LANDSCAPE AND PORTRAIT PAINTING
"He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for
the service of man: that he may bring forth fruit out of the
earth."--Psalms civ. 14.
1. The Value "Ugly" in the Mouth of the Creator.
In the last section of this lecture, I told you of three kinds of
ugliness. I said there was the ugliness of chaos and disorder, which
provokes the hate of the layman, and which the artist overcomes. I
spoke of the ugliness of form in Art, which appeared when the artist
had failed in his endeavour to master disorder, or when he had selected
a subject already ordered, in which he has left himself no scope
for manifesting his power; and I also pointed to that ugliness of
subject in Art, in which the ordinary beholder, as well as the artist,
recognizes the degeneration of his type or a low example of it.
There is, however, a fourth aspect of ugliness, and that is the
esoteric postulation of the value "ugly" by the creator. I have shown
how creating also involves giving, and therefore loss--just as
procreation does; but what is the precise meaning of the word "ugly" in
the mouth of the Dionysian artist?
We must remember that his eyes are not our eyes, and that his mind is
not our mind. He cannot look at Life without enriching her. But what is
his attitude to the transfigurations of former artists?
Before these the Dionysian artist can feel only loathing, and, in
a paroxysm of hatred, he raises his axe and shatters the past into
fragments. All around him, a moment before, people said: "The world
is beautiful!" But he, thoroughly alone, groans at its unspeakable
ugliness.
He rejoices as he sees the fragments fly beneath his mighty weapon,
and the greater the beauty of the thing he destroys, the higher is his
exultation. For, to him, "the joy in the destruction of the most noble
thing and at the sight of its gradual undoing," is "the joy over what
is coming and what lies in the future," and this "triumphs over actual
things, however good they may be."[1]
What he calls "ugly," then, has nothing whatsoever in common with any
other concept of ugliness; it is simply the outcome of his creative
spirit "which compels him to regard what has existed hitherto as no
longer acceptable, but as botched, worthy of being suppressed--ugly!"[2]
And thus it is peculiar to him alone.
I have shown you that Nietzsche explains pleasure, æsthetically, as
the appropriation of the world by man's Will to Power. Pain, or evil,
now obtains its æsthetic justification. It is the outcome of the
destruction that the creator spreads in a world of Becoming; it is the
periodical smashing of Being by the Dionysian creator who can endure
Becoming. No creator can tolerate the past save as a thing which once
served as his schooling. But a people are usually one with their past.
To them it is at once a grandfather, a father, and an elder brother.
In a trice the creator deprives them of these relatives. Through him
they are made orphans, brotherless and alone. Hence the pain that is
inevitably associated with the joy of destruction and of creation.
Not only a creative genius, however, but also a creative age, may use
the word ugly in this Dionysian sense. For a robust and rich people
scorn to treasure and to hoard that which has gone before. And thus our
museums, alone, are perhaps the greatest betrayal of our times.
When the Athenians returned to their ruined Acropolis in the first
half of the fifth century before Christ, they did not even scratch
the ground to recover the masterpieces that lay broken, though not
completely destroyed, all around them. And, as Professor Gardner
observes, it is fortunate for us that no mortar was required for the
buildings which were being erected to take the place of those that
had been destroyed; otherwise these fragments of marble sculpture
and architecture, instead of being buried to help in filling up the
terraced area of the Acropolis, would certainly have gone to the
lime-kiln.[3]
The men of the Renaissance, in the same way, regarded the buildings of
ancient Rome merely as so many quarries whence they might bear away
the materials for their own constructions. And whether Paul II wished
to build the Palazzo di Venezia, or Cardinal Riario the Cancellaria,
the same principle obtained. At the same period we also find Raphael
destroying the work of earlier painters by covering it with his own
compositions,[4] and Michelangelo not hesitating to obliterate
even Perugino's altar frescoes in the Sixtine Chapel in order to paint
his "Judgment." While in comparatively recent times, at a moment
when a great future seemed to be promised to modern Egypt, Mehemet
Ali sent his architect to the sacred Pyramids of Gizeh, to rob them
of the alabaster which he required for his magnificent mosque on the
citadel of Cairo.[5]
From a purely archæological and scholastic point of view, therefore,
it is possible to justify our museums--the British Museum, for
instance. But from the creative or artistic standpoint, they are simply
a confession of impotence, of poverty, and of fear; and, as such, are
utterly contemptible. In any case, however, I think that, for the
sake of public taste and sanity, some of the ugly fragments--such as
two-thirds of the maimed and mutilated parts of bodies from the Eastern
and Western pediments of the Parthenon--ought never to have been
allowed to stand outside a students' room in a school of archæology or
of art, and even in such institutions as these, I very much question
the value of the pieces to which I have referred.
[1] _W. P._, Vol I, p. 333. See also _B. T._, pp. 27, 28.
[2] _W. P._, Vol. I, p. 333.
[3] _A Handbook of Greek Sculpture_, by E. A. Gardner, M.A., p. 212.
[4] Piero della Francesca's decorations in the Vatican, painted under
the direction of Pope Nicholas V, were ultimately destroyed by Raphael.
See W. S. Waters, M.A., _Piero della Francesca_, pp. 23, 24, 108.
[5] See also Fergusson, _A History of Architecture_, Vol. I, p. 48:
"... If we had made the same progress in the higher that we have in the
lower branches of the building art, we should see a Gothic Cathedral
pulled down with the same indifference, content to know that we could
easily replace it by one far nobler and more worthy of our age and
intelligence. No architect during the Middle Ages ever hesitated to
pull down any part of a cathedral that was old and going to decay;
and to replace it with something in the style of the day, however
incongruous that might be; and if we were progressing as they were, we
should have as little compunction in following the same course."
2. Landscape Painting.
Up to the present, I have spoken only of Man as the proper subject
of Ruler-Art. I have done this because Man is the highest subject of
Art in general, and because the moment humanity ceases from holding
the first place in our interest, something must be amiss, either with
humanity, or with ourselves.
Still, there are degrees and grades among ruler-artists. All of them
cannot aspire to the exposition of the highest human values. And just
as some turn to design and to ornament, and thus, in a small way,
arrange and introduce order into a small area of the world, so others
--standing halfway between these designers and the valuers of humanity
--apply their powers quite instinctively to Nature away from Man. They
have a thought to express--let us say it is: "Order is the highest
good," or "Power is the source of all pleasure and beauty," or "Anarchy
contends in vain against the governing power of light which is genius,"
and in the case of this last thought they paint a rugged scene which
they reveal as arranged, simplified and transfigured by the power of
the sun. In each of these cases they use Nature merely as a symbol, or
a vehicle, by means of which their thought or valuation is borne in
upon their fellows; and they do not start out as actual admirers of
mere scenery, wishing only to repeat it as carefully as possible.
Even when it uses Nature merely as a symbol or a vehicle, however,
there can be little doubt that this kind of Ruler-Art is a degree lower
in rank than the art which concerns itself with man; and when this
kind of art becomes realistic, as it did with Constable and all his
followers, it is literally superfluous. Only when the landscape is a
minor element, serving but to receive and convey the mood or aspiration
of the artist, is it a subject for Ruler-Art, and then the hand of
man should be visible in it everywhere. With the artist's arranging,
simplifying and transfiguring power observable in Nature, landscape
painting, as Kant very wisely observed in his _Kritik der Urteilskraft_,
becomes a process of pictorial gardening, and as such can teach very
great lessons.
Still, all landscapes ought to be approached with caution by the lover
of Ruler-Art; for unless they are treated with an extreme ruler-spirit,
they point too imperatively away from man, to promise a development
that can be wholesomely human.
