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Artists and Thinkers

artists "nd Thinkers

BY

LOUIS WILLIAM FLACCUS

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

FOURTH AVENUE &• 30TH STREET, NEW YORK

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON

BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADBAS

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Copyright, 1016,

BY

LOUIS WILLIAM FLACCUS

CONTENTS

PAGES

I. Introductory 1-9

II. Rodin 10-36

III. Maeterlinck 37-62

IV. Wagner 63-103

V. Hegel 104-139

VI. Tolstoy 140-160

VII. Nietzsche ..♦..♦,..... 161-200

ARTISTS AND THINKERS

INTRODUCTORY

Each of these essays stands by itself as a record
of a man's thoughts on art and as a study of the man
himself, of his methods of work, his aims and his
outlook on life. But they are bound together, even
if only in the slenderest of ways: they all have a
window open on a problem. A philosopher must
have his problem; his comfort demands it — a trade
weakness, I admit, but one in which I must confess
a share. I have taken my material from the border-
line of art and philosophy. I have chosen three
artists — Rodin, Wagner, and Maeterlinck — who have
achieved greatness in such widely different arts as
sculpture, music, and the drama; and three thinkers —
Tolstoy, Hegel, and Nietzsche — who are quite unlike
and fairly representative. All these men have had
much to say on art; they have discussed special
points and formulated general theories. Many of
these theories are fanciful, unsound, clumsy; these

2 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

I have given as well as others which show remarkable
insight. Incidentally I may have touched on the
truth of a theory or weighed it historically, but the
main interest has been elsewhere: in the problem
of the interplay of art and philosophy; in tracing the
Thinker in the Artist and the Artist in the Thinker.
The problem might be put brutally in its most
general form: Is the Artist at heart a Thinker, and
the Thinker an Artist? But little would be gained
by such a headlong impatience of results. In a
mechanical puzzle the solution is the thing. Bits of
steel must be twisted about in a certain way or helter
skelter balls of mercury must be driven to cover;
the sooner it is done, the better. With scientific
problems it is much the same. But in philosophy
we are often interested in the question rather than
the answer; in the whereabouts, the variants, the
ins and outs rather than the solution. Not every
one would admit as much. There are some who dig
a problem in with a spade; they much prefer to have
it stay put. To me it seems more important to get
the life-beat of a problem in all its unruliness. Wil-
liam James does it successfully because of his open
mind and his taste for the individual: he indulges
a problem, gives it free play, enjoys its waywardness
and uncovers its richness; his work is a protest against
the philosopher's idol worship of the general as such.
What then should we gain by asking the general ques-
tion: Is the Artist a Thinker and the Thinker an

INTRODUCTORY 3

Artist? We might answer Yes or No; the result I
would still be the same: a washed-out answer to a
washed-out problem. I do not, of course, mean to
defend the ingenious way of keeping problems alive
by linking them with others and breaking them into
a thousand puzzles, offering a new one as soon as
the old one has become lifeless. But I do wish to
suggest the liveness, the colorfulness and richness of
the problem of tracing with some detail the thought
strain in certain artists and the artistic groundwork
of certain philosophies. To say that Nietzsche, for
instance, is an artist philosopher amounts to little,
but it might be worth while to try to give the artistic
quality of his thought, to get its stamp, to disentangle
some of the motifs in which it is so rich. It might
be worth while to show parallelisms between Rodin's
technique and his reflections on art; to give the world-
view of a Maeterlinck, a Tolstoy or a Wagner as it
reflects their imagination and defines their outlook
on the world of art; to explain Hegel's philosophy
as world-romance of the boldest. I realize quite
well that to attempt something of the sort is to set out
on the road to the individual, and means a compli-
cated rather than simplified task. It would have
been much easier to have given the ordinary schema-
tized interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy — a
few high lights and a bit of outline — but why make so
little of the richness of a problem? why lose so much
by your haste to turn it inside out and tuck it away?

