Which, inasmuch as it has been detached from time, is able to employ

mathematical symbols. These rigid figures _signify_ for us a destiny

of yore. But their meaning is other than mathematical. Past is not a

cause, nor Fate a formula, and to anyone who handles them, as the

historical materialist handles them, mathematically, the past event as

such, as an actuality that has lived once and only once, is invisible.

Footnote 173:

That is, not merely conclusions of peaces or deathdays of persons, but

the Renaissance style, the _Polis_, the Mexican Culture and so forth—

are dates or data, facts that have been, even when we possess no

representation of them.

Footnote 174:

See Vol. II, pp. 403 et seq., 589 et seq.

Footnote 175:

The formation of hypotheses in Chemistry is much more thoughtless,

owing to the less close relation of that science to mathematics. A

house of cards such as is presented to us in the researches of the

moment on atom-structure (see, for example, M. Born, _Der Aufbau der

Materie_, 1920) would be impossible in the near neighbourhood of the

electro-magnetic theory of light, whose authors never for a moment

lost sight of the frontier between mathematical vision and its

representation by a picture, or of the fact that this was only a

picture.

Footnote 176:

There is no difference essentially between these representations and

the switchboard wiring-diagram.

Footnote 177:

Goethe’s theory of colour openly controverted Newton’s theory of

light. A long account of the controversy will be found in Chapter IX

of G. H. Lewes’s _Life of Goethe_—a work that, taken all in all, is

one of the wisest biographies ever written. In reading his critique of

Goethe’s theory, of course, it has to be borne in mind that he wrote

before the modern development of the electro-magnetic theory, which

has substituted a merely mathematical existence for the Newtonian

physical existence of colour-rays as such in white light. Now, this

physical existence was just what, in substance, Goethe denied. What he

affirmed, in the simpler language of his day, was that white light was

something simple and colourless that becomes coloured through

diminutions or modifications imposed upon it by “darkness.” The modern

physicist, using a subtler hypothesis than Newton’s and a more refined

“balance” than that which Lewes reproaches Goethe for “flinging away,”

has found in white light, not the Newtonian mixture of colour-rays,

but a surge of irregular wave-trains which are only regularized into

colour-vibrations through being acted upon by analysers of one sort

and another, from prisms to particulate matter. This necessity of a

counter-agent for the production of colour seems—to a critical

outsider at any rate—very like the necessity of an efficient negative

principle or “opaque” that Goethe’s intuitive interpretation of his

experiments led him to postulate. It is this that is the heart of the

theory, and not the “simplicity” of light _per se_.

So much it seems desirable to add to the text and the reference, in

order to expand the author’s statement that “both were right.” For

Lewes, with all his sympathetic penetration of the man and real

appreciation of his scientific achievement, feels obliged to regard

his methods and his theory as such as “erroneous.” And it is perhaps

not out of place in this book to adduce an instance of the peculiar

nature and power of intuitive vision (which entirely escapes direct

description) in which Vision frankly challenges Reason on its own

ground, meets with refutation (or contempt) from the Reason of its

day, and yet may come to be upheld in its specific rightness (its

rightness as vision, that is, apart from its technical enunciation by

the seer) by the Reason of a later day.—_Tr._

Footnote 178:

See p. 123.

Footnote 179:

See page 123.

Footnote 180:

The word _dimension_ ought only to be used in the singular. It means

extension but not extensions. The idea of the three directions is an

out-and-out abstraction and is not contained in the immediate

extension-feeling of the body (the “soul”). Direction as such, the

direction-essence, gives rise to the mysterious _animal_ sense of

right and left and also the _vegetable_ characteristic of below-to-

above, earth to heaven. The latter is a fact felt dream-wise, the

former a truth of waking existence to be learned and therefore capable

of being transmuted. Both find expression in architecture, to wit, in

the symmetry of the plan and the energy of the elevation, and it is

only because of this that we specially distinguish in the

“architecture” of the space around us the angle of 90° in preference,

for example, to that of 60°. Had not this been so, the conventional

number of our “dimensions” would have been quite different.

Footnote 181:

The want of perspective in children’s drawings is emphatically not

perceptible to the children themselves.

Footnote 182:

His idea that the _a priori_-ness of space was proved by and through

the unconditional validity of simple geometrical facts rests, as we

have already remarked, on the all-too-popular notion that mathematics

are either geometry or arithmetic. Now, even in Kant’s time the

mathematic of the West had got far beyond this naïve scheme, which was

a mere imitation of the Classical. Modern geometry bases itself not on

space but on multiply-infinite number-manifolds—amongst which the

three-dimensional is simply the undistinguished special case—and

within these groups investigates functional formations with reference

to their structure; that is, there is no longer any contact or even

possibility of contact between any possible kind of sense-perception

and mathematical facts in the domain of such extensions as these, and

yet the demonstrability of the latter is in no wise impaired thereby.

Mathematics, then, are independent of the perceived, and the question

now is, how much of this famous demonstrability of the forms of

perception is left when the artificiality of juxtaposing both in a

supposedly single process of experience has been recognized.

Footnote 183:

It is true that a geometrical theorem may be proved, or rather

demonstrated, by means of a drawing. But the theorem is differently

constituted in every kind of geometry, and that being so, the drawing

ceases to be a _proof_ of anything whatever.

Footnote 184:

So much so that Gauss said nothing about his discovery until almost

the end of his life for tear of “the clamour of the Bœotians.”

Footnote 185:

The distinction of right and left (see p. 169) is only conceivable as

the outcome of this directedness in the dispositions of the body. “In

front” has no meaning whatever for the body of a plant.

Footnote 186:

It may not be out of place here to refer to the enormous importance

attached in savage society to initiation-rites at adolescence.—_Tr._

Footnote 187:

Either in Greek or in Latin, τόπος (= _locus_) means spot, locality,

and also social position; χώρα (= _spatium_) means space-between,

distance, rank, and also ground and soil (e.g., τὰ ἐκ τῆς χώρας,

produce); τὸ κένον (_vacuum_) means quite unequivocally a hollow body,

and the stress is emphatically on the envelope. The literature of the

Roman Imperial Age, which attempted to render the _Magian_ world-

feeling through Classical words, was reduced to such clumsy versions

as ὁρατὸς τόπος (sensible world) or _spatium inane_ (“endless space,”

but also “wide surface”—the root of the word “spatium” means to swell

or grow fat). In the true Classical literature, the idea not being

there, there was no necessity for a word to describe it.

Footnote 188:

It has not hitherto been seen that this fact is implicit in Euclid’s

famous parallel axiom (“through a point only one parallel to a

straight line is possible”).

This was the only one of the Classical theorems which remained

unproved, and as we know now, it is incapable of proof. But it was

just that which made it into a dogma (as opposed to any experience)

_and therefore the metaphysical centre_ and main girder of that

geometrical system. Everything else, axiom or postulate, is merely

introductory or corollary to this. This one proposition is necessary

and universally-valid for the Classical intellect, _and yet not

deducible_. What does this signify?

It signifies that the statement is a _symbol_ of the first rank. It

contains the structure of Classical corporeality. It is just this

proposition, theoretically the weakest link in the Classical geometry

(objections began to be raised to it as early as Hellenistic times),

that reveals its soul, and it was just this proposition, self-evident

within the limits of routine experience, that the Faustian number-

thinking, derived from incorporeal spatial distances, fastened upon as

the centre of doubt. It is one of the deepest symbols of _our_ being

that we have opposed to the Euclidean geometry not one but _several_

other geometries all of which for us are equally true and self-

consistent. The specific tendency of the anti-Euclidean group of

geometries—in which there may be no parallel or two parallels or

several parallels to a line through a point—lies in the fact that by

their very plurality the corporeal sense of extension, which Euclid

_canonized_ by his principle, is entirely got rid of; for what they

reject is that which all corporeal postulates but all spatial denies.

The question of which of the three Non-Euclidean geometries is the

“correct” one (i.e., that which underlies actuality)—although Gauss

himself gave it earnest consideration—is in respect of world-feeling

entirely Classical and therefore it should not have been asked by a

thinker of our sphere. Indeed it prevents us from seeing the true and

deep meaning implicit in the plurality of these geometries. The

specifically Western symbol resides not in the reality of one or of

another, but in the true plurality of _equally possible_ geometries.

It is the _group_ of space-structures—in the abundance of which the

classical system is a mere particular case—that has dissolved the last

residuum of the corporeal into the pure space-feeling.

-----

V

Each of the great Cultures, then, has arrived at a secret language of

world-feeling that is only fully comprehensible by him whose soul

belongs to that Culture. We must not deceive ourselves. Perhaps we can

read a little way into the Classical soul, because its form-language is

almost the exact inversion of the Western; how far we have succeeded or

can ever succeed is a question which necessarily forms the starting-

point of all criticism of the Renaissance, and it is a very difficult

one. But when we are told that probably (it is at best a doubtful

venture to meditate upon so alien an expression of Being) the Indians

conceived numbers which according to our ideas possessed neither value

nor magnitude nor relativity, and which only became positive and

negative, great or small units in virtue of position, we have to admit

that it is impossible for us exactly to re-experience what spiritually

underlies this kind of number. For us, 3 is always _something_, be it

positive or negative; for the Greeks it was unconditionally a positive

magnitude, +3; but for the Indian it indicates a possibility without

existence, to which the word “something” is _not yet_ applicable,

outside both existence and non-existence which are _properties_ to be

introduced into it. +3, -3, ⅓, are thus emanating actualities of

subordinate rank which reside in the mysterious substance (3) in some

way that is entirely hidden from us. It takes a Brahmanic soul to

perceive these numbers as self-evident, as ideal emblems of a self-

complete world-form; to us they are as unintelligible as is the Brahman

Nirvana, for which, as lying beyond life _and_ death, sleep _and_

waking, passion, compassion _and_ dispassion and yet somehow actual,

words entirely fail us. Only this spirituality could originate the grand

conception of _nothingness as a true number, zero_, and even then this

zero is the Indian zero for which existent and non-existent are equally

external designations.[189]

Arabian thinkers of the ripest period—and they included minds of the

very first order like Alfarabi and Alkabi—in controverting the ontology

of Aristotle, _proved_ that the body as such did not necessarily assume

space for existence, and deduced the essence of this space—the _Arabian_

kind of extension, that is—from the characteristic of “one’s being in a

position.”

But this does not prove that as against Aristotle and Kant they were in

error or that their thinking was muddled (as we so readily say of what

our own brains cannot take in). It shows that the Arabian spirit

possessed other world-categories than our own. They could have rebutted

Kant, or Kant them, with the same subtlety of proof—and both disputants

would have remained convinced of the correctness of their respective

standpoints.

When we talk of space to-day, we are all thinking more or less in the

same style, just as we are all using the same languages and word-signs,

whether we are considering mathematical space or physical space or the

space of painting or that of actuality, although all philosophizing that

insists (as it must) upon putting an _identity_ of understanding in the

place of such kinship of significance-feeling must remain somewhat

questionable. But no Hellene or Egyptian or Chinaman could re-experience

any part of those feelings of ours, and no artwork or thought-system

could possibly convey to him unequivocally what “space” means for us.

Again, the prime conceptions originated in the quite differently

constituted soul of the Greek, like ἀρχή, ὕλη, μορφἠ, comprise the whole

content of his world. But this world is differently constituted from

ours. It is, for us, alien and remote. We may take these words of Greek

and translate them by words of our own like “origin,” “matter” and

“form,” but it is mere imitation, a feeble effort to penetrate into a

world of feeling in which the finest and deepest elements, in spite of

all we can do, remain dumb; it is as though one tried to set the

Parthenon sculptures for a string quartet, or cast Voltaire’s God in

bronze. The master-traits of thought, life and world-consciousness are

as manifold and different as the features of individual men; in those

respects as in others there are distinctions of “races” and “peoples,”

and men are as unconscious of these distinctions as they are ignorant of

whether “red” and “yellow” do or do not mean the same for others as for

themselves. It is particularly the common symbolic of language that

nourishes the illusion of a homogeneous constitution of human inner-life

and an identical world-form; in this respect the great thinkers of one

and another Culture resemble the colour-blind in that each is unaware of

his own condition and smiles at the errors of the rest.

And now I draw the conclusions. There is a plurality of prime symbols.

It is the depth-experience through which the world becomes, through

which perception _extends itself_ to world. Its signification is for the

soul to which it belongs and only for that soul, and it is different in

waking and dreaming, acceptance and scrutiny, as between young and old,

townsmen and peasant, man and woman. It actualizes for every high

Culture the possibility of form upon which that Culture’s existence

rests and it does so of deep necessity. All fundamentals words like our

mass, substance, material, thing, body, extension (and multitudes of

words of the like order in other culture-tongues) are emblems,

obligatory and determined by destiny, that out of the infinite abundance

of world-possibilities evoke in the name of the individual Culture those

possibilities that alone are significant and therefore necessary for it.

None of them is exactly transferable just as it is into the experiential

living and knowing of another Culture. And none of these prime words

ever recurs. The _choice of prime symbol_ in the moment of the Culture-

soul’s awakening into self-consciousness on its own soil—a moment that

for one who can read world-history thus contains something catastrophic—

decides all.

