REPOST: The Art-Work of the Future - Part 1 Chapter 6
Derrick Everett
because of propagation problems with the previous posting. Some
participants in the group have reported that they did not receive
all of the parts. I apologize to anyone who receives them twice.
Part I - Chapter 6. Standard for the Art-work of the Future
It is not the lonely spirit, striving by means of art for redemption
into nature, that can frame the art-work of the future; only the
spirit of fellowship, fulfilled by life, can bring this work to
pass. Yet the lonely one can prefigure it to himself; and the thing
that saves his preconception from becoming a mere idle fancy, is the
very character of his striving: his striving after nature. The mind
that casts back longing eyes to nature, and therefore goes hungry in
the modern present, sees not alone in nature's great sum-total, but
also in the human nature that history lays before it, the human
types from whose study it may reconcile itself with life in general.
It recognises in this nature a type for all the future, already
shown in narrower bounds; to widen out these bounds to broadest
compass, rests on the imaginative faculty of its nature-craving
instinct.
Two cardinal moments of his development lie clear before us in the
history of man: the generic national, and the unnational universal.
If we still look forward to the future for the completion of the
second evolutionary step, yet in the past we have the rounded-off
conclusion of the first set, clear as day, before our eyes. To what
a pitch man once -- so far as, governed by generic ancestry, by
community of mother-tongue, by similarity of climate, and the
natural surroundings of a common fatherland, he yielded himself
unconsciously to the influence of nature -- to what a pitch man once
was able to develop himself beneath these moulding influences, we
have certainly full reason to acknowledge with most heartfelt
thanks. It is in the natural customs of all peoples, so far as they
embrace the normal man, and even of those decried as most
uncultured, that we first learn the truth of human nature in its
full nobility and in its real beauty. Not one true virtue has been
adopted by any religion as its god's command, but it was already in
these natural customs; not one genuine idea of human right has the
later civilised state developed -- though, alas, to the point of
complete distortion! -- but it already found its sure expression in
them; not one veritable discovery for the common weal has later
culture made her own -- with arrogant ingratitude! -- but she
derived it from the fruits of the homely understanding of the
stewards of those customs.
That art is not an artificial product -- that the need of art is not
an arbitrary issue, but an inbred craving of the natural, genuine,
and uncorrupted man -- who proves this in more striking manner than
just these peoples? Nay, whence shall our uneasy "spirit" derive its
proofs of art's necessity, if not from the testimony of this
artistic instinct and its glorious fruits afforded by these peoples
fostered by nature, by the great People itself? Before what
phenomenon do we stand with more humiliating sense of the impotence
of our frivolous culture, than before the art of the Greeks? To
this, to the art of the darlings of all-loving nature, of those
fairest children whom the great glad Mother holds up to us before
the darksome cloud of modern modish culture, as the triumphant
tokens of what she can bring forth -- let us look far hence to
glorious Greek art, and gather from its inner understanding the
outlines for the art-work of the future! Nature has done all that
she could do -- she has given birth to the Hellenic people, has fed
it at her breast and formed it by her mother-wisdom; she sets it now
before our gaze with all a mother's pride, and cries to wide mankind
with mother-love: "This have I done for you; now, of your love for
one another, do ye that which ye can!"
Thus have we then to turn Hellenic art into human art; to loose from
it the stipulations by which it was but an Hellenic and not a
universal art. The garment of religion, in which alone it was the
common art of Greece, and after whose removal it could only, as an
egoistic, isolated art-species, fulfil the needs of luxury --
however fair -- but no longer those of fellowship; this specific
garb of the Hellenic religion we must stretch out until its folds
embrace the religion of the future, the religion of universal
manhood, and thus to gain already a foretaste of the art-work of the
future. But this bond of union, this religion of the future, we
wretched ones shall never clasp the while we still are lonely
individuals, regardless of how many of us feel the spur towards the
art-work of the future. The art-work is the living presentation of
religion; but religions spring not from the artist's brain; their
only origin is in the people.
Let us then -- without a spark of egoistic vanity, without
attempting to console ourselves with any kind of self-derived
illusion, but honestly, lovingly and hopefully devoted to the
art-work of the future -- content ourselves to-day by testing first
the nature of the species of art which, in their shattered
segregation, make up the general substance of our modern art; let us
sharpen our gaze for this examination by casting our glance over
Hellenic art; and then let us draw a bold and confident conclusion
about the great and universal art-work of the future!
---- END OF PART ONE ----
(Tr. W.A. Ellis, with some corrections and changes for readability)
--
Derrick Everett
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