The Art-Work Of The Future Page 5

  This art has therefore no love-need; she can only take, but not give. She draws all foreign life-stuff into herself, disintegrates and devours it, assimilating it with her own unfruitful being; but cannot blend herself with any element whose life is based on grounds outside her, because she cannot give herself.

  Thus does our modern Dance attempt in Pantomime the task of Drama. Like every isolated, egoistic branch of art, she fain would be all things unto herself, and reign in lonely all-sufficiency. She would picture men and human haps, conditions, conflicts, characters and motives, without employing that faculty by which man first attains completion,-Speech. She would poetise, without the faintest comradeship with Poetry. And what does she breed, in this demure exclusiveness and "independence"? The most utterly dependent and cripple-like monstrosity: men who cannot talk; and not forsooth since some mischance has robbed them of the gift of speech, but since their stubborn choice forbids their speaking; actors whose release from some unholy spell we look for every moment, if only they could gain the courage to end the painful stammering of their Gestures by a wholesome spoken Word, but whom the rules and prescripts of pantomimic art forbid to dishallow by one natural syllable the unflecked sense of Dance's self-dependence.

  And yet so lamentably dependent is this absolute dumb Spectacle, that in its happiest moments it only ventures to concern itself with dramatic stuffs that require to enter on no relations with the human reason,-nay, even in the most favourable of such cases, still sees itself compelled to the ignominious expedient of acquainting the spectators with its particular intention by means of an explanatory programme !

  Yet herewith is undeniably manifested the remnant of Dance's noblest effort; she would still at least be somewhat, and soars upward to the yearning for the highest work of Art, the Drama; she seeks to withdraw from the wanton gaze of frivolity, and clutches after some artistic veil wherewith to cloak her shameful nakedness. But into what a dishonouring dependence must she cast herself, in the very manifestment of this effort! With what pitiable distortion must she expiate the vain desire for unnatural self-dependence! She, without whose highest and most individual help the highest, noblest Art-work cannot attain to show, must-severed from the union of her sisters-take refuge from prostitution in absurdity, from absurdity in prostitution!- O glorious Dance! O shameful Dance!-

  4. THE ART OF TONE.

  The ocean binds and separates the land: so does Music bind and separate the two opposite poles of human Art, the arts of Dance and Poetry.

  She is the heart of man; the blood, which takes this heart for starting-point, gives to the outward-facing flesh its warm and lively tint, - while it feeds the inward-coursing brain-nerves with its welling pulse. Without the heart's activity, the action of the brain would be no more than of a mere automaton; the action of the body's outer members, a mechanical and senseless motion. Through the heart the understanding feels itself allied with the whole body, and the man of mere 'five-senses' mounts upwards to the energy of Reason.

  But the organ of the heart is tone; its conscious speech, the art of Tone. She is the full and flowing heart-love, that ennobles the material sense of pleasure, and humanises immaterial thought. Through Tone are Dance and Poetry brought to mutual understanding: in her are intercrossed in loving blend the laws by which they each proclaim their own true nature; in her, the wilfulness of each becomes instinctive 'Will' ("Unwillkürlichen"), the Measure of Poetry and the Beat of Dance become the undictated Rhythm of the Heart-throb.)

  Does she receive from her sisters the conditions under which she manifests herself, so does she give them back to them in infinite embellishment, as the conditions of their own enunciation. If Dance conveys to Tone her own peculiar law of motion, so does Tone bring it back to her with soul and sense embodied in her Rhythm, for the measure of more noble, more intelligible motion. If Tone obtains from Poetry her pregnant coil of sharp-cut Words, entwined by meaning and by measure, and takes it as a solid mesh of thought wherewith to gird her boundless fluid mass of sound: so does she hand her sister back this ideal coil of yearning syllables, that indirectly shadow forth in images, but cannot yet express their thought with all the truth and cogence of necessity,-and hands it as the direct utterance of Feeling, the unerring vindicator and redeemer, Melody.

  In Rhythm and in Melody, ensouled by Tone, both Dance and Poetry regain their own true essence, materialised and endlessly enhanced and beautified; and thus they learn to know and love themselves. But melody and rhythm are the arms of Tone, with which she locks her sisters in the close embrace of triple growth; they are the shores through which the sea, herself, unites two continents. If this sea draws backward from the shores, and broadens out the waste of an abyss between itself and each of them, then can no light-winged ship bear aught from either continent unto the other; forever must they rest dissundered,-until some outcome of machinery, perchance a railroad, shall bridge the waste! Then men shall start therefrom, forsooth upon their steamboats, to cross the open sea; the breath of all-enlivening breezes replaced by sickening fumes from the machine. Blow the winds of heaven eastward: what matters it ?-the machine shall clatter westward, or wherever else. men choose to go. Even as the dance-wright fetches from the continent of Poetry, across the steam-tamed ocean crests of Music, the programme for his novel ballet; while the play-concoctor imports from the far-off continent of Dance just so much leg-gymnastics as he deems expedient for filling up a halting situation.-

  Let us see, then, what has come to sister Tone, since the death of all-loving father, Drama!-

  We cannot yet give up our simile of the Ocean, for picturing Tone's nature. If Melody and Rhythm are the shores through which the art of Tone lays fruitful hands upon twain continents of art, allied to her of yore: so is Sound itself her fluent, native element, and its immeasurable expanse of waters make out the sea of Harmony. The eye knows but the surface of this sea; its depth the depth of Heart alone can fathom. Upwards from its lightless bottom it expands into a sun-bright mirror; the ever-widening rings of Rhythm cross over on it from one shore; from the shady valleys of the other arise the yearning zephyrs that rouse this restful surface to the grace of' swelling, sinking waves of Melody.