4 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

I do not, however, wish to intimate that I have made
the problem yield more than a very small part of its
wealth; nor do I propose to say of every structural
looseness or of every instance of lack of skill that the
method demanded it. The choice of the method has
been intentional; I believe in its promise and its
possibilities; but it would require a much more skil-
ful handling than I can command to give more than
a hint or two of these possibilities.

At first sight philosophy and art seem to have little
in common. The artist must have color: every
daubed sketch or bit of clay in his cluttered-up studio
is a call to the eye and the hand; the philosopher
must have his grey-in-grey. One likes to imagine
the meeting between Socrates the philosopher and
Parrhasius the painter at the latter's workshop,
and is disappointed in Xenophon's meagre sketch.
Socrates with that quick, ferreting mind of his must
have found the artist shallow, and Parrhasius may
well have thought him uninspired. But, after all.
the antagonism may not be so sharp as it seems
There is many an artist with a devil-may-care stroke
to his brush or pen and a sincere contempt for the
tribe of thinkers, who is in his heart of hearts, quite
unknown to himself, a philosopher, and a poor one
at that, with a vague use of such terms as ideal,
imitation, character, milieu, and what not. And
the philosopher at his best and at his worst is often
a poet. I grant you there is little poetry in Locke;

INTRODUCTORY 5

not five drops of poetic essence could be distilled from
his entire philosophy. But over against him may be
set men like Plato, in whom the wealth and color
of Athenian life are preserved as they are in no con-
temporary artist; .Plotinus; Spinoza; and Hegel,
in whom the sense of the dramatic and the grasp of
divine adventure are unusually strong.

Go a step farther and get beyond the artist's pose
and the philosopher's clannishness, and you will
find them both creatively self-expressive. There
the common bond seems to lie. While there are
artists who are merely transmissive, sensuously and
emotionally, and in whose art there is not the slightest
tinge of intellectual expression; there are others —
a majority, I should say — who react intellectually
as well as emotionally and whose work is shot through
with thought. There is more than swing and clatter
in Kipling, more than cobblestone verse in the later
Browning; Rodin thinks with his chisel, and Klinger
with his brush. If Rodin had never jotted down his
thoughts or allowed himself to be interviewed, we
should still feel the intellectual force of his work;
if Wagner had never written his essays or letters we
should feel the philosophy of Schopenhauer throbbing
in the very music of Tristan und Isolde. With
philosophy it is very much the same. If there is
such a thing as a pure thinking machine it is the
scientist, not the philosopher. Philosophy might
seem to have freed itself once for all from its early

6 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

closeness to poetry when it exchanged the majestic
verse of a Lucretius or an Empedocles for a crabbed
terminology and a jargon not unlike cracked var-
nish, but the artistic foundation is still there. The
expression of self has simply become less naive.
This may be seen by taking nature and natural
phenomena as they appear in the philosophy of
Empedocles, Marcus Aurelius, and Hegel.

In Empedocles there is a very direct interest in
nature; the sea and the stars flash in his verse, and
the panorama of life is given with much of its color.
He seeks to interpret, to grasp general laws, but his
thought has not worked itself loose from imagery.
With Marcus Aurelius the interest in nature is much
less direct. His enthusiasm for the universe, the
City of Zeus, his delicate interpretations of natural
processes as so much material for duty, his demand
for loyal submission, are so many touches to the
problem of realizing oneself, around which his thought
moves. If nature is more than an incident in his
philosophy it is only because he sees its importance
and understands its place in the development of
common man and Thinker alike. In Hegel the
interest in nature is still less direct: the whole sys-
tem of nature becomes a phase of cosmic self-realiza-
tion. Enthusiasm, imagery, and in fact anything
that might suggest the Artist, has been pressed
beneath the surface, but what a subterranean roman-
ticism there is in this Thinker! With what an

INTRODUCTORY 7

artist's imagination he has seized upon the dramatic
possibilities of the human consciousness!

