Deductions from Part I.
Nietzsche's Art Principles
"For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the
scribes."-- Matthew vii. 29.
1. The Spirit of the Age Incompatible with Ruler-Art.
With Nietzsche's concept of Art before me I feel as if I had left the
arts of the present day many thousand leagues behind, and it is almost
a hardship to be obliged to return to them. For unless most of that
which is peculiar to this age be left many thousand leagues to the
rear, all hope of making any headway must be abandoned.
We live in a democratic age. It is only natural, therefore, that all
that belongs to the ruler should have been whittled down, diluted, and
despoiled of its dignity; and we must feel no surprise at finding that
no pains have been spared which might reduce Art also to a function
that would be compatible with the spirit of the times. All that
savours of authority has become the work of committees, assemblies,
herds, crowds, and mobs. How could the word of one man be considered
authoritative, now that the ruling principle, to use a phrase of Mr.
Chesterton's, is that "twelve men are better than one"?[1]
The conception of Art as a manifestation of the artist's will to power
and his determination to prevail, is a much too dangerous one for the
present day. It involves all kinds of things which are antagonistic to
democratic theory, such as: Command, Reverence, Despotism, Obedience,
Greatness and Inequality. Therefore, if artists are to be tolerated
at all, they must have a much more modest, humble, and pusillanimous
comprehension of what their existence means, and of the purpose and
aim of their work; and their claims, if they make any, must be meek,
unprivileged, harmless and unassuming.
While, therefore, the artist, as Nietzsche understood him, scarcely
exists at all to-day, another breed of man has come to the fore in
the graphic arts, whose very weakness is his passport, who makes no
claims at establishing new values of beauty, and who contents himself
modestly with exhibiting certain baffling dexterities, virtuosities
and tricks, which at once amaze and delight ordinary spectators or
Art-students, simply because they themselves have not yet overcome even
the difficulties of a technique.
Monet's pointillisme, Sargent's visible and nervous brush strokes,
Rodin's wealth of anatomical detail, the Impressionist's scientific
rendering of atmosphere, Peter Graham's gauzy mists, Lavery's
post-Whistlerian portraits of pale people, and the touching devotion of
all modern artists to Truth, in the Christian and scientific sense, are
all indications of the general "funk"--the universal paralysis of will
that has overtaken the Art-world.
But I am travelling too fast. I said that no pains have been spared
which might reduce Art also to a function that would be compatible with
the democratic spirit of the times. Now in what form have these pains
been taken?
Their form has invariably been to turn the tables upon Art, and to make
its beauty dependent upon Nature, instead of Nature's beauty dependent
upon it.[2]
Tradition, of course, very largely laid the foundation of this mode of
thinking, and, from the Greeks to Ruskin, few seem to have realized how
much beauty Art had already laid in Nature, before even the imitative
artist could consider Nature as beautiful.
As Croce rightly observes: "Antiquity seems generally to have been
entrammelled in the meshes of the belief in mimetic, or the duplication
of natural objects by the artist;"[3] but when we remember that, as
Schelling points out, in Greece speculation about Art began with Art's
decline,[4] we ought to feel no surprise at this remote underestimation
of the artistic fact.[5]
In reviewing the work of æstheticians from Plato to Croce, however,
what strikes me as so significant is the fact that, from the time
of Plotinus--who practically marks the end of the declension which
started in Plato's time--to the end of the seventeenth century,
scarcely a voice of any magnitude was raised in Europe on the subject
of Art.[6]
That there was no real "talk" about Art, at the time when it was
revived in the Middle Ages, and at the time when it flourished in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that all the old Hellenic
discussions on the subject should have been taken up again at a
period when the last emaciated blooms of the Renaissance and of the
counter-Renaissance were bowing their heads, only shows how very sorry
the plight of all great human functions must be when man begins to hope
that he may set them right by talking about them.
When it is remembered, however, that, from the end of the seventeenth
century onward, Art was regarded either as imitation pure and simple or
as idealized imitation by no less than fifteen thinkers of note--that
is to say, roughly speaking, by the Earl of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson,
Home, Burke and Hume in England, by Batteux and Diderot in France,
by Pagano and Spaletti in Italy, by Hemsterhuis in Holland, and by
Leibnitz, Baumgarten, Kant, Schiller and Fichte in Germany; and that
if Winckelmann and Lessing opposed these ideas, it was rather with the
recommendation of another kind of imitation--that of the antique--
than with a new valuation of Art; we can feel scarcely any surprise
at all at the sudden and total collapse of the dignity of Art in the
nineteenth century, under the deadly influence of the works of men like
Semper and his followers.
It is all very well to point to men like Goethe, Heydenreich,
Schelling, Hegel, Hogarth and Reynolds--all of whom certainly did a
good deal to brace the self-respect of artists; but it is impossible
to argue that any one of them took up either such a definite or such a
determined attitude against the fifteen others whom I have mentioned,
as could materially stem the tide of democratic Art which was rising
in Europe. And if in the latter half of the nineteenth century we have
Ruskin telling us that "the art which makes us believe what we would
not otherwise have believed, is misapplied, and in most instances very
dangerously so";[7] and if we find that his first principle is, "that our
graphic art, whether painting or sculpture, is to produce something
which shall look as like Nature as possible,"[8] and that, in extolling
the Gothic, he says it was "the love of natural objects for their
own sake, and the effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained
by artistic laws";[9] we realize how very slight the effect of those
exceptional spirits, headed by Goethe, must have been.
[1] See his evidence before the Joint Committee on the Stage
Censorship.--Daily Press, September 24th, 1909.
[2] _T. I._, Part 10, Aph. 19: "Man believes the world itself to be
overcharged with beauty,--he forgets that he is the cause of it. He
alone has endowed it with beauty.... In reality man mirrors himself in
things; he counts everything beautiful which reflects his likeness....
Is the world really beautiful, just because man thinks it is? Man has
humanized it, that is all."
[3] _Æsthetic_ (Douglas Ainslie's translation), p. 259. See also B.
Bosanquet, _A History of Æsthetic_, pp. 15-18.
[4] _Sämmtliche Werke_, Vol. V, "Vorlesungen über die Methode des
akademischen Studiums," pp. 346, 347.
[5] Dr. Max Schasler (_Kritische Geschichte der Æsthetik_, p. 73)
agrees that the understanding of Art in classical antiquity seems to
be quite barbaric in its stupidity ("_von einer geradezu barbarischen
Bornirtheit_"); but he adds that this may be an argument in favour of
the antique; for it may prove the unconsciousness of the artists and
the absolute unity of the artistic life and of artistic appreciation in
antiquity.
[6] Aristotle was, of course, studied and commentated to a very great
extent during these fifteen centuries; but in all the branches of
science save Æsthetic. Where his Poetic was examined, the philological
or literary-historical interest was paramount. Augustine and St. Thomas
Aquinas do not differ materially from Plotinus and Plato.
[7] _Lectures on Art_ (1870), p. 50.
[8] _Aratra Pentelici_ (1870), p. 118. It is true that this is followed
by a restriction; but what does this restriction amount to? Ruskin
says: "We must produce what shall look like Nature to people who know
what Nature is."
[9] _On the Nature of the Gothic_ (Smith, Elder, 1854), p. 19.
2. A Thrust parried. Police or Detective Art defined.
But to return to the movement initiated by Semper[10]--here we
certainly have the scientific and Christian _coup de grâce_ levelled
at the expiring spirit of nineteenth-century Art. For the actors in
this movement not only maintained that Art is imitation, but that it
actually took its origin in imitation--and of the basest sort--that
is to say, of accidental combinations of lines and colours produced in
basket-work, weaving and plaiting.
This conclusion, which was arrived at, once more, by means of a
formidable array of facts, and which called itself "Evolution in
Art," was, like its first cousin, "Evolution in the Organic World,"
absolutely democratic, ignoble, and vulgar; seeking the source of the
highest human achievements either in automatic mimicry, slavish and
even faulty copying, or involuntary adoption of natural or purely
utilitarian forms.
