The decline of the West

I
ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL

I
ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL

I

Every professed philosopherphilosopher is forced to believe, without serious examination, in the existence of a Something that in his opinion is capable of being handled by the reason, for his whole spiritual existence depends on the possibility of such a Something. For every logician and psychologist, therefore, however sceptical he may be, there is a point at which criticism falls silent and faith begins, a point at which even the strictest analytical thinker must cease to employ his method—the point, namely, at which analysis is confronted with itself and with the question of whether its problem is soluble or even exists at all. The proposition “it is possible by thought to establish the forms of thought” was not doubted by Kant, dubious as it may appear to the unphilosophical. The proposition “there is a soul, the structure of which is scientifically accessible; and that which I determine, by critical dissection of conscious existence-acts into the form of psychic elements, functions, and complexes, is my soul” is a proposition that no psychologist has doubted hitherto. And yet it is just here that his strongest doubts should have arisen. Is an abstract science of the spiritual possible at all? Is that which one finds on this path identical with that which one is seeking? Why has psychology—meaning thereby not knowledge of men and experience of life but scientific psychology—always been the shallowest and most worthless of the disciplines of philosophy, a field so empty that it has been left entirely to mediocre minds and barren systematists? The reason is not far to seek. It is the misfortune of “experimental” psychology that it does not even possess an object as the word is understood in any and every scientific technique. Its searches and solutions are fights with shadows and ghosts. What is it—the Soul? If the mere reason could give an answer to that question, the science would be ab initio unnecessary.

Of the thousands of psychologists of to-day not one can give an actual analysis or definition of “the” Will—or of regret, anxiety, jealousy, disposition, artistic intention. Naturally, since only the systematic can be dissected, and we can only define notions by notions. No subtleties of intellectual play with notional distinctions, no plausible observations of connexions between sensuous-corporeal states and “inward processes” touch that which is in question here. Will—this is no notion, but a name, a prime-word like God, a sign for something of which we have an immediate inward certainty but which we are for ever unable to describe.

We are dealing here with something eternally inaccessible to learned investigation. It is not for nothing that every language presents a baffling complexity of labels for the spiritual, warning us thereby that it is something not susceptible of theoretical synthesis or systematic ordering. Here there is nothing for us to order. Critical (i.e., literally, separating) methods apply only to the world-as-Nature. It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting-knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought. Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither aims nor ways in common. The primitive man experiences “soul,” first in other men and then in himself, as a Numen, just as he knows numina of the outer world, and develops his impressions in mythological form. His words for these things are symbols, sounds, not descriptive of the indescribable but indicative of it for him who hath ears to hear. They evoke images, likenesses (in the sense of Faust II)—the only language of spiritual intercourse that man has discovered to this day. Rembrandt can reveal something of his soul, to those who are in inward kinship with him, by way of a self-portrait or a landscape, and to Goethe “a god gave it to say what he suffered.” Certain ineffable stirrings of soul can be imparted by one man to the sensibility of another man through a look, two bars of a melody, an almost imperceptible movement. That is the real language of souls, and it remains incomprehensible to the outsider. The word as utterance, as poetic element, may establish the link, but the word as notion, as element of scientific prose, never.

“Soul,” for the man who has advanced from mere living and feeling to the alert and observant state, is an image derived from quite primary experiences of life and death. It is as old as thought, i.e., as the articulate separation of thinking (thinking-over) from seeing. We see the world around us, and since every free-moving being must for its own safety understand that world, the accumulating daily detail of technical and empirical experience becomes a stock of permanent data which man, as soon as he is proficient in speech, collects into an image of what he understands. This is the World-as-Nature.^[369] What is not environment we do not see, but we do divine “its” presence in ourselves and in others, and by virtue of “its” physiognomic impressive power it evokes in us the anxiety and the desire to know; and thus arises the meditated or pondered image of a counterworld which is our mode of visualizing that which remains eternally alien to the physical eye. The image of the soul is mythic and remains objective in the field of spiritual religion so long as the image of Nature is contemplated in the spirit of religion; and it transforms itself into a scientific notion and becomes objective in the field of scientific criticism as soon as “Nature” comes to be observed critically. As “Time” is a counter-concept^[370] to space, so the “soul” is a counterworld to “Nature” and therefore variable in dependence upon the notion of Nature as this stands from moment to moment. It has been shown how “Time” arose, out of the feeling of the direction-quality possessed by ever-mobile Life, as a conceptual negative to a positive magnitude, as an incarnation of that which is not extension; and that all the “properties” of Time, by the cool analysis of which the philosophers believe they can solve the problem of Time, have been gradually formed and ordered in the intellect as inverses to the properties of space. In exactly the same way, the notion of the spiritual has come into being as the inverse and negative of the notion of the world, the spatial notion of polarity assisting ("outward"-“inward”) and the terms being suitably transvalued. Every psychology is a counter-physics.

To attempt to get an “exact” science out of the ever-mysterious soul is futile. But the late-period City must needs have abstract thinking and it forces the “physicist of the inner world” to elucidate a fictitious world by ever more fictions, notions by more notions. He transmutes the non-extended into the extended, builds up a system as “cause” for something that is only manifested physiognomically, and comes to believe that in this system he has the structure of “the” soul before his eyes. But the very words that he selects, in all the Cultures, to notify to others the results of his intellectual labours betray him. He talks of functions, feeling-complexes, mainsprings, thresholds of consciousness; course, breadth, intensity and parallelism in spiritual processes. All these are words proper to the mode of representation that Natural Science employs. “The Will is related to objects” is a spatial image pure and simple. “Conscious” and “unconscious” are only too obviously derivatives of “above-ground” and “below-ground.” In modern theories of the Will we meet with all the vocabulary of electro-dynamics. Will-functions and thought-functions are spoken of in just the same way as the function of a system of forces. To analyse a feeling means to set up a representative silhouette in its place and then to treat this silhouette mathematically and by definition, partition, and measurement. All soul-examination of this stamp, however remarkable as a study of cerebral anatomy, is penetrated with the mechanical notion of locality, and works without knowing it under imaginary co-ordinates in an imaginary space. The “pure” psychologist is quite unaware that he is copying the physicist, but it is not at all surprising that the naïvest methods of experimental psychology give depressingly orthodox results. Brain-paths and association-threads, as modes of representation, conform entirely to an optical scheme—the “course” of the will or the feeling; both deal with cognate spatial phantoms. It does not make much difference whether I define some psychic capacity conceptually or the corresponding brain-region graphically. Scientific psychology has worked out for itself a complete system of images, in which it moves with entire conviction. Every individual pronouncement of every individual psychologist proves on examination to be merely a variation of this system conformable to the style of outer-world science of the day.

