by so doing to preserve an independent ground of vantage in its own self-reliance. When the collision comes therefore it is helpless; it acts hastily and without circumspection, or bows passively to the movement of events. So, for example, we have in Hamlet a beautiful and noble soul; one not so much spiritually weak, but one that wanders astray without a strong grasp of life's realities, moving in an atmosphere of dejection, a sombre and half articulate melancholy.
Gifted with a finely intuitive sense he feels that all is not well with him, that things are not as they should be though he has no external sign, no single ground for suspicion; nevertheless he surmises the atrocious deed that has been perpetrated. The ghost of his father gives yet closer embodiment to his feelings. He is at once ready in spirit to revenge, his sense of duty is always before him reflecting the innermost craving of his heart, but he is not carried away with the flood, as Macbeth; he cannot either kill, rage, or strike with the directness of a Laertes; he persists in the inactivity of a beautiful, introspective soul, which can neither realize its aims nor make itself at home in the conditions of actual life. He dallies, seeks for more positive certainty buoyed up by the fair integrity of his soul; he can, however, come to no firm decision, much as he has sought it, and permits himself to follow the course of external events. In this atmosphere of unreality he goes yet further astray in matters that lie directly in his path; he kills the old Polonius instead of the king; he acts in a hurry where he should have been more circumspect, yet persists in his self absorption, where decided action is essential; until at length, without any action on his part, the fated _dénouement_ of the entire drama, including that of his own persistently self-retiring personality, has unravelled itself on the broad highway of Life's external incidents and accidents.
We are particularly presented with this attitude in modern times among men of the lower levels of life, who are without an education which extends to aims of universal significance, or are devoid of the variety of objective interests. Consequently when some _particular_ aim of their life fails they are unable to secure any further stay of their spiritual forces and a centre of control for their activities.
This lack of education tends to make reserved natures, in proportion as it is undeveloped, adhere with the more rigidness and obstinacy to that which, through its appeal to their entire individuality, makes a claim upon them however limited in its range it may be. We find pre-eminently such a monotonous attitude incidental to this class of self-absorbed and speechless men among German characters, who for this reason appear in their seclusion inclined to stubbornness, ready to bristle up, crabbed, inaccessible, and in their dealings and expressions wholly unreliable and contradictory. As a master in the delineation and exposition of such obtuse characters of the poorer classes we will mention but one example, Hippel, the author of "Life's Careers in the Line of Ascent,"[283] one of our few German works stamped with original humour. He keeps himself wholly removed from Jean Paul's sentimentality and want of taste in plot construction, and possesses moreover an astonishing individuality, freshness, and vitality. He understands, in quite an exceptional way, and one that seizes on our interest at once, how to depict the thickset type of people who are unable to breathe freely and who consequently, when they do give themselves the rein, do so with a violence that is simply fearful. They put an end of their own accord to the infinite contradiction of their spiritual life and the unhappy circumstances in which they are involved in an appalling manner; and bring about by such means that which is otherwise the result of an external fate, as we find, for instance, in "Romeo and Juliet," where external accidents mar all the wise and able offices of the holy father's intervention and cause the death of the lovers.
(_c_) We find, then, that characters of this formal quality generally either expose merely the infinite volitional force of the individual's personality, which asserts itself frankly just as it is and storms ahead in the bare impulse of the will; or, to take the further aspect, present to us an essential self-contained[284], if not wholly articulate soul, which, affected as it becomes by one specific aspect of its spiritual experience, concentrates the entire breadth and depth of its personality on this point, yet, owing to the fact of its possessing no development externally, is unable to find its proper place or to act with practical sense when it comes into collision with that world. We have yet a _third_ point[285] to mention, which consists in this, that when characters of this type, wholly one-sided and restricted as they are in respect to their aims if at the same time fully developed in mental power, awake in us not merely a _formal_, but also a _substantial_ interest, we cannot fail to receive the impression that this limitation of their personal life is itself only a condition that is inevitable; in other words it is a result which grows out of the particular way in which their character is defined along with the profounder content of their personal life. Shakespeare in fact enables us to see this depth and wealth in such characters.