When it is remembered that landscape painting only became a really
important and serious branch of art when all the turmoil and
contradiction which three successive changes of values had brought
about were at their height--I refer to the blow levelled at Mediæval
values by the Renaissance, to 'the blow levelled at the Renaissance
by the Counter-Renaissance and Protestantism (in its German form of
Evangelism and in its English form as Puritanism), and to the blow
levelled at the artistic spirit of Europe in general by the rise of
modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--and when,
therefore, doubt and confusion had already entered men's minds as to
what was to be believed about Man and Life; when it is remembered also
that it was precisely in the north, where, as we shall see, culture was
less a matter of tradition than in the south, that landscape found its
most energetic and most realistic exponents--from Joachim Patenier[6]
to Ruysdael; and that it was in the north, even after the
Renaissance, that the negative character of Christianity, in regard to
humanity and to Life, found its strongest adherents; the importance of
establishing a very severe canon in regard to all landscape painting,
and of insisting upon very high ruler qualities in this branch of the
art, ought to be clear to all who take this subject to heart.
For, difficult as it may seem to realize it, there is nothing
whatsoever artistically beautiful in landscape.[7] Only sentimental[8]
townspeople, compelled by their particular mode of existence
to gaze daily on their own hideous homes and streets, ever manifest
a senselessly ardent and determined affection for green fields and
hills, for their own sake; and with English psychologists, it would be
quite admissible here to say that all beauty that particular people
believe to exist in country scenery, is the outcome of association. The
ancients liked the sunlit and fruitful valley because of its promise of
sustenance and wealth; but they showed no love of nature as such.[9]
Mr. S. H. Butcher,[10] for instance, points out how landscape painting
only became a serious and independent branch of art among the Greeks
after the fourth century B.C.--that is to say, long over a century
after the date when, according to Freeman, the decline of Hellas
began; and, in speaking of the Greeks in their best period, he says:
"They do not attach themselves to nature with that depth of feeling,
with that gentle melancholy, that characterizes the moderns....
Their impatient imagination only traverses nature to pass beyond it to
the drama of human life." J. A. Symonds tells us that "Conciseness,
simplicity and an almost prosaic accuracy are the never-failing
attributes of classical descriptive art--moreover, humanity was always
more present to their minds than to ours. Nothing evoked sympathy
from the Greek unless it appeared before him in human shape, or in
connection with some human sentiment. The ancient poets do not describe
inanimate nature as such, or attribute a vague spirituality to fields
and clouds. That feeling for the beauty of the world which is embodied
in such poems as Shelley's _Ode to the West Wind_ gave birth in their
imagination to definite legends, involving some dramatic interest and
conflict of passions."[11] And Mahaffy and Mr. W. R. Hardie tell the same
story.[12]
But even among sensible moderns, uninfected by sentimental fever, the
love of nature is mostly of a purely utilitarian kind, as witness the
love of cornfields, hayfields and orchards. The farmer at certain times
gazes kindly at the purple hills behind his acres of cultivated land,
because their colour indicates the coming rain. The cattle-breeder
smiles as he surveys the Romney marshes, and thinks of the splendid
pastureland they would make.
In fact, the attitude of sensible mankind in general towards landscape,
as landscape, seems to have been pretty well summarized by the writer
of the 104th Psalm, from whom, according to W. H. Rhiel, the Christian
world, and especially the Teutonic part of it, seems to have derived
much of their love of the beauties of Nature.[13]
What constitutes the artistic beauty in a painted landscape, then, is
the mood, the particular human quality, that the artist throws into
it. As the French painters say, a landscape is a state of the soul;
and unless the particular mood or idea with which the artist invests
a natural scene have some value and interest, and be painted in a
commanding or ruler manner, it is a mere piece of superfluous foolery,
which may, however, find its proper place on a great railway poster or
in an estate agent's illustrated catalogue.
There is, on the other hand, another kind of love of nature, which
dates only from the eighteenth century, and which is thoroughly and
unquestionably contemptible. This also, like the above, is the result
of association, and has nothing artistic in its constitution; but this
time it is an association which is misanthropic and negative. I refer
to what is generally known as the love of the Romantic in Nature, the
love of mountains, torrents, unhandseled copses, virgin woods, and
rough and uncultivated country.
In this love a new element enters the appreciation of Nature, and
that is a dislike and mistrust of everything that bears the stamp of
man's power or his labour, and therefore an exaltation of everything
untutored, uncultured, free, unconstrained and wild.
This attitude of mind seems to have been unknown not only to the Greeks
and to the Romans,[14] but, practically, to all European nations up
to the time of Rousseau. As Friedländer says, it would be difficult
to find evidence of travellers going to mountain country in quest of
beauty, before the eighteenth century,[15] and the majority of those who
were forced to visit such country, before that time, in their Journeys
to foreign cities, describe it as horrible, ugly and depressing. Oliver
Goldsmith is a case in point. Riehl declares that in guidebooks, even
as late as 1750, Berlin, Leipzig, Augsburg, Darmstadt, Mannheim, etc.,
are spoken of as lying in nice and cheerful surroundings, whilst the
most picturesque parts (according to modern notions) of the Black
Forest, of the Harz, and the Thuringian woods are described as "very
gloomy," "barren," and "monstrous," or at least as not particularly
pleasant. And then he adds: "This is not the private opinion of the
individual topographists: it is the standpoint of the age."[16]
Even in the Bible illustrations of the eighteenth century, we also find
the same spirit prevailing. Paradise--that is to say, the original
picture of virgin glory in natural beauty--is made to look like what
moderns would call a monotonously flat garden, devoid of any indication
of a hill, in which the Almighty, or Adam, or somebody, has already
clipped all the trees and hedges, and carefully trimmed the grass.
You may argue with Riehl[17] that mediæval painters must have thought
rough, wild and barren country beautiful; otherwise, why did they put
it in their pictures? One low-German painter of the Middle Ages, for
instance, painted a picture of Cologne, and, contrary to the genuine
nature of the surrounding country, introduced a background of jagged
and rocky mountains. Why did he do this, if he did not think jagged and
rocky mountains beautiful?
In reply to this I cannot do better than quote Friedländer again, who
on this very question writes as follows--
"At least the lack of a sense for the beauty of mountain scenery, which
is noticeable in the poetry and travels of the Middle Ages, viewed as
a whole, ought to lead us to suspect that this same sense could have
been only very slightly apparent in the realm of pictorial art. But
ought we not to ascribe the fantastic and romantic art ideal of the old
masters, in landscape, rather to their endeavour to transfer the scene
and figures of their pictures from reality to an imaginary world?...
Even if historical painters like John van Eyck and Memling eagerly
introduced jagged rocks and sharp mountain (which apparently they had
never seen) into their backgrounds ... it is difficult to recognize
any real understanding or even knowledge of the nature of mountains in
all this; but simply an old and therefore very conventional form of
heroic landscape which was considered as the only suitable one for a
large number of subjects."[18]
But there is other evidence, besides that to be found in mediæval
poetry and travels, which shows to what extent the particular sense
for natural beauty, which I am now discussing, was lacking in the
Middle Ages. Its absence is also illustrated by the arrangement of
castles and other buildings. Mr. d'Auvergne, in his work _The English
Castles_, more than once calls attention to this, and instances a tower
at Dunstanburgh Castle,[19] which, though commanding a wildly romantic
prospect, was selected for the vilest domestic uses.
Suddenly, all this is contradicted and reversed. Precisely where man's
hand has been, everything is supposed to be polluted, unclean, and
ugly; and rough, uncultivated nature, however rugged, however unkempt,
is exalted above all that which the human spirit has shaped and trained.
How did this change come about?