Taking the beauty of Nature for granted--an assumption which, as
the first part of this lecture shows, is quite unwarrantable--these
Art-Evolutionists sought to prove that all artistic beauty was the
outcome of man's Simian virtues working either in the realm of Nature
or in the realm of his own utilitarian handiwork. And from the purely
imitative productions found in the Madeleine Cavern in La Dordogne,
to the repetitive patterns worked on wooden bowls by the natives in
British New Guinea, the origin of all art lay in schoolboy "cribbing."
This was a new scientific valuation of Art--foreshadowed, as I have
shown, by philosophical æsthetic, but arriving independently, as it
were, at the conclusion that Art was no longer a giver, but a robber.
Volumes were written to show the origin in technical industry of
individual patterns and ornaments on antique vases. And as Alois Riegl
rightly observes, the authors of these works spoke with such assurance,
that one might almost have believed that they had been present when the
vases were made.[11]
Even Semper, however, as Riegl points out, did not go so far as his
disciples, and though he believed that art-forms had been evolved--a
fact any one would be ready to admit--he did not press the point that
technical industry had always been their root.
When we find such delicate and beautifully rhythmic patterns as those
which Dr. A. C. Haddon gives us in his interesting work on Evolution
in Art, and are told that they originated in the frigate birds, or in
woodlarks, which infest the neighbourhood from which these patterns
hail;[12] when we are shown a Chinese ornament which resembles
nothing so much as the Egyptian honeysuckle and lotus ornament,[13]
and we are told that it is derived from the Chinese bat, and when we
are persuaded that an ordinary fish-hook can lead to a delightful
bell-like[14] design; then our knowledge of what Art is protests
against this desecration of its sanctity--more particularly after
we have been informed that any beauty that the original "Skeuomorph"[15]
may ultimately possess is mostly due to rapid and faulty copying
by inexpert draughtsmen, or to a simplifying process which repeated
drawings of the same thing must at length involve.
This is nonsense, and of a most pernicious sort. No mechanical copying
or involuntary simplification will necessarily lead to designs of great
beauty. One has only to set a class of children to make dozens of
copies of an object--each more removed than the last from the original
--in order to discover that if any beauty arises at all, it is actually
_given_ or _imparted_ to the original by one particular child, who happens
to be an artist, and that the rest of the class will be quite innocent
of anything in the way of embellishments, or beauty of any kind.
It would be absurd to argue that the beak of a frigate bird had not
been noticed by particular natives in those parts of the world where
the creature abounds; but the creative act of making an ornamental
design based upon a pot-hook unit, such as the frigate bird's beak
is, bears no causal relation whatsoever to the original fact in the
artist's environment, and to write books in order to show that it
does, is as futile as to try and show that pneumonia or bronchitis or
pleurisy was the actual cause of Poe's charming poem, "Annabel Lee."
Riegl, Lipps, and Dr. Worringer very rightly oppose this view of Semper
and others. In his book, _Stilfragen_, Riegl successfully disposes of
the theory that repetitive patterns have invariably been the outcome
of technical processes such as weaving and plaiting, and points out
that, very often, a vegetable or animal form is given to an original
ornamental figure, only after it has been developed to such an extent
that it actually suggests that vegetable or animal form.[16]
Dr. Worringer goes to great pains in order to show that there is
an Art-will which is quite distinct from mimicry of any kind, and
that this Art-will, beginning in the graphic arts with rhythmic and
repetitive geometrical designs, such as zigzags, cross-hatchings and
spirals, has nothing whatsoever to do with natural objects or objects
of utility, such as baskets and woven work, which these designs happen
to resemble.[17]
He points out that there is not only a difference of degree, but
actually a marked difference of kind, between the intensely realistic
drawing of the Madeleine finds and of some Australian cave painting
and rock sculptures,[18] which are the work of the rudest savages, and the
rhythmic decoration of other races; and that whereas the former are
simply the result of a truly imitative instinct which the savage does
well to cultivate for his own self-preservation--since the ability
to imitate also implies sharpened detective senses[19]--the latter is
the result of a genuine desire for order and simple and organized
arrangement, and an attempt in a small way to overcome confusion. "It
is man's only possible way of emancipating himself from the accidental
and chaotic character of reality."[20]
The author also shows very ably that, even where plant forms are
selected by the original geometric artist, it is only owing to some
peculiarly orderly or systematic arrangement of their parts, and that
the first impulse in the selective artist is not to imitate Nature, but
to obtain a symmetrical and systematic arrangement of lines,[21] to gratify
his will to be master of natural disorder.
These objections of Riegl and Worringer are both necessary and
important; for, as the former declares: "It is now high time that we
should retreat from the position in which it is maintained that the
roots of Art lie in purely technical prototypes."[22]
Even in the camp of the out-and-out evolutionists, however, there seems
always to have been some uncertainty as to whether they were actually
on the right scent. One has only to read Grosse, where he throws doubt
on the technical origin of ornament, and acknowledges that he clings
to it simply because he can see no other,[23] and the concluding word of
Dr. Haddon's book, _Evolution in Art_,[24] in order to understand how
very much a proper concept of the Art-instinct would have helped these
writers to explain a larger field of facts than they were able to
explain, and to do so with greater accuracy.
Nobody, of course, denies that the patterns on alligators' backs, the
beaks of birds, and even the regular disposition of features in the
human face, have been incorporated into designs; but what must be
established, once and for all, is the fact that there is a whole ocean
of difference between the theory which would ascribe such coincidences
to the imitative faculty, and that which would show them to be merely
the outcome of an original desire for rhythmic order, simplification,
and organization, which may or may not avail itself of natural or
technical forms suggestive of symmetrical arrangement that happen to be
at hand.
It is an important controversy, and one to which I should have been
glad to devote more attention. In summing up, however, I don't think
I could do better than quote the opening lines of the Rev. J. F.
Rowbotham's excellent _History of Music_, in which the same questions,
although applied to a different branch of Art, are admirably stated and
answered.
In this book the author says--
"The twittering of birds, the rustling of leaves, the gurgling of
brooks, have provoked the encomiums of poets. Yet none of these has
ever so powerfully affected man's mind that he has surmised the
existence of something deeper in them than one hearing would suffice
to disclose, and has endeavoured by imitating them to familiarize
himself with their nature, so that he may repeat the effect at his own
will and pleasure in all its various shades. These sounds, with that
delicate instinct which has guided him so nicely through this universe
of tempting possibilities, he chose deliberately to pass over. He heard
them with pleasure maybe. But pleasure must possess some æsthetic
value. There must be a secret there to fathom, a mystery to unravel,
before we would undertake its serious pursuit.
"And there is a kind of sound which exactly possesses these
qualities--a sound fraught with seductive mystery--a sound which is
Nature's magic, for by it can dumb things speak.
"The savage who, for the first time in our world's history, knocked
two pieces of wood together, and took pleasure in the sound, had other
aims than his own delight. He was patiently examining a mystery; he was
peering with his simple eyes into one of Nature's greatest secrets. The
something he was examining was rhythmic sound, on which rests the whole
art of music."[25]
Thus, as you see, there is a goodly array of perfectly sensible people
on the other side. Still, the belief that graphic art took its origin
in imitation must undoubtedly have done a good deal of damage; for the
numbers that hold it and act upon it at the present day are, I am sorry
to say, exceedingly great.
By identifying the will to imitate with the instinct of
self-preservation pure and simple, however, we immediately obtain its
order of rank; for having already established that the will to Art is
the will to exist in a certain way--that is to say, with power, all
that which ministers to existence alone must of necessity fall below
the will to Art. In helping us to make this point, Dr. Worringer and
Mr. Felix Clay have done good service, while Riegl's contribution to
the side opposed to the Art-Evolutionists cannot be estimated too
highly.
We are now able to regard the realistic rockdrawings and cave-paintings
of rude Bushmen, as also the finds in the Madeleine Cavern, with an
understanding which has not been vouchsafed us before, and in comparing
these examples of amazing truth to Nature--which, for want of a better
name, we shall call Detective or Police Art[26]--with the double
twisted braid, the palmette, and the simple fret in Assyrian ornament,
we shall be able to assign to each its proper order of rank.