  Man dives into this sea; only to give himself once more, refreshed and radiant, to the light of day. His heart feels widened wondrously, when he peers down into this depth, pregnant with unimaginable possibilities whose bottom his eye shall never plumb, whose seeming bottomlessness thus fills him with the sense of marvel and the presage of Infinity. It is the depth and infinity Qf Nature herself, who veils from the prying eye of Man the unfathomable womb of her eternal Seed-time, her Begetting, and her Yearning; even because man's eye can only grasp the already manifested, the Blossom, the Begotten, the Fulfilled. This Nature is, however, none other than the nature of the human heart itself, which holds within its shrine the feelings of desire and love in their most infinite capacity; which is itself Desire and Love, and-as in its insatiable longing it yet wills nothing but itself-can only grasp and comprehend itself.

  If this sea stir up its waters of itself, if it beget the ground of its commotion from the depths of its own element: then is this agitation an endless one and never pacified; for ever returning on itself unstilled, and ever roused afresh by its eternal longing. But if the vast reach of this Desire be kindled by an outward object; if this measure-giving object step toward it from the sure and sharply outlined world of manifestment; if sun-girt, slender, blithely-moving Man incend the flame of this desire by the lightning of his glancing eye,-if he ruffle with his swelling breath the elastic crystal of the sea, - then let the fire crackle as it may, let the ocean's bosom heave with ne'er so violent a storm: yet the flame at last, when its wild glow has smouldered down, will shine with mild serenity of light,-the sea-rind, the last foam-wreath of its giant crests dissolved, will crisp itself at last to the soft play of rippling waves; and Man, rejoicing in the sweet harmony of his whole being, will entrust himself to the beloved element in some frail c
oracle, and steer his steadfast course towards the beacon of that kindly light.-

  The Greek, when he took ship upon his sea, ne'er let the coast line fade from sight: for him it was the trusty stream that bore him from one haven to the next, the stream on which he passed between the friendly strands amidst the music of his rhythmic oars,-here lending glances to the wood-nymphs' dance, there bending ear to sacred hymns whose melodious string of meaning words was wafted by the breezes from the temple on the mountain-top. On the surface of the water were truly mirrored back to him the jutting coasts, with all their peaks and valleys, trees and flowres and men, deep-set within the aether's blue; and this undulating mirror-picture, softly swayed by the fresh fan of gentle gusts, he deemed was Harmony.-

  The Christian left the shores of Life.-Farther afield, beyond all confines, he sought the sea,-to find himself at last upon the Ocean, twixt sea and heaven, boundlessly alone. The Word, the word of Faith was his only compass; and it pointed him unswervingly toward Heaven. This heaven brooded far above him, it sank down on every side in the horizon, and fenced his sea around. But the sailor never reached that confine; from century to century he floated on without redemption, towards this ever imminent, but never reached, new home; until he fell a-doubting of the virtue of his compass, and cast it, as the last remaining human bauble, grimly overboard. And now, denuded of all ties, he gave himself without a rudder to the never-ending turmoil of the waves' caprice. In unstilled, ireful love-rage, he stirred the waters of the sea against the unattainable and distant heaven: he urged the insatiate greed of that desire and love which, reft of an external object, must ever only crave and love itself,-that deepest, unredeemable hell of restless Egoism, which stretches out without an end, and wills and wishes, yet ever and forever can only wish and will itself,-he urged it 'gainst the abstract universalism of heaven's blue, that universal longing without the shadow of an 'object '-against the very vault of absolute un-objectivity. (Bliss, unconditioned bliss,-to gain in widest, most unbounded measure the height of bliss, and yet to stay completely wrapt in self: this was the unallayable desire of Christian passion.') So reared the sea from out its deepest depth to heaven, so sank it ever back again to its own depths; ever its unmixed self, and therefore ever unappeased,-like the all-usurping, measureless desire of the heart that ne'er will give itself and dare to be consumed in an external object, but damns itself to everlasting selfish solitude.

