Chapter 7

The Marriage of Mary. By Raphael. (Brera, Milan.)

Artists, on the other hand, having become infected by the public's original standpoint—the desire for order—either paint pictures like Raphael's "Marriage of Mary,"[49]his "Virgin and Child attended by St. John the Baptist and St. Nicholas of Bari,"[50]and Perugino's "Vision of St. Bernard,"[51]in which the perfectly symmetrical aspect and position of the architecture is both annoying and inartistic, owing to the fact that it was looked at by the artist from a point at which it was orderly and arranged before he actually painted it, and could not therefore testify to his power of simplifying or ordering—but simply to his ability to avail himself of another artist's power, namely, the architect's; or else, having become infected by the public's corrupt standpoint—the desire for disorder and chaos as an end in itself— they paint as Ruysdael, Hobbema and Constable painted—that is to say, without imparting anything of themselves, or of their power to order and simplify, to the content of the picture, lest the desire for disorder or chaos should be thwarted.[52]

This is an exceedingly important point, and its value for art criticism cannot be overrated. If one can trust one's taste, and it is still a purely public taste, it is possible to tell at a glance why one cannot get oneself to like certain pictures in which either initial regularity has been too great, thus leaving no scope for the artist's power, or in which final irregularity is too great, thus betraying no evidence of the artist's power.

Looking at Rubens' "Ceres,"[53]in which the architecture is viewed also in a frontal position, you may be tempted to ask why such a picture is not displeasing, despite the original symmetry of the architecture in the position in which the painter chose to paint it. The reply is simple. Here Rubens certainly placed the architecture full-face; but besides dissimulating the greater part of it in shadow— which in itself produces unsymmetrical shapes that have subsequently to be arranged by tone composition—lie carefully disordered it by means of garlands and festoons, and only then did he exercise his artistic mind in making a harmonious and orderly pictorial arrangement of it, which also included some cupids skilfully placed.

All realism, or Police Art, therefore, in addition to being the outcome of the will to truth which Christianity and its offshoot Modern Science have infused into the arts, may also be the result of the artist's becoming infected either with the public's pure taste, or with the public's corrupted or artist-infected taste, and we are thus in possession of one more clue as to what constitutes a superior work of graphic art.

[46]W. P., Vol. II, pp. 255, 256.

[47]In regard to this point it is interesting to note that Kant, in his Kritik der Urteilskraft, actually called landscape-painting a process of gardening.

[48]I do not mean to imply here that all the sentimental gushing that is given vent to nowadays over rugged and wild scenery is the outcome only of a confusion of the artist's and layman's standpoints. The influence of the Christian and Protestant worship of pointless freedom, together with that of their contempt of the work of man, is largely active here; and the sight of unhandseled and wild shrubs, and of tangled and matted grasses, cheers the heart of the fanatical believer in the purposeless freedom and anarchy which Christianity and Protestantism have done so much to honour and extol. That the same man who honours government and an aristocratic ideal may often be found to-day dilating upon the charms of chaotic scenery, only shows how muddle-headed and confused mankind has become.

[49]The Brera at Milan.

[50]The National Gallery, London. Raphael was very much infected with the people's point of view, hence the annoying stiltedness of many of his pictures.

[51]Pinakothek, Munich.

[52]See particularly, Ruysdael's "Rocky Landscape," "Landscape with a Farm" (Wallace collection); Hobbema's "Outskirts of a Wood" and many others in the Wallace collection; and Constable's "Flatford Mill" and "The Haywain" (National Gallery).

[53]Hermitage Gallery, St. Petersburg.