He presents them to us as men of imaginative power and genius by showing how their reflective faculty commands them and lifts them above that which their condition and definite purpose would make them, so that they are all the while as it were forced by the misfortune of circumstances and the obstacles of their position into doing that which they accomplish. At the same time we do not mean this to the extent of asserting, for example, that the bad witches were to blame for all that Macbeth dared after consulting them. These witches are rather to be looked at as the reflex of his own obstinate will. All that the characters of Shakespeare execute, that is the particular purpose they propose, originates and finds the taproot of its force in their own personality. But along with this they maintain in one and the same individuality a loftiness, which brushes aside that which they actually are, so far as their aims, interests, and actions are concerned, and which amplifies them and exalts them above themselves.
In like manner Shakespeare's more vulgar characters, such as Stephano, Trinculo, Pistol, and that hero among them all, Falstaff, though saturated with their own debasement, assert themselves as fellows of intelligence, whose genial quality is able to take in everything, to possess a large and open atmosphere of its own, and in short makes them all that great men are. In the tragedies of the French on the contrary even the greatest and most worthy characters only too frequently, if viewed critically, assert themselves as so many evil offshoots of the brute creation, whose only intelligence consists in this that it can furnish dialectical arguments in its vindication.
In Shakespeare we find neither vindication nor damnation, but merely a review of the general condition of destiny, which inevitably places such characters uncomplaining and unrepentant where they are, and from the starting-point of which they see everything, themselves included; and yet as independent spectators of themselves decline and fall.
In all these respects the realm which is peopled by such individual characters is an infinitely rich one, a kingdom, however, which very easily collapses in hollowness and dulness, so that only quite a few masters have received the gifts of poetical and intuitional power sufficient to enable them to reveal its truth.
2. THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE Now that we have examined the aspect of the inward soul-life, which may, at this stage of our inquiry, be presented by art, we must direct our attention to that which lies without it, to the particularity of circumstances and situations which affect character, also to the collisions in which its development proceeds, and finally review the entire collective form, which this inward life assumes within the boundaries of concrete reality.
It is, as we have more than once pointed out, a fundamental determinant of romantic art, that the spiritual sense, in other words, the soul in its aspect of self-reflection, should constitute a whole, and relates itself for this reason to the external world, not, in its own reality, inter-penetrated by this world, but as though related to something purely external and separated from it, which goes on its way independently disjoined from Spirit, is thus evolved, and thus disposes of itself as a finite and continuously fluid, changing, and complicate object of contingent causality[286]. To the self-absorbed soul it is as wholly a matter of indifference what particular circumstances it confronts, as it is an affair of chance what those circumstances are which appear before it. For in its action it is less a matter of importance that it should carry out a work whose essential basis is rooted in itself and owes its subsistency to its own character than that it should generally make itself effective in action.
(_a_) We have, in short, before us here a process which we may from one point of view describe as the rejection of the Divine from Nature. Spirit has here withdrawn itself from the externality of phenomena, which, for the reason that the inward life no longer sees itself reflected in this sphere[287], is now independently clothed on its part under a relation of indifference exterior to the subject of consciousness. Relatively to its truth Spirit is, no doubt, in its own medium mediated and reconciled with the Absolute: but in so far as we now take up our position on the ground of self-subsistent individuality, which proceeds from itself as it discovers itself in its immediacy, this divesting of the Divine[288] affects character in its active capacity. It moves forward, that is to say, with its own contingent aims into a world equally subject to chance, with which it fails to unite itself in an essentially harmonious whole. This relative character of purpose in an environment which is relative, whose determination and development does not subsist in the individual mind, but is defined externally and contingently and is responsible for collisions equally adventitious, which appear as offshoots that are unexpectedly interwoven with it, creates that to which we give the name of "the adventurous," which supplies the _fundamental type_ of romance for the mode of its events and actions.
It is necessary that the action and dramatic event in so far as they apply strictly to the Ideal and classic art, should be referable to an essentially true or, in other words, independently explicit and necessary end, in whose conformation that which is also the determinating factor for the external form, for the particular type and mode of execution, is an object of real existence. In the case of the acts and events of romantic art this is not the case. For, although essentially universal and substantive ends are also presented in their manner of realization by this type, the definition of the action which is referable to such ends, and the principle of co-ordination and articulation which appears in its progress on its spiritual side[289] is not the direct result of those ends themselves; this aspect of realization is inevitably left independent and subject to the operation of contingency.
