configuration of the human spirit receives consequently, in respect to its _beauty_, a totally different mode of relation to that presented by classical art. Greek beauty unfolds the inward aspect of spiritual individuality solely as it is envisaged by means of its bodily shape, actions, and events, wholly expressed in what is exterior, and living wholly therein. For romantic art, on the contrary, it is absolutely necessary that the soul, albeit envisaged in the exterior medium, should at the same time demonstrate its capacity of self-withdrawal from the tenement of the body and self-substantive life. The bodily frame can therefore now only express the inwardness of mind, in so far as it makes it plain that it is not in this material existence, but in itself, that the soul discovers its congruent reality. On account of this beauty is now no longer an idealization in respect to the objective form, but rather the ideal and essential configuration of the soul itself; it is in short a beauty of spiritual ideality, that is the specific mode of such, as every content is informed and elaborated within the temple of the subjective world, and without retaining the external medium in this its permeation with Spirit. For the reason, then, that by this means the interest disappears, which consists in clarifying real existence to the point of our classical unity, and is concentrated in the contrary direction of wafting a new breath of beauty through the unseen content of the spiritual itself, art ceases to retain the old solicitude for what is exterior at all. It accepts the same directly as it may chance to find it, leaving it to take whatever form may happen to please it. The reconciliation with the Absolute is in the Romantic an act of the inward life, which no doubt is embodied externally, but which does not retain that exterior in its material realization as its essential content and object. We may observe that in close association with this indifference towards the idealizing union of soul and body, and in its relation to the external treatment of the more predominant individuality of a sitter, we find the art of _portraiture_, which does not entirely erase particular traits and lines, as they are found in Nature, and her inevitable deficiencies--defects inseparable from finite effects--in order to replace them with something more adequate. Generally speaking even here there is a certain limit to the licence given to Nature in this respect; but to the general aspect of form in the first instance it is quite indifferent; and no attempt is made to exclude wholly from it the accidental impurities of finite and sensuous existence.