Nationalism and Culture (90 page)

WE HAVE treated the development of architecture at some length because here the transitions in style and the influence of the social environment upon artistic production are most clearly apparent. But it would be a mistake to assume that in the other arts the "national peculiarity" of the artist has any more decisive influence on the character of his work. The personal always takes first place in artistic work and gives it its special note. Two artists who are born in the same place, belong to the same time, and are related in the same way to the influences of their social environment, display fundamentally different reactions to the impressions which they receive and which more or less strongly influence their creations.

Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were both Florentines, both lived in the same time, both were gripped by the spirit of their epoch j still they differ from one another as do day and night, and not merely in their purely human qualities-. The works of these two men belong in quite different worlds, and even the boldest national fantasy cannot bridge the abyss that separates them.

'There is in Leonardo's art something siren-like, softly calling from bottomless depths. The enigmatic smile of his female figures issues from an inner world withdrawn from everything temporal, in which the soul

seems filled with an enticing yearning. It seems like a dreamy play of the senses that can never become truth. And like a dream, too, those strange landscapes that have nothing earthly in them. Misty distances enchant the eye, awakening melodies of dreamy depth and more than human loveliness. Let one think of the landscapes of the Virgin of the Rocks, the St. John, or the Mona Lisa. All the figures to which Leonardo imparted life are nymph-like, including his madonnas, which are touched by no breath of Christian tradition. Everything is surrounded with a veil of the most delicate sensuality, which stirs deep vibrations in the soul, and out of which one thinks he hears soft echoes of the harmony of the spheres. This same strange current runs through all the work of Leonardo, recurring again and again in inexhaustible diversity. It is this current which so allured his contemporaries and posterity, like the news of a remote fairyland, which no mortal being had ever entered: always and everywhere the half-veiled glance, that peeps out from darkly enigmatic depths and seem like a vision from another world.

Of what an utterly different sort was Michelangelo, the powerful creator of titanic figures, on which he imposed the curse of his own life. Himself a giant who wants to take every heaven by storm and always feels himself held back by the weight of his own spirit, one struck down by Fate, in whose gloomy soul rage superhuman forces, who can never find satisfaction in his work and still is driven by an inner compulsion to work restlessly on, because he can do nothing else. In his demonic figures lives the torment of loneliness and gloomy brooding about which hover all the terrors of eternity. Many of his figures impress us like an Alpine weight. Let one think of the Jeremiah of the Sistine Chapel, of the sybils and painted caryatids of the gigantic ceiling; or even of the mighty masonry of the Medicean chapel in Florence. This Day, this Night, this Morning, this Evening, on which rests the burden of all the thousands of years, and in which the sorrow-filled soul of the artist is mirrored. Even the Leda being mated with the swan shows the same expression of leaden weight and arouses no feeling of sensuous passion. In other figures rages the storm of passionate wrath, as in the colossal statue of Moses, in whose gigantic body every muscle is tensed, and on whose forehead shows the mood of the thunder-storm. Even the Christ of the Last Judgment and the troop of naked giants which fills the background breathe the same spirit.

It is a difference in world philosophy that here finds expression. In the art of Leonardo that Humanism survived which is not the spirit of a nation, but the spirit of an epoch, its culminating point, and at the same time its most comprehensive expression. In the works of Michelangelo, Humanism was utterly suppressed to make place for the striving after superhuman things, which dared to knock at the secret gates of all heavens

and of every hell, driven by the heat of enthusiasm and the fanatical desire for a law that should not be human law. The man who withstood both emperor and pope, who in Gianotti's dialogues defended tyrannicide— "because the tyrant is not a human being, but a beast in human form"— 4ived also in his work.

That which is revealed at first glance ift the work of a great artist who puts spiritual problems into visible shape is not the accident of his nationality but the deeply human in him which belongs to all times and teaches us to understand the speech of all peoples. Compared to this the assaults of the local environment—however important they may be as indexes for the technical and historical judgment of his work—play a very small part. But even the quite local touches in a work of art do not give it a national characterj for within every nation, and especially every great nation, there are a multitude of local influences that peacefully work together in motley mixture but can never be assembled within the narrow frame of a fictitious concept of the nation.

