The Art-Work Of The Future Read online

  The Spartan who thus directly carried out in Life his purely human, communistic artwork, instinctively portrayed it also in his Lyric; that most direct expression of joy in self and life, which hardly reached in its impulsive (nothwendig) utterance to Art's self-consciousness. In the prime of the Doric State, the Spartan Lyric bent so irresistibly towards the original basis of all Art, the living Dance, that- characteristically enough !-it has scarcely handed down to us one single literary memento of itself; precisely because it was a pure, physical expression of lovely life, and warded off all separation of the art of Poetry from those of Dance and Tone. Even the transitional stage from the Lyric to the Drama, such as we may recognise in the Epic songs, remained a stranger to the Spartans; and it is sufficiently significant, that the Homeric songs were collected in the Ionic, not the Doric dialect. Whereas the Ionic peoples, and notably in the event, the Athenians, developed themselves into political States under influence of the liveliest mutual intercourse, and preserved in Tragedy the artistic representation of the religion which was melting out of Life: the Spartans, as a shut-off inland people, kept faithful to their old-hellenic character, and held their unmixed Nature-state, as a living monument of art, against the changeful fashionings of the newer life of politics. Whatever in the hurry and confusion of the destructive restlessness of these new times sought rescue or support, now turned its gaze toward Sparta. The Statesman sought to scrutinise the forms of this primeval State, to convey them artificially to the political State of his day; while the Artist, who saw the common artwork of the Tragedy sloughing and crumbling before his very eyes, looked forth to where he might descry the kernel of this artwork, the beauteous old-hellenic (31) man, and preserve it for his art. As Sparta towered up, a living monument of older times: so did the art of Sculpture crystallise in stone the old-hellenic human being which she had recognised within this living monument, and garner up the lifeless monument of bygone beauty for coming times of quickening barbarism.

  But when Athens turned its eyes to Sparta, the worm of general egoism was already gnawing its destructive path into this fair State too. The Peloponnesian War had dragged it, all unwilling, into the whirlpool of the newer times; and Sparta had only been able to vanquish Athens by the very weapons which the Athenians had erewhile made so terrible and unassailable to it. Instead of their simple iron-bars-those tokens of contempt for money, as compared with human worth-the minted gold of Asia was heaped within the Spartan's coffers; leaving behind the ancient, frugal "public mess," he retired to his sumptuous banquet between his own four walls; and the noble love of man to man-whose motive had been an even higher one than that of love to woman-degenerated, as it had already done in the other Hellenic states, into its unnatural counterpart.

  This is the Man, lovely in his person but unlovely in his selfish isolation, that the Sculptor's art has handed down to us in marble and in bronze,-motionless and cold, like a petrified remembrance, like the mummy of the Grecian world.

  This art, the hireling of the rich for the adornment of their palaces, the easier won a troop of practisers as its creative process lent itself to speedy degradation to a mere mechanical labour. Certainly, the subject of the Sculptor's art is Man, that protean host of countless hues of character and myriad passions: but this art depicts alone his outer physical stature, in which there only lies the husk and not the kernel of the human being. True, that the inner man shows out most palpably through all his outward semblance; but this he only does completely in, and by means of; motion. The Sculptor can only seize and reproduce one single moment from all this manifold play of movements, and must leave the real motion itself to be unriddled from the physical relief of the work of art, by a process of mathematical computation. When once the most direct and surest mode of reaching from this poverty of means to a speaking likeness of actual life had been found,-when once the perfect measure of outward human show had been thought into the bronze and marble, and the power to persuade us of the truth of its reflection had been wrested from them,-this method, once discovered, could easily be learned; and Sculpture could live on from imitation to copy ad infinitum, bringing forth her store of products, graceful, beautiful, and true, without receiving any sustenance from real creative force. Thus we find that in the era of the Roman world-empire, when all artistic instinct had long since died away, the art of Sculpture brought a multitude of works to mart in which there seemed to dwell an artist soul, despite their really owing all their being to a mere mechanical gift of imitation. She could become a lovely handicraft when she had ceased to be an art-and the latter she was for only just so long as she had aught to discover, aught to invent. But the repetition of a discovery is nothing more nor less than imitation.