6. The Meaning of Beauty of Form and of Beauty of Content in Art.

So far, then, I have arrived at this notion of beauty in Ruler-Art, namely: that it may be regarded almost universally as that order, simplicity and transfiguration which the artist mind imparts to the content of his production. This notion seems to allow of almost universal application, because, as I showed in the first part of this lecture, it involves one of the primary instincts of man—the overcoming of chaos and anarchy by adjustment, simplification and transfiguration. It is only in democratic ages, or ages of decline, when instincts become disintegrated, that beauty in Art is synonymous with a lack of simplicity, of order and of transfiguration. I have shown, however, that the second kind of beauty, or democratic beauty, is of an inferior kind to that of the first beauty, or Ruler beauty, because, while the former takes its root in the will to live, the latter arises surely and truly out of the will to power.[54]Either beauty, however, constitutes ugliness in its opponent's opinion.

But there is another aspect of Beauty in Art which has to be considered, and that is the intrinsic beauty of the content of an artistic production. You may say that,ex hypothesi, I have denied that there could be any such beauty. Not at all!

Since the ruler-artist transfigures by enhancement, by embellishment and by ennoblement, his mind can be stimulated perfectly well by an object or a human being which to the layman is vertiginously beautiful, and which to himself is exceedingly pleasing. In fact, if his mind is a mind which, like that of most master-artists, adores that which is difficult, it will go in search of the greatest natural beauty it can find, in order, by a stupendous effort in transfiguration, to outstrip even that; for the embellishment of the downright ugly and the downright revolting presents a task too easy to the powerful artist—a fact which explains a good deal of the ugly contents of many a modern picture.

What, then, constitutes the beauty of the content in an artistic production, as distinct from the beauty of the treatment? In other words, what is beauty in a subject?

For the notion that the subject does not matter in a picture is one which should be utterly and severely condemned. It arose at a time when art was diseased, when artists themselves had ceased from having anything of importance to say, when the subjects chosen had no meaning, and when technique was bad. And it must be regarded more in the light of a war-cry coming from a counter-movement, aiming at an improved technique and rebelling against an abuse of literature in the graphic arts, than in the light of sound doctrine, taking its foundation in normal and healthy conditions.

The intrinsic beauty of the content or substance of a picture or sculpture may therefore be the subject of legitimate inquiry, and in determining what it consists of, we raise the whole question of content beauty.

Volumes, stacks of volumes, have been written on this question. The most complicated and incomprehensible answers have been given to it, and not one can be called satisfactory; for all of them would be absolute.

When, however, we find a modern writer defining the beautiful as "that which has characteristic or individual expressiveness for sense perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium,"[55]we feel, or at leastIfeel, that something must be wrong. It is definitions such as these which compel one to seek for something more definite and more lucid in the matter of explanation, and if, in finding the latter, one may seem a little too prosaic andterre-à-terre, it is only because the transcendental and metaphysical nature of the kind of definition we have just quoted makes anything which is in the slightest degree clearer, appear earthly and material beside it.

It is obvious that, if we could only arrive at a subject-beauty which was absolute, practically all the difficulties of our task would vanish. For having established the fact that the purpose of the graphic arts is to determine the values beautiful and ugly, it would only remain for us to urge all artists to advocate that absolute subject-beauty with all the eloquence of line and colour that our concept of Art-form would allow, and all the problems of Art would be solved.

But we can postulate no such absolute in subject-beauty. "Absolute beauty exists just as little as absolute goodness and truth."[56]The term "beautiful," like the term "good," is only a means to an end. It is simply the arbitrary self-affirmation of a certain type of man in his struggle to prevail.[57]He says "Yea" to his type, and calls it beautiful. He cannot extend his power and overcome other types unless with complete confidence and assurance he says "Yea" to his own type.

You and I, therefore, can speak of the beautiful with an understanding of what that term means, only on condition that our values, our traditions, our desires, and our outlook are exactly the same. If you agree with me on the question of what is good, our agreement simply means this, that in that corner of the world from which you and I hail, the same creator of values prevails over both of us. Likewise, if you and I agree on the question of what is beautiful, this fact merely denotes that as individuals coming from the same people, we have our values, our tradition and our outlook in common.

