The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 2 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Hegel · en
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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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(_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:
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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--
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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._