  Through the chinks of the iron-mailed, or monk-cowled, Middle Ages there shone at last the glimmer of the marble flesh of Grecian bodily beauty, and greeted hungry humankind with its first new taste of life. It was in this lovely stone, and not in the actual Life of the ancient world, that the modern was to learn fair Man again. Our modern art of Sculpture sprang from no lively impulse to portray the actual extant man, whom it could scarcely see beneath his modish covering, but from a longing to copy the counterfeit presentment of a physically extinct race of men. It is the expression of an honourable wish to reach back from an unlovely present to the past, and therefrom to reconstruct lost beauty. As the gradual vanishing of human beauty from actual existence was the first cause of the artistic development of Sculpture, which, as though in a last effort to fix the fading image of a common good, would fain preserve it in a monumental token,-so the modern impulse to reproduce those monuments could only find its motive in the total absence of this beauteous man from modern life. Wherefore, since this impulse could never spring from life and find in life its satisfaction, but for ever swayed from monument to monument, from image to image, stone to stone: our Modern Sculpture, a mere plagiarism of the genuine art, was forced to take the character of a craftsman's trade, in which the wealth of rules and canons by which her hand was guided but bared her poverty as art, her utter inability to invent. But while she busily set forth her self and products, in place of vanished beauteous Man,-while, in a sense, her art was only fostered by this lack,-she fell at last into her present selfish isolation, in which she, so to say, but plays the barometer to the ugliness that still prevails in life; and, indeed, with a certain complacent feeling of her-relative-necessity amid such atmospheric conditions.

  Modern Sculpture can only answer to any vestige of a need, for precisely so long as the loveliness of man is not at hand in actual life: the resurrection of this beauty, its immediate influence on the fashioning of life, must inevitably throw down our present "plastics." For the need to which alone this art can answer-nay, the need which she herself concocts-is that which yearns to flee the unloveliness of life; not that which, springing from an actual lovely life, strives toward the exhibition of this life in living artwork. The true, creative, artistic craving proceeds from fulness, not from void: while the fulness of the modern art of Sculpture is merely the wealth of the monuments bequeathed to us by Grecian plastic artists. Now, from this fulness she cannot create, but is merely driven back to it from hack of beauty in surrounding life; she plunges herself within this fulness, in order to escape from lack.

  Thus bare of all inventive power, she coquets at last with the forms to hand in present life, in her despairing attempt to invent-cost what it may. She casts around her the garment of Fashion, and so as to be recognised and rewarded by this life, she models the unbeautiful; in order to be true-that is to say, true according to our notions-she gives up all her hopes of beauty. So, during the continuance of those same conditions which maintain her in her artificial life, Sculpture falls into that wretched, sterile, or ugliness - begetting state in which she must inevitably yearn for nothing but redemption. The life-conditions, however, into which she desires to be released are, rightly measured, the conditions of that very life in presence of which the art of Sculpture must straightway cea
se to be an independent art. To gain the power of creating, she yearns for the reign of loveliness in actual life; from which she merely hopes to win the living matter for her invention. But the fulfilment of this desire could only lay bare the egoism of its indwelling self-delusion; inasmuch as the conditions for the necessary operation of the art of Sculpture must, in any case, he utterly annulled when actual life shall itself be fair of body.

  In present life the independent art of Sculpture but answers to a relative need: although to this she stands indebted for her existence of to-day, nay, for her very prime. But that other state of things, the antithesis of the modern state, is that in which an imperative need for the works of sculptural art cannot be so much as reasonably imagined. If man's whole life pay homage to the principle of beauty, if he make his living body fair to see, rejoicing in the beauty that he himself displays: then is the subject and the matter of the artistic exhibition of this beauty, and of the delight therein, without a doubt the whole warm, living man himself. His art-work is the Drama; and the redemption of Sculpture is just this: the disenchantment of the stone into the flesh and blood of man; out of immobility into motion, out of the monumental into the temporal. Only when the artistic impulse of the Sculptor shall have passed into the soul of the Dancer-the mimetic expositor who sings alike and speaks-can this impulse be conceived as truly satisfied. Only when the statuary's art no longer exists, or rather, has passed along another direction than that of the human body, namely as "sculpture" into "architecture "; (32) when the frozen loneliness of this solitary stone-hewn man shall have been resolved into the endless-streaming multitude of actual living men; when we recall the memory of the beloved dead in ever newborn, soul-filled flesh and blood, and no more in lifeless brass or marble; when we take the stones to build the living Art-work's shrine, and require them no longer for our imaging of living Man,-then first will the true Plastique be at our hand.

