their own inner life.
All their utterances must relate to something external; only then does
their inner nature come out vividly and expressively, for it fashions
itself only in reflections of the world and of life.

To depict two kindred characters one by means of the other, to have them
mutually reflect one another without their becoming aware of it, would
surely be the triumph of delineation.

It is a masterly trait in the _Prince of Homburg_ that the suspicion
that the Elector has had the Prince condemned to death, not so much on
account of the act of overhastiness committed on the battlefield as for
another reason, does not arise spontaneously in the Prince's soul, but
is first awakened by Hohenzollern's questioning.

A double process must take place in the mind of the true poet before it
can evolve anything. The crude matter must be resolved into an idea, and
the idea must condense again into a form. Man is the continuation of the
act of creation, an eternally growing, never completed creation, which
prevents the termination of the world and keeps it from congealing and
hardening. It is highly significant (this thought led me to the one I
have just expressed) that everything which exists as a human conception
is never wholly and perfectly--only fragmentarily--embodied in nature,
and everything which exists perfectly and completely in nature eludes
human conception, man's own nature not excepted. Thus we know and define
right and wrong, virtue and innocence (the latter as soon as we have
lost it), but not life itself, etc. Where knowledge has been vouchsafed
us, there nature requires our cooeperation.

The first and last aim of art is to render intuitively perceptible the
process of life itself, to show how the soul of man develops in the
atmosphere surrounding him, let it be suited to him or not, how good
engenders evil within him, and evil in turn produces something less
evil, and how this eternal growth has a limit so far as our apprehension
is concerned, but none at all in reality; this is symbolization. It is
an error when men say that only the fully developed is matter for the
poet; on the contrary, what is in process of development, what is first
begotten in conflict with the elements of creation, that is matter for
him. What is finished can be only a plaything of the waves, it can
only be destroyed and devoured by them; can art have anything to do
with that which is most common, in other words, most uni