To begin with, let it be said, that it was not quite so sudden as
Friedländer would have us suppose. Long before the dawn of the
eighteenth century, the very principles that were at the base of
European life and aspirations--the principle of the depravity of man,
the principle of liberty for liberty's sake, the principle of the
pursuit of general truth; and finally, the principle that experience
--that is to say, a direct appeal to nature--was the best method of
furnishing the mind--all these principles had been leading steadily to
one conclusion, and this conclusion Rousseau was the first to embody in
his energetic and fulminating protest against culture, tradition, human
power and society. And the fact that his doctrine spread so rapidly,
that within fifty years of its exposition, with the help of men like
Coxe, Ramond de Carbonnières, Étienne de Sénancour, Töppefer, Saussure
and Bourit, it had practically become the credo and the passion of
Europe, shows how ready the age must have been for the lessons Rousseau
taught it.
All of you who have read the fulsome and bombastic praise of Nature,
together with the bitter disparagement of the work of man, in such
works as _La Nouvelle Héloise_, the _Confessions_, his letters to _Monsieur
de Malesherbes_, and his _Reveries of a lonely Rambler_, will not require
to be told the gospel Rousseau preaches.[20]
Suffice it to say, that he successfully created a love of the rough, of
the rugged, the unhandseled and the uncultivated in the minds of almost
all Europeans--especially Northerners, and that this love was rapidly
reflected in landscape painting.
This new feeling for the romantic, for the unconstrained and for
the savage in Nature, although it soon dominated art, was, in its
essentials, quite foreign to art and to the artist. It had nothing
in common with the motives that prompt and impel the artist to his
creations. Its real essence was moral and not artistic; its fundamental
feature was its worship of the abstract principles of liberty, anarchy
and the absence of culture, which rude nature exemplifies on all sides;
and it was a moral or scientific spirit that animated it, whether in
Rousseau or in his followers.
Friedrich Schiller, who entirely supports Rousseau's particular kind
of love for Nature, frankly admits this[21] in his able and profound
analysis of the sentiment in question; whatever self-contempt, and
contempt of adult manhood, may have lain behind Rousseau's valuations,
Schiller brings all of it openly into the light of day, and in his
efforts to support the Frenchman's school of thought, literally exposes
it to ridicule.
One or two voices, such as Hegel's[22] and Chateaubriand's, were raised in
protest against this thoroughly vulgar and sentimental attitude towards
savage and wild phenomena; but they were unable to resist a movement,
the strength of which had been accumulating for so many centuries in
the hearts of almost all Europeans; and, ultimately, numbers triumphed.
Even the hand of man--of the artist--in a painted landscape, got
to be a thing of the past. Realism--because it most conscientiously
repeated that unconstrained and anarchical spirit which the romantic
age loved to detect in matted weeds, in tangled and impenetrable
coppices, in thick festoons of parasitic plants, in unhandseled
brambles and in babbling brooks--became the ruling principle.
Classical influence alone was able for a while to resist too rapid a
decline; but soon we find Constable declaring in the early part of
the nineteenth century, that "there is nothing ugly," and addressing
aspiring artists in these words: "Observe that thy best director, thy
perfect guide is Nature. Copy from her. In her paths is thy triumphal
arch. She is above all other teachers; and ever confide in her with
a bold heart:"[23] and a whole host of people following in his wake and
applauding his principles.
Just as England by her influence had created Rousseau and his peculiar
mode of thinking,[24] so, again, British influence was to show its
power in the world of Art. The parallel is striking, but nevertheless
true. In the years 1824, 1826 and 1829, Constable, whom Muther calls
the father of landscape painting,[25] and whom Meier Graefe calls the
father of modern painting,[26] exhibited in Paris, and his style soon
became a dominant force.[27]
Stendhal, though very much too moderate, was one of the first to
raise, his voice against the lack of idealism (transfiguration,
simplification) in these English pictures; but his efforts were of
no avail, and he might just as well have shouted in the face of a
hurricane.
[6] According to Dr. Wilhelm Lübke, _Outlines of the History of Art_
(Vol. II, p. 452), Patenier might almost be called the founder of the
modern northern school of landscape painting. See also p. 575 in the
same volume. On this subject see also Muther, _Geschichte der Malerei_,
Vol. II, p. 72: "Although in a way it is possible to establish in what
respect the painting of the Netherlands in the sixteenth century ran
parallel with that of Italy, it is also necessary to emphasize the
fact, on the other hand, that painting." Muther mentions Hendrik Met de
Bles, Joachim de Patenier and Bosch as the leaders of this tendency.
[7] See W. H. Riehl, _Culturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten_, p. 67.
[8] This use of the word sentimental in regard to the love of nature
for its own sake, is not by any means unprecedented. Schiller, in his
essay _Ueber naive und sentimentale Dichtung_, as an advocate in favour
of the love in question, constantly refers to it as sentimental. (See
1838 Edition of _Works_, Vol. XII, pp. 167-281.)
[9] See W. R. Hardie, _Lectures in Classical Subjects_, pp. 16-17:
"What are the scenes in Nature which had the greatest attraction
for the ancients? The landscape which a Greek would choose for his
environment was a tranquil one, a cultivated spot or a spot capable
of cultivation;" and p. 21: "... apart from the work of one or two
exceptional poets like Æschylus or Pindar, it must be allowed that the
ancient view of Nature was somewhat prosaic and practical, showing a
decided preference for fertile, habitable and accessible country."
[10] _Some Aspects of Greek Genius_, p. 252. See also his remarks,
pp. 246-248, concluding thus: "The great period, indeed, of the Attic
drama, when the dialectic movement of thought was in full operation,
can hardly be called 'simple' in Schiller's sense" [he is quoting
Schiller on "Simple and Sentimental Poetry," where in the opening
paragraph Schiller applies the word _naiv_, simple, to a natural
object, as meaning that state in which nature and art stand contrasted
and the former shames the latter]; "yet even then, as in Homer, nature
is but the background of the picture, the scene in which man's activity
displays itself. The change of sentiment sets in only from the time
of Alexander onwards. Nature is then sought for her own sake; artists
and poets turn to her with disinterested love; her moods are lovingly
noted, and she is brought into close relationship with man."
[11] _Studies of the Greek Poets_, Vol. II, p. 258.
[12] See _Social Life in Greece_ (Mahaffy), p. 426, and _What have the
Greeks done for Modern Civilization?_ (Mahaffy, 1909), p. 11: "External
nature was the very thing that the Greeks, all through their great
history, felt less keenly than we should have expected. Their want of a
sense of the picturesque has ever been cited as a notable defect." See
also W. R. Hardie, _Lectures on Classical Subjects_ (1903), p. 8: "To
what extent do the modern feelings and fancies about Nature appear in
the ancient poets?... The usual and substantially true answer is that
they appear to a very slight extent. Like Whitehead, the Greek is slow
to recognize 'a bliss that leans not to mankind.'"
[13] _Culturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten_ (2nd Edition, 1859), p. 63.
[14] See S. H. Butcher, _Some Aspects of the Greek Genius_, pp. 265,
266: "Mountains and lonely woods and angry seas, in all periods of
Greek literature, so far from calling out a sublime sense of mystery
and awe, raise images of terror and repulsion, of power divorced from
beauty and alien to art. Homer, when for the moment he pauses to
describe a place, chooses one in which the hand of man is visible;
which he has reclaimed from the wild, made orderly, subdued to his own
use. Up to the last days of Greek antiquity man has not yet learnt
so to lose himself in the boundless life of Nature, as to find a
contemplative pleasure in her wilder and more majestic scenes."
See also J. A. Symonds, _Studies of the Greek Poets_, Vol. II, p. 257:
"The Greeks and Romans paid less attention to inanimate nature than
we do, and were beyond all question repelled by the savage grandeur
of marine and mountain scenery, preferring landscapes of smiling
and cultivated beauty to rugged sublimity or the picturesqueness of
decay...."
