Chapter 5

[26]W. P., Vol. II, p. 28; also C.E., p. 288. See also Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, Vol. V, "Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums," p. 286: "The first origin of religion in general, as of every other kind of knowledge and culture, can be explained only as the teaching of higher natures."

[27]W. P., Vol. II, p. 89: "The Will to Truth at this stage is essentially the art of interpretation."

[28]Thus Schiller, in one of his happy moments, called beauty our second creator (zweite Schöpferin).

[29]Prof. W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Religion of Ancient Egypt, p. 67.

[30]That those who successfully determined values even in comparatively recent times should have been regarded almost universally as enjoying "some closer intimacy with the Deity than ordinary mortals," proves how very godlike and sacred the establishment of order was thought to be. See Max Müller,Introduction to the Science of Religion, p. 88.

[31]W. P., Vol. II, p. 102.

[32]W. P., Vol. II, p. 107.

[33]H. A. H., Vol. I, p. 154.

[34]W. P., Vol. II, p. 108: "Art is the will to overcome Becoming, it is a process of eternalizing." And p. 107: "To stamp Becoming with the character of Being—this is the highest Will to Power." See alsoG. M., p. 199.

[35]W. P., Vol. II, pp. 289, 290. See alsoH. A. H., Vol. I, p. 154.

[36]Z., I, IV.

[37]Schelling and Hegel both held this view; the one expressed it quite categorically in his lectures on Philosophy and Mythology, and the other in hisPhilosophy of History.

[38]Z., I, XI.

[39]Z., I, XV.

[40]Z., I, XVI.

[41]W. P., Vol. I, p. 113.

[42]See Th. Gomperz,Greek Thinkers, p. 46, who, speaking of the old Ionian Nature-philosophers, says: "The bold flight of their imagination did not stop at the assumption of a plurality of indestructible elements; it never rested till it reached the conception of a single fundamental or primordial matter as the essence of natural diversity.... The impulse to simplification, when it had once been aroused, was like a stone set in motion, which rolls continuously till it is checked by an obstacle." See also Dr. W. Worringer,Abstraktion und Einfühlung, p. 20.

[43]B. T., p. 20.

3. The People and their Man-God.

Think of the joy that must have spread through a wondering people like the Greeks, when they were told that Earth, as the bride of Heaven, and fertilized by his life-giving rain, became the mother not only of deep eddying Ocean, but also of all that lives and dies upon her broad bosom!

Imagine the jubilation, the feeling of power and the sense of extreme relief that must have filled the hearts of the ancient New Zealanders, when the first great Maori artist arose and said to his brothers and sisters that it was the god of the forests, Tane Mahuta, with his tall trees that had wrenched the sky by force from mother Earth, where once upon a time he used to crush her teeming offspring to death.[44]

With what superior understanding could they now gaze up into the sky, and snap their fingers scornfully at its former azure mystery! No wonder that the artist who could come forward with such an interpretation became a god! And no wonder that in strong nations gods and men are one! The fact that the explanation was not a true one, according to our notions, did not matter in the least.

History not only reveals, but also proves that lies are not necessarily hostile to existence.

For thousands of years the human race not only lived, but also flourished with the lie of the Ptolemaic theory of the heavens on their tongue.

For centuries men thrived and multiplied, believing that the lightning was Jehovah's anger, and that the rainbow was Jehovah's reminder of a certain solemn covenant by which He promised never again to destroy all life on earth by a flood.

I do not wish to imply that these two beliefs are false. For my part, I would prefer to believe them, rather than accept the explanations of these phenomena which modern science offers me. Still, the fact remains that these two Judaic explanations have been exploded by modern science, though the question whether, as explanations, they are superior to modern science, scarcely requires a moment's consideration.

At any rate they were the work of an artist, and when we think of the joy they must have spread among wondering mankind, we cannot wonder that such an artist was made a god. It was an artist, too, who created the unchanging thing;45who created every kind of permanency,i.e.Stability out of Evolution, and among other unchangeable things, the soul of man, which was perhaps the greatest artistic achievement that has ever been accomplished.

