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Title: Nietzsche and Art

Author: Anthony M. Ludovici

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NIETZSCHE AND ART

by

ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI

Author of 'Who is to be Master of the World?'

"Rien n'est beau que le vrai, dit un vers respecté;
et moi, je lui réponds, sans crainte d'un blasphème:
Rien n'est vrai sans beauté." —Alfred de Musset.

CONSTABLE & CO. LTD.

LONDON

1911

Sekhet (Louvre)

Preface

"We philosophers are never more delighted than when we are taken for artists."[1]

In this book, which embodies a course of lectures delivered in a somewhat condensed and summarized form at University College, London, during November and December, 1910, I have done two things. I have propounded Nietzsche's general Art doctrine, and, with the view of illustrating it and of defining it further, I have also applied its leading principles to one of the main branches of Art.

As this has not been done before, either in English or in any Continental language, my book is certainly not free from the crudeness and inadvertences which are inseparable from pioneer efforts of this nature. Nevertheless it is with complete confidence, and a deep conviction of its necessity, that I now see it go to print; for, even if here and there its adventurous spirit may ultimately require modification, I feel certain that, in the main, time itself, together with the help of other writers, will fully confirm its general thesis, if I should be unable to do so.

Sooner or later it will be brought home to us in Europe that we cannot with impunity foster and cultivate vulgarity and mob qualities in our architecture, our sculpture, our painting, our music and literature, without paying very dearly for these luxuries in our respective national politics, in our family institutions, and even in our physique. To connect all these things together, and to show their inevitable interdependence, would be a perfectly possible though arduous undertaking. In any case, this is not quite the task I have set myself in this work. I have indeed shown that to bestow admiration on a work of extreme democratic painting and at the same time to be convinced of the value of an aristocratic order of society, is to be guilty of a confusion of ideas which ultimately can lead only to disastrous results in practical life; but further than this I have not gone, simply because the compass of these lectures did not permit of my so doing.

Confining myself strictly to Nietzsche's æsthetic, I have been content merely to show that the highest Art, or Ruler Art, and therefore the highest beauty,—in which culture is opposed to natural rudeness, selection to natural chaos, and simplicity to natural complexity,—can be the flower and product only of an aristocratic society which, in its traditions and its active life, has observed, and continues to observe, the three aristocratic principles,—culture, selection and simplicity.

Following Nietzsche closely, I have sought to demonstrate the difference between the art which comes of inner poverty (realism, or democratic art), and that which is the result of inner riches (Ruler Art).

Identifying the first with the reflex actions which respond to external stimuli, I have shown it to be slavishly dependent upon environment for its existence, and, on that account, either beneath reality (Incompetence), on a level with reality (Realism), or fantastically different from reality (Romanticism). I have, moreover, associated these three forms of inferior art with democracy, because in democracy I find three conditions which are conducive to their cultivation, viz.—(1) The right of self-assertion granted to everybody, and the consequent necessary deterioration of world-interpretations owing to the fact that the function of interpretation is claimed by mediocrity; (2) the belief in a general truth that can be made common to all, which seems to become prevalent in democratic times, and which perforce reduces us to the only truth that can be made common to all, namely Reality; and (3) a democratic dislike of recognizing the mark or stamp of any particular human power in the things interpreted, and man's consequent "return to Nature" untouched by man, which, once again, is Reality.

Identifying Ruler Art, or the Art of inner riches, with the function of giving, I have shown it to be dependent upon four conditions which are quite inseparable from an aristocratic society, and which I therefore associate, without any hesitation, as Nietzsche does, with Higher Man, with Nature's rare and lucky strokes among men. These conditions are —(1) Long tradition under the sway of noble and inviolable values, resulting in an accumulation of will power and a superabundance of good spirits; (2) leisure which allows of meditation, and therefore of that process of lowering pitchers into the wells of inner riches; (3) the disbelief in freedom for freedom's sake without a purpose or without an aim; and (4) an order of rank according to which each is given a place in keeping with his value, and authority and reverence are upheld.

In the course of this exposition, it will be seen that I have to lay realism also at the door of Ruler Art; but I am careful to point out that, although such realism (I call it militant realism in respect to the art both of the Middle Ages and of the later Renaissance, as well as of Greece) is a fault, of Ruler Art which very much reduces the latter's rank among the arts; it is nevertheless above that other realism of mediocrity which, for the want of a better term, I call poverty realism. (See Lecture II, Part II, end.)

In order firmly to establish the difference between the Ruler and Democratic styles I ought, perhaps, to have entered with more thoroughness than I have done into the meditative nature of the one, and the empirical nature of the other. This, apart from a few very unmistakable hints, I have unfortunately been unable to do. I found it quite impossible to include all the detail bearing upon the main thesis, in this first treatise; and, though I have resolved to discuss these important matters very soon, in the form of supplementary essays, I can but acknowledge here that I recognize their omission as a blemish.

The wide field covered by this book, and the small form in which I was compelled to cast it, have thus led to many questions remaining inadequately answered and to many statements being left insufficiently substantiated. In the end I found it quite impossible to avail myself even of a third of the material I had collected for its production, and I should therefore be grateful if it could be regarded more in the light of a preliminary survey of the ground to be built upon, rather than as a finished building taking its foundation in Nietzsche's philosophy of Art.

With regard to all my utterances on Egypt, I should like the reader kindly to bear only this in mind: that my choice of Egyptian art, as the best example of Ruler Art we possess, is neither arbitrary nor capricious; but, because it is neither arbitrary nor capricious, it does not follow that I regard a return to the types of Egypt as the only possible salvation of the graphic arts. This would be sheer Romanticism and sentimentality. "A thousand paths are there which have never yet been trodden; a thousand salubrities and hidden islands of life. Unexhausted and undiscovered is still man and man's world" (Z., I, XXII.).

It is rather the spirit which led to this Egyptian Art, which I regard as so necessary to all great achievements, either in legislation, art, or religion; and whether this spirit happens to be found on the banks of the Nile, in the Vatican, or in Mexico. I point to it merely as something which we ought to prize and cherish, and which we now possess only in an extremely diluted and decadent form. It is the spirit which will establish order at all costs, whose manner of exploiting higher men is to look upon the world through their transfiguring vision, and which believes that it is better for mankind to attain to a high level, even in ones, twos, or threes, than that the bulk of humanity should begin to doubt that man can attain to a high level at all.

This spirit might produce any number of types; it is not necessary, therefore, that the Egyptian type should be regarded as precisely the one to be desired. I do but call your attention to these granite and diorite sculptures, because behind them I feel the presence and the power of that attitude towards life which the ancient Pharaohs held and reverenced, and which I find reflected in Nietzsche's Art values.

* * * * * * *

In quoting from German authorities, where I have not been able to give reference to standard English translations, I have translated the extracts from the original myself, for the convenience of English readers; while, in the case of French works, I have deliberately given the original text, only when I felt that the sense might suffer by translation.

I should now like to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Oscar Levy, who has always been ready to place his valuable time and wide knowledge at my disposal whenever I have expressed the smallest desire of consulting him on any difficult point that may have arisen during the preparation of these lectures. And I should also like to acknowledge the help afforded me by both Mr. J. M. Kennedy and Dr. Mügge,—the one through his extensive acquaintance with Eastern literature, and the other through his valuable bibliography of works relating to Nietzsche's life and philosophy.

It only remains for me to thank the Committee and the Provost of University College, Gower Street, for their kindness, and for the generous hospitality which they have now extended to me on two separate occasions; and, finally, to avail myself of this opportunity in order to express my grateful recognition of the trouble taken on my behalf by Professor Robert Priebsch and Mr. Walter W. Seton of London University, on both occasions when I had the honour of delivering a course of lectures at their College.

Anthony M. Ludovici.
February 1911.

CONTENTS


LECTURE I

Part I

Anarchy in Modern Art

The State of Modern Art

The Fine Arts:
1. The Artists
2. The Public
3. The Critics
4. Some Art-Criticisms

Part II

Suggested Causes of the Anarchy in Modern Art

1. Morbid Irritability
2. Misleading Systems of Æsthetic
3. Our Heritage:—
(a) Christianity
(b) Protestantism
(c) Philosophical Influences
(d) The Evolutionary Hypothesis

LECTURE II

Government in Art—Nietzsche's Definition of Art

Part I

Divine Art and the Man—God

1. The World "Without Form" and "Void"
2. The First Artists
3. The People and their Man-God
4. The Danger
5. The Two Kinds of Artists

Part II

Deductions from Part I—Nietzsche's Art Principles

1. The Spirit of the Age incompatible with Ruler Art
2. A Thrust parried. Police or Detective Art defined
3. The Purpose of Art Still the Same as Ever
4. The Artist's and the Layman's View of Life
5. The Confusion of the Two Points of View
6. The Meaning of Beauty of Form and of Beauty of Content in Art
7. The Meaning of Ugliness of Form and of Ugliness of Content in Art
8. The Ruler-Artist's Style and Subject

Part III

Landscape and Portrait Painting

1. The Value "Ugly" in the Mouth of the Dionysian Artist
2. Landscape Painting
3. Portrait Painting

LECTURE III

Nietzsche's art principles in the history of art

Part I

Christianity and the Renaissance

1. Rome and the Christian Ideal
2. The Pagan Type appropriated and transformed by Christian Art
3. The Gothic Building and Sentiment
4. The Renaissance

Part II

Greece and Egypt

1. Greek Art
(a) The Parthenon
(b) The Apollo of Tenea
(c) The Two Art-Wills of Ancient Greece
(d) Greek Painting

2. Egyptian Art
(a) King Khephrën
(b) The Lady Nophret
(c) The Pyramid

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


Sekhet (Louvre) Frontispiece
The Marriage of Mary, by Raphael (Brera, Milan)
Saskia, by Rembrandt (Dresden Royal Picture Gallery)
The Canon of Polycleitus (Rome)
The Apollo of Tenea (Glyptothek, Munich)
The Medusa Metope of Selinus (Palermo)
King Khephrën (Cairo Museum)
The Lady Nophret (Cairo Museum)

Abbreviations Used in Referring to Nietzsche's Works

The English renderings given in this book are taken from the Complete and Authorized Translation of Nietzsche's Works edited by Oscar Levy.

This edition in 18 volumes is entirely being made available at Project Gutenberg too, also with a linked index to all works as last volume, and will be completed soon.

Nietzsche and Art

Lecture I[1]

Part I

Anarchy in Modern Art

"Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth."—Genesis xi. 9.

"Concerning great things," said Nietzsche, "one should either be silent, or one should speak loftily:—loftily, that is to say, cynically and innocently."[2]

Art is a great thing. Maybe it is the greatest thing on earth. Wherever and whenever Nietzsche speaks about it he always does so loftily, and with reverence; while his position as an anchorite, and as an artist who kept aloof from the traffic for fame, allowed him to retain that innocence in his point of view, which he maintains is so necessary in the treatment of such a subject.

As the children of an age in which Art is rapidly losing its prestige, we modern Europeans may perhaps feel a little inclined to purse our lips at the religious solemnity with which Nietzsche approaches this matter. So large a number of vital forces have been applied to the object of giving us entertainment in our large cities, that it is now no longer a simple matter to divorce Art altogether in our minds from the category of things whose sole purpose is to amuse or please us.

Some there are, of course, who would repudiate this suggestion indignantly, and who would claim for Art a very high moral purpose. These moralists apart, however, it seems safe to say, that in the minds of most people to-day, Art is a thing which either leaves them utterly unmoved, or to which they turn only when they are in need of distraction, of decoration for their homes, or of stimulation in their thought.

Leaving the discussion of Nietzsche's personal view of Art to the next lecture, I shall now first attempt, from his standpoint, a general examination of the condition of Art at the present day, which, though it will be necessarily rapid and sketchy, will, I hope, not prove inadequate for my purpose.

Before I proceed, however, I should like to be allowed to call your attention to the difficulties of my task. As far as I am aware, mine is the first attempt that has been made, either here or abroad, to place an exhaustive account of Nietzsche's Art doctrine before any audience. But for one or two German writers, who have discussed Nietzsche —the artist—tentatively and hesitatingly, I know of no one who has endeavoured to do so after having had recourse to all his utterances on the subject, nor do I know of anybody who has applied his æsthetic principles to any particular branch or branches of Art. It is therefore with some reason that I now crave your indulgence for my undertaking and beg you to remember that it is entirely of a pioneer nature.

Many of you here, perhaps, are already acquainted with Nietzsche's philosophy, and are also intimately associated with one of the branches of Art. Nevertheless, let me warn you before I begin, that you may have to listen to heresies that will try your patience to the utmost.

I also am intimately associated with one of the branches of Art, and my traditions are Art traditions. I can well imagine, therefore, how some of you will receive many of the statements I am about to make; and I can only entreat you to bear with me patiently until the end, if only with the hope that, after all, there may be something worth thinking about, if not worth embracing, in what you are going to hear.

Two years ago, in this same hall, I had the honour of addressing an audience on the subject of Nietzsche's moral and evolutionary views, and, since then, I have wondered whether I really selected the more important side of his philosophy for my first lectures. If it were not for the fact that the whole of his thought is, as it were, of one single piece, harmoniously and consistently woven, I should doubt that I had selected the more vital portion of it; for it is impossible to overrate the value of his Art doctrine—especially to us, the children of an age so full of perplexity, doubt and confusion as this one is.

In taking Nietzsche's Art principles and Art criticism as a basis for a new valuation of Art, I am doing nothing that is likely to astonish the careful student of Nietzsche's works.

Friends and foes alike have found themselves compelled to agree upon this point, that Nietzsche, whatever he may have been besides, was at least a great artist and a great thinker on Art.

On the ground that he was solely and purely an artist some have even denied his claim to the title Philosopher. Among the more celebrated of modern writers who have done this, is the Italian critic Benedetto Croce;[3] while Julius Zeitler declares that "Nietzsche's artistic standpoint should be regarded as the very basis of all his thought," and that "no better access could be discovered to his spirit than by way of his æsthetic."[4]

Certainly, from the dawn of his literary career, Art seems to have been one of Nietzsche's most constant preoccupations. Even the general argument of his last work, The Will to Power, is an entirely artistic one; while his hatred of Christianity was the hatred of an artist long before it became the hatred of an aristocratic moralist, or of a prophet of Superman.

In The Birth of Tragedy, a book in which, by the bye, he declares that there can be but one justification of the world, and that is as an æsthetic phenomenon,[5] we find the following words—

"To the purely æsthetic world interpretation ... taught in this book, there is no greater antithesis than the Christian dogma, which is only and will be only moral, and which, with its absolute standards, for instance, its truthfulness of God, relegates—that is, disowns, convicts, condemns—Art, all Art, to the realm of falsehood. Behind such a mode of thought and valuation, which, if at all genuine, must be hostile to Art, I always experienced what was hostile to life, the wrathful vindictive counter will to life itself: for all life rests on appearance, Art, illusion, optics, and necessity of perspective and error."[6]

Nietzsche's works are, however, full of the evidences of an artistic temperament.

Who but an artist, knowing the joy of creating, for instance, could have laid such stress upon the creative act as the great salvation from suffering and an alleviation of life?[7] Who but an artist could have been an atheist out of his lust to create?

"For what could be created, if there were Gods!" cries Zarathustra.(7)

But, above all, who save an artist could have elevated taste to such a high place as a criterion of value, and have made his own personal taste the standard for so many grave valuations?

"And ye tell me, my friends," says Zarathustra, "that there is to be no dispute about taste and tasting? But all life is a dispute about taste and tasting!

"Taste: that is weight at the same time, and scales and weigher; and alas for every living thing that would live without dispute about weight and scales and weighing!"[8]

But it is more particularly in Nietzsche's understanding of the instinct which drove him to expression, and in his attitude towards those whom he would teach, that we recognize the typical artist, in the highest acceptation of the word—that is to say, as a creature of abundance, who must give thereof or perish. Out of plenitude and riches only, do his words come to us. With him there can be no question of eloquence as the result of poverty, vindictiveness, spite, resentment, or envy; for such eloquence is of the swamp.[9] Where he is wrath, he speaks from above, where he despises his contempt is prompted by love alone, and where he annihilates he does so as a creator.[10]

"Mine impatient love," he says, "floweth over in streams, down towards the sunrise and the sunset. From out silent mountains and tempests of affliction, rusheth my soul into the valleys.

"Too long have I yearned and scanned the far horizon. Too long hath the shroud of solitude been upon me: thus have I lost the habit of silence.

"A tongue have I become and little else besides, and the brawling of a brook, falling from lofty rocks: downward into the dale will I pour my words.

"And let the torrent of my love dash into all blocked highways. How could a torrent help but find its way to the sea!

"Verily, a lake lies within me, complacent and alone; but the torrent of my love draws this along with it, down—into the ocean!

"New highways I tread, new worlds come unto me; like all creators I have grown weary of old tongues. No longer will my spirit walk on worn-out soles.

"Too slow footed is all speech for me:—Into thy chariot, O storm, do I leap! And even thee will I scourge with my devilry.

"Thus spake Zarathustra."[11]

The State of Modern Art.

The Art of to-day, unholy and undivine as the Tower of Babel, seems to have incurred the wrath of a mighty godhead, and those who were at work upon it have abandoned it to its fate, and have scattered apart—all speaking different tongues, and all filled with confusion.

Precisely on account of the disorder which now prevails in this department of life, sincere and honest people find it difficult to show the interest in it, which would be only compatible with its importance.

Probably but few men, to-day, could fall on their knees and sob at the deathbed of a great artist, as Pope Leo X once did. Maybe there are but one or two who, like the Taiko's generals, when Teaism was in the ascendancy in Japan, would prefer the present of a rare work of art to a large grant of territory as a reward of victory;[12] and there is certainly not one individual in our midst but would curl his lips at the thought of a mere servant sacrificing his life for a precious picture.

And yet, says the Japanese writer, Okakura-Kakuzo, "many of our favourite dramas in Japan are based on the loss and subsequent recovery of a noted masterpiece."[13]

In this part of the world to-day, not only the author, but also the audience for such dramas is entirely lacking.

The layman, as well as the artist, knows perfectly well that this is so. Appalled by the disorder, contradictoriness, and difference of opinion among artists, the layman has ceased to think seriously about Art; while artists themselves are so perplexed by the want of solidarity in their ranks, that they too are beginning to question the wherefore of their existence.

Not only does every one arrogate to himself the right to utter his word upon Art; but Art's throne itself is now claimed by thousands upon thousands of usurpers—each of whom has a "free personality" which he insists upon expressing,[14] and to whom severe law and order would be an insuperable barrier. Exaggerated individualism and anarchy are the result. But such results are everywhere inevitable, when all æsthetic canons have been abolished, and when there is no longer anybody strong enough to command or to lead.

"Knowest thou not who is most needed of all?" says Zarathustra. "He who commandeth great things.

"To execute great things is difficult; but the more difficult task is to command great things."[15]

Direct commanding of any sort, however, as Nietzsche declares, has ceased long since. "In cases," he observes, "where it is believed that the leader and bell-wether cannot be dispensed with, attempt after attempt is made nowadays to replace commanders by the summing together of clever gregarious men: all representative constitutions, for example, are of this origin."[16]

Although, in this inquiry, the Fine Arts will be the subject of my particular attention, it should not be supposed that this is necessarily the department in modern life in which Nietzsche believed most disorder, most incompetence, and most scepticism prevails. I selected the Fine Arts, in the first place, merely because they are the arts concerning which I am best informed, and to which the Nietzschean doctrine can be admirably applied; and secondly, because sculpture and painting offer a wealth of examples known to all, which facilitates anything in the way of an exposition. For even outsiders and plain men in the street must be beginning to have more than an inkling of the chaos and confusion which now reigns in other spheres besides the Fine Arts. It must be apparent to most people that, in every department of modern life where culture and not calculation, where taste and not figures, where ability and not qualifications, are alone able to achieve anything great—that is to say, in religion, in morality, in law, in politics, in music, in architecture, and finally in the plastic arts, precision and government are now practically at an end.

"Disintegration," says Nietzsche,"—that is to say, uncertainty—is peculiar to this age: nothing stands on solid ground or on a sound faith.... All our road is slippery and dangerous, while the ice which still bears us has grown unconscionably thin: we all feel the mild and gruesome breath of the thaw-wind—soon, where we are walking, no one will any longer be able to stand!"[17]

We do not require to be told that in religion and moral matters, scarcely any two specialists are agreed—the extraordinarily large number of religious sects in England alone needs but to be mentioned here; in law we divine that things are in a bad state; in politics even our eyes are beginning to give us evidence of the serious uncertainty prevailing; while in architecture and music the case is pitiable.

"If we really wished, if we actually dared to devise a style of architecture which corresponded to the state of our souls," says Nietzsche, "a labyrinth would be the building we should erect. But," he adds, "we are too cowardly to construct anything which would be such a complete revelation of our hearts."[18]

However elementary our technical knowledge of the matter may be, we, as simple inquirers, have but to look about our streets to-day, in order to convince ourselves of the ignominious muddle of modern architecture. Here we find structural expedients used as ornaments,[19] the most rigid parts of buildings, in form (the rectangular parts, etc.), placed near the roof instead of in the basement,[20] and pillars standing supporting, and supported by, nothing.[21] Elsewhere we see solids over voids,[22] mullions supporting arches,[23] key-stones introduced into lintels,[24] real windows appearing as mere holes in the wall, while the ornamental windows are shams,[25] and pilasters resting on key-stones.[26]

And, everywhere, we see recent requirements masked and concealed behind Greek, Roman, Gothic, Renaissance, Rococo, and Baroque embellishments, thrown together helter-skelter, and with a disregard of structural demands which must startle even the uninitiated.[27]

Our streets are ugly in the extreme.[28] Only at night, as Camille Mauclair says, does the artificial light convert their hideousness into a sort of lugubrious grandeur,[29] and that is perhaps why, to the sensitive artistic Londoner, the darkness of night or the pale glow of the moon is such a solace and relief.

As to the state of modern music, this is best described perhaps, though with perfectly unconscious irony, by Mr. Henry Davey, in the opening words of his Student's Musical History.

"Music has indeed been defined," he says, "as 'sound with regular vibrations,' other sounds being called noise. This definition," the author adds, "is only suited to undeveloped music; modern music may include noise and even silence."[30]

People are mistaken if they suppose that Nietzsche, in attacking Wagner as he did, was prompted by any personal animosity or other considerations foreign to the question of music. In Wagner, Nietzsche saw a Romanticist of the strongest possible type, and he was opposed to the Romantic School of Music, because of its indifference to form. Always an opponent of anarchy, despite all that his critics may say to the contrary, Nietzsche saw with great misgiving the decline and decay of melody and rhythm in modern music, and in attacking Wagner as the embodiment of the Romantic School, he merely personified the movement to which he felt himself so fundamentally opposed. And in this opposition he was not alone. The Romantic movement, assailed by many, will continue to be assailed, until all its evil influences are exposed.

"Since the days of Beethoven," says Emil Naumann, "instrumental music, generally speaking, has retrograded as regards spontaneity of invention, thematic working, and mastery of art form,"[31] and the same author declares that he regards all modern masters as the natural outcome of the Romantic era.[32]

Nietzsche has told us in his Wagner pamphlets what he demands from music,[33] and this he certainly could not get from the kind of music which is all the rage just now.

What it lacks in invention it tries to make up in idiosyncrasy, intricacy, and complexity, and that which it cannot assume in the matter of form, it attempts to convert into a virtue and a principle.[34]

"Bombast and complexity in music," says P. von Lind, "as in any other art, are always a sign of inferiority; for they betray an artist's incapacity to express himself simply, clearly, and exhaustively—three leading qualities in our great heroes of music (Tonheroen). In this respect the whole of modern music, including Wagner's, is inferior to the music of the past."[35]

But of all modern musical critics, perhaps Richard Hamann is the most desperate concerning the work of recent composers. His book on Impressionism and Art entirely supports Nietzsche's condemnation of the drift of modern music, and in his references to Wagner, even the words lie uses seem to have been drawn from the Nietzschean vocabulary.[36]

Briefly what he complains of in the music of the day is its want of form,[37] its abuse of discord,[38] its hundred and one different artifices for producing nerve-exciting and nerve-stimulating effects,[39] its predilection in favour of cacophonous instruments,[40] its unwarrantable sudden changes in rhythm or tempo within the same movement,[41] its habit of delaying the solving chord, as in the love-death passage of Tristan and Isolde,[42] and, finally, its realism, of which a typical example is Strauss's "By a Lonely Brook"—all purely Nietzschean objections!

Well might Mr. Allen cry out: "Oh for the classic simplicity of a bygone age, the golden age of music that hath passed away!"[43] But the trouble does not end here; for, if we are to believe a certain organ-builder, bell-founder and pianoforte-maker of ripe experience, it has actually descended into the sphere of instrument-making as well.[44]

The Fine Arts.—1. The Artists.

Turning, now, to Painting and Sculpture, what is it precisely that we see?

In this branch of Art, chaos and anarchy are scarcely the words to use. The condition is rather one of complete and hopeless dissolution. There is neither a direction, a goal, nor a purpose. Slavish realism side by side with crude conventions, incompetence side by side with wasted talent, coloured photography side by side with deliberate eccentricity, and scientific principles applied to things that do not matter in the least: these are a few of the features which are noticeable at a first glance. Going a little deeper, we find that the whole concept of what Art really is seems to be totally lacking in the work of modern painters and sculptors, and, if we were forced to formulate a Broad definition for the painting and sculpture of our time, we should find ourselves compelled to say that they are no more than a field in which more or less interesting people manifest their more or less interesting personalities.

There is nothing in this definition which is likely to offend the modern artist. On the contrary, he would probably approve of it all too hastily. But, in approving of it, he would confess himself utterly ignorant of what Art actually is, and means, and purposes in our midst.

Or to state the case differently: it is not that the modern artist has no notion at all of what Art is; but, that his notion is one which belittles, humiliates and debases Art, root and branch.

To have gazed with understanding at the divine Art of Egypt, to have studied Egyptian realism and Egyptian conventionalism; to have stood doubtfully before Greek sculpture, even of the best period, and to have known how to place it in the order of rank among the art-products of the world; finally, to have learnt to value the Art of the Middle Ages, not so much because of its form, but because of its content: these are experiences which ultimately make one stand aghast before the work of our modern men, and even before the work of some of their predecessors, and to ask oneself into whose hands could Art have passed that she should have fallen so low?

Whether one look on a Sargent or on a Poynter, on a Rodin or on a Brock, on a Vuillard or on a Maurice Denis, on an Alfred East or on a Monet, the question in one's heart will be; not, why are these men so poor? but, why are they so modest?—why are they so humble?—why, in fact, are their voices so obsequiously servile and faint? One will ask: not, why do these men paint or mould as they do? but, why do they paint or mould at all?

Ugliness, in the sense of amorphousness, one will be able to explain. Ugliness, in this sense, although its position in Art has not yet been properly accounted for, one will be able to classify perfectly well. But this tremulousness, this plebeian embarrassment, this democratic desire to please, above all, this democratic disinclination to assume a position of authority,—these are things which contradict the very essence of Art, and these are the things which are found in the productions of almost every European school to-day.

But, as a matter of fact, to do artists justice, beneath all the tremendous activity of modern times in both branches of the art we are discussing, there is, among the thinking members of the profession, a feeling of purposelessness, of doubt and pessimism, which is ill concealed, even in their work. The best of these artists know, and will even tell you, that there are no canons, that individuality is absolute, and that the aim of all their work is extremely doubtful, if not impossible to determine. There is not much quarrelling done, or hand-to-hand scuffling engaged in; because no one feels sufficiently firm on his own legs to stand up and oppose the doctrine that "there is no accounting for tastes." A clammy, deathlike stillness reigns over the whole of this seething disagreement and antagonism in principles. Not since Whistler fired his bright missiles into the press has the report of a decent-sized gun been heard; and this peace in chaos, this silence in confusion, is full of the suggestion of decomposition and decay.

"Art appears to be surrounded by the magic influence of death," says Nietzsche, "and in a short time mankind will be celebrating festivals of memory in honour of it."[45]

With but one or two brilliant exceptions, that which characterizes modern painting and modern sculpture is, generally speaking, its complete lack of Art in the sense in which I shall use this word in my next lecture. This indeed, as you will see, covers everything. For the present purpose, however, let it be said that, from the Nietzschean standpoint, the painters and sculptors of the present age are deficient in dignity, in pride, in faith, and, above all, in love.

They are too dependent upon environment, upon Nature, to give a direction and a meaning to their exalted calling; they are too disunited and too lawless to be leaders; they are in an age too chaotic and too sceptical to be able to find a "wherefore" and a "whither" for themselves; and, above all, there are too many pretenders in their ranks—too many who ought never to have painted or moulded at all—to make it possible for the greatest among them to elevate the Cause of Art to its proper level.

No æsthetic canon is to be seen or traced anywhere; nobody knows one, nobody dares to assert one. The rule that tastes cannot be disputed is now the only rule that prevails, and, behind this rule, the basest, meanest and most preposterous individual claims are able to make their influence felt.

Certainly, it is true, there is no accounting for tastes; but, once a particular taste has revealed itself it ought to be possible to classify it and to point out where it belongs and whither it is going to lead. Undoubtedly a man's taste cannot be taken from him, because its roots are in his constitution; but, once he has identified himself with a particular form of taste, it ought to be possible to identify him too,—that is to say, to realize his rank and his value.

If it is impossible to do this nowadays, it is because there is no criterion to guide us. It will therefore be my endeavour to establish a criterion, based upon Nietzsche's æsthetic, and, in the course of these lectures, to classify a few forms of taste in accordance with it.

Meanwhile, however, the inquiry into the present condition of the Fine Arts must be continued; and this shall now be done by taking up the public's standpoint.

2.The Public.

