Richard Wagner: The Art-Work of the Future (1849): Part III Chapter 3
Derrick Everett
Just as, when we are denied the pleasure of hearing the symphonic
playing of an orchestra, we seek to recall our enjoyment by a
pianoforte rendering; just as, when we are no longer permitted to
gaze upon the colours of an oil-painting in a picture-gallery, we
strive by aid of an engraving to refresh the impression which they
have left, so had Painting, if not in her origination, yet in her
artistic evolution, to answer to the yearning need of calling back
to memory the lost features of the living human artwork.
We must pass by her raw beginnings, when, like Sculpture, she sprang
from the as yet unartistic impulse toward the symbolising of
religious ideas; for she first attained artistic significance at the
epoch when the living artwork of tragedy was fading, and the
brilliant tints of Painting sought to fix the vision of those
wondrous, pregnant scenes which no longer offered their immediate
warmth of life to the beholder.
Thus the Grecian artwork was solemnly remembered in Painting. This
harvest was not that which sprang by natural necessity from the
wealth of life; its necessity was the rather that of culture; it
issued from a conscious, arbitrary motive, to wit the knowledge of
the loveliness of art, united with the wilful purpose to force, as
it were, this loveliness to linger in a life to which it no longer
belonged instinctively as the unconscious, necessary expression of
that life's inmost soul. That art which, unbidden and of her own
accord, had blossomed from the communion of the people's life, had
likewise by her active presence, and through the regardal of her
demeanour, called up the mental concept (Begriff) of her essence;
for it was not the idea of art that had summoned her to life, but
herself; the actual breathing art, had evolved the "Idea" from out
herself.
The artistic power of the people, thrusting forward with all the
necessity of a natural force, was dead and buried; what it had done,
lived only now in memory, or in the artificial reproduction. Whereas
the people, in all its actions and especially in its self-wrought
destruction of national, pent-up insularity, has through all time
proceeded by the law of inner necessity, and thus in thorough
harmony with the majestic evolution of the human race: the lonely
spirit of the artist -- to whose yearning for the beautiful the
unbeauteous manifestments of the people's life-stress must ever stay
a dark enigma -- could only console itself by looking backward to
the artwork of a bygone era, and, recognising the impossibility of
arbitrarily relivening that artwork, could only make this solace as
lasting as might be, by freshening up with lifelike details the
harvest of its recollections -- just as through a portrait we
preserve to our memory the features of a loved lost friend. So art
herself became an object of art; the "idea" derived from her became
her law; and cultured art -- the art that can be learnt, and always
refers back to itself -- began its life-career. The latter, as we
may see to-day, can be pursued without a halt in the least artistic
times and amid the most sordid circumstances; yet only for the
selfish pleasure of a culture that is isolated, divorced from life
and yearning for art.
The senseless attempt to reconstruct the tragic artwork by purely
imitative reproduction -- such as was engaged in, for instance, by
the poets of the Alexandrian court -- was most advantageously
avoided by Painting; for she gave up the lost as lost, and answered
the impulse to restore it by the cultivation of a special, and
peculiar, artistic faculty of man. Though this faculty required a
greater variety of media for its operation, yet Painting soon won a
marked advantage over Sculpture. The sculptor's work displayed the
material likeness of the whole man in lifelike form, and, thus far,
stood nearer to the living artwork of self-portraying man than did
the painter's work, which was only able to render, so to speak, his
tinted shadow. As in both counterfeits, however, the breath of life
was unattainable, and motion could only be indicated to the thought
of the spectator, to whose imagination its conceivable extension
must be left to be worked out by certain natural laws of inductive
reasoning; so Painting, in that she looked still farther aside from
the reality, and depended still more on artistic illusion than did
Sculpture, was able to take a more ideal poetic flight than she.
Finally, Painting was not obliged to content herself with the
representation of this one man, or of that particular group or
combination to which the art of Statuary was restricted; rather, the
artistic illusion became so preponderant a necessity to her, that
she had not only to draw into the sphere of her portrayal a wealth
of correlated human groups extended both in length and breadth, but
also the circle of their extrahuman surroundings, the scenes of
nature herself. This led to an entirely novel step in the evolution
of man's artistic faculties, both perceptive and executive: namely,
that of the inner comprehension and reproduction of nature, by means
of landscape painting.
