CHAPTER VIII

MUSIC AND PLASTIC

II ACT AND PORTRAIT

I

The Classical has been characterized as a culture of the Body and the Northern as a culture of the Spirit, and not without a certain _arrière- pensée_ of disprizing the one in favour of the other. Though it was mainly in trivialities that Renaissance taste made its contrasts between Classical and Modern, Pagan and Christian, yet even this might have led to decisive discoveries if only men had seen how to get behind formula to origins.

If the environment of a man (whatever else it may be) is with respect to him a macrocosm with respect to a microcosm, an immense aggregate of symbols, then the man himself, in so far as he belongs to the fabric of actuality, in so far as he is _phenomenal_, must be comprised in the general symbolism. But, in the impress of him made upon men like himself, what is it that possesses the force of Symbol, viz., the capacity of summing within itself and intelligibly presenting the essence of that man and the signification of his being? Art gives the answer.

But this answer is necessarily different in different Cultures. As each lives differently, so each is differently impressed by Life. For the mode of human imagining—metaphysical, ethical, artistic imagining alike— it is more than important, it is determinant that the individual feels himself as a body amongst bodies or, on the contrary, as a centre in endless space; that he subtilizes his ego into lone distinctness or, on the contrary, regards it as substantially part of the general consensus, that the directional character is asserted or, on the contrary, denied in the rhythm and course of his life. In all these ways the prime-symbol of the great Culture comes to manifestation: this is indeed a world- feeling, but the life-ideal conforms to it. From the Classical ideal followed unreserved acceptance of the sensuous instant, from the Western a not less passionate wrestle to overcome it. The Apollinian soul, Euclidean and point-formed, felt the empirical visible body as the complete expression of its own way of being; the Faustian, roving into all distances, found this expression not in _person_, σῶμα, but in _personality_, _character_, call it what you will. “Soul” for the real Hellene was in last analysis the form of his body—and thus Aristotle defined it. “Body” for Faustian man was the vessel of the soul—and thus Goethe felt it.

But the result of this is that Culture and Culture differ very greatly in their selection and formation of their humane arts. While Gluck expresses the woe of Armida by a melody combined with drear gnawing tones in the instrumental accompaniment, the same is achieved in Pergamene sculptures by making every muscle speak. The Hellenistic portraiture tries to draw a spiritual _type_ in the structure of its heads. In China the heads of the Saints of Ling-yan-si tell of a _wholly personal_ inner life by their look and the play of the corners of the mouth.

The Classical tendency towards making the body the sole spokesman is emphatically not the result of any carnal overload in the race (to the man of σωφροσύνη wantonness was not permitted[324]), it was _not_, as Nietzsche thought, an orgiastic joy of untrammelled energy and perfervid passion. This sort of thing is much nearer to the ideals of Germanic- Christian or of Indian chivalry. What Apollinian man and Apollinian art can claim as their very own is simply the apotheosis of the bodily _phenomenon_, taking the word perfectly literally—the rhythmic proportioning of limbs and harmonious build of muscles. This is _not_ Pagan as against Christian, it is Attic as against Baroque; for it was Baroque mankind (Christian or unbeliever, monk or rationalist) that first utterly put away the cult of the palpable σῶμα, carrying its alienation indeed to the extremes of bodily uncleanliness that prevailed in the entourage of Louis XIV,[325] whose full wigs and lace cuffs and buckled shoes covered up Body with a whole web of ornament.

Thus the Classical plastic art, after liberating the form completely from the actual or imaginary back-wall and setting it up in the open, free and unrelated, to be seen as a body among bodies, moved on logically till the _naked_ body became its only subject. And, moreover, it is unlike every other kind of sculpture recorded in art-history in that its treatment of the bounding surfaces of this body is _anatomically convincing_. Here is the Euclidean world-principle carried to the extreme; any envelope whatever would have been in contradiction, however slightly, with the Apollinian phenomenon, would have indicated, however timidly, the existence of the circum-space.

In this art, what is ornamental in the high sense resides entirely in the proportions of the structure[326] and the equivalence of the axes in respect of support and load. Standing, sitting, lying down but always self-secure, the body has, like the peripteros, no interior, that is, no “soul.” The significance of the muscle-relief, carried out absolutely in the round, is the same as that of the self-closing array of the columns; both contain the _whole_ of the form-language of the work.

It was a strictly metaphysical reason, the need of a supreme life-symbol for themselves, that brought the later Hellenes to this art, which under all the consummate achievement is a narrow one. It is not true that this language of the outer surface is the completest, or the most natural, or even the most obvious mode of representing the human being. Quite the contrary. If the Renaissance, with its ardent theory and its immense misconception of its own tendency, had not continued to dominate our judgment—long after the plastic art itself had become entirely alien to our inner soul—we should not have waited till to-day to observe this distinctive character of the Attic style. No Egyptian or Chinese sculptor ever dreamed of using external anatomy to express his meaning. In Gothic image-work a language of the muscles is unheard of. The human tracery that clothes the mighty Gothic framework with a web of countless figures and reliefs (Chartres cathedral has more than _ten thousand_ such) is not merely ornament; as early as about 1200 it is employed for the expression of schemes and purposes far grander than even the grandest of Classical plastic. For these masses of figures constitute a _tragic_ unit. Here, by the North even earlier than by Dante, the historical feeling of the Faustian soul—of which the deep sacrament of _Contrition_ is the spiritual expression and the rite of _Confession_ the grave teacher—is intensified to the tragic fullness of a world- drama. That which Joachim of Floris, at this very time, was seeing in his Apulian cell—the picture of the world, not as Cosmos, but as a Divine History and succession of three world-ages[327]—the craftsmen were expressing at Reims, Amiens and Paris in serial presentation of it from the Fall to the Last Judgment. Each of the scenes, each of the great symbolic figures, had its significant place in the sacred edifice, each its rôle in the immense world-poem. Then, too, each individual man came to feel how his life-course was fitted as ornament in the plan of Divine history, and to experience this personal connexion with it in the forms of Contrition and Confession. And thus these bodies of stone are not mere servants of the architecture. They have a deep and particular meaning of their own, the same meaning as the memorial-tomb brings to expression with ever-increasing intensity from the Royal Tombs of St. Denis onward; they speak of a _personality_. Just as Classical man properly meant, with his perfected working-out of _superficial_ body (for all the anatomical aspiration of the Greek artist comes to that in the end), to exhaust the whole essence of the living phenomenon in and by the rendering of its bounding surfaces, so Faustian man no less logically found the most genuine, the only exhaustive, expression of his life-feeling in the _Portrait_. The Hellenic treatment of the nude is the great exceptional case; in this and in this only has it led to an art of the high order.[328]

_Act_ and _Portrait_ have never hitherto been felt as constituting an opposition, and consequently the full significance of their appearances in art-history has never been appreciated. And yet it is in the conflict of these two form-ideals that the contrast of two worlds is first manifested in full. There, on the one hand, an existence is made to show itself in the composition of the exterior structure; here, on the other hand, the human interior, the Soul, is made to speak of itself, as the interior of a church speaks to us through its façade or face. A mosque had no face, and consequently the Iconoclastic movement of the Moslems and the Paulicians—which under Leo III spread to Byzantium and beyond— necessarily drove the portrait-element quite out of the arts of form, so that thenceforward they possessed only a fixed stock of human arabesques. In Egypt the face of the statue was equivalent to the pylon, the face of the temple-plan; it was a mighty emergence out of the stone- mass of the body, as we see in the “Hyksos Sphinx” of Tanis and the portrait of Amenemhet III. In China the face is like a landscape, full of wrinkles and little signs that mean something. But, for us, the portrait is _musical_. The look, the play of the mouth, the pose of head and hands—these things are a fugue of the subtlest meaning, a composition of many voices that _sounds_ to the understanding beholder.

