Chapter VIII: Music and Plastic (2)

_Leonardo discovered the circulation of the blood._ It was no Renaissance spirit that brought him to that—on the contrary, the whole course of his thought took him right outside the conceptions of his age. Neither Michelangelo nor Raphael could have done it, for their painter’s anatomy looks only at the form and position, not the function, of the parts. In mathematical language, it is stereometry as against analysis. Did not the Renaissance find it quite sufficient preparation for great painted scenes to study _corpses_, suppressing the becoming in favour of the become and calling on the dead to make Classical ἀταραξία accessible to Northern creative energy? But Leonardo investigated the _life_ in the body as Rubens did, and not the body-in-itself as Signorelli did. His discovery was contemporary with that of Columbus, and the two have a deep affinity, for they signify the victory of the infinite over the material limitedness of the tangibly present. Would a Greek ever have concerned himself with questions like theirs? The Greeks inquired as little into the interior of their own organization as they sought for the sources of the Nile; these were problems that might have jeopardized the Euclidean constitution of their being. The Baroque, on the other hand, is truly the _period of the great discoveries_. The very word “discovery” has something bluntly un-Classical in it. Classical man took good care not to take the cover, the material wrapping, off anything cosmic, but to do _just this_ is the most characteristic impulse of a Faustian nature. The discoveries of the New World, the circulation of the blood, and the Copernican universe were achieved almost simultaneously and, at bottom, are completely equivalent; and the discovery of gunpowder (that is, the _long-range weapon_[358]) and of printing (the _long-range script_) were little earlier.

Leonardo was a discoverer through-and-through, and discovery was the sum in one word of his whole nature. Brush, chisel, dissecting-knife, pencil for calculating and compasses for drawing—all were for him of equal importance. They were for him what the Mariner’s Compass was for Columbus. When Raphael completes with colour the sharp-drawn outline he asserts the corporeal phenomenon in every brush-stroke, but Leonardo, in his red-chalk sketches and his backgrounds reveals aerial secrets with every line. He was the first, too, who set his mind to work on aviation. To fly, to free one’s self from earth, to lose one’s self in the expanse of the universe—is not this ambition Faustian in the highest degree? Is it not in fact the fulfilment of our dreams? Has it never been observed how the Christian legend became in Western painting a glorious transfiguration of this motive? All the pictured ascents into heaven and falls into hell, the divine figures floating above the clouds, the blissful detachment of angels and saints, the insistent emphasis upon freedom from earth’s heaviness, are emblems of soul-flight, peculiar to the art of the Faustian, utterly remote from that of the Byzantine.

V

The transformation of Renaissance fresco-painting into Venetian oil- painting is a matter of _spiritual history_. We have to appreciate very delicate and subtle traits to discern the process of change. In almost every picture from Masaccio’s “Peter and the Tribute Money” in the Brancacci Chapel, through the soaring background that Piero della Francesca gave to the figures of Federigo and Battista of Urbino,[359] to Perugino’s “Christ Giving the Keys,”[360] the fresco manner is contending with the invasive new form, though Raphael’s artistic development in the course of his work on the Vatican “stanze” is almost the only case in which we can see comprehensively the change that is going on. The Florentine fresco aims at actuality in individual things and produces a sum of such things in an architectonic setting. Oil- painting, on the other hand, sees and handles with ever-growing sureness extension as a whole, and treats all objects only as representatives thereof. The Faustian world-feeling created the new technique that it wanted. It rejected the drawing style, as, from Oresme’s time, co- ordinate geometry rejected it. It transformed the linear perspective associated with the architectural motive into a purely aerial perspective rendered by imponderable gradations of tone. But the condition of Renaissance art generally—its inability either to understand its own deeper tendencies or to make good its anti-Gothic principle—made the transition an obscure and difficult process. Each artist followed the trend in a way of his own. One painted in oils on the bare wall, and thereby condemned his work to perish (Leonardo’s “Last Supper”). Another painted pictures as if they were wall-frescoes (Michelangelo). Some ventured, some guessed, some fell by the way, some shied. It was, as always, the struggle between hand and soul, between eye and instrument, between the form willed by the artist and the form willed by time—the struggle between Plastic and Music.

In the light of this, we can at last understand that gigantic effort of Leonardo, the cartoon of the “Adoration of the Magi” in the Uffizi. It is the grandest piece of artistic daring in the Renaissance. Nothing like it was even imagined till Rembrandt. Transcending all optical measures, everything then called drawing, outline, composition and grouping, he pushes fearlessly on to challenge eternal space; everything bodily floats like the planets in the Copernican system and the tones of a Bach organ-fugue in the dimness of old churches. In the technical possibilities of the time, so dynamic an image of distance could only remain a torso.

In the Sistine Madonna, which is the very summation of the Renaissance, Raphael causes the outline to draw into itself the entire content of the work. It is the _last grand line_ of Western art. Already (and it is this that makes Raphael the least intelligible of Renaissance artists) convention is strained almost to breaking-point by the intensity of inward feeling. He did not indeed wrestle with problems. He had not even an inkling of them. But he brought art to the brink where it could no longer shirk the plunge, and he lived to achieve the utmost possibilities _within_ its form-world. The ordinary person who thinks him flat simply fails to realize _what is going on_ in his scheme. Look again, reader, at the hackneyed Madonna. Have you ever noticed the little dawn-cloudlets, transforming themselves into baby heads, that surround the soaring central figure?—these are the multitudes of the unborn that the Madonna is drawing into Life. We meet these light clouds again, with the same meaning, in the wondrous finale of Faust II.[361] It is just that which does _not_ charm in Raphael, his sublime unpopularity, that betrays the inner victory over the Renaissance- feeling in him. We do understand Perugino at a glance, we merely think we understand Raphael. His very line—that drawing-character that at first sight seems so Classical—is something that floats in space, supernal, Beethoven-like. In this work Raphael is the least obvious of all artists, less obvious even than Michelangelo, whose intention is manifest through all the fragmentariness of his works. In Fra Bartolommeo the material bounding-line is still entirely dominant. It is all foreground, and the whole sense of the work is exhaustively rendered by the definition of bodies. But in Raphael line has become silent, expectant, veiled, waiting in an extremity of tension for dissolution into the infinite, into space and music.

