The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 05

Each of these finds its distinct expression even in the completest repose, but a more living one where the Soul can reveal itself in activity and antagonism; and since it is by the passions mainly that the peace of life is interrupted, it is the generally received opinion that the beauty of the Soul shows itself especially in its quiet supremacy amid the storm of the passions.

But here an important distinction is to be made. For the Soul must not be called upon to moderate those passions which are only an outbreak of the lower spirits of Nature, nor can it be displayed in antithesis with these; for where calm considerateness is still in contention with them, the Soul has not yet appeared; they must be moderated by unassisted Nature in Man, by the might of the Spirit. But there are cases of a higher sort, in which not a single force alone, but the intelligent Spirit itself breaks down all barriers—cases, indeed, where even the Soul is subjected by the bond that connects it with sensuous existence, to pain, which should be foreign to its divine nature; where Man feels himself hard fought and attacked in the root of his existence, not by mere powers of Nature, but by moral forces; where innocent error hurries him into crime, and thus into misery; where deep-felt injustice excites to rebellion the holiest feelings of humanity.

This is the case in all situations, truly, and, in a high sense, tragic, such as the Tragedy of the ancients brings before our eyes. Where blindly passionate forces are aroused, the collected Spirit is present as the guardian of Beauty; but if the Spirit itself be carried away, as by an irresistible might, what power shall watch over and protect sacred beauty? Or, if even the soul participate in the struggle, how shall it save itself from pain and from desecration?

Arbitrarily to restrain the power of pain, of feeling in revolt, would be to sin against the very meaning and aim of Art, and would betray a want of feeling and soul in the artist himself.

Already therein, that Beauty, based on grand and firmly established forms, has become Character, Art has provided the means of displaying without injury to symmetry the whole intensity of Feeling. For where Beauty rests on mighty forms, as upon immovable pillars, even a slight change in its relations, scarcely touching the form, causes us to infer the great force that was necessary in order to provide it. Still more does Grace sanctify pain. It is the essential nature of Grace that it does not know itself; but not being wilfully acquired, it also cannot be wilfully lost. When intolerable anguish, when even madness, sent by avenging gods, takes away consciousness and reason, Grace stands as a protecting demon by the suffering person, and prevents it from manifesting anything unseemly, anything discordant to Humanity, but sees to it that, if the person falls, it falls at least a pure and unspotted victim.

Although not yet the Soul itself, but its forebodings only, Grace accomplishes by natural means what the Soul does by a divine power, in transforming pain, torpor, even death itself, into Beauty.

Yet Grace, which thus maintained itself in the extremest adversity, would be dead, without its transfiguration by the Soul. But what expression can belong to the Soul in this situation? It delivers itself from pain, and comes forth conquering, not conquered, by relinquishing its connection with sensuous existence.

It is for the natural Spirit to exert its energies for the preservation of sensuous existence; the Soul enters not into this contest, but its presence moderates even the storms of painfully-struggling life. Outward force can take away only outward goods, but not reach the Soul; it can tear asunder a temporal bond, not dissolve the eternal one of a truly divine love. Not hard and unfeeling, nor giving up love itself, on the contrary the Soul displays in pain this love alone, as the sentiment that outlasts sensuous existence, and thus raises itself above the ruins of outward life or fortune in divine glory.

It is this expression of the Soul that the creator of the Niobe has presented to us. All the means by which Art tempers even the Terrible, are here made use of. Mightiness of form, sensuous Grace, nay, even the nature of the subject-matter itself, soften the expression, through this, that Pain, transcending all expression, annihilates itself, and Beauty, which it seemed impossible to preserve from destruction when alive, is protected from injury by the commencing torpor.

But what would it all be without the Soul, and how does this manifest itself?

We see on the countenance of the mother, not grief alone for the already prostrated flower of her children; not alone deadly anxiety for the preservation of those yet remaining, and of the youngest daughter, who has fled for safety to her bosom; nor resentment against the cruel deities; least of all, as is pretended, cool defiance-all these we see, indeed, but not these alone; for, through grief, anxiety, and resentment streams, like a divine light, eternal love, as that which alone remains; and in this is preserved the mother, as one who was not, but now is a mother, and who remains united with the beloved ones by an eternal bond.

Every one acknowledges that greatness, purity, and goodness of Soul have also their sensuous expressions. But how is this conceivable, unless the principle that acts in Matter be itself cognate and similar to Soul?

For the representation of the Soul there are again gradations in Art, according as it is joined with the merely Characteristic, or in visible union with the Charming and Graceful.

Who perceives not already, in the tragedies of Æschylus, the presence of that lofty morality which is predominant in the works of Sophocles? But in the former it is enveloped in a bitter rind, and passes less into the whole work, since the bond of sensuous Grace is still wanting. But out of this severity, and the still rude charms of earlier Art, could proceed the grace of Sophocles, and with it the complete fusion of the two elements, which leaves us doubtful whether it is more moral or sensuous Grace that enchants us in the works of this poet.

The same is true of the plastic productions of the early and severe style, in comparison with the gentleness of the later.

If Grace, besides being the transfiguration of the spirit of Nature, is also the medium of connection between moral Goodness and sensuous Appearance, it is evident how Art must tend from all points toward it as its centre. This Beauty, which results from the perfect interpenetration of moral Goodness and sensuous Grace, seizes and enchants us when we meet it, with the force of a miracle. For, whilst the spirit of Nature shows itself everywhere else independent of the Soul, and, indeed, in a measure opposed to it, here, it seems, as if by voluntary accord, and the inward fire of divine love, to melt into union with it; the remembrance of the fundamental unity of the essence of Nature and the essence of the Soul comes over the beholder with sudden clearness—the conviction that all antagonism is only apparent, that Love is the bond of all things, and pure Goodness the foundation and substance of the whole Creation.

Here Art, as it were, transcends itself, and again becomes means only. On this summit sensuous Grace becomes in turn only the husk and body of a higher life; what was before a whole is treated as a part, and the highest relation of Art and Nature is reached in this—that it makes Nature the medium of manifesting the soul which it contains.

But though in this blossoming of Art, as in the blossoming of the vegetable kingdom, all the previous stages are repeated, yet, on the other hand, we may see in what various directions Art can proceed from this centre. Especially does the difference in nature of the two forms of Plastic Art here show itself most strongly. For Sculpture, representing its ideas by corporeal things, seems to reach its highest point in the complete equilibrium of Soul and Matter—if it give a preponderance to the latter it sinks below its own idea—but it seems altogether impossible for it to elevate the Soul at the expense of Matter, since it must thereby transcend itself. The perfect sculptor indeed, as Winckelmann remarks apropos of the Belvedere Apollo, will use no more material than is needful to accomplish his spiritual purpose; but also, on the other hand, he will put into the Soul no more energy than is at the same time expressed in the material; for precisely upon this, fully to embody the spiritual, depends his art. Sculpture, therefore, can reach its true summit only in the representation of those natures in whose constitution it is implied that they actually embody all that is contained in their Idea or Soul; thus only in divine natures. So that Sculpture, even if no Mythology had preceded it, would of itself have come upon gods, and have invented such if it found none.

Moreover as the Spirit, on this lower platform, has again the same relation to Matter that we have ascribed to the Soul (being the principle of activity and motion, as Matter is that of rest and inaction), the law that regulates Expression and Passion must be a fundamental principle of its nature.

But this law must be applicable not only to the lower passions, but also equally to those higher and godlike passions, if it is permitted so to call them, by which the Soul is affected in rapture, in devotion, in adoration. Hence, since from these passions the gods alone are exempt, Sculpture is inclined from this side also to the imaging of divine natures.

The nature of Painting, however, seems to differ entirely from that of Sculpture. For the former represents objects, not like the latter, by corporeal things, but by light and color, through a medium therefore itself incorporeal and in a measure spiritual. Painting, moreover, gives out its productions nowise as the things themselves, but expressly as pictures. From its very nature therefore it does not lay as much stress on the material as Sculpture, and seems indeed for this reason, while exalting the material above the spirit, to degrade itself more than Sculpture in a like case; on the other hand to be so much more justified in giving a clear preponderance to the Soul.

Where it aims at the highest it will indeed ennoble the passions by Character, or moderate them by Grace, or manifest in them the power of the Soul: but on the other hand it is precisely those higher passions, depending on the relationship of the Soul with a Supreme Being, that are entirely suited to the nature of Painting. Indeed, while Sculpture maintains an exact balance between the force whereby a thing exists outwardly and acts in Nature and that by virtue of which it lives inwardly and as Soul, and excludes mere suffering even from Matter, Painting may soften in favor of the Soul the characteristicness of the force and activity in Matter, and transform it into resignation and endurance, making it apparent that Man becomes more generally susceptible to the inspirations of the Soul, and to higher influences in general.

This diametrical difference explains of itself not only the necessary predominance of Sculpture in the ancient, and of Painting in the modern world (since in the former the tone of mind was thoroughly plastic, whereas the latter makes even the Soul the passive instrument of higher revelations); but this also is evident—that it is not enough to strive after the Plastic in form and manner of representation, but that it is requisite, before all, to think and to feel plastically, that is, antiquely.

And as the deviation of Sculpture into the picturesque is destructive to Art, so the narrowing down of Painting to the conditions and forms belonging to Sculpture is an arbitrarily imposed limitation. For while Sculpture, like gravitation, acts toward one point, it is permitted to Painting, as to light, to fill all space with its creative energy.

This unlimited universality of Painting is demonstrated by History itself, and by the examples of the greatest masters, who, without injury to the essential character of their art, have developed to perfection each particular stage by itself, so that we can find also in the history of Art the same sequence that may be pointed out in its nature—not indeed in exact order of time, but yet substantially. For thus is represented in Michelangelo the oldest and mightiest epoch of liberated Art, that in which it displays its yet uncontrolled strength in gigantic progeny; as in the fables of the symbolic Fore-world, the Earth, after the embrace of Uranus, brought forth at first Titans and heaven-storming giants before the mild reign of the serene gods began.

Thus the painting of the Last Judgment, with which, as the sum of his art, that giant spirit filled the Sistine Chapel, seems to remind us more of the first ages of the Earth and its products, than of its last. Attracted toward the most hidden abysses of organic, particularly of the human form, he shuns not the Terrible; nay, he seeks it purposely, and startles it from its repose in the dark workshops of Nature. Want of delicacy, grace, pleasingness, he balances by the extremest energy; and if he excites horror by his representations, it is the terror that, according to fable, the ancient god Pan spreads around him when he suddenly appears in the assemblies of men.

It is the method of Nature to produce the extraordinary by isolation and the exclusion of opposed qualities. Thus, it was necessary that, in Michelangelo, earnestness and the deep significant energy of Nature should prevail, rather than a sense of the grace and sensibility that belong to the Soul, in order to display the extreme of pure plastic force in the painting of modern times.

After the earlier violence and the vehement impulse of birth is assuaged, the spirit of Nature is transfigured into Soul, and Grace is born. This point Art reached, after Leonardo da Vinci, in Correggio, in whose works the sensuous Soul is the active principle of Beauty.

* * * * *

As the modern fable of Psyche closes the circle of the old mythology; so Painting, by giving a preponderance to the Soul, attained a new, though not a higher step of Art.

This Guido Reni strove after, and became the proper painter of the Soul. Such seems to us to be the necessary interpretation of his whole endeavor, often uncertain, and, in many of his works, losing itself in the vague.

This is shown, as, perhaps, in few of his other pictures, in the masterpiece that is offered to the admiration of all in the great collection of our king.

In the figure of the heavenward-ascending Virgin, all harshness and sternness are effaced, even to the last trace; and, indeed, does not Painting itself seem in it to soar upward, transfigured on its own pinions, as the liberated Psyche delivered from the severity of Form?

Here nothing outward remains, with separate natural force; everything expresses receptivity and still endurance, even the perishable flesh, the character of which the Italian language designates by the term morbidezza, altogether unlike that with which Raphael invests the descending Queen of Heaven, as she appears to the adoring pope and a saint.

Though the remark be well-founded, that the original of Guido's female heads is the Niobe of antiquity, yet the ground of this similarity is surely no mere intentional imitation; perhaps a like aim led to like means.

As the Florentine Niobe is an extreme in Sculpture, and the representation in it of the Soul, so this well-known picture is an extreme in Painting, which here ventures to lay aside even the requisite of shade and the obscure, and to work almost with pure Light.

Even though it might be permitted to Painting, from its peculiar nature, to give a distinct preponderance to the Soul, yet theory and instruction will do best constantly to aim at that original Centre, whence alone Art may be produced ever anew; whereas, at the stage last mentioned, it must necessarily stand still, or degenerate into cramped mannerism. For even that higher passion is opposed to the idea of having reached the acme of energy, whose image and reflex Art is called upon to display.

A right intelligence will ever enjoy seeing a creature worthily, and, as far as possible, also individually, represented; yea, Deity itself would look down with pleasure on a being that, gifted with a pure soul, should stoutly assert the dignity of its nature outwardly also, and by its sensually efficient existence.