And this Man-God who created Being—that is to say, a stable world, a world which can be reckoned with, and in which the incessant kaleidoscopic character of things is entirely absent—this same Man-God who found the earth "without form" and "void," and whose magnificent Spirit "moved upon the face of the waters"; when people grew too weak to look upon him as their brother and God at the same time,[46]was relegated to his own world, and from a great distance they now pray to him and worship him and say: "For Thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, For ever and ever. Amen."

"For ever and ever;" this was something they could not say of the world as it is; and the thought of stability and of Being was a delight to them.

It may be difficult for us to picture how great the rejoicings must have been which followed upon every fresh ordering and arranging of the universe, every fresh interpretation of the world in the terms of man.

Perhaps only a few people to-day, who are beginning to cast dubious glances at Life, and to question even the justification of man's existence, may be able to form some conception of the thrill that must have passed through an ancient community, when one of its higher men uprose and ordered and adjusted Life for them, and, in so ordering it, transfigured it.

How much richer they must have felt! And how inseparable the two notions "artist" and "giver" must have appeared to them!

"If indeed this is Life," they must have said; "if Life is really as he orders it"—and his voice and eye allowed them to prefix no such "if" with genuine scepticism—"then of a truth it is a well of delight and a fountain of blessedness."

Thus Art—this function which "is with us in order that we may not perish through truth,"[47]this "enhancement of the feeling of Life and Life's stimulant,"[48]which "acts as a tonic, increases strength and kindles desire"[49]—became the "great seducer" to earth and to the world;[50]and we can imagine the gratitude that swelled in the hearts of men for him whose function it was. How could he help but become a god! Even tradition was not necessary for this. For at the very moment when his creative spirit lent its glory to the earth, man must have been conscious of his divinity or of his use as a mouthpiece by a Divinity.[51]

"O, Lord Varuna, may this song go well to thy heart!" sang the ancient Hindus.

"Thou who knowest the place of the birds that fly through the sky, who on the waters knowest the ships.

"Thou the upholder of order, who knowest the twelve months with the offspring of each, and who knowest the month that is engendered afterwards.

"Thou who knowest the track of the wind, of the wide, the bright, the mighty; and knowest those who reside on high.

"Thou the upholder of order, Varuna, sit down among thy people, thou, the wise, sit there to govern.

"From thence perceiving all wondrous things, thou seest what has been and what will be done.

"Thou who givest to men glory, and not half glory, who givest it even to our own selves.

"Thou, O wise god, art Lord of all, of heaven and earth!"[52]

We can follow every word of this heartfelt worship with perfect sympathy now.

"Thou, the upholder of order, who knowest the twelve months with the offspring of each"—this is no empty praise. It is the cry of those who feel inexpressibly grateful to their great artist; to him who has put some meaning, some order into the world.

And "Thou who givest men glory, and not half glory"—here is the sincere recognition of a people who have been raised and who not only rejoice in their elevation, but also recognize that it has been a creative act—a gift and a blessing from one who had something to give. For the soul of man is a million times more sensitive to changes in interpretation than the column of mercury is to changes in the atmosphere, and nothing can be more grateful than the soul of man when it is raised, however little, and thereby glorified.

[44]See Max Müller,India. What can it teach us?pp. 154. 155; also pp. 150 and 151.

[45]W. P., Vol. II, pp. 88, 89: "Happiness can be promised only by Being: change and happiness exclude each other. The loftiest desire is thus to be one with Being. That is the formula for the way to happiness."

[46]W. P., Vol. II, p. 313.

[47]W. P., Vol. II, p. 264.

[48]W. P., Vol. II, p. 244.

[49]W. P., Vol. II, p. 252.

[50]W. P., Vol. II, p. 290. See also p. 292: "Art is more divine than truth."

[51]W. P., Vol. II, p. 133. See also Schopenhauer,Parerga und Paralipomena, Vol. II, Chap. XV, "Ueber Religion," para. 176, where this view is ably upheld.

[52]Rig-Veda, I, 23.