Leonardo _is_ already over the frontier. The Adoration of the Magi _is_ already music. It is not a casual but a deeply significant circumstance that in this work, as also in his St. Jerome,[362] he did not go beyond the brown underpainting, the “Rembrandt” stage, the atmospheric brown of the following century. For him, entire fullness and clearness of intention was attained with the work in that state, and one step into the domain of colour (for that domain was still under the metaphysical limitations of the fresco style) would have destroyed the soul of what he had created. Feeling, in all its depth, the symbolism of which oil- painting was later to be the vehicle, he was afraid of the fresco “slickness” (Fertigkeit) that must have ruined his idea. His studies for this painting show how close was his relation to the Rembrandt _etching_—an art whose home was also that of the art (unknown to Florence) of counterpoint. Only it was reserved for the Venetians, who stood outside the Florentine conventions, to achieve what he strove for here, to fashion a colour-world subserving space instead of things.

For this reason, too, Leonardo (after innumerable attempts) decided to leave the Christ-head in the “Last Supper” unfinished. The men of his time were not even ripe for portraiture as Rembrandt understood the word, the magistral building-up of a soul-history out of dynamic brush- strokes and lights and tones. But only Leonardo was great enough to experience this limitation as a Destiny. Others merely set themselves to paint heads (in the modes prescribed by their respective schools) but Leonardo—the first, here, to make the _hands_ also speak, and that with a physiognomic maestria—had an infinitely wider purpose. His soul was lost afar in the future, though his mortal part, his eye and hand, obeyed the spirit of the age. Assuredly he was the freest of the three great ones. From much of that which Michelangelo’s powerful nature vainly wrestled with, he was already remote. Problems of chemistry, geometrical analysis, physiology (Goethe’s “living Nature” was also Leonardo’s), the technique of fire-arms—all were familiar to him. Deeper than Dürer, bolder than Titian, more comprehensive than any single man of his time, he was essentially the _artist of torsos_.[363] Michelangelo the belated sculptor was so, too, but in another sense, while in Goethe’s day that which had been unattainable for the painter of the Last Supper had already been reached and overpassed. Michelangelo strove to force life once more into a dead form-world, Leonardo felt a new form-world in the future, Goethe divined that there could be no new form-worlds more. Between the first and the last of these men lie the ripe centuries of the Faustian Culture.

VI

It remains now to deal with the major characters of Western art during the phase of accomplishment. In this we may observe the deep necessity of all history at work. We have learned to understand arts as prime phenomena. We no longer look to the operations of cause and effect to give unity to the story of development. Instead, we have set up the idea of the _Destiny_ of an art, and admitted arts to be _organisms_ of the Culture, organisms which are born, ripen, age and _for ever_ die.

When the Renaissance—its last illusion—closes, the Western soul has come to the ripe consciousness of its own strength and possibilities. It has _chosen_ its arts. As a “late” period, the Baroque knows, just as the Ionic had known, what the form-language of its arts has to mean. From being a philosophical religion, art has to be a religious philosophy. Great masters come forward in the place of anonymous schools. At the culmination of every Culture we have the spectacle of a splendid _group of great arts_, well-ordered and linked as a unit by the unity of the prime symbol underlying them all. The _Apollinian group_, to which belong vase-painting, fresco relief, the architecture of ranked columns, the Attic drama and the dance, centres upon the naked statue. The _Faustian group_ forms itself round the ideal of pure spatial infinity and its centre of gravity is instrumental music. From this centre, fine threads radiate out into all spiritual form-languages and weave our infinitesimal mathematic, our dynamic physics, the propaganda of Jesuits and the power of our famous slogan of “progress,” the modern machine- technique, credit economics and the dynastic-diplomatic State—all into one immense totality of spiritual expression. Beginning with the inward rhythm of the cathedral and ending with Wagner’s “Tristan” and “Parsifal,” the artistic conquest of endless space deploys its full forces from about 1550. Plastic is dying with Michelangelo in Rome just when planimetry, dominant hitherto, is becoming the least important branch of our mathematic. At the same time, Venice is producing Zarlino’s theories of harmony and counterpoint (1558) and the practical method of the _basso continuo_—a perspective and an analysis of the world of sound—and this music’s sister, the Northern mathematic of the Calculus, is beginning to mount.