See also W. R. Hardie, _Lectures on Classical Subjects_, pp. 3, 9, 17,
and Friedlander, _Roman Life and Manners_, Vol. I. pp. 391, 392, 393,
395.
[15] _Ueber die Entstehung und Entwicklung des Gefühls für das
Romantische in der Natur_, pp. 4, 10.
[16] _Culturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten_, p. 57.
[17] _Ibid._, pp. 59, 60.
[18] _Ueber die Entstehung und Entwicklung des Gefühls für das
Romantische in der Natur_, pp. 2, 3.
[19] E. B. d'Auvergne, _The English Castles_, pp. 216, 217.
[20] See _Lettres Nouvelles addressées à Monsieur de Malesherbes_
(Geneva, 1780), 3rd letter, p. 43. Speaking of a lonely walk in the
neighbourhood of his country house, he says: "J'allois alors d'un pas
plus tranquille chercher quelque lieu sauvage dans la forêt, quelque
lieu désert, où rien ne me montrant la main de l'homme ne m'annonçât
la servitude et la domination, enfin quelqu' asyle où je pusse croire
avoir pénétré le premier, et où nul tiers importun ne vint s'entreposer
entre la nature et moi. C'était là qu'elle sembloit déployer à mes
yeux une magnificence toujours nouvelle. L'or des genêts et la pourpre
des bruyères frappoient mes yeux d'un luxe qui touchoit mon cœur; la
majesté des arbres"--and so on in the same romantic strain for twenty
lines. It is impossible to reproduce every passage I should like
to quote, in order to reveal the full range of Rousseau's passion
for nature and his bitter contempt of man and man's work; but the
above is typical, and other equally gushing passages may be found in
_Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire_ (Paris, 1882), pp. 119, 138,
etc., etc.; _La Nouvelle Héloise_, especially the 11th letter; _Les
Confessions_ (Ed. 1889, Vol. I), Bk. VI, pp. 229, 234, 238, 245, and
Bk. IV, p. 169: "... on sait déjà ce que j'entends par un beau pays.
Jamais pays de plaine, quelque beau qu'il fût, ne parut tel à mes yeux.
Il me faut des torrents, des rochers, des sapins, des bois noirs, des
montagnes, des chemins raboteux à monter et à descendre, des précipices
à mes cotés, qui me fassent peur.... J'eus ce plaisir ... en approchant
de Chambéri ... car ce qu'il y a de plaisir dans mon goût pour des
lieux escarpés, est qu'ils me font tourner la tête: et j'aime beaucoup
ce tournoiement pourvu que je sois en sureté."
[21] _Sämmtliche Werke_ (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1838), Vol. XII,
"Ueber naive und sentimentale Dichtung," p. 168, 169: "This kind of
pleasure at the sight of Nature is not an æsthetic pleasure, but a
moral one: for it is arrived at by means of an idea, and it is not
felt immediately the act of contemplation has taken place, neither
does it depend for its existence upon beauty of form." And, p. 189,
after pointing out that the Greeks completely lacked this feeling for
Nature, he says: "Whence comes this different sense? How is it that we
who, in everything related to Nature, are inferior to the ancients,
should pay such homage to her, should cling so heartily to her, and
be able to embrace the inanimate world with such warmth of feeling?
It is not our greater conformity to Nature, but, on the contrary, the
opposition to her, which is inherent in our conditions and our customs,
that impels us to find some satisfaction in the physical world for our
awakening instinct for truth and primitive rudeness, which, like the
moral tendency from which that instinct arises, lies incorruptible and
indestructible in all human hearts and can find no satisfaction in the
moral world."
[22] See _Hegels Leben_, by Karl Rosenkranz, especially pp. 475, 476
and 482, 483.
[23] See _The Life and Letters of John Constable_, by C. R. Leslie,
R.A., pp. 343, 349.
[24] See J. Morley's _Rousseau_, Vol. I, pp. 85, 86: "According to
his own account, it was Voltaire's Letters on the English which first
drew him seriously to study, and nothing which that illustrious man
wrote at this time escaped him." And p. 146: "Locke was Rousseau's most
immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmed himself to have treated
the same matters exactly on Locke's principles. Rousseau, however,
exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly as Condillac exaggerated his
metaphysics." And p. 147: "We need not quote passages from Locke to
demonstrate the substantial correspondence of assumption between him
and the author of the Social Contract. They are to be found in every
chapter."
[25] _Geschichte der Malerei_, Vol. III, p. 175.
[26] _Modern Art_, Vol. I, p. 140.
[27] _Ibid._, p. 138: "What his fatherland neglected was taken over
by the Continent. Strange as this neglect may seem, the rapidity
with which Europe assimilated Constable is even more remarkable.
The movement began in Paris.... France needed what Constable had to
give.... The young Frenchmen saw the traditional English freedom with
eyes sharpened by enthusiasm."
3. Portrait Painting.
When one now adds to these influences, the steady rise of the power of
the bourgeoisie in Europe, from the seventeenth century onward, and,
as a result of this increasing power, an uninterrupted growth in the
art of portrait painting--a growth that attained such vast proportions
that it cast all attainments of a like nature in any other age or
continent into the shade--one can easily understand what factors have
been the most formidable opponents of Ruler-Art in the Occident, since
the event of the Renaissance.
After all that I have said concerning the principles of Ruler-Art, it
will scarcely be necessary for me to expatiate upon those elements in
portrait painting which are antagonistic to these principles; for when
you think of portrait painting as it has been developed by the claims
of the bourgeoisie in Europe, you must not have Leonardo da Vinci's
"Mona Lisa" in mind. Neither must you consider that portrait work
in which, by chance, the artist has had before him a model who, in
every feature of face or of figure, corresponded to his ideal; nor
that in which the artist has been able to allow himself to exercise
his simplifying and transfiguring power. Otherwise some of the best
of Rubens' and Rembrandt's work would of necessity come under the ban
which we must set upon by far the greater number of portraits.
[Illustration: Saskia By Rembrandt.]
When Rembrandt painted his bride Saskia,[28] for instance, the extent to
which he exercised his simplifying and transfiguring power is amazing,
and precludes all possibility of our classing this work among the
portraits which should be condemned. He knew perfectly well that poor
Saskia was not beautiful--what beautiful girl would have condescended
to look at Rembrandt?--so what did he do? He cast all the upper and
right side of her face in shadow, and deliberately concentrated all
his attention, and consequently the attention of the beholder as well,
upon three or four square inches of nice round muscle in the lower part
of Saskia's young cheek and neck. But how many plain daughters of rich
bourgeois would allow three or four square inches of their cheek and
neck to be exalted in this way, at the cost of their eyes and their
nose and their brow? The same remarks also apply to Rembrandt's "Jewish
Rabbi" in the National Gallery. There he had to deal with an emaciated,
careworn old Jew. How did he overcome the difficulty? All of you who
know this picture will be able to answer this question for yourselves,
and I need not, therefore, go into the matter.
This, then, is not the class of portrait work which need necessarily
deteriorate the power of art. What does deteriorate this power, is
that other and more common class of portrait painting which began in
Holland in the seventeenth century, and in which each sitter insisted
upon discovering all his little characteristics and individual
peculiarities; in which, as Muther says, each sitter wished to find "a
counterfeit of his personality," and in which "no artistic effect, but
resemblance alone was the object desired."[29]
It was the insistence upon this kind of portrait work by the wealthy
bourgeoisie of England, which well-nigh drove Whistler, with his
ruler spirit, out of his mind, and it is precisely this portrait work
which is dominant to-day. In order to be pleasing and satisfactory
to the people who demand it, this class of painting presupposes the
suppression of all those first principles upon which Ruler-Art relies
in order to flourish and to soar; and where it is seriously and
earnestly pursued, art is bound to suffer.