It seems a pity, before laying down the principles of an art, that
it should be necessary to clear away so many false doctrines and
prejudices heaped upon it in perfect good faith by scientific men. It
is only one proof the more, if such were needed, of the vulgarizing
influence science has exercised over everything it has touched, since
it began to become almost divinely ascendant in the nineteenth century.
[10] "_Der Stil in der technischen und tektonischen Künsten, oder
praktische Æsthetik_."
[11] See the excellent work, _Stilfragen_, p. 11.
[12] _Evolution in Art_, by A. C. Haddon. See especially figures 26,
27, 30, 31, 32, pp. 49-52. See also figure 106, p. 181.
[13] _The Evolution of Decorative Art_, by Henry J. Balfour, p. 50.
[14] _Evolution in Art_, by A. C. Haddon, p. 76.
[15] A word Dr. Colley March introduced to express the idea of an
ornament due to structure.
[16] _Stilfragen_, p. 208 _et seq_. See also Dr. W. Worringer's really
valuable contribution to this subject: _Abstraktion und Einfühlung_, p.
58.
[17] _Abstraktion und Einfühlung_, pp. 4, 8, 9, 11.
[18] _Abstraktion und Einfühlung_, p. 51. See also Grosse, The
Beginnings of Art, pp. 166-169 et seq.
[19] For confirmation of this point see Felix Clay, _The Origin of the
Sense of Beauty_, p. 97.
[20] _Abstraktion und Einfühlung_, p. 44.
[21] _Abstraktion und Einfühlung_, p. 58.
[22] Stilfragen, p. 12.
[23] _The Beginnings of Art_, pp. 145-147.
[24] p. 309: "There are certain styles of ornamentation which, at all
events in particular cases, may very well be original, taking that word
in its ordinary sense, such, for example, as zigzags, cross-hatching,
and so forth. The mere toying with any implement which could make
a mark on any surface might suggest the simplest ornamentation
[_N.B._--It is characteristic of this school that even original design,
according to them, must be the result of "toying" with an instrument,
and of a suggestion from chance markings it may make] to the most
savage mind. This may or may not have been the case, and it is entirely
beyond proof either way, and therefore we must not press our analogy
too far. It is, however, surprising and is certainly very significant
that the origin of so many designs can be determined although they are
of unknown age."
[25] _The History of Music_, by J. F. Rowbotham, 1893, pp. 7, 8. See
also Dr. Wallaschek's _Anfänge der Tonkunst_ (Leipzig, 1903).
[26] The Bertillon system of identification and Madame Tussaud's,
together with a large number of modern portraits and landscapes, are
the highest development of this art.
3. The Purpose of Art Still the Same as Ever.
But in spite of all the attempts that have been made to democratize
Art, and to fit it to the Procrustes bed of modernity, two human
factors have remained precisely the same as they ever were, and show
no signs of changing. I refer to the general desire to obey and to
follow, in the mass of mankind, and to the general desire to prevail in
concepts, if not in offspring, among higher men.
Wherever one may turn, wherever one inquires, one will discover that,
at the present day, however few and weak the commanders may be, there
is among the vast majority of people an insatiable thirst to obey,
to find opinions ready-made, and to believe in some one or in some
law. The way the name of science is invoked when a high authority
is needed--just as the Church or the Bible used to be invoked in
years gone by--the love of statistics and the meekness with which
a company grows silent when they are quoted; the fact that the most
preposterous fashions are set in clothing, in tastes, and in manners;
the sheep-like way in which people will follow a leader, whether in
politics, literature, or in sport, not to dilate upon the love of great
names and the faith in the daily Press which nowadays, so I hear, even
prescribes schemes for dinner-table conversation--all these things
show what a vast amount of instinctive obedience still remains the
birthright of the Greatest Number. For even advertisement hoardings and
the excessive use of advertisements in this age, in addition to the
fact that they point unmistakably to the almost omnipotent power of the
commercial classes (a power which vouchsafes them even the privilege
of self-praise, which scarcely any other class of society could claim
without incurring the charge of bad-taste), also show how docilely
the greatest number must ultimately respond to repeated stimuli, and
finally obey if they be told often enough to buy, or to go to see,
any particular thing. And, in this respect, the Nietzschean attitude
towards the greatest number is one of kindness and consideration.
This instinct to obey, says Nietzsche, is the most natural thing in the
world, and it must be gratified. By all means it must be gratified.
What is fatal is not that it should be fed with commands, but that it
should be starved by the lack of commanders, and so be compelled to go
in search of food on its own account.
"Inasmuch as in all ages," says Nietzsche, "as long as mankind has
existed, there have always been human herds (family alliances,
communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches), and always a great
number who obey in proportion to the small number who command--in
view, therefore, of the fact that obedience has been most practised
and fostered among mankind hitherto, one may reasonably suppose that,
generally speaking, the need thereof is now innate in every one, as
a kind of _formal conscience_ which gives the command: 'Thou shalt
unconditionally do something, unconditionally refrain from something.'
In short, 'Thou shalt.' This need tries to satisfy itself and to fill
its form with a content; according to its strength, impatience and
eagerness, it thereby seizes, as an omnivorous appetite, with little
selection, and accepts whatever is shouted into its ear by all sorts
of commanders--parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, or public
opinion."[27]
Everywhere, then, "he who would command finds those who must obey"[28]--
this is obvious to the most superficial observer; because it is easier
to obey than to command.
"Wherever I found living things," says Zarathustra, "there heard I also
the language of obedience. All living things are things that obey.
"And this I heard secondly: whatever cannot obey itself, is commanded.
Such is the nature of living things.
"This, however, is the third thing I heard: to command is more
difficult than to obey. And not only because the commander beareth the
burden of all who obey, and because this burden easily crusheth him:--
"An effort and a risk seemed all commanding unto me; and whenever it
commandeth, the living thing risketh itself.
"Yea, even when it commandeth himself, then also must it atone for its
commanding. Of its own law must it become the judge and avenger and
victim."[29]
For opinions are a matter of will; they are always, or ought to
be always, travelling tickets implying a certain definite aim and
destination, and the opinions we hold concerning Life must point to
a certain object we see in Life;--hence there is just as great a
market for opinions, and just as great a demand for fixed values to-day
as there ever was, and the jealous love with which men will quote
well-established views, or begin to believe when they hear that a view
is well established--a fact which is at the root of all the fruits of
modern popularity--shows what a need and what a craving there is for
authority, for authoritative information, and for unimpeachable coiners
of opinions.
Now all the arts either determine values or lay stress upon certain
values already established.[30] What, then, are the particular values
that the graphic arts determine or accentuate? It must be clear that
they determine what is beautiful, desirable, in fact, imperative, in
form and colour.
The purpose of the graphic arts, then, has remained the same as it ever
was. It is to determine the values "ugly" and "beautiful" for those who
wish to know what is ugly and what is beautiful. The fact that painters
and sculptors have grown so tremulous and so little self-reliant as
to claim only the right to imitate, to please and to amuse, does not
affect this statement in the least; it is simply a reflection upon
modern artists and sculptors.
Since, however, these values beautiful and ugly are themselves but the
outcome of other more fundamental values which have ruled and moulded
a race for centuries, it follows that the artist who would accentuate
or determine the qualities beautiful or ugly, must bear some intimate
relation to the past and possible future of the people.
Place the Hermes of Praxiteles and especially the canon of Polycletus
in any part of a cathedral of the late Gothic, and you will see to what
extent the values which gave rise to Gothic Art were incompatible with,
and antagonistic to, those which reared Praxiteles and Polycletus.
Now, if you want a still greater contrast, place an Egyptian granite
sculpture inside a building like le Petit Trianon, and this intimate
association between the Art and the values of a people will begin to
seem clear to you.
You may ask, then, why or how such an art as Ruler-art can please?
Since it introduces something definitely associated with a particular
set of values, and commands an assent to these values, how is it that
one likes it?
