matic is not the deepest or most essential thing about Schopenhauer, neither a world-butchery nor a Nirvana being favorable to it. And it must be remembered that Schopenhauer, for all his brilliant theory of music, championed classical music, as he did elsewhere classical architecture. They seem to touch in their emphasis on conflict, but Wagner adds what Schopenhauer lacks, the principle of transforming movement. It is not present in Schopenhauer's theory of the successive objectifications of will-so many stone steps or separate blocks; it is present in Wagner's prose, where an imagination at once heavy and impatient pushes thought into thought and harmony into discord; or better still in his music: a music of violent contrasts, of fusings, and of a constantly changing life.

Understood in this way, character and dramatic quality may serve to mark Wagner the Artist and the Thinker,

V

HEGEL

And take upon us the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies.

-SHAKESPEARE.

Ar first sight Hegel seems very unpromising material. What in the way of interesting art criticism or of a sympathetic theory of art can be expected of a man who grinds everything to powder between a pedantic terminology and an aggressive method? What place has the artistic in the personality of this intellectual contortionist? And why, if we do not care for contortions, should we pay so high a price of admission to this most difficult of all philosophies?

I can well understand the temptation to ask such questions. One has to break into Hegel's system by main force; and will find there among much of value a great deal that is worthless and puzzling. It must be admitted that his æsthetics share the defects of that system. Of his keen interest in art there can be no doubt; he spent much of his leisure in the picture galleries of Berlin and at art exhibitions, and at Vienna and Paris he had more than a

taste of Italian opera and Shakespeare. He lacks technical knowledge just where it counts most heavily-in music and sculpture; it is here that he is weakest. But his illustrations from poetry and painting are happily chosen, and his theories illuminating as well as profound. Everywhere he shows imagination and judgment, although in fine perceptions and delicate touches he is excelled by philosophers like Schelling and Nietzsche. As for his personality, it promised little: he was often ill at ease, prosy, and commonplace. Schopenhauer had the fatuous self-assurance to speak of him as "der geistlose, plumpe Hegel." But the spark of genius was in this absorbed, unemotional man, this sworn enemy of romanticism. After all, his very elaborate and unprepossessing system of philosophy has its roots in the same creative imagination that shapes a work of art, and is an imaginative tour de force of the first order. In this dramatized romance of nature and of consciousness personality expresses itself quite as strongly and plainly as in art; and the spirit of adventure, so evident in German Romanticism, here takes on strange forms. If these things are overlooked Hegel escapes, for it is only through the interpretative imagination that his meaning can be seized.

From 1820 to the time of his death Hegel lectured on æsthetics at the University of Berlin. His general system at that time stood complete in outline;

there remained only the task of sketching in and of working out the detail of his theories on history, religion, and art. This work remained uncompleted; his lectures on æsthetics, like the others, were never put in final shape for publication. Of the two notebooks on æsthetics which he left at his death, one, of the year 1818, was used in connection with his lectures at Heidelberg; the other, of 1820, gives the substance of his later course at Berlin, and is by far the more important. Much of this note-book is a compact mass of notes to guide the lecturer; parts of it, especially the introductions to the several divisions, are fully written out. From year to year loose sheets were inserted, marginal remarks added, and the manuscript changed here and there. In view of all this, the task Hotho, one of Hegel's students, set himself in 1835, of reconstructing and publishing his master's æsthetic theories, was not an easy one. What he did was to take the two books, compare with them sets of students' noteson the assumption that they might be valuable if they could be had in large numbers-fill in what transitions seemed lacking, and give as much of Hegel's own language as he possibly could. One need not quarrel with the result, for these three volumes are rich to the point of embarrassment; so rich in fact in special and general problems that it becomes impossible to take more than an armful of this wealth at a time.

With the grave and judicial enthusiasm so characteristic of him, Hegel first takes up the problem of material and method, and widens it out into the problem of aim. To him the material of æsthetics is the beautiful in art. This he distinguishes from the beautiful in nature, for that is imperfect, incomplete, not willed as such, and therefore not reborn of the spirit.

But does this material admit of success and is it worth while? Art expresses the beautiful in so many different forms, breaks it up into so many types, is so riotously and joyously free that any orderly system of principles seems impossible. Worse still, is art really worth the attempt? Is it not after all a frivolous amusement, an entertaining and deceptive shadowplay? Hegel has the curiosity to raise these questions and the courage to answer them in the negative. Not only does he feel sure that his method can take care of even the most riotous material, but he is also a most determined and devoted champion of the dignity of art.

Nothing could be farther from Hegel's thought than a contemptuous attitude toward art, such as Plato's. It seems strange that art should be dealt its hardest blows by a man whose artistic genius shows itself in vivid and biting character sketches, in scene-painting and settings, in an ample and wonderfully flexible diction, and in a reach which allows him to handle the most abstruse problems