This was recognized three hundred years ago by the Spanish theoretician
Vincenti Carducho, and his judgment still remains the wisest that has
ever been written on the subject. In formulating the credo of the
sixteenth century, he wrote as follows--
"No great and extraordinary painter was ever a portraitist, for such
an artist is enabled by judgment and acquired habit to improve upon
nature. In portraiture, however, he must confine himself to the model,
whether it be good or bad, with sacrifice of his observation and
selection; which no one would like to do who has accustomed his mind
and his eye to good forms and proportions."[30]
Our art at the present day is, unfortunately, very largely the
development and natural outcome of the two influences I have just
described, and that accounts for a good deal for which I have failed to
account hitherto.
Art no longer gives: it takes. It no longer reflects beauty on reality:
it seeks its beauty in reality. And that is why it falls to pieces
judged by the standard of Ruler-Art. It cannot bear the fierce light
of an art that is intimate with Life and inseparable from Life. In
its death-throes it has decked itself with all kinds of metaphysical
plumes, in order that it may thus, perhaps, live after death. But these
plumes have been used before by dying gods and have proved of no avail.
"Virtue for virtue's sake," was the cry of a dying religion. "Art for
art's sake," is now the cry of an expiring godlike human function.
But unless this cry be altered very quickly into a cry of art for the
sake of Life, there will be no chance of saving it. Before this art for
Life's sake can be discovered, however; before the purpose after which
it will strive can be determined and established, the first thing to
which we shall have to lend our attention is not art, but mankind.
The purpose of man is a thousand times more important than the purpose
of art. The one determines the other. And as a proof of how intimately
the two are connected, see how much doubt there is as to the purpose of
art, precisely at a moment when men also, owing to the terrible civil
war which is raging among their values, are beginning to doubt the real
purpose of human existence.
It would be useless to indulge in a detailed criticism of individual
artists. To all those who have followed my arguments closely, no such
clumsy holding up of particular modern artists to ridicule will seem
necessary. In some of your minds these men are idols still, and it
pleases only the envious and the unsuccessful to see niche-statues
stoned.
The great artist, as I have shown you, is the synthetic and superhuman
spirit that apotheosizes the type of a people and thereby stimulates
them to a higher mode of life. But where should we go to-day, if we
wished to look for a type or for a desirable code of values which that
type would exemplify?
We know that we can go nowhere; for such things do not exist. They are
utterly and hopelessly extinct.
Our first duty, then, is not to mend the arts--you cannot mend a
cripple. But it is rather to mend the parents who bring forth this
cripple--to mend Life itself, and above all Man.
"Away from God and Gods did my will allure me," says Zarathustra; "what
would there be to create if there were Gods!
"But to man doth it ever drive me anew, my burning will; thus doth it
drive the hammer unto the stone.
"Alas, ye fellow-men, within the stone slumbereth an image for me,
the image of all my visions! Alas that it should perforce slumber in
ugliest stone!
"Now rageth my hammer, ruthlessly against its prison. From the stone
fly the fragments: what's that to me?
"I shall end the work: for a shadow came unto me--the stillest and
lightest of all things once came unto me.
"The beauty of the Superman came unto me as a shadow. Alas my brethren,
what are the gods to me now!"[31]
[28] Dresden Royal Picture Gallery.
[29] _History of Painting_ (Eng. Trans.), Vol. II, pp. 572, 576.
[30] Muther, _History of Painting_ (English Translation), Vol. II, p.
481.
[31] _Z._, II, XXIV.
Lecture III[1]
Nietzsche's Art Principles in the History of Art
Part I
Christianity and the Renaissance
"For if ye live after the flesh ye shall die: but if ye
through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye
shall live."--Romans viii. 13.
I shall now endeavour to show you when and where Nietzsche's Art
doctrine, or part of it, has raised its head in the past, and to touch
lightly upon the conditions which led to its observance.
In doing this I shall travel backwards, zigzag fashion, from Rome,
viâ Greece to Egypt, and beginning with Christianity, I shall show
how the Holy Catholic Church succeeded in establishing one of the
conditions necessary to all great Art, which, as I have said, is unity
and solidarity lasting over a long period of time, and forming men
according to a definite and severe scheme of values.
[1] Delivered at University College on Dec. 15th, 1910.
1. Rome and the Christian Ideal.
The compass of these lectures does not allow me to say anything
concerning the Art of Rome. There are many aspects of this Art which
are both interesting and important from the historical standpoint;
but, from the particular point of view which I am now representing,
temporal Rome does not concern me nearly as much as sacred Rome and its
provincial Government.
For the first act of the Christian power was not to volatilize the
stone bulwarks of the monuments of antiquity, neither was it to
spiritualize the citizen of the Roman Empire; but it was to convert
Rome the secular administration into Rome the Eternal City.
Long before the exterior of the Græco-Roman column was divided up and
sub-divided, until, despite its volume, it seemed to have no solidity
whatever; and long before men's eyes and bodies were transformed from
broad, spacious wells of life into narrow, tenuous cylinders of fire,
a teaching was spread broadcast over the Roman Empire, the devouring
power of which was astounding, and the like of whose digestion has not
been paralleled in history.
The Romans in their latter days had degenerated through the decline
among them of that very principle which is the basis of all great
art--restraint. Always utilitarians, in the end they had become
materialists, and finally their will power had disintegrated.
Then, suddenly--perhaps through the very fact that their will power had
declined, and through a preponderance among them of a class of people
who were unfit to allow themselves any material enjoyment, and who were
conscious of this shortcoming--the pendulum of Life swung back with a
force so great to the opposite extreme, that the Pagan world was shaken
to its foundations, and in its death-agony stretched out its arms and
embraced the foreign creed which said--
"Flesh is death; Spirit is life and peace. The body is dead because of
sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If ye live after
the flesh ye shall die; but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the
deeds of the body, ye shall live."[2]
Here was a fundamentally new valuation, a totally novel outlook upon
the world of man. Some extraordinarily magnetic creator of values had
spread his will over an empire, and stamped his hand upon a corner of
the globe, and "the blessedness to write upon the will of millenniums
as upon brass,"[3] promised to be his.
Here was a principle which obviously must have found its origin in a
class of mind which, in order to overcome the flesh at all, knew of no
better means thereto than to cut it right away and for ever. It was not
a matter of contriving some sort of desirable inner harmony; the will
of the people in whom this creed took its roots was incapable of such
an achievement. The order went: "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck
it out, and cast it from thee ... if thy right hand offend thee, cut
it off!" Whenever the Spirit was mentioned it was spelt in capital
letters and uttered in exalted tones; while the body, on the other
hand, as the great obstacle to salvation, was written small. States of
the soul became surer indices to the qualities "good," "beautiful,"
and "virtuous," than states of the body, and the paradox that Life was
the denial of Life, was honestly believed to be an attainable ideal.
In Lübke's words: "Christianity disturbed the harmony between man and
nature, and introduced a sense of discordance by proclaiming to man a
higher spiritual law, in the light of which his inborn nature became a
sinful thing which he was to overcome."[4]
The people who acclaimed this teaching by instinct ultimately organized
themselves, conquered the Pagan world, enlisted Pagan elements into
their organization--Pagan spirit and Pagan order--and gradually
accomplished a task which no other European values seem to have
been able to do. They established one idea, one thought, one hope,
in the breasts of almost all great Western peoples, from Ireland to
Constantinople, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic.