Oil-painting and instrumental music, the arts of space, are now entering into their kingdom. So also—_consequently_, we say—the two essentially material and Euclidean arts of the Classical Culture, viz., the all- round statue and the strictly planar fresco, attain to their primacy at the corresponding date of c. 600 B.C. And further, in the one and in the other case, it is the painting that ripens _first_. For in either kind painting on the plane is a less ambitious and more accessible art than modelling in solid or composing in immaterial extension. The period 1550-1650 belongs as completely to oil-painting as fresco and vase- painting belong to the 6th Century B.C. The symbolism of space and of body, expressed in the one case by perspective and in the other by proportion, are only indicated and not immediately displayed by pictorial arts. These arts, which can only in each case produce their respective prime-symbols (i.e., their possibilities in the extended) as illusions on a painted surface, are capable indeed of denoting and evoking the ideal—Classical or Western, as the case may be—but they are not capable of _fulfilling_ it; they appear therefore in the path of the “late” Culture as the ledges before the last summit. The nearer the grand style comes to its point of fulfilment, the more decisive the tendency to an ornamental language of inexorable clarity of symbolism. The group of great arts is further simplified. About 1670, just when Newton and Leibniz were discovering the Differential Calculus, oil- painting had reached the limit of its possibilities. Its last great masters were dead or dying—Velasquez 1660, Poussin 1665, Franz Hals 1666, Rembrandt 1669, Vermeer 1675, Murillo, Ruysdael and Claude Lorrain 1682—and one has only to name the few successors of any importance (Watteau, Hogarth, Tiepolo) to feel at once the descent, the end, of an art. In this time also, the great forms of _pictorial_ music expired. Heinrich Schütz died in 1672, Carissimi in 1674, and Purcell in 1695—the last great masters of the Cantata, who had played around image-themes with infinite variety of vocal and instrumental colour and had painted veritable pictures of fine landscape and grand legend-scene. With Lully (1687) the heart of the heroic Baroque opera of Monteverde ceased to beat. It was the same with the old “classical” sonata for orchestra, organ and string trio, which was a development of image-themes in the fugal style. Thereafter, the forms become those of final maturity, the concerto grosso, the suite, and the three-part sonata for solo instruments. Music frees itself from the relics of bodiliness inherent in the human voice and becomes absolute. The theme is no longer an image but a pregnant _function_, existent only in and by its own evolution, for the fugal style as Bach practised it can only be regarded as a ceaseless process of differentiation and integration. The victory of pure music over painting stands recorded in the Passions which Heinrich Schütz composed in his old age—the visible dawn of the new form- language—in the sonatas of Dall’Abaco and Corelli, the oratorios of Händel and the Baroque polyphony of Bach. Henceforth this music is _the_ Faustian art, and Watteau may fairly be described as a painter-Couperin, Tiepolo as a painter-Händel.

In the Classical world the corresponding change occurred about 460, when Polygnotus, the last of the great fresco-painters, ceded the inheritance of the grand style to Polycletus and free sculpture in the round. Till then—as late even as Polygnotus’s contemporaries Myron and the masters of the Olympia pediment—the form-language of a purely planar art had dominated that of statuary also; for, just as painting had developed its form more and more towards the ideal of the _silhouette of colour with internal drawing superposed_—to such an extent that at last there was almost no difference between the painted relief and the flat picture—so also the sculptor had regarded the frontal _outline_ as it presented itself to the beholder as the true symbol of the Ethos, the cultural type, that he meant his figure to represent. The field of the temple- pediment constitutes a _picture_; seen from the proper distance, it makes exactly the same impression as its contemporary the red-figure vase-painting. In Polycletus’s generation the monumental wall-painting gives place to the board-picture, the “picture” proper, in tempera or wax—a clear indication that the great style has gone to reside elsewhere. The ambition of Apollodorus’s shadow painting was not in any sense what we call chiaroscuro and atmosphere, but sheer _modelling in the round_ in the sculptor’s sense; and of Zeuxis Aristotle says expressly that his work lacked “Ethos.” Thus, this newer Classical painting with its cleverness and human charm is the equivalent of our 18th-Century work. Both lacked the inner greatness and both tried by force of virtuosity to speak in the language of that single and final Art which in each case stood for ornamentation in the higher sense. Hence Polycletus and Phidias aline themselves with Bach and Händel; as the Western masters liberated strict musical form from the executive methods of the Painting, so the Greek masters finally delivered the statue from the associations of the Relief.

And with this full plastic and this full music the two Cultures reach their respective ends. A pure symbolism of mathematical rigour had become possible. Polycletus could produce his “canon” of the proportions of the human body, and his contemporary Bach the “Kunst der Fuge” and “Wohltemperiertes Klavier.” In the two arts that ensued, we have the last perfection of achievement that pure form saturated with meaning can give. Compare the tone-body of Faustian instrumental music, and within that system again the body of the strings (in Bach, too, the virtual unity of the winds), with the bodies of Attic statuary. Compare the meaning of the word “figure” to Haydn with its meaning to Praxiteles. In the one case it is the figure of a rhythmic motive in a web of voices, in the other the figure of an athlete. But in both cases the notion comes from mathematics and it is made plain that the aim thus finally attained is a union of the artistic and the mathematical spirit, for analysis like music, and Euclidean geometry like plastic, have both come to full comprehension of their tasks and the ultimate meaning of their respective number-languages. The mathematics of beauty and the beauty of mathematics are henceforth inseparable. The unending space of tone and the all-round body of marble or bronze are _immediate_ interpretations of the extended. They belong to number-as-relation and to number-as- measure. In fresco and in oil-painting, in the laws of proportion and those of perspective, the mathematical is only indicated, but the two final arts _are_ mathematics, and on these peaks Apollinian art and Faustian art are seen entire.

With the exit of fresco and oil-painting, the great masters of absolute plastic and absolute music file on to the stage, man after man. Polycletus is followed by Phidias, Pæonius, Alcamenes, Scopas, Praxiteles, Lysippus. Behind Bach and Händel come Gluck, Stamitz, the younger Bachs, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—in their hands an armoury of wonderful and now long-forgotten instruments, a whole magician’s world created by the discovering and inventing spirit of the West in the hope of getting more and more tones and timbres for the service and enhancement of musical expression—in their winds an abundance of grand, solemn, ornate, dainty, ironic, laughing and sobbing forms of perfectly regular structure, forms that no one now understands. In those days, in 18th-Century Germany especially, there was actually and effectively a _Culture of Music_ that suffused all Life. Its type was Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister Kreisler. To-day it is hardly even a memory.