But in order to grasp the significance of the portraiture of the West more specifically in contrast with that of Egypt and that of China, we have to consider the deep change in the language of the West that began in Merovingian times to foreshadow the dawn of a new life-feeling. This change extended _equally_ over the old German and the vulgar Latin, but it affected only the tongues spoken in the countries of the coming Culture (for instance, Norwegian and Spanish, but not Rumanian). The change would be inexplicable if we were to regard merely the spirit of these languages and their “influence” of one upon another; the explanation is in the spirit of the mankind that raised a mere way of using words to the level of a symbol. Instead of _sum_, Gothic _im_, we say _ich bin_, _I am_, _je suis_; instead of _fecisti_, we say _tu habes factum_, _tu as fait_, _du habes gitân_; and again, _daz wîp_, _un homme_, _man hat_. This has hitherto been a riddle[329] because families of languages were considered as beings, but the mystery is solved when we discover in the idiom the reflection of a soul. The Faustian soul is here beginning to remould for its own use grammatical material of the most varied provenance. The coming of this specific “I” is the first dawning of that personality-idea which was so much later to create the sacrament of Contrition and _personal_ absolution. This “ego habeo factum,” the insertion of the auxiliaries “have” and “be” between a doer and a deed, in lieu of the “feci” which expresses activated body, replaces the world of bodies by one of functions between centres of force, the static syntax by a dynamic. And this “I” and “Thou” is the key to Gothic portraiture. A Hellenistic portrait is the type of an attitude—a confession it is not, either to the creator of it or to the understanding spectator. But our portraits depict something _sui generis_, once occurring and never recurring, a life-history expressed in a moment, a world-centre for which everything else is world-around, exactly as the grammatical subject “I” becomes the centre of force in the Faustian sentence.

It has been shown how the experience of the extended has its origin in the living _direction_, _time_, _destiny_. In the perfected “being” of the all-round nude body the depth-experience has been cut away, but the “look” of a portrait leads this experience into the supersensuous infinite. Therefore the Ancient art is an art of the near and tangible and timeless, it prefers motives of brief, briefest, pause between two movements, the last moment _before_ Myron’s athlete throws the discus, or the first moment after Pæonius’s Nike has alighted from the air, when the swing of the body is ending and the streaming draperies have not yet fallen—attitudes devoid equally of duration and of direction, disengaged from future and from past. “Veni, vidi, vici” is just such another attitude. But in "I—came, I—saw, I—conquered" there is a becoming each time in the very build of the sentence.

The depth-experience is a becoming and effects a become, signifies time and evokes space, is at once cosmic and historical. Living direction marches to the horizon as to the future. As early as 1230 the Madonna of the St. Anne entrance of Notre-Dame dreams of this future: so, later, the Cologne “Madonna with the Bean-blossom” of Meister Wilhelm. Long before the Moses of Michelangelo, the Moses of Klaus Suter’s well in the Chartreuse of Dijon meditates on destiny, and even the Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel are forestalled by those of Giovanni Pisano in Sant’ Andrea at Pistoia (1300). And, lastly, there are the figures on the Gothic tombs—how they rest from the long journey of Destiny and how completely they contrast with the _timeless_ grave and gay that is represented on the stelæ of Attic cemeteries.[330] The Western portraiture is endless in every sense, for it begins to wake out of the stone from about 1200 and it has become completely music in the 17th Century. It takes its man not as a mere centre of the World-as-Nature which as phenomenon receives shape and significance from his being, but, above all, as a centre of the World-as-History. The Classical statue is a piece of present “Nature” and nothing besides. The Classical poetry is statuary in verse. Herein is the root of our feeling that ascribes to the Greek an unreserved devotion to Nature. We shall never entirely shake off the idea that the Gothic style as compared with the Greek is “unnatural.” Of course it is, for it is _more than_ Nature; only we are unnecessarily loath to realize that it is a deficiency in the Greek that our feeling has detected. The Western form-language is richer— portraiture belongs to Nature _and_ to history. A tomb by one of those great Netherlanders who worked on the Royal graves of St. Denis from 1260, a portrait by Holbein or Titian or Rembrandt or Goya, is a _biography_, and a self-portrait is a historical _confession_. To make one’s confession is not to avow an act but to lay before the Judge the inner history of that act. The act is patent, its roots the personal secret. When the Protestant or the Freethinker opposes auricular confession, it never occurs to him that he is rejecting merely the outward form of the idea and not the idea itself. He declines to confess to the priest, but he confesses to himself, to a friend, or to all and sundry. The whole of Northern poetry is one outspoken confession. So are the portraits of Rembrandt and the music of Beethoven. What Raphael and Calderon and Haydn told to the priests, these men put into the language of their works. One who is forced to be silent because the _greatness_ of form that can take in even the ultimate things has been denied him ... goes under like Hölderlin. Western man lives in the _consciousness_ of his becoming and his eyes are constantly upon past and future. The Greek lives point-wise, ahistorically, somatically. No Greek would have been capable of a genuine self-criticism. As the phenomenon of the nude statue is the completely ahistoric copy of a man, so the Western self- portrait is the exact equivalent of the “Werther” or “Tasso” autobiography. To the Classical both are equally and wholly alien. There is nothing so impersonal as Greek art; that Scopas or Polycletus should make an image of himself is something quite inconceivable.

Looking at the work of Phidias, of Polycletus, or of any master later than the Persian Wars, do we not see in the doming of the brow, the lips, the set of the nose, the blind eyes, the expression of entirely non-personal, plantlike, _soulless_ vitality? And may we not ask ourselves whether this is the form-language that is capable even of hinting at an inner experience? Michelangelo devoted himself with all passion to the study of anatomy, but the phenomenal body that he works out is always the expression of the activity of all bones, sinews and organs of the _inside_; without deliberate intention, the living that is under the skin comes out in the phenomenon. It is a physiognomy, and not a system, of muscles that he calls to life. But this means at once that the personal destiny and not the material body has become the starting- point of the form-feeling. There is more psychology (and less “Nature”) in the arm of one of his Slaves[331] than there is in the whole head of Praxiteles’s Hermes.[332] Myron’s Discobolus,[333] on the other hand, renders the exterior form purely as itself, without relation of any sort to the inner organs, let alone to any “soul.” One has only to take the best work of this period and compare it with the old Egyptian statues, say the “Village Sheikh”[334] or King Phiops (Pepi), or again with Donatello’s “David,”[335] to understand at once what it means to recognize a body purely with reference to its material boundaries. Everything in a head that might allow something intimate or spiritual to become phenomenal the Greeks (and markedly this same Myron) most carefully avoid. Once this characteristic has struck us, the best heads of the great age sooner or later begin to pall. Seen in the perspective of our world-feeling, they are stupid and dull, wanting in the biographical element, devoid of any _destiny_. It was not out of caprice that that age objected so strongly to votive images. The statues of Olympian victors are representatives of a fighting attitude. Right down to Lysippus there is not one single character-head, but only masks. Again, considering the figure as a whole, with what skill the Greeks avoid giving any impression that the head is the favoured part of the body! That is why these heads are so small, so un-significant in their pose, so un-thoroughly modelled. Always they are formed as a part of the body like arms and legs, never as the seat and symbol of an “I.”

At last, even, we come to regard the feminine (not to say effeminate) look of many of these heads of the 5th, and still more of the 4th, Centuries[336] as the—no doubt unintentional—outcome of an effort to get rid of personal character entirely. We should probably be justified in concluding that the ideal facial type of this art—which was certainly not an art for the people, as the later naturalistic portrait-sculpture at once shows—was arrived at by rejecting all elements of an individual or historical character; that is, by steadily narrowing down the field of view to the pure Euclidean.

The portraiture of the great age of Baroque, on the contrary, applies to historical distance all those means of pictorial counterpoint that we already know as the fabric of their spatial distance—the brown-dipped atmosphere, the perspective, the dynamic brush-stroke, the quivering colour-tones and lights—and with their aid succeeds in treating body as something intrinsically non-material, as the highly expressive envelope of a space-commanding ego. (This problem the fresco-technique, Euclidean that it is, is powerless to solve.) The whole painting has only one theme, a soul. Observe the rendering of the hands and the brow in Rembrandt (e.g., in the etching of Burgomaster Six or the portrait of an architect at Cassel), and again, even so late, in Marées and Leibl[337]— spiritual to the point of dematerializing them, visionary, lyrical. Compare them with the hand and brow of an Apollo or a Poseidon of the Periclean age!

