The Art-Work Of The Future Read online

  As the Asiatic, that perpetual thrall of Nature, could only show the majesty of man in the one and absolute ruling despot, so did he heap all pomp of circumstance around this "God on earth" alone: and all this heaping-up was merely reckoned for the satisfaction of that egoistic sensuous longing which, even to the pitch of brutish fury, but wills itself but loves itself to madness, and in such never-sated appetite piles object upon object, mass on mass, in order to attain a final satisfaction of its prodigiously developed physicality. Luxury, therefore, is the root of all the Asiatic architecture: its monstrous, soulless sense-confounding outcrop we witness in the city-seeming palaces of Asiatic despots.

  Sweet repose and noble charm breathe on us, on the other hand, from the radiant aspect of Hellenic temples; in which we recognise the form of Nature, but spiritualised by human Art. The broadening of the temple of the Gods to the assembled People's show-place of the highest human art, was the Theatre. Herein Art, and verily that common-nurtured art which communed with a commonwealth, was a law and standard to herself; proceeding by her own Necessity and answering that necessity to the fullest, - nay, bringing forth therefrom the boldest and most marvellous creations.

  Meanwhile the dwellings of the individual units but answered to the need from which they sprang. Originally carpentered of wooden logs, and fitted--like the pavilion of Achilles-in accordance with the simplest laws of usefulness: in the heyday of Hellenic culture they were indeed adorned with walls of polished stone, and duly broadened out to give free space for hospitality; but they never stretched themselves beyond the natural needs of private persons, and neither in nor by them did the individual seek to satisfy a longing, which he found appeased in noblest fashion in the common polity; from which alone, at bottom, it can spring.

  The attitude of Architecture was entirely reversed, when the common bonds of public life dissolved, and the self-indulgence of the unit laid down her laws. When the private person no longer sacrificed to gods in common, to Zeus and to Apollo, but solely to the lonely bliss-purveyor Plutus, the God of Riches,-when each would be for his particular self what he had erstwhile only been amid the general community,-then did he take the architect also into his pay, and bade him build a temple for his idol, Egoism. But the slender temple of chaste Athene sufficed not the rich egoist for his private pleasures: his household goddess was Voluptuousness, with her all-devouring, never sated maw. To her must Asiatic piles be reared, for her consumption; and only bizarre curves and flourishes could seek to stanch her whim. Thus we see the despotism of Asia stretching out its beauty-crushing arms into the very heart of Europe-as though in vengeance for Alexander's conquest-and exercising its might to such effect beneath the imperial rule of Rome, that Beauty, having fled completely from the living conscience of mankind, could now be only conned from memory of the past.

  The most prosperous centuries of the Roman era present us, therefore, with the repugnant spectacle of pomp swelled up to a monstrosity in the palaces of the Emperors and richer classes, and Utilitarianism-however colossal in its proportions - stalking naked through the public buildings.

  Public life, having sunk to a mere general expression of the universal egoism, had no longer any care for the beautiful; it now knew naught but practical utility. The beautiful had withdrawn in favour of the absolutely useful; for the delight in man had contracted to the exclusive lust of the belly. To speak plainly, it is to the satisfaction of the belly that all this public utilitarianism (28) leads back, especially in our modern time with its boasted practical inventions, this time which-characteristically enough !- the more it invents, in this sense, the less is able to really fill the stomachs of the hungering classes. But where men had forgotten that the truly beautiful is likewise the highest expression of the useful, in so much as it can only manifest itself in life when the needs of life are secured a natural satisfaction, and not made harder, or interdicted, by useless prescripts of utility,-where the public care was concentrated on the catering for food and drink, and the utmost stilling of this care proclaimed itself as the vital condition of the rule of Caesars and of plutocrats alike; and that in such gigantic measure as during the Roman mastery of the world :-there arose those astounding causeways and aqueducts which we seek to-day to rival by our railway-tracks; there did Nature become a milch-cow, and Architecture a milking-pail; the wanton splendour of the rich lived on the skilful skimming of the cream from off the gathered milk, which then was taken, blue and watery, along those aqueducts to the beloved rabble.

