Here
under follows the transcription of chapter 9B7 of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's
The
Foundations of the 19th Century, 2nd ed., published by John Lane, The
Bodley Head, 1912.
CONTENTS
|
495
7. ART (From
Giotto to Goethe).
THE
IDEA
“ART“
It is no easy matter in these days to speak about art; for, despite the
example of all the best German authors, an absolutely senseless limitation
of the notion “art“ has become naturalised among us, and, on the other
hand, the systematising philosophy of history has cruelly paralysed our
faculty of looking at historical facts with open, truth-seeking eyes, and
of passing a sound judgment upon them. I sincerely regret the necessity
of mixing up polemical controversy with this final section, where I would
fain be soaring in the highest regions, but there is
496 ART
no way out of it; for in art the most
senseless errors are as firmly rooted as in religion, and we cannot rightly
estimate either the development of art of the year 1800 or its importance
in the nineteenth century till we have cleared away all misconceptions
and corrected the distorted misrepresentations of history. At any rate,
if I must pull down, I shall try at once to build up again, and so shall
employ the exposition of traditional errors as a means of revealing the
true position.
In these days a General
History of Art embraces only plastic technique, from architecture to
casting in pewter; in a work of this description Michael Angelo‘s Last
Judgment, or a portrait of Rembrandt by himself, will be found side
by side with the lid of a beer-mug or the back of an arm-chair. Two arts,
however, are absolutely unrepresented, not a word is said about them, they
are, it would seem, not “art“; I refer to those two which, as Kant said,
occupy the “highest place“ among all arts, and about which Lessing made
the extremely happy remark: “Nature meant them not so much to be united
as to be one and the same art.“ * These arts are Poetry and Music. The
view which our art-historians hold of “art“ might well provoke our indignation;
it annihilates the life-work of Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, who
took such pains to prove the organic unity of the whole creative work of
man, and the primacy of the poet among his fellows. From the Laocoon
to the Aesthetic Education and to Goethe‘s thoughts on the part
played by art “as nature‘s worthiest interpreter,“ † through all the thought
of the German Classics we can trace this red thread — the great endeavour
clearly and definitely to determine the essence of art, as a peculiar,
human capacity; when once this is settled, the dignity of art, as one of
the highest and holiest instruments for the trans-
* Zum
Loakoon ix.
† Goethe:
Maximen
und Reflexionen, Div. 3.
497 ART
figuration of all human life and thought,
is also established. And now come our experts who go back to Lucian‘s view;
* art is for them a technique, a trade, and since the work of the hands
in poetry and music signifies nothing, these are not included in art. “Art“
is exclusively plastic art, but, to make up for this, it includes every
possible plastic activity, every manuum factura, every handicraft!
The term is, therefore, not only inconsistently limited by them, but also
senselessly widened to be a synonym for technique. That means the loss
of one essential thing in art — the idea of the creative element. † Let
us look with a critical eye first at the preposterous extension, and then
at the senseless limitation.
The shortest and
at the same time the most exhaustive definition of art is that of Kant:
“Beautiful art is the art of genius.“ ‡ A history of art would, therefore,
be
a history of creative genius, and everything else, such as the development
of technique, the influence exercised by the workers in the industrial
arts, the changes of fashion, &c., would come in merely as an explanatory
supplement. To make technique the chief thing is ridiculous. It is no excuse
to urge that the greatest masters were at the same time the greatest inventors
and exponents of the technical art; that all depends upon the reason why
they were inventors in technique, and the answer is: because originality
is the first quality of the creative mind, in virtue of which the original
genius must invent new means of expressing what he has to say, new instruments
for his own peculiar and personal creations.
Heaven forbid that
I should enter the stony, thorny and sterile sphere of aesthetics! I have
nothing to do with aesthetics, but only with art itself. § I cling
firmly to what
* See
vol. i. p. 302. Cf.
Schiller‘s Letter to Meyer of 5. 2. 1795.
† Cf.
the remarks on Technique in contrast to Art and Science, vol i. p.
138.
‡ Kritik
der Urteilskraft, § 46.
§
“By every theory of art we close the path to true enjoyment: for no more
baneful nullity has ever been invented.“ — GOETHE.
498 ART
the Hellenes thoroughly realised and
the German classics always emphasised: that poetry is the root of every
art. Now if I take the view of art just given, and add to it that of the
“historians of art,“ I get so wide and indefinite a term that it embraces
my beer-jug and Homer‘s Iliad, and every journeyman with his graver
is put on the same level as Leonardo da Vinci. And so Kant‘s “art of genius“
vanishes into thin air. But the importance of creative art, as I, following
Schiller, have sketched it in the introduction to the first chapter of
this book, and in the course of the same chapter have exemplified it in
the Hellenes (vol. i. p.
14), is too significant a fact in our history of culture to be sacrificed
in this way. In the triad philosophy, religion, art — which three make
up culture — we could least of all dispense with art. For Teutonic philosophy
is transcendent, and Teutonic religion ideal; both, therefore, remain unexpressed,
incommunicable, invisible to most eyes, unconvincing to most hearts, unless
art with her freely creative moulding power — i.e., the art of genius
— should intervene as mediator. For this reason the Christian Church —
as formerly the Hellenic faith in Gods — has always sought the help of
art, and for that reason Immanuel Kant expresses the opinion that it is
only with the help of a “divine art“ that man is able to overcome mechanical
constraint by conscious inner freedom. Since we realise that mechanical
constraint exists, our philosophy of life (purely as philosophy) must be
negative; our art, on the contrary, arises from our inward experience of
freedom, and is, therefore, wholly and essentially positive.
This great and clear
idea of art we must preserve as a sacred, living possession; and if any
one speaks of “art“ — not of artistic handiwork, artistic technique, artistic
cabinet-making, &c. — he must use that sacred term solely of the art
of genius.
Genuine art alone
forms the sphere in which those two worlds, which we have just learned
to distinguish (p. 483)
499 ART
— the mechanical and the unmechanical
— meet in such a way that a new, third world arises. Art is this third
world. Here freedom, which otherwise remains only an idea, an eternally
invisible inner experience, reveals direct activity in the world of phenomena.
The law here prevailing is not the mechanical law; rather is it in every
respect analogous to that “Autonomy“ which stirred Kant to such admiration
in the moral sphere (p. 489).
And what religious instinct only vaguely divines and figures forth in all
kinds of mythological dreams (vol. i. p.
416), enters by art, so to speak, “into the daylight of life“; for
when art, of free inner necessity (genius), transforms the given, unfree,
mechanical necessity (the world of phenomena), it reveals a connection
between the two worlds which purely scientific observation would never
have brought to light. The artist enters into an alliance with the investigator
of nature; for while he freely shapes, he also “interprets“ nature, that
is, he looks deeper into the heart of things than the measuring and weighing
observer. With the philosopher too he joins hands; the logical skeleton
receives from him a blooming body and learns the reason of its being in
the world; as proof I need only refer to Goethe and Schiller, who both
attain the loftiest heights of their powers and their significance for
the Teutonic race after they have been associated with Kant, but thereby
show the world in quite a different manner from Schelling and his fellows
what incalculable importance is to be attached to the thought of the great
Königsberg Professor. *
* Since
Goethe has undoubtedly here and there been influenced by Schelling and
this has often led to absolutely false judgments, the fact must be emphasised
that he placed Kant far above any of his successors. At the time when Fichte
and Schelling were at the zenith of their influence, and Hegel was beginning
to write, Goethe expressed the opinion: “Speculation on the Superhuman,
in spite of all Kant‘s warnings, is a vain toil.“ When Schelling‘s life-work
was already known to the world (in 1817), Goethe said to Victor Cousin
that he had begun to read Kant again and was delighted with the unexampled
500
ART
ART
AND RELIGION
The relation between art and religion has still to be mentioned. This relation
is so manifold and intimate that it is a hard matter to analyse it critically.
In the present connection the following should be noted. As I have shown
in many passages in this book, among all the Indo-Teutonic peoples religion
is always “creative“ in the artistic sense of the word, and therefore related
to art. Our religion never was history, never exposition of chronicles,
but always inner experience and the interpretation, by free, reproductive
activity, of this experience as well as of surrounding nature, which means
the nature of experience; our whole art, on the other hand, owes its origin
to religious myths. But as we are no longer able to follow the simple impulse
of creative myth-production, our myths must be the outcome of the highest
and deepest reflection. The material is at hand. The true source of all
religion to-day is not an indefinite feeling, not interpretation of nature,
but the actual experience of definite human beings; * with Buddha and with
Christ religion has become realistic — a fact which is consistently overlooked
by the philosophers of religion, and of which mankind as a whole has not
yet become conscious. But what these men experienced and what we experience
through them is not something mechanically “real,“ but something much more
real than that, an experience of our inmost being. And it is only now,
in the light of our new
clearness
of his thought; he added also: “Le système de Kant n‘est pas
détruit.“ Six years later Goethe complained to Chancellor von
Müller that Schelling‘s “ambiguous expressions“ had put back rational
theology fifty years. The personality of Schelling, certain qualities of
his style, and certain tendencies of his thought, often fascinated Goethe;
but so great a mind could never commit the error of regarding Kant and
Schelling as commensurable magnitudes. (For the above quotations see
the Gespräche, ed. by Biedermann, i. 209, iii 290, iv. 227).
* See the whole of chap. iii., especially p.
182 f.
501 ART
philosophy, that
this inner meaning has become quite clear; it is only now — when the faultless
mechanism of all phenomena is irrefutably proved — that we are able to
purge religion of the last trace of materialism. But hereby art becomes
more and more indispensable. For we cannot express in words what a figure
like Jesus Christ signifies, what it reveals; it is something in the inmost
recesses of our souls, something apart from time and space — something
which cannot be exhaustively or even adequately expressed by any logical
chain of thought; with Christ it is a question solely of that “nature which
is subordinate to a will“ (as Kant said, p.
484), not of that which makes the will subordinate to itself; that
is, it is a question of that nature in which the artist is at home, and
from which he alone is able to build a bridge over into the world of phenomena.
