CHAPTER VII

MUSIC AND PLASTIC

I THE ARTS OF FORM

I

The clearest type of symbolic expression that the world-feeling of higher mankind has found for itself is (if we except the mathematical- scientific domain of presentation and the symbolism of its basic ideas) that of the arts of form,[272] of which the number is legion. _And with these arts we count music_ in its many and very dissimilar kinds; had these been brought within the domain of art-historical research instead of being put in a class apart from that of the pictorial-plastic arts, we should have progressed very much further in our understanding of the import of this evolution towards an end. For the formative impulse that is at work in the _wordless_[273] arts can never be understood until we come to regard the distinction between optical and acoustic means as only a superficial one. To talk of the art of the eye and the art of the ear takes us no further. It is not such things that divide one art from another. Only the 19th Century could so over-estimate the influence of _physiological_ conditions as to apply it to expression, conception or communion. A “singing” picture of Claude Lorrain or of Watteau does not really address itself to the bodily eye any more than the space- straining music since Bach addresses itself to the bodily ear. The Classical relation between art-work and sense-organ—of which we so often and so erroneously remind ourselves here—is something quite different from, something far simpler and more material than ours. We _read_ “Othello” and “Faust” and we study orchestral scores—that is, we change one sense-agency for another in order to let the undiluted spirit of these works take effect upon us. Here there is always an appeal from the outer senses to the “inner,” to the truly Faustian and wholly un- Classical power of imagination. Only thus can we understand Shakespeare’s ceaseless change of scene as against the Classical unity of place. In extreme cases indeed, for instance in that of “Faust” itself, no representation of the work (that is, of its full content) is physically possible. But in music too—in the unaccompanied “A capella” of the Palestrina style as well as _a fortiori_ in the Passions of Heinrich Schütz, in the fugues of Bach, in the last quartets of Beethoven, and in “Tristan”—we livingly experience _behind_ the sensuous impressions a whole world of others. And it is only through these latter that all the fullness and depth of the work begins to be present to us, and it is only mediately—through the images of blond, brown, dusky and golden colours, of sunsets and distant ranked mountain-summits, of storms and spring landscapes, of foundered cities and strange faces which harmony conjures up for us—that it tells us something of itself. It is not an incident that Beethoven wrote his last works when he was deaf—deafness merely released him from the last fetters. For this music, sight and hearing _equally_ are bridges into the soul and nothing more. To the Greek this visionary kind of artistic enjoyment was utterly alien. He _felt_ the marble with his eye, and the thick tones of an aulos moved him almost _corporally_. For him, eye and ear are the receivers of the _whole_ of the impression that he wished to receive. But for us this had ceased to be true even at the stage of Gothic.

In the actual, tones are something extended, limited and numerable just as lines and colours are; harmony, melody, rhyme and rhythm no less so than perspective, proportion, chiaroscuro and outline. The distance separating two kinds of painting can be infinitely greater than that separating the painting and the music of a period. Considered in relation to a statue of Myron, the art of a Poussin landscape is the same as that of a contemporary chamber-cantata; that of Rembrandt as that of the organ works of Buxtehude, Pachelbel and Bach; that of Guardi as that of the Mozart opera—the _inner_ form-language is so nearly identical that the difference between optical and acoustic means is negligible.

The importance which the “science of art” has always attached to a timeless and conceptual delimitation of the individual art-spheres only proves that the fundamentals of the problem have not been attacked. Arts are living units, and the living is incapable of being dissected. The first act of the learned pedant has always been to partition the infinitely wide domain into provinces determined by perfectly superficial criteria of medium and technique and to endow these provinces with eternal validity and immutable (!) form-principles. Thus he separated “Music” and “Painting,” “Music” and “Drama,” “Painting” and “Sculpture.” And then he proceeded to define “the” art of Painting, “the” art of Sculpture, and so on. But in fact the technical form- language is no more than the _mask_ of the real work. Style is not what the shallow Semper—worthy contemporary of Darwin and materialism— supposed it to be, the product of material, technique, and purpose. It is the very opposite of this, something inaccessible to art-reason, a revelation of the metaphysical order, a mysterious “must,” a Destiny. With the material boundaries of the different arts it has no concern whatever.

To classify the arts according to the character of the sense-impression, then, is to pervert the problem of form in its very enunciation. For how is it possible to predicate a genus “Sculpture” of so general a character as to admit of general laws being evolved from it? What _is_ “Sculpture?”

Take painting again. There is no such thing as “_the_” art of Painting, and anyone who compares a drawing of Raphael, effected by outline, with one of Titian, effected by flecks of light and shade, without feeling that they belong to two different arts; any one who does not realize a dissimilarity of essence between the works of Giotto or Mantegna—relief, created by brushstroke—and those of Vermeer or Goya—music, created on coloured canvas—such a one will never grasp the deeper questions. As for the frescoes of Polygnotus and the mosaics of Ravenna, there is not even the similarity of technical means to bring them within the alleged genus, and what is there in common between an etching and the art of Fra Angelico, or a proto-Corinthian vase-painting and a Gothic cathedral- window, or the reliefs of Egypt and those of the Parthenon?

If an art has boundaries at all—boundaries of its soul-become-form—they are historical and not technical or physiological boundaries.[274] An art is an organism, not a system. There is no art-genus that runs through all the centuries and all the Cultures. Even where (as in the case of the Renaissance) supposed technical traditions momentarily deceive us into a belief in the eternal validity of antique art-laws, there is at bottom entire discrepance. There is _nothing_ in Greek and Roman art that stands in any relation whatever to the form-language of a Donatello statue or a painting of Signorelli or a façade of Michelangelo. _Inwardly_, the Quattrocento is related to the contemporary Gothic and to nothing else. The fact of the archaic Greek Apollo-type being “influenced” by Egyptian portraiture, or early Tuscan representation by Etruscan tomb-painting, implies precisely what is implied by that of Bach’s writing a fugue upon an alien theme—he shows what he can express with it. Every individual art—Chinese landscape or Egyptian plastic or Gothic counterpoint—is _once existent_, and departs with its soul and its symbolism never to return.

II

With this, the notion of Form opens out immensely. Not only the technical instrument, not only the form-language, but also _the choice of art-genus itself_ is seen to be an expression-means. What the creation of a masterpiece means for an individual artist—the “Night Watch” for Rembrandt or the “Meistersinger” for Wagner—that the creation of a _species_ of art, comprehended as such, means for the life-history of a Culture. It is epochal. Apart from the merest externals, each such art is an individual organism without predecessor or successor. Its theory, technique and convention all belong to its character, and contain nothing of eternal or universal validity. When one of these arts is born, when it is spent, whether it dies or is transmuted into another, why this or that art is dominant in or absent from a particular Culture—all these are questions of Form in the highest sense, just as is that other question of why individual painters and musicians unconsciously avoid certain shades and harmonies or, on the contrary, show preferences so marked that authorship-attributions can be based on them.

The importance of these groups of questions has not yet been recognized by theory, even by that of the present day. And yet it is precisely from this side, the side of their physiognomic, that the arts are accessible to the understanding. Hitherto it has been supposed—without the slightest examination of the weighty questions that the supposition involves—that the several “arts” specified in the conventional classification-scheme (the validity of which is assumed) are all _possible_ at all times and places, and the absence of one or another of them in particular cases is attributed to the accidental lack of creative personalities or impelling circumstances or discriminating patrons to guide “art” on its “way.” Here we have what I call a transference of the causality-principle from the world of the become to that of the becoming. Having no eye for the perfectly different logic and necessity of the Living, for Destiny and the inevitableness and _unique occurrence_ of its expression-possibilities, men had recourse to tangible and obvious “causes” for the building of their art-history, which thus came to consist of a series of events of only superficial concordance.

I have already, in the earliest pages of this work, exposed the shallowness of the notion of a linear progression of “mankind” through the stages of “ancient,” “mediæval” and “modern,” a notion that has made us blind to the true history and structure of higher Cultures. The history of art is a conspicuous case in point. Having assumed as self- evident the existence of a number of constant and well-defined provinces of art, one proceeded to order the history of these several provinces according to the—equally self-evident—scheme of ancient-mediæval-modern, to the exclusion, of course, of Indian and East-Asiatic art, of the art of Axum and Saba, of the Sassanids and of Russia, which if not omitted altogether were at best relegated to appendices. It occurred to no one that such results argued unsoundness in the method; the scheme was there, demanded facts, and must at any price be fed with them. And so a futile up-and-down course was stolidly traced out. Static times were described as “natural pauses,” it was called “decline” when some great art in reality died, and “renaissance” where an eye really free from prepossessions would have seen another art being born in another landscape to express another humanity. Even to-day we are still taught that the Renaissance was a rebirth of the Classical. And the conclusion was drawn that it is possible and right to take up arts that are found weak or even dead (in this respect the present is a veritable battle- field) and set them going again by conscious reformation-program or forced “revival.”

And yet it is precisely in this problem of the end, the impressively sudden end, of a great art—the end of the Attic drama in Euripides, of Florentine sculpture with Michelangelo, of instrumental music in Liszt, Wagner and Bruckner—that the organic character of these arts is most evident. If we look closely enough we shall have no difficulty in convincing ourselves that no _one_ art of any greatness has ever been “reborn.”

Of the Pyramid style _nothing_ passed over into the Doric. _Nothing_ connects the Classical temple with the basilica of the Middle East, for the mere taking over of the Classical column as a structural member, though to a superficial observer it seems a fact of the first importance, weighs no more in reality than Goethe’s employment of the old mythology in the “Classical Walpurgis Night” scene of “Faust.” To believe genuinely in a rebirth of Classical art, or any Classical art, in the Western 15th Century requires a rare stretch of the imagination. And that a great art may die not merely with the Culture but within it, we may see from the fate of music in the Classical world.[275] Possibilities of great music there must have been in the Doric springtime—how otherwise can we account for the importance of old- fashioned Sparta in the eyes of such musicians as there were later (for Terpander, Thaletas and Alcman were effective there when elsewhere the statuary art was merely infantile)?—and yet the Late-Classical world refrained. In just the same fashion everything that the Magian Culture had attempted in the way of frontal portraiture, deep relief and mosaic finally succumbed before the Arabesque; and everything of the plastic that had sprung up in the shade of Gothic cathedrals at Chartres, Reims, Bamberg, Naumburg, in the Nürnberg of Peter Vischer and the Florence of Verrocchio, vanished before the oil-painting of Venice and the instrumental music of the Baroque.

III

The temple of Poseidon at Pæstum and the Minster of Ulm, works of the ripest Doric and the ripest Gothic, differ precisely as the Euclidean geometry of bodily bounding-surfaces differs from the analytical geometry of the position of points in space referred to spatial axes. All Classical building begins from the outside, all Western from the inside. The Arabian also begins with the inside, but it stays there. There is one and only one soul, the Faustian, that craves for a style which drives through walls into the limitless universe of space and makes both the exterior and the interior of the building complementary images of one and the same world-feeling. The exterior of the basilica and the domical building may be a _field for ornamentation_, but _architecture_ it is not. The impression that meets the beholder as he approaches is that of something shielding, something that hides a secret. The form-language in the cavern-twilight exists for the faithful only—that is the factor common to the highest examples of the style and to the simplest Mithræa and Catacombs, the prime powerful utterance of a new soul. Now, as soon as the Germanic spirit takes possession of the basilical type, there begins a wondrous mutation of all structural parts, as to both position and significance. Here in the Faustian North the outer form of the building, be it cathedral or mere dwelling-house, begins to be brought into relation with the meaning that governs the arrangement of the interior, a meaning undisclosed in the mosque and non-existent in the temple. The Faustian building has a _visage_ and not merely a façade (whereas the front of a peripteros is, after all, only one of four sides and the centre-domed building in principle has not even a front) and with this visage, this head, is associated an articulated trunk that draws itself out through the broad plain like the cathedral at Speyer, or erects itself to the heavens like the innumerable spires of the original design of Reims. The _motive of the façade_, which greets the beholder and tells him the inner meaning of the house, dominates not only individual major buildings but also the whole aspect of our streets, squares and towns with their characteristic wealth of windows.[276]

The great architecture of the early period is ever the mother of all following arts; it determines the choice of them and the spirit of them. Accordingly, we find that the history of the Classical shaping art is one untiring effort to accomplish one single ideal, viz., the conquest of the free-standing human body as the vessel of the pure real present. The temple of the naked body was to it what the cathedral of voices was to the Faustian from earliest counterpoint to the orchestral writing of the 18th Century. We have failed hitherto to understand the emotional force of this secular tendency of the Apollinian, because we have not felt how the _purely material, soulless body_ (for the Temple of the Body, too, has no "interior"!) is the object which archaic relief, Corinthian painting on clay, and Attic fresco were all striving to obtain until Polycletus and Phidias showed how to achieve it in full. We have, with a wonderful blindness, assumed this kind of sculpture as both authoritative and universally possible, as in fact, “the art of sculpture.” We have written its history as one concerned with all peoples and periods, and even to-day our sculptors, under the influence of unproved Renaissance doctrines, speak of the naked human body as the noblest and most genuine object of “the” art of sculpture. Yet in reality this statue-art, the art of the naked body standing free upon its footing and appreciable from all sides alike, existed in the Classical and the Classical only, for it was that Culture alone which quite decisively refused to transcend sense-limits in favour of space. The Egyptian statue is always meant to be seen from the front—it is a variant of plane-relief. And the _seemingly_ Classically-conceived statues of the Renaissance (we are astounded, as soon as it occurs to us to count them, to find how few of them there are[277]) are nothing but a semi-Gothic reminiscence.

The evolution of this rigorously _non-spatial_ art occupies the three centuries from 650 to 350, a period extending from the completion of the Doric and the simultaneous appearance of a tendency to free the figures from the Egyptian limitation of frontalness[278] to the coming of the Hellenistic and its illusion-painting which closed-off the grand style. This sculpture will never be rightly appreciated until it is regarded as the last and highest Classical, as _springing from a plane art, first obeying and then overcoming the fresco_. No doubt the technical origin can be traced to experiments in figure-wise treatment of the pristine column, or the plates that served to cover the temple wall,[279] and no doubt there are here and there imitations of Egyptian works (seated figures of Miletus), although very few Greek artists can ever have seen one.[280] But as a _form-ideal_ the statue goes back through relief to the archaic clay-painting in which fresco also originated. Relief, like fresco, is tied to the bodily wall. All this sculpture right down to Myron may be considered as relief detached from the plane. In the end, the figure is treated as a self-contained body apart from the mass of the building, but it remains essentially a silhouette in front of a wall.[281] Direction in depth is excluded, and the work is spread out frontally before the beholder. Even the Marsyas of Myron can be copied upon vases or coins without much trouble or appreciable foreshortenings.[282] Consequently, of the two major “late” arts after 650, fresco definitely has the priority. The small stock of types is always to be found first in vase-figuring, which is often exactly paralleled by quite late sculptures. We know that the Centaur group of the West pediment at Olympia was worked out from a painting. On the Ægina temple, the advance from the West to the East pediment is an advance from the fresco-character to the body-character. The change is completed about 460 with Polycletus, and thenceforward plastic groups become the model for strict painting. But it is from Lysippus that the wholly cubic and “all-ways” treatment becomes thoroughly veristic and yields “fact.” Till then, even in the case of Praxiteles, we have still a lateral or planar development of the subject, with a clear outline that is only fully effective in respect of one or two standpoints. But an undeviating testimony to the picture-origin of independent sculpture is the practice of polychroming the marble—a practice unknown to the Renaissance and to Classicism, which would have felt it as barbaric[283]—and we may say the same of the gold-and-ivory statuary and the enamel overlaying of bronze, a metal which already possesses a shining golden tone of its own.

IV

The corresponding stage of Western art occupies the three centuries 1500-1800, between the end of late Gothic and the decay of Rococo which marks the end of the great Faustian style. In this period, conformably to the persistent growth into consciousness of the will to spatial transcendence, it is instrumental music that develops into the ruling art. At the beginning, in the 17th Century, music uses the characteristic tone-colours of the instruments, and the contrasts of strings and wind, human voices and instrumental voices, as means wherewith to _paint_. Its (quite unconscious) ambition is to parallel the great masters from Titian to Velasquez and Rembrandt. It makes pictures (in the sonata from Gabrieli [d. 1612.] to Corelli [d. 1713] every movement shows a theme embellished with graces and set upon the background of a _basso continuo_), paints heroic landscapes (in the pastoral cantata), and draws a portrait in lines of melody (in Monteverde’s “Lament of Ariadne,” 1608). With the German masters, all this goes. Painting can take music no further. Music becomes itself _absolute_: it is music that (quite unconsciously again) dominates both painting and architecture in the 18th Century. And, ever more and more decisively, sculpture fades out from among the deeper possibilities of this form-world.

What distinguishes painting as it was before, from painting as it was after, the shift from Florence to Venice—or, to put it more definitely, what separates the painting of Raphael and that of Titian as two entirely distinct arts—is that the plastic spirit of the one associates painting with relief, while the musical spirit of the other works in a technique of visible brush-strokes and atmospheric depth-effects that is akin to the chromatic of string and wind choruses. It is an opposition and not a transition that we have before us, and the recognition of the fact is vital to our understanding of the _organism_ of these arts. Here, if anywhere, we have to guard against the abstract hypothesis of “eternal art-laws.” “Painting” is a mere word. Gothic glass-painting was an element of Gothic architecture, the servant of its strict symbolism just as the Egyptian and the Arabian and every other art in this stage was the servant of the stone-language. Draped figures were built up as cathedrals were. Their folds were an _ornamentation_ of extreme sincerity and severe expressiveness. To criticize their “stiffness” from a naturalistic-imitative point of view is to miss the point entirely.

Similarly “music” is a mere word. Some music there has been everywhere and always, even _before_ any genuine Culture, even among the beasts. But the serious music of the Classical was nothing but a _plastic for the ear_. The tetrachords, chromatic and enharmonic, have a structural and not a harmonic meaning:[284] but this is the very difference between body and space. This music was single-voiced. The few instruments that it employed were all developed in respect of capacity for tone-plastic; and naturally therefore it rejected the Egyptian harp, an instrument that was probably akin in tone-colour to the harpsichord. But, above all, the melody—like Classical verse from Homer to Hadrian’s time—was treated quantitatively and not accentually; that is, the syllables, their bodies and their _extent_, decided the rhythm. The few fragments that remain suffice to show us that the sensuous charm of this art is something outside our comprehension; but this very fact should cause us also

to reconsider our ideas as to the impressions purposed and achieved by the statuary and the fresco, for we do not and cannot experience the charm that these exercised upon the Greek eye.

Equally incomprehensible to us is Chinese music: in which, according to educated Chinese, we are never able to distinguish gay from grave.[285] Vice versa, to the Chinese all the music of the West without distinction is _march-music_. Such is the impression that the rhythmic dynamic of our life makes upon the accentless Tao of the Chinese soul, and, indeed, the impression that our entire Culture makes upon an alien humanity—the directional energy of our church-naves and our storeyed façades, the depth-perspectives of our pictures, the march of our tragedy and narrative, not to mention our technics and the whole course of our private and public life. We ourselves have _accent_ in our blood and therefore do not notice it. But when our rhythm is juxtaposed with that of an alien life, we find the discordance intolerable.

Arabian music, again, is quite another world. Hitherto we have only observed it through the medium of the Pseudomorphosis, as represented by Byzantine hymns and Jewish psalmody, and even these we know only in so far as they have penetrated to the churches of the far West as antiphons, responsorial psalmody and Ambrosian chants.[286] But it is self-evident that not only the religious west of Edessa (the syncretic cults, especially Syrian sun-worship, the Gnostic and the Mandæan) but also those to the east (Mazdaists, Manichæans, Mithraists, the synagogues of Irak and in due course the Nestorian Christians) must have possessed a sacred music of the same style; that side by side with this a gay secular music developed (above all, amongst the South-Arabian and Sassanid chivalry[287]); and that both found their culmination in the Moorish style that reigned from Spain to Persia.

Out of all this wealth, the Faustian soul borrowed only some few church- forms and, moreover, in borrowing them, it instantly transformed them root and branch (10th Century, Hucbald, Guido d’Arezzo). Melodic accent and beat produced the “march,” and polyphony (like the rime of contemporary poetry) the image of endless space. To understand this, we have to distinguish between the imitative[288] and the ornamental sides of music, and although owing to the fleeting nature of all tone- creations[289] our knowledge is limited to the musical history of our own West, yet this is quite sufficient to reveal that duality of development which is one of the master-keys of all art-history. The one is soul, landscape, feeling, the other strict form, style, school. West Europe has an _ornamental music of the grand style_ (corresponding to the full plastic of the Classical) which is associated with the architectural history of the cathedral, which is closely akin to Scholasticism and Mysticism, and which finds its laws in the motherland of high Gothic between Seine and Scheldt. Counterpoint developed simultaneously with the flying-buttress system, and its source was the “Romanesque” style of the Fauxbourdon and the Discant with their simple parallel and contrary motion.[290] It is an architecture of human voices and, like the statuary-group and the glass-paintings, is only conceivable in the setting of these stone vaultings. With them it is a high art of space, of that space to which Nicolas of Oresme, Bishop of Lisieux, gave mathematical meaning by the introduction of co- ordinates.[291] _This_ is the genuine “rinascita” and “reformatio” as Joachim of Floris saw it at the end of the 12th Century[292]—the birth of a new soul mirrored in the form-language of a new art.

Along with this there came into being in castle and village a secular _imitative_ music, that of troubadours, Minnesänger and minstrels. As “ars nova” this travelled from the courts of Provence to the palaces of Tuscan patricians about 1300, the time of Dante and Petrarch. It consisted of simple melodies that appealed to the heart with their major and minor, of canzoni, madrigals and caccias, and it included also a type of _galante_ operetta (Adam de la Hale’s “Robin and Marion”). After 1400, these forms give rise to forms of collective singing—the rondeau and the ballade. All this is “art” for a public.[293] Scenes are painted from life, scenes of love, hunting, chivalry. The point of it is in the melodic inventiveness, instead of in the symbolism of its linear progress.

Thus, musically as otherwise, the castle and the cathedral are distinct. The cathedral _is_ music and the castle _makes_ music. The one begins with theory, the other with impromptu: it is the distinction between waking consciousness and living existence, between the spiritual and the knightly singer. Imitation stands nearest to life and direction and therefore begins with melody, while the symbolism of counterpoint belongs to extension and through polyphony signifies infinite space. The result was, on the one side, a store of “eternal” rules and, on the other, an inexhaustible fund of folk-melodies on which even the 18th Century was still drawing. The same contrast reveals itself, artistically, in the _class_-opposition of Renaissance and Reformation.[294] The courtly taste of Florence was antipathetic to the spirit of counterpoint; the evolution of strict musical form from the Motet to the four-voice Mass through Dunstaple, Binchois and Dufay (c. 1430) proceeded wholly within the magic circle of Gothic architecture. From Fra Angelico to Michelangelo the great Netherlanders ruled alone in ornamental music. Lorenzo de’ Medici found no one in Florence who understood the strict style, and had to send for Dufay. And while in this region Leonardo and Raphael were painting, in the north Okeghem (d. 1495) and his school and Josquin des Prés (d. 1521) brought the formal polyphony of human voices to the height of fulfilment.

The transition into the “Late” age was heralded in Rome and Venice. With Baroque the leadership in music passes to Italy. But at the same time architecture ceases to be the ruling art and there is formed a group of Faustian special-arts in which oil-painting occupies the central place. About 1560 the empire of the human voice comes to an end in the _a cappella_ style of Palestrina and Orlando Lasso (both d. 1594). Its powers could no longer express the passionate drive into the infinite, and it made way for the chorus of instruments, wind and string. And thereupon Venice produced Titian-music, the new madrigal that in its flow and ebb follows the sense of the text. The music of the Gothic is architectural and vocal, that of the Baroque pictorial and instrumental. The one builds, the other operates by means of motives. For all the arts have become urban and therefore secular. We pass from super-personal Form to the personal expression of the Master, and shortly before 1600 Italy produces the _basso continuo_ which requires virtuosi and not pious participants.

Thenceforward, the great task was to extend the tone-corpus into the infinity, or rather to _resolve it into an infinite space of tone_. Gothic had developed the instruments into families of definite timbre. But the new-born “orchestra” no longer observes limitations imposed by the human voice, but treats it as a voice to be combined with other voices—at the same moment as our mathematic proceeds from the geometrical analysis of Fermat to the purely functional analysis of Descartes.[295] In Zarlino’s “Harmony” (1558) appears a genuine perspective of pure tonal space. We begin to distinguish between ornamental and fundamental instruments. Melody and embellishment join to produce the Motive, and this in development leads to the rebirth of counterpoint in the form of the fugal style, of which Frescobaldi was the first master and Bach the culmination. To the vocal masses and motets the Baroque opposes its grand, orchestrally-conceived forms of the oratorio (Carissimi), the cantata (Viadana) and the opera (Monteverde). Whether a bass melody be set against upper voices, or upper voices be concerted against one another upon a background of _basso continuo_, always sound-worlds of characteristic expression- quality work reciprocally upon one another in the infinity of tonal space, supporting, intensifying, raising, illuminating, threatening, overshadowing—a music all of interplay, scarcely intelligible save through ideas of contemporary Analysis.

From out of these forms of the early Baroque there proceeded, in the 17th Century, the sonata-like forms of suite, symphony and concerto grosso. The inner structure and the sequence of movements, the thematic working-out and modulation became more and more firmly established. And thus was reached the great, immensely dynamic, form in which music—now completely bodiless—was raised by Corelli and Handel and Bach to be the ruling art of the West. When Newton and Leibniz, about 1670, discovered the Infinitesimal Calculus, the fugal style was fulfilled. And when, about 1740, Euler began the definitive formulation of functional Analysis, Stamitz and his generation were discovering the last and ripest form of musical ornamentation, the four-part movement[296] as vehicle of pure and unlimited motion. For, at that time, there was still this one step to be taken. The theme of the fugue “is,” that of the new sonata-movement “becomes,” and the issue of its working out is in the one case a picture, in the other a drama. Instead of a series of pictures we get a cyclic succession,[297] and the real source of this tone-language was in the possibilities, realized at last, of our deepest and most intimate kind of music—the music of the strings. Certain it is that the violin is the noblest of all instruments that the Faustian soul has imagined and trained for the expression of its last secrets, and certain it is, too, that it is in string quartets and violin sonatas that it has experienced its most transcendent and most holy moments of full illumination. Here, _in chamber-music, Western art as a whole reaches its highest point_. Here our prime symbol of endless space is expressed as completely as the Spearman of Polycletus expresses that of intense bodiliness. When one of those ineffably yearning violin-melodies wanders through the spaces expanded around it by the orchestration of Tartini or Nardini, Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven, we know ourselves in the presence of an art beside which that of the Acropolis is alone worthy to be set.

With this, the Faustian music becomes dominant among the Faustian arts. It banishes the plastic of the statue and tolerates only the minor art— an entirely musical, refined, un-Classical and counter-Renaissance art— of porcelain, which (as a discovery of the West) is contemporary with the rise of chamber-music to full effectiveness. Whereas the statuary of Gothic is through-and-through architectural ornamentation, human espalier-work, that of the Rococo remarkably exemplifies the pseudo- plastic that results from entire subjection to the form-language of music, and shows to what a degree the technique governing the presented foreground can be in contradiction with the real expression-language that is hidden behind it. Compare Coysevox’s[298] (1686) crouching Venus in the Louvre with its Classical prototype in the Vatican—in the one plastic is understudying music, in the other plastic is itself. Terms like “staccato,” “accelerando,” “andante” and “allegro” best describe the kind of movements that we have here, the flow of the lines, the fluidity in the being of the stone itself which like the porcelain has more or less lost its fine compactness. Hence our feeling that the granular marble is out of keeping. Hence, too, the wholly un-Classical tendency to work with reference to effects of light and shade. This is quite in conformity with the principles of oil-painting from Titian onwards. That which in the 18th Century is called “colour” in an etching, a drawing, or a sculpture-group really signifies music. Music dominates the painting of Watteau and Fragonard and the art of Gobelins and pastels, and since then, have we not acquired the habit of speaking of colour-tones or tone-colours? And do not the very words imply a recognition of a final _homogeneity_ between the two arts, superficially dissimilar as they are? And are not these same words perfectly meaningless as applied to _any and every_ Classical art? But music did not stop there; it transmuted also the architecture of Bernini’s Baroque into accord with its own spirit, and made of it Rococo, a style of transcendent ornamentation upon which lights (or rather “tones”) play to dissolve ceilings, walls and everything else constructional and actual into polyphonies and harmonies, with architectural trills and cadences and runs to complete the identification of the form-language of these halls and galleries with that of the music imagined for them. Dresden and Vienna are the homes of this late and soon-extinguished fairyland of _visible_ chamber music, of curved furniture and mirror-halls, and shepherdesses in verse and porcelain. It is the final brilliant autumn with which the Western soul completes the expression of its high style. And in the Vienna of the Congress-time it faded and died.

V

The Art of the Renaissance, considered from this particular one of its many aspects,[299] is a _revolt against the spirit of the Faustian forest-music_ of counterpoint, which at that time was preparing to vassalize the whole form-language of the Western Culture. It was the logical consequence of the open assertion of this will in matured Gothic. It never disavowed its origin and it maintained the character of a simple _counter-movement_; necessarily therefore it remained dependent upon the forms of the original movement, and represented simply the effect of these upon a hesitant soul. Hence, it was without true depth, either ideal or phenomenal. As to the first, we have only to think of the bursting passion with which the Gothic world-feeling discharged itself upon the whole Western landscape, and we shall see at once what sort of a movement it was that the handful of select spirits—scholars, artists and humanists—initiated about 1420.[300] In the first the issue was one of life and death for a new-born soul, in the second it was a point of—taste. The Gothic gripped life in its entirety, penetrated its most hidden corners. It created new men and a new world. From the idea of Catholicism to the state-theory of the Holy Roman Emperors, from the knightly tourney to the new city-form, from cathedral to cottage, from language-building to the village maiden’s bridal attire, from oil- painting to the Spielmann’s song, everything is hall-marked with the stamp of one and the same symbolism. But the Renaissance, when it had mastered some arts of word and picture, had shot its bolt. It altered the ways of thought and the life-feeling of West Europe not one whit. It could penetrate as far as costume and gesture, but the roots of life it could not touch—even in Italy the world-outlook of the Baroque is essentially a continuation of the Gothic.[301] It produced no wholly great personality between Dante and Michelangelo, each of whom had one foot outside its limits. And as for the other—phenomenal or manifested depth—the Renaissance never touched the people, even in Florence itself. The man for whom they had ears was Savonarola—a phenomenon of quite another spiritual order and one which begins to be comprehensible when we discern the fact that, all the time, the deep under-currents are steadily flowing on towards the Gothic-musical Baroque. The Renaissance as an anti-Gothic movement and a reaction against the spirit of polyphonic music has its Classical equivalent in the Dionysiac movement. This was a reaction against Doric and against the sculptural-Apollinian world-feeling. It did _not_ “originate” in the Thracian Dionysus-cult, but merely took this up as a weapon against and counter-symbol to the Olympian religion, precisely as in Florence the cult of the antique was called in for the justification and confirmation of a feeling already there. The period of the great protest was the 7th Century in Greece and (_therefore_) the 15th in West Europe. In both cases we have in reality an outbreak of deep-seated discordances in the Culture, which physiognomically dominates a whole epoch of its history and especially of its artistic world—in other words, a stand that the soul attempts to make against the Destiny that at last it comprehends. The inwardly recalcitrant forces—_Faust’s second Soul that would separate itself from the other_—are striving to deflect the sense of the Culture, to repudiate, to get rid of or to evade its inexorable necessity; it stands anxious in presence of the call to accomplish its historical fate in Ionic and Baroque. This anxiety fastened itself in Greece to the Dionysus-cult with its musical, dematerializing, body-squandering orgasm, and in the Renaissance to the tradition of the Antique and its cult of the bodily-plastic tradition. In each case, the alien expression-means was brought in consciously and deliberately, in order that the force of a directly-opposite form-language should provide the suppressed feelings with a weight and a pathos of their own, and so enable them to stand against the stream—in Greece the stream which flowed from Homer and the Geometrical to Phidias, in the West that which flowed from the Gothic cathedrals, through Rembrandt, to Beethoven.

It follows from the very character of a counter-movement that it is far easier for it to define what it is opposing than what it is aiming at. This is the difficulty of all Renaissance research. In the Gothic (and the Doric) it is just the opposite—men are contending _for_ something, not against it—but Renaissance art is nothing more nor less than anti- Gothic art. Renaissance music, too, is a contradiction in itself; the music of the Medicean court was the Southern French “ars nova,” that of the Florentine Duomo was the Low-German counterpoint, both alike essentially _Gothic_ and the property of the _whole_ West.

The view that is customarily taken of the Renaissance is a very clear instance of how readily the proclaimed intentions of a movement may be mistaken for its deeper meaning. Since Burckhardt,[302] criticism has controverted every _individual_ proposition that the leading spirits of the age put forward as to their own tendencies—and yet, this done, it has continued to use the word Renaissance substantially in the former sense. Certainly, one is conscious at once in passing to the south of the Alps of a marked dissimilarity in architecture in particular and in the look of the arts in general. But the very obviousness of the conclusion that the impression prompts should have led us to distrust it and to ask ourselves, instead, whether the supposed distinction of Gothic and “antique” was not in reality merely a difference between _Northern and Southern_ aspects of one and the same form-world. Plenty of things in Spain give the impression of being “Classical” merely because they are Southern, and if a layman were confronted with the great cloister of S. Maria Novella or the façade of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and asked to say if these were “Gothic” he would certainly guess wrong. Otherwise, the sharp change of spirit ought to have set in not beyond the Alps but only beyond the Apennines, for Tuscany is artistically an island in Italian Italy. Upper Italy belongs entirely to a Byzantine-tinted Gothic; Siena in particular is a genuine monument of the _counter-Renaissance_, and Rome is already the home of Baroque. But, in fact, it is the change of _landscape_ that coincides with the change of feeling.

In the actual birth of the Gothic style Italy had indeed no inward share. At the epoch of 1000 the country was still absolutely under the domination of Byzantine taste in the East and Moorish taste in the South. When Gothic first took root here it was the mature Gothic, and it implanted itself with an intensity and force for which we look in vain in any of the great Renaissance creations—think of the “Stabat Mater,” the “Dies Iræ,” Catharine of Siena, Giotto and Simone Martini! At the same time, it was lighted from the South and its strangeness was, as it were, softened in acclimatization. That which it suppressed or expelled was not, as has been supposed, some lingering strains of the Classical but purely the Byzantine-_cum_-Saracen form-language that appealed to the senses in familiar everyday life—in the buildings of Ravenna and Venice but even more in the ornament of the fabrics, vessels and arms imported from the East.

If the Renaissance had been a “renewal” (whatever that may mean) of the Classical _world-feeling_, then, surely, would it not have had to replace the symbol of embraced and rhythmically-ordered _space_ by that of closed structural _body_? But there was never any question of this. On the contrary, the Renaissance practised wholly and exclusively an architecture of space prescribed for it by Gothic, from which it differed _only_ in that in lieu of the Northern “Sturm und Drang” it breathed the clear equable calm of the sunny, care-free and unquestioning South. It produced _no_ new building-idea, and the extent of its architectural achievement might almost be reduced to _façades and courtyards_.

Now, this focussing of expressible effort upon the street-front of a house or the side of a cloister—many-windowed and ever significant of the spirit within—is characteristic of the Gothic (and deeply akin to its art of portraiture); and the cloistered courtyard itself is, from the Sun-temple of Baalbek to the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra, as genuinely Arabian. And in the midst of this art the Poseidon temple of Pæstum, all body, stands lonely and unrelated: no one saw it, no one attempted to copy it. Equally un-Attic is the Florentine sculpture, for Attic is _free_ plastic, “in the round” in the full sense of the words, whereas every Florentine statue feels behind it the ghost of the niche into which the Gothic sculptor had built its real ancestors. In the relation of figure to background and in the build of the body, the masters of the “Kings’ heads” at Chartres and the masters of the “George” choir at Bamberg exhibit the same interpenetration of “Antique” and Gothic expression-means that we have, neither intensified nor contradicted, in the manner of Giovanni Pisano and Ghiberti and even Verrocchio.

If we take away from the models of the Renaissance all elements that originated later than the Roman Imperial Age—that is to say, those belonging to the Magian form-world—nothing is left. Even from Late-Roman architecture itself all elements derived from the great days of Hellas had one by one vanished. Most conclusive of all, though, is that motive which actually _dominates_ the Renaissance, which because of its Southern-ness we regard as the noblest of the Renaissance characters, viz., _the association of round-arch and column_. This association, no doubt, is very un-Gothic, but in the Classical style it simply does not exist, and in fact it represents the leitmotif of the Magian architecture that originated in Syria.

But it was just then that the South received from the North those decisive impulses which helped it first of all to emancipate itself entirely from Byzantium and then to step from Gothic into Baroque. In the region comprised between Amsterdam, Köln and Paris[303]—the counter- pole to Tuscany in the style-history of our culture—counterpoint and oil-painting had been created in association with the Gothic architecture. Thence Dufay in 1428 and Willaert in 1516 came to the Papal Chapel, and in 1527 the latter founded that Venetian school which was decisive of Baroque music. The successor of Willaert was de Rore of Antwerp. A Florentine commissioned Hugo van der Goes to execute the Portinari altar for Santa Maria Nuova, and Memlinc to paint a Last Judgment. And over and above this, numerous pictures (especially Low- Countries portraits) were acquired and exercised an enormous influence. In 1450 Rogier van der Weyden himself came to Florence, where his art was both admired and imitated. In 1470 Justus van Gent introduced oil- painting to Umbria, and Antonello da Messina brought what he had learned in the Netherlands to Venice. How much “Dutch” and how little “Classical” there is in the pictures of Filippino Lippi, Ghirlandaio and Botticelli and especially in the engravings of Pollaiulo! Or in Leonardo himself. Even to-day critics hardly care to admit the full extent of the influence exercised by the Gothic North upon the architecture, music, painting and plastic of the Renaissance.[304] It was just then, too, that Nicolaus Cusanus, Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen (1401-1464), brought into mathematics the “infinitesimal” principle, that _contrapuntal method_ of number which he reached by deduction from the idea of God as Infinite Being. It was from Nicholas of Cusa that Leibniz received the decisive impulse that led him to work out his differential calculus; and thus was forged the weapon with which dynamic, Baroque, Newtonian, physics definitely overcame the static idea characteristic of the Southern physics that reaches a hand to Archimedes and is still effective even in Galileo.

The high period of the Renaissance is a moment of _apparent_ expulsion of music from Faustian art. And in fact, for a few decades, in the only area where Classical and Western landscapes touched, Florence did uphold—with one grand effort that was essentially metaphysical and essentially defensive—an image of the Classical so convincing that, although its deeper characters were without exception mere anti-Gothic, it lasted beyond Goethe and, if not for our criticism, yet for our feelings, is valid to this day. The Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Rome of Leo the Tenth—that is what for us the Classical _is_, an eternal goal of most secret longing, the only deliverance from our heavy hearts and limit upon our horizon. And it is this because, and only because, it is anti-Gothic. So clean-cut is the opposition of Apollinian and Faustian spirituality.

But let there be no mistake as to the extent of this illusion. In Florence men practiced fresco and relief in contradiction of Gothic glass-painting and Byzantine gold-ground mosaic. This was the one moment in the history of the West when sculpture ranked as the paramount art. The dominant elements in the picture are the poised bodies, the ordered groups, the structural side of architecture. The backgrounds possess no intrinsic value, merely serving to fill up between and behind the self- sufficient present of the foreground-figures. For a while here, painting is actually under the domination of plastic; Verrocchio, Pollaiuolo and Botticelli were goldsmiths. Yet, all the same, these frescoes have nothing of the spirit of Polygnotus in them. Examine a collection of Classical painted vases—not in individual specimens or copies (which would give the wrong idea) but in the mass, for this is the one species of Classical art in which originals are plentiful enough to impress us effectively with the _will_ that is behind the art. In the light of such a study, the utter un-Classicalness of the Renaissance-spirit leaps to the eye. The great achievement of Giotto and Masaccio in creating a fresco-art is only _apparently_ a revival of the Apollinian way of feeling; but the depth-experience and idea of extension that underlies it is not the Apollinian unspatial and self-contained body but the _Gothic field_ (Bildraum). However recessive the backgrounds are, they exist. Yet here again there was the fullness of light, the clarity of atmosphere, the great noon-calm, of the South; dynamic space was changed in Tuscany, and only in Tuscany, to the static space of which Piero della Francesca was the master. Though fields of space were painted, they were put, not as an existence unbounded and like music ever striving into the depths, but as _sensuously definable_. Space was given a sort of bodiliness and order in plane layers, and drawing, sharpness of outline, definition of surface were studied with a care that seemingly approached the Hellenic ideal. Yet there was always this difference, that Florence depicted space perspectively as singular in contrast with things as plural, whereas Athens presented things as separate singulars in contrast to general nothingness. And in proportion as the surge of the Renaissance smoothed down, the _hardness_ of this tendency receded, from Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel to Raphael’s in the Vatican Stanze, until the _sfumato_ of Leonardo, the melting of the edges into the background, brings a musical ideal in place of the relief-ideal into painting. The hidden dynamic is equally unmistakable in the sculpture of Florence—it would be perfectly hopeless to look for an Attic companion for Verrocchio’s equestrian statue.[305] This art was a _mask_, a mode of the taste of an élite, and sometimes a comedy—though never was comedy more gallantly played out. The indescribable inward purity of Gothic form often causes us to forget what an excess of native strength and depth it possessed. Gothic, it must be repeated again, is the _only_ foundation of the Renaissance. The Renaissance never even touched the real Classical, let alone understood it or “revived” it. The consciousness of the Florentine élite, wholly under literary influences, fashioned the deceptive name to positivize the negative element of the movement—thereby demonstrating how little such currents are aware of their own nature. There is not a single one of their great works that the contemporaries of Pericles, or even those of Cæsar, would not have rejected as utterly alien. Their palace courtyards are Moorish courtyards, and their round arches on slender pillars are of Syrian origin. Cimabue taught his century to imitate with the brush the art of Byzantine mosaic. Of the two famous domical buildings of the Renaissance, the domed cathedral of Florence is a masterpiece of late Gothic, and St. Peter’s is one of early Baroque. When Michelangelo set himself to build the latter as the “Pantheon towering over the Basilica of Maxentius,” he was naming two buildings of the purest early Arabian style. And ornament—is there indeed a genuine Renaissance ornamentation? Certainly there is nothing comparable in symbolic force with the ornamentation of Gothic. But what is the provenance of that gay and elegant embellishment which has a real inward unity of its own and has captivated all Europe? There is a great difference between the home of a “taste” and the home of the expression- means that it employs: one finds a great deal that is Northern in the early Florentine motives of Pisano, Maiano, Ghiberti and Della Quercia. We have to distinguish in all these chancels, tombs, niches and porches between the outward and transferable forms (the Ionic column itself is doubly a transfer, for it originated in Egypt) and the spirit of the form-language that uses them as means and signs. One Classical element or item is equivalent to another so long as something un-Classical is being expressed—significance lies not in the thing but in the way in which it is used. But even in Donatello such motives are far fewer than in mature Baroque. As for a strict Classical capital, no such thing is to be found.

And yet, at moments, Renaissance art succeeded in achieving something wonderful that music _could not_ reproduce—a feeling for the bliss of perfect _nearness_, for pure, restful and _liberating_ space-effects, bright and tidy and free from the passionate movement of Gothic and Baroque. It is not Classical, but it is a dream of Classical existence, the only dream of the Faustian soul in which it was able to forget itself.

VI

And now, with the 16th Century, the decisive epochal turn begins for Western painting. The trusteeship of architecture in the North and that of sculpture in Italy expire, and painting becomes polyphonic, “picturesque,” infinity-seeking. The colours become tones. The art of the brush claims kinship with the style of cantata and madrigal. The technique of oils becomes the basis of an art that means to conquer _space_ and to dissolve things in that space. With Leonardo and Giorgione begins Impressionism.

In the actual picture there is transvaluation of all the elements. The background, hitherto casually put in, regarded as a fill-up and, as space, almost shuffled out of sight, gains a preponderant importance. A development sets in that is paralleled in no other Culture, not even in the Chinese which in many other respects is so near to ours. The background as symbol of the infinite conquers the sense-perceptible foreground, and at last (herein lies the distinction between the depicting and the delineating styles) the depth-experience of the Faustian soul is captured in the kinesis of a picture. The space-relief of Mantegna’s plane layers dissolves in Tintoretto into directional energy, and there emerges in the picture the great symbol of an unlimited space-universe which comprises the individual things within itself as incidentals—the _horizon_. Now, that a landscape painting should have a horizon has always seemed so self-evident to us that we have never asked ourselves the important question: _Is_ there always a horizon, and if not, when not and why not? In fact, there is not a hint of it, either in Egyptian relief or in Byzantine mosaic or in vase- paintings and frescoes of the Classical age, or even in those of the Hellenistic in spite of its spatial treatment of foregrounds. This line, in the unreal vapour of which heaven and earth melt, the sum and potent symbol of the far, contains the painter’s version of the “infinitesimal” principle. It is out of the remoteness of this horizon that the _music_ of the picture flows, and for this reason the great landscape-painters of Holland paint only backgrounds and atmospheres, just as for the contrary reason “anti-musical” masters like Signorelli and especially Mantegna, paint _only_ foregrounds and “reliefs.” It is in the horizon, then, that Music triumphs over Plastic, the _passion_ of extension over its _substance_. It is not too much to say that no picture by Rembrandt has a foreground at all. In the North, the home of counterpoint, a deep understanding of the meaning of horizons and high-lighted distances is found very early, while in the South the flat conclusive gold-background of the Arabic-Byzantine picture long remained supreme. The first definite emergence of the pure space-feeling is in the Books of Hours of the Duke of Berry (that at Chantilly and that at Turin) about 1416. Thereafter, slowly and surely, it conquers the Picture.

The same symbolic meaning attaches to clouds. Classical art concerns itself with them no more than with horizons, and the painter of the Renaissance treats them with a certain playful superficiality. But very early the Gothic looked at its cloud-masses, and through them, with the long sight of mysticism; and the Venetians (Giorgione and Paolo Veronese above all) discovered the full magic of the cloud-world, of the thousand-tinted Being that fills the heavens with its sheets and wisps and mountains. Grünewald and the Netherlanders heightened its significance to the level of tragedy. El Greco brought the grand art of cloud-symbolism to Spain.

It was at the same time that along with oil-painting and counterpoint the _art of gardens_ ripened. Here, expressed on the canvas of Nature itself by extended pools, brick walls, avenues, vistas and galleries, is the same tendency that is represented in painting by the effort towards the linear perspective that the early Flemish artists felt to be the basic problem of their art and Brunellesco, Alberti and Piero della Francesca formulated. We may take it that it was not entirely a coincidence that this formulation of perspective, this mathematical consecration of the picture (whether landscape or interior) as a field limited at the sides but immensely increased in depth, was propounded just at this particular moment. It was the proclamation of the Prime- Symbol. The point at which the perspective lines coalesce is at infinity. It was just because it avoided infinity and rejected distance that Classical painting possessed no perspective. _Consequently_ the Park, the deliberate manipulation of Nature so as to obtain space and distance effects, is an impossibility in Classical art. Neither in Athens nor in Rome proper was there a garden-art: it was only the Imperial Age that gratified its taste with ground-schemes of Eastern origin, and a glance at any of the plans of those “gardens” that have been preserved[306] is enough to show the shortness of their range and the emphasis of their bounds. And yet the first garden-theorist of the West, L. B. Alberti, was laying down the relation of the surroundings to the house (that is, to the spectators in it) as early as 1450, and from his projects to the parks of the Ludovisi and Albani villas,[307] we can see the importance of the perspective view into distance becoming ever greater and greater. In France, after Francis I (Fontainebleau) the long narrow lake is an additional feature having the same meaning.

The most significant element in the Western garden-art is thus the _point de vue_ of the great Rococo park, upon which all its avenues and clipped-hedge walks open and from which vision may travel out to lose itself in the distances. This element is wanting even in the Chinese garden-art. But it is exactly matched by some of the silver-bright distance-pictures of the pastoral music of that age (in Couperin for example). It is the _point de vue_ that gives us the key to a real understanding of this remarkable mode of making nature itself speak the form-language of a human symbolism. It is in principle akin to the dissolution of finite number-pictures into infinite series in our mathematic: as the remainder-expression[308] reveals the ultimate meaning of the series, so the glimpse into the boundless is what, in the garden, reveals to a Faustian soul the meaning of Nature. It was _we_ and not the Hellenes or the men of the high Renaissance that prized and sought out high mountain tops for the sake of the limitless range of vision that they afford. This is a Faustian craving—to be _alone_ with endless space. The great achievement of Le Nôtre and the landscape- gardeners of Northern France, beginning with Fouquet’s epoch-making creation of Vaux-le-Vicomte, was that they were able to render this symbol with such high emphasis. Compare the Renaissance park of the Medicean age—capable of being taken in, gay, cosy, well-rounded—with these parks in which all the water-works, statue-rows, hedges and labyrinths are instinct with the suggestion of long range. It is the Destiny of Western oil-painting told over again in a bit of garden- history.

But the feeling for long range is at the same time one for history. At a distance, space becomes time and the horizon signifies the future. _The Baroque park is the park of the Late season_, of the approaching end, of the falling leaf. A Renaissance park is meant for the summer and the noonday. It is timeless, and nothing in its form-language reminds us of mortality. It is perspective that begins to awaken a premonition of something passing, fugitive and final. The very words of distance possess, in the lyric poetry of all Western languages, a plaintive autumnal accent that one looks for in vain in the Greek and Latin. It is there in Macpherson’s “Ossian” and Hölderlin, and in Nietzsche’s Dionysus-Dithyrambs, and lastly in Baudelaire, Verlaine, George and Droem. The Late poetry of the withering garden avenues, the unending lines in the streets of a megalopolis, the ranks of pillars in a cathedral, the peak in a distant mountain chain—all tell us that the depth-experience which constitutes our space-world for us is in the last analysis our inward certainty of a Destiny, of a prescribed direction, of _time_, of the irrevocable. Here, in the experience of horizon as future, we become directly and surely conscious of the identity of Time with the “third dimension” of that experienced space which is living self-extension. And in these last days we are imprinting upon the plan of our megalopolitan streets the same directional-destiny character that the 17th Century imprinted upon the Park of Versailles. We lay our streets as long arrow-flights into remote distance, regardless even of preserving old and historic parts of our towns (for the symbolism of these is not now prepotent in us), whereas a megalopolis of the Classical world studiously maintained in its extension that tangle of crooked lanes that enabled Apollinian man to feel himself a body in the midst of bodies.[309] Herein, as always, practical requirements, so called, are merely the mask of a profound inward compulsion.

With the rise of perspective, then, the deeper form and full metaphysical significance of the picture comes to be concentrated upon the horizon. In Renaissance art the painter had stated and the beholder had accepted the contents of the picture for what they were, as self- sufficient and co-extensive with the title. But henceforth the contents became a _means_, the mere vehicle of a meaning that was beyond the possibility of verbal expression. With Mantegna or Signorelli the pencil sketch could have stood as the picture, without being carried out in colour—in some cases, indeed, we can only regret that the artist did not stop at the cartoon. In the statue-like sketch, colour is a mere supplement. Titian, on the other hand, could be told by Michelangelo that he did not know how to draw. The “object,” i.e., that which could be exactly fixed by the drawn outline, the near and material, had in fact lost its artistic actuality; but, as the theory of art was still dominated by Renaissance impressions, there arose thereupon that strange and interminable conflict concerning the “form” and the “content” of an art-work. Mis-enunciation of the question has concealed its real and deep significance from us. The first point for consideration should have been whether painting was to be conceived of plastically or musically, as a static of things or as a dynamic of space (for in this lies the essence of the opposition between fresco and oil technique), and the second point, the opposition of Classical and Faustian world-feeling. Outlines define the material, while colour-tones interpret space.[310] But the picture of the first order belongs to directly sensible nature— it _narrates_. Space, on the contrary, is by its very essence transcendent and addresses itself to our imaginative powers, and in an art that is under its suzerainty, the narrative element enfeebles and obscures the more profound tendency. Hence it is that the theorist, able to feel the secret disharmony but misunderstanding it, clings to the superficial opposition of content and form. The problem is purely a Western one, and reveals most strikingly the complete inversion in the significance of pictorial elements that took place when the Renaissance closed down and instrumental music of the grand style came to the front. For the Classical mind no problem of form and content in this sense could exist; in an Attic statue the two are completely identical and identified in the human body.

The case of Baroque painting is further complicated by the fact that it involves an opposition of ordinary popular feeling and the finer sensibility. Everything Euclidean and tangible is also popular, and the genuinely popular art is therefore the Classical. It is very largely the feeling of this popular character in it that constitutes its indescribable charm for the Faustian intellects that have to _fight_ for self-expression, to win their world by hard wrestling. For us, the contemplation of Classical art and its intention is pure _refreshment_: here nothing needs to be struggled for, everything offers itself freely. And something of the same sort was achieved by the anti-Gothic tendency of Florence. Raphael is, in many sides of his creativeness, distinctly popular. But Rembrandt is not, cannot be, so. From Titian painting becomes more and more esoteric. So, too, poetry. So, too, music. And the Gothic _per se_ had been esoteric from its very beginnings—witness Dante and Wolfram. The masses of Okeghem and Palestrina, or of Bach for that matter, were never intelligible to the average member of the congregation. Ordinary people are bored by Mozart and Beethoven, and regard music generally as something for which one is or is not in the mood. A certain degree of interest in these matters has been induced by concert room and gallery since the age of enlightenment invented the phrase “art for all.” But Faustian art is not, and by very essence cannot be, “for all.” If modern painting has ceased to appeal to any but a small (and ever decreasing) circle of connoisseurs, it is because it has turned away from the painting of things that the man in the street can understand. It has transferred the property of actuality from contents to space—the space _through_ which alone, according to Kant, things _are_. And with that a difficult metaphysical element has entered into painting, and this element does not give itself away to the layman. For Phidias, on the contrary, the word “lay” would have had no meaning. His sculpture appealed entirely to the bodily and not to the spiritual eye. _An art without space is a priori unphilosophical._

VII

With this is connected an important principle of _composition_. In a picture it is possible to set the things inorganically above one another or side by side or behind one another without any emphasis of perspective or interrelation, i.e., without insisting upon the dependence of their actuality upon the structure of space which does not necessarily mean that this dependence is denied. Primitive men and children draw thus, before their depth-experience has brought the sense- impressions of their world more or less into fundamental order. But this order differs in the different Cultures according to the prime symbols of these Cultures. The sort of perspective composition that is so self- evident to us is a particular case, and it is neither recognized nor intended in the painting of any other Culture. Egyptian art chose to represent simultaneous events in superposed ranks, thereby eliminating the third dimension from the look of the picture. The Apollinian art placed figures and groups separately, with a deliberate avoidance of space-and-time relations in the plane of representation. Polygnotus’s frescoes in the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi are a celebrated instance of this. There is no background to connect the individual scenes—for such a background would have been a challenge to the principle that things alone are actual and space non-existent. The pediment of the Ægina temple, the procession of gods on the François Vase and the Frieze of the Giants of Pergamum are all composed as meander-syntheses of separate and interchangeable motives, without organic character. It is only with the Hellenistic age (the Telephus Frieze of the altar of Pergamum is the earliest example that has been preserved) that the un-Classical motive of the consistent series comes into existence. In this respect, as in others, the feeling of the Renaissance was truly Gothic. It did indeed carry group-composition to such a pitch of perfection that its work remains the pattern for all following ages. But the order of it all proceeded out of space. In the last analysis, it was a silent music of colour-illumined extension that created within itself _light-resistances_, which the understanding eye could grasp as things and as existence, and could set marching with an invisible swing and rhythm out into the distance. And with this spatial ordering, with its unremarked substitution of air-and light-perspective for line-perspective, the Renaissance was already, in essence, defeated.

And now from the end of the Renaissance in Orlando Lasso and Palestrina right up to Wagner, from Titian right up to Manet and Marées and Leibl, great musicians and great painters followed close upon one another while the plastic art sank into entire insignificance. Oil-painting and instrumental music evolve organically towards aims that were comprehended in the Gothic and achieved in the Baroque. Both arts— Faustian in the highest sense—are within those limits _prime phenomena_. They have a soul, a physiognomy and therefore a history. And in this they are alone. All that sculpture could thenceforward achieve was a few beautiful incidental pieces in the shadow of painting, garden-art, or architecture. The art of the West had no real need of them. There was no longer a _style_ of plastic in the sense that there were styles of painting or music. No consistent tradition or necessary unity links the works of Maderna, Goujon, Puget and Schlüter. Even Leonardo begins to despise the chisel outright: at most he will admit the bronze cast, and that on account of its pictorial advantages. Therein he differs from Michelangelo, for whom the marble block was still the true element. And yet even Michelangelo in his old age could no longer succeed with the plastic, and none of the later sculptors are great in the sense that Rembrandt and Bach are great. There were clever and tasteful performances no doubt, but not one single _work_ of the same order as the “Night Watch” or the “Matthew Passion,” nothing that expresses, as these express, the whole depth of a whole mankind. This art had fallen out of the destiny of the Culture. Its speech meant nothing now. What there is in a Rembrandt portrait simply cannot be rendered in a bust. Now and then a sculptor of power arises, like Bernini or the masters of the contemporary Spanish school, or Pigalle or Rodin (none of whom, naturally, transcended the decorative and attained the level of grand symbolism), but such an artist is always visibly either a belated imitator of the Renaissance like Thorwaldsen, a disguised painter like Houdon or Rodin, an architect like Bernini and Schlüter or a decorator like Coysevox. And his very appearance on the scene only shows the more clearly that this art, incapable of carrying the Faustian burden, has no longer a mission—and therefore no longer a soul or a life-history of specific style-development—in the Faustian world. In the Classical world, correspondingly, music was the art that failed. Beginning with probably quite important advances in the earliest Doric, it had to give way in the ripe centuries of Ionic (650-350) to the two truly Apollinian arts, sculpture and fresco; renouncing harmony and polyphony, it had to renounce therewith any pretensions to organic development as a higher art.

VIII

The strict style in Classical painting limited its palette to yellow, red, black and white. This singular fact was observed long ago, and, since the explanation was only sought for in superficial and definitely material causes, wild hypotheses were brought forward to account for it, e.g., a supposed colour-blindness in the Greeks. Even Nietzsche discussed this (_Morgenröte_, 426).

But why did this painting in its great days _avoid_ blue and even blue- green, and only begin the gamut of permissible tones at greenish-yellow and bluish-red? It is not that the ancient artists did not know of blue and its effect. The metopes of many temples had blue backgrounds so that they should appear deep in contrast with the triglyphs; and trade- painting used _all_ the colours that were technically available. There are authentic blue horses in archaic Acropolis work and Etruscan tomb- painting; and a bright blue colouring of the hair was quite common. The ban upon it in the higher art was, without a doubt, imposed upon the Euclidean soul by its prime symbol.

Blue and green are the colours of the heavens, the sea, the fruitful plain, the shadow of the Southern noon, the evening, the remote mountains. They are essentially atmospheric and not substantial colours. They are _cold_, they disembody, and they evoke impressions of expanse and distance and boundlessness.

For this reason they were kept out of the frescoes of Polygnotus. And for this reason also, an “infinitesimal” blue-to-green is the space- creating element throughout the history of our perspective oil-painting, from the Venetians right into the 19th Century; it is the basic and supremely important tone which _supports_ the ensemble of the intended colour-effect, as the _basso continuo_ supports the orchestra, whereas the warm yellow and red tones are put on sparingly and in dependence upon this basic tone. It is not the full, gorgeous and _familiar_ green that Raphael and Dürer sometimes—and seldom at that—use for draperies, but an indefinite blue-green of a thousand nuances into white and grey and brown; something deeply musical, into which (notably in Gobelin tapestry) the whole atmosphere is plunged. That quality which we have named aerial perspective in contrast to linear—and might also have called _Baroque_ perspective in contrast to Renaissance—rests almost exclusively upon this. We find it with more and more intense depth- effect in Leonardo, Guercino, Albani in the case of Italy, and in Ruysdael and Hobbema in that of Holland, but, above all, in the great French painters, from Poussin and Claude Lorrain and Watteau to Corot. Blue, equally a perspective colour, always stands in relation to the dark, the unillumined, the unactual. It does not press in on us, it pulls us out into the remote. An “enchanting nothingness” Goethe calls it in his _Farbenlehre_.

Blue and green are transcendent, spiritual, non-sensuous colours. They are missing in the strict Attic fresco and _therefore dominant_ in oil- painting. Yellow and red, the Classical colours, are the colours of the material, the near, the full-blooded. Red is the characteristic colour of sexuality—hence it is the only colour that works upon the beasts. It matches best the Phallus-symbol—and therefore the statue and the Doric column—but it is pure blue that etherealizes the Madonna’s mantle. This relation of the colours has established itself in every great school as a deep-felt necessity. Violet, a red succumbing to blue, is the colour of women no longer fruitful and of priests living in celibacy.

Yellow and red are the _popular_ colours, the colours of the crowd, of children, of women, and of savages. Amongst the Venetians and the Spaniards high personages affected a splendid black or blue, with an unconscious sense of the aloofness inherent in these colours. For red and yellow, the _Apollinian, Euclidean-polytheistic_ colours, belong to the foreground even in respect of social life; they are meet for the noisy hearty market-days and holidays, the naïve immediateness of a life subject to the blind chances of the Classical _Fatum_, the point- existence. But blue and green—the Faustian, monotheistic colours—are those of loneliness, of care, of a present that is related to a past and a future, of destiny as the dispensation governing the universe from within.

The relation of Shakespearian destiny to space and of Sophoclean to the individual body has already been stated in an earlier chapter. All the genuinely transcendent Cultures—that is all whose prime-symbol requires the _overcoming_ of the apparent, the life of struggle and not that of acceptance—have the same metaphysical inclination to space as to blues and blacks. There are profound observations on the connexion between ideas of space and the meaning of colour in Goethe’s studies of “entoptic colours” in the atmosphere; the symbolism that is enunciated by him in the _Farbenlehre_ and that which we have deduced here from the ideas of Space and Destiny are in complete agreement.

The most significant use of dusky green as the colour of destiny is Grünewald’s. The indescribable power of space in his _nights_ is equalled only by Rembrandt’s. And the thought suggests itself here, is it possible to say that his bluish-green, the colour in which the interior of a great cathedral is so often clothed, is the specifically _Catholic_ colour?—it being understood that we mean by “Catholic” strictly the Faustian Christianity (with the Eucharist as its centre) that was founded in the Lateran Council of 1215 and fulfilled in the Council of Trent. This colour with its silent grandeur is as remote from the resplendent gold-ground of Early Christian-Byzantine pictures as it is from the gay, loquacious “pagan” colours of the painted Hellenic temples and statues. It is to be noted that the effect of this colour, entirely unlike that of yellow and red, depends upon work being exhibited _indoors_. Classical painting is emphatically a public art, Western just as emphatically a studio-art. The whole of our great oil- painting, from Leonardo to the end of the 18th Century, is not meant for the bright light of day. Here once more we meet the same opposition as that between chamber-music and the free-standing statue. The climatic explanation of the difference is merely superficial; the example of Egyptian painting would suffice to disprove it if disproof were necessary at all. Infinite space meant for Classical feeling complete nothingness, and the use of blue and green, with their powers of dissolving the near and creating the far, would have been a challenge to the absolutism of the foreground and its unit-bodies, and therefore to the very meaning and intent of Apollinian art. To the Apollinian eye, pictures in the colours of Watteau would have been destitute of all essence, things of almost inexpressible emptiness and untruth. By these colours the visually-perceived light-reflecting surface of the picture is made effectively to render, not circumscribed things, but circumambient space. And that is why they are missing in Greece and dominant in the West.

IX

Arabian art brought the Magian world-feeling to expression by means of the _gold ground_ of its mosaics and pictures. Something of the uncanny wizardry of this, and by implication of its symbolic purpose, is known to us through the mosaics of Ravenna, in the work of the Early Rhenish and especially North Italian masters who were still entirely under the influence of Lombardo-Byzantine models, and last but not least in the Gothic book-illustrations of which the archetypes were the Byzantine purple codices.

In this instance we can study the soul of three Cultures working upon very similar tasks in very dissimilar ways. The Apollinian Culture recognized as actual only that which was immediately present in time and place—and thus it repudiated the background as pictorial element. The Faustian strove through all sensuous barriers towards infinity—and it projected the centre of gravity of the pictorial idea into the distance by means of perspective. The Magian felt all happening as an expression of mysterious powers that filled the world-cavern with their spiritual substance—and it shut off the depicted scene with a gold background, that is, by something that stood beyond and outside all nature-colours. Gold is not a colour. As compared with simple yellow, it produces a complicated sense-impression, through the metallic, diffuse refulgence that is generated by its glowing surface. Colours—whether coloured substance incorporated with the smoothed wall-face (fresco) or pigment applied with the brush—are natural. But the metallic gleam, which is practically never found in natural conditions, is unearthly.[311] It recalls impressively the other symbols of the Culture, Alchemy and Kabbala, the Philosophers’ Stone, the Holy Scriptures, the Arabesque, the inner form of the tales of the “Thousand and One Nights.” The gleaming gold takes away from the scene, the life and the body their substantial being. Everything that was taught in the circle of Plotinus or by the Gnostics as to the nature of things, their independence of space, their accidental causes—notions paradoxical and almost unintelligible to _our_ world-feeling—is implicit also in the symbolism of this mysterious hieratic background. The nature of bodies was a principal subject of controversy amongst Neo-Pythagoreans and Neo- Platonists, as it was later in the schools of Baghdad and Basra. Suhrawardi distinguishes extension, as the primary existence of the body, from width and height and depth as its accidents. Nazzâm pronounced against the corporeal substantiality and space-filling character of the atom. These and the like were the metaphysical notions that, from Philo and Paul to the last great names of the Islamic philosophy, manifested the Arabian world-feeling. They played a decisive

## part in the disputes of the Councils upon the substantiality of

Christ.[312] And thus the gold background possesses, in the iconography of the Western Church, an explicit dogmatic significance. It is an express assertion of the existence and activity of the divine spirit. It represents the _Arabian_ form of the Christian world-consciousness, and with such a deep appropriateness that for a thousand years this treatment of the background was held to be the only one metaphysically— and even ethically—possible and seemly in representations of the Christian legend. When “natural” backgrounds, with their blue-green heavens, far horizons and depth perspective, began to appear in early Gothic, they had at first the appearance of something profane and worldly. The change of dogma that they implied was, if not acknowledged, at any rate felt, witness the tapestry backgrounds with which the real depth of space was covered up by a pious awe that disguised what it dared not exhibit. We have seen how just at this time, when the _Faustian_ (German-Catholic) Christianity attained to consciousness of itself through the institution of the sacrament of Contrition—a new religion in the old garb—the tendency to perspective, colour, and the mastering of aerial space in the art of the Franciscans[313] transformed the whole meaning of painting.

The Christianity of the West is related to that of the East as the symbol of perspective to the symbol of gold-ground—and the final schism took place almost at the same moment in Church and in Art. The landscape-background of the depicted scene and the _dynamic_ infiniteness of God were comprehended at the same moment; and, simultaneously with the gold ground of the sacred picture, there vanished from the Councils of the West that Magian, ontological problem of Godhead which had so passionately agitated Nicæa, Ephesus, Chalcedon and all the Councils of the East.

X

The Venetians discovered, and introduced into oil-painting as a space- forming and quasi-musical motive, the handwriting of the _visible brush- stroke_. The Florentine masters had never at any time challenged the fashion—would-be Classical and yet in Gothic employ—of smoothing out all turns of the brush so as to produce pure, cleanly-outlined and even colour-surfaces. In consequence, their pictures have a certain air of _being_, something felt, unmistakably, as the opposite of the inherent _motion_-quality of the Gothic expression-means that were storming in from over the Alps. The 15th-Century manner of applying colour is a denial of past and future. It is only in the brushwork, which remains permanently visible and, in a way, perennially fresh, that the _historical_ feeling comes out. Our desire is to see in the work of the painter not merely something that _has become_ but something that _is becoming_. And this is precisely what the Renaissance wanted to avoid. A piece of Perugino drapery tells us nothing of its artistic origin; it is ready-made, given, simply present. But the individual brush-strokes— first met with as a complete new form-language in the later work of Titian—are accents of a personal temperament, characteristic in the orchestra-colours of Monteverde, melodically-flowing as a contemporary Venetian madrigal: streaks and dabs, immediately juxtaposed, cross one another, cover one another, entangle one another, and bring unending movement into the plain element of colour. Just so the geometrical Analysis of the time made its objects become instead of being. Every painting has in its execution a history and does not disguise it; and a Faustian who stands before it feels that he too has a spiritual evolution. Before any great landscape by a Baroque master, the one word “historical” is enough to make us feel that there is a meaning in it wholly alien to the meaning of an Attic statue. As other melody, so also this of the restless outlineless brush-stroke is part of the dynamic stability of the universe of eternal Becoming, directional Time, and Destiny. The opposition of painting-style and drawing-style is but a

## particular aspect of the general opposition of historical and

ahistorical form, of assertion and denial of inner development, of eternity and instantaneity. A Classical art-work is an event, a Western is a deed. The one symbolizes the here-and-now point, the other the living course. And the physiognomy of this script of the brush—an ornamentation that is entirely new, infinitely rich and personal, and peculiar to the Western Culture—is purely and simply _musical_. It is no mere conceit to compare the _allegro feroce_ of Frans Hals with the _andante con moto_ of Van Dyck, or the minor of Guercino with the major of Velasquez. Henceforward the notion of _tempo_ is comprised in the execution of a painting and steadily reminds us that this art is the art of a soul which, in contrast to the Classical, forgets nothing and will let nothing be forgotten that once was. The aëry web of brush-strokes immediately dissolves the sensible surface of things. Contours melt into chiaroscuro. The beholder has to stand a very long way back to obtain any corporeal impression out of our coloured space values, and even so it is always the chromatic and active air itself that gives birth to the things.

At the same time with this, there appeared in Western painting another symbol of highest significance, which subdued more and more the actuality of all colour—the “studio-brown” (atelierbraun). This was unknown to the early Florentines and the older Flemish and Rhenish masters alike. Pacher, Dürer, Holbein, passionately strong as their tendency towards spatial depth seems, are quite without it, and its reign begins only with the last years of the 16th Century. This brown does not repudiate its descent from the “infinitesimal” greens of Leonardo’s, Schöngauer’s and Grünewald’s backgrounds, but it possesses a mightier power over things than they, and it carries the battle of Space against Matter to a decisive close. It even prevails over the more primitive linear perspective, which is unable to shake off its Renaissance association with architectural motives. Between it and the Impressionist technique of the visible brush-stroke there is an enduring and deeply suggestive connexion. Both in the end dissolve the tangible existences of the sense-world—the world of moments and foregrounds—into atmospheric semblances. Line disappears from the tone-picture. The Magian gold-ground had only dreamed of a mystic power that controlled and at will could thrust aside the laws governing corporeal existence within the world-cavern. But the brown of these pictures opened a prospect into an infinity of pure forms. And therefore its discovery marks for the Western style a culmination in the process of its becoming. _As contrasted with the preceding green, this colour has something Protestant in it._ It anticipates the hyperbolic[314] Northern pantheism of the 18th Century which the Archangels voice in the Prologue of Goethe’s “Faust.”[315] The atmosphere of Lear and the atmosphere of Macbeth are akin to it. The contemporary striving of instrumental music towards freer and ever freer chromatics (de Rore, Luca Marenzio) and towards the formation of bodies of tone by means of string and wind choruses corresponds exactly with the new tendency of oil-painting to create _pictorial chromatics_ out of pure colours, by means of these unlimited brown shadings and the contrast-effect of immediately juxtaposed colour-strokes. Thereafter both the arts spread through their worlds of tones and colours—colour-tones and tone-colours—an atmosphere of the purest spatiality, which enveloped and rendered, no longer body— the human being as a shape—but the soul unconfined. And thus was attained the inwardness that in the deepest works of Rembrandt and of Beethoven is able to unlock the last secrets themselves—the inwardness which Apollinian man had sought with his strictly somatic art to _keep at bay_.

From now onward, the old foreground-colours yellow and red—the Classical tones—are employed more and more rarely and always as deliberate contrasts to the distances and depths that they are meant to set off and emphasize (Vermeer in particular, besides of course Rembrandt). This atmospheric brown, which was entirely alien to the Renaissance, is the unrealest colour that there is. It is the one major colour that _does not exist in the rainbow_. There is white light, and yellow and green, and red and other light of the most entire purity. But a pure brown light is outside the possibilities of the Nature that we know. All the greenish-brown, silvery, moist brown, and deep gold tones that appear in their splendid variety with Giorgione, grow bolder and bolder in the great Dutch painters and lose themselves towards the end of the 18th Century, have the common quality that they strip nature of her tangible actuality. They contain, therefore, what is almost a religious profession of faith; we feel that here we are not very far from Port Royal, from Leibniz. With Constable on the other hand—who is the founder of the painting of _Civilization_—it is a different will that seeks expression; and the very brown that he had learnt from the Dutch meant to him not what it had meant to them—Destiny, God, the meaning of life— but simply romance, sensibility, yearning for something that was gone, memorial of the great past of the dying art. In the last German masters too—Lessing, Marées, Spitzweg, Diez, Leibl[316]—whose belated art is a romantic retrospect, an epilogue, the brown tones appear simply as a precious heirloom. Unwilling in their hearts to part with this last relic of the great style, they preferred to set themselves against the evident tendency of their generation—the soulless and soul-killing generation of _plein-air_ and Haeckel. Rightly understood (as it has never yet been), this battle of Rembrandt-brown and the _plein-air_ of the new school is simply one more case of the hopeless resistance put up by soul against intellect and Culture against Civilization, of the opposition of symbolic necessary art and megalopolitan “applied” art which affects building and painting and sculpture and poetry alike. Regarded thus, the significance of the brown becomes manifest enough. When it dies, an entire Culture dies with it.

It was the masters who were inwardly greatest—Rembrandt above all—who best understood this colour. It is the enigmatic brown of his most telling work, and its origin is in the deep lights of Gothic church- windows and the twilight of the high-vaulted Gothic nave. And the gold tone of the great Venetians—Titian, Veronese, Palma, Giorgione—is always reminding us of that old perished Northern art of glass painting of which they themselves know almost nothing. Here also the Renaissance with its deliberate bodiliness of colour is seen as merely an episode, an event of the very self-conscious surface, and not a product of the underlying Faustian instinct of the Western soul, whereas this luminous gold-brown of the Venetian painting links Gothic and Baroque, the art of the old glass-painting and the dark music of Beethoven. And it coincides precisely in time with the establishment of the Baroque style of colour- music by the work of the Netherlanders Willaert and Cyprian de Rore, the elder Gabrieli, and the Venetian music-school which they founded.

Brown, then, became the characteristic colour of the _soul_, and more

## particularly of a historically-disposed soul. Nietzsche has, I think,

spoken somewhere of the “brown” music of Bizet, but the adjective is far more appropriate to the music which Beethoven wrote for strings[317] and to the orchestration that even as late as Bruckner so often fills space with a browny-golden expanse of tone. All other colours are relegated to ancillary functions—thus the bright yellow and the vermilion of Vermeer intrude with the spatial almost as though from another world and with an emphasis that is truly metaphysical, and the yellow-green and blood-red lights of Rembrandt seem at most to play with the symbolism of space. In Rubens, on the contrary—brilliant performer but no thinker—the brown is almost destitute of idea, a shadow-colour. (In him and in Watteau, the “Catholic” blue-green disputes precedence with the brown.) All this shows how any particular means may, in the hands of men of inward depth, become a symbol for the evocation of such high transcendence as that of the Rembrandt landscape, while for other great masters it may be merely a serviceable technical expedient—or in other words that (as we have already seen) technical “form,” in the theoretical sense of something opposed to “content,” has nothing whatever to do with the real and true form of a great work.

I have called brown a historical colour. By this is meant that it makes the atmosphere of the pictured space signify directedness and _future_, and overpowers the assertiveness of any instantaneous element that may be represented. The other colours of distance have also this significance, and they lead to an important, considerable and distinctly bizarre extension of the Western symbolism. The Hellenes had in the end come to prefer bronze and even gilt-bronze to the painted marble, the better to express (by the radiance of this phenomenon against a deep blue sky) the idea of the individualness of any and every corporeal thing.[318] Now, when the Renaissance dug these statues up, it found them black and green with the patina of many centuries. The historic spirit, with its piety and longing, fastened on to this—and from that time forth our form-feeling has canonized this black and green of distance. To-day our eye finds it indispensable to the enjoyment of a bronze—an ironical illustration of the fact that this whole species of art is something that no longer concerns us as such. What does a cathedral dome or a bronze figure mean to us without the patina which transmutes the short-range brilliance into the tone of remoteness of time and place? Have we not got to the point of artificially producing this patina?[319]

But even more than this is involved in the ennoblement of decay to the level of an art-means of independent significance. That a Greek would have regarded the formation of patina as the ruin of the work, we can hardly doubt. It is not merely that the colour green, on account of its “distant” quality, was avoided by him on spiritual grounds. Patina is a symbol of _mortality_ and hence related in a remarkable way to the symbols of time-measurement and the funeral rite. We have already in an earlier chapter discussed the wistful regard of the Faustian soul for ruins and evidences of the distant past, its proneness to the collection of antiquities and manuscripts and coins, to pilgrimages to the Forum Romanum and to Pompeii, to excavations and philological studies, which appears as early as the time of Petrarch. When would it have occurred to a Greek to bother himself with the ruins of Cnossus or Tiryns?[320] Every Greek knew his “Iliad” but not one ever thought of digging up the hill of Troy. We, on the contrary, are moved by a secret piety to preserve the aqueducts of the Campagna, the Etruscan tombs, the ruins of Luxor and Karnak, the crumbling castles of the Rhine, the Roman Limes, Hersfeld and Paulinzella from becoming mere rubbish—but we keep them _as ruins_, feeling in some subtle way that reconstruction would deprive them of something, indefinable in terms, that can never be reproduced.[321] Nothing was further from the Classical mind than this reverence for the weather-beaten evidences of a once and a formerly. It cleared out of sight everything that did not speak of the present; never was the old preserved because it was old. After the Persians had destroyed old Athens, the citizens threw columns, statues, reliefs, broken or not, over the Acropolis wall, in order to start afresh with a clean slate—and the resultant scrap-heaps have been our richest sources for the art of the 6th Century. Their action was quite in keeping with the style of a Culture that raised cremation to the rank of a major symbol and refused with scorn to bind daily life to a chronology. _Our_ choice has been, as usual, the opposite. The heroic landscape of the Claude Lorrain type is inconceivable without ruins. The English park with its atmospheric suggestion, which supplanted the French about 1750 and abandoned the great perspective idea of the latter in favour of the “Nature” of Addison, Pope and sensibility, introduced into its stock of motives perhaps the most astonishing bizarrerie ever perpetrated, the _artificial ruin_, in order to deepen the historical character in the presented landscape.[322] The Egyptian Culture restored the works of its early period, but it would never have ventured to _build_ ruins as the symbols of the past. Again, it is not the Classical statue, but the Classical _torso_ that we really love. It has had a destiny: something suggestive of the past as past envelops it, and our imagination delights to fill the empty space of missing limbs with the pulse and swing of invisible lines. A good restoration—and the secret charm of endless possibilities is all gone. I venture to maintain that it is only by way of this _transposition into the musical_ that the remains of Classical sculpture can really reach us. The green bronze, the blackened marble, the fragments of a figure abolish for our inner eye the limitations of time and space. “Picturesque” this has been called—the brand-new statue and building and the too-well-groomed park are not picturesque—and the word is just to this extent, that the deep meaning of this weathering is the same as that of the studio-brown. But, at bottom, what both express is the spirit of instrumental music. Would the Spearman of Polycletus, standing before us in flashing bronze and with enamel eyes and gilded hair, affect us as it does in the state of blackened age? Would not the Vatican torso of Heracles lose its mighty impressiveness if, one fine day, the missing parts were discovered and replaced? And would not the towers and domes of our old cities lose their deep metaphysical charm if they were sheathed in new copper? Age, for us as for the Egyptian, ennobles all things. For Classical man, it depreciates them.

Lastly, consider Western tragedy; observe how the same feeling leads it to prefer “historical” material—meaning thereby not so much demonstrably actual or even possible, but _remote and crusted_ subjects. That which the Faustian soul wanted, and must have, could not be expressed by any event of purely momentary meaning, lacking in distance of time or place, or by a tragic art of the Classical kind, or by a timeless myth. Our tragedies, consequently, are tragedies of the past and of the future—the latter category, in which men yet to be are shown as carriers of a Destiny, is represented in a certain sense by “Faust,” “Peer Gynt” and the “Götterdämmerung.” But tragedies of the present we have _not_, apart from the trivial social drama of the 19th Century.[323] If Shakespeare wanted on occasion to express anything of importance in the present, he at least removed the scene of it to some foreign land—Italy for preference—in which he had never been, and German poets likewise take England or France—always for the sake of getting rid of that _nearness_ of time and place which the Attic drama emphasized even in the case of a mythological subject.

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## CHAPTER VIII MUSIC AND PLASTIC

II

ACT AND PORTRAIT

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