The reply is that one does not necessarily like it. One often hates
it. One likes it only when one feels that it reveals values which are
in sympathy with one's own aspirations. The Ruler-art of Egypt, for
instance, can stir no one who, consciously or unconsciously, is not in
some deep secret sympathy with the society which produced it; and as an
example of this sympathy--if you wish to know why the realism which
comes from poverty[31] tends to increase and flourish in democratic times,
it is only because there is that absence of particular human power in
it which is compatible with a society in which a particular human power
is completely lacking.
For it is absolute nonsense to speak of _l'art pour l'art_ and of the
pleasure of art for art's sake as acceptable principles.[32] I will show
later on how this notion arose. Suffice it to say, for the present,
that this is the death of Art. It is separating Art from Life, and it
is relegating it to a sphere--a Beyond--where other things, stronger
than Art, have already been known to die. The notion of art for art's
sake can only arise in an age when the purpose of Art is no longer
known, when its relation to Life has ceased from being recognized, and
when artists have grown too weak to find the realization of their will
in their works.
[27] _G. E._, p. 120.
[28] _W. P._, Vol. I, p. 105.
[29] _Z._, II, XXXIV.
[30] T. I., Part 10, Aph. 24: "A psychologist asks what does all art
do? does it not praise? does it not glorify? does it not select? does
it not bring into prominence? In each of these cases it strengthens or
weakens certain valuations. ... Is this only a contingent matter?--an
accident, something with which the instinct of the artist would not at
all be concerned? Or rather, is it not the pre-requisite which enables
the artist to do something? Is his fundamental instinct directed
towards art?--or is it not rather directed towards the sense of art,
namely, life? towards desirableness of life?"
[31] See p. 119.
[32] _W. P._, Vol. I, p. 246. See also T. I., Part 10, Aph. 24, and _G.
E._, p. 145.
4. The Artist's and the Layman's View of Life.
If the artist's view of Life can no longer affect Life, if his
ordering, simplifying and adjusting mind can no longer make Life
simpler, more orderly and better adjusted, then all his power has
vanished, and he has ceased from counting in our midst, save, perhaps,
as a _decorator_ of our homes--that is to say, as an artisan; or as an
_entertainer_--that is to say, as a mere illustrator of our literary
men's work.
What is so important in the artist is, that disorder and confusion are
the loadstones that attract him.[33] Though, in stating this, I should ask
you to remember that he sees disorder and confusion where, very often,
the ordinary person imagines everything to be admirably arranged.
Still, the fact remains that he finds his greatest proof of power only
where his ordering and simplifying mind meets with something whereon it
may stamp its two strongest features: Order and Simplicity; and where
he is strong, relative disorder is his element, and the arrangement
of this disorder is his product.[34] Stimulated by disorder, which he
despises, he is driven to his work; spurred by the sight of anarchy,
his inspiration is government; fertilized by rudeness and ruggedness,
his will to power gives birth to culture and refinement. He gives of
himself--his business is to make things reflect him.
Thus, even his will to eternalize, and to stamp the nature of stability
on Becoming, must not be confounded with that other desire for Being
which is a desire for rest and repose and opiates,[35] and which has
found its strongest expression in the idea of the Christian Heaven.
It is, rather, a feeling of gratitude towards Life, a desire to show
thankfulness to Life, which makes him desire to rescue one beautiful
body from the river of Becoming, and fix its image for ever in this
world,[36] whereas the other is based upon a loathing of Life and a
weariness of it.
Defining _ugliness_ provisionally as disorder, it may have a great
attraction for the artist, it may even be the artist's sole attraction,
and in converting it--the thing he despises most--into _beauty_, which
we shall define provisionally as order, he reaches the zenith of his
power.[37]
"Where is beauty?" Zarathustra asks. "Where I must will with my whole
will; where I will love and perish, that an image may not remain merely
an image.[38]
"For to create desireth the loving one, because he despiseth."[39]
It follows from this, therefore, that the realistic
artist--the purveyor of Police Art--who goes direct to beauty or
ugliness and, after having worked upon either, leaves it just as it was
before,[40] shows no proof of power at all, and ranks with the bushmen
of Australia and the troglodytes of La Dordogne, as very much below
the hierophantic artist who transforms and transfigures. All realists,
therefore, from Apelles[41] in the fourth century B.C. to the modern
impressionists, portrait painters and landscapists, must step down.
Like the scientists, they merely ascertain facts, and, in so doing,
leave things precisely as they are.[42] Photography is rapidly outstripping
them, and will outstrip them altogether once it has mastered the
problem of colour. Photography could never have vied with the artist of
Egypt, or even of China and Japan; because in the arts of each of these
nations there is an element of human power over Nature or reality,
which no mechanical process can emulate.
Now, what is important in the ideal and purely hypothetical layman
is, that he has a horror of disorder, of confusion, and of chaos, and
flees from it whenever possible. He finds no solace anywhere, except
where the artist has been and left things transformed and richer for
him. Bewildered by reality, he extends his hands for that which the
artist has made of reality. He is a receiver. He reaches his zenith in
apprehending.[43] His attitude is that of a woman, as compared with the
attitude of the artist which is that of the man.
"Logical and geometrical simplification is the result of an increase
of power: conversely, the mere aspect of such simplification increases
the sense of power in the beholder."[44] To see what is ugliness to him,
represented as what is beauty to him, also impresses the spectator with
the feeling of power; of an obstacle overcome, and thereby stimulates
his activities. Moreover, the spectator may feel a certain gratitude
to Life and Mankind. It often happens, even in our days, that another
world is pictured as by no means a better world,[45] and the healthy
and optimistic layman may feel a certain thankfulness to Life and to
Humanity. It is then once more that he turns to the artist who has
felt the same in a greater degree, who can give him this thing--be it
a corner of Life or of Humanity--who can snatch it from the eternal
flux and torrent of all things into decay or into death, and who can
carve or paint it in a form unchanging for him, in spite of a world of
Becoming, of Evolution, and of ebb and flow. Just as the musician cries
Time! Time! Time! to the cacophonous medley of natural sounds that pour
into his ears from all sides, and assembles them rhythmically for our
ears hostile to disorder; so the graphic artist cries Time! Time! Time!
to the incessant and kaleidoscopic procession of things from birth to
death, and places in the layman's arms the eternalized image of that
portion of Life for which he happens to feel great gratitude.
[33] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 368.
[34] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 241.
[35] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 280.
[36] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 281.
[37] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 244.
[38] _Z._, II, XXXVII.
[39] _Z._, I. XVIII.
[40]_ T. I._, Part 10, Aph. "Nature, estimated artistically,
is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps.
Nature is accident. Studying 'according to nature' seems
to me a bad sign; it betrays subjection, weakness, fatalism;
this lying-in-the-dust before petit fails is unworthy of a
complete artist. Seeing what is--that belongs to another
species of intellects, to the anti-artistic, to the practical."
[41] See Woltmann and Woermann, _History of Painting_,
Vol. I, p. 62.
[42] _B. T._, p. 59. See also Schopenhauer, _Parerga und
Paralipomena_, Vol. II, p. 447.
[43] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 255.
[44] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 241.
[45] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 95: "A people that are proud of
themselves, and who are on the ascending path of Life,
always picture another existence as lower and less valuable
than theirs."
5. The Confusion of the Two Points of View.
It is obvious that if both pleasures are to remain pure and undefiled--
if the artist is to attain to his zenith in happiness, and the layman
to his also--their particular points of view must not be merged,
dulled, or blunted by excessive spiritual intercourse.[46] For a very large
amount of the disorder in the arts of the present can easily be traced
to a confusion of the two points of view.
In an ideal society, the artist's standpoint would be esoteric, and the
layman's exoteric.
Nowadays, of course, owing to the process of universal levelling which
has been carried so far that it is invading even the department of sex,
it is hard to find such distinctions as the artist's and the layman's
standpoint in art sharply and definitely juxtaposed. And this fact
accounts for a good deal of the decrease in æsthetic pleasure, which
is so characteristic of the age. In fact, it accounts for the decrease
of pleasure in general, for only where there are sharp differences can
there be any great pleasure. Pessimism and melancholia can arise only
in inartistic ages, when a process of levelling has merged all the joys
of particular standpoints into one.