4. The Danger.

Now, having reached this point, and having established—First: that it is our artists who value and interpret things for us, and who put a meaning into reality which, without them, it would never possess; and, secondly: that it is their will to power that urges them thus to appropriate Nature in concepts, and their will to prevail which gives them the ardour to impose their valuation with authority upon their fellows, thus forming a people; the thought which naturally arises is this: The power that artists can exercise, and the prerogative they possess, is one which might prove exceedingly dangerous; for while it may work for good, it may also work very potently for evil. Does it matter who interprets the world? who gives a meaning to things? who adjusts and systematizes Nature? and who imposes order upon chaos?

Most certainly it matters. For a thousand meanings are possible, and men may have a thousand been aiming for years, other interpretations are still possible.

Listen to your artistic friend's description of the most trifling excursion he has made, and then set your inartistic friend to relate—say, his journey round the world. Whereupon ask yourself whether it matters who sees things and who interprets life for you. The first, even with his trifling excursion in his mind, will make you think that life is really worth living, that the world is full, of hidden treasure. The second will make you conclude that this earth is an uninteresting monster, and that boredom can be killed only by the dangers of motor racing, aerial navigation and glacier climbing.

"A thousand paths are there which never have been trodden," says Zarathustra, "a thousand salubrities and hidden islands of life. Still unexhausted and undiscovered is mankind and man's world."[53]

This interpreting of Nature and this making and moulding of a people might therefore have brilliant or sinister results. There are many who wish to prevail; there are many who wish to lure their fellows on, and not all are standing on a superior plane.

For though artists, as a rule, are men of strong propensities[54]and surplus energy, there is an instinct of chastity in the best of them,[55]which impels them to devote all their power to prevailing in concepts rather than in offspring, and which makes them avoid precisely that quarter whither other men turn when they wish to prevail.[56]

The question as to what kind of man it is who walks up to Life and orders and values her for us, is therefore of the most extraordinary importance. Nothing could be more important than this. Because, as we have seen, the question is not one of truth in the Christian and modern scientific sense. A belief is often life-preserving and still false from the standpoint of reality.[57]It is a matter, rather, of finding that belief, whether true or false, which most conduces to the love of an exalted form of Life. And if we ask, Who is the man who is interpreting life for us? What is he? What is his rank? we practically lay our finger upon the very worth of our view of the world.

There is no greater delight or passionate love on earth for the artist than this: to feel that he has stamped his hand on a people and on a millennium, to feel that his eyes, his ears, and his touch have become their eyes, and their ears, and their touch. There is no deeper enjoyment than this for him: to feel that as he sees, hears and feels, they also will be compelled to see, hear and feel. Only thus is he able to prevail. A people becomes his offspring.[58]

While their elation and blessedness consisted in being raised in concepts to his level, and in seeing the world through his artistic prisms—in fact, in scoring materially by allowing him, their higher man, to establish their type; it was his solitary and unfathomable glory to prevail for ever through their minds, and to lay the foundation of his hazar, his thousand years of life on earth, in the spirit of his fellows.

Utilitarian, if you will, are both points of view: the one giving from his abundance, simply because he must discharge some of his plenitude or perish, found his meaning in giving. The others, stepping up on the gifts bestowed, found their meaning in receiving.[59]

The artist, then, as the highest manifestation of any human community, justifies his existence merely by living his life, and by imparting some of his magnificence to the things about him. To use a metaphor of George Meredith's, he gilds his retainers as the sun gilds, with its livery, the small clouds that gather round it. This is the artist's power and it is also his bliss. From a lower and more economical standpoint, he justifies his life by raising the community to its highest power; by binding it to Life with the glories which he alone can see, and by luring it up to heights which he is the first to scale and to explore.[60]

[53]Z., I, XXII.

[54]W. P., Vol. II, p. 243.

[55]W. P., Vol. II, p. 259. AlsoG. M., p. 141.

