There can be no question, of course, that ideal art has no business at all with "a symbolism capriciously created;" and, if it really is the case that these ideal types of the ancients have been composed only to reduce the veritable forms of Nature to false and empty abstraction, we may freely admit that Herr von Rumohr is justified in his most trenchant opposition.
For our own part we would emphasize the points of fundamental importance to be grasped in this antithesis between the ideal of art and Nature as follows:
The forms which are borrowed from immediate Nature to determine an ideal content must be assumed to be thus taken symbolically in the usual sense of the term, namely, that they are not thus immediately significant in themselves, but only as the external embodiment of that which is inward and spiritual, the content, in fact, they express. It is only Spirit, even in the reality which they possess outside the limits of art, which constitutes their ideality in its contrast with that they entirely owe to Nature simply as such, and which is unable to reveal to us what is essentially mind. It is the object of art, on its more noble plane, to give external shape to the inward content of Spirit. This content we discover in the conscious life of men realized in the world. As such it possesses--we include with it our conscious human experience generally--an external semblance directly presented in and through which it finds expression. So much may readily be conceded. At the same time from a philosophical point of view it is simply futile to inquire whether we ought to look to the direct facts of Nature alone for objects and physiognomical traits of beauty and expression to serve as entirely adequate materials for art's representation, shall we say, of the majesty, repose, and power of a Jupiter or of a Juno, Venus, Peter, Christ, Madonna, or any other divinity, or saint. Arguments may be supported on either side, and the question can only remain finally undecided, being wholly empirical. For the only sufficient way of deciding the matter would be to contrast what is borrowed with the realities it purports to represent, and this, in the assumed case of the Greek gods, might be matter of some difficulty; and, to take the present day, one man will see traits of beauty in their perfection where another a thousand times more acute will see nothing. But over and above such considerations we must observe that the mere beauty of form will never give us that we have named the Ideal, inasmuch as the individuality of the content is a constituent part of it, and therein form is necessarily included. A human face, for example, may be both regular and beautiful in its outlines and yet remain cold and devoid of all expression. The ideal figures of the Greek gods are, on the contrary, true individualizations; the universality of their ideal conception does not exclude the characteristic determination which belongs to each of them. And the vitality of the Ideal consists just in this, that this determinate and fundamental spiritual significance, which it is the function of art to exhibit, should wholly transfuse by appropriate artistic treatment all the particular aspects of the external embodiment, such as composition, pose, motion, physiognomy, and configuration of limbs, so that nothing empty or insignificant should be left, but the entire work should reflect that ideal significance. All that we have learned from Greek sculpture in recent times of a quality which, in fact, emanates from the school of Pheidias, is characterized by nothing so much as this penetrative vitality. The Ideal is preserved in all its severity without any lapse in the direction of mere grace, softness, elegance, and exuberance, yet retains the form in close relation to the ideal significance which should be embodied throughout the whole. This supreme vitality is the distinguishing mark of the great artist.