Culture, as the soul’s total expression “become” and perceptible in

gestures and works, as its mortal transient body, obnoxious to

law, number and causality:

As the historical drama, a picture in the whole picture of world-

history:

As the sum of grand emblems of life, feeling and understanding:

—this is the language through which alone a soul can tell of what it

undergoes.

The macrocosm, too, is a property of the individual soul; we can never

know how it stands with the soul of another. That which is implied by

“infinite space,” the space that “passeth all understanding,” which is

the creative interpretation of depth-experience proper and peculiar to

us men of the West—the kind of extension that is nothingness to the

Greeks, the Universe to us—dyes our world in a colour that the

Classical, the Indian and the Egyptian souls had not on their palettes.

One soul listens to the world-experience in A flat major, another in F

minor; one apprehends it in the Euclidean spirit, another in the

contrapuntal, a third in the Magian spirit. From the purest analytical

Space and from Nirvana to the most somatic reality of Athens, there is a

series of prime symbols each of which is capable of forming a complete

world out of itself. And, as the idea of the Babylonian or that of the

Indian world was remote, strange and elusive for the men of the five or

six Cultures that followed, so also the Western world will be

incomprehensible to the men of Cultures yet unborn.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER VI

MAKROKOSMOS

II

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN AND MAGIAN SOUL

CHAPTER VI

MAKROKOSMOS

II

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN AND MAGIAN SOUL

I

Henceforth we shall designate the soul of the Classical Culture, which

chose the sensuously-present individual body as the ideal type of the

extended, by the name (familiarized by Nietzsche) of the _Apollinian_.

In opposition to it we have the _Faustian_ soul, whose prime-symbol is

pure and limitless space, and whose “body” is the Western Culture that

blossomed forth with the birth of the Romanesque style in the 10th

century in the Northern plain between the Elbe and the Tagus. The nude

statue is Apollinian, the art of the fugue Faustian. Apollinian are:

mechanical statics, the sensuous cult of the Olympian gods, the

politically individual city-states of Greece, the doom of Œdipus and the

phallus-symbol. Faustian are: Galileian dynamics, Catholic and

Protestant dogmatics, the great dynasties of the Baroque with their

cabinet diplomacy, the destiny of Lear and the Madonna-ideal from

Dante’s Beatrice to the last line of _Faust II_. The painting that

defines the individual body by contours is Apollinian, that which forms

space by means of light and shade is Faustian—this is the difference

between the fresco of Polygnotus and the oil painting of Rembrandt. The

Apollinian existence is that of the Greek who describes his ego as

_soma_ and who lacks all idea of an inner development and therefore all

real history, inward and outward; the Faustian is an existence which _is

led_ with a deep consciousness and introspection of the ego, and a

resolutely personal culture evidenced in memoirs, reflections,

retrospects and prospects and conscience. And in the time of Augustus,

in the countries between Nile and Tigris, Black Sea and South Arabia,

there appears—aloof but able to speak to us through forms borrowed,

adopted and inherited—the Magian soul of the Arabian Culture with its

algebra, astrology and alchemy, its mosaics and arabesques, its

caliphates and mosques, and the sacraments and scriptures of the

Persian, Jewish, Christian, “post-Classical” and Manichæan religions.

“Space”—speaking now in the Faustian idiom—is a spiritual something,

rigidly distinct from the momentary sense-present, which _could_ not be

represented in an Apollinian language, whether Greek or Latin. But the

created _expression-space_ of the Apollinian arts is equally alien to

ours. The tiny cella of the early-Classical temple was a dumb dark

nothingness, a structure (originally) of perishable material, an

envelope of the moment in contrast to the eternal vaults of Magian

cupolas and Gothic naves, and the closed ranks of columns were expressly

meant to convey that for the eye at any rate this body possessed no

_Inward_. In no other Culture is the firm footing, the socket, so

emphasized. The Doric column bores into the ground, the vessels are

always thought of from below upward (whereas those of the Renaissance

float above their footing), and the sculpture-schools feel the

stabilizing of their figures as their main problem. Hence in archaic

works the legs are disproportionately emphasized, the foot is planted on

the full sole, and if the drapery falls straight down, a part of the hem

is removed to show that the foot is standing. The Classical relief is

strictly stereometrically set on a plane, and there is an interspace

between the figures but no depth. A landscape of Claude Lorrain, on the

contrary, is _nothing but_ space, every detail being made to subserve

its illustration. All bodies in it possess an atmospheric and

perspective meaning purely as carriers of light and shade. The extreme

of this disembodiment of the world in the service of space is

Impressionism. Given this world-feeling, the Faustian soul in the

springtime necessarily arrived at an architectural problem which had its

centre of gravity in the spatial vaulting-over of vast, and from porch

to choir dynamically deep, cathedrals. This last expressed _its_ depth-

experience. But with it was associated, in opposition to the cavernous

Magian expression-space,[190] the element of a soaring into the broad

universe. Magian roofing, whether it be cupola or barrel-vault or even

the horizontal baulk of a basilica, _covers in_. Strzygowski[191] has

very aptly described the architectural idea of Hagia Sophia as an

introverted Gothic striving under a closed outer casing. On the other

hand, in the cathedral of Florence the cupola _crowns_ the long Gothic

body of 1367, and the same tendency rose in Bramante’s scheme for St.

Peter’s to a veritable towering-up, a magnificent “Excelsior,” that

Michelangelo carried to completion with the dome that floats high and

bright over the vast vaulting. To this sense of space the Classical

opposes the symbol of the Doric peripteros, wholly corporeal and

comprehensible in one glance.

The Classical Culture begins, then, with a great _renunciation_. A rich,

pictorial, almost over-ripe art lay ready to its hand. But this _could_

not become the expression of the young soul, and so from about 1100 B.C.

the harsh, narrow, and to our eyes scanty and barbaric, early-Doric

geometrical style appears in opposition to the Minoan.[192] For the

three centuries which correspond to the flowering of our Gothic, there

is no hint of an architecture, and it is only at about 650 B.C.,

“contemporarily” with Michelangelo’s transition into the Baroque, that

the Doric and Etruscan temple-type arises. All “Early” art is religious,

and this symbolic Negation is not less so than the Egyptian and the

Gothic Affirmation. The idea of _burning_ the dead accords with the

cult-site but not with the cult-building; and the Early Classical

religion which conceals itself from us behind the solemn names of

Calchas, Tiresias, Orpheus and (probably) Numa[193] possessed for its

rites simply that which is left of an architectural idea when one has

subtracted the architecture, viz., the sacred precinct. The original

cult-plan is thus the Etruscan templum, a sacred area merely staked off

on the ground by the augurs with an impassable boundary and a propitious

entrance on the East side.[194] A “templum” was created where a rite was

to be performed or where the representative of the state authority,

senate or army, happened to be. It existed only for the duration of its

use, and the spell was then removed. It was probably only about 700 B.C.

that the Classical soul so far mastered itself as to represent this

architectural Nothing in the sensible form of a built body. In the long

run the Euclidean feeling proved stronger than the mere antipathy to

duration.

Faustian architecture, on the contrary, begins on the grand scale

simultaneously with the first stirrings of a new piety (the Cluniac

reform, c. 1000) and a new thought (the Eucharistic controversy between

Berengar of Tours and Lanfranc 1050),[195] and proceeds at once to plans

of gigantic intention; often enough, as in the case of Speyer, the whole

community did not suffice to fill the cathedral,[196] and often again it

proved impossible to complete the projected scheme. The passionate

language of this architecture is that of the poems too.[197] Far apart

as may seem the Christian hymnology of the south and the Eddas of the

still heathen north, they are alike in the implicit space-endlessness of

prosody, rhythmic syntax and imagery. Read the _Dies Iræ_ together with

the Völuspá,[198] which is little earlier; there is the same adamantine

will to overcome and break all resistances of the visible. No rhythm

ever imagined radiates immensities of space and distance as the old

Northern does:

Zum Unheil werden—noch allzulange

Männer und Weiber—zur Welt geboren

Aber wir beide —bleiben zusammen

Ich und Sigurd.

The accents of the Homeric hexameter are the soft rustle of a leaf in

the midday sun, the rhythm of _matter_; but the “Stabreim” likes

“potential energy” in the world-pictures of modern physics, creates a

tense restraint in the void without limits, distant night-storms above

the highest peaks. In its swaying indefiniteness all words and things

dissolve themselves—it is the dynamics, not the statics, of language.

The same applies to the grave rhythm of _Media vita in morte sumus_.

Here is heralded the colour of Rembrandt and the instrumentation of

Beethoven—_here infinite solitude is felt as the home of the Faustian

soul_. What is Valhalla? Unknown to the Germans of the Migrations and

even to the Merovingian Age, it was conceived by the nascent Faustian

soul. It was conceived, no doubt, under Classic-pagan and Arabian-

Christian impressions, for the antique and the sacred writings, the

ruins and mosaics and miniatures, the cults and rites and dogmas of

these past Cultures reached into the new life at all points. _And yet_,

this Valhalla is something beyond all sensible actualities floating in

remote, dim, Faustian regions. Olympus rests on the homely Greek soil,

the Paradise of the Fathers is a magic garden somewhere in the Universe,

but Valhalla is nowhere. Lost in the limitless, it appears with its

inharmonious gods and heroes the supreme symbol of solitude. Siegfried,

Parzeval, Tristan, Hamlet, Faust are the loneliest heroes in all the

Cultures. Read the wondrous awakening of the inner life in Wolfram’s

Parzeval. The longing for the woods, the mysterious compassion, the

ineffable sense of forsakenness—it is all Faustian and only Faustian.

Every one of us knows it. The motive returns with all its profundity in

the Easter scene of Faust I.

“A longing pure and not to be described

drove me to wander over woods and fields,

and in a mist of hot abundant tears

I felt a world arise and live for me.”

Of this world-experience neither Apollinian nor Magian man, neither

Homer nor the Gospels, knows anything whatever. The climax of the poem

of Wolfram, that wondrous Good Friday morning scene when the hero, at

odds with God and with himself, meets the noble Gawan and resolves to go

on pilgrimage to Tevrezent, takes us to the heart of the _Faustian_

religion. Here one can feel the mystery of the Eucharist which binds the

communicant to a mystic company, to a Church that alone can give bliss.

In the myth of the Holy Grail and its Knights one can feel the inward

necessity of the German-Northern Catholicism. In opposition to the

Classical sacrifices offered to individual gods in separate temples,

there is here the _one never-ending_ sacrifice repeated everywhere and

every day. This is the Faustian idea of the 9th-11th Centuries, the Edda

time, foreshadowed by Anglo-Saxon missionaries like Winfried but only

then ripened. The Cathedral, with its High Altar enclosing the

accomplished miracle, is its expression in stone.[199]

The plurality of separate bodies which represents Cosmos for the

Classical soul, requires a similar pantheon—hence the antique

polytheism. The _single_ world-volume, be it conceived as cavern or as

space, demands the _single_ god of Magian or Western Christianity.

Athene or Apollo might be represented by a statue, but it is and has

long been evident to our feeling that the Deity of the Reformation and

the Counter-Reformation can only be “manifested” in the storm of an

organ fugue or the solemn progress of cantata and mass. From the rich

manifold of figures in the Edda and contemporary legends of saints to

Goethe our myth develops itself in steady opposition to the Classical—in

the one case a continuous disintegration of the divine that culminated

in the early Empire in an impossible multitude of deities, in the other

a process of simplification that led to the Deism of the 18th Century.

The Magian hierarchy of heaven—angels, saints, persons of the Trinity—

has grown paler and paler, more and more disembodied, in the sphere of

the Western pseudomorphosis,[200] supported though it was by the whole

weight of Church authority, and even the Devil—the great adversary in

the Gothic world-drama[201]—has disappeared unnoticed from among the

possibilities of the Faustian world-feeling. Luther could still throw

the inkpot at him, but he has been passed over in silence by perplexed

Protestant theologians long ago. For the _solitude_ of the Faustian soul

agrees not at all with a duality of world powers. God himself is the

All. About the end of the 17th Century this religiousness could no

longer be limited to pictorial expression, and instrumental music came

as its last and only form-language: we may say that the Catholic faith

is to the Protestant as an altar-piece is to an oratorio. But even the

Germanic gods and heroes are surrounded by this rebuffing immensity and

enigmatic gloom. They are steeped in music and in night, for daylight

gives visual bounds and therefore shapes bodily things. Night eliminates

body, day soul. Apollo and Athene have no souls. On Olympus rests the

eternal light of the transparent southern day, and Apollo’s hour is high

noon, when great Pan sleeps. But Valhalla is light-less, and even in the

Eddas we can trace that deep midnight of Faust’s study-broodings, the

midnight that is caught by Rembrandt’s etchings and absorbs Beethoven’s

tone colours. No Wotan or Baldur or Freya has “Euclidean” form. Of them,

as of the Vedic gods of India, it can be said that they suffer not “any

graven image or any likeness whatsoever”; and this impossibility carries

an implicit recognition that eternal space, and not the corporeal copy—

which levels them down, desecrates them, denies them—is the supreme

symbol. This is the deep-felt motive that underlies the iconoclastic

storms in Islam and Byzantium (_both_, be it noted, of the 7th century),

and the closely similar movement in our Protestant North. Was not

Descartes’s creation of the _anti-Euclidean_ analysis of space an

iconoclasm? The Classical geometry handles a number-world of day, the

function-theory is the genuine mathematic of night.

