THE STRUGGLE FOR INDIVIDUALITY
Who can doubt where the truth lies, when he contemplates on the one hand Goethe's theoretical doctrines concerning plastic art, and on the other Goethe's own life-work? Never was so un-Hellenic a work written as Faust; if Hellenic art were necessarily our ideal, we should have but to confess that invention, execution, everything in this poem is a horror. And we must not overlook the progressive movement within this mighty work, for -- to employ the famous but empty word "Olympic" (with all the contempt it deserves) -- the first part, in comparison with the second, would have to be called "Olympic." Faust, Helena, Euphorion -- and, as counterpart, Greek classicism! The Homeric laughter, into which we must burst on hearing such a comparison, would be the only "Greek" thing about it. Even the hero, drainer of marshes, might have pleased the Romans, but never the Greeks. If then our poetry -- Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Josquin, Bach, Beethoven -- is un-Hellenic to the very marrow, what is the meaning of holding up ideals to our plastic arts and prescribing to them laws which are borrowed from that alien poetry? Is not poetry the mother's lap of every art? Should our plastic art not remain our own, instead of limping along, an unloved and unrecognised bastard? At the root of all this lies a fatal mistake made by the Humanists, otherwise men of great merit; they wished to free us from Romish ecclesiastical fetters, and pointed to free, creative Hellenism; but archaeology soon grew predominant, and we fell from one dogma into another. We see what narrowness lies at the bottom of this fatal doctrine of classicism from the example of the great Winckelmann; of whom Goethe says that not only had he no appreciation of poetry, but he actually hated it, Greek poetry included; even Homer and AEschylus he valued only as indispensable commentaries to his beloved statues." [63] On the other hand, everyone of us has frequently had occasion to notice how classical philology mostly produces a peculiar insusceptibility to plastic art, as also to nature. For example, concerning Winckelmann's famous contemporary F. A. Wolf, we learn that his stupidity as regards nature and his absolute inability to appreciate works of art made him almost unbearable to Goethe. [64] We stand therefore -- with our dogma of Classical art -- before a pathological phenomenon, and we must needs rejoice when Goethe with his healthy, magnificent nature, while on the one hand lending his help to the sickly Classical reaction, on the other gives expression to absolutely naturalistic precepts. Thus on September 18, 1823, he warns Eckermann against phantastic poetising, and teaches him that "reality must provide the occasion and the subject-matter of all poems; a special case becomes common property and poetical by the very fact that the poet treats it ... the real world does not lack poetical interest." The very doctrine of Donatello and Rembrandt! And if we study Goethe's conception more closely -- to which the Einleitung in die Propylaen, written in 1798 at the close of our period, will greatly help us -- we shall find that the Classical element is, in his case, little more than a graceful draping. Ever and anon he reminds us that the study of nature is the "highest demand," and not satisfied with purely artistic study he requires exact scientific knowledge (mineralogy, botany, anatomy, &c.); that is the important point, for this is absolutely un-Hellenic and totally and specifically Teutonic. And when we find the fine remark that the artist should "in emulation of nature" try to produce a work "at once natural and supernatural," we shall, without hesitation, discover in this creed a direct contrast to the Hellenic principle of art; for the latter neither penetrates down to the roots of nature nor soars upward into the Supernatural." [65]
This comparison deserves a special paragraph.
The man who is not satisfied with the "sounding brass" of aesthetic phrases, but desires, by means of a clear insight into the peculiar and unique individuality of the Hellenic race, to grasp the distinct nature of their art, will do well not arbitrarily to separate the Greek artist from his intellectual surroundings, but from time to time for purposes of comparison to bring in and critically examine Greek science and philosophy. Then he will recognise that that "proportion," which we admire in the works of the Greek creative power, is the result of inborn restraint -- not narrowness, but restraint, -- not as a special, purely artistic law, but as an inevitable consequence of the whole nature of Greek individuality. The clear eye of the Hellene fails him whenever his glance wanders beyond the circle of what is human, in the narrower sense of the word. His natural investigators are not faithful observers, and in spite of their great gifts they discover absolutely nothing, a fact which startles us at first, but is easily explained, since discovery always depends on devotion to nature, not on mere human power (see p. 269 f.). [66] Here, therefore, we find a clear, sharp dividing-line in the downward direction; only what lies in man himself -- mathematics and logic -- could reveal itself to the Greeks as genuine science; and in this they achieved remarkable results. In the upward direction the boundary is just as clear. Their philosophy is from the first closed to everything which a Goethe would call "supernatural," such things as he himself has represented poetically in Faust's descent to the "Mothers" and in his Ascension to Heaven. On the one hand we find the strictly logical rationalism of Aristotle, on the other the poetical mathematics of a Pythagoras and a Plato. Plato's ideas, as I have already remarked (p. 313), are absolutely real, indeed concrete. The profound introspective glance into that other "supernatural" nature -- the glance into Atman, which formed the subject of Indian reflection, the glance into that realm which was familiar to everyone of our mystics as "the Realm of Grace," and which Kant called the "Realm of Freedom" -- was denied to the Hellene. This is the distinct dividing-line in the upward direction. What remains is man, man perceived by sense, and all that this human being from his exclusively and restrictedly human standpoint observes. Such was the nature of the people that created Hellenic art. Who would deny, when the facts speak so eloquently, that this tendency of mind was an excellent one for artistic life? Yet we see this Hellenic art develop out of the whole mental tendencies of this one peculiar human family; what can therefore be the meaning of holding up Hellenic principles of art as a law and ideal to us, whose intellectual gifts are manifestly so very different from theirs? Is our art then at any price to be an artificial and not an organic one? a made art, and not one that makes itself, that is to say, a living art? Are we not to be allowed to follow Goethe's admonition, to take our stand upon that nature which is external to man, and to strive upwards to that nature which is above us -- both closed realms to the Hellene? Are we to disregard Goethe's other warning: "We cannot see as the Greeks did, and our poetry and sculpture can never be like theirs"?
The history of our art is now to a great extent a struggle, a struggle between our inborn tendency and other foreign tendencies that are forced upon us. This struggle will be met with at every step -- from the Bamberg sculptor to Goethe. Sometimes it is a case of one school opposing another; frequently the struggle rages in the breast of the individual artist. It lasted throughout the whole of the nineteenth century.
THE INNER STRUGGLE
Yet there is another struggle, one that is altogether productive of good, one that accompanies and moulds our art. In our characterisation of it, the words already quoted from Goethe, that our art should be "natural and at the same time supernatural" will be of good service. To attain both -- the Natural and the Supernatural -- is not within the reach of everyone. And the problem varies very much according to the department of art. To make matters perfectly clear, we may discard those two words "natural" and "supernatural," which are hardly appropriate in art, and replace them by naturalistic and musical. The opposite of natural is artificial, and there we come to a stop; on the other hand, the contrast to Naturalistic is Idealistic, and this at once makes everything clear. The Hellenic artist creates according to the human "idea" of things; we, on the other hand, demand what is true to nature, i.e., the creative principle which grasps the particular individuality of things. Regarding the "Supernatural," demanded by Goethe, we must observe that of all the arts music alone is directly -- i.e., of its very essence -- supernatural; the Supernatural in the products of other arts may, therefore, from the artistic standpoint, be described as musical. These two tendencies, qualities, instincts, or whatever else you may please to call them -- the Musical on the one hand and the Naturalistic on the other -- are, as I have been endeavouring to show, the elementary powers of our whole artistic creation; they are not contradictory, as superficial minds are wont to suppose, they rather supplement each other, and it is just in the co-existence of two impulses so opposed and yet so closely correlated that individuality consists. [67] The man who paints the severed wing of the roller as minutely as if his salvation depended upon it, also creates the picture, Knight, Death and Devil. However, it is sufficiently apparent that from this peculiar nature of our intellect a rich inner life of powers either opposing each other or combining in the most various ways was bound to result. Our power of music has borne us aloft, as on angel's wings, to regions to which no human aspirations had as yet soared. Naturalism has been a safety anchor, but for which our art would soon have lost itself in phantasies, allegories and thought-cryptography. One is almost inclined to point to the vigorous antagonism and the consequently enhanced strength of the united Patricians and Plebeians in Rome (see vol. i. p. 99).
SHAKESPEARE AND BEETHOVEN
This view of art, which I cannot pursue further, I would fain recommend to the consideration of the reader. It contains, as I believe, the whole history of our genuine, living art. [68] I shall only give two examples to illustrate in its essence and consequences the above-mentioned struggle between the two creative principles. If the strong naturalistic impulse had not separated poetry from music, we should never have had a Shakespeare. On the Hellenic standpoint, therefore, one of the brightest stars in the imaginative world would have been impossible. Schiller writes to Goethe: "It has occurred to me that the characters of Greek tragedy are more or less idealistic masks and not real individuals, as I find them in Shakespeare and in your dramas." [69] This collocation of two poets, who stand so far apart, is interesting; what unites Goethe and Shakespeare is truth to nature. Shakespeare's art is altogether naturalistic, even to rudeness -- yes, thank Maven, even to rudeness. As Leonardo tells us, the artist should lovingly study even "the dirt." This explains how Shakespeare could be so shamefully neglected in the century of false classicism, and how even so great a mind as Frederick could prefer the tragedies of a Voltaire to those of the great English poet. Recently several critics have cavilled at Shakespeare's art for not being true to nature in the sense of so-called "Realism"; but, as Goethe says, "Art is called art because it is not nature." [70] Art is creative shaping; this is the business of the artist and of the special branch of art; to demand absolute truth to nature from a work is in the first place superfluous, as nature herself gives us that; in the second place absurd, as man can only achieve what is human; and in the third preposterous, as man desires by means of art to force nature to represent something "Supernatural." In every work of art, therefore, there will he an arbitrary Fashioning; [71] art can be naturalistic only in its aims, not in its methods. "Realism" as it is called, denotes a low ebb of artistic power; even Montesquieu said of the realistic poets: "Ils passent leur vie a chercher la nature, et la manquent toujours." To demand of Shakespeare that his characters should make no poetical speeches is just as reasonable as it was for Giovanni Strozzi to demand of Michael Angelo's Night that the stone should stand up and speak. Shakespeare himself has in the Winter's Tale with infinite grace destroyed the tissue of these aesthetic sophisms:
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean; so, o'er that art
Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes ... this is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.
Since it is the aim of Shakespeare's drama to depict characters, the degree of his naturalism can be measured by nothing but his naturalistic representation of characters. He who thinks that the cinematographic reproduction of daily life on the stage is naturalistic art, looks at things too much from the silly standpoint of the panopticon to make it worth while to enter into a discussion with him. [72] My second example shall be taken from the other extreme. Music had with us, as I have shown above, almost completely severed itself from poetry; it seemed to have freed itself from earth. It became so predominantly, indeed, one might almost say, so exclusively expression, that it seemed sometimes as if it had ceased to be art, for as we have seen, art is not expression but that which interprets expression. And, as a matter of fact, while Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller had honoured music in the highest degree, and Beethoven had said of it that "it was the one incorporeal entrance into a higher world," there soon came men who boldly asserted and taught the whole world that music expressed nothing, signified nothing, but was merely a kind of ornamentation, a kaleidoscopic playing with relative vibrations! Such is the retribution that falls upon an art which leaves the ground of actuality. Yet in reality something totally different had taken place from what these empty-nutshell-headed worthies had found sufficient for their modest intellectual needs. Our musicians had in the meantime, by efforts extending over exactly five hundred years, gradually attained a more and more complete mastery of their material, had made it more pliant and workable, that is, more capable of creating form (cf. p. 536) -- which in Greece, where music was strictly subordinate to the text, would have been as impossible as the birth of a Shakespeare. And so music, the better it became able to interpret expression, had become more and more true Art. And as a result of this development music -- which was formerly a more purely formal art, like a flowing robe wrapt round the living body of poetry- -- ame more and more within the reach of the naturalistic creative tendencies peculiar to the Teutonic races. Nothing is so direct in its effect as music. Shakespeare could paint characters only by the mediation of the understanding, that is, by a double reflex process; for the character first mirrors itself in actions, which require a far-reaching definition, in order to be understood, and then we throw back upon it the reflection of our own judgment. Music, on the other hand, appeals immediately to the understanding; it gives us all that is contradictory in the mood of the moment, it gives the quick succession of changing feelings, the remembrance of what is long past, hope, longing, foreboding, it gives expression to the Inexpressible; Music alone has made possible the natural religion of the soul, and that in the highest degree by the development which culminated at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Beethoven.
SUMMARY
In order to make myself quite clear let me once more summarise the factors upon which our whole artistic development is founded; on the one hand depth, power and directness of expression (musical genius) as out most individual gift, on the other, the great secret of our superiority in so many spheres, namely, our inborn tendency to follow nature honestly and faithfully (Naturalism); and opposed to these two contrary but, in all the highest works of art, mutually supplementary impulses and capacities, the tradition of an alien, dead art, which in strict limitation attained to great perfection, an art which affords us lively stimulus and valuable instruction, but at the same time, by mirroring a foreign ideal, leads us astray again, and inclines us to despise that in which our greatest talent lies -- the power of expression in music and naturalistic truth. If anyone follows out these hints, he will, I am convinced, be rewarded by vivid conceptions and valuable insight in every branch of art. I should only like to add the warning that where we desire to arrive at a combined whole we must contemplate things with exactitude, but not too closely. If, for example, we regard this age as the end of the world, we are almost oppressed by the near splendour of the great Italian epoch; but if we take refuge in the arms of an extravagantly generous future, that wonderful splendour of plastic art will perhaps appear a mere episode in a much greater whole. Even the existence of a man like Michael Angelo; side by side with Raphael, points to future ages and future works. Art is always at its goal; I have already appropriated this remark of Schopenhauer, and so in this section have not traced the historical development of art from Giotto and Dante to Goethe and Beethoven, but have contented myself with pointing to the permanent features of our individual human race. It is only a knowledge of these impelling and constraining features that enable us really to understand the art of the past and of the present. We Teutons are yet destined to create much, and what will be created must not be measured by the standard of an alien past; we must rather seek to judge it by a comprehensive knowledge of our whole individuality. In this way only shall we possess a criterion that will enable us to be just to the widely diverging movements of the nineteenth century, and to make an end of clap-trap, that poison-breathing dragon of all art-criticism.
CONCLUSION
I think that my imaginary "Bridge" is now finished. We have seen that nothing is more characteristic of our Teutonic culture than the fact that the impulse to discover and the impulse to fashion go hand in hand. Contrary to the teaching of our historians we hold that our art and science have never rested; had they done so, we should have ceased to be Teutons. Indeed we see that the one is dependent upon the other; the source of all our inventive talent, of all our genius, even of the whole originality of our civilisation, is nature; yet our philosophers and natural scientists have agreed with Goethe when he said: "The worthiest interpreter of nature is art." [73]
How much might still be added! But I have now placed in position not only the key-stone of my "Bridge" for this chapter, but also for my whole book, which I merely regard and wish others to regard -- from beginning to end -- as a makeshift structure. I said at the very beginning (see p. lix of the Introduction) that my object was not to instruct; even at the very few points where I might have more knowledge at my command than the average educated man who is not specially well read in any particular branch of learning, I have endeavoured to keep this in the background; for my object was not to bring forward new facts, but to give shape to those that are well known, and so to fashion them that they might form a living whole in our consciousness. Schiller says of beauty that it is at once our condition and our achievement; this may be applied to knowledge. To begin with, knowledge is something purely objective. it forms no portion of the person who knows; but if this knowledge is shaped, it becomes a living portion of our consciousness, and is henceforth" a condition of our subject." This knowledge I can now look at from all sides, can, so to speak, turn it over and over. That is already a very great gain. But it is not all. A knowledge which has become a condition of my Ego, something which I not only "regard," but "feel"; -- it is part of my life; "in a word, it is at once my condition and my achievement." To transform knowledge into fact! to summarise the past in such a way that we no longer take pride in an empty, borrowed learning concerning things long dead and buried, but make of the knowledge of the past a living, determining power for the present! a knowledge which has so fully entered our consciousness that even unconsciously it determines our judgment! Surely a sublime and worthy aim! And the greater the difficulty there is, in view of the increase of new facts, in surveying the whole field of knowledge, the more worthy of attainment that aim becomes. "In order to rescue ourselves from endless complexity, and once more to attain simplicity, we must always ask ourselves the question: How would Plato have acted?" Such is the advice of our greatest Teuton, Goethe. But the aphorism might well plunge us into despair, for who would dare to say: thus and thus only would a Teutonic Plato of to-day have set about the task of reducing complexity to simplicity, which means, to possibility of life?