Clear thought, emancipated from all connexion with seeing, presupposes as its organ a culture-language, which is created by the soul of the Culture as a part supporting other parts of its expression;^[371] and presently this language itself creates a “Nature” of word-meanings, a linguistic cosmos within which abstract notions, judgments and conclusions—representations of number, causality, motion—can lead a mechanically determinate existence. At any particular time, therefore, the current image of the soul is a function of the current language and its inner symbolism. All the Western, Faustian, languages possess the notion of Will. This mythical entity manifested itself, simultaneously in all, in that transformation of the verb^[372] which decisively differentiated our tongues from the Classical tongues and therefore our soul from the Classical soul. When “ego habeo factum” replaced “feci,” a new numen of the inner world spoke. And at the same time, under specific label, there appeared in the scientific soul-pictures of all the Western psychologies the figure of the Will, of a well-rounded capacity of which the definition may be formulated in different ways by different schools, but the existence is unquestionable.

II

I maintain, then, that scientific psychology (and, it may be added, the psychology of the same kind that we all unconsciously practise when we try to “figure to ourselves” the stirrings of our own or others’ souls) has, in its inability to discover or even to approach the essenceessence of the soul, simply added one more to the symbols that collectively make up the Macrocosm of the culture-man. Like everything else that is no longer becoming but become, it has put a mechanism in place of an organism. We miss in its picture that which fills our feeling of life (and should surely be “soul” if anything is) the Destiny-quality, the necessary directedness of existence, the possibility that life in its course actualizes. I do not believe that the word “Destiny” figures in any psychological system whatsoever—and we know that nothing in the world could be more remote from actual life-experience and knowledge of men than a system without such elements. Associations, apperceptions, affections, motives, thought, feeling, will—all are dead mechanisms, the mere topography of which constitutes the insignificant total of our “soul-science.” One looked for Life and one found an ornamental pattern of notions. And the soul remained what it was, something that could neither be thought nor represented, the secret, the ever-becoming, the pure experience.

This imaginary soul-body (let it be called so outright for the first time) is never anything but the exact mirror-image of the form in which the matured culture-man looks on his outer world. In the one as in the other, the depth-experience actualizes the extension-world.^[373] Alike out of the perception of the outside and the conception of the inside, the secret that is hinted at in the root-word Time creates Space. The soul-image like the world-image has its directional depth, its horizon, and its boundedness or its unboundedness. An “inner eye” sees, an “inner ear” hears. There exists a distinct idea of an inner order, and this inner order like the outer wears the badge of causal necessity.

This being so, everything that has been said in this work regarding the phenomenon of the high Cultures combines to demand an immensely wider and richer sort of soul-study than anything worked upon so far. For everything that our present-day psychologist has to tell us—and here we refer not only to the systematic science but also in the wider sense to the physiognomic knowledge of men—relates to the present condition of the Western soul, and not, as hitherto gratuitously assumed, to “the human soul” at large.

A soul-image is never anything but the image of one quite definite soul. No observer can ever step outside the conditions and the limitations of his time and circle, and whatever it may be that he “knows” or “cognizes,” the very cognition itself involves in all cases choice, direction and inner form, and is therefore ab initio an expression of his proper soul. The primitive himself appropriates a soul-image out of facts of his own life as subjected to the formative working of the basic experiences of waking consciousness (distinction of ego and world, of ego and tu) and those of being (distinction of body and soul, sense-life and reflection, sex-life and sentiment). And as it is thoughtful men who think upon these matters, an inner numen (Spirit, Logos, Ka, Ruach) always arises as an opposite to the rest. But the dispositions and relations of this numen in the individual case, and the conception that is formed of the spiritual elements—layers of forces or substances, unity or polarity or plurality—mark the thinker from the outset as a part of his own specific Culture. When, therefore, one convinces one’s self that one knows the soul of an alien Culture from its workings in actuality, the soul-image underlying the knowledge is really one’s own soul-image. In this wise new experiences are readily assimilated into the system that is already there, and it is not surprising that in the end one comes to believe that one has discovered forms of eternal validity.

In reality, every Culture possesses its own systematic psychology just as it possesses its own style of knowledge of men and experience of life; and just as even each separate stage—the age of Scholasticism, that of the Sophists, that of Enlightenment—forms special ideas of number and thought and Nature that pertain to itself only, so even each separate century mirrors itself in a soul-image of its own. The best judge of men in the Western world goes wrong when he tries to understand a Japanese, and vice versa. But the man of learning goes equally wrong when he tries to translate basic words of Arabic or Greek by basic words of his own tongue. “Nephesh” is not “animus” and “âtmân” is not “soul,” and what we consistently discover under our label “will” Classical man did not find in his soul-picture at all.

Taking one thing with another, it is no longer possible to doubt the immense importance of the individual soul-images that have severally arisen in the general history of thought. Classical, Apollinian man, the man of Euclidean point-formed being, looked upon his soul as a Cosmos ordered in a group of excellent parts. Plato called it νοῦς, θυμός, ἐπιθυμία and compared it with man, beast and plant, in one place even with Southern, Northern and Hellenic man. What seems to be copied here is Nature as seen by the Classical age, a well-ordered sum of tangible things, in contrast to a space that was felt as the non-existent, the Nonent. Where in this field is "Will"? or the idea of functional connexions? or the other creations of our psychology? Do we really believe that Plato and Aristotle were less sure in analysis than we are, and did not see what is insistently obvious to every layman amongst us? Or is it that Will is missing here for the same reason as space is missing in the Classical mathematic and force in the Classical physics?

Take, on the contrary, any Western psychology that you please, and you will always find a functional and never a bodily ordering. The basic form of all impressions which we receive from within is y = f(x), and that, because the function is the basis of our outer world. Thinking, feeling, willing—no Western psychologist can step outside this trinity, however much he may desire to do so; even in the controversies of Gothic thinkers concerning the primacy of will or reason it already emerges that the question is one of a relation between forces. It matters not at all whether these old philosophers put forward their theories as original or read them into Augustine or Aristotle. Associations, apperceptions, will-processes, call them what you will, the elements of our picture are without exception of the type of the mathematico-physical Function, and in very form radically un-Classical. Now, such psychology examines the soul, not physiognomically to indicate its traits, but physically, as an object, to ascertain its elements, and it is quite natural therefore to find psychology reduced to perplexity when confronted with the problem of motion. Classical man, too, had his inward Eleatic difficulty,^[374] and the inability of the Schoolmen to agree as to the primacy of Will or Reason foreshadows the dangerous flaw in Baroque physics—its inability to reach an unchallengeable statement of the relation between force and movement. Directional energy, denied in the Classical and also in the Indian soul-image (where all is settled and rounded), is emphatically affirmed in the Faustian and in the Egyptian (wherein all is systems and centres of forces); and yet, precisely because this affirmation cannot but involve the element of time, thought, which is alien to Time, finds itself committed to self-contradictions.