-----

Footnote 189:

This zero, which probably contains a suggestion of the _Indian_ idea

of extension—of that spatiality of the world that is treated in the

Upanishads and is entirely alien to our space-consciousness—was of

course wholly absent in the Classical. By way of the Arabian

mathematics (which completely transformed its meaning) it reached the

West, where it was only introduced in 1554 by Stipel, with its sense,

moreover, again fundamentally changed, for it became the mean of +1

and -1 as a cut in a linear continuum, i.e., it was assimilated to the

Western number-world in a wholly un-Indian sense of _relation_.

Footnote 190:

The word _Höhlengefühl_ is Leo Frobenius’s (_Paideuma_, p. 92). (The

Early-Christian Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem [A.D. 327] is

built over a natural cave.—_Tr._)

Footnote 191:

Strzygowski’s _Ursprung der Christlichen Kirchenkunst_ (1920), p. 80.

Footnote 192:

See Vol. II, p. 101 et seq.

Footnote 193:

See Vol. II, pp. 345 et seq.

Footnote 194:

Müller-Decker, _Die Etrusker_ (1877), II, pp. 128 et seq. Wissowa,

_Religion und Kultus der Römer_ (1912), p. 527. The oldest plan of

Roma Quadrata was a “templum” whose limits had nothing to do with the

building-up of the city but were connected with sacral rules, as the

significance of this precinct (the “Pomœrium”) in later times shows. A

“templum,” too, was the Roman camp whose rectangular outline is

visible to-day in many a Roman-founded town; it was the consecrated

area within which the army felt itself under the protection of its

gods, and originally had nothing whatever to do with fortification,

which is a product of Hellenistic times. (It may be added that Roman

camps retained their rigidity of outline even where obvious “military

considerations” of ground, etc., must have suggested its

modification.—_Tr._) Most Roman stone-temples ("_ædes_") were not

“templa” at all. On the other hand, the early Greek τέμενος of Homeric

times must have had a similar significance.

Footnote 195:

The student may consult the articles “Church History,” “Monasticism,”

“Eucharist” and other articles therein referred to in the Encyclopædia

Britannica, XI Edition.—_Tr._

Footnote 196:

English readers may remember that Cobbett (“Rural Rides,” passim) was

so impressed with the spaciousness of English country churches as to

formulate a theory that mediæval England must have been more populous

than modern England is.—_Tr._

Footnote 197:

Cf. my introduction to Ernst Droem’s _Gesänge_, p. ix.

Footnote 198:

The oldest and most mystical of the poems of the “Elder Edda.”—_Tr._

Footnote 199:

See Vol. II, p. 358 et seq.

Footnote 200:

See Vol. II, pp. 241 et seq.

Footnote 201:

See Vol. II, p. 354.

-----

II

That which is expressed by the soul of the West in its extraordinary

wealth of media—words, tones, colours, pictorial perspectives,

philosophical systems, legends, the spaciousness of Gothic cathedrals

and the formulæ of functions—namely its world-feeling, is expressed by

the soul of Old Egypt (which was remote from all ambitions towards

theory and literariness) almost exclusively by the immediate language of

_Stone_. Instead of spinning word-subtleties around its form of

extension, its “space” and its “time,” instead of forming hypotheses and

number-systems and dogmas, it set up its huge symbols in the landscape

of the Nile in all silence. Stone is the great emblem of the Timeless-

Become; space and death seem bound up in it. “Men have built for the

dead,” says Bachofen in his autobiography, “before they have built for

the living, and even as a perishable wooden structure suffices for the

span of time that is given to the living, so the housing of the dead for

ever demands the solid stone of the earth. The oldest cult is associated

with the stone that marks the place of burial, the oldest temple-

building with the tomb-structure, the origins of art and decoration with

the grave-ornament. Symbol has created itself in the graves. That which

is thought and felt and silently prayed at the grave-side can be

expressed by no word, but only hinted by the boding symbol that stands

in unchanging grave repose.” The dead strive no more. They are no more

Time, but only Space—something that stays (if indeed it stays at all)

but does _not_ ripen towards a Future; and hence it is stone, the

abiding stone, that expresses how the dead is mirrored in the waking

consciousness of the living. The Faustian soul looks for an immortality

to follow the bodily end, a sort of marriage with endless space, and it

disembodies the stone in its Gothic thrust-system (contemporary, we may

note, with the “consecutives” in Church music[202]) till at last nothing

remained visible but the indwelling depth- and height-energy of this

self-extension. The Apollinian soul would have its dead burned, would

see them annihilated, and so it remained averse from stone building

throughout the early period of its Culture. The Egyptian soul saw itself

as moving down a narrow and inexorably-prescribed life-path to come at

the end before the judges of the dead (“Book of the Dead,” cap. 125).

That was its _Destiny-idea_. The Egyptian’s existence is that of the

traveller who follows one unchanging direction, and the whole form-

language of his Culture is a translation into the sensible of this one

theme. And as we have taken _endless space_ as the prime symbol of the

North and _body_ as that of the Classical, so we may take the word _way_

as most intelligibly expressing that of the Egyptians. Strangely, and

for Western thought almost incomprehensibly, the one element in

extension that they emphasize is that of direction in depth. The tomb-

temples of the Old Kingdom and especially the mighty pyramid-temples of

the Fourth Dynasty represent, not a purposed organization of space such

as we find in the mosque and the cathedral, but a rhythmically ordered

_sequence_ of spaces. The sacred way leads from the gate-building on the

Nile through passages, halls, arcaded courts and pillared rooms that

grow ever narrower and narrower, to the chamber of the dead,[203] and

similarly the Sun-temples of the Fifth Dynasty are not “buildings” but a

path enclosed by mighty masonry.[204] The reliefs and the paintings

appear always as rows which with an impressive compulsion lead the

beholder in a definite direction. The ram and sphinx avenues of the New

Empire have the same object. For the Egyptian, the depth-experience

which governed his world-form was so emphatically directional that he

comprehended space more or less as a continuous process of

actualization. There is nothing rigid about distance as expressed here.

The man must move, and so become himself a symbol of life, in order to

enter into relation with the stone part of the symbolism. “Way”

signifies both Destiny and third dimension. The grand wall-surfaces,

reliefs, colonnades past which he moves are “length and breadth”; that

is, mere perceptions of the senses, and it is the forward-driving life

that _extends_ them into “world.” Thus the Egyptian experienced space,

we may say, in and by the processional march along its distinct

elements, whereas the Greek who sacrificed _outside_ the temple did not

feel it and the man of our Gothic centuries praying in the cathedral let

himself be immersed in the quiet infinity of it. And consequently the

art of these Egyptians must aim at _plane_ effects and nothing else,

even when it is making use of solid means. For the Egyptian, the pyramid

over the king’s tomb is a _triangle_, a huge, powerfully expressive

_plane_ that, whatever be the direction from which one approaches,

closes off the “way” and commands the landscape. For him, the columns of

the inner passages and courts, with their dark backgrounds, their dense

array and their profusion of adornments, appear entirely as vertical

strips which rhythmically accompany the march of the priests. Relief-

work is—in utter contrast to the Classical—carefully restricted in one

plane; in the course of development dated by the Third to the Fifth

dynasties it diminishes from the thickness of a finger to that of a

sheet of paper, and finally it is _sunk_ in the plane.[205] The

dominance of the horizontal, the vertical and the right angle, and the

avoidance of all foreshortening support the two-dimensional principle

and serve to insulate this directional depth-experience which coincides

with the way and the grave at its end. It is an art that admits of no

deviation for the relief of the tense soul.

Is not this an expression in the noblest language that it is possible to

conceive of what all our space-theories would like to put into words? Is

it not a metaphysic in stone by the side of which the written

metaphysics of Kant seems but a helpless stammering?

There is, however, another Culture that, different as it most

fundamentally is from the Egyptian, yet found a closely-related prime

symbol. This is the Chinese, with its intensely directional principle of

the Tao.[206] But whereas the Egyptian treads to the end a way that is

prescribed for him with an inexorable necessity, the Chinaman _wanders_

through his world; consequently, he is conducted to his god or his

ancestral tomb not by ravines of stone, between faultless smooth walls,

but by friendly Nature herself. Nowhere else has the _landscape_ become

so genuinely the material of the architecture. “Here, on religious

foundations, there has been developed a grand lawfulness and unity

common to all building, which, combined with the strict maintenance of a

north-south general axis, always holds together gate-buildings, side-

buildings, courts and halls in the same homogeneous plan, and has led

finally to so grandiose a planning and such a command over ground and

space that one is quite justified in saying that the artist builds and

reckons with the landscape itself.”[207] The temple is not a self-

contained building but a lay-out, in which hills, water, trees, flowers,

and stones in definite forms and dispositions are just as important as

gates, walls, bridges and houses. This Culture is the only one in which

the art of gardening is a grand religious art. There are gardens that

are reflections of particular Buddhist sects.[208] It is the

architecture of the landscape, and only that, which explains the

architecture of the buildings, with their flat extension and the

emphasis laid on the roof as the really expressive element. And just as

the devious ways through doors, over bridges, round hills and walls lead

at last to the end, so the paintings take the beholder from detail to

detail whereas Egyptian relief masterfully points him in the one set

direction. “The whole picture is _not_ to be taken at once. Sequence in

time presupposes a sequence of space-elements through which the eye is

to wander from one to the next.”[209] Whereas the Egyptian architecture

dominates the landscape, the Chinese espouses it. But in both cases it

is direction in depth that maintains the _becoming_ of space as a

continuously-present experience.

-----

Footnote 202:

This refers to the diaphonic chant of Church music in the eleventh and

twelfth centuries. The form of this chant is supposed to have been an

accompaniment of the “plain chant” by voices moving parallel to it at

a fourth, fifth, or octave.—_Tr._

Footnote 203:

Hölscher, _Grabdenkmal des Königs Chephren_; Borchardt, _Grabdenkmal

des Sahurê_; Curtius, _Die Antike Kunst_, p. 45.

Footnote 204:

See Vol. II, p. 342; Borchardt, _Re-Heiligtum des Newoserri_; Ed.

Mayer, _Geschichte des Altertums_, I, 251.

Footnote 205:

“Relief en creux”; compare H. Schäfer, _Von ägyptischer Kunst_ (1919),

I, p. 41.

Footnote 206:

See Vol. II, pp. 350 et seq.

Footnote 207:

O. Fischer, _Chinesische Landmalerei_ (1921), p. 24. What makes

Chinese—as also Indian—art so difficult a study for us is the fact

that all works of the early periods (namely, those of the Hwangho

region from 1300 to 800 B.C. and of pre-Buddhist India) have vanished

without a trace. But that which we now call “Chinese art” corresponds,

say, to the art of Egypt from the Twentieth Dynasty onward, and the

great schools of painting find their parallel in the sculpture schools

of the Saïte and Ptolemaic periods, in which an antiquarian preciosity

takes the place of the living inward development that is no longer

there. Thus from the examples of Egypt we are able to tell how far it

is permissible to argue backwards to conclusions about the art of Chóu

and Vedic times.

Footnote 208:

C. Glaser, _Die Kunst Ostasiens_ (1920), p. 181.

Footnote 209:

Glaser, _op. cit._, p. 43.

-----

III

All art is _expression-language_.[210] Moreover, in its very earliest

essays—which extend far back into the animal world—it is that of one

active existence speaking for itself only, and it is unconscious of

witnesses even though in the absence of such the impulse to expression

would not come to utterance. Even in quite “late” conditions we often

see, instead of the combination of artist and spectator, a crowd of art-

makers who _all_ dance or mime or sing. The idea of the “Chorus” as sum

total of persons present has never entirely vanished from art-history.

It is only the higher art that becomes decisively an art “before

witnesses” and especially (as Nietzsche somewhere remarks) before God as

the supreme witness.[211]

This expression is either _ornament_ or _imitation_. Both are _higher_

possibilities and their polarity to one another is hardly perceptible in

the beginnings. Of the two, imitation is definitely the earlier and the

closer to the producing race. Imitation is the outcome of a physiognomic

idea of a second person with whom (or which) the first is involuntarily

induced into resonance of vital rhythm (mitschwingen im); whereas

ornament evidences an ego conscious of its own specific character. The

former is widely spread in the animal world, the latter almost peculiar

to man.

Imitation is born of the secret rhythm of all things cosmic. For the

waking being the One appears as discrete and extended; there is a Here

and a There, a Proper and an Alien something, a Microcosm and a

Macrocosm that are polar to one another in the sense-life, and what the

rhythm of imitation does is to bridge this dichotomy. Every religion is

an effort of the waking soul to reach the powers of the world-around.