This moment is of the highest importance for the whole range of
plastic art: it brings this art -- which began, in Architecture,
with the observation and artistic exploitation of nature for the
benefit of man -- which in Sculpture, as though for the deification
of man, exalted him as its only subject, to its complete conclusion,
by turning it at last, with ever growing understanding, entirely
back from man to nature; and this inasmuch as it enabled plastic art
to take her by the hand of intimate friendship, and thus, as it
were, to broaden Architecture out to a full and lifelike portraiture
of nature. Human egoism, which in naked Architecture was forever
referring nature to its own exclusive self; to some extent broke up
in landscape painting, which vindicated nature's individual rights
and prompted artistic man to loving absorption into her, in order
there to find himself again, immeasurably amplified.
When Grecian painters sought to fix the memory of the scenes which
had erstwhile been presented to their actual sight and hearing in
the lyric, in the lyrical epos, and in the tragedy, and to picture
them again in outline and in colour; without a doubt they considered
men alone as worthy objects of their exhibition; and it is to the
so-called historical tendency that we owe the raising of Painting to
her first artistic height. As she thus preserved the united artwork
green in memory, so when the conditions that summoned forth the
passionate preservation of these memories vanished quite away, there
yet remained two byways open, along which the art of Painting could
carry on her further independent self-development: the portrait and
the landscape. True, that landscape had already been appropriated
for the necessary background of the scenes from Homer and the tragic
poets: but at the time of their painting's prime the Greeks looked
on landscape with no other eye than that with which the peculiar
bent of the Grecian character had caused them to regard the whole of
nature. With the Greeks, nature was merely the distant background of
the human being: well in the foreground stood man himself; and the
gods to whom he assigned the force controlling nature were
anthropomorphic gods. He sought to endue everything he saw in nature
with human shape and human being; as humanised, she had for him that
endless charm in whose enjoyment it was impossible for his sense of
beauty to look on her from such a standpoint as that of our modern
Judaistic utilitarianism, and make of her a mere inanimate object of
his sensuous pleasure. However, he but cherished this beautiful
relationship between himself and nature from an involuntary error:
in his anthropomorphosis of nature he credited her with human
motives which, necessarily contrasted with the true character of
nature, could be only arbitrarily assumed as operating within her.
As man, in all his life and all his relations to nature, acts from a
necessity peculiar to his own being, he unwittingly distorts her
character when he conceives nature as behaving not according to her
own necessity but to that of man. Although this error took a
beauteous form among the Greeks, while among other races, especially
those of Asia, its utterances were for the most part hideous, it was
none the less destructive in its influence on Hellenic life. When
the Greek broke adrift from his ancestral bond of national
communion, when he lost the standard of life's beauty that he had
drawn from it instinctively, he was unable to replace this needful
standard by one derived from a correct survey of surrounding nature.
He had unconsciously perceived in nature a coherent, encompassing
necessity for just so long as this same necessity came before his
consciousness as a ground condition of his communal life. But when
the latter crumbled into its egoistic atoms, when the Greek was
ruled by naught but the caprice of his own selfwill, no longer
harmonised by brotherhood, or eventually submitted to an arbitrary
outer force that gained its leverage from this general selfwill;
then with his faulty knowledge of nature, whom he deemed as
capricious as himself and the worldly might that governed him, he
lacked the certain standard by which he could have learnt to measure
out himself again; that standard which nature offers as their
highest boon to those men who recognise her innermost necessity and
learn to know the eternal harmony of her creative forces, working in
widest compass through each separate individual.
It is from this error alone, that arose those vast excesses of the
Grecian mind which we see attaining under the Byzantine empire a
pitch that quite obscures the old Hellenic character, yet which were
but, at bottom, the normal blemishes of its good qualities.
Philosophy might put forth its honestest endeavour to grasp the
harmony of nature: it only showed how impotent is the might of
abstract intellect. In defiance of all the saws of Aristotle, the
people, in its desire to win itself an absolute bliss from the midst
of this million-headed egoism, formed itself a religion in which
nature was made the pitiful plaything of the quibbling search for
human blessedness. It only needed the Grecian view of nature's
government by selfwilled, human-borrowed motives to be wedded to the
Judao-oriental theory of her subservience to human use; for the
disputations and decrees of Councils anent the essence of the
Trinity, and the interminable strifes, nay national wars therefrom
arising, to face astounded history with the irrefutable fruits of
this intermarriage.
Towards the close of the Middle Ages, the Roman Church raised its
assumption of the immobility of the earth to the rank of an article
of belief: but it could not prevent America from being discovered,
the conformation of the globe mapped out, and nature's self at last
laid so far bare to knowledge that the inner harmony of all her
manifold phenomena has now been proved to demonstration. The impulse
that led toward these discoveries sought, at like time, to find an
utterance in that branch of art which was of all best fitted for its
artistic satisfaction. With the Renaissance of art, Painting also,
in eager struggle for ennoblement, linked on her own new birth to
the revival of the antique; beneath the shelter of the prosperous
Church she waxed to the portrayal of its chronicles, and passed from
these to scenes of veritable history and actual life, still
profiting by the advantage that she yet could take her form and
colour from this actual life. But the more the physical present was
crushed by the marring influence of Fashion, and the more the newer
school of historical painting, in order to be beautiful, saw itself
compelled by the unloveliness of life to construct from its own
fancy and to combine from styles and manners twice borrowed from
arthistory -- not from life -- the farther did Painting, departing
from the portraiture of modish man, strike out that path to which we
owe the loving understanding of nature in the landscape.
Man, around whom the landscape had grouped itself as round its
egoistic centre, shrank ever smaller against the fullness of his
surroundings, in direct proportion as he bowed beneath the unworthy
yoke of disfiguring fashion in his daily life; so that at last he
played the role in landscape which before had been assigned to
landscape as a foil to him. Under the given circumstances, we can
only celebrate this advance of landscape as a victory of nature over
base and man-degrading culture. For therein undisfigured nature
asserted herself; in the only possible mode, against her foe;
inasmuch as, seeking for a sanctuary the while, she laid bare
herself; as though from very want, to the inner understanding of
artistic man.
Modern natural science and landscape painting are the only outcomes
of the present which, either from an artistic or a scientific point
of view, offer us the smallest consolation in our impotence, or
refuge from our madness. Amid the hopeless splintering of all our
artistic endeavours, the solitary genius who for a moment binds them
into almost violent union, may accomplish feats the more astounding
as neither the need nor the conditions for his art-work are now to
hand: the general concensus of the Painter's art, however, takes
almost solely the direction of the landscape. For here it finds
inexhaustible subjects, and thereby an inexhaustible capacity;
whereas in every other attempt to shadow nature forth, it can only
proceed by arbitrary sifting, sorting, and selecting, to garner from
our absolutely inartistic life an object worthy of artistic
treatment.
The more the so-called historical school of painting is busied with
its efforts to build up and explain to us the genuine beauteous man
and genuine beauteous life, by reminiscences from the farthest past;
the more, with all its prodigious outlay of expedients, it confesses
the heaviness of the burden imposed upon it, to seek to be more and
other than behoves the nature of one single branch of art; so much
the more must it long for a redemption which, like that destined for
Sculpture, can only consist in its ascension into that from which it
drew the original force that gave to it artistic life; and this is
even the living human art-work, whose very birth from life must
dismiss the conditions that made possible the being and the
prospering of Painting as an independent branch of art. The
man-portraying art of Painting will never find it possible to lead a
healthy, necessary life; when, without a pencil or a canvas, in
liveliest artistic setting, the beauteous man portrays himself in
full perfection. What she now toils to reach by honest effort, she
then will reach in perfect measure, when she bequeaths her colour
and her skill of composition to the living "plastic" of the real
dramatic representant; when she steps down from her canvas and her
plaster, and stands upon the tragic stage; when she bids the artist
carry out in his own person what she toiled in vain to consummate by
heaping up of richest means without the breath of actual life.
But landscape painting, as last and perfected conclusion of all the
plastic arts, will become the very soul of Architecture; she will
teach us so to rear the stage for the dramatic artwork of the future
that on it, herself imbued with life, she may picture forth the warm
background of nature for living, no longer counterfeited, man.
If we may thus regard the scene of the collected Art-Work of the
Future as won by the highest power of plastic art, and therewith as
attained the inmost knowledge of familiar nature: we may now proceed
to take a closer view of the nature of this art-work itself.
(Tr. W.A. Ellis, with some corrections and changes for readability)
--
Derrick Everett
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