The Gothic, too, had deeply and sincerely felt this. It had draped body, not for its own sake but for the sake of developing in the ornament of the drapery a form-language consonant with the language of the head and the hands in a fugue of Life. So, too, with the relations of the voices in counterpoint and, in Baroque, those of the “continuo” to the upper voices of the orchestra. In Rembrandt there is always interplay of bass melody in the costume and motives in the head.

Like the Gothic draped figure, the old Egyptian statue denies the intrinsic importance of body. As the former, by treating the clothing in a purely ornamental fashion, reinforces the expressiveness of head and hands, so the latter, with a grandeur of idea never since equalled (at any rate in sculpture), holds the body—as it holds a pyramid or an obelisk—to a mathematical scheme and confines the personal element to the head. The fall of draperies was meant in Athens to reveal the sense of the body, in the North to conceal it; in the one case the fabric becomes body, in the other it becomes music. And from this deep contrast springs the silent battle that goes on in high-Renaissance work between the consciously-intended and the unconsciously-insistent ideals of the artist, a battle in which the first—anti-Gothic—often wins the superficial, but the second—Gothic becoming Baroque—invariably wins the fundamental victory.

II

The opposition of Apollinian and Faustian ideals of Humanity may now be stated concisely. Act and Portrait are to one another as body and space, instant and history, foreground and background, Euclidean and analytical number, proportion and relation. The Statue is rooted in the ground, Music (and the Western portrait _is_ music, soul woven of colour-tones) invades and pervades space without limit. The fresco-painting is tied to the wall, trained on it, but the oil-painting, the “picture” on canvas or board or other table, is free from limitations of place. The Apollinian form-language reveals only the become, the Faustian shows above all a becoming.

It is for this reason that child-portraits and family groups are amongst the finest and most intimately right achievements of the Western art. In the Attic sculpture this motive is entirely absent, and although in Hellenistic times the playful motive of the Cupid or Putto came into favour, it was expressly as a being _different_ from the other beings and not at all as a person growing or becoming. The child links past and future. In every art of human representation that has a claim to symbolic import, it signifies duration in the midst of phenomenal change, the endlessness of Life. But the Classical Life exhausted itself in the completeness of the moment. The individual shut his eyes to time- distances; he comprehended in his thought the men like himself whom he saw around him, but not the coming generations; and therefore there has never been an art that so emphatically ignored the intimate representation of children as the Greek art did. Consider the multitude of child-figures that our own art has produced from early Gothic to dying Rococo—and in the Renaissance above all—and find if you can in Classical art right down to Alexander one work of importance that intentionally sets by the side of the worked-out body of man or woman any child-element with existence still before it.

Endless Becoming is comprehended in the idea of _Motherhood_, Woman as Mother _is_ Time and _is_ Destiny. Just as the mysterious act of depth- experience fashions, out of sensation, extension and world, so through motherhood the bodily man is made an individual member of this world, in which thereupon he _has_ a Destiny. All symbols of Time and Distance are also symbols of maternity. _Care_ is the root-feeling of future, and all care is motherly. It expresses itself in the formation and the idea of Family and State and in the principle of Inheritance which underlies both. Care may be either affirmed or denied—one can live care-filled or care-free. Similarly, Time may be looked at in the light of eternity or in the light of the instant, and the drama of begetting and bearing or the drama of the nursing mother with her child may be chosen as the symbol of Life to be made apprehensible by all the means of art. India and the Classical took the first alternative, Egypt and the West the second.[338] There is something of pure unrelated present in the Phallus and the Lingam, and in the phenomenon of the Doric column and the Attic statue as well. But the nursing Mother points into the future, and she is just the figure that is entirely missing in the Classical art. She could not possibly be rendered in the style of Phidias. One feels that this form is opposed to the sense of the phenomenon.

But in the religious art of the West, the representation of Motherhood is the noblest of all tasks. As Gothic dawns, the Theotokos of the Byzantine changes into the Mater Dolorosa, the Mother of God. In German mythology she appears (doubtless from Carolingian times only) as Frigga and Frau Holle. The same feeling comes out in beautiful Minnesinger fancies like Lady Sun, Lady World, Lady Love. The whole panorama of early Gothic mankind is pervaded by something maternal, something caring and patient, and Germanic-Catholic Christianity—when it had ripened into full consciousness of itself and in one impulse settled its sacraments and created its Gothic Style—placed _not the suffering Redeemer but the suffering Mother_ in the centre of its world-picture. About 1250, in the great epic of statuary of Reims Cathedral, the principal place in the centre of the main porch, which in the cathedrals of Paris and Amiens was still that of Christ, was assigned to the Madonna; and it was about this time, too, that the Tuscan school at Arezzo and Siena (Guido da Siena) began to infuse a suggestion of mother-love into the conventional Byzantine Theotokos. And after that the Madonnas of Raphael led the way to the purely human type of the Baroque, the mother in the sweetheart— Ophelia, Gretchen—whose secret reveals itself in the glorious close of Faust II and in its fusion with the early Gothic Mary.

As against these types, the imagination of the Greeks conceived goddesses who are either Amazons like Athene or hetæræ like Aphrodite. In the root-feeling which produced the Classical type of womanhood, fruitfulness has a vegetal character—in this connexion as in others the word σῶμα exhaustively expresses the meaning of the phenomenon. Think of the masterpieces of this art, the three mighty female bodies of the East Pediment of the Parthenon,[339] and compare with them that noblest image of a mother, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. In the latter, all bodiliness has disappeared. She is all distance and space. The Helen of the “Iliad,” compared with Kriemhild, the motherly comrade of Siegfried, is a courtesan, while Antigone and Clytæmnestra are Amazons. How strangely even Æschylus passes over in silence the mother-tragic in Clytæmnestra! The figure of Medea is nothing less than the mythic _inverse_ of the Faustian “Mater Dolorosa”; her tragic is not one of future or children, it is with her lover, the symbol of wholly-present life, that her universe collapses. Kriemhild revenges her unborn children—it is _this_ future that has been murdered in her—but Medea revenges only a past happiness. When the Classical sculpture, _late_ art that it is,[340] arrives at secularizing[341] the pictures of the god, it creates the antique ideal of female form in a Cnidian Aphrodite—merely a very beautiful object, not a character or an ego but a piece of Nature. And in the end Praxiteles finds the hardihood to represent a goddess entirely naked. This innovation met with severe criticism, for it was felt to be a sign of the decline of the Classical world-feeling; suitable as it was to erotic symbolism, it was in sharp contradiction with the dignity of the older Greek religion. But exactly then, too, a portrait-art ventured to show itself, simultaneously with the invention of a form that has never since been forgotten, the _bust_. Unfortunately (here as elsewhere) art-research has made the mistake of discovering in this the “beginnings” of “the” portrait. In reality, whereas a Gothic visage speaks of an individual destiny, and even an Egyptian—in spite of the rigid formalism of the figure—has the recognizable traits of the individual person (since otherwise it could not serve as dwelling for the higher soul of the dead, his _Ka_), the Greeks developed a taste for typical representations just as the contemporary comedy produced standard men and situations, to which any names whatever could be affixed. The “portrait” is distinguishable not by personal traits but by the label only. This is the general custom amongst children and primitive men, and it is connected with name-magic. The name serves to capture some essence of what is named and to bind it as an object which thereupon becomes specific for every beholder. The statues of the Tyrannicides,[342] the (Etruscan) statues of Kings in the Capitol and the “iconic” portraits of victors at Olympia must have been portraits of this sort, viz., not likenesses but figures with names. But now, in the later phase, there was an additional factor—the tendency of the time towards genre and applied art, which produced also the Corinthian column. What the sculptors worked out was the _types_ of life’s stage, the ἦθος which we mistranslate by character but which is really the kinds and modes of public behaviour and attitude; thus there is “the” grave Commander, “the” tragic poet, “the” passion-torn actor, “the” absorbed philosopher. Here is the real key to the understanding of the celebrated Hellenistic portraiture, for which the quite unjustifiable claim has been set up that its products are expressions of a deep spiritual life. It is not of much moment whether the work bears the name of someone long dead—the Sophocles[343] was sculptured about 340—or of a living man like the Pericles of Cresilas.[344] It was only in the 4th Century that Demetrius of Alopeke began to emphasize individual traits in the _external build_ of the man and Lysistratus the brother of Lysippus to copy (as Pliny tells us) a plaster-of-paris cast of the subject’s face without much subsequent modification. And how little such portraiture is portraiture in Rembrandt’s sense should surely have been obvious to anyone. The _soul_ is missing. The brilliant fidelity of Roman busts especially has been mistaken for physiognomic depth. But what really distinguishes the higher work from this craftsman’s and virtuoso’s work is an intention that is the precise opposite of the artistic intention of a Marées or a Leibl. That is, in such work the important and significant is not _brought out_, it is _put in_. An example of this is seen in the Demosthenes statue,[345] the artist of which possibly saw the orator in life. Here the particulars of the body- surface are emphasized, perhaps over-emphasized (“true to Nature,” they called this then), but into the disposition so conceived he works the character-type of the Serious Orator which we meet again on different bases in the portraits of Æschines and Lysias at Naples. That is truth to life, undoubtedly, but it is truth to life as Classical man felt it, typical and impersonal. We have contemplated the result with _our_ eyes, and have accordingly misunderstood it.