The Faustian and the Apollinian images of the soul are in blunt opposition. Once more all the old contrasts crop up. In the Apollinian we have, so to call it, the soul-body, in the Faustian the soul-space, as the imagination-unit. The body possesses parts, while the space is the scene of processes. Classical man conceives of his inner world plastically. Even Homer’s idiom betrays it; echoing, we may well believe, immemorial temple-traditions, he shows us, for instance, the dead in Hades as well-recognizable copies of the bodies that had been. The Pre-Socratic philosophy, with its three well-ordered parts λογιστικόν, ἐπιθυμητικόν, θυμοειδές, suggests at once the Laocoön group. In our case the impress is a musical one; the sonata of the inner life has the will as first subject, thought and feeling as themes of the second subject; the movement is bound by the strict rules of a spiritual counterpoint, and psychology’s business is to discover this counterpoint. The simplest elements fall into antithesis like Classical and Western number—on the one hand magnitudes, on the other spiritual relations—and the spiritual static of Apollinian existence, the stereometric ideal of σωφροσύνη and ἀταραξία, stands opposed to the soul-dynamic of Faustian.

The Apollinian soul-image—Plato’s biga-team with νοῦς as charioteer—takes to flight at once on the approach of the Magian soul. It is fading out already in the later Stoa, where the principal teachers came predominantly from the Aramaic East, and by the time of the Early Roman Empire, even in the literature of the city itself, it has come to be a mere reminiscence.

The hall-mark of the Magian soul-image is a strict dualism of two mysterious substances, Spirit and Soul. Between these two there is neither the Classical (static) nor the Western (functional) relation, but an altogether differently constituted relation which we are obliged to call merely “Magian” for want of a more helpful term, though we may illustrate it by contrasting the physics of Democritus and the physics of Galileo with Alchemy and the Philosopher’s Stone. On this specifically Middle-Eastern soul-image rests, of inward necessity, all the psychology and particularly the theology with which the “Gothic” springtime of the Arabian Culture (0-300 A.D.) is filled. The Gospel of St. John belongs thereto, and the writings of the Gnostics, the Early Fathers, the Neoplatonists, the Manichæans, and the dogmatic texts in the Talmud and the Avesta; so, too, does the tired spirit of the Imperium Romanum, now expressed only in religiosity and drawing the little life that is in its philosophy from the young East, Syria, and Persia. Even in the 1st Century B.C. the great Posidonius, a true Semite and young-Arabian in spite of the Classical dress of his immense learning, was inwardly sensible of the complete opposition between the Classical life-feeling and this Magian soul-structure which for him was the true one. There is a patent difference of value between a Substance permeating the body and a Substance which falls from the world-cavern into humanity, abstract and divine, making of all participants a Consensus.^[375] This “Spirit” it is which evokes the higher world, and through this creation triumphs over mere life, “the flesh” and Nature. This is the prime image that underlies all feeling of ego. Sometimes it is seen in religious, sometimes in philosophical, sometimes in artistic guise. Consider the portraits of the Constantinian age, with their fixed stare into the infinite—that look stands for the πνεῦμα. It is felt by Plotinus and by Origen. Paul distinguishes, for example in I Cor., xv, 44, between σῶμα ψυχικόν and σῶμα πνευματικόν. The conception of a double, bodily or spiritual, ecstasy and of the partition of men into lower and higher, psychics and pneumatics, was familiar currency amongst the Gnostics. Late-Classical literature (Plutarch) is full of the dualistic psychology of νοῦς and ψυχή, derived from Oriental sources. It was very soon brought into correlation with the contrast between Christian and Heathen and that between Spirit and Nature, and it issued in that scheme of world-history as man’s drama from Creation to Last Judgment (with an intervention of God as means) which is common to Gnostics, Christians, Persians and Jews alike, and has not even now been altogether overcome.

This Magian soul-image received its rigorously scientific completion in the schools of Baghdad and Basra.^[376] Alfarabi and Alkindi dealt thoroughly with the problems of this Magian psychology, which to us are tangled and largely inaccessible. And we must by no means underrate its influence upon the young and wholly abstract soul-theory (as distinct from the ego-feeling) of the West. Scholastic and Mystic philosophy, no less than Gothic art, drew upon Moorish Spain, Sicily and the East for many of its forms. It must not be forgotten that the Arabian Culture is the culture of the established revelation-religions, all of which assume a dualistic soul-image. The Kabbala^[377] and the part played by Jewish philosophers in the so-called mediæval philosophy—i.e., late-Arabian followed by early-Gothic—is well known. But I will only refer here to the remarkable and little-appreciated Spinoza.^[378] Child of the Ghetto, he is, with his contemporary Schirazi, the last belated representative of the Magian, a stranger in the form-world of the Faustian feeling. As a prudent pupil of the Baroque he contrived to clothe his system in the colours of Western thought, but at bottom he stands entirely under the aspect of the Arabian dualism of two soul-substances. And this is the true and inward reason why he lacked the force-concept of Galileo and Descartes. This concept is the centre of gravity of a dynamic universe and ipso facto is alien to the Magian world-feeling. There is no link between the idea of the Philosopher’s Stone (which is implicit in Spinoza’s idea of Deity as “causa sui”) and the causal necessity of our Nature-picture.Nature-picture. Consequently, his determinism is precisely that which the orthodox wisdom of Baghdad had maintained—“Kismet.” It was there that the home of the more geometrico^[379] method was to be looked for—it is common to the Talmud, the Zend Avesta and the Arabian Kalaam;^[380] but its appearance in Spinoza’s “Ethics” is a grotesque freak in our philosophy.

Once more this Magian soul-image was to be conjured up, for a moment. German Romanticism found in magic and the tangled thought-threads of Gothic philosophers the same attractiveness as it found in the Crusade-ideals of cloisters and castles, and even more in Saracenic art and poetry—without of course understanding very much of these remote things. Schelling, Oken, Baader, Görres and their circle indulged in barren speculations in the Arabic-Jewish style, which they felt with evident self-satisfaction to be “dark” and “deep”—precisely what, for Orientals, they were not—understanding them but partially themselves and hoping for similar quasi-incomprehension in their audiences. The only noteworthy point in the episode is the attractiveness of obscurity. We may venture the conclusion that the clearest and most accessible conceptions of Faustian thought—as we have it, for instance, in Descartes or in Kant’s “Prolegomena”—would in the same way have been regarded by an Arabian student as nebulous and abstruse. What for us is true, for them is false, and vice versa; and this is valid for the soul-images of the different Cultures as it is for every other product of their scientific thinking.

The separation of its ultimate elements is a task that the Gothic world-outlook and its philosophy leaves to the courage of the future. Just as the ornamentation of the cathedral and the primitive contemporary painting still shirk the decision between gold and wide atmosphere in backgrounds—between the Magian and the Faustian aspects of God in Nature—so this early, timid, immature soul-image as it presents itself in this philosophy mingles characters derived from the Christian-Arabian metaphysic and its dualism of Spirit and Soul with Northern inklings of functional soul-forces not yet avowed. This is the discrepance that underlies the conflict concerning the primacy of will or reason, the basic problem of the Gothic philosophy, which men tried to solve now in the old Arabian, now in the new Western sense. It is this myth of the mind—which under ever-changing guises accompanies our philosophy throughout its course—that distinguishes it so sharply from every other. The rationalism of late Baroque, in all the pride of the self-assured city-spirit, decided in favour of the greater power of the Goddess Reason (Kant, the Jacobins); but almost immediately thereafter the 19th Century (Nietzsche above all) went back to the stronger formula Voluntas superior intellectu, and this indeed is in the blood of all of us.^[381] Schopenhauer, the last of the great systematists, has brought it down to the formula “World as Will and Idea,” and it is only his ethic and not his metaphysic that decides against the Will.

Here we begin to see by direct light the deep foundations and meaning of philosophizing within a Culture. For what we see here is the Faustian soul trying in labour of many centuries to paint a self-portrait, and one, moreover, that is in intimate concordance with its world-portrait. The Gothic world-view with its struggle of will and reason is in fact an expression of the life-feeling of the men of the Crusades, of the Hohenstaufen empire, of the great cathedrals. These men saw the soul thus, because they were thus.

Will and thought in the soul-image correspond to Direction and Extension, History and Nature, Destiny and Causality in the image of the outer world. Both aspects of our basic characters emerge in our prime-symbol which is infinite extension. Will links the future to the present, thought the unlimited to the here. The historic future is distance-becoming, the boundless world-horizon distance-become—this is the meaning of the Faustian depth-experience. The direction-feeling as “Will” and the space-feeling as “Reason” are imagined as entities, almost as legend-figures; and out of them comes the picture that our psychologists of necessity abstract from the inner life.

To call the Faustian Culture a Will-Culture is only another way of expressing the eminently historical disposition of its soul. Our first-person idiom, our “ego habeo factum”—our dynamic syntax, that is—faithfully renders the “way of doing things” that results from this disposition and, with its positive directional energy, dominates not only our picture of the World-as-History but our own history to boot. This first person towers up in the Gothic architecture; the spire is an “I,” the flying buttress is an “I.” And therefore the entire Faustian ethic, from Thomas Aquinas to Kant, is an “excelsior”—fulfilment of an “I,” ethical work upon an “I,” justification of an “I” by faith and works; respect of the neighbour “Thou” for the sake of one’s “I” and its happiness; and, lastly and supremely, immortality of the “I.”

Now this, precisely this, the genuine Russian regards as contemptible vain-glory. The Russian soul, will-less, having the limitless plane as its prime-symbol,^[382] seeks to grow up—serving, anonymous, self-oblivious—in the brother-world of the plane. To take “I” as the starting-point of relations with the neighbour, to elevate “I” morally through “I’s” love of near and dear, to repent for “I’s” own sake, are to him traits of Western vanity as presumptuous as is the upthrusting challenge to heaven of our cathedrals that he compares with his plane church-roof and its sprinkling of cupolas. Tolstoi’s hero Nechludov looks after his moral “I” as he does after his finger-nails; this is just what betrays Tolstoi as belonging to the pseudomorphosis of Petrinism. But Raskolnikov is only something in a “we.” His fault is the fault of all,^[383] and even to regard his sin as special to himself is pride and vanity. Something of the kind underlies the Magian soul-image also. “If any man come to me,” says Jesus (Luke xiv, 26), “and hate not his father and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, yea, and his own life (τὴν ἑαυτοῦ ψυχήν) also,^[384] he cannot be my disciple”; and it is the same feeling that makes him call himself by the title that we mistranslate “Son of Man.”^[385] The Consensus of the Orthodox too is impersonal and condemns “I” as a sin. So too with the—truly Russian—conception of truth as the anonymous agreement of the elect.

Classical man, belonging wholly to the present, is equally without that directional energy by which our images of world and of soul are dominated, which sums all our sense-impressions as a path towards distance and our inward experiences as a feeling of future. He is will-less. The Classical idea of destiny and the symbol of the Doric column leave no doubt as to that. And the contest of thinking and willing that is the hidden theme of every serious portrait from Jan van Eyck to Marées is impossible in Classical portraiture, for in the Classical soul-image thought (νοῦς), the inner Zeus, is accompanied by the wholly ahistoric entities of animal and vegetative impulse (θυμός and ἐπιθυμία), wholly somatic and wholly destitute of conscious direction and drive towards an end.

The actual designation of the Faustian principle, which belongs to us and to us alone, is a matter of indifference. A name is in itself mere sound. Space, too, is a word that is capable of being employed with a thousand nuances—by mathematicians and philosophers, poets and painters—to express one and the same indescribable; a word that is ostensibly common to all mankind and yet, carrying a metaphysical under-meaning that we gave it and could not but give it, is in that sense valid only for our Culture. It is not the notion of “Will,” but the circumstance that we possess it while the Greeks were entirely ignorant of it, that gives it high symbolic import. At the very bottom, there is no distinction between space-as-depth and will. For the one, and therefore for the other also, the Classical languages had no expression.^[386] The pure space of the Faustian world-picture is not mere extension, but efficient extension into the distance, as an overcoming of the merely sensuous, as a strain and tendency, as a spiritual will-to-power. I am fully aware how inadequate these periphrases are. It is entirely impossible to indicate in exact terms the difference between what we and what the men of the Indian or the Arabian Culture call space, or feel or imagine in the word. But that there is some radical distinction is proved by the very different fundamentals of the respective mathematics, arts of form, and, above all, immediate utterances of life. We shall see how the identity of space and will comes to expression in the acts of Copernicus and Columbus—as well as in those of the Hohenstaufen and Napoleon—but it underlies also, in another way, the physical notions of fields of force and potential, ideas that it would be impossible to convey to the comprehension of any Greek. "Space as a priori form of perception," the formula in which Kant finally enunciated that for which Baroque philosophy had so long and tirelessly striven, implies an assertion of supremacy of soul over the alien; the ego, through the form, is to rule the world.^[387]

This is brought to expression in the depth-perspective of oil-painting which makes the space-field of the picture, conceived as infinite, dependent on the observer, who in choosing his distance asserts his dominion. It is this attraction of distance that produces the type of the heroic and historically-felt landscape that we have alike in the picture and the park of the Baroque period, and that is expressed also in the mathematico-physical concept of the vector. For centuries painting fought passionately to reach this symbol, which contains all that the words space, will and force are capable of indicating. And correspondingly we find in our metaphysic the steady tendency to formulate pairs of concepts (such as phenomena and things-in-themselves, will and idea, ego and non-ego) all of the same purely dynamic content, and—in utter contrast to Protagoras’s conception of man as the measure, not the creator, of things—to establish a functional dependence of things upon spirit. The Classical metaphysic regarded man as a body among bodies, and knowledge as a sort of contact, passing from the known to the knower and not vice versa. The optical theories of Anaxagoras and Democritus were far from admitting any active participation of the percipient in sense-perception. Plato never felt, as Kant was driven to feel, the ego as centre of a transcendent sphere of effect. The captives in his celebrated cave are really captives, the slaves and not the masters of outer impressions—recipients of light from the common sun and not themselves suns which irradiate the universe.