"Beautiful," then, is a purely relative term which may be applied to a host of dissimilar types and which every people must apply to its own type alone, if it wishes to preserve its power. Biologically, absolute beauty exists only within the confines of a particular race. That race which would begin to consider another type than their own as beautiful, would thereby cease from being a race. We may be kind, amiable, and even hospitable to the Chinaman or the Negro; but the moment we begin to share the Chinaman's or the Negro's view of beauty, we run the risk of cutting ourselves adrift from our own people.

But assuming, as we must, that all people, the Chinese, the Negroes, the Hindus, the Red Indians, and the Arabs between themselves apply the word beautiful only to particular individuals among their own people, in order to distinguish them from less beautiful or mediocre individuals—what meaning has the term in that case?

Obviously, since the spirit of the people, its habits, prejudices and prepossessions are determined by their values, and values may fix a type, that creature will be most beautiful among them who is the highest embodiment and outcome of all their values, and who therefore corresponds most to the ideal their æsthetic legislator had in mind when he created their values.[58]Thus even morality can be justified æsthetically.[59]And in legislating for primeval peoples, higher men and artist-legislators certainly worked like sculptors on a yielding medium which was their own kind.

The most beautiful negro or Chinaman thus becomes that individual negro or Chinaman who is rich in those features which the life-spirit of the Ethiopian or Chinese people is calculated to produce, and who, owing to a long and regular observance of the laws and traditions of his people, by his ancestors for generations, has inherited that regularity of form in his type, which all long observance of law and order is bound to cultivate and to produce.[60]And in reviewing the peoples of Europe alone, we can ascribe the many and different views which they have held and still hold of beauty, only to a difference in the values they have observed for generations in their outlook, their desires and their beliefs.

It is quite certain, therefore, that, in the graphic arts, which either determine or accentuate the values "ugly" and "beautiful," every artist who sets up his notion of what is subject-beauty, like every lover about to marry, either assails or confirms and consolidates the values of his people.[61]

Examples of this, if they were needed, are to be found everywhere. See how the Gothic school of painting, together with men like Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, El Greco, and subsequently Burne-Jones, set up the soulful person, the person of tenuous, nervous and heaven-aspiring slenderness, as the type of beauty, thus advocating and establishing Christian values in a very seductive and often artistic manner; while the Pagans, with Michelangelo, Titian, and even Rubens, represented another code of values—perhaps even several other codes— and sought to fix their type also.

Note, too, how hopeless are the attempts of artists who stand for the Pagan ideal, when they paint Christian saints and martyrs, and how singularly un-Pagan those figures are which appear in the pictures of the advocates of the Christian ideal when they attempt Pagan types. Christ by Rubens is not the emaciated, tenuous Person suffering from a wasting disease that Segna represents him to be; while the Mars and Venus of Botticelli in the National Gallery would have been repudiated with indignation by any Greek of antiquity.

When values are beginning to get mixed, then, owing to an influx of foreigners from all parts of the world, we shall find the strong biological idea of absolute beauty tending to disappear, and in its place we shall find the weak and wholly philosophical belief arising that beauty is relative. Thus, in Attica of the fifth century B.C., when 300,000 slaves, chiefly foreigners, were to be counted among the inhabitants, the idea that beauty was a relative term first occurred to the "talker" Socrates.

Still, in all concepts of beauty, however widely separated and however diametrically opposed, there is this common factor: that the beautiful person is the outcome of a long observance through generations of the values peculiar to a people. A certain regularity of form and feature, whether this form and feature be Arab, Ethiopian or Jewish, is indicative of a certain regular mode of life which has lasted for generations; and in calling this indication beautiful, a people once more affirms itself and its values. If the creature manifesting this regularity be a Chinaman, he will be the most essential Chinaman that the Chinese values can produce; his face will reveal no fighting and discordant values; there will be no violent contrasts of type in his features, and, relative to Chinese values, his face will be the most regular and harmonious that can be seen, and therefore the most beautiful.[62]The Chinese ruler-artist, in representing a mediocre Chinaman, would therefore exercise his transfiguring powers to overcome any discordant features in the face before him, and would thus produce a beautiful type.[63]Or, if his model happened to be the highest product of Chinese values, his object would be to transcend even that, and to point to something higher.

Once again, therefore, though it is impossible to posit a universal concept of subject-beauty, various concepts may be given an order of rank, subject to the values with which they happen to be associated.

[54]If this book be read in conjunction with my monograph onNietzsche: his Life and Works(Constable), or myWho is to be Master of the World?(Foulis), there ought to be no difficulty in understanding this point.

[55]B. Bosanquet,A History of Æsthetic, p. 4.

[56]W. P., Vol. II, p. 246. See alsoT. I., Part 10, Aph. 19: "The 'beautiful in itself' is merely an expression, not even a concept."

[57]T. I., Part 10, Apr. 19: "In the beautiful, man posits himself as the standard of perfection; in select cases he worships himself in that standard. A speciescannotpossibly do otherwise than thus say yea to itself."

[58]W. P., Vol. II, p. 361: "Legislative moralities are the principal means by which one can form mankind, according to the fancy of a creative and profound will: provided, of course, that such an artistic will of the first order gets the power into its own hands, and can make its creative will prevail over long periods in the form of legislation, religions, and morals." See p. 79 in the first part of this lecture.

[59]W. P., Vol. II, p. 185.

[60]G. E., p. 107: "The essential thing 'in heaven and earth' is, apparently, that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living; for instance, virtue, art, music, dancing, reason, spirituality—anything whatever that is transfiguring, refined, foolish, or divine."

[61]T. I., Part 10, Aph. 24.

[62]T. I., Part 10, Aph. 47: "Even the beauty of a race or family, the pleasantness and kindness of their whole demeanour, is acquired by effort; like genius, it is the final result of the accumulated labour of generations. There must have been great sacrifices made to good taste; for the sake of it, much must have been done, and much refrained from —the seventeenth century in France is worthy of admiration in both ways; good taste must then have been a principle of selection, for society, place, dress, and sexual gratification, beauty must have been preferred to advantage, habit, opinion, indolence. Supreme rule:—we must not 'let ourselves go,' even when only in our own presence.—Good things are costly beyond measure, and the rule always holds, that he who possesses them is other than he who acquires them. All excellence is inheritance; what has not been inherited is imperfect, it is a beginning."

[63]W. P., Vol. II, p. 245: "'Beauty,' therefore, is, to the artist, something which is above order of rank, because in beauty contrasts are overcome, the highest sign of power thus manifesting itself in the conquest of opposites; and achieved without a feeling of tension." See also Hegel,Vorlesungen über Æsthetik, Vol. I, pp. 130, 144.

7. The Meaning of Ugliness of Form and of Ugliness of Content in Art.

Ugliness in Art, therefore, is Art's contradiction.[64]It is the absence of Art. It is a sign that the simplifying, ordering and transfiguring power of the artist has not been successful, and that chaos, disorder and complexity have not been overcome.

Ugliness of form in Art, therefore, will tend to become prevalent in democratic times; because it is precisely at such times that a general truth for all is believed in, and, since reality is the only truth which can be made common to all, democratic art is invariably realistic, and therefore, according to my definition of the beautiful in form, ugly.

In this matter, I do not ask you to take my views on trust. A person who will seem to you very much more authoritative than myself—a man who once had the honour of influencing Whistler, and who, by the bye, is also famous for having flung down the Colonne Vendôme in Paris— once expressed himself quite categorically on this matter.

At the Congress of Antwerp in 1861, after he had criticized other artists and other concepts of art, this man concluded his speech as follows: "By denying the ideal and all that it involves, I attain to the complete emancipation of the individual, and finally to democracy. Realism is essentially democratic."[65]

As you all must know, this man was Gustave Courbet, of whom Muther said that he had a predilection for the ugly.[66]

Artists infected with the pure or the corrupt layman's view of Art, as described in the previous section, and artists obsessed by the Christian or scientific notion of truth, will consequently produce ugly work. They will be realists, or Police-artists, and consequently ugly.

But how can content- or subject-ugliness be understood? Content- or subject-ugliness is the decadence of a type.[67]It is the sign that certain features, belonging to other peoples (hitherto called ugly according to the absolute biological standard of beauty of a race), are beginning to be introduced into their type. Or it may mean that the subject to be represented does not reveal that harmony and lack of contrasts which the values of a people are capable of producing. In each case it provokes hatred, and this "hatred is inspired by the most profound instinct of the species; there is horror, foresight, profundity, and far-reaching vision in it—it is the profoundest of all hatreds. On account of it art isprofound."[68]

The hatred amounts to a condemnation of usurping values, or of discordant values; in fact, to a condemnation of dissolution and anarchy, and the judgment "ugly" is of the most serious import.

Thus, although few of us can agree to-day as to what constitutes a beautiful man or woman, there is still a general idea common to us all, that a certain regularity of features constitutes beauty, and that, with this beauty, a certain reliable, harmonious, and calculable nature will be present. Spencer said the wisest thing in all his philosophy when he declared that "the saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying."[69]

For beauty in any human creature, being the result of a long and severe observance by his ancestors of a particular set of values, always denotes some definite attitude towards Life; it always lures to some particular kind of life and joy—as Stendhal said, "Beauty is a promise of happiness"—and as such it seduces to Life and to this earth.

This explains why beauty is regarded with suspicion by negative religions, and why it tends to decline in places where the sway of a negative religion is powerful. Because a negative religion cannot tolerate that which lures to life, to the body, to joy and to voluptuous ecstasy.

It is upon their notion of spiritual beauty, upon passive virtues, that the negative religions lay such stress, and thus they allow the ugly to find pedestals in their sanctuaries more easily than the beautiful.

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

[65]A. Estignard,Gustave Courbet(Paris, 1896), p. 118.

[66]Geschichte der Malerei, Vol. III, p. 204.

[67]W. P., Vol. II, pp. 241, 242, 245. See also T. I., Part 10, Aph. 20: "The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration; that which reminds us in the remotest manner of degeneracy prompts us to pronounce the verdict 'ugly.' Every indication of exhaustion, gravity, age or lassitude; every kind of constraint, such as cramp or paralysis; and above all the odour, the colour, and the likeness of decomposition or putrefaction, be it utterly attenuated even to a symbol:—all these things call forth a similar reaction, the evaluation 'ugly.' A hatred is there excited: whom does man hate there? There can be no doubt:the decline of his type."

[68]T. I., Part 10, Aph. 20.

[69]Essays, Vol. II (1901 Edition), p. 394.

8. The Ruler-Artist's Style and Subject.

Up to the present, you have doubtless observed that I have spoken only of man as the proper subject-matter of the graphic Arts. In maintaining this, Nietzsche not only has Goethe and many lesser men on his side, but he has also the history of Art in general. I cannot, however, show you yet how, or in what manner, animal-painting, landscape-painting, and, in some respects, portrait-painting are to be placed lower than the art which concerns itself with man. Let it therefore suffice, for the present, simply to recognize the fact that Nietzsche did take up this attitude, and leave the more exhaustive discussion of it to the next part of this lecture.

Now, eliminating for a moment all those pseudo-artists who have been reared by the two strongest public demands on the Art of the present age—I speak of portrait-painting and dining-room pictures—there remains a class of artists which still shows signs of raising its head here and there, though every year with less frequency, and this is the class which, for want of a better term, we call Ruler-artists.

As I say, they are becoming extremely rare; their rarity, which may be easily accounted for,[70]is one of the evil omens of the time.

The ruler-artist is he who, elated by his own health and love of Life, says "Yea" to his own type and proclaims his faith or confidence in it, against all other types; and who, in so doing, determines or accentuates the values of that type. If he prevails in concepts in so doing, he also ennobles and embellishes the type he is advocating.

He is either the maker or the highest product of an aspiring and an ascending people. In him their highest values find their most splendid bloom. In him their highest values find their strongest spokesman. And in his work they find the symbol of their loftiest hopes.