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III

In the oil-painting age that followed the end of the Renaissance, the depth of an artist can be accurately measured by the content of his portraits. To this rule there is hardly an exception. All forms in the picture (whether single, or in scenes, groups or masses)[346] are fundamentally felt as portraits; whether they are meant to be so or not is immaterial, for the individual painter has no choice in the matter. Nothing is more instructive than to observe how under the hands of a real Faustian man even the Act transforms itself into a portrait- study.[347] Take two German masters like Lucas Cranach and Tilmann Riemenschneider who were untouched by any theory and (in contrast to Dürer, whose inclination to æsthetic subtlety made him pliant before alien tendencies) worked in unqualified naïveté. They seldom depict the Act, and when they do so, they show themselves entirely unable to concentrate their expression on the immediately-present plane-specified bodiliness. The meaning of the human phenomenon, and therefore of the representation of it, remains entirely in the head, and is consistently physiognomical rather than anatomical. And the same may be said of Dürer’s Lucrezia, notwithstanding his Italian studies and the quite opposite intention. A Faustian _act_ is a contradiction in itself—hence the character-heads that we so often see on feeble act-representations (as far back as the Job of old French cathedral-sculpture) and hence also the laborious, forced, equivocal character that arouses our dislike in too manifest efforts to placate the Classical ideal—sacrifices offered up not by the soul but by the cultivated understanding. In the whole of painting after Leonardo there is not one important or distinctive work that derives its meaning from the Euclidean being of the nude body. It is mere incomprehension to quote Rubens here, and to compare his unbridled dynamism of swelling bodies in any respect whatever with the art of Praxiteles and even Scopas. It is owing precisely to his splendid sensuality that he is so far from the _static_ of Signorelli’s bodies. If there ever was an artist who could put a maximum of “becoming” into the beauty of naked bodies, who could treat bodily floridness _historically_ and convey the (utterly un-Hellenic) idea of an inexhaustible outflowing from within, it was Rubens. Compare the horse’s head from the Parthenon pediment[348] with his horses’ heads in the Battle of the Amazons,[349] and the deep metaphysical contrast between the two conceptions of the same phenomenal element is felt at once. In Rubens (recalling once more the characteristic opposition of Apollinian and Faustian mathematics) the body is not magnitude but relation. What matters is not the regimen of its external structure but the fullness of life that streams out of it and the stride of its life along the road from youth to age, where the Last Judgment that turns bodies into flames takes up the motive and intertwines it in the quivering web of active space. Such a synthesis is entirely un- Classical; but even nymphs, when it is Corot who paints them, are likewise shapes ready to dissolve into colour-patches reflecting endless space. Such was _not_ the intention of the Classical artist when he depicted the Act.

At the same time, the Greek form-ideal—the self-contained unit of being expressed in sculpture—has equally to be distinguished from that of the merely beautiful bodies on which painters from Giorgione to Boucher were always exercising their cleverness, which are fleshly still-life, genre- work expressing merely a certain gay sensuousness (e.g., “Rubens’s wife in a fur cloak.”[350]) and in contrast with the high ethical significance of the Classical Act have almost no symbolic force.[351] Magnificent as these men’s painting is, therefore, they have not succeeded in reaching the highest levels either of portraiture or of space-representation in landscape. Their brown and their green and their perspective lack “religiousness,” future, Destiny. They are masters only in the domain of _elementary_ form, and when it has actualized this their art is exhausted. It is they who constitute the substance-element in the development-history of a great art. But when a great _artist_ pressed on beyond them to a form that was to be capable of embracing the whole meaning of the world, he had necessarily to push to perfection the treatment of the nude body if his world was the Classical, and _not_ to do so if it was our North. Rembrandt never once painted an Act, in this foreground sense, and if Leonardo, Titian, Velasquez (and, among moderns, Menzel, Leibl, Marées and Manet) did so at all, it was very rarely; and even then, so to say, they painted bodies as _landscapes_. The portrait is ever the touchstone.[352]

But no one would ever judge masters like Signorelli, Mantegna, Botticelli or even Verrocchio, by the quality of their portraits. The equestrian statue of Can Grande[353] of 1330 is in a far higher sense a portrait than the Bartolommeo Colleoni is; and Raphael’s portraits (the best of which e.g., Pope Julius II were done under the influence of the Venetian Sebastian del Piombo), could be ignored altogether in an appreciation of his creative work. It is only with Leonardo that the portrait begins to count seriously. Between fresco-technique and oil- painting there is a subtle opposition. In fact, Giovanni Bellini’s “Doge” (Loredano)[354] is the first great oil-portrait. Here too the character of the Renaissance as a protest against the Faustian spirit of the West betrays itself. The episode of Florence amounts to an attempt to replace the Portrait of the Gothic style (as distinct from the “ideal” portrait of late-Classical art, which was well known through the Cæsar-busts) by the Act as human symbol. Logically, therefore, the entire art of the Renaissance should be wanting in the physiognomic traits. And yet the strong undercurrent of Faustian art-will kept alive, not only in the smaller towns and schools of middle Italy, but also in the instincts of the great masters themselves, a Gothic tradition that was never interrupted. Nay, the physiognomic of Gothic art even made itself master of the Southern nude body, alien as this element was. Its creations are not bodies that speak to us through static definition of their bounding surfaces. What we see is a _dumb-show_ that spreads from the face over all parts of the body, and the appreciative eye detects in this very _nudity_ of Tuscany a deep identity with the _drapery_ of the Gothic. Both are envelopes, neither a limitation. The reclining nude figures of Michelangelo in the Medici chapel are wholly and entirely the visage and the utterance of a _soul_. But, above all, every head, painted or modelled, became of itself a portrait, even when the heads were of gods or saints. The whole of the portrait-work of A. Rossellino, Donatello, Benedetto de Maiano, Mino da Fiesole, stands so near in spirit to that of Van Eyck, Memlinc and the Early Rhenish masters as to be often indistinguishable from theirs. There is not and there cannot be, I maintain, any genuine Renaissance portraiture, that is, a portraiture in which just that artistic sentiment which differentiates the Court of the Palazzo Strozzi from the Loggia dei Lanzi and Perugino from Cimabue applies itself to the rendering of a visage. In architecture, little as the new work was Apollinian in spirit, it was possible to create anti-Gothically, but in portraiture—no. It was too specifically Faustian a symbol. Michelangelo declined the task: passionately devoted as he was to his pursuit of a plastic ideal, he would have considered it an abdication to busy himself with portraiture. His Brutus bust is as little of a portrait as his de’ Medici, whereas Botticelli’s portrait of the latter is actual, and frankly Gothic to boot. Michelangelo’s heads are allegories in the style of dawning Baroque, and their resemblance even to Hellenistic work is only superficial. And however highly we may value the Uzzano bust of Donatello[355]—which is perhaps the most important achievement of that age and that circle—it will be admitted that by the side of the portraits of the Venetians it hardly counts.