[56]In this regard it is interesting to note that: "The Teutonic 'Kunst' (Art) is formed fromkönnen, andkönnenis developed from a primitive Ich kann. Ich kann philology recognizes a preterite form of a lost verb, of which we find the traces in Kin-d, a child; and the form Ich kann, thus meaning originally, 'I begot,' contains the germ of the two developments—können, 'to be master,' 'to be able,' and 'kennen' to know" (Sidney Colvin, in theEncyclopædia Britannica, 9th Edition. Article, "Art").

[57]W. P., Vol. II, p. 14. See alsoG. E., pp. 8, 9.

[58]W. P., Vol. II, p. 368: "The great man is conscious of his power over a people, and of the fact that he coincides temporarily with a people or with a century—this magnifying of his self-consciousness as causa and voluntas is misunderstood as 'altruism': he feels driven to means of communication: all great men are inventive in such means. They want to form great communities in their own image; they would fain give multiformity and disorder definite shape; it stimulates them to behold chaos."

[59]W. P., pp. 255, 256.

[60]Even Fichte recognizes this power in Art to stamp values upon a people. See the Sämmtliche Werke, Vol, IV, p. 353: "Art converts the transcendental standpoint into the general standpoint.... The philosopher can raise himself and others to this standpoint only with great effort. But the artistic spirit actually finds himself there, without having thought about it; he knows no other standpoint, and those who yield to his influence are drawn so imperceptibly over to his side, that they do not even notice how the change takes place."

5. The Two Kinds of Artists.

Up to the present I have spoken only of the desirable artist, of him who, from the very health and fulness that is in him, cannot look on Life without transfiguring her; of the man who naturally sees things fuller, simpler, stronger and grander[61]than his fellows.62When this man speaks of Life, his words are those of a lover extolling his bride.[63]There is a ring of ardent desire and deep longing in his speech, which is infectious because it is so sincere, which is convincing because it is so authoritative, and which is beautiful because it is so simple.

Intoxicated[64]by his love, giddy with enthusiasm, he rhapsodizes about her, magnifies her; points to vast unknown qualities and beauties in her, to which he is the first to give some lasting names; and stakes his life upon her myriad charms. This Dionysian artist, the prototype of all gods and demi-gods that have ever existed on earth, exalts Life when he honours her with his love; and in exalting her, exalts humanity as well.[65]

For the mediocre, simply because they cannot transfigure Life in that way, benefit extremely from looking on the world through the Dionysian artist's personality. It is his genius which, by putting ugly reality into an art-form, makes life desirable. Beneath all his dithyrambs, however, there is still the will to power and the will to prevail—just as these instincts are to be found behind the magnificats of the everyday lover; but, in the case of the former, it is the power in the spirit.

There is, however, another kind of man who walks towards Life to value and to order her. The kind of man who, as we saw in my last lecture, declares that "man is born in sin,"—"that depravity is universal," —"that nothing exists in the intellect but what has before existed in the senses; "and that "every man is his own priest"; the man who defines Life as "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations"; and who says: "it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce, well-developed human beings"; the man who declares that we are all equal, that there is one truth for all, if only it can be found; and who thus not only kills all higher men, but also deprives his fellow creatures of all the beauty that these higher men have brought, and might still bring, into the world; finally, the man who values humanity with figures and in the terms of matter, who values progress in the terms of the engineer's workshop, and who denies that Art can have any relation to Life.

This man is a sort of inverted Midas at whose touch all gold turns to tinsel, all pearls turn to beads, and all beauty withers and fades, His breath is that of the late autumn, and his words are hoarfrost. Having nothing to give,[66]he merely robs things of the beauty that was once laid in them, by insisting upon the truth of their reality; and he sees Life smaller, thinner, weaker, and greyer than it is even to the people themselves. He is the antithesis of the Dionysian artist. He comes from the people, and very often from a substratum lower than they. How, therefore, can he give the people anything they do not already possess? He is a housewives have not already seen or felt? People have no use for him, therefore, and whenever they are drawn to his side by his seditious songs about equality, they find, when it is too late, that he has made the world drabbier, uglier, colder, and stranger for them than it was before.