By the beauty which his soul reflects upon the selected men he represents in his works, he establishes an order of rank among his people, and puts each in his place.

The spectator who is very much beneath the beauty of the ruler-artist's masterpieces feels his ignominious position at a glance. He realizes the impassable gulf that is for ever fixed between himself and that! And this sudden revelation tells him his level. Such a man, after he has contemplated the ruler-artist's work, may rush headlong to the nearest river and drown himself. His despair may be so great when he realizes the impossibility of ever reaching the heights he has been contemplating, that he may immolate himself on the spot. Only thus can the world be purged of the many-too-many.

"Unto many life is a failure," says Zarathustra, "a poisonous worm eating through into their heart. These ought to see to it that they succeed better in dying.

"Many-too-many live.... Would that preachers of swift death might arise! They would be the proper storms to shake the trees of life."[71]

In the presence of beauty, alone, can one know one's true rank, and this explains why the Japanese declare that "until a man has made himself beautiful he has no right to approach beauty,"[72]for "great art is that before which we long to die."[73]

But, to those who see but the smallest chance of approaching it, beauty is an exhortation, a stimulus, a bugle-call. It may drive them to means for pruning themselves of ugliness; it may urge them to inner harmony, to a suppression of intestinal discord.

"Beauty alone should preach penitence,"[74]says Zarathustra. And in this sentence you have the only utilitarian view of beauty that has any aristocratic value, besides that which maintains that beauty lures to Life, and to the body.

Hence, beauty need not impel all men to the river. There are some who, after contemplating it, will feel just near enough to it not to despair altogether of attaining to its level, and this thought will lend them both hope and courage.

The ruler-artist, therefore, in order that his subject-beauty may have some meaning, must be the synthesis of the past and the future of a people. Up to his waist in their spirit, he must mould or paint them the apotheosis of their type. Only thus can he hope to prevail with his subject—Man.

The German philosopher, Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, was one of the first to recognize this power of the ruler-artist, and the necessity of his being intimately associated with a particular people, although above them; and in his little book,System der Æsthetik, he makes some very illuminating remarks on this matter.[75]

Thus Benedetto Croce rightly argues that in order toappreciatethe artistic works of bygone and extinct nations, it is necessary to have a knowledge and understanding of their life and history—in other words, of their values.[76]What he does not point out, however, and what seems very important, is, that such historical research would be quite unnecessary to one who by nature wasa prioriin sympathy with the values of an extinct nation; and also, that all the historical knowledge available could not make any one whose character was not a little Periclean or Egyptian from the start, admire, or even appreciate, either the Parthenon, or the brilliant diorite statue of King Khephrën in the Cairo Museum.

All great ruler-art, then, is, as it were, a song of praise, a magnificat, appealing only to those, and pleasing only those, who feel in sympathy with the values which it advocates. And that is why all art of any importance, and of any worth, must be based upon a certain group of values—in other words, must have a philosophy or a particular view of the world as its foundation. Otherwise it is pointless, meaningless, and divorced from life. Otherwise it is acting, sentimental nonsense, orl'art pour l'art.

All great ruler-art also takes Man as its content; because human values are the only values that concern it. All great ruler-art also takes beauty within a certain people as its aim; because the will-to-power is its driving instinct, and beauty, being the most difficulty thing to achieve, is the strongest test of power. Finally, all great ruler-art is optimistic; because it implies the will of the artist to prevail.

But what constitutes the form of the ruler-artist's work? In what way must he give us his content?

The ruler-artist's form is the form of the commander. It must scorn to please.[77]It must brook no disobedience and no insubordination, save among those of its beholders about whom it does not care, from whom it would fain separate itself, and among whom it is not with its peers. It must be authoritative, extremely simple, irrefutable, full of restraint, and as repetitive as a Mohammedan prayer. It must point to essentials, it must select essentials, and it must transfigure essentials. The presence of non-essentials in a work of art is sufficient to put it at once upon a very low plane. For what matters above all is that the ruler-artist should prevail in concepts, and in order to do this his work must contain the definite statement of the value he sets upon all that he most cherishes.

