Richard Wagner: The Art-Work of the Future (1849): Part III Chapter 1
Derrick Everett
Chapter 1. Architectural Art
As man becomes the subject and the matter of his own art, in the first
and highest reference, so does he extend his longing for artistic
portrayal to the objects of surrounding, allied, ministering nature.
Exactly in proportion as man knows how to grasp the reference of nature
to himself in his portrayal of her, and to set himself in the centre of
his survey of the world as the conscience-woken and the conscience-
wakener, is he able to picture nature to himself artistically; and
thereafter to impart her to the only beings for whom this portrait can
be destined; to wit, to men. In this he proceeds from a like, though
not an equally imperative, impulse to that which urged the art-work
whose subject and whose stuff he was himself. But only the man who has
already brought forth from and in himself the directly human artwork,
and can thus both comprehend and impart himself artistically, is also
able to represent nature to himself artistically; not the unawakened
thrall of nature. The Asiatic peoples, and even the Egyptians -- to
whom nature only showed herself as a self-willed, elementary, or
brutish force, to which man stood in the relation either of
unconditioned suffering or of grovelling self-debasement -- set nature
up above them as the object of their adoration, the graven symbol of
their worship; without, for that very reason, being able to exalt
themselves to free, artistic consciousness. Here, then, man could never
form the subject of his own artistic exposition; but seeing that,
whether he willed or no, he could only conceive all personality -- such
as the personified force of nature -- according to a human standard, he
made over his own image, although n horrible distortion, to those
objects of nature that he wanted to portray.
It was reserved for the Greeks to first evolve the purely-human (rein
menschliche) art-work in their own person, and from that to expand it
to the exposition of nature. But they could not be ripe for this human
art-work itself until they had conquered nature, in the sense in which
she presented herself to the Asiatic peoples, and had so far set man on
nature's pinnacle that they conceived those personified nature-forces
as clothed with the perfect shape of human beauty, as Gods that bore
themselves as men. First when Zeus breathed life throughout the world
from his Olympian height, when Aphrodite rose from out the sea-foam,
and Apollo proclaimed the spirit and the form of his own being as the
law of beauteous human life, did the uncouth nature-deities of Asia
vanish with their idols, and fair artistic man, awakening to
self-consciousness, apply the laws of human beauty to his conception
and his portraiture of nature.
Before the God's-oak at Dodona the Pelasgian ("primal Greek") bowed
himself in waiting for the oracle; beneath the shady thatch of leaves,
and circled by the verdant pillars of the god's grove, the Orpheist
raised his voice; but under the fair-ceiled roof, and amid the symmetry
of marble columns of the god's temple, the art-glad lyrist led the
mazes of his dance, to strains of sounding hymns -- and in the theatre,
which reared itself around the God's-altar -- as its central point --
on the one hand to the message-giving stage, on the other to the ample
rows where sat the message-craving audience, the tragedian brought to
birth the living work of consummated art.
Thus did artistic man, of his longing for artistic commune with himself
rule nature to his own artistic needs and bid her serve his highest
purpose. Thus did the lyrist and tragedian command the architect to
build the artistic edifice which should answer to their art in worthy
manner.
It was basic natural need that led men to build homes and strongholds:
but in that land and mid that folk from which our whole art originates,
it was not this purely physical need, but the need of men engaged in
artistic presentation of themselves, that was destined to convert the
Handicraft of building into a genuine art. Not the royal dwellings of
Theseus and Agamemnon, not the rude rock-built walls of Pelasgian
citadels, have reached our physical or even our mental field of vision
-- but the temples of the gods, the tragic theatres of the people.
Every relic that has come to us of architectural art applied to objects
outside these, dates after the decline of tragedy, i.e. of the
completed Grecian art, and is essentially of Asiatic origin.
As the Asiatic, that perpetual thrall of nature, could only show the
majesty of man in the one and absolute ruling despot, so did he heap
all pomp of circumstance around this "god on earth" alone: and all this
heaping-up was merely reckoned for the satisfaction of that egoistic
sensuous longing which, even to the pitch of brutish fury, but wills
itself but loves itself to madness, and in such never-sated appetite
piles object upon object, mass on mass, in order to attain a final
satisfaction of its prodigiously developed physicality. Luxury,
therefore, is the root of all the Asiatic architecture: its monstrous,
soulless sense-confounding outcrop we witness in the city-seeming
palaces of Asiatic despots.
Sweet repose and noble charm breathe on us, on the other hand, from the
radiant aspect of Hellenic temples; in which we recognise the form of
nature, but spiritualised by human art. The broadening of the temple of
the gods to the assembled people's show-place of the highest human art,
was the theatre; where art, and verily that common-nurtured art which
communed with a commonwealth, was a law and standard to herself;
proceeding by her own necessity and answering that necessity to the
fullest; nay, bringing forth therefrom the boldest and most marvellous
creations.
Meanwhile the dwellings of the individual units but answered to the
need from which they sprang. Originally carpentered of wooden logs, and
fitted -- like the pavilion of Achilles -- in accordance with the
simplest
laws of usefulness: in the heyday of Hellenic culture they were indeed
adorned with walls of polished stone, and duly broadened out to give
free space for hospitality; but they never stretched themselves beyond
the natural needs of private persons, and neither in nor by them did
the individual seek to satisfy a longing, which he found appeased in
noblest fashion in the common polity; from which alone, at bottom, it
can spring.