  3. THE PAINTER'S ART.

  Just as, when we are denied the pleasure of hearing the symphonic playing of an orchestra, we seek to recall our enjoyment by a pianoforte rendering; just as, when we are no longer permitted to gaze upon the colours of an oil-painting in a picture-gallery, we strive by aid of an engraving to refresh the impression which they have left, (33) so had Painting, if not in her origination, yet in her artistic evolution, to answer to the yearning need of calling back to memory the lost features of the living Human Artwork.

  We must pass by her raw beginnings, when, like Sculpture, she sprang from the as yet unartistic impulse toward the symbolising of religious ideas; for she first attained artistic significance at the epoch when the living artwork of Tragedy was paling, and the brilliant tints of Painting sought to fix the vision of those wondrous, pregnant scenes which no longer offered their immediate warmth of life to the beholder.

  Thus the Grecian artwork solemnised its after-math in Painting. This harvest was not that which sprang by natural necessity from the wealth of Life; its necessity was the rather that of Culture; it issued from a conscious, arbitrary motive, to wit the knowledge of the loveliness of Art, united with the wilful purpose to force, as it were, this loveliness to linger in a life to which it no longer belonged instinctively as the unconscious, necessary expression of that life's inmost soul. That Art which, unbidden and of her own accord, had blossomed from the communion of the People's life, had likewise by her active presence, and through the regardal of her demeanour, called up the mental concept (Begriff) of her essence; for it was not the idea of Art that had summoned her to life, but herself; the actual breathing Art, had evolved the "Idea" from out herself.

  The artistic power of the Folk, thrusting forward with all the necessity of a nature-force, was dead and buried; what it had done, lived only now in memory, or in the artificial reproduction. Whereas the Folk, in all its actions and especially in its self-wrought destruction of national, pent-up insularity, has through all time proceeded by the law of inner necessity, and thus in thorough harmony with the majestic evolution of the human race: the lonely spirit of the Artist-to whose yearning for the beautiful the unbeauteous manifestments of the People's life-stress must ever stay a dark enigma-could only console itself by looking backward to the artwork of a bygone era, and, recognising the impossibility of arbitrarily relivening that artwork, could only make this solace as lasting as might be, by freshening up with lifelike details the harvest of its recollections,-just as through a portrait we preserve to our memory the features of a loved lost friend. Hereby Art herself became an object of art; the "idea" derived from her became her law; and cultured art-the art that can be learnt, and always points back to itself-began its life-career. The latter, as we may see to-day, can be pursued without a halt in the least artistic times and amid the most sordid circumstances,-yet only for the selfish pleasure of isolated, life-divorced, and art-repining Culture.-

  The senseless attempt to reconstruct the Tragic Artwork by purely imitative reproduction-such as was engaged in, for instance, by the poets of the Alexandrian court-was most advantageously avoided by Painting; for she gave up the lost as lost, and answered the impulse to restore it by the cultivation of a special, and peculiar, artistic faculty of man. Though this faculty required a greater variety of media for its operation, yet Painting soon won a marked advantage over Sculpture. The sculptor's work displayed the material likeness of the whole man in lifelike form, and, thus far, stood nearer to the living artwork of self-portraying man than did the painter's work, which was only able to render, so to speak, his tinted shadow. As in both counterfeits, however, the breath of Life was unattainable, and motion could only be indicated to the thought of the spectator, to whose phantasy its conceivable extension must be left to be worked out by certain natural laws of inductive reasoning,-so Painting, in that she looked still farther aside from the reality, and depended still more on artistic illusion than did Sculpture, was able to take a more ideal poetic flight than she. Finally, Painting was not obliged to content herself with the representation of this one man, or of that particular group or combination to which the art of Statuary was restricted; rather, the artistic illusion became so preponderant a necessity to her, that she had not only to draw into the sphere of her portrayal a wealth of correlated human groups extended both in length and breadth, but also the circle of their extrahuman surroundings, the scenes of Nature herself. Hereon is based an entirely novel step in the evolution of man's artistic faculties, both perceptive and executive: namely, that of the inner comprehension and reproduction of Nature, by means of Landscape-painting.