And so too is Imitation, which in its most devoted moments is wholly

religious, for it consists in an identity of inner activity between the

soul and body “here” and the world-around “there” which, vibrating as

one, become one. As a bird poises itself in the storm or a float gives

to the swaying waves, so our limbs take up an irresistible beat at the

sound of march-music. Not less contagious is the imitation of another’s

bearing and movements, wherein children in particular excel. It reaches

the superlative when we “let ourselves go” in the common song or parade-

march or dance that creates out of many units one unit of feeling and

expression, a “we.” But a “successful” picture of a man or a landscape

is also the outcome of a felt harmony of the pictorial motion with the

secret swing and sway of the living opposite; and it is this actualizing

of physiognomic rhythm that requires the executant to be an adept who

can reveal the idea, the _soul_, of the alien in the play of its

surface. In certain unreserved moments we are all adepts of this sort,

and in such moments, as we follow in an imperceptible rhythm the music

and the play of facial expression, we suddenly look over the precipice

and see great secrets. The aim of all imitation is effective simulation;

this means effective assimilation of ourselves into an alien something—

such a transposition and transubstantiation that the One lives

henceforth in the Other that it describes or depicts—and it is able to

awaken an intense feeling of unison over all the range from silent

absorption and acquiescence to the most abandoned laughter and down into

the last depths of the erotic, a unison which is inseparable from

creative activity. In this wise arose the popular circling-dances (for

instance, the Bavarian _Schuhplattler_ was originally imitated from the

courtship of the woodcocks) but this too is what Vasari means when he

praises Cimabue and Giotto as the first who returned to the imitation of

“Nature”—the Nature, that is, of springtime men, of which Meister Eckart

said: “God flows out in all creatures, and therefore all created is

God.” That which in this world-around presents itself to our

contemplation—and therefore contains meaning for our feelings—as

movement, we render by movement. Hence all imitation is in the broadest

sense dramatic; drama is presented in the movement of the brush-stroke

or the chisel, the melodic curve of the song, the tone of the

recitation, the line of poetry, the description, the dance. But

everything that we _experience_ with and in seeings and hearings is

always an alien soul to which we are uniting ourselves. It is only at

the stage of the Megalopolis that art, reasoned to pieces and de-

spiritualized, goes over to naturalism as that term is understood

nowadays; viz., imitation of the charm of visible appearances, of the

stock of sensible characters that are capable of being scientifically

fixed.

Ornament detaches itself now from Imitation as something which does not

follow the stream of life but rigidly _faces it_. Instead of

physiognomic traits overheard in the alien being, we have established

motives, _symbols_, which are impressed upon it. The intention is no

longer to pretend but to conjure. The “I” overwhelms the “Thou.”

Imitation is only a _speaking_ with means that are born of the moment

and unreproduceable—but Ornament _employs a language_ emancipated from

the speaking, a stock of forms that possesses duration and is not at the

mercy of the individual.[212]

Only the _living_ can be imitated, and it can be imitated only in

movements, for it is through these that it reveals itself to the senses

of artists and spectators. To that extent, imitation belongs to Time and

Direction. All the dancing and drawing and describing and portraying for

eye and ear is irrevocably “directional,” and hence the highest

possibilities of Imitation lie in the copying of a destiny, be it in

tones, verses, picture or stage-scene.[213] Ornament, on the contrary,

is something taken away from Time: it is pure extension, settled and

stable. Whereas an imitation expresses something by _accomplishing

itself_, ornament can only do so by presenting itself to the senses as a

finished thing. It is Being as such, wholly independent of origin. Every

imitation possesses beginning and end, while an ornament possesses only

duration, and therefore we can only imitate the destiny of an

_individual_ (for instance, Antigone or Desdemona), while by an ornament

or symbol only the generalized destiny-idea itself can be represented

(as, for example, that of the Classical world by the Doric column). And

the former presupposes a talent, while the latter calls for an

acquirable knowledge as well.

All strict arts have their grammar and syntax of form-language, with

rules and laws, inward logic and tradition. This is true not merely for

the Doric cabin-temple and Gothic cottage-cathedral, for the carving-

schools of Egypt[214] and Athens and the cathedral plastic of northern

France, for the painting-schools of the Classical world and those of

Holland and the Rhine and Florence, but also for the fixed rules of the

Skalds and Minnesänger which were learned and practised as a craft (and

dealt not merely with sentence and metre but also with gesture and the

choice of imagery[215]), for the narration-technique of the Vedic,

Homeric and Celto-Germanic Epos, for the composition and delivery of the

Gothic sermon (both vernacular and Latin), and for the orators’

prose[216] in the Classical, and for the rules of French drama. In the

ornamentation of an art-work is reflected the inviolable causality of

the macrocosm as the man of the particular kind sees and comprehends it.

Both have system. Each is penetrated with the religious side of life—

_fear_ and love.[217] A genuine symbol can instil fear or can set free

from fear; the “right” emancipates and the “wrong” hurts and depresses.

The imitative side of the arts, on the contrary, stands closer to the

real race-feelings of _hate_ and love, out of which arises the

opposition of _ugly_ and _beautiful_. This is in relation only with the

living, of which the inner rhythm repels us or draws us into phase with

it, whether it be that of the sunset-cloud or that of the tense breath

of the machine. An imitation is beautiful, an ornament _significant_,

and therein lies the difference between direction and extension, organic

and inorganic logic, life and death. That which we think beautiful is

“worth copying.” Easily it swings with us and draws us on to imitate, to

join in the singing, to repeat. Our hearts beat higher, our limbs

twitch, and we are stirred till our spirits overflow. But as it belongs

to Time, it “has its time.” A symbol endures, but everything beautiful

vanishes with the life-pulsation of the man, the class, the people or

the race that feels it as a specific beauty in the general cosmic

rhythm.[218] The “beauty” that Classical sculpture and poetry contained

for Classical eyes is something different from the beauty that they

contain for ours—something extinguished irrecoverably with the Classical

soul—while what we regard as beautiful in it is something that only

exists for us. Not only is that which is beautiful for one kind of man

neutral or ugly for another—e.g., the whole of our music for the

Chinese, or Mexican sculpture for us. For _one and the same life_ the

accustomed, the habitual, owing to the very fact of its possessing

duration, cannot possess beauty.

And now for the first time we can see the opposition between these two

sides of every art in all its depth. Imitation spiritualizes and

quickens, ornament enchants and kills. The one becomes, the other is.

And therefore the one is allied to love and, above all—in songs and riot

and dance—to the _sexual love_, which turns existence to face the

future; and the other to care of the past, to recollection[219] and to

the _funerary_. The beautiful is longingly pursued, the significant

instils dread, and there is no deeper contrast than that between the

house of the living and the house of the dead.[220] The peasant’s

cottage[221] and its derivative the country noble’s hall, the fenced

town and the castle are mansions of life, unconscious expressions of

circling blood, that no art produced and no art can alter. The idea of

the family appears in the plan of the proto-house, the inner form of the

stock in the plan of its villages—which after many a century and many a

change of occupation still show what race it was that founded them[222]—

the life of a nation and its social ordering in the plan (_not_ the

elevation or silhouette) of the city.[223] On the other hand,

Ornamentation of the high order develops itself on the stiff symbols of

death, the urn, the sarcophagus, the stele and the temple of the

dead,[224] and beyond these in gods’ temples and cathedrals _which are

Ornament through and through_, not the expressions of a race but the

language of a world-view. They are pure art through and through—just

what the castle and the cottage are not.[225]

For cottage and castle are _buildings in which_ art, and, specifically,

imitative art, is _made and done_, the home of Vedic, Homeric and

Germanic epos, of the songs of heroes, the dance of boors and that of

lords and ladies, of the minstrel’s lay. The cathedral, on the other

hand, _is_ art, and, moreover, the only art by which _nothing_ is

imitated; it alone is pure tension of persistent forms, pure three-

dimensional logic that expresses itself in edges and surfaces and

volumes. But the art of villages and castles is derived from the

inclinations of the moment, from the laughter and high spirit of feasts

and games, and to such a degree is it dependent on Time, so much is it a

thing of occasion, that the troubadour obtains his very name from

finding, while Improvisation—as we see in the Tzigane music to-day—is

nothing but race manifesting itself to alien senses under the influence

of the hour. To this free creative power all spiritual art opposes the

strict _school_ in which the individual—in the hymn as in the work of

building and carving—is the servant of a logic of timeless forms, and so

in all Cultures the seat of its style-history is in its early cult

architecture. In the castle it is the life and not the structure that

possesses style. In the town the plan is an image of the destinies of a

people, whereas the silhouette of emergent spires and cupolas tells of

the _logic in the builders’ world-picture_, of the “first and last

things” of their universe.

In the architecture of the living, stone _serves a_ worldly _purpose_,

but in the architecture of the cult _it is a symbol_.[226] Nothing has

injured the history of the great architectures so much as the fact that

it has been regarded as the history of architectural techniques instead

of as that of architectural ideas which took their technical expression-

means as and where they found them. It has been just the same with the

history of musical instruments,[227] which also were developed on a

foundation of tone-language. Whether the groin and the flying buttress

and the squinch-cupola were imagined specially for the great

architectures or were expedients that lay more or less ready to hand and

were taken into use, is for art-history a matter of as little importance

as the question of whether, technically, stringed instruments originated

in Arabia or in Celtic Britain. It may be that the Doric column was, as

a matter of workmanship, borrowed from the Egyptian temples of the New

Empire, or the late-Roman domical construction from the Etruscans, or

the Florentine court from the North-African Moors. Nevertheless the

Doric peripteros, the Pantheon, and the Palazzo Farnese belong to wholly

different worlds—they subserve the artistic expression of the prime-

symbol in three different Cultures.

-----

Footnote 210:

See Vol. II, pp. 135 et seq.

Footnote 211:

The monologue-art of very lonely natures is also in reality a

conversation with self in the second person. But it is only in the

intellectuality of the megalopolitan stages that the impulse to

express is overcome by the impulse to communicate (see Vol. II, p.

135) which gives rise to that tendencious art that seeks to instruct

or convert or prove views of a politico-social or moral character, and

provokes the antagonistic formula of “Art for Art’s sake”—which is

itself rather a view than a discipline, though it does at least serve

to recall the primitive significance of artistic expression.

Footnote 212:

See Vol. II, pp. 138 et seq., and Worringer, _Abstraktion und

Einführung_, pp. 66 et seq.

Footnote 213:

Imitation, being life, is past in the very moment of accomplishment.

The curtain falls, and it passes either into oblivion or, if the

product is a durable artifact, into art-history. Of the songs and

dances of old Cultures nothing remains, of their pictures and poems

little. And even this little contains, substantially, only the

ornamental side of the original imitation. Of a grand drama there

remains only the text, not the image and the sound; of a poem only the

words, not the recital; and of all their music the notes at most, not

the tone-colours of the instruments. The essential is irrevocably

gone, and every “reproduction” is in reality something new and

different.

Footnote 214:

For the workshop of Thothmes at Tell-el-Amarna, see _Mitteilungen der

Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft_, No. 52, pp. 28 et seq.

Footnote 215:

K. Burdach, _Deutsche Renaissance_, p. 11. The pictorial art of the

Gothic period also has its strict typism and symbolism.

Footnote 216:

E. Norden, _Antike Kunst-prosa_, pp. 8 et seq.

Footnote 217:

See Vol. II, p. 323.

Footnote 218:

The translation is so far a paraphrase here that it is desirable to

reproduce the German original: “Alles Schöne vergeht mit dem

Lebenspulsschlag (dessen) der es aus dem kosmischen Takt heraus als

solches empfindet.”

Footnote 219:

Hence the ornamental character of script.

Footnote 220:

See p. 188.

Footnote 221:

See Vol. II, p. 104.

Footnote 222:

E.g., the Slavonic round-villages and Teutonic street-villages east of

the Elbe. Similarly, conclusions can be drawn as to many of the events

of the Homeric age from the distribution of round and rectangular

buildings in ancient Italy.

Footnote 223:

See Vol. II, p. 109.

Footnote 224:

See p. 167.

Footnote 225:

See Vol. II, pp. 142 et seq.

Footnote 226:

See p. 128.

Footnote 227:

See p. 62.

-----

IV

In every springtime, consequently, there are _two_ definitely ornamental

and non-imitative arts, that of building and that of decoration. In the

longing and pregnant centuries before it, elemental expression belongs

exclusively to Ornamentation in the narrow sense. The Carolingian period

is represented only by its ornament, as its architecture, for want of

the _Idea_, stands between the styles. And similarly, as a matter of

art-history, it is immaterial that no buildings of the Mycenæan age have

survived.[228] But with the dawn of the great Culture, _architecture as

ornament_ comes into being suddenly and with such a force of expression

that for a century mere decoration-as-such shrinks away from it in awe.

The spaces, surfaces and edges of stone speak _alone_. The tomb of

Chephren is the culmination of mathematical simplicity—everywhere right

angles, squares and rectangular pillars, nowhere adornment, inscription

or desinence—and it is only after some generations have passed that

Relief ventures to infringe the solemn magic of those spaces and the

strain begins to be eased. And the noble Romanesque of Westphalia-Saxony

(Hildesheim, Gernrode, Paulinzella, Paderborn), of Southern France and

of the Normans (Norwich and Peterborough) managed to render the whole

sense of the world with indescribable power and dignity in _one_ line,

_one_ capital, _one_ arch.