The attitude of Architecture was entirely reversed, when the common
bonds of public life dissolved, and the self-indulgence of the unit
laid down her laws. When the private person no longer sacrificed to
gods in common, to Zeus and to Apollo, but solely to the lonely
bliss-purveyor Plutus, the god of riches -- when each would be for his
particular self what he had erstwhile only been amid the general
community -- then did he take the architect also into his pay, and bade
him build a temple for his idol, egoism. But the slender temple of
chaste Athene sufficed not the rich egoist for his private pleasures:
his household goddess was Voluptuousness, with her all-devouring, never
sated maw. To her must Asiatic piles be reared, for her consumption;
and only bizarre curves and flourishes could seek to stanch her whim.
Thus we see the despotism of Asia stretching out its beauty-crushing
arms into the very heart of Europe -- as though in vengeance for
Alexander's conquest -- and exercising its might to such effect beneath
the imperial rule of Rome, that beauty, having fled completely from the
living conscience of mankind, was only known from memory of the past.
The most prosperous centuries of the Roman era present us, therefore,
with the repugnant spectacle of pomp swelled up to a monstrosity in the
palaces of the Emperors and richer classes, and utilitarianism --
however colossal in its proportions -- stalking naked through the
public buildings.
Public life, having sunk to a mere general expression of the universal
egoism, had no longer any care for the beautiful; it now knew naught
but practical utility. The beautiful had withdrawn in favour of the
absolutely useful; for the delight in man had contracted to the
exclusive lust of the belly. To speak plainly, it is to the
satisfaction of the belly that all this public utilitarianism leads
back, especially in our modern time with its boasted practical
inventions, this time which -- characteristically enough! -- the more
it invents, in this sense, the less is able to really fill the stomachs
of the hungry classes. But where men had forgotten that the truly
beautiful is likewise the highest expression of the useful, in so much
as it can only manifest itself in life when the needs of life are
secured a natural satisfaction, and not made harder, or interdicted, by
useless prescripts of utility -- where the public care was concentrated
on the catering for food and drink, and the utmost stilling of this
care proclaimed itself as the vital condition of the rule of Cæsars
and
of plutocrats alike; and that in such gigantic measure as during the
Roman mastery of the world -- there arose those astounding causeways
and aqueducts which we seek to-day to rival by our railway-tracks;
there did nature become a milch-cow, and Architecture a milking-pail;
the wanton splendour of the rich lived on the skilful skimming of the
cream from off the gathered milk, which then was taken, blue and
watery, along those aqueducts to the beloved rabble.
Yet with the Romans this utilitarian toil and moil, this ostentation,
put on imposing forms: the radiant world of Greece lay not so far from
them but that, for all their practical stolidity and all their Asiatic
gaudiness, they still could cast an ogling glance towards her; so that
our eyes discern, and rightly, outspread over all the buildings of the
Roman world a majestic charm which almost seems to us a beauty. But
whatever has accrued to us from that same world, across the steeples of
the Middle Ages, lacks both the charm of beauty and of majesty; for
where we still may trace a gloomy shade of undelighting majesty, as in
the colossal domes of our cathedrals, we see alas! no longer any drop
of beauty. The genuine temples of our modern religion, the buildings of
the Stock Exchange, are certainly most ingenuously propped by Grecian
columns; Greek tympana invite us to our railroad journeys; and from
under the Athenian Parthenon the military guard is marched towards us,
on its 'relief'; but however elevating these exceptions may be, they
are still only exceptions, and as a rule our utilitarian architecture
is desperately vile and trivial. Let the modern art of building bring
forth the gracefullest and most imposing edifice she can, she still can
never keep from sight her shameful want of independence: for our
public, as our private, needs are of such a kind that, in order to
supply them, Architecture can never produce, but forever merely copy,
merely piece together. Only a real need makes man inventive: while the
real need of our present era asserts itself in the language of the
rankest utilitarianism; therefore it can only get its answer from
mechanical contrivances, and not from art's creations. That which lies
beyond this actual need, however, is with us the need of luxury, of the
unneeded; and it is only by the superfluous and unneeded that
Architecture can serve it; i.e. she reproduces the buildings which
earlier epochs had produced from their felt need of beauty; she pieces
together the individual details of these works, according to her wanton
fancy; out of a restless longing for alteration, she stitches every
national style of building throughout the world into her motley,
disconnected botches; in short, she follows the caprice of fashion,
whose frivolous laws she needs must make her own because she nowhere
hears the call of inner, beautiful necessity.
Architecture has thus to share in all the humbling destiny of the
divided purely-human arts; to the extent that she can only be incited
to a true formative process by the need of men who manifest, or long to
manifest, their own inborn beauty. In step with the withering of
Grecian tragedy, her fall began; that is, her own peculiar productive
power commenced to weaken. The most lavish of the monuments which she
was forced to rear to the glory of the colossal egoism of later times
-- even of that of the Christian faith -- seem, when set beside the
lofty simplicity and pregnant meaning of Grecian buildings at the
flowering-time of tragedy, like the rank, luxuriant parasites of some
midnight dream, against the radiant progeny of the cleansing, all-
enlivening light of day.
Only together with the redemption of the egoistically severed, purely-
human arts into the collective Art-Work of the Future, and with the
redemption of utilitarian man himself into the artistic manhood of the
future, will Architecture also be redeemed from the bond of serfdom,
from the curse of barrenness, into the freest, inexhaustible fertility
of art-resource.
(Tr. W.A. Ellis, with some corrections and changes for readability)
--
Derrick Everett
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