It is well worth noting that this overcoming of, or at least this desire to overcome, the Gothic portrait with the Classical Act—the deeply historical and biographical form by the completely ahistoric—appears simultaneously with, and in association with, a decline in the capacity for self-examination and artistic confession in the Goethian sense. The true Renaissance man did not know what spiritual development meant. He managed to live entirely outwardly, and this was the great good fortune and success of the Quattrocento. Between Dante’s “Vita Nuova” and Michelangelo’s sonnets there is no poetic confession, no self-portrait of the high order. The Renaissance artist and humanist is the one single type of Western man for whom the word “loneliness” remained unmeaning. His life accomplished its course in the light of a _courtly_ existence. His feelings and impressions were all public, and he had neither secret discontents nor reserves, while the life of the great contemporary Netherlanders, on the contrary, moved on in the shadow of their works. Is it perhaps permissible to add that it was _because_ of this that that other symbol of historic distance, duration, care and ponderation, _the State_, also disappeared from the purview of the Renaissance, between Dante and Michelangelo? In “fickle Florence”—whose great men one and all were cruelly maltreated and whose incapacity for political creation seems, by the side of other Western state-forms, to border on sheer _bizarrerie_—and, more generally, wherever the anti-Gothic (which in this connexion means anti-dynastic) spirit displayed itself vigorously in art and public life, the State made way for a truly Hellenic sorriness of Medicis, Sforzas, Borgias, Malatestas, and waste republics. Only that city where sculpture gained _no_ foothold, where the Southern music was at home, where Gothic and Baroque joined hands in Giovanni Bellini and the Renaissance remained an affair of occasional dilettantism, had an art of portraiture and therewith a subtle diplomacy and a will to political duration—Venice.

IV

The Renaissance was born of defiance, and therefore it lacked depth, width and sureness of creative instinct. It is the one and only epoch which was more consistent in theory than in performance and—in sharp contrast to Gothic and Baroque—the only one in which theoretically- formulated intention preceded (often enough surpassed) the ability to perform. But the fact that the individual arts were forced to become satellites of a Classicist sculpture could not in the last analysis alter the essence of them, and could only impoverish their store of inward possibilities. For natures of medium size, the Renaissance theme was not too big; it was attractive indeed from its very plainness, and we miss consequently that Gothic wrestling with overpowering imprecise problems which distinguishes the Rhenish and Flemish schools. The seductive ease and clarity of the Renaissance rests very largely upon evasion—the evasion of deeper reluctances by the aid of speciously simple rule. To men of the inwardness of Memlinc or the power of Grünewald such conditions as those of the Tuscan form-world would have been fatal. They could not have developed their strength in and through it, but only against it. Seeing as we do no weakness in the form of the Renaissance masters, we are very prone to overrate their humanity. In Gothic, and again in Baroque, an entirely great artist was fulfilling his art in deepening and completing its language, but in Renaissance he was necessarily only destroying it. “ So it was in the cases of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, the only really great men of Italy after Dante. Is it not curious that between the masters of the Gothic— who were nothing but silent workers in their art and yet achieved the very highest that could be achieved within its convention and its field— and the Venetians and Dutch of 1600—who again were purely workers—there should be these three men who were not “sculptors” or "painters” but _thinkers_, and thinkers who of necessity busied themselves not merely with all the available means of artistic expression but with a thousand other things besides, ever restless and dissatisfied, in their effort to get at the real essence and aim of their being? Does it not mean—that in the Renaissance they could not “find themselves”? Each in his own fashion, each under his own tragic illusion, these three giants strove to be “Classical” in the Medicean sense; and yet it was they themselves who in one and another way—Raphael in respect of the line, Leonardo in respect of the surface, Michelangelo in respect of the body—shattered the dream. In them the misguided soul is finding its way back to its Faustian starting-points. What they _intended_ was to substitute proportion for relation, drawing for light-and-air effect, Euclidean body for pure space. But neither they nor others of their time produced a Euclidean-static sculpture—for that was possible once only, in Athens. In all their work one feels a secret music, in all their forms the movement-quality and the tending into distances and depths. They are on the way, not to Phidias but to Palestrina, and they have come thither not from Roman ruins but from the still music of the cathedral. Raphael thawed the Florentine fresco, and Michelangelo the statue, and Leonardo dreamed already of Rembrandt and Bach. The higher and more conscientious the effort to actualize the ideas of the age, the more intangible it became.

Gothic and Baroque, however, are something that _is_, while Renaissance is only an ideal, unattainable like all ideals, that floats over the will of a period. Giotto _is_ a Gothic, and Titian _is_ a Baroque, artist. Michelangelo _would be_ a Renaissance artist, but fails. Visibly, the plastic in him, for all its ambitiousness, is overpowered by the pictorial spirit—and a pictorial spirit, too, in which the Northern space-perspective is implicit. Even as soon as 1520 the beautiful proportion, the pure rule—that is, the conscious Classical—are felt as frigid and formal. The cornice which he put on to Sangallo’s purely “Classical” façade of the Palazzo Farnese was no doubt, from the strictly Renaissance standpoint, a disfigurement, but he himself and many with him felt it to be far superior to the achievements of Greeks and Romans.

As Petrarch was the first, so Michelangelo was the last Florentine who gave himself up passionately to the Antique. But it was no longer an entire devotion. The Franciscan Christianity of Fra Angelico, with its subtle gentleness and its quiet, reflective piety—to which the Southern refinement of ripe Renaissance work owes far more than has been supposed[356]—came now to its end. The majestic spirit of the Counter- Reformation, massive, animated, gorgeous, lives already in Michelangelo. There is something in Renaissance work which at the time passed for being “Classical” but is really only a deliberately noble dress for the Christian-German world-feeling; as we have already mentioned, the combination of round-arch and pillar, that favourite Florentine motive, was of Syrian origin. But compare the pseudo-Corinthian column of the 15th Century with the columns of a real Roman ruin—remembering that these ruins were known and on the spot! Michelangelo alone would tolerate no half-and-half. Clarity he wanted and he would have. The question of form was for him a religious matter; for him (and only for him) it was all or nothing. And this is the explanation of the lonely fearful wrestlings of this man, surely the unhappiest figure in our art; of the fragmentary, the tortured, the unsatisfied, the _terribile_ in his forms that frightened his contemporaries. The one half of his nature drew him towards the Classical and therefore to sculpture—we all know the effect produced upon him by the recently-discovered Laocoön. No man ever made a more honest effort than he did to find a way with the chisel into a buried world. Everything that he created he meant sculpturally— sculpturally, that is, in a sense of the word that he and he alone stood for. “The world, presented in the great Pan,” the element which Goethe meant to render when he brought Helena into the Second Part of Faust, the Apollinian world in all its powerful sensuous corporal presence—that was what Michelangelo was striving with all his might to capture and to fix in artistic being when he was painting the Sistine ceiling. Every resource of fresco—the big contours, the vast surfaces, the immense nearness of naked shapes, the materiality of colour—was here for the last time strained to the utmost to liberate the paganism, the high- Renaissance paganism, that was in him. But his second soul, the soul of Gothic-Christian Dante and of the music of great expanses, is pulling in the opposite sense; his scheme for the ensemble is manifestly metaphysical in spirit.