When the form-world of the springtime is at its highest, and not before,

the ordained relation is that architecture is lord and ornament is

vassal. And the word “ornament” is to be taken here in the widest

possible sense. Even conventionally, it covers the Classical _unit_-

motive with its quiet poised symmetry or meander supplement, the _spun

surface_ of arabesque and the not dissimilar surface-patterning of Mayan

art, and the “Thunder-pattern”[229] and others of the early Chóu period

which prove once again the landscape basis of the old Chinese

architecture without a doubt. But the warrior figures of Dipylon vases

are also conceived in the spirit of ornament, and so, in a far higher

degree still, are the statuary _groups_ of Gothic cathedrals. “The

figures were composed pillarwise from the spectator, the figures of the

pillar being, with reference to the spectator, ranked upon one another

like rhythmic figures in a symphony that soars heavenward and expands

its sounds in every direction.”[230] And besides draperies, gestures,

and figure-types, even the structure of the hymn-strophe and the

parallel motion of the parts in church music are ornament in the service

of the all-ruling architectural idea.[231] The spell of the great

Ornamentation remains unbroken till in the beginning of a “late” period

architecture falls into a _group_ of civic and worldly special arts that

unceasingly devote themselves to pleasing and clever imitation and

become _ipso facto_ personal. To Imitation and Ornament the same applies

that has been said already of time and space. Time gives birth to space,

but space gives death to time.[232] In the beginning, rigid symbolism

had petrified everything alive; the Gothic statue was not permitted to

be a living body, but was simply a set of lines disposed in human form.

But now Ornament loses all its sacred rigour and becomes more and more

decoration for the architectural setting of a polite and mannered life.

It was purely as this, namely _as a beautifying_ element, that

Renaissance taste was adopted by the courtly and patrician world of the

North (and by it alone!). Ornament meant something quite different in

the Egyptian Old Kingdom from what it meant in the Middle; in the

geometric period from what it meant in the Hellenistic; at the end of

the 12th Century from what it meant at the end of Louis XIV’s reign. And

architecture too becomes pictorial and makes music, and its forms seem

always to be trying to imitate something in the picture of the world-

around. From the Ionic capital we proceed to the Corinthian, and from

Vignola through Bernini to the Rococo.

At the last, when Civilization sets in, true ornament and, with it,

great art as a whole are extinguished. The transition consists—in every

Culture—in Classicism and Romanticism of one sort or another, the former

being a sentimental regard for an Ornamentation (rules, laws, types)

that has long been archaic and soulless, and the latter a sentimental

Imitation, not of life, but of an older Imitation. In the place of

architectural style we find architectural taste. Methods of painting and

mannerisms of writing, old forms and new, home and foreign, come and go

with the fashion. The inward necessity is no longer there, there are no

longer “schools,” for everyone selects what and where it pleases him to

select. _Art becomes craft-art_ (_Kunstgewerbe_) in all its branches—

architecture and music, poetry and drama—and in the end we have a

pictorial and literary stock-in-trade which is destitute of any deeper

significance and is employed according to taste. This final or

industrial form of Ornament—no longer historical, no longer in the

condition of “becoming”—we have before us not only in the patterns of

oriental carpets, Persian and Indian metal work,` Chinese porcelain, but

also in Egyptian (and Babylonian) art as the Greeks and Romans met it.

The Minoan art of Crete is pure craft-art, a northern outlier of

Egyptian post-Hyksos taste; and its “contemporary,” Hellenistic-Roman

art from about the time of Scipio and Hannibal, similarly subserves the

habit of comfort and the play of intellect. From the richly-decorated

entablature of the Forum of Nerva in Rome to the later provincial

ceramics in the West, we can trace the same steady formation of an

unalterable craft-art that we find in the Egyptian and the Islamic

worlds, and that we have to presume in India after Buddha and in China

after Confucius.

V

Now, Cathedral and Pyramid-temple are different in spite of their deep

inward kinship, and it is precisely in these differences that we seize

the mighty phenomenon of the Faustian soul, whose depth-impulse refuses

to be bound in the prime symbol of a way, and from its earliest

beginnings strives to transcend every optical limitation. Can anything

be more alien to the Egyptian conception of the State—whose tendency we

may describe as a noble sobriety—than the political ambitions of the

great Saxon, Franconian and Hohenstaufen Emperors, who came to grief

because they overleapt all political actualities and for whom the

recognition of any bounds would have been a betrayal of the idea of

their rulership? Here the prime symbol of infinite space, with all its

indescribable power, entered the field of active political existence.

Beside the figures of the Ottos, Conrad II, Henry VI and Frederick II

stand the Viking-Normans, conquerors of Russia, Greenland, England,

Sicily and almost of Constantinople; and the great popes, Gregory VII

and Innocent III—all of whom alike aimed at making their visible spheres

of influence coincident with the whole known world. This is what

distinguishes the heroes of the Grail and Arthurian and Siegfried sagas,

ever roaming in the infinite, from the heroes of Homer with their

geographically modest horizon; and the Crusades, that took men from the

Elbe and the Loire to the limits of the known world, from the historical

events upon which the Classical soul built the “Iliad” and which from

the style of that soul we may safely assume to have been local, bounded,

and completely appreciable.

The Doric soul actualized the symbol of the corporally-present

individual thing, while deliberately rejecting all big and far-reaching

creations, and it is for this very good reason that the first post-

Mycenæan period has bequeathed nothing to our archæologists. The

expression to which this soul finally attained was the Doric temple with

its purely outward effectiveness, set upon the landscape as a massive

image but denying and artistically disregarding the space within as the

μὴ ὄv, that which was held to be incapable of existence. The ranked

columns of the Egyptians carried the roof of a hall. The Greek in

borrowing the motive invested it with a meaning proper to himself—he

turned the architectural type inside out like a glove. The outer column-

sets are, in a sense, relics of a denied interior.[233]

The Magian and the Faustian souls, on the contrary, built high. Their

dream-images became concrete as vaultings above significant inner-

spaces, structural anticipations respectively of the mathematic of

algebra and that of analysis. In the style that radiated from Burgundy

and Flanders rib-vaulting with its lunettes and flying buttresses

emancipated the contained space from the sense-appreciable surface[234]

bounding it. In the Magian interior "the window is merely a negative

component, a utility-form in no wise yet developed into an art-form—to

put it crudely, nothing but a hole in the wall."[235] When windows were

in practice indispensable, they were for the sake of artistic impression

concealed by galleries as in the Eastern basilica.[236] The _window as

architecture_, on the other hand, is peculiar to the Faustian soul and

the most significant symbol of its depth-experience. In it can be felt

the will to emerge from the interior into the boundless. The same will

that is immanent in contrapuntal music was native to these vaultings.

The incorporeal world of this music was and remained that of the first

Gothic, and even when, much later, polyphonic music rose to such heights

as those of the Matthew Passion, the Eroica, and Tristan and Parsifal,

it became of inward necessity _cathedral-like_ and returned to its home,

the stone language of the Crusade-time. To get rid of every trace of

Classical corporeality, there was brought to bear the full force of a

deeply significant Ornamentation, which defies the delimiting power of

stone with its weirdly impressive transformations of vegetal, animal and

human bodies (St. Pierre in Moissac), which dissolves all its lines into

melodies and variations on a theme, all its façades into many-voiced

fugues, and all the bodiliness of its statuary into a music of drapery-

folds. It is this spirituality that gave their deep meaning to the

gigantic glass-expanses of our cathedral-windows with their polychrome,

_translucent and therefore wholly bodiless_, painting—an art that has

never and nowhere repeated itself and forms the completest contrast that

can be imagined to the Classical fresco. It is perhaps in the Sainte-

Chapelle at Paris that this emancipation from bodiliness is most

evident. Here the stone practically vanishes in the gleam of the glass.

Whereas the fresco-painting is co-material with the wall on and with

which it has grown and its colour is effective as material, here we have

colours dependent on no carrying surface but as free in space as organ

notes, and shapes poised in the infinite. Compare with the Faustian

spirit of these churches—almost wall-less, loftily vaulted, irradiated

with many-coloured light, aspiring from nave to choir—the Arabian (that

is, the Early-Christian Byzantine) cupola-church. The pendentive cupola,

that seems to float on high above the basilica or the octagon, was

indeed also a victory over the principle of natural gravity which the

Classical expressed in architrave and column; it, too, was a defiance of

architectural body, of “exterior.” But the very absence of an exterior

emphasizes the more the unbroken coherence of the wall that shuts in the

Cavern and allows no look and no hope to emerge from it. An ingeniously

confusing interpenetration of spherical and polygonal forms; a load so

placed upon a stone drum that it seems to hover weightless on high, yet

closing the interior without outlet; all structural lines concealed;

vague light admitted, through a small opening in the heart of the dome

but only the more inexorably to emphasize the walling-in—such are the

characters that we see in the masterpieces of this art, S. Vitale in

Ravenna, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and the Dome of the Rock[237]

in Jerusalem. Where the Egyptian puts reliefs that with their flat

planes studiously avoid any foreshortening suggestive of lateral depth,

where the Gothic architects put their pictures of glass to draw in the

world of space without, the Magian clothes his walls with sparkling,

predominantly golden, mosaics and arabesques and so drowns his cavern in

that unreal, fairy-tale light which for Northerners is always so

seductive in Moorish art.

-----

Footnote 228:

The same applies to the architecture of Thinite Egypt and to the

Seleucid-Persian sun and fire temples of the pre-Christian area.

Footnote 229:

The combination of scrolls and “Greek keys” with the Dragon or other

emblem of storm-power.—_Tr._

Footnote 230:

Dvorák, _Idealismus und Naturalismus in der got. Skulptur u. Malerei_

(_Hist. Zeitschrift_, 1918, pp. 44 et seq.).

Footnote 231:

And, finally, ornament in the highest sense includes _script_, and

with it, the Book, which is the true associate of the cult-building,

and as an art-work always appears and disappears with it. (See Vol.

II, pp. 182. et seq., pp. 298 et seq.) In writing, it is understanding

as distinct from intuition that attains to form: it is not essences

that those signs symbolize but notions abstracted therefrom by words,

and as for the speech-habituated human intellect rigid space is the

presented objective, the writing of a Culture is (after its stone-

building) the purest of all expressions of its prime-symbol. It is

quite impossible to understand the history of Arabesque if we leave

the innumerable Arabian scripts out of consideration, and it is no

less impossible to separate Egyptian and Chinese style-history from

the history of the corresponding writing-signs and their arrangement

and application.

Footnote 232:

See p. 173.

Footnote 233:

Certainly the Greeks at the time when they advanced from the Antæ to

the Peripteros were under the mighty influence of the Egyptian

_series_-columns—it was at this time that their sculpture in the

round, indisputably following Egyptian models, freed itself from the

relief manner which still clings to the Apollo figures. But this does

not alter the fact that the motive of the Classical column and the

Classical application of the rank-principle were wholly and peculiarly

Classical.

Footnote 234:

The surface of the space-volume itself, not that of the stone. Dvorák,

_Hist. Ztschr._, 1918, pp. 17 et seq.

Footnote 235:

Dehio, _Gesch. der deutschen Kunst_, I, p. 16.

Footnote 236:

For descriptions and illustrations of types of Doming and Vaulting,

see the article _Vault_ in Ency. Brit., XI Ed.—_Tr._

Footnote 237:

“Mosque of Omar.”—_Tr._

-----

VI

The phenomenon of the _great style_, then, is an emanation from the

essence of the Macrocosm, from the prime-symbol of a _great_ culture. No

one who can appreciate the connotation of the word sufficiently to see

that it designates not a form-aggregate but a form-history, will try to

aline the fragmentary and chaotic art-utterances of primitive mankind

with the comprehensive certainty of a style that consistently develops

over centuries. Only the art of great Cultures, the art that has ceased

to be only art and has begun to be an effective unit of expression and

significance, possesses style.

The organic history of a style comprises a "pre—," a "non—" and a "post—

." The bull tablet of the First Dynasty of Egypt[238] is not yet

“Egyptian.” Not till the Third Dynasty do the works acquire a style—but

then they do so suddenly and very definitely. Similarly the Carolingian

period stands “between-styles.” We see different forms touched on and

explored, but nothing of inwardly necessary expression. The creator of

the Aachen Minster “thinks surely and builds surely, but does not feel

surely.”[239] The Marienkirche in the Castle of Würzburg (c. 700) has

its counterpart in Salonika (St. George), and the Church of St. Germigny

des Près (c. 800) with its cupolas and horseshoe niches is almost a

mosque. For the whole of West Europe the period 850-950 is almost a

blank. And just so to-day Russian art stands between two styles. The

primitive wooden architecture with its steep eight-sided tent-roof

(which extends from Norway to Manchuria) is impressed with Byzantine

motives from over the Danube and Armenian-Persian from over the

Caucasus. We can certainly feel an “elective affinity” between the

Russian and the Magian souls, but as yet the prime symbol of Russia, the

_plane without limit_,[240] finds no sure expression either in religion

or in architecture. The church roof emerges, hillock-wise, but little

from the landscape and on it sit the tent-roofs whose points are coifed

with the “kokoshniks” that suppress and would abolish the upward

tendency. They neither tower up like the Gothic belfry nor enclose like

the mosque-cupola, but _sit_, thereby emphasizing the horizontality of

the building, which is meant to be regarded merely from the outside.

When about 1760 the Synod forbade the tent roofs and prescribed the

orthodox onion-cupolas, the heavy cupolas were set upon slender

cylinders, of which there may be any number[241] and which sit on the

roof-plane.[242] It is not yet a style, only the promise of a style that

will awaken when the real Russian religion awakens.

In the Faustian West, this awakening happened shortly before A.D. 1000.