If, then, philosophy and art express more and more
indirectly and reflectively certain heart-felt needs and
certain personal ways of reacting, what will be the
result? The mere asking such a question complicates
it immensely. The philosopher must take himself
seriously; he means to give the record of reality,
and not the " human document " of his tempera-
mental reaction to the universe. He must have his
objectivity at all costs, even if he has to attribute
to the universe, as Bergson does, his own elan and his
own plasticity. He regards himself as the inter-
preter of world-meanings, and not as a child on a
frolic. Back of the playfulness of a Nietzsche is a
grim constructive earnestness. There is no phil-
osopher who from an observer's point of view is more
subjective; and yet, while Nietzsche is fully aware of
the influence of his temperament on his thought and
is constantly indulging in self-analysis, he does not
seem to feel that such temperamental influences
affect the truth of his philosophy. But an artistically
rich philosophy is not on that account true. Still
what if a pragmatist blocks a statement like this by
interpreting truth as "the sentiment of rationality "
and that in turn as so many ethical and aesthetic
demands? There is one way out of this tangle: the
Thinker may develop as fine a sense of loyalty to
facts as such as the scientist's, and still have an

8 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

interpretative Artist's imagination and originality.
It is not an easy thing to do, but it is not more difficult
than the artist's task of combining idealization and
imitation. The path from emotional resonance to
such more and more indirect self-expression means a
richer and a truer philosophy.

But what of art and the resulting complications in
its field? The thought-strain is beyond a doubt
strongly present in much of modern art: there is
an intellectual undercurrent in our architecture and
our music, and a great deal of intellectual symbolism
in our sculpture and painting. But it appears most
plainly in the novel and the drama. Rolland's
Jean Christophe, the novels of Wells and Galsworthy,
those of Hardy or Anatole France, flash with intel-
lectual cross-lights of all colors. And what shall be
said of the problem play, from Ibsen to Brieux, Shaw,
Zangwill, Hauptmann and Bernstein? There is
everything there: social theories; social criticism;
intellectual fads and fancies; bits of biology and
metaphysics; a criss-cross analysis of character.
One feels constantly a tugging at the universe and its
problems. The question of the artistic value of
such developments is not one lightly to be settled.
A poem like Rabbi ben Ezra gains immensely through
its intellectual vigor; so does a play like Ghosts, but
artistic disintegration can be seen in Damaged Goods,
The Link, and The Doctor's Dilemma, and the col-
lapse of a thought-riddled art can be imagined. On

INTRODUCTORY 9

the other hand an intellectual freshening would do
our love poets and court poets and war poets no harm.
The true value of thought for art seems to me to
depend on its indirectness and emotional suggestive-
ness. This is the r61e it plays in Rodin and in
Maeterlinck. They make you feel the thrust of the
universe. Back of the artist's earnestness there
must be a certain freedom or playfulness, just as
there must be a certain earnestness back of the play-
fulness of the philosopher. Downrightness and
eagerness to solve problems have spoiled many a play
and novel.

Such are a few of the relations between Thinker
and Artist. To follow the problem further lies aside
from my purpose, which is rather to consider a few
individual artists and thinkers, to get some under-
standing of their working beliefs, and to trace the
intellectual and artistic motifs which are an impor-
tant, even if at times hidden, part of their art and
their philosophy.

II

RODIN

Lines and colors are for us only signs of
hidden realities. Our eyes plunge be-
yond the surfaces to the spirit. — Rodin.