(_α_) The romantic world had one and only _one absolute_ work to accomplish, namely, the extension of Christendom, and the bringing into manifest performance the spirit of the community[290]. Situated in the midst of a hostile world consisting in part of the unbelieving ancient _régime_, and in part of a human life which was barbarous and coarse, the character of its actual accomplishment, in so far as it passed from mere theory to deeds, was, in the main, the passive endurance of pain and torture, the sacrifice of its own temporal existence for the eternal salvation of the soul. A further product of its energies, which is equally a portion of the same essential content, is, in the Middle Ages, that carried out by Christian Chivalry, the driving forth of the Moors, Arabs, and Mohammedans generally from Christian countries, and, above all, along with it, the conquest of the Holy Sepulchre in the Crusades. This, however, was not an object which affected man simply as human[291], but one which a mere collection of isolated individuals had to accomplish under conditions in which the individuals which composed it streamed together at their own free will and pleasure as such. From such a point of view we may call the Crusades the collective adventure of the Christian Middle Ages; an adventure, which was essentially subject to lapses[292], and fantastical, of a spiritual tendency, and yet devoid of a truly spiritual aim, and in its relation to action and character delusive. For in its relation to the processes of religion, the supreme object of the Crusades is in the highest degree empty and external. Christianity purported to secure its salvation solely in Spirit, in Christ, who is raised to the right hand of God; it finds its living reality and stay in Spirit, not in the grave of Spirit, or in the sensuous, immediately present localities of its former temporal abiding-place. The impulse and religious yearning of the Middle Ages, however, was centred on the spot, the external locality of the Passion and the Holy Sepulchre. In just the same direct contradiction with the religious object we find that wholly worldly one which was bound up with conquest; a possession, which in its relation to the secular world, carried a totally different character to that of a truly religious purpose. Men would fain win for themselves what was spiritual and health to their souls, and they set before them as an aim a purely material locality, from which Spirit had vanished; they strained after a gain that was temporal, and united this which was of the world to the pure substance of religion. It is this distraction which gives us the discordant and fantastic note in such enterprises in which we find that which is of the world confound the life of soul, or the latter prove the confounding of the former instead of a harmony which is the result of both. And for the same reason much that is contradictory appears in the execution unresolved. Piety is carried to the point of rawness and barbarous cruelty. And this rawness permits every kind of selfishness and passion to break forth, or casts itself conversely once more upon the eternal depths which either move or bruise the human spirit, and which are, in truth, the heart and substance of the matter. In the medley of elements so discrepant, there is also an absence of all unity in the object proposed by the exploits and events themselves, or in the consequential power of authority. The host of men is diverted and split up in single adventures, victories, defeats, and a variety of accidents; and the outcome of it all fails to correspond to the means and enormous preparations which were involved. Nay, the object itself is stultified in the execution. For the Crusades would once again bring truth to the sentence: "Thou couldst not leave him in peace in the grave, thou didst not suffer thy holy one to see corruption." But it is precisely this longing to find Christ and spiritual content in such places and spaces, even the grave itself, the place of death, which is itself, whatever essential worth even a Chateaubriand may make out of it, a corruption of Spirit, out of which Christianity must rise in resurrection in order to return once more to the fresh and abundant life of the concrete world.
An object of much the same kind, mystical from one point of view, equally fantastical from another, and adventurous in its undertaking, is the search of the Holy Grail.
(_β_) A more exalted emprise is that which every man has to go through in his own domain, his life, in the course of which he determines his eternal destiny. It is this object which Dante has, consistently with the catholic standpoint, seized upon in his "Divine Comedy" as he conducts us in turn through hell, purgatory, and paradise. In this poem, too, despite the strenuous co-ordination of the whole, we have abundant evidence of conceptions which are fantastic[293], aspects that are suffused with the spirit of adventure, in so far, at any rate, as this work in its blessing and cursing is not carried through merely in the explicit form of universal statement, but as referable to an almost innumerable company of distinct personalities, not to mention the fact that the _poet_ takes upon himself the _fiat_ of his church, seizes the keys of heaven in his hand, adjudicates both bliss and damnation, and so constitutes himself the judge of the v world, who places the best known individuals both of the ancient and Christian eras, whether poets, citizens, cardinals, or popes, respectively in hell, purgatory, or paradise.
