Richard Wagner: The Art-Work of the Future (1849): Part III Chapter 2
Derrick Everett
Asiatics and Egyptians, in their representation of the natural
forces that governed them, had passed from the delineation of the
forms of beasts to that of the human figure itself; under which,
although in immoderate proportions and disfigured by repugnant
symbolism, they now sought to picture to themselves those forces.
They had no wish to copy man; but since man, at bottom, can only
conceive the highest in his own generic form, they involuntarily
transferred the human stature -- distorted for this very reason --
to the objects of their nature-worship.
In this sense, and from a similar impulse, we also see the oldest of
the Greek races (ältesten Hellenischen Stämmen) portraying their
gods, i.e., their deified and personified natural forces, under the
human shapes they hewed from wood or stone for objects of their
worship. The religious need for objectification of invisible, adored
or dreaded godlike powers, was answered by the oldest sculptural art
through the shaping of natural substances to imitate the human form;
just as Architecture answered an immediate human need by the fitting
and framing of natural 'stuffs' into what we may call a condensation
of nature's features to suit the special aim: as, for instance, we
may recognise in the god's temple the condensed presentment of the
god's grove. Now we have seen that if the man whose purpose informed
the builder's art had no thought for anything but the immediate
practical use, then this art would be nothing more than, or return
to being, a craft; while if, on the contrary, he were an artist and
set himself in the forefront of this purpose, as the man who had
already become the subject and the matter of his own artistic
treatment, he also raised the builder's craft to the status of art.
In like manner, so long as man felt bound in brutish slavery to
nature, he might indeed conceive the objects of his nature-worship
under the guise of a human form, but could only shape their plastic
images according to the standard by which he measured himself namely
in the garb and with the attributes of that nature on whom he felt
so brutishly dependent. But in measure as he raised himself his own
uncrippled body, and his inborn human faculties, to the stuff and
purport of his artistic handling, he gained the power to also show
his gods in the image of a free, undistorted human form; until at
last he frankly set before himself, in highest joy, this beauteous
human shape itself as nothing but the likeness of a man.
Here we touch the fatal ridge on which the living human art-work
splintered, and left its fragments to linger through an artificial
life of petrefaction in the monumental fixity of plastic art. The
discussion of this vital question we have been forced to reserve for
our present exposition of the art of Sculpture.
The first and earliest association of men was the work of nature.
The purely tribal fellowship, i.e., the circle of all those who
claimed descent from a common ancestor and the lineal seed of his
loins, is the original bond of union of every race of people that we
meet in history. This tribal stem preserves in its traditional
sagas, as in an ever lively memory, the instinctive knowledge of its
common ancestry: while the impressions derived from the particular
natural features of its surroundings exalt these legendary
recollections to the rank of religious ideas. Now, in however
manifold accretion these ideas and reminiscences may have heaped
themselves together and crowded into novel forms, among the
quickest-witted historical nations, owing to racial admixture on the
one hand and on the other to change of natural surroundings as the
result of tribal migration -- however broadly, in their sagas and
religions, these peoples may have stretched the narrowing bands of
nationality, so that the idea of their own particular origin was
expanded to the theory of a universal descent and derivation of men
in general from their gods, as from the gods in general; yet in
every epoch and every land where myth and religion have flourished
in the lively faith of any racial stem, the peculiar bond of union
of this particular stem has always lain in its specific myth and its
particular religion. The Hellenic races solemnised the joint
memorial celebration of their common descent in their religious
feasts, i.e., in the glorification and adoration of the god or hero
in whose being they felt themselves included as one common whole.
Finally and with the greatest truth to life -- as though from a felt
need to fix with utmost definition their recollection of what was
ever dropping farther back into the past -- they materialised their
national traditions in their art, and most directly in that
full-fledged work of art, the tragedy. The lyric and the dramatic
art-works were each a religious act: but there was already evinced
in this act, when compared with the simple primitive religious rite,
a taint of artificial effort; the effort, namely, to bring forward
of set purpose that common memory which had already lost its
immediate living impress on the life of every day. Thus tragedy was
the religious rite become a work of art, by side of which the
traditional observance of the genuinely religious temple rite was
necessarily docked of so much of its inwardness and truth that it
became nothing more than conventional and soulless ceremony, whereas
its kernel lived on in the art-work.
In the highly important matter of the externals of the religious
act, the tribal fellowship shows its communal character by certain
ancestral usages, by certain forms and garments. The garb of
religion is, so to speak, the costume of the tribe (Folkstamme) by
which it mutually recognises itself, and that at the first glance.
This garment, hallowed by the use of ages, this -- in a manner --
social-religious convention, had shifted from the religious to the
artistic rite, the tragedy; in it and by it the tragic actor
embodied the familiar, reverenced figure of the people's fellowship.
It was by no means the mere vastness of the theatre and the distance
of the audience, that prescribed the heightening of the human
stature by the cothurnus, or, precisely, that admitted the
employment of the immobile tragic mask -- but the cothurnus and the
mask were necessary, religiously significant attributes which,
accompanied by other symbolical tokens, first gave to the performer
his weighty character of priest. Now where a religion, commencing to
fade from daily life and wholly withdrawing from its political
aspect, is discernible by its outer garb alone, but this garment, as
with the Athenians, can only now take on the folds of actual life
when it forms the investiture of art: there must this actual life at
last confess itself the core of that religion, by frankly throwing
off its last disguise. But the core of the Hellenic religion, the
centre round which its whole system revolved, and which
instinctively asserted its exclusive rule in actual life, was: man.
It was for art to formulate aloud this plain confession: she did it,
when she cast aside the last concealing garment of religion, and
showed its core in simple nakedness, the actual bodily man.
Yet this unveiling was alike the final annihilation of the
collective artwork: for its bond of union had been that very garment
of religion. While the contents of the common mythical religion, the
traditional subject of dramatic art, were employed to point the
poet's moral, developed to fit his purpose, and finally disfigured
by his self-willed fancy, the religious belief had already
disappeared completely from the life of the people's fellowship, now
only linked by political interests. This belief however, the honour
paid to national gods, the sure assumption of the truth of primal
race-traditions, had formed the bond of all community. Was this now
rent and hooted as a heresy, at least the core of that religion had
come to light as unconditioned, actual, naked man; but this man was
no longer the associate man, united by the bond of tribal
fellowship: only the absolute, egoistic, solitary invididual: man
beautiful and naked but loosed from the beauteous bond of
brotherhood.
>From here on, from the shattering of the Greek religion, from the
wreck of the Grecian nature-State, and its resolution into the
political state -- from the splintering of the common tragic artwork
-- the manhood of world-history begins with measured tread its new
gigantic march of evolution, from the fallen natural kinsmanship of
national community to the universal fellowship of all mankind. The
band which the full-fledged man, coming to consciousness in the
Greeks, disrupted as a cramping fetter -- with this awakened
consciousness -- must now expand into a universal girdle embracing
all mankind. The period from that point of time down to our own
to-day is, therefore, the history of absolute egoism; and the end of
this period will be its redemption into communism (Gemeinsamkeit).
The art which has taken this solitary, egoistic, naked man, the
point of departure of the said world-historical period, and set him
up before us as a beauteous monument of admonition -- is the art of
Sculpture, which reached its height exactly at the time when the
conjoint human art-work of Tragedy declined from its meridian.
The beauty of the human body was the foundation ot all Hellenic art,
nay even of the natural State. We know that with the noblest of
Hellenic stems, the Doric Spartans, the healthiness and unmarred
beauty of the newborn child made out the terms on which alone it was
allowed to live, while puling deformity was denied the right of
life. This beauteous naked man is the kernel of all Spartanhood:
from genuine delight in the beauty of the most perfect human body,
that of the male, arose that spirit of comradeship which pervades
and shapes the whole economy of the Spartan state. This love of man
to man, in its primitive purity, proclaims itself as the noblest and
least selfish utterance of man's sense of beauty, for it teaches man
to sink and merge his entire self in the object of his affection.
And exactly in degree as woman, in perfected womanhood, through love
to man and sinking of herself within his being, has developed the
manly element of that womanhood and brought it to a thorough balance
with the purely womanly, and thus in measure as she is no longer
merely man's beloved but his friend, can man find fullest
satisfaction in the love of woman.
The higher element of that love of man to man consisted even in
this: that it excluded the motive of egoistic physicalism.
Nevertheless it not only included a purely spiritual bond of
friendship, but this spiritual friendship was the blossom and the
crown of the physical friendship. The latter sprang directly from
delight in the beauty, aye, in the material, bodily beauty of the
beloved comrade; yet this delight was no egoistic yearning, but a
thorough stepping out of self into unreserved sympathy with the
comrade's joy in himself involuntarily betrayed by his life-glad,
beauty-prompted bearing. This love, which had its basis in the
noblest pleasures of both eye and soul -- not like our modern postal
correspondence of sober friendship, half businesslike, half
sentimental -- was the Spartan's only tutoress of youth, the never
aging instructress alike of boy and man, the ordainer of the common
feasts and valiant enterprises; nay, the inspiring help-meet on the
battlefield. For this it was that knit the fellowships of love into
battalions of war and forewrote the tactics of death-daring, in
rescue of the imperilled or vengeance for the slaughtered comrade,
by the infrangible laws of the soul's most natural necessity.
The Spartan who thus directly carried out in life his purely human,
communistic artwork, instinctively portrayed it also in his Lyric;
that most direct expression of joy in self and life, which hardly
reached in its impulsive (nothwendig) utterance to art's self-
consciousness. In the prime of the Doric state, the Spartan lyric
bent so irresistibly towards the original basis of all art, the
living Dance, that -- characteristically enough! -- it has scarcely
handed down to us one single literary memento of itself; precisely
because it was a pure, physical expression of lovely life, and
warded off all separation of the art of Poetry from those of Dance
and Tone. Even the transitional stage from the lyric to the drama,
such as we may recognise in the epic songs, remained a stranger to
the Spartans; and it is sufficiently significant, that the Homeric
songs were collected in the Ionic, not the Doric dialect. Whereas
the Ionic peoples, and notably in the event, the Athenians,
developed themselves into political states under influence of the
liveliest mutual intercourse, and preserved in tragedy the artistic
representation of the religion which was melting out of life: the
Spartans, as a shut-off inland people, kept faithful to their
old-hellenic character, and held their unmixed nature-state, as a
living monument of art, against the changeful fashionings of the
newer life of politics. Whatever in the hurry and confusion of the
destructive restlessness of these new times sought rescue or
support, now turned its gaze toward Sparta. The statesman sought to
scrutinise the forms of this early state, to convey them
artificially to the political state of his day; while the artist,
who saw the common artwork of the tragedy sloughing and crumbling
before his very eyes, looked forth to where he might descry the
kernel of this artwork, the beauteous old-Hellenic man, and preserve
it for his art. As Sparta towered up, a living monument of older
times: so did the art of Sculpture crystallise in stone the
old-Hellenic human being which she had recognised within this living
monument, and garner up the lifeless monument of bygone beauty for
coming times of quickening barbarism.
But when Athens turned its eyes to Sparta, the worm of general
egoism was already gnawing its destructive path into this fair state
too. The Peloponnesian War had dragged it, all unwilling, into the
whirlpool of the newer times; and Sparta had only been able to
vanquish Athens by the very weapons which the Athenians had erewhile
made so terrible and unassailable to it. Instead of their simple
iron-bars -- those tokens of contempt for money, as compared with
human worth -- the minted gold of Asia was heaped within the
Spartan's coffers; leaving behind the ancient, frugal "communal
mess," he retired to his sumptuous banquet between his own four
walls; and the noble love of man to man -- whose motive had been an
even higher one than that of love to woman -- degenerated, as it had
already done in the other Hellenic states, into its unnatural
counterpart.
This is the man, lovely in his person but unlovely in his selfish
isolation, that the Sculptor's art has handed down to us in marble
and in bronze: motionless and cold, like a petrified remembrance,
like the mummy of the Grecian world.
This art, the hireling of the rich for the adornment of their
palaces, the easier won a troop of practisers as its creative
process lent itself to speedy degradation to a mere mechanical
labour. Certainly, the subject of the Sculptor's art is man, that
protean host of countless hues of character and myriad passions: but
this art depicts alone his outer physical stature, in which there
only lies the husk and not the kernel of the human being. True, that
the inner man shows out most palpably through all his outward
semblance; but this he only does completely in, and by means of;
motion. The Sculptor can only seize and reproduce one single moment
from all this manifold play of movements, and must leave the real
motion itself to be unriddled from the physical relief of the work
of art, by a process of mathematical computation. When once the most
direct and surest mode of reaching from this poverty of means to a
speaking likeness of actual life had been found -- when once the
perfect measure of outward human show had been thought into the
bronze and marble, and the power to persuade us of the truth of its
reflection had been wrested from them -- this method, once
discovered, could easily be learned; and Sculpture could live on
from imitation to copy ad infinitum, bringing forth her store of
products, graceful, beautiful, and true, without receiving any
sustenance from real creative force. Thus we find that in the era of
the Roman world-empire, when all artistic instinct had long since
died away, the art of Sculpture brought forth a multitude of works
in which there seemed to dwell an artist soul, despite their really
owing all their being to a mere mechanical gift of imitation. She
could become a lovely handicraft when she had ceased to be an art;
and the latter she was for only just so long as she had anything to
discover, anything to invent. But the repetition of a discovery is
nothing more nor less than imitation.
Through the chinks of the iron-mailed, or monk-cowled, Middle Ages
there shone at last the glimmer of the marble flesh of Grecian
bodily beauty, and greeted hungry humankind with its first new taste
of life. It was in this lovely stone, and not in the actual life of
the ancient world, that the modern was to learn fair man again. Our
modern art of Sculpture sprang from no lively impulse to portray the
actual extant man, whom it could scarcely see beneath his modish
covering, but from a longing to copy the counterfeit presentment of
a physically extinct race of men. It is the expression of an
honourable wish to reach back from an unlovely present to the past,
and therefrom to reconstruct lost beauty. As the gradual vanishing
of human beauty from actual existence was the first cause of the
artistic development of Sculpture, which, as though in a last effort
to fix the fading image of a common good, wanted to preserve it in
a monumental token -- so the modern impulse to reproduce those
monuments could only find its motive in the total absence of this
beauteous man from modern life. Wherefore, since this impulse could
never spring from life and find in life its satisfaction, but for
ever swayed from monument to monument, from image to image, stone to
stone: our modern Sculpture, a mere plagiarism of the genuine art,
was forced to take the character of a craftsman's trade, in which
the wealth of rules and canons by which her hand was guided but
bared her poverty as art, her utter inability to invent. But while
she busily set forth her self and products, in place of vanished
beauteous man -- while, in a sense, her art was only fostered by
this lack -- she fell at last into her present selfish isolation, in
which she, so to say, but plays the barometer to the ugliness that
still prevails in life; and, indeed, with a certain complacent
feeling of her -- relative -- necessity amid such atmospheric
conditions.
Modern Sculpture can only answer to any vestige of a need, for
precisely so long as the loveliness of man is not at hand in actual
life: the resurrection of this beauty, its immediate influence on
the fashioning of life, must inevitably throw down our present
"plastics." For the need to which alone this art can answer --
indeed, the need which she herself concocts -- is that which yearns
to flee the unloveliness of life; not that which, springing from an
actual lovely life, strives toward the exhibition of this life in
living artwork. The true, creative, artistic craving proceeds from
fullness, not from void: while the fullness of the modern art of
Sculpture is merely the wealth of the monuments bequeathed to us by
Grecian plastic artists. Now, from this fullness she cannot create,
but is merely driven back to it from hack of beauty in surrounding
life; she plunges herself within this fullness, in order to escape
from lack.
Thus bare of all inventive power, she coquets at last with the forms
to hand in present life, in her despairing attempt to invent, cost
what it may. She casts around her the garment of fashion, and so as
to be recognised and rewarded by this life, she models the
unbeautiful; in order to be true -- that is to say, true according
to our notions -- she gives up all her hopes of beauty. So, during
the continuance of those same conditions which maintain her in her
artificial life, Sculpture falls into that wretched, sterile, or
ugliness - begetting state in which she must inevitably yearn for
nothing but redemption. The life-conditions, however, into which she
desires to be released are, rightly measured, the conditions of that
very life in presence of which the art of Sculpture must straightway
cease to be an independent art. To gain the power of creating, she
yearns for the reign of loveliness in actual life; from which she
merely hopes to win the living matter for her invention. But the
fulfilment of this desire could only lay bare the egoism of its
inherent self-delusion; inasmuch as the conditions for the necessary
operation of the art of Sculpture must, in any case, he utterly
annulled when actual life shall itself be fair of body.
In present life the independent art of Sculpture but answers to a
relative need: although to this she stands indebted for her
existence of to-day; indeed, for her very prime. But that other
state of things, the antithesis of the modern state, is that in
which an imperative need for the works of sculptural art cannot be
so much as reasonably imagined. If man's whole life pay homage to
the principle of beauty, if he make his living body fair to see,
rejoicing in the beauty that he himself displays: then is the
subject and the matter of the artistic exhibition of this beauty,
and of the delight therein, without a doubt the whole warm, living
man himself. His art-work is the drama; and the redemption of
Sculpture is just this: the disenchantment of the stone into the
flesh and blood of man; out of immobility into motion, out of the
monumental into the temporal. Only when the artistic impulse of the
Sculptor shall have passed into the soul of the dancer -- the
mimetic expositor who both sings and speaks -- can this impulse be
conceived as truly satisfied. Only when the art of statuary no
longer exists, or rather, has passed along another direction than
that of the human body, namely as "sculpture" into "architecture";
when the frozen loneliness of this solitary stone-hewn man shall
have been resolved into the endless- streaming multitude of actual
living men; when we recall the memory of the beloved dead in ever
newborn, soul-filled flesh and blood, and no more in lifeless brass
or marble; when we take the stones to build the living art-work's
shrine, and require them no longer for our imaging of living man,
then first will the true plastique be at our hand.
(Tr. W.A. Ellis, with some corrections and changes for readability)
--
Derrick Everett
======= Writing from 59°54'N 10°37'E =======
http://home.c2i.net/monsalvat/index.htm
http://home.c2i.net/monsalvat/wagnerfaq.htm