We have seen how the work of Art, springing up out of the depths of Nature, begins with determinateness and limitation, unfolds its inward plenitude and infinity, is finally transfigured in Grace, and at last attains to Soul. But we can conceive only in detail what, in the creative act of mature Art, is but one operation. No theory and no rules can give this spiritual, creative power. It is the pure gift of Nature, which here, for the second time, makes a close; for, having fully actualized herself, she invests the creature with her creative energy. But as, in the grand progress of Art, these different stages appeared successively, until, at the highest, all joined in one; so also, in particulars, sound culture can spring up only where it has unfolded itself regularly from the germ and root to the blossom.

The requirement that Art, like everything living, should commence from the first rudiments, and, to renew its youth, constantly return to them, may seem a hard doctrine to an age that has so often been assured that it has only to take from works of Art already in existence the most consummate Beauty, and thus, as at a step, to reach the final goal. Have we not already the Excellent, the Perfect? How then should we return to the rudimentary and unformed?

Had the great founders of modern Art thought thus, we should never have seen their miracles. Before them also stood the creations of the ancients, round statues and works in relief, which they might have transferred immediately to their canvas. But such an appropriation of a Beauty not self-won, and therefore unintelligible, would not satisfy an artistic instinct that aimed throughout at the fundamental, and from which the Beautiful was again to create itself with free original energy. They were not afraid, therefore, to appear simple, artless, dry, beside those exalted ancients; nor to cherish Art for a long time in the undistinguished bud, until the period of Grace had arrived.

Whence comes it that we still look upon these works of the older masters, from Giotto to the teacher of Raphael, with a sort of reverence, indeed with a certain predilection, if not that the faithfulness of their endeavor, and the grand earnestness of their serene voluntary limitation, compel our respect and admiration.

The same relation that they held to the ancients, the present generation holds to them. Their time and ours are joined by no living transmission, no link of continuous, organic growth; we must reproduce Art in the way they did, but with energy of our own, in order to be like them.

Even that Indian-summer of Art, at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, could call forth only a few new blossoms on the old stem, but no productive germs, still less plant a new tree of Art. But to set aside the works of perfected Art, and to seek out its scanty and simple beginnings, as some have desired, would be a new and perhaps greater mistake; it would be no real return to the fundamental; simplicity would be affectation, and grow into hypocritical show.

But what prospect does the present time offer for an Art springing from a vigorous germ, and growing up from the root? For it is in a great measure dependent on the character of its time; and who would promise the approbation of the present time to such earnest beginnings, when Art, on the one hand, scarcely obtains equal consideration with other instruments of prodigal luxury, and, on the other, artists and amateurs, with entire want of ability to grasp Nature, praise and demand the Ideal?

Art springs only from that powerful striving of the inmost powers of the heart and the spirit, which we call Inspiration. Everything that from difficult or small beginnings has grown up to great power and height, owes its growth to Inspiration. Thus spring empires and states, thus arts and sciences. But it is not the power of the individual that accomplishes this, but the Spirit alone, that diffuses itself over all. For Art especially is dependent on the tone of the public mind, as the more delicate plants on atmosphere and weather; it needs a general enthusiasm for Sublimity and Beauty, like that which, in the time of the Medici, as a warm breath of spring, called forth at once and together all those great spirits.

* * * * *

It is only when the public life is actuated by the same forces through whose energy Art is elevated, that the latter can derive any advantage from it; for Art cannot, without giving up the nobility of its nature, aim at anything outward.

Art and Science can move only on their own axes; the artist, like every spiritual laborer, can follow only the law that God and Nature have written in his heart. None can help him—he must help himself; nor can he be outwardly rewarded, since anything that he should produce for the sake of aught out of itself, would thereby become a nullity; hence, too, no one can direct him, nor prescribe the path he is to tread. Is he to be pitied if he have to contend against his time, he is deserving of contempt if he truckle to it. But how should it be even possible for him to do this? Without great general enthusiasm there are only sects—no public opinion; not an established taste, not the great ideas of a whole people, but the voices of a few arbitrarily-appointed judges, determine as to merit; and Art, which in its elevation is self-sufficing, courts favor, and serves where it should rule.

To different ages are given different inspirations. Can we expect none for this age, since the new world now forming itself, as it exists in part already outwardly, in part inwardly and in the hearts of men, can no longer be measured by any standard of previous opinion, and since everything, on the contrary, loudly demands higher standards and an entire renovation?