His was the last effort, repeated again and again, to put the entirety of the artist-personality into the language of stone. But the Euclidean material failed him. His attitude to it was not that of the Greek. In the very character of its being the chiselled statue contradicts the world-feeling that tries to _find_ something by, and not to _possess_ something in, its art-works. For Phidias, marble is the cosmic stuff that is crying for form. The story of Pygmalion and Galatea expresses the very essence of that art. But for Michelangelo marble was the foe to be subdued, the prison out of which he must deliver his idea as Siegfried delivered Brunhilde. Everyone knows his way of setting to work. He did not approach the rough block coolly from every aspect of the intended form, but attacked it with a passionate frontal attack, hewing into it as though into space, cutting away the material layer by layer and driving deeper and deeper until his form emerged, while the members slowly developed themselves out of the quarry. Never perhaps has there been a more open expression of world-dread in the presence of the become—Death—of the will to overpower and capture it in vibrant form. There is no other artist of the West whose relation to the stone has been that of Michelangelo—at once so intimate and so violently masterful. It is his symbol of Death. In it dwells the hostile principle that his daemonic nature is always striving to overpower, whether he is cutting statues or piling great buildings out of it.[357] He is the one sculptor of his age who dealt _only_ with marble. Bronze, as cast, allows the modeller to compromise with pictorial tendencies, and it appealed therefore to other Renaissance artists and to the softer Greeks. The Giant stood aloof from it.

The instantaneous bodily _posture_ was what the Classical sculptor created, and of this Faustian man was incapable. It is here just as it is in the matter of love, in which Faustian man discovers, not primarily the act of union between man and woman, but the great love of Dante and beyond that the caring Mother. Michelangelo’s erotic—which is that of Beethoven also—is as un-Classical as it is possible to be. It stands _sub specie æternitatis_ and not under that of sense and the moment. He produced acts—a sacrifice to the Hellenic idol—but the soul in them denies or overmasters the visible form. He wills infinity as the Greek willed proportion and rule, he embraces past and future as the Greek embraced present. The Classical eye absorbs plastic form into itself, but Michelangelo saw with the spiritual eye and broke through the foreground-language of immediate sensuousness. And inevitably, in the long run, he destroyed the conditions for this art. Marble became too trivial for his will-to-form. He ceased to be sculptor and turned architect. In full old age, when he was producing only wild fragments like the Rondanini Madonna and hardly cutting his figures out of the rough at all, the _musical_ tendency of his artistry broke through. In the end the impulse towards contrapuntal form was no longer to be repressed and, dissatisfied through and through with the art upon which he had spent his life, yet dominated still by the unquenchable will to self-expression, he shattered the canon of Renaissance architecture and created the Roman Baroque. For relations of material and form he substituted the contest of force and mass. He grouped the columns in sheaves or else pushed them away into niches. He broke up the storeys with huge pilasters and gave the façade a sort of surging and thrusting quality. Measure yielded to melody, the static to the dynamic. And thus Faustian music enlisted in its service the chief of all the other arts.

With Michelangelo the history of Western sculpture is at an end. What of it there was after him was mere misunderstandings or reminiscences. His real heir was _Palestrina_.

Leonardo speaks another language. In essentials his spirit reached forward into the following century, and he was in nowise bound, as Michelangelo was bound by every tie of heart, to the Tuscan ideal. He alone had neither the ambition to be sculptor nor the ambition to be architect. It was a strange illusion of the Renaissance that the Hellenic feeling and the Hellenic cult of the exterior structure could be got at by way of anatomical studies. But when Leonardo studied anatomy it was not, as in Michelangelo’s case, foreground anatomy, the _topography_ of human surfaces, studied for the sake of plastic, but _physiology_ studied for the inward secrets. While Michelangelo tried to force the whole meaning of human existence into the language of the living body, Leonardo’s studies show the exact opposite. His much- admired _sfumato_ is the first sign of the repudiation of corporeal bounds, in the name of _space_, and as such it is the starting-point of Impressionism. Leonardo begins with the inside, the spiritual space within us, and not with the considered definition-line, and when he ends (that is, if he ends at all and does not leave the picture unfinished), the substance of colour lies like a mere breathing over the real structure of the picture, which is something incorporeal and indescribable. Raphael’s paintings fall into planes in which he disposes his well-ordered groups, and he closes off the whole with a well- proportioned background. But Leonardo knows only one space, wide and eternal, and his figures, as it were, float therein. The one puts inside a frame a sum of individual near things, the other a portion cut out of the infinite.

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

VIII

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

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

IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-----

Footnote 272:

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

Footnote 273:

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

Footnote 274:

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

Footnote 275:

This sentence is not in the original. It has been inserted, and the following sentence modified, for the sake of clarity.—_Tr._

Footnote 276:

See Vol. II, p. 110. The aspect of the streets of Old Egypt may have been very similar to this, if we can draw conclusions from tesseræ discovered in Cnossus (see H. Bossert, _Alt Kreta_ (1921), T. 14). And the Pylon is an undoubted and genuine façade. (Such tesseræ, bearing pictures of windowed houses, are illustrated in Art. “_Ægean Civilization_,” Ency. Brit., XI Edition, Vol. I, p. 251, plate IV, fig. 1.—_Tr._).

Footnote 277:

Ghiberti has not outgrown the Gothic, nor has even Donatello; and already in Michelangelo the feeling is Baroque, i.e., musical.

Footnote 278:

The struggle to fix the problem is visible in the series of “Apollo- figures.” See Déonna, _Les Apollons archaïques_ (1909).

Footnote 279:

Woermann, _Geschichte der Kunst, I_ (1915), p. 236. The first tendency is seen in the Samian Hera of Cheramues and the persistent turning of columns into caryatids; the second in the Delian figure dedicated to Artemis by Nicandra, with its relation to the oldest metope-technique.

Footnote 280:

Miletus was in a particular relation with Egypt through Naucratis.— _Tr._

Footnote 281:

Most of the works are pediment-groups or metopes. But even the Apollo- figures and the “Maidens” of the Acropolis could not have stood free.

Footnote 282:

V. Salis, _Kunst der Griechen_ (1919), pp. 47, 98 et seq.

Footnote 283:

The decisive preference of the _white_ stone is itself significant of the _opposition_ of Renaissance to Classical feeling.

Footnote 284:

All Greek scales are capable of reduction to “tetrachords” or four- note scales of which the form E—note—note—A is typical. In the diatonic the unspecified inner notes are F, G; in the chromatic they are F, F sharp; and in the enharmonic they are E half-sharp, F. Thus, the chromatic and enharmonic scales do not provide additional notes as the modern chromatic does, but simply displace the inner members of the scale downwards, altering the proportionate distances between the same given total. In Faustian music, on the contrary, the meaning of “enharmonic” is simply _relational_. It is applied to a change, say from A flat to G sharp. The difference between these two is not a quarter-tone but a “very small” interval (theory and practice do not even agree as to which note is the higher, and in tempered instruments with standardized scales the physical difference is eliminated altogether). While a note is being sounded, even without any physical change in it, its harmonic co-ordinates (i.e., substantially, the key of the harmony) may alter, so that henceforth the note, from A flat, has become G sharp.—_Tr._

Footnote 285:

In the same way the whole of Russian music appears to us infinitely mournful, but real Russians assure us that it is not at all so for themselves.

Footnote 286:

See articles under these headings in Grove’s “Dictionary of Music.”— _Tr._

Footnote 287:

See Vol. II, p. 238.

Footnote 288:

In Baroque music the word “imitation” means something quite different from this, viz., the exact repetition of a motive in a new colouring (starting from a different note of the scale).

Footnote 289:

For all that survives performance is the notes, and these speak only to one who still knows and can manage the tone and technique of the expression-means appropriate to them.

Footnote 290:

See articles _Fauxbourdon_, _Discant_ and _Gimel_ in Grove’s “Dictionary of Music.”—_Tr._

Footnote 291:

Note that Oresme was a contemporary of Machault and Philippe de Vitry, in whose generation the rules and prohibitions of strict counterpoint were definitively established.

Footnote 292:

See p. 19 and Vol. II, p. 357.