In one moment, the Romanesque style was there. Instead of the fluid

organization of space on an insecure ground plan, there was, suddenly, a

strict dynamic of space. From the very beginning, inner and outer

construction were placed in a fixed relation, the wall was penetrated by

the form-language and the form worked into the wall in a way that no

other Culture has ever imagined. From the very beginning the window and

the belfry were invested with their meanings. The form was irrevocably

assigned. Only its development remained to be worked out.

The Egyptian style began with another such creative act, just as

unconscious, just as full of symbolic force. The prime symbol of the Way

came into being suddenly with the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty (2930

B.C.). The world-creating depth-experience of this soul gets its

substance from the direction-factor itself. Spatial depth as stiffened

Time, distance, death, Destiny itself dominate the expression, and the

merely sensuous dimensions of length and breadth become an escorting

plane which restricts and prescribes the Way of destiny. The Egyptian

flat-relief, which is designed to be seen at close quarters and arranged

serially so as to compel the beholder to pass along the wall-planes in

the prescribed direction, appears with similar suddenness about the

beginning of the Fifth Dynasty.[243] The still later avenues of sphinxes

and statues and the rock- and terrace-temples constantly intensify that

tendency towards the one distance that the world of Egyptian mankind

knows, the grave. Observe how soon the colonnades of the early period

come to be systems of huge, close-set pillars that _screen off_ all

side-view. This is something that has never reproduced itself in any

other architecture.

The grandeur of this style appears to us as rigid and unchanging. And

certainly it stands beyond the passion which is ever seeking and fearing

and so imparts to subordinate characters a quality of restless personal

movement in the flow of the centuries. But, vice versa, we cannot doubt

that to an Egyptian the Faustian style (which _is_ our style, from

earliest Romanesque to Rococo and Empire) would with its unresting

persistent search for a Something, appear far more uniform than we can

imagine. It follows, we must not forget, from the conception of style

that we are working on here, that Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance,

Baroque and Rococo are only _stages of one and the same style_, in which

it is naturally the variable that we and the constant that men of other

eyes remark. In actual fact, the inner unity of the Northern Renaissance

is shown in innumerable reconstructions of Romanesque work in Baroque

and of late Gothic work in Rococo that are not in the least startling.

In peasant art, Gothic and Baroque have been identical, and the streets

of old towns with their pure harmony of all sorts of gables and façades

(wherein definite attributions to Romanesque or Gothic Renaissance or

Baroque or Rococo are often quite impossible) show that the family

resemblance between the members is far greater than they themselves

realize.

The Egyptian style was purely architectural, and remained so till the

Egyptian soul was extinguished. It is the only one in which

Ornamentation as a decorative supplement to architecture is entirely

absent. It allowed of no divergence into arts of entertainment, no

display-painting, no busts, no secular music. In the Ionic phase, the

centre of gravity of the Classical style shifted from architecture to an

independent plastic art; in that of the Baroque the style of the West

passed into music, whose form-language in its turn ruled the entire

building art of the 18th Century; in the Arabian world, after Justinian

and Chosroes-Nushirvan, Arabesque dissolved all the forms of

architecture, painting and sculpture into style-impressions that

nowadays we should consider as craft-art. But in Egypt the sovereignty

of architecture remained unchallenged; it merely softened its language a

little. In the chambers of the pyramid-temple of the Fourth Dynasty

(Pyramid of Chephren) there are unadorned angular pillars. In the

buildings of the Fifth (Pyramid of Sahu-rê) the plant-column makes its

appearance. Lotus and papyrus branches turned into stone arise gigantic

out of a pavement of transparent alabaster that represents water,

enclosed by purple walls. The ceiling is adorned with birds and stars.

The sacred way from the gate-buildings to the tomb-chamber, the picture

of life, is a stream—it is the Nile itself become one with the prime-

symbol of direction. The spirit of the mother-landscape unites with the

soul that has sprung from it.

In China, in lieu of the awe-inspiring pylon with its massy wall and

narrow entrance, we have the “Spirit-wall” (yin-pi) that conceals the

way in. The Chinaman slips into life and thereafter follows the Tao of

life’s path; as the Nile valley is to the up-and-down landscape of the

Hwang Ho, so is the stone-enclosed temple-way to the mazy paths of

Chinese garden-architecture. And just so, in some mysterious fashion,

the Euclidean existence is linked with the multitude of little islands

and promontories of the Ægean, and the passionate Western, roving in the

infinite, with the broad plains of Franconia and Burgundy and Saxony.

VII

The Egyptian style is the expression of a _brave_ soul. The rigour and

force of it Egyptian man himself never felt and never asserted. He dared

all, but said nothing. In Gothic and Baroque, on the contrary, the

triumph over heaviness became a perfectly conscious motive of the form-

language. The drama of Shakespeare deals openly with the desperate

conflict of will and world. Classical man, again, was weak in the face

of the “powers.” The κάθαρσις of fear and pity, the _relief and

recovery_ of the Apollinian soul in the moment of the περιπέτεια was,

according to Aristotle, the effect deliberately aimed at in Attic

tragedy. As the Greek spectator watched _someone whom he knew_ (for

everyone knew the myth and its heroes and lived in them) senselessly

maltreated by fortune, without any conceivable possibility of resistance

to the Powers, and saw him go under with splendid mien, defiant, heroic,

his own Euclidean soul experienced a marvellous uplifting. If life was

worthless, at any rate the _grand gesture_ in losing it was not so. The

Greek willed nothing and dared nothing, but he found a stirring beauty

in _enduring_. Even the earlier figures of Odysseus the patient, and,

above all, Achilles the archetype of Greek manhood, have this

characteristic quality. The morale of the Cynics, that of the Stoics,

that of Epicurus, the common Greek ideals of σωφροσύνη and ἀταραξἰα,

Diogenes devoting himself to θεωρία in a tub—all this is masked

cowardice in the face of grave matters and responsibilities, and

different indeed from the pride of the Egyptian soul. Apollinian man

goes below ground out of life’s way, even to the point of suicide, which

_in this Culture alone_ (if we ignore certain related Indian ideals)

ranked as a high ethical act and was treated with the solemnity of a

ritual symbol.[244] The Dionysiac intoxication seems a sort of furious

drowning of uneasinesses that to the Egyptian soul were utterly unknown.

And consequently the Greek Culture is that of the small, the easy, the

simple. Its technique is, compared with Egyptian or Babylonian, a clever

nullity.[245] No ornamentation shows such a poverty of invention as

theirs, and their stock of sculptural positions and attitudes could be

counted on one’s fingers. “In its poverty of forms, which is conspicuous

even allowing that at the beginning of its development it may have been

better off than it was later, the Doric style pivoted everything on

proportions and on measure.”[246] Yet, even so, what adroitness in

avoiding! The Greek architecture with its commensuration of load and

support and its peculiar smallness of scale suggests a persistent

evasion of difficult architectural problems that on the Nile and, later,

in the high North were literally looked for, which moreover were known

and certainly not burked in the Mycenæan age. The Egyptian loved the

strong stone of immense buildings; it was in keeping with his self-

consciousness that he should choose only the hardest for his task. But

the Greek avoided it; his architecture first set itself small tasks,

then ceased altogether. If we survey it as a whole, and then compare it

with the totality of Egyptian or Mexican or even, for that matter,

Western architecture, we are astounded at the feeble development of the

style. A few variations of the Doric temple and it was exhausted. It was

already closed off about 400 when the Corinthian capital was invented,

and everything subsequent to this was merely modification of what

existed.

The result of this was an almost bodily standardization of form-types

and style-species. One might choose between them, but never overstep

their strict limits—that would have been in some sort an admission of an

infinity of possibilities. There were three orders of columns and a

definite disposition of the architrave corresponding to each; to deal

with the difficulty (considered, as early as Vitruvius, as a conflict)

which the alternation of triglyphs and metopes produced at the corners,

the nearest intercolumniations were narrowed—no one thought of imagining

new forms to suit the case. If greater dimensions were desired, the

requirements were met by superposition, juxtaposition, etc., of

additional elements. Thus the Colosseum possesses three rings, the

Didymæum of Miletus three rows of columns in front, and the Frieze of

the Giants of Pergamum an endless succession of individual and

unconnected motives. Similarly with the style-species of prose and the

types of lyric poetry, narrative and tragedy. Universally, the

expenditure of powers on the basic form is restricted to the minimum and

the creative energy of the artist directed to detail-fineness. It is a

statical treatment of static genera, and it stands in the sharpest

possible contrast to the dynamic fertility of the Faustian with its

ceaseless creation of new types and domains of form.

VIII

We are now able to see the _organism_ in a great style-course. Here, as

in so many other matters, Goethe was the first to whom vision came. In

his “Winckelmann” he says of Velleius Paterculus: “with his standpoint,

it was not given to him to see all art as a living thing (ζῶον) that

must have an inconspicuous beginning, a slow growth, a brilliant moment

of fulfilment and a gradual decline like every other organic being,

though it is presented in a set of individuals.” This sentence contains

the entire morphology of art-history. Styles do not follow one another

like waves or pulse-beats. It is not the personality or will or brain of

the artist that makes the style, but the style that makes the _type_ of

the artist. The style, like the Culture, is a prime phenomenon in the

strictest Goethian sense, be it the style of art or religion or thought,

or the style of life itself. It is, as “Nature” is, an ever-new

experience of waking man, his alter ego and mirror-image in the world-

around. And therefore in the general historical picture of a Culture

there can be but one style, _the style of the Culture_. The error has

lain in treating mere style-phases—Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Rococo,

Empire—as if they were styles on the same level as units of quite

another order such as the Egyptian, the Chinese (or even a

“prehistoric”) style. Gothic and Baroque are simply the youth and age of

one and the same vessel of forms, the style of the West as ripening and

ripened. What has been wanting in our art-research has been detachment,

freedom from prepossessions, and the will to abstract. Saving ourselves

trouble, we have classed any and every form-domain that makes a strong

impression upon us as a “style,” and it need hardly be said that our

insight has been led astray still further by the Ancient-Mediæval-Modern

scheme. But in reality, even a masterpiece of strictest Renaissance like

the court of the Palazzo Farnese is infinitely nearer to the arcade-

porch of St. Patroclus in Soest, the interior of the Magdeburg

cathedral, and the staircases of South-German castles of the 18th

Century than it is to the Temple of Pæstum or to the Erechtheum. The

same relation exists between Doric and Ionic, and hence Ionic columns

can be as completely combined with Doric building forms as late Gothic

is with early Baroque in St. Lorenz at Nürnberg, or late Romanesque with

late Baroque in the beautiful upper part of the West choir at Mainz. And

our eyes have scarcely yet learned to distinguish within the Egyptian

style the Old Kingdom and Middle Empire elements corresponding to Doric

and Gothic youth and to Ionic and Baroque maturity, because from the

Twelfth Dynasty these elements interpenetrate in all harmony in the

form-language of all the greater works.

The task before art-history is to write the _comparative biographies of

the great styles_, all of which as organisms of the same genus possess

structurally cognate life histories.

In the beginning there is the timid, despondent, naked expression of a

newly-awakened soul which is still seeking for a relation between itself

and the world that, though its proper creation, yet is presented as

alien and unfriendly. There is the child’s fearfulness in Bishop

Bernward’s building at Hildesheim, in the Early-Christian catacomb-

painting, and in the pillar-halls of the Egyptian Fourth Dynasty. A

February of art, a deep presentiment of a coming wealth of forms, an

immense suppressed tension, lies over the landscape that, still wholly

rustic, is adorning itself with the first strongholds and townlets. Then

follows the joyous mounting into the high Gothic, into the Constantinian

age with its pillared basilicas and its domical churches, into the

relief-ornament of the Fifth-Dynasty temple. _Being_ is understood, a

sacred form-language has been completely mastered and radiates its

glory, and the Style ripens into a majestic symbolism of directional

depth and of Destiny. But fervent youth comes to an end, and

contradictions arise within the soul itself. The Renaissance, the

Dionysiac-musical hostility to Apollinian Doric, the Byzantine of 450

that looks to Alexandria and away from the overjoyed art of Antioch,

indicate a moment of resistance, of effective or ineffective impulse to

destroy what has been acquired. It is very difficult to elucidate this

moment, and an attempt to do so would be out of place here.

And now it is the manhood of the style-history that comes on. The

Culture is changing into the intellectuality of the great cities that

will now dominate the country-side, and _pari passu_ the style is

becoming intellectualized also. The grand symbolism withers; the riot of

superhuman forms dies down; milder and more worldly arts drive out the

great art of developed stone. Even in Egypt sculpture and fresco are

emboldened to lighter movement. The _artist_ appears, and “plans” what

formerly grew out of the soil. Once more existence becomes self-

conscious and now, detached from the land and the dream and the mystery,

stands questioning, and wrestles for an expression of its new duty—as at

the beginning of Baroque when Michelangelo, in wild discontent and

kicking against the limitations of his art, piles up the dome of St.

Peter’s—in the age of Justinian I which built Hagia Sophia and the

mosaic-decked domed basilicas of Ravenna—at the beginning of that

Twelfth Dynasty in Egypt which the Greeks condensed under the name of

Sesostris—and at the decisive epoch in Hellas (c. 600) whose

architecture probably, nay certainly, expressed that which is echoed for

us in its grandchild Æschylus.

