The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 07: Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English. in Twenty Volumes
Philosophy
The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 07: Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English. in Twenty Volumes
German literature -- 19th century -- Translations into English; German literature -- 20th century -- Translations into English
Such, then, is the organic totality of the several arts the external art
of architecture, the objective art of sculpture, and the subjective arts
of painting, music, and poetry. The higher principle from which these
are derived we have found in the types of art, the symbolic, the
classical, and the romantic, which form the universal phases of the
idea of beauty itself. Thus symbolic art finds its most adequate reality
and most perfect application in architecture, in which it is
self-complete, and is not yet reduced, so to speak, to the inorganic
medium for another art. The classical form of art, on the other hand,
attains its most complete realization in sculpture, while it accepts
architecture only as forming an inclosure round its products and is as
yet not capable of developing painting and music as absolute expressions
of its meaning. The romantic type of art, finally, seizes upon painting,
music, and poetry as its essential and adequate modes of expression.
Poetry, however, is in conformity with all types of the beautiful and
extends over them all, because its characteristic element is the
esthetic imagination, and imagination is necessary for every product of
art, to whatever type it may belong.
Thus what the particular arts realize in individual artistic creations
are, according to the philosophic conception, simply the universal types
of the self-unfolding idea of beauty. Out of the external realization of
this idea arises the wide Pantheon of art, whose architect and builder
is the self-developing spirit of beauty, for the completion of which,
however, the history of the world will require its evolution of
countless ages.
THE LIFE OF BETTINA VON ARNIM
BY HENRY WOOD, PH.D. Professor of German, Johns Hopkins University
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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