Let me give you a simple example, drawn from modern life and the
pictorial arts, in order to show you to what extent the standpoint of
the people or of the layman has become corrupted by the standpoint of
the artist, and vice-versâ.
Strictly speaking, artists in search of scope for their powers should
prefer Hampstead Heath or the Forest of Fontainebleau[47] to the
carefully laid-out gardens of our parks and of Versailles. Conversely,
if their taste were still uncorrupted, the public ought to prefer the
carefully arranged gardens of our parks and of Versailles to Hampstead
Heath or the Forest of Fontainebleau.
Some of the public, of course, still do hold the proper views on these
points, but their number is rapidly diminishing, and most of them
assume the airs of artists now, and speak with sentimental enthusiasm
about the beautiful ruggedness of craggy rocks, the glorious beauty of
uncultivated Nature, and the splendour of wild scenery.[48]
[Illustration: The Marriage of Mary. By Raphael. (Brera, Milan.)]
Artists, on the other hand, having become infected by the public's
original standpoint--the desire for order--either paint pictures
like Raphael's "Marriage of Mary,"[49] his "Virgin and Child attended
by St. John the Baptist and St. Nicholas of Bari,"[50] and Perugino's
"Vision of St. Bernard,"[51] in which the perfectly symmetrical aspect and
position of the architecture is both annoying and inartistic, owing to
the fact that it was looked at by the artist from a point at which it
was orderly and arranged before he actually painted it, and could not
therefore testify to his power of simplifying or ordering--but simply
to his ability to avail himself of another artist's power, namely, the
architect's; or else, having become infected by the public's corrupt
standpoint--the desire for disorder and chaos as an end in itself--
they paint as Ruysdael, Hobbema and Constable painted--that is to
say, without imparting anything of themselves, or of their power to
order and simplify, to the content of the picture, lest the desire for
disorder or chaos should be thwarted.[52]
This is an exceedingly important point, and its value for art criticism
cannot be overrated. If one can trust one's taste, and it is still a
purely public taste, it is possible to tell at a glance why one cannot
get oneself to like certain pictures in which either initial regularity
has been too great, thus leaving no scope for the artist's power, or in
which final irregularity is too great, thus betraying no evidence of
the artist's power.
Looking at Rubens' "Ceres,"[53] in which the architecture is
viewed also in a frontal position, you may be tempted to ask why such
a picture is not displeasing, despite the original symmetry of the
architecture in the position in which the painter chose to paint it.
The reply is simple. Here Rubens certainly placed the architecture
full-face; but besides dissimulating the greater part of it in shadow--
which in itself produces unsymmetrical shapes that have subsequently to
be arranged by tone composition--lie carefully disordered it by means
of garlands and festoons, and only then did he exercise his artistic
mind in making a harmonious and orderly pictorial arrangement of it,
which also included some cupids skilfully placed.
All realism, or Police Art, therefore, in addition to being the outcome
of the will to truth which Christianity and its offshoot Modern Science
have infused into the arts, may also be the result of the artist's
becoming infected either with the public's pure taste, or with the
public's corrupted or artist-infected taste, and we are thus in
possession of one more clue as to what constitutes a superior work of
graphic art.
[46] _W. P._, Vol. II, pp. 255, 256.
[47] In regard to this point it is interesting to note that Kant, in
his _Kritik der Urteilskraft_, actually called landscape-painting a
process of gardening.
[48] I do not mean to imply here that all the sentimental gushing
that is given vent to nowadays over rugged and wild scenery is the
outcome only of a confusion of the artist's and layman's standpoints.
The influence of the Christian and Protestant worship of pointless
freedom, together with that of their contempt of the work of man, is
largely active here; and the sight of unhandseled and wild shrubs,
and of tangled and matted grasses, cheers the heart of the fanatical
believer in the purposeless freedom and anarchy which Christianity and
Protestantism have done so much to honour and extol. That the same man
who honours government and an aristocratic ideal may often be found
to-day dilating upon the charms of chaotic scenery, only shows how
muddle-headed and confused mankind has become.
[49] The Brera at Milan.
[50] The National Gallery, London. Raphael was very much infected with
the people's point of view, hence the annoying stiltedness of many of
his pictures.
[51] Pinakothek, Munich.
[52] See particularly, Ruysdael's "Rocky Landscape," "Landscape with a
Farm" (Wallace collection); Hobbema's "Outskirts of a Wood" and many
others in the Wallace collection; and Constable's "Flatford Mill" and
"The Haywain" (National Gallery).
[53] Hermitage Gallery, St. Petersburg.
6. The Meaning of Beauty of Form and of Beauty of Content in Art.
So far, then, I have arrived at this notion of beauty in Ruler-Art,
namely: that it may be regarded almost universally as that order,
simplicity and transfiguration which the artist mind imparts to the
content of his production. This notion seems to allow of almost
universal application, because, as I showed in the first part of
this lecture, it involves one of the primary instincts of man--the
overcoming of chaos and anarchy by adjustment, simplification and
transfiguration. It is only in democratic ages, or ages of decline,
when instincts become disintegrated, that beauty in Art is synonymous
with a lack of simplicity, of order and of transfiguration. I have
shown, however, that the second kind of beauty, or democratic beauty,
is of an inferior kind to that of the first beauty, or Ruler beauty,
because, while the former takes its root in the will to live, the
latter arises surely and truly out of the will to power.[54] Either
beauty, however, constitutes ugliness in its opponent's opinion.
But there is another aspect of Beauty in Art which has to be
considered, and that is the intrinsic beauty of the content of an
artistic production. You may say that, _ex hypothesi_, I have denied that
there could be any such beauty. Not at all!
Since the ruler-artist transfigures by enhancement, by embellishment
and by ennoblement, his mind can be stimulated perfectly well by an
object or a human being which to the layman is vertiginously beautiful,
and which to himself is exceedingly pleasing. In fact, if his mind
is a mind which, like that of most master-artists, adores that which
is difficult, it will go in search of the greatest natural beauty it
can find, in order, by a stupendous effort in transfiguration, to
outstrip even that; for the embellishment of the downright ugly and the
downright revolting presents a task too easy to the powerful artist--a
fact which explains a good deal of the ugly contents of many a modern
picture.
What, then, constitutes the beauty of the content in an artistic
production, as distinct from the beauty of the treatment? In other
words, what is beauty in a subject?
For the notion that the subject does not matter in a picture is one
which should be utterly and severely condemned. It arose at a time
when art was diseased, when artists themselves had ceased from having
anything of importance to say, when the subjects chosen had no meaning,
and when technique was bad. And it must be regarded more in the light
of a war-cry coming from a counter-movement, aiming at an improved
technique and rebelling against an abuse of literature in the graphic
arts, than in the light of sound doctrine, taking its foundation in
normal and healthy conditions.
The intrinsic beauty of the content or substance of a picture or
sculpture may therefore be the subject of legitimate inquiry, and in
determining what it consists of, we raise the whole question of content
beauty.
Volumes, stacks of volumes, have been written on this question. The
most complicated and incomprehensible answers have been given to it,
and not one can be called satisfactory; for all of them would be
absolute.
When, however, we find a modern writer defining the beautiful as
"that which has characteristic or individual expressiveness for sense
perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or
abstract expressiveness in the same medium,"[55] we feel, or at least
_I_ feel, that something must be wrong. It is definitions such as these
which compel one to seek for something more definite and more lucid
in the matter of explanation, and if, in finding the latter, one may
seem a little too prosaic and _terre-à-terre_, it is only because the
transcendental and metaphysical nature of the kind of definition we
have just quoted makes anything which is in the slightest degree
clearer, appear earthly and material beside it.
It is obvious that, if we could only arrive at a subject-beauty which
was absolute, practically all the difficulties of our task would
vanish. For having established the fact that the purpose of the
graphic arts is to determine the values beautiful and ugly, it would
only remain for us to urge all artists to advocate that absolute
subject-beauty with all the eloquence of line and colour that our
concept of Art-form would allow, and all the problems of Art would be
solved.