Then comes the gleaming autumn of the style. Once more the soul depicts

its happiness, this time conscious of self-completion. The “return to

Nature” which already thinkers and poets—Rousseau, Gorgias and their

“contemporaries” in the other Cultures—begin to feel and to proclaim,

reveals itself in the form-world of the arts as a sensitive longing and

_presentiment of the end_. A perfectly clear intellect, joyous urbanity,

the sorrow of a parting—these are the colours of these last Culture-

decades of which Talleyrand was to remark later: “Qui n’a pas vécu avant

1789 ne connaît pas la douceur de vivre.” So it was, too, with the free,

sunny and superfine art of Egypt under Sesostris III (c. 1850 B.C.) and

the brief moments of satiated happiness that produced the varied

splendour of Pericles’s Acropolis and the works of Zeuxis and Phidias. A

thousand years later again, in the age of the Ommaiyads, we meet it in

the glad fairyland of Moorish architecture with its fragile columns and

horseshoe arches that seem to melt into air in an iridescence of

arabesques and stalactites. A thousand years more, and we see it in the

music of Haydn and Mozart, in Dresden shepherdesses, in the pictures of

Watteau and Guardi, and the works of German master-builders at Dresden,

Potsdam, Würzburg and Vienna.

Then the style fades out. The form-language of the Erechtheum and the

Dresden Zwinger, honeycombed with intellect, fragile, ready for self-

destruction, is followed by the flat and senile Classicism that we find

in the Hellenistic megalopolis, the Byzantium of 900 and the “Empire”

modes of the North. The end is a sunset reflected in forms revived for a

moment by pedant or by eclectic—semi-earnestness and doubtful

genuineness dominate the world of the arts. We to-day are in this

condition—playing a tedious game with dead forms to keep up the illusion

of a living art.

IX

No one has yet perceived that Arabian art is a single phenomenon. It is

an idea that can only take shape when we have ceased to be deceived by

the crust which overlaid the young East with post-Classical art-

exercises that, whether they were imitation-antique or chose their

elements from proper or alien sources at will, were in any case long

past all inward life; when we have discovered that Early Christian art,

together with every really living element in “late-Roman,” is in fact

the springtime of the _Arabian style_; and when we see the epoch of

Justinian I as exactly on a par with the Spanish-Venetian Baroque that

ruled Europe in the great days of Charles V or Philip II, and the

palaces of Byzantium and their magnificent battle-pictures and pageant-

scenes—the vanished glories that inspired the pens of courtly literati

like Procopius—on a par with the palaces of early Baroque in Madrid,

Vienna and Rome and the great decorative-painting of Rubens and

Tintoretto. This Arabian style embraces the entire first millennium of

our era. It thus stands at a critical position in the picture of a

general history of “Art,” and its organic connectedness has been

imperceptible under the erroneous conventions thereof.[247]

Strange and—if these studies have given us the eye for things latent—

moving it is to see how this young Soul, held in bondage to the

intellect of the Classical and, above all, to the political omnipotence

of Rome, dares not rouse itself into freedom but humbly subjects itself

to obsolete value-forms and tries to be content with Greek language,

Greek ideas and Greek art-elements. Devout acceptance of the powers of

the strong day is present in every young Culture and is the sign of its

youth—witness the humility of Gothic man in his pious high-arched spaces

with their pillar-statuary and their light-filled pictures in glass, the

high tension of the Egyptian soul in the midst of its world of pyramids,

lotus-columns and relief-lined halls. But in this instance there is the

additional element of an intellectual prostration before forms really

dead but supposedly eternal. Yet in spite of all, the taking-over and

continuance of these forms came to nothing. Involuntarily, unobserved,

not supported by an inherent pride as Gothic was, but felt, there in

Roman Syria, almost as a lamentable come-down, a whole new form-world

grew up. Under a mask of Græco-Roman conventions, it filled even Rome

itself. The master-masons of the Pantheon and the Imperial Fora were

_Syrians_. In no other example is the primitive force of a young soul so

manifest as here, where it has to make its own world by sheer conquest.

In this as in every other Culture, Spring seeks to express its

spirituality in a new ornamentation and, above all, in religious

architecture as the sublime form of that ornamentation. But of all this

rich form-world the only part that (till recently) has been taken into

account has been the Western edge of it, which consequently has been

assumed to be the true home and habitat of Magian style-history. In

reality, in matters of style as in those of religion, science and

social-political life, what we find there is only an irradiation from

outside the Eastern border of the Empire.[248] Riegl[249] and

Strzygowski[250] have discovered this, but if we are to go further and

arrive at a conspectus of the development of Arabian art we have to shed

many philological and religious prepossessions. The misfortune is that

our art-research, although it no longer recognizes the religious

frontiers, nevertheless unconsciously assumes them. For there is in

reality no such thing as a Late-Classical nor an Early-Christian nor yet

an Islamic art in the sense of an art proper to each of those faiths and

evolved by the community of believers as such. On the contrary, the

totality of these religions—from Armenia to Southern Arabia and Axum,

and from Persia to Byzantium and Alexandria—possess a broad uniformity

of artistic expression that overrides the contradictions of detail.[251]

_All_ these religions, the Christian, the Jewish, the Persian, the

Manichæan, the Syncretic,[252] possessed cult-buildings and (at any rate

in their script) an Ornamentation of the first rank; and however

different the items of their dogmas, they are all pervaded by an

homogeneous religiousness and express it in a homogeneous symbolism of

depth-experience. There is something in the basilicas of Christianity,

Hellenistic, Hebrew and Baal-cults, and in the Mithræum,[253] the

Mazdaist fire-temple and the Mosque, that tells of a like spirituality:

it is the _Cavern_-feeling.

It becomes therefore the bounden duty of research to seek to establish

the hitherto completely neglected architecture of the South-Arabian and

Persian temple, the Syrian and the Mesopotamian synagogue, the cult-

buildings of Eastern Asia Minor and even Abyssinia;[254] and in respect

of Christianity to investigate no longer merely the Pauline West but

also the Nestorian East that stretched from the Euphrates to China,

where the old records significantly call its buildings “Persian

temples.” If in all this building practically nothing has, so far,

forced itself specially upon our notice, it is fair to suppose that both

the advance of Christianity first and that of Islam later could change

the religion of a place of worship without contradicting its plan and

style. We know that this is the case with Late Classical temples: but

how many of the churches in Armenia may once have been fire-temples?

The artistic centre of this Culture was very definitely—as Strzygowski

has observed—in the triangle of cities Edessa, Nisibis, Amida.

To the westward of it is the domain of the Late-Classical

“Pseudomorphosis,”[255] the Pauline Christianity that conquered in the

councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon,[256] Western Judaism and the cults of

Syncretism. _The architectural type of the Pseudomorphosis_, both for

Jew and Gentile, is the Basilica.[257] It employs the means of the

Classical to express the opposite thereof, and is unable to free itself

from these means—that is the essence and the tragedy of

“Pseudomorphosis.” The more “Classical” Syncretism modifies a cult that

is resident in a Euclidean place into one which is _professed by a

community_ of indefinite estate, the more the interior of the temple

gains in importance over the exterior without needing to change either

plan or roof or columns very much. The space-feeling is different, but

not—at first—the means of expressing it. In the pagan religious

architecture of the Imperial Age there is a perceptible—though never yet

perceived—movement from the wholly corporeal Augustan temple, in which

the cella is the architectural expression of _nothingness_, to one in

which the interior _only_ possesses meaning. Finally the external

picture of the Peripteros of the Doric is transferred to the four inside

walls. Columns ranked in front of a windowless wall are a denial of

space beyond—that is, for the Classical beholder, of space within, and

for the Magian, of space without. It is therefore a question of minor

importance whether the entire space is covered in as in the Basilica

proper, or only the sanctuary as in the Sun-temple of Baalbek with the

great forecourt,[258] which later becomes a standing element of the

mosque and is probably of South Arabian origin.[259] That the Nave

originates in a court surrounded by halls is suggested not only by the

special development of the basilica-type in the East Syrian steppe

(particularly Hauran) but also by the basic disposition of porch, nave

and choir as stages leading to the altar—for the aisles (originally the

side-halls of the court) end blind, and only the nave proper corresponds

with the apse. This basic meaning is very evident in St. Paul at Rome,

albeit the Pseudomorphosis (inversion of the Classical temple) dictated

the technical means, viz., column and architrave. How symbolic is the

Christian reconstruction of the Temple of Aphrodisias in Caria, in which

the cella within the columns is abolished and replaced by a new wall

outside them.[260]

Outside the domain of the “Pseudomorphosis,” on the contrary, the

cavern-feeling was free to develop its own form-language, and here

therefore it is _the definite roof that is emphasized_ (whereas in the

other domain the protest against the Classical feeling led merely to the

development of an _interior_). When and where the various possibilities

of dome, cupola, barrel-vaulting, rib-vaulting, came into existence as

technical methods is, as we have already said, a matter of no

significance. What is of decisive importance is the fact that about the

time of Christ’s birth and the rise of the new world-feeling, the new

space-symbolism must have begun to make use of these forms and to

develop them further in expressiveness. It will very likely come to be

shown that the fire-temples and synagogues of Mesopotamia (and possibly

also the temples of Athtar in Southern Arabia) were originally cupola-

buildings.[261] Certainly the pagan marna-temple at Gaza was so, and

long before Pauline Christianity took possession of these forms under

Constantine, builders of Eastern origin had introduced them, as

novelties to please the taste of the Megalopolitans, into all parts of

the Roman Empire. In Rome itself, Apollodorus of Damascus was employed

under Trajan for the vaulting of the temple of “Venus and Rome,” and the

domed chambers of the Baths of Caracalla and the so-called “Minerva

Medica” of Gallienus’s time were built by Syrians. But the masterpiece,

_the earliest of all Mosques_, is the Pantheon as rebuilt by Hadrian.

Here, without a doubt, the emperor was imitating, for the satisfaction

of his own taste, cult-buildings that he had seen in the East.[262]

The architecture of the central-dome, in which the Magian world-feeling

achieved its purest expression, extended beyond the limits of the Roman

Empire. For the Nestorian Christianity that extended from Armenia even

into China it was the only form, as it was also for the Manichæns and

the Mazdaists, and it also impressed itself victoriously upon the

Basilica of the West when the Pseudomorphosis began to crumble and the

last cults of Syncretism to die out. In Southern France—where there were

Manichæan sects even as late as the Crusades—the form of the East was

domesticated. Under Justinian, the interpenetration of the two produced

the domical basilica of Byzantium and Ravenna. The pure basilica was

pushed into the Germanic West, there to be transformed by the energy of

the Faustian depth-impulse into the cathedral. The domed basilica,

again, spread from Byzantium and Armenia into Russia, where it came by

slow degrees to be felt as an element of exterior architecture belonging

to a symbolism concentrated in the roof. But in the Arabian world Islam,

the heir of Monophysite and Nestorian Christianity and of the Jews and

the Persians, carried the development through to the end. When it turned

Hagia Sophia into a mosque it only resumed possession of an old

property. Islamic domical building followed Mazdaist and Nestorian along

the same tracks to Shan-tung and to India. Mosques grew up in the far

West in Spain and Sicily, where, moreover, the style appears rather in

its East-Aramæan-Persian than in its West-Aramæan-Syrian mode.[263] And

while Venice looked to Byzantium and Ravenna (St. Mark), the brilliant

age of the Norman-Hohenstaufen rule in Palermo taught the cities of the

Italian west coast, and even Florence, to admire and to imitate these

Moorish buildings. More than one of the motives that the Renaissance

thought were Classical—e.g., the court surrounded by halls and the union

of column and arch—really originated thus.

What is true as regards architecture is even more so as regards

ornamentation, which in the Arabian world very early overcame all

figure-representation and swallowed it up in itself. Then, as

“arabesque,” it advanced to meet, to charm and to mislead the young art-

intention of the West.

The early-Christian-Late-Classical art of the Pseudomorphosis shows the

same ornament-_plus_-figure mixture of the inherited “alien” and the

inborn “proper” as does the Carolingian-Early Romanesque of (especially)

Southern France and Upper Italy. In the one case Hellenistic

intermingles with Early-Magian, in the other Mauro-Byzantine with

Faustian. The researcher has to examine line after line and ornament

after ornament to detect the form-feeling which differentiates the one

stratum from the other. In every architrave, in every frieze, there is

to be found a secret battle between the conscious old and the

unconscious, but victorious, new motives. One is confounded by this

general interpenetration of the Late-Hellenistic and the Early-Arabian

form-senses, as one sees it, for example, in Roman portrait-busts (here

it is often only in the treatment of the hair that the new way of

expression is manifested); in the acanthus-shoots which show—often on

one and the same frieze—chisel-work and drill-work side by side; in the

sarcophagi of the 3rd Century in which a childlike feeling of the Giotto

and Pisano character is entangled with a certain late and megalopolitan

Naturalism that reminds one more or less of David or Carstens; and in

buildings such as the Basilica of Maxentius[264] and many parts of the

Baths and the Imperial Fora that are still very Classical in conception.

