OE THE BEAUTIFUL. 45 



had come." But he demands, further, an intermediate 29. 

 stage or medium through which this return is effected. 

 This middle term he finds in Mythology. Every great 

 poet and artist, every poetical age, creates its own 

 mythology. " How such a new mythology [or as we 

 might say Symbolism], which is not the creation of a 

 single poet but of a new age which represents as it 

 were one poet, can come into existence, this is a problem 

 the solution of which depends only upon the coming 

 events in the world and the further course of history." ^ 

 This passage may be considered as giving expression 

 to a central idea which was taken up in many different 

 ways and by different representatives of the thought of 

 the age. For Schelling it meant the renewed study of a 

 subject which had occupied him in the earliest years of his 

 speculation, the mythology of the different nations, not- 

 ably of the classical nations. In that school of poetry 

 and literature which in Germany was opposed to the 

 classical as the Eomantic school, the same idea was 

 taken up in an extreme form, as indicating the liberation 

 of philosophical as well as of poetical thought from the 

 strict rules of reasoning on the one side and from the 

 limitations of the classical models on the other side. It 

 led there to much that was fantastic and irregular. This 

 development, in its further course, threw off many 

 brilliant suggestions as well as poetical creations, but, 

 where it was not controlled by or subservient to histori- 

 cal studies and the critical spirit, it ended in arbitrari- 

 ness and barren subjectivism. A well-known example 

 both of the brilliant achievements and of the unsatis- 



1 Ibid., p. 629. 