  Yet in Nature each immensity strives after Measure; the unconfined draws bounds around itself; the elements condense at last to definite show; and even the boundless sea of Christian yearning found the new shore on which its turbid waves might break. Where on the farthest horizon we thought to find the ever made-for, never happed-on gateway into the realms of Heaven unlimited, there did the boldest of all seafarers discover land at last,-man-tenanted, real, and blissful land. Through his discovery the wide ocean is now not only meted out, but made for men an inland sea, round which the coasts are merely broadened out in unimaginably ampler circle. Did Columbus teach us to take ship across the ocean, and thus to bind in one each continent of Earth; did his world-historical discovery convert the narrow-seeing national-man into a universal and all-seeing Man: so, by the hero who explored the broad and seeming shoreless sea of absolute Music unto its very bounds, are won the new and never dreamt-of coasts which this sea no longer now divorces from the old and primal continent of man, but binds together with it for the new-born, happy art-life of the Manhood of the Future. And this hero is none other than-Beet hoven.-

  When Tone unloosed her from the chain of sisters, she took as her unrehinquishable, her foremost life's-condition-just as light-minded sister Dance had filched from her her rhythmic measure-from thoughtful sister Poetry her Word; yet not the human-breathing spirit of the musing ("dichtende") word, but only its bare corporeal condensation ("verdichtete") into tones. As she had abandoned her rhythmic beat to parting Dance's use and pleasure, she thenceforth built upon the Word alone; the word of Christian Creed, that toneless, fluid, scattering word which, un-withstanding and right gladly, soon gave to her complete dominion over it. But the more this word evaporated into the mere stammer of humility, the mere babbling of implicit, childlike love, so much the more imperatively did Tone see herself impelled to shape herself from out the exhaustless depths of her own liquid nature. The struggle for such shaping is the building up of Harmony.

  Harmony grows from below upwards as a perpendicular pillar, by the joining-together and overlaying of correlated tone-stuffs. Unceasing alternation of such columns, each freshly risen member taking rank beside its fellows, constitutes the only possibility of absolute harmonic movement 'in breadth,' The feeling of needful care for the beauty of this motion 'in breadth' is foreign to the nature of absolute Harmony; she knows but the beauty of her columns' changing play of colour, but not the grace of their marshalling in point of 'time,'-for that is the work of Rhythm. On the other hand, the inexhaustible variety of this play of colours is the ever-fruitful source on which she draws, with immoderate self-satisfaction, to show herself in constant change of garb; while the life-breath which en-souls and sets in motion this restless, capricious, and self-conditioning change, is the essence of elemental tone itself, the outbreathing of an unfathomable, all-dominating heart's-desire. In the kingdom of Harmony there is therefore no beginning and no end; just as the objectless and self-devouring fervour of the soul, all ignorant of its source, is nothing but itself; nothing but longing, yearning, tossing, pining-and dying out, i.e. dying without having assuaged itself in any 'object'; thus dying without death, (11) and therefore everlasting falling back upon itself.

  So long as the Word was in power, it commanded both beginning and ending; but when it was engulfed in the bottomless depths of Harmony, when it became naught but "groanings and sighings of the soul," (12)-as on the ardent summit of the music of the Catholic Church,-then was the word capriciously hoisted to the capitals of those harmonic columns, of that unrhythmic melody, and cast as though from wave to wave; while the measureless harmonic possibilities must draw from out themselves the laws for their own finite manifestment. There is no other artistic faculty of man that answers to the character of Harmony: it cannot find its mirror in the physical precision of the movements of the body, nor in the logical induction of the thinking brain,-it cannot set up for itself its standard in the recognised necessity of the material world of show, like Thought, nor like corporeal Motion in the periodic calculation of its instinctive, physically governed properties: it is like a nature-force which men perceive but cannot comprehend. Summoned by outer-not by inner-necessity to resolve on surer and more finite manifestment, Harmony must mould from out its own immensurate depths the laws for its own following. These laws of harmonic sequence, based on the nature of Affinity,-just as those harmonic columns, the chords, were formed by the affinity of tone-stuffs,-unite themselves into one standard, which sets up salutary bounds around the giant playground of capricious possibilities. They allow the most varied choice from amid the kingdom of harmonic families, and extend the possibility of union by elective-affinity ("Wahlverwandschaftliche Verbindungen") with the members of neighbouring families, almost to free liking ; they demand, however, before all a strict observance of the house-laws of affinity of the family once chosen, and a faithful tarrying with it, for sake of a happy end. But this end itself, and thus the measure of the composition's extension in time, the countless laws of harmonic decorum can neither give nor govern. As the scientifically teachable or learnable department of the art of Tone, they can cleave the fluid tonal masses of Harmony asunder, and part them into fenced-off bodies; but they cannot assign the periodic measure of these fenced-off masses.

  When the limit-setting might of Speech was swallowed up, and yet the art of Tone, now turned to Harmony, could never find her time-assigning law within herself: then was she forced to face towards the remnant of the rhythmic beat that Dance had left for her to garner. Rhythmic figures must now enliven harmony; their change, th
eir recurrence, their parting and uniting, must condense the fluid breadths of Harmony-as Word had earlier done with Tone-and bring their periods to more sure conclusion. But no inner necessity, striving after purely human exposition, lay at the bottom of this rhythmic livening; not the feeling, thinking, will-ing Man, such as proclaims himself by speech and bodily motion, was its motive power; nothing but an outer necessity, which Harmony, in struggle for her selfish close, had taken up into herself. This rhythmic interchange and shaping, which moved not of its inner, own necessity, could therefore only borrow life from arbitrary laws and canons. These laws and canons are those of Counterpoint.