The relation of our will to our imaginary space is evidenced again in the physical concept of space-energy—that utterly un-Classical idea in which even spatial interval figures as a form, and indeed as prime form thereof, for the notions of “capacity” and “intensity” rest upon it. We feel will and space, the dynamic world-picture of Galileo and Newton and the dynamic soul-picture which has will as its centre of gravity and centre of reference, as of identical significance. Both are Baroque ideas, symbols of the fully-ripened Faustian Culture.

It is wrong, though it may be usual, to regard the cult of the “will” as common, if not to mankind, at any rate to Christendom, and derived in consequence from the Early-Arabian ethos. The connexion is merely a phenomenon of the historical surface, and the deduction fails because it confuses the (formal) history of words and ideas such as “voluntas” with the course of their destiny, thereby missing the profoundly symbolical changes of connotation that occur in that course. When Arabian psychologists—Murtada for instance—discuss the possibility of several “wills,” a will that hangs together with the act, another will that independently precedes the act, another that has no relation to the act at all, a will that is simply the parent of a willing, they are obviously working in deeper connotations of the Arabic word and on the basis of a soul-image that in structure differs entirely from the Faustian.

For every man, whatever the Culture to which he belongs, the elements of the soul are the deities of an inner mythology. What Zeus was for the outer Olympus, νοῦς was for the inner world that every Greek was entirely conscious of possessing—the throned lord of the other soul-elements. What “God” is for us, God as Breadth of the world, the Universal Power, the ever-present doer and provider, that also—reflected from the space of world into the imaginary space of soul and necessarily felt as an actual presence—is “Will.” With the microcosmic dualism of the Magian Culture, with ruach and nephesh, pneuma and psyche, is necessarily associated the macrocosmic opposition of God and Devil—Ormuzd and Ahriman for Persians, Yahwe and Beelzebub for Jews, Allah and Eblis for Mohammedans—in brief, Absolute Good and Absolute Evil. And note, further, how in the Western world-feeling both these oppositions pale together. In proportion as the Will emerges, out of the Gothic struggle for primacy between “intellectus” and “voluntas,” as the centre of a spiritual monotheism, the figure of the Devil fades out of the real world. In the Baroque age the pantheism of the outer world immediately resulted in one of the inner world also; and the word “God” in antithesis to “world” has always—however interpreted in this or that case—implied exactly what is implied in the word “will” with respect to soul, viz., the power that moves all that is within its domain.^[388] Thought no sooner leaves Religion for Science than we get the double myth of concepts, in physics and psychology. The concepts “force,” “mass,” “will,” “passion” rest not on objective experience but on a life-feeling. Darwinism is nothing but a specially shallow formulation of this feeling. No Greek would have used the word “Nature” as our biology employs it, in the sense of an absolute and methodical activity. “The will of God” for us is a pleonasm—God (or “Nature,” as some say) is nothing but will. After the Renaissance the notion of God sheds the old sensuous and personal traits (omnipresence and omnipotence are almost mathematical concepts), becomes little by little identical with the notion of infinite space and in becoming so becomes transcendent world-will. And therefore it is that about 1700 painting has to yield to instrumental music—the only art that in the end is capable of clearly expressing what we feel about God. Consider, in contrast with this, the gods of Homer. Zeus emphatically does not possess full powers over the world, but is simply “primus inter pares,” a body amongst bodies, as the Apollinian world-feeling requires. Blind necessity, the Ananke immanent in the cosmos of Classical consciousness, is in no sense dependent upon him; on the contrary, the Gods are subordinate to It. Æschylus says so outright in a powerful passage of the “Prometheus,”^[389] but it is perceptible enough even in Homer, e.g., in the Strife of the Gods and in that decisive passage in which Zeus takes up the scales of destiny, not to settle, but to learn, the fate of Hector.^[390] The Classical soul, therefore, with its parts and its properties, imagines itself as an Olympus of little gods, and to keep these at peace and in harmony with one another is the ideal of the Greek life-ethic of σωφροσύνη and ἀταραξία. More than one of the philosophers betrays the connexion by calling νοῦς, the highest part of the soul, Zeus. Aristotle assigns to his deity the single function of θεωρία, contemplation, and this is Diogenes’s ideal also—a completely-matured static of life in contrast to the equally ripe dynamic of our 18th-Century ideal.

The enigmatic Something in the soul-image that is called “will,” the passion of the third dimension, is therefore quite specially a creation of the Baroque, like the perspective of oil-painting and the force-idea of modern physics and the tone-world of instrumental music. In every case the Gothic had foreshadowed what these intellectualizing centuries brought to fullness. Here, where we are trying to take in the cast of Faustian life in contradiction to that of all other lives, what we have to do is to keep a firm hold on the fact that the primary words will, space, force, God, upborne by and permeated with connotations of Faustian feeling, are emblems, are the effective framework that sustains the great and kindred form-worlds in which this being expresses itself. It has been believed, hitherto, that in these matters one was holding in one’s grip a body of eternal facts, of facts-in-themselves, which sooner or later would be successfully treated, “known,” and proved by the methods of critical research. This illusion of natural science was shared by psychology also. But the view that these “universally-valid” fundamentals belong merely to the Baroque style of apprehension and comprehension, that as expression-forms they are only of transitory significance, and that they are only “true” for the Western type of intellect, alters the whole meaning of those sciences and leads us to look upon them not only as subjects of systematic cognition but also, and in a far higher degree, as objects of physiognomic study.

Baroque architecture began, as we have seen, when Michelangelo replaced the tectonic elements of the Renaissance, support and load, by those of dynamics, force and mass. While Brunelleschi’s chapel of the Pazzi in Florence expresses a bright composedness, Vignola’s façade of the Gesù in Rome is will become stone. The new style in its ecclesiastical form has been designated the “Jesuit,” and indeed there is an inward connexion between the achievement of Vignola and Giacomo Della Porta and the creation by Ignatius Loyola of the Order that stands for the pure and abstract will of the Church,^[391] just as there is between the invisible operations and the unlimited range of the Order and the arts of Calculus and Fugue.

Henceforward, then, the reader will not be shocked if we speak of a Baroque, and even of a Jesuit, style in psychology, mathematics, and pure physics. The form-language of dynamics, which puts the energetic contrast of capacity and intensity in place of the volitionless somatic contrast of material and form, is one common to all the mind-creations of those centuries.