But we can postulate no such absolute in subject-beauty. "Absolute
beauty exists just as little as absolute goodness and truth."[56] The
term "beautiful," like the term "good," is only a means to an end. It
is simply the arbitrary self-affirmation of a certain type of man in
his struggle to prevail.[57] He says "Yea" to his type, and calls it
beautiful. He cannot extend his power and overcome other types unless
with complete confidence and assurance he says "Yea" to his own type.
You and I, therefore, can speak of the beautiful with an understanding
of what that term means, only on condition that our values, our
traditions, our desires, and our outlook are exactly the same. If you
agree with me on the question of what is good, our agreement simply
means this, that in that corner of the world from which you and I hail,
the same creator of values prevails over both of us. Likewise, if you
and I agree on the question of what is beautiful, this fact merely
denotes that as individuals coming from the same people, we have our
values, our tradition and our outlook in common.
"Beautiful," then, is a purely relative term which may be applied to a
host of dissimilar types and which every people must apply to its own
type alone, if it wishes to preserve its power. Biologically, absolute
beauty exists only within the confines of a particular race. That race
which would begin to consider another type than their own as beautiful,
would thereby cease from being a race. We may be kind, amiable, and
even hospitable to the Chinaman or the Negro; but the moment we begin
to share the Chinaman's or the Negro's view of beauty, we run the risk
of cutting ourselves adrift from our own people.
But assuming, as we must, that all people, the Chinese, the Negroes,
the Hindus, the Red Indians, and the Arabs between themselves apply
the word beautiful only to particular individuals among their own
people, in order to distinguish them from less beautiful or mediocre
individuals--what meaning has the term in that case?
Obviously, since the spirit of the people, its habits, prejudices
and prepossessions are determined by their values, and values may
fix a type, that creature will be most beautiful among them who is
the highest embodiment and outcome of all their values, and who
therefore corresponds most to the ideal their æsthetic legislator had
in mind when he created their values.[58] Thus even morality can
be justified æsthetically.[59] And in legislating for primeval peoples,
higher men and artist-legislators certainly worked like sculptors on a
yielding medium which was their own kind.
The most beautiful negro or Chinaman thus becomes that individual negro
or Chinaman who is rich in those features which the life-spirit of the
Ethiopian or Chinese people is calculated to produce, and who, owing to
a long and regular observance of the laws and traditions of his people,
by his ancestors for generations, has inherited that regularity of form
in his type, which all long observance of law and order is bound to
cultivate and to produce.[60] And in reviewing the peoples of Europe
alone, we can ascribe the many and different views which they have held
and still hold of beauty, only to a difference in the values they have
observed for generations in their outlook, their desires and their
beliefs.
It is quite certain, therefore, that, in the graphic arts, which either
determine or accentuate the values "ugly" and "beautiful," every artist
who sets up his notion of what is subject-beauty, like every lover
about to marry, either assails or confirms and consolidates the values
of his people.[61]
Examples of this, if they were needed, are to be found everywhere. See
how the Gothic school of painting, together with men like Fra Angelico,
Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, El Greco, and subsequently Burne-Jones,
set up the soulful person, the person of tenuous, nervous and
heaven-aspiring slenderness, as the type of beauty, thus advocating and
establishing Christian values in a very seductive and often artistic
manner; while the Pagans, with Michelangelo, Titian, and even Rubens,
represented another code of values--perhaps even several other codes--
and sought to fix their type also.
Note, too, how hopeless are the attempts of artists who stand for the
Pagan ideal, when they paint Christian saints and martyrs, and how
singularly un-Pagan those figures are which appear in the pictures of
the advocates of the Christian ideal when they attempt Pagan types.
Christ by Rubens is not the emaciated, tenuous Person suffering from
a wasting disease that Segna represents him to be; while the Mars and
Venus of Botticelli in the National Gallery would have been repudiated
with indignation by any Greek of antiquity.
When values are beginning to get mixed, then, owing to an influx of
foreigners from all parts of the world, we shall find the strong
biological idea of absolute beauty tending to disappear, and in its
place we shall find the weak and wholly philosophical belief arising
that beauty is relative. Thus, in Attica of the fifth century B.C.,
when 300,000 slaves, chiefly foreigners, were to be counted among the
inhabitants, the idea that beauty was a relative term first occurred to
the "talker" Socrates.
Still, in all concepts of beauty, however widely separated and however
diametrically opposed, there is this common factor: that the beautiful
person is the outcome of a long observance through generations of
the values peculiar to a people. A certain regularity of form and
feature, whether this form and feature be Arab, Ethiopian or Jewish,
is indicative of a certain regular mode of life which has lasted for
generations; and in calling this indication beautiful, a people once
more affirms itself and its values. If the creature manifesting this
regularity be a Chinaman, he will be the most essential Chinaman that
the Chinese values can produce; his face will reveal no fighting and
discordant values; there will be no violent contrasts of type in
his features, and, relative to Chinese values, his face will be the
most regular and harmonious that can be seen, and therefore the most
beautiful.[62] The Chinese ruler-artist, in representing a mediocre
Chinaman, would therefore exercise his transfiguring powers to overcome
any discordant features in the face before him, and would thus produce
a beautiful type.[63] Or, if his model happened to be the highest
product of Chinese values, his object would be to transcend even that,
and to point to something higher.
Once again, therefore, though it is impossible to posit a universal
concept of subject-beauty, various concepts may be given an order of
rank, subject to the values with which they happen to be associated.
[54] If this book be read in conjunction with my monograph on
_Nietzsche: his Life and Works_ (Constable), or my _Who is to be
Master of the World?_ (Foulis), there ought to be no difficulty in
understanding this point.
[55] B. Bosanquet, _A History of Æsthetic_, p. 4.
[56] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 246. See also _T. I._, Part 10, Aph. 19: "The
'beautiful in itself' is merely an expression, not even a concept."
[57] _T. I._, Part 10, Apr. 19: "In the beautiful, man posits himself
as the standard of perfection; in select cases he worships himself in
that standard. A species _cannot_ possibly do otherwise than thus say
yea to itself."
[58] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 361: "Legislative moralities are the
principal means by which one can form mankind, according to the fancy
of a creative and profound will: provided, of course, that such an
artistic will of the first order gets the power into its own hands,
and can make its creative will prevail over long periods in the form
of legislation, religions, and morals." See p. 79 in the first part of
this lecture.
[59] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 185.
[60] _G. E._, p. 107: "The essential thing 'in heaven and earth' is,
apparently, that there should be long obedience in the same direction;
there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run,
something which has made life worth living; for instance, virtue,
art, music, dancing, reason, spirituality--anything whatever that is
transfiguring, refined, foolish, or divine."
[61] _T. I._, Part 10, Aph. 24.
[62] _T. I._, Part 10, Aph. 47: "Even the beauty of a race or family,
the pleasantness and kindness of their whole demeanour, is acquired by
effort; like genius, it is the final result of the accumulated labour
of generations. There must have been great sacrifices made to good
taste; for the sake of it, much must have been done, and much refrained
from--the seventeenth century in France is worthy of admiration in
both ways; good taste must then have been a principle of selection, for
society, place, dress, and sexual gratification, beauty must have been
preferred to advantage, habit, opinion, indolence. Supreme rule:--we
must not 'let ourselves go,' even when only in our own presence.--Good
things are costly beyond measure, and the rule always holds, that he
who possesses them is other than he who acquires them. All excellence
is inheritance; what has not been inherited is imperfect, it is a
beginning."
[63] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 245: "'Beauty,' therefore, is, to the artist,
something which is above order of rank, because in beauty contrasts
are overcome, the highest sign of power thus manifesting itself in the
conquest of opposites; and achieved without a feeling of tension." See
also Hegel, _Vorlesungen über Æsthetik_, Vol. I, pp. 130, 144.