Footnote 293:

Even the first great troubadour, Guilhem of Poitiers, though a reigning sovereign, made it his ambition to be regarded as a “professional,” as we should say.—_Tr._

Footnote 294:

See also Vol. II, p. 365.

Footnote 295:

See p. 74.

Footnote 296:

A movement in sonata form consists essentially of (_a_) First Subject; (_b_) Second Subject (in an allied key); (_c_) Working-out, or free development of the themes grouped under (_a_) and (_b_); and (_d_) Recapitulation, in which the two subjects are repeated in the key of the tonic.

The English usage is to consider (_a_) and (_b_) with the bridge or modulation connecting them, together as the “Exposition,” and the form is consequently designated “three-part.”—_Tr._

Footnote 297:

Einstein, _Gesch. der Musik_, p. 67.

Footnote 298:

Coysevox lived 1640-1720. Much of the embellishment and statuary of Versailles is his work.—_Tr._

Footnote 299:

See Vol. II, pp. 357 et seq., 365 et seq.

Footnote 300:

It was not merely national-Italian (for that Italian Gothic was also): it was purely Florentine, and even within Florence the ideal of one class of society. That which is called Renaissance in the Trecento has its centre in Provence and particularly in the papal court at Avignon, and is nothing whatever but the southern type of chivalry, that which prevailed in Spain and Upper Italy and was so strongly influenced by the Moorish polite society of Spain and Sicily.

Footnote 301:

Renaissance ornament is merely embellishment and self-conscious "art"- inventiveness. It is only with the frank and outspoken Baroque that we return to the necessities of high symbolism.

Footnote 302:

Jacob Burckhardt, _Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien_. (An English translation was published in 1878.—_Tr._)

Footnote 303:

Inclusive of Paris itself. Even as late as the fifteenth century Flemish was as much spoken there as French, and the architectural appearance of the city in its oldest parts connects it with Bruges and Ghent and not with Troyes and Poitiers.

Footnote 304:

A. Schmarsow, _Gotik in der Renaissance_ (1921); B. Haendke, _Der niederl. Einfluss auf die Malerei Toskana-Umbriens_ (_Monatshefte für Kunstwissensch._ 1912).

Footnote 305:

The colossal statue of Bartolommeo Colleone at Venice.—_Tr._

Footnote 306:

Svoboda, _Römische und Romanische Paläste_ (1919); Rostowzew, _Pompeianische Landschaften und Römische Villen_ (_Röm. mitt._, 1904).

Footnote 307:

Environs of Rome. They date from the late 17th and the mid-18th centuries respectively; the gardens of the V. Ludovisi were laid out by Le Nôtre.—_Tr._

Footnote 308:

That is, the expression for the sum of a convergent series beyond any specified term.—_Tr._

Footnote 309:

See Vol. II, pp. 117 et seq.

Footnote 310:

In Classical painting, light and shadow were first consistently employed by Zeuxis, but _only for the shading of the thing itself_, for the purpose of freeing the modelling of the body painted from the restriction of the relief-manner, i.e., without any reference to the relation of shadows to the _time of day_. But even with the earliest of the Netherlanders light and shade are already _colour-tones_ and affected by atmosphere.

Footnote 311:

The brilliant _polish_ of the stone in Egyptian art has a deep symbolic significance of much the same kind. Its effect is to dematerialize the statue by causing the eye to glide along its exterior. Hellas on the contrary manifests, by its progress from “Poros” stone, through Naxian, to the translucent Parian and Pentelic marbles, how determined it is that the look shall sink right into the material essence of the body.

Footnote 312:

See Vol. II, pp. 314 et seq.

Footnote 313:

The life and teaching of St. Francis were, morally and æsthetically alike, the centres of inspiration for Cimabue, Giotto and the Italian Gothic generally.—_Tr._

Footnote 314:

Der nordische im Grenzenlose schweifende Pantheismus.

Footnote 315:

On the following page is a translation of this chorus.—_Tr._

_Raphael._ The Sun outsings the brother-spheres in olden rivalry of song, and thunder-girt pursues the years the preordainèd path along. ’Tis from his face the angels gain their strength; but scan it no one may. Thought is outranged and Works remain sublime as on Creation-Day. _Gabriel._ And, swift beyond description, flies the circling scene of land and sea, in alternance of Paradise with dark and awful Mystery. The ocean swings, the billows sway, back from the cliff the waves are hurled. But cliff and waves alike obey the mightier movement of the World. _Michael._ And storms arise and swell and ebb o’er sea and mountain, lake and field, in wild contention weave a web of forces purposed though concealed. The lightning is thy flaming sword, the thunder veils thee on thy way, yet ever spare thy envoys, Lord, the gentle changing of thy day. _The Three._ ’Tis from thy face the angels gain their strength, but scan it no one may. Beyond all thought thy Works remain sublime as on Creation-Day.

Footnote 316:

His portrait of Frau Gedon, all steeped in brown, is the last _Old- Master portrait_ of the West; it is painted entirely in the style of the past.

Footnote 317:

The strings in the Orchestra represent, as a class, the colours of the distance. The bluish green of Watteau is found already in the Neapolitan _bel canto_ of about 1700, in Couperin, in Mozart and Haydn; and the brown of the Dutch in Corelli, Handel and Beethoven. The woodwind, too, calls up illumined distances. Yellow and red, on the other hand, the colours of nearness, the _popular_ colours, are associated with the brass timbre, the effect of which is corporeal often to the point of vulgarity. The tone of an old fiddle is entirely bodiless. It is worth remarking that the Greek music, insignificent as it is, underwent an evolution from the Dorian lyre to the Ionian flute (aulos and syrinx) and that even in the time of Pericles strict Dorians blamed this as an enervating and lowering tendency.

(The horn is an exception, and is always treated as an exception, to the brass generally. Its place is with the woodwind, and its colours are those of the distance.—_Tr._)

Footnote 318:

The use of gold in this way, viz., to add brilliancy to bodies standing freely in the open, has nothing in common with its employment in Magian art to provide glittering backgrounds for figures seen in dim interiors.

Footnote 319:

The Chinese also attach enormous importance to the patinas of their old bronzes, which, owing to the different alloys used and the strong chemical characters of the soil, are of infinite variety and natural intricacy. They too, in later phases, have come to the production of artificial patina.—_Tr._

Footnote 320:

Pausanias, it should be observed, was neither by date nor by origin a Greek.—_Tr._

Footnote 321:

“In places, as you stand on it, the great towered and embattled enceinte produces an illusion: it looks as if it were still equipped and defended. One vivid challenge at any rate it flings down before you; it compels you to make up your mind on the matter of restoration. For myself, I have no hesitation; I prefer in every case the ruined, however ruined, to the reconstructed however splendid.... After that, I am free to say that the restoration of Carcassonne is a splendid achievement.” (Henry James, “A Little Tour in France,” xxiii.) Yet if ever there was a reconstruction carried out with piety and scholarship as well as skill, it was Viollet-le-Duc’s reconstruction of these old town-walls.—_Tr._

Footnote 322:

Home, an English philosopher of the 18th Century, declared in a lecture on English parks that Gothic ruins represented the triumph of _time over power_, Classical ruins that of barbarism over taste. It was that age that first discovered the beauty of the ruin-studded Rhine, which was thenceforward the _historic_ river of the Germans.

Footnote 323:

English readers will very likely think of the case of Shaw’s “Back to Methuselah,” with its extreme contrast of the cheaply-satirical present-day scene and the noble and tragic scenes of far past and far future.—_Tr._

Footnote 324:

One need only contrast the Greek artist with Rubens and Rabelais.

Footnote 325:

Of whom one of his mistresses remarked that he “smelt like a carcass” (qu’il puait comme une charogne). Note also how the musician generally has a reputation for uncleanliness.

Footnote 326:

From the solemn canon of Polycletus to the elegance of Lysippus the same process of lightening is going on in the body-build as that which brought the column from the Doric to the Corinthian order. The Euclidean feeling was beginning to relax.