IV

The question is now: How far is the man of this Culture himself fulfilling what the soul-image that he has created requires of him? If we can, to-day, state the theme of Western physics quite generally to be efficient space, we have ipso facto defined also the kind of existence, the content of existence as lived by contemporary man. We, as Faustian natures, are accustomed to take note of the individual according to his effective and not according to his plastic-static appearance in the field of our life-experience. We measure what a man is by his activity, which may be directed inwardly or outwardly, and we judge all intentions, reasons, powers, convictions and habits entirely by this directedness. The word with which we sum up this aspect is character. We habitually speak of the “character” of heads and landscapes; of ornaments, brush-strokes and scripts; of whole arts and ages and Cultures. The art of the characteristic is, above all, Baroque music—alike in respect of its melody and its instrumentation. Here again is a word indicating an indescribable, a something that emphasizes, among all the Cultures, the Faustian in particular. And the deep relation between this word “character” and the word “will” is unmistakable; what will is in the soul-image, character is in the picture of life as we see it, the Western life that is self-evident to Western men. It is the fundamental postulate of all our ethical systems, differ otherwise as they may in their metaphysical or practical precepts, that man has character. Character, which forms itself in the stream of the world—the personality, the relation of living to doing—is a Faustian impression of the man made by the man; and, significantly enough, just as in the physical world-picture it has proved impossible (in spite of the most rigorous theoretical examination) to separate the vectorial idea of forces from the idea of motion (because of the inherent directional quality of the vector), so also it is impossible to draw a strict distinction between will and soul, character and life. At the height of our Culture, certainly since the 17th Century, we feel the word “life” as a pure and simple synonym of willing. Expressions like living force, life-will, active energy, abound in our ethical literature and their import is taken for granted, whereas the Age of Pericles could not even have translated them into its language.

Hitherto the pretension of each and every morale to universal validity has obscured the fact that every Culture, as a homogeneous being of higher order, possesses a moral constitution proper to itself. There are as many morales as there are Cultures. Nietzsche was the first to have an inkling of this; but he never came anywhere near to a really objective morphology of morale “beyond good” (all good) “and evil” (all evil). He evaluated Classical, Indian, Christian and Renaissance morale by his own criteria instead of understanding the style of them as a symbol. And yet if anything could detect the prime-phenomenon of Morale as such, it should have been the historical insight of a Westerner. However, it appears that we are only now ripe enough for such a study. The conception of mankind as an active, fighting, progressing whole is (and has been since Joachim of Floris and the Crusades) so necessary an idea for us that we find it hard indeed to realize that it is an exclusively Western hypothesis, living and valid only for a season. To the Classical spirit mankind appears as a stationary mass, and correspondingly there is that quite dissimilar morale that we can trace from the Homeric dawn to the time of the Roman Empire. And, more generally, we shall find that the immense activity of the Faustian life-feeling is most nearly matched in the Chinese and the Egyptian, and the rigorous passivity of the Classical in the Indian.

If ever there was a group of nations that kept the “struggle for existence” constantly before its eyes, it was the Classical Culture. All the cities, big and little, fought one another to sheer extinction, without plan or purpose, without mercy, body against body, under the stimulus of a completely anti-historical instinct. But Greek ethics, notwithstanding Heraclitus, were far from making struggle an ethical principle. The Stoics and the Epicureans alike preached abstention from it as an ideal. The overcoming of resistances may far more justly be called the typical impulse of the Western soul. Activity, determination, self-control, are postulates. To battle against the comfortable foregrounds of life, against the impressions of the moment, against what is near, tangible and easy, to win through to that which has generality and duration and links past and future—these are the sum of all Faustian imperatives from earliest Gothic to Kant and Fichte, and far beyond them again to the Ethos of immense power and will exhibited in our States, our economic systems and our technics. The carpe diem, the saturated being, of the Classical standpoint is the most direct contrary of that which is felt by Goethe and Kant and Pascal, by Church and Freethinker, as alone possessing value—active, fighting and victorious being.^[392]

As all the forms of Dynamic (whether pictorial, musical, physical, social or political) are concerned with the working-out of infinite relations and deal, not with the individual case and the sum of individual cases as the Classical physics had done, but with the typical course or process and its functional rule, “character” must be understood as that which remains in principle constant in the working-out of life; where there is no such constant we speak of “lack of character.” It is character—the form in virtue of which a moving existence can combine the highest constancy in the essential with the maximum variability in the details—that makes telling biography (such as Goethe’s “Wahrheit und Dichtung”), possible at all. Plutarch’s truly Classical biographies are by comparison mere collections of anecdotes strung together chronologically and not ordered pictures of historical development, and it will hardly be disputed that only this second kind of biography is imaginable in connexion with Alcibiades or Pericles or, for that matter, any purely Apollinian figure. Their experiences lack, not mass, but relation; there is something atomic about them. Similarly in the field of Science the Greek did not merely forget to look for general laws in the sum of his experiential data; in his cosmos they were simply not there to be found.

It follows that the sciences of character-study, particularly physiognomy and graphology, would not be able to glean much in the Classical field. Its handwriting we do not know, but we do know that its ornament, as compared with the Gothic, is of incredible simplicity and feebleness of character-expression—think of the Meander and the Acanthus-shoot. On the other hand, it has never been surpassed in timeless evenness.

It goes without saying that we, when we turn to look into the Classical life-feeling, must find there some basic element of ethical values that is antithetical to “character” in the same way as the statue is antithetical to the fugue. Euclidean geometry to Analysis, and body to space. We find it in the Gesture. It is this that provides the necessary foundation for a spiritual static. The word that stands in the Classical vocabulary where “personality” stands in our own is προσῶπον, “persona”—namely rôle or mask. In late Greek or Roman speech it means the public aspect and mien of a man, which for Classical man is tantamount to the essence and kernel of him. An orator was described as speaking in the προσῶπον—not the character or the vein as we should say—of a priest or a soldier. The slave was ἀπρόσωπος—that is, he had no attitude or figure in the public life—but not ἀσώματος—that is, he did have a soul. The idea that Destiny had assigned the rôle of king or general to a man was expressed by Romans in the words persona regis, imperatoris.^[393] The Apollinian cast of life is manifest enough here. What is indicated is not the personality (that is, an unfolding of inward possibilities in active striving) but a permanent and self-contained posture strictly adapted to a so-to-say plastic ideal of being. It is only in the Classical ethic that Beauty plays a distinct rôle. However labelled—as σωφροσύνη, καλοκἀγαθία or ἀταραξία—it always amounts to the well-ordered group of tangible and publicly evident traits, defined for other men rather than specific to one’s self. A man was the object and not the subject of outward life. The pure present, the moment, the foreground were not conquered but worked up. The notion of an inward life is impossible in this connexion. The significance of Aristotle’s phrase ζῶον πολιτίκον—quite untranslatable and habitually translated with a Western connotation—is that it refers to men who are nothing when single and lonely (what could be more preposterous than an Athenian Robinson Crusoe!) and only count for anything when in a plurality, in agora or forum, where each reflects his neighbour and thus, only thus, acquires a genuine reality. It is all implicit in the phrase σώματα πόλεως, used for the burghers of the city. And thus we see that the Portrait, the centre of Baroque art, is identical with the representation of a man to the extent that he possesses character, and that in the best age of Attic the representation of a man in respect of his attitude, as persona, necessarily leans to the form-ideal of the nude statue.

V

This opposition, further, has produced forms of tragedy that differ from one another radically in every respect. The Faustian character-drama and the Apollinian drama of noble gesture have in fact nothing but name in common.^[394]

Starting, significantly enough, from Seneca and not from Æschylus and Sophocles^[395] (just as the contemporary architecture linked itself with Imperial Rome and not with Pæstum), the Baroque drama with ever-increasing emphasis makes character instead of occurrence its centre of gravity, the origin of a system of spiritual co-ordinates (so to express it) which gives the scenic facts position, sense, and value in relation to itself. The outcome is a tragedy of willing, of efficient forces, of inward movement not necessarily exhibited in visible form, whereas Sophocles’s method was to employ a minimum of happening and to put it behind the scenes particularly by means of the artifice of the “messenger.” The Classical tragedy relates to general situations and not particular personalities. It is specifically described by Aristotle as μίμησίς οὐκ ἀνθρώπων ἀλλὰ πρᾶξεωςἀνθρώπων ἀλλὰ πρᾶξεως καὶ βίου. That which in his Poetica—assuredly the most fateful of all books for our poetry—he calls ἦθος, namely the ideal bearing of the ideal Hellene in a painful situation, has as little in common with our notion of character (viz., a constitution of the ego which determines events) as a surface in Euclidean geometry has with the like-named concept in Riemann’s theory of algebraic equations. It has, unfortunately, been our habit for centuries past to translate ἦθος as “character” instead of paraphrasing it (exact rendering is almost impossible) by “rôle,” “bearing” or “gesture”; to reproduce myth, μῦθος, which is timeless occurrence, by “action”; and to derive δρᾶμα from “doing.” It is Othello, Don Quixote, Le Misanthrope, Werther and Hedda Gabler that are characters, and the tragedy consists in the mere existence of human beings thus constituted in their respective milieux. Their struggle—whether against this world or the next, or themselves—is forced on them by their character and not by anything coming from outside; a soul is placed in a web of contradictory relations that admits of no net solution. Classical stage-figures, on the contrary, are rôles and not characters; over and over again the same figures appear—the old man, the slayer, the lover, all slow-moving bodies under masks and on stilts. Thus in Classical drama—even of the Late period—the mask is an element of profound symbolic necessity, whereas our pieces would not be regarded as played at all without the play of features. It is no answer to point to the great size of the Greek theatre, for even the strolling player—even the portrait-statue^[396]—wore a mask, and had there been any spiritual need of a more intimate setting the required architectural form would have been forthcoming quickly enough.

In the tragedy of a character, what happens is the outcome of a long inner development. But in what befalls Ajax and Philoctetes, Antigone and Electra, their psychological antecedents (even supposing them to have any) play no part. The decisive event comes upon them, brutally, as accident, from without, and it might have befallen another in the same way and with the same result. It would not be necessary even for that other to be of the same sex.

It is not enough to distinguish Classical and Western tragedy merely as action-drama and event-drama. Faustian tragedy is biographical, Classical anecdotal; that is, the one deals with the sense of a whole life and the other with the content of the single moment.^[397] What relation, for instance, has the entire inward past of Œdipus or Orestes to the shattering event that suddenly meets him on his way?^[398] There is one sort of destiny, then, that strikes like a flash of lightning, and just as blindly, and another that interweaves itself with the course of a life, an invisible thread^[399] that yet distinguishes this particular life from all others. There is not the smallest trait in the past existence of Othello—that masterpiece of psychological analysis—that has not some bearing on the catastrophe. Race-hatred, the isolation of the upstart amongst the patricians, the Moor as soldier and as child of Nature, the loneliness of the ageing bachelor—all these things have their significance. Lear, too, and Hamlet—compare the exposition of these characters with that of Sophoclean pieces. They are psychological expositions through-and-through and not summations of outward data. The psychologist, in our sense of the word, namely the fine student (hardly nowadays to be distinguished from the poet) of spiritual turning-points, was entirely unknown to the Greeks. They were no more analytical in the field of soul than in that of number; vis-à-vis the Classical soul, how could they be so? “Psychology” in fact is the proper designation for the Western way of fashioning men; the word holds good for a portrait by Rembrandt as for the music of “Tristan,” for Stendhal’s Julian Sorel as for Dante’s “Vita Nuova.” The like of it is not to be found in any other Culture. If there is anything that the Classical arts scrupulously exclude it is this, for psychology is the form in which art handles man as incarnate will and not as σῶμα. To call Euripides a psychologist is to betray ignorance of what psychology is. What an abundance of character there is even in the mere mythology of the North with its sly dwarfs, its lumpy giants, its teasing elves, its Loki, Baldr and the rest! Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon, Ares are simply “men,” Hermes the “youth,” Athene a maturer Aphrodite, and the minor gods—as the later plastic shows—distinguishable only by the labels. And the same is true without reservation of the figures of the Attic stage. In Wolfram von Eschenbach, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, the tragic is individual, life develops from within outwards, dynamic, functional, and the life-courses are only fully understandable with reference to the historical background of the century. But in the great tragedians of Athens it comes from outside, it is static, Euclidean. To repeat a phrase already used in connexion with world-history, the shattering event is epochal in the former and merely episodic in the latter, even the finale of death being only the last bead in the string of sheer accidents that makes up an existence.

A Baroque tragedy is nothing but this same directive character brought into and developed in the light-world, and shown as a curve instead of as an equation, as kinetic instead of as potential energy. The visible person is the character as potential, the action the character at work. This, under the heap of Classicist reminiscences and misunderstandings that still hides it, is the whole meaning of our idea of Tragedy. The tragic man of the Classical is a Euclidean body that is struck by the Heimarmene in a position that it did not choose and cannot alter, but is seen, in the light that plays from without upon its surfaces, to be indeformable quand même. This is the sense in which Agamemnon is ναύαρχον σῶμα βασίλειον and in which Œdipus’s σῶμα is subjected to the Oracle.^[400] Down to Alexander the significant figures of Greek history astonish us with their inelasticity; not one of them, apparently, undergoes in the battle of life any such inward transformation as those which we know took place in Luther and Loyola. What we are prone—too prone—to call “characterization” in Greek drama is nothing but the reflection of events upon the ἦθος of the hero, never the reflection of a personality on events.

Of deep necessity, therefore, we Faustians understand drama as a maximum of activity; and, of deep necessity also, the Greek understood it as a maximum of passivity.^[401] Speaking generally, the Attic tragedy had no “action” at all. The Mysteries were purely δράματα or δρώμενα, i.e., ritual performances, and it was from the Mystery-form with its “peripeteia” that Æschylus (himself an Eleusinian) derived the high drama that he created. Aristotle describes tragedy as the imitation of an occurrence. This imitation is identical with the “profanation” of the mysteries; and we know that Æschylus went further and made the sacral vestments of the Eleusinian priesthood the regular costume of the Attic stage, and was accused on that account.^[402] For the δρᾶμα proper, with its reversal from lamentation to joy, consisted not in the fable that was narrated but in the ritual action that lay behind it, and was understood and felt by the spectator as deeply symbolic. With this element of the non-Homeric early religion^[403] there became associated another, a boorish—the burlesque (whether phallic or dithyrambic) scenes of the spring festivals of Demeter and Dionysus. The beast-dances^[404] and the accompanying song were the germ of the tragic Chorus which puts itself before the actor or “answerer” of Thespis (534).