Far be it from me to pretend that in this book I have succeeded in picturing the Foundations of the Nineteenth Century upon these principles. Between the undertaking and the execution of such a task, so many intentions, so many hopes are wrecked on the narrow, sharp limitations of a man's own powers that he cannot write his last words without a sense of humility. Whatever success my book may have attained I owe to those giants of our race upon whom I have kept my eyes steadfastly fixed.
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Notes:
1. Zum Loakoon ix.
2. Goethe: Maximen und Reflexionen, Div. 3.
3. See vol. i. p. 302. Cf. Schiller's Letter to Meyer of 5.2.1795.
4. Cf. the remarks on Technique in contrast to Art and Science, vol. i. p. 138.
5. Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 46.
6. "By every theory of art we close the path to true enjoyment: for no more baneful nullity has ever been invented." -- GOETHE.
7. Since Goethe has undoubtedly here and there been influenced by Schelling and this has often led to absolutely false judgments, the fact must be emphasised that he placed Kant far above any of his successors. At the time when Fichte and Schelling were at the zenith of their influence, and Hegel was beginning to write, Goethe expressed the opinion: "Speculation on the Superhuman, in spite of all Kant's warnings, is a vain toil." When Schelling's life-work was already known to the world (in 1817), Goethe said to Victor Cousin that he had begun to read Kant again and was delighted with the unexampled clearness of his thought; he added also: "Le systeme de Kant n'est pas deiruit." Six years later Goethe complained to Chancellor von Muller that Schelling's "ambiguous expressions" had put back rational theology fifty years. The personality of Schelling, certain qualities of his style, and certain tendencies of his thought, often fascinated Goethe; but so great a mind could never commit the error of regarding Kant and Schelling as commensurable magnitudes. (For the above quotations see the Gesprache, ed. by Biedermann, i. 209, iii. 290, iv. 227).
8. See the whole of chap. iii., especially p. 182f.
9. This is not aesthetic theory, but the experience of creative artists. Thus Eugene Fromentin says in his exquisite and thoroughly scientific book Les Mattres d'autrefois (ed. 7, p. 2): "L'art de peindre est l'art d'exprimer l'invisible par le visible."
10. These two tendencies become more concrete to us when we think of them as Jesuitism and Pietism (the correlative of Deism). For each of these finds in an apparent contrast a complementary form, into which it is liable to merge. The correlative of Jesuitism is Materialism: as Paul de Lagarde has rightly remarked: "The water in these communicating pipes is always at the same height" (Deutsche Schriften, ed. 1891, p. 49); all Jesuitical natural science is just as strictly dogmatic and materialistic as that of any Holbach or De Lamettrie; the correlative of abstract Deism is Pietism with its faith in the letter.
11. Cf. Kant: Fortschritte der Metaphysik, Supplement. As we see, the Real which is derived from the testimony of sense is interpreted as an idea, whereas the Idea which is given by inner experience is interpreted as real. It is exactly like the Copernican theory of motion: what was supposed to be moving, rests, and what was supposed to rest, moves.
12. Cf. The Conversation with Riemer on March 26, 1814.
13. Ambros: Geschichte der Musik, 2nd ed. i. 219.
14. Lamprecht: Deutsche Geschichte, 2nd ed. i. 174.
15. The usual exclusive emphasising of the Netherlands is, as Ambros shows, an historical error; Frenchmen, Germans, English, have to a great extent assisted; see loc. cit. iii. 336, as well as the following section and the whole of Bk. II. It is interesting to learn that Milton's father was a composer. For further facts see Riemann's Geschichte der Musiktheorie and Illustration zur Musikgeschichte.
16. It is very noteworthy that Palestrina's teacher, the Frenchman Goudimel, was a Calvinist, who was killed on the night of Saint Bartholomew; for as Palestrina in style and manner of writing followed his teacher most closely (see Ambros. II. p. 11 of V.) we see that the purification of Roman church-music "from lascivious and obscene songs" (as the Council of Trent in its twenty-second sitting expressed it) and its elevation and refinement were fundamentally the work of Protestantism and the Teutonic north.
17. I intentionally refrain from saying "ear" or "hearing," for, to judge from many facts, known to every musician, we may conclude that there has within the last three centuries been a retrogression instead of an advance in power of ear. Our forefathers, for example, had a preference for compositions for four, eight or even more voices, and the dilettante, who sang to the lute, did not take the treble (as that was considered vulgar!) but a middle part. But it has long been established that acuteness of ear stands in no necessary, direct relation to susceptibility to musical expression; to a great extent this acuteness is a matter of practice, and we find peoples (e.g., the Turks) who can without exception accurately distinguish quarter-notes and who yet are absolutely lacking in musical imagination and creative power.
18. Read the reports on the recent discoveries in Mantineia with Praxiteles' reliefs of the Muses.
19. Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde, Collected Works, 1st ed. iv. 309.
20. Democritus can only be compared with Kant: the history of the world knows of no more remarkable intellectual power than his. Whoever does not yet know this fact should read the section in Zeller's Philosophy of the Greeks (Div. 2, vol. i.) and supplement this by Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus. Democritus is the only Greek whom we can regard as a forerunner of Teutonic philosophy; for in him -- and in him alone -- we find the absolutely mathematical-mechanical interpretation of the world of phenomena, united to the idealism of inner experience and the resolute rejection of all dogmatism. In contrast to the silly "middle path" of Aristotle he teaches that truth lies in depth! Knowledge of things according to their real nature is, he says, impossible. His Ethics are just as important: morality depends, in his estimation, solely upon will, not upon works; he already gives us a glimpse of Goethe's idea of reverence for self, and rejects fear and hope as moral impulses.
21. Hermann Grothe: Leonardo da Vinci als Ingenieur und Philosoph, p. 93. In this book the author has attempted to prove that scientific knowledge in Leonardo's time was altogether more extensive and precise than two centuries later, yet he too humours the Hegelian art-history so far as to write: "We have always been able to observe the fact that the greatest splendour of science is preceded by a sublime epoch of art"; surely that is the non plus ultra. Nothing is more difficult to root out than such phrases: the very man who in a preeminent case has just proved the opposite, still babbles the same phrases and excuses the departure from the supposed rule with an "always" -- to which we are inclined to retort with the question: Where is there except among the Teutonic peoples a "highest splendour of science?" He would be at a loss for an answer. And with us -- that he could not deny -- art from Giotto to Goethe runs parallel to science from Roger Bacon to Cuvier.
22. Libra di pittura, § 33 (ed. Ludwig).
23. See his Leben des Kopernikus in his Physikalische und mathematische Schriften, ed. 1884, Part 1. p. 51.
24. Cf. pp. 392, 425 f.
25. Both facts are taken from the above-mentioned biography by Lichtenberg.
26. For all these facts see Fiske: The Discovery of America.
27. Letter to Schiller, June 28, 1804.
28. Those who like such frivolous divisions may note the following: in the year of Michael Angelo's death (1564) Shakespeare was born; the death of Calderon (1681) coincides almost exactly with the birth of Bach, and the lives of Gluck, Mozart, and Haydn bring us exactly to the end of the eighteenth century: we might therefore say that a century of plastic art was followed by one of poetry and that by one of music. There have been people who have spoken of mathematical, astronomical-physical, anatomical-systematic and chemical centuries -- simply nonsense, which mathematicians, natural scientists and anatomists of to-day will know how to estimate at its proper value.
29. I recall to the reader's memory Goethe's remark: "Technique finally becomes fatal to art" (Spruche in Prosa); that means, of course, to true, creative art.
30. Cf. vol. i. p. 24. How many aesthetic delusions and useless discussions the nineteenth century might have spared itself had it weighed more carefully Kant's profound remark: "Genius is the inborn quality of mind, by which nature prescribes the rule to art -- for this reason genius cannot describe or scientifically reveal how it produces, for the same reason, the producer of a work of genius does not know the source of the ideas which conduced to it, nor can he, according to a plan or at will, think out these ideas and communicate them with instructions to others, so as to enable the latter to produce similar works" (Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 46). Cf. also § 57, close of the first note. The Italian Journey had not then appeared in print, otherwise Kant might have referred to Goethe's letter of September 6, 1789: "The greatest works of art have at the same time been the greatest works of nature, produced by men according to true and natural laws."
31. Uber Anmut und Wurde.
32. Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre. Div. I.
33. Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (1895). ii. 76.
34. Richard Wagner: Entwurfe, Gedanken, Fragmente (1885), p. 19.
35. Franz von Assisi und die Anfange der Kunst der Renaissance in Italien, 1885. p. 524 f.
36. Cf. Schroder: Indiens Litteratur und Kultur, Lectures iii. and 1.; and Ambros: Geschichte der Musik, Bk. 1. 1.
37. Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit, Bk. XIII. Div. 2.
38. Nachlese zur Adrastea I.
39. Ambros, as above, conclusion of vol. i.
40. It is well known that authorities are inclined to see in the Hungarian gipsies of to-day an early severed branch of the Indian Aryans, and musical writers have thought fit to see in the incomparable and peculiar musical gifts of these people an analogy to genuine Indian music: a scale which includes quarter-notes and sometimes even minuter differences, hence harmonic structures and progressions unknown to Teutonic music; moreover the passionate fervour of the melody and the infinitely rich and florid accompaniment, which defies fixation by our scale of notation, corresponds exactly to what is told us of Indian music, and so renders intelligible much that is to us inexplicable in Indian musical books. Anyone who has for a whole evening listened to a genuine Hungarian gipsy orchestra will agree with me when I assert that here and here alone we see absolute musical genius at work; for this music, though built upon well-known melodies, is always improvised, always suggested by the moment; now pure music is not monumental, but direct feeling, and it is clear that music which is at the time of playing improvised as the expression of momentary feeling must influence the heart quite differently, that is, must exercise a more purely musical effect than music which has been learned and practised. But such a production contains unfortunately no elements out of which lasting works of art can be forged (we only require to refer to those stupid parodies of Hungarian music which under the name of "Hungarian dances" enjoy a regrettably wide popularity); this is in fact not a question of real art but of something lying deeper, namely, the elements from which art first arises; it is not the sea-born Aphrodite, but the sea itself.
41. In so far there is an analogy between Indian and Hellenic music, however different they otherwise were; in the one case it is over-luxuriance, in the other subordination of the musical expression, by which the feeling is created of something unshaped and elementary in contrast to genuine, formed art. To gain deeper insight into Hellenic music, I recommend the reader to consult the little book of Hausegger: Die Anfange der Harmonie, 1895; from these seventy-six pages he can learn more facts and more important ones than from whole volumes.
42. That is the reason why they (as Ambros points out, i. 380 and elsewhere) dabble in purely imaginary musical subtleties, which would have been impossible in practice and would not have contributed in the least to pave the way for a development of Greek music. On the contrary, the highly developed theory of music actually hindered the development of Greek music.
43. To avoid stupid misinterpretations, I may remark that I do not fail to appreciate the interest or the value of musical theory and instrumental technique; but neither is art, they are merely the instruments of art.
44. The quotation is said to be from Luther.
45. Kalligone, 2nd Part, iv. The quotation seems to have been taken from Leibniz.
46. Uber schone Litteratur und Kunst ii. 33.
47. Richard Wagner: Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, Collected Writings, 1st ed. iii. 112.
48. Here you are called to be yourself a poet,
To add a world to the existing world.
49. Letter to Privy Councillor von Mosel (cf. Nohl : Briefe Beethoven's, 1865. p. 159).
50. Hero-Worship, 3rd Lecture.
51. Lettres Persanes, 137.
52. Fruchte aus den sogenannt goldenen Zeiten des 18. Jahrhunderts, II. Das Drama.
53. Letter to Goethe, March 18, 1796.
54. See the Wanderjahre, Bk. II. chap. i. 9. Further details on this point and especially on the organic relations between poetry and music are to be found in my book on Richard Wagner, 1896, pp. 20 f., 186 f., 200 (text ed. 1902, pp. 28 f., 271 f., 295 f.), as also in my lecture on the Klassiker der Dicht-und Tonkunst (Bayreuther Blatter, 1897); cf., too, my Immanuel Kant, p. 29.
55. See The Renaissance, Studies in Art and Poetry, revised and enlarged edition, 1888, pp. 140, 144-5.
56. The Opera, in his Miscellaneous Essays.
57. Here, as elsewhere in this chapter, I have been forced to mention only a few well-known names, which will serve as guiding stars in the survey of our history, but more careful study of the history of art, as it is pursued with so much success to-day, shows that no genius grows up in a night like a mushroom. The power of Donatello, which seems to resemble an elemental force, is rooted in hundreds and thousands of honest, artistic efforts, which go back two or three centuries and have their home -- as should be noted -- not in the south, but in the north. Look at the reliefs of the Prophets in the choir of St. George in the Bamberg Cathedral; here is spirit of Donatello's spirit. An authority who has recently made a most careful study of these sculptures, says: "Note how the artist follows the spoor of nature with the instinct of the tracker." This historian then asks himself in what school the Bamberg sculptor learned and practised such astonishing individuality, and proves convincingly that these great works of German artists, dating from the beginning of the thirteenth century, were inspired by a long series of attempts in the same line by their Teutonic brethren in the west, who were happier, more free, and richer in their political and social conditions. This artistic longing to follow the track of nature had long before found an artistic centre in the Frankish and Norman north (Paris, Rheims, &c.), another in that steadfast focus of free, heretical, Gothic art, Toulouse (cf. Arthur Weese: Die Bamberger Domskulpturen, 1897, pp. 33, 59 f.). The same is manifestly true of painting. The brothers Van Eyck, born a hundred years before Durer, are masters of noble, genuine naturalism, and they were educated in this school by their father; but for the fatal influence of Italy, which ever and anon, like the periodical waves of the Pacific Ocean, swept away our whole stock of individuality, the development of genuine Teutonic painting would have been quite different.
58. It has already been shown (see p. 307) that our whole natural science rests on the same basis of faithful, untiring observation of every detail, and the reader may conclude from that how closely our science and our art are related, both of them being creations of the same individual spirit.
59. E. Muntz: Raphael, 1881, p. 138.
60. Quoted from Janitschek: Geschichte der deutschen Male i. 1890, p. 349.
61. Birds of the family Coracidae are so called because of their habit of turning over suddenly or "tumbling" in their flight. The common European species is known as Coracias garrula.
62. Rembrandt's Radierungen, 1894, p. 31. See also Goethe's short essay on the same picture, Rembrandt der Denker.
63. Winckelmann (section on Poetry).
64. F. W. Reimer: Mitteilungen uber Goethe, 1841, i. 266.
65. Goethe also writes in another passage (Dichtung und Wahrheit, Bk. XV.): "But no one reflected that we cannot see as the Greeks did, and that our poetry, sculpture and medicine can never be the same as theirs."
66. Thus Aristotle had noticed that in a thick wood the sunshine casts round spots of light, but instead of convincing himself by childishly simple observation that these spots were sun-images and consequently
round, he immediately constructed a frightfully complicated, faultlessly logical and absurdly false theory, which, till Kepler's time was regarded as irrefutable.
67. Cf. p. 226. Thus we see the plastic art of the Greek sway back and forwards between the Typical and the Realistic, while ours roves throughout the whole realm, from the Fantastic to the Naturalistic.
68. The "True" must "prove itself true" everywhere. That is why I gladly refer to the investigations of specialists as confirming testimony that my general philosophical view adequately expresses the concretely existing relations. Thus Kurt Moriz-Eichborn, in his excellent book on the Skulpturen-cyclus in der Vorhalle des Freiburger Munsters, 1899 (p. 164, with the sections preceding and following), comes to the conclusion that "Teutonic art is rooted, and reaches its highest growth, in Naturalism and the drama;" and for the drama he points to Wagner, that is, to music.
69. April 4, 1797.
70. Wanderjahre ii. 9.
71. Described by Tane with delightful scientific clearness: Philosophie de l'Art i. 5. On the other hand, Seneca's Omnis ars imitatio est Naturae shows the thorough Roman shallowness in all questions of art and philosophy.
72. At most we might do such a man the kindness to refer him to Schiller's illuminating remarks on this point in his essay Uber den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragodie; they culminate in the sentences: "Nature itself is an idea of the mind, which the senses do not encounter. It lies under the covering of appearance, but it never appears itself. Only the art of the Ideal is able, or rather it is its task, to grasp this spirit of the Whole and bind it in a corporeal form. Even it can never bring this spirit before the senses, but by its creative power it can bring it before the imagination and thereby be truer than all actuality and more real than all experience. From that it manifestly follows that the artist can use no single element from actuality, as he finds it; his work in all parts must be ideal if it is to have reality as a whole and be in agreement with nature."
73. Maximen und Reflexionen.