CHAPTER VI

MAKROKOSMOS

II APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN AND MAGIAN SOUL

I

Henceforth we shall designate the soul of the Classical Culture, which chose the sensuously-present individual body as the ideal type of the extended, by the name (familiarized by Nietzsche) of the _Apollinian_. In opposition to it we have the _Faustian_ soul, whose prime-symbol is pure and limitless space, and whose “body” is the Western Culture that blossomed forth with the birth of the Romanesque style in the 10th century in the Northern plain between the Elbe and the Tagus. The nude statue is Apollinian, the art of the fugue Faustian. Apollinian are: mechanical statics, the sensuous cult of the Olympian gods, the politically individual city-states of Greece, the doom of Œdipus and the phallus-symbol. Faustian are: Galileian dynamics, Catholic and Protestant dogmatics, the great dynasties of the Baroque with their cabinet diplomacy, the destiny of Lear and the Madonna-ideal from Dante’s Beatrice to the last line of _Faust II_. The painting that defines the individual body by contours is Apollinian, that which forms space by means of light and shade is Faustian—this is the difference between the fresco of Polygnotus and the oil painting of Rembrandt. The Apollinian existence is that of the Greek who describes his ego as _soma_ and who lacks all idea of an inner development and therefore all real history, inward and outward; the Faustian is an existence which _is led_ with a deep consciousness and introspection of the ego, and a resolutely personal culture evidenced in memoirs, reflections, retrospects and prospects and conscience. And in the time of Augustus, in the countries between Nile and Tigris, Black Sea and South Arabia, there appears—aloof but able to speak to us through forms borrowed, adopted and inherited—the Magian soul of the Arabian Culture with its algebra, astrology and alchemy, its mosaics and arabesques, its caliphates and mosques, and the sacraments and scriptures of the Persian, Jewish, Christian, “post-Classical” and Manichæan religions.

“Space”—speaking now in the Faustian idiom—is a spiritual something, rigidly distinct from the momentary sense-present, which _could_ not be represented in an Apollinian language, whether Greek or Latin. But the created _expression-space_ of the Apollinian arts is equally alien to ours. The tiny cella of the early-Classical temple was a dumb dark nothingness, a structure (originally) of perishable material, an envelope of the moment in contrast to the eternal vaults of Magian cupolas and Gothic naves, and the closed ranks of columns were expressly meant to convey that for the eye at any rate this body possessed no _Inward_. In no other Culture is the firm footing, the socket, so emphasized. The Doric column bores into the ground, the vessels are always thought of from below upward (whereas those of the Renaissance float above their footing), and the sculpture-schools feel the stabilizing of their figures as their main problem. Hence in archaic works the legs are disproportionately emphasized, the foot is planted on the full sole, and if the drapery falls straight down, a part of the hem is removed to show that the foot is standing. The Classical relief is strictly stereometrically set on a plane, and there is an interspace between the figures but no depth. A landscape of Claude Lorrain, on the contrary, is _nothing but_ space, every detail being made to subserve its illustration. All bodies in it possess an atmospheric and perspective meaning purely as carriers of light and shade. The extreme of this disembodiment of the world in the service of space is Impressionism. Given this world-feeling, the Faustian soul in the springtime necessarily arrived at an architectural problem which had its centre of gravity in the spatial vaulting-over of vast, and from porch to choir dynamically deep, cathedrals. This last expressed _its_ depth- experience. But with it was associated, in opposition to the cavernous Magian expression-space,[190] the element of a soaring into the broad universe. Magian roofing, whether it be cupola or barrel-vault or even the horizontal baulk of a basilica, _covers in_. Strzygowski[191] has very aptly described the architectural idea of Hagia Sophia as an introverted Gothic striving under a closed outer casing. On the other hand, in the cathedral of Florence the cupola _crowns_ the long Gothic body of 1367, and the same tendency rose in Bramante’s scheme for St. Peter’s to a veritable towering-up, a magnificent “Excelsior,” that Michelangelo carried to completion with the dome that floats high and bright over the vast vaulting. To this sense of space the Classical opposes the symbol of the Doric peripteros, wholly corporeal and comprehensible in one glance.

The Classical Culture begins, then, with a great _renunciation_. A rich, pictorial, almost over-ripe art lay ready to its hand. But this _could_ not become the expression of the young soul, and so from about 1100 B.C. the harsh, narrow, and to our eyes scanty and barbaric, early-Doric geometrical style appears in opposition to the Minoan.[192] For the three centuries which correspond to the flowering of our Gothic, there is no hint of an architecture, and it is only at about 650 B.C., “contemporarily” with Michelangelo’s transition into the Baroque, that the Doric and Etruscan temple-type arises. All “Early” art is religious, and this symbolic Negation is not less so than the Egyptian and the Gothic Affirmation. The idea of _burning_ the dead accords with the cult-site but not with the cult-building; and the Early Classical religion which conceals itself from us behind the solemn names of Calchas, Tiresias, Orpheus and (probably) Numa[193] possessed for its rites simply that which is left of an architectural idea when one has subtracted the architecture, viz., the sacred precinct. The original cult-plan is thus the Etruscan templum, a sacred area merely staked off on the ground by the augurs with an impassable boundary and a propitious entrance on the East side.[194] A “templum” was created where a rite was to be performed or where the representative of the state authority, senate or army, happened to be. It existed only for the duration of its use, and the spell was then removed. It was probably only about 700 B.C. that the Classical soul so far mastered itself as to represent this architectural Nothing in the sensible form of a built body. In the long run the Euclidean feeling proved stronger than the mere antipathy to duration.

Faustian architecture, on the contrary, begins on the grand scale simultaneously with the first stirrings of a new piety (the Cluniac reform, c. 1000) and a new thought (the Eucharistic controversy between Berengar of Tours and Lanfranc 1050),[195] and proceeds at once to plans of gigantic intention; often enough, as in the case of Speyer, the whole community did not suffice to fill the cathedral,[196] and often again it proved impossible to complete the projected scheme. The passionate language of this architecture is that of the poems too.[197] Far apart as may seem the Christian hymnology of the south and the Eddas of the still heathen north, they are alike in the implicit space-endlessness of prosody, rhythmic syntax and imagery. Read the _Dies Iræ_ together with the Völuspá,[198] which is little earlier; there is the same adamantine will to overcome and break all resistances of the visible. No rhythm ever imagined radiates immensities of space and distance as the old Northern does:

Zum Unheil werden—noch allzulange Männer und Weiber—zur Welt geboren Aber wir beide —bleiben zusammen Ich und Sigurd.

The accents of the Homeric hexameter are the soft rustle of a leaf in the midday sun, the rhythm of _matter_; but the “Stabreim” likes “potential energy” in the world-pictures of modern physics, creates a tense restraint in the void without limits, distant night-storms above the highest peaks. In its swaying indefiniteness all words and things dissolve themselves—it is the dynamics, not the statics, of language. The same applies to the grave rhythm of _Media vita in morte sumus_. Here is heralded the colour of Rembrandt and the instrumentation of Beethoven—_here infinite solitude is felt as the home of the Faustian soul_. What is Valhalla? Unknown to the Germans of the Migrations and even to the Merovingian Age, it was conceived by the nascent Faustian soul. It was conceived, no doubt, under Classic-pagan and Arabian- Christian impressions, for the antique and the sacred writings, the ruins and mosaics and miniatures, the cults and rites and dogmas of these past Cultures reached into the new life at all points. _And yet_, this Valhalla is something beyond all sensible actualities floating in remote, dim, Faustian regions. Olympus rests on the homely Greek soil, the Paradise of the Fathers is a magic garden somewhere in the Universe, but Valhalla is nowhere. Lost in the limitless, it appears with its inharmonious gods and heroes the supreme symbol of solitude. Siegfried, Parzeval, Tristan, Hamlet, Faust are the loneliest heroes in all the Cultures. Read the wondrous awakening of the inner life in Wolfram’s Parzeval. The longing for the woods, the mysterious compassion, the ineffable sense of forsakenness—it is all Faustian and only Faustian. Every one of us knows it. The motive returns with all its profundity in the Easter scene of Faust I.

“A longing pure and not to be described drove me to wander over woods and fields, and in a mist of hot abundant tears I felt a world arise and live for me.”

Of this world-experience neither Apollinian nor Magian man, neither Homer nor the Gospels, knows anything whatever. The climax of the poem of Wolfram, that wondrous Good Friday morning scene when the hero, at odds with God and with himself, meets the noble Gawan and resolves to go on pilgrimage to Tevrezent, takes us to the heart of the _Faustian_ religion. Here one can feel the mystery of the Eucharist which binds the communicant to a mystic company, to a Church that alone can give bliss. In the myth of the Holy Grail and its Knights one can feel the inward necessity of the German-Northern Catholicism. In opposition to the Classical sacrifices offered to individual gods in separate temples, there is here the _one never-ending_ sacrifice repeated everywhere and every day. This is the Faustian idea of the 9th-11th Centuries, the Edda time, foreshadowed by Anglo-Saxon missionaries like Winfried but only then ripened. The Cathedral, with its High Altar enclosing the accomplished miracle, is its expression in stone.[199]

The plurality of separate bodies which represents Cosmos for the Classical soul, requires a similar pantheon—hence the antique polytheism. The _single_ world-volume, be it conceived as cavern or as space, demands the _single_ god of Magian or Western Christianity. Athene or Apollo might be represented by a statue, but it is and has long been evident to our feeling that the Deity of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation can only be “manifested” in the storm of an organ fugue or the solemn progress of cantata and mass. From the rich manifold of figures in the Edda and contemporary legends of saints to Goethe our myth develops itself in steady opposition to the Classical—in the one case a continuous disintegration of the divine that culminated in the early Empire in an impossible multitude of deities, in the other a process of simplification that led to the Deism of the 18th Century.

The Magian hierarchy of heaven—angels, saints, persons of the Trinity— has grown paler and paler, more and more disembodied, in the sphere of the Western pseudomorphosis,[200] supported though it was by the whole weight of Church authority, and even the Devil—the great adversary in the Gothic world-drama[201]—has disappeared unnoticed from among the possibilities of the Faustian world-feeling. Luther could still throw the inkpot at him, but he has been passed over in silence by perplexed Protestant theologians long ago. For the _solitude_ of the Faustian soul agrees not at all with a duality of world powers. God himself is the All. About the end of the 17th Century this religiousness could no longer be limited to pictorial expression, and instrumental music came as its last and only form-language: we may say that the Catholic faith is to the Protestant as an altar-piece is to an oratorio. But even the Germanic gods and heroes are surrounded by this rebuffing immensity and enigmatic gloom. They are steeped in music and in night, for daylight gives visual bounds and therefore shapes bodily things. Night eliminates body, day soul. Apollo and Athene have no souls. On Olympus rests the eternal light of the transparent southern day, and Apollo’s hour is high noon, when great Pan sleeps. But Valhalla is light-less, and even in the Eddas we can trace that deep midnight of Faust’s study-broodings, the midnight that is caught by Rembrandt’s etchings and absorbs Beethoven’s tone colours. No Wotan or Baldur or Freya has “Euclidean” form. Of them, as of the Vedic gods of India, it can be said that they suffer not “any graven image or any likeness whatsoever”; and this impossibility carries an implicit recognition that eternal space, and not the corporeal copy— which levels them down, desecrates them, denies them—is the supreme symbol. This is the deep-felt motive that underlies the iconoclastic storms in Islam and Byzantium (_both_, be it noted, of the 7th century), and the closely similar movement in our Protestant North. Was not Descartes’s creation of the _anti-Euclidean_ analysis of space an iconoclasm? The Classical geometry handles a number-world of day, the function-theory is the genuine mathematic of night.

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Footnote 189:

This zero, which probably contains a suggestion of the _Indian_ idea of extension—of that spatiality of the world that is treated in the Upanishads and is entirely alien to our space-consciousness—was of course wholly absent in the Classical. By way of the Arabian mathematics (which completely transformed its meaning) it reached the West, where it was only introduced in 1554 by Stipel, with its sense, moreover, again fundamentally changed, for it became the mean of +1 and -1 as a cut in a linear continuum, i.e., it was assimilated to the Western number-world in a wholly un-Indian sense of _relation_.

Footnote 190:

The word _Höhlengefühl_ is Leo Frobenius’s (_Paideuma_, p. 92). (The Early-Christian Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem [A.D. 327] is built over a natural cave.—_Tr._)

Footnote 191:

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

Footnote 192:

See Vol. II, p. 101 et seq.

Footnote 193:

See Vol. II, pp. 345 et seq.

Footnote 194:

Müller-Decker, _Die Etrusker_ (1877), II, pp. 128 et seq. Wissowa, _Religion und Kultus der Römer_ (1912), p. 527. The oldest plan of Roma Quadrata was a “templum” whose limits had nothing to do with the building-up of the city but were connected with sacral rules, as the significance of this precinct (the “Pomœrium”) in later times shows. A “templum,” too, was the Roman camp whose rectangular outline is visible to-day in many a Roman-founded town; it was the consecrated area within which the army felt itself under the protection of its gods, and originally had nothing whatever to do with fortification, which is a product of Hellenistic times. (It may be added that Roman camps retained their rigidity of outline even where obvious “military considerations” of ground, etc., must have suggested its modification.—_Tr._) Most Roman stone-temples ("_ædes_") were not “templa” at all. On the other hand, the early Greek τέμενος of Homeric times must have had a similar significance.

Footnote 195:

The student may consult the articles “Church History,” “Monasticism,” “Eucharist” and other articles therein referred to in the Encyclopædia Britannica, XI Edition.—_Tr._

Footnote 196:

English readers may remember that Cobbett (“Rural Rides,” passim) was so impressed with the spaciousness of English country churches as to formulate a theory that mediæval England must have been more populous than modern England is.—_Tr._

Footnote 197:

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

Footnote 198:

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

Footnote 199:

See Vol. II, p. 358 et seq.

Footnote 200:

See Vol. II, pp. 241 et seq.

Footnote 201:

See Vol. II, p. 354.

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II

That which is expressed by the soul of the West in its extraordinary wealth of media—words, tones, colours, pictorial perspectives, philosophical systems, legends, the spaciousness of Gothic cathedrals and the formulæ of functions—namely its world-feeling, is expressed by the soul of Old Egypt (which was remote from all ambitions towards theory and literariness) almost exclusively by the immediate language of _Stone_. Instead of spinning word-subtleties around its form of extension, its “space” and its “time,” instead of forming hypotheses and number-systems and dogmas, it set up its huge symbols in the landscape of the Nile in all silence. Stone is the great emblem of the Timeless- Become; space and death seem bound up in it. “Men have built for the dead,” says Bachofen in his autobiography, “before they have built for the living, and even as a perishable wooden structure suffices for the span of time that is given to the living, so the housing of the dead for ever demands the solid stone of the earth. The oldest cult is associated with the stone that marks the place of burial, the oldest temple- building with the tomb-structure, the origins of art and decoration with the grave-ornament. Symbol has created itself in the graves. That which is thought and felt and silently prayed at the grave-side can be expressed by no word, but only hinted by the boding symbol that stands in unchanging grave repose.” The dead strive no more. They are no more Time, but only Space—something that stays (if indeed it stays at all) but does _not_ ripen towards a Future; and hence it is stone, the abiding stone, that expresses how the dead is mirrored in the waking consciousness of the living. The Faustian soul looks for an immortality to follow the bodily end, a sort of marriage with endless space, and it disembodies the stone in its Gothic thrust-system (contemporary, we may note, with the “consecutives” in Church music[202]) till at last nothing remained visible but the indwelling depth- and height-energy of this self-extension. The Apollinian soul would have its dead burned, would see them annihilated, and so it remained averse from stone building throughout the early period of its Culture. The Egyptian soul saw itself as moving down a narrow and inexorably-prescribed life-path to come at the end before the judges of the dead (“Book of the Dead,” cap. 125). That was its _Destiny-idea_. The Egyptian’s existence is that of the traveller who follows one unchanging direction, and the whole form- language of his Culture is a translation into the sensible of this one theme. And as we have taken _endless space_ as the prime symbol of the North and _body_ as that of the Classical, so we may take the word _way_ as most intelligibly expressing that of the Egyptians. Strangely, and for Western thought almost incomprehensibly, the one element in extension that they emphasize is that of direction in depth. The tomb- temples of the Old Kingdom and especially the mighty pyramid-temples of the Fourth Dynasty represent, not a purposed organization of space such as we find in the mosque and the cathedral, but a rhythmically ordered _sequence_ of spaces. The sacred way leads from the gate-building on the Nile through passages, halls, arcaded courts and pillared rooms that grow ever narrower and narrower, to the chamber of the dead,[203] and similarly the Sun-temples of the Fifth Dynasty are not “buildings” but a path enclosed by mighty masonry.[204] The reliefs and the paintings appear always as rows which with an impressive compulsion lead the beholder in a definite direction. The ram and sphinx avenues of the New Empire have the same object. For the Egyptian, the depth-experience which governed his world-form was so emphatically directional that he comprehended space more or less as a continuous process of actualization. There is nothing rigid about distance as expressed here. The man must move, and so become himself a symbol of life, in order to enter into relation with the stone part of the symbolism. “Way” signifies both Destiny and third dimension. The grand wall-surfaces, reliefs, colonnades past which he moves are “length and breadth”; that is, mere perceptions of the senses, and it is the forward-driving life that _extends_ them into “world.” Thus the Egyptian experienced space, we may say, in and by the processional march along its distinct elements, whereas the Greek who sacrificed _outside_ the temple did not feel it and the man of our Gothic centuries praying in the cathedral let himself be immersed in the quiet infinity of it. And consequently the art of these Egyptians must aim at _plane_ effects and nothing else, even when it is making use of solid means. For the Egyptian, the pyramid over the king’s tomb is a _triangle_, a huge, powerfully expressive _plane_ that, whatever be the direction from which one approaches, closes off the “way” and commands the landscape. For him, the columns of the inner passages and courts, with their dark backgrounds, their dense array and their profusion of adornments, appear entirely as vertical strips which rhythmically accompany the march of the priests. Relief- work is—in utter contrast to the Classical—carefully restricted in one plane; in the course of development dated by the Third to the Fifth dynasties it diminishes from the thickness of a finger to that of a sheet of paper, and finally it is _sunk_ in the plane.[205] The dominance of the horizontal, the vertical and the right angle, and the avoidance of all foreshortening support the two-dimensional principle and serve to insulate this directional depth-experience which coincides with the way and the grave at its end. It is an art that admits of no deviation for the relief of the tense soul.

Is not this an expression in the noblest language that it is possible to conceive of what all our space-theories would like to put into words? Is it not a metaphysic in stone by the side of which the written metaphysics of Kant seems but a helpless stammering?

There is, however, another Culture that, different as it most fundamentally is from the Egyptian, yet found a closely-related prime symbol. This is the Chinese, with its intensely directional principle of the Tao.[206] But whereas the Egyptian treads to the end a way that is prescribed for him with an inexorable necessity, the Chinaman _wanders_ through his world; consequently, he is conducted to his god or his ancestral tomb not by ravines of stone, between faultless smooth walls, but by friendly Nature herself. Nowhere else has the _landscape_ become so genuinely the material of the architecture. “Here, on religious foundations, there has been developed a grand lawfulness and unity common to all building, which, combined with the strict maintenance of a north-south general axis, always holds together gate-buildings, side- buildings, courts and halls in the same homogeneous plan, and has led finally to so grandiose a planning and such a command over ground and space that one is quite justified in saying that the artist builds and reckons with the landscape itself.”[207] The temple is not a self- contained building but a lay-out, in which hills, water, trees, flowers, and stones in definite forms and dispositions are just as important as gates, walls, bridges and houses. This Culture is the only one in which the art of gardening is a grand religious art. There are gardens that are reflections of particular Buddhist sects.[208] It is the architecture of the landscape, and only that, which explains the architecture of the buildings, with their flat extension and the emphasis laid on the roof as the really expressive element. And just as the devious ways through doors, over bridges, round hills and walls lead at last to the end, so the paintings take the beholder from detail to detail whereas Egyptian relief masterfully points him in the one set direction. “The whole picture is _not_ to be taken at once. Sequence in time presupposes a sequence of space-elements through which the eye is to wander from one to the next.”[209] Whereas the Egyptian architecture dominates the landscape, the Chinese espouses it. But in both cases it is direction in depth that maintains the _becoming_ of space as a continuously-present experience.

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Footnote 202:

This refers to the diaphonic chant of Church music in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The form of this chant is supposed to have been an accompaniment of the “plain chant” by voices moving parallel to it at a fourth, fifth, or octave.—_Tr._

Footnote 203:

Hölscher, _Grabdenkmal des Königs Chephren_; Borchardt, _Grabdenkmal des Sahurê_; Curtius, _Die Antike Kunst_, p. 45.

Footnote 204:

See Vol. II, p. 342; Borchardt, _Re-Heiligtum des Newoserri_; Ed. Mayer, _Geschichte des Altertums_, I, 251.

Footnote 205:

“Relief en creux”; compare H. Schäfer, _Von ägyptischer Kunst_ (1919), I, p. 41.

Footnote 206:

See Vol. II, pp. 350 et seq.

Footnote 207:

O. Fischer, _Chinesische Landmalerei_ (1921), p. 24. What makes Chinese—as also Indian—art so difficult a study for us is the fact that all works of the early periods (namely, those of the Hwangho region from 1300 to 800 B.C. and of pre-Buddhist India) have vanished without a trace. But that which we now call “Chinese art” corresponds, say, to the art of Egypt from the Twentieth Dynasty onward, and the great schools of painting find their parallel in the sculpture schools of the Saïte and Ptolemaic periods, in which an antiquarian preciosity takes the place of the living inward development that is no longer there. Thus from the examples of Egypt we are able to tell how far it is permissible to argue backwards to conclusions about the art of Chóu and Vedic times.

Footnote 208:

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

Footnote 209:

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

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III

All art is _expression-language_.[210] Moreover, in its very earliest essays—which extend far back into the animal world—it is that of one

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

witnesses even though in the absence of such the impulse to expression would not come to utterance. Even in quite “late” conditions we often see, instead of the combination of artist and spectator, a crowd of art- makers who _all_ dance or mime or sing. The idea of the “Chorus” as sum total of persons present has never entirely vanished from art-history. It is only the higher art that becomes decisively an art “before witnesses” and especially (as Nietzsche somewhere remarks) before God as the supreme witness.[211]

This expression is either _ornament_ or _imitation_. Both are _higher_ possibilities and their polarity to one another is hardly perceptible in the beginnings. Of the two, imitation is definitely the earlier and the closer to the producing race. Imitation is the outcome of a physiognomic idea of a second person with whom (or which) the first is involuntarily induced into resonance of vital rhythm (mitschwingen im); whereas ornament evidences an ego conscious of its own specific character. The former is widely spread in the animal world, the latter almost peculiar to man.

Imitation is born of the secret rhythm of all things cosmic. For the waking being the One appears as discrete and extended; there is a Here and a There, a Proper and an Alien something, a Microcosm and a Macrocosm that are polar to one another in the sense-life, and what the rhythm of imitation does is to bridge this dichotomy. Every religion is an effort of the waking soul to reach the powers of the world-around. And so too is Imitation, which in its most devoted moments is wholly religious, for it consists in an identity of inner activity between the soul and body “here” and the world-around “there” which, vibrating as one, become one. As a bird poises itself in the storm or a float gives to the swaying waves, so our limbs take up an irresistible beat at the sound of march-music. Not less contagious is the imitation of another’s bearing and movements, wherein children in particular excel. It reaches the superlative when we “let ourselves go” in the common song or parade- march or dance that creates out of many units one unit of feeling and expression, a “we.” But a “successful” picture of a man or a landscape is also the outcome of a felt harmony of the pictorial motion with the secret swing and sway of the living opposite; and it is this actualizing of physiognomic rhythm that requires the executant to be an adept who can reveal the idea, the _soul_, of the alien in the play of its surface. In certain unreserved moments we are all adepts of this sort, and in such moments, as we follow in an imperceptible rhythm the music and the play of facial expression, we suddenly look over the precipice and see great secrets. The aim of all imitation is effective simulation; this means effective assimilation of ourselves into an alien something— such a transposition and transubstantiation that the One lives henceforth in the Other that it describes or depicts—and it is able to awaken an intense feeling of unison over all the range from silent absorption and acquiescence to the most abandoned laughter and down into the last depths of the erotic, a unison which is inseparable from creative activity. In this wise arose the popular circling-dances (for instance, the Bavarian _Schuhplattler_ was originally imitated from the courtship of the woodcocks) but this too is what Vasari means when he praises Cimabue and Giotto as the first who returned to the imitation of “Nature”—the Nature, that is, of springtime men, of which Meister Eckart said: “God flows out in all creatures, and therefore all created is God.” That which in this world-around presents itself to our contemplation—and therefore contains meaning for our feelings—as movement, we render by movement. Hence all imitation is in the broadest sense dramatic; drama is presented in the movement of the brush-stroke or the chisel, the melodic curve of the song, the tone of the recitation, the line of poetry, the description, the dance. But everything that we _experience_ with and in seeings and hearings is always an alien soul to which we are uniting ourselves. It is only at the stage of the Megalopolis that art, reasoned to pieces and de- spiritualized, goes over to naturalism as that term is understood nowadays; viz., imitation of the charm of visible appearances, of the stock of sensible characters that are capable of being scientifically fixed.

Ornament detaches itself now from Imitation as something which does not follow the stream of life but rigidly _faces it_. Instead of physiognomic traits overheard in the alien being, we have established motives, _symbols_, which are impressed upon it. The intention is no longer to pretend but to conjure. The “I” overwhelms the “Thou.” Imitation is only a _speaking_ with means that are born of the moment and unreproduceable—but Ornament _employs a language_ emancipated from the speaking, a stock of forms that possesses duration and is not at the mercy of the individual.[212]

Only the _living_ can be imitated, and it can be imitated only in movements, for it is through these that it reveals itself to the senses of artists and spectators. To that extent, imitation belongs to Time and Direction. All the dancing and drawing and describing and portraying for eye and ear is irrevocably “directional,” and hence the highest possibilities of Imitation lie in the copying of a destiny, be it in tones, verses, picture or stage-scene.[213] Ornament, on the contrary, is something taken away from Time: it is pure extension, settled and stable. Whereas an imitation expresses something by _accomplishing itself_, ornament can only do so by presenting itself to the senses as a finished thing. It is Being as such, wholly independent of origin. Every imitation possesses beginning and end, while an ornament possesses only duration, and therefore we can only imitate the destiny of an _individual_ (for instance, Antigone or Desdemona), while by an ornament or symbol only the generalized destiny-idea itself can be represented (as, for example, that of the Classical world by the Doric column). And the former presupposes a talent, while the latter calls for an acquirable knowledge as well.

All strict arts have their grammar and syntax of form-language, with rules and laws, inward logic and tradition. This is true not merely for the Doric cabin-temple and Gothic cottage-cathedral, for the carving- schools of Egypt[214] and Athens and the cathedral plastic of northern France, for the painting-schools of the Classical world and those of Holland and the Rhine and Florence, but also for the fixed rules of the Skalds and Minnesänger which were learned and practised as a craft (and dealt not merely with sentence and metre but also with gesture and the choice of imagery[215]), for the narration-technique of the Vedic, Homeric and Celto-Germanic Epos, for the composition and delivery of the Gothic sermon (both vernacular and Latin), and for the orators’ prose[216] in the Classical, and for the rules of French drama. In the ornamentation of an art-work is reflected the inviolable causality of the macrocosm as the man of the particular kind sees and comprehends it. Both have system. Each is penetrated with the religious side of life— _fear_ and love.[217] A genuine symbol can instil fear or can set free from fear; the “right” emancipates and the “wrong” hurts and depresses. The imitative side of the arts, on the contrary, stands closer to the real race-feelings of _hate_ and love, out of which arises the opposition of _ugly_ and _beautiful_. This is in relation only with the living, of which the inner rhythm repels us or draws us into phase with it, whether it be that of the sunset-cloud or that of the tense breath of the machine. An imitation is beautiful, an ornament _significant_, and therein lies the difference between direction and extension, organic and inorganic logic, life and death. That which we think beautiful is “worth copying.” Easily it swings with us and draws us on to imitate, to join in the singing, to repeat. Our hearts beat higher, our limbs twitch, and we are stirred till our spirits overflow. But as it belongs to Time, it “has its time.” A symbol endures, but everything beautiful vanishes with the life-pulsation of the man, the class, the people or the race that feels it as a specific beauty in the general cosmic rhythm.[218] The “beauty” that Classical sculpture and poetry contained for Classical eyes is something different from the beauty that they contain for ours—something extinguished irrecoverably with the Classical soul—while what we regard as beautiful in it is something that only exists for us. Not only is that which is beautiful for one kind of man neutral or ugly for another—e.g., the whole of our music for the Chinese, or Mexican sculpture for us. For _one and the same life_ the accustomed, the habitual, owing to the very fact of its possessing duration, cannot possess beauty.

And now for the first time we can see the opposition between these two sides of every art in all its depth. Imitation spiritualizes and quickens, ornament enchants and kills. The one becomes, the other is. And therefore the one is allied to love and, above all—in songs and riot and dance—to the _sexual love_, which turns existence to face the future; and the other to care of the past, to recollection[219] and to the _funerary_. The beautiful is longingly pursued, the significant instils dread, and there is no deeper contrast than that between the house of the living and the house of the dead.[220] The peasant’s cottage[221] and its derivative the country noble’s hall, the fenced town and the castle are mansions of life, unconscious expressions of circling blood, that no art produced and no art can alter. The idea of the family appears in the plan of the proto-house, the inner form of the stock in the plan of its villages—which after many a century and many a change of occupation still show what race it was that founded them[222]— the life of a nation and its social ordering in the plan (_not_ the elevation or silhouette) of the city.[223] On the other hand, Ornamentation of the high order develops itself on the stiff symbols of death, the urn, the sarcophagus, the stele and the temple of the dead,[224] and beyond these in gods’ temples and cathedrals _which are Ornament through and through_, not the expressions of a race but the language of a world-view. They are pure art through and through—just what the castle and the cottage are not.[225]

For cottage and castle are _buildings in which_ art, and, specifically, imitative art, is _made and done_, the home of Vedic, Homeric and Germanic epos, of the songs of heroes, the dance of boors and that of lords and ladies, of the minstrel’s lay. The cathedral, on the other hand, _is_ art, and, moreover, the only art by which _nothing_ is imitated; it alone is pure tension of persistent forms, pure three- dimensional logic that expresses itself in edges and surfaces and volumes. But the art of villages and castles is derived from the inclinations of the moment, from the laughter and high spirit of feasts and games, and to such a degree is it dependent on Time, so much is it a thing of occasion, that the troubadour obtains his very name from finding, while Improvisation—as we see in the Tzigane music to-day—is nothing but race manifesting itself to alien senses under the influence of the hour. To this free creative power all spiritual art opposes the strict _school_ in which the individual—in the hymn as in the work of building and carving—is the servant of a logic of timeless forms, and so in all Cultures the seat of its style-history is in its early cult architecture. In the castle it is the life and not the structure that possesses style. In the town the plan is an image of the destinies of a people, whereas the silhouette of emergent spires and cupolas tells of the _logic in the builders’ world-picture_, of the “first and last things” of their universe.

In the architecture of the living, stone _serves a_ worldly _purpose_, but in the architecture of the cult _it is a symbol_.[226] Nothing has injured the history of the great architectures so much as the fact that it has been regarded as the history of architectural techniques instead of as that of architectural ideas which took their technical expression- means as and where they found them. It has been just the same with the history of musical instruments,[227] which also were developed on a foundation of tone-language. Whether the groin and the flying buttress and the squinch-cupola were imagined specially for the great architectures or were expedients that lay more or less ready to hand and were taken into use, is for art-history a matter of as little importance as the question of whether, technically, stringed instruments originated in Arabia or in Celtic Britain. It may be that the Doric column was, as a matter of workmanship, borrowed from the Egyptian temples of the New Empire, or the late-Roman domical construction from the Etruscans, or the Florentine court from the North-African Moors. Nevertheless the Doric peripteros, the Pantheon, and the Palazzo Farnese belong to wholly different worlds—they subserve the artistic expression of the prime- symbol in three different Cultures.

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Footnote 210:

See Vol. II, pp. 135 et seq.

Footnote 211:

The monologue-art of very lonely natures is also in reality a conversation with self in the second person. But it is only in the intellectuality of the megalopolitan stages that the impulse to express is overcome by the impulse to communicate (see Vol. II, p. 135) which gives rise to that tendencious art that seeks to instruct or convert or prove views of a politico-social or moral character, and provokes the antagonistic formula of “Art for Art’s sake”—which is itself rather a view than a discipline, though it does at least serve to recall the primitive significance of artistic expression.

Footnote 212:

See Vol. II, pp. 138 et seq., and Worringer, _Abstraktion und Einführung_, pp. 66 et seq.

Footnote 213:

Imitation, being life, is past in the very moment of accomplishment. The curtain falls, and it passes either into oblivion or, if the product is a durable artifact, into art-history. Of the songs and dances of old Cultures nothing remains, of their pictures and poems little. And even this little contains, substantially, only the ornamental side of the original imitation. Of a grand drama there remains only the text, not the image and the sound; of a poem only the words, not the recital; and of all their music the notes at most, not the tone-colours of the instruments. The essential is irrevocably gone, and every “reproduction” is in reality something new and different.

Footnote 214:

For the workshop of Thothmes at Tell-el-Amarna, see _Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft_, No. 52, pp. 28 et seq.

Footnote 215:

K. Burdach, _Deutsche Renaissance_, p. 11. The pictorial art of the Gothic period also has its strict typism and symbolism.

Footnote 216:

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

Footnote 217:

See Vol. II, p. 323.

Footnote 218:

The translation is so far a paraphrase here that it is desirable to reproduce the German original: “Alles Schöne vergeht mit dem Lebenspulsschlag (dessen) der es aus dem kosmischen Takt heraus als solches empfindet.”

Footnote 219:

Hence the ornamental character of script.

Footnote 220:

See p. 188.

Footnote 221:

See Vol. II, p. 104.

Footnote 222:

E.g., the Slavonic round-villages and Teutonic street-villages east of the Elbe. Similarly, conclusions can be drawn as to many of the events of the Homeric age from the distribution of round and rectangular buildings in ancient Italy.

Footnote 223:

See Vol. II, p. 109.

Footnote 224:

See p. 167.

Footnote 225:

See Vol. II, pp. 142 et seq.

Footnote 226:

See p. 128.

Footnote 227:

See p. 62.

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IV

In every springtime, consequently, there are _two_ definitely ornamental and non-imitative arts, that of building and that of decoration. In the longing and pregnant centuries before it, elemental expression belongs exclusively to Ornamentation in the narrow sense. The Carolingian period is represented only by its ornament, as its architecture, for want of the _Idea_, stands between the styles. And similarly, as a matter of art-history, it is immaterial that no buildings of the Mycenæan age have survived.[228] But with the dawn of the great Culture, _architecture as ornament_ comes into being suddenly and with such a force of expression that for a century mere decoration-as-such shrinks away from it in awe. The spaces, surfaces and edges of stone speak _alone_. The tomb of Chephren is the culmination of mathematical simplicity—everywhere right angles, squares and rectangular pillars, nowhere adornment, inscription or desinence—and it is only after some generations have passed that Relief ventures to infringe the solemn magic of those spaces and the strain begins to be eased. And the noble Romanesque of Westphalia-Saxony (Hildesheim, Gernrode, Paulinzella, Paderborn), of Southern France and of the Normans (Norwich and Peterborough) managed to render the whole sense of the world with indescribable power and dignity in _one_ line, _one_ capital, _one_ arch.

When the form-world of the springtime is at its highest, and not before, the ordained relation is that architecture is lord and ornament is vassal. And the word “ornament” is to be taken here in the widest possible sense. Even conventionally, it covers the Classical _unit_- motive with its quiet poised symmetry or meander supplement, the _spun surface_ of arabesque and the not dissimilar surface-patterning of Mayan art, and the “Thunder-pattern”[229] and others of the early Chóu period which prove once again the landscape basis of the old Chinese architecture without a doubt. But the warrior figures of Dipylon vases are also conceived in the spirit of ornament, and so, in a far higher degree still, are the statuary _groups_ of Gothic cathedrals. “The figures were composed pillarwise from the spectator, the figures of the pillar being, with reference to the spectator, ranked upon one another like rhythmic figures in a symphony that soars heavenward and expands its sounds in every direction.”[230] And besides draperies, gestures, and figure-types, even the structure of the hymn-strophe and the parallel motion of the parts in church music are ornament in the service of the all-ruling architectural idea.[231] The spell of the great Ornamentation remains unbroken till in the beginning of a “late” period architecture falls into a _group_ of civic and worldly special arts that unceasingly devote themselves to pleasing and clever imitation and become _ipso facto_ personal. To Imitation and Ornament the same applies that has been said already of time and space. Time gives birth to space, but space gives death to time.[232] In the beginning, rigid symbolism had petrified everything alive; the Gothic statue was not permitted to be a living body, but was simply a set of lines disposed in human form. But now Ornament loses all its sacred rigour and becomes more and more decoration for the architectural setting of a polite and mannered life. It was purely as this, namely _as a beautifying_ element, that Renaissance taste was adopted by the courtly and patrician world of the North (and by it alone!). Ornament meant something quite different in the Egyptian Old Kingdom from what it meant in the Middle; in the geometric period from what it meant in the Hellenistic; at the end of the 12th Century from what it meant at the end of Louis XIV’s reign. And architecture too becomes pictorial and makes music, and its forms seem always to be trying to imitate something in the picture of the world- around. From the Ionic capital we proceed to the Corinthian, and from Vignola through Bernini to the Rococo.

At the last, when Civilization sets in, true ornament and, with it, great art as a whole are extinguished. The transition consists—in every Culture—in Classicism and Romanticism of one sort or another, the former being a sentimental regard for an Ornamentation (rules, laws, types) that has long been archaic and soulless, and the latter a sentimental Imitation, not of life, but of an older Imitation. In the place of architectural style we find architectural taste. Methods of painting and mannerisms of writing, old forms and new, home and foreign, come and go with the fashion. The inward necessity is no longer there, there are no longer “schools,” for everyone selects what and where it pleases him to select. _Art becomes craft-art_ (_Kunstgewerbe_) in all its branches— architecture and music, poetry and drama—and in the end we have a pictorial and literary stock-in-trade which is destitute of any deeper significance and is employed according to taste. This final or industrial form of Ornament—no longer historical, no longer in the condition of “becoming”—we have before us not only in the patterns of oriental carpets, Persian and Indian metal work,` Chinese porcelain, but also in Egyptian (and Babylonian) art as the Greeks and Romans met it. The Minoan art of Crete is pure craft-art, a northern outlier of Egyptian post-Hyksos taste; and its “contemporary,” Hellenistic-Roman art from about the time of Scipio and Hannibal, similarly subserves the habit of comfort and the play of intellect. From the richly-decorated entablature of the Forum of Nerva in Rome to the later provincial ceramics in the West, we can trace the same steady formation of an unalterable craft-art that we find in the Egyptian and the Islamic worlds, and that we have to presume in India after Buddha and in China after Confucius.

V

Now, Cathedral and Pyramid-temple are different in spite of their deep inward kinship, and it is precisely in these differences that we seize the mighty phenomenon of the Faustian soul, whose depth-impulse refuses to be bound in the prime symbol of a way, and from its earliest beginnings strives to transcend every optical limitation. Can anything be more alien to the Egyptian conception of the State—whose tendency we may describe as a noble sobriety—than the political ambitions of the great Saxon, Franconian and Hohenstaufen Emperors, who came to grief because they overleapt all political actualities and for whom the recognition of any bounds would have been a betrayal of the idea of their rulership? Here the prime symbol of infinite space, with all its indescribable power, entered the field of active political existence. Beside the figures of the Ottos, Conrad II, Henry VI and Frederick II stand the Viking-Normans, conquerors of Russia, Greenland, England, Sicily and almost of Constantinople; and the great popes, Gregory VII and Innocent III—all of whom alike aimed at making their visible spheres of influence coincident with the whole known world. This is what distinguishes the heroes of the Grail and Arthurian and Siegfried sagas, ever roaming in the infinite, from the heroes of Homer with their geographically modest horizon; and the Crusades, that took men from the Elbe and the Loire to the limits of the known world, from the historical events upon which the Classical soul built the “Iliad” and which from the style of that soul we may safely assume to have been local, bounded, and completely appreciable.

The Doric soul actualized the symbol of the corporally-present individual thing, while deliberately rejecting all big and far-reaching creations, and it is for this very good reason that the first post- Mycenæan period has bequeathed nothing to our archæologists. The expression to which this soul finally attained was the Doric temple with its purely outward effectiveness, set upon the landscape as a massive image but denying and artistically disregarding the space within as the μὴ ὄv, that which was held to be incapable of existence. The ranked columns of the Egyptians carried the roof of a hall. The Greek in borrowing the motive invested it with a meaning proper to himself—he turned the architectural type inside out like a glove. The outer column- sets are, in a sense, relics of a denied interior.[233]

The Magian and the Faustian souls, on the contrary, built high. Their dream-images became concrete as vaultings above significant inner- spaces, structural anticipations respectively of the mathematic of algebra and that of analysis. In the style that radiated from Burgundy and Flanders rib-vaulting with its lunettes and flying buttresses emancipated the contained space from the sense-appreciable surface[234] bounding it. In the Magian interior "the window is merely a negative component, a utility-form in no wise yet developed into an art-form—to put it crudely, nothing but a hole in the wall."[235] When windows were in practice indispensable, they were for the sake of artistic impression concealed by galleries as in the Eastern basilica.[236] The _window as architecture_, on the other hand, is peculiar to the Faustian soul and the most significant symbol of its depth-experience. In it can be felt the will to emerge from the interior into the boundless. The same will that is immanent in contrapuntal music was native to these vaultings. The incorporeal world of this music was and remained that of the first Gothic, and even when, much later, polyphonic music rose to such heights as those of the Matthew Passion, the Eroica, and Tristan and Parsifal, it became of inward necessity _cathedral-like_ and returned to its home, the stone language of the Crusade-time. To get rid of every trace of Classical corporeality, there was brought to bear the full force of a deeply significant Ornamentation, which defies the delimiting power of stone with its weirdly impressive transformations of vegetal, animal and human bodies (St. Pierre in Moissac), which dissolves all its lines into melodies and variations on a theme, all its façades into many-voiced fugues, and all the bodiliness of its statuary into a music of drapery- folds. It is this spirituality that gave their deep meaning to the gigantic glass-expanses of our cathedral-windows with their polychrome, _translucent and therefore wholly bodiless_, painting—an art that has never and nowhere repeated itself and forms the completest contrast that can be imagined to the Classical fresco. It is perhaps in the Sainte- Chapelle at Paris that this emancipation from bodiliness is most evident. Here the stone practically vanishes in the gleam of the glass. Whereas the fresco-painting is co-material with the wall on and with which it has grown and its colour is effective as material, here we have colours dependent on no carrying surface but as free in space as organ notes, and shapes poised in the infinite. Compare with the Faustian spirit of these churches—almost wall-less, loftily vaulted, irradiated with many-coloured light, aspiring from nave to choir—the Arabian (that is, the Early-Christian Byzantine) cupola-church. The pendentive cupola, that seems to float on high above the basilica or the octagon, was indeed also a victory over the principle of natural gravity which the Classical expressed in architrave and column; it, too, was a defiance of architectural body, of “exterior.” But the very absence of an exterior emphasizes the more the unbroken coherence of the wall that shuts in the Cavern and allows no look and no hope to emerge from it. An ingeniously confusing interpenetration of spherical and polygonal forms; a load so placed upon a stone drum that it seems to hover weightless on high, yet closing the interior without outlet; all structural lines concealed; vague light admitted, through a small opening in the heart of the dome but only the more inexorably to emphasize the walling-in—such are the characters that we see in the masterpieces of this art, S. Vitale in Ravenna, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and the Dome of the Rock[237] in Jerusalem. Where the Egyptian puts reliefs that with their flat planes studiously avoid any foreshortening suggestive of lateral depth, where the Gothic architects put their pictures of glass to draw in the world of space without, the Magian clothes his walls with sparkling, predominantly golden, mosaics and arabesques and so drowns his cavern in that unreal, fairy-tale light which for Northerners is always so seductive in Moorish art.

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Footnote 228:

The same applies to the architecture of Thinite Egypt and to the Seleucid-Persian sun and fire temples of the pre-Christian area.

Footnote 229:

The combination of scrolls and “Greek keys” with the Dragon or other emblem of storm-power.—_Tr._

Footnote 230:

Dvorák, _Idealismus und Naturalismus in der got. Skulptur u. Malerei_ (_Hist. Zeitschrift_, 1918, pp. 44 et seq.).

Footnote 231:

And, finally, ornament in the highest sense includes _script_, and with it, the Book, which is the true associate of the cult-building, and as an art-work always appears and disappears with it. (See Vol. II, pp. 182. et seq., pp. 298 et seq.) In writing, it is understanding as distinct from intuition that attains to form: it is not essences that those signs symbolize but notions abstracted therefrom by words, and as for the speech-habituated human intellect rigid space is the presented objective, the writing of a Culture is (after its stone- building) the purest of all expressions of its prime-symbol. It is quite impossible to understand the history of Arabesque if we leave the innumerable Arabian scripts out of consideration, and it is no less impossible to separate Egyptian and Chinese style-history from the history of the corresponding writing-signs and their arrangement and application.

Footnote 232:

See p. 173.

Footnote 233:

Certainly the Greeks at the time when they advanced from the Antæ to the Peripteros were under the mighty influence of the Egyptian _series_-columns—it was at this time that their sculpture in the round, indisputably following Egyptian models, freed itself from the relief manner which still clings to the Apollo figures. But this does not alter the fact that the motive of the Classical column and the Classical application of the rank-principle were wholly and peculiarly Classical.

Footnote 234:

The surface of the space-volume itself, not that of the stone. Dvorák, _Hist. Ztschr._, 1918, pp. 17 et seq.

Footnote 235:

Dehio, _Gesch. der deutschen Kunst_, I, p. 16.

Footnote 236:

For descriptions and illustrations of types of Doming and Vaulting, see the article _Vault_ in Ency. Brit., XI Ed.—_Tr._

Footnote 237:

“Mosque of Omar.”—_Tr._

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VI

The phenomenon of the _great style_, then, is an emanation from the essence of the Macrocosm, from the prime-symbol of a _great_ culture. No one who can appreciate the connotation of the word sufficiently to see that it designates not a form-aggregate but a form-history, will try to aline the fragmentary and chaotic art-utterances of primitive mankind with the comprehensive certainty of a style that consistently develops over centuries. Only the art of great Cultures, the art that has ceased to be only art and has begun to be an effective unit of expression and significance, possesses style.

The organic history of a style comprises a "pre—," a "non—" and a "post— ." The bull tablet of the First Dynasty of Egypt[238] is not yet “Egyptian.” Not till the Third Dynasty do the works acquire a style—but then they do so suddenly and very definitely. Similarly the Carolingian period stands “between-styles.” We see different forms touched on and explored, but nothing of inwardly necessary expression. The creator of the Aachen Minster “thinks surely and builds surely, but does not feel surely.”[239] The Marienkirche in the Castle of Würzburg (c. 700) has its counterpart in Salonika (St. George), and the Church of St. Germigny des Près (c. 800) with its cupolas and horseshoe niches is almost a mosque. For the whole of West Europe the period 850-950 is almost a blank. And just so to-day Russian art stands between two styles. The primitive wooden architecture with its steep eight-sided tent-roof (which extends from Norway to Manchuria) is impressed with Byzantine motives from over the Danube and Armenian-Persian from over the Caucasus. We can certainly feel an “elective affinity” between the Russian and the Magian souls, but as yet the prime symbol of Russia, the _plane without limit_,[240] finds no sure expression either in religion or in architecture. The church roof emerges, hillock-wise, but little from the landscape and on it sit the tent-roofs whose points are coifed with the “kokoshniks” that suppress and would abolish the upward tendency. They neither tower up like the Gothic belfry nor enclose like the mosque-cupola, but _sit_, thereby emphasizing the horizontality of the building, which is meant to be regarded merely from the outside. When about 1760 the Synod forbade the tent roofs and prescribed the orthodox onion-cupolas, the heavy cupolas were set upon slender cylinders, of which there may be any number[241] and which sit on the roof-plane.[242] It is not yet a style, only the promise of a style that will awaken when the real Russian religion awakens.

In the Faustian West, this awakening happened shortly before A.D. 1000. In one moment, the Romanesque style was there. Instead of the fluid organization of space on an insecure ground plan, there was, suddenly, a strict dynamic of space. From the very beginning, inner and outer construction were placed in a fixed relation, the wall was penetrated by the form-language and the form worked into the wall in a way that no other Culture has ever imagined. From the very beginning the window and the belfry were invested with their meanings. The form was irrevocably assigned. Only its development remained to be worked out.

The Egyptian style began with another such creative act, just as unconscious, just as full of symbolic force. The prime symbol of the Way came into being suddenly with the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty (2930 B.C.). The world-creating depth-experience of this soul gets its substance from the direction-factor itself. Spatial depth as stiffened Time, distance, death, Destiny itself dominate the expression, and the merely sensuous dimensions of length and breadth become an escorting plane which restricts and prescribes the Way of destiny. The Egyptian flat-relief, which is designed to be seen at close quarters and arranged serially so as to compel the beholder to pass along the wall-planes in the prescribed direction, appears with similar suddenness about the beginning of the Fifth Dynasty.[243] The still later avenues of sphinxes and statues and the rock- and terrace-temples constantly intensify that tendency towards the one distance that the world of Egyptian mankind knows, the grave. Observe how soon the colonnades of the early period come to be systems of huge, close-set pillars that _screen off_ all side-view. This is something that has never reproduced itself in any other architecture.

The grandeur of this style appears to us as rigid and unchanging. And certainly it stands beyond the passion which is ever seeking and fearing and so imparts to subordinate characters a quality of restless personal movement in the flow of the centuries. But, vice versa, we cannot doubt that to an Egyptian the Faustian style (which _is_ our style, from earliest Romanesque to Rococo and Empire) would with its unresting persistent search for a Something, appear far more uniform than we can imagine. It follows, we must not forget, from the conception of style that we are working on here, that Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo are only _stages of one and the same style_, in which it is naturally the variable that we and the constant that men of other eyes remark. In actual fact, the inner unity of the Northern Renaissance is shown in innumerable reconstructions of Romanesque work in Baroque and of late Gothic work in Rococo that are not in the least startling. In peasant art, Gothic and Baroque have been identical, and the streets of old towns with their pure harmony of all sorts of gables and façades (wherein definite attributions to Romanesque or Gothic Renaissance or Baroque or Rococo are often quite impossible) show that the family resemblance between the members is far greater than they themselves realize.

The Egyptian style was purely architectural, and remained so till the Egyptian soul was extinguished. It is the only one in which Ornamentation as a decorative supplement to architecture is entirely absent. It allowed of no divergence into arts of entertainment, no display-painting, no busts, no secular music. In the Ionic phase, the centre of gravity of the Classical style shifted from architecture to an independent plastic art; in that of the Baroque the style of the West passed into music, whose form-language in its turn ruled the entire building art of the 18th Century; in the Arabian world, after Justinian and Chosroes-Nushirvan, Arabesque dissolved all the forms of architecture, painting and sculpture into style-impressions that nowadays we should consider as craft-art. But in Egypt the sovereignty of architecture remained unchallenged; it merely softened its language a little. In the chambers of the pyramid-temple of the Fourth Dynasty (Pyramid of Chephren) there are unadorned angular pillars. In the buildings of the Fifth (Pyramid of Sahu-rê) the plant-column makes its appearance. Lotus and papyrus branches turned into stone arise gigantic out of a pavement of transparent alabaster that represents water, enclosed by purple walls. The ceiling is adorned with birds and stars. The sacred way from the gate-buildings to the tomb-chamber, the picture of life, is a stream—it is the Nile itself become one with the prime- symbol of direction. The spirit of the mother-landscape unites with the soul that has sprung from it.

In China, in lieu of the awe-inspiring pylon with its massy wall and narrow entrance, we have the “Spirit-wall” (yin-pi) that conceals the way in. The Chinaman slips into life and thereafter follows the Tao of life’s path; as the Nile valley is to the up-and-down landscape of the Hwang Ho, so is the stone-enclosed temple-way to the mazy paths of Chinese garden-architecture. And just so, in some mysterious fashion, the Euclidean existence is linked with the multitude of little islands and promontories of the Ægean, and the passionate Western, roving in the infinite, with the broad plains of Franconia and Burgundy and Saxony.

VII

The Egyptian style is the expression of a _brave_ soul. The rigour and force of it Egyptian man himself never felt and never asserted. He dared all, but said nothing. In Gothic and Baroque, on the contrary, the triumph over heaviness became a perfectly conscious motive of the form- language. The drama of Shakespeare deals openly with the desperate conflict of will and world. Classical man, again, was weak in the face of the “powers.” The κάθαρσις of fear and pity, the _relief and recovery_ of the Apollinian soul in the moment of the περιπέτεια was, according to Aristotle, the effect deliberately aimed at in Attic tragedy. As the Greek spectator watched _someone whom he knew_ (for everyone knew the myth and its heroes and lived in them) senselessly maltreated by fortune, without any conceivable possibility of resistance to the Powers, and saw him go under with splendid mien, defiant, heroic, his own Euclidean soul experienced a marvellous uplifting. If life was worthless, at any rate the _grand gesture_ in losing it was not so. The Greek willed nothing and dared nothing, but he found a stirring beauty in _enduring_. Even the earlier figures of Odysseus the patient, and, above all, Achilles the archetype of Greek manhood, have this characteristic quality. The morale of the Cynics, that of the Stoics, that of Epicurus, the common Greek ideals of σωφροσύνη and ἀταραξἰα, Diogenes devoting himself to θεωρία in a tub—all this is masked cowardice in the face of grave matters and responsibilities, and different indeed from the pride of the Egyptian soul. Apollinian man goes below ground out of life’s way, even to the point of suicide, which _in this Culture alone_ (if we ignore certain related Indian ideals) ranked as a high ethical act and was treated with the solemnity of a ritual symbol.[244] The Dionysiac intoxication seems a sort of furious drowning of uneasinesses that to the Egyptian soul were utterly unknown. And consequently the Greek Culture is that of the small, the easy, the simple. Its technique is, compared with Egyptian or Babylonian, a clever nullity.[245] No ornamentation shows such a poverty of invention as theirs, and their stock of sculptural positions and attitudes could be counted on one’s fingers. “In its poverty of forms, which is conspicuous even allowing that at the beginning of its development it may have been better off than it was later, the Doric style pivoted everything on proportions and on measure.”[246] Yet, even so, what adroitness in avoiding! The Greek architecture with its commensuration of load and support and its peculiar smallness of scale suggests a persistent evasion of difficult architectural problems that on the Nile and, later, in the high North were literally looked for, which moreover were known and certainly not burked in the Mycenæan age. The Egyptian loved the strong stone of immense buildings; it was in keeping with his self- consciousness that he should choose only the hardest for his task. But the Greek avoided it; his architecture first set itself small tasks, then ceased altogether. If we survey it as a whole, and then compare it with the totality of Egyptian or Mexican or even, for that matter, Western architecture, we are astounded at the feeble development of the style. A few variations of the Doric temple and it was exhausted. It was already closed off about 400 when the Corinthian capital was invented, and everything subsequent to this was merely modification of what existed.

The result of this was an almost bodily standardization of form-types and style-species. One might choose between them, but never overstep their strict limits—that would have been in some sort an admission of an infinity of possibilities. There were three orders of columns and a definite disposition of the architrave corresponding to each; to deal with the difficulty (considered, as early as Vitruvius, as a conflict) which the alternation of triglyphs and metopes produced at the corners, the nearest intercolumniations were narrowed—no one thought of imagining new forms to suit the case. If greater dimensions were desired, the requirements were met by superposition, juxtaposition, etc., of additional elements. Thus the Colosseum possesses three rings, the Didymæum of Miletus three rows of columns in front, and the Frieze of the Giants of Pergamum an endless succession of individual and unconnected motives. Similarly with the style-species of prose and the types of lyric poetry, narrative and tragedy. Universally, the expenditure of powers on the basic form is restricted to the minimum and the creative energy of the artist directed to detail-fineness. It is a statical treatment of static genera, and it stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the dynamic fertility of the Faustian with its ceaseless creation of new types and domains of form.

VIII

We are now able to see the _organism_ in a great style-course. Here, as in so many other matters, Goethe was the first to whom vision came. In his “Winckelmann” he says of Velleius Paterculus: “with his standpoint, it was not given to him to see all art as a living thing (ζῶον) that must have an inconspicuous beginning, a slow growth, a brilliant moment of fulfilment and a gradual decline like every other organic being, though it is presented in a set of individuals.” This sentence contains the entire morphology of art-history. Styles do not follow one another like waves or pulse-beats. It is not the personality or will or brain of the artist that makes the style, but the style that makes the _type_ of the artist. The style, like the Culture, is a prime phenomenon in the strictest Goethian sense, be it the style of art or religion or thought, or the style of life itself. It is, as “Nature” is, an ever-new experience of waking man, his alter ego and mirror-image in the world- around. And therefore in the general historical picture of a Culture there can be but one style, _the style of the Culture_. The error has lain in treating mere style-phases—Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Rococo, Empire—as if they were styles on the same level as units of quite another order such as the Egyptian, the Chinese (or even a “prehistoric”) style. Gothic and Baroque are simply the youth and age of one and the same vessel of forms, the style of the West as ripening and ripened. What has been wanting in our art-research has been detachment, freedom from prepossessions, and the will to abstract. Saving ourselves trouble, we have classed any and every form-domain that makes a strong impression upon us as a “style,” and it need hardly be said that our insight has been led astray still further by the Ancient-Mediæval-Modern scheme. But in reality, even a masterpiece of strictest Renaissance like the court of the Palazzo Farnese is infinitely nearer to the arcade- porch of St. Patroclus in Soest, the interior of the Magdeburg cathedral, and the staircases of South-German castles of the 18th Century than it is to the Temple of Pæstum or to the Erechtheum. The same relation exists between Doric and Ionic, and hence Ionic columns can be as completely combined with Doric building forms as late Gothic is with early Baroque in St. Lorenz at Nürnberg, or late Romanesque with late Baroque in the beautiful upper part of the West choir at Mainz. And our eyes have scarcely yet learned to distinguish within the Egyptian style the Old Kingdom and Middle Empire elements corresponding to Doric and Gothic youth and to Ionic and Baroque maturity, because from the Twelfth Dynasty these elements interpenetrate in all harmony in the form-language of all the greater works.

The task before art-history is to write the _comparative biographies of the great styles_, all of which as organisms of the same genus possess structurally cognate life histories.

In the beginning there is the timid, despondent, naked expression of a newly-awakened soul which is still seeking for a relation between itself and the world that, though its proper creation, yet is presented as alien and unfriendly. There is the child’s fearfulness in Bishop Bernward’s building at Hildesheim, in the Early-Christian catacomb- painting, and in the pillar-halls of the Egyptian Fourth Dynasty. A February of art, a deep presentiment of a coming wealth of forms, an immense suppressed tension, lies over the landscape that, still wholly rustic, is adorning itself with the first strongholds and townlets. Then follows the joyous mounting into the high Gothic, into the Constantinian age with its pillared basilicas and its domical churches, into the relief-ornament of the Fifth-Dynasty temple. _Being_ is understood, a sacred form-language has been completely mastered and radiates its glory, and the Style ripens into a majestic symbolism of directional depth and of Destiny. But fervent youth comes to an end, and contradictions arise within the soul itself. The Renaissance, the Dionysiac-musical hostility to Apollinian Doric, the Byzantine of 450 that looks to Alexandria and away from the overjoyed art of Antioch, indicate a moment of resistance, of effective or ineffective impulse to destroy what has been acquired. It is very difficult to elucidate this moment, and an attempt to do so would be out of place here.

And now it is the manhood of the style-history that comes on. The Culture is changing into the intellectuality of the great cities that will now dominate the country-side, and _pari passu_ the style is becoming intellectualized also. The grand symbolism withers; the riot of superhuman forms dies down; milder and more worldly arts drive out the great art of developed stone. Even in Egypt sculpture and fresco are emboldened to lighter movement. The _artist_ appears, and “plans” what formerly grew out of the soil. Once more existence becomes self- conscious and now, detached from the land and the dream and the mystery, stands questioning, and wrestles for an expression of its new duty—as at the beginning of Baroque when Michelangelo, in wild discontent and kicking against the limitations of his art, piles up the dome of St. Peter’s—in the age of Justinian I which built Hagia Sophia and the mosaic-decked domed basilicas of Ravenna—at the beginning of that Twelfth Dynasty in Egypt which the Greeks condensed under the name of Sesostris—and at the decisive epoch in Hellas (c. 600) whose architecture probably, nay certainly, expressed that which is echoed for us in its grandchild Æschylus.

Then comes the gleaming autumn of the style. Once more the soul depicts its happiness, this time conscious of self-completion. The “return to Nature” which already thinkers and poets—Rousseau, Gorgias and their “contemporaries” in the other Cultures—begin to feel and to proclaim, reveals itself in the form-world of the arts as a sensitive longing and _presentiment of the end_. A perfectly clear intellect, joyous urbanity, the sorrow of a parting—these are the colours of these last Culture- decades of which Talleyrand was to remark later: “Qui n’a pas vécu avant 1789 ne connaît pas la douceur de vivre.” So it was, too, with the free, sunny and superfine art of Egypt under Sesostris III (c. 1850 B.C.) and the brief moments of satiated happiness that produced the varied splendour of Pericles’s Acropolis and the works of Zeuxis and Phidias. A thousand years later again, in the age of the Ommaiyads, we meet it in the glad fairyland of Moorish architecture with its fragile columns and horseshoe arches that seem to melt into air in an iridescence of arabesques and stalactites. A thousand years more, and we see it in the music of Haydn and Mozart, in Dresden shepherdesses, in the pictures of Watteau and Guardi, and the works of German master-builders at Dresden, Potsdam, Würzburg and Vienna.

Then the style fades out. The form-language of the Erechtheum and the Dresden Zwinger, honeycombed with intellect, fragile, ready for self- destruction, is followed by the flat and senile Classicism that we find in the Hellenistic megalopolis, the Byzantium of 900 and the “Empire” modes of the North. The end is a sunset reflected in forms revived for a moment by pedant or by eclectic—semi-earnestness and doubtful genuineness dominate the world of the arts. We to-day are in this condition—playing a tedious game with dead forms to keep up the illusion of a living art.

IX

No one has yet perceived that Arabian art is a single phenomenon. It is an idea that can only take shape when we have ceased to be deceived by the crust which overlaid the young East with post-Classical art- exercises that, whether they were imitation-antique or chose their elements from proper or alien sources at will, were in any case long past all inward life; when we have discovered that Early Christian art, together with every really living element in “late-Roman,” is in fact the springtime of the _Arabian style_; and when we see the epoch of Justinian I as exactly on a par with the Spanish-Venetian Baroque that ruled Europe in the great days of Charles V or Philip II, and the palaces of Byzantium and their magnificent battle-pictures and pageant- scenes—the vanished glories that inspired the pens of courtly literati like Procopius—on a par with the palaces of early Baroque in Madrid, Vienna and Rome and the great decorative-painting of Rubens and Tintoretto. This Arabian style embraces the entire first millennium of our era. It thus stands at a critical position in the picture of a general history of “Art,” and its organic connectedness has been imperceptible under the erroneous conventions thereof.[247]

Strange and—if these studies have given us the eye for things latent— moving it is to see how this young Soul, held in bondage to the intellect of the Classical and, above all, to the political omnipotence of Rome, dares not rouse itself into freedom but humbly subjects itself to obsolete value-forms and tries to be content with Greek language, Greek ideas and Greek art-elements. Devout acceptance of the powers of the strong day is present in every young Culture and is the sign of its youth—witness the humility of Gothic man in his pious high-arched spaces with their pillar-statuary and their light-filled pictures in glass, the high tension of the Egyptian soul in the midst of its world of pyramids, lotus-columns and relief-lined halls. But in this instance there is the additional element of an intellectual prostration before forms really dead but supposedly eternal. Yet in spite of all, the taking-over and continuance of these forms came to nothing. Involuntarily, unobserved, not supported by an inherent pride as Gothic was, but felt, there in Roman Syria, almost as a lamentable come-down, a whole new form-world grew up. Under a mask of Græco-Roman conventions, it filled even Rome itself. The master-masons of the Pantheon and the Imperial Fora were _Syrians_. In no other example is the primitive force of a young soul so manifest as here, where it has to make its own world by sheer conquest.

In this as in every other Culture, Spring seeks to express its spirituality in a new ornamentation and, above all, in religious architecture as the sublime form of that ornamentation. But of all this rich form-world the only part that (till recently) has been taken into account has been the Western edge of it, which consequently has been assumed to be the true home and habitat of Magian style-history. In reality, in matters of style as in those of religion, science and social-political life, what we find there is only an irradiation from outside the Eastern border of the Empire.[248] Riegl[249] and Strzygowski[250] have discovered this, but if we are to go further and arrive at a conspectus of the development of Arabian art we have to shed many philological and religious prepossessions. The misfortune is that our art-research, although it no longer recognizes the religious frontiers, nevertheless unconsciously assumes them. For there is in reality no such thing as a Late-Classical nor an Early-Christian nor yet an Islamic art in the sense of an art proper to each of those faiths and evolved by the community of believers as such. On the contrary, the totality of these religions—from Armenia to Southern Arabia and Axum, and from Persia to Byzantium and Alexandria—possess a broad uniformity of artistic expression that overrides the contradictions of detail.[251] _All_ these religions, the Christian, the Jewish, the Persian, the Manichæan, the Syncretic,[252] possessed cult-buildings and (at any rate in their script) an Ornamentation of the first rank; and however different the items of their dogmas, they are all pervaded by an homogeneous religiousness and express it in a homogeneous symbolism of depth-experience. There is something in the basilicas of Christianity, Hellenistic, Hebrew and Baal-cults, and in the Mithræum,[253] the Mazdaist fire-temple and the Mosque, that tells of a like spirituality: it is the _Cavern_-feeling.

It becomes therefore the bounden duty of research to seek to establish the hitherto completely neglected architecture of the South-Arabian and Persian temple, the Syrian and the Mesopotamian synagogue, the cult- buildings of Eastern Asia Minor and even Abyssinia;[254] and in respect of Christianity to investigate no longer merely the Pauline West but also the Nestorian East that stretched from the Euphrates to China, where the old records significantly call its buildings “Persian temples.” If in all this building practically nothing has, so far, forced itself specially upon our notice, it is fair to suppose that both the advance of Christianity first and that of Islam later could change the religion of a place of worship without contradicting its plan and style. We know that this is the case with Late Classical temples: but how many of the churches in Armenia may once have been fire-temples?

The artistic centre of this Culture was very definitely—as Strzygowski has observed—in the triangle of cities Edessa, Nisibis, Amida. To the westward of it is the domain of the Late-Classical “Pseudomorphosis,”[255] the Pauline Christianity that conquered in the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon,[256] Western Judaism and the cults of Syncretism. _The architectural type of the Pseudomorphosis_, both for Jew and Gentile, is the Basilica.[257] It employs the means of the Classical to express the opposite thereof, and is unable to free itself from these means—that is the essence and the tragedy of “Pseudomorphosis.” The more “Classical” Syncretism modifies a cult that is resident in a Euclidean place into one which is _professed by a community_ of indefinite estate, the more the interior of the temple gains in importance over the exterior without needing to change either plan or roof or columns very much. The space-feeling is different, but not—at first—the means of expressing it. In the pagan religious architecture of the Imperial Age there is a perceptible—though never yet perceived—movement from the wholly corporeal Augustan temple, in which the cella is the architectural expression of _nothingness_, to one in which the interior _only_ possesses meaning. Finally the external picture of the Peripteros of the Doric is transferred to the four inside walls. Columns ranked in front of a windowless wall are a denial of space beyond—that is, for the Classical beholder, of space within, and for the Magian, of space without. It is therefore a question of minor importance whether the entire space is covered in as in the Basilica proper, or only the sanctuary as in the Sun-temple of Baalbek with the great forecourt,[258] which later becomes a standing element of the mosque and is probably of South Arabian origin.[259] That the Nave originates in a court surrounded by halls is suggested not only by the special development of the basilica-type in the East Syrian steppe (particularly Hauran) but also by the basic disposition of porch, nave and choir as stages leading to the altar—for the aisles (originally the side-halls of the court) end blind, and only the nave proper corresponds with the apse. This basic meaning is very evident in St. Paul at Rome, albeit the Pseudomorphosis (inversion of the Classical temple) dictated the technical means, viz., column and architrave. How symbolic is the Christian reconstruction of the Temple of Aphrodisias in Caria, in which the cella within the columns is abolished and replaced by a new wall outside them.[260]

Outside the domain of the “Pseudomorphosis,” on the contrary, the cavern-feeling was free to develop its own form-language, and here therefore it is _the definite roof that is emphasized_ (whereas in the other domain the protest against the Classical feeling led merely to the development of an _interior_). When and where the various possibilities of dome, cupola, barrel-vaulting, rib-vaulting, came into existence as technical methods is, as we have already said, a matter of no significance. What is of decisive importance is the fact that about the time of Christ’s birth and the rise of the new world-feeling, the new space-symbolism must have begun to make use of these forms and to develop them further in expressiveness. It will very likely come to be shown that the fire-temples and synagogues of Mesopotamia (and possibly also the temples of Athtar in Southern Arabia) were originally cupola- buildings.[261] Certainly the pagan marna-temple at Gaza was so, and long before Pauline Christianity took possession of these forms under Constantine, builders of Eastern origin had introduced them, as novelties to please the taste of the Megalopolitans, into all parts of the Roman Empire. In Rome itself, Apollodorus of Damascus was employed under Trajan for the vaulting of the temple of “Venus and Rome,” and the domed chambers of the Baths of Caracalla and the so-called “Minerva Medica” of Gallienus’s time were built by Syrians. But the masterpiece, _the earliest of all Mosques_, is the Pantheon as rebuilt by Hadrian. Here, without a doubt, the emperor was imitating, for the satisfaction of his own taste, cult-buildings that he had seen in the East.[262]

The architecture of the central-dome, in which the Magian world-feeling achieved its purest expression, extended beyond the limits of the Roman Empire. For the Nestorian Christianity that extended from Armenia even into China it was the only form, as it was also for the Manichæns and the Mazdaists, and it also impressed itself victoriously upon the Basilica of the West when the Pseudomorphosis began to crumble and the last cults of Syncretism to die out. In Southern France—where there were Manichæan sects even as late as the Crusades—the form of the East was domesticated. Under Justinian, the interpenetration of the two produced the domical basilica of Byzantium and Ravenna. The pure basilica was pushed into the Germanic West, there to be transformed by the energy of the Faustian depth-impulse into the cathedral. The domed basilica, again, spread from Byzantium and Armenia into Russia, where it came by slow degrees to be felt as an element of exterior architecture belonging to a symbolism concentrated in the roof. But in the Arabian world Islam, the heir of Monophysite and Nestorian Christianity and of the Jews and the Persians, carried the development through to the end. When it turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque it only resumed possession of an old property. Islamic domical building followed Mazdaist and Nestorian along the same tracks to Shan-tung and to India. Mosques grew up in the far West in Spain and Sicily, where, moreover, the style appears rather in its East-Aramæan-Persian than in its West-Aramæan-Syrian mode.[263] And while Venice looked to Byzantium and Ravenna (St. Mark), the brilliant age of the Norman-Hohenstaufen rule in Palermo taught the cities of the Italian west coast, and even Florence, to admire and to imitate these Moorish buildings. More than one of the motives that the Renaissance thought were Classical—e.g., the court surrounded by halls and the union of column and arch—really originated thus.

What is true as regards architecture is even more so as regards ornamentation, which in the Arabian world very early overcame all figure-representation and swallowed it up in itself. Then, as “arabesque,” it advanced to meet, to charm and to mislead the young art- intention of the West.

The early-Christian-Late-Classical art of the Pseudomorphosis shows the same ornament-_plus_-figure mixture of the inherited “alien” and the inborn “proper” as does the Carolingian-Early Romanesque of (especially) Southern France and Upper Italy. In the one case Hellenistic intermingles with Early-Magian, in the other Mauro-Byzantine with Faustian. The researcher has to examine line after line and ornament after ornament to detect the form-feeling which differentiates the one stratum from the other. In every architrave, in every frieze, there is to be found a secret battle between the conscious old and the unconscious, but victorious, new motives. One is confounded by this general interpenetration of the Late-Hellenistic and the Early-Arabian form-senses, as one sees it, for example, in Roman portrait-busts (here it is often only in the treatment of the hair that the new way of expression is manifested); in the acanthus-shoots which show—often on one and the same frieze—chisel-work and drill-work side by side; in the sarcophagi of the 3rd Century in which a childlike feeling of the Giotto and Pisano character is entangled with a certain late and megalopolitan Naturalism that reminds one more or less of David or Carstens; and in buildings such as the Basilica of Maxentius[264] and many parts of the Baths and the Imperial Fora that are still very Classical in conception.

Nevertheless, the Arabian soul was cheated of its maturity—like a young tree that is hindered and stunted in its growth by a fallen old giant of the forest. Here there was no brilliant instant _felt and experienced as such_, like that of ours in which, simultaneously with the Crusades, the wooden beams of the Cathedral roof locked themselves into rib-vaulting and an interior was made to actualize and fulfil the idea of infinite space. The political creation of Diocletian was shattered in its glory upon the fact that, standing as he did on Classical ground, he had to accept the whole mass of the administrative tradition of Urbs Roma; this sufficed to reduce his work to a mere reform of obsolete conditions. And yet he was the first of the Caliphs. With him, the idea of the Arabian State emerges clearly into the light. It is Diocletian’s dispensation, together with that of the Sassanids which preceded it somewhat and served in all respects as its model, that gives us the first notion of the ideal that ought to have gone on to fulfilment here. But so it was in all things. To this very day we admire as last creations of the Classical—because we cannot or will not regard them otherwise—the thought of Plotinus and Marcus Aurelius, the cults of Isis, Mithras and the Sun-God, the Diophantine mathematics and, lastly, the whole of the art which streamed towards us from the Eastern marches of the Roman Empire and for which Antioch and Alexandria were merely _points d’appui_.

This alone is sufficient to explain the intense vehemence with which the Arabian Culture, when released at length from artistic as from other fetters, flung itself upon all the lands that had inwardly belonged to it for centuries past. It is the sign of a soul that feels itself in a hurry, that notes in fear the first symptoms of old age before it has had youth. This emancipation of Magian mankind is without a parallel. Syria is conquered, or rather _delivered_, in 634. Damascus falls in 637, Ctesiphon in 637. In 641 Egypt and India are reached, in 647 Carthage, in 676 Samarkand, in 710 Spain. And in 732 the Arabs stood before Paris. Into these few years was compressed the whole sum of saved-up passions, postponed hopes, reserved deeds, that in the slow maturing of other Cultures suffice to fill the history of centuries. The Crusaders before Jerusalem, the Hohenstaufen in Sicily, the Hansa in the Baltic, the Teutonic Knights in the Slavonic East, the Spaniards in America, the Portuguese in the East Indies, the Empire of Charles V on which the sun never set, the beginnings of England’s colonial power under Cromwell—the equivalent of all this was shot out in _one_ discharge that carried the Arabs to Spain and France, India and Turkestan.

True, all Cultures (the Egyptian, the Mexican and the Chinese excepted) have grown up under the tutelage of some older Culture. Each of the form-worlds shows certain alien traits. Thus, the Faustian soul of the Gothic, already predisposed to reverence by the Arabian origin of Christianity, grasped at the treasures of Late-Arabian art. An unmistakably Southern, one might even say an Arabian, Gothic wove itself over the façades of the Burgundian and Provençal cathedrals, dominated with a magic of stone the outward language of Strassburg Minster, and fought a silent battle in statues and porches, fabric-patterns, carvings and metalwork—and not less in the intricate figures of scholastic philosophy and in that intensely Western symbol, the Grail legend[265]— with the Nordic prime-feeling of _Viking Gothic_ that rules the interior of the Magdeburg Cathedral, the points of Freiburg Minster and the mysticism of Meister Eckart. More than once the pointed arch threatens to burst its restraining line and to transform itself into the horseshoe arch of Moorish-Norman architecture.

So also the Apollinian art of the Doric spring—whose first efforts are practically lost to us—doubtless took over Egyptian elements to a very large extent, and by and through these came to its own proper symbolism.

But the Magian soul of the Pseudomorphosis had not the courage to appropriate alien means _without yielding to them_. And this is why the physiognomic of the Magian soul has still so much to disclose to the quester.

X

The idea of the Macrocosm, then, which presents itself in the style- problem as simplified and capable of treatment, poses a multitude of tasks for the future to tackle. To make the form-world of the arts available as a means of penetrating the spirituality of entire Cultures— by handling it in a thoroughly physiognomic and symbolic spirit—is an undertaking that has not hitherto got beyond speculations of which the inadequacy is obvious. We are hardly as yet aware that there may be a psychology of the metaphysical bases of all great architectures. We have no idea what there is to discover in the change of meaning that a form of _pure extension_ undergoes when it is taken over into another Culture. The history of the column has never yet been written, nor have we any notion of the deeply symbolic significances that reside in the means and the instruments of art.

Consider mosaic. In Hellenic times it was made up of pieces of marble, it was opaque and corporeal-Euclidean (e.g., the famous Battle of Issus at Naples), and it adorned the floor. But with the awakening of the Arabian soul it came to be built up of pieces of glass and set in fused gold, and it simply covered the walls and roofs of the domed basilica. This Early-Arabian Mosaic-picturing corresponds exactly, as to phase, with the glass-picturing of Gothic cathedrals, both being “early” arts ancillary to religious architectures. The one by letting in the light enlarges the church-space into world-space, while the other transforms it into the magic, gold-shimmering sphere which bears men away from earthly actuality into the visions of Plotinus, Origen, the Manichæans, the Gnostics and the Fathers, and the Apocalyptic poems.

Consider, again, the beautiful notion of _uniting the round arch and the column_; this again is a Syrian, if not a North-Arabian, creation of the third (or “high Gothic”) century.[266] The revolutionary importance of this motive, which is specifically Magian, has never in the least degree been recognized; on the contrary, it has always been assumed to be Classical, and for most of us indeed it is even representatively Classical. The Egyptians ignored any deep relation between the roof and the column; the latter was for them a plant-column, and represented not stoutness but growth. Classical man, in his turn, for whom the monolithic column was the mightiest symbol of Euclidean existence—all body, all unity, all steadiness—connected it, in the strictest proportions of vertical and horizontal, of strength and load, with his architrave. But here, in this union of arch and column which the Renaissance in its tragicomic deludedness admired as expressly Classical (though it was a notion that the Classical neither possessed nor could possess), the bodily principle of load and inertia is rejected and the arch is made to spring clear and open out of the slender column. The idea actualized here is at once a liberation from all earth-gravity and a capture of space, and between this element and that of the dome which soars free but yet encloses the great “cavern,” there is the deep relation of like meaning. The one and the other are eminently and powerfully Magian, and they come to their logical fulfilment in the “Rococo” stage of Moorish mosques and castles, wherein ethereally delicate columns—often growing out of, rather than based on, the ground— seem to be empowered by some secret magic to carry a whole world of innumerable notched arcs, gleaming ornaments, stalactites, and vaultings saturated with colours. The full importance of this basic form of Arabian architecture may be expressed by saying that the combination of column and architrave is the Classical, that of column and round arch the Arabian, and that of pillar and pointed arch the Faustian Leitmotiv.

Take, further, the history of the Acanthus motive.[267] In the form in which it appears, for example, on the Monument of Lysicrates at Athens, it is one of the most distinctive in Classical ornamentation. It has body, it is and remains individual, and its structure is capable of being taken in at one glance. But already it appears heavier and richer in the ornament of the Imperial Fora (Nerva’s, Trajan’s) and that of the temple of Mars Ultor; the organic disposition has become so complicated that, as a rule, it requires to be studied, and the tendency to _fill up_ the surfaces appears. In Byzantine art—of which Riegl thirty years ago noticed the “latent Saracenic character” though he had no suspicion of the connexion brought to light here—the acanthus leaf was broken up into endless tendril-work which (as in Hagia Sophia) is disposed quite inorganically over whole surfaces. To the Classical motive are added the old-Aramæan vine and palm leaves, which have already played a part in Jewish ornamentation. The interlaced borders of “Late-Roman” mosaic pavements and sarcophagus-edges, and even geometrical plane-patterns are introduced, and finally, throughout the Persian-Anatolian world, mobility and _bizarrerie_ culminate in the Arabesque. _This_ is the genuine Magian motive—anti-plastic to the last degree, hostile to the pictorial and to the bodily alike. Itself bodiless, it disembodies the object over which its endless richness of web is drawn. A masterpiece of this kind—a piece of architecture completely opened out into Ornamentation—is the façade of the Castle of Mashetta in Moab built by the Ghassanids.[268] The craft-art of Byzantine-Islamic style (hitherto called Lombard, Frankish, Celtic or Old-Nordic) which invaded the whole youthful West and dominated the Carolingian Empire, was largely practised by Oriental craftsmen or imported as patterns for our own weavers, metal-workers and armourers.[269] Ravenna, Lucca, Venice, Granada, Palermo were the efficient centres of this then highly- civilized form-language; in the year 1000, when in the North the forms of a new Culture were already being developed and established, Italy was still entirely dominated by it.

Take, lastly, the changed point of view towards the human body. With the victory of the Arabian world-feeling, men’s conception of it underwent a complete revolution. In almost every Roman head of the period 100-250 that the Vatican Collection contains, one may perceive the opposition of Apollinian and Magian feeling, and of muscular position and “look” as different bases of expression. Even in Rome itself, since Hadrian, the sculptor made constant use of the drill, an instrument which was wholly repugnant to the Euclidean feeling towards stone—for whereas the chisel brings out the limiting surfaces and _ipso facto_ affirms the corporeal and material nature of the marble block, the drill, in breaking the surfaces and creating effects of light and shade, denies it; and accordingly the sculptors, be they Christian or “pagan,” lose the old feeling for the phenomenon of the naked body. One has only to look at the shallow and empty Antinous statues—and yet these were quite definitely “Classical.” Here it is only the head that is physiognomically of interest—as it never is in Attic sculpture. The drapery is given quite a new meaning, and simply dominates the whole appearance. The consul-statues in the Capitoline Museum[270] are conspicuous examples. The pupils are bored, and the eyes look into the distance, so that the whole expression of the work lies no longer in its body but in that Magian principle of the “Pneuma” which Neo-Platonism and the decisions of the Church Councils, Mithraism and Mazdaism alike presume in man.

The pagan “Father” Iamblichus, about 300, wrote a book concerning statues of gods in which the divine is substantially present and working upon the beholder.[271] Against this idea of the image—an idea of the Pseudomorphosis—the East and the South rose in a storm of iconoclasm; and the sources of this iconoclasm lay in a conception of artistic creation that is nearly impossible for us to understand.

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Footnote 238:

H. Schäfer, _Von Aegyptischer Kunst_, I, pp. 15 et seq.

(The bulls are shown in Fig. 18 in the article _Egypt_ in the Encyclopædia Britannica, XI Edition, Vol. IX, pp. 65-66.—_Tr._)

Footnote 239:

Frankl, _Baukunst des Mittelalters_ (1918), pp. 16 et seq.

Footnote 240:

See Vol. II, pp. 361 et seq. The lack of any vertical tendency in the Russian life-feeling is perceptible also in the saga-figure of Ilya Murometz (see Vol. II, p. 231). The Russian has not the smallest relation with a _Father_-God. His ethos is not a filial but purely a _fraternal_ love, radiating in all directions along the human plane. Christ, even, is conceived as a Brother. The Faustian, wholly vertical, tendency to strive up to fulfilment is to the real Russian an incomprehensible pretension. The same absence of all vertical tendency is observable in Russian ideas of the state and property.

Footnote 241:

The cemetery church of Kishi has 22.

Footnote 242:

J. Grabar, “History of Russian Art” (Russian, 1911), I-III. Eliasberg, _Russ. Baukunst_ (1922), Introduction.

Footnote 243:

The disposition of Egyptian and that of Western history are so clear as to admit of comparison being carried right down into the details, and it would be well worth the expert’s while to carry out such an investigation. The Fourth Dynasty, that of the strict Pyramid style, B.C. 2930-2750 (Cheops, Chephren), corresponds to the Romanesque (980- 1100), the Fifth Dynasty (2750-2625, Sahu-rê) to the early Gothic (1100-1230), and the Sixth Dynasty, prime of the archaic portraiture (2625-2475, Phiops I and II), to the mature Gothic of 1230-1400.

Footnote 244:

That which differentiates the Japanese harakiri from this suicide is its intensely purposeful and (so to put it) active and demonstrative character.—_Tr._

Footnote 245:

See Vol. II, p. 626.

Footnote 246:

Koldewey-Puchstein, _Die griech. Tempel in Unter-Italien und Sizilien_, I, p. 228.

Footnote 247:

See Vol. II,