This is the man who insists upon truth. Forgetting that truth is ugly[67]and that humanity has done little else, since it first became conscious, than to master and overcome truth, he wishes to make this world what it was in the beginning, "without form" and "void," and to empty things of the meaning that has been put into them, simply because he is unable to create a world for himself.[68]

Aiming at a general truth for all, he is reduced to naked reality, to Nature as it was before God's Spirit moved upon the face of the waters, and this is his world of facts, stripped of all that higher men have put into them. This man of science without Art, is gradually reducing us to a state of absolute ignorance; for while he takes from us what we know about things, he gives us nothing in return. How often do we not hear people who are influenced by his science, exclaim that the more they learn the less they feel they know. This exclamation contains a very profound truth; for science is robbing us inch by inch of all the groundfield-labourer among field-labourers, a housewife among housewives—how could he point to any beauty or desire which field-labourers and that was once conquered for us by bygone artists.[69]

Such a man, if he can be really useful in garnering and accumulating facts, and in devising and developing novel mechanical contrivances, ought in any case to be closeted apart, so that none of his breath can reach the Art-made world. And when he begins valuing, all windows and doors ought speedily to be barred and bolted against him. He is the realist. It is he who sees spots on the sun's face; it is he who denies that mist is the passionate sigh of mother Earth, yearning for her spouse the sky; it is he who will not believe that the god of the forest with his tallest trees separated the earth and the heavens by force, and the explanations he gives of things, though they are doubtless useful to him in his laboratory, are empty and colourless. Granting, as I say, that he does anything useful in the department of facts, let his profession at least be a strictly esoteric one. For his interpretations are so often ignoble, in addition to being colourless, that his business, like that of a certain Paris functionary, ought to be pursued in the most severe and most zealous secrecy.

If the world grows ugly, and Life loses her bloom; if all winds are ill winds, and the sunshine seems sickly and pale; if we turn our eyes dubiously about us, and begin to question the justification of our existence, we may be quite certain that this man, this realist, and his type, are in the ascendancy, and that he it is who is stamping his ugly fist upon our millennium.

For the function of Art is the function of the ruler. It relieves the highest of their burden, so that mediocrity may be twice blessed, and it makes us a people by luring us to a certain kind of Life. Its essence is riches, its activity is giving and perfecting,and while it is a delight to the highest, it is also a boon to those beneath them.

The attempt of the Dionysian artistto prevail, therefore, is sacred and holy. In his efforts to make his eyes our eyes, his ears our ears, and his touch our touch, though he does not pursue any altruistic purpose, he confers considerable benefits upon mankind. Whereas the attempt of that other man to prevail—the realist and devotee of so-called truth—is barbarous and depraved. By his egoism he depresses, depreciates and dismantles Life in great things as in small. Woe to the age whose values allow his voice to be heard with respect! There are necessary grey studies to be made, necessary uglinesses to be described, perhaps. But let these studies and descriptions be kept within the four walls of a laboratory until the time comes when, by their collective means, man can be raised and not depressed by them. Science is not with us to promulgate values. It is with us to be the modest handmaiden of Art, working in secrecy until all its ugliness can be collected, transfigured, and used for the purpose of man's exaltation by the artist. It may be useful for our science-slaves, working behind the scenes of Life, to know that the sky is merely our limited peep into an infinite expanse of ether—whatever that is. But when we ask to hear about it, let us be told as follows—

"O heaven above me! Thou pure! Thou deep! Thou abyss of light! Gazing on Thee, I quiver with godlike desires.

"To cast myself up unto thy height—that is my profundity! To hide myself in thy purity—that is mine innocence.

"We have been friends from the beginning, thou and I. Sorrow and horror and soil we share: even the sun is common to us.

"We speak not to each other, for we know too many things. We stare silently at each other; by smiles do we communicate our knowledge.

"And all my wanderings and mountain-climbings—these were but a necessity and a makeshift of the helpless one. To fly is the one thing that my will willeth, to fly into thee.

"And what have I hated more than passing clouds and all that defileth thee!

"The passing clouds I loathe—those stealthy cats of prey. They take from thee and me what we have in common—that immense, that infinite saying of Yea and Amen.

"These mediators and mixers we loathe—the passing clouds.

