philosophy of Epicurus, and Vergil, with the information he supplies on agriculture, are in part examples of the same type. Despite all their artistic adroitness they are unable to give their versification the genuine spontaneity of the artistic form. In Germany the didactic poem is new out of fashion; in France Delille, in addition to his previous efforts entitled "Les jardins, ou l'art d'embellir les paysages," and his "Homme des champs," has presented his compatriots with a further example of the didactic poem, in which he has treated physical science as compendiously through its forms of magnetism, electricity and the rest.
2. DESCRIPTIVE POETRY The _second_ type which we have to examine stands out in direct contrast to the previous one. The point of departure here is not from a significance already present before the mind in an independent form of its own, but from external objects simply such as natural localities, buildings, seasons of the year or periods of time, and the modes under which they are presented to sense. But as we found in the didactic poem the content persisted in formless _generality_ so far as its essential character was concerned, so here, if in a converse manner, the _external material_ is _independently_ set forth in the singularity which pertains to it simply as phenomenon without being drawn within the circle of the significances apparent to mind; and it is this particularity which is depicted and described in its external aspect precisely as it appears to the matter-of-fact consciousness. Such a sensuous content has no relation to true art whatever, except under the _one_ feature, namely, that of its external existence; and this can only claim art's recognition in so far as it represents the natural basis of _spiritual_ life and individuality, its actions and events, the facts, that is to say, which constitute an environing world; as merely external form separated by itself from all that pertains to such life it has no such claim.
3. RELATION OF BOTH ASPECTS On grounds deducible from the above, neither the instructive nor the descriptive type is secured in the exclusive one-sidedness which would obliterate every vestige of art, and we find in the one case that the external reality is brought into appreciable relation with that which is seized by mind as significance, just as conversely in the other the abstract universal is related to its concrete mode of appearance.
(_a_) We have already explained how this is so in the case of the didactic poem. Without depicting external conditions and particular phenomena, without the episodical narration of mythological and other illustrations we shall rarely find a genuine example of it. By means, however, of a parallel series of this character in which the universal for mind is thus laid alongside of the particular object of sense we have merely a quite collateral relation set up instead of a union carried out in every detail, a parallelogism, moreover, which does not affect the entire content and its all-embracing artistic form, but merely isolated aspects and traits.
(_b_) Such a modicum of true relation is particularly conspicuous in the case of descriptive poetry, in so far as its delineations are accompanied with such emotions as the sight of natural landscape, the course of the days and seasons, a wooded hill, a lake, a babbling brook, a church, a picturesquely situated village and the poor man's peaceful cottage are likely to arouse. We find consequently in descriptive poetry much as we do in the didactic poem episodes which, although merely accessory, animate us, in particular through the reflection of affecting emotions, such as a tender melancholy or little touches of occasional experience taken from the more homely levels of life. Such an association of spiritual feeling with the external facts of Nature can still only too easily in this type of poetry remain wholly external in its presentation. For the natural or local condition is here assumed to be something which quite independently confronts us. Man no doubt draws near to it; under its influence he entertains this or that feeling, but there is nothing which essentially unites moonlight, forests, valleys, landscape, and so on, with the emotions of the soul they excite. I am not here either the interpreter or the animating focus of Nature, but feel, as each happens to confront me, a wholly indefinite kind of harmonious reciprocity establish itself between the objects I face and the emotional life which they stimulate.
Most of all are we Germans devoted to this type of picturesque description, and along with it to every variety of exquisite feeling and heart effervescence such natural scenery can possibly evoke. It is a public high-road over which all may march in line. Even some of the odes of Klopstock are tuned to its key.
(_c_) But _thirdly_, if we inquire whether there is not a profounder relation between these opposed aspects of the internal feeling and external object, we shall find our nearest approach to an answer in the ancient _epigram._ (_α_) The very name of the epigram already expresses the original gist of it. It is an _inscription._ Unquestionably we find, also here on the one hand an object, and on the other we have a definite statement propounded as to this object; but in the most ancient epigrams, among which Hesiod has preserved a few examples, we do not have the picture of an object accompanied by any reaction of feeling, rather we find, the matter of fact put before us in two distinct ways. In the one the external existence, and with it the meaning thereof and explanation, is concentrated in its form as epigram on the keenest and most forcible of its characteristics.
This original characterization of the epigram, however, even among the Greeks, later examples have already lost; and we find an increasing tendency both to secure and apply the passing conceits of fancy, whether ingenious, witty, or merely entertaining, to particular incidents, works of art, people and so on, ideas in short which do not so much set forth the object itself, as illustrate the condition of personal feeling in reference to the same.
(_β_) The main point to observe here is this that, just in proportion as the object itself fails as such to become the predominant factor in this type of presentment to that extent it becomes less complete.
In this connection we may also in passing mention a few more modern examples of an analogous nature. The novels of Tieck, for instance, not unfrequently have to deal with specific works of art or artists, or a definite gallery of pictures, composition of music and so forth, and they have then some nice little romance attached. These particular pictures, however, which the reader has never seen, these compositions, which he has never heard, the poet obviously can neither bring before our eyes nor ears. From this point of view the entire expression of his art, in so far as it depends on objects of this nature, must remain subject to this defect. In the same way in yet more important romances writers have sought to embody as the real content of their work entire arts, and their finest productions as Heinse, for instance, did with that of music in his _Hildegard von Hohenthal._ But in every case where we find that a work of art throughout is unable to reproduce with essential adequacy its fundamental subject-matter, we can only conclude that the primary cause of this defect arises from the inadequacy of the type of art selected.
(_γ_) To remove the defects above adverted to two things are clearly essential; the objective fact and the explanation of it which is offered to mind must not be suffered to fall into absolute _severation_ as was the case in the type last considered, nor must the union when effected, an equally important point, assume a character _identical_ with either the symbolical, sublime or purely comparative types. A yet more genuine form of presentment must be sought for under a condition