It is perhaps too early for a final estimate of Rodin's
work. Time has done much in the way of giving
the necessary perspective, but with so startling, so
revolutionary an artist it must do much more. Cer-
tain prejudices have been cleared away; and to-day
at the age of seventy-four Rodin has taken his place
at the head of French sculptors as a man of ripe
achievement. This recognition he owes largely to
himself. He remained unshaken by the ridicule of
the press, and was utterly indifferent to the adverse
comments of the critics. He took his time; worked
in his own way; refused to modify his designs; kept
to his ideals and his technique; and routed the
scoffers and faultfinders by sheer force of artistic
purpose. It is easy to be too severe with these
critics. After all there is some excuse for their
hostility; they had a right to distrust a sculptor who
offered as his debut The Man with the Broken Nose,
and who, when commissioned to design a statue of

10

RODIN 11

Balzac, submitted as his sketch jagged, grotesquely
sensual features and a huge mass of body wrapped in
a formless dressing gown. It was but human to
attack a man whose attitude of cheerful independence
seemed insulting and whose work could not be made
to square with their pet theories. They have had
their say, and time has unsaid it. We credit ourselves
with greater insight, but it would, I think, be rash
of us to deny that we are too near to judge completely
and surely, and that much remains for Time, the
sifter and shifter of values.

But this much may be said even now of Rodin's
sculpture, that it shows a technique which is forceful
and resourceful as well as radical, dramatic quality,
nervous strength; and that it is intense, imaginative,
and intellectually stimulating. Such things are rare
in modern sculpture, which at its best is too often
simply smooth, graceful or piquant, and at its worst
theatrical and lifeless. It gives the impression of
being a thing without resource or vitality. Modern
music and poetry are vibrant with the spirit of the
times; why should sculpture alone of all the arts
fail to give something of the passionateness and rich-
ness of modern life? Rodin has proved once for all
that the fault lies not with sculpture itself, that it,
too, can be made responsive and vital; he has broken
new ground and shown sculpture to be still very much
alive.

His art is not his only answer to the critics. He

12 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

has defended his ideals and his technique, has done
it brilliantly and incidentally, as only a Frenchman
can; he has jotted down his thoughts on art in note-
books; and allowed himself to be interviewed freely.
There is hardly a critical study of Rodin in which
abundant use has not been made of this material.
Perhaps the completest and most suggestive collec-
tions published are those of Gsell and Judith Cladel.
Some allowance must, of course be made for par-
tisanship, but enough remains. All these sayings
of Rodin's give the same impression: of a critic
who is unaffected, earnest, and appreciative of fine
points; of an artist who takes his art very seri-
ously, reflects on its trend and its sources of
inspiration, and refuses to be classed as merely a
maker. They are the credo of a reflective artist;
they are not afterthoughts; and they are anything
but academic. In them may be found the verve,
the imaginative boldness, and the intellectual quality
so characteristic of Rodin's sculpture. When there
is such a parallelism it is worth while to trace
it by getting independently the marking qualities
of the man's work and then passing on to the sayings,
which are the self-expression of the Artist and the
Thinker in one.

As a worker in marble and bronze, Rodin is not a
believer in smooth, highly polished surfaces, and in
the large, monotonous planes of groups in repose.
Occasionally he aims very successfully at smoothness

RODIN 13

and grace. The softness and delicacy of his Spring-
time can hardly be matched. But the truer Rodin
cuts into surfaces boldly; roughens and hollows out.
The effect is strikingly varied and individual. It may
be studied in The Burghers of Calais, the busts of
Dalou and Puvis de Chavannes, and the face of
Balzac. A comparison of the surface of the bust
of Falguiere with that of The Man with the Broken
Nose shows a slow maturing of this principle of
technique, in which Rodin saw greater and greater
possibilities. In his groups he shows a preference
for bodies in motion and for sharp-angled positions
such as are given by bent, stooping or writhing bodies.
Technically this method of modelling and grouping
means a sharp contrast between bulging and hollowed
out surfaces, and a strong play of light and shade;
there is the illusion of depth, of the thrust of mass, of
variety in the breaking up of linear expanse. This
furrowing and tilting of planes is not Rodin's only
reason for the choice of other than reposeful and well-
balanced groups. He aims to give to his art the free
naturalness of life. John the Baptist is sculptured
not standing, but walking; thus he, the great fore-
runner, is caught in his stride. Nothing could be
simpler, less of the nature of posturing and arranging,
than The Burghers of Calais. The critics protested
against such violations of well-established academic
principles, and asked him to group the burghers
differently: his was such an informal way of sending

14 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

men on the road to death, with nothing in the way
of pose or set melodramatic touch. And John the
Baptist? One might almost suspect them of a naive
fear lest he be off and out of the door before they
knew it. -

Beauty, in the accepted sense of formal beauty, is
not the highest law of Rodin's art. There again he
ran afoul of the critics, to whom his continued and
bold use of the ugly seemed perverse. He would not
fit their pseudo-classical ideal of banishing from
sculpture every touch and influence of the ugly.
But even this side of their extreme position, Rodin's
extensive use of the ugly is startling. There are in
formative art few instances of greater daring in its
use than La Vieille Heaulmiere, that distressingly
frank picture of the physical decay of old age in all
its hideousness. In The Weeper & face not unattract-
ive in its lines is deliberately caught at its worst,
in the grimace of weeping. What has been con-
demned as absurd in sculpture — a mouth wide open-
Rodin has attempted: in the bust The Tempest
there are the head and shoulders of a female figure
springing from the solid block with a fine suggestion
of frenzied movement; a suggestion carried over
to the face with its tense expression, its wild eyes,
and wide-open mouth.

A further characteristic of Rodin's work is its
dramatic quality. This must not be held to imply
theatricalism, which marks an art at once showy and

RODIN 15

weak; and which expresses itself in unnatural poses,
constrained gestures, and affected conceits. On the
whole there is no theatricalism in Rodin's work,
although a few of his groups are marred by a not alto-
gether happy rqffinement: The Angel's Kiss and
Triton and Siren are instances. His figures are
elemental, passionate, dramatic, but supremely nat-
ural in every gesture and in the tension and mus-
cular play of their bodies. They seem to hold us by
sheer weight of ecstasy or passion. Every muscle
shares in the dramatic voicing of movement; inner
and outer, everything is at one; one life animates
all the parts of a Rodin group. The utmost com-
pactness is insisted on, and much of the dramatic
quality of Rodin's sculpture is due to this, but the
compactness is never purely external or unnatural,
as it is in the Laocoon group. Rodin often blocks
his figures or works them out of a solid background
of rock for the sake of binding violent gestures or
figures to a unity. Often he gains the same end by
flexing an elbow or rounding a gesture or by economic
grouping; no straggling arm is allowed; the group
is bent back into itself, and yet there is nothing
suggestive of the strained or unnatural; simply be-
cause an inner life is there, gathering up everything,
making everything one. The mood or idea is worked
out in the several figures of the group and in
their relations; no single figure dominates the group.
In looking at Springtime, an exquisitely modelled

16 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

piece, the eye does not catch separately the free and
strong posture of the one figure and the passionate
yieldingness of the other.

It is to this inwardness as well as to compactness
and a strong naturalness that the dramatic quality
of Rodin's art is due. It gives beauty and expressive-
ness to his bust Thought and his statue The Thinker.
The face of the bust is not meant to be beautiful;
its lines are too irregular; and yet never has sculptor
suggested more forcibly the pensive calm and intense
self-absorption of a soul lost in thought. In The
Thinker a contrasted mood is caught. Rodin repre-
sents his Thinker seated on a rock, bent forward,
one arm clasping a knee, the other bent at the elbow
and again at the wrist; the back of the hand shoved
under and supporting a massive chin. The muscles
are tense and bulky; the neck, short; head and body,
those of a heavy-set athlete. No statue could be
more compact in its lines; nor could compactness
be more expressive of mood; here is thought at its
hardest, puzzled, bewildered, groping obstinately;
with the body, muscles, tendons and all, heaved into
the struggle.

In Rodin's Hell Gate, which, still unfinished, is
to be a chiselled Dante's Inferno, there is a group of
two souls in hellfire. Their bodies, supported by
knees and arms and crossing at the thighs, form a
double arc — a position extreme, but tragic and simple
with the simplicity of great art. These arched

RODIN 17

bodies suggest the curling and shrivelling of leaves
in the fire and a more merciless heat than could have
been suggested by any writhing or twisting.