"Rather would I sit in a tub, with the sky shut out; rather would I sit in the abyss without a sky, than see thee, sky of Light, denied by wandering clouds!

"And oft have I longed to pin them fast with the jagged gold wires of lightning, that I might, like the thunder, beat the drum upon their bellies.

"An angry drummer, because they bereave me of thy Yea and Amen!—thou heaven above me, thou pure, thou bright, thou abyss of Light! And because they bereave thee ofmyYea and Amen.

"Thus spake Zarathustra."72

[61]W. P., Vol. II, p. 243: "Artists should not see things as they are; they should see them fuller, simpler, stronger. To this end, however, a kind of youthfulness, of vernality, a sort of perpetual elation, must be peculiar to their lives." See also T. I., Part 10, Aph. 8.

[62]W. P., Vol. II, p. 243. See also T. I., Part 10, Aph. 9.

[63]W. P., Vol. II, p. 248.

[64]W. P., Vol. II, p. 241: "The feeling of intoxication (elation) is, as a matter of fact, equivalent to a sensation of surplus strength." See also p. 254.

[65]Schelling also recognized the transfiguring power of Art; but he traced it to the fact that the artist invariably paints Nature at her zenith. See p. II,The Philosophy of Art(translation by A. Johnson): "Every growth of nature has but one moment of perfect beauty, ... Art, in that it presents the object in this moment, withdraws it from time, and causes it to display its pure being in the form of eternal beauty." This is making the natural object itself the adequate source of its own transfiguration, and the theory overlooks the power of the artist himself to see things as they are not.

[66]W. P., Vol. II, p. 244: "The sober-minded man, the tired man, the exhausted and dried-up man, can have no feeling for Art, because he does not possess the primitive force of Art, which is the tyranny of inner riches."

[67]W. P., Vol. II, p. 101.

[68]W. P., Vol. II, p. 89: "The belief that the world which ought to be, is, really exists, is a belief proper to the unfruitful, who do not wish to create a world. They take it for granted, they seek for ways and means of attaining it. 'The will to truth' [in the Christian and scientific sense] is the impotence of the will to create."

[69]W. P., Vol. II, p. 104: "The development of science tends ever more to transform the known into the unknown: its aim, however, is to do thereverse, and it starts out with the instinct of tracing the unknown to the known. In short, science is laying the road to sovereign ignorance, to a feeling that knowledge does not exist at all, that it was merely a form of haughtiness to dream of such a thing."

[70]W. P., Vol. II, p. 263: "The essential feature in art is its power of perfecting existence, its production of perfection and plenitude. Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence."

[71]Fichte comes near to Nietzsche, here, with his idea of the "beautiful spirit" which sees all nature full, large and abundant, as opposed to him who sees all things thinner, smaller, and emptier than they actually are. See Fichte'sSämmtliche Werke, Vol. IV, p. 354. See also Vol. III, p. 273.

[72]Z., III, XLVIII.

"For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes."—Matthewvii. 29.

1. The Spirit of the Age Incompatible with Ruler-Art.

With Nietzsche's concept of Art before me I feel as if I had left the arts of the present day many thousand leagues behind, and it is almost a hardship to be obliged to return to them. For unless most of that which is peculiar to this age be left many thousand leagues to the rear, all hope of making any headway must be abandoned.

We live in a democratic age. It is only natural, therefore, that all that belongs to the ruler should have been whittled down, diluted, and despoiled of its dignity; and we must feel no surprise at finding that no pains have been spared which might reduce Art also to a function that would be compatible with the spirit of the times. All that savours of authority has become the work of committees, assemblies, herds, crowds, and mobs. How could the word of one man be considered authoritative, now that the ruling principle, to use a phrase of Mr. Chesterton's, is that "twelve men are better than one"?[1]

The conception of Art as a manifestation of the artist's will to power and his determination to prevail, is a much too dangerous one for the present day. It involves all kinds of things which are antagonistic to democratic theory, such as: Command, Reverence, Despotism, Obedience, Greatness and Inequality. Therefore, if artists are to be tolerated at all, they must have a much more modest, humble, and pusillanimous comprehension of what their existence means, and of the purpose and aim of their work; and their claims, if they make any, must be meek, unprivileged, harmless and unassuming.