(_γ_) The remaining material, on the basis of the _worldly_ life, which leads up to action and event, consists in the infinitely manifold and venturesome experiments of imaginative idea, all that element of chance in what arises either without or within the soul from love, honour, and fidelity. At one time we may see men thus affected box the compass for their own reputation's sake, at another leap to help persecuted innocence, carry out amazing exploits in defence of the honour of their lady, or vindicate some right that is invaded with the strength of their own arm, and the able use of their own weapons; and this albeit the innocence which is delivered prove only a company of knaves. In the majority of such cases there is absolutely no condition, no situation, no conflict before us in virtue of which we can assert that action follows as a _necessary_ result. The soul simply wills it and _intentionally_ looks out for adventure. The exploits of love, for instance, in such cases have for the most part, if we look at their more specific content, no other real principle of determination beyond the effort to give proof of the steadfastness, fidelity, and constancy of love, to testify that all the surrounding world, together with the entire complexus of its relations, is merely of value as so much material in which love may be brought to light. For this reason the specific act of such manifestation, since the only thing that matters is the proof, is not determined by its own course, but is left dependent on a freak of chance, the mood of the lady, the caprice of external accidents. The same principle holds where the objects are honour or bravery. They are proper to an individual who holds himself far aloof from all further content of a more substantive character, who is perfectly able to enter into any and every content as it may chance to occur, to find himself the object of insult therein, or to look for an opportunity in which he may display his courage and shrewdness.
As we have here absolutely no criterion as to what should or what should not form part of this content, in the same way also we have no principle in accordance with which we can fix what in each case is really an attack upon honour or the true subject-matter of bravery. It is just the same with the treatment of _right_, which is likewise an object of chivalry. In other words, right and law are here not as yet asserted as a condition and object which is of essentially independent stability, or as a system which is continuously made more perfect in accordance with law and its necessary content, but as themselves purely the product of individual caprice, so that their interposition, no less than the judgment passed upon that which in every particular case is held to be right or wrong, is throughout relegated to the entirely haphazard criteria of individual judgment.
(_b_) What we have before us generally, more particularly on the secular field, in chivalry and the formalism of character above indicated, is not merely, to a more or less degree, the contingency of the circumstantial conditions of human action, but also that of the soul in its attitude of volition. For individuals of this one-sided characterization are capable of accepting as the substance of their life that which is wholly contingent, conduct that is only sustained by virtue of the energy of their character, and is carried out, or fails in its contact with the inevitable collisions which the condition of the world opposes to it. The same thing is true of the chivalry which receives in honour, love, and fidelity a more lofty ground of justification, and one entitled to rank with a truly ethical basis. On the one hand, it is still emphatically a matter of chance on account of the particular aspect of the circumstances on which it reacts; we find that here the object is to carry out aims peculiar to some particular person, instead of some work of general significance, and the modes of its attachment with the rest of life fail to possess independent stability. On the other hand, precisely at the point where we consider such action as part of the personal life of individuals, we are aware of the presence of caprice and illusion in respect to all that it either projects, originates, or undertakes. The net result of such a spirit of enterprise consequently, through all that it performs or enters upon, no less than in its ultimate effects, is no other than a world of events and fatalities which is self-dissolvent, a world of comedy for this very reason.
This self-dissolution of Chivalry we find set before us and artistically reproduced, pre-eminently and with unsurpassed adequacy, by Ariosto and Cervantes, and, so far as it affects the fate of such highly individual characters as those above described in their isolation, by Shakespeare.
(_α_) In Ariosto, more particularly, an attempt is made to delight the reader with the infinitely varied developments of personal destiny and aims, the fabulous complexity of fantastic relations and ludicrous situations over which the adventurous fancy of the poet plays to the point of absolute frivolity. The heroes of these dramas are seriously engaged in what is often unadulterated folly and the wildest eccentricity. And, to note especial points, love is frequently degraded from the Divine love of a Dante, or the romantic tenderness of a Petrarca, to sensual tales and ludicrous collisions; or heroism appears to be screwed up to a pitch that is so incredible it ceases to amaze, and merely excites a smile over the fabulousness of such exploits. By virtue, however, of this indifference in respect to the particular manner in which dramatic situations are brought about, astonishing complications and conflicts are introduced, broken off and once more interwoven, chopped about, and finally resolved in a surprising way; yet, despite his ludicrous treatment of chivalry, Ariosto is as able to secure and display to us the true nobility and greatness which we may find in chivalry, or the exhibition of courage, love, honour, and bravery, as he can on occasion excellently depict other passions, cunning, subtlety, presence of mind, and much else.
