As against these types, the imagination of the Greeks conceived

goddesses who are either Amazons like Athene or hetæræ like Aphrodite.

In the root-feeling which produced the Classical type of womanhood,

fruitfulness has a vegetal character—in this connexion as in others the

word σῶμα exhaustively expresses the meaning of the phenomenon. Think of

the masterpieces of this art, the three mighty female bodies of the East

Pediment of the Parthenon,[339] and compare with them that noblest image

of a mother, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. In the latter, all bodiliness

has disappeared. She is all distance and space. The Helen of the

“Iliad,” compared with Kriemhild, the motherly comrade of Siegfried, is

a courtesan, while Antigone and Clytæmnestra are Amazons. How strangely

even Æschylus passes over in silence the mother-tragic in Clytæmnestra!

The figure of Medea is nothing less than the mythic _inverse_ of the

Faustian “Mater Dolorosa”; her tragic is not one of future or children,

it is with her lover, the symbol of wholly-present life, that her

universe collapses. Kriemhild revenges her unborn children—it is _this_

future that has been murdered in her—but Medea revenges only a past

happiness. When the Classical sculpture, _late_ art that it is,[340]

arrives at secularizing[341] the pictures of the god, it creates the

antique ideal of female form in a Cnidian Aphrodite—merely a very

beautiful object, not a character or an ego but a piece of Nature. And

in the end Praxiteles finds the hardihood to represent a goddess

entirely naked. This innovation met with severe criticism, for it was

felt to be a sign of the decline of the Classical world-feeling;

suitable as it was to erotic symbolism, it was in sharp contradiction

with the dignity of the older Greek religion. But exactly then, too, a

portrait-art ventured to show itself, simultaneously with the invention

of a form that has never since been forgotten, the _bust_. Unfortunately

(here as elsewhere) art-research has made the mistake of discovering in

this the “beginnings” of “the” portrait. In reality, whereas a Gothic

visage speaks of an individual destiny, and even an Egyptian—in spite of

the rigid formalism of the figure—has the recognizable traits of the

individual person (since otherwise it could not serve as dwelling for

the higher soul of the dead, his _Ka_), the Greeks developed a taste for

typical representations just as the contemporary comedy produced

standard men and situations, to which any names whatever could be

affixed. The “portrait” is distinguishable not by personal traits but by

the label only. This is the general custom amongst children and

primitive men, and it is connected with name-magic. The name serves to

capture some essence of what is named and to bind it as an object which

thereupon becomes specific for every beholder. The statues of the

Tyrannicides,[342] the (Etruscan) statues of Kings in the Capitol and

the “iconic” portraits of victors at Olympia must have been portraits of

this sort, viz., not likenesses but figures with names. But now, in the

later phase, there was an additional factor—the tendency of the time

towards genre and applied art, which produced also the Corinthian

column. What the sculptors worked out was the _types_ of life’s stage,

the ἦθος which we mistranslate by character but which is really the

kinds and modes of public behaviour and attitude; thus there is “the”

grave Commander, “the” tragic poet, “the” passion-torn actor, “the”

absorbed philosopher. Here is the real key to the understanding of the

celebrated Hellenistic portraiture, for which the quite unjustifiable

claim has been set up that its products are expressions of a deep

spiritual life. It is not of much moment whether the work bears the name

of someone long dead—the Sophocles[343] was sculptured about 340—or of a

living man like the Pericles of Cresilas.[344] It was only in the 4th

Century that Demetrius of Alopeke began to emphasize individual traits

in the _external build_ of the man and Lysistratus the brother of

Lysippus to copy (as Pliny tells us) a plaster-of-paris cast of the

subject’s face without much subsequent modification. And how little such

portraiture is portraiture in Rembrandt’s sense should surely have been

obvious to anyone. The _soul_ is missing. The brilliant fidelity of

Roman busts especially has been mistaken for physiognomic depth. But

what really distinguishes the higher work from this craftsman’s and

virtuoso’s work is an intention that is the precise opposite of the

artistic intention of a Marées or a Leibl. That is, in such work the

important and significant is not _brought out_, it is _put in_. An

example of this is seen in the Demosthenes statue,[345] the artist of

which possibly saw the orator in life. Here the particulars of the body-

surface are emphasized, perhaps over-emphasized (“true to Nature,” they

called this then), but into the disposition so conceived he works the

character-type of the Serious Orator which we meet again on different

bases in the portraits of Æschines and Lysias at Naples. That is truth

to life, undoubtedly, but it is truth to life as Classical man felt it,

typical and impersonal. We have contemplated the result with _our_ eyes,

and have accordingly misunderstood it.

sp 2

III

In the oil-painting age that followed the end of the Renaissance, the

depth of an artist can be accurately measured by the content of his

portraits. To this rule there is hardly an exception. All forms in the

picture (whether single, or in scenes, groups or masses)[346] are

fundamentally felt as portraits; whether they are meant to be so or not

is immaterial, for the individual painter has no choice in the matter.

Nothing is more instructive than to observe how under the hands of a

real Faustian man even the Act transforms itself into a portrait-

study.[347] Take two German masters like Lucas Cranach and Tilmann

Riemenschneider who were untouched by any theory and (in contrast to

Dürer, whose inclination to æsthetic subtlety made him pliant before

alien tendencies) worked in unqualified naïveté. They seldom depict the

Act, and when they do so, they show themselves entirely unable to

concentrate their expression on the immediately-present plane-specified

bodiliness. The meaning of the human phenomenon, and therefore of the

representation of it, remains entirely in the head, and is consistently

physiognomical rather than anatomical. And the same may be said of

Dürer’s Lucrezia, notwithstanding his Italian studies and the quite

opposite intention. A Faustian _act_ is a contradiction in itself—hence

the character-heads that we so often see on feeble act-representations

(as far back as the Job of old French cathedral-sculpture) and hence

also the laborious, forced, equivocal character that arouses our dislike

in too manifest efforts to placate the Classical ideal—sacrifices

offered up not by the soul but by the cultivated understanding. In the

whole of painting after Leonardo there is not one important or

distinctive work that derives its meaning from the Euclidean being of

the nude body. It is mere incomprehension to quote Rubens here, and to

compare his unbridled dynamism of swelling bodies in any respect

whatever with the art of Praxiteles and even Scopas. It is owing

precisely to his splendid sensuality that he is so far from the _static_

of Signorelli’s bodies. If there ever was an artist who could put a

maximum of “becoming” into the beauty of naked bodies, who could treat

bodily floridness _historically_ and convey the (utterly un-Hellenic)

idea of an inexhaustible outflowing from within, it was Rubens. Compare

the horse’s head from the Parthenon pediment[348] with his horses’ heads

in the Battle of the Amazons,[349] and the deep metaphysical contrast

between the two conceptions of the same phenomenal element is felt at

once. In Rubens (recalling once more the characteristic opposition of

Apollinian and Faustian mathematics) the body is not magnitude but

relation. What matters is not the regimen of its external structure but

the fullness of life that streams out of it and the stride of its life

along the road from youth to age, where the Last Judgment that turns

bodies into flames takes up the motive and intertwines it in the

quivering web of active space. Such a synthesis is entirely un-

Classical; but even nymphs, when it is Corot who paints them, are

likewise shapes ready to dissolve into colour-patches reflecting endless

space. Such was _not_ the intention of the Classical artist when he

depicted the Act.

At the same time, the Greek form-ideal—the self-contained unit of being

expressed in sculpture—has equally to be distinguished from that of the

merely beautiful bodies on which painters from Giorgione to Boucher were

always exercising their cleverness, which are fleshly still-life, genre-

work expressing merely a certain gay sensuousness (e.g., “Rubens’s wife

in a fur cloak.”[350]) and in contrast with the high ethical

significance of the Classical Act have almost no symbolic force.[351]

Magnificent as these men’s painting is, therefore, they have not

succeeded in reaching the highest levels either of portraiture or of

space-representation in landscape. Their brown and their green and their

perspective lack “religiousness,” future, Destiny. They are masters only

in the domain of _elementary_ form, and when it has actualized this

their art is exhausted. It is they who constitute the substance-element

in the development-history of a great art. But when a great _artist_

pressed on beyond them to a form that was to be capable of embracing the

whole meaning of the world, he had necessarily to push to perfection the

treatment of the nude body if his world was the Classical, and _not_ to

do so if it was our North. Rembrandt never once painted an Act, in this

foreground sense, and if Leonardo, Titian, Velasquez (and, among

moderns, Menzel, Leibl, Marées and Manet) did so at all, it was very

rarely; and even then, so to say, they painted bodies as _landscapes_.

The portrait is ever the touchstone.[352]

But no one would ever judge masters like Signorelli, Mantegna,

Botticelli or even Verrocchio, by the quality of their portraits. The

equestrian statue of Can Grande[353] of 1330 is in a far higher sense a

portrait than the Bartolommeo Colleoni is; and Raphael’s portraits (the

best of which e.g., Pope Julius II were done under the influence of the

Venetian Sebastian del Piombo), could be ignored altogether in an

appreciation of his creative work. It is only with Leonardo that the

portrait begins to count seriously. Between fresco-technique and oil-

painting there is a subtle opposition. In fact, Giovanni Bellini’s

“Doge” (Loredano)[354] is the first great oil-portrait. Here too the

character of the Renaissance as a protest against the Faustian spirit of

the West betrays itself. The episode of Florence amounts to an attempt

to replace the Portrait of the Gothic style (as distinct from the

“ideal” portrait of late-Classical art, which was well known through the

Cæsar-busts) by the Act as human symbol. Logically, therefore, the

entire art of the Renaissance should be wanting in the physiognomic

traits. And yet the strong undercurrent of Faustian art-will kept alive,

not only in the smaller towns and schools of middle Italy, but also in

the instincts of the great masters themselves, a Gothic tradition that

was never interrupted. Nay, the physiognomic of Gothic art even made

itself master of the Southern nude body, alien as this element was. Its

creations are not bodies that speak to us through static definition of

their bounding surfaces. What we see is a _dumb-show_ that spreads from

the face over all parts of the body, and the appreciative eye detects in

this very _nudity_ of Tuscany a deep identity with the _drapery_ of the

Gothic. Both are envelopes, neither a limitation. The reclining nude

figures of Michelangelo in the Medici chapel are wholly and entirely the

visage and the utterance of a _soul_. But, above all, every head,

painted or modelled, became of itself a portrait, even when the heads

were of gods or saints. The whole of the portrait-work of A. Rossellino,

Donatello, Benedetto de Maiano, Mino da Fiesole, stands so near in

spirit to that of Van Eyck, Memlinc and the Early Rhenish masters as to

be often indistinguishable from theirs. There is not and there cannot

be, I maintain, any genuine Renaissance portraiture, that is, a

portraiture in which just that artistic sentiment which differentiates

the Court of the Palazzo Strozzi from the Loggia dei Lanzi and Perugino

from Cimabue applies itself to the rendering of a visage. In

architecture, little as the new work was Apollinian in spirit, it was

possible to create anti-Gothically, but in portraiture—no. It was too

specifically Faustian a symbol. Michelangelo declined the task:

passionately devoted as he was to his pursuit of a plastic ideal, he

would have considered it an abdication to busy himself with portraiture.

His Brutus bust is as little of a portrait as his de’ Medici, whereas

Botticelli’s portrait of the latter is actual, and frankly Gothic to

boot. Michelangelo’s heads are allegories in the style of dawning

Baroque, and their resemblance even to Hellenistic work is only

superficial. And however highly we may value the Uzzano bust of

Donatello[355]—which is perhaps the most important achievement of that

age and that circle—it will be admitted that by the side of the

portraits of the Venetians it hardly counts.

It is well worth noting that this overcoming of, or at least this desire

to overcome, the Gothic portrait with the Classical Act—the deeply

historical and biographical form by the completely ahistoric—appears

simultaneously with, and in association with, a decline in the capacity

for self-examination and artistic confession in the Goethian sense. The

true Renaissance man did not know what spiritual development meant. He

managed to live entirely outwardly, and this was the great good fortune

and success of the Quattrocento. Between Dante’s “Vita Nuova” and

Michelangelo’s sonnets there is no poetic confession, no self-portrait

of the high order. The Renaissance artist and humanist is the one single

type of Western man for whom the word “loneliness” remained unmeaning.

His life accomplished its course in the light of a _courtly_ existence.

His feelings and impressions were all public, and he had neither secret

discontents nor reserves, while the life of the great contemporary

Netherlanders, on the contrary, moved on in the shadow of their works.

Is it perhaps permissible to add that it was _because_ of this that that

other symbol of historic distance, duration, care and ponderation, _the

State_, also disappeared from the purview of the Renaissance, between

Dante and Michelangelo? In “fickle Florence”—whose great men one and all

were cruelly maltreated and whose incapacity for political creation

seems, by the side of other Western state-forms, to border on sheer

_bizarrerie_—and, more generally, wherever the anti-Gothic (which in

this connexion means anti-dynastic) spirit displayed itself vigorously

in art and public life, the State made way for a truly Hellenic

sorriness of Medicis, Sforzas, Borgias, Malatestas, and waste republics.

Only that city where sculpture gained _no_ foothold, where the Southern

music was at home, where Gothic and Baroque joined hands in Giovanni

Bellini and the Renaissance remained an affair of occasional

dilettantism, had an art of portraiture and therewith a subtle diplomacy

and a will to political duration—Venice.

IV

The Renaissance was born of defiance, and therefore it lacked depth,

width and sureness of creative instinct. It is the one and only epoch

which was more consistent in theory than in performance and—in sharp

contrast to Gothic and Baroque—the only one in which theoretically-

formulated intention preceded (often enough surpassed) the ability to

perform. But the fact that the individual arts were forced to become

satellites of a Classicist sculpture could not in the last analysis

alter the essence of them, and could only impoverish their store of

inward possibilities. For natures of medium size, the Renaissance theme

was not too big; it was attractive indeed from its very plainness, and

we miss consequently that Gothic wrestling with overpowering imprecise

problems which distinguishes the Rhenish and Flemish schools. The

seductive ease and clarity of the Renaissance rests very largely upon

evasion—the evasion of deeper reluctances by the aid of speciously

simple rule. To men of the inwardness of Memlinc or the power of

Grünewald such conditions as those of the Tuscan form-world would have

been fatal. They could not have developed their strength in and through

it, but only against it. Seeing as we do no weakness in the form of the

Renaissance masters, we are very prone to overrate their humanity. In

Gothic, and again in Baroque, an entirely great artist was fulfilling

his art in deepening and completing its language, but in Renaissance he

was necessarily only destroying it. “ So it was in the cases of

Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, the only really great men of Italy

after Dante. Is it not curious that between the masters of the Gothic—

who were nothing but silent workers in their art and yet achieved the

very highest that could be achieved within its convention and its field—

and the Venetians and Dutch of 1600—who again were purely workers—there

should be these three men who were not “sculptors” or "painters” but

_thinkers_, and thinkers who of necessity busied themselves not merely

with all the available means of artistic expression but with a thousand

other things besides, ever restless and dissatisfied, in their effort to

get at the real essence and aim of their being? Does it not mean—that in

the Renaissance they could not “find themselves”? Each in his own

fashion, each under his own tragic illusion, these three giants strove

to be “Classical” in the Medicean sense; and yet it was they themselves

who in one and another way—Raphael in respect of the line, Leonardo in

respect of the surface, Michelangelo in respect of the body—shattered

the dream. In them the misguided soul is finding its way back to its

Faustian starting-points. What they _intended_ was to substitute

proportion for relation, drawing for light-and-air effect, Euclidean

body for pure space. But neither they nor others of their time produced

a Euclidean-static sculpture—for that was possible once only, in Athens.

In all their work one feels a secret music, in all their forms the

movement-quality and the tending into distances and depths. They are on

the way, not to Phidias but to Palestrina, and they have come thither

not from Roman ruins but from the still music of the cathedral. Raphael

thawed the Florentine fresco, and Michelangelo the statue, and Leonardo

dreamed already of Rembrandt and Bach. The higher and more conscientious

the effort to actualize the ideas of the age, the more intangible it

became.

Gothic and Baroque, however, are something that _is_, while Renaissance

is only an ideal, unattainable like all ideals, that floats over the

will of a period. Giotto _is_ a Gothic, and Titian _is_ a Baroque,

artist. Michelangelo _would be_ a Renaissance artist, but fails.

Visibly, the plastic in him, for all its ambitiousness, is overpowered

by the pictorial spirit—and a pictorial spirit, too, in which the

Northern space-perspective is implicit. Even as soon as 1520 the

beautiful proportion, the pure rule—that is, the conscious Classical—are

felt as frigid and formal. The cornice which he put on to Sangallo’s

purely “Classical” façade of the Palazzo Farnese was no doubt, from the

strictly Renaissance standpoint, a disfigurement, but he himself and

many with him felt it to be far superior to the achievements of Greeks

and Romans.

As Petrarch was the first, so Michelangelo was the last Florentine who

gave himself up passionately to the Antique. But it was no longer an

entire devotion. The Franciscan Christianity of Fra Angelico, with its

subtle gentleness and its quiet, reflective piety—to which the Southern

refinement of ripe Renaissance work owes far more than has been

supposed[356]—came now to its end. The majestic spirit of the Counter-

Reformation, massive, animated, gorgeous, lives already in Michelangelo.

There is something in Renaissance work which at the time passed for

being “Classical” but is really only a deliberately noble dress for the

Christian-German world-feeling; as we have already mentioned, the

combination of round-arch and pillar, that favourite Florentine motive,

was of Syrian origin. But compare the pseudo-Corinthian column of the

15th Century with the columns of a real Roman ruin—remembering that

these ruins were known and on the spot! Michelangelo alone would

tolerate no half-and-half. Clarity he wanted and he would have. The

question of form was for him a religious matter; for him (and only for

him) it was all or nothing. And this is the explanation of the lonely

fearful wrestlings of this man, surely the unhappiest figure in our art;

of the fragmentary, the tortured, the unsatisfied, the _terribile_ in

his forms that frightened his contemporaries. The one half of his nature

drew him towards the Classical and therefore to sculpture—we all know

the effect produced upon him by the recently-discovered Laocoön. No man

ever made a more honest effort than he did to find a way with the chisel

into a buried world. Everything that he created he meant sculpturally—

sculpturally, that is, in a sense of the word that he and he alone stood

for. “The world, presented in the great Pan,” the element which Goethe

meant to render when he brought Helena into the Second Part of Faust,

the Apollinian world in all its powerful sensuous corporal presence—that

was what Michelangelo was striving with all his might to capture and to

fix in artistic being when he was painting the Sistine ceiling. Every

resource of fresco—the big contours, the vast surfaces, the immense

nearness of naked shapes, the materiality of colour—was here for the

last time strained to the utmost to liberate the paganism, the high-

Renaissance paganism, that was in him. But his second soul, the soul of

Gothic-Christian Dante and of the music of great expanses, is pulling in

the opposite sense; his scheme for the ensemble is manifestly

metaphysical in spirit.

His was the last effort, repeated again and again, to put the entirety

of the artist-personality into the language of stone. But the Euclidean

material failed him. His attitude to it was not that of the Greek. In

the very character of its being the chiselled statue contradicts the

world-feeling that tries to _find_ something by, and not to _possess_

something in, its art-works. For Phidias, marble is the cosmic stuff

that is crying for form. The story of Pygmalion and Galatea expresses

the very essence of that art. But for Michelangelo marble was the foe to

be subdued, the prison out of which he must deliver his idea as

Siegfried delivered Brunhilde. Everyone knows his way of setting to

work. He did not approach the rough block coolly from every aspect of

the intended form, but attacked it with a passionate frontal attack,

hewing into it as though into space, cutting away the material layer by

layer and driving deeper and deeper until his form emerged, while the

members slowly developed themselves out of the quarry. Never perhaps has

there been a more open expression of world-dread in the presence of the

become—Death—of the will to overpower and capture it in vibrant form.

There is no other artist of the West whose relation to the stone has

been that of Michelangelo—at once so intimate and so violently

masterful. It is his symbol of Death. In it dwells the hostile principle

that his daemonic nature is always striving to overpower, whether he is

cutting statues or piling great buildings out of it.[357] He is the one

sculptor of his age who dealt _only_ with marble. Bronze, as cast,

allows the modeller to compromise with pictorial tendencies, and it

appealed therefore to other Renaissance artists and to the softer

Greeks. The Giant stood aloof from it.

The instantaneous bodily _posture_ was what the Classical sculptor

created, and of this Faustian man was incapable. It is here just as it

is in the matter of love, in which Faustian man discovers, not primarily

the act of union between man and woman, but the great love of Dante and

beyond that the caring Mother. Michelangelo’s erotic—which is that of

Beethoven also—is as un-Classical as it is possible to be. It stands

_sub specie æternitatis_ and not under that of sense and the moment. He

produced acts—a sacrifice to the Hellenic idol—but the soul in them

denies or overmasters the visible form. He wills infinity as the Greek

willed proportion and rule, he embraces past and future as the Greek

embraced present. The Classical eye absorbs plastic form into itself,

but Michelangelo saw with the spiritual eye and broke through the

foreground-language of immediate sensuousness. And inevitably, in the

long run, he destroyed the conditions for this art. Marble became too

trivial for his will-to-form. He ceased to be sculptor and turned

architect. In full old age, when he was producing only wild fragments

like the Rondanini Madonna and hardly cutting his figures out of the

rough at all, the _musical_ tendency of his artistry broke through. In

the end the impulse towards contrapuntal form was no longer to be

repressed and, dissatisfied through and through with the art upon which

he had spent his life, yet dominated still by the unquenchable will to

self-expression, he shattered the canon of Renaissance architecture and

created the Roman Baroque. For relations of material and form he

substituted the contest of force and mass. He grouped the columns in

sheaves or else pushed them away into niches. He broke up the storeys

with huge pilasters and gave the façade a sort of surging and thrusting

quality. Measure yielded to melody, the static to the dynamic. And thus

Faustian music enlisted in its service the chief of all the other arts.

With Michelangelo the history of Western sculpture is at an end. What of

it there was after him was mere misunderstandings or reminiscences. His

real heir was _Palestrina_.

Leonardo speaks another language. In essentials his spirit reached

forward into the following century, and he was in nowise bound, as

Michelangelo was bound by every tie of heart, to the Tuscan ideal. He

alone had neither the ambition to be sculptor nor the ambition to be

architect. It was a strange illusion of the Renaissance that the

Hellenic feeling and the Hellenic cult of the exterior structure could

be got at by way of anatomical studies. But when Leonardo studied

anatomy it was not, as in Michelangelo’s case, foreground anatomy, the

_topography_ of human surfaces, studied for the sake of plastic, but

_physiology_ studied for the inward secrets. While Michelangelo tried to

force the whole meaning of human existence into the language of the

living body, Leonardo’s studies show the exact opposite. His much-

admired _sfumato_ is the first sign of the repudiation of corporeal

bounds, in the name of _space_, and as such it is the starting-point of

Impressionism. Leonardo begins with the inside, the spiritual space

within us, and not with the considered definition-line, and when he ends

(that is, if he ends at all and does not leave the picture unfinished),

the substance of colour lies like a mere breathing over the real

structure of the picture, which is something incorporeal and

indescribable. Raphael’s paintings fall into planes in which he disposes

his well-ordered groups, and he closes off the whole with a well-

proportioned background. But Leonardo knows only one space, wide and

eternal, and his figures, as it were, float therein. The one puts inside

a frame a sum of individual near things, the other a portion cut out of

the infinite.

_Leonardo discovered the circulation of the blood._ It was no

Renaissance spirit that brought him to that—on the contrary, the whole

course of his thought took him right outside the conceptions of his age.

Neither Michelangelo nor Raphael could have done it, for their painter’s

anatomy looks only at the form and position, not the function, of the

parts. In mathematical language, it is stereometry as against analysis.

Did not the Renaissance find it quite sufficient preparation for great

painted scenes to study _corpses_, suppressing the becoming in favour of

the become and calling on the dead to make Classical ἀταραξία accessible

to Northern creative energy? But Leonardo investigated the _life_ in the

body as Rubens did, and not the body-in-itself as Signorelli did. His

discovery was contemporary with that of Columbus, and the two have a

deep affinity, for they signify the victory of the infinite over the

material limitedness of the tangibly present. Would a Greek ever have

concerned himself with questions like theirs? The Greeks inquired as

little into the interior of their own organization as they sought for

the sources of the Nile; these were problems that might have jeopardized

the Euclidean constitution of their being. The Baroque, on the other

hand, is truly the _period of the great discoveries_. The very word

“discovery” has something bluntly un-Classical in it. Classical man took

good care not to take the cover, the material wrapping, off anything

cosmic, but to do _just this_ is the most characteristic impulse of a

Faustian nature. The discoveries of the New World, the circulation of

the blood, and the Copernican universe were achieved almost

simultaneously and, at bottom, are completely equivalent; and the

discovery of gunpowder (that is, the _long-range weapon_[358]) and of

printing (the _long-range script_) were little earlier.

Leonardo was a discoverer through-and-through, and discovery was the sum

in one word of his whole nature. Brush, chisel, dissecting-knife, pencil

for calculating and compasses for drawing—all were for him of equal

importance. They were for him what the Mariner’s Compass was for

Columbus. When Raphael completes with colour the sharp-drawn outline he

asserts the corporeal phenomenon in every brush-stroke, but Leonardo, in

his red-chalk sketches and his backgrounds reveals aerial secrets with

every line. He was the first, too, who set his mind to work on aviation.

To fly, to free one’s self from earth, to lose one’s self in the expanse

of the universe—is not this ambition Faustian in the highest degree? Is

it not in fact the fulfilment of our dreams? Has it never been observed

how the Christian legend became in Western painting a glorious

transfiguration of this motive? All the pictured ascents into heaven and

falls into hell, the divine figures floating above the clouds, the

blissful detachment of angels and saints, the insistent emphasis upon

freedom from earth’s heaviness, are emblems of soul-flight, peculiar to

the art of the Faustian, utterly remote from that of the Byzantine.

V

The transformation of Renaissance fresco-painting into Venetian oil-

painting is a matter of _spiritual history_. We have to appreciate very

delicate and subtle traits to discern the process of change. In almost

every picture from Masaccio’s “Peter and the Tribute Money” in the

Brancacci Chapel, through the soaring background that Piero della

Francesca gave to the figures of Federigo and Battista of Urbino,[359]

to Perugino’s “Christ Giving the Keys,”[360] the fresco manner is

contending with the invasive new form, though Raphael’s artistic

development in the course of his work on the Vatican “stanze” is almost

the only case in which we can see comprehensively the change that is

going on. The Florentine fresco aims at actuality in individual things

and produces a sum of such things in an architectonic setting. Oil-

painting, on the other hand, sees and handles with ever-growing sureness

extension as a whole, and treats all objects only as representatives

thereof. The Faustian world-feeling created the new technique that it

wanted. It rejected the drawing style, as, from Oresme’s time, co-

ordinate geometry rejected it. It transformed the linear perspective

associated with the architectural motive into a purely aerial

perspective rendered by imponderable gradations of tone. But the

condition of Renaissance art generally—its inability either to

understand its own deeper tendencies or to make good its anti-Gothic

principle—made the transition an obscure and difficult process. Each

artist followed the trend in a way of his own. One painted in oils on

the bare wall, and thereby condemned his work to perish (Leonardo’s

“Last Supper”). Another painted pictures as if they were wall-frescoes

(Michelangelo). Some ventured, some guessed, some fell by the way, some

shied. It was, as always, the struggle between hand and soul, between

eye and instrument, between the form willed by the artist and the form

willed by time—the struggle between Plastic and Music.

In the light of this, we can at last understand that gigantic effort of

Leonardo, the cartoon of the “Adoration of the Magi” in the Uffizi. It

is the grandest piece of artistic daring in the Renaissance. Nothing

like it was even imagined till Rembrandt. Transcending all optical

measures, everything then called drawing, outline, composition and

grouping, he pushes fearlessly on to challenge eternal space; everything

bodily floats like the planets in the Copernican system and the tones of

a Bach organ-fugue in the dimness of old churches. In the technical

possibilities of the time, so dynamic an image of distance could only

remain a torso.

In the Sistine Madonna, which is the very summation of the Renaissance,

Raphael causes the outline to draw into itself the entire content of the

work. It is the _last grand line_ of Western art. Already (and it is

this that makes Raphael the least intelligible of Renaissance artists)

convention is strained almost to breaking-point by the intensity of

inward feeling. He did not indeed wrestle with problems. He had not even

an inkling of them. But he brought art to the brink where it could no

longer shirk the plunge, and he lived to achieve the utmost

possibilities _within_ its form-world. The ordinary person who thinks

him flat simply fails to realize _what is going on_ in his scheme. Look

again, reader, at the hackneyed Madonna. Have you ever noticed the

little dawn-cloudlets, transforming themselves into baby heads, that

surround the soaring central figure?—these are the multitudes of the

unborn that the Madonna is drawing into Life. We meet these light clouds

again, with the same meaning, in the wondrous finale of Faust II.[361]

It is just that which does _not_ charm in Raphael, his sublime

unpopularity, that betrays the inner victory over the Renaissance-

feeling in him. We do understand Perugino at a glance, we merely think

we understand Raphael. His very line—that drawing-character that at

first sight seems so Classical—is something that floats in space,

supernal, Beethoven-like. In this work Raphael is the least obvious of

all artists, less obvious even than Michelangelo, whose intention is

manifest through all the fragmentariness of his works. In Fra

Bartolommeo the material bounding-line is still entirely dominant. It is

all foreground, and the whole sense of the work is exhaustively rendered

by the definition of bodies. But in Raphael line has become silent,

expectant, veiled, waiting in an extremity of tension for dissolution

into the infinite, into space and music.

Leonardo _is_ already over the frontier. The Adoration of the Magi _is_

already music. It is not a casual but a deeply significant circumstance

that in this work, as also in his St. Jerome,[362] he did not go beyond

the brown underpainting, the “Rembrandt” stage, the atmospheric brown of

the following century. For him, entire fullness and clearness of

intention was attained with the work in that state, and one step into

the domain of colour (for that domain was still under the metaphysical

limitations of the fresco style) would have destroyed the soul of what

he had created. Feeling, in all its depth, the symbolism of which oil-

painting was later to be the vehicle, he was afraid of the fresco

“slickness” (Fertigkeit) that must have ruined his idea. His studies for

this painting show how close was his relation to the Rembrandt

_etching_—an art whose home was also that of the art (unknown to

Florence) of counterpoint. Only it was reserved for the Venetians, who

stood outside the Florentine conventions, to achieve what he strove for

here, to fashion a colour-world subserving space instead of things.

For this reason, too, Leonardo (after innumerable attempts) decided to

leave the Christ-head in the “Last Supper” unfinished. The men of his

time were not even ripe for portraiture as Rembrandt understood the

word, the magistral building-up of a soul-history out of dynamic brush-

strokes and lights and tones. But only Leonardo was great enough to

experience this limitation as a Destiny. Others merely set themselves to

paint heads (in the modes prescribed by their respective schools) but

Leonardo—the first, here, to make the _hands_ also speak, and that with

a physiognomic maestria—had an infinitely wider purpose. His soul was

lost afar in the future, though his mortal part, his eye and hand,

obeyed the spirit of the age. Assuredly he was the freest of the three

great ones. From much of that which Michelangelo’s powerful nature

vainly wrestled with, he was already remote. Problems of chemistry,

geometrical analysis, physiology (Goethe’s “living Nature” was also

Leonardo’s), the technique of fire-arms—all were familiar to him. Deeper

than Dürer, bolder than Titian, more comprehensive than any single man

of his time, he was essentially the _artist of torsos_.[363]

Michelangelo the belated sculptor was so, too, but in another sense,

while in Goethe’s day that which had been unattainable for the painter

of the Last Supper had already been reached and overpassed. Michelangelo

strove to force life once more into a dead form-world, Leonardo felt a

new form-world in the future, Goethe divined that there could be no new

form-worlds more. Between the first and the last of these men lie the

ripe centuries of the Faustian Culture.

VI

It remains now to deal with the major characters of Western art during

the phase of accomplishment. In this we may observe the deep necessity

of all history at work. We have learned to understand arts as prime

phenomena. We no longer look to the operations of cause and effect to

give unity to the story of development. Instead, we have set up the idea

of the _Destiny_ of an art, and admitted arts to be _organisms_ of the

Culture, organisms which are born, ripen, age and _for ever_ die.

When the Renaissance—its last illusion—closes, the Western soul has come

to the ripe consciousness of its own strength and possibilities. It has

_chosen_ its arts. As a “late” period, the Baroque knows, just as the

Ionic had known, what the form-language of its arts has to mean. From

being a philosophical religion, art has to be a religious philosophy.

Great masters come forward in the place of anonymous schools. At the

culmination of every Culture we have the spectacle of a splendid _group

of great arts_, well-ordered and linked as a unit by the unity of the

prime symbol underlying them all. The _Apollinian group_, to which

belong vase-painting, fresco relief, the architecture of ranked columns,

the Attic drama and the dance, centres upon the naked statue. The

_Faustian group_ forms itself round the ideal of pure spatial infinity

and its centre of gravity is instrumental music. From this centre, fine

threads radiate out into all spiritual form-languages and weave our

infinitesimal mathematic, our dynamic physics, the propaganda of Jesuits

and the power of our famous slogan of “progress,” the modern machine-

technique, credit economics and the dynastic-diplomatic State—all into

one immense totality of spiritual expression. Beginning with the inward

rhythm of the cathedral and ending with Wagner’s “Tristan” and

“Parsifal,” the artistic conquest of endless space deploys its full

forces from about 1550. Plastic is dying with Michelangelo in Rome just

when planimetry, dominant hitherto, is becoming the least important

branch of our mathematic. At the same time, Venice is producing

Zarlino’s theories of harmony and counterpoint (1558) and the practical

method of the _basso continuo_—a perspective and an analysis of the

world of sound—and this music’s sister, the Northern mathematic of the

Calculus, is beginning to mount.

Oil-painting and instrumental music, the arts of space, are now entering

into their kingdom. So also—_consequently_, we say—the two essentially

material and Euclidean arts of the Classical Culture, viz., the all-

round statue and the strictly planar fresco, attain to their primacy at

the corresponding date of c. 600 B.C. And further, in the one and in the

other case, it is the painting that ripens _first_. For in either kind

painting on the plane is a less ambitious and more accessible art than

modelling in solid or composing in immaterial extension. The period

1550-1650 belongs as completely to oil-painting as fresco and vase-

painting belong to the 6th Century B.C. The symbolism of space and of

body, expressed in the one case by perspective and in the other by

proportion, are only indicated and not immediately displayed by

pictorial arts. These arts, which can only in each case produce their

respective prime-symbols (i.e., their possibilities in the extended) as

illusions on a painted surface, are capable indeed of denoting and

evoking the ideal—Classical or Western, as the case may be—but they are

not capable of _fulfilling_ it; they appear therefore in the path of the

“late” Culture as the ledges before the last summit. The nearer the

grand style comes to its point of fulfilment, the more decisive the

tendency to an ornamental language of inexorable clarity of symbolism.

The group of great arts is further simplified. About 1670, just when

Newton and Leibniz were discovering the Differential Calculus, oil-

painting had reached the limit of its possibilities. Its last great

masters were dead or dying—Velasquez 1660, Poussin 1665, Franz Hals

1666, Rembrandt 1669, Vermeer 1675, Murillo, Ruysdael and Claude Lorrain

1682—and one has only to name the few successors of any importance

(Watteau, Hogarth, Tiepolo) to feel at once the descent, the end, of an

art. In this time also, the great forms of _pictorial_ music expired.

Heinrich Schütz died in 1672, Carissimi in 1674, and Purcell in 1695—the

last great masters of the Cantata, who had played around image-themes

with infinite variety of vocal and instrumental colour and had painted

veritable pictures of fine landscape and grand legend-scene. With Lully

(1687) the heart of the heroic Baroque opera of Monteverde ceased to

beat. It was the same with the old “classical” sonata for orchestra,

organ and string trio, which was a development of image-themes in the

fugal style. Thereafter, the forms become those of final maturity, the

concerto grosso, the suite, and the three-part sonata for solo

instruments. Music frees itself from the relics of bodiliness inherent

in the human voice and becomes absolute. The theme is no longer an image

but a pregnant _function_, existent only in and by its own evolution,

for the fugal style as Bach practised it can only be regarded as a

ceaseless process of differentiation and integration. The victory of

pure music over painting stands recorded in the Passions which Heinrich

Schütz composed in his old age—the visible dawn of the new form-

language—in the sonatas of Dall’Abaco and Corelli, the oratorios of

Händel and the Baroque polyphony of Bach. Henceforth this music is _the_

Faustian art, and Watteau may fairly be described as a painter-Couperin,

Tiepolo as a painter-Händel.

In the Classical world the corresponding change occurred about 460, when

Polygnotus, the last of the great fresco-painters, ceded the inheritance

of the grand style to Polycletus and free sculpture in the round. Till

then—as late even as Polygnotus’s contemporaries Myron and the masters

of the Olympia pediment—the form-language of a purely planar art had

dominated that of statuary also; for, just as painting had developed its

form more and more towards the ideal of the _silhouette of colour with

internal drawing superposed_—to such an extent that at last there was

almost no difference between the painted relief and the flat picture—so

also the sculptor had regarded the frontal _outline_ as it presented

itself to the beholder as the true symbol of the Ethos, the cultural

type, that he meant his figure to represent. The field of the temple-

pediment constitutes a _picture_; seen from the proper distance, it

makes exactly the same impression as its contemporary the red-figure

vase-painting. In Polycletus’s generation the monumental wall-painting

gives place to the board-picture, the “picture” proper, in tempera or

wax—a clear indication that the great style has gone to reside

elsewhere. The ambition of Apollodorus’s shadow painting was not in any

sense what we call chiaroscuro and atmosphere, but sheer _modelling in

the round_ in the sculptor’s sense; and of Zeuxis Aristotle says

expressly that his work lacked “Ethos.” Thus, this newer Classical

painting with its cleverness and human charm is the equivalent of our

18th-Century work. Both lacked the inner greatness and both tried by

force of virtuosity to speak in the language of that single and final

Art which in each case stood for ornamentation in the higher sense.

Hence Polycletus and Phidias aline themselves with Bach and Händel; as

the Western masters liberated strict musical form from the executive

methods of the Painting, so the Greek masters finally delivered the

statue from the associations of the Relief.

And with this full plastic and this full music the two Cultures reach

their respective ends. A pure symbolism of mathematical rigour had

become possible. Polycletus could produce his “canon” of the proportions

of the human body, and his contemporary Bach the “Kunst der Fuge” and

“Wohltemperiertes Klavier.” In the two arts that ensued, we have the

last perfection of achievement that pure form saturated with meaning can

give. Compare the tone-body of Faustian instrumental music, and within

that system again the body of the strings (in Bach, too, the virtual

unity of the winds), with the bodies of Attic statuary. Compare the

meaning of the word “figure” to Haydn with its meaning to Praxiteles. In

the one case it is the figure of a rhythmic motive in a web of voices,

in the other the figure of an athlete. But in both cases the notion

comes from mathematics and it is made plain that the aim thus finally

attained is a union of the artistic and the mathematical spirit, for

analysis like music, and Euclidean geometry like plastic, have both come

to full comprehension of their tasks and the ultimate meaning of their

respective number-languages. The mathematics of beauty and the beauty of

mathematics are henceforth inseparable. The unending space of tone and

the all-round body of marble or bronze are _immediate_ interpretations

of the extended. They belong to number-as-relation and to number-as-

measure. In fresco and in oil-painting, in the laws of proportion and

those of perspective, the mathematical is only indicated, but the two

final arts _are_ mathematics, and on these peaks Apollinian art and

Faustian art are seen entire.

With the exit of fresco and oil-painting, the great masters of absolute

plastic and absolute music file on to the stage, man after man.

Polycletus is followed by Phidias, Pæonius, Alcamenes, Scopas,

Praxiteles, Lysippus. Behind Bach and Händel come Gluck, Stamitz, the

younger Bachs, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—in their hands an armoury of

wonderful and now long-forgotten instruments, a whole magician’s world

created by the discovering and inventing spirit of the West in the hope

of getting more and more tones and timbres for the service and

enhancement of musical expression—in their winds an abundance of grand,

solemn, ornate, dainty, ironic, laughing and sobbing forms of perfectly

regular structure, forms that no one now understands. In those days, in

18th-Century Germany especially, there was actually and effectively a

_Culture of Music_ that suffused all Life. Its type was Hoffmann’s

Kapellmeister Kreisler. To-day it is hardly even a memory.

And with the 18th Century, too, architecture died at last, submerged and

choked in the music of Rococo. On that last wonderful fragile growth of

the Western architecture criticism has blown mercilessly, failing to

realize that its origin is in the spirit of the fugue and that its non-

proportion and non-form, its evanescence and instability and sparkle,

its destruction of surface and visual order, are nothing else than a

victory of tones and melodies over lines and walls, the triumph of pure

space over material, of absolute becoming over the become. They are no

longer buildings, these abbeys and castles and churches with their

flowing façades and porches and “gingerbread” courts and their splendid

staircases, galleries, salons and cabinets; they are sonatas, minuets,

madrigals in stone, chamber-music in stucco, marble, ivory and fine

woods, cantilene of volutes and cartouches, cadences of fliers and

copings. The Dresden Zwinger is the most completely musical piece in all

the world’s architecture, with an ornamentation like the tone of an old

violin, an _allegro fugitivo_ for small orchestra.

Germany produced the great musicians _and therefore_ also the great

architects of this century (Poppelmann, Schlüter, Bähr, Naumann, Fischer

von Erlach, Dinzenhofer). In oil-painting she played no part at all: in

instrumental music, on the contrary, hers was the principal rôle.

VII

There is a word, “Impressionism,” which only came into general use in

Manet’s time (and then, originally, as a word of contempt like Baroque

and Rococo) but very happily summarizes the special quality of the

Faustian way of art that has evolved from oil-painting. But, as we

ordinarily speak of it, the idea has neither the width nor the depth of

meaning that it ought to have: we regard it as a sequel to or derivative

of the old age of an art which, in fact, belongs to it entirely and from

first to last. What is the imitation of an "impression"? Something

purely Western, something related to the idea of Baroque and even to the

unconscious purposes of Gothic architecture and diametrically opposed to

the deliberate aims of the Renaissance. Does it not signify the

tendency—the deeply-necessary tendency of a waking consciousness to feel

pure endless space as _the_ supreme and unqualified actuality, and all

sense-images as secondary and conditioned actualities "within it"? A

tendency that can manifest itself in artistic creations, but has a

thousand other outlets besides. Does not Kant’s formula "space as _a

priori_ form of perception" sound like a slogan for the whole movement

that began with Leonardo? Impressionism is the inverse of the Euclidean

world-feeling. It tries to get as far as possible from the language of

plastic and as near as possible to that of music. The effect that is

made upon us by things that receive and reflect light is made not

because the things _are_ there but as though they “in themselves” _are

not_ there. The things are not even bodies, but light-resistances in

space, and their illusive density is to be unmasked by the brush-stroke.

What is received and rendered is the _impression_ of such resistances,

which are tacitly evaluated as simple functions of a transcendent

extension. The artist’s inner eye penetrates the body, breaks the spell

of its material bounding surfaces and sacrifices it to the majesty of

Space. And with this impression, under its influence, he feels an

endless _movement-quality_ in the sensuous element that is in utter

contrast to the statuesque “Ataraxia” of the fresco. Therefore, there

was not and could not be any Hellenic impressionism; if there is one art

that _must_ exclude it on principle, it is Classical sculpture.

Impressionism is the comprehensive expression of a world-feeling, and it

must obviously therefore permeate the whole physiognomy of our “Late”

Culture. There is an impressionistic mathematic, which frankly and with

intent transcends all optical limitations. It is Analysis, as developed

after Newton and Leibniz, and to it belong the visionary images of

number-“bodies,” aggregates, and the multidimensional geometry. There is

again an impressionistic physics which “sees” in lieu of bodies systems

of mass-points—units that are evidently no more than constant relations

between variable efficients. There are impressionistic ethics, tragedy,

and logic, and even (in Pietism) an impressionistic Christianity.

Be the artist painter or musician, his art consists in creating with a

few strokes or spots or tones an image of inexhaustible content, a

microcosm meet for the eyes or ears of Faustian man; that is, in laying

the actuality of infinite space under enchantment by fleeting and

incorporeal indications of something objective which, so to say, forces

that actuality to become phenomenal. The daring of these arts of moving

the immobile has no parallel. Right from the later work of Titian to

Corot and Menzel, matter quivers and flows like a solution under the

mysterious pressure of brush-stroke and broken colours and lights. It

was in pursuit of the same object that Baroque music became “thematic”

instead of melodic and—reinforcing the “theme” with every expedient of

harmonic charm, instrumental colour, rhythm, and tempo—developed the

tone-picture from the imitative piece of Titian’s day to the leitmotiv-

fabric of Wagner, and captured a whole new world of feeling and

experience. When German music was at its culmination, this art

penetrated also into lyric poetry (German lyric, that is, for in French

it is impossible) and gave rise to a whole series of tiny masterpieces,

from Goethe’s “Urfaust” to Hölderlin’s last poems—passages of a few

lines apiece, which have never yet been noticed, let alone collected,

but include nevertheless whole worlds of experience and feeling. On a

small scale, it continually repeats the achievements of Copernicus and

Columbus. No other Culture possesses an ornament-language of such

dynamical impressiveness relatively to the means it employs. Every point

or stroke of colour, every scarce-audible tone releases some surprising

charm and continually feeds the imagination with fresh elements of

space-creating energy. In Masaccio and Piero della Francesca we have

_actual bodies_ bathed in air. Then Leonardo, the first, discovers the

transitions of _atmospheric_ light and dark, the soft edges, the

outlines that merge in the depth, the domains of light and shade in

which the individual figures are inseparably involved. Finally, in

Rembrandt, objects dissolve into mere coloured impressions, and forms

lose their specific humanness and become collocations of strokes and

patches that tell as elements of a passionate depth-rhythm. Distance, so

treated, comes to signify Future, for what Impressionism seizes and

holds is by hypothesis a unique and never-recurring instant, not a

landscape _in being_ but a fleeting moment of the _history_ thereof.

Just as in a Rembrandt portrait it is not the anatomical relief of the

head that is rendered, but the _second visage_ in it that is confessed;

just as the art of his brush-stroke captures not the eye but the look,

not the brow but the experience, not the lips but the sensuousness; so

also the impressionist picture in general presents to the beholder not

the Nature of the foreground but again a _second visage_, the look and

soul of the landscape. Whether we take the Catholic-heroic landscape of

Claude Lorrain, the “paysage intime” of Corot, the sea and river-banks

and villages of Cuyp and Van Goyen, we find always a portrait in the

physiognomic sense, something uniquely-occurring, unforeseen, brought to

light for the first and last time. In this love of the character and

physiognomy in landscape—just the motive that was unthinkable in fresco

art and permanently barred to the Classical—the art of portraiture

widens from the immediately human to the mediately human, to the

representation of the world as a part of the ego or the self-world in

which the painter paints himself and the beholder sees himself. For the

expansion of Nature into Distance reflects a _Destiny_. In this art of

tragic, daemonic, laughing and weeping landscapes there is something of

which the man of another Culture has no idea and for which he has no

organ. Anyone who in the presence of this form-world talks of

Hellenistic illusion-painting must be unable to distinguish between an

ornamentation of the highest order and a soulless imitation, an ape-

mimicry of the obvious. If Lysippus said (as Pliny tells us he said)

that he represented men as they appeared to him, his ambition was that

of a child, of a layman, of a savage, not that of an artist. The great

style, the meaning, the deep necessity, are absent; even the cave-

dwellers of the stone age painted thus. In reality, the Hellenistic

painters could do more when they chose. Even so late, the wall-paintings

of Pompeii and the “Odyssey” landscapes in Rome contain a _symbol_. In

each case it is a _group of bodies_ that is rendered—rocks, trees, even

“the Sea” as a body among bodies! There is no depth, but only

superposition. Of course, of the objects represented one or several had

necessarily to be furthest away (or rather _least near_) but this is a

mere technical servitude without the remotest affinity to the illumined

supernal distances of Faustian art.

VIII

I have said that oil-painting faded out at the end of the 17th Century,

when one after another all its great masters died, and the question will

naturally, therefore, be asked—is Impressionism (in the current narrow

sense) a creation of the 19th Century? Has painting lived, after all,

two centuries more? Is it still existing? But we must not be deceived by

appearances. Not only was there a dead space between Rembrandt and

Delacroix or Constable—for when we think of the living art of high

symbolism that was Rembrandt’s the purely decorative artists of the 18th

Century do not count—but, further, that which began with Delacroix and

Constable was, notwithstanding all technical continuity, something quite

different from that which had ended with Rembrandt. The new _episode_ of

painting that in the 19th Century (i.e., beyond the 1800 frontier and in

“Civilization”) has succeeded in awakening some illusion of a great

culture of painting, has itself chosen the word _Plein-air_

(_Freilicht_) to designate its special characteristic. The very

designation suffices to show the significance of the fleeting phenomenon

that it is. It implies the conscious, intellectual, cold-blooded

rejection of that for which a sudden wit invented the name “brown

sauce,” but which the great masters had, as we know, regarded as the one

truly metaphysical colour. On it had been built the painting-culture of

the schools, and especially the Dutch school, that had vanished

irretrievably in the Rococo. This brown, the symbol of a spatial

infinity, which had for Faustian mankind created a spiritual something

out of a mere canvas, now came to be regarded, quite suddenly, as an

offence to Nature. What had happened? Was it not simply this, that the

_soul_ for which this supernal colour was something religious, the sign

of wistfulness, the whole meaning of “Living Nature,” had quietly

slipped away? The materialism of a Western Cosmopolis blew into the

ashes and rekindled this curious brief flicker—a brief flicker of two

generations, for with the generation of Manet all was ended again. I

have (as the reader will recall) characterized the noble green of

Grünewald and Claude and Giorgione as the Catholic space-colour and the

transcendent brown of Rembrandt as the colour of the Protestant world-

feeling. On the other hand, _Plein-air_ and its new colour scale stand

for irreligion.[364] From the spheres of Beethoven and the stellar

expanses of Kant, Impressionism has come down again to the crust of the

earth. Its space is cognized, not experienced, seen, not contemplated;

there is tunedness in it, but not Destiny. It is the mechanical object

of physics and not the felt world of the pastorale that Courbet and

Manet give us in their landscapes. Rousseau’s tragically correct

prophecy of a “return to Nature” fulfils itself in this dying art—the

senile, too, return to Nature day by day. The modern artist is a

workman, not a creator. He sets unbroken spectrum-colours side by side.

The subtle script, the dance of brush-strokes, give way to crude

commonplaces, pilings and mixings and daubings of points, squares, broad

inorganic masses. The whitewasher’s brush and the trowel appear in the

painter’s equipment; the oil-priming of the canvas is brought into the

scheme of execution and in places left bare. It is a risky art,

meticulous, cold, diseased—an art for over-developed nerves, but

scientific to the last degree, energetic in everything that relates to

the conquest of technical obstacles, acutely assertive of programme. It

is the “satyric pendant” of the great age of oil-painting that stretches

from Leonardo to Rembrandt; it could only be at home in the Paris of

Baudelaire. Corot’s silvern landscapes, with their grey-greens and

browns, dream still of the spiritual of the Old Masters; but Courbet and

Manet conquer bare physical space, “factual” space. The meditative

discoverer represented by Leonardo gives way to the painting

experimentalist. Corot, the eternal child, French but not Parisian,

finds his transcendent landscapes anywhere and everywhere; Courbet,

Manet, Cézanne, portray over and over again, painfully, laboriously,

soullessly, the Forest of Fontainebleau, the bank of the Seine at

Argenteuil, or that remarkable valley near Arles. Rembrandt’s mighty

landscapes lie essentially in the universe, Manet’s near a railway

station. The plein-air painters, true megalopolitans, obtain as it were

specimens of the music of space from the least agitated sources of Spain

and Holland—from Velasquez, Goya, Hobbema, Franz Hals—in order (with the

aid of English landscapists and, later, the Japanese, “highbrows” all)

to restate it in empirical and scientific terms. It is natural science

as opposed to nature experience, head against heart, knowledge in

contrast to faith.

In Germany it was otherwise. Whereas in France it was a matter of

closing-off the great school, in Germany it was a case of catching up

with it. For in the picturesque style, as practised from Rottmann,

Wasmann, K. D. Friedrich and Runge to Marées and Leibl, an unbroken

evolution is the very basis of technique, and even a new-style school

requires a closed tradition behind it. Herein lies the weakness and the

strength of the last German painters. Whereas the French possessed a

continuous tradition of their own from early Baroque to Chardin and

Corot, whereas there was living connexion between Claude Lorrain and

Corot, Rubens and Delacroix, all the great Germans of the 18th Century

had been _musicians_. After Beethoven this music, without change of

inward essence, was diverted (one of the modalities of the German

Romantic movement) back into painting. And it was in painting that it

flowered longest and bore its kindliest fruits, for the portraits and

landscapes of these men are suffused with a secret wistful music, and

there is a breath of Eichendorff and Mörike left even in Thoma and

Böcklin. But a foreign teacher had to be asked to supply that which was

lacking in the native tradition, and so these painters one and all went

to Paris, where they studied and copied the old masters of 1670. So also

did Manet and his circle. But there was this difference, that the

Frenchmen found in these studies only reminiscences of something that

had been in their art for many generations, whereas the Germans received

fresh and wholly different impressions. The result was that, in the 19th

Century, the German arts of form (other than music) were a phenomenon

out of season—hasty, anxious, confused, puzzled as to both aim and

means. There was indeed no time to be lost. The level that German music

or French painting had taken centuries to attain had to be made good by

German painting in two generations. The expiring art demanded its last

phase, and this phase had to be reached by a vertiginous race through

the whole past. Hence the unsteadiness, in everything pertaining to

form, of high Faustian natures like Marées and Böcklin, an unsteadiness

that in German music with its sure tradition (think of Bruckner) would

have been impossible. The art of the French Impressionists was too

explicit in its programme and correspondingly too poor in soul to expose

them to such a tragedy. German literature, on the contrary, was in the

same condition as German painting; from Goethe’s time, every major work

was intended to found something _and_ obliged to conclude something.

Just as Kleist felt in himself both Shakespeare and Stendhal, and

laboured desperately, altering and discarding without end and without

result, to forge two centuries of psychological art into a unit; just as

Hebbel tried to squeeze all the problems from Hamlet to Rosmersholm into

one dramatic type; so Menzel, Leibl, and Marées sought to force the old

and new models—Rembrandt, Claude, Van Goyen, and Watteau, Delacroix,

Courbet and Manet—into a single form. While the little early interiors

of Menzel anticipated all the discoveries of the Manet circle and Leibl

not seldom succeeded where Courbet tried and failed, their pictures

renew the metaphysical browns and greens of the Old Masters and are

fully expressive of an inward experience. Menzel _actually_ re-

experienced and reawakened something of Prussian Rococo, Marées

something of Rubens, Leibl in his “Frau Gedon” something of Rembrandt’s

portraiture. Moreover, the studio-brown of the 17th Century had had by

its side a second art, the intensely Faustian art of etching. In this,

as in the other, Rembrandt is the greatest master of all time; this,

like the other, has something Protestant in it that puts it in a quite

different category from the work of the Southern Catholic painters of

blue-green atmospheres and the Gobelin tapestries. And Leibl, the last

artist in the brown, was the last great etcher whose plates possess that

Rembrandtesque infinity that contains and reveals secrets without end.

In Marées, lastly, there was all the mighty intention of the great

Baroque style, but, though Guéricault and Daumier were not too belated

to capture it in positive form, he—lacking just that strength that a

tradition would have given him—was unable to force it into the world of

painter’s actuality.

IX

The last of the Faustian arts died in “Tristan.” This work is the giant

keystone of Western music. Painting achieved nothing like this as a

finale—on the contrary, the effect of Manet, Menzel and Leibl, with

their combination of “free light” and resurrected old-master styles, is

weak.

“Contemporaneously,” in our sense, Apollinian art came to its end in

Pergamene sculpture. _Pergamum is the counterpart of Bayreuth._ The

famous altar itself,[365] indeed, is later, and probably not the most

important work of the epoch at that; we have to assume a century (330-

220 B.C.) of development now lost in oblivion. Nevertheless, all

Nietzsche’s charges against Wagner and Bayreuth, the “Ring” and

“Parsifal”—decadence, theatricalness and the like—could have been

levelled in the same words at the Pergamene sculpture. A masterpiece of

this sculpture—a veritable “Ring”—has come down to us in the

Gigantomachia frieze of the great altar. Here is the same theatrical

note, the same use of motives from ancient discredited mythology as

_points d’appui_, the same ruthless bombardment of the nerves, and also

(though the lack of inner power cannot altogether be concealed) the same

fully self-conscious force and towering greatness. To this art the

Farnese Bull and the older model of the Laocoön group certainly belong.

The symptom of decline in creative power is the fact that to produce

something round and complete the artist now requires to be emancipated

from form and proportion. Its most obvious, though not its most

significant, manifestation is the taste for the gigantic. Here size is

not, as in the Gothic and the Pyramid styles, the expression of inward

greatness, but the dissimulation of its absence. This swaggering in

_specious_ dimensions is common to all nascent Civilizations—we find it

in the Zeus altar of Pergamum, the Helios of Chares called the “Colossus

of Rhodes,” the architecture of the Roman Imperial Age, the New Empire

work in Egypt, the American skyscraper of to-day. But what is far more

indicative is the arbitrariness and immoderateness that tramples on and

shatters the conventions of centuries. In Bayreuth and in Pergamum, it

was the superpersonal Rule, the absolute mathematic of Form, the Destiny

immanent in the quietly-matured language of a great art, that was found

to be intolerable. The way from Polycletus to Lysippus and from Lysippus

to the sculptors of the groups of Gauls[366] is paralleled by the way

from Bach, by Beethoven, to Wagner. The earlier artists felt themselves

masters, the later uneasy slaves, of the great form. While even

Praxiteles and Haydn were able to speak freely and gaily within the

limits of the strictest canon, Lysippus and Beethoven could only produce

by straining their voices. The sign of all living art, the pure harmony

of “will,” “must” and “can,” the self-evidence of the aim, the un-self-

consciousness of the execution, the unity of the art and the Culture—all

that is past and gone. In Corot and Tiepolo, Mozart and Cimarosa, there

is still a real mastery of the mother-tongue. After them, the process of

mutilation begins, but no one is conscious of it because no one now can

speak it fluently. Once upon a time, Freedom and Necessity were

identical; but now what is understood by freedom is in fact

indiscipline. In the time of Rembrandt or Bach the “failures” that we

know only too well were quite unthinkable. The Destiny of the form lay

in the race or the school, not in the private tendencies of the

individual. Under the spell of a great tradition full achievement is

possible even to a minor artist, because the living art brings him in

touch with his task and the task with him. To-day, these artists can no

longer perform what they intend, for intellectual operations are a poor

substitute for the trained instinct that has died out. All of them have

experienced this. Marées was unable to complete any of his great

schemes. Leibl could not bring himself to let his late pictures go, and

worked over them again and again to such an extent that they became cold

and hard. Cézanne and Renoir left work of the best quality unfinished

because, strive as they would, they could do no more. Manet was

exhausted after he had painted thirty pictures, and his “Shooting of the

Emperor Maximilian,” in spite of the immense care that is visible in

every item of the picture and the studies for it, hardly achieved as

much as Goya managed without effort in its prototype the “shootings of

the 3rd of May.” Bach, Haydn, Mozart and a thousand obscure musicians of

the 18th Century could rapidly turn out the most finished work as a

matter of routine, but Wagner knew full well that he could only reach

the heights by concentrating all his energy upon “getting the last

ounce” out of the best moments of his artistic endowment.

Between Wagner and Manet there is a deep relationship, which is not,

indeed, obvious to everyone but which Baudelaire with his unerring flair

for the decadent detected at once. For the Impressionists, the end and

the culmination of art was the conjuring up of a world in space out of

strokes and patches of colour, and this was just what Wagner achieved

with three bars. A whole world of soul could crowd into these three

bars. Colours of starry midnight, of sweeping clouds, of autumn, of the

day dawning in fear and sorrow, sudden glimpses of sunlit distances,

world-fear, impending doom, despair and its fierce effort, hopeless

hope—all these impressions which no composer before him had thought it

possible to catch, he could paint with entire distinctness in the few

tones of a motive. Here the contrast of Western music with Greek plastic

has reached its maximum. Everything merges in bodiless infinity, no

longer even does a linear melody wrestle itself clear of the vague tone-

masses that in strange surgings challenge an imaginary space. The motive

comes up out of dark terrible deeps. It is flooded for an instant by a

flash of hard bright sun. Then, suddenly, it is so close upon us that we

shrink. It laughs, it coaxes, it threatens, and anon it vanishes into

the domain of the strings, only to return again out of endless

distances, faintly modified and in the voice of a single oboe, to pour

out a fresh cornucopia of spiritual colours. Whatever this is, it is

neither painting nor music, in any sense of these words that attaches to

previous work in the strict style. Rossini was asked once what he

thought of the music of the “Huguenots”; “Music?” he replied. “I heard

nothing resembling it.” Many a time must this judgment have been passed

at Athens on the new painting of the Asiatic and Sicyonian schools, and

opinions not very different must have been current in Egyptian Thebes

with regard to the art of Cnossus and Tell-el-Amarna.

All that Nietzsche says of Wagner is applicable, also, to Manet.

Ostensibly a return to the elemental, to Nature, as against

contemplation-painting (Inhaltsmalerei) and abstract music, their art

really signifies a concession to the barbarism of the Megalopolis, the

beginning of dissolution sensibly manifested in a mixture of brutality

and refinement. As a step, it is necessarily the last step. An

artificial art has no further organic future, it is the mark of the end.

And the bitter conclusion is that it is all irretrievably over with the

arts of form of the West. The crisis of the 19th Century was the death-

struggle. Like the Apollinian, the Egyptian and every other, the

Faustian art dies of senility, having actualized its inward

possibilities and fulfilled its mission within the course of its

Culture.

What is practised as art to-day—be it music after Wagner or painting

after Cézanne, Leibl and Menzel—is impotence and falsehood. Look where

one will, can one find the great personalities that would justify the

claim that there is still an art of determinate necessity? Look where

one will, can one find the _self-evidently necessary_ task that awaits

such an artist? We go through all the exhibitions, the concerts, the

theatres, and find only industrious cobblers and noisy fools, who

delight to produce something for the market, something that will “catch

on” with a public for whom art and music and drama have long ceased to

be spiritual necessities. At what a level of inward and outward dignity

stand to-day that which is called art and those who are called artists!

In the shareholders’ meeting of any limited company, or in the technical

staff of any first-rate engineering works there is more intelligence,

taste, character and capacity than in the whole music and painting of

present-day Europe. There have always been, for one great artist, a

hundred superfluities who practised art, but so long as a great

tradition (and _therefore_ great art) endured even these achieved

something worthy. We can forgive this hundred for existing, for in the

ensemble of the tradition they were the footing for the individual great

man. But to-day we have only these superfluities, and ten thousand of

them, working art “for a living” (as if that were a justification!). One

thing is quite certain, that to-day every single art-school could be

shut down without art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all

we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in

order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year

200. There, as here in our world-cities, we find a pursuit of illusions

of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of “the new style,” of

“unsuspected possibilities,” theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable

artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells—the “Literary Man” in

the Poet’s place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism which the art-

trade has organized as a “phase of art-history,” thinking and feeling

and forming as industrial art. Alexandria, too, had problem-dramatists

and box-office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who

invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. What do

we possess to-day as "art"? A faked music, filled with artificial

noisiness of massed instruments; a faked painting, full of idiotic,

exotic and showcard effects, that every ten years or so concocts out of

the form-wealth of millennia some new “style” which is in fact no style

at all since everyone does as he pleases; a lying plastic that steals

from Assyria, Egypt and Mexico indifferently. Yet this and only this,

the taste of the “man of the world,” can be accepted as the expression

and sign of the age; everything else, everything that “sticks to” old

ideals, is for provincial consumption.

The grand Ornamentation of the past has become as truly a dead language

as Sanskrit or Church Latin.[367] Instead of its symbolism being

honoured and obeyed, its mummy, its legacies of perfected forms, are put

into the pot anyhow, and recast in wholly inorganic forms. Every modern

age holds change to be development, and puts revivals and fusions of old

styles in the place of real becoming. Alexandria also had its Pre-

Raphaelite comedians with their vases, chairs, pictures and theories,

its symbolists, naturalists and expressionists. The fashion at Rome was

now Græco-Asiatic, now Græco-Egyptian, now (after Praxiteles) neo-Attic.

The relief of the XIXth Dynasty—the modern age in the Egyptian Culture—

that covered the monstrous, meaningless, inorganic walls, statues and

columns, seems like a sheer parody of the art of the Old Kingdom. The

Ptolemaic Horus-temple of Edfu is quite unsurpassed in the way of

vacuous eclecticism—so far, for we are only at the beginning of our own

development in this line, showy and assertive as the style of our

streets and squares already is.

In due course, even the strength to wish for change fades out. Rameses

the Great—so soon—appropriated to himself buildings of his predecessors

by cutting out their names and inserting his own in the inscriptions. It

was the same consciousness of artistic impotence that led Constantine to

adorn his triumphal arch in Rome with sculptures taken from other

buildings; but Classical craftsmanship had set to work long before

Constantine—as early, in fact, as 150—on the business of copying old

masterpieces, not because these were understood and appreciated in the

least, but because no one was any longer capable of producing originals.

It must not be forgotten that these copyists were the _artists_ of their

time; their work therefore (done in one style or another according to

the moment’s fashion) represent the maximum of creative power then

available. All the Roman portrait statues, male and female, go back for

posture and mien to a very few Hellenic types; these, copied more or

less true to style, served for torsos, while the heads were executed as

“Likenesses” by simple craftsmen who possessed the knack. The famous

statue of Augustus in armour, for example, is based on the Spearman of

Polycletus, just as—to name the first harbingers of the same phase in

our own world—Lenbach rests upon Rembrandt and Makart upon Rubens. For

1500 years (Amasis I to Cleopatra) Egypticism piled portrait on portrait

in the same way. Instead of the steady development that the great age

had pursued through the Old and Middle Kingdoms, we find _fashions_ that

change according to the taste of this or that dynasty. Amongst the

discoveries at Turfan are relics of Indian dramas, contemporary with the

birth of Christ, which are similar in all respects to the Kalidasa of a

later century. Chinese painting as we know it shows not an evolution but

an up-and-down of fashions for more than a thousand years on end; and

this unsteadiness must have set in as early as the Han period. The final

result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms

which we see to-day in Indian, Chinese, and Arabian-Persian art.

Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical

compositions—all is patternwork.[368] We cease to be able to date

anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of its

ornamentation. So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures.

-----

Footnote 272:

_Die bildenden Künste._ The expression is a standard one in German,

but unfamiliar in English. Ordinarily, however, “die bildenden Künste”

(shaping arts, arts of form) are contrasted with “die redenden Künste”

(speaking arts)—music, as giving utterance rather than spatial form to

things, being counted among the latter.—_Tr._

Footnote 273:

As soon as the word, which is a transmission-agent of the

understanding, comes to be used as the expression-agent of an art, the

waking consciousness ceases to express or to take in a thing

integrally. Not to mention the _read_ word of higher Cultures—the

medium of literature proper—even the spoken word, when used in any

artificial sense, separates hearing from understanding, for the

ordinary meaning of the word also takes a hand in the process and, as

this art grows in power, the wordless arts themselves arrive at

expression-methods in which the motives are joined to word-meanings.

Thus arises the _Allegory_, or motive that _signifies a word_, as in

Baroque sculpture after Bernini. So, too, painting very often develops

into a sort of painting-writing, as in Byzantium after the second

Nicene Council (787) which took from the artist his freedom of choice

and arrangement. This also is what distinguishes the arias of Gluck,

in which the melody grew up out of the meaning of the libretto, from

those of Alessandro Scarlatti, in which the texts are in themselves of

no significance and mostly serve to carry the voices. The high-Gothic

counterpoint of the 13th Century is entirely free from any connexion

with words: it is a _pure architecture of human voices_ in which

several texts, Latin and vernacular, sacred and secular, were sung

together.

Footnote 274:

Our pedantic method has given us an art-history that excludes music-

history; and while the one has become a normal element of higher

education, the other has remained an affair solely for the expert. It

is just as though one tried to write a history of Greece without

taking Sparta into account. The result is a theory of “Art” that is a

pious fraud.

Footnote 275:

This sentence is not in the original. It has been inserted, and the

following sentence modified, for the sake of clarity.—_Tr._

Footnote 276:

See Vol. II, p. 110. The aspect of the streets of Old Egypt may have

been very similar to this, if we can draw conclusions from tesseræ

discovered in Cnossus (see H. Bossert, _Alt Kreta_ (1921), T. 14). And

the Pylon is an undoubted and genuine façade. (Such tesseræ, bearing

pictures of windowed houses, are illustrated in Art. “_Ægean

Civilization_,” Ency. Brit., XI Edition, Vol. I, p. 251, plate IV,

fig. 1.—_Tr._).

Footnote 277:

Ghiberti has not outgrown the Gothic, nor has even Donatello; and

already in Michelangelo the feeling is Baroque, i.e., musical.

Footnote 278:

The struggle to fix the problem is visible in the series of “Apollo-

figures.” See Déonna, _Les Apollons archaïques_ (1909).

Footnote 279:

Woermann, _Geschichte der Kunst, I_ (1915), p. 236. The first tendency

is seen in the Samian Hera of Cheramues and the persistent turning of

columns into caryatids; the second in the Delian figure dedicated to

Artemis by Nicandra, with its relation to the oldest metope-technique.

Footnote 280:

Miletus was in a particular relation with Egypt through Naucratis.—

_Tr._

Footnote 281:

Most of the works are pediment-groups or metopes. But even the Apollo-

figures and the “Maidens” of the Acropolis could not have stood free.

Footnote 282:

V. Salis, _Kunst der Griechen_ (1919), pp. 47, 98 et seq.

Footnote 283:

The decisive preference of the _white_ stone is itself significant of

the _opposition_ of Renaissance to Classical feeling.

Footnote 284:

All Greek scales are capable of reduction to “tetrachords” or four-

note scales of which the form E—note—note—A is typical. In the

diatonic the unspecified inner notes are F, G; in the chromatic they

are F, F sharp; and in the enharmonic they are E half-sharp, F. Thus,

the chromatic and enharmonic scales do not provide additional notes as

the modern chromatic does, but simply displace the inner members of

the scale downwards, altering the proportionate distances between the

same given total. In Faustian music, on the contrary, the meaning of

“enharmonic” is simply _relational_. It is applied to a change, say

from A flat to G sharp. The difference between these two is not a

quarter-tone but a “very small” interval (theory and practice do not

even agree as to which note is the higher, and in tempered instruments

with standardized scales the physical difference is eliminated

altogether). While a note is being sounded, even without any physical

change in it, its harmonic co-ordinates (i.e., substantially, the key

of the harmony) may alter, so that henceforth the note, from A flat,

has become G sharp.—_Tr._

Footnote 285:

In the same way the whole of Russian music appears to us infinitely

mournful, but real Russians assure us that it is not at all so for

themselves.

Footnote 286:

See articles under these headings in Grove’s “Dictionary of Music.”—

_Tr._

Footnote 287:

See Vol. II, p. 238.

Footnote 288:

In Baroque music the word “imitation” means something quite different

from this, viz., the exact repetition of a motive in a new colouring

(starting from a different note of the scale).

Footnote 289:

For all that survives performance is the notes, and these speak only

to one who still knows and can manage the tone and technique of the

expression-means appropriate to them.

Footnote 290:

See articles _Fauxbourdon_, _Discant_ and _Gimel_ in Grove’s

“Dictionary of Music.”—_Tr._

Footnote 291:

Note that Oresme was a contemporary of Machault and Philippe de Vitry,

in whose generation the rules and prohibitions of strict counterpoint

were definitively established.

Footnote 292:

See p. 19 and Vol. II, p. 357.

Footnote 293:

Even the first great troubadour, Guilhem of Poitiers, though a

reigning sovereign, made it his ambition to be regarded as a

“professional,” as we should say.—_Tr._

Footnote 294:

See also Vol. II, p. 365.

Footnote 295:

See p. 74.

Footnote 296:

A movement in sonata form consists essentially of (_a_) First Subject;

(_b_) Second Subject (in an allied key); (_c_) Working-out, or free

development of the themes grouped under (_a_) and (_b_); and (_d_)

Recapitulation, in which the two subjects are repeated in the key of

the tonic.

The English usage is to consider (_a_) and (_b_) with the bridge or

modulation connecting them, together as the “Exposition,” and the form

is consequently designated “three-part.”—_Tr._

Footnote 297:

Einstein, _Gesch. der Musik_, p. 67.

Footnote 298:

Coysevox lived 1640-1720. Much of the embellishment and statuary of

Versailles is his work.—_Tr._

Footnote 299:

See Vol. II, pp. 357 et seq., 365 et seq.

Footnote 300:

It was not merely national-Italian (for that Italian Gothic was also):

it was purely Florentine, and even within Florence the ideal of one

class of society. That which is called Renaissance in the Trecento has

its centre in Provence and particularly in the papal court at Avignon,

and is nothing whatever but the southern type of chivalry, that which

prevailed in Spain and Upper Italy and was so strongly influenced by

the Moorish polite society of Spain and Sicily.

Footnote 301:

Renaissance ornament is merely embellishment and self-conscious "art"-

inventiveness. It is only with the frank and outspoken Baroque that we

return to the necessities of high symbolism.

Footnote 302:

Jacob Burckhardt, _Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien_. (An English

translation was published in 1878.—_Tr._)

Footnote 303:

Inclusive of Paris itself. Even as late as the fifteenth century

Flemish was as much spoken there as French, and the architectural

appearance of the city in its oldest parts connects it with Bruges and

Ghent and not with Troyes and Poitiers.

Footnote 304:

A. Schmarsow, _Gotik in der Renaissance_ (1921); B. Haendke, _Der

niederl. Einfluss auf die Malerei Toskana-Umbriens_ (_Monatshefte für

Kunstwissensch._ 1912).

Footnote 305:

The colossal statue of Bartolommeo Colleone at Venice.—_Tr._

Footnote 306:

Svoboda, _Römische und Romanische Paläste_ (1919); Rostowzew,

_Pompeianische Landschaften und Römische Villen_ (_Röm. mitt._, 1904).

Footnote 307:

Environs of Rome. They date from the late 17th and the mid-18th

centuries respectively; the gardens of the V. Ludovisi were laid out

by Le Nôtre.—_Tr._

Footnote 308:

That is, the expression for the sum of a convergent series beyond any

specified term.—_Tr._

Footnote 309:

See Vol. II, pp. 117 et seq.

Footnote 310:

In Classical painting, light and shadow were first consistently

employed by Zeuxis, but _only for the shading of the thing itself_,

for the purpose of freeing the modelling of the body painted from the

restriction of the relief-manner, i.e., without any reference to the

relation of shadows to the _time of day_. But even with the earliest

of the Netherlanders light and shade are already _colour-tones_ and

affected by atmosphere.

Footnote 311:

The brilliant _polish_ of the stone in Egyptian art has a deep

symbolic significance of much the same kind. Its effect is to

dematerialize the statue by causing the eye to glide along its

exterior. Hellas on the contrary manifests, by its progress from

“Poros” stone, through Naxian, to the translucent Parian and Pentelic

marbles, how determined it is that the look shall sink right into the

material essence of the body.

Footnote 312:

See Vol. II, pp. 314 et seq.

Footnote 313:

The life and teaching of St. Francis were, morally and æsthetically

alike, the centres of inspiration for Cimabue, Giotto and the Italian

Gothic generally.—_Tr._

Footnote 314:

Der nordische im Grenzenlose schweifende Pantheismus.

Footnote 315:

On the following page is a translation of this chorus.—_Tr._

_Raphael._ The Sun outsings the brother-spheres

in olden rivalry of song,

and thunder-girt pursues the years

the preordainèd path along.

’Tis from his face the angels gain

their strength; but scan it no one may.

Thought is outranged and Works remain

sublime as on Creation-Day.

_Gabriel._ And, swift beyond description, flies

the circling scene of land and sea,

in alternance of Paradise

with dark and awful Mystery.

The ocean swings, the billows sway,

back from the cliff the waves are hurled.

But cliff and waves alike obey

the mightier movement of the World.

_Michael._ And storms arise and swell and ebb

o’er sea and mountain, lake and field,

in wild contention weave a web

of forces purposed though concealed.

The lightning is thy flaming sword,

the thunder veils thee on thy way,

yet ever spare thy envoys, Lord,

the gentle changing of thy day.

_The Three._ ’Tis from thy face the angels gain

their strength, but scan it no one may.

Beyond all thought thy Works remain

sublime as on Creation-Day.

Footnote 316:

His portrait of Frau Gedon, all steeped in brown, is the last _Old-

Master portrait_ of the West; it is painted entirely in the style of

the past.

Footnote 317:

The strings in the Orchestra represent, as a class, the colours of the

distance. The bluish green of Watteau is found already in the

Neapolitan _bel canto_ of about 1700, in Couperin, in Mozart and

Haydn; and the brown of the Dutch in Corelli, Handel and Beethoven.

The woodwind, too, calls up illumined distances. Yellow and red, on

the other hand, the colours of nearness, the _popular_ colours, are

associated with the brass timbre, the effect of which is corporeal

often to the point of vulgarity. The tone of an old fiddle is entirely

bodiless. It is worth remarking that the Greek music, insignificent as

it is, underwent an evolution from the Dorian lyre to the Ionian flute

(aulos and syrinx) and that even in the time of Pericles strict

Dorians blamed this as an enervating and lowering tendency.

(The horn is an exception, and is always treated as an exception, to

the brass generally. Its place is with the woodwind, and its colours

are those of the distance.—_Tr._)

Footnote 318:

The use of gold in this way, viz., to add brilliancy to bodies

standing freely in the open, has nothing in common with its employment

in Magian art to provide glittering backgrounds for figures seen in

dim interiors.

Footnote 319:

The Chinese also attach enormous importance to the patinas of their

old bronzes, which, owing to the different alloys used and the strong

chemical characters of the soil, are of infinite variety and natural

intricacy. They too, in later phases, have come to the production of

artificial patina.—_Tr._

Footnote 320:

Pausanias, it should be observed, was neither by date nor by origin a

Greek.—_Tr._

Footnote 321:

“In places, as you stand on it, the great towered and embattled

enceinte produces an illusion: it looks as if it were still equipped

and defended. One vivid challenge at any rate it flings down before

you; it compels you to make up your mind on the matter of restoration.

For myself, I have no hesitation; I prefer in every case the ruined,

however ruined, to the reconstructed however splendid.... After that,

I am free to say that the restoration of Carcassonne is a splendid

achievement.” (Henry James, “A Little Tour in France,” xxiii.) Yet if

ever there was a reconstruction carried out with piety and scholarship

as well as skill, it was Viollet-le-Duc’s reconstruction of these old

town-walls.—_Tr._

Footnote 322:

Home, an English philosopher of the 18th Century, declared in a

lecture on English parks that Gothic ruins represented the triumph of

_time over power_, Classical ruins that of barbarism over taste. It

was that age that first discovered the beauty of the ruin-studded

Rhine, which was thenceforward the _historic_ river of the Germans.

Footnote 323:

English readers will very likely think of the case of Shaw’s “Back to

Methuselah,” with its extreme contrast of the cheaply-satirical

present-day scene and the noble and tragic scenes of far past and far

future.—_Tr._

Footnote 324:

One need only contrast the Greek artist with Rubens and Rabelais.

Footnote 325:

Of whom one of his mistresses remarked that he “smelt like a carcass”

(qu’il puait comme une charogne). Note also how the musician generally

has a reputation for uncleanliness.

Footnote 326:

From the solemn canon of Polycletus to the elegance of Lysippus the

same process of lightening is going on in the body-build as that which

brought the column from the Doric to the Corinthian order. The

Euclidean feeling was beginning to relax.

Footnote 327:

See p. 19.—_Tr._

Footnote 328:

In other countries, e.g., old Egypt and Japan (to anticipate a

particularly foolish and shallow assertion), the sight of naked men

was a far more ordinary and commonplace thing than it was in Athens,

but the Japanese art-lover feels emphasized nudity as ridiculous and

vulgar. The act is depicted (as for that matter it is in the “Adam and

Eve” of Bamberg Cathedral), but merely as an object without any

significance of potential whatsoever.

Footnote 329:

Kluge, _Deutsche Sprachgesch._ (1920), pp. 202 et seq.

Footnote 330:

A. Conze, _Die Attischen Grabreliefs_ (1893 etc.).

Footnote 331:

Louvre. Replicas of the pair in the Vict. and Alb. Museum, London.—

_Tr._

Footnote 332:

Olympia—the only unquestioned original that we have from the “great

age.” References would be superfluous, for few, if any, Classical

works are better or more widely known.—_Tr._

Footnote 333:

Of the several copies that have survived, all imperfectly preserved,

that in the Palazzo Massimi is accounted the best. The restoration

which, once seen, convinces, is Professor Furtwängler’s (shown in

Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article _Greek Art_, fig. 68).—_Tr._

Footnote 334:

A cast of this is in the British Museum (illustrated in the Museum

Guide to Egypt. Antiq., pl. XXI).—_Tr._

Footnote 335:

In the Bargello, Florence. Replica in Vict. and Alb. Museum, London.—

_Tr._

Footnote 336:

The “Apollo with the lyre” at Munich was admired by Winckelmann and

his time as a Muse. Till quite recently a head of Athene (a copy of

Praxiteles) at Bologna passed as that of a general. Such errors would

be entirely impossible in dealing with a physiognomic art, e.g.,

Baroque.

Footnote 337:

In his portrait of Frau Gedon, already alluded to, p. 252.

Footnote 338:

See p. 136 and also Vol. II, p. 354.

Footnote 339:

The so-called “Three Fates” in the British Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 340:

The Orphic springtime _contemplates_ the Gods and does not _see_ them.

See Vol. II, p. 345.

Footnote 341:

There was indeed a beginning of this in the aristocratic epic of

Homer—so nearly akin to the courtly narrative art of Boccaccio. But

throughout the Classical age strictly religious people felt it as a

profanation; the worship that shines through the Homeric poems is

quite without idolatry, and a further proof is the anger of thinkers

who, like Heraclitus and Plato, were in close touch with the temple

tradition. It will occur to the student that the unrestricted handling

of even the highest divinities in this very late art is not unlike the

theatrical Catholicism of Rossini and Liszt, which is already

foreshadowed in Corelli and Händel and had, earlier even, almost led

to the condemnation of Church music in 1564.

(The event alluded to in the last line is the dispute in and after the

Council of Trent as to the nature and conduct of Church music. If

Wagner’s suggestion that Pope Marcellus II tried to exclude it

altogether is exaggerated, it is certain at least that the complaints

were deep and powerful, and that the Council found it necessary to

forbid “unworthy music in the house of God” and to bring the subject

under the disciplinary control of the Bishops.—_Tr._)

Footnote 342:

Harmodius and Aristogiton. At Naples. Illustrated in Ency. Brit. XI

ed., article _Greek Art_, fig. 50. Cast in British Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 343:

The famous statue now in the Lateran Museum, Rome.—_Tr._

Footnote 344:

See foot-note, p. 130. An antique copy is in the British Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 345:

In the Vatican Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 346:

Even the landscape of the Baroque develops from composed backgrounds

to portraits of definite localities, representations of the soul of

these localities which are thus endowed with _faces_.

Footnote 347:

It could be said of Hellenistic portrait art that it followed exactly

the opposite course.

Footnote 348:

British Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 349:

Pinakothek, Munich.—_Tr._

Footnote 350:

Art Gallery, Vienna.—_Tr._

Footnote 351:

Nothing more clearly displays the decadence of Western art since the

middle of the 19th century than its absurd rendering of acts by

masses; the deeper meaning of act-study and the importance of the

motive have been entirely forgotten.

Footnote 352:

By that test Rubens, and, among moderns, especially Feuerbach and

Böcklin, lose, while Goya, Daumier, and, in Germany, Oldach, Wasmann,

Rayski and many another almost forgotten artist of the earlier 19th

Century, gain. And Marées passes to the rank of the very greatest.

Footnote 353:

Tombs of the Scaligers, Verona.—_Tr._

Footnote 354:

National Gallery, London.—_Tr._

Footnote 355:

Museo Nazionale, Florence.—_Tr._

Footnote 356:

It is the same “noble simplicity and quiet greatness”—to speak in the

language of the German Classicists—that produces such an impression of

the antique in the Romanesque of Hildesheim, Gernrode, Paulinzella and

Hersfeld. The ruined cloisters of Paulinzella, in fact, have much of

what Brunellesco so many centuries later strove to obtain in his

palace-courts. But the basic feeling that underlies these creations is

not something which we got from the Classical, but something that we

projected on to our own notion of Classical being. And our own notion

of peace is one of an _infinite_ peace. We feel the “Rest in God” to

be an _expanse_ of quietude. All Florentine work, in so far as

sureness does not turn into the Gothic challenge of Verrocchio, is

characterized by this feeling, with which Attic σωφροσύνη has nothing

whatever in common.

Footnote 357:

It has never been sufficiently noticed that the few sculptors who came

after Michelangelo had no more than a mere workaday relation with

marble. But we see at once that it is so when we think of the deeply

intimate relation of great musicians to their favourite instruments.

The story of Tartini’s violin, which shattered itself to pieces on the

death of the master—and there are a hundred such stories—is the

Faustian counterpart of the Pygmalion legend. Consider, too, E. T. A.

Hoffmann’s “Johannes Kreisler the Kapellmeister”; he is a figure

worthy to stand by the side of Faust, Werther and Don Juan. To see his

symbolic significance and the inward necessity of him, we have only to

compare him with the theatrical painter-characters in the works of

contemporary Romanticists, who are not in any relation whatever with

the idea of Painting. As the fate of 19th-Century art-romances shows—a

painter _cannot_ be made to stand for the destiny of Faustian art.

(E. T. A. Hoffmann, the strange many-sided genius who was at once

musician, caricaturist, novelist, critic, wit, able public official

and winebibber, at one time in his career wrote in the character of

“Johannes Kreisler.” See his _Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier_ and

_Der Kater Murr_, also Thomas Carlyle’s “Miscellanies” and the

biographical sketches of Hoffmann in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and

the Ency. Brit.—_Tr._)

Footnote 358:

Although gunpowder is much older than the Baroque, its application in

real earnest to long-ranging fire-arms was only accomplished during

the 16th Century. It cannot be said that there was any _technical_

reason why 100 years should have elapsed between the first use of

powder in European warfare and the first effective soldier’s fire-arm.

No careful student of this period of military history can fail to be

struck with this fact—the significance of which, not being technical,

must be cultural. Much the same could be said of printing, which, so

far as concerns technical factors, might just as well have been

invented in the 10th as in the 15th Century.—_Tr._

Footnote 359:

Uffizi, Florence.—_Tr._

Footnote 360:

Sistine Chapel, Rome.—_Tr._

Footnote 361:

“Doctor Marianus.”—_Tr._

Footnote 362:

Vatican.—_Tr._

Footnote 363:

In Renaissance work the finished product is often quite depressingly

complete. The absence of “infinity” is palpable. No secrets, no

discoveries.

Footnote 364:

Hence the impossibility of achieving a genuinely religious painting on

plein-air principles. The world-feeling that underlies it is so

thoroughly irreligious, so worthless for any but a “religion of

reason” so-called, that every one of its efforts in that direction,

even with the noblest intentions (Uhde, Puvis de Chavannes), strikes

us as hollow and false. One instant of plein-air treatment suffices to

secularize the interior of a church and degrade it into a showroom.

Footnote 365:

State Museum, Berlin.—_Tr._

Footnote 366:

I.e., the “giants” of the great frieze, who were in fact Galatians

playing the part. This Gigantomachia, a programme-work like the Ring,

represented a situation, as the Ring represented characters, under

mythological labels.—_Tr._

Footnote 367:

See Vol. II, pp. 138 et seq.

Footnote 368:

See pp. 197 et seq.

-----

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

CHAPTER IX

SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

I

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL

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

CHAPTER IX

SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

I

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL

I

Every professed philosopher is forced to believe, without serious

examination, in the existence of a Something that in his opinion is

capable of being handled by the reason, for his whole spiritual

existence depends on the possibility of such a Something. For every

logician and psychologist, therefore, however sceptical he may be, there

is a point at which criticism falls silent and faith begins, a point at

which even the strictest analytical thinker must cease to employ his

method—the point, namely, at which analysis is confronted with itself

and with the question of whether its problem is soluble or even exists

at all. The proposition “it is possible by thought to establish the

forms of thought” was not doubted by Kant, dubious as it may appear to

the unphilosophical. The proposition “there is a soul, the structure of

which is scientifically accessible; and that which I determine, by

critical dissection of conscious existence-acts into the form of psychic

elements, functions, and complexes, _is_ my soul” is a proposition that

no psychologist has doubted hitherto. And yet it is just here that his

strongest doubts should have arisen. Is an abstract science of the

spiritual possible at all? Is that which one finds on this path

identical with that which one is seeking? Why has psychology—meaning

thereby not knowledge of men and experience of life but _scientific_

psychology—always been the shallowest and most worthless of the

disciplines of philosophy, a field so empty that it has been left

entirely to mediocre minds and barren systematists? The reason is not

far to seek. It is the misfortune of “experimental” psychology that it

does not even possess an _object_ as the word is understood in any and

every scientific technique. Its searches and solutions are fights with

shadows and ghosts. What is it—the Soul? If the mere reason could give

an answer to that question, the science would be _ab initio_

unnecessary.

Of the thousands of psychologists of to-day not one can give an actual

analysis or definition of “the” Will—or of regret, anxiety, jealousy,

disposition, artistic intention. Naturally, since only the systematic

can be dissected, and we can only define notions by notions. No

subtleties of intellectual play with notional distinctions, no plausible

observations of connexions between sensuous-corporeal states and “inward

processes” touch that which is in question here. Will—this is no notion,

but a name, a prime-word like God, a sign for something of which we have

an immediate inward certainty but which we are for ever unable to

describe.

We are dealing here with something eternally inaccessible to learned

investigation. It is not for nothing that every language presents a

baffling complexity of labels for the spiritual, warning us thereby that

it is something not susceptible of theoretical synthesis or systematic

ordering. Here there is nothing for us to order. Critical (i.e.,

literally, separating) methods apply only to the world-as-Nature. It

would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting-knife

or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought.

Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither aims nor ways in common.

The primitive man experiences “soul,” first in other men and then in

himself, as a _Numen_, just as he knows numina of the outer world, and

develops his impressions in mythological form. His words for these

things are symbols, sounds, not descriptive of the indescribable but

indicative of it for him who hath ears to hear. They evoke images,

_likenesses_ (in the sense of Faust II)—the only language of spiritual

intercourse that man has discovered to this day. Rembrandt can reveal

something of his soul, to those who are in inward kinship with him, by

way of a self-portrait or a landscape, and to Goethe “a god gave it to

say what he suffered.” Certain ineffable stirrings of soul can be

imparted by one man to the sensibility of another man through a look,

two bars of a melody, an almost imperceptible movement. That is the real

language of souls, and it remains incomprehensible to the outsider. The

word as utterance, as poetic element, may establish the link, but the

word as notion, as element of scientific prose, never.

“Soul,” for the man who has advanced from mere living and feeling to the

alert and observant state, is an _image_ derived from quite primary

experiences of life and death. It is as old as thought, i.e., as the

articulate separation of thinking (thinking-over) from seeing. We _see_

the world around us, and since every free-moving being must for its own

safety understand that world, the accumulating daily detail of technical

and empirical experience becomes a stock of permanent data which man, as

soon as he is proficient in speech, collects into an _image_ of what he

_understands_. This is the World-as-Nature.[369] What is not environment

we do not see, but we do divine “its” presence in ourselves and in

others, and by virtue of “its” physiognomic impressive power it evokes

in us the anxiety and the desire to know; and thus arises the meditated

or pondered _image of a counterworld_ which is our mode of visualizing

that which remains eternally alien to the physical eye. The image of the

soul is mythic and remains objective in the field of spiritual religion

so long as the image of Nature is contemplated in the spirit of

religion; and it transforms itself into a scientific notion and becomes

objective in the field of scientific criticism as soon as “Nature” comes

to be observed critically. As “Time” is a counter-concept[370] to space,

so the “soul” is a counterworld to “Nature” and therefore variable in

dependence upon the notion of Nature as this stands from moment to

moment. It has been shown how “Time” arose, out of the feeling of the

direction-quality possessed by ever-mobile Life, as a conceptual

_negative_ to a positive magnitude, as an incarnation of _that which is

not extension_; and that all the “properties” of Time, by the cool

analysis of which the philosophers believe they can solve the problem of

Time, have been gradually formed and ordered in the intellect as

inverses to the properties of space. In exactly the same way, the notion

of the spiritual has come into being as the inverse and _negative of the

notion of the world_, the spatial notion of polarity assisting

("outward"-“inward”) and the terms being suitably transvalued. _Every

psychology is a counter-physics._

To attempt to get an “exact” science out of the ever-mysterious soul is

futile. But the late-period City must needs have abstract thinking and

it forces the “physicist of the inner world” to elucidate a fictitious

world by ever more fictions, notions by more notions. He transmutes the

non-extended into the extended, builds up a system as “cause” for

something that is only manifested physiognomically, and comes to believe

that in this system he has the structure of “the” soul before his eyes.

But the very words that he selects, in all the Cultures, to notify to

others the results of his intellectual labours betray him. He talks of

functions, feeling-complexes, mainsprings, thresholds of consciousness;

course, breadth, intensity and parallelism in spiritual processes. All

these are words proper to the mode of representation that Natural

Science employs. “The Will is related to objects” is a spatial image

pure and simple. “Conscious” and “unconscious” are only too obviously

derivatives of “above-ground” and “below-ground.” In modern theories of

the Will we meet with all the vocabulary of electro-dynamics. Will-

functions and thought-functions are spoken of in just the same way as

the function of a system of forces. To analyse a feeling means to set up

a representative silhouette in its place and then to treat this

silhouette mathematically and by definition, partition, and measurement.

All soul-examination of this stamp, however remarkable as a study of

cerebral anatomy, is penetrated with the mechanical notion of locality,

and works without knowing it under imaginary co-ordinates in an

imaginary space. The “pure” psychologist is quite unaware that he is

copying the physicist, but it is not at all surprising that the naïvest

methods of experimental psychology give depressingly orthodox results.

Brain-paths and association-threads, as modes of representation, conform

entirely to an optical scheme—the “course” of the will or the feeling;

both deal with cognate _spatial_ phantoms. It does not make much

difference whether I define some psychic capacity conceptually or the

corresponding brain-region graphically. Scientific psychology has worked

out for itself a complete system of images, in which it moves with

entire conviction. Every individual pronouncement of every individual

psychologist proves on examination to be merely a variation of this

system conformable to the style of outer-world science of the day.

Clear thought, emancipated from all connexion with seeing, presupposes

as its organ a culture-language, which is created by the soul of the

Culture as a part supporting other parts of its expression;[371] and

presently this language itself creates a “Nature” of word-meanings, a

linguistic cosmos within which abstract notions, judgments and

conclusions—representations of number, causality, motion—can lead a

mechanically determinate existence. At any particular time, therefore,

the current image of the soul is a function of the _current language and

its inner symbolism_. All the Western, Faustian, languages possess the

notion of Will. This mythical entity manifested itself, simultaneously

in all, in that transformation of the verb[372] which decisively

differentiated our tongues from the Classical tongues and therefore our

soul from the Classical soul. When “ego habeo factum” replaced “feci,” a

new numen of the inner world spoke. And at the same time, under specific

label, there appeared in the scientific soul-pictures of all the Western

psychologies the figure of the Will, of a well-rounded capacity of which

the definition may be formulated in different ways by different schools,

but the existence is unquestionable.

II

I maintain, then, that scientific psychology (and, it may be added, the

psychology of the same kind that we all unconsciously practise when we

try to “figure to ourselves” the stirrings of our own or others’ souls)

has, in its inability to discover or even to approach the essence of the

soul, simply added one more to the symbols that collectively make up the

Macrocosm of the culture-man. Like everything else that is no longer

becoming but become, it has put a _mechanism_ in place of an _organism_.

We miss in its picture that which fills our feeling of life (and should

surely be “soul” if anything is) the Destiny-quality, the necessary

directedness of existence, the possibility that life in its course

actualizes. I do not believe that the word “Destiny” figures in any

psychological system whatsoever—and we know that nothing in the world

could be more remote from actual life-experience and knowledge of men

than a system without such elements. Associations, apperceptions,

affections, motives, thought, feeling, will—all are dead mechanisms, the

mere topography of which constitutes the insignificant total of our

“soul-science.” One looked for Life and one found an ornamental pattern

of notions. And the soul remained what it was, something that could

neither be thought nor represented, _the_ secret, _the_ ever-becoming,

_the_ pure experience.

This _imaginary soul-body_ (let it be called so outright for the first

time) is never anything but the exact mirror-image of the form in which

the matured culture-man looks on his outer world. In the one as in the

other, the depth-experience actualizes the extension-world.[373] Alike

out of the perception of the outside and the conception of the inside,

the secret that is hinted at in the root-word Time creates Space. The

soul-image like the world-image has its directional depth, its horizon,

and its boundedness or its unboundedness. An “inner eye” sees, an “inner

ear” hears. There exists a distinct idea of an inner order, and this

inner order like the outer wears the badge of _causal necessity_.

This being so, everything that has been said in this work regarding the

phenomenon of the high Cultures combines to demand an immensely wider

and richer sort of soul-study than anything worked upon so far. For

everything that our present-day psychologist has to tell us—and here we

refer not only to the systematic science but also in the wider sense to

the physiognomic knowledge of men—relates to the _present_ condition of

the _Western_ soul, and not, as hitherto gratuitously assumed, to “the

human soul” at large.

A soul-image is never anything but the image of one quite definite soul.

No observer can ever step outside the conditions and the limitations of

his time and circle, and whatever it may be that he “knows” or

“cognizes,” the very cognition itself involves in all cases choice,

direction and inner form, and is therefore _ab initio_ an expression of

his proper soul. The primitive himself appropriates a soul-image out of

facts of _his own_ life as subjected to the formative working of the

basic experiences of waking consciousness (distinction of ego and world,

of ego and tu) and those of being (distinction of body and soul, sense-

life and reflection, sex-life and sentiment). And as it is thoughtful

men who think upon these matters, an inner numen (Spirit, Logos, Ka,

Ruach) always arises as an opposite to the rest. But the dispositions

and relations of this numen in the individual case, and the conception

that is formed of the spiritual elements—layers of forces or substances,

unity or polarity or plurality—mark the thinker from the outset as a

part of his own specific Culture. When, therefore, one convinces one’s

self that one knows the soul of an alien Culture from its workings in

actuality, the soul-image underlying the knowledge is really _one’s own_

soul-image. In this wise new experiences are readily assimilated into

the system that is already there, and it is not surprising that in the

end one comes to believe that one has discovered forms of eternal

validity.

In reality, every Culture possesses its own systematic psychology just

as it possesses its own style of knowledge of men and experience of

life; and just as even each separate stage—the age of Scholasticism,

that of the Sophists, that of Enlightenment—forms special ideas of

number and thought and Nature that pertain to itself only, so even each

separate century mirrors itself in a soul-image of its own. The best

judge of men in the Western world goes wrong when he tries to understand

a Japanese, and vice versa. But the man of learning goes equally wrong

when he tries to translate basic words of Arabic or Greek by basic words

of his own tongue. “Nephesh” is not “animus” and “âtmân” is not “soul,”

and what we consistently discover under our label “will” Classical man

did not find in his soul-picture _at all_.

Taking one thing with another, it is no longer possible to doubt the

immense importance of the individual soul-images that have severally

arisen in the general history of thought. Classical, Apollinian man, the

man of Euclidean point-formed being, looked upon his soul as a Cosmos

ordered in a group of excellent parts. Plato called it νοῦς, θυμός,

ἐπιθυμία and compared it with man, beast and plant, in one place even

with Southern, Northern and Hellenic man. What seems to be copied here

is Nature as seen by the Classical age, a well-ordered sum of tangible

things, in contrast to a space that was felt as the non-existent, the

Nonent. Where in this field is "Will"? or the idea of functional

connexions? or the other creations of _our_ psychology? Do we really

believe that Plato and Aristotle were less sure in analysis than we are,

and did not see what is insistently obvious to every layman amongst us?

Or is it that Will is missing here for the same reason as space is

missing in the Classical mathematic and force in the Classical physics?

Take, on the contrary, any Western psychology that you please, and you

will always find a _functional_ and never a _bodily_ ordering. The basic

form of all impressions which we receive from within is _y_ = _f_(_x_),

and that, _because_ the function is the basis of our outer world.

Thinking, feeling, willing—no Western psychologist can step outside this

trinity, however much he may desire to do so; even in the controversies

of Gothic thinkers concerning the primacy of will or reason it already

emerges that the question is one of a relation between _forces_. It

matters not at all whether these old philosophers put forward their

theories as original or read them into Augustine or Aristotle.

Associations, apperceptions, will-processes, call them what you will,

the elements of our picture are without exception of the type of the

mathematico-physical Function, and in very form radically un-Classical.

Now, such psychology examines the soul, not physiognomically to indicate

its traits, but physically, as an object, to ascertain its elements, and

it is quite natural therefore to find psychology reduced to perplexity

when confronted with the problem of motion. Classical man, too, had his

inward _Eleatic_ difficulty,[374] and the inability of the Schoolmen to

agree as to the primacy of Will or Reason foreshadows the dangerous flaw

in Baroque physics—its inability to reach an unchallengeable statement

of the relation between force and movement. Directional energy, denied

in the Classical and also in the Indian soul-image (where all is settled

and rounded), is emphatically affirmed in the Faustian and in the

Egyptian (wherein all is systems and centres of forces); and yet,

precisely because this affirmation cannot but involve the element of

time, thought, which is alien to Time, finds itself committed to self-

contradictions.

The Faustian and the Apollinian images of the soul are in blunt

opposition. Once more all the old contrasts crop up. In the Apollinian

we have, so to call it, the soul-body, in the Faustian the soul-space,

as the imagination-unit. The body possesses parts, while the space is

the scene of processes. Classical man conceives of his inner world

plastically. Even Homer’s idiom betrays it; echoing, we may well

believe, immemorial temple-traditions, he shows us, for instance, the

dead in Hades as well-recognizable copies of the bodies that had been.

The Pre-Socratic philosophy, with its three well-ordered parts

λογιστικόν, ἐπιθυμητικόν, θυμοειδές, suggests at once the Laocoön group.

In our case the impress is a musical one; the sonata of the inner life

has the will as first subject, thought and feeling as themes of the

second subject; the movement is bound by the strict rules of a spiritual

counterpoint, and psychology’s business is to discover this

counterpoint. The simplest elements fall into antithesis like Classical

and Western number—on the one hand magnitudes, on the other spiritual

relations—and the _spiritual static_ of Apollinian existence, the

stereometric ideal of σωφροσύνη and ἀταραξία, stands opposed to the

_soul-dynamic_ of Faustian.

The Apollinian soul-image—Plato’s biga-team with νοῦς as charioteer—

takes to flight at once on the approach of the Magian soul. It is fading

out already in the later Stoa, where the principal teachers came

predominantly from the Aramaic East, and by the time of the Early Roman

Empire, even in the literature of the city itself, it has come to be a

mere reminiscence.