While, therefore, the artist, as Nietzsche understood him, scarcely exists at all to-day, another breed of man has come to the fore in the graphic arts, whose very weakness is his passport, who makes no claims at establishing new values of beauty, and who contents himself modestly with exhibiting certain baffling dexterities, virtuosities and tricks, which at once amaze and delight ordinary spectators or Art-students, simply because they themselves have not yet overcome even the difficulties of a technique.

Monet's pointillisme, Sargent's visible and nervous brush strokes, Rodin's wealth of anatomical detail, the Impressionist's scientific rendering of atmosphere, Peter Graham's gauzy mists, Lavery's post-Whistlerian portraits of pale people, and the touching devotion of all modern artists to Truth, in the Christian and scientific sense, are all indications of the general "funk"—the universal paralysis of will that has overtaken the Art-world.

But I am travelling too fast. I said that no pains have been spared which might reduce Art also to a function that would be compatible with the democratic spirit of the times. Now in what form have these pains been taken?

Their form has invariably been to turn the tables upon Art, and to make its beauty dependent upon Nature, instead of Nature's beauty dependent upon it.[2]

Tradition, of course, very largely laid the foundation of this mode of thinking, and, from the Greeks to Ruskin, few seem to have realized how much beauty Art had already laid in Nature, before even the imitative artist could consider Nature as beautiful.

As Croce rightly observes: "Antiquity seems generally to have been entrammelled in the meshes of the belief in mimetic, or the duplication of natural objects by the artist;"[3]but when we remember that, as Schelling points out, in Greece speculation about Art began with Art's decline,[4]we ought to feel no surprise at this remote underestimation of the artistic fact.[5]

In reviewing the work of æstheticians from Plato to Croce, however, what strikes me as so significant is the fact that, from the time of Plotinus—who practically marks the end of the declension which started in Plato's time—to the end of the seventeenth century, scarcely a voice of any magnitude was raised in Europe on the subject of Art.[6]

That there was no real "talk" about Art, at the time when it was revived in the Middle Ages, and at the time when it flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that all the old Hellenic discussions on the subject should have been taken up again at a period when the last emaciated blooms of the Renaissance and of the counter-Renaissance were bowing their heads, only shows how very sorry the plight of all great human functions must be when man begins to hope that he may set them right by talking about them.

When it is remembered, however, that, from the end of the seventeenth century onward, Art was regarded either as imitation pure and simple or as idealized imitation by no less than fifteen thinkers of note—that is to say, roughly speaking, by the Earl of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Home, Burke and Hume in England, by Batteux and Diderot in France, by Pagano and Spaletti in Italy, by Hemsterhuis in Holland, and by Leibnitz, Baumgarten, Kant, Schiller and Fichte in Germany; and that if Winckelmann and Lessing opposed these ideas, it was rather with the recommendation of another kind of imitation—that of the antique— than with a new valuation of Art; we can feel scarcely any surprise at all at the sudden and total collapse of the dignity of Art in the nineteenth century, under the deadly influence of the works of men like Semper and his followers.

It is all very well to point to men like Goethe, Heydenreich, Schelling, Hegel, Hogarth and Reynolds—all of whom certainly did a good deal to brace the self-respect of artists; but it is impossible to argue that any one of them took up either such a definite or such a determined attitude against the fifteen others whom I have mentioned, as could materially stem the tide of democratic Art which was rising in Europe. And if in the latter half of the nineteenth century we have Ruskin telling us that "the art which makes us believe what we would not otherwise have believed, is misapplied, and in most instances very dangerously so";[7]and if we find that his first principle is, "that our graphic art, whether painting or sculpture, is to produce something which shall look as like Nature as possible,"[8]and that, in extolling the Gothic, he says it was "the love of natural objects for their own sake, and the effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistic laws";[9]we realize how very slight the effect of those exceptional spirits, headed by Goethe, must have been.

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