(_β_) Just as Ariosto inclines more to the _fabulous_ element in this spirit of adventure, Cervantes develops that aspect of it which is appropriate to _romantic_ fiction. We find in his Don Quixote a noble nature in whose adventures chivalry goes mad, the substance of such adventures being placed as the centre of a stable and well-defined state of things whose external character is copied with exactness from nature. This produces the humorous contradiction of a rationally constituted world on the one hand, and an isolated soul on the other, which seeks to create the same order and stability entirely through his own exertions and the knight-errantry which could only destroy it. Despite, however, this ludicrous confusion we have still in Don Quixote that which we have already eulogized in Shakespeare. Cervantes has created in his hero an original figure of noble nature endowed with varied spiritual qualities, and one which at the same time throughout retains our full interest. In all the madness of his mind and his enterprise he is a completely consistent[294] soul, or rather his madness lies in this, that he is and remains securely rooted in himself and his enterprise. Without this unreflecting equanimity respectively to the content and result of his actions he would fail to be a truly romantic figure; and this self-assuredness, if we look at the substantive character of his opinions, is throughout great and indicative of his genius, adorned as it is with the finest traits of character. And, further, the entire work is a satire upon the chivalry of romance, ironical from beginning to end in the truest sense. In Ariosto this genius of adventure is merely the butt of frivolous jest.
From another point of view, however, the exploits of Don Quixote are merely the central thread around which a succession of genuinely romantic tales are intertwined in the most charming way, in order to unfold the true worth of that which the romance in other respects scatters to the winds with the genius of comedy.
(_γ_) In somewhat the same way as we thus have seen chivalry, even in respect to its most momentous interests, overturned in comedy, Shakespeare, too, either places the characters and scenes of comedy in juxtaposition to his downright and stable individualities, and tragic situations and conflicts, or exalts the essential figures of his drama through a profound humour above themselves and their uncouth, limited, and false purposes. Falstaff, the fool in "Lear," the musician scene in "Romeo and Juliet," will sufficiently illustrate the first alternative, and Richard III the second.
(_c_) The dissolution of romance, in the sense we have hitherto regarded it, introduces us finally and in the third place to the spirit of the _novel_[295], in our modern sense of the term, which historically the knight-errantry and pastoral romances precede. This spirit of modern fiction is, in fact, that of chivalry, once more taken seriously and receiving a true content. The contingent character of external existence has changed to a stable, secure order of civic society and state-life, so that now police administration, tribunals of justice, the army and political government generally take the place of those chimerical objects which the knight of chivalry proposed to himself. For this reason the knightly character of the heroes who play their parts in our modern novels is altered. Confronted by the existing order and the ordinary prose of life they appear before us as individuals with personal aims of love, honour, ambition, and ideals of world reform, ideals in the path of which that order presents obstacles on every side. The result is that personal desires and demands unroll themselves[296] before this opposition to unfathomable heights. Every man finds himself face to face with an enchanted world that is by no means all that he asks for, which he must contend with for the reason that it contends with himself, and in its tenacious stability refuses to give way before his passions, but interposes as an obstacle the will of some one else whoever it may be, his father's, his aunt's, or social conditions generally. For the most part such a knighthood will consist of young people, who feel it incumbent upon them to hew their way through a world which makes for its own realization rather than that of their ideals, and who hold it a misfortune that there should be family ties, civic society, state laws, professions, and all the rest of such things at all, because conditions of such solidity and so inevitably restricted are so cruelly opposed to their ideal dreams and the infinite claims of their souls. The main object now is to drive a breach through this wall of facts, to change, to improve, or at least carve for themselves in despite of it some little heaven on earth such as they seek for, their ideal maiden, discover her, win her from the clutches of her wicked relations or her evil circumstances, carry her off and lay the balm of love on her wounds. Conflicts of this kind, however, in our modern world are the apprentice years, the education of individuality in the actual world; they have no further significance, but the significance has, nevertheless, a real value. The object and consummation of such apprenticeship consists in this, that the individual drops his horns and finds his own place, together with his wishes and opinions in social conditions as they are and the rational order which belongs to them, that he enters, in short, upon the varied field of life, and secures that position within it which is appropriate to his powers. However soundly he may have rated the world and have been shoved on one side, the day comes at last with the most of us when the maiden is discovered and some kind of place in the world, he marries, and is as much a Philistine as the rest of his neighbours. His wife takes charge of his domestic arrangements; children do not fail to put in an appearance; the adorable wife who was so unique, an angel, acts very much as other wives do; the profession supplies its toils and vexations, the married tie its domestic sorrows, and, in short, we have the entire process of marital caterwauling once more illustrated.