7. The Meaning of Ugliness of Form and of Ugliness of Content in Art.
Ugliness in Art, therefore, is Art's contradiction.[67] It is the absence
of Art. It is a sign that the simplifying, ordering and transfiguring
power of the artist has not been successful, and that chaos, disorder
and complexity have not been overcome.
Ugliness of form in Art, therefore, will tend to become prevalent
in democratic times; because it is precisely at such times that a
general truth for all is believed in, and, since reality is the only
truth which can be made common to all, democratic art is invariably
realistic, and therefore, according to my definition of the beautiful
in form, ugly.
In this matter, I do not ask you to take my views on trust. A person
who will seem to you very much more authoritative than myself--a man
who once had the honour of influencing Whistler, and who, by the bye,
is also famous for having flung down the Colonne Vendôme in Paris--
once expressed himself quite categorically on this matter.
At the Congress of Antwerp in 1861, after he had criticized other
artists and other concepts of art, this man concluded his speech as
follows: "By denying the ideal and all that it involves, I attain to
the complete emancipation of the individual, and finally to democracy.
Realism is essentially democratic."[68]
As you all must know, this man was Gustave Courbet, of whom Muther said
that he had a predilection for the ugly.[69]
Artists infected with the pure or the corrupt layman's view of Art,
as described in the previous section, and artists obsessed by the
Christian or scientific notion of truth, will consequently produce ugly
work. They will be realists, or Police-artists, and consequently ugly.
But how can content- or subject-ugliness be understood? Content- or
subject-ugliness is the decadence of a type.[70] It is the sign
that certain features, belonging to other peoples (hitherto called ugly
according to the absolute biological standard of beauty of a race),
are beginning to be introduced into their type. Or it may mean that
the subject to be represented does not reveal that harmony and lack
of contrasts which the values of a people are capable of producing.
In each case it provokes hatred, and this "hatred is inspired by the
most profound instinct of the species; there is horror, foresight,
profundity, and far-reaching vision in it--it is the profoundest of
all hatreds. On account of it art is _profound_."[71]
The hatred amounts to a condemnation of usurping values, or of
discordant values; in fact, to a condemnation of dissolution and
anarchy, and the judgment "ugly" is of the most serious import.
Thus, although few of us can agree to-day as to what constitutes a
beautiful man or woman, there is still a general idea common to us all,
that a certain regularity of features constitutes beauty, and that,
with this beauty, a certain reliable, harmonious, and calculable nature
will be present. Spencer said the wisest thing in all his philosophy
when he declared that "the saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but
a skin-deep saying."[72]
For beauty in any human creature, being the result of a long and
severe observance by his ancestors of a particular set of values,
always denotes some definite attitude towards Life; it always lures to
some particular kind of life and joy--as Stendhal said, "Beauty is
a promise of happiness"--and as such it seduces to Life and to this
earth.
This explains why beauty is regarded with suspicion by negative
religions, and why it tends to decline in places where the sway
of a negative religion is powerful. Because a negative religion
cannot tolerate that which lures to life, to the body, to joy and to
voluptuous ecstasy.
It is upon their notion of spiritual beauty, upon passive virtues, that
the negative religions lay such stress, and thus they allow the ugly to
find pedestals in their sanctuaries more easily than the beautiful.
[67] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 252.
[68] A. Estignard, _Gustave Courbet_ (Paris, 1896), p. 118.
[69] _Geschichte der Malerei_, Vol. III, p. 204.
[70] _W. P._, Vol. II, pp. 241, 242, 245. See also T. I., Part 10, Aph.
20: "The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration; that
which reminds us in the remotest manner of degeneracy prompts us to
pronounce the verdict 'ugly.' Every indication of exhaustion, gravity,
age or lassitude; every kind of constraint, such as cramp or paralysis;
and above all the odour, the colour, and the likeness of decomposition
or putrefaction, be it utterly attenuated even to a symbol:--all these
things call forth a similar reaction, the evaluation 'ugly.' A hatred
is there excited: whom does man hate there? There can be no doubt: _the
decline of his type_."
[71] _T. I._, Part 10, Aph. 20.
[72] _Essays_, Vol. II (1901 Edition), p. 394.
8. The Ruler-Artist's Style and Subject.
Up to the present, you have doubtless observed that I have spoken only
of man as the proper subject-matter of the graphic Arts. In maintaining
this, Nietzsche not only has Goethe and many lesser men on his side,
but he has also the history of Art in general. I cannot, however, show
you yet how, or in what manner, animal-painting, landscape-painting,
and, in some respects, portrait-painting are to be placed lower than
the art which concerns itself with man. Let it therefore suffice, for
the present, simply to recognize the fact that Nietzsche did take up
this attitude, and leave the more exhaustive discussion of it to the
next part of this lecture.
Now, eliminating for a moment all those pseudo-artists who have been
reared by the two strongest public demands on the Art of the present
age--I speak of portrait-painting and dining-room pictures--there
remains a class of artists which still shows signs of raising its head
here and there, though every year with less frequency, and this is the
class which, for want of a better term, we call Ruler-artists.
As I say, they are becoming extremely rare; their rarity, which may be
easily accounted for,[73] is one of the evil omens of the time.
The ruler-artist is he who, elated by his own health and love of Life,
says "Yea" to his own type and proclaims his faith or confidence in
it, against all other types; and who, in so doing, determines or
accentuates the values of that type. If he prevails in concepts in so
doing, he also ennobles and embellishes the type he is advocating.
He is either the maker or the highest product of an aspiring and an
ascending people. In him their highest values find their most splendid
bloom. In him their highest values find their strongest spokesman. And
in his work they find the symbol of their loftiest hopes.
By the beauty which his soul reflects upon the selected men he
represents in his works, he establishes an order of rank among his
people, and puts each in his place.
The spectator who is very much beneath the beauty of the ruler-artist's
masterpieces feels his ignominious position at a glance. He realizes
the impassable gulf that is for ever fixed between himself and that!
And this sudden revelation tells him his level. Such a man, after
he has contemplated the ruler-artist's work, may rush headlong to the
nearest river and drown himself. His despair may be so great when he
realizes the impossibility of ever reaching the heights he has been
contemplating, that he may immolate himself on the spot. Only thus can
the world be purged of the many-too-many.
"Unto many life is a failure," says Zarathustra, "a poisonous worm
eating through into their heart. These ought to see to it that they
succeed better in dying.
"Many-too-many live.... Would that preachers of swift death might
arise! They would be the proper storms to shake the trees of life."[74]
In the presence of beauty, alone, can one know one's true rank, and
this explains why the Japanese declare that "until a man has made
himself beautiful he has no right to approach beauty,"[75] for "great art
is that before which we long to die."[76]
But, to those who see but the smallest chance of approaching it, beauty
is an exhortation, a stimulus, a bugle-call. It may drive them to means
for pruning themselves of ugliness; it may urge them to inner harmony,
to a suppression of intestinal discord.
"Beauty alone should preach penitence,"[77] says Zarathustra. And in this
sentence you have the only utilitarian view of beauty that has any
aristocratic value, besides that which maintains that beauty lures to
Life, and to the body.
Hence, beauty need not impel all men to the river. There are some who,
after contemplating it, will feel just near enough to it not to despair
altogether of attaining to its level, and this thought will lend them
both hope and courage.
The ruler-artist, therefore, in order that his subject-beauty may have
some meaning, must be the synthesis of the past and the future of a
people. Up to his waist in their spirit, he must mould or paint them
the apotheosis of their type. Only thus can he hope to prevail with his
subject--Man.
The German philosopher, Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, was one of the first
to recognize this power of the ruler-artist, and the necessity of his
being intimately associated with a particular people, although above
them; and in his little book, _System der Æsthetik_, he makes some very
illuminating remarks on this matter.[78]
Thus Benedetto Croce rightly argues that in order to _appreciate_ the
artistic works of bygone and extinct nations, it is necessary to have
a knowledge and understanding of their life and history--in other
words, of their values.[79] What he does not point out, however, and
what seems very important, is, that such historical research would be
quite unnecessary to one who by nature was _a priori_ in sympathy with
the values of an extinct nation; and also, that all the historical
knowledge available could not make any one whose character was not
a little Periclean or Egyptian from the start, admire, or even
appreciate, either the Parthenon, or the brilliant diorite statue of
King Khephrën in the Cairo Museum.
All great ruler-art, then, is, as it were, a song of praise, a
magnificat, appealing only to those, and pleasing only those, who feel
in sympathy with the values which it advocates. And that is why all art
of any importance, and of any worth, must be based upon a certain group
of values--in other words, must have a philosophy or a particular view
of the world as its foundation. Otherwise it is pointless, meaningless,
and divorced from life. Otherwise it is acting, sentimental nonsense,
or _l'art pour l'art_.
All great ruler-art also takes Man as its content; because human values
are the only values that concern it. All great ruler-art also takes
beauty within a certain people as its aim; because the will-to-power is
its driving instinct, and beauty, being the most difficulty thing to
achieve, is the strongest test of power. Finally, all great ruler-art
is optimistic; because it implies the will of the artist to prevail.
But what constitutes the form of the ruler-artist's work? In what way
must he give us his content?
The ruler-artist's form is the form of the commander. It must scorn
to please.[80] It must brook no disobedience and no insubordination,
save among those of its beholders about whom it does not care, from
whom it would fain separate itself, and among whom it is not with its
peers. It must be authoritative, extremely simple, irrefutable, full
of restraint, and as repetitive as a Mohammedan prayer. It must point
to essentials, it must select essentials, and it must transfigure
essentials. The presence of non-essentials in a work of art is
sufficient to put it at once upon a very low plane. For what matters
above all is that the ruler-artist should prevail in concepts, and in
order to do this his work must contain the definite statement of the
value he sets upon all that he most cherishes.
Hence the belief all through the history of æsthetic that high art is
a certain unity in variety, a certain single idea exhaled from a more
or less complex whole, or, as the Japanese say, "repetition with a
modicum of variation."[81]
_Symmetry_, as denoting balance, and as a help to obtaining a complete
grasp of an idea; _Sobriety_, as revealing that restraint which a
position of command presupposes; _Simplicity_, as proving the power
of the great mind that has overcome the chaos in itself,[82] to reflect
its order and harmony upon other things,[83] and to select the
most essential features from among a host of more or less essential
features; _Transfiguration_, as betraying that Dionysian elation and
elevation from which the artist gives of himself to reality and makes
it reflect his own glory back upon him; _Repetition_, as a means of
obtaining obedience; and _Variety_, as the indispensable condition of all
living Art--all Art which is hortatory and which does not aim at repose
alone, at sleep, and at soothing and lulling jaded and exasperated
nerves,--these are the principal qualities of ruler-art, and any work
which would be deficient in one of these qualities would thereby be
utterly and deservedly condemned to take its place on a lower plane.
Perhaps the greatest test of all, however, in regard to the worth of an
artistic production is to inquire whence it came, what was its source.
Has hunger or superabundance created it?[84]
If the first, the work will make nobody richer. It will rather rob
them of what they have. It is likely to be either (A) true to Nature,
(B) uglier than Nature, or (C) absurdly unnatural. A is the product of
the ordinary man, B is the product of the man below mediocrity, save
in a certain manual dexterity, and C is the outcome of the tyrannical
will of the sufferer,[85] who wishes to wreak his revenge on all that
thrives, and is beautiful and happy, and which bids him weave fantastic
worlds of his own, away from this one, where people of his calibre can
forget their wretched ailments and evil humours, and wallow in their
own feverish nightmares of overstrained, palpitating and neuropathic
yearnings. A is poverty-realism or Police Art. B is pessimism and
incompetent Art. C is Romanticism.
Where superabundance is active, the work is the gift and the blessing
of the will to power of some higher man. It will seem as much above
Nature to mediocre people as its creator is above them. But, since it
will brook no contradiction, it will actually value Nature afresh, and
stimulate them to share in this new valuation.
Where poverty is active, the work is an act of robbery. It is what
psychologists call a reflex action resulting from a stimulus--the
only kind of action that we understand nowadays: hence our belief in
Determinism, Darwinism, and such explanations of Art as we find in
books by Taine and other writers who share his views.
The Art which must have experience and which is not the outcome of
inner riches brought to the surface by meditation--this is the art of
poverty. The general modern belief in experience and in the necessity
of furnishing the mind by going direct to Nature and to reality shows
to what extent the Art of to-day has become reactive instead of active.
The greater part of modern realism is the outcome of this poverty. It
is reactive art, resulting from reflex actions; and, as such, is an
exceedingly unhealthy sign. Not only does it show that the power of
resisting stimuli is waning or altogether absent; but it also denotes
that that inner power which requires no stimulus to discharge itself is
either lacking or exceedingly weak.
With these words upon the subject of realism, I shall now conclude this
part of Lecture II.
I shall return to realism in my next lecture; but you will see that
it will be of a different kind from that of which I have just spoken.
It will be superior, and will be the outcome of riches rather than
of poverty. Although beneath genuine Ruler-art, which transfigures
reality, it will nevertheless be superior to the poverty-realism
which I have just discussed; for it will be of a kind which is forced
upon the powerful artist who, in the midst of a world upholding other
values than his own, is obliged to bring forward his ideal with such
a preponderance of characteristic features as would seem almost to
represent a transcript of reality. This realism I call _militant
realism_, to distinguish it from the former kind.
In discussing mediæval. Renaissance and Greek Art, in my next lecture,
this distinction will, I hope, be made quite plain to you.
[73] _G. E._, p. 120
[74] _Z._, I, XXI.
[75] _The Book of Tea_, p. 152.
[76] _Ibid._ 199.
[77] _Z._, I, XXVI.
[78] _System der Æsthetik_ (1790), pp. 9, 10, 11, where,
in replying to the question why the arts were not only pursued with
more perfection by the ancients, but also judged with more competence
by them, he says: "Their material was drawn from the heart of their
nation, and from the life of their citizens, and the manner of
representing it and of framing it was in keeping with the character
and needs of the people.... If the Greek lent his ear to the poet, or
his eye to the painter and sculptor, of his age, he was shown subjects
which were familiar to his soul, intimately related to his imagination,
and, as it were, bound by blood-relationship to his heart." On pp. 12,
13, he also shows that if Art is less thrilling nowadays, it is because
peoples are too mixed, and a single purpose no longer characterizes
their striving.
[79] _Æsthetic_ (translated by Douglas Ainslie), p. 210 et seq.
[80] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 277: "The greatness of an artist is
not to be measured by the beautiful feelings which he evokes: let this
belief be left to the girls. It should be measured according to the
extent to which he approaches the grand style, according to the extent
to which he is capable of the grand style. This style and great passion
have this in common--that they scorn to please; that they forget to
persuade; that they command; that they will...." See also p. 241.
[81] This was first brought to my notice by my friend, Dr.
Wrench. See _The Grammar of Life_, by G. T. Wrench (Heinemann, 1908),
p. 218. Although the development of this idea really belongs to a
special treatise on the laws of Style in painting, it is interesting
to note here that this excellent principle is quickly grasped if the
powerfully alliterative phrases: "Where there's a will there's a way,"
or "Goodness gracious!" or "To-morrow, to-morrow, and not to-day," be
spoken before certain pictures, or written beneath them. The first
phrase, for instance, written beneath the "Aldobrindini Marriage," or
Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," is seen immediately to be next of kin to
these pictures as an art-form; and the same holds good of the second
written beneath Reynolds's "John Dunning (First Lord Ashburton) and his
Sister," or Manet's "Olympia."
[82] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 277.
[83] _W. P._, Vol. II. p. 288. "The most convincing artists
are those who make harmony ring out of every discord, and who benefit
all things by the gift of their power and their inner harmony: in
every work of art they merely reveal the symbol of their inmost
experiences--their creation is gratitude for their life." See also p.
307.
[84] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 280: "In regard to all æsthetic
values I now avail myself of this fundamental distinction: in every
individual case I ask myself has hunger or has superabundance been
creative here?"
[85] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 281.