Nevertheless, the Arabian soul was cheated of its maturity—like a young

tree that is hindered and stunted in its growth by a fallen old giant of

the forest. Here there was no brilliant instant _felt and experienced as

such_, like that of ours in which, simultaneously with the Crusades, the

wooden beams of the Cathedral roof locked themselves into rib-vaulting

and an interior was made to actualize and fulfil the idea of infinite

space. The political creation of Diocletian was shattered in its glory

upon the fact that, standing as he did on Classical ground, he had to

accept the whole mass of the administrative tradition of Urbs Roma; this

sufficed to reduce his work to a mere reform of obsolete conditions. And

yet he was the first of the Caliphs. With him, the idea of the Arabian

State emerges clearly into the light. It is Diocletian’s dispensation,

together with that of the Sassanids which preceded it somewhat and

served in all respects as its model, that gives us the first notion of

the ideal that ought to have gone on to fulfilment here. But so it was

in all things. To this very day we admire as last creations of the

Classical—because we cannot or will not regard them otherwise—the

thought of Plotinus and Marcus Aurelius, the cults of Isis, Mithras and

the Sun-God, the Diophantine mathematics and, lastly, the whole of the

art which streamed towards us from the Eastern marches of the Roman

Empire and for which Antioch and Alexandria were merely _points

d’appui_.

This alone is sufficient to explain the intense vehemence with which the

Arabian Culture, when released at length from artistic as from other

fetters, flung itself upon all the lands that had inwardly belonged to

it for centuries past. It is the sign of a soul that feels itself in a

hurry, that notes in fear the first symptoms of old age before it has

had youth. This emancipation of Magian mankind is without a parallel.

Syria is conquered, or rather _delivered_, in 634. Damascus falls in

637, Ctesiphon in 637. In 641 Egypt and India are reached, in 647

Carthage, in 676 Samarkand, in 710 Spain. And in 732 the Arabs stood

before Paris. Into these few years was compressed the whole sum of

saved-up passions, postponed hopes, reserved deeds, that in the slow

maturing of other Cultures suffice to fill the history of centuries. The

Crusaders before Jerusalem, the Hohenstaufen in Sicily, the Hansa in the

Baltic, the Teutonic Knights in the Slavonic East, the Spaniards in

America, the Portuguese in the East Indies, the Empire of Charles V on

which the sun never set, the beginnings of England’s colonial power

under Cromwell—the equivalent of all this was shot out in _one_

discharge that carried the Arabs to Spain and France, India and

Turkestan.

True, all Cultures (the Egyptian, the Mexican and the Chinese excepted)

have grown up under the tutelage of some older Culture. Each of the

form-worlds shows certain alien traits. Thus, the Faustian soul of the

Gothic, already predisposed to reverence by the Arabian origin of

Christianity, grasped at the treasures of Late-Arabian art. An

unmistakably Southern, one might even say an Arabian, Gothic wove itself

over the façades of the Burgundian and Provençal cathedrals, dominated

with a magic of stone the outward language of Strassburg Minster, and

fought a silent battle in statues and porches, fabric-patterns, carvings

and metalwork—and not less in the intricate figures of scholastic

philosophy and in that intensely Western symbol, the Grail legend[265]—

with the Nordic prime-feeling of _Viking Gothic_ that rules the interior

of the Magdeburg Cathedral, the points of Freiburg Minster and the

mysticism of Meister Eckart. More than once the pointed arch threatens

to burst its restraining line and to transform itself into the horseshoe

arch of Moorish-Norman architecture.

So also the Apollinian art of the Doric spring—whose first efforts are

practically lost to us—doubtless took over Egyptian elements to a very

large extent, and by and through these came to its own proper symbolism.

But the Magian soul of the Pseudomorphosis had not the courage to

appropriate alien means _without yielding to them_. And this is why the

physiognomic of the Magian soul has still so much to disclose to the

quester.

X

The idea of the Macrocosm, then, which presents itself in the style-

problem as simplified and capable of treatment, poses a multitude of

tasks for the future to tackle. To make the form-world of the arts

available as a means of penetrating the spirituality of entire Cultures—

by handling it in a thoroughly physiognomic and symbolic spirit—is an

undertaking that has not hitherto got beyond speculations of which the

inadequacy is obvious. We are hardly as yet aware that there may be a

psychology of the metaphysical bases of all great architectures. We have

no idea what there is to discover in the change of meaning that a form

of _pure extension_ undergoes when it is taken over into another

Culture. The history of the column has never yet been written, nor have

we any notion of the deeply symbolic significances that reside in the

means and the instruments of art.

Consider mosaic. In Hellenic times it was made up of pieces of marble,

it was opaque and corporeal-Euclidean (e.g., the famous Battle of Issus

at Naples), and it adorned the floor. But with the awakening of the

Arabian soul it came to be built up of pieces of glass and set in fused

gold, and it simply covered the walls and roofs of the domed basilica.

This Early-Arabian Mosaic-picturing corresponds exactly, as to phase,

with the glass-picturing of Gothic cathedrals, both being “early” arts

ancillary to religious architectures. The one by letting in the light

enlarges the church-space into world-space, while the other transforms

it into the magic, gold-shimmering sphere which bears men away from

earthly actuality into the visions of Plotinus, Origen, the Manichæans,

the Gnostics and the Fathers, and the Apocalyptic poems.

Consider, again, the beautiful notion of _uniting the round arch and the

column_; this again is a Syrian, if not a North-Arabian, creation of the

third (or “high Gothic”) century.[266] The revolutionary importance of

this motive, which is specifically Magian, has never in the least degree

been recognized; on the contrary, it has always been assumed to be

Classical, and for most of us indeed it is even representatively

Classical. The Egyptians ignored any deep relation between the roof and

the column; the latter was for them a plant-column, and represented not

stoutness but growth. Classical man, in his turn, for whom the

monolithic column was the mightiest symbol of Euclidean existence—all

body, all unity, all steadiness—connected it, in the strictest

proportions of vertical and horizontal, of strength and load, with his

architrave. But here, in this union of arch and column which the

Renaissance in its tragicomic deludedness admired as expressly Classical

(though it was a notion that the Classical neither possessed nor could

possess), the bodily principle of load and inertia is rejected and the

arch is made to spring clear and open out of the slender column. The

idea actualized here is at once a liberation from all earth-gravity and

a capture of space, and between this element and that of the dome which

soars free but yet encloses the great “cavern,” there is the deep

relation of like meaning. The one and the other are eminently and

powerfully Magian, and they come to their logical fulfilment in the

“Rococo” stage of Moorish mosques and castles, wherein ethereally

delicate columns—often growing out of, rather than based on, the ground—

seem to be empowered by some secret magic to carry a whole world of

innumerable notched arcs, gleaming ornaments, stalactites, and vaultings

saturated with colours. The full importance of this basic form of

Arabian architecture may be expressed by saying that the combination of

column and architrave is the Classical, that of column and round arch

the Arabian, and that of pillar and pointed arch the Faustian Leitmotiv.

Take, further, the history of the Acanthus motive.[267] In the form in

which it appears, for example, on the Monument of Lysicrates at Athens,

it is one of the most distinctive in Classical ornamentation. It has

body, it is and remains individual, and its structure is capable of

being taken in at one glance. But already it appears heavier and richer

in the ornament of the Imperial Fora (Nerva’s, Trajan’s) and that of the

temple of Mars Ultor; the organic disposition has become so complicated

that, as a rule, it requires to be studied, and the tendency to _fill

up_ the surfaces appears. In Byzantine art—of which Riegl thirty years

ago noticed the “latent Saracenic character” though he had no suspicion

of the connexion brought to light here—the acanthus leaf was broken up

into endless tendril-work which (as in Hagia Sophia) is disposed quite

inorganically over whole surfaces. To the Classical motive are added the

old-Aramæan vine and palm leaves, which have already played a part in

Jewish ornamentation. The interlaced borders of “Late-Roman” mosaic

pavements and sarcophagus-edges, and even geometrical plane-patterns are

introduced, and finally, throughout the Persian-Anatolian world,

mobility and _bizarrerie_ culminate in the Arabesque. _This_ is the

genuine Magian motive—anti-plastic to the last degree, hostile to the

pictorial and to the bodily alike. Itself bodiless, it disembodies the

object over which its endless richness of web is drawn. A masterpiece of

this kind—a piece of architecture completely opened out into

Ornamentation—is the façade of the Castle of Mashetta in Moab built by

the Ghassanids.[268] The craft-art of Byzantine-Islamic style (hitherto

called Lombard, Frankish, Celtic or Old-Nordic) which invaded the whole

youthful West and dominated the Carolingian Empire, was largely

practised by Oriental craftsmen or imported as patterns for our own

weavers, metal-workers and armourers.[269] Ravenna, Lucca, Venice,

Granada, Palermo were the efficient centres of this then highly-

civilized form-language; in the year 1000, when in the North the forms

of a new Culture were already being developed and established, Italy was

still entirely dominated by it.

Take, lastly, the changed point of view towards the human body. With the

victory of the Arabian world-feeling, men’s conception of it underwent a

complete revolution. In almost every Roman head of the period 100-250

that the Vatican Collection contains, one may perceive the opposition of

Apollinian and Magian feeling, and of muscular position and “look” as

different bases of expression. Even in Rome itself, since Hadrian, the

sculptor made constant use of the drill, an instrument which was wholly

repugnant to the Euclidean feeling towards stone—for whereas the chisel

brings out the limiting surfaces and _ipso facto_ affirms the corporeal

and material nature of the marble block, the drill, in breaking the

surfaces and creating effects of light and shade, denies it; and

accordingly the sculptors, be they Christian or “pagan,” lose the old

feeling for the phenomenon of the naked body. One has only to look at

the shallow and empty Antinous statues—and yet these were quite

definitely “Classical.” Here it is only the head that is

physiognomically of interest—as it never is in Attic sculpture. The

drapery is given quite a new meaning, and simply dominates the whole

appearance. The consul-statues in the Capitoline Museum[270] are

conspicuous examples. The pupils are bored, and the eyes look into the

distance, so that the whole expression of the work lies no longer in its

body but in that Magian principle of the “Pneuma” which Neo-Platonism

and the decisions of the Church Councils, Mithraism and Mazdaism alike

presume in man.

The pagan “Father” Iamblichus, about 300, wrote a book concerning

statues of gods in which the divine is substantially present and working

upon the beholder.[271] Against this idea of the image—an idea of the

Pseudomorphosis—the East and the South rose in a storm of iconoclasm;

and the sources of this iconoclasm lay in a conception of artistic

creation that is nearly impossible for us to understand.

-----

Footnote 238:

H. Schäfer, _Von Aegyptischer Kunst_, I, pp. 15 et seq.

(The bulls are shown in Fig. 18 in the article _Egypt_ in the

Encyclopædia Britannica, XI Edition, Vol. IX, pp. 65-66.—_Tr._)

Footnote 239:

Frankl, _Baukunst des Mittelalters_ (1918), pp. 16 et seq.

Footnote 240:

See Vol. II, pp. 361 et seq. The lack of any vertical tendency in the

Russian life-feeling is perceptible also in the saga-figure of Ilya

Murometz (see Vol. II, p. 231). The Russian has not the smallest

relation with a _Father_-God. His ethos is not a filial but purely a

_fraternal_ love, radiating in all directions along the human plane.

Christ, even, is conceived as a Brother. The Faustian, wholly

vertical, tendency to strive up to fulfilment is to the real Russian

an incomprehensible pretension. The same absence of all vertical

tendency is observable in Russian ideas of the state and property.

Footnote 241:

The cemetery church of Kishi has 22.

Footnote 242:

J. Grabar, “History of Russian Art” (Russian, 1911), I-III. Eliasberg,

_Russ. Baukunst_ (1922), Introduction.

Footnote 243:

The disposition of Egyptian and that of Western history are so clear

as to admit of comparison being carried right down into the details,

and it would be well worth the expert’s while to carry out such an

investigation. The Fourth Dynasty, that of the strict Pyramid style,

B.C. 2930-2750 (Cheops, Chephren), corresponds to the Romanesque (980-

1100), the Fifth Dynasty (2750-2625, Sahu-rê) to the early Gothic

(1100-1230), and the Sixth Dynasty, prime of the archaic portraiture

(2625-2475, Phiops I and II), to the mature Gothic of 1230-1400.

Footnote 244:

That which differentiates the Japanese harakiri from this suicide is

its intensely purposeful and (so to put it) active and demonstrative

character.—_Tr._

Footnote 245:

See Vol. II, p. 626.

Footnote 246:

Koldewey-Puchstein, _Die griech. Tempel in Unter-Italien und

Sizilien_, I, p. 228.

Footnote 247:

See Vol. II, Chapter III.

Footnote 248:

See Vol. II, pp. 240 et seq.

Footnote 249:

_Stilfragen, Grundlage zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik_ (1893).

_Spatrömische Kunstindustrie_ (1901).

Footnote 250:

_Amida_ (1910). _Die bildende Kunst des Ostens_ (1916), _Altai-Iran_

(1917). _Die Baukunst der Armenier und Europa_ (1918).

Footnote 251:

These contradictions of detail are not greater, after all, than those

between Doric, Attic and Etruscan art, and certainly less than those

which existed about 1450 between Florentine Renaissance, North French,

Spanish and East-German (brick) Gothic.

Footnote 252:

See Vol. II, pp. 304 et seq.

Footnote 253:

For a brief description of the components of a Mithræum, the student

may be referred to the Encyclopædia Britannica, XI Edition, art.

Mithras (Section II).—_Tr._

Footnote 254: