The hall-mark of the Magian soul-image is a strict _dualism of two

mysterious substances, Spirit and Soul_. Between these two there is

neither the Classical (static) nor the Western (functional) relation,

but an altogether differently constituted relation which we are obliged

to call merely “Magian” for want of a more helpful term, though we may

illustrate it by contrasting the physics of Democritus and the physics

of Galileo with Alchemy and the Philosopher’s Stone. On this

specifically Middle-Eastern soul-image rests, of inward necessity, all

the psychology and particularly the theology with which the “Gothic”

springtime of the Arabian Culture (0-300 A.D.) is filled. The Gospel of

St. John belongs thereto, and the writings of the Gnostics, the Early

Fathers, the Neoplatonists, the Manichæans, and the dogmatic texts in

the Talmud and the Avesta; so, too, does the tired spirit of the

Imperium Romanum, now expressed only in religiosity and drawing the

little life that is in its philosophy from the young East, Syria, and

Persia. Even in the 1st Century B.C. the great Posidonius, a true Semite

and young-Arabian in spite of the Classical dress of his immense

learning, was inwardly sensible of the complete opposition between the

Classical life-feeling and this Magian soul-structure which for him was

the true one. There is a patent difference of _value_ between a

Substance permeating the body and a Substance which falls from the

world-cavern into humanity, abstract and divine, making of all

participants a Consensus.[375] This “Spirit” it is which evokes the

higher world, and through this creation triumphs over mere life, “the

flesh” and Nature. This is the prime image that underlies all feeling of

ego. Sometimes it is seen in religious, sometimes in philosophical,

sometimes in artistic guise. Consider the portraits of the Constantinian

age, with their fixed stare into the infinite—_that look stands for the_

πνεῦμα. It is felt by Plotinus and by Origen. Paul distinguishes, for

example in I Cor., xv, 44, between σῶμα ψυχικόν and σῶμα πνευματικόν.

The conception of a double, bodily or spiritual, ecstasy and of the

partition of men into lower and higher, psychics and pneumatics, was

familiar currency amongst the Gnostics. Late-Classical literature

(Plutarch) is full of the dualistic psychology of νοῦς and ψυχή, derived

from Oriental sources. It was very soon brought into correlation with

the contrast between Christian and Heathen and that between Spirit and

Nature, and it issued in that scheme of world-history as man’s drama

from Creation to Last Judgment (with an intervention of God as means)

which is common to Gnostics, Christians, Persians and Jews alike, and

has not even now been altogether overcome.

This Magian soul-image received its rigorously scientific completion in

the schools of Baghdad and Basra.[376] Alfarabi and Alkindi dealt

thoroughly with the problems of this Magian psychology, which to us are

tangled and largely inaccessible. And we must by no means underrate its

influence upon the young and wholly abstract soul-theory (_as distinct

from the ego-feeling_) of the West. Scholastic and Mystic philosophy, no

less than Gothic art, drew upon Moorish Spain, Sicily and the East for

many of its forms. It must not be forgotten that the Arabian Culture is

the culture of the established revelation-religions, all of which assume

a dualistic soul-image. The Kabbala[377] and the part played by Jewish

philosophers in the so-called mediæval philosophy—i.e., late-Arabian

followed by early-Gothic—is well known. But I will only refer here to

the remarkable and little-appreciated Spinoza.[378] Child of the Ghetto,

he is, with his contemporary Schirazi, the last belated representative

of the Magian, a stranger in the form-world of the Faustian feeling. As

a prudent pupil of the Baroque he contrived to clothe his system in the

colours of Western thought, but at bottom he stands entirely under the

aspect of the Arabian dualism of two soul-substances. _And this is the

true and inward reason why he lacked the force-concept of Galileo and

Descartes._ This concept is the centre of gravity of a dynamic universe

and _ipso facto_ is alien to the Magian world-feeling. There is no link

between the idea of the Philosopher’s Stone (which is implicit in

Spinoza’s idea of Deity as “causa sui”) and the causal necessity of

_our_ Nature-picture. Consequently, his determinism is precisely that

which the orthodox wisdom of Baghdad had maintained—“Kismet.” It was

there that the home of the _more geometrico_[379] method was to be

looked for—it is common to the Talmud, the Zend Avesta and the Arabian

Kalaam;[380] but its appearance in Spinoza’s “Ethics” is a grotesque

freak in _our_ philosophy.

Once more this Magian soul-image was to be conjured up, for a moment.

German Romanticism found in magic and the tangled thought-threads of

Gothic philosophers the same attractiveness as it found in the Crusade-

ideals of cloisters and castles, and even more in Saracenic art and

poetry—without of course understanding very much of these remote things.

Schelling, Oken, Baader, Görres and their circle indulged in barren

speculations in the Arabic-Jewish style, which they felt with evident

self-satisfaction to be “dark” and “deep”—precisely what, for Orientals,

they were _not_—understanding them but partially themselves and hoping

for similar quasi-incomprehension in their audiences. The only

noteworthy point in the episode is the attractiveness of obscurity. We

may venture the conclusion that the clearest and most accessible

conceptions of Faustian thought—as we have it, for instance, in

Descartes or in Kant’s “Prolegomena”—would in the same way have been

regarded by an Arabian student as nebulous and abstruse. What for us is

true, for them is false, and vice versa; and this is valid for the soul-

images of the different Cultures as it is for every other product of

their scientific thinking.

III

The separation of its ultimate elements is a task that the Gothic world-

outlook and its philosophy leaves to the courage of the future. Just as

the ornamentation of the cathedral and the primitive contemporary

painting still shirk the decision between gold and wide atmosphere in

backgrounds—between the Magian and the Faustian aspects of God in

Nature—so this early, timid, immature soul-image as it presents itself

in this philosophy mingles characters derived from the Christian-Arabian

metaphysic and its dualism of Spirit and Soul with Northern inklings of

functional soul-forces not yet avowed. This is the discrepance that

underlies the conflict concerning the primacy of will or reason, the

_basic problem of the Gothic philosophy_, which men tried to solve now

in the old Arabian, now in the new Western sense. It is this myth of the

mind—which under ever-changing guises accompanies our philosophy

throughout its course—that distinguishes it so sharply from every other.

The rationalism of late Baroque, in all the pride of the self-assured

city-spirit, decided in favour of the greater power of the Goddess

Reason (Kant, the Jacobins); but almost immediately thereafter the 19th

Century (Nietzsche above all) went back to the stronger formula

_Voluntas superior intellectu_, and this indeed is in the blood of all

of us.[381] Schopenhauer, the last of the great systematists, has

brought it down to the formula “World as Will and Idea,” and it is only

his ethic and not his metaphysic that decides _against_ the Will.

Here we begin to see by direct light the deep foundations and meaning of

philosophizing within a Culture. For what we see here is the Faustian

soul trying in labour of many centuries to paint a _self-portrait_, and

one, moreover, that is in intimate concordance with its world-portrait.

The Gothic world-view with its struggle of will and reason is in fact an

expression of the life-feeling of the men of the Crusades, of the

Hohenstaufen empire, of the great cathedrals. _These men saw the soul

thus, because they were thus._

_Will and thought in the soul-image correspond to Direction and

Extension, History and Nature, Destiny and Causality in the image of the

outer world._ Both aspects of our basic characters emerge in our prime-

symbol which is infinite extension. Will links the future to the

present, thought the unlimited to the here. _The historic future is

distance-becoming, the boundless world-horizon distance-become_—this is

the meaning of the Faustian depth-experience. The direction-feeling as

“Will” and the space-feeling as “Reason” are imagined as entities,

almost as legend-figures; and out of them comes the picture that our

psychologists of necessity abstract from the inner life.

To call the Faustian Culture a _Will-Culture_ is only another way of

expressing the eminently historical disposition of its soul. Our first-

person idiom, our “ego habeo factum”—our dynamic syntax, that is—

faithfully renders the “way of doing things” that results from this

disposition and, with its positive directional energy, dominates not

only our picture of the World-as-History but our own history to boot.

This first person towers up in the Gothic architecture; the spire is an

“I,” the flying buttress is an “I.” And therefore the _entire Faustian

ethic_, from Thomas Aquinas to Kant, _is an “excelsior”_—fulfilment of

an “I,” ethical work upon an “I,” justification of an “I” by faith and

works; respect of the neighbour “Thou” for the sake of one’s “I” and its

happiness; and, lastly and supremely, immortality of the “I.”

Now this, precisely this, the genuine Russian regards as contemptible

vain-glory. The Russian soul, will-less, having the limitless _plane_ as

its prime-symbol,[382] seeks to grow up—serving, anonymous, self-

oblivious—in the brother-world of the plane. To take “I” as the

starting-point of relations with the neighbour, to elevate “I” morally

through “I’s” love of near and dear, to repent for “I’s” own sake, are

to him traits of Western vanity as presumptuous as is the upthrusting

challenge to heaven of our cathedrals that he compares with his plane

church-roof and its sprinkling of cupolas. Tolstoi’s hero Nechludov

looks after his moral “I” as he does after his finger-nails; this is

just what betrays Tolstoi as belonging to the pseudomorphosis of

Petrinism. But Raskolnikov is only something in a “we.” His fault is the

fault of all,[383] and even to regard his sin as special to himself is

pride and vanity. Something of the kind underlies the Magian soul-image

also. “If any man come to me,” says Jesus (Luke xiv, 26), “and hate not

his father and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, _yea, and

his own life_ (τὴν ἑαυτοῦ ψυχήν) _also_,[384] he cannot be my disciple”;

and it is the same feeling that makes him call himself by the title that

we mistranslate “Son of Man.”[385] The Consensus of the Orthodox too is

impersonal and condemns “I” as a sin. So too with the—truly Russian—

conception of truth as the anonymous agreement of the elect.

Classical man, belonging wholly to the present, is equally without that

directional energy by which our images of world and of soul are

dominated, which sums all our sense-impressions as a path towards

distance and our inward experiences as a feeling of future. He is will-

less. The Classical idea of destiny and the symbol of the Doric column

leave no doubt as to that. And the contest of thinking and willing that

is the hidden theme of every serious portrait from Jan van Eyck to

Marées is impossible in Classical portraiture, for in the Classical

soul-image thought (νοῦς), the inner Zeus, is accompanied by the wholly

ahistoric entities of animal and vegetative impulse (θυμός and

ἐπιθυμία), wholly somatic and wholly destitute of conscious direction

and drive towards an end.

The actual designation of the Faustian principle, which belongs to us

and to us alone, is a matter of indifference. A name is in itself mere

sound. Space, too, is a word that is capable of being employed with a

thousand nuances—by mathematicians and philosophers, poets and painters—

to express one and the same indescribable; a word that is ostensibly

common to all mankind and yet, carrying a metaphysical under-meaning

that we gave it and could not but give it, is in that sense valid only

for our Culture. It is not the notion of “Will,” but the circumstance

that we possess it while the Greeks _were entirely ignorant of it_, that

gives it high symbolic import. At the very bottom, there is no

distinction between space-as-depth and will. For the one, and

_therefore_ for the other also, the Classical languages had no

expression.[386] The pure space of the Faustian world-picture is not

mere extension, but efficient extension into the distance, as an

overcoming of the merely sensuous, as a strain and tendency, as a

spiritual will-to-power. I am fully aware how inadequate these

periphrases are. It is entirely impossible to indicate in exact terms

the difference between what we and what the men of the Indian or the

Arabian Culture call space, or feel or imagine in the word. But that

there _is_ some radical distinction is proved by the very different

fundamentals of the respective mathematics, arts of form, and, above

all, immediate utterances of _life_. We shall see how the identity of

space and will comes to expression in the acts of Copernicus and

Columbus—as well as in those of the Hohenstaufen and Napoleon—but it

underlies also, in another way, the physical notions of fields of force

and potential, ideas that it would be impossible to convey to the

comprehension of any Greek. "Space as _a priori_ form of perception,"

the formula in which Kant finally enunciated that for which Baroque

philosophy had so long and tirelessly striven, implies an assertion of

supremacy of soul over the alien; the ego, through the form, is to rule

the world.[387]

_This_ is brought to expression in the depth-perspective of oil-painting

which makes the space-field of the picture, conceived as infinite,

dependent on the observer, who in choosing his distance asserts his

dominion. It is this attraction of distance that produces the type of

the _heroic and historically-felt_ landscape that we have alike in the

picture and the park of the Baroque period, and that is expressed also

in the mathematico-physical concept of the vector. For centuries

painting fought passionately to reach this symbol, which contains all

that the words space, will and force are capable of indicating. And

correspondingly we find in our metaphysic the steady tendency to

formulate pairs of concepts (such as phenomena and things-in-themselves,

will and idea, ego and non-ego) all of the same purely dynamic content,

and—in utter contrast to Protagoras’s conception of man as the measure,

not the creator, of things—to establish a functional dependence of

things upon spirit. The Classical metaphysic regarded man as a body

among bodies, and knowledge as a sort of _contact_, passing from the

known to the knower and not vice versa. The optical theories of

Anaxagoras and Democritus were far from admitting any active

participation of the percipient in sense-perception. Plato never felt,

as Kant was driven to feel, the ego as centre of a transcendent sphere

of effect. The captives in his celebrated cave are really captives, the

_slaves_ and not the masters of outer impressions—recipients of light

from the common sun and not themselves suns which irradiate the

universe.

The relation of our will to our imaginary space is evidenced again in

the physical concept of space-energy—that utterly un-Classical idea in

which even _spatial interval_ figures as a form, and indeed as prime

form thereof, for the notions of “capacity” and “intensity” rest upon

it. We feel will and space, the dynamic world-picture of Galileo and

Newton and the dynamic soul-picture which has will as its centre of

gravity and centre of reference, as of identical significance. Both are

Baroque ideas, symbols of the fully-ripened Faustian Culture.

It is wrong, though it may be usual, to regard the cult of the “will” as

common, if not to mankind, at any rate to Christendom, and derived in

consequence from the Early-Arabian ethos. The connexion is merely a

phenomenon of the historical surface, and the deduction fails because it

confuses the (formal) history of words and ideas such as “voluntas” with

the course of their destiny, thereby missing the profoundly symbolical

changes of connotation that occur in that course. When Arabian

psychologists—Murtada for instance—discuss the possibility of several

“wills,” a will that hangs together with the act, another will that

independently precedes the act, another that has no relation to the act

at all, a will that is simply the parent of a willing, they are

obviously working in deeper connotations of the Arabic word and on the

basis of a soul-image that in structure differs entirely from the

Faustian.

For every man, whatever the Culture to which he belongs, the elements of

the soul are the deities of an _inner mythology_. What Zeus was for the

outer Olympus, νοῦς was for the inner world that every Greek was

entirely conscious of possessing—the throned lord of the other soul-

elements. What “God” is for us, God as Breadth of the world, the

Universal Power, the ever-present doer and provider, that also—reflected

from the space of world into the imaginary space of soul and necessarily

felt as an actual presence—is “Will.” With the microcosmic dualism of

the Magian Culture, with _ruach_ and _nephesh_, pneuma and psyche, is

necessarily associated the macrocosmic opposition of God and Devil—

Ormuzd and Ahriman for Persians, Yahwe and Beelzebub for Jews, Allah and

Eblis for Mohammedans—in brief, Absolute Good and Absolute Evil. And

note, further, how in the Western world-feeling _both_ these oppositions

pale _together_. In proportion as the Will emerges, out of the Gothic

struggle for primacy between “intellectus” and “voluntas,” as the

_centre of a spiritual monotheism_, the figure of the Devil fades out of

the real world. In the Baroque age the pantheism of the outer world

immediately resulted in one of the inner world also; and the word “God”

in antithesis to “world” has always—however interpreted in this or that

case—implied exactly what is implied in the word “will” with respect to

soul, viz., the power that moves all that is within its domain.[388]

Thought no sooner leaves Religion for Science than we get the double

myth of concepts, in physics and psychology. The concepts “force,”

“mass,” “will,” “passion” rest not on objective experience but on a

life-feeling. Darwinism is nothing but a specially shallow formulation

of this feeling. No Greek would have used the word “Nature” as our

biology employs it, in the sense of an absolute and methodical activity.

“The will of God” for us is a pleonasm—God (or “Nature,” as some say) is

nothing but will. After the Renaissance the notion of God sheds the old

sensuous and personal traits (omnipresence and omnipotence are almost

mathematical concepts), becomes little by little identical with the

notion of infinite space and in becoming so becomes transcendent world-

will. And _therefore_ it is that about 1700 painting has to yield to

instrumental music—the only art that in the end is capable of clearly

expressing what we feel about God. Consider, in contrast with this, the

gods of Homer. Zeus emphatically does _not_ possess full powers over the

world, but is simply “primus inter pares,” a body amongst bodies, as the

Apollinian world-feeling requires. Blind necessity, the Ananke immanent

in the cosmos of Classical consciousness, is in no sense dependent upon

him; on the contrary, the Gods are subordinate to It. Æschylus says so

outright in a powerful passage of the “Prometheus,”[389] but it is

perceptible enough even in Homer, e.g., in the Strife of the Gods and in

that decisive passage in which Zeus takes up the scales of destiny, not

to settle, but to learn, the fate of Hector.[390] The Classical soul,

therefore, with its parts and its properties, imagines itself as an

Olympus of little gods, and to keep these at peace and in harmony with

one another is the ideal of the Greek life-ethic of σωφροσύνη and

ἀταραξία. More than one of the philosophers betrays the connexion by

calling νοῦς, the highest part of the soul, Zeus. Aristotle assigns to

his deity the single function of θεωρία, contemplation, and this is

Diogenes’s ideal also—a completely-matured static of life in contrast to

the equally ripe dynamic of our 18th-Century ideal.

The enigmatic Something in the soul-image that is called “will,” the

_passion of the third dimension_, is therefore quite specially a

creation of the Baroque, like the perspective of oil-painting and the

force-idea of modern physics and the tone-world of instrumental music.

In every case the Gothic had foreshadowed what these intellectualizing

centuries brought to fullness. Here, where we are trying to take in the

_cast_ of Faustian life in contradiction to that of all other lives,

what we have to do is to keep a firm hold on the fact that the primary

words will, space, force, God, upborne by and permeated with

connotations of _Faustian_ feeling, are emblems, are the effective

framework that sustains the great and kindred form-worlds in which this

being expresses itself. It has been believed, hitherto, that in these

matters one was holding in one’s grip a body of eternal facts, of facts-

in-themselves, which sooner or later would be successfully treated,

“known,” and proved by the methods of critical research. This illusion

of natural science was shared by psychology also. But the view that

these “universally-valid” fundamentals belong merely _to the Baroque

style of apprehension and comprehension_, that as expression-forms they

are only of transitory significance, and that they are only “true” for

the Western type of intellect, alters the whole meaning of those

sciences and leads us to look upon them not only as subjects of

systematic cognition but also, and in a far higher degree, as _objects

of physiognomic study_.

Baroque architecture began, as we have seen, when Michelangelo replaced

the tectonic elements of the Renaissance, support and load, by those of

dynamics, force and mass. While Brunelleschi’s chapel of the Pazzi in

Florence expresses a bright composedness, Vignola’s façade of the Gesù

in Rome is _will become stone_. The new style in its ecclesiastical form

has been designated the “Jesuit,” and indeed there is an inward

connexion between the achievement of Vignola and Giacomo Della Porta and

the creation by Ignatius Loyola of the Order that stands for the pure

and abstract will of the Church,[391] just as there is between the

invisible operations and the unlimited range of the Order and the arts

of Calculus and Fugue.

Henceforward, then, the reader will not be shocked if we speak of _a

Baroque_, _and even of a Jesuit_, _style in psychology_, _mathematics_,

_and pure physics_. The form-language of dynamics, which puts the

energetic contrast of capacity and intensity in place of the

volitionless somatic contrast of material and form, is one common to all

the mind-creations of those centuries.

IV

The question is now: How far is the man of this Culture himself

fulfilling what the soul-image that he has created requires of him? If

we can, to-day, state the theme of Western physics quite generally to be

efficient space, we have _ipso facto_ defined also the kind of

existence, the _content_ of existence as lived by contemporary man. We,

as Faustian natures, are accustomed to take note of the individual

according to his _effective_ and not according to his plastic-static

appearance in the field of our life-experience. We measure what a man is

by his activity, which may be directed inwardly or outwardly, and we

judge all intentions, reasons, powers, convictions and habits entirely

by this directedness. The word with which we sum up this aspect is

_character_. We habitually speak of the “character” of heads and

landscapes; of ornaments, brush-strokes and scripts; of whole arts and

ages and Cultures. The art of the characteristic is, above all, Baroque

music—alike in respect of its melody and its instrumentation. Here again

is a word indicating an indescribable, a something that emphasizes,

among all the Cultures, the Faustian in particular. And the deep

relation between this word “character” and the word “will” is

unmistakable; what will is in the soul-image, character is in the

picture of life as we see it, the Western life that is self-evident to

Western men. It is the fundamental postulate of all our ethical systems,

differ otherwise as they may in their metaphysical or practical

precepts, that man has character. Character, which forms itself _in the

stream of the world—the personality, the relation of living to doing_—is

a Faustian impression of the man made by the man; and, significantly

enough, just as in the physical world-picture it has proved impossible

(in spite of the most rigorous theoretical examination) to separate the

vectorial idea of forces from the idea of motion (because of the

inherent directional quality of the vector), so also it is impossible to

draw a strict distinction between will and soul, character and life. At

the height of our Culture, certainly since the 17th Century, we feel the

word “life” as a pure and simple synonym of willing. Expressions like

living force, life-will, active energy, abound in our ethical literature

and their import is taken for granted, whereas the Age of Pericles could

not even have translated them into its language.

Hitherto the pretension of each and every morale to universal validity

has obscured the fact that every Culture, as a homogeneous being of

higher order, possesses a _moral constitution proper to itself_. There

are as many morales as there are Cultures. Nietzsche was the first to

have an inkling of this; but he never came anywhere near to a really

objective morphology of morale “beyond good” (_all_ good) “and evil”

(_all_ evil). He evaluated Classical, Indian, Christian and Renaissance

morale by his own criteria instead of understanding the style of them as

a symbol. And yet if anything could detect the _prime-phenomenon_ of

Morale as such, it should have been the historical insight of a

Westerner. However, it appears that we are only now ripe enough for such

a study. The conception of mankind as an active, fighting, progressing

whole is (and has been since Joachim of Floris and the Crusades) so

necessary an idea for us that we find it hard indeed to realize that it

is an exclusively Western hypothesis, living and valid only for a

season. To the Classical spirit mankind appears as a stationary mass,

and correspondingly there is that quite dissimilar morale that we can

trace from the Homeric dawn to the time of the Roman Empire. And, more

generally, we shall find that the immense activity of the Faustian life-

feeling is most nearly matched in the Chinese and the Egyptian, and the

rigorous passivity of the Classical in the Indian.

If ever there was a group of nations that kept the “struggle for

existence” constantly before its eyes, it was the Classical Culture. All

the cities, big and little, fought one another to sheer extinction,

without plan or purpose, without mercy, body against body, under the

stimulus of a completely anti-historical instinct. But Greek ethics,

notwithstanding Heraclitus, were far from making struggle an ethical

principle. The Stoics and the Epicureans alike preached abstention from

it as an ideal. The overcoming of resistances may far more justly be

called the typical impulse of the Western soul. Activity, determination,

self-control, are postulates. To battle against the comfortable

foregrounds of life, against the impressions of the moment, against what

is near, tangible and easy, to win through to that which has generality

and duration and links past and future—these are the sum of all Faustian

imperatives from earliest Gothic to Kant and Fichte, and far beyond them

again to the Ethos of immense power and will exhibited in our States,

our economic systems and our technics. The _carpe diem_, the saturated

being, of the Classical standpoint is the most direct contrary of that

which is felt by Goethe and Kant and Pascal, by Church and Freethinker,

as alone possessing value—_active, fighting and victorious being_.[392]

As all the forms of Dynamic (whether pictorial, musical, physical,

social or political) are concerned with the working-out of infinite

relations and deal, not with the individual case and the sum of

individual cases as the Classical physics had done, but with the typical

course or process and its functional rule, “character” must be

understood as that which remains in principle constant in the working-

out of life; where there is no such constant we speak of “lack of

character.” It is character—the form in virtue of which a _moving_

existence can combine the highest constancy in the essential with the

maximum variability in the details—that makes telling biography (such as

Goethe’s “Wahrheit und Dichtung”), possible at all. Plutarch’s truly

Classical biographies are by comparison mere collections of anecdotes

strung together chronologically and not ordered pictures of historical

development, and it will hardly be disputed that only this second kind

of biography is imaginable in connexion with Alcibiades or Pericles or,

for that matter, any purely Apollinian figure. Their experiences lack,

not mass, but relation; there is something _atomic_ about them.

Similarly in the field of Science the Greek did not merely _forget_ to

look for general laws in the sum of his experiential data; in his cosmos

they were simply _not there to be found_.

It follows that the sciences of character-study, particularly

physiognomy and graphology, would not be able to glean much in the

Classical field. Its handwriting we do not know, but we do know that its

ornament, as compared with the Gothic, is of incredible simplicity and

feebleness of character-expression—think of the Meander and the

Acanthus-shoot. On the other hand, it has never been surpassed in

timeless evenness.

It goes without saying that we, when we turn to look into the Classical

life-feeling, must find there some basic element of ethical values that

is antithetical to “character” in the same way as the statue is

antithetical to the fugue. Euclidean geometry to Analysis, and body to

space. We find it in the _Gesture_. It is this that provides the

necessary foundation for a spiritual static. The word that stands in the

Classical vocabulary where “personality” stands in our own is προσῶπον,

“persona”—namely _rôle_ or _mask_. In late Greek or Roman speech it

means _the public aspect and mien_ of a man, which for Classical man is

tantamount to the essence and kernel of him. An orator was described as

speaking in the προσῶπον—not the character or the vein as we should say—

of a priest or a soldier. The slave was ἀπρόσωπος—that is, he had _no_

attitude or figure in the public life—but not ἀσώματος—that is, he did

have a _soul_. The idea that Destiny had assigned the rôle of king or

general to a man was expressed by Romans in the words _persona regis,

imperatoris_.[393] The Apollinian cast of life is manifest enough here.

What is indicated is not the personality (that is, an unfolding of

inward possibilities in _active striving_) but a permanent and self-

contained _posture_ strictly adapted to a so-to-say plastic ideal of

being. It is only in the Classical ethic that Beauty plays a distinct

rôle. However labelled—as σωφροσύνη, καλοκἀγαθία or ἀταραξία—it always

amounts to the well-ordered group of tangible and publicly evident

traits, defined for other men rather than specific to one’s self. A man

was the object and not the subject of outward life. The pure present,

the moment, the foreground were not conquered but worked up. The notion

of an inward life is impossible in this connexion. The significance of

Aristotle’s phrase ζῶον πολιτίκον—quite untranslatable and habitually

translated with a Western connotation—is that it refers to men who are

nothing when single and lonely (what could be more preposterous than an

Athenian Robinson Crusoe!) and only count for anything when in a

plurality, in agora or forum, where each reflects his neighbour and

thus, only thus, acquires a genuine reality. It is all implicit in the

phrase σώματα πόλεως, used for the burghers of the city. And thus we see

that the Portrait, the centre of Baroque art, is identical with the

representation of a man to the extent that he possesses character, and

that in the best age of Attic the representation of a man in respect of

his _attitude_, as _persona_, necessarily leans to the form-ideal of the

nude statue.

V

This opposition, further, has produced forms of tragedy that differ from

one another radically in every respect. The Faustian _character-drama_

and the Apollinian _drama of noble gesture_ have in fact nothing but

name in common.[394]

Starting, significantly enough, from Seneca and not from Æschylus and

Sophocles[395] (just as the contemporary architecture linked itself with

Imperial Rome and not with Pæstum), the Baroque drama with ever-

increasing emphasis makes character instead of occurrence its centre of

gravity, the origin of a system of spiritual co-ordinates (so to express

it) which gives the scenic facts position, sense, and value in relation

to itself. The outcome is a _tragedy of willing_, of efficient forces,

of inward movement not necessarily exhibited in visible form, whereas

Sophocles’s method was to employ a minimum of happening and to put it

behind the scenes particularly by means of the artifice of the

“messenger.” The Classical tragedy relates to general situations and not

particular personalities. It is specifically described by Aristotle as

μίμησίς οὐκ ἀνθρώπων ἀλλὰ πρᾶξεως καὶ βίου. That which in his _Poetica_—

assuredly the most fateful of all books for our poetry—he calls ἦθος,

namely the ideal _bearing_ of the ideal Hellene in a painful situation,

has as little in common with our notion of character (viz., a

constitution of the ego which determines events) as a surface in

Euclidean geometry has with the like-named concept in Riemann’s theory

of algebraic equations. It has, unfortunately, been our habit for

centuries past to translate ἦθος as “character” instead of paraphrasing

it (exact rendering is almost impossible) by “rôle,” “bearing” or

“gesture”; to reproduce myth, μῦθος, which is _timeless occurrence_, by

“action”; and to derive δρᾶμα from “doing.” It is Othello, Don Quixote,

Le Misanthrope, Werther and Hedda Gabler that are characters, and the

tragedy consists in the mere existence of human beings thus constituted

in their respective _milieux_. Their struggle—whether against this world

or the next, or themselves—is forced on them by their character and not

by anything coming from outside; a soul is placed in a web of

contradictory relations that admits of no net solution. Classical stage-

figures, on the contrary, are rôles and not characters; over and over

again the same figures appear—the old man, the slayer, the lover, all

slow-moving bodies under masks and on stilts. Thus in Classical drama—

even of the Late period—the mask is an element of profound symbolic

_necessity_, whereas our pieces would not be regarded as played at all

without the play of features. It is no answer to point to the great size

of the Greek theatre, for even the strolling player—even the portrait-

statue[396]—wore a mask, and had there been any spiritual need of a more

intimate setting the required architectural form would have been

forthcoming quickly enough.

In the tragedy of a character, what _happens_ is the outcome of a long

inner development. But in what _befalls_ Ajax and Philoctetes, Antigone

and Electra, their psychological antecedents (even supposing them to

have any) play no part. The decisive event comes upon them, brutally, as

accident, from without, and it might have befallen another in the same

way and with the same result. It would not be necessary even for that

other to be of the same sex.

It is not enough to distinguish Classical and Western tragedy merely as

action-drama and event-drama. Faustian tragedy is _biographical_,

Classical _anecdotal_; that is, the one deals with the sense of a whole

life and the other with the content of the single moment.[397] What

relation, for instance, has the entire _inward_ past of Œdipus or

Orestes to the shattering event that suddenly meets him on his way?[398]

There is one sort of destiny, then, that strikes like a flash of

lightning, and just as blindly, and another that interweaves itself with

the course of a life, an invisible thread[399] that yet distinguishes

this particular life from all others. There is not the smallest trait in

the past existence of Othello—that masterpiece of psychological

analysis—that has not some bearing on the catastrophe. Race-hatred, the

isolation of the upstart amongst the patricians, the Moor as soldier and

as child of Nature, the loneliness of the ageing bachelor—all these

things have their significance. Lear, too, and Hamlet—compare the

exposition of these characters with that of Sophoclean pieces. They are

psychological expositions through-and-through and not summations of

outward data. The psychologist, in our sense of the word, namely the

fine student (hardly nowadays to be distinguished from the poet) of

spiritual turning-points, was entirely unknown to the Greeks. They were

no more analytical in the field of soul than in that of number; _vis-à-

vis_ the Classical soul, how could they be so? “Psychology” in fact is

the proper designation for the _Western_ way of fashioning men; the word

holds good for a portrait by Rembrandt as for the music of “Tristan,”

for Stendhal’s Julian Sorel as for Dante’s “Vita Nuova.” The like of it

is not to be found in any other Culture. If there is anything that the

Classical arts scrupulously exclude it is this, for psychology is the

form in which art handles man as incarnate will and not as σῶμα. To call

Euripides a psychologist is to betray ignorance of what psychology is.

What an abundance of character there is even in the mere mythology of

the North with its sly dwarfs, its lumpy giants, its teasing elves, its

Loki, Baldr and the rest! Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon, Ares are simply “men,”

Hermes the “youth,” Athene a maturer Aphrodite, and the minor gods—as

the later plastic shows—distinguishable only by the labels. And the same

is true without reservation of the figures of the Attic stage. In

Wolfram von Eschenbach, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, the tragic is

individual, life develops from within outwards, dynamic, functional, and

the life-courses are only fully understandable with reference to the

historical background of the century. But in the great tragedians of

Athens it comes from outside, it is static, Euclidean. To repeat a

phrase already used in connexion with world-history, the shattering

event is _epochal_ in the former and merely _episodic_ in the latter,

even the finale of death being only the last bead in the string of sheer

accidents that makes up an existence.

A Baroque tragedy is nothing but this same directive character brought

into and developed in the light-world, and shown as a curve instead of

as an equation, as kinetic instead of as potential energy. The visible

person is the character as potential, the action the character at work.

This, under the heap of Classicist reminiscences and misunderstandings

that still hides it, is the whole meaning of our idea of Tragedy. The

tragic man of the Classical is a Euclidean body that is struck by the

Heimarmene in a position that it did not choose and cannot alter, but is

seen, in the light that plays from without upon its surfaces, to be

indeformable _quand même_. This is the sense in which Agamemnon is

ναύαρχον σῶμα βασίλειον and in which Œdipus’s σῶμα is subjected to the

Oracle.[400] Down to Alexander the significant figures of Greek history

astonish us with their inelasticity; not one of them, apparently,

undergoes in the battle of life any such inward transformation as those

which we know took place in Luther and Loyola. What we are prone—too

prone—to call “characterization” in Greek drama is nothing but the

reflection of events upon the ἦθος of the hero, never the reflection of

a personality on events.

Of deep necessity, therefore, we Faustians understand drama as a maximum

of activity; and, of deep necessity also, the Greek understood it as a

maximum of passivity.[401] Speaking generally, the Attic tragedy had no

“action” at all. The Mysteries were purely δράματα or δρώμενα, i.e.,

ritual performances, and it was from the Mystery-form with its

“peripeteia” that Æschylus (himself an Eleusinian) derived the high

drama that he created. Aristotle describes tragedy as the _imitation_ of

an occurrence. This imitation is identical with the “profanation” of the

mysteries; and we know that Æschylus went further and made the sacral

vestments of the Eleusinian priesthood the regular costume of the Attic

stage, and was accused on that account.[402] For the δρᾶμα proper, with

its reversal from lamentation to joy, consisted not in the fable that

was narrated but in the ritual action that lay behind it, and was

understood and felt by the spectator as deeply symbolic. With this

element of the non-Homeric early religion[403] there became associated

another, a boorish—the burlesque (whether phallic or dithyrambic) scenes

of the spring festivals of Demeter and Dionysus. The beast-dances[404]

and the accompanying song were the germ of the tragic Chorus which puts

itself before the actor or “answerer” of Thespis (534).

The genuine tragedy grew up out of the solemn death-lament (threnos,

nænia). At some time or other the joyous play of the Dionysus festival

(which also was a soul-feast) became a mourners’ chorus of men, the

Satyr-play being relegated to the end. In 494 Phrynichus produced the

“Fall of Miletus”—not a historical drama but a lament of the women of

Miletus—and was heavily fined for thus recalling the public calamity. It

was Æschylus’s introduction of the second actor that accomplished the

essential of Classical tragedy; the lament as _given theme_ was

thenceforward subordinated to the visual presentation of a great human

suffering as _present motive_. The foreground-story (μύθος) is not

“action” but the occasion for the songs of the Chorus, which still

constitutes the τραγῳδία proper. It is immaterial whether the occurrence

is indicated by narrative or exposition. The spectator was in solemn

mood and he felt himself and his own fate to be meant in the words of

pathos. It was in him that the περιπέτεια, the central element of the

holy pageant, took place. Whatever the environment of message and tale,

the liturgical lament for the woe of mankind remained always the centre

of gravity of the whole, as we see more particularly in the

“Prometheus,” the “Agamemnon” and the “Œdipus Rex.” But presently—at the

very time when in Polycletus the pure plastic was triumphing over the

fresco[405]—there emerges high above the lament the grandeur of human

endurance, the attitude, the ἦθος of the Hero. The theme is, not the

heroic Doer whose will surges and breaks against the resistance of alien

powers or the demons in his own breast, but the will-less Patient whose

somatic existence is—gratuitously—destroyed. The Prometheus trilogy of

Æschylus begins just where Goethe would in all probability have left

off. King Lear’s madness is the _issue_ of the tragic action, but

Sophocles’s Ajax is _made_ mad by Athene before the drama opens—here is

the difference between a character and an operated figure. Fear and

compassion, in fact, are, as Aristotle says, the necessary effect of

Greek tragedy upon the Greek (and only the Greek) spectator, as is

evident at once from his choice of the most effective scenes, which are

those of piteous crash of fortune (περιπέτεια) and of recognition

(ἀναγνώρισις). In the first, the ruling impression is φόβος (terror) and

in the second it is ἐλεός (pity), and the καθάρσις in the spectator

presupposes his existence-ideal to be that of ἀταραξία.[406] The

Classical soul is pure “present,” pure σῶμα, unmoved and point-formed

being. To see this imperilled by the jealousy of the Gods or by that

blind chance that may crash upon any man’s head without reason and

without warning, is the most fearful of all experiences. The very roots

of Greek being are struck at by what for the challenging Faustian is the

first stimulus to living activity. And then—to find one’s self

_delivered_, to see the sun come out again and the dark thunder clouds

huddle themselves away on the remote horizon, to rejoice profoundly in

the admired grand gesture, to see the tortured mythical soul breathe

again—that is the κάθαρσις. But it presupposes a kind of life-feeling

that is entirely alien to us, the very word being hardly translatable

into our languages and our sensations. It took all the æsthetic industry

and assertiveness of the Baroque and of Classicism, backed by the

meekest submissiveness before ancient texts, to persuade us that this is

the spiritual basis of our own tragedy as well. And no wonder. For the

fact is that the effect of our tragedy is precisely the opposite. It

does not deliver us from deadweight pressure of events, but evokes

active dynamic elements in us, stings us, stimulates us. It awakens the

primary feelings of an energetic human being, the fierceness and the joy

of tension, danger, violent deed, victory, crime, the triumph of

overcoming and destroying—feelings that have slumbered in the depths of

every Northern soul since the days of the Vikings, the Hohenstaufen and

the Crusades. _That_ is Shakespearian effect. A Greek would not have

tolerated Macbeth, nor, generally, would he have comprehended the

meaning of this mighty art of directional biography at all. That figures

like Richard III, Don Juan, Faust, Michael Kohlhaas, Golo—un-Classical

from top to toe—awaken in us not sympathy but a deep and strange envy,

not fear but a mysterious desire to suffer, to suffer-with (“compassion”

of quite another sort), is visibly—even to-day when Faustian tragedy in

its final form, the German, is dead at last—the standing motive of the

literature of our Alexandrian phase. In the “sensational” adventure- and

detective-story, and still more recently in the cinema-drama (the

equivalent of the Late-Classical mimes), a relic of the unrestrainable

Faustian impulse to conquer and discover is still palpable.

There are corresponding differences between the Apollinian and the

Faustian outlook in the forms of dramatic presentation, which are the

complement of the poetic idea. The antique drama is a piece of plastic,

a group of pathetic scenes conceived as reliefs, a pageant of gigantic

marionettes disposed against the definitive plane of the back-wall.[407]

Presentation is entirely that of grandly-imagined gestures, the meagre

facts of the fable being solemnly recited rather than presented. The

technique of Western drama aims at just the opposite—unbroken movement

and strict exclusion of flat static moments. The famous “three unities”

of place, time and action, as unconsciously evolved (though not

expressly formulated) in Athens, are a paraphrase of the type of the

Classical marble statue and, like it, an indication of what classical

man, the man of the Polis and the pure present and the gesture, felt

about life. The unities are all, effectively, _negative_, denials of

past and future, repudiation of all spiritual action-at-a-distance. They

can be summed in the one word ἀταραξία. The postulates of these

“unities” must not be confused with the superficially similar postulates

in the drama of the Romance peoples. The Spanish theatre of the 16th

Century bowed itself to the authority of “Classical” rules, but it is

easy to see the influence of _noblesse oblige_ in this; Castilian

dignity responded to the appeal without knowing, or indeed troubling to

find out, the original sense of the rules. The great Spanish dramatists,

Tirso da Molina above all, fashioned the “unities” of the Baroque, but

not as metaphysical negations, but purely as expressions of the spirit

of high courtesy, and it was as such that Corneille, the docile pupil of

Spanish “grandezza,” borrowed them. It was a fateful step. If Florence

threw herself into the imitation of the Classical sculpture—at which

everyone marvelled and of which no one possessed the final criteria—no

harm was done, for there was by then no Northern plastic to suffer

thereby. But with tragedy it was another matter. Here there was the

possibility of a mighty drama, purely Faustian, of unimagined forms and

daring. That this did _not_ appear, that for all the greatness of

Shakespeare the Teutonic drama never quite shook off the spell of

misunderstood convention, was the consequence of blind faith in the

authority of Aristotle. What might not have come out of Baroque drama

had it remained under the impression of the knightly epic and the Gothic

Easter-play and Mystery, in the near neighbourhood of Oratorios and

Passions, without ever hearing of the Greek theatre! A tragedy issuing

from the spirit of contrapuntal music, free of limitations proper to

plastic but here meaningless, a dramatic poetry that from Orlando Lasso

and Palestrina could develop—side by side with Heinrich Schütz, Bach,

Händel, Gluck and Beethoven, but entirely free—to a pure form of its

own: that was what was possible, and that was what did not happen; and

it is only to the fortunate circumstance that the whole of the fresco-

art of Hellas has been lost that we owe the inward freedom of our oil-

painting.

VI

The unities were not sufficient for the Attic drama. It demanded,

further, the rigid mask in lieu of facial play, thus forbidding

spiritual characterization in the same spirit as Attic sentiment forbade

likeness-statuary. It demanded more-than-life-sized figures and got them

by means of the cothurnus and by padding and draping the actor till he

could scarcely move, thus eliminating all his individuality. Lastly, it

required monotonous sing-song delivery, which it ensured by means of a

mouthpiece fixed in the mask.

The bare text as we read it to-day (not without reading into it the

spirit of Goethe and Shakespeare and of our perspective vision) conveys

little of the deeper significance of these dramas. Classical art-works

were created entirely for the eye, even the physical eye, of Classical

man, and the secrets reveal themselves only when put in sensuous forms.

And here our attention is drawn to a feature of Greek tragedy that any

true tragedy of the Faustian style must find intolerable, the continual

presence of the Chorus. The Chorus is the primitive tragedy, for without

it the ἦθος would be impossible. Character one possesses for one’s self,

but attitude has meaning only in relation to others.

This Chorus as crowd (the ideal opposite to the lonely or inward man and

the monologue of the West), this Chorus which is always there, the

witness of every “soliloquy,” this Chorus by which, in the stage-life as

in the real life, fear before the boundless and the void is banished, is

truly Apollinian. Self-review as a _public_ action, pompous public

mourning in lieu of the solitary anguish of the bedchamber, the tears

and lamentations that fill a whole series of dramas like the

“Philoctetes” and the “Trachiniæ,” the impossibility of being alone, the

feeling of the Polis, all the feminine of this Culture that we see

idealized in the Belvedere Apollo, betrays itself in this symbol of the

Chorus. In comparison with this kind of drama, Shakespeare’s is a single

monologue. Even in the conversations, even in the group-scenes we are

sensible of the immense _inner_ distance between the persons, each of

whom at bottom is only talking with himself. Nothing can overcome this

spiritual remoteness. It is felt in Hamlet as in “Tasso” and in Don

Quixote as in Werther, but even Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzeval is

filled with and stamped by the sense of infinity. The distinction holds

for all Western poetry against all Classical. All our lyric verse from

Walther von der Vogelweide to Goethe and from Goethe to the poems of our

dying world-cities is monologue, while the Classical lyric is a choral

lyric, a singing before witnesses. The one is received inwardly, in

wordless reading, as soundless music, and the other is publicly recited.

The one belongs to the still chamber and is spread by means of the book,

the other belongs to the place where it is voiced.

Thus, although the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Thracian festival of the

epiphany of Dionysus had been nocturnal celebrations, the art of Thespis

developed, as its inmost nature required, as a scene of the morning and

the full sunlight. On the contrary, our Western popular and Passion

plays, which originated in the sermon of allocated parts and were

produced first by priests in the church, and then by laymen in the open

square, on the _mornings_ of high festivals, led almost unnoticed to an

art of evening and night. Already in Shakespeare’s time performances

took place in the late afternoon, and by Goethe’s this mystical sense of

a proper relation between art-work and light-setting had attained its

object. In general, every art and every Culture has its significant

times of day. The music of the 18th Century is a music of the darkness

and the inner eye, and the plastic of Athens is an art of cloudless day.

That this is no superficial contrast we can see by comparing the Gothic

plastic, wrapped eternally in “dim religious light,” and the Ionic

flute, the instrument of high noon. The candle affirms and the sunlight

denies space as the opposite of things. At night the universe of space

triumphs over matter, at midday things and nearness assert themselves

and space is repudiated. The same contrast appears in Attic fresco and

Northern oil-painting, and in the symbols of Helios and Pan and those of

the starry night and red sunset. It is at midnight, too, and

particularly in the twelve long nights after Christmas, that the souls

of our dead walk abroad. In the Classical world, the souls belong to the

day—even the early Church still speaks of the δωδεκαήμερον, the twelve

dedicated days; but with the awakening of the Faustian soul these become

“Twelfth Night.”

The Classical vase-painting and fresco—though the fact has never been

remarked—has no time-of-day. No shadow indicates the state of the sun,

no heaven shows the stars. There is neither morning nor evening, neither

spring nor autumn, but _pure timeless brightness_.[408] For equally

obvious reasons our oil-painting developed in the opposite direction,

towards an imaginary darkness, also independent of time-of-day, which

forms the characteristic atmosphere of the Faustian soul-space. This is

all the more significant as the intention is from the outset to treat

the field of the picture with reference to a certain time-of-day, that

is, historically. There are early mornings, sunset-clouds, the last

gleams upon the sky-line of distant mountains, the candle-lighted room,

the spring meadows and the autumn woods, the long and short shadows of

bushes and furrows. But they are all penetrated through and through with

a subdued darkness that is _not_ derived from the motion of the heavenly

bodies. In fact, steady brightness and steady twilight are the

respective hall-marks of the Classical and the Western, alike in

painting and in drama; and may we not also describe Euclidean geometry

as a mathematic of the day and Analysis as a mathematic of the night?

Change of scene, undoubtedly regarded by the Greeks as a sort of

profanation, is for us almost a religious necessity, a postulate of our

world-feeling. There seems something pagan in the fixed scene of Tasso.

We _inwardly_ need a drama of perspectives and wide backgrounds, a stage

that shakes off sensuous limitations and draws the whole world into

itself. In Shakespeare, who was born when Michelangelo died and ceased

to write when Rembrandt came into the world, dramatic infinity, the

passionate overthrow of all static limitations, attained the maximum.

His woods, seas, alleys, gardens, battlefields lie in the afar, the

unbounded. Years fly past in the space of minutes. The mad Lear between

fool and reckless outcast on the heath, in the night and the storm, the

unutterably lonely ego lost in space—here is the Faustian life-feeling!

From such a scene as this it is but a step to the _inwardly_ seen and

_inwardly_ felt landscapes of the almost contemporary Venetian music;

for on the Elizabethan stage the whole thing was merely _indicated_, and

it was the inner eye that out of a few hints fashioned for itself an

image of the world in which the scenes—far-fetched always—played

themselves out. Such scenes the Greek stage could not have handled at

all. The Greek scene is never a landscape; in general, it is nothing,

and at best it may be described as a basis for movable statues. The

figures are everything, in drama, as in fresco. It is sometimes said

that Classical man lacked the feeling for Nature. Insensitive to

Faustian Nature, that of space and of landscape, Classical man certainly

was. _His_ Nature was the _body_, and if once we have let the sentiment

of this sink into us, we suddenly comprehend the eye with which the

Greek would follow the mobile muscle-relief of the nude body. This, and

not clouds and stars and horizon, was his “Living Nature.”

VII

Now, whatever is sensuously-near is understandable for all, and

therefore of all the Cultures that have been, the Classical is the most

popular, and the Faustian the least popular, in its expressions of life-

feeling. A creation is “popular” that gives itself with all its secrets

to the first comer at the first glance that incorporates its meaning in

its exterior and surface. In any Culture, that element is “popular”

which has come down unaltered from primitive states and imaginings,

which a man understands from childhood without having to _master by

effort_ any really novel method or standpoint—and, generally, that which

is immediately and frankly evident to the senses, as against that which

is merely hinted at and has to be discovered—by the few, and sometimes

the very, very few. There are popular ideas, works, men and landscapes.

Every Culture has its own quite definite sort of esoteric or popular

character that is immanent in all its doings, so far as these have

symbolic importance. The commonplace eliminates differences of spiritual

breadth as well as depth between man and man, while the esoteric

emphasizes and strengthens them. Lastly, considered in relation to the

primary depth-experience of this and that kind of awakening man—that is,

in relation to the prime-symbol of his existence and the cast of his

world-around—the purely “popular” and naïve associates itself with the

symbol of the bodily, while to the symbol of endless Space belongs a

frankly _un_-popular relation between the creations and the men of the

Culture.

The Classical geometry is that of the child, that of any layman—Euclid’s

Elements are used in England as a school-book to this day. The workaday

mind will always regard this as the only true and correct geometry. All

other kinds of natural geometry that are possible (and have in fact, by

an immense effort of overcoming the popular-obvious, been discovered)

are understandable only for the circle of the professional

mathematicians. The famous “four elements” of Empedocles are those of

every naïve man and his “instinctive” physics, while the idea of

isotopes which has come out of research into radioactivity is hardly

comprehensible even to the adept in closely-cognate sciences. Everything

that is Classical is comprehensible in _one_ glance, be it the Doric

temple, the statue, the Polis, the cults; backgrounds and secrets there

are none. But compare a Gothic cathedral-façade with the Propylæa, an

etching with a vase-painting, the policy of the Athenian people with

that of the modern Cabinet. Consider what it means that every one of our

epoch-making works of poetry, policy and science has called forth a

whole literature of explanations, and not indubitably successful

explanations at that. While the Parthenon sculptures were “there” for

every Hellene, the music of Bach and his contemporaries was only for

musicians. We have the types of the Rembrandt expert, the Dante scholar,

the expert in contrapuntal music, and it is a reproach—a justifiable

reproach—to Wagner that it was possible for far too many people to be

Wagnerians, that far too little of his music was for the trained

musician. But do we hear of Phidias-experts or even Homer-scholars?

Herein lies the explanation of a set of phenomena which we have hitherto

been inclined to treat—in a vein of moral philosophy, or, better, of

melodrama—as weaknesses common to humanity, but which are in fact

symptoms of the Western life-feeling, viz., the “misunderstood” artist,

the poet “left to starve,” the “derided discoverer,” the thinker who is

“centuries in advance of his time” and so on. These are types of an

esoteric Culture. Destinies of this sort have their basis in the passion

of distance in which is concealed the desire-to-infinity and the will-

to-power, and they are as necessary in the field of Faustian mankind—at

all stages—as they are unthinkable in the Apollinian.

Every high creator in Western history has in reality aimed, from first

to last, at something which only the few could comprehend. Michelangelo

made the remark that his style was ordained for the correction of fools.

Gauss concealed his discovery of non-Euclidean geometry for thirty

years, for fear of the “clamour of the Bœotians.” It is only to-day that

we are separating out the masters of Gothic cathedral art from the rank-

and-file. But the same applies also to every painter, statesman,

philosopher. Think of Giordano Bruno, or Leibniz, or Kant, as against

Anaximander, Heraclitus or Protagoras. What does it mean, that no German

philosopher worth mentioning can be understood by the man in the street,

and that the combination of simplicity with majesty that is Homer’s is

simply not to be found in any Western language? The Nibelungenlied is a

hard, reserved utterance, and as for Dante, in Germany at any rate the

pretension to understand him is seldom more than a literary pose. We

find everywhere in the Western what we find nowhere in the Classical—the

exclusive form. Whole periods—for instance, the Provençal Culture and

the Rococo—are in the highest degree select and uninviting, their ideas

and forms having no existence except for a small class of higher men.

Even the Renaissance is no exception, for though it purports to be the

rebirth of that Antique which is so utterly _non_-exclusive and caters

so frankly for all, it is in fact, through-and-through, the creation of

a circle or of individual chosen souls, a taste that rejects popularity

from the outset—and how deep this sense of detachment goes we can tell

from the case of Florence, where the generality of the people viewed the

works of the elect with indifference, or with open mouths, or with

dislike, and sometimes, as in the case of Savonarola, turned and rent

them. On the contrary, _every_ Attic burgher belonged to the Attic

Culture, which excluded nobody; and consequently, the distinctions of

deeps and shallows, which are so decisively important for us, did not

exist at all for it. For us, popular and shallow are synonymous—in art

as in science—but for Classical man it was not so.

Consider our sciences too. Every one of them, without exception, has

besides its elementary groundwork certain “higher” regions that are

inaccessible to the layman—symbols, these also, of our will-to-infinity

and directional energy. The public for whom the last chapters of up-to-

date physics have been written numbers at the utmost a thousand persons,

and certain problems of modern mathematics are accessible only to a much

smaller circle still—for our “popular” science is without value,

_détraquée_, and falsified. We have not only an art for artists, but

also a mathematic for mathematicians, a politic for politicians (of

which the _profanum vulgus_ of newspaper-readers has not the smallest

inkling,[409] whereas Classical politics never got beyond the horizon of

the Agora), a religion for the “religious genius” and a poetry for

philosophers. Indeed, we may take the craving for wide effect as a

sufficient index by itself of the commencing and already perceptible

decline of Western science. That the severe esoteric of the Baroque Age

is felt now as a burden, is a symptom of sinking strength and of the

dulling of that distance-sense which _confessed_ the limitation with

humility. The few sciences that have kept the old fineness, depth, and

energy of conclusion and deduction and have not been tainted with

journalism—and few indeed they are, for theoretical physics,

mathematics, Catholic dogma, and perhaps jurisprudence exhaust the list—

address themselves to a very narrow and chosen band of experts. _And it

is this expert, and his opposite the layman, that are totally lacking in

the Classical life, wherein everyone knows everything._ For us, the

polarity of expert and layman has all the significance of a high symbol,

and when the tension of this distance is beginning to slacken, there the

Faustian life is fading out.

The conclusion to be argued from this as regards the advances of Western

science in its last phase (which will cover, or quite possibly will

_not_ cover, the next two centuries) is, that in proportion as

megalopolitan shallowness and triviality drive arts and sciences on to

the bookstall and into the factory, the posthumous spirit of the Culture

will confine itself more and more to very narrow circles; and that

there, remote from advertisement, it will work in ideas and forms so

abstruse that only a mere handful of superfine intelligences will be

capable of attaching meanings to them.

VIII

In no Classical art-work is a relation with the beholder attempted, for

that would require the form-language of the individual object to affirm

and to make use of the existence of a relation between that object and

ambient unlimited space. An Attic statue is a completely Euclidean body,

timeless and relationless, wholly self-contained. It neither speaks nor

looks. _It is quite unconscious of the spectator._ Unlike the plastic

forms of every other Culture, it stands wholly for itself and fits into

no architectural order; it is an individual amongst individuals, a body

amongst bodies. And the living individuals merely perceive it _as a

neighbour_, and do not feel it as an invasive influence, an efficient

capable of traversing space. Thus is expressed the Apollinian life-

feeling.

The awakening Magian art at once reversed the meaning of these forms.

The eyes of the statues and portraits in the Constantinian style are big

and staring and very definitely directed. They represent the Pneuma, the

higher of the two soul-substances. The Classical sculptor had fashioned

the eyes as blind, but now the pupils are bored, the eye, unnaturally

enlarged, looks into the space that in Attic art it had not acknowledged

as existing. In the Classical fresco-painting, heads are turned towards

one another, but in the mosaics of Ravenna and even in the relief-work

of Early-Christian-Late-Roman sarcophagi they are always turned towards

the beholder, and their wholly spiritual look is fixed upon him.

Mysteriously and quite un-Classically the beholder’s sphere is invaded

by an action-at-a-distance from the world that is in the art-work.

Something of this magic can still be traced in early Florentine and

early Rhenish gold-ground pictures.

Consider, now, Western painting as it was after Leonardo, fully

conscious of its mission. How does it deal with infinite space as

something _singular_ which comprehends both picture and spectator as

mere centres of gravity of a spatial dynamic? The full Faustian life-

feeling, the passion of the third dimension, takes hold of the form of

the picture, the painted plane, and transforms it in an unheard-of way.

The picture no longer stands for itself, nor looks at the spectator, but

_takes him into its sphere_. The sector defined by the sides of the

frame—the peepshow-field, twin with the stage-field—represents universal

space itself. Foreground and background lose all tendency to materiality

and propinquity and disclose instead of marking off. Far horizons deepen

the field to infinity, and the colour-treatment of the close foreground

eliminates the ideal plane of separation formed by the canvas and thus

expands the field so that the spectator is _in_ it. It is not he, now,

who chooses the standpoint from which the picture is most effective; on

the contrary, the picture dictates position and distance to him. Lateral

limits, too, are done away with—from 1500 onwards overrunnings of the

frame are more and more frequent and daring. The Greek spectator stands

_before_ the fresco of Polygnotus. We _sink into_ a picture, that is, we

are pulled into it by the power of the space-treatment. Unity of space

being thus re-established, the infinity that is expanded in all

directions by the picture is ruled by the Western perspective;[410] and

from perspective there runs a road straight to the comprehension of our

astronomical world-picture and its passionate pioneering into unending

farness.

Apollinian man _did not want_ to observe the broad universe, and the

philosophical systems one and all are silent about it. They know only

problems concerned with tangible and actual things, and have never

anything positive or significant to say about what is between the

“things.” The Classical thinker takes the earth-sphere, upon which he

stands and which (even in Hipparchus) is enveloped in a fixed celestial

sphere, as the complete and _given_ world, and if we probe the depths

and secrets of motive here we are almost startled by the persistency

with which theory attempted time after time to attach the order of these

heavens to that of the earth in some way that would not impugn the

primacy of the latter.[411]

Compare with this the convulsive vehemence with which the discovery of

Copernicus—the “contemporary” of Pythagoras—drove through the soul of

the West, and the deep spirit of awe in which Kepler looked upon the

laws of planetary orbits which he had discovered as an immediate

revelation from God, not daring to doubt that they were circular because

any other form would have been too unworthy a symbol. Here the old

Northern life-feeling, the Viking infinity-wistfulness, comes into its

own. Here, too, is the meaning of the characteristically Faustian

discovery of the telescope which, penetrating into spaces hidden from

the naked eye and inaccessible to the will-to-power, _widens_ the

universe that we possess. The truly religious feeling that seizes us

even to-day when we dare to look into the depths of starry space for the

first time—the same feeling of power that Shakespeare’s greatest

tragedies aim at awakening—would to Sophocles appear as the impiety of

all impieties.

Our denial of the “vault” of heaven, then, is a _resolve_ and not a

sense-experience. The modern ideas as to the nature of starry space—or,

to speak more prudently, of an extension indicated by light-indices that

are communicated by eye and telescope—most certainly do not rest upon

sure knowledge, for what we see in the telescope is small bright disks

of different sizes. The photographic plate yields quite another picture—

not a _sharper_ one but a _different_ one—and the construction of a

consistent world-picture such as we crave depends upon connecting the

two by numerous and often very daring hypotheses (e.g., of distances,

magnitudes and movements) that we ourselves frame. The style of this

picture corresponds to the style of our own soul. In actual fact we do

not know how different the light-powers of one and another star may be,

nor whether they vary in different directions. We do not know whether or

not light is altered, diminished, or extinguished in the immensities of

space. We do not know whether our earthly conceptions of the nature of

light, and therefore all the theories and laws deduced from them, have

validity beyond the immediate environment of the earth. What we “see”

are merely light-_indices_; what we understand are symbols of ourselves.

The strong upspringing of the Copernican world-idea—which belongs

exclusively to our Culture and (to risk an assertion that even now may

seem paradoxical) would be and will be _deliberately forced into

oblivion_ whenever the soul of a coming Culture shall feel itself

endangered by it[412]—was founded on the certainty that the corporeal-

static, the imagined preponderance of the plastic _earth_, was

henceforth eliminated from the Cosmos. Till then, the heavens which were

thought of, or at any rate felt, as a substantial quantity, like the

earth, had been regarded as being in polar equilibrium with it. But now

it was _Space_ that ruled the universe. “World” signifies space, and the

stars are hardly more than mathematical points, tiny balls in the

immense, that as material no longer affect the world-feeling. While

Democritus, who tried (as on behalf of the Apollinian Culture he was

bound to try) to settle some limit of a bodily kind to it all, imagined

a layer of hook-shaped atoms as a skin over the Cosmos, an insatiable

hunger drives _us_ ever further and further into the remote. The solar

system of Copernicus, already expanded by Giordano Bruno to a thousand

such systems, grew immeasurably wider in the Baroque Age; and to-day we

“know” that the sum of all the solar systems, about 35,000,000,

constitutes a closed (and demonstrably finite[413]) stellar system which

forms an ellipsoid of rotation and has its equator approximately along

the band of the Milky Way. Swarms of solar systems traverse this space,

like flights of migrant birds, with the same velocity and direction. One

such group, with an apex in the constellation of Hercules, is formed by

our sun together with the bright stars Capella, Vega, Altair and

Betelgeuse. The axis of this immense system, which has its mid-point not

far from the present position of our sun, is taken as 470,000,000 times

as long as the distance from the earth to the sun. Any night, the starry

heavens give us at the same moment impressions that originated 3,700

years apart in time, for that is the distance in light-years from the

extreme outer limit to the earth. In the picture of history as it

unfolds before us here, this period corresponds to a duration covering

the whole Classical and Magian ages and going back to the zenith of the

Egyptian Culture in the XIIth Dynasty. This aspect—an _image_, I repeat,

and not a matter of experimental knowledge—is for the Faustian a high

and noble[414] aspect, but for the Apollinian it would have been woeful

and terrible, an annihilation of the most profound conditions of his

being. And he would have felt it as sheer salvation when after all a

limit, however remote, had been found. But we, driven by the deep

necessity that is in us, must simply ask ourselves the new question: Is

there anything _outside_ this system? Are there aggregates of such

systems, at such distances that even the dimensions established by our

astronomy[415] are small by comparison? As far as sense-observations are

concerned, it seems that an absolute limit has been reached; neither

light nor gravitation can give a sign of existence through this outer

space, void of mass. But for us it is a simple _necessity of thought_.

Our spiritual passion, our unresting need to actualize our existence-

idea in symbols, _suffers_ under this limitation of our sense-

perceptions.

IX

So also it was that the old Northern races, in whose primitive souls the

Faustian was already awakening, discovered in their grey dawn the art of

_sailing the seas_ which emancipated them.[416] The Egyptians knew the

sail, but only profited by it as a labour-saving device. They sailed, as

they had done before in their oared ships, along the coast to Punt and

Syria, but the _idea_ of the high-seas voyage—what it meant as a

liberation, a symbol—was not in them. Sailing, real sailing, is a

triumph over Euclidean land. At the beginning of our 14th Century,

almost coincident with each other (and with the formation-periods of

oil-painting and counterpoint!) came gunpowder and the compass, that is,

_long-range weapons and long-range intercourse_ (means that the Chinese

Culture[417] too had, necessarily, discovered for itself). It was the

spirit of the Vikings and the Hansa, as of those dim peoples, so unlike

the Hellenes with their domestic funerary urns, who heaped up great

barrows as memorials of the lonely soul on the wide plains. It was the

spirit of those who sent their dead kings to sea in their burning ships,

thrilling manifests of their dark yearning for the boundless. The spirit

of the Norsemen drove their cockle-boats—in the Tenth Century that

heralded the Faustian birth—to the coasts of America. But to the

circumnavigation of Africa, already achieved by Egyptians and

Carthaginians, Classical mankind was wholly indifferent. How statuesque

their existence was, even with respect to intercourse, is shown by the

fact that the news of the First Punic War—one of the most intense wars

of history—penetrated to Athens from Sicily merely as an indefinite

report. Even the souls of the Greeks were assembled in Hades as

unexcitable shadows (εἴδωλα) without strength, wish or feeling. But the

Northern dead gathered themselves in fierce unresting armies of the

cloud and the storm.

The event which stands at the same cultural level as the discoveries of

the Spaniards and Portuguese is that of the Hellenic colonizations of

the 8th Century B.C. But, while the Spaniards and the Portuguese were

possessed by the adventured-craving for uncharted distances and for

everything unknown and dangerous, the Greeks went carefully, point by

point, on the known tracks of the Phœnicians, Carthaginians and

Etruscans, and their curiosity in no wise extended to what lay beyond

the Pillars of Hercules and the Isthmus of Suez, easily accessible as

both were to them. Athens no doubt heard of the way to the North Sea, to

the Congo, to Zanzibar, to India—in Nero’s time the position of the

southern extremity of India was known, also that of the islands of

Sunda—but Athens shut its eyes to these things just as it did to the

astronomical knowledge of the old East. Even when the lands that we call

Morocco and Portugal had become Roman provinces, no Atlantic voyaging

ensued, and the Canaries remained forgotten. Apollinian man felt the

Columbus-longing as little as he felt the Copernican. Possessed though

the Greek merchants were with the desire of gain, a deep metaphysical

shyness restrained them from extending the horizon, and in geography as

in other matters they stuck to near things and foregrounds. The

existence of the Polis, that astonishing ideal of the State as statue,

was in truth nothing more nor less than a refuge from the wide world of

the sea-peoples—and that though the Classical, alone of all the Cultures

so far, had a ring of coasts about a sea of islands, and not a

continental expanse, as its motherland. Not even Hellenism, with all its

proneness to technical diversions,[418] freed itself from the oared ship

which tethered the mariner to the coasts. The naval architects of

Alexandria were capable of constructing giant ships of 260-ft.

length,[419] and, for that matter, the steamship was discovered in

principle. But there are some discoveries that have all the pathos of a

great and _necessary_ symbol and reveal depths within, and there are

others that are merely play of intellect. The steamship is for

Apollinians one of the latter and for Faustians one of the former class.

It is prominence or insignificance in the Macrocosm as a whole that

gives discovery and the application thereof the character of depth or

shallowness.

The discoveries of Columbus and Vasco da Gama extended the geographical

horizon without limit, and the world-sea came into the same relation

with land as that of the universe of space with earth. And then first

the political tension within the Faustian world-consciousness discharged

itself. For the Greeks, Hellas was and remained the important part of

the earth’s surface, but with the discovery of America West-Europe

became a province in a gigantic whole. Thenceforward the history of the

Western Culture has a _planetary_ character.

Every Culture possesses a proper conception of home and fatherland,

which is hard to comprehend, scarcely to be expressed in words, full of

dark metaphysical relations, but nevertheless unmistakable in its

tendency. The Classical home-feeling which tied the individual

corporally and Euclidean-ly to the Polis[420] is the very antithesis of

that enigmatic “Heimweh” of the Northerner which has something musical,

soaring and unearthly in it. Classical man felt as “Home” just what he

could see from the Acropolis of his native city. Where the horizon of

Athens ended, the alien, the hostile, the “fatherland” of another began.

Even the Roman of late Republican times understood by “patria” nothing

but Urbs Roma, not even Latium, still less Italy. The Classical world,

as it matured, dissolved itself into a large number of point-patriæ, and

the need of bodily separation between them took the form of hatreds far

more intense than any hatred that there was of the Barbarian. And it is

therefore the most convincing of all evidences of the victory of the

Magian world-feeling that Caracalla[421] in 212 A.D. granted Roman

citizenship to all provincials. For this grant simply abolished the

ancient, statuesque, idea of the citizen. There was now a Realm and

consequently a new kind of membership. The Roman notion of an army, too,

underwent a significant change. In genuinely Classical times there had

been no Roman Army in the sense in which we speak of the Prussian Army,

but only “armies,” that is, definite formations (as we say) created as

corps, limited and visibly present bodies, by the appointment of a

Legatus to command—an _exercitus Scipionis_, _Crassi_ for instance—but

never an _exercitus Romanus_. It was Caracalla, the same who abolished

the idea of “civis Romanus” by decree and wiped out the Roman civic

deities by making all alien deities equivalent to them, who created the

un-Classical and _Magian_ idea of an Imperial Army, something

_manifested_ in the separate legions. These now meant something, whereas

in Classical times they _meant_ nothing, but simply _were_. The old

“fides exercituum” is replaced by “fides exercitus” in the inscriptions

and, instead of individual bodily-conceived deities special to each

legion and ritually honoured by its Legatus, we have a spiritual

principle common to all. So also, and in the same sense, the

"fatherland"-feeling undergoes a change of meaning for Eastern men—_and

not merely Christians_—in Imperial times. Apollinian man, so long as he

retained any effective remnant at all of his proper world-feeling,

regarded “home” in the genuinely corporeal sense as the ground on which

his city was built—a conception that recalls the “unity of place” of

Attic tragedy and statuary. But to Magian man, to Christians, Persians,

Jews, “Greeks,”[422] Manichæans, Nestorians and Mohammedans, it means

nothing that has any connexion with geographical actualities. And for

ourselves it means an impalpable unity of nature, speech, climate,

habits and history—not earth but “country,” not point-like presence but

historic past and future, not a unit made up of men, houses and gods but

an _idea_, the idea that takes shape in the restless wanderings, the

deep loneliness, and that ancient German impulse towards the South which

has been the ruin of our best, from the Saxon Emperors to Hölderlin and

Nietzsche.

The bent of the Faustian Culture, therefore, was overpoweringly towards

_extension_, political, economic or spiritual. It overrode all

geographical-material bounds. It sought—without any practical object,

merely for the Symbol’s own sake—to reach North Pole and South Pole. It

ended by transforming the entire surface of the globe into a single

colonial and economic system. Every thinker from Meister Eckhardt to

Kant willed to subject the “phenomenal” world to the asserted domination

of the cognizing ego, and every leader from Otto the Great to Napoleon

did it. The _genuine_ object of their ambitions was the boundless, alike

for the great Franks and Hohenstaufen with their world-monarchies, for

Gregory VII and Innocent III, for the Spanish Habsburgs “on whose empire

the sun never set,” and for the Imperialism of to-day on behalf of which

the World-War was fought and will continue to be fought for many a long

day. Classical man, for inward reasons, could not be a conqueror,

notwithstanding Alexander’s romantic expedition—for we can discern

enough of the inner hesitations and unwillingnesses of his companions

not to need to explain it as an “exception proving the rule.”[423] The

never-stilled desire to be liberated from the binding element, to range

far and free, which is the essence of the fancy-creatures of the North—

the dwarfs, elves and imps—is utterly unknown to the Dryads and Oreads

of Greece. Greek daughter-cities were planted by the hundred along the

rim of the Mediterranean, but not one of them made the slightest real

attempt to conquer and penetrate the hinterlands. To settle far from the

coast would have meant to lose sight of “home,” while to settle in

_loneliness_—the ideal life of the trapper and prairie-man of America as

it had been of Icelandic saga-heroes long before—was something entirely

beyond the possibilities of Classical mankind. Dramas like that of the

emigration to America—man by man, each on his own account, driven by

deep promptings to loneliness—or the Spanish Conquest, or the

Californian gold-rush, dramas of uncontrollable longings for freedom,

solitude, immense independence, and of giantlike contempt of all

limitations whatsoever upon the home-feeling—these dramas are Faustian

and only Faustian. No other Culture, not even the Chinese, knows them.

The Hellenic emigrant, on the contrary, clung as a child clings to its

mother’s lap. To make a new city out of the old one, exactly like it,

with the same fellow citizens, the same gods, the same customs, with the

linking sea never out of sight, and there to pursue in the Agora the

familiar life of the ζῷον πολιτικόν—this was the limit of change of

scene for the Apollinian life. To us, for whom freedom of movement (if

not always as a practical, yet in any case as an ideal, right) is

indispensable, such a limit would have been the most crying of all

slaveries. It is from the Classical point of view that the oft-

misunderstood expansion of Rome must be looked at. It was anything

rather than an _extension_ of the fatherland; it confined itself exactly

within fields that had already been taken up by other culture-men whom

they dispossessed. Never was there a hint of dynamic world-schemes of

the Hohenstaufen or Habsburg stamp, or of an imperialism comparable with

that of our own times. The Romans made no attempt to penetrate the

interior of Africa. Their later wars were waged only for the

_preservation_ of what they already possessed, not for the sake of

ambition nor under a significant stimulus from within. They could give

up Germany and Mesopotamia without regret.

If, in fine, we look at it all together—the expansion of the Copernican

world-picture into that aspect of stellar space that we possess to-day;

the development of Columbus’s discovery into a worldwide command of the

earth’s surface by the West; the perspective of oil-painting and of

tragedy-scene; the sublimed home-feeling; the passion of our

Civilization for swift transit, the conquest of the air, the exploration

of the Polar regions and the climbing of almost impossible mountain-

peaks—we see, emerging everywhere the prime-symbol of the Faustian soul,

Limitless Space. And those specially (in form, uniquely) Western

creations of the soul-myth called “Will,” “Force” and “Deed” must be

regarded as derivatives of this prime-symbol.

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

CHAPTER X

SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

II

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM

CHAPTER X

SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

II

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM

I

We are now at last in a position to approach the phenomenon of

_Morale_,[424] the intellectual interpretation of Life by itself, to

ascend the height from which it is possible to survey the widest and

gravest of all the fields of human thought. At the same time, we shall

need for this survey an objectivity such as no one has as yet set

himself seriously to gain. Whatever we may take Morale to be, it is no

part of Morale to provide its own _analysis_; and we shall get to grips

with the problem, not by considering what _should_ be our acts and aims

and standards, but only by diagnosing the Western feeling in the very

form of the enunciation.

In this matter of morale, Western mankind, without exception, is under

the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone _demands_

something of the rest. We say “thou shalt” in the conviction that so-

and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged

conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in

our title to give, such orders is unshakable. _That_, and nothing short

of it, _is_, for us, morale. In the ethics of the West everything is

direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. Here Luther is

completely at one with Nietzsche, Popes with Darwinians, Socialists with

Jesuits; for one and all, the beginning of morale is a claim to general

and permanent validity. It is a necessity of the Faustian soul that this

should be so. He who thinks or teaches “otherwise” is sinful, a

backslider, a _foe_, and he is fought down without mercy. You “shall,”

the State “shall,” society “shall”—this form of morale is to us self-

evident; it represents the only real meaning that we can attach to the

word. But it was not so either in the Classical, or in India, or in

China. Buddha, for instance, gives a pattern to take or to leave, and

Epicurus offers counsel. Both undeniably are forms of high morale, and

neither contains the will-element.

What we have entirely failed to observe is the peculiarity of moral

_dynamic_. If we allow that Socialism (in the ethical, not the economic,

sense) is that world-feeling which seeks to carry out its own views on

behalf of all, then we are all without exception, willingly or no,

wittingly or no, Socialists. Even Nietzsche, that most passionate

opponent of “herd morale,” was perfectly incapable of limiting his zeal

to himself in the Classical way. He thought only of “mankind,” and he

attacked everyone who differed from himself. Epicurus, on the contrary,

was heartily indifferent to others’ opinions and acts and never wasted

one thought on the “transformation” of mankind. He and his friends were

content that _they_ were as they were and not otherwise. The Classical

ideal was indifference (ἀπάθεια) to the course of the world—the very

thing which it is the whole business of Faustian mankind to master—and

an important element both of Stoic and of Epicurean philosophy was the

recognition of a category of things neither preferred nor rejected[425]

(ἀδιάφορα). In Hellas there was a pantheon of morales as there was of

deities, as the peaceful coexistence of Epicureans, Cynics and Stoics

shows, but the Nietzschean Zarathustra—though professedly standing

beyond good and evil—breathes from end to end the pain of seeing men to

be other than as he would have them be, and the deep and utterly un-

Classical desire to devote a life to their reformation—his own sense of

the word, naturally, being the only one. It is just this, the _general_

transvaluation, that makes ethical monotheism and—using the word in a

novel and deep sense—socialism. All world-improvers are Socialists. And

consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.

The moral imperative as the form of morale is Faustian and only

Faustian. It is wholly without importance that Schopenhauer denies

theoretically the will to live, or that Nietzsche will have it affirmed—

these are superficial differences, indicative of personal tastes and

temperaments. The important thing, that which makes Schopenhauer the

progenitor of ethical modernity, is that he too _feels_ the whole world

as Will, as movement, force, direction. This basic feeling is not merely

the foundation of our ethics, _it is itself our whole ethics_, and the

rest are bye-blows. That which we call not merely activity but

action[426] is a historical conception through-and-through, saturated

with directional energy. It is the proof of being, the dedication of

being, in that sort of man whose ego possesses the tendency to Future,

who feels the momentary present not as saturated being but as epoch, as

turning-point, in a great complex of becoming—and, moreover, feels it so

of both his personal life and of the life of history as a whole.

Strength and distinctness of this consciousness are the marks of higher

Faustian man, but it is not wholly absent in the most insignificant of

the breed, and it distinguishes his smallest acts from those of any and

every Classical man. It is the distinction between character and

attitude, between conscious becoming and simple accepted statuesque

becomeness, between will and suffering in tragedy.

In the world as seen by the Faustian’s eyes, everything is motion with

an aim. He himself _lives_ only under that condition, for to him life

means struggling, overcoming, winning through. The struggle for

existence as ideal form of existence is implicit even in the Gothic age

(of the architecture of which it is visibly the foundation) and the 19th

Century has not invented it but merely put it into mechanical-

utilitarian form. In the Apollinian world there is no such directional

motion—the purposeless and aimless see-saw of Heraclitus’s “becoming” (ἡ

ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω) is irrelevant here—no “Protestantism,” no “Sturm und

Drang,” no ethical, intellectual or artistic “revolution” to fight and

destroy the existent. The Ionic and Corinthian styles appear by the side

of the Doric without setting up any claim to sole and general validity,

but the Renaissance expelled the Gothic and Classicism expelled the

Baroque styles, and the history of every European literature is filled

with battles over form-problems. Even our monasticism, with its

Templars, Franciscans, Dominicans and the rest, takes shape as an order-

_movement_, in sharp contrast to the “askesis” of the Early-Christian

hermit.

To go back upon this basic form of his existence, let alone transform

it, is entirely beyond the power of Faustian man. It is presupposed even

in efforts to resist it. One fights against “advanced” ideas, but all

the time he looks on his fight itself as an advance. Another agitates

for a “reversal,” but what he intends is in fact a continuance of

development. “Immoral” is only a new kind of “moral” and sets up the

same claim to primacy. The will-to-power is intolerant—all that is

Faustian wills to reign alone. The Apollinian feeling, on the contrary,

with its world of coexistent individual things, is tolerant as a matter

of course. But, if toleration is in keeping with will-less Ataraxia, it

is for the Western world with its oneness of infinite soul-space and the

singleness of its fabric of tensions the sign either of self-deception

or of fading-out. The Enlightenment of the 18th Century was tolerant

towards—that is, careless of—differences between the various Christian

creeds, but in respect of its own relation to the Church as a whole, it

was anything but tolerant as soon as the power to be otherwise came to

it. The Faustian instinct, active, strong-willed, as vertical in

tendency as its own Gothic cathedrals, as upstanding as its own “ego

habeo factum,” looking into distance and Future, demands toleration—

_that is, room, space_—for its proper activity, but only for that.

Consider, for instance, how much of it the city democracy is prepared to

accord to the Church in respect of the latter’s management of religious

powers, while claiming for itself unlimited freedom to exercise its own

and adjusting the “common” law to conform thereto whenever it can. Every

“movement” means to _win_, while every Classical “attitude” only wants

to _be_ and troubles itself little about the Ethos of the neighbour. To

fight for or against the trend of the times, to promote Reform or

Reaction, construction, reconstruction or destruction—all this is as un-

Classical as it is un-Indian. It is the old antithesis of Sophoclean and

Shakespearian tragedy, the tragedy of the man who only wants to exist

and that of the man who wants to win.

It is quite wrong to bind up Christianity with the moral imperative. It

was not Christianity that transformed Faustian man, but Faustian man who

transformed Christianity—and he not only made it a new religion but also

gave it a new moral direction. The “it” became “I,” the passion-charged

centre of the world, the foundation of the great Sacrament of _personal_

contrition. Will-to-power even in ethics, the passionate striving to set

up a proper morale as a universal truth, and to enforce it upon

humanity, to reinterpret or overcome or destroy everything otherwise

constituted—nothing is more characteristically our own than this is. And

in virtue of it the Gothic springtime proceeded to a profound—and never

yet appreciated—_inward transformation_ of the morale of Jesus. A quiet

spiritual morale welling from Magian feeling—a morale or conduct

recommended as potent for salvation, a morale the knowledge of which was

communicated as a special act of grace[427]—was recast as a _morale of

imperative command_.[428]

Every ethical system, whether it be of religious or of philosophical

origin, has associations with the great arts and especially with that of

architecture. It is in fact a structure of propositions of causal

character. Every truth that is intended for practical application is

propounded with a “because” and a “therefore.” There is mathematical

logic in them—in Buddha’s “Four Truths” as in Kant’s “Critique of

Practical Reason”[429] and in every popular catechism. What is _not_ in

these doctrines of acquired truth is the uncritical logic of the blood,

which generates and matures those conduct-standards (Sitten) of social

classes and of practical men (e.g., the chivalry-obligations in the time

of the Crusades) that we only consciously realize when someone infringes

them. A systematic morale is, as it were, an Ornament, and it manifests

itself not only in precepts but also in the style of drama and even in

the choice of art-motives. The Meander, for example, is a Stoic motive.

The Doric column is the very embodiment of the Antique life-ideal. And

just _because_ it was so, it was the one Classical “order” which the

Baroque style necessarily and frankly excluded; indeed, even Renaissance

art was warned off it by some very deep spiritual instinct. Similarly

with the transformation of the Magian dome into the Russian roof-

cupola,[430] the Chinese landscape-architecture of devious paths, the

Gothic cathedral-tower. Each is an image of the particular and unique

morale which arose out of the waking-consciousness of the Culture.

II

The old riddles and perplexities now resolve themselves. There are as

many morales as there are Cultures, no more and no fewer. Just as every

painter and every musician has something in him which, by force of

inward necessity, never emerges into consciousness but dominates _a

priori_ the form-language of his work and differentiates that work from

the work of every other Culture, so every conception of Life held by a

Culture-man possesses _a priori_ (in the very strictest Kantian sense of

the phrase) a constitution that is deeper than all momentary judgments

and strivings and impresses the _style_ of these with the hall-mark of

the particular Culture. The individual may act morally or immorally, may

do “good” or “evil” with respect to the primary feeling of his Culture,

but the theory of his actions is not a result but a datum. Each Culture

possesses its own standards, the validity of which begins and ends with

it. There is no general morale of humanity.

It follows that there is not and cannot be any true “conversion” in the

deeper sense. Conscious behaviour of any kind that rests upon

convictions is a primary phenomenon, the basic tendency of an existence

developed into a “timeless truth.” It matters little what words or

pictures are employed to express it, whether it appears as the

predication of a deity or as the issue of philosophic meditation, as

proposition or as symbol, as proclamation of proper or confutation of

alien convictions. It is enough that it is _there_. It can be wakened

and it can be put theoretically in the form of doctrine, it can change

or improve its intellectual vehicle but it cannot be begotten. Just as

we are incapable of altering our world-feeling—so incapable that even in

trying to alter it we have to follow the old lines and confirm instead

of overthrowing it—so also we are powerless to alter the ethical basis

of our waking being. A certain verbal distinction has sometimes been

drawn between ethics the science and morale the duty, but, as we

understand it, the point of duty does not arise. We are no more capable

of converting a man to a morale alien to his being than the Renaissance

was capable of reviving the Classical or of making anything but a

Southernized Gothic, an anti-Gothic, out of Apollinian motives. We may

talk to-day of transvaluing all our values; we may, as Megalopolitans,

“go back to” Buddhism or Paganism or a romantic Catholicism; we may

champion as Anarchists an individualist or as Socialists a collectivist

ethic—but in spite of all we do, will and feel the same. A conversion to

Theosophy or Freethinking or one of the present-day transitions from a

supposed Christianity to a supposed Atheism (or vice versa) is an

alteration of words and notions, of the religious or intellectual

surface, no more. None of our “movements” have changed _man_.

A strict morphology of all the morales is a task for the future. Here,

too, Nietzsche has taken the first and essential step towards the new

standpoint. But he has failed to observe his own condition that the

thinker shall place himself “beyond good and evil.” He tried to be at

once sceptic _and_ prophet, moral critic _and_ moral gospeller. It

cannot be done. One cannot be a first-class psychologist as long as one

is still a Romantic. And so here, as in all his crucial penetrations, he

got as far as the door—and stood outside it. And so far, no one has done

any better. We have been blind and uncomprehending before the immense

wealth that there is in the moral as in other form-languages. Even the

sceptic has not understood his task; at bottom he, like others, sets up

his own notion of morale, drawn from his particular disposition and

private taste, as standard by which to measure others. The modern

revolutionaires—Stirner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw—are just the same; they

have only managed to hide the facts (from themselves as well as from

others) behind new formulæ and catchwords.

But a morale, like a sculpture, a music, a painting-art, is a self-

contained form-world expressing a life-feeling; it is a datum,

fundamentally unalterable, an inward necessity. It is ever true within

its historical circle, ever untrue outside it. As we have seen

already,[431] what his several works are to the poet or musician or

painter, that its several art-genera are for the higher individual that

we call the Culture, viz., _organic units_; and that oil-painting as a

whole, act-sculpture as a whole and contrapuntal music as a whole, and

rhymed lyric and so on are all epoch-making, and as such take rank as

major symbols of Life. In the history of the Culture as in that of the

individual existence, we are dealing with the actualization of the

possible; it is the story of an inner spirituality becoming the _style

of a world_. By the side of these great form-units, which grow and

fulfil themselves and close down within a predeterminate series of human

generations, which endure for a few centuries and pass irrevocably into

death, we see the group of Faustian morals and the sum of Apollinian

morals also as individuals of the higher order. That they _are_, is

Destiny. They are data, and revelation (or scientific insight, as the

case may be) only put them into shape for the consciousness.

There is something, hardly to be described, that assembles all the

theories from Hesiod and Sophocles to Plato and the Stoa and opposes

them collectively to _all_ that was taught from Francis of Assisi and

Abelard to Ibsen and Nietzsche, and even the morale of Jesus is only the

noblest expression of a general morale that was put into other forms by

Marcion and Mani, by Philo and Plotinus, by Epictetus, Augustine and

Proclus. All Classical ethic is an ethic of attitude, all Western an

ethic of deed. And, likewise, the sum of all Indian and the sum of all

Chinese systems forms each a world of its own.

III

Every Classical ethic that we know or can conceive of constitutes man an

individual static entity, a body among bodies, and all Western

valuations relate to him as a centre of effect in an infinite

generality. Ethical Socialism is neither more nor less than the

sentiment of action-at-a-distance, the moral pathos of the third

dimension; and the root-feeling of Care—care for those who are with us,

and for those who are to follow—is its emblem in the sky. Consequently

there is for us something socialistic in the aspect of the Egyptian

Culture, while the opposite tendency to immobile attitude, to non-

desire, to static self-containedness of the individual, recalls the

Indian ethic and the man formed by it. The seated Buddha-statue

(“looking at its navel”) and Zeno’s Ataraxia are not altogether alien to

one another. The ethical ideal of Classical man was that which is led up

to in his tragedy, and revealed in its Katharsis. This in its last

depths means the purgation of the Apollinian soul from its burden of

what is _not_ Apollinian, not free from the elements of distance and

direction, and to understand it we have to recognize that Stoicism is

simply the mature form of it. That which the drama effected in a solemn

hour, the Stoa wished to spread over the whole field of life; viz.,

statuesque steadiness and will-less ethos. Now, is not this conception

of κάθαρσις closely akin to the Buddhist ideal of Nirvana, which as a

formula is no doubt very “late” but as an essence is thoroughly Indian

and traceable even from Vedic times? And does not this kinship bring

ideal Classical man and ideal Indian man very close to one another and

separate them both from that man whose ethic is manifested in the

Shakespearian tragedy of dynamic evolution and catastrophe? When one

thinks of it, there is nothing preposterous in the idea of Socrates,

Epicurus, and especially Diogenes, sitting by the Ganges, whereas

Diogenes in a Western megalopolis would be an unimportant fool. Nor, on

the other hand, is Frederick William I of Prussia, the prototype of the

Socialist in the grand sense, unthinkable in the polity of the Nile,

whereas in Periclean Athens he is impossible.

Had Nietzsche regarded his own times with fewer prejudices and less

disposition to romantic championship of certain ethical creations, he

would have perceived that a specifically Christian morale of compassion

in _his_ sense does not exist on West-European soil. We must not let the

words of humane formulæ mislead us as to their real significance.

Between the morale that one has and the morale that one thinks one has,

there is a relation which is very obscure and very unsteady, and it is

just here that an incorruptible psychology would be invaluable.

Compassion is a dangerous word, and neither Nietzsche himself—for all

his maestria—nor anyone else has yet investigated the meaning—conceptual

and effective—of the word at different times. The Christian morale of

Origen’s time was quite different from the Christian morale of St.

Francis’s. This is not the place to enquire what _Faustian_ compassion—

sacrifice or ebullience or again race-instinct in a chivalrous

society[432]—means as against the fatalistic Magian-Christian kind, how

far it is to be conceived as action-at-a-distance and _practical

dynamic_, or (from another angle) as a proud soul’s demand upon itself,

or again as the utterance of an imperious distance-feeling. A fixed

stock of ethical phrases, such as we have possessed since the

Renaissance, has to cover a multitude of different ideas and a still

greater multitude of different meanings. When a mankind so historically

and retrospectively disposed as we are accepts the superficial as the

real sense, and regards ideals as subject-matter for mere knowing, it is

really evidencing its veneration for the past—in this particular

instance, for religious tradition. The _text_ of a conviction is never a

test of its _reality_, for man is rarely conscious of his own beliefs.

Catchwords and doctrines are always more or less popular and external as

compared with deep spiritual actualities. Our theoretical reverence for

the propositions of the New Testament is in fact of the same order as

the theoretical reverence of the Renaissance and of Classicism for

antique art; the one has no more transformed the spirit of men than the

other has transformed the spirit of works. The oft-quoted cases of the

Mendicant Orders, the Moravians and the Salvation Army prove by their

very rarity, and even more by the slightness of the effects that they

have been able to produce, that they are exceptions in a quite different

generality—namely, the _Faustian-Christian_ morale. That morale will not

indeed be found formulated, either by Luther or by the Council of Trent,

but all Christians of the great style—Innocent III and Calvin, Loyola

and Savonarola, Pascal and St. Theresa—have had it in them, even in

unconscious contradiction to their own formal teachings.

We have only to compare the purely Western conception of the manly

virtue that is designated by Nietzsche’s “moralinfrei” _virtù_, the

_grandezza_ of Spanish and the _grandeur_ of French Baroque, with that

very feminine ἀρετή of the Hellenic ideal, of which the practical

application is presented to us as capacity for enjoyment (ἡδονή),

placidity of disposition (γαλήνη, ἀπάθεια), absence of wants and

demands, and, above all, the so typical ἀταραξία. What Nietzsche called

the Blond Beast and conceived to be embodied in the type of Renaissance

Man that he so overvalued (for it is really only a jackal counterfeit of

the great Hohenstaufen Germans) is the utter antithesis to the type that

is presented in every Classical ethic without exception and embodied in

every Classical man of worth. The Faustian Culture has produced a long

series of granite-men, the Classical never a one. For Pericles and

Themistocles were soft natures in tune with Attic καλοκἀγαθία, and

Alexander was a Romantic who never woke up, Cæsar a shrewd reckoner.

Hannibal, the alien, was the only “Mann” amongst them all. The men of

the early time, as Homer presents them to our judgment—the Odysseuses

and Ajaxes—would have cut a queer figure among the chevaliers of the

Crusades. Very feminine natures, too, are capable of brutality—a

rebound-brutality of their own—and Greek cruelty was of this kind. But

in the North the great Saxon, Franconian and Hohenstaufen emperors

appear on the very threshold of the Culture, surrounded by giant-men

like Henry the Lion and Gregory VII. Then come the men of the

Renaissance, of the struggle of the two Roses, of the Huguenot Wars, the

Spanish Conquistadores, the Prussian electors and kings, Napoleon,

Bismarck, Rhodes. What other Culture has exhibited the like of these?

Where in all Hellenic history is so powerful a scene as that of 1176—the

Battle of Legnano as foreground, the suddenly-disclosed strife of the

great Hohenstaufen and the great Welf as background? The heroes of the

Great Migrations, the Spanish chivalry, Prussian discipline, Napoleonic

energy—how much of the Classical is there in these men and things? And

where, on the heights of Faustian morale, from the Crusades to the World

War, do we find anything of the “slave-morale,” the meek resignation,

the deaconess’s Caritas?[433] Only in pious and honoured words, nowhere

else. The type of the very priesthood is Faustian; think of those

magnificent bishops of the old German empire who on horseback led their

flocks into the wild battle,[434] or those Popes who could force

submission on a Henry IV and a Frederick II, of the Teutonic Knights in

the Ostmark, of Luther’s challenge in which the old Northern heathendom

rose up against old Roman, of the great Cardinals (Richelieu, Mazarin,

Fleury) who shaped France. _That_ is Faustian morale, and one must be

blind indeed if one does not see it efficient in the whole field of

West-European history. And it is only through such grand instances of

worldly passion which express the consciousness of a _mission_ that we

are able to understand those of grand spiritual passion, of the upright

and forthright Caritas which nothing can resist, the dynamic charity

that is so utterly unlike Classical moderation and Early-Christian

mildness. There is a _hardness_ in the sort of com-passion that was

practised by the German mystics, the German and Spanish military Orders,

the French and English Calvinists. In the Russian, the Raskolnikov, type

of charity a soul melts into the fraternity of souls, in the Faustian it

arises out of it. Here too “ego habeo factum” is the formula. Personal

charity is the justification before God of the Person, the individual.

This is the reason why "compassion"-morale, in the everyday sense,

always respected by us so far as words go, and sometimes hoped for by

the thinker, is _never_ actualized. Kant rejected it with decision, and

in fact it is in profound contradiction with the Categorical Imperative,

which sees the meaning of Life to lie in actions and not in surrender to

soft opinions. Nietzsche’s “slave-morale” is a phantom, _his master-

morale is a reality_. It does not require formulation to be effective—it

is there, and has been from of old. Take away his romantic Borgia-mask

and his nebulous vision of supermen, and what is left of his man is

Faustian man himself, as he is to-day and as he was even in saga-days,

the type of an energetic, imperative and dynamic Culture. However it may

have been in the Classical world, _our_ great well-doers are the great

_doers_ whose forethought and care affects millions, the great statesmen

and organizers. "A higher sort of men, who thanks to their preponderance

of will, knowledge, wealth and influence make use of democratic Europe

as their aptest and most mobile tool, in order to bring into their own

hands the destinies of the Earth and as artists to shape ‘man’ himself.

Enough—the time is coming when men will unlearn and relearn the art of

politics." So Nietzsche delivered himself in one of the unpublished

drafts that are so much more concrete than the finished works. “We must

either breed political capacities, or else be ruined by the democracy

that has been forced upon us by the failure of the older

alternatives,”[435] says Shaw in _Man and Superman_. Limited though his

philosophic horizon is in general, Shaw has the advantage over Nietzsche

of more practical schooling and less ideology, and the figure of the

multimillionaire Undershaft in _Major Barbara_ translates the Superman-

ideal into the unromantic language of the modern age (which in truth is

its real source for Nietzsche also, though it reached him indirectly

through Malthus and Darwin). It is these fact-men of the grand style who

are the representatives to-day of the Will-to-Power over other men’s

destinies and therefore of the Faustian ethic generally. Men of this

sort do not broadcast their millions to dreamers, “artists,” weaklings

and “down-and-outs” to satisfy a boundless benevolence; they employ them

for those who like themselves count as material for the Future. They

pursue a purpose with them. They make a centre of force for the

existence of generations which outlives the single lives. The mere

money, too, can develop ideas and make history, and Rhodes—precursor of

a type that will be significant indeed in the 21st Century—provided, in

disposing of his possessions by will, that it should do so. It is a

shallow judgment, and one incapable of inwardly understanding history,

that cannot distinguish the literary chatter of popular social-moralists

and humanity-apostles from the deep ethical instincts of the West-

European Civilization.

Socialism—in its highest and not its street-corner sense—is, like every

other Faustian ideal, exclusive. It owes its popularity only to the fact

that it is completely misunderstood even by its exponents, who present

it as a sum of rights instead of as one of duties, an abolition instead

of an intensification of the Kantian imperative, a slackening instead of

a tautening of directional energy. The trivial and superficial tendency

towards ideals of “welfare,” “freedom,” “humanity,” the doctrine of the

“greatest happiness of the greatest number,” are mere negations of the

Faustian ethic—a very different matter from the tendency of Epicureanism

towards the ideal of “happiness,” for the condition of happiness was the

actual sum and substance of the Classical ethic. Here precisely is an

instance of sentiments, to all outward appearance much the same, but

meaning in the one case everything and in the other nothing. From this

point of view, we might describe the content of the Classical ethic as

_philanthropy_, a boon conferred by the individual upon himself, his

_soma_. The view has Aristotle on its side, for it is exactly in this

sense that he uses the word φιλάνθρωπος, which the best heads of the

Classicist period, above all Lessing, found so puzzling. Aristotle

describes the effect of the Attic tragedy on the Attic spectator as

philanthropic. Its Peripeteia relieves him from compassion with himself.

A sort of theory of master-morale and slave-morale existed also in the

early Hellenism, in Callicles for example—naturally, under strictly

corporeal-Euclidean postulates. The ideal of the first class is

Alcibiades. He did exactly what at the moment seemed to him best for his

own person, and he is felt to be, and admired as, the type of Classical

Kalokagathia. But Protagoras is still more distinct, with his famous

proposition—essentially ethical in intention—that man (each man for

himself) is the measure of things. That is master-morale in a statuesque

soul.

IV

When Nietzsche wrote down the phrase “transvaluation of all values” for

the first time, the spiritual movement of the centuries in which we are

living found at last its formula. Transvaluation of all values is the

most fundamental character of _every_ civilization. For it is the

beginning of a Civilization that it remoulds all the forms of the

Culture that went before, understands them otherwise, practises them in

a different way. It begets no more, but only reinterprets, and herein

lies the negativeness common to all periods of this character. It

assumes that the genuine act of creation has already occurred, and

merely enters upon an inheritance of big actualities. In the Late-

Classical, we find the event taking place inside Hellenistic-Roman

Stoicism, that is, the long death-struggle of the Apollinian soul. In

the interval from Socrates—who was the spiritual father of the Stoa and

in whom the first signs of inward impoverishment and city-

intellectualism became visible—to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, every

existence-ideal of the old Classical underwent transvaluation. In the

case of India, the transvaluation of Brahman life was complete by the

time of King Asoka (250 B.C.), as we can see by comparing the parts of

the Vedanta put into writing before and after Buddha. And ourselves?

Even now the ethical socialism of the Faustian soul, its fundamental

ethic, as we have seen, is being worked upon by the process of

transvaluation as that soul is walled up in the stone of the great

cities. _Rousseau is the ancestor of this socialism; he stands, like

Socrates and Buddha, as the representative spokesman of a great

Civilization._ Rousseau’s rejection of all great Culture-forms and all

significant conventions, his famous “Return to the state of Nature,” his

practical rationalism, are unmistakable evidences. Each of the three

buried a millennium of spiritual depth. Each proclaimed his gospel to

mankind, but it was to the mankind of the city intelligentsia, which was

tired of the town and the Late Culture, and whose “pure” (i.e.,

soulless) reason longed to be free from them and their authoritative

form and their hardness, from the symbolism with which it was no longer

in living communion and which therefore it detested. The Culture was

annihilated by discussion. If we pass in review the great 19th-Century

names with which we associate the march of this great drama—

Schopenhauer, Hebbel, Wagner, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg—we comprehend

in a glance that which Nietzsche, in a fragmentary preface to his

incomplete master-work, deliberately and correctly called the _Coming of

Nihilism_. Every one of the great Cultures knows it, for it is of deep

necessity inherent in the finale of these mighty organisms. Socrates was

a nihilist, and Buddha. There is an Egyptian or an Arabian or a Chinese

de-souling of the human being, just as there is a Western. This is a

matter not of mere political and economic, nor even of religious and

artistic, transformations, nor of any tangible or factual change

whatsoever, but of the condition of a soul after it has actualized its

possibilities in full. It is easy, but useless, to point to the bigness

of Hellenistic and of modern European achievement. Mass slavery and mass

machine-production, “Progress” and Ataraxia, Alexandrianism and modern

Science, Pergamum and Bayreuth, social conditions as assumed in

Aristotle and as assumed in Marx, are merely symptoms on the historical

surface. Not external life and conduct, not institutions and customs,

but deepest and last things are in question here—the inward

_finishedness_ (Fertigsein) of megalopolitan man, _and_ of the

provincial as well.[436] For the Classical world this condition sets in

with the Roman age; for us it will set in from about the year 2000.

Culture and Civilization—the living body of a soul and the mummy of it.

For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800—on the

one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself,

formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from

Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal,

artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by

the intellect. Culture and Civilization—the organism born of Mother

Earth, and the mechanism proceeding from hardened fabric. Culture-man

lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and amongst bodies and

“facts.” That which the one feels as Destiny the other understands as a

linkage of causes and effects, and thenceforward he is a materialist—in

the sense of the word valid for, and only valid for, Civilization—

whether he wills it or no, and whether Buddhist, Stoic or Socialist

doctrines wear the garb of religion or not.

To Gothic and Doric men, Ionic and Baroque men, the whole vast form-

world of art, religion, custom, state, knowledge, social life was easy.

They could carry it and actualize it without “knowing” it. They had over

the symbolism of the Culture that unstrained mastery that Mozart

possessed in music. Culture is the self-evident. The feeling of

strangeness in these forms, the idea that they are a burden from which

creative freedom requires to be relieved, the impulse to overhaul the

stock in order by the light of reason to turn it to better account, the

fatal imposition of thought upon the inscrutable quality of

creativeness, are all symptoms of a soul that is beginning to tire. Only

the sick man feels his limbs. When men construct an unmetaphysical

religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a “natural law” is set

up against historical law; when, in art, styles are invented in place of

_the_ style that can no longer be borne or mastered; when men conceive

of the State as an “order of society” which not only can be but must be

altered[437]—then it is evident that something has definitely broken

down. The Cosmopolis itself, the supreme Inorganic, is there, settled in

the midst of the Culture-landscape, whose men it is uprooting, drawing

into itself and using up.