  This moment is of the highest importance for the whole range of plastic art: it brings this art-which began, in Architecture, with the observation and artistic exploitation of Nature for the benefit of Man,-which in Sculpture, as though for the deification of Man, exalted him as its only subject-to its complete conclusion, by turning it at last, with ever growing understanding, entirely back from Man to Nature; and this inasmuch as it enabled plastic art to take her by the hand of intimate friendship, and thus, as it were, to broaden Architecture out to a full and lifelike portraiture of Nature. Human Egoism, which in naked Architecture was forever referring Nature to its own exclusive self; to some extent broke up in Landscape-painting, which vindicated Nature's individual rights and prompted artistic Man to loving absorption into her, in order there to find himself again, immeasurably amplified.

  When Grecian painters sought to fix the memory of the scenes which had erstwhile been presented to their actual sight and hearing in the Lyric, in the lyrical Epos, and in the Tragedy, and to picture them again in outline and in colour-without a doubt they considered men alone as worthy objects of their exhibition; and it is to the so-called historical tendency that we owe the raising of Painting to her first artistic height. As she thus preserved the united artwork green in memory, so when the conditions that summoned forth the passionate preservation of these memories vanished quite away, there yet remained two byways open, along which the art of Painting could carry on her further in
dependent self-development: the Portrait and-the Landscape. True, that Landscape had already been appropriated for the necessary background of the scenes from Homer and the Tragic poets: but at the time of their painting's prime the Greeks looked on landscape with no other eye than that with which the peculiar bent of the Grecian character had caused them to regard the whole of Nature. With the Greeks, Nature was merely the distant background of the human being: well in the foreground stood Man himself; and the Gods to whom he assigned the force controlling Nature were anthropomorphic gods. He sought to endue everything he saw in Nature with human shape and human being; as humanised, she had for him that endless charm in whose enjoyment it was impossible for his sense of beauty to look on her from such a standpoint as that of our modern Judaistic utilism, and make of her a mere inanimate object of his sensuous pleasure. However, he but cherished this beautiful relationship between himself and Nature from an involuntary error: in his anthropomorphosis of Nature he credited her with human motives which, necessarily contrasted with the true character of Nature, could be only arbitrarily assumed as operating within her.

  As Man, in all his life and all his relations to Nature, acts from a necessity peculiar to his own being, he unwittingly distorts her character when he conceives Nature as behaving not according to her own necessity but to that of Man. Although this error took a beauteous form among the Greeks, while among other races, especially those of Asia, its utterances were for the most part hideous, it was none the less destructive in its influence on Hellenic life. When the Hellenian broke adrift from his ancestral bond of national communion, when he lost the standard of life's beauty that he had drawn from it instinctively, he was unable to replace this needful standard by one derived from a correct survey of surrounding Nature. He had unconsciously perceived in Nature a coherent, encompassing Necessity for just so long as this same Necessity came before his consciousness as a ground condition of his communal life. But when the latter crumbled into its egoistic atoms, when the Greek was ruled by naught but the caprice of his own selfwill, no longer harmonised by brotherhood, or eventually submitted to an arbitrary outer force that gained its leverage from this general selfwill,-then with his faulty knowledge of Nature, whom he deemed as capricious as himself and the worldly might that governed him, he lacked the certain standard by which he could have learnt to measure out himself again; that standard which Nature offers as their highest boon to those men who recognise her innermost necessity and learn to know the eternal harmony of her creative forces, working in widest compass through every separate unit.