And with the 18th Century, too, architecture died at last, submerged and choked in the music of Rococo. On that last wonderful fragile growth of the Western architecture criticism has blown mercilessly, failing to realize that its origin is in the spirit of the fugue and that its non- proportion and non-form, its evanescence and instability and sparkle, its destruction of surface and visual order, are nothing else than a victory of tones and melodies over lines and walls, the triumph of pure space over material, of absolute becoming over the become. They are no longer buildings, these abbeys and castles and churches with their flowing façades and porches and “gingerbread” courts and their splendid staircases, galleries, salons and cabinets; they are sonatas, minuets, madrigals in stone, chamber-music in stucco, marble, ivory and fine woods, cantilene of volutes and cartouches, cadences of fliers and copings. The Dresden Zwinger is the most completely musical piece in all the world’s architecture, with an ornamentation like the tone of an old violin, an _allegro fugitivo_ for small orchestra.

Germany produced the great musicians _and therefore_ also the great architects of this century (Poppelmann, Schlüter, Bähr, Naumann, Fischer von Erlach, Dinzenhofer). In oil-painting she played no part at all: in instrumental music, on the contrary, hers was the principal rôle.

VII

There is a word, “Impressionism,” which only came into general use in Manet’s time (and then, originally, as a word of contempt like Baroque and Rococo) but very happily summarizes the special quality of the Faustian way of art that has evolved from oil-painting. But, as we ordinarily speak of it, the idea has neither the width nor the depth of meaning that it ought to have: we regard it as a sequel to or derivative of the old age of an art which, in fact, belongs to it entirely and from first to last. What is the imitation of an "impression"? Something purely Western, something related to the idea of Baroque and even to the unconscious purposes of Gothic architecture and diametrically opposed to the deliberate aims of the Renaissance. Does it not signify the tendency—the deeply-necessary tendency of a waking consciousness to feel pure endless space as _the_ supreme and unqualified actuality, and all sense-images as secondary and conditioned actualities "within it"? A tendency that can manifest itself in artistic creations, but has a thousand other outlets besides. Does not Kant’s formula "space as _a priori_ form of perception" sound like a slogan for the whole movement that began with Leonardo? Impressionism is the inverse of the Euclidean world-feeling. It tries to get as far as possible from the language of plastic and as near as possible to that of music. The effect that is made upon us by things that receive and reflect light is made not because the things _are_ there but as though they “in themselves” _are not_ there. The things are not even bodies, but light-resistances in space, and their illusive density is to be unmasked by the brush-stroke. What is received and rendered is the _impression_ of such resistances, which are tacitly evaluated as simple functions of a transcendent extension. The artist’s inner eye penetrates the body, breaks the spell of its material bounding surfaces and sacrifices it to the majesty of Space. And with this impression, under its influence, he feels an endless _movement-quality_ in the sensuous element that is in utter contrast to the statuesque “Ataraxia” of the fresco. Therefore, there was not and could not be any Hellenic impressionism; if there is one art that _must_ exclude it on principle, it is Classical sculpture.

Impressionism is the comprehensive expression of a world-feeling, and it must obviously therefore permeate the whole physiognomy of our “Late” Culture. There is an impressionistic mathematic, which frankly and with intent transcends all optical limitations. It is Analysis, as developed after Newton and Leibniz, and to it belong the visionary images of number-“bodies,” aggregates, and the multidimensional geometry. There is again an impressionistic physics which “sees” in lieu of bodies systems of mass-points—units that are evidently no more than constant relations between variable efficients. There are impressionistic ethics, tragedy, and logic, and even (in Pietism) an impressionistic Christianity.