The genuine tragedy grew up out of the solemn death-lament (threnos, nænia). At some time or other the joyous play of the Dionysus festival (which also was a soul-feast) became a mourners’ chorus of men, the Satyr-play being relegated to the end. In 494 Phrynichus produced the “Fall of Miletus”—not a historical drama but a lament of the women of Miletus—and was heavily fined for thus recalling the public calamity. It was Æschylus’s introduction of the second actor that accomplished the essential of Classical tragedy; the lament as given theme was thenceforward subordinated to the visual presentation of a great human suffering as present motive. The foreground-story (μύθος) is not “action” but the occasion for the songs of the Chorus, which still constitutes the τραγῳδία proper. It is immaterial whether the occurrence is indicated by narrative or exposition. The spectator was in solemn mood and he felt himself and his own fate to be meant in the words of pathos. It was in him that the περιπέτεια, the central element of the holy pageant, took place. Whatever the environment of message and tale, the liturgical lament for the woe of mankind remained always the centre of gravity of the whole, as we see more particularly in the “Prometheus,” the “Agamemnon” and the “Œdipus Rex.” But presently—at the very time when in Polycletus the pure plastic was triumphing over the fresco^[405]—there emerges high above the lament the grandeur of human endurance, the attitude, the ἦθος of the Hero. The theme is, not the heroic Doer whose will surges and breaks against the resistance of alien powers or the demons in his own breast, but the will-less Patient whose somatic existence is—gratuitously—destroyed. The Prometheus trilogy of Æschylus begins just where Goethe would in all probability have left off. King Lear’s madness is the issue of the tragic action, but Sophocles’s Ajax is made mad by Athene before the drama opens—here is the difference between a character and an operated figure. Fear and compassion, in fact, are, as Aristotle says, the necessary effect of Greek tragedy upon the Greek (and only the Greek) spectator, as is evident at once from his choice of the most effective scenes, which are those of piteous crash of fortune (περιπέτεια) and of recognition (ἀναγνώρισις). In the first, the ruling impression is φόβος (terror) and in the second it is ἐλεός (pity), and the καθάρσις in the spectator presupposes his existence-ideal to be that of ἀταραξία.^[406] The Classical soul is pure “present,” pure σῶμα, unmoved and point-formed being. To see this imperilled by the jealousy of the Gods or by that blind chance that may crash upon any man’s head without reason and without warning, is the most fearful of all experiences. The very roots of Greek being are struck at by what for the challenging Faustian is the first stimulus to living activity. And then—to find one’s self delivered, to see the sun come out again and the dark thunder clouds huddle themselves away on the remote horizon, to rejoice profoundly in the admired grand gesture, to see the tortured mythical soul breathe again—that is the κάθαρσις. But it presupposes a kind of life-feeling that is entirely alien to us, the very word being hardly translatable into our languages and our sensations. It took all the æsthetic industry and assertiveness of the Baroque and of Classicism, backed by the meekest submissiveness before ancient texts, to persuade us that this is the spiritual basis of our own tragedy as well. And no wonder. For the fact is that the effect of our tragedy is precisely the opposite. It does not deliver us from deadweight pressure of events, but evokes active dynamic elements in us, stings us, stimulates us. It awakens the primary feelings of an energetic human being, the fierceness and the joy of tension, danger, violent deed, victory, crime, the triumph of overcoming and destroying—feelings that have slumbered in the depths of every Northern soul since the days of the Vikings, the Hohenstaufen and the Crusades. That is Shakespearian effect. A Greek would not have tolerated Macbeth, nor, generally, would he have comprehended the meaning of this mighty art of directional biography at all. That figures like Richard III, Don Juan, Faust, Michael Kohlhaas, Golo—un-Classical from top to toe—awaken in us not sympathy but a deep and strange envy, not fear but a mysterious desire to suffer, to suffer-with (“compassion” of quite another sort), is visibly—even to-day when Faustian tragedy in its final form, the German, is dead at last—the standing motive of the literature of our Alexandrian phase. In the “sensational” adventure- and detective-story, and still more recently in the cinema-drama (the equivalent of the Late-Classical mimes), a relic of the unrestrainable Faustian impulse to conquer and discover is still palpable.

There are corresponding differences between the Apollinian and the Faustian outlook in the forms of dramatic presentation, which are the complement of the poetic idea. The antique drama is a piece of plastic, a group of pathetic scenes conceived as reliefs, a pageant of gigantic marionettes disposed against the definitive plane of the back-wall.^[407] Presentation is entirely that of grandly-imagined gestures, the meagre facts of the fable being solemnly recited rather than presented. The technique of Western drama aims at just the opposite—unbroken movement and strict exclusion of flat static moments. The famous “three unities” of place, time and action, as unconsciously evolved (though not expressly formulated) in Athens, are a paraphrase of the type of the Classical marble statue and, like it, an indication of what classical man, the man of the Polis and the pure present and the gesture, felt about life. The unities are all, effectively, negative, denials of past and future, repudiation of all spiritual action-at-a-distance. They can be summed in the one word ἀταραξία. The postulates of these “unities” must not be confused with the superficially similar postulates in the drama of the Romance peoples. The Spanish theatre of the 16th Century bowed itself to the authority of “Classical” rules, but it is easy to see the influence of noblesse oblige in this; Castilian dignity responded to the appeal without knowing, or indeed troubling to find out, the original sense of the rules. The great Spanish dramatists, Tirso da Molina above all, fashioned the “unities” of the Baroque, but not as metaphysical negations, but purely as expressions of the spirit of high courtesy, and it was as such that Corneille, the docile pupil of Spanish “grandezza,” borrowed them. It was a fateful step. If Florence threw herself into the imitation of the Classical sculpture—at which everyone marvelled and of which no one possessed the final criteria—no harm was done, for there was by then no Northern plastic to suffer thereby. But with tragedy it was another matter. Here there was the possibility of a mighty drama, purely Faustian, of unimagined forms and daring. That this did not appear, that for all the greatness of Shakespeare the Teutonic drama never quite shook off the spell of misunderstood convention, was the consequence of blind faith in the authority of Aristotle. What might not have come out of Baroque drama had it remained under the impression of the knightly epic and the Gothic Easter-play and Mystery, in the near neighbourhood of Oratorios and Passions, without ever hearing of the Greek theatre! A tragedy issuing from the spirit of contrapuntal music, free of limitations proper to plastic but here meaningless, a dramatic poetry that from Orlando Lasso and Palestrina could develop—side by side with Heinrich Schütz, Bach, Händel, Gluck and Beethoven, but entirely free—to a pure form of its own: that was what was possible, and that was what did not happen; and it is only to the fortunate circumstance that the whole of the fresco-art of Hellas has been lost that we owe the inward freedom of our oil-painting.

VI