The art of genius forces the Visible to serve the Invisible. * Now in Jesus
Christ it is the corporeal revelation, to which His whole earthly life
belongs, that is the Visible, and, in so far, to a certain extent, only
an allegorical representation of the invisible being; but this allegory
is indispensable, for it was the revealed personality — not a dogma, not
a system, certainly not the thought that here the Word invested with a
distinct personality went about in flesh and blood — that made the unparalleled
impression and completely transformed the inner being of men; with death
the personality — that is, the only effectual thing — disappeared. What
remains is fragment and outline. In order that the example may retain its
miraculous power, that the Christian religion may not lose its character
as actual, real experience, the figure of Jesus Christ must ever be born
anew; otherwise there remains only a vain tissue of dogmas, and the personality
— whose extra-
* This is not aesthetic theory, but the experience of creative artists.
Thus Eugène Fromentin says in his exquisite and thoroughly scientific
book Les Maîtres d‘autrefois (éd. 7, p. 2):
„L‘art
de peindre est l‘art d‘exprimer l‘invisible par le visible.“
502 ART
ordinary influence
was the sole source of this religion — becomes crystallised to an abstraction.
As soon as the eye ceases to see, and the ear to hear, the personality
of Christ fades further and further away, and in place of living and —
as I said before — realistic religion, there remains either stupid idolatry,
or an Aristotelian structure of reason made up of pure abstractions. We
saw this in the case of Dante, in whose creed the one sure foundation of
religion possible to us Teutons — experience — is altogether absent and
the name of Christ consequently not once mentioned (cf. pp. 106,
425).
Only one human power is capable of rescuing religion from the double danger
of idolatry and philosophic Deism; * that power is art. For it is art alone
that can give new birth to the original form, i.e., the original
experience. In Leonardo da Vinci, who is perhaps the greatest creative
genius that ever lived, we have a striking example of the way in which
art steers safely between these two cliffs; his hatred of all dogma, his
contempt of all idolatry, his power to give shape to the true subject-matter
of Christianity, namely, the figure of Christ Himself, have been emphasised
by me in the first chapter (vol. i. p.
82); they signify the dawn of a new day. And we might prove the same
of every artistic genius from him to Beethoven.
This point I may require to explain more fully, to make the relation between
art and religion perfectly clear.
I said on p. 291 that a mechanical
interpretation of the world is consistent only with an ideal religion;
I think I have proved this irrefutably in the previous
* These two tendencies become more concrete to us when we think of them
as Jesuitism and Pietism (the correlative of Deism). For each of these
finds in an apparent contrast a complementary form, into which it is liable
to merge. The correlative of Jesuitism is Materialism; as Paul de Lagarde
has rightly remarked: “The water in these communicating pipes is always
at the same height“ (Deutsche Schriften, ed. 1891, p. 49); all Jesuitical
natural science is just as strictly dogmatic and materialistic as that
of any Holbach or De Lamettrie; the correlative of abstract Deism is Pietism
with its faith in the letter.
503 ART
section. Now what
is the distinguishing-mark of an ideal religion? Its absolute existence
in the present. We recognised this clearly in the case of the Mystics;
they put time aside like a cast-off garment; they wish to dwell neither
upon creation — in which the materialistic religions find the guarantee
of God's power — nor upon future reward and punishment; rather is the present
time to them “like eternity“ (p.
421). The scientific philosophy which has been built up by the intellectual
work of the last centuries has given clear and comprehensible expression
to this feeling. Teutonic philosophy has from the first “turned on two
hinges“: (1) The ideality of space and time; (2) the reality of the idea
of freedom. * That is at the same time — if I may so express myself — the
formula of art. For in the creations of art the freedom of the will proves
itself real, and time — as compared with the inner, unmechanical world
— a mere, inconstant idea. Art is the everlasting Present. And it is that
in two respects. In the first place it holds time in its spell: what Homer
creates is as young to-day as it was three thousand years ago; he who stands
before the tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici feels himself in the presence of
Michael Angelo; the art of genius does not grow old. Moreover, art is the
Present in the sense that only that which is absolutely without duration
is present. Time is divisible, infinitely so, a flash of lightning is only
relatively shorter than a life of a hundred years, the latter only relatively
longer than the former; whereas the Present in the sense of something which
has no duration is shorter than the shortest thinkable time and longer
than all conceivable eternity; this applies to art; the works of art have
an absolutely
* Cf. Kant: Fortschritte der Metaphysik, Supplement. As we
see, the Real which is derived from the testimony of sense is interpreted
as an idea, whereas the Idea which is given by inner experience is interpreted
as real. It is exactly like the Copernican theory of motion: what was supposed
to be moving, rests, and what was supposed to rest, moves.
504 ART
momentary effect,
and at the same time awaken the feeling of everlastingness. Goethe somewhere
distinguishes true art from dream and shadow by saying that art is “a living,
momentary revelation of the inscrutable.“ Even this much-abused word “revelation“
receives in the light of Teutonic philosophy a perfectly clear sense devoid
of all extravagance; it means the opening of the gate which separates us
(as mechanical phenomena) from the timeless world of freedom. Art keeps
watch over the gate. A work of art — let us say Michael Angelo's Night
— shows the gate wide open; we step from the surroundings of the temporal
into the presence of the Timeless. As this artist himself says triumphantly,
“Dall' arte è vinta la nartua!“ (Nature is conquered by art);
that is to say, the Visible is forced to give shape to the Invisible —
the Inevitable is forced to serve freedom; the stone now presents a living
revelation of the Inscrutable.
What powerful support a religion resting on direct experience derives from
such a power must be plain to all. Art is capable of always bringing to
new life the former experience; it can reveal in the personality the super-personal
element, in the ephemeral phenomenon the unephemeral; a Leonardo gives
us the figure and a Bach the voice of Jesus Christ, now for ever present.
Moreover, art elsewhere reveals that religion which had found in the One
its inimitable, convincing existence, and we are deeply moved when, in
a portrait of Dürer or Rembrandt by their own hand, we look into eyes
which introduce us to that same world in which Jesus Christ “lived and
moved and had his being,“ the threshold of which can be crossed neither
by words nor thoughts. Something of this is in all sublime art, for it
is this that makes it sublime. Not only the countenance of man, but everything
that the eye of man sees, that the thought of man grasps and has moulded
anew according to the law of inner, unmechanical freedom, opens that gate
of “momentary revelation“;
505 ART
for every work
of art brings us face to face with the creative artist, that is, with the
rule of that at once transcendent and real world from which Christ speaks
when he says that the Kingdom of God lies in this life like a treasure
buried in the soil. Look at one of the numerous representations of Christ
by Rembrandt, e.g., The
Hundred Gulden etching, and hold beside it his Landscape
with Three Trees; my meaning will become clear. And the reader
will agree with me when I say, Art is not indeed Religion — for ideal Religion
is an actual process in the inmost heart of every individual, the process
of conversion and regeneration, of which Christ spoke — but Art transports
us into the atmosphere of religion, explains all nature to us, and by its
sublime revelations stirs our inmost being so deeply and directly that
many men only get to know what religion is by Art. That the converse is
also true is manifest without further words, and we can understand how
Goethe — who cannot be reproached with piety in the ecclesiastical sense
— could assert that only religious men possessed creative power. *
So much to define what we are to understand by, and reverence in, the term
“art“ and to prevent a weakening of the idea by uncritical extension. The
theoretical definition of art I have thought fit to supplement by reference
to the importance of the art of genius in the work of culture generally,
by which the significance of art is concretely presented to the mind. We
see how far polemics may lead us in a short time! I therefore turn now
to the second point: the senseless limitation which our art-historians
affect in the use of the term “art.“
* Cf. The Conversation with Riemer on March 26, 1814.
506
ART
POETRY
WEDDED TO MUSIC
No history of art of the present day makes any mention of poetry or music;
the former now belongs to literature — the art of writing letters — the
latter stands in a category by itself, neither fish nor flesh, its technique
being too abstruse and difficult to awaken interest or be understood outside
the narrow circle of professional musicians, and its influence too physical
and general not to be regarded somewhat contemptuously by the learned as
the art of the misera plebs and the superficial dilettanti.
And yet we have but to open our eyes and look around us to see that poetry
not only occupies in itself, as the philosophers assert, the “highest place“
among all arts, but is the direct source of almost all creative activity
and the creative focus even of those works of art which do not directly
depend upon it. Moreover, every historical and every critical investigation
will convince us, as they did Lessing, that poetry and music are not two
arts, but rather “one and the same art.“ It is the poet wedded to music
that ever awakens us to art; it is he who opens our eyes and ears; in him,
more than in any other creator, reigns that commanding freedom which subordinates
nature to its will, and, as the freest of all artists he is unquestionably
the foremost. All plastic art might be destroyed and yet poetry — the poet
wedded to music — would remain untouched; the empire of music would not
be an inch narrower, only here and there devoid of form. It is indeed an
inexact expression when we say that poetry is the “first“ among the arts:
rather is it the only art. Poetry is the all-embracing art which gives
all other arts life, so that where the latter emancipate themselves, they
needs must carry on an ars poetica on their own account — with as
much success as may be. Only think: is the plastic art of the Hellenes
conceivable without their poetical
507 ART
art? Did not Homer
guide the chisel of Phidias? Had not the Hellenic poet to create the forms
before the Hellenic artist could re-create them? Are we to believe that
the Greek architect would have erected inimitably perfect temples had not
the poet conjured up before his mind such glorious divine forms that he
felt compelled to devote to the work of invention every fibre of his being,
so as not to fall too far short of that which hovered before his own imagination
and that of his contemporaries as divine and worthy of the Gods? It is
the same with ourselves. Our plastic art depends partly on Hellenic, partly
and to a large extent upon Christian religious poetry. Before the sculptor
can grasp them, the forms must exist in the imagination; the God must be
believed in, before temples are built to him. Here we see religion — as
Goethe bade us to see — the source of all productiveness. But historical
religion must have attained poetical shape before we can represent and
understand it in plastic form: the Gospel, the legend, the poem is the
forerunner and forms the indispensable commentary to every Last Supper,
every Crucifixion, every Inferno. The Teutonic artist, however,
in accordance with his true, analytic nature, as soon as he had mastered
the technique of his craft, went much deeper; he shared with the Indian
the leaning towards nature; hence the two-fold inclination which strikes
us so much in Albrecht Dürer: outwards, to painfully exact observation
and lovingly conscientious reproduction of every blade of grass, every
beetle — inwards, into the inscrutable inner nature, by means of the human
image and profound allegories. Here the most genuine religion is at work
and for that reason — as I have already proved — the most genuine art.
Here we see exactly reflected the mental tendency towards Nature of the
Mystics, the tendency towards the dignity of man of the Humanists, the
tendency towards the inadequacy of the world of phenomena of the naturalist-philosopher.
508 ART
Every one of them
in fact contributes his stone to the building of the new world, and since
the uniform spirit of a definite human race predominates, all the different
parts fit exactly into each other. I am therefore far from denying that
our plastic art has emancipated itself much more from poetry (i.e.,
word-poetry) than it did among the Hellenes; I believe indeed that we can
trace a gradual development in this direction from the thirteenth century
to the present day. Yet we must admit that this art cannot be understood
unless we take into account the general development of culture, and if
we do this we shall at once see that all-powerful, free poetry everywhere
preceded, took the lead and smoothed the way for her manifoldly restricted
sisters. A Francis of Assisi had to press nature to his burning heart and
a Gottfried von Strassburg inspiredly to describe it, before men's eyes
were opened and the brush could attempt to delineate it; a great poetical
work had been completed in every district of Europe — from Florence to
London — before the painter recognised the dignity of the human countenance,
and personality began to take the place of pattern in his works. Before
a Rembrandt could reveal his greatness, a Shakespeare had to live. In the
case of allegory the relation of the plastic arts to poetry is so striking
that no one can be blind to it. Here the artist himself wishes to invent
poetically. In the Introduction (p.
lx) I quoted words of Michael Angelo, in which he puts the stone and
unwritten page on the same footing, and says that into neither of them
does anything come but what he wills. He therefore creates poetically as
with the pen, so with the chisel and the brush.
-
The kindled marble's
bust may wear
-
More poesy upon its
speaking brow
-
Than aught less than
the Homeric page may bear!
-
BYRON
(“Prophecy of Dante“).
Michael Angelo's
Creation
of Light is his own
509 ART
invention, but
we should not understand it did it not rest upon a well-known myth. And
his figures Day and Night, with Lorenzo de' Medici above them, what are
they if not poetical creations? Surely they are not merely two naked figures
and a draped one. What then has been added? Something which, by the power
which it has of stirring the feelings, is just as closely related to music
as it is to poetry by its awakening of thoughts. It is an heroic attempt
to create poetically, by means of the mere world of phenomena, without
the help of an existing poetical fable, and that necessarily means by way
of allegory. The great work of Michael Angelo can, in fact, only be understood
and judged as poetic creation, and the same holds of Rembrandt and Beethoven;
all aesthetic wrangling on this point, and on the limits of expression
in the various arts, is settled when we grasp the simple fact that clear
ideas can only be communicated by language; from this it follows that every
plastic creation must lack definiteness of idea and in so far exercise
a “musical“ effect, if it is to have any at all; but on the other hand,
this plastic creation must, inasmuch as it is devoid of music, be interpreted
by ideas and in so far is to be regarded “poetically.“ “Night“ is, of course,
but one word, but in spite of that, thanks to the magic power of language,
it unrolls a whole poetical programme. And thus we see that plastic art,
event where it follows, as much as possible, its own independent course,
yet stretches out both hands to the poet, “who is wedded to music“: if
it has not borrowed the matter from him, it must receive from him the soul
that will give life to its work.
I do not think I need say anything more to prove that a history of art
which leaves out poetry is just as senseless as the famous representation
of Hamlet without the Prince. And yet I shall immediately show that
the most daring historico-philosophical assertions of
510 ART
well-known scholars
rest on this view. When in one scene Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not
appear on the stage, it seems empty to our historians of art. But, as I
was speaking of the poet whose words are wedded to music, and as the twin-sister
of the poet, Polyhymnia, is included in the anathema and not regarded as
presentable, I must still say a word about her art, before going on to
discuss the historical delusions.
It is now a universally acknowledged fact that in all the branches of the
Indo-European group in ancient times poetry was at the same time music:
evidence regarding the Indians, Hellenes and Teutonic peoples is to be
found in all the more recent histories. Among the books which contributed
most in the nineteenth century to the formation of a sound judgment on
this point, those of Fortlage, Westphal, Helmholtz and Ambros on the music
of the Greeks deserve special mention: they clearly show that music was
valued as highly by the Greeks as poetry and plastic art, and that at the
time of the greatest splendour of Greek culture music and poetry were so
closely allied and intertwined “that the history of Hellenic music cannot
be separated from the history of Hellenic poetry and vice versa.“
* What we to-day admire as Hellenic poetry is only a torso; for it was
the music which organically belonged to them that first “raised the Pindaric
ode, the Sophoclean scene, into the full brilliancy of the Hellenic day.“
If modern ideas should hold good, which have established the threefold
division, Literature, Music, Art, and have banished all that is sung from
literature and still more from art, then all Greek poetry must belong to
the history of music — not to literature or to art! That gives something
to think about. In the meantime, music has passed through a great development
(to which I shall return in another connection), whereby it has not
* Ambros: Geschichte der Musik, 2nd ed. i. 219.
511 ART
lost in dignity
or independence, but on the contrary has become more and more powerful
in expression, and therefore more capable of artistic form. Here we have
not merely development, as our historians of music would fain represent
it, but the passing over of this art from Hellenic into Teutonic hands.
The Teuton — in all the branches of this group of peoples — is the most
musical being on earth; music is his special art, that in which he is among
all mankind the incomparable master. We have seen how in ancient times
the Teutons did not lay aside the harp even when on horseback, and how
their most capable kings were personally the leaders of instruction in
singing (vol. i. p. 327); the
ancient Goths could invent no other term for reading (lesen) than
singing (singen), “as they knew no kind of communication in elevated
speech but what was sung.“ * And so the Teuton, as soon as in the thirteenth
century he had awakened to independence and to some extent shaken off the
deadening spell of Rome, at once devoted himself to that harmony and polyphony
which is natural to him alone: the development starts in the thoroughly
Teutonic Netherlands (the home of Beethoven) and for at least three centuries
its one firm support and cradle, so to speak, is there and in the north
generally. † It was only at a later time that the Italians, who were really
pupils of the Germans, attained to importance in music; even Palestrina
follows closely in the footsteps of the men of the north. ‡ And that which
was so
* Lamprecht: Deutsche Geschichte, 2nd ed. i. 174.
† The usual exclusive emphasising of the Netherlands is, as Ambros shows,
an historical error; Frenchmen, Germans, English, have to a great extent
assisted; see loc. cit. iii. 336, as well as the following section
and the whole of Bk. II. It is interesting to learn that Milton's father
was a composer. For further facts see Riemann's Geschichte der Musiktheorie
and Illustration zur Musikgeschichte.
‡ It is very noteworthy that Palestrina's teacher, the Frenchman Goudimel,
was a Calvinist, who was killed on the night of Saint Bartholomew; for
as Palestrina in style and manner of writing followed his teacher most
closely (see Ambros, II, p. 11 of V.) We see that the
512 ART
enthusiastically
begun went on without a break. In Josquin de Près, a contemporary
of Raphael, Teutonic music had already produced a genius. From Josquin
to Beethoven, on the threshold of the nineteenth century, the development
of this divine art, which, as Shakespeare says, alone can transform the
inmost nature of man — has progressed smoothly and uninterruptedly. Music,
zealously cultivated and furthered by thousands and tens of thousands,
put at the disposal of every succeeding genius ever more and more perfect
instruments, a ripe technique, a finer receptive capacity. * And this specifically
Teutonic art has been for centuries also recognised as a specifically Christian
art and frequently called simply the “divine art,“ la divina musica,
and rightly too, since it is the peculiarity of this art not to build with
forms presented by the senses, but, absolutely neglecting these, to influence
the feelings directly. That is why it stirs the heart of man so powerfully.
The profound affinity between mechanism and ideality, to which I have often
referred (see especially pp. 291
and 486 f.), here presents
itself, as it were, in the embodiment of an image: the mathematical art
which is above all others and in so far also the most “mechanical“ one
is at the same time the most “ideal,“ the most free of all that is corporeal.
purification
of Roman church-music “from lascivious and obscene songs“ (as the Council
of Trent in its twenty-second sitting expressed it) and its elevation and
refinement were fundamentally the work of Protestantism and the Teutonic
north.
* I intentionally refrain from saying “ear“ or “hearing,“ for, to judge
from many facts known to every musician, we may conclude that there has
within the last three centuries been a retrogression instead of an advance
in power of ear. Our forefathers, for example, had a preference for compositions
for four, eight or even more voices, and the dilettante, who sang to the
lute, did not take the treble (as that was considered vulgar!) but a middle
part. But it has long been established that acuteness of ear stands in
no necessary, direct relation to susceptibility to musical expression;
to a great extent this acuteness is a matter of practice, and we find peoples
(e.g., the Turks) who can without exception accurately distinguish
quarter-notes and who yet are absolutely lacking in musical imagination
and creative power.
513 ART
This explains
the directness of the effect of music, i.e., its absolute presentness,
which implies a further affinity to genuine religion; and, in fact, if
we wished by means of an example to make clear what we meant by calling
religion an experience, musical experiences, that is, the direct, all powerful
and indelible impression which sublime music makes upon the mind, would
certainly be the most appropriate and perhaps the only permissible illustration.
There are chorales by Johann Sebastian Bach — and not only chorales, but
I name these to keep to what is best known — which in the simple, literal
sense of the word are the most Christ-like sounds ever heard since the
divine voice died into silence upon the Cross.
I shall say nothing more in this connection; it is enough to have alluded
to the great importance of music for our culture, and to have called to
mind the incomparable achievements which the “art of genius“ has accomplished
during the last five centuries in this sphere. Every one will be ready
to admit that generalisations on the connection between art and culture
are of no value, if poetry and music, which — as Lessing taught us — in
reality form one single, comprehensive art, are shut out from consideration.
ART
AND SCIENCE
We are by this time armed to do battle with those dogmas of the history
of art which are so universally accepted at the present day. An indispensable
undertaking, for this philosophy of history renders an understanding of
the growth of Teutonic culture absolutely impossible, and at the same time
laughably distorts all judgment of the art of the nineteenth century.
A concrete example must be given, and as we everywhere find the same luxuriant
aftermath of Hegelian delusion, it does not much matter where we seek one.
514 ART
I take up an excellent
book which is very widely read, the Einführung in das Studium der
neueren Kunstgeschichte by Professor Alwin Schultz, the famous Prague
professor; I quote from p. 5 of the edition of 1878: “Have art and science
ever at the same moment (sic!) produced their finest fruits? Did
not Aristotle appear, when the heroic age of Greek art was already past?
And what scholar (sic!) lived at the time of Leonardo, Michael Angelo,
Raphael, whose works could even approximately be placed side by side with
those of these masters? No! art and science have never at the same time
been successfully cultivated by the nations; art rather precedes science;
science does not really gain strength till the brilliant epoch of art is
a thing of the past, and the more science grows and gains in importance,
the more is art pressed into the background. No nation has ever simultaneously
achieved great things in both spheres. We can therefore take consolation
from the fact that in our century, the scientific work of which has been
so brilliant and so momentous for our cultures, art has succeeded in achieving
something which is only less important.“ There are a couple more pages
in the same strain. The reader must peruse the quotation several times
carefully, and every time he does so he will be more and more amazed at
this mass of absurd judgments, and especially at the fact that a conscientious
scholar can simply ignore self-evident facts known to every educated person,
in favour of a traditional, artificial, absolutely false construction of
history. Little wonder that we laymen no longer understand the history
of the past, and consequently our own time! But we will understand them.
Let us therefore look more closely and with critical eyes at the official
philosophy of history which I have just quoted.
In the first place I ask: Even supposing that what Professor Schultz says
were true of the Hellenes, what
515 ART
would that prove
for us Teutons? Behind his error there lurks once more the cursed abstract
conception of “humanity.“ For he speaks not only of Greeks; universal laws
are laid down with his “ever“ and “never,“ as if we could all — Egyptians,
Chinese, Congo negroes, Teutons — be cast into one pot; whereas in every
sphere of life we see that even our nearest relations — Greeks, Romans,
Indians, Iranians — pass through a perfectly individual and peculiar course
of development. Moreover, the example he takes to prove his point rings
a false note. Of course, if our historians of art had set themselves to
prove the thesis, which I have attempted to sketch in the first chapter
of this book, viz., that creative art — the art of Homer — has formed the
basis of all Hellenic culture, that by it we first “entered into the daylight
of life,“ and that this is the special distinguishing-mark of the one unique,
Hellenic history, their position would have been unassailable, and we should
have been indebted to them; but there is no question of that. Poetry and
music form no part of art in Schultz's estimation any more than they do
in that of his colleagues; not a word is said about them; “the whole wide
sphere of manual production“ (p. 14) is looked upon as belonging to the
subject — that is, the plastic arts alone. And in that case the assertion
made is not only risky but demonstrably false. For, in the first place,
the limitation of the heroic age of plastic art to Phidias is little more
than a convenient phrase. What do we possess from his hand to serve as
good grounds for such a judgment? Is not investigation from year to year
recognising ever more and more the many-sided importance of Praxiteles,
* and has not Apelles the reputation of having been an incomparable painter?
Both are contemporaries of Aristotle. And are we really justified, for
the sake of
* Read the reports on the recent discoveries in Mantineia with Praxiteles'
reliefs of the Muses.
516 ART
a favourite system,
to despise the splendid sculptures from Pergamon as “second-rate goods“?
But Pergamon was not founded till fifty years after Aristotle's death.
I have always been compelled in this book to mention only a few pre-eminent,
well-known names; I have also laid the greatest emphasis on art as “the
art of genius“; but it seems to me ridiculous when such simplification
is admitted into standard books; genius is not like an order of merit hung
on the breast of a single, definite individual, it slumbers, and not only
does it slumber but it is at work in hundreds and thousands of men, before
the individual can rise to pre-eminence. As I have said on p.
34 (vol. i.), it is only in a surrounding of personalities that personalities
can as such make themselves seen and heard; art of genius implies a basis
of widespread artistic genius; in works of creative imagination, as Richard
Wagner has remarked, there shows itself “a common power distributed among
infinitely various and manifold individualities.“ * Such widespread genius
as the Greeks manifested even down to later times, a genius which long
after Aristotle produced the Giant's frieze and the Laocoon group, does
not need to fear comparison with science — above all with the absolutely
unheroic science of that late period! I shall, however, not insist more
on this, but, to begin with, make the standpoint of the art-historians
my own, and regard the age of Pericles as the zenith of art. But in that
case how could I close my eyes to the fact that the “heroic age“ of science
corresponds exactly to that of art? For how is it possible to regard Aristotle
as the chief Greek scientist? This great man has summarised, sifted, arranged,
schematised the science of his time, like everything else; but his own
personal science is anything but heroic, indeed it is rather the opposite,
that is to
* Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde, Collected Works, 1st ed. iv.
309.
517 ART
say, decidedly
official, not to say parsonic. On the other hand, more than a century before
the birth of Phidias all Hellenic thinkers proved themselves scientifically
trained mathematicians and astronomers, and science became really “heroic“
when Pythagoras, born at latest eighty years before Phidias, appeared.
I refer to what I merely sketched on p.
52 (vol. i). To-day it is a recognised fact how brilliant the Pythagorean
astronomy was; with what zeal and success the Greeks down to the Alexandrian
age, without a break, cultivated mathematics and astronomy, and how Aristotle
stands apart from this movement, which is the only one dealing with genuine
natural science: how can any one overlook these facts in favour of a dogmatic
theory? From Thales, who a hundred years before Phidias fixes in advance
the date of the eclipse of the sun, to Aristarchus, the forerunner of Copernicus,
who was born a hundred years after Aristotle — that is, as long as the
Greek intellectual life was at all in a flourishing condition, from the
beginning to the end — we see the active influence of the peculiar Hellenic
capacity for the science of space. Apart from this the Greeks have on the
whole accomplished little of lasting importance in science, for they were
too hasty, too bad observers; but two names are so pre-eminent that even
to this day they are known to every child: Hippocrates, the founder of
scientific medicine, and Democritus, far the greatest of all Hellenic investigators
of nature, the only one of them whose influence is not yet spent; * and
both of these are contemporaries of Phidias!
* Democritus can only be compared with Kant: the history of the world knows
of no more remarkable intellectual power than his. Whoever does not yet
know this fact should read the section in Zeller's Philosophy of the
Greeks (Div. 2, vol. i.) and supplement this by Lange's Geschichte
des Materialismus. Democritus is the only Greek whom we can regard
as a forerunner of Teutonic philosophy; for in him — and in him alone —
we find the absolutely mathematical-mechanical interpretation of the world
of phenomena, united to the idealism of
518 ART
But the assertion that art and science have never at the same time been
cultivated with success has still less justification when we apply it to
Teutonic culture. “What scholar lived in the time of Leonardo, Michael
Angelo, Raphael, whose works could be even approximately compared with
those of these great masters?“ Truly, one can't help pitying such a poor
art-historian! At the very first name — Leonardo — we exclaim: “Why, my
good sir, Leonardo himself!“ Scientific authorities say regarding him:
“Leonardo da Vinci must be regarded as the greatest forerunner of the Galilean
epoch of the development of inductive science.“ *
I have often had occasion in this book to refer to Leonardo, and so I may
here merely remind the reader that he was mathematician, mechanician, engineer,
astronomer, geologist, anatomist, physiologist. Though the short span of
a human life made it impossible for him to win in every sphere the immortal
fame which he won in that of art, his numerous correct divinations of things
which were discovered later are all the more
inner
experience and the resolute rejection of all dogmatism. In contrast to
the silly “middle path“ of Aristotle he teaches that truth lies in depth!
Knowledge of things according to their real nature is, he says, impossible.
His Ethics are just as important: morality depends, in his estimation,
solely upon will, not upon works; he already gives us a glimpse of Goethe's
idea of reverence for self, and rejects fear and hope as moral impulses.
* Hermann Grothe: Leonardo da Vinci als Ingenieur und Philosoph,
p. 93. In this book the author has attempted to prove that scientific
knowledge in Leonardo's time was altogether more extensive and precise
than two centuries later, yet he too humours the Hegelian art-history so
far as to write: “We have always been able to observe the fact that the
greatest splendour of science is preceded by a sublime epoch of art“; surely
that is the non plus ultra. Nothing is more difficult to root out
than such phrases: the very man who in a pre-eminent case has just proved
the opposite, still babbles the same phrases and excuses the departure
from the supposed rule with an “always“ — to which we are inclined to retort
with the question: Where is there except among the Teutonic peoples a “highest
splendour of science?“ He would be at a loss for an answer. And with us
— that he could not deny — art from Giotto to Goethe runs parallel to science
from Roger Bacon to Cuvier.
519 ART
valuable, as they
are not airy intuitions but the result of observation and a strictly scientific
method of thinking. He was the first to establish clearly the great central
principle of all natural science, mathematics and experiment. “All knowledge
is vain,“ he says, “which is not based upon facts of experience and which
cannot be traced step by step to the scientifically arranged experiment.“
* I certainly do not know whether Professor Schultz would call Leonardo
a “scholar“; but history proves that there is something greater than scholarship
even in the sciences, namely, genius; and Leonardo is, beyond doubt, one
of the greatest scientific geniuses of all time. But let us look further
to see if there is not another scientific contemporary of Michael Angelo
and Raphael worthy of being “approximately“ placed alongside of them. Nothing
is more difficult than to awaken men to the appreciation of past scientific
greatness, and if I were to quote, as examples of natural investigators
whose lives fall within that of Michael Angelo, Vesalius, the immortal
founder of human anatomy, Servet, the forerunner of the discovery of the
circulation of the blood, Konrad Gessner, that remarkable many-sided marvel
of all later “naturalists,“ and others as well, I should have to add a
commentary to each name, and even after all a whole life of successful
work would still not be equivalent, in the vague conception of the layman,
to one great work of art which he knows by having actually seen it. But
fortunately in this case we have not to seek far to find a name, the splendour
of which has impressed even the most unscientific brain. For with all our
admiration of these immortal artists we must yet admit that a Nicolaus
Copernicus has exercised a greater, more thorough and more lasting influence
upon all human culture than Michael Angelo and Raphael. Georg Christoph
Lichtenberg exclaims,
* Libro di pittura, § 33 (ed. Ludwig).
520 ART
after pointing
out the scientific and moral greatness of Copernicus: “If this was not
a great man, who in this world can lay claim to the title?“ * And Copernicus
is so exactly the contemporary of Raphael and Michael Angelo that his life
embraces that of Raphael. Raphael was born in 1483 and died in 1520: Copernicus'
dates are 1473-1543. Copernicus was famous in Rome at a time when Raphael's
name was unknown there; and when the genius of Urbino was summoned by Julius
II., in 1508, the astronomer already carried in his brain his theory of
the cosmic system, although like a genuine investigator of nature he worked
at it for thirty years longer before publishing it. Copernicus is twenty-one
years younger than Leonardo, two years younger than Albrecht Dürer,
two years older than Michael Angelo, four years older than Titian; all
these men were at the zenith of their powers between 1500 and 1520. But
not they alone, the epoch-making natural investigator Paracelsus † is only
ten years younger than Raphael and closed his eventful and scientifically
important life more than twenty years before Michael Angelo. We must, however,
not overlook the fact that men like Copernicus and Paracelsus do not fall
from heaven; if the art of genius is a collective phenomenon, science is
so in a still higher degree. The very first biographer of Copernicus, namely,
Gassendi, proved that he would not have been possible but for his predecessor
Regiomontanus, and that the latter owed just as much to his teacher, Purbach;
and on the other hand, the astronomer Bailly, a recognised authority, asserts
that, if his instruments had been a little more perfect, Regiomontanus
would have anticipated most of the discoveries of Galilei. ‡
* See his Leben des Kopernikus in his Physikalische und
mathematische Schriften, ed. 1884, Part I. p. 51.
† Cf. pp. 392, 425 f.
‡ Both facts are taken from the above-mentioned biography by Lichtenberg.
521 ART
It is impossible to compare art and science with one another in the way
in which our art-historians compare them; for art — the art of genius —
“is always at its goal,“ as Schopenhauer has finely remarked; there is
no progress beyond Homer, beyond Michael Angelo or Bach; science, on the
other hand, is essentially “cumulative“ and every investigator stands on
the shoulders of his predecessor. The modest Purbach paves the way for
that marvel Regiomontanus, and the latter makes Copernicus possible, upon
his work Kepler and Galilei (who was born in the year in which Michael
Angelo died) build, and upon theirs Newton. According to what criterion
are we to determine the “best fruit“ here? A single consideration will
show how invalid artificial determination from a priori constructions
is. The great discoveries of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magalhães,
&c., are the fruits of exact scientific work. Toscanelli (born 1397),
the adviser of Columbus and probable instigator of the voyage to the west,
was an excellent, learned astronomer and cosmographer, who undertook to
prove the spherical shape of the earth, and whose map of the Atlantic Ocean,
which Columbus used on his first voyage, is a marvel of knowledge and intuition.
The Florentine Amerigo Vespucci was taught by him, and thus enabled to
map the first exact topographical details of the American coast. Yet that
would not have sufficed. But for the wonderfully exact astronomical almanacs
of Regiomontanus which, on the basis of his observations of the stars and
of new methods, he had calculated and printed for the period I475-1506,
no transatlantic voyage would have been possible; from Columbus onwards
every geographical discoverer had them on board. * I should have thought
that the discovery of the earth, which coincides exactly with the greatest
splendour of plastic art in Italy, was in itself a
* For all these facts see Fiske: The Discovery of America.
522 ART
“fruit,“ just
as worthy of our appreciation as a Madonna of Raphael; science, in preparing
the way for and making art possible, can hardly be said to have limped
on behind, but rather to have preceded art.
If we continued step by step to criticise our art-historian, we should
still have much to say concerning him; but now we have shown the total
invalidity of the basis of his further assertions, we may throw open door
and window and let the sunshine of glorious reality and the fresh air of
impetuous development clear the stuffy atmosphere of a philosophy of history,
in which the past remains obscure and the present insignificant. I may
therefore briefly summarise the further facts that go to refute his theory.
About a hundred and fifty years after Raphael's death — Kepler and Galilei
had been long dead, Harvey recently; Swammerdam was engaged in discovering
undreamt-of secrets of anatomy, Newton had already worked out his theory
of gravitation, and John Locke in his fortieth year was just undertaking
the scientific analysis of the human mind — a poem was written, of which
Goethe has said: “If poetry were altogether lost to the world, it could
be restored by means of this work“; that must be, I should think, art of
genius in the most superlative sense! The artist was Calderon, the work
his Steadfast Prince. * Such extravagant praise from so capable
and level-headed a critic as Goethe makes us feel that the creative power
of Art in the seventeenth century had not declined. We shall doubt it the
less when we consider that Newton, the contemporary of Calderon, might
have seen Rembrandt at work, and perhaps — I do not know — did see him;
if he had travelled in Germany, he might equally have seen the great musician
of the Thomaskirche produce one of his Passions, and doubtless he
* Letter to Schiller, June 28, 1804.
523 ART
saw or knew Handel,
who had settled in England long before Newton's death. This brings us past
the middle of the eighteenth century. In the year of Handel's death, Gluck
was at the zenith of his power, Mozart was born and Goethe had written
a great deal, not for the world, but for his brother Jakob, who died young,
and he had just become, in consequence of the presence of the French in
Frankfurt, acquainted with the theatre before and behind the scenes; before
the close of the same year Schiller saw the light of the world. These few
hasty indications — and I have not mentioned the rich artistic life of
England, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, and from the latter to Hogarth and
Byron, nor the fine creations of France, from the invention of Gothic architecture
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the great Racine — prove quite
clearly that in no century, since our new world began to arise, have there
been lacking a deep-felt need of art, widespread artistic genius and its
revelation in glorious masterpieces. Calderon does not stand alone, as
we have just seen: what Goethe said of his Steadfast Prince he might
just as well have said of Shakespeare's Macbeth; and in the meantime
the purest of all the arts — that art which was to give the Teutonic poets
the instrument they required for the full expression of their thought —
music — gradually attained a perfection undreamt of before, and produced
one genius after the other. This reveals the invalidity of the assertion
that art and science exclude each other: an assertion which rests partly
upon an altogether capricious and wrong definition of the term “art,“ partly
upon ignorance of historical facts and traditional perversity of judgment.
If there is a century which deserves to be called the “scientific“ century,
it is the sixteenth; we find this view of Goethe's confirmed by the authority
of Justus Liebig (p. 320);
but the sixteenth is the century of
524 ART
Raphael, Michael
Angelo and Titian, its beginning saw Leonardo and its end Rubens; the century
of natural science above all others was therefore also a century incomparably
rich in plastic art. But all these divisions should be rejected as artificial
and senseless. * There are no such things as centuries except in our imagination,
and there is no relation between art and science except one of indirect
mutual advancement. There is only one great unfettered power, busily active
in all spheres simultaneously, the power of a definite race. This power
is, of course, hindered or furthered now here, now there, frequently by
purely external chance events, often by great ideas and the influence of
pre-eminent personalities. Thus Italian painting developed importance and
independence under the direct influence of Francis of Assisi, and of the
great churches of which his order encouraged the building with frescoes
for the instruction of the ignorant; then in Germany in consequence of
almost three hundred years of war, devastation and inner strife, the interest
in and capacity for plastic art gradually waned, because that, more than
any other art, requires wealth and peace, in order that it may live; or
to give another example, the circumnavigation of the world supplied a great
impetus to astronomical studies (p.
284), while the rise of the Jesuits put a complete stop to the growth
of science in Italy (p. 193).
All this the historian — and the art-historian as well — can and should
show us, by means of concrete
* Those who like such frivolous divisions may note the following: in the
year of Michael Angelo's death (1564) Shakespeare was born; the death of
Calderon (1681) coincides almost exactly with the birth of Bach, and the
lives of Gluck, Mozart, and Haydn bring us exactly to the end of the eighteenth
century; we might therefore say that a century of plastic art was followed
by one of poetry and that by one of music. There have been people who have
spoken of mathematical, astronomical-physical, anatomical-systematic and
chemical centuries — simply nonsense, which mathematicians, natural scientists
and anatomists of to-day will know how to estimate at its proper value.
525 ART
facts, instead
of dimming our judgment by impotent generalisations.
ART
AS A WHOLE
And yet we require generalisations; without them there is no knowledge,
and hence, until the arrival of the eagerly expected Bichat of the history
of culture, we sway backwards and forwards between false general views,
which reveal every individual fact in a wrong perspective, and correct
individual judgments, which we are unable so to unite that knowledge, i.e.,
an understanding embracing all phenomena, may be thereby derived. But I
hope the whole preceding exposition, from the first chapter of this book
onwards, will have provided us with sufficient material to complete our
makeshift bridge here. The fundamental facts of knowledge now lie so clearly
before us and have been regarded from so many sides that I do not require
to offer excuses for an almost aphoristic brevity.
In order to understand the history and the importance of art in succession
of time and amid other phenomena of life, the first and absolute condition
is that we consider it as a whole, and do not fix our attention solely
on this or that fragment — as, for example, “the sphere of manual production“
— and philosophise over that. *
Wherever and in whatever way there is free, creative reshaping of the inner
and outer material presented by nature, there we have art. As art implies
freedom and creative power, it demands personality; a work which does not
bear the stamp of a peculiar distinct individuality is not a work of art.
Now personalities are distinct not only in physiognomy, but also in degree;
here (as elsewhere in nature) the difference in degree merges at a certain
point into specific difference, so that we are
* I recall to the reader's memory Goethe's remark: “Technique finally becomes
fatal to art“ (Sprüche in Prosa); that means, of course, to
true, creative art.
526 ART
justified in asserting
with Kant that the genius is specifically different from the ordinary man.
* This is nowhere so apparent as in art, which in the works of authentic
geniuses becomes a kind of second nature, and is consequently, like it,
imperishable, incalculable, inexplicable and inimitable. Yet in every personality
which is free, that is, capable of originality, there is affinity to genius;
this is seen in the fine appreciation of the art of genius, in the enthusiasm
which it arouses, in the stimulus which it gives to creative activity,
in its influence upon the work of men who are not in the true sense of
the word artists. Not only does the art of the inspired man live in an
atmosphere of artistic creation in which genius has preceded him, is his
contemporary, and will live after him, but genius stretches out its roots
to the most remote spheres, drawing in nourishment from all sides and conveying
vitality wherever it goes. I point to Leonardo and to Goethe. Here we can
see with our eyes how the artistic gift, overflowing all boundaries, expands
its fructifying power over every field that the intellect of man can till.
If we look more closely, we shall be no less astonished at the way in which
these men draw fresh inspiration from the most varied and widely differing
sources; the fostering soil of Goethe's inspiration extends from comparative
osteology to the philologically exact
* Cf. vol. i. p. 24. How
many aesthetic delusions and useless discussions the nineteenth century
might have spared itself had it weighed more carefully Kant's profound
remark: “Genius is the inborn quality of mind, by which nature prescribes
the rule to art — for this reason genius cannot describe or scientifically
reveal how it produces; for the same reason, the producer of a work of
genius does not know the source of the ideas which conduced to it, nor
can he, according to a plan or at will, think out these ideas and communicate
them with instructions to others, so as to enable the latter to produce
similar works“ (Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 46).
Cf. also
chapter § 57, close of the first note. The Italian Journey
had not then appeared in print, otherwise Kant might have referred to Goethe's
letter of September 6, 1789: “The greatest works of art have at the same
time been the greatest works of nature, produced by men according to true
and natural laws.“
527 ART
criticism of the
Hebrew Torah; that of Leonardo from the inner anatomy of the human body
to the actual execution of those magnificent canals of which Goethe dreamt
in his old days. Are we just to such men, if we measure and codify their
artistic capacity according to what they have achieved within the four
corners of “fixed patterns“? Are we to allow intellectual pigmies to clamber
down from their Darwinian monkey-tree and reproach these men for going
beyond their own particular “speciality in art“? Certainly not. “Only as
creator can man be really worthy of our reverence,“ said Schiller. * Leonardo's
and Goethe's views on nature and their philosophic thoughts are by their
creative character most certainly “worthy of reverence“; they are Art.
What is here visibly manifest, because in these exceptional men we can
directly observe in the same individual the capacity for giving and receiving,
goes on everywhere by manifold mediation, though for that very reason it
remains unnoticed. Everything can be a source of artistic inspiration,
and on the other hand, often where, in the hurry of life, we least expect
it, successes are achieved which must be attributed in the last instance
to artistic inspiration. Nothing is more receptive than human creative
power. It takes impressions from everywhere, and for it a new impression
means a new addition not only to its material, but also to its creative
capacity, because, as I said on p.
78 (vol. i.) and pp. 273
and 326 (vol. ii.), nature
alone, and not the human mind, is inventive and gifted with genius. There
is therefore a close connection between knowledge and art, and the great
artist (we see it from Homer to Goethe) is always specially eager to learn.
But art gives back with interest what it receives; by a thousand often
hidden channels it influences philosophy, science, religion, industry,
life, but especially the possibility of knowledge. As Goethe says: “Men
as a whole are better adapted to
* Über Anmut und Würde.
528 ART
art than to science.
The former belongs in the largest measure to themselves, the latter in
the largest measure to the world; — so we must necessarily conceive science
as art, if we expect from it any kind of completeness.“ * Thus, for instance,
Kant's Theory of the Heavens is just as artistic a work as Goethe's
Metamorphosis
of
Plants, and that not only on the positive side, as a creative benefit
to mankind, but also negatively, in so far as all such summaries are, in
spite of the instruments of mathematics, human creations, that is to say,
myths.
I therefore postulate as our first principle that art must be considered
as a whole, and in saying this I maintain that I have laid down an important
rule. Artistic handicraft belongs altogether to Industry, i.e.,
to the department of civilisation; it can flourish (as among the Chinese)
without a trace of creative power being present; Art, on the other hand,
as element of culture (in the various branches of the Indo-European family)
is like the life-blood throbbing through the whole higher intellectual
life. In order to form a correct historical estimate of our art, we must
first of all comprehend the unity of the impulse — which proceeds from
the innermost emotions of the personality — then we must trace the manifold
exchange of giving and taking in all its most minute ramifications. I said
on p. 233
it is only the man who surveys the whole that can establish distinctions
within that whole; and a true history of art cannot be built up by piecing
together the various so-called “forms of art“; we must rather first of
all obtain a view of art as a uniform whole and trace it to where it merges
with other phenomena of life into a still greater whole; only then are
we in a position to judge correctly the importance of its individual manifestations.
This then is the first general principle.
* Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre, Div. 1.
529
ART
THE
PRIMACY
OF POETRY
The second fundamental principle draws the indispensable narrower circle;
all genuinely artistic creation is subject to the absolute primacy of poetry.
For the most part I can rest content with referring to what has been said
on p. 506 f. The reader will find further confirmation everywhere. Thus
Springer shows that the first movements of plastic creative power among
the Teutons (about the tenth century) did not occur where men copied former
patterns of plastic art, but where their imagination had been awakened
to free creation by poetical works — chiefly by the Psalms and legends;
immediately “there reveals itself a remarkable poetic power of perception,
it penetrates the object and envelops even abstract conceptions with a
tangible body.“ * The plastic artist, then, becomes productive when he
can give form to figures which the poet has conjured up before his imagination.
Of course the plastic artist receives many a creative inspiration which
has not first been conveyed to him by the pen of the poet; a brilliant
example is presented by the almost incalculable influence of Francis of
Assisi; but we must not overlook the fact that it is not only what is written
that is poetry. Poetical creative power slumbers in many breasts and in
many forms; “the real inventor was in all times the people alone; the individual
cannot invent, he only makes himself master of what has been already invented.“
† Scarcely had this wonderful personality of Francis vanished, when the
people transformed and transfigured it to an ideal figure; and it is this
ideal poetical figure that stimulated Cimabue, Giotto and those who followed
after them. But the lesson to be drawn from this example is not yet
* Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (1895), ii. 76.
† Richard Wagner: Entwürfe, Gedanken, Fragmente (1885), p.
19.
530 ART
exhausted. An
art-historian, who has made the influence of Francis upon plastic art the
subject of the most minute studies, and who must be inclined rather to
over-estimate than under-estimate that influence, namely, Professor Henry
Thode, calls attention to the fact that only to a certain degree did this
influence have a creative effect; such a religious movement rouses the
slumbering depths of the personality, but in itself offers the eye little
material and still less form; in order that the plastic art of Italy should
grow to full strength, a new impulse had to be given, and that was the
work of the poets. * It was Dante who taught the Italians to create; and
not he only, but also the poetry of antiquity which had been unearthed
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Naturally we must not take a
narrow view of this fact; while the illuminator of the tenth century may
get his inspiration for free creation by following a psalm verse by verse,
at a later time such an illustrator is little valued, freer invention is
demanded; in every sphere the artist rises to ever increasing independence;
but his independence is determined by the development and the power of
all-embracing Poetry.
This is an appropriate place for introducing Lessing's important theory,
that poetry and music are one single art, that the two together form true
poetry. That is the starting-point for an understanding of Teutonic art,
including plastic art; whoever carelessly overlooks this fact will never
reach the purity of truth. To what has been already said above (p. 510
f.) I require only to add a few words by way of an indispensable supplement.
* Franz von Assisi und die Anfänge der Kunst der Renaissance in
Italien, 1885, p. 524 f.
531
ART
TEUTONIC
MUSIC
Wherever we find highly developed, creative poetry among Teutonic peoples,
there too we find a developed tone-art, which is intimately bound up with
it. I shall mention only three characteristic features of the Aryan Indians.
Bharata, the legendary inventor of their most popular art, namely, the
Drama, is looked upon also as the author of the Foundations of Musical
Instruction, for in India music was an integral part of dramatic works;
lyric poets were wont to give the melody along with the verses, and when
they did not do so they at least indicated in what key each poem was to
be rendered. These two features bear eloquent witness; — a third clearly
illustrates the development of technique. The old method, which was universal
in all Europe, of designating the musical scale do, re, mi, &c.,
is derived from India, transmitted through Erania. Thus we see how intimately
associated music and poetry were, and what a part the knowledge of music
played in life. * I need not add anything concerning the music of the Hellenes.
Herder says: “Among the Greeks poetry and music were but one work, one
splendour of the human mind.“ † In another passage he says: “The Greek
theatre was Song; everything was arranged with a view to that; and whoever
does not understand this has heard nothing of the Greek theatre.“ ‡ On
the other hand, where there was no poetry, as among the ancient Romans,
there too music was absent. At a late hour they obtained a substitute for
both, and Ambros mentions, as especially characteristic, the circumstance
that the chief instrument of the Romans was the pipe, whereas among the
Indians, harps, lutes, and other
* Cf. Schröder: Indiens Litteratur und Kultur, Lectures
iii and l.; and Ambros: Geschichte der Musik, Bk. I, i.
† Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit, Bk. XIII. Div. 2.
‡ Nachlese zur Adrastea I.
532 ART
stringed instruments
formed the chief stock; this fact tells the whole tale. Ambros points out
that the Romans never demanded more of music than that “it should be pleasant
and should delight the ear“ (practically the same standpoint as that of
most of our men of letters and aesthetic critics); on the other hand, they
were never able to comprehend the lofty intellectual significance which
all Greeks, artists and philosophers alike, attributed to this very art.
And so they were the first to have the melancholy courage to write Odes
(i.e., songs) which were not meant to be sung. In the later Imperial
age, in music as in other things, there was aroused an interest in virtuosity
and aimless dilettantism; this was the work of the Chaos of Peoples which
was beginning to assert itself. * These facts need no commentary. But one
thing that does require comment is the fact already alluded to, that the
prominence of musical talent is an intellectual characteristic of the Teutons
— which of necessity implies a new and special development of Poetry, and
with it of Art in general. The contrast presented by other Indo-European
races will be instructive on this subject. Certainly the Indians too seem
to have been highly gifted musically, but with them everything merged and
lost itself in something Prodigious, Over-complex, and, therefore, Shapeless.
Thus they distinguished nine hundred and sixty different keys and so made
a complete technical development impossible. †
* Ambros, as above, conclusion of vol. i.
† It is well known that authorities are inclined to see in the Hungarian
gypsies of to-day an early severed branch of the Indian Aryans, and musical
writers have thought fit to see in the incomparable and peculiar musical
gifts of these people an analogy to genuine Indian music: a scale which
includes quarter-notes and sometimes even minuter differences, hence harmonic
structures and progressions unknown to Teutonic music; moreover the passionate
fervour of the melody and the infinitely rich and florid accompaniment,
which defies fixation by our scale of notation, corresponds exactly to
what is told us of Indian music, and so renders intelligible much that
is to us inexplicable in Indian musical books. Any one who has for a whole
evening listened to a genuine Hungarian gypsy orchestra will agree with
me when I assert that here and here alone we see absolute musical
533 ART
The Hellenes erred
by going to the other extreme; they possessed a scientifically complete
but narrowly limiting musical theory, and their music developed in such
a direct and inseparable alliance with their poetry — music being, as it
were, the living body of the words — that it never attained to any independence,
and for that reason never to a higher life of expression. The linguistic
expression always formed the basis of Hellenic music; on that, and not
on purely musical considerations, the Greeks built up even the melody;
and instead of constructing, as we do, the harmonic structure from the
bottom upwards (this is not of course caprice, but is based on the facts
of acoustics, namely, the presence of harmonising overtones), the Greeks
constructed from the top downwards. With them the melody of speech was
supreme, and it was independent, unfettered by considerations of the musical
structure; it was, so to speak, “speech sung“; and the instrumental accompaniment,
which was devoid of all independence, was linked on as something subordinate.
Even those who are not musicians will understand that on such a basis the
ear could not be trained and music could not grow into an independent art;
music remained under these circumstances an indispensable artistic element
rather than a creative art. * What therefore
genius
at work; for this music, though built upon well-known melodies, is always
improvised, always suggested by the moment; now pure music is not monumental,
but direct feeling, and it is clear that music which is at the time of
playing improvised as the expression of momentary feeling must influence
the heart quite differently, that is, must exercise a more purely musical
effect than music which has been learned and practised. But such a production
contains unfortunately no elements out of which lasting works of art can
be forged (we only require to refer to those stupid parodies of Hungarian
music which under the name of “Hungarian dances“ enjoy a regrettably wide
popularity); this is in fact not a question of real art but of something
lying deeper, namely, the elements from which art first arises, it is not
the sea-born Aphrodite, but the sea itself.
* In so far there is an analogy between Indian and Hellenic music, however
different they otherwise were; in the one case it is over-luxuriance, in
the other subordination of the musical expression, by which the feeling
is created of something unshaped and elementary in
534 ART
in the case of
the Indians was frustrated by excessive refinement of the ear, was from
the first impossible to the Hellenes in consequence of the subordination
of the musical sense in favour of the linguistic expression. Schiller has
laid down the decisive law: “Music must become form“; the possibility of
this was first realised among the Teutons.
By what means the Teuton succeeded in making music an art — his art — and
in developing it to ever growing independence and capacity of expression,
may be studied by the reader in histories of music. But, as we are here
considering art as a whole, I must call his attention to one great drawback
in such histories. Since music is essentially the revelation of something
inexpressible, we can “say“ little or nothing about it; histories of music
shrink, therefore, in the main, into a discussion of things technical.
In histories of the plastic arts this is not so much the case; plans, photographs,
facsimiles give us a direct view of the objects; moreover, the handbooks
of the plastic arts contain only so much of the technical as every intelligent
person can at once understand, whereas musical technique requires special
study. The comparison with histories of poetry is just as unfavourable
to music. For in these we are hardly told that there is such a thing as
technique, its discussion is limited to the narrowest circles of the learned;
knowledge of the history of poetry is acquired directly from the poetical
works themselves. Thus the various branches of art are presented to us
in totally different historical perspectives, and this makes it very difficult
to acquire a view of art as a whole. It is our business, therefore, mentally
to rearrange our historical knowledge of art; and in this respect it is
useful to know that there is no art in which —
contrast
to genuine, formed art. To gain deeper insight into Hellenic music, I recommend
the reader to consult the little book of Hausegger: Die Anfänge
der Harmonie, 1895; from these seventy-six pages he can learn more
facts, and more important ones than from whole volumes.
535 ART
in the living
work — technique is so absolutely a matter of indifference as in music.
The theory of music is altogether abstract, the technique of musical instruments
quite mechanical; both run, as it were, parallel to art, but stand in no
other relation to it than the theory of perspective or the handling of
the brush to the picture. So far as instrumental technique is concerned,
it consists solely of the training of certain muscles of the hands, arms,
or, it may be, of the face, or of the appropriate drilling of the vocal
chords; all else that is necessary — intuitive understanding of what has
been felt by another, and expression — cannot be taught, and it is just
this that is music. It is the same with theory; the greatest musical genius
— the Hungarian gypsy — does not know what a note, an interval, or a key
is, and the most profound musical theorists among the Greeks possessed
as little musical talent as the physicist Helmholtz; they were not artists,
but mathematicians. * For music is the only art which is non-allegorical,
it is, therefore, the purest, the most perfectly “artistic,“ that in which
the human being comes nearest to an absolute creator; for the same reason
its influence is direct; it transforms the listener into a “fellow-creator“;
when taking in musical impressions, every one is a genius; hence the Technical
disappears completely in this case, indeed we may almost say that at the
moment of execution it does not exist. The consequence is that in music,
where we hear most about it, technique possesses the least significance.
†
Still more important for the historical estimate of art
* That is the reason why they (as Ambros points out, i. 380 and elsewhere)
dabble in purely imaginary musical subtleties, which would have been impossible
in practice and would not have contributed in the least to pave the way
for a development of Greek music. On the contrary, the highly developed
theory of music actually hindered the development of Greek music.
† To avoid stupid misinterpretations, I may remark that I do not fail to
appreciate the interest or the value of musical theory and instrumental
technique; but neither is art, they are merely the instruments of art.
536 ART
as a whole is
the following point, which is again based upon Lessing and Herder and their
theory of the one Art, namely, that music has never been able to develop
itself apart from poetry. Even in the case of the Hellenes, it is a striking
fact that, in spite of their great gifts and their brilliance as theorists,
they were never able to emancipate and develop music where it was cultivated
apart from poetry (e.g., in the dance). On the other hand, we shall
see that all Indian music, so rich and varied instrumentally, develops
around song as a kind of frame, and as a manifold deepening of the expression.
The gypsy of our day never plays anything but what is based upon some definite
song; if you say to him that you do not like the melody, that it does not
suit the mood of the moment, he will invent a new one, or transform the
already known one (as the modern musician his “motives“) into something
psychically different; but, if you ask him freely to extemporise, he does
not know what that means; and he is right, for a music not based upon a
definite poetical mood is a mere juggling with vibrations. Now if we carefully
follow the development of Teutonic music, we shall discover a fact which
is certainly unknown and will be surprising to most of our contemporaries,
namely, that from the first it has developed in the most direct dependence
upon, and intimately bound up with, poetry. Not only was all old Teutonic
poetry at the same time music, not only were all Troubadours and Minnesingers
just as much musicians as poets, but when, from the beginning of the eleventh
century onwards, with Guido of Arezzo our music began its triumphant progress
towards technical perfection and undreamt-of richness of expressive power
it remained throughout the whole development Song. The training of the
ear, the gradual discovery of harmonic possibilities, the wonderful artistic
structure of counterpoint, by which music, so to speak, builds itself a
home in which it can rule as mistress; all this we have not
537 ART
thought out independently,
like the Grecian theorists, nor invented in an instrumental ecstasy, as
those enthusiastic visionaries who dream of an “absolute“ music imagine;
— we have attained it by song. Guido himself expressed the opinion that
the path of the philosophers was not for him, he was interested solely
in the improvement of church-singing and the training of the singers. For
centuries there was no music but what was song or the accompaniment of
song. And though this singing sometimes seems to treat the words rather
arbitrarily and violently; though the expression often disappears in favour
of polyphonic effects in counterpoint — only one really great master needs
to come and then we learn the purpose of it all: namely, technical mastery
of material in the interest of expressive power. Thus our music develops
from master to master; the technique of composition more and more perfect,
the singers and instrumentalists more and more accomplished, the musical
genius consequently more and more free. Even of Josquin de Près
his contemporaries said: “Others had to submit their will to the notes,
but Josquin is a master of notes, they must do as he wills.“ * And what
was his aim? Whoever has not the privilege of hearing works of this glorious
master should read Ambros (iii. 211 f.) to learn how he not only maintained
the whole mood of every poetical work, a Miserere, a Te Deum,
a Motette, a joyful (sometimes very frivolous) many part song, &c.,
but also gave the full significance to the purport of the words, and kept
bringing them forward again and again, wherever necessary, not for mere
fun's sake, but in order to convey to the feelings the poetical meaning
of the words in all their aspects. Every one knows Herder's fine remark:
“Germany was reformed by songs“; † we may say, music itself was reformed
by songs. If this were the
* The quotation is said to be from Luther.
† Kalligone, 2nd Part, iv. The quotation seems to have been taken
from Leibniz.
538 ART
proper place,
I should make it my business to prove that even at a later time, when pure
instrumental technique had arisen, genuine Teutonic music never moved further
away from poetry “than the rose can be carried in bloom,“ for as soon as
music desires complete independence, it loses the vital spark; it can indeed
continue to move in forms already attained, but it contains no creative,
moulding principles. That is why Herder — that truly great aesthetic critic
— sounds a note of warning: “May the Muse save us from a mere poetry of
ear!“ For such poetry, in his opinion, leads to shapelessness and makes
the soul “useless and dull.“ * Still more clearly has the great tone-poet
of the nineteenth century explained the connection: “Music, even at the
highest climax, when raised to its highest point, is only feeling; it comes
in as the companion of the moral act, but not as act itself; it can represent
feelings and moods side by side, but it cannot, as the need arises, develop
one mood from another; it lacks the moral will.“ † And hence, even during
that century which stretches from Haydn's birth to Beethoven's death, and
produced the greatest splendour of instrumental music, there has never
been a musical genius who did not devote a great, if not the greatest,
part of his artistic activity to the calling to life of poetical works.
That is true of all composers before Bach, it is true in the highest degree
of Bach himself, likewise of Handel, of Haydn in a scarcely less degree,
of Gluck in every respect, of Mozart both in his artistic achievements
and in his words, also of Beethoven, though in his case seemingly less
so, because with him pure instrumental music has reached such a pitch of
precision that, with the courage of desperation, it dared to create a poetry
of its own; but Beethoven came ever nearer and nearer to poetry, either
by descriptive music or by the
* Über schöne Litteratur und Kunst ii. 33.
† Richard Wagner: Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, Collected Writings,
1st ed. iii. 112.
539 ART
preference given
to vocal compositions. I do not dispute the justification of pure instrumental
music — Lessing expressly guards against any such mistake — I am an enthusiastic
admirer of it, and I regard chamber music (when played in a room, not in
a concert hall) as one of the greatest blessings that enrich our intellectual
life; but I insist that all such music draws its breath from the achievements
of the song, and that every single extension and increase of musical expression
always proceeds from that music, which is subject to the “moral will“ of
the creative poet. We have become aware of this once more in the nineteenth
century. A fact that should not be overlooked, as it often is, when we
are estimating art as a whole, is that, even in the works of so-called
absolute music, the poet always stands, frequently indeed unperceived,
beside the musician. Had this music not grown up under the wing of the
poet, we should be unable to understand it, and even now it cannot dispense
with the poet, it only turns to the listener and begs him to take the place
of the poet, which he can only do so long as music does not leave the sphere
of what is known to him by analogy. Goethe describes it as a general characteristic
of Teutonic poetry in contrast to Hellenic:
-
Hier fordert man Euch
auf zu eigenem Dichten,
-
Von Euch verlangt
man eine Welt zur Welt. *
In no sphere is that
more true than in that of our instrumental music. A really, literally “absolute“
music would be a monster without an equal; for it would be an expression
which expresses nothing.
It is impossible ever to gain a clear conception of our whole artistic
development if we do not first arm ourselves with a critical knowledge
of Teutonic music, in order to turn back to the consideration of poetry
in its widest compass. It is only in this way that Lessing's
* Here you are called to be yourself a poet, / To add a world to the existing
world.
540 ART
remark, “Poetry
and music are one and the same art,“ becomes really intelligible, and that
light is thrown on our whole history of art. In the first place, it is
manifest that we must regard our great musicians as poets if we are to
be just to them and thereby help our own understanding; in the sphere of
Teutonic poetry they occupy a place of honour; no poet in the world is
greater than Johann Sebastian Bach. No art but music could have given artistic
shape to the Christian religion, for it alone could catch up and reflect
the glance into the soul (see p. 512); how poor in this respect
is a Dante in comparison with a Bach! And this specifically Christian character
passes from the works, in which the Gospel finds expression, to other,
purely instrumental ones (an example of the previously mentioned analogous
procedure); the Wohltemperierte Klavier, for example, is in this
respect one of the most sublime works of humanity, and I could name a Prelude
from it, in which the words, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what
they do“ — or rather, not the words but the divine frame of mind which
gave birth to them — have found so clear, so touching an expression that
every other art must despair of ever attaining this pure effect. But what
we here call Christian is at the same time specifically Teutonic, so we
are in a certain sense justified in asserting that our truest and greatest
poets are our great musicians. This is especially true of Germany, where,
as Beethoven has strikingly said, “Music is a national need.“ * At the
same time, we notice in our poetry, even apart from music, a leaning or
rather an irresistible impulse towards development in the musical direction,
an impulse whose deeper meaning becomes clear to us. The introduction of
rhyme, for example, which was unknown to the ancients, is no accident;
it springs from the musical need. Still
* Letter to Privy Councillor von Mosel (cf. Nohl: Briefe Beethoven's,
1865, p. 159).
541 ART
more significant
is the magnificent musical sense which we find in our poets. Read those
two wonderful pages in Carlyle where he shows that Dante's Divina Commedia
is music everywhere; music in the architectonic structure of the three
parts, music not only in the rhythm of the words, but as he says, “in the
rhythm of the thoughts,“ music in the fervour and passion of the feelings;
“go deep enough, there is music everywhere!“ * Our poets are all musicians;
the greater they are, the more manifest does this become. Hence Shakespeare
is a musical artist of inexhaustible wealth, and Calderon in his way no
less so. Just as the learned musical philologist, Westphal, has pointed
out in Bach and Beethoven the most complicated rhythm of the Hellenic stanza,
so in the Spanish drama we find a preference for musically interlaced lines,
we might almost say for tricks of counterpoint. From Petrarch to Byron,
moreover, we notice an inclination on the part of the lyric poet to develop
more and more the purely musical element, and this is due to the felt lack
of music. Regarding Goethe's lyric poems, more than one musician of fine
feeling has said that they could not be composed, they were already in
all respects music. In reality, for a long time we have been in a peculiar
position. Poetry and music are by nature destined to be one and the same
art, and now in the most musical race in the world they have been separated!
The musician, it is true, has developed more and more strength in the strictest
dependence upon poetry, but the song of the word-poet has gradually grown
silent, until his words have come to be mere printed letters, to be read
silently; and so the word-poet has had to save himself either by didactic
subjects or by those circumstantial, impossible descriptions of things,
to which music alone can do justice, or has devoted all his energy to the
task
* Hero-Worship, 3rd Lecture.
542 ART
of creating music
without music. This misrelation has been particularly noticeable in dramatic
art, the living centre of all poetry. “Les poètes dramatiques
sont les poètes par excellence,“ says Montesquieu; * but they
were deprived of the mightiest dramatic instrument of expression just at
the moment when it had attained a power undreamt of before. Herder has
given voice to this in words of touching eloquence: “If a Greek, accustomed
to the musical atmosphere of Greek tragedy, were to go to see ours, he
would find it a melancholy spectacle. How dumb with all the wealth of words,
he would say, how depressing, how toneless! Have I entered an adorned tomb?
You shout and sigh and bluster! You move the arms, make faces, wrangle,
declaim! Does your voice and feeling never burst forth in song? Do you
never feel the want of this all-powerful expression? Does your rhythm,
your iambus, never invite you to utter the accents of the true divine speech?“
† This state of affairs was, and still is, really tragical. Not that an
“absolute poetry,“ which only “supposes“ the musician, as Lessing says,
is not as justifiable as an absolute music — indeed it is much more so;
that is, however, not the point; the important thing is to note that our
natural musical craving, our need of an expression which only music can
give, has forcibly influenced even those poetical works and those poets
who stood apart from music. This has of course been felt most profoundly
in Germany, where music has reached an incomparable development. From the
passages quoted, it is clear how disapprovingly Lessing regarded the void
in Teutonic poetry and how keenly it was felt by Herder. But many a reader
will attach still more value to the sentiments of their great creative
contemporaries. Schiller tells us of himself: “With
* Lettres Persanes, 137.
† Früchte aus den sogenannt goldenen Zeiten des 18. Jahrhunderts,
II. Das Drama.
543 ART
me a certain musical
mood precedes, and after this comes the poetical idea“; * several of his
works are directly inspired by definite musical impressions, the Jungfrau
von Orleans by the production of a work of Gluck. The feeling that
“the drama leans to music“ constantly occupies his mind. In a letter to
Goethe on December 29, 1797, he sifts the matter thoroughly: “In order
to exclude from a work of art all that is alien to its class, we must necessarily
be able to include everything which belongs to the class. And it is just
this that is at present impossible (to the tragic poets) .... The capacity
of feeling which the audience possesses must be fully occupied and affected
at all points; the measure of this capacity is the standard for the poets“;
and at the close of his letter he rests his hope upon music and expects
it to fill up the gap so painfully felt in the modern drama. Music on the
stage he knew only in the shape of opera, and he expected and hoped “that
from it, as from the choruses of the ancient Bacchic festival, tragedy
would develop in a nobler form.“ As for Goethe, the musical element in
his work — I mean what is related to, and saturated with music — reveals
itself forcibly at every step, and without calling attention to the frequent
use of music in his drama, pointed with the stage direction “ahnend
seltene Gefühle“ (expressing intense feeling) and the like, we
could easily prove that even the conception of his plays indicates motives,
principles, and aims which belong to the innerm