Footnote 327:

See p. 19.—_Tr._

Footnote 328:

In other countries, e.g., old Egypt and Japan (to anticipate a

## particularly foolish and shallow assertion), the sight of naked men

was a far more ordinary and commonplace thing than it was in Athens, but the Japanese art-lover feels emphasized nudity as ridiculous and vulgar. The act is depicted (as for that matter it is in the “Adam and Eve” of Bamberg Cathedral), but merely as an object without any significance of potential whatsoever.

Footnote 329:

Kluge, _Deutsche Sprachgesch._ (1920), pp. 202 et seq.

Footnote 330:

A. Conze, _Die Attischen Grabreliefs_ (1893 etc.).

Footnote 331:

Louvre. Replicas of the pair in the Vict. and Alb. Museum, London.— _Tr._

Footnote 332:

Olympia—the only unquestioned original that we have from the “great age.” References would be superfluous, for few, if any, Classical works are better or more widely known.—_Tr._

Footnote 333:

Of the several copies that have survived, all imperfectly preserved, that in the Palazzo Massimi is accounted the best. The restoration which, once seen, convinces, is Professor Furtwängler’s (shown in Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article _Greek Art_, fig. 68).—_Tr._

Footnote 334:

A cast of this is in the British Museum (illustrated in the Museum Guide to Egypt. Antiq., pl. XXI).—_Tr._

Footnote 335:

In the Bargello, Florence. Replica in Vict. and Alb. Museum, London.— _Tr._

Footnote 336:

The “Apollo with the lyre” at Munich was admired by Winckelmann and his time as a Muse. Till quite recently a head of Athene (a copy of Praxiteles) at Bologna passed as that of a general. Such errors would be entirely impossible in dealing with a physiognomic art, e.g., Baroque.

Footnote 337:

In his portrait of Frau Gedon, already alluded to, p. 252.

Footnote 338:

See p. 136 and also Vol. II, p. 354.

Footnote 339:

The so-called “Three Fates” in the British Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 340:

The Orphic springtime _contemplates_ the Gods and does not _see_ them. See Vol. II, p. 345.

Footnote 341:

There was indeed a beginning of this in the aristocratic epic of Homer—so nearly akin to the courtly narrative art of Boccaccio. But throughout the Classical age strictly religious people felt it as a profanation; the worship that shines through the Homeric poems is quite without idolatry, and a further proof is the anger of thinkers who, like Heraclitus and Plato, were in close touch with the temple tradition. It will occur to the student that the unrestricted handling of even the highest divinities in this very late art is not unlike the theatrical Catholicism of Rossini and Liszt, which is already foreshadowed in Corelli and Händel and had, earlier even, almost led to the condemnation of Church music in 1564.

(The event alluded to in the last line is the dispute in and after the Council of Trent as to the nature and conduct of Church music. If Wagner’s suggestion that Pope Marcellus II tried to exclude it altogether is exaggerated, it is certain at least that the complaints were deep and powerful, and that the Council found it necessary to forbid “unworthy music in the house of God” and to bring the subject under the disciplinary control of the Bishops.—_Tr._)

Footnote 342:

Harmodius and Aristogiton. At Naples. Illustrated in Ency. Brit. XI ed., article _Greek Art_, fig. 50. Cast in British Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 343:

The famous statue now in the Lateran Museum, Rome.—_Tr._

Footnote 344:

See foot-note, p. 130. An antique copy is in the British Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 345:

In the Vatican Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 346:

Even the landscape of the Baroque develops from composed backgrounds to portraits of definite localities, representations of the soul of these localities which are thus endowed with _faces_.

Footnote 347:

It could be said of Hellenistic portrait art that it followed exactly the opposite course.

Footnote 348:

British Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 349:

Pinakothek, Munich.—_Tr._

Footnote 350:

Art Gallery, Vienna.—_Tr._

Footnote 351:

Nothing more clearly displays the decadence of Western art since the middle of the 19th century than its absurd rendering of acts by masses; the deeper meaning of act-study and the importance of the motive have been entirely forgotten.

Footnote 352:

By that test Rubens, and, among moderns, especially Feuerbach and Böcklin, lose, while Goya, Daumier, and, in Germany, Oldach, Wasmann, Rayski and many another almost forgotten artist of the earlier 19th Century, gain. And Marées passes to the rank of the very greatest.

Footnote 353:

Tombs of the Scaligers, Verona.—_Tr._

Footnote 354:

National Gallery, London.—_Tr._

Footnote 355:

Museo Nazionale, Florence.—_Tr._

Footnote 356:

It is the same “noble simplicity and quiet greatness”—to speak in the language of the German Classicists—that produces such an impression of the antique in the Romanesque of Hildesheim, Gernrode, Paulinzella and Hersfeld. The ruined cloisters of Paulinzella, in fact, have much of what Brunellesco so many centuries later strove to obtain in his palace-courts. But the basic feeling that underlies these creations is not something which we got from the Classical, but something that we projected on to our own notion of Classical being. And our own notion of peace is one of an _infinite_ peace. We feel the “Rest in God” to be an _expanse_ of quietude. All Florentine work, in so far as sureness does not turn into the Gothic challenge of Verrocchio, is characterized by this feeling, with which Attic σωφροσύνη has nothing whatever in common.

Footnote 357:

It has never been sufficiently noticed that the few sculptors who came after Michelangelo had no more than a mere workaday relation with marble. But we see at once that it is so when we think of the deeply intimate relation of great musicians to their favourite instruments. The story of Tartini’s violin, which shattered itself to pieces on the death of the master—and there are a hundred such stories—is the Faustian counterpart of the Pygmalion legend. Consider, too, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Johannes Kreisler the Kapellmeister”; he is a figure worthy to stand by the side of Faust, Werther and Don Juan. To see his symbolic significance and the inward necessity of him, we have only to compare him with the theatrical painter-characters in the works of contemporary Romanticists, who are not in any relation whatever with the idea of Painting. As the fate of 19th-Century art-romances shows—a painter _cannot_ be made to stand for the destiny of Faustian art.

(E. T. A. Hoffmann, the strange many-sided genius who was at once musician, caricaturist, novelist, critic, wit, able public official and winebibber, at one time in his career wrote in the character of “Johannes Kreisler.” See his _Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier_ and _Der Kater Murr_, also Thomas Carlyle’s “Miscellanies” and the biographical sketches of Hoffmann in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and the Ency. Brit.—_Tr._)

Footnote 358:

Although gunpowder is much older than the Baroque, its application in real earnest to long-ranging fire-arms was only accomplished during the 16th Century. It cannot be said that there was any _technical_ reason why 100 years should have elapsed between the first use of powder in European warfare and the first effective soldier’s fire-arm. No careful student of this period of military history can fail to be struck with this fact—the significance of which, not being technical, must be cultural. Much the same could be said of printing, which, so far as concerns technical factors, might just as well have been invented in the 10th as in the 15th Century.—_Tr._

Footnote 359:

Uffizi, Florence.—_Tr._

Footnote 360:

Sistine Chapel, Rome.—_Tr._

Footnote 361:

“Doctor Marianus.”—_Tr._

Footnote 362:

Vatican.—_Tr._

Footnote 363:

In Renaissance work the finished product is often quite depressingly complete. The absence of “infinity” is palpable. No secrets, no discoveries.

Footnote 364:

Hence the impossibility of achieving a genuinely religious painting on plein-air principles. The world-feeling that underlies it is so thoroughly irreligious, so worthless for any but a “religion of reason” so-called, that every one of its efforts in that direction, even with the noblest intentions (Uhde, Puvis de Chavannes), strikes us as hollow and false. One instant of plein-air treatment suffices to secularize the interior of a church and degrade it into a showroom.

Footnote 365:

State Museum, Berlin.—_Tr._

Footnote 366:

I.e., the “giants” of the great frieze, who were in fact Galatians playing the part. This Gigantomachia, a programme-work like the Ring, represented a situation, as the Ring represented characters, under mythological labels.—_Tr._

Footnote 367:

See Vol. II, pp. 138 et seq.

Footnote 368:

See pp. 197 et seq.

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## CHAPTER IX SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

I ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL

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