The power of their creation--the Church--was such that it
co-ordinated the most heterogeneous elements, the most conflicting
factors, and the most absurd contrasts. And, however much one may
deprecate the nature of the type they advocated, and the ignoble
valuation of humanity upon which their religion was based, as a
Nietzschean, one can but acknowledge the power they wielded, the might
with which they made one ideal prevail, and the art with which for a
while they united and harmonized such discordant voices as those of the
people of Europe.
One can admire all this, I say, even though it is but a spiritual
reflection of Rome's former power, her former victories, and her former
law and order.[5]
For, soon, however un-Pagan the ideal may have been which the Church
made to prevail, the methods it employed were purely Pagan methods.
Fearing nothing, respecting nothing that was opposed to it, and not
losing heart before the difficulty of vanquishing even the most
formidable enemies of the expiring Empire--the Teutons away in the
North--spiritual Rome thus set about its task of appropriating
humanity; and all the art of the organizer, of the orator, of the
painter, sculptor and architect, was speedily ordered into its service.
If the type to which its ideal aspired were not already a general fact,
then it must be made a general fact. It must be reared, cultivated
and maintained.
Strangely enough, the feat of vanquishing the German nation proved a
thousand times easier to Rome the Eternal City, than it had done to
Rome the Metropolis of the Greatest Empire of antiquity. The ancient
Germans, with their strong tendency to subjectivity, to fantastic
brooding and to cobweb spinning, and with their coarse, brutal natures
unused either to restraint or to the culture that arises from it, fell
easy victims to this burning teaching of the spirit, of faith, and
of sentiment;[6] and it was in their susceptible and untutored
breasts that Christianity laid its firmest foundation.
In its work of appropriation and consumption, as I say, the Church
halted at nothing.
[2] Romans viii. 6, 10, 13.
[3] _Z._, III, LVI.
[4] _Outlines of the History of Art_, Vol. I, p. 445.
[5] See H. H. Milman, D.D., _History of Latin Christianity_ (Ed.
1864), Vol. I, p. 10. Speaking of Catholicism, he says: "It was
the Roman Empire, again extended over Europe by a universal code,
and a provincial government; by a hierarchy of religious prætors
or proconsuls, and a host of inferior officers, each in strict
subordination to those immediately above them, and gradually descending
to the very lowest ranks of society, the whole with a certain degree of
freedom of action, but a restrained and limited freedom, and with an
appeal to the spiritual Cæsar in the last resort."
[6] See J. B. Bury, _A History of the Roman Empire_, Vol. I, p. 17:
"It has been said that the function of the German nations was to
be the bearers of Christianity. The growth of the new religion was
indeed contemporary with the spread of the new races in the Empire,
but at this time in the external events of history, so far from
being closely attached to the Germans, Christianity is identified
with the Roman Empire. It is long afterwards that we see the mission
fulfilled. The connection lies on a psychological basis: the German
character was essentially subjective. The Teutons were gifted with
that susceptibility which we call heart, and it was to the needs
of the heart that Christianity possessed endless potentialities of
adaptation.... Christianity and Teutonism were both solvents of the
ancient world, and as the German nations became afterwards entirely
Christian, we see that they were historically adapted to one another."
2. The Pagan Type appropriated and transformed by Christian Art.
Just as St. Paul had not refrained from taking possession of the
Unknown God whom the Athenians ignorantly worshipped, by declaring
Him to be precisely the God whom he had come among them to proclaim,
so Christianity did not refrain from incorporating all the suitable
features of the Pagan faith into its own creed.
The Pagan type was thus the first thing to be assimilated and absorbed,
and in the early Christian paintings of the catacombs you must not be
surprised to find the Saviour depicted with all the beauties and charms
of the classical god or hero. Here he appears as a Hermes, there as an
Apollo, and yonder as an Orpheus.[7] Beardless, young, and strong, Christ
stalks towards you. His gait is free his carriage majestic. Across his
shoulders you will sometimes see, as in the catacombs of the Via Appia
in Rome, that he bears a sheep, and he looks for all the world like a
young Hermes, who, as you know, was the Greek god of flocks.
Elsewhere he looks like a Roman senator, as in the catacomb of St.
Callixtus, for instance; his mother Mary looks like a Roman matron,
praying with uplifted hands, and the apostles Peter and Paul, together
with the prophets, appear as peripatetic philosophers, grasping
learned-looking scrolls of manuscript, while Daniel is presented as
a Hercules.[8]
Even the famous bronze statue of St. Peter in his great
church at Rome is in fact an antique statue of a consul which has
been transformed into a Peter, and the original of this monument was
probably quite innocent of the sanctity which has caused the foot of
his effigy to be worn away by the kisses of the faithful.[9]
This bold manner of appropriating the Pagan ideal in Art was but
the symbol of what was actually occurring in the outside world; for
the object was not to glorify the Pagan type, but to overthrow it,
to transform it by degrees into the type which was compatible with
Christian values, and thus to obliterate it.
We can watch this process. We can see the classic features and form
of body surely and permanently vanishing from the wall decorations of
the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries A.D., and the Christian type
asserting itself with ever greater assurance. Already in San Paolo
fuori-le-mura in Rome, which had been decorated about the middle of
the fifth century,[10] Christ appears bearded,[11] ugly and gloomy, and his
apostles reflect his appearance and mood. In the Church of San Vitale
in Ravenna, of the sixth century, the spirit of the antique had almost
passed away;[12] in the basilica of San Lorenzo fuori-le-mura the bearded
Christ is no longer sublime and dignified, but wan and emaciated;[13] while
in the Church of SS. Nazarus and Celsus at Ravenna, there is a mosaic
of the fifth century in which even the sheep are beginning to look with
gloomy and dissatisfied eyes upon the world about them.
Examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely to prove how slow but
sure was this gradual self-assertion of the type that was compatible
with Christian values, and the early period of mediæval art is well
described by Woltmann and Woermann as one in which the classical cast
of figure and features gets swallowed up in ugliness.[14]
Finally, in the seventh century, the most daring and most extraordinary
artistic feat of all was accomplished. The greatest paradox the world
had ever seen--a god on a cross--was portrayed for men's eyes
to behold. The Crucifixion became one of the loftiest subjects of
Christian art, and the god of the Christians was painted in his death
agony.
I will not dwell upon the manifold influences exercised by this
class of picture; I simply record the fact, in order to show with
what steadily increasing audacity the Church ultimately realized and
exhibited its type.
For, the fact that Christian Art was didactic, as all art is which is
associated with the will and idea of a fighting cause, and which is
born on a soil of clashing values, nobody seems to deny.[15] Paulinus
of Nola, Gregory the Great, Bishop Germanus, Gregory the Second,[16] John
of Damascus and Basil the Great were all agreed as to the incalculable
worth of images in the propagation of the Christian doctrine, and their
attitude, subsequently adopted by the Franciscans and Dominicans,
lasted, according to Milman, until very late in the Middle Ages. When
it is remembered, moreover, that illuminated manuscripts, which were
destined to remain in the hands of single individuals, retained the
classical mould of body and features much later than did the work for
church decoration, it is not difficult to discover the strong motive
which lay behind the production of public art.[17]
With Roman culture and art, the western and northern provinces of Gaul,
Spain, Germany and Britain thus received their religion and their ideal
type; and if to-day, in our ball-rooms and drawing-rooms we are often
confronted with tenuous, flamelike, swan-necked creatures, that recall
Burne-Jones, Botticelli, Duccio and Segna to our minds, we know to
which values these people owe their slender, heaven-aspiring stature,
and their long, sensitive fingers.
For the attitude of the Christian ideal to Life, to the body, and to
the world was an entirely negative one. The command from on high was,
that the deeds of the body should be mortified through the Spirit. All
beauty, all voluptuousness, smoothness and charm were very naturally
regarded with suspicion by the promoters of such an ideal; for beauty,
voluptuousness and shapeliness lure back to Life, lure back to the
flesh, and ultimately back to the body.
What else, then, could possibly have been expected from such an ideal
than the ultimate decline and uglification of the body? To what else
did such an ideal actually aspire? For was not ugliness the strongest
obstacle in the way of the loving one, in the way of him who wished
only to affirm and to promote life?
When the student of mediæval miniatures, wall-paintings and
stained-glass windows finds bodily charm almost completely eliminated,
when he sees ugliness prevailing, and even made seductive by a host
of the most subtle art-forms, by a gorgeous wealth of ornament
and repetitive design; and when he perceives a certain guilty
self-consciousness in regard to the attributes of sex revealing
itself in such paintings as that on the ceiling of the Church of St.
Michael at Hildesheim, where Adam and Eve are represented as naked
human monstrosities, exactly alike in frame and limbs, and with all
indications as to sex, save Eve's long tresses and Adam's beard,
carefully suppressed,[18] what can be concluded from all this irrefutable
and unimpeachable evidence?
When he finds the Gothic type of figure growing ever more tenuous, ever
more emaciated and more sickly as the centuries roll on; when he hears
of a Byzantine canon of the eleventh century in which the human body
is actually declared to be a monstrosity measuring nine heads; when he
finds strength and manhood gradually departing from the faces and the
limbs of the men, and an expression of tender sentiment, culminating
in puling sentimentality becoming the rule; finally, when he stands
opposite Segna's appalling picture of "Christ on the Cross" at the
National Gallery; what, under these circumstances, is he to say, save
that he is here concerned with an art which is antagonistic and hostile
to beauty, to Life and the world?
For the qualities of this art, qua art, although they never once attain
to the excellence of Ruler-Art, are sometimes exceedingly great. With
Meier Graefe I should be willing to agree that there has been no real
style since the Gothic,[19] or certainly not one that can claim anything
like such general distribution. And, if it had not been for the fact
that the more the paradox at the root of Christian doctrine was
realized, the more paradoxical it appeared--a fact which called forth
the energies of scores of apologists, commentators, and dialecticians,
and which made pictures retain to the very end a rhetorical,
persuasive, and therefore more or less realistic manner, sometimes
assisted (more especially towards the close of the Middle Ages) by
almost lyrical ornament and charm; there is no saying to what simple
power Christian art might not have attained. For behind it were all the
conditions which go to produce the greatest artistic achievements.
As a style, apart from its subject--or content beauty; as the
manifestation of a mighty will--who can help admiring this art of
Christianity? If only its ideal had been a possible one, and one which
would have required no rhetoric, seduction, or emotional oratory,
accompanied by the ringing of all the precious metals, to support it
until the end; it might have ascended to the highest pinnacle of art in
simplicity, restraint and order. Into simplicity, however, it was never
able to develop, while its constant need of explaining made it to the
very last retain more or less realism in the presentation of its ideal
type.
[7] On this point see Kraus, _Geschichte der christlichen Kunst_, Vol.
I, pp. 41, 46 et seq. Muther, _Geschichte der Malerei_, Vol. I, p. 13.
Woltmann and Woermann, _History of Painting_, Vol. I. pp. 151-156. Paul
Lacroix, _Les Arts au Moyen Age et à l'Epoque de la Renaissance_ (Ed.
1877, Paris), p. 254.
[8] See J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle, _The History of Painting
in Italy_ (Ed. 1903), Vol. I, p. 4. Woltmann and Woermann, _op. cit._,
Vol. I, p. 156.
[9] Woltmann and Woermann, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 156.
[10] J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle, _op. cit._, pp. 14, 15.
[11] For a discussion of the material causes of the change of type, see
Milman, _op. cit._. Vol. IX, p. 324.
[12] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _op. cit._, Vol. I, pp. 24, 25.
[13] Woltmann and Woermann, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 185.
[14] Woltmann and Woermann, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 230.
[15] See an interesting discussion on the early Christian attitude
towards art in Kraus, _Geschichte der christlichen Kunst_, Vol. I, pp.
58 et seq. See also Milman's conclusions on the subject, _History of
Latin Christianity_, Vol. II, pp. 345, 346.
[16] See his letter to Leo the Isaurian, quoted by Milman, _op. cit._,
Vol. II, pp. 358-361. See also the Rev. J. S. Black's article on
"Images" in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ (9th Edition).
[17] The Rev. J. S. Black says, in his article on "Images," above
referred to, that even as early as the fourth or fifth centuries there
is evidence of the tendency to enlist art in the service of the Church,
while Woltmann and Woermann (_op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 167) quote the
following instance: "When St. Nilus (A.D. 450) was consulted about
the decoration of a church, he rejected as childish and unworthy the
intended design of plants, birds, animals, and a number of crosses,
and desired the interior to be adorned with pictures from the Old
and New Testaments, with the same motive that Gregory II expressed
afterwards...."
[18] Kraus seems to be of the opinion that this suppression of primary
sexual characteristics in paintings was not at all uncommon in the
Middle Ages. See _Geschichte der christlichen Kunst_, Vol. II, p. 280.
[19] _Modern Art_, Vol. I, p. 24.
3. The Gothic Building and Sentiment.
But the hierarchy of the Church, although it left no doubt in the minds
of its followers as to the genuine type which was the apotheosis of
Christian values, was nevertheless unable completely to impose its culture
upon the barbarians under its sway. And soon, somewhere towards the end
of the twelfth century, there began to appear in Europe, in things that
did not seem to matter from the moral or didactic standpoint, a certain
uncouth and uncultured spirit, which showed to what extent the despotic
rule of Rome was beginning to be flouted.
In architecture, which, like music, has for some reason or other
always seemed to Europeans to be less intimately connected with the
thought and will of man than the graphic arts, an un-Catholic spirit
was preparing its road to triumph. When I say un-Catholic, I mean
emancipated from the law and order of the Universal Church.[20] And in
the Gothic edifice, from its early stages to its development
into the flamboyant style, all the impossibilities, all the terrible
self-immolations imposed by the Christian ideal upon man, begin to make
themselves openly felt.
Now churches begin to tower aloft into heights undreamt of heretofore.
Huge columns spring heavenwards, bearing up a roof that seems almost
ethereal because it is so high. Spires are thrust right into the very
breasts of clouds, and acres are covered by constructions which,
mechanically speaking, are alive. Kicks from the vaulted arches against
the hollowed-out walls below, necessitate counter-kicks; buttresses and
flying buttresses strive and struggle against the crushing pressure of
the stone or brick skies of these fantastic architectural feats. All
the parts of this mass of stone on baked clay are at loggerheads and at
variance with each other, and their strife never ceases.
Typical of the contest going on within the body of the mediæval
Christian, and the vain aspirations of his soul, the lofty buildings
are also symbolic of the discord and lack of equilibrium which, as
Lübke says, Christianity introduced into man's relations to Nature and
to himself. And when we find the columns of these buildings carved and
moulded to look like groups of pillars embracing each other to gain
strength, the salient parts of the construction grooved and striped,
and the extremities of the clustered pillars spreading after the manner
of a fan, over our heads; we are amazed at the manner in which mass and
volume have been volatilized, spiritualized, and apparently dissipated.
Elsewhere, too, there is variegated glass, gigantic filigree work,
festive decoration, as elaborated as that of a queen or a bride;
infinite grandeur and infinite littleness.[21] The ornament is nervous
and excited, festoons, trefoils, gables, gargoyles and niches, all
thrust themselves at you; all strive for individual effect, individual
attention, and individual value, with a restlessness and an importunacy
which knows no limits; until your eyes, bewildered and dazzled by the
jutting, projecting and budding details, and out-startled by surprise,
instinctively drop at last, and perhaps close in a paroxysm of despair,
before the High Altar.[22]
This was the germ of Protestantism in stone. Long before Martin Luther
burned the Papal Bull in the market-place of Wittenberg, the elements
of Protestantism had already found expression in Gothic architecture.
True the Pagan and Catholic spirit was still sufficiently master to
dominate them, just as it did the heretics, by a tremendous force
of style; but they are nevertheless present, and it is in this
architecture, if we choose to seek it, that we shall find, at once, all
the beauty, all the ugliness, and all the incompatible elements of the
Christian ideal.
Its beauty and the fact for which we ought to be grateful to it, is,
that by its one-sided and earnest advocacy of the spiritual in man, it
extended the domain of his spirit over an area so much greater than
that which had been covered theretofore, that only now can it be said
that he knows exactly where he stands and who he is. Its ugliness lies
in its contempt of the body and of Life; and its incompatible elements
are its negation of Life and the necessary attitude of affirmation
towards Life which all living creatures are bound to assume.
If, however, the above description of the Gothic may seem unfair, hear
what one of the greatest friends of the Gothic has said on the subject!
John Ruskin, in the early days of the last half of the nineteenth
century, wrote as follows--
"I believe that the characteristic or moral elements of the Gothic are
the following, placed in order of their importance: (1) Savageness, (2)
Changefulness, (3) Naturalism, (4) Grotesqueness, (5) Rigidity, (6)
Redundance."[23]
He speaks of it as being "instinct with work of an imagination
as wild and wayward as the Northern Sea";[24] lays stress upon its
rudeness,[25] and declares that it is that strange disquietude of
the Gothic spirit--that is its greatness, "that restlessness of the
dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and
flickers feverishly around, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be
satisfied."[26]
In fact, in no instance could the saying, "preserve me from my own
friends," be more aptly applied than in Ruskin's defence of the Gothic.
For Ruskin was a conscientious student, and things which even enemies
of his subject would be likely to overlook, he brings forward proudly
and ingenuously, like a truculent mother presenting an ugly child to a
friend, and with a broad smile in his forcible prose which sometimes
throws even the experienced reader quite off his guard.
Hippolyte Taine speaks of the people of the Middle Ages as being
possessed of delicate and over-excited imaginations, of morbid fancy
unto whom vivid sensation--manifold, changing, bizarre and extreme
--are necessary. In referring to their taste in ornament, he says,
"It is the adornment of a nervous, over-excited woman, similar to
the extravagant costumes of the day, whose delicate and morbid poesy
denotes by its excess the singular sentiments, the feverish, violent,
and impotent aspiration peculiar to an age of knights and monks."[27]
[Illustration: The Canon of Polycleitus (_Rome_)]
And if you think of the physical and spiritual operations they had been
made to undergo, you will not feel very much inclined to question these
conclusions. It must not be supposed that the canon of Polycletus,
measuring seven heads, was transformed into the Byzantine canon,
measuring nine heads, without some one's suffering--even though it
took centuries to effect the change. It must not be believed that the
calm Pagan idea of death was converted into the Christian terror of
death without the sacrifice of something; nor must these emaciated,
careworn, and neurotic faces in Mediæval paintings be conceived as mere
inventions of morbid phantasy. The deeds of the body are not mortified
through the Spirit with impunity. Such brilliant achievements have
their accounts to pay, and the Church never once deceived itself or
its followers as to what was paying, what was suffering, or where the
amputations and vivisections were taking place.
Look at the type of which the monks approved! Examine it in Cimabue's,
Duccio's, Segna's and the Cologne painters' pictures. Examine it in the
tapestry of Berne, known as the "Adoration of the Kings"; look at it
in countless stained glass windows, and see its repetition in hundreds
of illuminated manuscripts, some of which, like the Latin missal of
the Church of St. Bavon at Ghent, and the _Lives of the Saints_ by Simeon
Metaphrasi, have found their way into the British Museum.
Then ask yourself whether or not humanity was suffering in conforming
itself to this holy creed. "Like those mothers," says Lecky, "who
govern their children by persuading them that the dark is crowded
with spectres that' will seize the disobedient, and who often succeed
in creating an association of ideas which the adult man is unable
altogether to dissolve, the Catholic priests, by making the terrors of
death for centuries the nightmare of the imagination, resolved to base
their power upon the nerves."[28]
And, now that all this is known and realized, what is the meaning of
the Renaissance, what is its explanation?
[20] Speaking of Gothic buildings in general, Fergusson, in A History
of Architecture, Vol. I, p. 41, says: "It is in Nature's highest works
that we find the symmetry of proportion most prominent. When we descend
to the lower types of animals we find we lose it to a great extent, and
among trees and vegetables generally find it only in a far less degree,
and sometimes miss it altogether. In the mineral kingdom among rocks
and stones it is altogether absent. So universal is this principle in
Nature that we may safely apply it to our criticism on art, and say
that a building is perfect as a whole in proportion to its motived
regularity, and departs from the highest type in the ratio in which
symmetrical arrangement is neglected. It may, however, be incorrect to
say that an oak-tree is a less perfect work of creation than a human
body, but it is certain that a picturesque group of Gothic buildings
may be as perfect as the stately regularity of an Egyptian or classic
temple; but if it is so, it is equally certain that it belongs to a
lower and inferior class of design." Page 34: "The revival of the
rites and ceremonies of the Mediæval Church, our reverent love of our
own national antiquities, and our admiration of the rude but vigorous
manhood of the Middle Ages, all have combined to repress the classical
element, both in our literature and in our art, and to exalt in their
place Gothic feelings and Gothic art to an extent which cannot be
justified on any grounds of reasonable criticism."
[21] See Hippolyte Taine, _On the Nature of the Work of Art_
(translated by John Durand), pp. 130, 131, 132, 133, 134.
[22] Dr. Wilhelm Lübke, _op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 14, 15, says, speaking
of the Gothic: "What a contrast to the quiet, sober masses of the
Romanesque style ...! Here, on the other hand, everything thrusts
itself into prominence, everything strives for outward effect,
everything endeavours to work out its individuality with spirit and
energy. ... At the choir ... a positive sense of disquiet and confusion
is produced, which may indeed excite the fancy, but cannot satisfy the
sense of beauty."
[23] _On the Nature of Gothic Architecture_ (1854), p. 4.
[24] _On the Nature of Gothic Architecture_, p. 6.
[25] _Ibid_., p. 11.
[26] _Ibid_., p. 19.
[27] _On the Nature of the Work of Art_, pp. 131-33, 134.
[28] _History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne_, Vol. I,
p. 211.
4. The Renaissance.
The Renaissance, in its early stages, at least, was a period neither
of pure realism nor of classicalism; it was neither a revival of
learning nor a revival of antiquity. These words are mere euphemisms,
mere drawing-room phrases. For, at its inception, the Renaissance
was nothing more nor less than man's convalescence, after an illness
that had lasted centuries. It was his first walk into the open, after
leaving his bed and his sick-room.
According to the Nietzschean doctrine of art, this realism of Van Eyck,
of Van der Weyden, Quintin Massys, Donatello, Pisanello, Masolino,
Ucello and others ought to disgust you. It is not art, or if it is, its
rank is inferior. Why, then, does it claim attention? Why is it far
superior to the realism of the present day, despite some appallingly
ugly features?[29]
It is superior only in this sense, that it is the work of
convalescents. After they had been laid on the rack in the attempt to
stretch their limbs and bodies to infinity, you must not be surprised
that these men could only limp along. How could they be expected to
walk majestically and with grace? That they could stand at all was a
mercy. That they were able to hobble along as they did was a triumph.