/$ Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. $/
The same thing may be said of those last words of Cardinal Wolsey in "Henry VIII,"[116] uttered at the close of his career when struck down from the summit of his greatness:
/$ Farewell! a long farewell to all my greatness! This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hopes: to-morrow blossoms, And bears his blushing honours thick upon him; The third day comes a frost, a killing frost; And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root, And then he falls, as I do. $/
(_γγ_) In this impersonal relation of objective fact and its expression of the comparative mode, the repose and substantial self-command of character returns to itself; it is the means whereby the pain of a great downfall is softened. So Cleopatra exclaims[117] to Charmian, after she has already put the mortal aspic to her breast:
/$ Peace, peace! Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep? As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle-- $/
The bite of the serpent relaxes her members so gently that Death is himself deceived and holds himself to be Sleep. And this image may well pass as itself a counterfeit of the mild and allaying influence of such similitudes.
C. THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE SYMBOLIC TYPE OF ART
_Didactic_, _descriptive poetry and the ancient epigram._
The conception we have in general terms formed of the symbolic type of art is such that within it significance and expression are unable to unite sufficiently to appear in complete and reciprocal fusion. In unconscious symbolism the _incompatibility_ of these two aspects remained a fact throughout, if not actually _declared_ as such; in the Sublime on the contrary this inadequacy was _explicitly_ asserted: the absolute significance, God, no less than His external reality, the world, are expressly represented in this excluding relation to one another. On the other hand, however, in all these types that further aspect of symbolism, namely, the _affinity_ which obtains between the significance and the external form, in which it is visibly manifested, still retained its importance. In the original type of symbolism this was exclusively the case, a type which did not as yet set forth the significance in contrast to its concrete existence. But in the Sublime, too, it remained an _essential_ relation, a type which, in order to express the Supreme Being, if here under a wholly inadequate mode, required as its means the phenomena of Nature, and the events and exploits of God's chosen people. And finally it reappears in the comparative type of art a personal relation and one that is consequently amenable to _caprice._ This element of caprice, however, albeit it is an entirely present fact and particularly so in the case of the metaphor, image, and simile, is notwithstanding still hidden away behind the _affinity_ between the significance and the image utilized to express it, in so far as it selects the comparison simply out of a regard for their mutual resemblance, a fundamental aspect of which is not so much the _external_ form as just this _relation_ set up between them by the activity of the soul and consisting in subjective emotions, points of view and ideas and their cognate modes of configuration[118]. When, however, it is not the notion of the material itself, but simply a capricious use of the judgment, which brings together the content and its artistic form, both can only be conceived as posited in an entirely external relation to one another; their association is now a juxtaposition without essential relation, simply a dressing up, that is to say, of the one side by the other. For this reason we have here to treat these last-mentioned and subordinate types of art by way of supplement. They arise from the absolute collapse of the essential phases in all true art-production; they bring before us, in short, by their independence of the principle of relativity the suicide of the symbolic type.