What Leonardo, for example, wished to give expression to in his Mona Lisa was the manifold emotions of the human soul, the hidden ebb and flow of profound inner feeling. In it he followed the most delicate oscillations of mood, and the woman whom he had, so to speak, discovered for art, gave him a superlative starting point in this. The enigmatic countenance of Mona Lisa reflects all the extremes of human emotion j the adorably radiant and the abysmally demonic, cheerful innocence and cunning calculation, undesirous purity and ruinous sensuality. It is the artist's own soul that radiates from this picture j himself a Faust, who follows every obscure path, aching with the urge for knowledge, is yet unable to force his way to the Ultima Thule. It is just this profound experience of the innately tragic in the human soul that imparts to his work its peculiar greatness. With Michelangelo, also, every work is transformed into an expression of the experiences of his own soul: "And always it became an image of my own anguish, bore the gloomy lines of my own brow." In this profoundest emotion of the man and the artist there breathes no breath of national feeling. How little, how trifling, is all the bungling assertion of national influence in contrast with this struggling humanity that is always striving for the superhuman.

Just as in history the alleged national currents are forced quite into the background by the universal flood-stream of the time, so also in art. Thus we could hardly picture to ourselves the art of Albrecht Diirer without the Reformation and its countless undercurrents. Only if one keep clearly in mind the storm and stress of that time of ferment in which old and new were so completely churned together can one understand the strange combinations that are revealed in Diirer's work. We cite Diirer because he has been so often and so baselessly styled the "most German

of all German painters." Such a designation really means nothing at all. If one wants to designate as German the master's deep feeling for the tender inspirations and spiritual radiations of his native soil, by all means let him do so, but this in no way expresses the distinctive essence of Diirer's art. Lafarge was quite right when he said: "But the German side of his work is its limitation. The national or race side of any work of art is its weakness. What is called German is probably nothing more than the form of a less lengthy civilization." ^

In Diirer's art lives that strange dreamland which the surroundings of his homeland had called into being in his soul, people with the creatures of his fantasy which are born of the landscape, breathe its atmosphere and feel its sunrise sky above them. Works like Jerome at Homey the Flight into Egypty the Saint Anthonyy The Knight, Death and the Devil and many others, are illuminated by that strange gleam from his native soil that is so comforting to the eye. But in this same artist in whose soul is mirrored all the magic of his northern homeland lives also the alluring longing, the silent rhythm, of sunlit fields through which his feet have wandered. This influence, this voice from the distant South, is impressively revealed in the work of the master. When Scheffler declares that "in a painter like Diirer the Gothic has entered into a most noteworthy combination with the Grecian," he is merely giving expression to this feeling in other words. Diirer had absorbed into himself the whole creative urge of the Italian Renaissance and saturated every fiber of his being with it. The influence of Italian masters like Verrocchio, Leonardo, Mantegna, Bellini, Raffaello, Pollajuole and many others, find plain expression in many of his works. Verrocchio's equestrian statue of Colleoni stirred Durer deeply, and one can definitely accept it that without this influence works like the Saint George and Ritter, Tod und Teufel would never have come into existence. The Renaissance landscape, also, and, above all, the love of the naked human body, which is one of the most typical characteristics of the Renaissance, had an unmistakable influence on Diirer's art.

Diirer absorbed everything foreign, sucked it in at every pore, till it became a part of himself. Thus there mingled in his work the confused and twilight wonderings of the Northland and the clear and cheerful impressions of the South, which brightened and clarified his brimming fancy and supplied the current of his art as a whole. Even the deeply human in his work, that is brought so close to us especially by his figure of Christ, is in no way a "revelation of his German soul, but a revelation of the spiritual aspirations of his time. Here speaks to us Diirer the Humanist, who follows every human emotion to its utmost depths. The deeply human feature of Diirer's art appeals to us, too, in the well-known

^ John Lafarge, Great Mfisters. New York, 1906.

self-portrait of the master in the Munich Pinakothek—a silent brooder with searching eyes, whose gaze seems to be directed inward. One feels that behind that brow the great problems of the time are struggling to take shape, but the profound earnestness beaming from his countenance tells us also that this brain will not solve every riddle. We think involuntarily of the winged woman in the Melancholy of the master, who, sunk in gloomy brooding, gazes into an enigmatic distance, over which spreads mysteriously the glow of comet and of northern light.

If there were in reality such a thing as a national art, then such an artist as Rembrandt, and with him a legion of others, would be inconceivable. For the "national feeling" of his contemporaries had for the work of the greatest artist that little Holland ever produced nothing but scorn and derision. Its spokesmen had so little comprehension of Rembrandt's greatness that they calmly allowed him to perish in misery and took not the slightest notice even of his death. Only long after his demise did Rembrandt slowly find his way into the ranks of the immortals so that today he serves his country as the symbol of its "national spirit."

The citizenry of the Netherlands, which once carried on a desperate fight for the liberation of the country from the yoke of Spanish despotism, came out victorious in that struggle. A new spirit entered into every class of the population and brought the little country to an undreamed of height. In every city there was excitement and motion j everywhere, a surplus of vital energy. There still survives in the pictures of Franz Hals a last precipitate of the spirit of this time of impudent upstarts, intoxicated with its own vigor. But this unbridled spirit was rather quickly curbed j the desire for orderly conditions became more and more noticeable among the citizens, and with the rising development of business and of mercantile capital these assumed more and more stable form. Thus there developed gradually that comfortable Philistinism that lived only for its material interests and endeavored to regulate all life by fixed rules.

To Rembrandt this bourgeois-national orderliness became the curse of his life So long as he tried, as he did at first, to satisfy the taste of his unimaginative public, he got along after a fashion. Until the artist in him was aroused! Then it Was all over with the cheap popularity of the master, and the irreconcilable antagonism between him and the "nation" became increasingly evident.This antagonism finds in his works a completely conscious expression raised to a mordant sharpness. The artist became a rebel against his time and drew with keen clarity the boundary between his art and the national Philistinism of his land. Let one think of that Samson in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, who threatens his father-in-law with his clenched fist, or of that angry Moses in Dresden, who is dashing to pieces the tables of the law in grim rage, and one feels

that it is Rembrandt himself who is smashing the bourgeois orderliness on which his life was to be wrecked.

Even in his later work, which reveals the quality of the artist in full maturity, when he had long ceased to vent his ire on complacent profiteers, he came no closer to the national feeling of his country. On the contrary, the chasm between his art and the national lack of taste became ever wider and deeper, until at last he established his residence in the middle of the Ghetto of Amsterdam where the exiled Jews from Spain and Portugal unveiled to his keen eyes a new world strangely unlike the gray uniformity of Dutch life of his day. There he gradually forgot the old environment and reveled in all the colorful dreams of the Orient. What he had earlier surmised and in various ways developed became for him the profoundest spiritual experience. So he became the mighty magician of the brush, who flooded with spirituality everything corporeal and laid bare the hidden landscape of the soul. And so doing he became the bearer of a new art which was trammeled by no national ties, and was therefore to become an inner revelation for men of a later time.

There runs also through Rembrandt's art a deep social current. Let one cast a glance at the Christ of the "Hundred Guilder Print," - that savior of the despised and the outcast, surrounded by ragged beggars, the sick and the lame, who in torment pant for salvation. For beggars, drunkards and tramps were the constant companions of the artist during his last years, when, in order to be able to endure existence at all, he sought forgetfulness in carousal. And let us not here forget those last self-portraits of the master, out of which there stares at us a drink-wasted countenance marked by anguish of soul—perhaps the most terrible indictment of the nation that any artist ever put on canvas.