In this history we may see the same old type of the adventurous spirit with this distinction, that here that spirit discovers its real significance, and all that is wholly fantastic in it receives its necessary correction.
3. THE DISSOLUTION OF THE ROMANTIC TYPE OF ART The last point which we have to establish still more closely is that relatively to which the romantic spirit, for the reason that it already is _intrinsically_ the principle of the dissolution of the classic Ideal, manifests, in fact, this _dissolution_ clearly as such a process. In this connection it is of the first importance to consider the ultimately complete contingent and external character of the material, which the activity of the artist seizes on and informs. In the plastic material of the plastic arts the spiritual conception is so related to the external medium that this external show is the embodiment which uniquely belongs to that spiritual significance itself, and possesses no real independence apart from it. In romantic art, on the contrary, in which we find the inwardness of Spirit withdraws within its own domain, the entire content of the _external_ world secures the freedom of unfettered independence and the assured subsistency of its own peculiar character and particularity.
Conversely, as we have seen, if the personal life of soul forms the essential feature in the artistic product, it is a question of similar indifference with what specific content of external reality and the spiritual world the soul is vitally connected. The romantic Idea can therefore assert itself through _every_ sort of condition; can embrace every conceivable position, circumstance, relation, aberration, confusion, conflict, and means of satisfaction; it is simply its own personal and self-subsistent mode of conformation, the expression and receptive form of the soul rather than any objective independently valid form which is the object of search and is made good. In the representation of romantic art therefore everything has its due place, all the departments and phenomena of life, the greatest and the least, the highest and most insignificant, what is moral with that which is immoral and evil. And we may further note in particular that the more secular the art becomes, the more it amasses the finite wealth of the world, the more it takes to it with, delight, bestows upon it a validity that is without reserve and exists for the artist in such a world under the sole condition that it is reproduced in its naked reality, so much the more is art at home with itself. Thus we may observe in Shakespeare, on account of the fact that with him the action as a rule runs its course in the most realistic association with objective life, and is isolated and broken up in a mass of purely accidental relations, and conditions of every kind, the least important and most incidental no less than the most sovereign flights and most weighty interests of poetry are each and all substantiated. So in "Hamlet" we have the sentry on watch no less than the royal court; in "Romeo and Juliet" the domestic _ménage_; in other pieces, not to mention clowns, swashbucklers, and all the vulgarities of ordinary life, we have pot-houses, carriers, chamber-pots and fleas, much as in the representations by romantic art of the birth of Christ and the adoration of the kings we do not fail to find oxen and asses, mangers and straw[297]. And this is the kind of thing throughout, that the scriptural text may receive its fulfilment, too, in art, "they that are of low estate shall be exalted." It is from out this contingent sphere of its subject-matter, which in a measure asserts itself as merely the environment of a content intrinsically more important and in part also in absolute independence, that the _downfall_ of romantic art issues, to which we have already above adverted. In other words we have, on the one hand, objective reality placed before us in what is from the point of view of the Ideal its _prosaic objectivity_, that is, the content of everyday life, which is not grasped in the substantive form in which it adumbrates what is both moral and divine, but rather in that which is for ever changing and which as temporal passes away. And, in the further aspect of it, it is also the _subjective condition_, which, with its emotion and insight, with the principle and authority of its wit or humour, is able to exalt itself in mastery over the entire world of the real, a mastery which leaves nothing in the ordinary connections and significance where the commonsense consciousness finds it, and is not fully satisfied until it has proved that everything which is a part of that world is, by virtue of the form and relative position which it receives from the view of it, mood and supreme gifts of the artist[298], itself intrinsically capable of being broken up, and, as such, is for the artistic vision and feeling dissolved. We have now, in this connection, first, to add a few words on the principle contained in those very varied works of art whose level of representation approximates closely to the ordinary appearance of objective or external reality, what in common parlance is called the imitation of Nature.
_Secondly_, we shall have to discuss humour as a personal quality in the artist. It plays a very considerable part in modern art, and is that which in the case of many poets distinctively supplies the