The man who goes to a modern exhibition of pictures and sculptures, experiences visually what they experience aurally who stand on a Sunday evening within sight of the Marble Arch, just inside Hyde Park. Not only different voices and different subjects are in the air; but fundamentally different conceptions of life, profoundly and utterly antagonistic outlooks.

The Academy, The International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, The Royal Society of British Artists, The New English Art Club, The Salon des Artistes Français, and the Salon des Beaux Arts, are all alike in this; and the International's scorn of the Academy,[46] or the Academy's scorn of it, is as ridiculous as the Beaux Arts' scorn of the Salon, or vice versâ.

It is quite foolish, therefore, to inveigh against the public for their bad taste, Philistinism and apathy. How can they be expected to know, where there are no teachers? How can they be otherwise than apathetic where keen interest must perforce culminate in confusion? How can they have good taste or any taste at all, where there is no order of rank in tastes?

We know the torments of the modern lay student of Art, when he asks himself uprightly and earnestly whether he should say "yes" or "no" before a picture or a piece of sculpture. We know the moments of impotent hesitancy during which he racks his brains for some canon or rule on which to base his judgment, and we sympathize with his blushes when finally he inquires after the name of the artist, before volunteering to express an opinion.

At least a name is some sort of a standard nowadays. In the absence of other standards it is something to cling to; and the modern visitor to an Art exhibition has precious little to cling to, poor soul!

Still, even names become perplexing in the end; for it soon occurs to the lay student in question that, not only Millais, but also Leighton, Whistler, Rodin, Frith, Watts, Gauguin, John, and Vuillard have names in the Art world.

Now, it is generally at this stage that such a student of Art either retires disconcerted from his first attempts at grappling with the problem, and takes refuge in indifference; or else, from the depth of his despair, draws a certain courage which makes him say that, after all, he knows what he likes. Even if he does utter a heresy at times against fashion or against culture, he knows what pleases him.

And thus is formed that large concourse of people who set up what they like and dislike as the standard of taste.

It is in vain that painters and sculptors deplore the existence of this part of their audience. It is they themselves who are responsible for its existence. It is the anarchy in their own ranks that has infected the bravest of their followers.

The taste of the masses, endowed with self-confidence in this way, is now a potent force in European Art, and among those so-called artists who do not suffer under the existing state of affairs, there are many who actually conform and submit to this mob-rule. In my next lecture I shall show how even the art-canons of the lay masses have been adopted by some painters and sculptors in perfect good faith.

"Too long have we acknowledged them to be right, these petty people," says Zarathustra. "Thus we have at last given them power as well;—and now they teach that 'good' is only what petty people call 'good.'"[47]

It is on this account that many sincere and refined natures turn reluctantly away from Art altogether nowadays, and begin to doubt whether it serves any good purpose in the world at all. They grow weary of the humbug of the studios, the affectation of gushing amateurs, and the snobbery of the lionizing disciple of one particular school, and doubt the honesty even of his leader. They grow timid and renounce all judgment in Art, wondering whether any of it really matters. In a gingerly fashion they still hold on to generally accepted views,— views that time seems to have endorsed,—and thus they very often give all their attention to the Old Masters.[48]

And yet, it is in thus turning away with contempt from modern Art, that sincere people tacitly acknowledge how profoundly serious the question is on which they have turned their backs. For, it is the horror of its disorder that makes them disconsolate: they could continue facing this disorder only if the matter were less important.

Passing over that unfortunately large percentage of up-to-date people, in whose minds Art in general is associated with jewellery, French pastry and goldfish, as a more or less superfluous, though pleasing, luxury, the rest of the civilized world certainly feels with varying degrees of conviction that Art has some essential bearing upon life; and, though few will grant it the importance that Nietzsche claims for it, a goodly number will realize that it is quite impossible to reckon without it.

Now, if by chance, one of the last-mentioned people, having grown disgusted at the prevailing degeneration of Art, should start out in quest of a canon, or a standard whereby he might take his bearings in the sea of confusion around him, what are we to suppose would await him?

Unfortunately, we know only too well what awaits him!

He may turn to the art-critics—the class of men which society sustains for his special benefit in art matters,—or he may turn to the philosophers. He may spend years and years of labour in studying the Art and thought of Antiquity, of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance; but, unless he have sufficient independence of spirit to distrust not only the Art, but every single manifestation of modern life, and to try to find what the general corrosive is which seems to be active everywhere, it is extremely doubtful whether he will ever succeed in reaching a bourne or a destination of any sort whatsoever.

He will still be asking: "What is a good poem?" "What is good music?"—and, above all, "What is a good picture or a good statue?"

We know the difficulties of the layman, and even of the artist in this matter; for most of us who have thought about Art at all have experienced these same difficulties.

The general need, then, I repeat, is a definite canon,[49] a definite statement as to the aim and purpose of Art, and the establishment of an order of rank among tastes. Once more, I declare that I have attempted to arrive at these things by the principles of Nietzsche's Æsthetic; but, in order to forestall the amusement which an announcement of this sort is bound to provoke nowadays, let me remind you of two things: First, that any artistic canon must necessarily be relative to a certain type of man; and secondly, that the most that an establishment of an order of rank among tastes can do for you, is to allow you the opportunity of exercising some choice—a choice of type in manhood, therefore a choice as to a mode of life, and therefore a choice of values, and the customs and conditions that spring from them.

At present you have no such choice. You certainly have the option of following either Rodin and Renoir, or Whistler and Manet, or Sargent and Boldini, or John and Gauguin, or Herkomer and Lavery; but not one of you can say, "If I follow the first couple I shall be going in such and such a direction," or, "If I follow the second couple I shall be travelling towards this or that goal,"—this you would scarcely be able to say; neither could your leaders help you.

3. The Critics.

Now, to return to our lay-student of Art, let us suppose that he first approaches the art-critics of the day for guidance. Will there be one among these men who will satisfy him? Is there a single art-critic either of the nineteenth or twentieth century who knew, or who knows, his business?

It is possible to point to one or two, and even so, in doing this, one is prompted more by a sense of kindness than by a sense of accuracy. Some Continental critics, Camille Mauclair and Muther among them, and here and there an English critic like R. A. M. Stevenson, occasionally seem to hit a nail on the head; but as a rule, one can say with Coventry Patmore: "There is little that is conclusive or fruitful in any of the criticism of the present day."[50]

For the most part it is written by men who know absurdly little of their subject, and who, if they do know it, are acquainted much more with its chronological and encyclopædic than with its philosophical side. There is not much conscience either, or much acumen, in these men; and they are as a rule concerned with questions that are irrelevant to the point at issue. Like a certain kind of insect, as Nietzsche very justly remarks, they live by stinging; but their stings serve no purpose save that of providing them with their food.[51]

They are, perhaps, less to blame than the artists themselves for the state of affairs that exists to-day; but, while the artists have betrayed only themselves, the critics have betrayed the reading public. They have neither resisted nor condemned the flood of anarchy that has swept over the art-world; they have rather promoted it in every way in their power, abetting and applauding artists in their lawlessness. In fairness to some of them, however, it should be said, that in encouraging the confusion and disorder around them they very often acted with almost religious sincerity. This reservation applies to Ruskin, for instance, and to many other critics writing for the better-class papers.

Lest this be considered as an overstatement of the case, hear what one of these men himself actually says concerning his own profession! Mr. Frank Rutter, writing in 1907, expressed himself as follows:—

"In olden days the press used to lead public opinion; now it meekly follows because its courage has been sapped by servile cringing to the advertiser, because its antics and sensational inaccuracy have brought it into contempt. No longer commanding the authority of a parent or guardian, it seeks to attract attention by the methods of the cheap-jack. The few exceptions surviving only prove the rule."[52]

Finding themselves forced to speak of other things than "The Purpose of Art," "The Standard of Beauty," and "The Canons of Art"—simply because nobody now knows anything about these matters, or dares to assert anything concerning them,—the better-class art-critics, feeling that they must do something more than state merely their opinions concerning the work under notice—in fact, that they must give their reasons for their praise or blame—have lately been compelled to have recourse to the only field that is open to them, and that is technique.

Now, while Mr. Clutton Brock seems perfectly justified in deprecating these tactics on the part of some of his brother critics, and while Mr. Rutter seems quite wrong in upholding them, the question which naturally arises out of the controversy is: what is there left to the critic to talk about?

If he is no longer able to judge of the general tendency and teaching of a play, and if he is no longer able to regard it æsthetically, what can he do but analyse the playwright's grammar, and seek out the latter's split infinitives, his insufficient use of the subjunctive mood, his Cockney idioms and Cockney solecisms?

We agree with Mr. Clutton Brock that ... "the public has no concern with the process of production but only with the product"; and that "if Art were in a healthy state[53] the public would know this and would not ask for technical criticism." We also agree that "the critic's proper business is with the product, not with the process of production; to explain their own understanding and enjoyment of the meaning and beauty of works of art, and not the technical means by which they have been made."[54]

But, while we agree with all this, we cannot help sympathizing with the late R. A. M. Stevenson and his admirer Mr. Frank Rutter; for their dilemma is unique.

When Monsieur Domergue of the French Academy assured his friend Beauzée confidentially that he had discovered that Voltaire didn't know grammar, Beauzée very rightly replied with some irony: "I am much obliged to you for telling me; now I know that it is possible to do without it."[55]

And this is the only reply that ought to be made to any criticism which analyses the technique of a real work of Art; since it is obvious, that if technical questions are uppermost, the work is by implication unworthy of consideration in all other respects.[56]

4. Some Art Criticisms.

In order further to establish my contention, it might perhaps be an advantage to refer to some criticisms that have actually been made. It will not be necessary to give more than one or two of these, because everybody must know that similar instances could be multiplied indefinitely; but while I shall limit the selection, I should not like it to be thought that the cases I present are not absolutely typical.

Quite recently the art-world has been staring with something akin to amazement, not unmingled here and there with indignation, at the work of one Augustus John, in whose pictures they have found at once a problem and an innovation.

Now, without for the present wishing to express any opinion at all upon Mr. John's work, this at least seemed quite clear to me when I first saw it; namely, that it challenged profound analysis. Unconsciously or consciously, Mr. John seemed to re-question a whole number of things afresh. The direction of Art, the purpose of Art, the essence of Art, the value of Art—these are some of the subjects into which he provoked me to inquire.

Here was an opportunity for the more wise among the critics to show their wisdom. This was essentially a case in which the public required expert guidance. Augustus John comes forward with a new concept of what is beautiful. He says pictorially this and that is beautiful. Are we to follow him or to reject him?

Hear one or two critics:—

Commenting upon one of Mr. Max Beerbohm's caricatures in the Spring Exhibition of the New English Art Club, 1909, the Times critic writes as follows—"Here an art-critic meets a number of Mr. John's strange females with long necks and bent, unlovely heads, like a child's copy of a Primitive; and the puzzled critic ejaculates, 'How odd it seems that thirty years hence I may be desperately in love with these ladies!' Odd, indeed, but perfectly possible," continues the Timesexpert. "Some of us have learned, in twenty years, to find nature in Claude Monet, and the time may come when the women in Mr. John's 'Going to the Sea,' or in the 'Family Group' at the Grafton, will seem as beautiful as the Venus de Milo. The 'return of Night primeval and of old chaos' may be nearer than we think." Then after paying Mr. John's drawing a compliment, the writer continues: "But can any one, for all that, whose mind is not warped by purely technical prepossession in favour of a technician, say that the picture would not have been enormously improved if the artist had thought more of nature and less of his 'types' If Mr. John would throw his types to the winds, look for a beautiful model, and paint her as she is, we should not have to wait the thirty years of Mr. Max Beerbohm's critic, but might begin to fall in love with her at once."[57]

And this, let me assure you, is a comparatively able criticism!

But, what guidance does it give? Why is it so timid and non-committing? And, where it is committing, why is it so vague? The words "beautiful model" mean absolutely nothing nowadays. How, then, can the critic employ them without defining the particular sense in which he wishes them to be understood?

I examined this picture of Mr. John's, as also the one at the Grafton. Both of them were full of his personal solution of the deepest problems associated with the ideas of Art and beauty; but how can we know whether to accept these solutions unless they are made quite plain by our critics? It may be suggested that Mr. John's solutions of these problems is not sufficiently important. Why, then, discuss them at all?

The Daily Telegraph also contained a so-called criticism of Mr. John. After commenting, as the previous critic did, upon Mr. Max Beerbohm's caricature and the words accompanying it, the writer proceeds: "How true—to give the most obvious of all instances—with respect to Wagner! And yet Mr. Max Beerbohm, the satirist, is as regards the actual moment, not quite, quite up to date. To-day, for fear of being accused of a Bœotian denseness, we hasten to acclaim, if not necessarily to enjoy, Cézanne, Maurice Denis, the neo-Impressionists, etc., etc."[58]

"For fear of being accused of Bœotian denseness!" Yes, that is the whole trouble! Apparently, then, if we are to believe the Daily Telegraph critic, Mr. John has been acclaimed, simply in order that his critics may escape the gibe of being classically dense!

Possessing neither the necessary knowledge, nor the necessary values, nor yet the necessary certainty, to take up a definite stand for or against, these critics "acclaim" novelty, in whatever garb it may come, lest, perchance, their intelligence be for one instant doubted. Very good!—at least this is a confession which reveals both their humility and their honesty, and, since it entirely supports my contention, I am entirely grateful for it.

But what ought to be said to the implied, ingenuous and perfectly unwarrantable assumption, that that which posterity endorses must of necessity have been right all along? Why should Wagner be vindicated simply because an age subsequent to his own happens to rave about him? Before such posthumous success can vindicate a man, surely the age in which it occurs must be duly valued. In the event of its being more lofty, more noble, and more tasteful than the age which preceded it, then certainly posthumous fame is a vindication; but if the case be otherwise, then it is a condemnation. In an ascending culture the classic of yesterday becomes the primitive of to-morrow, and in a declining culture the decadent of yesterday becomes the classic of to-morrow. Thus in valuing, say, Michelangelo, it all depends whence you come. If you come from Egypt and walk down towards him, your opinion will be very different from that of the man who comes from twentieth-century Europe and who walks up towards him.

But we are not ascending so rapidly or so materially—if we are ascending at all—as to make posthumous success a guarantee of excellence. In fact, precisely the converse might be true, and men who are now quickly forgotten, may be all the greater on that account alone. In any case, however, the matter is not so obvious as to allow us to make the broad generalizations we do concerning it.

Perhaps, in order to be quite fair, I ought now to refer to other critics, as well as to other criticisms concerning John written by the critics already quoted. True, in the Times for October 14th, 1905, there appears a more elaborate discussion of Mr. John's powers. (I say more elaborate, but I mean more lengthy!) And the Daily Telegraph has also given us more careful views, as, for instance, in their issues of October 17th, 1905, and November 23rd, 1909. I doubt, however, whether it could be honestly said that one really understands any better how to place Mr. John after having read the articles in question, though, in making this objection, I should like it to be understood, that I regard it as applying not only to the art-criticism of the two particular papers to which I have referred, but to art-criticism in general.[59]

Most of what we read on this matter in the sphere of journalism is pure badinage, and little besides—entertainingly and ably written it is true, but generally very wide of the fundamental principles at stake, and of that consciousness of dealing with a deeply serious question, which the subject Art ought to awaken.

No one seems to feel nowadays that a picture, like a sonnet, like a sonata, and like a statue, if it claim attention at all, should claim the attention of all those who are most deeply concerned with the problems of Life, Humanity, and the Future; and that every breath of Art comes from the lungs of Life herself, and is full of indications as to her condition.

When one says these things nowadays, people are apt to regard one as a little peculiar, a little morbid, and perhaps a little too earnest as well. Only two or three months ago, a certain critic, commenting upon a sentence of mine in my Introduction to Nietzsche's Case of Wagner,[60] in which I declared that "the principles of Art are inextricably bound up with the laws of Life," assured the readers of the Nation that "the plainest facts of everyday life contradict this theory of non-artistic philosophers in their arm-chairs."[61] And thus the fundamental questions are shelved, year after year, while Art withers, and real artists become ever more and more scarce.

"I loathe this great city," cried Zarathustra.

"Woe to this great city!—And I would that I already saw the pillar of fire in which it will be consumed!

"For such pillars of fire must precede the great noontide. But this hath its time and its own fate."[62]

Part II

Suggested Causes Of The Anarchy In Modern Art

"... To them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that do believe in his name."—John i. 12.

And now, what are the causes of this depression and this madness in Art? For Nietzsche was not alone in recognizing it. Many voices, some wholly trustworthy, have been raised in support of his view.

It could only have been the unsatisfactory conditions, even in his time, that made Hegel regard Art as practically dead; for, as Croce and Monsieur Bénard rightly observe, Hegel's Vorlesungen über Æsthetik are Art's dirge.[1] Schopenhauer's extraordinary misunderstanding of Art, also, precisely like Plato's,[2] can be explained only by supposing that the examples of Art which he saw about him misled his otherwise penetrating judgment. Even Ruskin's vague and wholly confused utterances on the subject are evidence of his groping efforts to find his way in the disorder of his time. And, as to the voices of lesser men, their name is legion.

Two eminent Englishmen of the last century, however, were both clear and emphatic in their denunciation of the age in which they lived. I refer to Matthew Arnold and William Morris. The former made a most illuminating analysis of some of the influences which have conduced to bring about the regrettable state of modern life, while William Morris—less philosophical perhaps, and more direct, though totally wrong in the remedies he advocates—bewailed Art's unhappy plight as follows—

"I must in plain words say of the Decorative Arts, of all the arts, that it is not merely that we are inferior in them to all who have gone before us, but also that they are in a state of anarchy and disorganization, that makes a sweeping change necessary and certain."[3]

There can be no doubt, therefore, that what Nietzsche saw was a plain fact to very many thinking men besides; but, in tracing the conditions to precise and definite causes, Nietzsche by far excelled any of his contemporaries.

Before proceeding, however, to examine the more general causes that he suggests, I should like to pause here a moment, in order to dispose of one particular cause which, although of tremendous importance for us moderns, can scarcely be regarded as having been active for a very long period. I refer to the manner in which Nietzsche accounts for a good deal that is incompetent and futile, in the Art of the present day only, by pointing to a psychological misapprehension which is, alas, but all too common. I should not have broken my general narrative with the consideration of this particular cause, had it not been that I feel sure it will help laymen, and artists as well, to account for much that will still remain obscure, even after the more general causes have been discussed.

1. Morbid Irritability.

Nietzsche recognized that this age is one in which Will is not merely diseased, but almost paralyzed. Everywhere he saw men and women, youths and girls, who are unable to resist a stimulus, however slight; who react with excessive speed in the presence of an irritant, and who bedeck this weakness and this irritability with all the finest gala dresses and disguises that they can lay their hands on.[4]

In Determinism he saw the philosophical abstract of this fact; in our novels and plays he saw its representation under the cloak of passion and emotion; in the Darwinian theory of the influence of environment, he saw it logged out in scientific garb, and in the modern artist's dependence upon an appeal to Nature for inspiration—i. e. for a spur to react upon, he recognized its unhealthiest manifestation.

"The power of resisting stimuli is on the wane," he says; "the strength required in order to stop action, and to cease from reacting, is most seriously diseased."[5]

"Man unlearns the art of doing, and all he does is to react to stimuli coming from his environment."[6]

Speaking of the modern artist, he refers to "the absurd irritability of his system, which makes a crisis out of every one of his experiences, and deprives him of all calm reflection,"[7] and, while describing Europeans in general, he lays stress upon their "spontaneous and changeable natures."[8]

In calling our attention to these things, Nietzsche certainly laid his finger on the root of a good deal for which the other more general causes which I shall adduce fail to account.

There can be no doubt that this irritability does exist, and that it causes large numbers of unrefined and undesirable men and women to enter the arts to-day, who are absolutely mistaken in their diagnosis of their condition. We are all only too ready to conceal our defects beneath euphemistic interpretations of them, and we most decidedly prefer, if we have the choice, to regard any morbid symptoms we may reveal, as the sign of strength rather than of weakness. There is some temptation, therefore, both for our friends and ourselves, to interpret our natures kindly and if possible flatteringly; and, if we suffer from a certain "sickly irritability and sensitiveness" in the presence of what we think beautiful, we prefer to ascribe this to an artistic temperament rather than to a debilitated will.

We are acquainted with the irascible nerve patient who pours his curses on the head of a noisy child; and in his case we are only too ready to suspect a morbid condition of the body. But when we ourselves, or our young friends, or our brothers, sister, or cousins, suddenly display, when still in their teens, a sort of gasping enthusiasm before a landscape, a peasant child, or a sunset; when they show an inability to bide their time, to pause, and to remain inactive in the presence of what they consider beautiful, we immediately conclude from their conduct, not that they have little command of themselves, but that they must of necessity have strong artistic natures.

Our novels are full of such people with weak wills, so are our plays; so, too, unfortunately, are our Art Schools.

We know the Art student who, the moment he sees what he would call "a glorious view," or a "dramatic sunset or sunrise," hurls his materials together helter-skelter and dashes off, ventre à terre, to the most convenient spot whence he can paint it.

We have seen him seize the thing he calls an impression, his teeth clenched the while, and his nostrils dilated. But how often does it occur to us that such a creature has got a bad temper? How often do we realize that he is irritable, self-indulgent, sick in fact?

Only in an age like our own could this ridiculous travesty of an artist pass for an artist. It is only in our age that his neurotic touchiness could possibly be mistaken for strength and vigour; and yet there are hundreds of his kind among the painters and sculptors of the day.

Many a student's call to Art, at present, is merely a reminder, on the part of Nature, that he should cultivate restraint and forbearance, and should go in for commerce; for there is a whole universe between such a man and the artist of value. Not that sensitiveness is absent in the real artist; but it is of a kind which has strength to wait, to reflect, to weigh, and, if necessary, to refrain from action altogether.

"Slow is the experience of all deep wells," says Zarathustra. "Long must they wait ere they know what hath sunk into their depths."[9]

But the people I have just described have only a skin, and any itch upon it they call Art.

No lasting good, no permanent value can come of these irascible people who will be avenged on all that they call beauty, "right away"; who will, so to speak, "pay beauty out," and who cannot contain themselves in its presence. They can but help to swell the ranks of the incompetent, and even if they are successful, as they sometimes are nowadays, all they do is to wreck the sacred calling in which they are but pathological usurpers.

Now, in turning to the more general causes, we find that in accounting for the prevailing anarchy in Europe and in countries like Europe, and particularly in England and in countries like England, Nietzsche pointed to the whole heritage of traditional thought which prevailed and still does prevail in the civilized parts of the Western world, and declared that it was in our most fundamental beliefs, in our most unquestioned dogmas, and in our most vaunted birthrights that this anarchy takes its source.

If Art had lost its prestige in our midst, and even its justification; and if individualism, incompetence, eccentricity, mediocrity and doubt were rife, we must seek the causes of all this neither in Diderot's somewhat disappointing essay on painting, nor in the slur that Rousseau had once cast upon the culture of man, nor in John Stuart Mill's arguments in favour of individualism, nor yet in Spencer's declaration that "the activities we call play are united with the æsthetic activities by the trait that neither subserves in any direct way the processes conducive to life."[10]

All these things are merely symptomatic. Diderot, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Spencer were only symptoms of still deeper influences which have been at work for centuries, and those influences are to be sought in the most vital values upon which our civilization is based.

2. Misleading Systems of Æsthetic.

It is perfectly true that from classic times onward the guidance of European thought, on matters of Art, has been almost entirely inadequate if not misleading. But for the subconscious motives of artists and their spectators there seems to have been very little comprehension of what Art actually means and aspires to, and even these subconscious motives have been well-nigh stifled, thanks to the false doctrines with which they have been persistently and systematically smothered. Perhaps, however, the very nature of the subject condemns it to false theoretical treatment; for it has almost always been at the mercy of men who were not themselves performers in the arts. Of the few artists who have written on Art, how many have given us an adequate expression of what they themselves must have felt and aspired to? Not one. Ghiberti, Vasari, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Mengs, Hogarth and Reynolds—to mention the most famous, teach us scarcely anything at all concerning the essence of their life passion, and this is, as Nietzsche observes, perhaps "a necessary fault; for," he continues, "the artist who would begin to understand himself would therewith begin to mistake himself—he must not look backwards, he must not look at all; he must give.—It is an honour for an artist to have no critical faculty; if he can criticize he is mediocre, he is modern."[11]

Still, the greater part of this faulty guidance may, in itself, be but another outcome of the erroneous and rooted beliefs which lie even deeper in the heart of life than Art itself, and for these beliefs we must seek deep down in the foundations of European thought for the last two or three hundred years. In fact, we must ask ourselves what our heritage from by-gone ages has been.

Since Art is the subject of our inquiry, and "Art is the only task of life,"[12] it seems moderately clear that everything that has tended to reduce the dignity of Art must, in the first place, have reduced the dignity of man.

Is our heritage of thought of a kind that exalts man, or is it of a kind that debases him? What are, in fact, its chief characteristics?

3. Our Heritage.—A. Christianity.

We shall find that the one definite and unswerving tendency of the traditional thought of Europe has been, first, to establish on earth that equality between men which from the outset Christianity had promised them in Heaven; secondly, to assail the prestige of man by proving that other tenet of the Faith which maintains the general depravity of human nature; and thirdly, to insist upon truth in the Christian sense; that is, as an absolute thing which can be, and must be, made common to all.

At the root of all our science, all our philosophy, and all our literature, the three fundamental doctrines of Christianity: the equality of all souls, the insuperable depravity of human nature, and the insistence upon Truth, are the ruling influences.

By means of the first and third doctrines equality was established in the spirit, and by means of the second it was established in the flesh.[13]

By means of the first, each individual, great or small, was granted an importance[14] undreamt of theretofore,[15] while the lowest were raised to the highest power; by means of the second, in which the pride of mankind received a snub at once severe and merciless, the highest were reduced to the level of the low, while the low were by implication materially raised; and by means of the third, no truth or point of view which could not be made general could be considered as a truth or a point of view at all. Practically it amounted to this, that in one breath mankind was told, first,

Thy Lord for thee the Cross endured
To save thy soul from Death and Hell;"[16]

secondly, "Thou shalt have no other God before Me;" and thirdly,

"From Greenland's icy mountains
To India's coral strand,
... every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile."[17]

But in each case, as I have pointed out, it was the higher men who suffered. Because they alone had something to lose. The first notion —that of equality, threatened at once to make them doubt their own privileges and powers, to throw suspicion into the hearts of their followers, and to make all special, exceptional and isolated claims utterly void. The third—the insistence upon a truth which could be general and absolute, denied their right to establish their own truths in the hearts of men, and to rise above the most general truth which was reality; while in the second—the Semitic doctrine of general sin, which held that man was not only an imperfect, but also a fallen being, and that all his kind shared in this shame—there was not alone the ring of an absence of rank, but also of a universal depreciation of human nature which was ultimately to lead, by gradual stages, from a disbelief in man himself to a disbelief in nobles, in kings and finally in gods.[18]

At one stroke, not one or two human actions, but all human performances, inspirations and happy thoughts, had been stripped of their glory and condemned. Man could raise himself only by God's grace —that is to say, by a miracle, otherwise he was but a fallen angel, aimlessly beating the air with his broken wings.

These three blows levelled at the head of higher men were fatal to the artist; for it is precisely in the value of human inspirations, in the efficiency of human creativeness, and in the irresistible power of human will, that he, above all, must and does believe. It is his mission to demand obedience and to procure reverence; for, as we shall see, every artist worthy the name is at heart a despot.[19]

Fortunately, the Holy Catholic Church intervened, and by its rigorous discipline and its firm establishment upon a hierarchical principle, suppressed for a while the overweening temper of the Christian soul, and all claims of individual thought and judgment, while it also recognized an order of rank among men; but the three doctrines above described remained notwithstanding at the core of the Christian Faith, and awaited only a favourable opportunity to burst forth and blight all the good that the Church had done.

This favourable opportunity occurred in the person of Martin Luther. The Reformation, in addition to reinstating, with all their evil consequences, the three doctrines mentioned above, also produced a certain contempt for lofty things and an importunate individualism which has done nought but increase and spread from that day to this.

Individualism, on a large scale, of course, had been both tolerated and practised in Gothic architecture, and on this account the buildings of the Middle Ages might be said to breathe a more truly Christian spirit[20] than most of the sculpture and the painting of the same period, which are more hieratic.[21] But it was not until the Reformation began to spread that the most tiresome form of individualism, which we shall call Amateurism,[22] received, as it were, a Divine sanction; and there can be no doubt that it is against this element in modern life that not only Art, but all forces which aim at order, law and discipline, will eventually have to wage their most determined and most implacable warfare.

B. Protestantism.

For Protestantism was nothing more nor less than a general rebellion against authority.[23] By means of it the right of private judgment was installed once more, and to the individual was restored that importance which Christianity had acknowledged from the first, and which only the attitude of the Church had been able to modify. The layman, with his conscience acknowledged to be the supreme tribunal, was declared a free man, emancipated even from the law,[24] or, as Luther said, "free Lord of all, subject to none."[25]

Now, not only the immortal soul of every individual became important; but also every one of his proclivities, desires and aspirations. He was told that he could be his own priest if he chose,[26] and that Christ had obtained this prerogative for him. Megalomania, in fact, as Nietzsche declares, was made his duty.[27]

"Let men so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God."[28]

With these words St. Paul had addressed the Corinthians, and Luther did not fail to base his strongest arguments upon the text.[29]

"Even the Reformation," says Nietzsche, "was a movement for individual liberty; 'Every one his own priest' is really no more than a formula for libertinage.As a matter of fact, the words, 'Evangelical freedom' would have sufficed—and all instincts which had reasons for remaining concealed broke out like wild hounds, the most brutal needs suddenly acquired the courage to show themselves, everything seemed justified."[30]

Was it at all likely that the formula, "Every one his own priest," was going to lead to trouble only in ecclesiastical matters? As a matter of fact we know that Luther himself extended the principle still further in his own lifetime. By his radical alterations in the church service Luther gave the laity a much more prominent place in Divine worship than they had ever had before; for, in addition to the fact that the liturgy as compiled by him was written almost entirely in the native tongue, the special attention he gave to the singing of hymns[31] allowed the people an opportunity of displaying their individual powers to such an extent that it has even been said that "they sang themselves into enthusiasm for the new faith."[31]

But these remarkable changes were only symbolic of the changes that followed elsewhere; for, once this spirit of individual liberty and judgment had invaded that department of life which theretofore had been held most sacred, what was there to prevent it from entering and defiling less sacred sanctuaries?

Bearing in mind the condition of the arts at the present day, and taking into account a fact which we all very well know; namely, that thousands upon thousands are now practising these arts who have absolutely no business to be associated with them in any way, we are almost inclined to forgive Protestantism and Puritanism their smashing of our images, and their material iconoclasm; so light does this damage appear, compared with the other indirect damage they have done to the spirit of Art, by establishing the fatal precedent of allowing everybody to touch and speak of everything—however sacred.

We may argue with Buckle that the English spirit is of a kind which is essentially Protestant in temper; but this only seems to make the matter worse.

When Cardinal Newman and Matthew Arnold point, the one to the evils of Liberalism, and the other to the evils of anarchy, we know to what they are referring. They are referring to the impossibility, nowadays, of awakening reverence for anything or for anybody.

"May not every man in England say what he likes?" Matthew Arnold exclaims. "But," he continues, "the aspirations of culture, which is the study of perfection, are not satisfied, unless what men say, when they may say what they like, is worth saying.... Culture indefatigably tries, not to make what each raw person may like, the rule by which he fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that."[32]

But what is fatal to culture is no less fatal to art, and thus we find Nietzsche saying—

"Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it becometh mob."[33]

If in the Europe, and especially in the England of to-day, everybody has a right to every judgment and to every joy; if a certain slavish truthfulness to nature and reality, rawness and ruggedness, have well-nigh wrecked higher aspirations, and if everybody can press his paltry modicum of voice, of thought, of draughtsmanship, of passion and impudence to the fore, and thus spread his portion of mediocrity like dodder over the sacred field of Art; it is because the fundamental principles of the Christian faith are no longer latent or suppressed in our midst; but active and potent—if not almighty.

It might almost be said that they have reared a special instinct—the instinct of liberty and of taking liberties, without any particular aim or purpose; and, by so doing, have thrown all virtue, all merit, all ambition, not on the side of culture, but on the side of that "free personality"[34] and rude naturalness, or truth to man's original savagery, which it seems the triumph of every one, great or small, to produce.

No one any longer claims the kind of freedom that Pope Paul III claimed for his protégé Benvenuto Cellini:[35] this would be too dangerous, because, in a trice, it would be applied to all. Therefore the insignificant majority get more freedom than is good for them, and the noble minority are deprived of their birthright.

"Thus do I speak unto you in parable," cries Zarathustra, "ye who make the soul giddy, ye preachers of equality! Tarantulas are ye unto me, and secretly revengeful ones!

"But I will soon bring your hiding-places to the light, therefore do I laugh in your faces my laughter of the height.

"And 'Will to Equality'—that itself shall henceforth be the name of virtue; and against all that hath power will we raise an outcry!

"Ye preachers of equality, the tyrant frenzy of impotence crieth thus in you for 'equality': your most secret tyrant longings disguise themselves in words of virtue!"[36]

And now recapitulating a moment, what have we found our heritage to consist of, in the realm of the religious spirit?

In the first place: a certain universal acknowledgment and claim of liberty, which has no special purpose or direction, and which is too fair to some and unfair to many. Secondly, a devotion to a truth that could be general, which perforce has reduced us to vulgar reality; thirdly, a prevailing depression in the value and dignity of man, resulting from the suspicion that has been cast upon all authority and all loftiness; and fourthly, a wanton desecrating and befingering of all sanctuaries by anybody and everybody, which is the inevitable outcome of that amateur priesthood introduced and sanctified by Martin Luther.

C. Philosophical Influences.

Now, turning to our heritage in philosophy and science, do we find that it tends to resist, or to thwart in any way the principles of our religious heritage? Not in the slightest degree! At every point and at every stage it has confirmed and restated, with all the pomp of facts and statistics to support it, what the religious spirit had laid down for our acceptance. It is superficial and ridiculous to suppose, as Dr. Draper once supposed, that there has been a conflict between Religion and Science. I take it that he means the Christian Religion alone. Such a conflict has never taken place; what has taken place, however, is a conflict between Science and the Catholic Church. The Christian Religion and Science together, however, have never had any such antagonism, and least of all in England, where, from the time of Roger Bacon,[37] the first English Experimentalist, to the present day, nothing has been left undone, no stone has been left unturned, which might establish scientifically that which Christianity, as we have seen, wished to establish emotionally.

Universal liberty, without a purpose or a direction; the free and plebeian production of thoughts and theories divorced from all aim or ideal, after the style in which children are born in the slums; devotion to a truth that can be common to all; the depression of the value and dignity of man, and a certain lack of reverence for all things—these four aspirations of Christianity and Protestantism have been the aspirations of science, and at the present moment they are practically attained.

Unfortunately, it is in the nature of human beings to imitate success, and England's success as a colonizing and constitutional nation has undoubtedly been a potent force in spreading not only her commercial, but also her philosophical views among all ambitious and aspiring Western nations, who guilelessly took the evil with the good.

The empiricists, Francis Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, were among the first, by their teaching, to level a decisive blow at genuine thought, at the man who knows and who is the measure of all things;[38] and this they did by arriving at a conception of knowledge and thought that converted the latter into possessions which might be common to everybody—that is to say, by reducing all knowledge to that which can be made immediately the experience of all. This was the greatest blasphemy against the human spirit that has ever been committed. By means of it, every one, whatever he might be, could aspire to intellectuality and wisdom; for experience belongs to everybody, whereas a great spirit is the possession only of the fewest.

The Frenchmen, Helvetius, Voltaire, Rousseau, Maupertius, Condillac, Diderot, d'Alembert, La Mettrie and Baron Holbach, were quick to become infected, and in Germany, despite the essentially aristocratic influence of Leibnitz,[39] Kant was the first to follow suit.

Begun in this way, English philosophical speculation, as Dr. Max Schasler says, was forced to grow ever more and more materialistic[40] in character, and, if "Science has already come very generally to mean, not that which may be known, but only such knowledge as every animal with faculties a little above those of an ant or a beaver can be induced to admit," and if "incommunicable knowledge, or knowledge which can be communicated at present only to a portion—perhaps a small portion—of mankind, is already affirmed to be no knowledge at all,"[41] it is thanks to the efforts of the fathers of English thought.

Hence Nietzsche's cry, that "European ignobleness, the plebeian ism of modern ideas—is England's work and invention."[42]

But it is not alone in its vulgarization of the concept of knowledge, or in its materialistic tendency, that English influence has helped to reduce the dignity of man and to level his kind; the utilitarians from Bentham to John Stuart Mill and Sidgwick, by taking the greatest number as the norm, as the standard and measurement of all things, ably reflected the Christian principle, of the equality of souls, in their works, and, incidentally, by so doing, treated the greatest number exceedingly badly. For what is mediocre can neither be exalted nor charmed by values drawn from mediocrity, and is constantly in need of values drawn from super-mediocrity, for its joy, for its love of life, and for its reconciliation with drabby reality.[43]

D. The Evolutionary Hypothesis.

Finally, in the latter half of the last century, these two tendencies at last reached their zenith, and culminated in a discovery which, by some, is considered as the proudest product of the English mind. This discovery, which was at once a gospel and a solution of all world riddles, and which infected the whole atmosphere of Europe from Edinburgh to Athens, was the Evolutionary Hypothesis as expounded by Darwin and Spencer.

A more utterly vulgar, mechanistic, and depressing conception of life and man cannot be conceived than this evolutionary hypothesis as it was presented to us by its two most famous exponents; and its immediate popularity and rapid success, alone, should have made it seem suspicious, even in the eyes of its most ardent adherents.

And yet it was acclaimed and embraced by almost everybody, save those, only, whose interests it assailed.

How much more noble was the origin of the world as described even in Genesis, Disraeli was one of the first to see and to declare;[44] and yet, so strong was the faith in a doctrine which, by means of its popular proof through so-called facts, could become the common possession of every tinker, tailor and soldier, that people preferred to think they had descended from monkeys, rather than doubt such an overwhelming array of data, and regard themselves still as fallen angels.

In its description of the prime motor of life as a struggle for existence; in its insistence upon adaptation to environment and mechanical adjustment to external influences;[45] in its deification of a blind and utterly inadequate force which was called Natural Selection; and above all in its unprincipled optimism, this new doctrine bore the indelible stamp of shallowness and vulgarity.

According to it, man was not only a superior monkey, but he was also a creature who sacrificed everything in order to live; he was not only a slave of habit, but he was a yielding jelly, fashioned by his surroundings; he was not only a coward, but a cabbage; and, with it all, he was invoked to do nothing to assist the world process and his own improvement; for, he was told by his unscrupulous teachers, that "evil tended perpetually to disappear,"[46] and that "progress was therefore not an accident, but a necessity."[47]

Thus not only was man debased, but we could now fold our arms apathetically, and look on while he dashed headlong to his ruin.[48]

"No," said the evolutionists, "we do not believe in a moral order of things, although our doctrine does indeed seem to be a reflection of such an order; neither do we believe in God: but we certainly pin our faith to our little idol Evolution, and feel quite convinced that it is going to make us muddle through to perfection somehow—look at our proofs!"

And what are these proofs? On all sides they are falling to bits, and we are quickly coming to the conclusion that an assembly of facts can prove nothing—save the inability of a scientist to play the rôle of a creative poet.

Nietzsche was one of the first to see, that if Becoming were a reliable hypothesis, it must be supported by different principles from those of the Darwinian school, and he spared no pains in sketching out these different principles.[49]

"These English psychologists—what do they really mean?" Nietzsche demands. "We always find them voluntarily or involuntarily at the same task of pushing to the front the partie honteuse of our inner world, and looking for the efficient, governing and decisive principle in that precise quarter where the intellectual self-respect of the race would be the most reluctant to find it—that is to say, in slothfulness of habit, or in forgetfulness, or in blind and fortuitous mechanism and association of ideas, or in some factor that is purely passive, reflex, molecular, or fundamentally stupid,—what is the real motive power which always impels these psychologists in precisely this direction?"[50]

Not one of these advocates of mechanism, however, realized how profoundly he was degrading man, and how seriously he had therefore sullied all human achievement. In their scientific réchauffé of the Christian concept of man's depravity, they all had the most hearty faith, and, as there was little in their over-populated and industrial country to contradict their conclusions, they did not refrain from passing these conclusions into law.

We can detect nothing in this greatest scientific achievement of the last century which seriously resists or opposes our heritage in the realm of the religious spirit. In their fundamentals, the two are one; And when we take them both to task, and try to discover their influence upon the world, we wonder not so much why Art is so bad, but why Art has survived at all.

For, though for the moment we may exclude the influence of earlier English thought upon general artistic achievement, at least the degraded condition of Art at the present day cannot be divorced in this manner from more recent English speculation, for even Mr. Bosanquet counts Darwin and Lyell among those who have ushered in the new renaissance of art in England![51]

"At present," says Nietzsche, "nobody has any longer the courage for separate rights, for rights of domination, for a feeling of reverence for himself and his equals,—for pathos of distance,... and even our politics are morbid from this want of courage!"[52]

To-day, when all reverence has vanished, even before kings and gods, when to respect oneself overmuch is regarded with undisguised resentment, what can we hope from a quarter in which self-reverence and reverence in general are the first needs of all?

We can only hope to find what we actually see, and that, as we all very well know and cannot deny, is a condition of anarchy, incompetence, purposelessness and chaos.

"Culture ... has a very important function to fulfil for mankind," said Matthew Arnold. "And this function is particularly important in our modern world, of which the whole civilization is, to a much greater degree than the civilization of Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and tends constantly to become more so. But, above all, in our own country has culture a weighty part to perform, because, here, that mechanical character, which civilization tends to take everywhere, is shown in the most eminent degree.... The idea of perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is at variance with the mechanical and material civilization in esteem with us, and nowhere, as I have said, so much in esteem as with us."[53]

We may trust that it is not in vain that men like Matthew Arnold and Nietzsche raised their voices against the spirit of the age. And we may hope that it is not in vain that lesser men have taken up their cry.

In any case Nietzsche did not write in utter despair. His words do not fall like faded autumn leaves announcing the general death that is imminent. On the contrary, he saw himself approaching a new century, this century, and he drew more than half his ardour from the hope that we might now renounce this heritage of the past, the deleterious effects of which he spent his lifetime in exposing.

"Awake and listen, ye lonely ones!" he says. "From the future winds are coming with a gentle beating of wings, and there cometh good tidings for fine ears.

"Ye lonely ones of to-day, ye who stand apart, ye shall one day be a people, and from you who have chosen yourselves, a chosen people shall arise.

"Verily a place of healing shall the earth become! And already a new odour lieth around it, an odour which bringeth salvation—and a new hope."[54]

Lecture II[1]

Government in Art. Nietzsche's Definition of Art

Part I

Divine Art and the Man-God

"And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."—Genesis i. 28.

Man has ceased from believing in miracles, because he is convinced that the divine power of the miracle-worker has departed from him. At last he has proclaimed the age of wonders to be at an end, because he no longer knows himself capable of working wonders.

He acknowledges that miracles are still needed. He hears the distressing cry for the super-natural everywhere. All about him to-day he feels that wonders will have to be worked if the value of Life, of his fellows, and of himself is to be raised, by however little; and yet he halts like one paralyzed before the task he can no longer accomplish, and finding that his hand has lost its cunning and that his eye has lost its authority, he stammers helplessly that the age of miracles has gone by.

Everything convinces him of the fact. Everybody, from his priest to his porter, from his wife to his astrologer, from his child to his neighbour, tells him plainly that he is no longer divine, no longer a god, no longer even a king!

Not only has the age of miracles gone by; but with it, also, has vanished that age in which man could conceive of god in his own image. There are no gods now; because man himself has long since doubted that man is godlike.

Soon there will be no kings,[2] finally there will be no greatness at all, and this will mean the evanescence of man himself.

To speak of all this as the advance of knowledge, as the march of progress, as the triumph of science, and as the glories of enlightenment, is merely to deck a corpse, to grease-paint a sore, and to pour rose-water over a cesspool.

If the triumph of science mean "The Descent of Man"; if the glories of enlightenment mean, again, the descent of man; and if progress imply, once more, the descent of man; then the question to be asked is: in whose hands have science, enlightenment and the care of progress fallen?

This world is here for us to make of it what we will. It is a field of yielding clay, in which, like sandboys, we can build our castles and revel in our creations.

But what are these people doing? In building their castles they grow ever more like beavers, and ants, and beetles. In laying out their gardens they grow ever more like slugs, and worms, and centipedes. And their joy seems to be to feel themselves small and despised.

Once, for instance, their sky was the mighty god Indra; the clouds were his flock, and he drove his flock across his vast fields—blue and fragrant with delicate flowers. Their fruitful rain was the milk which their god Indra obtained from his herd of cows, and their seasons of drought were times when the god Indra was robbed by brigands of his flock.

Now, their sky is infinite space. Their clouds are masses of vapour in a state of condensation more or less considerable, and their rain is the outcome of that condensation becoming too considerable.

Not so many years ago their Heaven and their Earth were the father and mother of all living things, who had become separated in order that their offspring might have room to live and breathe and move. And thus their mists were the passionate sighs of the loving wife, breathing her love heavenwards; and the dew, the tearful response of her affectionate and sorrowful spouse.

Now, their Heaven is a thing that no one knows anything at all about. Their Earth is an oblate spheroid revolving aimlessly through a hypothetical medium called ether; their mists are vaporous emanations; while their dew is a discharge of moisture from the air upon substances that have irradiated a sufficient quantity of heat.

Their Sun was once a god with long, shining streams of golden hair, of which every year their goddess Night would rob him, thus leaving Winter mistress of the earth.

Now, their sun is the central orb of their Solar system. It consists of a nucleus, it is surrounded by a photosphere and a chromosphere, and has a disease of the face called "spots."

The facts remain the same; the mist still rises, the dew still falls, and the canopy of Heaven still spans the two horizons. Whatever the interpretation of these phenomena may be, this at least is certain, that they are still with us. But there is one thing that changes; one thing that cannot remain indifferent to interpretation—even though the facts do not alter,—and that is the soul of man.

A million times more sensitive to changes in interpretation than the column of mercury is to changes in the atmosphere, the soul of man rises or falls according to the nobility or the baseness of the meaning which he himself puts into things; and, just as, in this matter, he may be his own regenerator, so, also, may he be his own assassin.

1. The World "without form" and "void."

For, in the beginning, the world was "without form" and "void," things surrounded man; but they had no meaning. His senses received probably the same number of impressions as they do now—and perhaps more—but these impressions had no co-ordination and no order. He could neither calculate them, reckon with them, nor communicate[3] them to his fellows.

Before he could thus calculate, reckon with, and communicate the things of this world, a vast process of simplification, co-ordination, organization and ordering had to be undertaken, and this process, however arbitrarily it may have been begun, was one of the first needs of thinking man.

Everything had to be given some meaning, some interpretation, and some place; and in every case, of course, this interpretation was in the terms of man, this meaning was a human meaning, and this place was a position relative to humanity.

Perhaps no object is adequately defined until the relation to it of every creature and thing in the universe has been duly discovered and recorded.[4] But no such transcendental meaning of a thing preoccupied primeval man. All he wished was to understand the world, in order that he might have power over it, reckon with it, and communicate his impressions concerning it. And, to this end, the only relation of a thing that he was concerned with was its relation to himself. It must be given a name, a place, an order, a meaning—however arbitrary, however fanciful, however euphemistic. Facts were useless, chaotic, bewildering, meaningless, before they had been adjusted,[5] organized, classified, and interpreted in accordance with the desires, hopes, aims and needs of a particular kind of man.

Thus interpretation was the first activity of all to thinking humanity, and it was human needs that interpreted the world.[6]

The love of interpreting and of adjusting—this primeval love and desire, this power of the sandboy over his castles; how much of the joy in Life, the love of Life, and, at the same time, the sorrow in Life, does not depend upon it! For we can know only a world which we ourselves have created.[7]

There was the universe—strange and inscrutable; terrible in its strangeness, insufferable in its inscrutability, incalculable in its multifariousness. With his consciousness just awaking, a cloud or a shower might be anything to man—a godlike friend or a savage foe. The dome of blue behind was also prodigious in its volume and depth, and the stars upon it at night horrible in their mystery.

What, too, was this giant's breath that seemed to come from nowhere, and which, while it cooled his face, also bent the toughest trees like straws? The sun and moon were amazing—the one marvellously eloquent, communicative, generous, hot and passionate: the other silent, reserved, aloof, cold, incomprehensible.[8]

But there were other things to do, besides interpreting the stars, the sun, the moon, the sea, and the sky above. There was the perplexing multiplicity of changes and of tides in Life, to be mastered and simplified. There was the fateful flow of all things into death and into second birth, the appalling fact of Becoming and never-resting, of change and instability, of bloom and of decay, of rise and of decline. What was to be done?

It was impossible to live in chaos. And yet, in its relation to man Nature was chaotic. There was no order anywhere. And, where there is no order, there are surprises,[9] ambushes, lurking indignities. The unexpected could jump out at any minute. And a masterful mind abhors surprises and loathes disorder. His Will to Power is humiliated by them. To man,—whether he be of yesterday, of to-day or of to-morrow— unfamiliarity, constant change, and uncertainty, are sources of great anxiety, great sorrow, great humiliation and sometimes great danger. Hence everything must be familiarized, named and fixed. Values must be definitely ascertained and determined. And thus valuing becomes a biological need. Nietzsche even goes so far as to ascribe the doctrine of causality to the inherent desire in man to trace the unfamiliar to the familiar. "The so-called instinct of causality," he says, "is nothing more than the fear of the unfamiliar, and the attempt at finding something in it which is already known."[10]

In the torrent and pell-mell of Becoming, some milestones must be fixed for the purpose of human orientation. In the avalanche of evolutionary changes, pillars must be made to stand, to which man can hold tight for a space and collect his senses. The slippery soil of a world that is for ever in flux, must be transformed into a soil on which man can gain some foothold.[11]

Primeval man stood baffled and oppressed by the complexity of his task. Facts were insuperable as facts; they could, however, be overcome spiritually—that is to say, by concepts. And that they must be overcome, man never doubted for an instant—he was too proud for that. For his aim was not existence, but a certain kind of existence—an existence in which he could hold his head up, look down upon the world, and stare defiance even at the firmament.

And thus all humanity began to cry out for a meaning, for an interpretation, for a scheme, which would make all these distant and uncontrollable facts their property, their spiritual possessions. This was not a cry for science, or for a scientific explanation, as we understand it; nor was it a cry for truth in the Christian sense.[12] For the bare truth, the bare fact, the bald reality of the thing was obvious to everybody. All who had eyes to see could see it. All who had ears to hear could hear it. And all who had nerves to feel could feel it. If ever there was a time when there was a truth for all, this was the time; and it was ugly, bare and unsatisfying. What was wanted was a scheme of life, a picture of life, in which all these naked facts and truths could be given some place and some human significance—in fact, some order and arrangement, whereby they would become the chattels of the human spirit, and no longer subjects of independent existence and awful strangeness.[13] Only thus could the dignity and pride of humanity begin to breathe with freedom. Only thus could life be made possible, where existence alone was not the single aim and desire.

"The purpose of 'knowledge,' "says Nietzsche, "in this case, as in the case of 'good,' or 'beautiful,' must be regarded strictly and narrowly from an anthropocentric and biological standpoint. In order that a particular species may maintain and increase its power, its conception of reality must contain enough which is calculable and constant to allow of its formulating a scheme of conduct. The utility of preservation—and not some abstract or theoretical need to eschew deception—stands as the motive force behind the development of the organs of knowledge.... In other words, the measure of the desire for knowledge depends upon the extent to which the Will to Power grows in a certain species: a species gets a grasp of a given amount of reality in order to master it, in order to enlist that amount into its service."[14]

And thus "the object was, not to know, but to schematize, to impose as much regularity and form upon chaos as our practical needs required."[15]

"The whole apparatus of knowledge," says Nietzsche, "is an abstracting and simplifying apparatus—not directed at knowledge, but at the appropriation of things."[16]

No physical thirst, no physical hunger, has ever been stronger than this thirst and hunger, which yearned to make all that is unfamiliar, familiar; or in other words, all that is outside the spirit, inside the spirit.[17]

Life without food and drink was bad enough; but Life without nourishment for this spiritual appetite, this famished wonder,[18] this starving amazement, was utterly intolerable!

The human system could appropriate, and could transform into man, in bone and flesh, the vegetation and the animals of the earth; but what was required was a process, a Weltanschauung, a general concept of the earth which would enable man to appropriate also Life's other facts, and transform them into man the spirit. Hence the so-called thirst for knowledge may be traced to the lust of appropriation and conquest,[19] and the "will to truth" to a process of establishing things, to a process of making things true and lasting.... Thus truth is not something which is present and which has to be found and discovered; it is something which has to be created and which gives its name to a process, or better still, to the "will to overpower."[20]

For what is truth? It is any interpretation of the world which has succeeded in becoming the belief of a particular type of man.[21] Therefore there can be many truths; therefore there must be an order of rank among truths.

"Let this mean Will to Truth unto you," says Zarathustra, "that everything be made thinkable, visible, tangible unto man!

"And what ye have called the world, shall have first to be created by you:[22] your reason, your image, your will, your love shall the world be! And, verily, for your own bliss, ye knights of Knowledge!"[23]

"The purpose was to deceive oneself in a useful way; the means thereto was the invention of forms and signs, with the help of which, the confusing multifariousness of Life could be reduced to a useful and wieldly scheme."[24]

This was the craving. Not only must a meaning, a human meaning, be given to all things, in order to subordinate them to man's power; but Life itself must also be schematized and arranged. And, while all humanity cried aloud for this to be done, it was humanity's artists and higher men who set to and did it.[25]

2. The First Artists.

For it was then that man's strongest instinct became creative in man's highest product—the artist—and the discovery was made that the world, although "without form" and "void," as a fact, could be simplified and made calculable and full of form and attractions, as a valuation, as an interpretation, as a spiritual possession. With the world at a distance from him, unfamiliar and unhuman, man's existence was a torment. With it beneath him, inside him, bearing the impress of his spirit, and proceeding from him, he became a lord, casting care to the winds, and terror to the beasts around.

Man, the bravest animal on earth, thus conceived the only possible condition of his existence; namely, to become master of the world. And, when we think of the miracles he then began to perform, we cease from wondering why he once believed in miracles, why he thought of God as in his own image, and why he made his strongest instinct God, and thereupon made Him say: "Replenish the earth and subdue it!"

It was therefore the powerful who made the names of things into law.[26] It was their Will to Power that simplified, organized, ordered and schematized the world, and it was their will to prevail which made them proclaim their simplification, their organization, their order and scheme, as the norm, as the thing to be believed, as the world of values which must be regarded as creation itself.

These early artists conceived of no other way of subduing the earth than by converting it into concepts; and, as time soon showed that there actually was no other way, interpretation came to be regarded as the greatest task of all.[27] Naming, adjusting, classifying, qualifying, valuing, putting a meaning into things, and, above all, simplifying—all these functions acquired a sacred character, and he who performed them to the glory of his fellows became sacrosanct.

So great were the relief and solace that these functions bestowed upon mankind, and so different did ugly reality appear, once it had been interpreted by the artist mind, that creating and naming actually began to acquire much the same sense. For to put a meaning into things was clearly to create them afresh[28]—in fact, to create them literally. And so it came to pass that, in one of the oldest religions on earth, the religion of Egypt, God was imagined as a Being who created things by naming them;[29] while, in the Judaic notion of the creation of the world, which was probably derived from the Egyptians themselves, Jehovah is also said to have brought things into existence merely by pronouncing their names.[30]

The world thus became literally man's Work of Art,[31] man's Sculpture.[32] Miracle after miracle at last reduced Nature to man's chattel, and it was man's lust of mastership, his will to power, which thus became creative in his highest specimen—the artist—and which, fighting for "the higher worthiness and meaning of mankind,"[33]transfigured reality by means of human valuations, and overcame Becoming by falsifying it as Being.[34]

"We are in need of lies," says Nietzsche, "in order to rise superior to reality, to truth—that is to say, in order to live.... That lies should be necessary to life, is part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of existence....

"Metaphysics, morality, religion, science—all these things are merely different forms of falsehood, by means of them we are led to believe in life. 'Life must inspire confidence;' the task which this imposes upon us is enormous. In order to solve this problem man must already be a liar in his heart. But he must, above all, be an artist. And he is that. Metaphysics, religion, morality, science—all these things are but an offshoot of his will to Art, to falsehood, to a flight from 'truth,' to a denial of 'truth.' This ability, this artistic capacity, par excellence, of man—thanks to which he overcomes reality with lies—is a quality which he has in common with all other forms of existence....

"To be blind to many things, to see many things falsely, to fancy many things. Oh, how clever man has been in those circumstances in which he believed that he was anything but clever! Love, enthusiasm, 'God'—are but subtle forms of ultimate self-deception; they are but seductions to life and to the belief in life! In those moments when man was deceived, when he befooled himself and when he believed in life: Oh, how his spirit swelled within him! Oh, what ecstasies he had! What power he felt! And what artistic triumphs in the feeling of power!... Man had once more become master of 'matter'—master of truth!... And whenever man rejoices, it is always in the same way: he rejoices as an artist, his Power is his joy, he enjoys falsehood as his power."[35]

"Subdue it!" said the Jehovah of the Old Testament, speaking to man, and pointing to the earth: "have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

This was man's original concept of his task on earth, and with it before him he began to breathe at last, and to feel no longer a worm, entangled in a mysterious piece of clockwork mechanism.

"What is it that created esteeming and despising and value and will?" Zarathustra asks.

"The creating self created for itself esteeming and despising, it created for itself joy and woe. The creating body created for itself spirit, as a hand to its will."[36]

To appraise a thing was to create it for ever in the minds of a people. But to create a thing in the minds of a people was to create that people too; for it is to have values in common that constitutes a people.[37]

"Creators were they who created peoples, and hung one belief and one love over them," says Zarathustra; "thus they served life."[38]

"Values did man stamp upon things only that he might preserve himself—he alone created the meaning of things—a human meaning! Therefore calleth he himself man—that is, the valuing one.

"Valuing is creating: listen, ye creators! Valuation itself is the treasure and jewel of valued things.

"Through valuing alone can value arise; and without valuing, the nut of existence would be hollow. Listen, ye creators!

"Change of values—that is, change of creators.[39]

"Verily a prodigy is this power of praising and blaming. Tell me, ye brethren, who will master it for me? Who will put a yoke on the thousand necks of this animal?"[40]

"All the beauty and sublimity with which we have invested real and imagined things," says Nietzsche, "I will show to be the property and product of man, and this should be his most beautiful apology. Man as a poet, as a thinker, as a god, as love, as power. Oh, the regal liberality with which he has lavished gifts upon things!... Hitherto this has been his greatest disinterestedness, that he admired and worshipped, and knew how to conceal from himself that he it was who had created what he admired."[41]

"Man as a poet, as a thinker, as a god, as love, as power"—this man, following his divine inspiration to subdue the earth and to make it his, became the greatest stimulus to Life itself, the greatest bond between earth and the human soul; and, in shedding the glamour of his personality, like the sun, upon the things he interpreted and valued, he also gilded, by reflection, his fellow creatures.

There is not a thing we call sacred, beautiful, good or precious, that has not been valued for us by this man, and when we, like children, call out for the Truth about the riddles of this world, it is not for the truth of reality which is the object of Christianity and of science for which we crave; but for the simplifications[42] and values of this man-god, who, by the art-form, into which he casts reality, makes us believe that reality is as he says it is.

If this man is lacking, then we succumb to the blackest despair. If he is with us, we voluntarily yield to boundless joy and good cheer. His function is the divine principle on earth; his creation Art "is the highest task and the properly metaphysical activity of this life."[43]

3. The People and their Man-God.

Think of the joy that must have spread through a wondering people like the Greeks, when they were told that Earth, as the bride of Heaven, and fertilized by his life-giving rain, became the mother not only of deep eddying Ocean, but also of all that lives and dies upon her broad bosom!

Imagine the jubilation, the feeling of power and the sense of extreme relief that must have filled the hearts of the ancient New Zealanders, when the first great Maori artist arose and said to his brothers and sisters that it was the god of the forests, Tane Mahuta, with his tall trees that had wrenched the sky by force from mother Earth, where once upon a time he used to crush her teeming offspring to death.[44]

With what superior understanding could they now gaze up into the sky, and snap their fingers scornfully at its former azure mystery! No wonder that the artist who could come forward with such an interpretation became a god! And no wonder that in strong nations gods and men are one! The fact that the explanation was not a true one, according to our notions, did not matter in the least.

History not only reveals, but also proves that lies are not necessarily hostile to existence.

For thousands of years the human race not only lived, but also flourished with the lie of the Ptolemaic theory of the heavens on their tongue.

For centuries men thrived and multiplied, believing that the lightning was Jehovah's anger, and that the rainbow was Jehovah's reminder of a certain solemn covenant by which He promised never again to destroy all life on earth by a flood.

I do not wish to imply that these two beliefs are false. For my part, I would prefer to believe them, rather than accept the explanations of these phenomena which modern science offers me. Still, the fact remains that these two Judaic explanations have been exploded by modern science, though the question whether, as explanations, they are superior to modern science, scarcely requires a moment's consideration.

At any rate they were the work of an artist, and when we think of the joy they must have spread among wondering mankind, we cannot wonder that such an artist was made a god. It was an artist, too, who created the unchanging thing;45 who created every kind of permanency, i.e. Stability out of Evolution, and among other unchangeable things, the soul of man, which was perhaps the greatest artistic achievement that has ever been accomplished.

And this Man-God who created Being—that is to say, a stable world, a world which can be reckoned with, and in which the incessant kaleidoscopic character of things is entirely absent—this same Man-God who found the earth "without form" and "void," and whose magnificent Spirit "moved upon the face of the waters"; when people grew too weak to look upon him as their brother and God at the same time,[46] was relegated to his own world, and from a great distance they now pray to him and worship him and say: "For Thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, For ever and ever. Amen."

"For ever and ever;" this was something they could not say of the world as it is; and the thought of stability and of Being was a delight to them.

It may be difficult for us to picture how great the rejoicings must have been which followed upon every fresh ordering and arranging of the universe, every fresh interpretation of the world in the terms of man.

Perhaps only a few people to-day, who are beginning to cast dubious glances at Life, and to question even the justification of man's existence, may be able to form some conception of the thrill that must have passed through an ancient community, when one of its higher men uprose and ordered and adjusted Life for them, and, in so ordering it, transfigured it.

How much richer they must have felt! And how inseparable the two notions "artist" and "giver" must have appeared to them!

"If indeed this is Life," they must have said; "if Life is really as he orders it"—and his voice and eye allowed them to prefix no such "if" with genuine scepticism—"then of a truth it is a well of delight and a fountain of blessedness."

Thus Art—this function which "is with us in order that we may not perish through truth,"[47] this "enhancement of the feeling of Life and Life's stimulant,"[48] which "acts as a tonic, increases strength and kindles desire"[49]—became the "great seducer" to earth and to the world;[50] and we can imagine the gratitude that swelled in the hearts of men for him whose function it was. How could he help but become a god! Even tradition was not necessary for this. For at the very moment when his creative spirit lent its glory to the earth, man must have been conscious of his divinity or of his use as a mouthpiece by a Divinity.[51]

"O, Lord Varuna, may this song go well to thy heart!" sang the ancient Hindus.

"Thou who knowest the place of the birds that fly through the sky, who on the waters knowest the ships.

"Thou the upholder of order, who knowest the twelve months with the offspring of each, and who knowest the month that is engendered afterwards.

"Thou who knowest the track of the wind, of the wide, the bright, the mighty; and knowest those who reside on high.

"Thou the upholder of order, Varuna, sit down among thy people, thou, the wise, sit there to govern.

"From thence perceiving all wondrous things, thou seest what has been and what will be done.

"Thou who givest to men glory, and not half glory, who givest it even to our own selves.

"Thou, O wise god, art Lord of all, of heaven and earth!"[52]

We can follow every word of this heartfelt worship with perfect sympathy now.

"Thou, the upholder of order, who knowest the twelve months with the offspring of each"—this is no empty praise. It is the cry of those who feel inexpressibly grateful to their great artist; to him who has put some meaning, some order into the world.

And "Thou who givest men glory, and not half glory"—here is the sincere recognition of a people who have been raised and who not only rejoice in their elevation, but also recognize that it has been a creative act—a gift and a blessing from one who had something to give. For the soul of man is a million times more sensitive to changes in interpretation than the column of mercury is to changes in the atmosphere, and nothing can be more grateful than the soul of man when it is raised, however little, and thereby glorified.

4. The Danger.

Now, having reached this point, and having established—First: that it is our artists who value and interpret things for us, and who put a meaning into reality which, without them, it would never possess; and, secondly: that it is their will to power that urges them thus to appropriate Nature in concepts, and their will to prevail which gives them the ardour to impose their valuation with authority upon their fellows, thus forming a people; the thought which naturally arises is this: The power that artists can exercise, and the prerogative they possess, is one which might prove exceedingly dangerous; for while it may work for good, it may also work very potently for evil. Does it matter who interprets the world? who gives a meaning to things? who adjusts and systematizes Nature? and who imposes order upon chaos?

Most certainly it matters. For a thousand meanings are possible, and men may have a thousand been aiming for years, other interpretations are still possible.

Listen to your artistic friend's description of the most trifling excursion he has made, and then set your inartistic friend to relate—say, his journey round the world. Whereupon ask yourself whether it matters who sees things and who interprets life for you. The first, even with his trifling excursion in his mind, will make you think that life is really worth living, that the world is full, of hidden treasure. The second will make you conclude that this earth is an uninteresting monster, and that boredom can be killed only by the dangers of motor racing, aerial navigation and glacier climbing.

"A thousand paths are there which never have been trodden," says Zarathustra, "a thousand salubrities and hidden islands of life. Still unexhausted and undiscovered is mankind and man's world."[53]

This interpreting of Nature and this making and moulding of a people might therefore have brilliant or sinister results. There are many who wish to prevail; there are many who wish to lure their fellows on, and not all are standing on a superior plane.

For though artists, as a rule, are men of strong propensities[54] and surplus energy, there is an instinct of chastity in the best of them,[55] which impels them to devote all their power to prevailing in concepts rather than in offspring, and which makes them avoid precisely that quarter whither other men turn when they wish to prevail.[56]

The question as to what kind of man it is who walks up to Life and orders and values her for us, is therefore of the most extraordinary importance. Nothing could be more important than this. Because, as we have seen, the question is not one of truth in the Christian and modern scientific sense. A belief is often life-preserving and still false from the standpoint of reality.[57] It is a matter, rather, of finding that belief, whether true or false, which most conduces to the love of an exalted form of Life. And if we ask, Who is the man who is interpreting life for us? What is he? What is his rank? we practically lay our finger upon the very worth of our view of the world.

There is no greater delight or passionate love on earth for the artist than this: to feel that he has stamped his hand on a people and on a millennium, to feel that his eyes, his ears, and his touch have become their eyes, and their ears, and their touch. There is no deeper enjoyment than this for him: to feel that as he sees, hears and feels, they also will be compelled to see, hear and feel. Only thus is he able to prevail. A people becomes his offspring.[58]

While their elation and blessedness consisted in being raised in concepts to his level, and in seeing the world through his artistic prisms—in fact, in scoring materially by allowing him, their higher man, to establish their type; it was his solitary and unfathomable glory to prevail for ever through their minds, and to lay the foundation of his hazar, his thousand years of life on earth, in the spirit of his fellows.

Utilitarian, if you will, are both points of view: the one giving from his abundance, simply because he must discharge some of his plenitude or perish, found his meaning in giving. The others, stepping up on the gifts bestowed, found their meaning in receiving.[59]

The artist, then, as the highest manifestation of any human community, justifies his existence merely by living his life, and by imparting some of his magnificence to the things about him. To use a metaphor of George Meredith's, he gilds his retainers as the sun gilds, with its livery, the small clouds that gather round it. This is the artist's power and it is also his bliss. From a lower and more economical standpoint, he justifies his life by raising the community to its highest power; by binding it to Life with the glories which he alone can see, and by luring it up to heights which he is the first to scale and to explore.[60]

5. The Two Kinds of Artists.

Up to the present I have spoken only of the desirable artist, of him who, from the very health and fulness that is in him, cannot look on Life without transfiguring her; of the man who naturally sees things fuller, simpler, stronger and grander[61] than his fellows.62 When this man speaks of Life, his words are those of a lover extolling his bride.[63] There is a ring of ardent desire and deep longing in his speech, which is infectious because it is so sincere, which is convincing because it is so authoritative, and which is beautiful because it is so simple.

Intoxicated[64] by his love, giddy with enthusiasm, he rhapsodizes about her, magnifies her; points to vast unknown qualities and beauties in her, to which he is the first to give some lasting names; and stakes his life upon her myriad charms. This Dionysian artist, the prototype of all gods and demi-gods that have ever existed on earth, exalts Life when he honours her with his love; and in exalting her, exalts humanity as well.[65]

For the mediocre, simply because they cannot transfigure Life in that way, benefit extremely from looking on the world through the Dionysian artist's personality. It is his genius which, by putting ugly reality into an art-form, makes life desirable. Beneath all his dithyrambs, however, there is still the will to power and the will to prevail—just as these instincts are to be found behind the magnificats of the everyday lover; but, in the case of the former, it is the power in the spirit.

There is, however, another kind of man who walks towards Life to value and to order her. The kind of man who, as we saw in my last lecture, declares that "man is born in sin,"—"that depravity is universal," —"that nothing exists in the intellect but what has before existed in the senses; "and that "every man is his own priest"; the man who defines Life as "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations"; and who says: "it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce, well-developed human beings"; the man who declares that we are all equal, that there is one truth for all, if only it can be found; and who thus not only kills all higher men, but also deprives his fellow creatures of all the beauty that these higher men have brought, and might still bring, into the world; finally, the man who values humanity with figures and in the terms of matter, who values progress in the terms of the engineer's workshop, and who denies that Art can have any relation to Life.

This man is a sort of inverted Midas at whose touch all gold turns to tinsel, all pearls turn to beads, and all beauty withers and fades, His breath is that of the late autumn, and his words are hoarfrost. Having nothing to give,[66] he merely robs things of the beauty that was once laid in them, by insisting upon the truth of their reality; and he sees Life smaller, thinner, weaker, and greyer than it is even to the people themselves. He is the antithesis of the Dionysian artist. He comes from the people, and very often from a substratum lower than they. How, therefore, can he give the people anything they do not already possess? He is a housewives have not already seen or felt? People have no use for him, therefore, and whenever they are drawn to his side by his seditious songs about equality, they find, when it is too late, that he has made the world drabbier, uglier, colder, and stranger for them than it was before.

This is the man who insists upon truth. Forgetting that truth is ugly[67] and that humanity has done little else, since it first became conscious, than to master and overcome truth, he wishes to make this world what it was in the beginning, "without form" and "void," and to empty things of the meaning that has been put into them, simply because he is unable to create a world for himself.[68]

Aiming at a general truth for all, he is reduced to naked reality, to Nature as it was before God's Spirit moved upon the face of the waters, and this is his world of facts, stripped of all that higher men have put into them. This man of science without Art, is gradually reducing us to a state of absolute ignorance; for while he takes from us what we know about things, he gives us nothing in return. How often do we not hear people who are influenced by his science, exclaim that the more they learn the less they feel they know. This exclamation contains a very profound truth; for science is robbing us inch by inch of all the groundfield-labourer among field-labourers, a housewife among housewives—how could he point to any beauty or desire which field-labourers and that was once conquered for us by bygone artists.[69]

Such a man, if he can be really useful in garnering and accumulating facts, and in devising and developing novel mechanical contrivances, ought in any case to be closeted apart, so that none of his breath can reach the Art-made world. And when he begins valuing, all windows and doors ought speedily to be barred and bolted against him. He is the realist. It is he who sees spots on the sun's face; it is he who denies that mist is the passionate sigh of mother Earth, yearning for her spouse the sky; it is he who will not believe that the god of the forest with his tallest trees separated the earth and the heavens by force, and the explanations he gives of things, though they are doubtless useful to him in his laboratory, are empty and colourless. Granting, as I say, that he does anything useful in the department of facts, let his profession at least be a strictly esoteric one. For his interpretations are so often ignoble, in addition to being colourless, that his business, like that of a certain Paris functionary, ought to be pursued in the most severe and most zealous secrecy.

If the world grows ugly, and Life loses her bloom; if all winds are ill winds, and the sunshine seems sickly and pale; if we turn our eyes dubiously about us, and begin to question the justification of our existence, we may be quite certain that this man, this realist, and his type, are in the ascendancy, and that he it is who is stamping his ugly fist upon our millennium.

For the function of Art is the function of the ruler. It relieves the highest of their burden, so that mediocrity may be twice blessed, and it makes us a people by luring us to a certain kind of Life. Its essence is riches, its activity is giving and perfecting, and while it is a delight to the highest, it is also a boon to those beneath them.

The attempt of the Dionysian artist to prevail, therefore, is sacred and holy. In his efforts to make his eyes our eyes, his ears our ears, and his touch our touch, though he does not pursue any altruistic purpose, he confers considerable benefits upon mankind. Whereas the attempt of that other man to prevail—the realist and devotee of so-called truth—is barbarous and depraved. By his egoism he depresses, depreciates and dismantles Life in great things as in small. Woe to the age whose values allow his voice to be heard with respect! There are necessary grey studies to be made, necessary uglinesses to be described, perhaps. But let these studies and descriptions be kept within the four walls of a laboratory until the time comes when, by their collective means, man can be raised and not depressed by them. Science is not with us to promulgate values. It is with us to be the modest handmaiden of Art, working in secrecy until all its ugliness can be collected, transfigured, and used for the purpose of man's exaltation by the artist. It may be useful for our science-slaves, working behind the scenes of Life, to know that the sky is merely our limited peep into an infinite expanse of ether—whatever that is. But when we ask to hear about it, let us be told as follows—

"O heaven above me! Thou pure! Thou deep! Thou abyss of light! Gazing on Thee, I quiver with godlike desires.

"To cast myself up unto thy height—that is my profundity! To hide myself in thy purity—that is mine innocence.

"We have been friends from the beginning, thou and I. Sorrow and horror and soil we share: even the sun is common to us.

"We speak not to each other, for we know too many things. We stare silently at each other; by smiles do we communicate our knowledge.

"And all my wanderings and mountain-climbings—these were but a necessity and a makeshift of the helpless one. To fly is the one thing that my will willeth, to fly into thee.

"And what have I hated more than passing clouds and all that defileth thee!

"The passing clouds I loathe—those stealthy cats of prey. They take from thee and me what we have in common—that immense, that infinite saying of Yea and Amen.

"These mediators and mixers we loathe—the passing clouds.

"Rather would I sit in a tub, with the sky shut out; rather would I sit in the abyss without a sky, than see thee, sky of Light, denied by wandering clouds!

"And oft have I longed to pin them fast with the jagged gold wires of lightning, that I might, like the thunder, beat the drum upon their bellies.

"An angry drummer, because they bereave me of thy Yea and Amen!—thou heaven above me, thou pure, thou bright, thou abyss of Light! And because they bereave thee of my Yea and Amen.

"Thus spake Zarathustra."72

Part II

Deductions from Part I.

Nietzsche's Art Principles

"For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes."—Matthew vii. 29.

1. The Spirit of the Age Incompatible with Ruler-Art.

With Nietzsche's concept of Art before me I feel as if I had left the arts of the present day many thousand leagues behind, and it is almost a hardship to be obliged to return to them. For unless most of that which is peculiar to this age be left many thousand leagues to the rear, all hope of making any headway must be abandoned.

We live in a democratic age. It is only natural, therefore, that all that belongs to the ruler should have been whittled down, diluted, and despoiled of its dignity; and we must feel no surprise at finding that no pains have been spared which might reduce Art also to a function that would be compatible with the spirit of the times. All that savours of authority has become the work of committees, assemblies, herds, crowds, and mobs. How could the word of one man be considered authoritative, now that the ruling principle, to use a phrase of Mr. Chesterton's, is that "twelve men are better than one"?[1]

The conception of Art as a manifestation of the artist's will to power and his determination to prevail, is a much too dangerous one for the present day. It involves all kinds of things which are antagonistic to democratic theory, such as: Command, Reverence, Despotism, Obedience, Greatness and Inequality. Therefore, if artists are to be tolerated at all, they must have a much more modest, humble, and pusillanimous comprehension of what their existence means, and of the purpose and aim of their work; and their claims, if they make any, must be meek, unprivileged, harmless and unassuming.

While, therefore, the artist, as Nietzsche understood him, scarcely exists at all to-day, another breed of man has come to the fore in the graphic arts, whose very weakness is his passport, who makes no claims at establishing new values of beauty, and who contents himself modestly with exhibiting certain baffling dexterities, virtuosities and tricks, which at once amaze and delight ordinary spectators or Art-students, simply because they themselves have not yet overcome even the difficulties of a technique.

Monet's pointillisme, Sargent's visible and nervous brush strokes, Rodin's wealth of anatomical detail, the Impressionist's scientific rendering of atmosphere, Peter Graham's gauzy mists, Lavery's post-Whistlerian portraits of pale people, and the touching devotion of all modern artists to Truth, in the Christian and scientific sense, are all indications of the general "funk"—the universal paralysis of will that has overtaken the Art-world.

But I am travelling too fast. I said that no pains have been spared which might reduce Art also to a function that would be compatible with the democratic spirit of the times. Now in what form have these pains been taken?

Their form has invariably been to turn the tables upon Art, and to make its beauty dependent upon Nature, instead of Nature's beauty dependent upon it.[2]

Tradition, of course, very largely laid the foundation of this mode of thinking, and, from the Greeks to Ruskin, few seem to have realized how much beauty Art had already laid in Nature, before even the imitative artist could consider Nature as beautiful.

As Croce rightly observes: "Antiquity seems generally to have been entrammelled in the meshes of the belief in mimetic, or the duplication of natural objects by the artist;"[3] but when we remember that, as Schelling points out, in Greece speculation about Art began with Art's decline,[4] we ought to feel no surprise at this remote underestimation of the artistic fact.[5]

In reviewing the work of æstheticians from Plato to Croce, however, what strikes me as so significant is the fact that, from the time of Plotinus—who practically marks the end of the declension which started in Plato's time—to the end of the seventeenth century, scarcely a voice of any magnitude was raised in Europe on the subject of Art.[6]

That there was no real "talk" about Art, at the time when it was revived in the Middle Ages, and at the time when it flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that all the old Hellenic discussions on the subject should have been taken up again at a period when the last emaciated blooms of the Renaissance and of the counter-Renaissance were bowing their heads, only shows how very sorry the plight of all great human functions must be when man begins to hope that he may set them right by talking about them.

When it is remembered, however, that, from the end of the seventeenth century onward, Art was regarded either as imitation pure and simple or as idealized imitation by no less than fifteen thinkers of note—that is to say, roughly speaking, by the Earl of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Home, Burke and Hume in England, by Batteux and Diderot in France, by Pagano and Spaletti in Italy, by Hemsterhuis in Holland, and by Leibnitz, Baumgarten, Kant, Schiller and Fichte in Germany; and that if Winckelmann and Lessing opposed these ideas, it was rather with the recommendation of another kind of imitation—that of the antique— than with a new valuation of Art; we can feel scarcely any surprise at all at the sudden and total collapse of the dignity of Art in the nineteenth century, under the deadly influence of the works of men like Semper and his followers.

It is all very well to point to men like Goethe, Heydenreich, Schelling, Hegel, Hogarth and Reynolds—all of whom certainly did a good deal to brace the self-respect of artists; but it is impossible to argue that any one of them took up either such a definite or such a determined attitude against the fifteen others whom I have mentioned, as could materially stem the tide of democratic Art which was rising in Europe. And if in the latter half of the nineteenth century we have Ruskin telling us that "the art which makes us believe what we would not otherwise have believed, is misapplied, and in most instances very dangerously so";[7] and if we find that his first principle is, "that our graphic art, whether painting or sculpture, is to produce something which shall look as like Nature as possible,"[8] and that, in extolling the Gothic, he says it was "the love of natural objects for their own sake, and the effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistic laws";[9] we realize how very slight the effect of those exceptional spirits, headed by Goethe, must have been.

2. A Thrust parried. Police or Detective Art defined.

But to return to the movement initiated by Semper[10]—here we certainly have the scientific and Christian coup de grâce levelled at the expiring spirit of nineteenth-century Art. For the actors in this movement not only maintained that Art is imitation, but that it actually took its origin in imitation—and of the basest sort—that is to say, of accidental combinations of lines and colours produced in basket-work, weaving and plaiting.

This conclusion, which was arrived at, once more, by means of a formidable array of facts, and which called itself "Evolution in Art," was, like its first cousin, "Evolution in the Organic World," absolutely democratic, ignoble, and vulgar; seeking the source of the highest human achievements either in automatic mimicry, slavish and even faulty copying, or involuntary adoption of natural or purely utilitarian forms.

Taking the beauty of Nature for granted—an assumption which, as the first part of this lecture shows, is quite unwarrantable—these Art-Evolutionists sought to prove that all artistic beauty was the outcome of man's Simian virtues working either in the realm of Nature or in the realm of his own utilitarian handiwork. And from the purely imitative productions found in the Madeleine Cavern in La Dordogne, to the repetitive patterns worked on wooden bowls by the natives in British New Guinea, the origin of all art lay in schoolboy "cribbing."

This was a new scientific valuation of Art—foreshadowed, as I have shown, by philosophical æsthetic, but arriving independently, as it were, at the conclusion that Art was no longer a giver, but a robber.

Volumes were written to show the origin in technical industry of individual patterns and ornaments on antique vases. And as Alois Riegl rightly observes, the authors of these works spoke with such assurance, that one might almost have believed that they had been present when the vases were made.[11]

Even Semper, however, as Riegl points out, did not go so far as his disciples, and though he believed that art-forms had been evolved—a fact any one would be ready to admit—he did not press the point that technical industry had always been their root.

When we find such delicate and beautifully rhythmic patterns as those which Dr. A. C. Haddon gives us in his interesting work on Evolution in Art, and are told that they originated in the frigate birds, or in woodlarks, which infest the neighbourhood from which these patterns hail;[12] when we are shown a Chinese ornament which resembles nothing so much as the Egyptian honeysuckle and lotus ornament,[13] and we are told that it is derived from the Chinese bat, and when we are persuaded that an ordinary fish-hook can lead to a delightful bell-like[14] design; then our knowledge of what Art is protests against this desecration of its sanctity—more particularly after we have been informed that any beauty that the original "Skeuomorph"[15] may ultimately possess is mostly due to rapid and faulty copying by inexpert draughtsmen, or to a simplifying process which repeated drawings of the same thing must at length involve.

This is nonsense, and of a most pernicious sort. No mechanical copying or involuntary simplification will necessarily lead to designs of great beauty. One has only to set a class of children to make dozens of copies of an object—each more removed than the last from the original —in order to discover that if any beauty arises at all, it is actually given or imparted to the original by one particular child, who happens to be an artist, and that the rest of the class will be quite innocent of anything in the way of embellishments, or beauty of any kind.

It would be absurd to argue that the beak of a frigate bird had not been noticed by particular natives in those parts of the world where the creature abounds; but the creative act of making an ornamental design based upon a pot-hook unit, such as the frigate bird's beak is, bears no causal relation whatsoever to the original fact in the artist's environment, and to write books in order to show that it does, is as futile as to try and show that pneumonia or bronchitis or pleurisy was the actual cause of Poe's charming poem, "Annabel Lee."

Riegl, Lipps, and Dr. Worringer very rightly oppose this view of Semper and others. In his book, Stilfragen, Riegl successfully disposes of the theory that repetitive patterns have invariably been the outcome of technical processes such as weaving and plaiting, and points out that, very often, a vegetable or animal form is given to an original ornamental figure, only after it has been developed to such an extent that it actually suggests that vegetable or animal form.[16]

Dr. Worringer goes to great pains in order to show that there is an Art-will which is quite distinct from mimicry of any kind, and that this Art-will, beginning in the graphic arts with rhythmic and repetitive geometrical designs, such as zigzags, cross-hatchings and spirals, has nothing whatsoever to do with natural objects or objects of utility, such as baskets and woven work, which these designs happen to resemble.[17]

He points out that there is not only a difference of degree, but actually a marked difference of kind, between the intensely realistic drawing of the Madeleine finds and of some Australian cave painting and rock sculptures,[18] which are the work of the rudest savages, and the rhythmic decoration of other races; and that whereas the former are simply the result of a truly imitative instinct which the savage does well to cultivate for his own self-preservation—since the ability to imitate also implies sharpened detective senses[19]—the latter is the result of a genuine desire for order and simple and organized arrangement, and an attempt in a small way to overcome confusion. "It is man's only possible way of emancipating himself from the accidental and chaotic character of reality."[20]

The author also shows very ably that, even where plant forms are selected by the original geometric artist, it is only owing to some peculiarly orderly or systematic arrangement of their parts, and that the first impulse in the selective artist is not to imitate Nature, but to obtain a symmetrical and systematic arrangement of lines,[21] to gratify his will to be master of natural disorder.

These objections of Riegl and Worringer are both necessary and important; for, as the former declares: "It is now high time that we should retreat from the position in which it is maintained that the roots of Art lie in purely technical prototypes."[22]

Even in the camp of the out-and-out evolutionists, however, there seems always to have been some uncertainty as to whether they were actually on the right scent. One has only to read Grosse, where he throws doubt on the technical origin of ornament, and acknowledges that he clings to it simply because he can see no other,[23] and the concluding word of Dr. Haddon's book, Evolution in Art,[24] in order to understand how very much a proper concept of the Art-instinct would have helped these writers to explain a larger field of facts than they were able to explain, and to do so with greater accuracy.

Nobody, of course, denies that the patterns on alligators' backs, the beaks of birds, and even the regular disposition of features in the human face, have been incorporated into designs; but what must be established, once and for all, is the fact that there is a whole ocean of difference between the theory which would ascribe such coincidences to the imitative faculty, and that which would show them to be merely the outcome of an original desire for rhythmic order, simplification, and organization, which may or may not avail itself of natural or technical forms suggestive of symmetrical arrangement that happen to be at hand.

It is an important controversy, and one to which I should have been glad to devote more attention. In summing up, however, I don't think I could do better than quote the opening lines of the Rev. J. F. Rowbotham's excellent History of Music, in which the same questions, although applied to a different branch of Art, are admirably stated and answered.

In this book the author says—

"The twittering of birds, the rustling of leaves, the gurgling of brooks, have provoked the encomiums of poets. Yet none of these has ever so powerfully affected man's mind that he has surmised the existence of something deeper in them than one hearing would suffice to disclose, and has endeavoured by imitating them to familiarize himself with their nature, so that he may repeat the effect at his own will and pleasure in all its various shades. These sounds, with that delicate instinct which has guided him so nicely through this universe of tempting possibilities, he chose deliberately to pass over. He heard them with pleasure maybe. But pleasure must possess some æsthetic value. There must be a secret there to fathom, a mystery to unravel, before we would undertake its serious pursuit.

"And there is a kind of sound which exactly possesses these qualities—a sound fraught with seductive mystery—a sound which is Nature's magic, for by it can dumb things speak.

"The savage who, for the first time in our world's history, knocked two pieces of wood together, and took pleasure in the sound, had other aims than his own delight. He was patiently examining a mystery; he was peering with his simple eyes into one of Nature's greatest secrets. The something he was examining was rhythmic sound, on which rests the whole art of music."[25]

Thus, as you see, there is a goodly array of perfectly sensible people on the other side. Still, the belief that graphic art took its origin in imitation must undoubtedly have done a good deal of damage; for the numbers that hold it and act upon it at the present day are, I am sorry to say, exceedingly great.

By identifying the will to imitate with the instinct of self-preservation pure and simple, however, we immediately obtain its order of rank; for having already established that the will to Art is the will to exist in a certain way—that is to say, with power, all that which ministers to existence alone must of necessity fall below the will to Art. In helping us to make this point, Dr. Worringer and Mr. Felix Clay have done good service, while Riegl's contribution to the side opposed to the Art-Evolutionists cannot be estimated too highly.

We are now able to regard the realistic rockdrawings and cave-paintings of rude Bushmen, as also the finds in the Madeleine Cavern, with an understanding which has not been vouchsafed us before, and in comparing these examples of amazing truth to Nature—which, for want of a better name, we shall call Detective or Police Art[26]—with the double twisted braid, the palmette, and the simple fret in Assyrian ornament, we shall be able to assign to each its proper order of rank.

It seems a pity, before laying down the principles of an art, that it should be necessary to clear away so many false doctrines and prejudices heaped upon it in perfect good faith by scientific men. It is only one proof the more, if such were needed, of the vulgarizing influence science has exercised over everything it has touched, since it began to become almost divinely ascendant in the nineteenth century.

3. The Purpose of Art Still the Same as Ever.

But in spite of all the attempts that have been made to democratize Art, and to fit it to the Procrustes bed of modernity, two human factors have remained precisely the same as they ever were, and show no signs of changing. I refer to the general desire to obey and to follow, in the mass of mankind, and to the general desire to prevail in concepts, if not in offspring, among higher men.

Wherever one may turn, wherever one inquires, one will discover that, at the present day, however few and weak the commanders may be, there is among the vast majority of people an insatiable thirst to obey, to find opinions ready-made, and to believe in some one or in some law. The way the name of science is invoked when a high authority is needed—just as the Church or the Bible used to be invoked in years gone by—the love of statistics and the meekness with which a company grows silent when they are quoted; the fact that the most preposterous fashions are set in clothing, in tastes, and in manners; the sheep-like way in which people will follow a leader, whether in politics, literature, or in sport, not to dilate upon the love of great names and the faith in the daily Press which nowadays, so I hear, even prescribes schemes for dinner-table conversation—all these things show what a vast amount of instinctive obedience still remains the birthright of the Greatest Number. For even advertisement hoardings and the excessive use of advertisements in this age, in addition to the fact that they point unmistakably to the almost omnipotent power of the commercial classes (a power which vouchsafes them even the privilege of self-praise, which scarcely any other class of society could claim without incurring the charge of bad-taste), also show how docilely the greatest number must ultimately respond to repeated stimuli, and finally obey if they be told often enough to buy, or to go to see, any particular thing. And, in this respect, the Nietzschean attitude towards the greatest number is one of kindness and consideration.

This instinct to obey, says Nietzsche, is the most natural thing in the world, and it must be gratified. By all means it must be gratified. What is fatal is not that it should be fed with commands, but that it should be starved by the lack of commanders, and so be compelled to go in search of food on its own account.

"Inasmuch as in all ages," says Nietzsche, "as long as mankind has existed, there have always been human herds (family alliances, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches), and always a great number who obey in proportion to the small number who command—in view, therefore, of the fact that obedience has been most practised and fostered among mankind hitherto, one may reasonably suppose that, generally speaking, the need thereof is now innate in every one, as a kind of formal conscience which gives the command: 'Thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally refrain from something.' In short, 'Thou shalt.' This need tries to satisfy itself and to fill its form with a content; according to its strength, impatience and eagerness, it thereby seizes, as an omnivorous appetite, with little selection, and accepts whatever is shouted into its ear by all sorts of commanders—parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, or public opinion."[27]

Everywhere, then, "he who would command finds those who must obey"[28]— this is obvious to the most superficial observer; because it is easier to obey than to command.

"Wherever I found living things," says Zarathustra, "there heard I also the language of obedience. All living things are things that obey.

"And this I heard secondly: whatever cannot obey itself, is commanded. Such is the nature of living things.

"This, however, is the third thing I heard: to command is more difficult than to obey. And not only because the commander beareth the burden of all who obey, and because this burden easily crusheth him:—

"An effort and a risk seemed all commanding unto me; and whenever it commandeth, the living thing risketh itself.

"Yea, even when it commandeth himself, then also must it atone for its commanding. Of its own law must it become the judge and avenger and victim."[29]

For opinions are a matter of will; they are always, or ought to be always, travelling tickets implying a certain definite aim and destination, and the opinions we hold concerning Life must point to a certain object we see in Life;—hence there is just as great a market for opinions, and just as great a demand for fixed values to-day as there ever was, and the jealous love with which men will quote well-established views, or begin to believe when they hear that a view is well established—a fact which is at the root of all the fruits of modern popularity—shows what a need and what a craving there is for authority, for authoritative information, and for unimpeachable coiners of opinions.

Now all the arts either determine values or lay stress upon certain values already established.[30] What, then, are the particular values that the graphic arts determine or accentuate? It must be clear that they determine what is beautiful, desirable, in fact, imperative, in form and colour.

The purpose of the graphic arts, then, has remained the same as it ever was. It is to determine the values "ugly" and "beautiful" for those who wish to know what is ugly and what is beautiful. The fact that painters and sculptors have grown so tremulous and so little self-reliant as to claim only the right to imitate, to please and to amuse, does not affect this statement in the least; it is simply a reflection upon modern artists and sculptors.

Since, however, these values beautiful and ugly are themselves but the outcome of other more fundamental values which have ruled and moulded a race for centuries, it follows that the artist who would accentuate or determine the qualities beautiful or ugly, must bear some intimate relation to the past and possible future of the people.

Place the Hermes of Praxiteles and especially the canon of Polycletus in any part of a cathedral of the late Gothic, and you will see to what extent the values which gave rise to Gothic Art were incompatible with, and antagonistic to, those which reared Praxiteles and Polycletus. Now, if you want a still greater contrast, place an Egyptian granite sculpture inside a building like le Petit Trianon, and this intimate association between the Art and the values of a people will begin to seem clear to you.

You may ask, then, why or how such an art as Ruler-art can please? Since it introduces something definitely associated with a particular set of values, and commands an assent to these values, how is it that one likes it?

The reply is that one does not necessarily like it. One often hates it. One likes it only when one feels that it reveals values which are in sympathy with one's own aspirations. The Ruler-art of Egypt, for instance, can stir no one who, consciously or unconsciously, is not in some deep secret sympathy with the society which produced it; and as an example of this sympathy—if you wish to know why the realism which comes from poverty[31] tends to increase and flourish in democratic times, it is only because there is that absence of particular human power in it which is compatible with a society in which a particular human power is completely lacking.

For it is absolute nonsense to speak of l'art pour l'art and of the pleasure of art for art's sake as acceptable principles.[32] I will show later on how this notion arose. Suffice it to say, for the present, that this is the death of Art. It is separating Art from Life, and it is relegating it to a sphere—a Beyond—where other things, stronger than Art, have already been known to die. The notion of art for art's sake can only arise in an age when the purpose of Art is no longer known, when its relation to Life has ceased from being recognized, and when artists have grown too weak to find the realization of their will in their works.

4. The Artist's and the Layman's View of Life.

If the artist's view of Life can no longer affect Life, if his ordering, simplifying and adjusting mind can no longer make Life simpler, more orderly and better adjusted, then all his power has vanished, and he has ceased from counting in our midst, save, perhaps, as a decorator of our homes—that is to say, as an artisan; or as an entertainer—that is to say, as a mere illustrator of our literary men's work.

What is so important in the artist is, that disorder and confusion are the loadstones that attract him.[33] Though, in stating this, I should ask you to remember that he sees disorder and confusion where, very often, the ordinary person imagines everything to be admirably arranged. Still, the fact remains that he finds his greatest proof of power only where his ordering and simplifying mind meets with something whereon it may stamp its two strongest features: Order and Simplicity; and where he is strong, relative disorder is his element, and the arrangement of this disorder is his product.[34] Stimulated by disorder, which he despises, he is driven to his work; spurred by the sight of anarchy, his inspiration is government; fertilized by rudeness and ruggedness, his will to power gives birth to culture and refinement. He gives of himself—his business is to make things reflect him.

Thus, even his will to eternalize, and to stamp the nature of stability on Becoming, must not be confounded with that other desire for Being which is a desire for rest and repose and opiates,[35] and which has found its strongest expression in the idea of the Christian Heaven. It is, rather, a feeling of gratitude towards Life, a desire to show thankfulness to Life, which makes him desire to rescue one beautiful body from the river of Becoming, and fix its image for ever in this world,[36] whereas the other is based upon a loathing of Life and a weariness of it.

Defining ugliness provisionally as disorder, it may have a great attraction for the artist, it may even be the artist's sole attraction, and in converting it—the thing he despises most—into beauty, which we shall define provisionally as order, he reaches the zenith of his power.[37]

"Where is beauty?" Zarathustra asks. "Where I must will with my whole will; where I will love and perish, that an image may not remain merely an image.[38]

"For to create desireth the loving one, because he despiseth."[39]

It follows from this, therefore, that the realistic artist—the purveyor of Police Art—who goes direct to beauty or ugliness and, after having worked upon either, leaves it just as it was before,[40] shows no proof of power at all, and ranks with the bushmen of Australia and the troglodytes of La Dordogne, as very much below the hierophantic artist who transforms and transfigures. All realists, therefore, from Apelles[41] in the fourth century B.C. to the modern impressionists, portrait painters and landscapists, must step down. Like the scientists, they merely ascertain facts, and, in so doing, leave things precisely as they are.[42] Photography is rapidly outstripping them, and will outstrip them altogether once it has mastered the problem of colour. Photography could never have vied with the artist of Egypt, or even of China and Japan; because in the arts of each of these nations there is an element of human power over Nature or reality, which no mechanical process can emulate.

Now, what is important in the ideal and purely hypothetical layman is, that he has a horror of disorder, of confusion, and of chaos, and flees from it whenever possible. He finds no solace anywhere, except where the artist has been and left things transformed and richer for him. Bewildered by reality, he extends his hands for that which the artist has made of reality. He is a receiver. He reaches his zenith in apprehending.[43] His attitude is that of a woman, as compared with the attitude of the artist which is that of the man.

"Logical and geometrical simplification is the result of an increase of power: conversely, the mere aspect of such simplification increases the sense of power in the beholder."[44] To see what is ugliness to him, represented as what is beauty to him, also impresses the spectator with the feeling of power; of an obstacle overcome, and thereby stimulates his activities. Moreover, the spectator may feel a certain gratitude to Life and Mankind. It often happens, even in our days, that another world is pictured as by no means a better world,[45] and the healthy and optimistic layman may feel a certain thankfulness to Life and to Humanity. It is then once more that he turns to the artist who has felt the same in a greater degree, who can give him this thing—be it a corner of Life or of Humanity—who can snatch it from the eternal flux and torrent of all things into decay or into death, and who can carve or paint it in a form unchanging for him, in spite of a world of Becoming, of Evolution, and of ebb and flow. Just as the musician cries Time! Time! Time! to the cacophonous medley of natural sounds that pour into his ears from all sides, and assembles them rhythmically for our ears hostile to disorder; so the graphic artist cries Time! Time! Time! to the incessant and kaleidoscopic procession of things from birth to death, and places in the layman's arms the eternalized image of that portion of Life for which he happens to feel great gratitude.

5. The Confusion of the Two Points of View.

It is obvious that if both pleasures are to remain pure and undefiled— if the artist is to attain to his zenith in happiness, and the layman to his also—their particular points of view must not be merged, dulled, or blunted by excessive spiritual intercourse.[46] For a very large amount of the disorder in the arts of the present can easily be traced to a confusion of the two points of view.

In an ideal society, the artist's standpoint would be esoteric, and the layman's exoteric.

Nowadays, of course, owing to the process of universal levelling which has been carried so far that it is invading even the department of sex, it is hard to find such distinctions as the artist's and the layman's standpoint in art sharply and definitely juxtaposed. And this fact accounts for a good deal of the decrease in æsthetic pleasure, which is so characteristic of the age. In fact, it accounts for the decrease of pleasure in general, for only where there are sharp differences can there be any great pleasure. Pessimism and melancholia can arise only in inartistic ages, when a process of levelling has merged all the joys of particular standpoints into one.

Let me give you a simple example, drawn from modern life and the pictorial arts, in order to show you to what extent the standpoint of the people or of the layman has become corrupted by the standpoint of the artist, and vice-versâ.

Strictly speaking, artists in search of scope for their powers should prefer Hampstead Heath or the Forest of Fontainebleau[47] to the carefully laid-out gardens of our parks and of Versailles. Conversely, if their taste were still uncorrupted, the public ought to prefer the carefully arranged gardens of our parks and of Versailles to Hampstead Heath or the Forest of Fontainebleau.

Some of the public, of course, still do hold the proper views on these points, but their number is rapidly diminishing, and most of them assume the airs of artists now, and speak with sentimental enthusiasm about the beautiful ruggedness of craggy rocks, the glorious beauty of uncultivated Nature, and the splendour of wild scenery.[48]

The Marriage of Mary. By Raphael. (Brera, Milan.)

Artists, on the other hand, having become infected by the public's original standpoint—the desire for order—either paint pictures like Raphael's "Marriage of Mary,"[49] his "Virgin and Child attended by St. John the Baptist and St. Nicholas of Bari,"[50] and Perugino's "Vision of St. Bernard,"[51] in which the perfectly symmetrical aspect and position of the architecture is both annoying and inartistic, owing to the fact that it was looked at by the artist from a point at which it was orderly and arranged before he actually painted it, and could not therefore testify to his power of simplifying or ordering—but simply to his ability to avail himself of another artist's power, namely, the architect's; or else, having become infected by the public's corrupt standpoint—the desire for disorder and chaos as an end in itself— they paint as Ruysdael, Hobbema and Constable painted—that is to say, without imparting anything of themselves, or of their power to order and simplify, to the content of the picture, lest the desire for disorder or chaos should be thwarted.[52]

This is an exceedingly important point, and its value for art criticism cannot be overrated. If one can trust one's taste, and it is still a purely public taste, it is possible to tell at a glance why one cannot get oneself to like certain pictures in which either initial regularity has been too great, thus leaving no scope for the artist's power, or in which final irregularity is too great, thus betraying no evidence of the artist's power.

Looking at Rubens' "Ceres,"[53] in which the architecture is viewed also in a frontal position, you may be tempted to ask why such a picture is not displeasing, despite the original symmetry of the architecture in the position in which the painter chose to paint it. The reply is simple. Here Rubens certainly placed the architecture full-face; but besides dissimulating the greater part of it in shadow— which in itself produces unsymmetrical shapes that have subsequently to be arranged by tone composition—lie carefully disordered it by means of garlands and festoons, and only then did he exercise his artistic mind in making a harmonious and orderly pictorial arrangement of it, which also included some cupids skilfully placed.

All realism, or Police Art, therefore, in addition to being the outcome of the will to truth which Christianity and its offshoot Modern Science have infused into the arts, may also be the result of the artist's becoming infected either with the public's pure taste, or with the public's corrupted or artist-infected taste, and we are thus in possession of one more clue as to what constitutes a superior work of graphic art.

6. The Meaning of Beauty of Form and of Beauty of Content in Art.

So far, then, I have arrived at this notion of beauty in Ruler-Art, namely: that it may be regarded almost universally as that order, simplicity and transfiguration which the artist mind imparts to the content of his production. This notion seems to allow of almost universal application, because, as I showed in the first part of this lecture, it involves one of the primary instincts of man—the overcoming of chaos and anarchy by adjustment, simplification and transfiguration. It is only in democratic ages, or ages of decline, when instincts become disintegrated, that beauty in Art is synonymous with a lack of simplicity, of order and of transfiguration. I have shown, however, that the second kind of beauty, or democratic beauty, is of an inferior kind to that of the first beauty, or Ruler beauty, because, while the former takes its root in the will to live, the latter arises surely and truly out of the will to power.[54] Either beauty, however, constitutes ugliness in its opponent's opinion.

But there is another aspect of Beauty in Art which has to be considered, and that is the intrinsic beauty of the content of an artistic production. You may say that, ex hypothesi, I have denied that there could be any such beauty. Not at all!

Since the ruler-artist transfigures by enhancement, by embellishment and by ennoblement, his mind can be stimulated perfectly well by an object or a human being which to the layman is vertiginously beautiful, and which to himself is exceedingly pleasing. In fact, if his mind is a mind which, like that of most master-artists, adores that which is difficult, it will go in search of the greatest natural beauty it can find, in order, by a stupendous effort in transfiguration, to outstrip even that; for the embellishment of the downright ugly and the downright revolting presents a task too easy to the powerful artist—a fact which explains a good deal of the ugly contents of many a modern picture.

What, then, constitutes the beauty of the content in an artistic production, as distinct from the beauty of the treatment? In other words, what is beauty in a subject?

For the notion that the subject does not matter in a picture is one which should be utterly and severely condemned. It arose at a time when art was diseased, when artists themselves had ceased from having anything of importance to say, when the subjects chosen had no meaning, and when technique was bad. And it must be regarded more in the light of a war-cry coming from a counter-movement, aiming at an improved technique and rebelling against an abuse of literature in the graphic arts, than in the light of sound doctrine, taking its foundation in normal and healthy conditions.

The intrinsic beauty of the content or substance of a picture or sculpture may therefore be the subject of legitimate inquiry, and in determining what it consists of, we raise the whole question of content beauty.

Volumes, stacks of volumes, have been written on this question. The most complicated and incomprehensible answers have been given to it, and not one can be called satisfactory; for all of them would be absolute.

When, however, we find a modern writer defining the beautiful as "that which has characteristic or individual expressiveness for sense perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium,"[55] we feel, or at least I feel, that something must be wrong. It is definitions such as these which compel one to seek for something more definite and more lucid in the matter of explanation, and if, in finding the latter, one may seem a little too prosaic and terre-à-terre, it is only because the transcendental and metaphysical nature of the kind of definition we have just quoted makes anything which is in the slightest degree clearer, appear earthly and material beside it.

It is obvious that, if we could only arrive at a subject-beauty which was absolute, practically all the difficulties of our task would vanish. For having established the fact that the purpose of the graphic arts is to determine the values beautiful and ugly, it would only remain for us to urge all artists to advocate that absolute subject-beauty with all the eloquence of line and colour that our concept of Art-form would allow, and all the problems of Art would be solved.

But we can postulate no such absolute in subject-beauty. "Absolute beauty exists just as little as absolute goodness and truth."[56] The term "beautiful," like the term "good," is only a means to an end. It is simply the arbitrary self-affirmation of a certain type of man in his struggle to prevail.[57] He says "Yea" to his type, and calls it beautiful. He cannot extend his power and overcome other types unless with complete confidence and assurance he says "Yea" to his own type.

You and I, therefore, can speak of the beautiful with an understanding of what that term means, only on condition that our values, our traditions, our desires, and our outlook are exactly the same. If you agree with me on the question of what is good, our agreement simply means this, that in that corner of the world from which you and I hail, the same creator of values prevails over both of us. Likewise, if you and I agree on the question of what is beautiful, this fact merely denotes that as individuals coming from the same people, we have our values, our tradition and our outlook in common.

"Beautiful," then, is a purely relative term which may be applied to a host of dissimilar types and which every people must apply to its own type alone, if it wishes to preserve its power. Biologically, absolute beauty exists only within the confines of a particular race. That race which would begin to consider another type than their own as beautiful, would thereby cease from being a race. We may be kind, amiable, and even hospitable to the Chinaman or the Negro; but the moment we begin to share the Chinaman's or the Negro's view of beauty, we run the risk of cutting ourselves adrift from our own people.

But assuming, as we must, that all people, the Chinese, the Negroes, the Hindus, the Red Indians, and the Arabs between themselves apply the word beautiful only to particular individuals among their own people, in order to distinguish them from less beautiful or mediocre individuals—what meaning has the term in that case?

Obviously, since the spirit of the people, its habits, prejudices and prepossessions are determined by their values, and values may fix a type, that creature will be most beautiful among them who is the highest embodiment and outcome of all their values, and who therefore corresponds most to the ideal their æsthetic legislator had in mind when he created their values.[58] Thus even morality can be justified æsthetically.[59] And in legislating for primeval peoples, higher men and artist-legislators certainly worked like sculptors on a yielding medium which was their own kind.

The most beautiful negro or Chinaman thus becomes that individual negro or Chinaman who is rich in those features which the life-spirit of the Ethiopian or Chinese people is calculated to produce, and who, owing to a long and regular observance of the laws and traditions of his people, by his ancestors for generations, has inherited that regularity of form in his type, which all long observance of law and order is bound to cultivate and to produce.[60] And in reviewing the peoples of Europe alone, we can ascribe the many and different views which they have held and still hold of beauty, only to a difference in the values they have observed for generations in their outlook, their desires and their beliefs.

It is quite certain, therefore, that, in the graphic arts, which either determine or accentuate the values "ugly" and "beautiful," every artist who sets up his notion of what is subject-beauty, like every lover about to marry, either assails or confirms and consolidates the values of his people.[61]

Examples of this, if they were needed, are to be found everywhere. See how the Gothic school of painting, together with men like Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, El Greco, and subsequently Burne-Jones, set up the soulful person, the person of tenuous, nervous and heaven-aspiring slenderness, as the type of beauty, thus advocating and establishing Christian values in a very seductive and often artistic manner; while the Pagans, with Michelangelo, Titian, and even Rubens, represented another code of values—perhaps even several other codes— and sought to fix their type also.

Note, too, how hopeless are the attempts of artists who stand for the Pagan ideal, when they paint Christian saints and martyrs, and how singularly un-Pagan those figures are which appear in the pictures of the advocates of the Christian ideal when they attempt Pagan types. Christ by Rubens is not the emaciated, tenuous Person suffering from a wasting disease that Segna represents him to be; while the Mars and Venus of Botticelli in the National Gallery would have been repudiated with indignation by any Greek of antiquity.

When values are beginning to get mixed, then, owing to an influx of foreigners from all parts of the world, we shall find the strong biological idea of absolute beauty tending to disappear, and in its place we shall find the weak and wholly philosophical belief arising that beauty is relative. Thus, in Attica of the fifth century B.C., when 300,000 slaves, chiefly foreigners, were to be counted among the inhabitants, the idea that beauty was a relative term first occurred to the "talker" Socrates.

Still, in all concepts of beauty, however widely separated and however diametrically opposed, there is this common factor: that the beautiful person is the outcome of a long observance through generations of the values peculiar to a people. A certain regularity of form and feature, whether this form and feature be Arab, Ethiopian or Jewish, is indicative of a certain regular mode of life which has lasted for generations; and in calling this indication beautiful, a people once more affirms itself and its values. If the creature manifesting this regularity be a Chinaman, he will be the most essential Chinaman that the Chinese values can produce; his face will reveal no fighting and discordant values; there will be no violent contrasts of type in his features, and, relative to Chinese values, his face will be the most regular and harmonious that can be seen, and therefore the most beautiful.[62] The Chinese ruler-artist, in representing a mediocre Chinaman, would therefore exercise his transfiguring powers to overcome any discordant features in the face before him, and would thus produce a beautiful type.[63] Or, if his model happened to be the highest product of Chinese values, his object would be to transcend even that, and to point to something higher.

Once again, therefore, though it is impossible to posit a universal concept of subject-beauty, various concepts may be given an order of rank, subject to the values with which they happen to be associated.

7. The Meaning of Ugliness of Form and of Ugliness of Content in Art.

Ugliness in Art, therefore, is Art's contradiction.[64]It is the absence of Art. It is a sign that the simplifying, ordering and transfiguring power of the artist has not been successful, and that chaos, disorder and complexity have not been overcome.

Ugliness of form in Art, therefore, will tend to become prevalent in democratic times; because it is precisely at such times that a general truth for all is believed in, and, since reality is the only truth which can be made common to all, democratic art is invariably realistic, and therefore, according to my definition of the beautiful in form, ugly.

In this matter, I do not ask you to take my views on trust. A person who will seem to you very much more authoritative than myself—a man who once had the honour of influencing Whistler, and who, by the bye, is also famous for having flung down the Colonne Vendôme in Paris— once expressed himself quite categorically on this matter.

At the Congress of Antwerp in 1861, after he had criticized other artists and other concepts of art, this man concluded his speech as follows: "By denying the ideal and all that it involves, I attain to the complete emancipation of the individual, and finally to democracy. Realism is essentially democratic."[65]

As you all must know, this man was Gustave Courbet, of whom Muther said that he had a predilection for the ugly.[66]

Artists infected with the pure or the corrupt layman's view of Art, as described in the previous section, and artists obsessed by the Christian or scientific notion of truth, will consequently produce ugly work. They will be realists, or Police-artists, and consequently ugly.

But how can content- or subject-ugliness be understood? Content- or subject-ugliness is the decadence of a type.[67]It is the sign that certain features, belonging to other peoples (hitherto called ugly according to the absolute biological standard of beauty of a race), are beginning to be introduced into their type. Or it may mean that the subject to be represented does not reveal that harmony and lack of contrasts which the values of a people are capable of producing. In each case it provokes hatred, and this "hatred is inspired by the most profound instinct of the species; there is horror, foresight, profundity, and far-reaching vision in it—it is the profoundest of all hatreds. On account of it art is profound."[68]

The hatred amounts to a condemnation of usurping values, or of discordant values; in fact, to a condemnation of dissolution and anarchy, and the judgment "ugly" is of the most serious import.

Thus, although few of us can agree to-day as to what constitutes a beautiful man or woman, there is still a general idea common to us all, that a certain regularity of features constitutes beauty, and that, with this beauty, a certain reliable, harmonious, and calculable nature will be present. Spencer said the wisest thing in all his philosophy when he declared that "the saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying."[69]

For beauty in any human creature, being the result of a long and severe observance by his ancestors of a particular set of values, always denotes some definite attitude towards Life; it always lures to some particular kind of life and joy—as Stendhal said, "Beauty is a promise of happiness"—and as such it seduces to Life and to this earth.

This explains why beauty is regarded with suspicion by negative religions, and why it tends to decline in places where the sway of a negative religion is powerful. Because a negative religion cannot tolerate that which lures to life, to the body, to joy and to voluptuous ecstasy.

It is upon their notion of spiritual beauty, upon passive virtues, that the negative religions lay such stress, and thus they allow the ugly to find pedestals in their sanctuaries more easily than the beautiful.

8. The Ruler-Artist's Style and Subject.

Up to the present, you have doubtless observed that I have spoken only of man as the proper subject-matter of the graphic Arts. In maintaining this, Nietzsche not only has Goethe and many lesser men on his side, but he has also the history of Art in general. I cannot, however, show you yet how, or in what manner, animal-painting, landscape-painting, and, in some respects, portrait-painting are to be placed lower than the art which concerns itself with man. Let it therefore suffice, for the present, simply to recognize the fact that Nietzsche did take up this attitude, and leave the more exhaustive discussion of it to the next part of this lecture.

Now, eliminating for a moment all those pseudo-artists who have been reared by the two strongest public demands on the Art of the present age—I speak of portrait-painting and dining-room pictures—there remains a class of artists which still shows signs of raising its head here and there, though every year with less frequency, and this is the class which, for want of a better term, we call Ruler-artists.

As I say, they are becoming extremely rare; their rarity, which may be easily accounted for,[70] is one of the evil omens of the time.

The ruler-artist is he who, elated by his own health and love of Life, says "Yea" to his own type and proclaims his faith or confidence in it, against all other types; and who, in so doing, determines or accentuates the values of that type. If he prevails in concepts in so doing, he also ennobles and embellishes the type he is advocating.

He is either the maker or the highest product of an aspiring and an ascending people. In him their highest values find their most splendid bloom. In him their highest values find their strongest spokesman. And in his work they find the symbol of their loftiest hopes.

By the beauty which his soul reflects upon the selected men he represents in his works, he establishes an order of rank among his people, and puts each in his place.

The spectator who is very much beneath the beauty of the ruler-artist's masterpieces feels his ignominious position at a glance. He realizes the impassable gulf that is for ever fixed between himself and that! And this sudden revelation tells him his level. Such a man, after he has contemplated the ruler-artist's work, may rush headlong to the nearest river and drown himself. His despair may be so great when he realizes the impossibility of ever reaching the heights he has been contemplating, that he may immolate himself on the spot. Only thus can the world be purged of the many-too-many.

"Unto many life is a failure," says Zarathustra, "a poisonous worm eating through into their heart. These ought to see to it that they succeed better in dying.

"Many-too-many live.... Would that preachers of swift death might arise! They would be the proper storms to shake the trees of life."[71]

In the presence of beauty, alone, can one know one's true rank, and this explains why the Japanese declare that "until a man has made himself beautiful he has no right to approach beauty,"[72] for "great art is that before which we long to die."[73]

But, to those who see but the smallest chance of approaching it, beauty is an exhortation, a stimulus, a bugle-call. It may drive them to means for pruning themselves of ugliness; it may urge them to inner harmony, to a suppression of intestinal discord.

"Beauty alone should preach penitence,"[74] says Zarathustra. And in this sentence you have the only utilitarian view of beauty that has any aristocratic value, besides that which maintains that beauty lures to Life, and to the body.

Hence, beauty need not impel all men to the river. There are some who, after contemplating it, will feel just near enough to it not to despair altogether of attaining to its level, and this thought will lend them both hope and courage.

The ruler-artist, therefore, in order that his subject-beauty may have some meaning, must be the synthesis of the past and the future of a people. Up to his waist in their spirit, he must mould or paint them the apotheosis of their type. Only thus can he hope to prevail with his subject—Man.

The German philosopher, Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, was one of the first to recognize this power of the ruler-artist, and the necessity of his being intimately associated with a particular people, although above them; and in his little book, System der Æsthetik, he makes some very illuminating remarks on this matter.[75]

Thus Benedetto Croce rightly argues that in order to appreciate the artistic works of bygone and extinct nations, it is necessary to have a knowledge and understanding of their life and history—in other words, of their values.[76] What he does not point out, however, and what seems very important, is, that such historical research would be quite unnecessary to one who by nature was a priori in sympathy with the values of an extinct nation; and also, that all the historical knowledge available could not make any one whose character was not a little Periclean or Egyptian from the start, admire, or even appreciate, either the Parthenon, or the brilliant diorite statue of King Khephrën in the Cairo Museum.

All great ruler-art, then, is, as it were, a song of praise, a magnificat, appealing only to those, and pleasing only those, who feel in sympathy with the values which it advocates. And that is why all art of any importance, and of any worth, must be based upon a certain group of values—in other words, must have a philosophy or a particular view of the world as its foundation. Otherwise it is pointless, meaningless, and divorced from life. Otherwise it is acting, sentimental nonsense, or l'art pour l'art.

All great ruler-art also takes Man as its content; because human values are the only values that concern it. All great ruler-art also takes beauty within a certain people as its aim; because the will-to-power is its driving instinct, and beauty, being the most difficulty thing to achieve, is the strongest test of power. Finally, all great ruler-art is optimistic; because it implies the will of the artist to prevail.

But what constitutes the form of the ruler-artist's work? In what way must he give us his content?

The ruler-artist's form is the form of the commander. It must scorn to please.[77] It must brook no disobedience and no insubordination, save among those of its beholders about whom it does not care, from whom it would fain separate itself, and among whom it is not with its peers. It must be authoritative, extremely simple, irrefutable, full of restraint, and as repetitive as a Mohammedan prayer. It must point to essentials, it must select essentials, and it must transfigure essentials. The presence of non-essentials in a work of art is sufficient to put it at once upon a very low plane. For what matters above all is that the ruler-artist should prevail in concepts, and in order to do this his work must contain the definite statement of the value he sets upon all that he most cherishes.

Hence the belief all through the history of æsthetic that high art is a certain unity in variety, a certain single idea exhaled from a more or less complex whole, or, as the Japanese say, "repetition with a modicum of variation."[78]

Symmetry, as denoting balance, and as a help to obtaining a complete grasp of an idea; Sobriety, as revealing that restraint which a position of command presupposes; Simplicity, as proving the power of the great mind that has overcome the chaos in itself,[79] to reflect its order and harmony upon other things,[80] and to select the most essential features from among a host of more or less essential features; Transfiguration, as betraying that Dionysian elation and elevation from which the artist gives of himself to reality and makes it reflect his own glory back upon him; Repetition, as a means of obtaining obedience; and Variety, as the indispensable condition of all living Art—all Art which is hortatory and which does not aim at repose alone, at sleep, and at soothing and lulling jaded and exasperated nerves,—these are the principal qualities of ruler-art, and any work which would be deficient in one of these qualities would thereby be utterly and deservedly condemned to take its place on a lower plane.

Perhaps the greatest test of all, however, in regard to the worth of an artistic production is to inquire whence it came, what was its source. Has hunger or superabundance created it?[81]

If the first, the work will make nobody richer. It will rather rob them of what they have. It is likely to be either (A) true to Nature, (B) uglier than Nature, or (C) absurdly unnatural. A is the product of the ordinary man, B is the product of the man below mediocrity, save in a certain manual dexterity, and C is the outcome of the tyrannical will of the sufferer,[82] who wishes to wreak his revenge on all that thrives, and is beautiful and happy, and which bids him weave fantastic worlds of his own, away from this one, where people of his calibre can forget their wretched ailments and evil humours, and wallow in their own feverish nightmares of overstrained, palpitating and neuropathic yearnings. A is poverty-realism or Police Art. B is pessimism and incompetent Art. C is Romanticism.

Where superabundance is active, the work is the gift and the blessing of the will to power of some higher man. It will seem as much above Nature to mediocre people as its creator is above them. But, since it will brook no contradiction, it will actually value Nature afresh, and stimulate them to share in this new valuation.

Where poverty is active, the work is an act of robbery. It is what psychologists call a reflex action resulting from a stimulus—the only kind of action that we understand nowadays: hence our belief in Determinism, Darwinism, and such explanations of Art as we find in books by Taine and other writers who share his views.

The Art which must have experience and which is not the outcome of inner riches brought to the surface by meditation—this is the art of poverty. The general modern belief in experience and in the necessity of furnishing the mind by going direct to Nature and to reality shows to what extent the Art of to-day has become reactive instead of active.

The greater part of modern realism is the outcome of this poverty. It is reactive art, resulting from reflex actions; and, as such, is an exceedingly unhealthy sign. Not only does it show that the power of resisting stimuli is waning or altogether absent; but it also denotes that that inner power which requires no stimulus to discharge itself is either lacking or exceedingly weak.

With these words upon the subject of realism, I shall now conclude this part of Lecture II.

I shall return to realism in my next lecture; but you will see that it will be of a different kind from that of which I have just spoken. It will be superior, and will be the outcome of riches rather than of poverty. Although beneath genuine Ruler-art, which transfigures reality, it will nevertheless be superior to the poverty-realism which I have just discussed; for it will be of a kind which is forced upon the powerful artist who, in the midst of a world upholding other values than his own, is obliged to bring forward his ideal with such a preponderance of characteristic features as would seem almost to represent a transcript of reality. This realism I call militant realism, to distinguish it from the former kind.

In discussing mediæval. Renaissance and Greek Art, in my next lecture, this distinction will, I hope, be made quite plain to you.

Part III

LANDSCAPE AND PORTRAIT PAINTING

"He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth fruit out of the earth."—Psalms civ. 14.

1. The Value "Ugly" in the Mouth of the Creator.

In the last section of this lecture, I told you of three kinds of ugliness. I said there was the ugliness of chaos and disorder, which provokes the hate of the layman, and which the artist overcomes. I spoke of the ugliness of form in Art, which appeared when the artist had failed in his endeavour to master disorder, or when he had selected a subject already ordered, in which he has left himself no scope for manifesting his power; and I also pointed to that ugliness of subject in Art, in which the ordinary beholder, as well as the artist, recognizes the degeneration of his type or a low example of it.

There is, however, a fourth aspect of ugliness, and that is the esoteric postulation of the value "ugly" by the creator. I have shown how creating also involves giving, and therefore loss—just as procreation does; but what is the precise meaning of the word "ugly" in the mouth of the Dionysian artist?

We must remember that his eyes are not our eyes, and that his mind is not our mind. He cannot look at Life without enriching her. But what is his attitude to the transfigurations of former artists?

Before these the Dionysian artist can feel only loathing, and, in a paroxysm of hatred, he raises his axe and shatters the past into fragments. All around him, a moment before, people said: "The world is beautiful!" But he, thoroughly alone, groans at its unspeakable ugliness.

He rejoices as he sees the fragments fly beneath his mighty weapon, and the greater the beauty of the thing he destroys, the higher is his exultation. For, to him, "the joy in the destruction of the most noble thing and at the sight of its gradual undoing," is "the joy over what is coming and what lies in the future," and this "triumphs over actual things, however good they may be."[1]

What he calls "ugly," then, has nothing whatsoever in common with any other concept of ugliness; it is simply the outcome of his creative spirit "which compels him to regard what has existed hitherto as no longer acceptable, but as botched, worthy of being suppressed—ugly!"[2] And thus it is peculiar to him alone.

I have shown you that Nietzsche explains pleasure, æsthetically, as the appropriation of the world by man's Will to Power. Pain, or evil, now obtains its æsthetic justification. It is the outcome of the destruction that the creator spreads in a world of Becoming; it is the periodical smashing of Being by the Dionysian creator who can endure Becoming. No creator can tolerate the past save as a thing which once served as his schooling. But a people are usually one with their past. To them it is at once a grandfather, a father, and an elder brother. In a trice the creator deprives them of these relatives. Through him they are made orphans, brotherless and alone. Hence the pain that is inevitably associated with the joy of destruction and of creation.

Not only a creative genius, however, but also a creative age, may use the word ugly in this Dionysian sense. For a robust and rich people scorn to treasure and to hoard that which has gone before. And thus our museums, alone, are perhaps the greatest betrayal of our times.

When the Athenians returned to their ruined Acropolis in the first half of the fifth century before Christ, they did not even scratch the ground to recover the masterpieces that lay broken, though not completely destroyed, all around them. And, as Professor Gardner observes, it is fortunate for us that no mortar was required for the buildings which were being erected to take the place of those that had been destroyed; otherwise these fragments of marble sculpture and architecture, instead of being buried to help in filling up the terraced area of the Acropolis, would certainly have gone to the lime-kiln.[3]

The men of the Renaissance, in the same way, regarded the buildings of ancient Rome merely as so many quarries whence they might bear away the materials for their own constructions. And whether Paul II wished to build the Palazzo di Venezia, or Cardinal Riario the Cancellaria, the same principle obtained. At the same period we also find Raphael destroying the work of earlier painters by covering it with his own compositions,[4] and Michelangelo not hesitating to obliterate even Perugino's altar frescoes in the Sixtine Chapel in order to paint his "Judgment." While in comparatively recent times, at a moment when a great future seemed to be promised to modern Egypt, Mehemet Ali sent his architect to the sacred Pyramids of Gizeh, to rob them of the alabaster which he required for his magnificent mosque on the citadel of Cairo.[5]

From a purely archæological and scholastic point of view, therefore, it is possible to justify our museums—the British Museum, for instance. But from the creative or artistic standpoint, they are simply a confession of impotence, of poverty, and of fear; and, as such, are utterly contemptible. In any case, however, I think that, for the sake of public taste and sanity, some of the ugly fragments—such as two-thirds of the maimed and mutilated parts of bodies from the Eastern and Western pediments of the Parthenon—ought never to have been allowed to stand outside a students' room in a school of archæology or of art, and even in such institutions as these, I very much question the value of the pieces to which I have referred.

2. Landscape Painting.

Up to the present, I have spoken only of Man as the proper subject of Ruler-Art. I have done this because Man is the highest subject of Art in general, and because the moment humanity ceases from holding the first place in our interest, something must be amiss, either with humanity, or with ourselves.

Still, there are degrees and grades among ruler-artists. All of them cannot aspire to the exposition of the highest human values. And just as some turn to design and to ornament, and thus, in a small way, arrange and introduce order into a small area of the world, so others —standing halfway between these designers and the valuers of humanity —apply their powers quite instinctively to Nature away from Man. They have a thought to express—let us say it is: "Order is the highest good," or "Power is the source of all pleasure and beauty," or "Anarchy contends in vain against the governing power of light which is genius," and in the case of this last thought they paint a rugged scene which they reveal as arranged, simplified and transfigured by the power of the sun. In each of these cases they use Nature merely as a symbol, or a vehicle, by means of which their thought or valuation is borne in upon their fellows; and they do not start out as actual admirers of mere scenery, wishing only to repeat it as carefully as possible.

Even when it uses Nature merely as a symbol or a vehicle, however, there can be little doubt that this kind of Ruler-Art is a degree lower in rank than the art which concerns itself with man; and when this kind of art becomes realistic, as it did with Constable and all his followers, it is literally superfluous. Only when the landscape is a minor element, serving but to receive and convey the mood or aspiration of the artist, is it a subject for Ruler-Art, and then the hand of man should be visible in it everywhere. With the artist's arranging, simplifying and transfiguring power observable in Nature, landscape painting, as Kant very wisely observed in his Kritik der Urteilskraft, becomes a process of pictorial gardening, and as such can teach very great lessons.

Still, all landscapes ought to be approached with caution by the lover of Ruler-Art; for unless they are treated with an extreme ruler-spirit, they point too imperatively away from man, to promise a development that can be wholesomely human.

When it is remembered that landscape painting only became a really important and serious branch of art when all the turmoil and contradiction which three successive changes of values had brought about were at their height—I refer to the blow levelled at Mediæval values by the Renaissance, to 'the blow levelled at the Renaissance by the Counter-Renaissance and Protestantism (in its German form of Evangelism and in its English form as Puritanism), and to the blow levelled at the artistic spirit of Europe in general by the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and when, therefore, doubt and confusion had already entered men's minds as to what was to be believed about Man and Life; when it is remembered also that it was precisely in the north, where, as we shall see, culture was less a matter of tradition than in the south, that landscape found its most energetic and most realistic exponents—from Joachim Patenier[6] to Ruysdael; and that it was in the north, even after the Renaissance, that the negative character of Christianity, in regard to humanity and to Life, found its strongest adherents; the importance of establishing a very severe canon in regard to all landscape painting, and of insisting upon very high ruler qualities in this branch of the art, ought to be clear to all who take this subject to heart.

For, difficult as it may seem to realize it, there is nothing whatsoever artistically beautiful in landscape.[7] Only sentimental[8] townspeople, compelled by their particular mode of existence to gaze daily on their own hideous homes and streets, ever manifest a senselessly ardent and determined affection for green fields and hills, for their own sake; and with English psychologists, it would be quite admissible here to say that all beauty that particular people believe to exist in country scenery, is the outcome of association. The ancients liked the sunlit and fruitful valley because of its promise of sustenance and wealth; but they showed no love of nature as such.[9]

Mr. S. H. Butcher,[10] for instance, points out how landscape painting only became a serious and independent branch of art among the Greeks after the fourth century B.C.—that is to say, long over a century after the date when, according to Freeman, the decline of Hellas began; and, in speaking of the Greeks in their best period, he says: "They do not attach themselves to nature with that depth of feeling, with that gentle melancholy, that characterizes the moderns.... Their impatient imagination only traverses nature to pass beyond it to the drama of human life." J. A. Symonds tells us that "Conciseness, simplicity and an almost prosaic accuracy are the never-failing attributes of classical descriptive art—moreover, humanity was always more present to their minds than to ours. Nothing evoked sympathy from the Greek unless it appeared before him in human shape, or in connection with some human sentiment. The ancient poets do not describe inanimate nature as such, or attribute a vague spirituality to fields and clouds. That feeling for the beauty of the world which is embodied in such poems as Shelley's Ode to the West Wind gave birth in their imagination to definite legends, involving some dramatic interest and conflict of passions."[11] And Mahaffy and Mr. W. R. Hardie tell the same story.[12]

But even among sensible moderns, uninfected by sentimental fever, the love of nature is mostly of a purely utilitarian kind, as witness the love of cornfields, hayfields and orchards. The farmer at certain times gazes kindly at the purple hills behind his acres of cultivated land, because their colour indicates the coming rain. The cattle-breeder smiles as he surveys the Romney marshes, and thinks of the splendid pastureland they would make.

In fact, the attitude of sensible mankind in general towards landscape, as landscape, seems to have been pretty well summarized by the writer of the 104th Psalm, from whom, according to W. H. Rhiel, the Christian world, and especially the Teutonic part of it, seems to have derived much of their love of the beauties of Nature.[13]

What constitutes the artistic beauty in a painted landscape, then, is the mood, the particular human quality, that the artist throws into it. As the French painters say, a landscape is a state of the soul; and unless the particular mood or idea with which the artist invests a natural scene have some value and interest, and be painted in a commanding or ruler manner, it is a mere piece of superfluous foolery, which may, however, find its proper place on a great railway poster or in an estate agent's illustrated catalogue.

There is, on the other hand, another kind of love of nature, which dates only from the eighteenth century, and which is thoroughly and unquestionably contemptible. This also, like the above, is the result of association, and has nothing artistic in its constitution; but this time it is an association which is misanthropic and negative. I refer to what is generally known as the love of the Romantic in Nature, the love of mountains, torrents, unhandseled copses, virgin woods, and rough and uncultivated country.

In this love a new element enters the appreciation of Nature, and that is a dislike and mistrust of everything that bears the stamp of man's power or his labour, and therefore an exaltation of everything untutored, uncultured, free, unconstrained and wild.

This attitude of mind seems to have been unknown not only to the Greeks and to the Romans,[14] but, practically, to all European nations up to the time of Rousseau. As Friedländer says, it would be difficult to find evidence of travellers going to mountain country in quest of beauty, before the eighteenth century,[15] and the majority of those who were forced to visit such country, before that time, in their Journeys to foreign cities, describe it as horrible, ugly and depressing. Oliver Goldsmith is a case in point. Riehl declares that in guidebooks, even as late as 1750, Berlin, Leipzig, Augsburg, Darmstadt, Mannheim, etc., are spoken of as lying in nice and cheerful surroundings, whilst the most picturesque parts (according to modern notions) of the Black Forest, of the Harz, and the Thuringian woods are described as "very gloomy," "barren," and "monstrous," or at least as not particularly pleasant. And then he adds: "This is not the private opinion of the individual topographists: it is the standpoint of the age."[16]

Even in the Bible illustrations of the eighteenth century, we also find the same spirit prevailing. Paradise—that is to say, the original picture of virgin glory in natural beauty—is made to look like what moderns would call a monotonously flat garden, devoid of any indication of a hill, in which the Almighty, or Adam, or somebody, has already clipped all the trees and hedges, and carefully trimmed the grass.

You may argue with Riehl[17] that mediæval painters must have thought rough, wild and barren country beautiful; otherwise, why did they put it in their pictures? One low-German painter of the Middle Ages, for instance, painted a picture of Cologne, and, contrary to the genuine nature of the surrounding country, introduced a background of jagged and rocky mountains. Why did he do this, if he did not think jagged and rocky mountains beautiful?

In reply to this I cannot do better than quote Friedländer again, who on this very question writes as follows—

"At least the lack of a sense for the beauty of mountain scenery, which is noticeable in the poetry and travels of the Middle Ages, viewed as a whole, ought to lead us to suspect that this same sense could have been only very slightly apparent in the realm of pictorial art. But ought we not to ascribe the fantastic and romantic art ideal of the old masters, in landscape, rather to their endeavour to transfer the scene and figures of their pictures from reality to an imaginary world?... Even if historical painters like John van Eyck and Memling eagerly introduced jagged rocks and sharp mountain (which apparently they had never seen) into their backgrounds ... it is difficult to recognize any real understanding or even knowledge of the nature of mountains in all this; but simply an old and therefore very conventional form of heroic landscape which was considered as the only suitable one for a large number of subjects."[18]

But there is other evidence, besides that to be found in mediæval poetry and travels, which shows to what extent the particular sense for natural beauty, which I am now discussing, was lacking in the Middle Ages. Its absence is also illustrated by the arrangement of castles and other buildings. Mr. d'Auvergne, in his work The English Castles, more than once calls attention to this, and instances a tower at Dunstanburgh Castle,[19] which, though commanding a wildly romantic prospect, was selected for the vilest domestic uses.

Suddenly, all this is contradicted and reversed. Precisely where man's hand has been, everything is supposed to be polluted, unclean, and ugly; and rough, uncultivated nature, however rugged, however unkempt, is exalted above all that which the human spirit has shaped and trained.

How did this change come about?

To begin with, let it be said, that it was not quite so sudden as Friedländer would have us suppose. Long before the dawn of the eighteenth century, the very principles that were at the base of European life and aspirations—the principle of the depravity of man, the principle of liberty for liberty's sake, the principle of the pursuit of general truth; and finally, the principle that experience —that is to say, a direct appeal to nature—was the best method of furnishing the mind—all these principles had been leading steadily to one conclusion, and this conclusion Rousseau was the first to embody in his energetic and fulminating protest against culture, tradition, human power and society. And the fact that his doctrine spread so rapidly, that within fifty years of its exposition, with the help of men like Coxe, Ramond de Carbonnières, Étienne de Sénancour, Töppefer, Saussure and Bourit, it had practically become the credo and the passion of Europe, shows how ready the age must have been for the lessons Rousseau taught it.

All of you who have read the fulsome and bombastic praise of Nature, together with the bitter disparagement of the work of man, in such works as La Nouvelle Héloise, the Confessions, his letters to Monsieur de Malesherbes, and his Reveries of a lonely Rambler, will not require to be told the gospel Rousseau preaches.[20]

Suffice it to say, that he successfully created a love of the rough, of the rugged, the unhandseled and the uncultivated in the minds of almost all Europeans—especially Northerners, and that this love was rapidly reflected in landscape painting.

This new feeling for the romantic, for the unconstrained and for the savage in Nature, although it soon dominated art, was, in its essentials, quite foreign to art and to the artist. It had nothing in common with the motives that prompt and impel the artist to his creations. Its real essence was moral and not artistic; its fundamental feature was its worship of the abstract principles of liberty, anarchy and the absence of culture, which rude nature exemplifies on all sides; and it was a moral or scientific spirit that animated it, whether in Rousseau or in his followers.

Friedrich Schiller, who entirely supports Rousseau's particular kind of love for Nature, frankly admits this[21] in his able and profound analysis of the sentiment in question; whatever self-contempt, and contempt of adult manhood, may have lain behind Rousseau's valuations, Schiller brings all of it openly into the light of day, and in his efforts to support the Frenchman's school of thought, literally exposes it to ridicule.

One or two voices, such as Hegel's[22] and Chateaubriand's, were raised in protest against this thoroughly vulgar and sentimental attitude towards savage and wild phenomena; but they were unable to resist a movement, the strength of which had been accumulating for so many centuries in the hearts of almost all Europeans; and, ultimately, numbers triumphed.

Even the hand of man—of the artist—in a painted landscape, got to be a thing of the past. Realism—because it most conscientiously repeated that unconstrained and anarchical spirit which the romantic age loved to detect in matted weeds, in tangled and impenetrable coppices, in thick festoons of parasitic plants, in unhandseled brambles and in babbling brooks—became the ruling principle. Classical influence alone was able for a while to resist too rapid a decline; but soon we find Constable declaring in the early part of the nineteenth century, that "there is nothing ugly," and addressing aspiring artists in these words: "Observe that thy best director, thy perfect guide is Nature. Copy from her. In her paths is thy triumphal arch. She is above all other teachers; and ever confide in her with a bold heart:"[23] and a whole host of people following in his wake and applauding his principles.

Just as England by her influence had created Rousseau and his peculiar mode of thinking,[24] so, again, British influence was to show its power in the world of Art. The parallel is striking, but nevertheless true. In the years 1824, 1826 and 1829, Constable, whom Muther calls the father of landscape painting,[25] and whom Meier Graefe calls the father of modern painting,[26] exhibited in Paris, and his style soon became a dominant force.[27] Stendhal, though very much too moderate, was one of the first to raise, his voice against the lack of idealism (transfiguration, simplification) in these English pictures; but his efforts were of no avail, and he might just as well have shouted in the face of a hurricane.

3. Portrait Painting.

When one now adds to these influences, the steady rise of the power of the bourgeoisie in Europe, from the seventeenth century onward, and, as a result of this increasing power, an uninterrupted growth in the art of portrait painting—a growth that attained such vast proportions that it cast all attainments of a like nature in any other age or continent into the shade—one can easily understand what factors have been the most formidable opponents of Ruler-Art in the Occident, since the event of the Renaissance.

After all that I have said concerning the principles of Ruler-Art, it will scarcely be necessary for me to expatiate upon those elements in portrait painting which are antagonistic to these principles; for when you think of portrait painting as it has been developed by the claims of the bourgeoisie in Europe, you must not have Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" in mind. Neither must you consider that portrait work in which, by chance, the artist has had before him a model who, in every feature of face or of figure, corresponded to his ideal; nor that in which the artist has been able to allow himself to exercise his simplifying and transfiguring power. Otherwise some of the best of Rubens' and Rembrandt's work would of necessity come under the ban which we must set upon by far the greater number of portraits.

Saskia By Rembrandt.

When Rembrandt painted his bride Saskia,[28] for instance, the extent to which he exercised his simplifying and transfiguring power is amazing, and precludes all possibility of our classing this work among the portraits which should be condemned. He knew perfectly well that poor Saskia was not beautiful—what beautiful girl would have condescended to look at Rembrandt?—so what did he do? He cast all the upper and right side of her face in shadow, and deliberately concentrated all his attention, and consequently the attention of the beholder as well, upon three or four square inches of nice round muscle in the lower part of Saskia's young cheek and neck. But how many plain daughters of rich bourgeois would allow three or four square inches of their cheek and neck to be exalted in this way, at the cost of their eyes and their nose and their brow? The same remarks also apply to Rembrandt's "Jewish Rabbi" in the National Gallery. There he had to deal with an emaciated, careworn old Jew. How did he overcome the difficulty? All of you who know this picture will be able to answer this question for yourselves, and I need not, therefore, go into the matter.

This, then, is not the class of portrait work which need necessarily deteriorate the power of art. What does deteriorate this power, is that other and more common class of portrait painting which began in Holland in the seventeenth century, and in which each sitter insisted upon discovering all his little characteristics and individual peculiarities; in which, as Muther says, each sitter wished to find "a counterfeit of his personality," and in which "no artistic effect, but resemblance alone was the object desired."[29]

It was the insistence upon this kind of portrait work by the wealthy bourgeoisie of England, which well-nigh drove Whistler, with his ruler spirit, out of his mind, and it is precisely this portrait work which is dominant to-day. In order to be pleasing and satisfactory to the people who demand it, this class of painting presupposes the suppression of all those first principles upon which Ruler-Art relies in order to flourish and to soar; and where it is seriously and earnestly pursued, art is bound to suffer.

This was recognized three hundred years ago by the Spanish theoretician Vincenti Carducho, and his judgment still remains the wisest that has ever been written on the subject. In formulating the credo of the sixteenth century, he wrote as follows—

"No great and extraordinary painter was ever a portraitist, for such an artist is enabled by judgment and acquired habit to improve upon nature. In portraiture, however, he must confine himself to the model, whether it be good or bad, with sacrifice of his observation and selection; which no one would like to do who has accustomed his mind and his eye to good forms and proportions."[30]

Our art at the present day is, unfortunately, very largely the development and natural outcome of the two influences I have just described, and that accounts for a good deal for which I have failed to account hitherto.

Art no longer gives: it takes. It no longer reflects beauty on reality: it seeks its beauty in reality. And that is why it falls to pieces judged by the standard of Ruler-Art. It cannot bear the fierce light of an art that is intimate with Life and inseparable from Life. In its death-throes it has decked itself with all kinds of metaphysical plumes, in order that it may thus, perhaps, live after death. But these plumes have been used before by dying gods and have proved of no avail. "Virtue for virtue's sake," was the cry of a dying religion. "Art for art's sake," is now the cry of an expiring godlike human function.

But unless this cry be altered very quickly into a cry of art for the sake of Life, there will be no chance of saving it. Before this art for Life's sake can be discovered, however; before the purpose after which it will strive can be determined and established, the first thing to which we shall have to lend our attention is not art, but mankind.

The purpose of man is a thousand times more important than the purpose of art. The one determines the other. And as a proof of how intimately the two are connected, see how much doubt there is as to the purpose of art, precisely at a moment when men also, owing to the terrible civil war which is raging among their values, are beginning to doubt the real purpose of human existence.

It would be useless to indulge in a detailed criticism of individual artists. To all those who have followed my arguments closely, no such clumsy holding up of particular modern artists to ridicule will seem necessary. In some of your minds these men are idols still, and it pleases only the envious and the unsuccessful to see niche-statues stoned.

The great artist, as I have shown you, is the synthetic and superhuman spirit that apotheosizes the type of a people and thereby stimulates them to a higher mode of life. But where should we go to-day, if we wished to look for a type or for a desirable code of values which that type would exemplify?

We know that we can go nowhere; for such things do not exist. They are utterly and hopelessly extinct.

Our first duty, then, is not to mend the arts—you cannot mend a cripple. But it is rather to mend the parents who bring forth this cripple—to mend Life itself, and above all Man.

"Away from God and Gods did my will allure me," says Zarathustra; "what would there be to create if there were Gods!

"But to man doth it ever drive me anew, my burning will; thus doth it drive the hammer unto the stone.

"Alas, ye fellow-men, within the stone slumbereth an image for me, the image of all my visions! Alas that it should perforce slumber in ugliest stone!

"Now rageth my hammer, ruthlessly against its prison. From the stone fly the fragments: what's that to me?

"I shall end the work: for a shadow came unto me—the stillest and lightest of all things once came unto me.

"The beauty of the Superman came unto me as a shadow. Alas my brethren, what are the gods to me now!"[31]

Lecture III[1]

Nietzsche's Art Principles in the History of Art

Part I

Christianity and the Renaissance

"For if ye live after the flesh ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live."—Romans viii. 13.

I shall now endeavour to show you when and where Nietzsche's Art doctrine, or part of it, has raised its head in the past, and to touch lightly upon the conditions which led to its observance.

In doing this I shall travel backwards, zigzag fashion, from Rome, viâ Greece to Egypt, and beginning with Christianity, I shall show how the Holy Catholic Church succeeded in establishing one of the conditions necessary to all great Art, which, as I have said, is unity and solidarity lasting over a long period of time, and forming men according to a definite and severe scheme of values.

1. Rome and the Christian Ideal.

The compass of these lectures does not allow me to say anything concerning the Art of Rome. There are many aspects of this Art which are both interesting and important from the historical standpoint; but, from the particular point of view which I am now representing, temporal Rome does not concern me nearly as much as sacred Rome and its provincial Government.

For the first act of the Christian power was not to volatilize the stone bulwarks of the monuments of antiquity, neither was it to spiritualize the citizen of the Roman Empire; but it was to convert Rome the secular administration into Rome the Eternal City.

Long before the exterior of the Græco-Roman column was divided up and sub-divided, until, despite its volume, it seemed to have no solidity whatever; and long before men's eyes and bodies were transformed from broad, spacious wells of life into narrow, tenuous cylinders of fire, a teaching was spread broadcast over the Roman Empire, the devouring power of which was astounding, and the like of whose digestion has not been paralleled in history.

The Romans in their latter days had degenerated through the decline among them of that very principle which is the basis of all great art—restraint. Always utilitarians, in the end they had become materialists, and finally their will power had disintegrated.

Then, suddenly—perhaps through the very fact that their will power had declined, and through a preponderance among them of a class of people who were unfit to allow themselves any material enjoyment, and who were conscious of this shortcoming—the pendulum of Life swung back with a force so great to the opposite extreme, that the Pagan world was shaken to its foundations, and in its death-agony stretched out its arms and embraced the foreign creed which said—

"Flesh is death; Spirit is life and peace. The body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If ye live after the flesh ye shall die; but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live."[2]

Here was a fundamentally new valuation, a totally novel outlook upon the world of man. Some extraordinarily magnetic creator of values had spread his will over an empire, and stamped his hand upon a corner of the globe, and "the blessedness to write upon the will of millenniums as upon brass,"[3] promised to be his.

Here was a principle which obviously must have found its origin in a class of mind which, in order to overcome the flesh at all, knew of no better means thereto than to cut it right away and for ever. It was not a matter of contriving some sort of desirable inner harmony; the will of the people in whom this creed took its roots was incapable of such an achievement. The order went: "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee ... if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off!" Whenever the Spirit was mentioned it was spelt in capital letters and uttered in exalted tones; while the body, on the other hand, as the great obstacle to salvation, was written small. States of the soul became surer indices to the qualities "good," "beautiful," and "virtuous," than states of the body, and the paradox that Life was the denial of Life, was honestly believed to be an attainable ideal. In Lübke's words: "Christianity disturbed the harmony between man and nature, and introduced a sense of discordance by proclaiming to man a higher spiritual law, in the light of which his inborn nature became a sinful thing which he was to overcome."[4]

The people who acclaimed this teaching by instinct ultimately organized themselves, conquered the Pagan world, enlisted Pagan elements into their organization—Pagan spirit and Pagan order—and gradually accomplished a task which no other European values seem to have been able to do. They established one idea, one thought, one hope, in the breasts of almost all great Western peoples, from Ireland to Constantinople, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic.

The power of their creation—the Church—was such that it co-ordinated the most heterogeneous elements, the most conflicting factors, and the most absurd contrasts. And, however much one may deprecate the nature of the type they advocated, and the ignoble valuation of humanity upon which their religion was based, as a Nietzschean, one can but acknowledge the power they wielded, the might with which they made one ideal prevail, and the art with which for a while they united and harmonized such discordant voices as those of the people of Europe.

One can admire all this, I say, even though it is but a spiritual reflection of Rome's former power, her former victories, and her former law and order.[5]

For, soon, however un-Pagan the ideal may have been which the Church made to prevail, the methods it employed were purely Pagan methods.

Fearing nothing, respecting nothing that was opposed to it, and not losing heart before the difficulty of vanquishing even the most formidable enemies of the expiring Empire—the Teutons away in the North—spiritual Rome thus set about its task of appropriating humanity; and all the art of the organizer, of the orator, of the painter, sculptor and architect, was speedily ordered into its service. If the type to which its ideal aspired were not already a general fact, then it must be made a general fact. It must be reared, cultivated and maintained.

Strangely enough, the feat of vanquishing the German nation proved a thousand times easier to Rome the Eternal City, than it had done to Rome the Metropolis of the Greatest Empire of antiquity. The ancient Germans, with their strong tendency to subjectivity, to fantastic brooding and to cobweb spinning, and with their coarse, brutal natures unused either to restraint or to the culture that arises from it, fell easy victims to this burning teaching of the spirit, of faith, and of sentiment;[6] and it was in their susceptible and untutored breasts that Christianity laid its firmest foundation.

In its work of appropriation and consumption, as I say, the Church halted at nothing.

2. The Pagan Type appropriated and transformed by Christian Art.

Just as St. Paul had not refrained from taking possession of the Unknown God whom the Athenians ignorantly worshipped, by declaring

Him to be precisely the God whom he had come among them to proclaim, so Christianity did not refrain from incorporating all the suitable features of the Pagan faith into its own creed.

The Pagan type was thus the first thing to be assimilated and absorbed, and in the early Christian paintings of the catacombs you must not be surprised to find the Saviour depicted with all the beauties and charms of the classical god or hero. Here he appears as a Hermes, there as an Apollo, and yonder as an Orpheus.[7] Beardless, young, and strong, Christ stalks towards you. His gait is free his carriage majestic. Across his shoulders you will sometimes see, as in the catacombs of the Via Appia in Rome, that he bears a sheep, and he looks for all the world like a young Hermes, who, as you know, was the Greek god of flocks.

Elsewhere he looks like a Roman senator, as in the catacomb of St. Callixtus, for instance; his mother Mary looks like a Roman matron, praying with uplifted hands, and the apostles Peter and Paul, together with the prophets, appear as peripatetic philosophers, grasping learned-looking scrolls of manuscript, while Daniel is presented as a Hercules.[8]

Even the famous bronze statue of St. Peter in his great church at Rome is in fact an antique statue of a consul which has been transformed into a Peter, and the original of this monument was probably quite innocent of the sanctity which has caused the foot of his effigy to be worn away by the kisses of the faithful.[9]

This bold manner of appropriating the Pagan ideal in Art was but the symbol of what was actually occurring in the outside world; for the object was not to glorify the Pagan type, but to overthrow it, to transform it by degrees into the type which was compatible with Christian values, and thus to obliterate it.

We can watch this process. We can see the classic features and form of body surely and permanently vanishing from the wall decorations of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries A.D., and the Christian type asserting itself with ever greater assurance. Already in San Paolo fuori-le-mura in Rome, which had been decorated about the middle of the fifth century,[10] Christ appears bearded,[11] ugly and gloomy, and his apostles reflect his appearance and mood. In the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, of the sixth century, the spirit of the antique had almost passed away;[12] in the basilica of San Lorenzo fuori-le-mura the bearded Christ is no longer sublime and dignified, but wan and emaciated;[13] while in the Church of SS. Nazarus and Celsus at Ravenna, there is a mosaic of the fifth century in which even the sheep are beginning to look with gloomy and dissatisfied eyes upon the world about them.

Examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely to prove how slow but sure was this gradual self-assertion of the type that was compatible with Christian values, and the early period of mediæval art is well described by Woltmann and Woermann as one in which the classical cast of figure and features gets swallowed up in ugliness.[14]

Finally, in the seventh century, the most daring and most extraordinary artistic feat of all was accomplished. The greatest paradox the world had ever seen—a god on a cross—was portrayed for men's eyes to behold. The Crucifixion became one of the loftiest subjects of Christian art, and the god of the Christians was painted in his death agony.

I will not dwell upon the manifold influences exercised by this class of picture; I simply record the fact, in order to show with what steadily increasing audacity the Church ultimately realized and exhibited its type.

For, the fact that Christian Art was didactic, as all art is which is associated with the will and idea of a fighting cause, and which is born on a soil of clashing values, nobody seems to deny.[15] Paulinus of Nola, Gregory the Great, Bishop Germanus, Gregory the Second,[16] John of Damascus and Basil the Great were all agreed as to the incalculable worth of images in the propagation of the Christian doctrine, and their attitude, subsequently adopted by the Franciscans and Dominicans, lasted, according to Milman, until very late in the Middle Ages. When it is remembered, moreover, that illuminated manuscripts, which were destined to remain in the hands of single individuals, retained the classical mould of body and features much later than did the work for church decoration, it is not difficult to discover the strong motive which lay behind the production of public art.[17]

With Roman culture and art, the western and northern provinces of Gaul, Spain, Germany and Britain thus received their religion and their ideal type; and if to-day, in our ball-rooms and drawing-rooms we are often confronted with tenuous, flamelike, swan-necked creatures, that recall Burne-Jones, Botticelli, Duccio and Segna to our minds, we know to which values these people owe their slender, heaven-aspiring stature, and their long, sensitive fingers.

For the attitude of the Christian ideal to Life, to the body, and to the world was an entirely negative one. The command from on high was, that the deeds of the body should be mortified through the Spirit. All beauty, all voluptuousness, smoothness and charm were very naturally regarded with suspicion by the promoters of such an ideal; for beauty, voluptuousness and shapeliness lure back to Life, lure back to the flesh, and ultimately back to the body.

What else, then, could possibly have been expected from such an ideal than the ultimate decline and uglification of the body? To what else did such an ideal actually aspire? For was not ugliness the strongest obstacle in the way of the loving one, in the way of him who wished only to affirm and to promote life?

When the student of mediæval miniatures, wall-paintings and stained-glass windows finds bodily charm almost completely eliminated, when he sees ugliness prevailing, and even made seductive by a host of the most subtle art-forms, by a gorgeous wealth of ornament and repetitive design; and when he perceives a certain guilty self-consciousness in regard to the attributes of sex revealing itself in such paintings as that on the ceiling of the Church of St. Michael at Hildesheim, where Adam and Eve are represented as naked human monstrosities, exactly alike in frame and limbs, and with all indications as to sex, save Eve's long tresses and Adam's beard, carefully suppressed,[18] what can be concluded from all this irrefutable and unimpeachable evidence?

When he finds the Gothic type of figure growing ever more tenuous, ever more emaciated and more sickly as the centuries roll on; when he hears of a Byzantine canon of the eleventh century in which the human body is actually declared to be a monstrosity measuring nine heads; when he finds strength and manhood gradually departing from the faces and the limbs of the men, and an expression of tender sentiment, culminating in puling sentimentality becoming the rule; finally, when he stands opposite Segna's appalling picture of "Christ on the Cross" at the National Gallery; what, under these circumstances, is he to say, save that he is here concerned with an art which is antagonistic and hostile to beauty, to Life and the world?

For the qualities of this art, qua art, although they never once attain to the excellence of Ruler-Art, are sometimes exceedingly great. With Meier Graefe I should be willing to agree that there has been no real style since the Gothic,[19] or certainly not one that can claim anything like such general distribution. And, if it had not been for the fact that the more the paradox at the root of Christian doctrine was realized, the more paradoxical it appeared—a fact which called forth the energies of scores of apologists, commentators, and dialecticians, and which made pictures retain to the very end a rhetorical, persuasive, and therefore more or less realistic manner, sometimes assisted (more especially towards the close of the Middle Ages) by almost lyrical ornament and charm; there is no saying to what simple power Christian art might not have attained. For behind it were all the conditions which go to produce the greatest artistic achievements.

As a style, apart from its subject—or content beauty; as the manifestation of a mighty will—who can help admiring this art of Christianity? If only its ideal had been a possible one, and one which would have required no rhetoric, seduction, or emotional oratory, accompanied by the ringing of all the precious metals, to support it until the end; it might have ascended to the highest pinnacle of art in simplicity, restraint and order. Into simplicity, however, it was never able to develop, while its constant need of explaining made it to the very last retain more or less realism in the presentation of its ideal type.

3. The Gothic Building and Sentiment.

But the hierarchy of the Church, although it left no doubt in the minds of its followers as to the genuine type which was the apotheosis of Christian values, was nevertheless unable completely to impose its culture upon the barbarians under its sway. And soon, somewhere towards the end of the twelfth century, there began to appear in Europe, in things that did not seem to matter from the moral or didactic standpoint, a certain uncouth and uncultured spirit, which showed to what extent the despotic rule of Rome was beginning to be flouted.

In architecture, which, like music, has for some reason or other always seemed to Europeans to be less intimately connected with the thought and will of man than the graphic arts, an un-Catholic spirit was preparing its road to triumph. When I say un-Catholic, I mean emancipated from the law and order of the Universal Church.[20] And in the Gothic edifice, from its early stages to its development into the flamboyant style, all the impossibilities, all the terrible self-immolations imposed by the Christian ideal upon man, begin to make themselves openly felt.

Now churches begin to tower aloft into heights undreamt of heretofore. Huge columns spring heavenwards, bearing up a roof that seems almost ethereal because it is so high. Spires are thrust right into the very breasts of clouds, and acres are covered by constructions which, mechanically speaking, are alive. Kicks from the vaulted arches against the hollowed-out walls below, necessitate counter-kicks; buttresses and flying buttresses strive and struggle against the crushing pressure of the stone or brick skies of these fantastic architectural feats. All the parts of this mass of stone on baked clay are at loggerheads and at variance with each other, and their strife never ceases.

Typical of the contest going on within the body of the mediæval Christian, and the vain aspirations of his soul, the lofty buildings are also symbolic of the discord and lack of equilibrium which, as Lübke says, Christianity introduced into man's relations to Nature and to himself. And when we find the columns of these buildings carved and moulded to look like groups of pillars embracing each other to gain strength, the salient parts of the construction grooved and striped, and the extremities of the clustered pillars spreading after the manner of a fan, over our heads; we are amazed at the manner in which mass and volume have been volatilized, spiritualized, and apparently dissipated.

Elsewhere, too, there is variegated glass, gigantic filigree work, festive decoration, as elaborated as that of a queen or a bride; infinite grandeur and infinite littleness.[21] The ornament is nervous and excited, festoons, trefoils, gables, gargoyles and niches, all thrust themselves at you; all strive for individual effect, individual attention, and individual value, with a restlessness and an importunacy which knows no limits; until your eyes, bewildered and dazzled by the jutting, projecting and budding details, and out-startled by surprise, instinctively drop at last, and perhaps close in a paroxysm of despair, before the High Altar.[22]

This was the germ of Protestantism in stone. Long before Martin Luther burned the Papal Bull in the market-place of Wittenberg, the elements of Protestantism had already found expression in Gothic architecture. True the Pagan and Catholic spirit was still sufficiently master to dominate them, just as it did the heretics, by a tremendous force of style; but they are nevertheless present, and it is in this architecture, if we choose to seek it, that we shall find, at once, all the beauty, all the ugliness, and all the incompatible elements of the Christian ideal.

Its beauty and the fact for which we ought to be grateful to it, is, that by its one-sided and earnest advocacy of the spiritual in man, it extended the domain of his spirit over an area so much greater than that which had been covered theretofore, that only now can it be said that he knows exactly where he stands and who he is. Its ugliness lies in its contempt of the body and of Life; and its incompatible elements are its negation of Life and the necessary attitude of affirmation towards Life which all living creatures are bound to assume.

If, however, the above description of the Gothic may seem unfair, hear what one of the greatest friends of the Gothic has said on the subject!

John Ruskin, in the early days of the last half of the nineteenth century, wrote as follows—

"I believe that the characteristic or moral elements of the Gothic are the following, placed in order of their importance: (1) Savageness, (2) Changefulness, (3) Naturalism, (4) Grotesqueness, (5) Rigidity, (6) Redundance."[23]

He speaks of it as being "instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the Northern Sea";[24] lays stress upon its rudeness,[25] and declares that it is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit— that is its greatness,"that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied."[26]

In fact, in no instance could the saying, "preserve me from my own friends," be more aptly applied than in Ruskin's defence of the Gothic. For Ruskin was a conscientious student, and things which even enemies of his subject would be likely to overlook, he brings forward proudly and ingenuously, like a truculent mother presenting an ugly child to a friend, and with a broad smile in his forcible prose which sometimes throws even the experienced reader quite off his guard.

Hippolyte Taine speaks of the people of the Middle Ages as being possessed of delicate and over-excited imaginations, of morbid fancy unto whom vivid sensation—manifold, changing, bizarre and extreme —are necessary. In referring to their taste in ornament, he says, "It is the adornment of a nervous, over-excited woman, similar to the extravagant costumes of the day, whose delicate and morbid poesy denotes by its excess the singular sentiments, the feverish, violent, and impotent aspiration peculiar to an age of knights and monks."[27]

The Canon of Polycleitus (Rome)

And if you think of the physical and spiritual operations they had been made to undergo, you will not feel very much inclined to question these conclusions. It must not be supposed that the canon of Polycletus, measuring seven heads, was transformed into the Byzantine canon, measuring nine heads, without some one's suffering—even though it took centuries to effect the change. It must not be believed that the calm Pagan idea of death was converted into the Christian terror of death without the sacrifice of something; nor must these emaciated, careworn, and neurotic faces in Mediæval paintings be conceived as mere inventions of morbid phantasy. The deeds of the body are not mortified through the Spirit with impunity. Such brilliant achievements have their accounts to pay, and the Church never once deceived itself or its followers as to what was paying, what was suffering, or where the amputations and vivisections were taking place.

Look at the type of which the monks approved! Examine it in Cimabue's, Duccio's, Segna's and the Cologne painters' pictures. Examine it in the tapestry of Berne, known as the "Adoration of the Kings"; look at it in countless stained glass windows, and see its repetition in hundreds of illuminated manuscripts, some of which, like the Latin missal of the Church of St. Bavon at Ghent, and the Lives of the Saints by Simeon Metaphrasi, have found their way into the British Museum.

Then ask yourself whether or not humanity was suffering in conforming itself to this holy creed. "Like those mothers," says Lecky, "who govern their children by persuading them that the dark is crowded with spectres that' will seize the disobedient, and who often succeed in creating an association of ideas which the adult man is unable altogether to dissolve, the Catholic priests, by making the terrors of death for centuries the nightmare of the imagination, resolved to base their power upon the nerves."[28]

And, now that all this is known and realized, what is the meaning of the Renaissance, what is its explanation?

4. The Renaissance.

The Renaissance, in its early stages, at least, was a period neither of pure realism nor of classicalism; it was neither a revival of learning nor a revival of antiquity. These words are mere euphemisms, mere drawing-room phrases. For, at its inception, the Renaissance was nothing more nor less than man's convalescence, after an illness that had lasted centuries. It was his first walk into the open, after leaving his bed and his sick-room.

According to the Nietzschean doctrine of art, this realism of Van Eyck, of Van der Weyden, Quintin Massys, Donatello, Pisanello, Masolino, Ucello and others ought to disgust you. It is not art, or if it is, its rank is inferior. Why, then, does it claim attention? Why is it far superior to the realism of the present day, despite some appallingly ugly features?[29]

It is superior only in this sense, that it is the work of convalescents. After they had been laid on the rack in the attempt to stretch their limbs and bodies to infinity, you must not be surprised that these men could only limp along. How could they be expected to walk majestically and with grace? That they could stand at all was a mercy. That they were able to hobble along as they did was a triumph.

To expect these recovering invalids to impart something of themselves to Life, to enrich her and to transfigure her, would be to expect the impossible. But if you applaud them at all, applaud them for their recovery, for the fact that it is well that they can give us even drabby reality as it is. Do not congratulate them yet on their health. For their realism, as realism, is as hopeless, as uninteresting and as unelevating as any realism ever was and ever will be.

It is deceptive, too, for what seem to be beauties in their pictures are borrowed from such of their predecessors of the late Gothic period as were already overloading their pictures with ornamental art forms, in order to disguise the ugliness of the type they presented. Where they beguile you, it is often with a wealth of sweet ornament.[30]

In Ucello's "Battle of Sant' Eglidio," at the National Gallery, it is impossible not to recognize the pains the artist has taken to make your eye dwell on the dainty trappings and accoutrements of the knights and their steeds, on the distracting balls of gold in the shrubbery, artfully repeated in the bridles of the horses, and on the complex maze of pikes, spears and lances, which makes the glimpse of hills in the distance all the more restful and pleasing.

Also in Pisanello's "St. Anthony and St. George" (National Gallery), whatever charm there is to be seen is still a Gothic charm, and the same holds good of this painter's remarkable picture of the "Vision of St. Eustace," in which the deliberately ornamental purpose of the animals in the background charms you more than their startling realism.

If you leave these pictures, in the National Gallery, and walk over to Orcagna's "Coronation of the Virgin," you will see where the ornamental charm of the early Renaissance realists probably found its origin. For these convalescent men made no sudden and unanticipated appearance. They were preceded by painters like Orcagna, who were beginning to feel the impossibility of making a beautiful image out of the Christian type, and who therefore crammed their pictures with ornament in a manner so prodigal that the human portion of them assumed quite a subordinate place.

Look at this picture of Orcagna's. It seems positively to ring with gold. Massed halos of the precious metal convert the faces of the people into mere decorative discs of colour. The golden embroidery on the dresses and on the hangings in the background give you a feeling of sunshine, of wealth and of luxury, which makes you forget the ideal for which all this lavish display is acting but as a subtle impresario. And the utilization of every square inch of room by filigrees, festoons, frills and fretwork of gorgeousness, almost convinces you at last that you are in front of an art which says "Yea" to the glory of sunshine, beauty and life.

In this very need of extravagant ornament, however, Orcagna confesses quite openly to you that, as far as humanity is concerned, he, as an artist, is bankrupt and destitute. His picture, like most things connected with the art of Christianity, is a pictorial paradox; and when you leave it, to wander through the other rooms, your mind must be of a singularly ingenuous stamp if it feels no suspicion with regard to Orcagna's use of such a deafening brass band in the exaltation of his ideal.

If you doubt all this, how can you explain the fact that those painters of the early Renaissance who remained faithful to the Christian type—such men, I mean, as Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Alesso Baldovinetti, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio—all remained more or less faithful, too, to Orcagna's belief in ornament and pretty accessories; while all those painters who either carried on or developed the new spirit in Pisanello's, Ucello's, Masolino's and Masaccio's work— such men as Pollajuolo, Verrochio, Perugini, Bellini, and ultimately Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael—all discarded pretty and seductive accessories, or, when they did use them, made them completely subordinate to the human element in their work?

The gradual growth in the importance of the human body and of the Pagan type, in the Renaissance painters, from Masaccio to Michelangelo, with whom there can no longer be any question of convalescence, the rapid return to a healthy life-affirming type, and the ultimate triumph of this type in the very heart of the Vatican—the headquarters of the greatest negative religion on earth,—these are the facts which make the art of this age so admirable and so thrilling.

It represents the greatest stand which Europe has ever made against the denial of life, humanity and beauty; and if some of the artists, like Pisanello, Piero della Francesca, and ultimately Titian, in their great zeal, returned to nature with almost as much interest as to man, this is easily accounted for when it is remembered how long nature and man had been separated.[31]

But the fact that makes the final glory of the Renaissance type all the more glorious is the extraordinary circumstance that almost every one of the artists who fought for it, and for the principles it involved, from Piero della Francesca to Titian, were one after the other captured and enchained by the Church itself. Often it was in the very atmosphere of the high altar, with the fumes of the incense about them, that they asserted their positive faith in Life and Man. The greatest dangers, the greatest temptations surrounded them But they planted their banner, notwithstanding, in the centre of their true enemy's camp, and, for a while, their true enemy acquiesced, because the command was in the hands of men who were artists and pagans themselves, and who consequently did not believe in one single tenet of the negative creed which they professed.

Just as the realism of some of the early Renaissance artists, however, was the inevitable outcome of their convalescent state, so the strong realism of many of the painters and sculptors of the late Renaissance was the natural result of their combative attitude.

Fighting for a particular kind of man, against centuries of false and unhealthy tradition, it was necessary to bring forward the new ideal with every characteristic plainly, emphatically and powerfully expressed; for every characteristic of a new ideal is of the highest importance.

These new values of the Renaissance spirit were scarcely one hundred years old, when Michelangelo set himself the task of embodying them in his sculpture and painting. Would it be fair to criticize him from the standpoint of Egypt or even of Greece?

From the standpoint of Egypt he is disappointing. The preponderance of characteristic traits over simplicity in his work spoils the power of his conceptions. His prevailing lack of simplicity makes you guess at the youth of the values on which he stood, and his tortuous bodies often make you question whether his types have entirely left the nerves of the Gothic period behind them. But are not all these defects precisely of a kind which are unfortunately inseparable from the position which Michelangelo assumed?

He was the greatest of the Renaissance artists. In criticizing him, I have said all that can be said, from this particular standpoint, of his predecessors and contemporaries. His power lies in the forcibleness, the exhilaration, the exuberance and the wealth with which he brings forward his type. It lies in his absolute contempt of seductive prettiness, his sometimes terrible strength, his vehemence and his energy, and above all in his magnificent conceptions and the types with which he illustrates them. Compared with the art from which it had sprung, his art was stupendous.

And where he is weak, compared with a higher—and by no means a modern —concept of art, he suffers from the virtues of his position as a fighter and as an innovator.

In valuing him, as I said in my first lecture, it all depends whence you come. If you hail from Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth century, you can but go on your knees before him. If you hail from Memphis of the year 4000 B.C., you can but criticize and feel ill at ease before his work.

I have not yet said anything concerning the relation of the Renaissance artists to Greece, simply because, taking in view the circumstances of their development, the relation seems fairly obvious. In discussing the art of Greece itself, however, the matter will probably appear quite clear to you. How much of the transfiguration in late Renaissance art is actually due to Greek influence, or to the Dionysian spirit of the age, it is difficult to determine. In my opinion, the latter influence was more potent, and to the Greek influence I should be more prepared to ascribe the spur which originally led to the adoption of a thoroughly Pagan type.

Part II

Greece and Egypt

"The land of Egypt is before thee; in the best of the land make thy father and brethren to dwell."—Genesis xlvii. 6.

1. Greek Art.

I have now spoken to you of Christian Art, and you have not been taken altogether by surprise; because, in England at least, people are not unacquainted with the fight Art has had with Puritanism. And you were, therefore, partly prepared for what I had to say. The views I have expressed concerning the Renaissance were not entirely new to you either, and, if they were, I can only hope that they will assist you in giving to the Art of that period its proper valuation. Now, however, I fear I am going to level a blow at what must seem to you even more sacred, even more invulnerable and even more thoroughly established than either Christian or Renaissance Art. I refer to the Art of Greece.

Albeit, before I proceed with my task, do not be surprised if, like Charles the First's executioner, Brandon, I kneel to kiss the hand of my victim, if only by so doing I may seem to you to understand the grave nature of my business, and satisfy you that the blow I am about to deliver is prompted more by conviction than by that cheap irreverence for great things which is, alas, only too prevalent to-day.

Goethe says somewhere that, if we find fault with Euripides at all we should do so on bended knees. It seems to me that this ought also to be the attitude of people and critics in this age who attempt to value what the Greeks achieved in the graphic arts. For the earnestness and vigour wherewith, collectively, they set up their triumphs and ideals in stone and marble, the moment any opportunity arose for them to affirm and exalt their type, is deserving of the utmost praise and admiration.

Too many great writers have exalted the Greeks, however, to make it necessary for me to edify you with any long and enthusiastic praise of those qualities which Nietzsche admired in them.

Fairness alone, therefore, compels me to acknowledge the grandeur of the type their art advocates. With Nietzsche I can but extol the yea-saying of this type to the passions, to beauty, to health, in fact to life. The fearlessness of the Greeks before beauty was their acknowledgment that life was a blessing to which it was worth while to be lured and seduced. And their innocent acceptance of the strongest passions is sufficient to show to what extent they had not only mastered them, but had also enlisted them into their service.

Nevertheless, though it is only decent to exercise some reserve in this matter, it certainly is necessary to point to a curious fact in regard to Greek Art in general, and that is, that, with the exception of some of its archaic examples, it has been revered with ever-increasing fervour by strangers, from the second century before Christ to the present day,—when I say strangers, I mean people whose thought and aspirations were not necessarily the outcome of Hellenic values,—and that this general appreciation of Greek Art by foreigners implies that there is some quality in it which is only too common to everybody and to anybody, irrespective of nationality and education. If it were asked what this common factor was, I should reply, it is Nature herself, to which Greek Art, in its so-called best period, is undeniably in close and intimate relationship.

In examining the works of the seventh, sixth and fifth centuries before Christ, it is well to bear in mind the peculiar state of the country in which they appeared, its division into states, and its mixed population. It is well to think of the many ideals that dominated these people, and of the fact that the citizen of one city was often regarded as an alien, without any political rights whatever, if he ventured to transfer his abode to another city but a few miles distant from his own; and allowances should be made for the rivalry and competition this state of affairs conduced to bring about. It is also well to remember the individual lives the colonists lived, and the altered outlook on life to which their independent positions were bound to lead, and which, when they returned to their mother city, as many of them used to do, must have shed a new and strange light upon what they saw.

Although a certain uniformity can be traced in the political history of most Greek states, no one would dare to maintain that the Greeks, at any time in their history, were a perfectly united people observing the same values; whilst even in the history of each separate state, changes occurred so constantly that a stable political type is a rare and practically negligible fact.

In spite of the many heroes and geniuses which arose from time to time, there never seems to have been that power, either human or superhuman, which might have welded these peoples indissolubly together, or which, taking its root in one of the contending races, could have made that race completely absorb and digest the others.

Even the games of Greece, which, it might be argued, tended to unite the various peoples, cannot be said to have gone very far in this respect, since the very fact that the Hellenic nation enforced a sacred armistice during the month of the games, between states that were at war, shows that the most this institution could achieve was a suspension of arms.

On the whole, therefore, the fact that one can talk of different types as characteristic of particular schools or ideals is amply accounted for, and when the general spirit of rivalry that animated the whole nation for centuries is duly taken into consideration it is not difficult to explain a certain preponderance of manifold characteristics over simplicity, which is observable in the greater part of Greek sculpture—a preponderance which sometimes led very rapidly to the crudest realism, and which at other times approached realism only after a considerable lapse of time. Such phenomena are the inevitable result of that lack of the powerful master or ruler spirit who unifies and co-ordinates heterogeneity, and who thereby makes simplification and powerful art possible, as the outcome of relative permanency.[32]

For, when technique is largely mastered, realism, as I have shown in the case of Mediæval and Renaissance Art, may in a great measure be the outcome of a desire to make one's own particular ideal unmistakably plain, and although this kind of truth to nature always reveals a clashing of values or types, it is of a kind which may be regarded as infinitely superior to the realism which has nothing to say at all, and which merely copies out of poverty of invention.

When talking to strangers about an ideal they do not share with you, it is necessary to bring all your powers to bear upon an adequate and perfectly vivid representation of what you have in your mind.

I, on this platform, assuming that Nietzsche as an art valuer was strange to you, had to present him to you with all the realism and detail I could dispose of. If I had been talking to people who knew the Nietzschean views of art perfectly well, I might have indulged in certain artistic simplifications and poetical transfigurations which I considered unsuited to the present circumstances.

This same feeling, I believe, partly explains the tendency to realism in Greek art. And it is precisely to this tendency to realism that I think it is now high time to call attention, after all the fulsome praise which has for ages been lavished upon the products of the Hellenic spirit.

When you turn to the granite statue of the Egyptian goddess Sekhet in the Louvre, or to the lions of Gebel Barkal in the Egyptian Gallery of the British Museum, you are conscious of a sensation of great strangeness, of humiliating unfamiliarity, of almost incalculable distance. You may look at these things for a moment and wonder what they mean; you may even pass on with a feeling of indifference amounting to scorn;[33] but whatever your sensations are, you will be quite unable to deny that what you have seen does not belong to your world, that it is utterly and completely separated from you, and that you felt in need of a guide and of an initiator in its presence.

You may laugh at the lions of Gebel Barkal, you may deny that they are beautiful; but, whoever you are, scholar, poet, painter or layman, you will admit that they are cruelly distant and strange, terribly remote and uncommunicative.

A. The Parthenon.

Now, if you turn round and bear to the right in the Egyptian Gallery at the British Museum, you will find a broad passage lined with statues that seem very much more familiar to you than those which you are just leaving behind; and, in the distance, you will espy the maimed figures of the Eastern pediment of the Parthenon. In a moment you will be in the Elgin Room, and everywhere about you you will see all that remains of the ancient temple of Athens which is worth seeing.

If you have not been to Athens, you must not suppose that you have missed much, as far as the Parthenon is concerned. Unless you are very modern and very romantic, and can take pleasure in visiting a gruesome ruin by moonlight, you would be only depressed and disappointed by the decayed and ugly mass of stones that now stands like a battered skeleton on the Acropolis. You may take it, therefore, that, as you stand in the Elgin Room, you have around you the best that the Parthenon could yield after its partial destruction and dismantlement in 1687 by the victorious Veneto-German army. And what is it that you see?

Remember that you are a man of the twentieth century A.D., and that you have just been bored to extinction by a walk in the Egyptian Gallery. Remember, too, that you have very few fixed opinions about Art, and that the artistic condition of your continent is one of chaos and anarchy.

In spite of all this, however, you will walk up to the horse's head at the extreme right of the Eastern pediment of the Parthenon, and the two thousand and four hundred years that separate you from it will vanish as by magic.

For years I have taken men, women and children up to this horse's head. In some cases these people have been technical connoisseurs of a horse's points; in others they have been mere bourgeois people, indifferent both to the art of Greece and to equine anatomy; and with the children I was concerned with raw manhood that cared not a jot for Art, and whose one sole, savage instinct was to recognize and classify what was before them.

If you supposed, however, that the verdict of these different people was anything but unanimous, you would be vastly mistaken. The children cried with delight. Their powers of recognizing things was stimulated to the utmost. One of them told me it was like a real bus-horse. The connoisseurs of a horse's points began to draw plausible conclusions from the existing head as to the probable conformation of the body which the artist had deliberately omitted, and the bourgeois people declared that they loved the fascinating softness and convincing looseness of the mouth.—All of them were charmed. All of them understood. Not one of them felt that this horse held itself aloof from them and kept its distance, as the austere Egyptian lions had done. And all of them were children of the twentieth century A.D., and over two thousand years separated them from the objects they were inspecting.

Their comments on the Parthenon Frieze were much the same. Once or twice one of them would say that there was a monotonous similarity of feature in the men and in the horses—a comment which immediately revealed to me that 2,400 years had indeed wrought some change. On the whole, however, the attitude of those I escorted amazed me; for, with but few exceptions, it was one of sympathy and understanding. I will not say that I did not stimulate their interest a good deal, by making them feel that their criticism was valuable to me; I will not pretend that if they had been alone they would have troubled to concentrate their minds to any great extent upon the exhibits around them; but this I will affirm, with absolute confidence: that if all the men, women and children who stream through the Elgin Room daily were given the same stimulus to exercise their critical faculty, and were similarly induced to give particular attention to all they saw, the sympathy and understanding which I observed among the groups of visitors I escorted would be found to be a fairly general, if not a common occurrence.

The Apollo of Tenea, Glyptothek, Munich.

B. The Apollo of Tenea.

Take the same people down to the Cast Room and show them the Apollo of Tenea, and what will they say?

When I first halted before this bewilderingly beautiful statue in the Glyptothek at Munich, I felt I was in the presence of something very much more masterful, very much more impressive, and infinitely more commanding than anything Greek I had ever seen in London, Paris, or Athens.

Here was a style which was strange. But it was evidently a style which was the product of a will, and of a long observance of particular values that had at last culminated in a type; for this Apollo resembled nothing modern, Egyptian, Assyrian, Mediæval, or of the Renaissance.

This statue scorns to make a general appeal. It is the apotheosis of a type. Of this there can be no question. It is the work of a loving and powerful artist, who could simplify the human frame, and express stenographically, so to speak, the essential features of the people he represented, because he knew the essential features to which their values aspired.

The arms, alone, transcend everything that I have ever seen in Hellenic Art for consummate skill in transfiguring and retaining bare essentials alone; and although, here and there, particularly in the breast, there is a broadness and a sweeping ease, which I admit ought to be attributed more to incomplete control of essentials than to their actual simplification, the whole figure breathes a spirit so pure, so certain and so sound, that it is the nearest approach I can find in Greek Art to that ideal artistic fact in which the particular values of a people find their apotheosis in the transfigured and simplified example of their type.

I would deny that the qualities of this statue are not ultimate qualities. I would deny that there is anything transitional or archaic in them. What is archaic, what is transitional, is the weak treatment of the chest and abdomen. Compared with the simplified chest and abdomen of an Egyptian statue of the fourth or fifth dynasty, it shows a minimum rather than a maximum of command of, and superiority over, reality. Any healthy development of such an art, however, ought only to have led to greater perfection in the treatment of the parts mentioned, and I seriously question the general belief that it marks a progress in sculpture which must ultimately lead to the rendering of the athletic types for which the sculptors of Argos and Sicyon became famous. There is something strange and foreign in this statue which does not reappear in the Hellenic Art of the Periclean age.[34] Like the vases of the sixth century and some of the ante-Periclean Acropolis statues, there is a Ruler form in its execution that makes quite a limited appeal— a fact which would be consistent with its having been the apotheosis of a type. Its exhortation is not directed at mankind in general. It communicates little to the modern European, and the crowds that stream through the Elgin Room of the British Museum would probably pass it by without either sympathy or understanding.

And yet, as I have shown, it cannot be regarded as a perfect specimen of Ruler-art; there are too many uncertainties and too many doubts in it.

As marking an advanced stage in a very high class of Ruler-art, however, it is magnificent, and any transformation of its form to greater realism would be a descent, rather than an ascent, in taste.

If you turn from it to the sculptures of the temple of Selinus, which, as far as one can say, must have been carved not more than about half a century earlier, you will see that these are indeed archaic. They are beneath realism in their coarseness and crudity. But it is in the sculptures of Selinus, and not in the Apollo of Tenea, or in the best vases of the sixth century, that you must seek the motive spirit of the Art which has made the Periclean age so glorious; This striving after realism, although unsuccessful in the metopes of Selinus, reveals a different aspiration, a totally different will, from that which created the Munich Apollo, and it was precisely this aspiration that was fully realized, with but a slight admixture of the other will, in Athens of the fifth century.

Some will say that Egyptian influence is apparent in the Apollo of Tenea, and they will add that the Greek colonists in Selinus, finding themselves in very close contact with their commercial rivals the Phœnicians, very naturally scorned all Eastern canons and ideas when erecting their temples.

Both of these suggestions are perfectly legitimate. The Apollo of Tenea either betrays Egyptian influence or, owing to its Ruler form, it takes one's mind back involuntarily to the Ruler-art of the Nile. The sculptures of Selinus may also be the outcome of the conscious renunciation of Eastern influence, or they may be the manifestation of a particular "Art-Will," as Worringer has it, which aimed at realism and was quite guiltless of any other ulterior motive. In both cases I favour the latter alternative, and I should like to believe that in addition to the influences I have already mentioned in respect of realism there were two Art-Wills active in ancient Greece—each striving for supremacy and power.

C. The two Art-Wills of Ancient Greece.

I cannot see how any one rising from a study of Hellenic Art can arrive at any other conclusion. A superior will aiming at a Ruler-art form is the one, an inferior will aiming at realism is the other. And it is a significant fact, that while the first will sent forth its last blooms in the sixth century—a period when, according to Freeman, Hellenic life readied its zenith,[35] the ultimate triumphs of the other and inferior will, in the fifth century, marks the first stage in a decline that was never to be arrested.[36]

The Medusa Metope of Sellinus, Palermo.

This is not the usual view, I know. As a rule, the art of the age of Pericles is considered to be the highest that Greece ever produced. But in this art I see a preponderance of realism which reveals to what extent the other and inferior will was beginning to prevail. And when I study Hellenistic art, and see this evil assuming such proportions as to make even modern historians and Art-scholars deliberately denounce it, I cannot help but recognize the germs of this decay in the art which hitherto has been most praised and admired.

As I say, I am judging purely from the artistic records. But I have no doubt that, if I possessed the necessary scholarship, I could trace the two Art-wills to two distinct races of men who, from the days of the fall of Mycenæan culture, strove for mastership in Greece. I also entertain no doubts that the fall of Greece might be attributed to the gradual triumph of that race which possessed the inferior Art-will, and nothing I have read, either in Grote, Bury, Oman, Curtius, Schnaase, Miss Harrison and others, has led me seriously to hesitate before suggesting this hypothesis.

Professor Ridgeway's Early Age of Greece leads me to suppose that the problem might be solved in the way I suggest. But, in any case, whether this is so or not, the style of the art of Pheidias shows a descent from the style of the Apollo of Tenea, which only an age with a mistaken conception of what art really is could possibly have overlooked.

The art of the fifth and fourth centuries, I will not and cannot deny, contains a large proportion of Ruler form, or what modern and ancient art-historians call the "ideal."[37] No people, any portion of which had been capable of producing the Apollo of Tenea, could have avoided it; but that it preponderates in realism, the evidence of history, alone, apart from that of our own senses, proves beyond a doubt.

The appreciation which it has met with at the hands of almost all Europeans of all ages, and particularly at the hands of the Renaissance realists, shows how general its appeal has been; and no art which has been so very much above Nature as to apotheosize the particular values of a particular people at its zenith, has ever made such a general appeal.

D. Greek Painting.

In regard to the painting of Greece, I will not detain you long. Practically all I have said in regard to Greek sculpture may be applied with equal force to Greek painting, and I cannot do better than sum up this side of the question with the words of that profound Japanese artist Okakura-Kakuzo.

In speaking of the great style of the Greeks, in painting—a style which vanished with the sixth century,—he says—

"The great style of the Greeks in painting—that style which was theirs before a stage chiaroscuro and imitation of Nature were brought in by the Appellesian school,—rises up before us with ineffaceable regret ... and we cannot refrain from saying that European work, by following the later school, has lost greatly in power of structural composition and line expression, though it has added to the facility of realistic representation."[38]

When it is remembered that the demands of theatrical scenery are generally admitted to have exercised considerable influence over Greek painting, we need feel no surprise at the necessarily vulgar nature of its ultimate development; while in raising this point about chiaroscuro, Okakura-Kakuzo really opens a very serious and needful inquiry.

It may be seriously questioned whether the chiaroscuro which Apollodorus is said to have introduced in the fifth century was not the worst possible blow that has ever been levelled at Ruler-Art, and it is difficult to separate this discovery from the people who made it.

Once it is recognized that chiaroscuro implies a blending of colours together, an elimination of all those sharp contrasts which the compromising spirit of a democratic age cannot abide, and a general hugging and embracing of all colours by each other, at the cost of the life of all definite lines; once it is acknowledged, moreover, that all gradations and blurred zones of contact lead inevitably to the very worst forms of Police Art, such as Zeuxis, Parrhasius and Timanthus practised, and that escape from realism is not only difficult, but almost impossible under such conditions, the question whether Apollodorus is to be praised or cursed becomes a very weighty and vital one; and in saying that he ought to be cursed, I make a very important statement, however unreasonable it may seem to you at present.

You have noticed that until now I have not compared the Periclean art of Greece with the art of any other country, but simply with what is generally called the archaic art of Greece itself. I have spoken Only of the Apollo of Tenea, and of certain promising features in the sixth-century sculptures which were discovered on the Acropolis within recent years.

2. Egyptian Art.—A. King Khephrën.

If, however, I now choose to compare the art of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, and the Parthenon at Athens[39] with that of Egypt, the first falls absolutely to pieces. If I walk from the lions of Gebel Barkal, which Reginald Stuart Poole considers as the "finest example of the idealization of animal forms that any age has produced,"[40] over to the horses of the Parthenon, the latter seem poor, feeble, and slavish beside the powerfully simplified and commanding work of Egypt. And if, with vivid recollections of the diorite statue of King Khephrën at Cairo, I walk up to the best Greek work of the Periclean age, or after, either in London or Paris, I marvel at the denseness of an age which can put the Egyptian Pharaoh second in the order of rank.

King Khephrën, Cairo Museum

We now know too much to believe that the noble simplicity of King Khephrën—the builder of the second pyramid of Gizeh—is the result of incompetence or of limited means in dealing with the stone out of which he was carved. No artist who follows the careful lines and profiles of this statue, and who understands the broad grasp with which each undulation, however sweeping, comprehends and comprises all that is essential and indispensable, can doubt for an instant that the sculptor who carved it was not only capable of realism, but infinitely superior to it. And he who does not admire the consummate Ruler form of this statue, and see in it the expression of the greatest artistic power that has ever existed on earth, and probably the portrait of the greatest human power that has ever existed on earth, confesses himself, immediately, unfamiliar with the fundamental spirit of great art.[41]

The type of King Khephrën it is quite impossible to admire and to like, unless one is to some extent in sympathy with his ideals and his aspirations. His features will remain strange and quite inscrutable as long as one does not feel one's self leaning, however slightly, to his side, in thought and emotion; but the masterly treatment of his apotheosized portrait by a man who was probably his greatest artist, ought to be apparent to all who have thought and meditated upon the question of what constitutes the greatest art.

Here is to be seen that autocratic mode of expression which brooks neither contradiction nor disobedience; the Symmetry which makes the spectator obtain a complete grasp of an idea; the Sobriety which reveals the restraint that a position of command presupposes; the Simplicity proving the power of a great mind that has overcome the chaos in itself and has reflected its order and harmony upon an object, the most essential features of which it has selected with unfailing accuracy; the Transfiguration that betrays the Dionysian ecstasy and pathos from which the artist gives of himself to reality and makes it reflect his own glory back upon him; the Repetition which ensures obedience, and finally the Variety which is the indispensable condition of all living Art.[42]

For the artist who carved this monument was no coward. His duty was to surpass the beauty of the most beautiful subject on earth in his time. This man whom he has bequeathed to us in stone was not only a king, but a god, and none but the most masterful mind, none but the most ultimate product of ages spent in the observance of a definite and particular set of values, could have been capable of giving this simplified rendering, this selection of essentials, of a man-god who was the highest outcome of these same values.

How was this possible? How were these values maintained so long?

In the first place, it can now be affirmed with confidence that the Egyptians, in the days of Khephrën, were a very pure and united race, having remained, thanks to their isolated position on the Delta of the Nile, aloof and free from the ethical and blood influence of the foreigner for probably thousands of years. Secondly, everybody seems to agree that, whatever its ultimate purity may have been, the Egyptian people, thanks to the inordinate power of their values, certainly had a capacity for absorbing and digesting foreign elements which was simply extraordinary;[43] and, thirdly, we have it on the authority of Wilkinson that "the superiority of their legislation has always been acknowledged as the cause of the duration of an empire which lasted with a very uniform succession of hereditary sovereigns, and with the same form of government for a much longer period than the generality of ancient states."[44]

We can understand King Khephrën, then, only as the apotheosis of a type which was the product of the values of his people. For that they loved him and worshipped him quite willingly and quite heartily, no honest student of their history can any longer doubt.

It was with great rejoicings, and not, as Buckle and Spencer thought, with the woeful and haggard faces of ill-used slaves, that his people assembled annually to continue and to complete the building of his pyramid. Dr. Henry Brugsch-Bey, Wilkinson, Dr. Petrie,[45] and many others have cleared up all our doubts on this point, and only an Englishman like Buckle,[46] who could not divorce labour from the modern idea of sweating, and absolute monarchy from the modern idea of cruelty, and slavery from the modern idea of brutality,[47] was able to think otherwise.

For it was highly probable that King Khephrën had no standing army. It is certain that his predecessor had not.[48] It is even probable that he had no armed bodyguard. What, then, was the power which, every year, could muster thousands of his fellow-countrymen about him, and which induced them cheerfully to undertake this most strenuous, this most skilful, and this most highly artistic labour for him?

This power, there can no longer be any doubt, was the power of affection and profound and sincere reverence. An examination of the pyramids of Gizeh, alone, apart from all historical evidence, is sufficient to convince any one who has any knowledge of what forced labour produces, that love was very largely active in the work of these Egyptians of the third and fourth dynasties;[49] and, if we turn from the actual monuments themselves to the sculpture that adorned them, we become convinced that the people who built them were a united, law-abiding race, who recognized in Khephrën the highest product of their values. And yet, that enormous power was wielded by this one man-god, is proved by every detail that history and the archæological records have handed down to us. He was the remote predecessor of a king who one day would be able to declare—

"I teach the priests what is their duty: I turn away the ignorant man from his ignorance.... The gods are full of delight in my time, and their temples celebrate feasts of joy. I have placed the boundaries of the land of Egypt at the horizon. I gave protection to those who were in trouble, and smote those who did evil against them. I placed Egypt at the head of all the nations, because its inhabitants are at one with me in the worship of Amon!"[50]

He was a man the moral standards of whose people were in many respects higher than those of the Greeks;[51] he and his subjects felt very strongly the value of strength of character and of self-control;[52] though perhaps they laid "greater stress upon discretion and quietness than on any qualities of character. In the repudiation of sins an Egyptian would say: 'My mouth hath not run on;' 'My mouth hath not been hot;' 'My voice hath not been voluble in my speech;' 'My voice is not loud.'"[53]

"Ptahotep urged similar discreetness; he said: 'Let thy heart be overflowing, but let thy mouth be restrained.'"[54] While another Egyptian moralist said: "Do not be a talker!"[55]

Thus we find all the evidences of precisely that principle which goes to rear a great people—the belief that restraint is necessary, and part of the art of life, and that in order to have one group of advantages, another group must be sacrificed.

For this is the principle of all great legislation; it is the principle of all great art,—and it is the principle of all great life.

A great legislator has to discover what sacrifices his people can afford to make, what things they will be able for ever to discard in order to reap the advantages of a certain mode of life. His teaching must include restraint. It is the renunciation of some things and the careful cultivation of others that builds up a noble type. As Mr. Chesterton once observed, with really uncustomary wisdom, you cannot be King of England and the Beadle of Balham at the same time. To be the one you must sacrifice the advantages which are associated with the other. All values, all art,[56] and all life is based upon this principle—that if you grasp all, you lose all; or, as Nietzsche has it: "The belief in the pleasure which comes of restraint—this pleasure of a rider on a fiery steed."[57]

You may argue that the enjoyment of one set of joys is better in your opinion than the enjoyment of another set; but you cannot claim the enjoyment of all; that is impossible. It is only among an uncultured or democratic people that every one aspires to all pleasures, and it is precisely among such a people that some form of Puritanism becomes an urgent need—that is to say, as a substitute for the art of life.[58] Because the indiscriminate pursuit of all joys perforce ends in failure, and therefore in unhappiness. But measure is the delight only of æsthetic natures;[59] hence, where the art of living has not yet been learned, some kind of severe puritanical morality will be a condition of existence, and if that is dropped excesses will soon begin to make their presence felt.

I do not wish you to imagine, therefore, that the Egyptians were an austere, ascetic and self-castigating race; on the contrary, as all authorities declare, they were full of the joy of life and of the love of life;[60] and it was precisely because they recognized well-defined limits in particular things that they could allow themselves a certain margin in others.

In the art of Egypt I recognized this principle of restraint, long before I discovered that it existed in their life and system of society, and I was not surprised to find it observed with greater severity by their rulers than by the mass of the people themselves.[61]

No one can command who has not first learnt to obey his own will. Nobody could command as that Man-God Khephrën commanded,[62] before he had become complete master of himself.

"He who cannot command himself shall obey," says Zarathustra.[63] And about five thousand years ago Ptahotep—the great moralist of the fifth dynasty of Egypt—said: "He that obeyeth his heart, shall command!"[64]

This atmosphere is strange to us. We, who are used to seeing liberty and authority granted indiscriminately as ends in themselves, to everybody and anybody, find it difficult to realize this manner of thought. If we know of it at all, we misunderstand it and confound the moderation of weak natures with the restraint of the strong.[65]

This art of life which takes as a fundamental principle that every joy is bought by some sacrifice, is strange and archaic now. The people it reared communicate little to our age, as their statues will prove if you look at them; the art it created leaves modern spectators cold; and yet, as every great legislator and artist should know, it is precisely upon the principle with which the Egyptian people of the fourth dynasty were reared, and with which the splendid statue of King Khephrën was carved, that all great life and art repose.

It cannot be said too often, therefore, that the Egyptians were a happy and contented people, and this they were because there was some power abroad in their world, and because he who wielded that power could make them believe that the human race was as high as a pyramid, although but one man perhaps could ever represent the apex.

B. The Lady Nophret.

But you may object that in some of the works of this period the Egyptian artists showed a lack of restraint, a lack of the instinct that knows how much to sacrifice, which far surpassed this same vice in the art of the Greeks. You may point to the perfectly stupendous realism of the Lady Nophret and her husband or brother, and declare with Fergusson that "nothing more wonderfully truthful and realistic has been done since that time, till the invention of photography."[66]

The Lady Nophret (Cairo Museum)

I confess that when I drew near to these statues in the Museum at Cairo, it is no exaggeration to say that I was literally startled by their lifelike appearance. Like Miss Jane Harrison, I felt that the "Lady Nophret," at least, must be able to rise and come forward,[67] so ridiculously fresh and warm did she appear in her spotless white dress and her majestic wig. I soon realized that I was in the presence of a kind of realism which transcended anything I had ever seen in ancient or modern art, for its convincingness and truth; and it was difficult to believe that this piece of wholesale deception—certainly more perfect than any waxwork figure I had ever known,—like the statue of the Man-God Khephrën, was a product of the pyramid period.

You must not gather, from what I have just said, that the Lady Nophret is in the slightest degree as vulgar or as commonplace as an ordinary waxwork figure or modern portrait. Though its vitality cannot be denied,[68] there are artistic qualities in the simple moulding of the figure which place it very much higher than the realistic work either of ancient Greece or of modern Europe. It is only beside the statue of King Khephrën that it appears so weak; and, as it is almost a contemporary of this magnificent person, the manner in which it has been presented to us by the artist seems to be a problem.

The first lesson it teaches you is this—that whatever you may think about the conventionalism of King Khephrën, such conventionalism has nothing whatever to do with archaic clumsiness, inability to see Nature, or incompetence. It is clear that the Egyptians were greater masters in rendering nature realistically than any people before or after them.[69] If they had not been, they could never have produced the portrait-statues of the architect Ti; the two portrait-statues of Ranofir, priest of Ptah of Memphis, and that of the Scribe and of the Cheikh-el-Beled[70]—all in the museum at Cairo.

When they are not realistic, then, it is because they do not wish to be; it is because they deliberately desire to rise above nature, to transfigure it, simplify it, and arrange it—in fact, to be artists.

What, then, was the object of these realistic portrait-statues about which I have chosen to speak collectively in my references to the Lady Nophret?

They were never intended by the artist who made them to be seen by the eye of man. They were never intended to be works of Ruler-art, set up to emphasize and underline the values of a people. They had a definite purpose, of course, but this purpose was quite foreign to that of Art as I defined it in my last lecture. What was this purpose?

It was related to Death.[71] No realistic sculptural work was associated with Life by the ancient Egyptians. As men who were still able to believe in a Man-God, and were still convinced of the power of man-wrought miracles, how could they associate realism or that principle of manufacture whereby a man deliberately suppresses his will to art and makes himself subservient to nature—how could they associate this with Life,—Life which to these dwellers on the Nile was inextricably bound up with the hand, the thought, the will, and the power of man?

No—these realistic sculptures which throw all our puerile Police Art into the shade were associated not with Life, but with the opposite of Life—with Death, with underground tombs and sarcophagi, with mummies and musty mastabas, and with the hope of conquering Eternal Sleep.

The Egyptians believed that a living man consisted of a body, a Ka or ghost, and a Ba or soul. At death, the Ka and Ba were supposed to be liberated; but it was hoped that a day would nevertheless come when the Ka, which was the element in which the life of the deceased person was specially believed to reside, would come back to the body and effect its resurrection. Hence the care with which a body was embalmed and preserved from putrefaction.

Accidents, however, might happen, thought the ancient Egyptians. The embalmed mummy might perish, it might be destroyed. What would the unfortunate Ka do, if it returned and found the mummy of its former body annihilated? A way out of this difficulty quickly occurred to the nimble minds of these imaginative people. If the mummy had perished, they thought, the Ka might possibly enter an effigy of its former body, provided that effigy were sufficiently lifelike. In this way the realistic Ka-statues were introduced, and for fear lest even these might perish, wealthy people would sometimes multiply their number to what would seem a ridiculous extent.

Once they were manufactured, these Ka-statues would be placed far away from the sight of living man, in the tomb of the departed person, and in this way his resurrection was supposed to be ensured.[72]

For the Egyptians could imagine no world better than their own. And even a resurrection could but occur amid surroundings which were as like as possible to those of everyday life on earth.

The realism of the Ka-statue of the Lady Nophret, therefore, need not frighten us. On the contrary, it only helps to throw the transfiguration and power of King Khephrën's diorite statue into greater relief. The Egyptians knew perfectly well that a Ka-statue was only a duplication, a copy, and a repetition of reality, and they knew also that its proper place was underground and out of sight.[73] If Lady Nophret and her companion Ka-statues had never been found, however, we might have believed, as many have believed, that the conventionalism of Egyptian sculpture was beneath instead of very much above Nature.

But even when we know what we do know, it is only with the utmost difficulty that an artist who is a child of this weak and impotent age can feel any love for these strange, transcendentally powerful, and almost superhuman figures in granite and diorite which the sculptors of Egypt have left us. The artist may perhaps get nearer to them than any one else in his age, because he, by virtue of the modicum of creative power that is in him, initiates himself almost automatically into the mysteries of this great Egyptian simplicity, order, and transfiguration. But others who are not artists can only pass them by. For these figures are the apotheosis of a particular type. They are what all art should be, a stimulus, and a spur to a life based upon a definite set of values. How, then, could people stop and admire them who are living under values which are possibly the very reverse of those which this art advocates, or under no definite values at all?

The style of the statue of King Khephrën, with but a few modifications, was the style of all Egyptian statuary until the days of Psammetichus, over two thousand years later: how can we, the changeable and restless children of Europe, understand these things?

C. The Pyramid.

How can we admire and understand even the symbol of King Khephrën's social organization—the Pyramid, when we know and love only the level plain?

The Pyramid, which in its form embodies all the highest qualities of great art, and all the highest principles of a healthy society, is the greatest artistic achievement that has been discovered hitherto.

This symbolic wedlock of Art and Sociology still stands, with all its six thousand years of age, on the threshold of the desert—that is to say, on the threshold of chaos and disorder, where none but the wind attempts to shape and to form; and reminds us of a master will that once existed and set its eternal stamp upon the face of the world in Egypt, so that posterity might learn whether mankind had risen or declined.

In its synthesis of the three main canons, simplicity, repetition and variety,[74] nothing has ever excelled it; in its mystic utterance of the conditions of the ideal state, in which every member takes his place and ultimately succeeds in holding highest man uppermost and nearest the sun, it is unparalleled in history; and in its sacred revelation that Man can attain to some height if he chooses, that he can believe in Man the God, and Man the Hierophant, and Man the Prophet, if he chooses, and that he can be noble, happy, lasting and powerful in so doing—in this treble advocacy of these sublime ideals, the pyramid and the Egyptians who created it stand absolutely alone in the history of the world.

The best in Greece was borrowed from them; the best we still possess is perhaps but a faint after-glow of their setting sun, and the cold and unfamiliar tone in which their art seems to appeal to modern men ought to prove to us how remote, how incalculably far off, they are from our insignificant age of progress and advancement, of feebleness and mediocrity, and of hopeless errors, in which "the prince proposes, but the shopkeeper disposes!"[75]

I cannot go into the details of their society with you now. I can but assure you that the more you read about it in the works of men like Wilkinson, Petrie and Brugsch-Bey, the more convinced you will become of its transcendental superiority. And if, in praising their art above that of any other nation, I have been forced to deal all too hastily with their morals and their State, it is simply because I can conceive of no such perfect art being possible, save as the flower of the noble and man-exalting values which I find at the base of the Egyptian Pyramid.

In identifying Nietzsche's art canon with that admired and respected by Egypt at its best, I have done nothing at all surprising to those who know Nietzsche's philosophy. Everything he says on Art in his maturest work, The Will to Power, drove me inevitably, not to Italy, not to Greece, not to Holland, and not to India—but to the Valley of the Nile; while in two books already published I forestalled these lectures, in one respect, by declaring Nietzsche's ideal aristocratic state to have been based symbolically upon the idea of the Egyptian Pyramid.

Only a romantic idealist would have the sentimental fanaticism to stand up before you now to preach an Egyptian Renaissance. I wish to do nothing of the sort. I know too well to what extent the Art of Egypt was the product of a people reared by a definite set of inviolable values, to hope to transplant it with any chance of success on to our democratic and anarchical soil. What I do wish to advocate, however, is, that when you think of the best in Art, your mind should go back to the severe and vigorous culture of Egypt and not to that of any other country.

This will at least give you a standard of measurement, according to which most of the culture of the present day will strike you as tawdry and putrescent. In this way a salutary change may be brought about, and the words of Disraeli concerning the Egyptians may also come true, in which he said: "The day may yet come when we shall do justice to the high powers of that mysterious and imaginative people."[76]

Nothing can be done, however, until our type is purified, until we have at least become a people. For until that time it will be impossible to discover a type which may become the subject-matter of the graphic arts.

"Upwards life striveth to build itself with columns and stairs: into remote distances it longeth to gaze: and outwards after blissful beauties—therefore it needeth height!

"And because it needeth height, it needeth stairs and contradiction between stairs, and those who can climb! to rise striveth life, and in rising to surpass itself!

"Verily, he who here towered aloft his thought in stone knew as well as the wisest ones about the secret of life!

"That there is struggle and inequality even in beauty and war for power and supremacy: that doth he here teach us in the plainest parable.

"Thus spake Zarathustra."78

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