Hence the belief all through the history of æsthetic that high art is a certain unity in variety, a certain single idea exhaled from a more or less complex whole, or, as the Japanese say, "repetition with a modicum of variation."[78]

Symmetry, as denoting balance, and as a help to obtaining a complete grasp of an idea;Sobriety, as revealing that restraint which a position of command presupposes;Simplicity, as proving the power of the great mind that has overcome the chaos in itself,[79]to reflect its order and harmony upon other things,[80]and to select the most essential features from among a host of more or less essential features;Transfiguration, as betraying that Dionysian elation and elevation from which the artist gives of himself to reality and makes it reflect his own glory back upon him;Repetition, as a means of obtaining obedience; andVariety, as the indispensable condition of all living Art—all Art which is hortatory and which does not aim at repose alone, at sleep, and at soothing and lulling jaded and exasperated nerves,—these are the principal qualities of ruler-art, and any work which would be deficient in one of these qualities would thereby be utterly and deservedly condemned to take its place on a lower plane.

Perhaps the greatest test of all, however, in regard to the worth of an artistic production is to inquire whence it came, what was its source. Has hunger or superabundance created it?[81]

If the first, the work will make nobody richer. It will rather rob them of what they have. It is likely to be either (A) true to Nature, (B) uglier than Nature, or (C) absurdly unnatural. A is the product of the ordinary man, B is the product of the man below mediocrity, save in a certain manual dexterity, and C is the outcome of the tyrannical will of the sufferer,[82]who wishes to wreak his revenge on all that thrives, and is beautiful and happy, and which bids him weave fantastic worlds of his own, away from this one, where people of his calibre can forget their wretched ailments and evil humours, and wallow in their own feverish nightmares of overstrained, palpitating and neuropathic yearnings. A is poverty-realism or Police Art. B is pessimism and incompetent Art. C is Romanticism.

Where superabundance is active, the work is the gift and the blessing of the will to power of some higher man. It will seem as much above Nature to mediocre people as its creator is above them. But, since it will brook no contradiction, it will actually value Nature afresh, and stimulate them to share in this new valuation.

Where poverty is active, the work is an act of robbery. It is what psychologists call a reflex action resulting from a stimulus—the only kind of action that we understand nowadays: hence our belief in Determinism, Darwinism, and such explanations of Art as we find in books by Taine and other writers who share his views.

The Art which must have experience and which is not the outcome of inner riches brought to the surface by meditation—this is the art of poverty. The general modern belief in experience and in the necessity of furnishing the mind by going direct to Nature and to reality shows to what extent the Art of to-day has become reactive instead of active.

The greater part of modern realism is the outcome of this poverty. It is reactive art, resulting from reflex actions; and, as such, is an exceedingly unhealthy sign. Not only does it show that the power of resisting stimuli is waning or altogether absent; but it also denotes that that inner power which requires no stimulus to discharge itself is either lacking or exceedingly weak.

With these words upon the subject of realism, I shall now conclude this part of Lecture II.

I shall return to realism in my next lecture; but you will see that it will be of a different kind from that of which I have just spoken. It will be superior, and will be the outcome of riches rather than of poverty. Although beneath genuine Ruler-art, which transfigures reality, it will nevertheless be superior to the poverty-realism which I have just discussed; for it will be of a kind which is forced upon the powerful artist who, in the midst of a world upholding other values than his own, is obliged to bring forward his ideal with such a preponderance of characteristic features as would seem almost to represent a transcript of reality. This realism I callmilitant realism, to distinguish it from the former kind.

In discussing mediæval. Renaissance and Greek Art, in my next lecture, this distinction will, I hope, be made quite plain to you.

[73]G. E., p. 120

[74]Z., I, XXI.

[75]The Book of Tea, p. 152.

[76]Ibid.199.

[77]Z., I, XXVI.

Back to Index Next