Be the artist painter or musician, his art consists in creating with a few strokes or spots or tones an image of inexhaustible content, a microcosm meet for the eyes or ears of Faustian man; that is, in laying the actuality of infinite space under enchantment by fleeting and incorporeal indications of something objective which, so to say, forces that actuality to become phenomenal. The daring of these arts of moving the immobile has no parallel. Right from the later work of Titian to Corot and Menzel, matter quivers and flows like a solution under the mysterious pressure of brush-stroke and broken colours and lights. It was in pursuit of the same object that Baroque music became “thematic” instead of melodic and—reinforcing the “theme” with every expedient of harmonic charm, instrumental colour, rhythm, and tempo—developed the tone-picture from the imitative piece of Titian’s day to the leitmotiv- fabric of Wagner, and captured a whole new world of feeling and experience. When German music was at its culmination, this art penetrated also into lyric poetry (German lyric, that is, for in French it is impossible) and gave rise to a whole series of tiny masterpieces, from Goethe’s “Urfaust” to Hölderlin’s last poems—passages of a few lines apiece, which have never yet been noticed, let alone collected, but include nevertheless whole worlds of experience and feeling. On a small scale, it continually repeats the achievements of Copernicus and Columbus. No other Culture possesses an ornament-language of such dynamical impressiveness relatively to the means it employs. Every point or stroke of colour, every scarce-audible tone releases some surprising charm and continually feeds the imagination with fresh elements of space-creating energy. In Masaccio and Piero della Francesca we have _actual bodies_ bathed in air. Then Leonardo, the first, discovers the transitions of _atmospheric_ light and dark, the soft edges, the outlines that merge in the depth, the domains of light and shade in which the individual figures are inseparably involved. Finally, in Rembrandt, objects dissolve into mere coloured impressions, and forms lose their specific humanness and become collocations of strokes and patches that tell as elements of a passionate depth-rhythm. Distance, so treated, comes to signify Future, for what Impressionism seizes and holds is by hypothesis a unique and never-recurring instant, not a landscape _in being_ but a fleeting moment of the _history_ thereof. Just as in a Rembrandt portrait it is not the anatomical relief of the head that is rendered, but the _second visage_ in it that is confessed; just as the art of his brush-stroke captures not the eye but the look, not the brow but the experience, not the lips but the sensuousness; so also the impressionist picture in general presents to the beholder not the Nature of the foreground but again a _second visage_, the look and soul of the landscape. Whether we take the Catholic-heroic landscape of Claude Lorrain, the “paysage intime” of Corot, the sea and river-banks and villages of Cuyp and Van Goyen, we find always a portrait in the physiognomic sense, something uniquely-occurring, unforeseen, brought to light for the first and last time. In this love of the character and physiognomy in landscape—just the motive that was unthinkable in fresco art and permanently barred to the Classical—the art of portraiture widens from the immediately human to the mediately human, to the representation of the world as a part of the ego or the self-world in which the painter paints himself and the beholder sees himself. For the expansion of Nature into Distance reflects a _Destiny_. In this art of tragic, daemonic, laughing and weeping landscapes there is something of which the man of another Culture has no idea and for which he has no organ. Anyone who in the presence of this form-world talks of Hellenistic illusion-painting must be unable to distinguish between an ornamentation of the highest order and a soulless imitation, an ape- mimicry of the obvious. If Lysippus said (as Pliny tells us he said) that he represented men as they appeared to him, his ambition was that of a child, of a layman, of a savage, not that of an artist. The great style, the meaning, the deep necessity, are absent; even the cave- dwellers of the stone age painted thus. In reality, the Hellenistic painters could do more when they chose. Even so late, the wall-paintings of Pompeii and the “Odyssey” landscapes in Rome contain a _symbol_. In each case it is a _group of bodies_ that is rendered—rocks, trees, even “the Sea” as a body among bodies! There is no depth, but only superposition. Of course, of the objects represented one or several had necessarily to be furthest away (or rather _least near_) but this is a mere technical servitude without the remotest affinity to the illumined supernal distances of Faustian art.

VIII

I have said that oil-painting faded out at the end of the 17th Century, when one after another all its great masters died, and the question will naturally, therefore, be asked—is Impressionism (in the current narrow sense) a creation of the 19th Century? Has painting lived, after all, two centuries more? Is it still existing? But we must not be deceived by appearances. Not only was there a dead space between Rembrandt and Delacroix or Constable—for when we think of the living art of high symbolism that was Rembrandt’s the purely decorative artists of the 18th Century do not count—but, further, that which began with Delacroix and Constable was, notwithstanding all technical continuity, something quite different from that which had ended with Rembrandt. The new _episode_ of painting that in the 19th Century (i.e., beyond the 1800 frontier and in “Civilization”) has succeeded in awakening some illusion of a great culture of painting, has itself chosen the word _Plein-air_ (_Freilicht_) to designate its special characteristic. The very designation suffices to show the significance of the fleeting phenomenon that it is. It implies the conscious, intellectual, cold-blooded rejection of that for which a sudden wit invented the name “brown sauce,” but which the great masters had, as we know, regarded as the one truly metaphysical colour. On it had been built the painting-culture of the schools, and especially the Dutch school, that had vanished irretrievably in the Rococo. This brown, the symbol of a spatial infinity, which had for Faustian mankind created a spiritual something out of a mere canvas, now came to be regarded, quite suddenly, as an offence to Nature. What had happened? Was it not simply this, that the _soul_ for which this supernal colour was something religious, the sign of wistfulness, the whole meaning of “Living Nature,” had quietly slipped away? The materialism of a Western Cosmopolis blew into the ashes and rekindled this curious brief flicker—a brief flicker of two generations, for with the generation of Manet all was ended again. I have (as the reader will recall) characterized the noble green of Grünewald and Claude and Giorgione as the Catholic space-colour and the transcendent brown of Rembrandt as the colour of the Protestant world- feeling. On the other hand, _Plein-air_ and its new colour scale stand for irreligion.[364] From the spheres of Beethoven and the stellar expanses of Kant, Impressionism has come down again to the crust of the earth. Its space is cognized, not experienced, seen, not contemplated; there is tunedness in it, but not Destiny. It is the mechanical object of physics and not the felt world of the pastorale that Courbet and Manet give us in their landscapes. Rousseau’s tragically correct prophecy of a “return to Nature” fulfils itself in this dying art—the senile, too, return to Nature day by day. The modern artist is a workman, not a creator. He sets unbroken spectrum-colours side by side. The subtle script, the dance of brush-strokes, give way to crude commonplaces, pilings and mixings and daubings of points, squares, broad inorganic masses. The whitewasher’s brush and the trowel appear in the painter’s equipment; the oil-priming of the canvas is brought into the scheme of execution and in places left bare. It is a risky art, meticulous, cold, diseased—an art for over-developed nerves, but scientific to the last degree, energetic in everything that relates to the conquest of technical obstacles, acutely assertive of programme. It is the “satyric pendant” of the great age of oil-painting that stretches from Leonardo to Rembrandt; it could only be at home in the Paris of Baudelaire. Corot’s silvern landscapes, with their grey-greens and browns, dream still of the spiritual of the Old Masters; but Courbet and Manet conquer bare physical space, “factual” space. The meditative discoverer represented by Leonardo gives way to the painting experimentalist. Corot, the eternal child, French but not Parisian, finds his transcendent landscapes anywhere and everywhere; Courbet, Manet, Cézanne, portray over and over again, painfully, laboriously, soullessly, the Forest of Fontainebleau, the bank of the Seine at Argenteuil, or that remarkable valley near Arles. Rembrandt’s mighty landscapes lie essentially in the universe, Manet’s near a railway station. The plein-air painters, true megalopolitans, obtain as it were specimens of the music of space from the least agitated sources of Spain and Holland—from Velasquez, Goya, Hobbema, Franz Hals—in order (with the aid of English landscapists and, later, the Japanese, “highbrows” all) to restate it in empirical and scientific terms. It is natural science as opposed to nature experience, head against heart, knowledge in contrast to faith.