One further illustration — the Ugolino. The story
of Ugolino, crazed by hunger and devouring his sons,
has been put by Dante in verse unmatched for sheer
horror and sublimity. In sculpture Carpeaux has
given a rather theatrical group. Rodin's is simple
and tragic. Ugolino crouches, on hands and knees,
with his sons caught under him. Nothing could be
more wolfish than the position of this hunger-racked
body; but Rodin passes from the horrible to the
tragic in Ugolino's face. The head is not bent down;
it is in line with shoulders and back; the eyes stare
wildly and vacantly, and there is something about
the cast of the mouth and the smooth lines of the face
more terrible than the utmost physical agony. It
is the wreckage of hunger and grief — something of
beast and something of a god demented.

A further mark of Rodin's art is its combination of
realism and symbolism. His busts run remarkably
true, but it is in giving the muscular expressiveness
of the body that he excels. One need only compare
his Adam with that of Michael Angelo to see what an
advantage the fearless sculptor has over the painter
in this respect. Very instructive also are his nu-
merous and accurate studies of the hand. So true
anatomically was one of his earlier figures that he
was accused of having taken a cast from the living

18 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

model. Rejecting the one-angle theory of sculptured
figures, Rodin insists on their being modelled with
equal strength and care on all sides; this leads him
to a remarkably realistic and expressive treatment
of shoulders and back, as in the marble statuette
The Bather, or still better in the Eve. It would,
however, be a mistake to say that Rodin aims at
extreme naturalism as a tour de force or at all costs;
it is after all, a mood, a passion, an elemental conflict
he wishes to catch; and he purposely exaggerates the
size of a hand or foot, overdoes a muscle or hints at
two successive moments in one and the same posture,
in order to heighten the significance or give the sym-
bolical content of his figures. In this way he avoids
such dangers of decadent sculpture as the muscular
theatricalism of the Laocoon group and the muscular
overdevelopment and immobility of the Farnese
Hercules; besides, he avoids the opposite defect,
that of the insipid. Rodin's art is nothing if not
imaginatively and intellectually stimulating. It is
an Eve ashamed, guilt-stricken, that he gives us.
In Satyr and Nymph there is something of the force
and breathless lust of nature at her earliest. In the
Burghers of Calais there is a subtle grading of hero-
ism and suffering, worked out in figures that com-
bine an almost grotesque naturalism — think of the
figure of the monk — with an astounding wealth and
intensity of feeling and thought.

RODIN 19

So much for some of the significant features of
Rodin's art. It is in direct relation to them that his
reflections on art must be taken. Of the latter the
rich and charmingly simple conversations with
Gsell, published under the title UArt in 191 1, offer
good samples. There Rodin discusses such topics
as realism in art, symbolism, design and color,
movement in sculpture, thought in art, and modelling.
Some four or five of these are of unusual interest.
They reveal the inner springs of Rodin's art and
genius.

Discussing modelling, Rodin by way of an object
lesson takes up a small lamp and lets its light glide
over a marble copy of the Venus dei Medici, and
asks Gsell to notice the many grooves, unevennesses,
minute juttings and depressions. What seemed
smooth and simple turns out to be complex, and
gives the impression of an infinitely rich, warm,
and faithful art in sharp contrast to the lifelessness
and meagreness of academic sculpture. The Greek
ideal is one of blended richness; and it is only because
the Greek artist was a patient student of nature and
a master in the science of modelling, that he could
give warmth and finality to his work. Rodin puts it
this way:

<c Do you know how this impression of lifelike-
ness the Venus has just given us is produced? By
the science of modelling. These words may seem trite
to you, but you will soon see their importance. The

20 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

science of modelling was shown me by a certain Con-
stant, who worked in the decorator's shop where I
began as a sculptor. One day he saw me shaping
in clay the foliage of a capital. ' Rodin/ he said,
1 you handle yourself poorly. All these leaves of
yours appear flat. That is why they don't seem real.
Make some with their points shaped toward you, so
as to give any one who looks at them the impression
of depth.'