Scientific worlds are superficial worlds, practical, soulless and purely

extensive worlds. The ideas of Buddhism, of Stoicism, and of Socialism

alike rest upon them.[438] Life is no longer to be lived as something

self-evident—hardly a matter of consciousness, let alone choice—or to be

accepted as God-willed destiny, but is to be treated as a problem,

presented as the intellect sees it, judged by “utilitarian” or

“rational” criteria. This, at the back, is what all three mean. The

brain rules, because the soul abdicates. Culture-men live unconsciously,

Civilization-men consciously. The Megalopolis—sceptical, practical,

artificial—_alone_ represents Civilization to-day. The soil-peasantry

before its gates does not count. The “People” means the city-people, an

inorganic mass, something fluctuating. The peasant is _not_ democratic—

this again being a notion belonging to mechanical and urban

existence[439]—and he is therefore overlooked, despised, detested. With

the vanishing of the old “estates”—gentry and priesthood—he is the only

organic man, the sole relic of the Early Culture. There is no place for

him either in Stoic or in Socialistic thought.

Thus the Faust of the First Part of the tragedy, the passionate student

of solitary midnights, is logically the progenitor of the Faust of the

Second Part and the new century, the type of a purely practical, far-

seeing, outward-directed activity. In him Goethe presaged,

psychologically, the whole future of West Europe. He is Civilization in

the place of Culture, external mechanism in place of internal organism,

intellect as the petrifact of extinct soul. As the Faust of the

beginning is to the Faust of the end, so the Hellene of Pericles’s age

is to the Roman of Cæsar’s.

V

So long as the man of a Culture that is approaching its fulfilment still

continues to live straight before him naturally and unquestioningly, his

life has a settled conduct. This is the _instinctive_ morale, which may

disguise itself in a thousand controversial forms but which he himself

does not controvert, because he _has_ it. As soon as Life is fatigued,

as soon as a man is put on to the artificial soil of great cities—which

are intellectual worlds to themselves—and needs a theory in which

suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into a _problem_.

Culture-morale is that which a man has, Civilization-morale that which

he looks for. The one is too deep to be exhaustible by logical means,

the other is a _function_ of logic. As late as Plato and as late as Kant

ethics are still mere dialectics, a game with concepts, or the rounding-

off of a metaphysical system, something that at bottom would not be

thought really necessary. The Categorical Imperative is merely an

abstract statement of what, for Kant, was not in question at all. But

with Zeno and with Schopenhauer this is no longer so. It had become

necessary to discover, to invent or to squeeze into form, as a rule of

being, that which was no longer anchored in instinct; and at this point

therefore begin the civilized ethics that are no longer the reflection

of Life but the reflection of Knowledge upon Life. One feels that there

is something artificial, soulless, half-true in all these _considered_

systems that fill the first centuries of all the Civilizations. They are

not those profound and almost unearthly creations that are worthy to

rank with the great arts. All metaphysic of the high style, all pure

intuition, vanishes before the one need that has suddenly made itself

felt, the need of a _practical_ morale for the governance of a Life that

can no longer govern itself. Up to Kant, up to Aristotle, up to the Yoga

and Vedanta doctrines, philosophy had been a sequence of grand world-

systems in which _formal_ ethics occupied a very modest place. But now

it became “moral philosophy” with a metaphysic as background. The

enthusiasm of epistemology had to give way to hard practical needs.

Socialism, Stoicism and Buddhism are philosophies of this type.

To look at the world, no longer from the heights as Æschylus, Plato,

Dante and Goethe did, but from the standpoint of oppressive actualities

is _to exchange the bird’s perspective for the frog’s_. This exchange is

a fair measure of the fall from Culture to Civilization. Every ethic is

a formulation of a soul’s view of its destiny—heroic or practical, grand

or commonplace, manly or old-manly. I distinguish, therefore, between a

_tragic_ and a _plebeian_ morale. The tragic morale of a Culture knows

and grasps the heaviness of being, but it draws therefrom the feeling of

pride that enables the burden to be borne. So Æschylus, Shakespeare, the

thinkers of the Brahman philosophy felt it; so Dante and German

Catholicism. It is heard in the stern battle-hymn of Lutheranism “Ein’

feste Burg ist unser Gott,” and it echoes still in the Marseillaise. The

plebeian morale of Epicurus and the Stoa, the sects of Buddha’s day and

the 19th Century made rather battle-plans for the outmanœuvring of

destiny. What Æschylus did in grand, the Stoa did in little—no more

fullness, but poverty, coldness and emptiness of life—and all that Roman

bigness achieved was to intensify this same intellectual chill and void.

And there is the same relation between the ethical passion of the great

Baroque masters—Shakespeare, Bach, Kant, Goethe—the manly will to

_inward mastery_ of natural things that it felt to be far below itself,

and modern Europe’s state-provision, humanity-ideals, world-peace,

“greatest happiness of greatest number,” etc., which express the will to

an _outward clearance from the path_ of things that are on the same

level. This, no less than the other, is a manifestation of the will-to-

power, as against the Classical endurance of the inevitable, but the

fact remains that material bigness is not the same as metaphysical

majesty of achievement. The former lacks depth, lacks that which former

men had called God. The Faustian world-feeling of _deed_, which had been

efficient in every great man from the Hohenstaufen and the Welf to

Frederick the Great, Goethe and Napoleon, smoothes itself down to a

philosophy of _work_. Whether such a philosophy attacks or defends work

does not affect its inward value. The Culture-idea of Deed and the

Civilization-idea of Work are related as the attitude of Æschylus’s

Prometheus and that of Diogenes. The one suffers and bears, the other

lolls. It was _deeds_ of science that Galileo, Kepler and Newton

performed, but it is _scientific work_ that the modern physicist carries

out. And, in spite of all the great words from Schopenhauer to Shaw, it

is the plebeian morale of every day and “sound human reason” that is the

basis of all our expositions and discussions of Life.

VI

Each Culture, further, has _its own mode of spiritual extinction_, which

is that which follows of necessity from its life as a whole. And hence

Buddhism, Stoicism and Socialism are morphologically equivalent as end-

phenomena.

For even Buddhism is such. Hitherto the deeper meaning of it has always

been misunderstood. It was _not_ a Puritan movement like, for instance,

Islamism and Jansenism, _not_ a Reformation as the Dionysiac wave was

for the Apollinian world, and, quite generally, _not_ a religion like

the religions of the Vedas or the religion of the Apostle Paul,[440] but

a final and purely practical world-sentiment of tired megalopolitans who

had a closed-off Culture behind them and no future before them. It was

the basic feeling of the Indian Civilization and as such both equivalent

to and “contemporary” with Stoicism and Socialism. The quintessence of

this thoroughly worldly and unmetaphysical thought is to be found in the

famous sermon near Benares, the Four Noble Truths that won the prince-

philosopher his first adherents.[441] Its roots lay in the rationalist-

atheistic Sankhya philosophy, the world-view of which it tacitly

accepts, just as the social ethic of the 19th Century comes from the

Sensualism and Materialism of the 18th and the Stoa (in spite of its

superficial exploitation of Heraclitus) is derived from Protagoras and

the Sophists. In each case it is the all-power of Reason that is the

starting-point from which to discuss morale, and religion (in the sense

of belief in anything metaphysical) does not enter into the matter.

Nothing could be more irreligious than these systems in their original

forms—and it is these, and not derivatives of them belonging to later

stages of the Civilizations, that concern us here.

Buddhism rejects all speculation about God and the cosmic problems; only

self and the conduct of actual life are important to it. And it

definitely did not recognize a soul. The standpoint of the Indian

psychologist of early Buddhism was that of the Western psychologist and

the Western “Socialist” of to-day, who reduce the inward man to a bundle

of sensations and an aggregation of electrochemical energies. The

teacher Nagasena tells King Milinda[442] that the parts of the car in

which he is journeying are not the car itself, that “car” is only a word

and that so also is the soul. The spiritual elements are designated

_Skandhas_, groups, and are impermanent. Here is complete correspondence

with the ideas of association-psychology, and in fact the doctrines of

Buddha contain much materialism.[443] As the Stoic appropriated

Heraclitus’s idea of Logos and flattened it to a materialist sense, as

the Socialism based on Darwin has mechanicalized (with the aid of Hegel)

Goethe’s deep idea of development, so Buddhism treated the Brahman

notion of _Karma_, the idea (hardly achievable in our thought) of a

being actively completing itself. Often enough it regarded this quite

materially as a world-stuff under transformation.

What we have before us is three forms of Nihilism, using the word in

Nietzsche’s sense. In each case, the ideals of yesterday, the religious

and artistic and political forms that have grown up through the

centuries, are undone; yet even in this last act, this self-repudiation,

each several Culture employs the prime-symbol of its whole existence.

The Faustian nihilist—Ibsen or Nietzsche, Marx or Wagner—shatters the

ideals. The Apollinian—Epicurus or Antisthenes or Zeno—watches them

crumble before his eyes. And the Indian withdraws from their presence

into himself. Stoicism is directed to _individual self-management_, to

statuesque and purely present being, without regard to future or past or

neighbour. Socialism is the dynamic treatment of the same theme; it is

defensive like Stoicism, but what it defends is not the pose but the

working-out of the life; and more, it is offensive-defensive, for with a

powerful thrust into distance it spreads itself into all future and over

all mankind, which shall be brought under one single regimen. Buddhism,

which only a mere dabbler in religious research could compare with

Christianity,[444] is hardly reproducible in words of the Western

languages. But it is permissible to speak of a Stoic Nirvana and point

to the figure of Diogenes, and even the notion of a Socialist Nirvana

has its justification in so far that European weariness covers its

flight from the struggle for existence under catchwords of world-peace,

Humanity and brotherhood of Man. Still, none of this comes anywhere near

the strange profundity of the Buddhist conception of Nirvana. It would

seem as though the soul of an old Culture, when from its last

refinements it is passing into death, clings, as it were, jealously to

the property that is most essentially its own, to its form-content and

the innate prime-symbol. There is nothing in Buddhism that could be

regarded as “Christian,” nothing in Stoicism that is to be found in the

Islam of A.D. 1000, nothing that Confucius shares with Socialism. The

phrase “si duo faciunt idem, non est idem”—which ought to appear at the

head of every historical work that deals with living and uniquely-

occurring Becomings and not with logically, causally and numerically

comprehensible Becomes—is specially applicable to these final

expressions of Culture-movements. In all Civilizations being ceases to

be suffused with soul and comes to be suffused with intellect, but in

each several Civilization the intellect is of a particular structure and

subject to the form-language of a particular symbolism. And just because

of all this individualness of the Being which, working in the

unconscious, fashions the last-phase creations on the historical

surface, relationship of the instances to one another _in point of

historical position_ becomes decisively important. What they bring to

expression is different in each case, but the fact that they bring it to

expression _so_ marks them as “contemporary” with one another. The

Buddhistic abnegation of full resolute life has a Stoic flavour, the

Stoic abnegation of the same a Buddhistic flavour. Allusion has already

been made to the affinity between the Katharsis of the Attic drama and

the Nirvana-idea. One’s feeling is that ethical Socialism, although a

century has already been given to its development, has not yet reached

the clear hard resigned form of its own that it will finally possess.

Probably the next decades will impart to it the ripe formulation that

Chrysippus imparted to the Stoa. But even now there is a look of the

Stoa in Socialism, when it is that of the higher order and the narrower

appeal, when its tendency is the Roman-Prussian and entirely unpopular

tendency to self-discipline and self-renunciation from sense of great

duty; and a look of Buddhism in its contempt for momentary ease and

_carpe diem_. And, on the other hand, it has unmistakably the Epicurean

look in that mode of it which alone makes it effective downward and

outward as a popular ideal, in which it is a hedonism (not indeed of

each-for-himself, but) of individuals in the name of all.

Every soul has religion, which is only another word for its existence.

All living forms in which it expresses itself—all arts, doctrines,

customs, all metaphysical and mathematical form-worlds, all ornament,

every column and verse and idea—are ultimately religious, and _must_ be

so. But from the setting-in of Civilization they _cannot_ be so any

longer. As the essence of every Culture is religion, so—and

_consequently_—the essence of every Civilization is irreligion—the two

words are synonymous. He who cannot feel this in the creativeness of

Manet as against Velasquez, of Wagner as against Haydn, of Lysippus as

against Phidias, of Theocritus as against Pindar, knows not what the

best means in art. Even Rococo in its worldliest creations is still

religious. But the buildings of Rome, even when they are temples, are

irreligious; the one touch of religious architecture that there was in

old Rome was the intrusive Magian-souled Pantheon, first of the mosques.

The megalopolis itself, as against the old Culture-towns—Alexandria as

against Athens, Paris as against Bruges, Berlin as against Nürnberg—is

irreligious[445] down to the last detail, down to the look of the

streets, the dry intelligence of the faces.[446] And, correspondingly,

the ethical sentiments belonging to the form-language of the megalopolis

are irreligious and soulless also. Socialism is the Faustian world-

feeling become irreligious; “Christianity,” so called (and qualified

even as “true Christianity”), is always on the lips of the English

Socialist, to whom it seems to be something in the nature of a “dogma-

less morale.” Stoicism also was irreligious as compared with Orphic

religion, and Buddhism as compared with Vedic, and it is of no

importance whatever that the Roman Stoic approved and conformed to

Emperor-worship, that the later Buddhist sincerely denied his atheism,

or that the Socialist calls himself an earnest Freethinker or even goes

on believing in God.

It is this extinction of living inner religiousness, which gradually

tells upon even the most insignificant element in a man’s being, that

becomes phenomenal in the historical world-picture at the turn from the

Culture to the Civilization, the _Climacteric_ of the Culture, as I have

already called it, the time of change in which a mankind loses its

spiritual fruitfulness for ever, and building takes the place of

begetting. Unfruitfulness—understanding the word in all its direct

seriousness—marks the brain-man of the megalopolis, as the sign of

fulfilled destiny, and it is one of the most impressive facts of

historical symbolism that the change manifests itself not only in the

extinction of great art, of great courtesy, of great formal thought, of

the great style in all things, but also quite carnally in the

childlessness and “race-suicide” of the civilized and rootless strata, a

phenomenon not peculiar to ourselves but already observed and deplored—

and of course not remedied—in Imperial Rome and Imperial China.[447]

VII

As to the living representatives of these new and purely intellectual

creations, the men of the “New Order” upon whom every decline-time

founds such hopes, we cannot be in any doubt. They are the fluid

megalopolitan Populace, the rootless city-mass (οἱ πολλοί, as Athens

called it) that has replaced the People, the Culture-folk that was

sprung from the soil and peasantlike even when it lived in towns. They

are the market-place loungers of Alexandria and Rome, the newspaper-

readers of our own corresponding time; the “educated” man who then and

now makes a cult of intellectual mediocrity and a church of

advertisement;[448] the man of the theatres and places of amusement, of

sport and “best-sellers.” It is this late-appearing mass and _not_

“mankind” that is the object of Stoic and Socialist propaganda, and one

could match it with equivalent phenomena in the Egyptian New Empire,

Buddhist India and Confucian China.