In Germany it was otherwise. Whereas in France it was a matter of closing-off the great school, in Germany it was a case of catching up with it. For in the picturesque style, as practised from Rottmann, Wasmann, K. D. Friedrich and Runge to Marées and Leibl, an unbroken evolution is the very basis of technique, and even a new-style school requires a closed tradition behind it. Herein lies the weakness and the strength of the last German painters. Whereas the French possessed a continuous tradition of their own from early Baroque to Chardin and Corot, whereas there was living connexion between Claude Lorrain and Corot, Rubens and Delacroix, all the great Germans of the 18th Century had been _musicians_. After Beethoven this music, without change of inward essence, was diverted (one of the modalities of the German Romantic movement) back into painting. And it was in painting that it flowered longest and bore its kindliest fruits, for the portraits and landscapes of these men are suffused with a secret wistful music, and there is a breath of Eichendorff and Mörike left even in Thoma and Böcklin. But a foreign teacher had to be asked to supply that which was lacking in the native tradition, and so these painters one and all went to Paris, where they studied and copied the old masters of 1670. So also did Manet and his circle. But there was this difference, that the Frenchmen found in these studies only reminiscences of something that had been in their art for many generations, whereas the Germans received fresh and wholly different impressions. The result was that, in the 19th Century, the German arts of form (other than music) were a phenomenon out of season—hasty, anxious, confused, puzzled as to both aim and means. There was indeed no time to be lost. The level that German music or French painting had taken centuries to attain had to be made good by German painting in two generations. The expiring art demanded its last phase, and this phase had to be reached by a vertiginous race through the whole past. Hence the unsteadiness, in everything pertaining to form, of high Faustian natures like Marées and Böcklin, an unsteadiness that in German music with its sure tradition (think of Bruckner) would have been impossible. The art of the French Impressionists was too explicit in its programme and correspondingly too poor in soul to expose them to such a tragedy. German literature, on the contrary, was in the same condition as German painting; from Goethe’s time, every major work was intended to found something _and_ obliged to conclude something. Just as Kleist felt in himself both Shakespeare and Stendhal, and laboured desperately, altering and discarding without end and without result, to forge two centuries of psychological art into a unit; just as Hebbel tried to squeeze all the problems from Hamlet to Rosmersholm into one dramatic type; so Menzel, Leibl, and Marées sought to force the old and new models—Rembrandt, Claude, Van Goyen, and Watteau, Delacroix, Courbet and Manet—into a single form. While the little early interiors of Menzel anticipated all the discoveries of the Manet circle and Leibl not seldom succeeded where Courbet tried and failed, their pictures renew the metaphysical browns and greens of the Old Masters and are fully expressive of an inward experience. Menzel _actually_ re- experienced and reawakened something of Prussian Rococo, Marées something of Rubens, Leibl in his “Frau Gedon” something of Rembrandt’s portraiture. Moreover, the studio-brown of the 17th Century had had by its side a second art, the intensely Faustian art of etching. In this, as in the other, Rembrandt is the greatest master of all time; this, like the other, has something Protestant in it that puts it in a quite different category from the work of the Southern Catholic painters of blue-green atmospheres and the Gobelin tapestries. And Leibl, the last artist in the brown, was the last great etcher whose plates possess that Rembrandtesque infinity that contains and reveals secrets without end. In Marées, lastly, there was all the mighty intention of the great Baroque style, but, though Guéricault and Daumier were not too belated to capture it in positive form, he—lacking just that strength that a tradition would have given him—was unable to force it into the world of painter’s actuality.

IX

The last of the Faustian arts died in “Tristan.” This work is the giant keystone of Western music. Painting achieved nothing like this as a finale—on the contrary, the effect of Manet, Menzel and Leibl, with their combination of “free light” and resurrected old-master styles, is weak.

“Contemporaneously,” in our sense, Apollinian art came to its end in Pergamene sculpture. _Pergamum is the counterpart of Bayreuth._ The famous altar itself,[365] indeed, is later, and probably not the most important work of the epoch at that; we have to assume a century (330- 220 B.C.) of development now lost in oblivion. Nevertheless, all Nietzsche’s charges against Wagner and Bayreuth, the “Ring” and “Parsifal”—decadence, theatricalness and the like—could have been levelled in the same words at the Pergamene sculpture. A masterpiece of this sculpture—a veritable “Ring”—has come down to us in the Gigantomachia frieze of the great altar. Here is the same theatrical note, the same use of motives from ancient discredited mythology as _points d’appui_, the same ruthless bombardment of the nerves, and also (though the lack of inner power cannot altogether be concealed) the same fully self-conscious force and towering greatness. To this art the Farnese Bull and the older model of the Laocoön group certainly belong.

