(_β_) In romantic art, it is true, the breach or dissonance of the subjective principle is carried further, inasmuch as in it the exposed contradictions are emphasized and their division can be preserved. Thus, to take an example, we find the art of painting, in its representation of the Passion, not unfrequently dallies round the expression of ribaldry visible in the hideous contortions and grimaces of tormenting common soldiers; and, in its attachment to such discordant emotions, especially when depicting what is criminal, shameless, or evil, permitting the glad serenity of the Ideal to pass away. Even when such disruption loses its force, we find frequently that ugliness, or, at least, the absence of real beauty, is set up in its place. In another school of the earlier Flemish art of painting the downright directness and truth of the representation, no less than the inextinguishable confidence of the faith to which it testifies, tend to assert, in despite of itself, a reconciliation in the feelings of all who behold it[276]. But such an unyielding result falls[277] short of the entire cheerfulness and satisfaction appropriate to the Ideal. However, it is possible also in romantic art, albeit here the representation of suffering and grief penetrates the soul and its emotions more deeply than is the case with antique art, that the delineation may reveal to us a spiritual intimacy, a delight in resignation, a blessedness in pain, a rapture in sorrow, nay, even a voluptuous ecstasy in martyrdom[278]. Not only in painting but in the profoundly religious music of Italian composers, we find this ecstasy and illumination of grief abundantly expressed. We may, as a summary definition in romantic art, call it "the smile through tears." The tears have their origin in affliction, the smile in blithesome serenity, and consequently this smile through weeping indicates, as it were, the point of self-repose in the midst of pain and suffering. It is hardly necessary to add that the smile indicated here is no mere sentimental emotion, no mere vanity of the subject treated or dabbling with beauty[279] over painful effects and insignificant traits of subjective feeling; rather (on its artistic side) it must appear as the firm delineation and freedom of beauty in defiance of all pain, in the spirit of what was said of Ximenes in the romances of the Cid, "how beautiful she was in tears." In contrast to this emotional abandonment in men is either ugly and repellent, or actually ridiculous. Children, for example, break into tears at the slightest provocation, and we can only laugh at them. The tears, however, in the eyes of a man of earnest and self-contained character, under stress of deep feeling, betray a very different type of emotion. Laughter and tears can, however, very readily fall apart as unrelated, and are, as such, falsely utilized as a vehicle of art in such abstraction; the laughter chorus in Weber's "Freischütz" may be cited as an example.