ll, the peculiarity and
caprice of the individual, of character, action, or of incident and
plot, assume likewise the character they had in symbolic art. The
external side of things is surrendered to accident and committed to the
excesses of the imagination, whose caprice now mirrors existence as it
is, now chooses to distort the objects of the outer world into a bizarre
and grotesque medley, for the external form no longer possesses a
meaning and significance, as in classical art, on its own account and
for it own sake. Feeling is now everything. It finds its artistic
reflection, not in the world of external things and their forms, but in
its own expression; and in every incident and accident of life, in every
misfortune, grief, and even crime, feeling preserves or regains its
healing power of reconciliation.

Hence, the indifference, incongruity, and antagonism of spiritual idea
and sensuous form, the characteristics of symbolic art, reappear in the
romantic type, but with this essential difference. In the romantic
realm, the spiritual idea, to whose defectiveness was due the defective
forms of symbolic art, now reveals itself in its perfection within mind
and feeling. It is by virtue of the higher perfection of the idea that
it shuns any adequate union with an external form, since it can seek and
attain its true reality and expression best within itself.

This, in general terms, is the character of the symbolic, classical, and
romantic forms of art, which stand for the three relations of the
spiritual idea to its expression in the realm of art. They consist in
the aspiration after, and the attainment and transcendence of, the ideal
as the true idea of beauty.

THE PARTICULAR ARTS

But, now, there inhere in the idea of beauty different modifications
which art translates into sensuous forms. And we find a fundamental
principle by which the several particular arts may be arranged and
defined--that is, the species of art contain in themselves the same
essential differences which we have found in the three general types of
art. External objectivity, moreover, into which these types are molded
by means of a sensuous and particular material, renders them independent
and separate means of realizing different artistic functions, as far as
each type finds its definite character in some one definite external
material whose mode of portrayal determines its adequate realization.
Furthermore, the general types of art corresp