The symptom of decline in creative power is the fact that to produce something round and complete the artist now requires to be emancipated from form and proportion. Its most obvious, though not its most significant, manifestation is the taste for the gigantic. Here size is not, as in the Gothic and the Pyramid styles, the expression of inward greatness, but the dissimulation of its absence. This swaggering in _specious_ dimensions is common to all nascent Civilizations—we find it in the Zeus altar of Pergamum, the Helios of Chares called the “Colossus of Rhodes,” the architecture of the Roman Imperial Age, the New Empire work in Egypt, the American skyscraper of to-day. But what is far more indicative is the arbitrariness and immoderateness that tramples on and shatters the conventions of centuries. In Bayreuth and in Pergamum, it was the superpersonal Rule, the absolute mathematic of Form, the Destiny immanent in the quietly-matured language of a great art, that was found to be intolerable. The way from Polycletus to Lysippus and from Lysippus to the sculptors of the groups of Gauls[366] is paralleled by the way from Bach, by Beethoven, to Wagner. The earlier artists felt themselves masters, the later uneasy slaves, of the great form. While even Praxiteles and Haydn were able to speak freely and gaily within the limits of the strictest canon, Lysippus and Beethoven could only produce by straining their voices. The sign of all living art, the pure harmony of “will,” “must” and “can,” the self-evidence of the aim, the un-self- consciousness of the execution, the unity of the art and the Culture—all that is past and gone. In Corot and Tiepolo, Mozart and Cimarosa, there is still a real mastery of the mother-tongue. After them, the process of mutilation begins, but no one is conscious of it because no one now can speak it fluently. Once upon a time, Freedom and Necessity were identical; but now what is understood by freedom is in fact indiscipline. In the time of Rembrandt or Bach the “failures” that we know only too well were quite unthinkable. The Destiny of the form lay in the race or the school, not in the private tendencies of the individual. Under the spell of a great tradition full achievement is possible even to a minor artist, because the living art brings him in touch with his task and the task with him. To-day, these artists can no longer perform what they intend, for intellectual operations are a poor substitute for the trained instinct that has died out. All of them have experienced this. Marées was unable to complete any of his great schemes. Leibl could not bring himself to let his late pictures go, and worked over them again and again to such an extent that they became cold and hard. Cézanne and Renoir left work of the best quality unfinished because, strive as they would, they could do no more. Manet was exhausted after he had painted thirty pictures, and his “Shooting of the Emperor Maximilian,” in spite of the immense care that is visible in every item of the picture and the studies for it, hardly achieved as much as Goya managed without effort in its prototype the “shootings of the 3rd of May.” Bach, Haydn, Mozart and a thousand obscure musicians of the 18th Century could rapidly turn out the most finished work as a matter of routine, but Wagner knew full well that he could only reach the heights by concentrating all his energy upon “getting the last ounce” out of the best moments of his artistic endowment.

Between Wagner and Manet there is a deep relationship, which is not, indeed, obvious to everyone but which Baudelaire with his unerring flair for the decadent detected at once. For the Impressionists, the end and the culmination of art was the conjuring up of a world in space out of strokes and patches of colour, and this was just what Wagner achieved with three bars. A whole world of soul could crowd into these three bars. Colours of starry midnight, of sweeping clouds, of autumn, of the day dawning in fear and sorrow, sudden glimpses of sunlit distances, world-fear, impending doom, despair and its fierce effort, hopeless hope—all these impressions which no composer before him had thought it possible to catch, he could paint with entire distinctness in the few tones of a motive. Here the contrast of Western music with Greek plastic has reached its maximum. Everything merges in bodiless infinity, no longer even does a linear melody wrestle itself clear of the vague tone- masses that in strange surgings challenge an imaginary space. The motive comes up out of dark terrible deeps. It is flooded for an instant by a flash of hard bright sun. Then, suddenly, it is so close upon us that we shrink. It laughs, it coaxes, it threatens, and anon it vanishes into the domain of the strings, only to return again out of endless distances, faintly modified and in the voice of a single oboe, to pour out a fresh cornucopia of spiritual colours. Whatever this is, it is neither painting nor music, in any sense of these words that attaches to previous work in the strict style. Rossini was asked once what he thought of the music of the “Huguenots”; “Music?” he replied. “I heard nothing resembling it.” Many a time must this judgment have been passed at Athens on the new painting of the Asiatic and Sicyonian schools, and opinions not very different must have been current in Egyptian Thebes with regard to the art of Cnossus and Tell-el-Amarna.

All that Nietzsche says of Wagner is applicable, also, to Manet. Ostensibly a return to the elemental, to Nature, as against contemplation-painting (Inhaltsmalerei) and abstract music, their art really signifies a concession to the barbarism of the Megalopolis, the beginning of dissolution sensibly manifested in a mixture of brutality and refinement. As a step, it is necessarily the last step. An artificial art has no further organic future, it is the mark of the end.

And the bitter conclusion is that it is all irretrievably over with the arts of form of the West. The crisis of the 19th Century was the death- struggle. Like the Apollinian, the Egyptian and every other, the Faustian art dies of senility, having actualized its inward possibilities and fulfilled its mission within the course of its Culture.

What is practised as art to-day—be it music after Wagner or painting after Cézanne, Leibl and Menzel—is impotence and falsehood. Look where one will, can one find the great personalities that would justify the claim that there is still an art of determinate necessity? Look where one will, can one find the _self-evidently necessary_ task that awaits such an artist? We go through all the exhibitions, the concerts, the theatres, and find only industrious cobblers and noisy fools, who delight to produce something for the market, something that will “catch on” with a public for whom art and music and drama have long ceased to be spiritual necessities. At what a level of inward and outward dignity stand to-day that which is called art and those who are called artists! In the shareholders’ meeting of any limited company, or in the technical staff of any first-rate engineering works there is more intelligence, taste, character and capacity than in the whole music and painting of present-day Europe. There have always been, for one great artist, a hundred superfluities who practised art, but so long as a great tradition (and _therefore_ great art) endured even these achieved something worthy. We can forgive this hundred for existing, for in the ensemble of the tradition they were the footing for the individual great man. But to-day we have only these superfluities, and ten thousand of them, working art “for a living” (as if that were a justification!). One thing is quite certain, that to-day every single art-school could be shut down without art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 200. There, as here in our world-cities, we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of “the new style,” of “unsuspected possibilities,” theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells—the “Literary Man” in the Poet’s place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism which the art- trade has organized as a “phase of art-history,” thinking and feeling and forming as industrial art. Alexandria, too, had problem-dramatists and box-office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. What do we possess to-day as "art"? A faked music, filled with artificial noisiness of massed instruments; a faked painting, full of idiotic, exotic and showcard effects, that every ten years or so concocts out of the form-wealth of millennia some new “style” which is in fact no style at all since everyone does as he pleases; a lying plastic that steals from Assyria, Egypt and Mexico indifferently. Yet this and only this, the taste of the “man of the world,” can be accepted as the expression and sign of the age; everything else, everything that “sticks to” old ideals, is for provincial consumption.

The grand Ornamentation of the past has become as truly a dead language as Sanskrit or Church Latin.[367] Instead of its symbolism being honoured and obeyed, its mummy, its legacies of perfected forms, are put into the pot anyhow, and recast in wholly inorganic forms. Every modern age holds change to be development, and puts revivals and fusions of old styles in the place of real becoming. Alexandria also had its Pre- Raphaelite comedians with their vases, chairs, pictures and theories, its symbolists, naturalists and expressionists. The fashion at Rome was now Græco-Asiatic, now Græco-Egyptian, now (after Praxiteles) neo-Attic. The relief of the XIXth Dynasty—the modern age in the Egyptian Culture— that covered the monstrous, meaningless, inorganic walls, statues and columns, seems like a sheer parody of the art of the Old Kingdom. The Ptolemaic Horus-temple of Edfu is quite unsurpassed in the way of vacuous eclecticism—so far, for we are only at the beginning of our own development in this line, showy and assertive as the style of our streets and squares already is.

In due course, even the strength to wish for change fades out. Rameses the Great—so soon—appropriated to himself buildings of his predecessors by cutting out their names and inserting his own in the inscriptions. It was the same consciousness of artistic impotence that led Constantine to adorn his triumphal arch in Rome with sculptures taken from other buildings; but Classical craftsmanship had set to work long before Constantine—as early, in fact, as 150—on the business of copying old masterpieces, not because these were understood and appreciated in the least, but because no one was any longer capable of producing originals. It must not be forgotten that these copyists were the _artists_ of their time; their work therefore (done in one style or another according to the moment’s fashion) represent the maximum of creative power then available. All the Roman portrait statues, male and female, go back for posture and mien to a very few Hellenic types; these, copied more or less true to style, served for torsos, while the heads were executed as “Likenesses” by simple craftsmen who possessed the knack. The famous statue of Augustus in armour, for example, is based on the Spearman of Polycletus, just as—to name the first harbingers of the same phase in our own world—Lenbach rests upon Rembrandt and Makart upon Rubens. For 1500 years (Amasis I to Cleopatra) Egypticism piled portrait on portrait in the same way. Instead of the steady development that the great age had pursued through the Old and Middle Kingdoms, we find _fashions_ that change according to the taste of this or that dynasty. Amongst the discoveries at Turfan are relics of Indian dramas, contemporary with the birth of Christ, which are similar in all respects to the Kalidasa of a later century. Chinese painting as we know it shows not an evolution but an up-and-down of fashions for more than a thousand years on end; and this unsteadiness must have set in as early as the Han period. The final result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms which we see to-day in Indian, Chinese, and Arabian-Persian art. Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical compositions—all is patternwork.[368] We cease to be able to date anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of its ornamentation. So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures.

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Footnote 272:

_Die bildenden Künste._ The expression is a standard one in German,
but unfamiliar in English. Ordinarily, however, “die bildenden Künste”
(shaping arts, arts of form) are contrasted with “die redenden Künste”
(speaking arts)—music, as giving utterance rather than spatial form to
things, being counted among the latter.—_Tr._

Footnote 273:

As soon as the word, which is a transmission-agent of the
understanding, comes to be used as the expression-agent of an art, the
waking consciousness ceases to express or to take in a thing
integrally. Not to mention the _read_ word of higher Cultures—the
medium of literature proper—even the spoken word, when used in any
artificial sense, separates hearing from understanding, for the
ordinary meaning of the word also takes a hand in the process and, as
this art grows in power, the wordless arts themselves arrive at
expression-methods in which the motives are joined to word-meanings.
Thus arises the _Allegory_, or motive that _signifies a word_, as in
Baroque sculpture after Bernini. So, too, painting very often develops
into a sort of painting-writing, as in Byzantium after the second
Nicene Council (787) which took from the artist his freedom of choice
and arrangement. This also is what distinguishes the arias of Gluck,
in which the melody grew up out of the meaning of the libretto, from
those of Alessandro Scarlatti, in which the texts are in themselves of
no significance and mostly serve to carry the voices. The high-Gothic
counterpoint of the 13th Century is entirely free from any connexion
with words: it is a _pure architecture of human voices_ in which
several texts, Latin and vernacular, sacred and secular, were sung
together.

Footnote 274:

Our pedantic method has given us an art-history that excludes music-
history; and while the one has become a normal element of higher
education, the other has remained an affair solely for the expert. It
is just as though one tried to write a history of Greece without
taking Sparta into account. The result is a theory of “Art” that is a
pious fraud.

Footnote 275: