Nationalism and Culture (85 page)

and habits—in comparison with the overpowering effect of an idea or concept of the universe which applies to all men with equal force and strides on across all artificially constructed national boundaries. No, the human mind will not permit itself to be bound in the chains of artificially created prejudice and will not endure the restraint of national limitation. The individual man may be held temporarily or permanently under the spell of a national ideology, just as perhaps the man of science may be influenced by the inbred prejudices of his class or stationj but no power is in a position to give a national stamp to science as such or to fix the thought of a people by the artificial norms of a so-called "national idea." Whither such attempts lead, the present conditions in Germany and Italy show us with complete clarity. The mere fact that the national-minded in every country persuade themselves that they must enforce their peculiar lines of ideas upon all others, if necessary even against their will, is the announcement of intellectual bankruptcy of nationalism of every sort. If national sentiment were in fact a clearly recognizable spiritual phenomenon, which shaped itself in men into a kind of instinct, then this feeling would be alive in every one of us and would assert itself with compelling necessity, and there would be no need to cultivate it and force it upon the consciousness of men artificially.

We have purposely brought up for consideration the Copernican system of the universe and the theory of evolution, because in them the universal character of human thought shows most clearly. To achieve the same result it would suffice to have brought out any special branch of science, a philosophical theory, a social popular movement or a great discovery. Every bit of scientific knowledge, every philosophical consideration of man and the universe, every social movement which is born of the conditions of the time, every practical application of acquired knowledge in technique and industry, is fostered and built up by members of all nations. One can just as little speak of a national science as of a national syster% of the universe or a national theory of earthquakes. Science as such has nothing in common with national ambitions, it stands rather in unmistakable opposition to them, for while it is without doubt one of the most effective factors that unite men and bind them to one another, nationalism is an element that estranges them from one another and always tries to make their natural intercourse difficult and hostile. It is not the nation which shapes the thought of our species and inspires and equips it for new experiments; it is the culture circle to which we belong that brings to maturity everything intellectual in us and constantly stimulates it. No national isolation can withdraw us from this influence j it can only contribute to our cultural impoverishment and the curtailment of our intellectual endowments and capacities, as is shown today with terrifying consistency especially in Germany.

ART AND NATIONALITY. ARTISTIC PRODUCTION AND WORLD PHILOSOPHY. THE PERSONALITY OF THE ARTIST. STYLES AND SOCIAL FORMS. THE ARBITRARINESS OF DESIGNATIONS OF STYLE. ARCHITECTURE AND COMMUNITY. NECESSITY AND ESTHETICS. INFLUENCE OF MATERIAL ON STYLE. THE BRIDGE BETWEEN EGYPT AND BABYLON. FROM GRECIAN TEMPLE TO HELLENISTIC STYLE OF ART. CONNECTION BETWEEN ETRUSCAN AND GRECIAN FORMS. ARCHED STRUCTURES. TRANSITION TO THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH STYLE. THE CENTRAL TYPE AND CAESARISM. THE BYZANTINE STYLE. THE MIGRATION OF PEOPLES AND THE ROMANESQUE STYLE. THE TRANSITION TO GOTHIC. GOTHIC AS SOCIAL STRUCTURE. THE RENAISSANCE. DEVELOPMENT OF TYPES OF SPACE TREATMENT. MICHELANGELO AND THE TRANSITION TO THE BAROQUE. ABSOLUTISM AND THE SHAPING OF THE BAROQUE. THE STYLE OF THE JESUITS. DOWNFALL OF THE OLD REGIME AND THE ROCOCO IN ART. THE CAPITALISTIC WORLD AND THE CHAOS OF STYLE. FACTORY. WAREHOUSE.

"BUT, art.'"' someone will say. Does not the peculiar soul of every people speak in that.'' Are not the differences which reveal themselves in the art of different peoples results of their national peculiarities and determined by them.'' Does there not live in every work of art a certain something that can only be felt nationally and which the offspring of another people or a foreign race will never rightly understand because he lacks the special organ needed for its emotional comprehension.'' Those are questions which one often meets when the "essence of national art" is under discussion.

First let us just picture to ourselves how a work of art comes into being—everywhere, be it understood, without distinction of race or nation. When, for instance, we look at a landscape, what we behold may produce in us various effects. It may impel us to grasp in detail the things which the eye perceives, to distinguish them from one another in order to recognize their peculiar properties and to discover their relation to the environment. Perhaps a naturalist would at first approach things with this purely intellectual attitude and so arrive at purely scientific interpretations, which he keeps in mind and elaborates. But we may also make a

purely emotional appraisal of the same landscape j we may be affected merely by the splendor of its colors, its vibrations and tones, without concerning ourselves about the special type of its material structure. In this case our experience of what we see is purely esthetic, and if nature has endowed us with the needful ability to reproduce what we have seen, there results a work of art. Certainly our visual impressions cannot always be separated so neatly as we have suggested here, but the more profoundly the purely emotional, the so-called "mood," permeates a work of art, the better does it deserve the name. For this very reason art is never a mere imitation of nature. The artist does not simply give back what he sees, he animates it, breathes into it that mysterious life which alone has power to awaken the strange mood which is the peculiar property of artistic feelingj in a word, the artist "wirkt Seele ins All" ("puts a soul into everything"), as Dehmel has so strikingly phrased it.

That an artist can devote his art to the service of a particular world philosophy and work in its spirit is so clear a truth that it needs no proof. At the outset it matters little whether this philosophy be of a religious, an esthetic or a generally social character. Therefore, even the "national idea"—whatever that means—can animate the artist and influence his creations. But a work of art is never the result of an inborn national feeling that is of determinative importance for its esthetic qualities. Philosophies are acquired by man and come to him from without. How he reacts to them is a question of his personality, a result of his individual endowment, and in no way the effect of a peculiar national quality. The personal quality of the artist reveals itself in his style, the peculiar tone that is revealed in everything he produces.

Of course, the artist does not stand outside of space and time; he, too, is but a man, like the least of his contemporaries. His ego is no abstract image, but a living entity, in which every side of his social being is mirrored and action and reaction are at work. He, too, is bound to the men of his time by ^ thousand tiesj in their sorrows and their joys he has his personal share; and in his heart their ambitions, hopes and wishes find an echo. As a social being he is endowed with the same social instinct; in his person is reflected the whole environment in which he lives and works and which, of necessity, finds expression in his productions. But how this expression will manifest itself, in what particular manner the soul of the artist will react to the impressions that he receives from his surroundings, is in the final outcome decided by his own temperament, his special endowment of character—in a word, his personality.

How utterly art is the highest manifestation of an existing community of culture, how little it can be regarded as the result of alleged racial peculiarities or national emotional complexes, is revealed especially by architecture. Its various styles are always bound up with a particular

period of time, never with a definite nation or race. Whenever in the life of the European peoples there has occurred a rearrangement of social forms and their spiritual and material assumptions, new styles appeared in art in general and in architecture in particular, which gave expression to the new ambitions. These changes in the artistic formative impulse were confined to one country or one nation just as little as were the social changes from which they arose. Rather, they spread over the whole European culture circle to which we belong and out of whose womb it was born. Antique, Gothic, Renaissance—to mention only the best-known styles—do not simply embody special trends in artj they are also to be regarded as forms of expression of the social structure and the intellectual acquirements of definite epochs.

The more clearly the thinking man recognized the gap which opens between the antique, with its classical art forms and the later developed Christian world and the formative impulses peculiar to it, the more strongly was he impelled to search out the esthetic reasons for this contrast. This occurred first when men made comparisons between the art products of the two epochs j and the rediscovery of the antique was an immediate incitement to such comparisons. In this they scarcely took into account the deeper evolutionary processes which underlay the two social structures and their intellectual eflfects. Such comparisons always lead to definite judgments of value, which are made to serve abstract thought as concrete symbols. But a judgment of value is always preceded by a concept of purpose. When these comparisons were instituted between different styles, the judgment depended on the degree to which any particular style fitted in, or failed to fit in, with certain assumptions. In this manner Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Winckelmann and their numerous successors arrived at the conclusions in their theories of art. They saw in art merely the purpose of representing the beautiful j and since the Greek ideal of beauty seemed to our classicists the most perfect, it acquired for them an absolute significance j it was for them, consequently, the beautiful, measured by which every other style must seem crude and imperfect. So, while following the trail of the antique, they arrived at many valuable discoveries, yet left the heart of the question untouched.

The beautiful is a much debated concept, which has a special meaning, not merely for peoples of different regions and different culture circlesj the ideal of beauty of the same people or the same cultural community— if one may speak of such a thing—is constantly subject to great variations. What «-oday seems to the individual an ugly fad, tomorrow achieves recognition as a new concept of beauty. We are therefore of the opinion that in art in general there is no definite goal, only a way in which the formative impulse of man finds expression. Following up the forms in which this impulse reveals itself is a very attractive undertaking, nothing

more. It furnishes us no stopping point for the alleged purpose of artj for in this field, also, purpose has only a relative, never an absolute, meaning. Scheffler has beautifully clothed this idea in words: "Just as no single mortal possesses all of truth, just as truth is, rather, divided up among all, so also art as a whole is not in the possession of any one people or any one definite time. All styles together are just art." ^

Just as in natural science, so also in the history of art, the theory of catastrophes has long since been abandoned. No style sprang suddenly into existence of itself without points of contact with earlier styles. Every historian of art is in a position to demonstrate how one style gradually developed from another, in just the same way, in fact, as did the different forms of social life. That, of course, does not prevent the conflict of opinions about the worth of the various types of style from becoming often very sharp. So it has recently become common to acclaim the Gothic as bearer of the "Germanic spirit" and to play up its peculiar beauty in opposition to that of antique and Renaissance art. In fact, if one compares a Grecian temple with a Gothic cathedral one finds a quite overpowering difference between them. But to conclude from this that the contrast in style is the outgrowth of race or nationality is a monstrous absurdity. If Gothic was in fact the result of definite racial endowment or of a special national formative urge, then it is hard to understand why men like Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Winckelmann and others, honored as the most outstanding representatives of the German race, committed themselves to unconditional approval of the classical antique. Goethe, who was in his younger ye3»-s strongly attracted by the Gothic—as is shown by his observations on the cathedral at Strassburg—later turned more and more decisively to the antique ideal of beauty and made no secret of his low estimate of everything Gothic. Ought not this to prove to us that all theories which seek to find in artistic feeling in general and in the creative activities of artists in particular merely a revelation of the genius of the race or the nation are based on vain imaginings which have nothing in common with the realities of life?

There is one peculiar thing to note in connection with theories of art and style. They have the advantage that they bring definite differences between artistic creations more clearly before our consciousness, but their weak side is that they all proceed from assumptions which accord with the arbitrary views of their founders. When one tries to uphold his preference for one particular style over the others there are frequently brought out contrasts of a purely abstract nature which may fulfill the purpose of exalting special details, but are of little value for the clarifying of the real problem. Even the designations which have been given to the different styles have usually been chosen very arbitrarily and seldom cor-

^ Karl Scheffler, Der Geist der Gotik. Leipzig, 1921, p. 14.

respond to any clearly defined idea. Thus the word "Renaissance" in no way covers the concept which we associate with it todays for the culture of that period represents very much more than a rebirth of the antique. It was a complete overturning of all traditional notions and social concepts, which naturally made itself felt in art also. In place of the medieval society with its countless religious and social ties, its mysticism and its other-worldly urge, there appeared a new order of things to which the great discoveries of the time and the rapid transformation of all economic conditions were highly favorable. The Renaissance was, therefore, by no means a repetition of antique life forms, but a great unchaining of new impulses in every sphere of life. It could not be a rebirth of the antique, because it could not arbitrarily shake off the fifteen-hundred-years-old traditions of Christianity, but was bound up with these throughout its development.