  Yet with the Romans this utilitarian toil and moil, this ostentation, put on imposing forms: the radiant world of Greece lay not so far from them but that, for all their practical stolidity and all their Asiatic gaudiness, they still could cast an ogling glance towards her; so that our eyes discern, and rightly, outspread o'er all the buildings of the Roman world a majestic charm which almost seems to us a beauty. But whatever has accrued to us from that same world, across the steeples of the Middle Ages, lacks both the charm of beauty and of majesty; for where we still may trace a gloomy shade of undelighting majesty, as in the colossal domes of our cathedrals, we see alas! no longer any drop of beauty. The genuine temples of our modern religion, the buildings of the Bourse, are certainly most ingenuously propped by Grecian columns; Greek tympana invite us to our railroad journeys; and from under the Athenian Parthenon the military guard is marched towards us, on its 'relief,'-but however elevating these exceptions may be, they are still but mere exceptions, and the rule of our utilitarian architecture is desperately vile and trivial. Let the modern Art of Building bring forth the gracefullest and most imposing edifice she can, she still can never keep from sight her shameful want of independence: for our public, as our private, needs are of such a kind that, in order to supply them, Architecture can never produce, but forever merely copy, merely piece together. Only a real need makes man inventive: whilst the real need of our present era asserts itself in the language of the rankest utilitarianism; therefore it can only get its answer from mechanical contrivances, and not from Art's creations. That which lies beyond this actual need, however, is with us the need of Luxury, of the un-needful; and it is only by the superfluous and un-needful that Architecture can serve it-i.e. she reproduces the buildings which earlier epochs had produced from their felt need of beauty; she pieces together the individual details of these works, according to her wanton fancy; out of a restless longing for alteration, she stitches every national style of building throughout the world into her motley, disconnected botches; in short-she follows the caprice of Fashion, whose frivolous laws she needs must make her own because she nowhere hears the call of inner, beautiful Necessity.

  Architecture has thus to share in all the humbling destiny of the divided humanistic arts; insomuch as she can only be incited to a true formative process by the need of men who manifest, or long to manifest, their inborn beauty. In step with the withering of Grecian Tragedy, her fall began; that is, her own peculiar productive power commenced to weaken. The most lavish of the monuments which she was forced to rear to the glory of the colossal egoism of later times-aye, even of that of the Christian faith-seem, when set beside the lofty simplicity and pregnant meaning of Grecian buildings at the flowering-time of Tragedy, like the rank, luxuriant parasites of some midnight dream, against the radiant progeny of the cleansing, all-enlivening light of day.

  Only together with the redemption of the egoistically severed humanistic arts into the collective Art-work of the Future, with the redemption of utilitarian man himself into the artistic manhood of the Future, will Architecture also be redeemed from the bond of serfdom, from the curse of barrenness, into the freest, inexhaustible fertility of art-resource.

  2. THE ART OF SCULPTURE.

  Asiatics and Egyptians, in their representation of the nature-forces that governed them, had passed from the delineation of the forms of beasts to that of the human figure itself; under which, although in immoderate proportions and disfigured by repugnant symbolism, they now sought to picture
to themselves those forces. They had no wish to copy man; but since man, at bottom, can only conceive the highest in his own generic form, they involuntarily transferred the human stature-distorted for this very reason-to the objects of their nature-worship.

  In this sense, and from a similar impulse, we also see the oldest Hellenic races portraying their gods, i.e., their deified embodiments of nature-forces, under the human shapes they hewed from wood or stone for objects of their worship. The religious need for objectification of invisible, adored or dreaded godlike powers, was answered by the oldest Sculptural art through the shaping of natural substances to imitate the human form; just as Architecture answered an immediate human need by the fitting and framing of natural.' stuffs' into what we may call a condensation of Nature's features to suit the special aim: as, for instance, we may recognise in the God's-temple the condensed presentment of the God's-grove. Now we have seen that if the man whose purpose informed the builder's art had no thought for aught but the immediate practical use, then this art could only stay a handiwork, or return thereto; while if, on the contrary, he were an artist and set himself in the forefront of this purpose, as the man who had already become the subject and the matter of his own artistic treatment, he also raised the building-handicraft to Art. In like manner, so long as Man felt bound in brutish slavery to Nature, he might indeed conceive the objects of his nature-worship under the guise of a human form, but could only shape their plastic images according to the standard by which he measured himself namely in the garb and with the attributes of that Nature on whom he felt so brutishly dependent. But in measure as he raised himself his own uncrippled body, and his inborn human faculties, to the stuff and purport of his artistic handling, he gained the power to also show his Gods in the image of a free, uncrippled human form; until at last he frankly set before himself:, in highest glee, this beauteous human shape itself as nothing but the likeness of a man.

  Here we touch the fatal ridge on which the living Human Artwork splintered, and left its fragments to linger through an artificial life of petrefaction in the monumental fixity of Plastic art. The discussion of this vital question we have been forced to reserve for our present exposition of the art of Sculpture.-

  The first and earliest association of men was the work of Nature. The purely tribal fellowship, i.e., the circle of all those who claimed descent from a common ancestor and the lineal seed of his loins, is the original bond of union of every race of people that we meet in history. This tribal stem preserves in its traditional Sagas, as in an ever lively memory, the instinctive knowledge of its common ancestry: while the impressions derived from the particular natural features of its surroundings exalt these legendary recollections to the rank of religious ideas. Now, in however manifold accretion these ideas and reminiscences may have heaped themselves together and crowded into novel forms, among the quickest-witted historical nations, owing to racial admixture on the one hand, and on the other to change of natural surroundings as the result of tribal migration, - however broadly, in their Sagas and religions, these peoples may have stretched the narrowing bands of nationality, so that the idea of their own particular origin was expanded to the theory of a universal descent and derivation of men in general from their Gods, as from the Gods in general,-yet in every epoch and every land where Myth and Religion have flourished in the lively faith of any racial stem, the peculiar bond of union of this particular stem has always lain in its specific myth and its particular religion. The Hellenic races solemnised the joint memorial celebration of their common descent in their religious feasts, i.e., in the glorification and adoration of the God or Hero in whose being they felt themselves included as one common whole. Finally and with the greatest truth to life-as though from a felt need to fix with utmost definition their recollection of what was ever dropping farther back into the past-they materialised their national traditions in their Art, and most directly in that full-fledged work of art, the Tragedy. The lyric and the dramatic art-works were each a religious act: but there was already evinced in this act, when compared with the simple primitve religious rite, a taint of artificial effort; the effort, namely, to bring forward of set purpose that common memory which had already lost its immediate living impress on the life of every day. Thus Tragedy was the religious rite become a work of Art, by side of which the traditional observance of the genuine religious temple-rite was necessarily docked of so much of its inwardness and truth that it became indeed a mere conventional and soulless ceremony, whereas its kernel lived on in the Art-work.

  In the highly important matter of the externals of the religious act, the tribal fellowship shows its communal character by certain ancestral usages, by certain forms and garments. The garb of Religion is, so to speak, the costume of the Race by which it mutually recognises itself, and that at the first glance. This garment, hallowed by the use of ages, this- in a manner-religio-social conventiona had shifted from the religious to the artistic rite, the Tragedy; in it and by it the Tragic actor embodied the familiar, reverenced figure of the People's fellowship. It was by no means the mere vastness of the theatre and the distance of the audience, that prescribed the heightening of the human stature by the cothurnus, or, precisely, that admitted the employment of the immobile tragic mask ;-but the cothurnus and the mask were necessary, religiously significant attributes which, accompanied by other symbolical tokens, first gave to the performer his weighty character of Priest. Now where a religion, commencing to fade from daily life and wholly withdrawing from its political aspect, is discernible by its outer garb alone, but this garment, as with the Athenians, can only now take on the folds of actual Life when it forms the investiture of Art: there must this actual life at last confess itself the core of that religion, by frankly throwing off its last disguise. But the core of the Hellenic religion, the centre round which its whole system revolved, and which instinctively asserted its exclusive rule in actual life, was: Man. It was for Art to formulate aloud this plain confession: she did it, when she cast aside the last concealing garment of Religion, and showed its core in simple nakedness, the actual bodily man.

  Yet this unveiling was alike the final annihilation of the collective Artwork: for its bond of union had been that very garment of Religion. While the contents of the common mythical religion, the traditional subject of Dramatic art, were employed to point the poet's moral, developed to fit his purpose, and finally disfigured by his selfwilled fancy, the religious belief had already disappeared completely from the life of the Folk-fellowship, now only linked by political interests. This belief however, the honour paid to national Gods, the sure assumption of the truth of primal race-traditions, had formed the bond of all community. Was this now rent and hooted as a heresy, at least the core of that religion had come to light as unconditioned, actual, naked Man; but this Man was no longer the associate man, united by the bond of racial fellowship: only the absolute, egoistic, solitary unit, - man beautiful and naked, but loosed from the beauteous bond of brotherhood.

  From here on, from the shattering of the Greek religion, from the wreck of the Grecian Nature-State, and its resolution into the Political State,-from the splintering of the common Tragic A rtwork,-the manhood of world-history begins with measured tread its new gigantic march of evolution, from the fallen natural kinsmanship of national community to the universal fellowship of all mankind. The band which the full-fledged Man, coming to consciousness in the national Hellenian, disrupted as a cramping fetter- with this awakened consciousness-must now expand into a universal girdle embracing all mankind. The period from that point of time down to our own to-day is, therefore, the history of absolute Egoism; and the end of this period will be its redemption into Communism. (29)

  The art which has taken this solitary, egoistic, naked Man, the point of departure of the said world-historical period, and set him up before us as a beauteous monument of admonition-is the art of Sculpture, which reached its height exactly at the time when the conjoint human art-work of Tragedy declined from its merid
ian.-

  The beauty of the human body was the foundation ot all Hellenic Art, nay even of the natural State. We know that with the noblest of Hellenic stems, the Doric Spartans, the healthiness and unmarred beauty of the newborn child made out the terms on which alone it was allowed to live, while puling deformity was denied the right of life. This beauteous naked man is the kernel of all Spartanhood: from genuine delight in the beauty of the most perfect human body, that of the male, arose that spirit of comradeship which pervades and shapes the whole economy of the Spartan State. This love of man to man, in its primitive purity, proclaims itself as the noblest and least selfish utterance of man's sense of beauty, for it teaches man to sink and merge his entire self in the object of his affection. And exactly in degree as woman, in perfected womanhood, through love to man and sinking of herself within his being, has developed the manly element of that womanhood and brought it to a thorough balance with the purely womanly, and thus in measure as she is no longer merely man's beloved but his friend-can man find fullest satisfaction in the hove of woman. (30)

  The higher element of that love of man to man consisted even in this: that it excluded the motive of egoistic physicalism. Nevertheless it not only included a purely spiritual bond of friendship, but this spiritual friendship was the blossom and the crown of the physical friendship. The latter sprang directly from delight in the beauty, aye, in the material, bodily beauty of the beloved comrade; yet this delight was no egoistic yearning, but a thorough stepping out of self into unreserved sympathy with the comrade's joy in himself involuntarily betrayed by his life-glad, beauty-prompted bearing. This love, which had its basis in the noblest pleasures of both eye and soul-not like our modern postal correspondence of sober friendship, half businesslike, half sentimental-was the Spartan's only tutoress of youth, the never aging instructress alike of boy and man, the ordainer of the common feasts and valiant enterprises; nay, the inspiring helpmeet on the battlefield. For this it was that knit the fellowships of love into battalions of war and forewrote the tactics of death-daring, in rescue of the imperilled or vengeance for the slaughtered comrade, by the infrangible laws of the soul's most natural necessity.-