The decline of the West

I
THE ARTS OF FORM

I

The clearest type of symbolic expression that the world-feeling of higher mankind has found for itself is (if we except the mathematical-scientific domain of presentation and the symbolism of its basic ideas) that of the arts of form,^[272] of which the number is legion. And with these arts we count music in its many and very dissimilar kinds; had these been brought within the domain of art-historical research instead of being put in a class apart from that of the pictorial-plastic arts, we should have progressed very much further in our understanding of the import of this evolution towards an end. For the formative impulse that is at work in the wordless^[273] arts can never be understood until we come to regard the distinction between optical and acoustic means as only a superficial one. To talk of the art of the eye and the art of the ear takes us no further. It is not such things that divide one art from another. Only the 19th Century could so over-estimate the influence of physiological conditions as to apply it to expression, conception or communion. A “singing” picture of Claude Lorrain or of Watteau does not really address itself to the bodily eye any more than the space-straining music since Bach addresses itself to the bodily ear. The Classical relation between art-work and sense-organ—of which we so often and so erroneously remind ourselves here—is something quite different from, something far simpler and more material than ours. We read “Othello” and “Faust” and we study orchestral scores—that is, we change one sense-agency for another in order to let the undiluted spirit of these works take effect upon us. Here there is always an appeal from the outer senses to the “inner,” to the truly Faustian and wholly un-Classical power of imagination. Only thus can we understand Shakespeare’s ceaseless change of scene as against the Classical unity of place. In extreme cases indeed, for instance in that of “Faust” itself, no representation of the work (that is, of its full content) is physically possible. But in music too—in the unaccompanied “A capella” of the Palestrina style as well as a fortiori in the Passions of Heinrich Schütz, in the fugues of Bach, in the last quartets of Beethoven, and in “Tristan”—we livingly experience behind the sensuous impressions a whole world of others. And it is only through these latter that all the fullness and depth of the work begins to be present to us, and it is only mediately—through the images of blond, brown, dusky and golden colours, of sunsets and distant ranked mountain-summits, of storms and spring landscapes, of foundered cities and strange faces which harmony conjures up for us—that it tells us something of itself. It is not an incident that Beethoven wrote his last works when he was deaf—deafness merely released him from the last fetters. For this music, sight and hearing equally are bridges into the soul and nothing more. To the Greek this visionary kind of artistic enjoyment was utterly alien. He felt the marble with his eye, and the thick tones of an aulos moved him almost corporally. For him, eye and ear are the receivers of the whole of the impression that he wished to receive. But for us this had ceased to be true even at the stage of Gothic.

In the actual, tones are something extended, limited and numerable just as lines and colours are; harmony, melody, rhyme and rhythm no less so than perspective, proportion, chiaroscuro and outline. The distance separating two kinds of painting can be infinitely greater than that separating the painting and the music of a period. Considered in relation to a statue of Myron, the art of a Poussin landscape is the same as that of a contemporary chamber-cantata; that of Rembrandt as that of the organ works of Buxtehude, Pachelbel and Bach; that of Guardi as that of the Mozart opera—the inner form-language is so nearly identical that the difference between optical and acoustic means is negligible.

The importance which the “science of art” has always attached to a timeless and conceptual delimitation of the individual art-spheres only proves that the fundamentals of the problem have not been attacked. Arts are living units, and the living is incapable of being dissected. The first act of the learned pedant has always been to partition the infinitely wide domain into provinces determined by perfectly superficial criteria of medium and technique and to endow these provinces with eternal validity and immutable (!) form-principles. Thus he separated “Music” and “Painting,” “Music” and “Drama,” “Painting” and “Sculpture.” And then he proceeded to define “the” art of Painting, “the” art of Sculpture, and so on. But in fact the technical form-language is no more than the mask of the real work. Style is not what the shallow Semper—worthy contemporary of Darwin and materialism—supposed it to be, the product of material, technique, and purpose. It is the very opposite of this, something inaccessible to art-reason, a revelation of the metaphysical order, a mysterious “must,” a Destiny. With the material boundaries of the different arts it has no concern whatever.

To classify the arts according to the character of the sense-impression, then, is to pervert the problem of form in its very enunciation. For how is it possible to predicate a genus “Sculpture” of so general a character as to admit of general laws being evolved from it? What is “Sculpture?”

Take painting again. There is no such thing as “the” art of Painting, and anyone who compares a drawing of Raphael, effected by outline, with one of Titian, effected by flecks of light and shade, without feeling that they belong to two different arts; any one who does not realize a dissimilarity of essence between the works of Giotto or Mantegna—relief, created by brushstroke—and those of Vermeer or Goya—music, created on coloured canvas—such a one will never grasp the deeper questions. As for the frescoes of Polygnotus and the mosaics of Ravenna, there is not even the similarity of technical means to bring them within the alleged genus, and what is there in common between an etching and the art of Fra Angelico, or a proto-Corinthian vase-painting and a Gothic cathedral-window, or the reliefs of Egypt and those of the Parthenon?

If an art has boundaries at all—boundaries of its soul-become-form—they are historical and not technical or physiological boundaries.^[274] An art is an organism, not a system. There is no art-genus that runs through all the centuries and all the Cultures. Even where (as in the case of the Renaissance) supposed technical traditions momentarily deceive us into a belief in the eternal validity of antique art-laws, there is at bottom entire discrepance. There is nothing in Greek and Roman art that stands in any relation whatever to the form-language of a Donatello statue or a painting of Signorelli or a façade of Michelangelo. Inwardly, the Quattrocento is related to the contemporary Gothic and to nothing else. The fact of the archaic Greek Apollo-type being “influenced” by Egyptian portraiture, or early Tuscan representation by Etruscan tomb-painting, implies precisely what is implied by that of Bach’s writing a fugue upon an alien theme—he shows what he can express with it. Every individual art—Chinese landscape or Egyptian plastic or Gothic counterpoint—is once existent, and departs with its soul and its symbolism never to return.

II

With this, the notion of Form opens out immensely. Not only the technical instrument, not only the form-language, but also the choice of art-genus itself is seen to be an expression-means. What the creation of a masterpiece means for an individual artist—the “Night Watch” for Rembrandt or the “Meistersinger” for Wagner—that the creation of a species of art, comprehended as such, means for the life-history of a Culture. It is epochal. Apart from the merest externals, each such art is an individual organism without predecessor or successor. Its theory, technique and convention all belong to its character, and contain nothing of eternal or universal validity. When one of these arts is born, when it is spent, whether it dies or is transmuted into another, why this or that art is dominant in or absent from a particular Culture—all these are questions of Form in the highest sense, just as is that other question of why individual painters and musicians unconsciously avoid certain shades and harmonies or, on the contrary, show preferences so marked that authorship-attributions can be based on them.

The importance of these groups of questions has not yet been recognized by theory, even by that of the present day. And yet it is precisely from this side, the side of their physiognomic, that the arts are accessible to the understanding. Hitherto it has been supposed—without the slightest examination of the weighty questions that the supposition involves—that the several “arts” specified in the conventional classification-scheme (the validity of which is assumed) are all possible at all times and places, and the absence of one or another of them in particular cases is attributed to the accidental lack of creative personalities or impelling circumstances or discriminating patrons to guide “art” on its “way.” Here we have what I call a transference of the causality-principle from the world of the become to that of the becoming. Having no eye for the perfectly different logic and necessity of the Living, for Destiny and the inevitableness and unique occurrence of its expression-possibilities, men had recourse to tangible and obvious “causes” for the building of their art-history, which thus came to consist of a series of events of only superficial concordance.

I have already, in the earliest pages of this work, exposed the shallowness of the notion of a linear progression of “mankind” through the stages of “ancient,” “mediæval” and “modern,” a notion that has made us blind to the true history and structure of higher Cultures. The history of art is a conspicuous case in point. Having assumed as self-evident the existence of a number of constant and well-defined provinces of art, one proceeded to order the history of these several provinces according to the—equally self-evident—scheme of ancient-mediæval-modern, to the exclusion, of course, of Indian and East-Asiatic art, of the art of Axum and Saba, of the Sassanids and of Russia, which if not omitted altogether were at best relegated to appendices. It occurred to no one that such results argued unsoundness in the method; the scheme was there, demanded facts, and must at any price be fed with them. And so a futile up-and-down course was stolidly traced out. Static times were described as “natural pauses,” it was called “decline” when some great art in reality died, and “renaissance” where an eye really free from prepossessions would have seen another art being born in another landscape to express another humanity. Even to-day we are still taught that the Renaissance was a rebirth of the Classical. And the conclusion was drawn that it is possible and right to take up arts that are found weak or even dead (in this respect the present is a veritable battle-field) and set them going again by conscious reformation-program or forced “revival.”

And yet it is precisely in this problem of the end, the impressively sudden end, of a great art—the end of the Attic drama in Euripides, of Florentine sculpture with Michelangelo, of instrumental music in Liszt, Wagner and Bruckner—that the organic character of these arts is most evident. If we look closely enough we shall have no difficulty in convincing ourselves that no one art of any greatness has ever been “reborn.”

Of the Pyramid style nothing passed over into the Doric. Nothing connects the Classical temple with the basilica of the Middle East, for the mere taking over of the Classical column as a structural member, though to a superficial observer it seems a fact of the first importance, weighs no more in reality than Goethe’s employment of the old mythology in the “Classical Walpurgis Night” scene of “Faust.” To believe genuinely in a rebirth of Classical art, or any Classical art, in the Western 15th Century requires a rare stretch of the imagination. And that a great art may die not merely with the Culture but within it, we may see from the fate of music in the Classical world.^[275] Possibilities of great music there must have been in the Doric springtime—how otherwise can we account for the importance of old-fashioned Sparta in the eyes of such musicians as there were later (for Terpander, Thaletas and Alcman were effective there when elsewhere the statuary art was merely infantile)?—and yet the Late-Classical world refrained. In just the same fashion everything that the Magian Culture had attempted in the way of frontal portraiture, deep relief and mosaic finally succumbed before the Arabesque; and everything of the plastic that had sprung up in the shade of Gothic cathedrals at Chartres, Reims, Bamberg, Naumburg, in the Nürnberg of Peter Vischer and the Florence of Verrocchio, vanished before the oil-painting of Venice and the instrumental music of the Baroque.

III

The temple of Poseidon at Pæstum and the Minster of Ulm, works of the ripest Doric and the ripest Gothic, differ precisely as the Euclidean geometry of bodily bounding-surfaces differs from the analytical geometry of the position of points in space referred to spatial axes. All Classical building begins from the outside, all Western from the inside. The Arabian also begins with the inside, but it stays there. There is one and only one soul, the Faustian, that craves for a style which drives through walls into the limitless universe of space and makes both the exterior and the interior of the building complementary images of one and the same world-feeling. The exterior of the basilica and the domical building may be a field for ornamentation, but architecture it is not. The impression that meets the beholder as he approaches is that of something shielding, something that hides a secret. The form-language in the cavern-twilight exists for the faithful only—that is the factor common to the highest examples of the style and to the simplest Mithræa and Catacombs, the prime powerful utterance of a new soul. Now, as soon as the Germanic spirit takes possession of the basilical type, there begins a wondrous mutation of all structural parts, as to both position and significance. Here in the Faustian North the outer form of the building, be it cathedral or mere dwelling-house, begins to be brought into relation with the meaning that governs the arrangement of the interior, a meaning undisclosed in the mosque and non-existent in the temple. The Faustian building has a visage and not merely a façade (whereas the front of a peripteros is, after all, only one of four sides and the centre-domed building in principle has not even a front) and with this visage, this head, is associated an articulated trunk that draws itself out through the broad plain like the cathedral at Speyer, or erects itself to the heavens like the innumerable spires of the original design of Reims. The motive of the façade, which greets the beholder and tells him the inner meaning of the house, dominates not only individual major buildings but also the whole aspect of our streets, squares and towns with their characteristic wealth of windows.^[276]

The great architecture of the early period is ever the mother of all following arts; it determines the choice of them and the spirit of them. Accordingly, we find that the history of the Classical shaping art is one untiring effort to accomplish one single ideal, viz., the conquest of the free-standing human body as the vessel of the pure real present. The temple of the naked body was to it what the cathedral of voices was to the Faustian from earliest counterpoint to the orchestral writing of the 18th Century. We have failed hitherto to understand the emotional force of this secular tendency of the Apollinian, because we have not felt how the purely material, soulless body (for the Temple of the Body, too, has no "interior"!) is the object which archaic relief, Corinthian painting on clay, and Attic fresco were all striving to obtain until Polycletus and Phidias showed how to achieve it in full. We have, with a wonderful blindness, assumed this kind of sculpture as both authoritative and universally possible, as in fact, “the art of sculpture.” We have written its history as one concerned with all peoples and periods, and even to-day our sculptors, under the influence of unproved Renaissance doctrines, speak of the naked human body as the noblest and most genuine object of “the” art of sculpture. Yet in reality this statue-art, the art of the naked body standing free upon its footing and appreciable from all sides alike, existed in the Classical and the Classical only, for it was that Culture alone which quite decisively refused to transcend sense-limits in favour of space. The Egyptian statue is always meant to be seen from the front—it is a variant of plane-relief. And the seemingly Classically-conceived statues of the Renaissance (we are astounded, as soon as it occurs to us to count them, to find how few of them there are^[277]) are nothing but a semi-Gothic reminiscence.

The evolution of this rigorously non-spatial art occupies the three centuries from 650 to 350, a period extending from the completion of the Doric and the simultaneous appearance of a tendency to free the figures from the Egyptian limitation of frontalness^[278] to the coming of the Hellenistic and its illusion-painting which closed-off the grand style. This sculpture will never be rightly appreciated until it is regarded as the last and highest Classical, as springing from a plane art, first obeying and then overcoming the fresco. No doubt the technical origin can be traced to experiments in figure-wise treatment of the pristine column, or the plates that served to cover the temple wall,^[279] and no doubt there are here and there imitations of Egyptian works (seated figures of Miletus), although very few Greek artists can ever have seen one.^[280] But as a form-ideal the statue goes back through relief to the archaic clay-painting in which fresco also originated. Relief, like fresco, is tied to the bodily wall. All this sculpture right down to Myron may be considered as relief detached from the plane. In the end, the figure is treated as a self-contained body apart from the mass of the building, but it remains essentially a silhouette in front of a wall.^[281] Direction in depth is excluded, and the work is spread out frontally before the beholder. Even the Marsyas of Myron can be copied upon vases or coins without much trouble or appreciable foreshortenings.^[282] Consequently, of the two major “late” arts after 650, fresco definitely has the priority. The small stock of types is always to be found first in vase-figuring, which is often exactly paralleled by quite late sculptures. We know that the Centaur group of the West pediment at Olympia was worked out from a painting. On the Ægina temple, the advance from the West to the East pediment is an advance from the fresco-character to the body-character. The change is completed about 460 with Polycletus, and thenceforward plastic groups become the model for strict painting. But it is from Lysippus that the wholly cubic and “all-ways” treatment becomes thoroughly veristic and yields “fact.” Till then, even in the case of Praxiteles, we have still a lateral or planar development of the subject, with a clear outline that is only fully effective in respect of one or two standpoints. But an undeviating testimony to the picture-origin of independent sculpture is the practice of polychroming the marble—a practice unknown to the Renaissance and to Classicism, which would have felt it as barbaric^[283]—and we may say the same of the gold-and-ivory statuary and the enamel overlaying of bronze, a metal which already possesses a shining golden tone of its own.

IV

The corresponding stage of Western art occupies the three centuries 1500-1800, between the end of late Gothic and the decay of Rococo which marks the end of the great Faustian style. In this period, conformably to the persistent growth into consciousness of the will to spatial transcendence, it is instrumental music that develops into the ruling art. At the beginning, in the 17th Century, music uses the characteristic tone-colours of the instruments, and the contrasts of strings and wind, human voices and instrumental voices, as means wherewith to paint. Its (quite unconscious) ambition is to parallel the great masters from Titian to Velasquez and Rembrandt. It makes pictures (in the sonata from Gabrieli [d. 1612.] to Corelli [d. 1713] every movement shows a theme embellished with graces and set upon the background of a basso continuo), paints heroic landscapes (in the pastoral cantata), and draws a portrait in lines of melody (in Monteverde’s “Lament of Ariadne,” 1608). With the German masters, all this goes. Painting can take music no further. Music becomes itself absolute: it is music that (quite unconsciously again) dominates both painting and architecture in the 18th Century. And, ever more and more decisively, sculpture fades out from among the deeper possibilities of this form-world.

What distinguishes painting as it was before, from painting as it was after, the shift from Florence to Venice—or, to put it more definitely, what separates the painting of Raphael and that of Titian as two entirely distinct arts—is that the plastic spirit of the one associates painting with relief, while the musical spirit of the other works in a technique of visible brush-strokes and atmospheric depth-effects that is akin to the chromatic of string and wind choruses. It is an opposition and not a transition that we have before us, and the recognition of the fact is vital to our understanding of the organism of these arts. Here, if anywhere, we have to guard against the abstract hypothesis of “eternal art-laws.” “Painting” is a mere word. Gothic glass-painting was an element of Gothic architecture, the servant of its strict symbolism just as the Egyptian and the Arabian and every other art in this stage was the servant of the stone-language. Draped figures were built up as cathedrals were. Their folds were an ornamentation of extreme sincerity and severe expressiveness. To criticize their “stiffness” from a naturalistic-imitative point of view is to miss the point entirely.

Similarly “music” is a mere word. Some music there has been everywhere and always, even before any genuine Culture, even among the beasts. But the serious music of the Classical was nothing but a plastic for the ear. The tetrachords, chromatic and enharmonic, have a structural and not a harmonic meaning:^[284] but this is the very difference between body and space. This music was single-voiced. The few instruments that it employed were all developed in respect of capacity for tone-plastic; and naturally therefore it rejected the Egyptian harp, an instrument that was probably akin in tone-colour to the harpsichordharpsichord. But, above all, the melody—like Classical verse from Homer to Hadrian’s time—was treated quantitatively and not accentually; that is, the syllables, their bodies and their extent, decided the rhythm. The few fragments that remain suffice to show us that the sensuous charm of this art is something outside our comprehension; but this very fact should cause us also

to reconsider our ideas as to the impressions purposed and achieved by the statuary and the fresco, for we do not and cannot experience the charm that these exercised upon the Greek eye.

Equally incomprehensible to us is Chinese music: in which, according to educated Chinese, we are never able to distinguish gay from grave.^[285] Vice versa, to the Chinese all the music of the West without distinction is march-music. Such is the impression that the rhythmic dynamic of our life makes upon the accentless Tao of the Chinese soul, and, indeed, the impression that our entire Culture makes upon an alien humanity—the directional energy of our church-naves and our storeyed façades, the depth-perspectives of our pictures, the march of our tragedy and narrative, not to mention our technics and the whole course of our private and public life. We ourselves have accent in our blood and therefore do not notice it. But when our rhythm is juxtaposed with that of an alien life, we find the discordance intolerable.

Arabian music, again, is quite another world. Hitherto we have only observed it through the medium of the Pseudomorphosis, as represented by Byzantine hymns and Jewish psalmody, and even these we know only in so far as they have penetrated to the churches of the far West as antiphons, responsorial psalmody and Ambrosian chants.^[286] But it is self-evident that not only the religious west of Edessa (the syncretic cults, especially Syrian sun-worship, the Gnostic and the Mandæan) but also those to the east (Mazdaists, Manichæans, Mithraists, the synagogues of Irak and in due course the Nestorian Christians) must have possessed a sacred music of the same style; that side by side with this a gay secular music developed (above all, amongst the South-Arabian and Sassanid chivalry^[287]); and that both found their culmination in the Moorish style that reigned from Spain to Persia.

Out of all this wealth, the Faustian soul borrowed only some few church-forms and, moreover, in borrowing them, it instantly transformed them root and branch (10th Century, Hucbald, Guido d’Arezzo). Melodic accent and beat produced the “march,” and polyphony (like the rime of contemporary poetry) the image of endless space. To understand this, we have to distinguish between the imitative^[288] and the ornamental sides of music, and although owing to the fleeting nature of all tone-creations^[289] our knowledge is limited to the musical history of our own West, yet this is quite sufficient to reveal that duality of development which is one of the master-keys of all art-history. The one is soul, landscape, feeling, the other strict form, style, school. West Europe has an ornamental music of the grand style (corresponding to the full plastic of the Classical) which is associated with the architectural history of the cathedral, which is closely akin to Scholasticism and Mysticism, and which finds its laws in the motherland of high Gothic between Seine and Scheldt. Counterpoint developed simultaneously with the flying-buttress system, and its source was the “Romanesque” style of the Fauxbourdon and the Discant with their simple parallel and contrary motion.^[290] It is an architecture of human voices and, like the statuary-group and the glass-paintings, is only conceivable in the setting of these stone vaultings. With them it is a high art of space, of that space to which Nicolas of Oresme, Bishop of Lisieux, gave mathematical meaning by the introduction of co-ordinates.^[291] This is the genuine “rinascita” and “reformatio” as Joachim of Floris saw it at the end of the 12th Century^[292]—the birth of a new soul mirrored in the form-language of a new art.

Along with this there came into being in castle and village a secular imitative music, that of troubadours, Minnesänger and minstrels. As “ars nova” this travelled from the courts of Provence to the palaces of Tuscan patricians about 1300, the time of Dante and Petrarch. It consisted of simple melodies that appealed to the heart with their major and minor, of canzoni, madrigals and caccias, and it included also a type of galante operetta (Adam de la Hale’s “Robin and Marion”). After 1400, these forms give rise to forms of collective singing—the rondeau and the ballade. All this is “art” for a public.^[293] Scenes are painted from life, scenes of love, hunting, chivalry. The point of it is in the melodic inventiveness, instead of in the symbolism of its linear progress.

Thus, musically as otherwise, the castle and the cathedral are distinct. The cathedral is music and the castle makes music. The one begins with theory, the other with impromptu: it is the distinction between waking consciousness and living existence, between the spiritual and the knightly singer. Imitation stands nearest to life and direction and therefore begins with melody, while the symbolism of counterpoint belongs to extension and through polyphony signifies infinite space. The result was, on the one side, a store of “eternal” rules and, on the other, an inexhaustible fund of folk-melodies on which even the 18th Century was still drawing. The same contrast reveals itself, artistically, in the class-opposition of Renaissance and Reformation.^[294] The courtly taste of Florence was antipathetic to the spirit of counterpoint; the evolution of strict musical form from the Motet to the four-voice Mass through Dunstaple, Binchois and Dufay (c. 1430) proceeded wholly within the magic circle of Gothic architecture. From Fra Angelico to Michelangelo the great Netherlanders ruled alone in ornamental music. Lorenzo de’ Medici found no one in Florence who understood the strict style, and had to send for Dufay. And while in this region Leonardo and Raphael were painting, in the north Okeghem (d. 1495) and his school and Josquin des Prés (d. 1521) brought the formal polyphony of human voices to the height of fulfilment.

The transition into the “Late” age was heralded in Rome and Venice. With Baroque the leadership in music passes to Italy. But at the same time architecture ceases to be the ruling art and there is formed a group of Faustian special-arts in which oil-painting occupies the central place. About 1560 the empire of the human voice comes to an end in the a cappella style of Palestrina and Orlando Lasso (both d. 1594). Its powers could no longer express the passionate drive into the infinite, and it made way for the chorus of instruments, wind and string. And thereupon Venice produced Titian-music, the new madrigal that in its flow and ebb follows the sense of the text. The music of the Gothic is architectural and vocal, that of the Baroque pictorial and instrumental. The one builds, the other operates by means of motives. For all the arts have become urban and therefore secular. We pass from super-personal Form to the personal expression of the Master, and shortly before 1600 Italy produces the basso continuo which requires virtuosi and not pious participants.

Thenceforward, the great task was to extend the tone-corpus into the infinity, or rather to resolve it into an infinite space of tone. Gothic had developed the instruments into families of definite timbre. But the new-born “orchestra” no longer observes limitations imposed by the human voice, but treats it as a voice to be combined with other voices—at the same moment as our mathematic proceeds from the geometrical analysis of Fermat to the purely functional analysis of Descartes.^[295] In Zarlino’s “Harmony” (1558) appears a genuine perspective of pure tonal space. We begin to distinguish between ornamental and fundamental instruments. Melody and embellishment join to produce the Motive, and this in development leads to the rebirth of counterpoint in the form of the fugal style, of which Frescobaldi was the first master and Bach the culmination. To the vocal masses and motets the Baroque opposes its grand, orchestrally-conceived forms of the oratorio (Carissimi), the cantata (Viadana) and the opera (Monteverde). Whether a bass melody be set against upper voices, or upper voices be concerted against one another upon a background of basso continuo, always sound-worlds of characteristic expression-quality work reciprocally upon one another in the infinity of tonal space, supporting, intensifying, raising, illuminating, threatening, overshadowing—a music all of interplay, scarcely intelligible save through ideas of contemporary Analysis.

From out of these forms of the early Baroque there proceeded, in the 17th Century, the sonata-like forms of suite, symphony and concerto grosso. The inner structure and the sequence of movements, the thematic working-out and modulation became more and more firmly established. And thus was reached the great, immensely dynamic, form in which music—now completely bodiless—was raised by Corelli and Handel and Bach to be the ruling art of the West. When Newton and Leibniz, about 1670, discovered the Infinitesimal Calculus, the fugal style was fulfilled. And when, about 1740, Euler began the definitive formulation of functional Analysis, Stamitz and his generation were discovering the last and ripest form of musical ornamentation, the four-part movement^[296] as vehicle of pure and unlimited motion. For, at that time, there was still this one step to be taken. The theme of the fugue “is,” that of the new sonata-movement “becomes,” and the issue of its working out is in the one case a picture, in the other a drama. Instead of a series of pictures we get a cyclic succession,^[297] and the real source of this tone-language was in the possibilities, realized at last, of our deepest and most intimate kind of music—the music of the strings. Certain it is that the violin is the noblest of all instruments that the Faustian soul has imagined and trained for the expression of its last secrets, and certain it is, too, that it is in string quartets and violin sonatas that it has experienced its most transcendent and most holy moments of full illumination. Here, in chamber-music, Western art as a whole reaches its highest point. Here our prime symbol of endless space is expressed as completely as the Spearman of Polycletus expresses that of intense bodiliness. When one of those ineffably yearning violin-melodies wanders through the spaces expanded around it by the orchestration of Tartini or Nardini, Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven, we know ourselves in the presence of an art beside which that of the Acropolis is alone worthy to be set.

With this, the Faustian music becomes dominant among the Faustian arts. It banishes the plastic of the statue and tolerates only the minor art—an entirely musical, refined, un-Classical and counter-Renaissance art—of porcelain, which (as a discovery of the West) is contemporary with the rise of chamber-music to full effectiveness. Whereas the statuary of Gothic is through-and-through architectural ornamentation, human espalier-work, that of the Rococo remarkably exemplifies the pseudo-plastic that results from entire subjection to the form-language of music, and shows to what a degree the technique governing the presented foreground can be in contradiction with the real expression-language that is hidden behind it. Compare Coysevox’s^[298] (1686) crouching Venus in the Louvre with its Classical prototype in the Vatican—in the one plastic is understudying music, in the other plastic is itself. Terms like “staccato,” “accelerando,” “andante” and “allegro” best describe the kind of movements that we have here, the flow of the lines, the fluidity in the being of the stone itself which like the porcelain has more or less lost its fine compactness. Hence our feeling that the granular marble is out of keeping. Hence, too, the wholly un-Classical tendency to work with reference to effects of light and shade. This is quite in conformity with the principles of oil-painting from Titian onwards. That which in the 18th Century is called “colour” in an etching, a drawing, or a sculpture-group really signifies music. Music dominates the painting of Watteau and Fragonard and the art of Gobelins and pastels, and since then, have we not acquired the habit of speaking of colour-tones or tone-colours? And do not the very words imply a recognition of a final homogeneity between the two arts, superficially dissimilar as they are? And are not these same words perfectly meaningless as applied to any and every Classical art? But music did not stop there; it transmuted also the architecture of Bernini’s Baroque into accord with its own spirit, and made of it Rococo, a style of transcendent ornamentation upon which lights (or rather “tones”) play to dissolve ceilings, walls and everything else constructional and actual into polyphonies and harmonies, with architectural trills and cadences and runs to complete the identification of the form-language of these halls and galleries with that of the music imagined for them. Dresden and Vienna are the homes of this late and soon-extinguished fairyland of visible chamber music, of curved furniture and mirror-halls, and shepherdesses in verse and porcelain. It is the final brilliant autumn with which the Western soul completes the expression of its high style. And in the Vienna of the Congress-time it faded and died.

V

The Art of the Renaissance, considered from this particular one of its many aspects,^[299] is a revolt against the spirit of the Faustian forest-music of counterpoint, which at that time was preparing to vassalize the whole form-language of the Western Culture. It was the logical consequence of the open assertion of this will in matured Gothic. It never disavowed its origin and it maintained the character of a simple counter-movement; necessarily therefore it remained dependent upon the forms of the original movement, and represented simply the effect of these upon a hesitant soul. Hence, it was without true depth, either ideal or phenomenal. As to the first, we have only to think of the bursting passion with which the Gothic world-feeling discharged itself upon the whole Western landscape, and we shall see at once what sort of a movement it was that the handful of select spirits—scholars, artists and humanists—initiated about 1420.^[300] In the first the issue was one of life and death for a new-born soul, in the second it was a point of—taste. The Gothic gripped life in its entirety, penetrated its most hidden corners. It created new men and a new world. From the idea of Catholicism to the state-theory of the Holy Roman Emperors, from the knightly tourney to the new city-form, from cathedral to cottage, from language-building to the village maiden’s bridal attire, from oil-painting to the Spielmann’s song, everything is hall-marked with the stamp of one and the same symbolism. But the Renaissance, when it had mastered some arts of word and picture, had shot its bolt. It altered the ways of thought and the life-feeling of West Europe not one whit. It could penetrate as far as costume and gesture, but the roots of life it could not touch—even in Italy the world-outlook of the Baroque is essentially a continuation of the Gothic.^[301] It produced no wholly great personality between Dante and Michelangelo, each of whom had one foot outside its limits. And as for the other—phenomenal or manifested depth—the Renaissance never touched the people, even in Florence itself. The man for whom they had ears was Savonarola—a phenomenon of quite another spiritual order and one which begins to be comprehensible when we discern the fact that, all the time, the deep under-currents are steadily flowing on towards the Gothic-musical Baroque. The Renaissance as an anti-Gothic movement and a reaction against the spirit of polyphonic music has its Classical equivalent in the Dionysiac movement. This was a reaction against Doric and against the sculptural-Apollinian world-feeling. It did not “originate” in the Thracian Dionysus-cult, but merely took this up as a weapon against and counter-symbol to the Olympian religion, precisely as in Florence the cult of the antique was called in for the justification and confirmation of a feeling already there. The period of the great protest was the 7th Century in Greece and (therefore) the 15th in West Europe. In both cases we have in reality an outbreak of deep-seated discordances in the Culture, which physiognomically dominates a whole epoch of its history and especially of its artistic world—in other words, a stand that the soul attempts to make against the Destiny that at last it comprehends. The inwardly recalcitrant forces—Faust’s second Soul that would separate itself from the other—are striving to deflect the sense of the Culture, to repudiate, to get rid of or to evade its inexorable necessity; it stands anxious in presence of the call to accomplish its historical fate in Ionic and Baroque. This anxiety fastened itself in Greece to the Dionysus-cult with its musical, dematerializing, body-squandering orgasm, and in the Renaissance to the tradition of the Antique and its cult of the bodily-plastic tradition. In each case, the alien expression-means was brought in consciously and deliberately, in order that the force of a directly-opposite form-language should provide the suppressed feelings with a weight and a pathos of their own, and so enable them to stand against the stream—in Greece the stream which flowed from Homer and the Geometrical to Phidias, in the West that which flowed from the Gothic cathedrals, through Rembrandt, to Beethoven.

It follows from the very character of a counter-movement that it is far easier for it to define what it is opposing than what it is aiming at. This is the difficulty of all Renaissance research. In the Gothic (and the Doric) it is just the opposite—men are contending for something, not against it—but Renaissance art is nothing more nor less than anti-Gothic art. Renaissance music, too, is a contradiction in itself; the music of the Medicean court was the Southern French “ars nova,” that of the Florentine Duomo was the Low-German counterpoint, both alike essentially Gothic and the property of the whole West.

The view that is customarily taken of the Renaissance is a very clear instance of how readily the proclaimed intentions of a movement may be mistaken for its deeper meaning. Since Burckhardt,^[302] criticism has controverted every individual proposition that the leading spirits of the age put forward as to their own tendencies—and yet, this done, it has continued to use the word Renaissance substantially in the former sense. Certainly, one is conscious at once in passing to the south of the Alps of a marked dissimilarity in architecture in particular and in the look of the arts in general. But the very obviousness of the conclusion that the impression prompts should have led us to distrust it and to ask ourselves, instead, whether the supposed distinction of Gothic and “antique” was not in reality merely a difference between Northern and Southern aspects of one and the same form-world. Plenty of things in Spain give the impression of being “Classical” merely because they are Southern, and if a layman were confronted with the great cloister of S. Maria Novella or the façade of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and asked to say if these were “Gothic” he would certainly guess wrong. Otherwise, the sharp change of spirit ought to have set in not beyond the Alps but only beyond the Apennines, for Tuscany is artistically an island in Italian Italy. Upper Italy belongs entirely to a Byzantine-tinted Gothic; Siena in particular is a genuine monument of the counter-Renaissance, and Rome is already the home of Baroque. But, in fact, it is the change of landscape that coincides with the change of feeling.

In the actual birth of the Gothic style Italy had indeed no inward share. At the epoch of 1000 the country was still absolutely under the domination of Byzantine taste in the East and Moorish taste in the South. When Gothic first took root here it was the mature Gothic, and it implanted itself with an intensity and force for which we look in vain in any of the great Renaissance creations—think of the “Stabat Mater,” the “Dies Iræ,” Catharine of Siena, Giotto and Simone Martini! At the same time, it was lighted from the South and its strangeness was, as it were, softened in acclimatization. That which it suppressed or expelled was not, as has been supposed, some lingering strains of the Classical but purely the Byzantine-cum-Saracen form-language that appealed to the senses in familiar everyday life—in the buildings of Ravenna and Venice but even more in the ornament of the fabrics, vessels and arms imported from the East.

If the Renaissance had been a “renewal” (whatever that may mean) of the Classical world-feeling, then, surely, would it not have had to replace the symbol of embraced and rhythmically-ordered space by that of closed structural body? But there was never any question of this. On the contrary, the Renaissance practised wholly and exclusively an architecture of space prescribed for it by Gothic, from which it differed only in that in lieu of the Northern “Sturm und Drang” it breathed the clear equable calm of the sunny, care-free and unquestioning South. It produced no new building-idea, and the extent of its architectural achievement might almost be reduced to façades and courtyards.

Now, this focussing of expressible effort upon the street-front of a house or the side of a cloister—many-windowed and ever significant of the spirit within—is characteristic of the Gothic (and deeply akin to its art of portraiture); and the cloistered courtyard itself is, from the Sun-temple of Baalbek to the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra, as genuinely Arabian. And in the midst of this art the Poseidon temple of Pæstum, all body, stands lonely and unrelated: no one saw it, no one attempted to copy it. Equally un-Attic is the Florentine sculpture, for Attic is free plastic, “in the round” in the full sense of the words, whereas every Florentine statue feels behind it the ghost of the niche into which the Gothic sculptor had built its real ancestors. In the relation of figure to background and in the build of the body, the masters of the “Kings’ heads” at Chartres and the masters of the “George” choir at Bamberg exhibit the same interpenetration of “Antique” and Gothic expression-means that we have, neither intensified nor contradicted, in the manner of Giovanni Pisano and Ghiberti and even Verrocchio.

If we take away from the models of the Renaissance all elements that originated later than the Roman Imperial Age—that is to say, those belonging to the Magian form-world—nothing is left. Even from Late-Roman architecture itself all elements derived from the great days of Hellas had one by one vanished. Most conclusive of all, though, is that motive which actually dominates the Renaissance, which because of its Southern-ness we regard as the noblest of the Renaissance characters, viz., the association of round-arch and column. This association, no doubt, is very un-Gothic, but in the Classical style it simply does not exist, and in fact it represents the leitmotif of the Magian architecture that originated in Syria.

But it was just then that the South received from the North those decisive impulses which helped it first of all to emancipate itself entirely from Byzantium and then to step from Gothic into Baroque. In the region comprised between Amsterdam, Köln and Paris^[303]—the counter-pole to Tuscany in the style-history of our culture—counterpoint and oil-painting had been created in association with the Gothic architecture. Thence Dufay in 1428 and Willaert in 1516 came to the Papal Chapel, and in 1527 the latter founded that Venetian school which was decisive of Baroque music. The successor of Willaert was de Rore of Antwerp. A Florentine commissioned Hugo van der Goes to execute the Portinari altar for Santa Maria Nuova, and Memlinc to paint a Last Judgment. And over and above this, numerous pictures (especially Low-Countries portraits) were acquired and exercised an enormous influence. In 1450 Rogier van der Weyden himself came to Florence, where his art was both admired and imitated. In 1470 Justus van Gent introduced oil-painting to Umbria, and Antonello da Messina brought what he had learned in the Netherlands to Venice. How much “Dutch” and how little “Classical” there is in the pictures of Filippino Lippi, Ghirlandaio and Botticelli and especially in the engravings of Pollaiulo! Or in Leonardo himself. Even to-day critics hardly care to admit the full extent of the influence exercised by the Gothic North upon the architecture, music, painting and plastic of the Renaissance.^[304] It was just then, too, that Nicolaus Cusanus, Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen (1401-1464), brought into mathematics the “infinitesimal” principle, that contrapuntal method of number which he reached by deduction from the idea of God as Infinite Being. It was from Nicholas of Cusa that Leibniz received the decisive impulse that led him to work out his differential calculus; and thus was forged the weapon with which dynamic, Baroque, Newtonian, physics definitely overcame the static idea characteristic of the Southern physics that reaches a hand to Archimedes and is still effective even in Galileo.

The high period of the Renaissance is a moment of apparent expulsion of music from Faustian art. And in fact, for a few decades, in the only area where Classical and Western landscapes touched, Florence did uphold—with one grand effort that was essentially metaphysical and essentially defensive—an image of the Classical so convincing that, although its deeper characters were without exception mere anti-Gothic, it lasted beyond Goethe and, if not for our criticism, yet for our feelings, is valid to this day. The Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Rome of Leo the Tenth—that is what for us the Classical is, an eternal goal of most secret longing, the only deliverance from our heavy hearts and limit upon our horizon. And it is this because, and only because, it is anti-Gothic. So clean-cut is the opposition of Apollinian and Faustian spirituality.

But let there be no mistake as to the extent of this illusion. In Florence men practiced fresco and relief in contradiction of Gothic glass-painting and Byzantine gold-ground mosaic. This was the one moment in the history of the West when sculpture ranked as the paramount art. The dominant elements in the picture are the poised bodies, the ordered groups, the structural side of architecture. The backgrounds possess no intrinsic value, merely serving to fill up between and behind the self-sufficient present of the foreground-figures. For a while here, painting is actually under the domination of plastic; Verrocchio, Pollaiuolo and Botticelli were goldsmiths. Yet, all the same, these frescoes have nothing of the spirit of Polygnotus in them. Examine a collection of Classical painted vases—not in individual specimens or copies (which would give the wrong idea) but in the mass, for this is the one species of Classical art in which originals are plentiful enough to impress us effectively with the will that is behind the art. In the light of such a study, the utter un-Classicalness of the Renaissance-spirit leaps to the eye. The great achievement of Giotto and Masaccio in creating a fresco-art is only apparently a revival of the Apollinian way of feeling; but the depth-experience and idea of extension that underlies it is not the Apollinian unspatial and self-contained body but the Gothic field (Bildraum). However recessive the backgrounds are, they exist. Yet here again there was the fullness of light, the clarity of atmosphere, the great noon-calm, of the South; dynamic space was changed in Tuscany, and only in Tuscany, to the static space of which Piero della Francesca was the master. Though fields of space were painted, they were put, not as an existence unbounded and like music ever striving into the depths, but as sensuously definable. Space was given a sort of bodiliness and order in plane layers, and drawing, sharpness of outline, definition of surface were studied with a care that seemingly approached the Hellenic ideal. Yet there was always this difference, that Florence depicted space perspectively as singular in contrast with things as plural, whereas Athens presented things as separate singulars in contrast to general nothingness. And in proportion as the surge of the Renaissance smoothed down, the hardness of this tendency receded, from Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel to Raphael’s in the Vatican Stanze, until the sfumato of Leonardo, the melting of the edges into the background, brings a musical ideal in place of the relief-ideal into painting. The hidden dynamic is equally unmistakable in the sculpture of Florence—it would be perfectly hopeless to look for an Attic companion for Verrocchio’s equestrian statue.^[305] This art was a mask, a mode of the taste of an élite, and sometimes a comedy—though never was comedy more gallantly played out. The indescribable inward purity of Gothic form often causes us to forget what an excess of native strength and depth it possessed. Gothic, it must be repeated again, is the only foundation of the Renaissance. The Renaissance never even touched the real Classical, let alone understood it or “revived” it. The consciousness of the Florentine élite, wholly under literary influences, fashioned the deceptive name to positivize the negative element of the movement—thereby demonstrating how little such currents are aware of their own nature. There is not a single one of their great works that the contemporaries of Pericles, or even those of Cæsar, would not have rejected as utterly alien. Their palace courtyards are Moorish courtyards, and their round arches on slender pillars are of Syrian origin. Cimabue taught his century to imitate with the brush the art of Byzantine mosaic. Of the two famous domical buildings of the Renaissance, the domed cathedral of Florence is a masterpiece of late Gothic, and St. Peter’s is one of early Baroque. When Michelangelo set himself to build the latter as the “Pantheon towering over the Basilica of Maxentius,” he was naming two buildings of the purest early Arabian style. And ornament—is there indeed a genuine Renaissance ornamentation? Certainly there is nothing comparable in symbolic force with the ornamentation of Gothic. But what is the provenance of that gay and elegant embellishment which has a real inward unity of its own and has captivated all Europe? There is a great difference between the home of a “taste” and the home of the expression-means that it employs: one finds a great deal that is Northern in the early Florentine motives of Pisano, Maiano, Ghiberti and Della Quercia. We have to distinguish in all these chancels, tombs, niches and porches between the outward and transferable forms (the Ionic column itself is doubly a transfer, for it originated in Egypt) and the spirit of the form-language that uses them as means and signs. One Classical element or item is equivalent to another so long as something un-Classical is being expressed—significance lies not in the thing but in the way in which it is used. But even in Donatello such motives are far fewer than in mature Baroque. As for a strict Classical capital, no such thing is to be found.

And yet, at moments, Renaissance art succeeded in achieving something wonderful that music could not reproduce—a feeling for the bliss of perfect nearness, for pure, restful and liberating space-effects, bright and tidy and free from the passionate movement of Gothic and Baroque. It is not Classical, but it is a dream of Classical existence, the only dream of the Faustian soul in which it was able to forget itself.