MUSIC AND PLASTIC. (2) ACT AND PORTRAIT

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 259-295.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.259-260

For the mode of human imagining metaphysical, ethical, artistic imagining alike it is more than important, it is determinant that the individual feels himself as a body amongst bodies or, on the contrary, as a centre in endless space; that he subtilizes his ego into lone distinctness or, on the contrary, regards it as substantially part of the general consensus, that the directional character is asserted or, on the contrary, denied in the rhythm and course of his life. In all these ways the primesymbol of the great Culture comes to manifestation: this is indeed a worldfeeling, but the life-ideal conforms to it. From the Classical ideal followed unreserved acceptance of the sensuous instant, from the Western a not less passionate wrestle to overcome it. The Apollinian soul, Euclidean and pointformed, felt the empirical visible body as the complete expression of its own way of being; the Faustian, roving into all distances, found this expression not in person, but in personality, character, call it what you will. "Soul" for the real Hellene was in last analysis the form of his body and thus Aristotle defined it. "Body" for Faustian man was the vessel of the soul and thus Goethe felt it. But the result of this is that Culture and Culture differ very greatly in their selection and formation of their humane arts. While Gluck expresses the woe of Armida by a melody combined with drear gnawing tones in the instrumental accompaniment, the same is achieved in Pergamene sculptures by making every muscle speak. The Hellenistic portraiture tries to draw a spiritual type in the structure of its heads. In China the heads of the Saints of Ling-yan-si tell of a wholly personal inner life by their look and the play of the corners of the mouth.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.262-263

But in order to grasp the significance of the portraiture of the West more specifically in contrast with that of Egypt and that of China, we have to consider the deep change in the language of the West that began in Merovingian times to foreshadow the dawn of a new life-feeling. This change extended equally over the old German and the vulgar Latin, but it affected only the tongues spoken in the countries of the coming Culture (for instance, Norwegian and Spanish, but not Rumanian). The change would be inexplicable if we were to regard merely the spirit of these languages and their "influence" of one upon another; the explanation is in the spirit of the mankind that raised a mere way of using words to the level of a symbol. Instead of sum, Gothic im, we say ich bin, I am, je suis; instead of fecisti, we say tu habes factum, tu as fait, du habes gitán; and again, daz wíp, un homme, man hat. This has hitherto been a riddle because families of languages were considered as beings, but the mystery is solved when we discover in the idiom the reflection of a soul. The Faustian soul is here beginning to remould for its own use grammatical material of the most varied provenance. The coming of this specific "I" is the first dawning of that personality-idea which was so much later to create the sacrament of Contrition and personal absolution. This "ego habeo factum," the insertion of the auxiliaries "have" and "be" between a doer and a deed, in lieu of the "feci" which expresses activated body, replaces the world of bodies by one of functions between centres of force, the static syntax by a dynamic. And this "I" and "Thou" is the key to Gothic portraiture. A Hellenistic portrait is the type of an attitude a confession it is not, either to the creator of it or to the understanding spectator. But our portraits depict something sui generis, once occurring and never recurring, a life-history expressed in a moment, a world-centre for which everything else is world-around, exactly as the grammatical subject "I" becomes the centre offeree in the Faustian sentence.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.263

It has been shown how the experience of the extended has its origin in the living direction, time, destiny. In the perfected "being" of the all-round nude body the depth-experience has been cut away, but the "look" of a portrait leads this experience into the supersensuous infinite.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.264

Western man lives in the consciousness of his becoming and his eyes are constantly upon past and future. The Greek lives pointwise, ahistorically, somatically. No Greek would have been capable of a genuine self-criticism. [...] Looking at the work of Phidias, of Polycletus, or of any master later than the Persian Wars, do we not see in the doming of the brow, the lips, the set of the nose, the blind eyes, the expression of entirely non-personal, plantlike, soulless vitality? And may we not ask ourselves whether this is the formlanguage that is capable even of hinting at an inner experience? Michelangelo devoted himself with all passion to the study of anatomy, but the phenomenal body that he works out is always the expression of the activity of all bones, sinews and organs of the inside; without deliberate intention, the living that is under the skin comes out in the phenomenon. It is a physiognomy, and not a system, of muscles that he calls to life. But this means at once that the personal destiny and not the material body has become the starting-point of the form-feeling.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.266

The opposition of Apollinian and Faustian ideals of Humanity may now be stated concisely. Act and Portrait are to one another as body and space, instant and history, foreground and background, Euclidean and analytical number, proportion and relation. The Statue is rooted in the ground, Music (and the Western portrait is music, soul woven of colour-tones) invades and pervades space without limit. The fresco-painting is tied to the wall, trained on it, but the oil-painting, the "picture" on canvas or board or other table, is free from limitations of place. The Apollinian form-language reveals only the become, the Faustian shows above all a becoming. It is for this reason that child-portraits and family groups are amongst the finest and most intimately right achievements of the Western art.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.267-268

Endless Becoming is comprehended in the idea of Motherhood, Woman as Mother is Time and is Destiny. Just as the mysterious act of depth-experience fashions, out of sensation, extension and world, so through motherhood the bodily man is made an individual member of this world, in which thereupon he has a Destiny. All symbols of Time and Distance are also symbols of maternity. Care is the root-feeling of future, and all care is motherly. It expresses itself in the formation and the idea of Family and State and in the principle of Inheritance which underlies both. Care may be either affirmed or denied one can live care-filled or care-free. Similarly, Time may be looked at in the light of eternity or in the light of the instant; and the drama of begetting and bearing, or the drama of the nursing mother with her child, may be chosen as the symbol of Life to be made apprehensible by all the means of art. India and the Classical took the first alternative, Egypt and the West the second. [...] But in the religious art of the West, the representation of Motherhood is the noblest of all tasks. As Gothic dawns, the Theotokos of the Byzantine changes into the Mater Dolorosa, the Mother of God. In German mythology she appears (doubtless from Carolingian times only) as Frigga and Frau Holle. The same feeling comes out in beautiful Minnesinger fancies like Lady Sun, Lady World, Lady Love. The whole panorama of early Gothic mankind is pervaded by something maternal, something caring and patient, and Germanic-Catholic Christianity when it had ripened into full consciousness of itself and in one impulse settled its sacraments and created its Gothic Style placed not the suffering Redeemer but the suffering Mother in the centre of its world-picture. [...] As against these types, the imagination of the Greeks conceived goddesses who are either Amazons like Athene or hetaerae like Aphrodite.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.279

The transformation of Renaissance fresco-painting into Venetian oil-painting is a matter of spiritual history. [...] The Florentine fresco aims at actuality in individual things and produces a sum of such things in an architectonic setting. Oil-painting, on the other hand, sees and handles with ever-growing sureness extension as a whole, and treats all objects only as representatives thereof. The Faustian world-feeling created the new technique that it wanted. It rejected the drawing style, as, from Oresme's time, so-ordinate geometry rejected it. It transformed the linear perspective associated with the architectural motive into a purely aerial perspective rendered by imponderable gradations of tone.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.281

It remains now to deal with the major characters of Western art during the phase of accomplishment. In this we may observe the deep necessity of all history at work. We have learned to understand arts as prime phenomena. We no longer look to the operations of cause and effect to give unity to the story of development. Instead, we have set up the idea of the Destiny of an art, and admitted arts to be organisms of the Culture, organisms which are born, ripen, age and for ever die.Here's something for the financial doomer.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.282

At the culmination of every Culture we have the spectacle of a splendid group of great arts, well-ordered and linked as a unit by the unity of the prime symbol underlying them all. The Apollinian group, to which belong vase-painting, fresco relief, the architecture of ranked columns, the Attic drama and the dance, centres upon the naked statue. The Faustian group forms itself round the ideal of pure spatial infinity and its centre of gravity is instrumental music. From this centre, fine threads radiate out into all spiritual form-languages and weave our infinitesimal mathematic, our dynamic physics, the propaganda of Jesuits and the power of our famous slogan of "progress," the modern machine-technique, credit economics and the dynastic-diplomatic State all into one immense totality of spiritual expression.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.283

Thereafter, the forms become those of final maturity, the concerto grosso, the suite, and the three-part sonata for solo instruments. Music frees itself from the relics of bodiliness inherent in the human voice and becomes absolute. The theme is no longer an image but a pregnant function, existent only in and by its own evolution, for the fugal style as Bach practised it can only be regarded as a ceaseless process of differentiation and integration.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.286

Impressionism is the comprehensive expression of a world-feeling, and it must obviously therefore permeate the whole physiognomy of our "Late" Culture. There is an impressionistic mathematic, which frankly and with intent transcends all optical limitations. It is Analysis, as developed after Newton and Leibniz, and to it belong the visionary images of number-" bodies," aggregates, and the multidimensional geometry. There is again an impressionistic physics which "sees" in lieu of bodies systems of mass-points units that are evidently no more than constant relations between variable efficients. There are impressionistic ethics, tragedy, and logic, and even (in Pietism) an impressionistic Christianity. Be the artist painter or musician, his art consists in creating with a few strokes or spots or tones an image of inexhaustible content, a microcosm meet for the eyes or ears of Faustian man; that is, in laying the actuality of infinite space under enchantment by fleeting and incorporeal indications of something objective which, so to say, forces that actuality to become phenomenal. The daring of these arts of moving the immobile has no parallel.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.286-287

On a small scale, it continually repeats the achievements of Copernicus and Columbus. No other Culture possesses an ornament-language of such dynamical impressiveness relatively to the means it employs. Every point or stroke of colour, every scarce-audible tone releases some surprising charm and continually feeds the imagination with fresh elements of space-creating energy. In Masaccio and Piero della Francesca we have actual bodies bathed in air. Then Leonardo, the first, discovers the transitions of atmospheric light and dark, the soft edges, the outlines that merge in the depth, the domains of light and shade in which the individual figures are inseparably involved. Finally, in Rembrandt, objects dissolve into mere coloured impressions, and forms lose their specific humanness and become collocations of strokes and patches that tell as elements of a passionate depth-rhythm. Distance, so treated, comes to signify Future, for what Impressionism seizes and holds is by hypothesis a unique and never recurring instant, not a landscape in being but a fleeting moment of the history thereof.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.288

I have said that oil-painting faded out at the end of the 17th Century, when one after another all its great masters died, and the question will naturally, therefore, be asked is Impressionism (in the current narrow sense) a creation of the 19th Century? Has painting lived, after all, two centuries more? Is it still existing? But we must not be deceived by appearances. Not only was there a dead space between Rembrandt and Delacroix or Constable for when we think of the living art of high symbolism that was Rembrandt's the purely decorative artists of the 18th Century do not count but, further, that which began with Delacroix and Constable was, notwithstanding all technical continuity, something quite different from that which had ended with Rembrandt. The new episode of painting that in the 19th Century (i.e., beyond the 1800 frontier and in "Civilization") has succeeded in awakening some illusion of a great culture of painting, has itself chosen the word Plein-air (Frcilichi) to designate its special characteristic. The very designation suffices to show the significance of the fleeting phenomenon that it is. It implies the conscious, intellectual, cold-blooded rejection of that for which a sudden wit invented the name "brown sauce," but which the great masters had, as we know, regarded as the one truly metaphysical colour. On it had been built the painting-culture of the schools, and especially the Dutch school, that had vanished irretrievably in the Rococo. This brown, the symbol of a spatial infinity, which had for Faustian mankind created a spiritual something out of a mere canvas, now came to be regarded, quite suddenly, as an offence to Nature. What had happened? Was it not simply this, that the soul for which this supernal colour was something religious, the sign of wistfulness, the whole meaning of "Living Nature," had quietly slipped away? The materialism of a Western cosmopolis blew into the ashes and rekindled this curious brief flicker a brief flicker of two generations, for with the generation of Manet all was ended again. I have (as the reader will recall) characterized the noble green of Griinewald and Claude and Giorgione as the Catholic space-colour and the transcendent brown of Rembrandt as the colour of the Protestant world-feeling. On the other hand, Plein-air and its new colour scale stand for irreligion.Here's the nasty quote I've warned for.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.293-294

What is practised as art to-day be it music after Wagner or painting after Cezanne, Leibl and Menzel is impotence and falsehood. Look where one will, can one find the great personalities that would justify the claim that there is still an art of determinate necessity? Look where one will, can one find the self-evidently necessary task that awaits such an artist? We go through all the exhibitions, the concerts, the theatres, and find only industrious cobblers and noisy fools, who delight to produce something for the market, something that will "catch on" with a public for whom art and music and drama have long ceased to be spiritual necessities. At what a level of inward and outward dignity stand to-day that which is called art and those who are called artists! In the shareholders' meeting of any limited company, or in the technical staff of any first-rate engineering works there is more intelligence, taste, character and capacity than in the whole music and painting of present-day Europe.There have always been, for one great artist, a hundred superfluities who practised art, but so long as a great tradition (and therefore great art) endured even these achieved something worthy. We can forgive this hundred for existing, for in the ensemble of the tradition they were the footing for the individual great man. But to-day we have only these superfluities, and ten thousand of them, working art "for a living" (as if that were a justification!). One thing is quite certain, that to-day every single art-school could be shut down without art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 100. There, as here in our world-cities, we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of "the new style," of "unsuspected possibilities," theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells the "Literary Man" in the Poet's place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism which the; art-trade has organized as a "phase of art-history," thinking and feeling and forming as industrial art. Alexandria, too, had problem-dramatists and box-office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. What do we possess to-day as "art"? A faked music, filled with artificial noisiness of massed instruments; a faked painting, full of idiotic, exotic and showcard effects, that every ten years or so concocts out of the form-wealth of millennia some new "style" which is in fact no style at all since everyone does as he pleases; a lying plastic that steals from Assyria, Egypt and Mexico indifferently. Yet this and only this, tie taste of the "man of the world," can be accepted as the expression and sign of the age; everything else, everything that "sticks to" old ideals, is for provincial consumption.