" I followed his advice and was surprised at the
result. ' Remember well what I have told you/
continued Constant, ' henceforth in your sculpture
never see forms spread out, flat, but always deep . . .
Never consider a surface other than the end of a
solid, as a point more or less large aimed at you.
That is how you will acquire the science of model-
ling.'

" This principle proved itself wonderfully fruitful
to me. I made use of it in shaping my figures. In-
stead of regarding the different parts of the body as
so many planes I represented them as so many juttings
of masses beyond. I forced myself to let feel injevery
bulging of the torso or the limbs the cropping out of
a muscle or bone that continued as depth beneath
the skin. That is why the truth of my figures instead
of being superficial seems to expand from within
outward like life itself.

" Then I discovered that the ancients used exactly
the same science of modelling. And it is certainly
to this principle of technique that their works owe
at once their strength and their quivering suppleness."

Rodin then suggests that light and shade effects are
possible in sculpture as well as in painting.

RODIN 21

" In your opinion, Gsell, is color a quality of paint-
ing or of sculpture? "

"Of painting, naturally."

" Well, look at this statue." Saying this, he held
the lamp so that its light fell on the torso from above.
" Do you see these strong lights on the breasts, these
strong shadows in the folds of the flesh, and then
the whitenesses, the vaporous and trembling half-
lights on the most delicate parts of this divine body;
these parts so delicately drawn that they seem to
dissolve into thin air? What do you say to them?
Isn't it all a wonderful symphony in black and white?"

" I had to admit it."
.*" Paradox as it may seem, the great sculptors
have been great colorists, and the best painters have
been excellent engravers.

" They play so skilfully all the resources of relief,
they fuse so well the boldness of light and the modesty
of shadow that their sculptures have all the relish
of the richest etching. Color then — and that is
what I wish to come to — is like the flower and bloom
of good modelling. These qualities go together, and
it is they that give to the masterpieces of sculpture
the radiant aspect of living flesh."

Rodin also considers the problem of movement in
sculpture. He himself makes use of movement in
order to bring out sharply the muscular expressive-
ness of the body; here his suggestive theory of
movement in sculpture may be said to begin. It is
the sculptor's aim to express feelings and passions;
and this he must do largely through the muscles;
they in turn can be rendered effectively only on

22 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

condition that the figure whose mood is to be given is
lifelike. This lifelikeness depends on two things:
good modelling and movement; and they are the
" blood " and " breath " of sculpture. Defining
movement as " the changing of one posture into an-
other/ ' Rodin develops the principle of progressive
movement. The sculptor, he argues, combines in
one moment of presentation two successive positions,
and thus makes the spectator take part in the de-
velopment of a movement, follow it with the eye,
and get the stimulus of active change. John the
Baptist is shown walking, and yet flatfooted as one
standing. In the Age of Bronze, one of Rodin's
earlier works, the awakening of primitive man is
symbolized. There the lower part of the body still
has something of the softness and deep unconscious-
ness of sleep, but as the eye follows the body upward,
the first dawn of consciousness shows itself in head,
shoulder, and arm. Rodin further suggests that in
complex groups a skilful grading of moments or a
varying of the tempo will allow the sculptor by his
own technique to render movement quite as effect-
ively as the poet. As examples he cites Rude's
La Marseillaise and his own Burghers of Calais.

Rodin's thoughts on modelling, light and shade,
and movement are thoughts on technique and are
offered as new observations on very old principles
of all masterly sculpture. Rodin himself again and
again turns to Greek art and professes to find all his

KODIN 23

principles there; he refers to the modelling of the
Venus dei Medici and the rush and sweep of the
Victory of Samothrace. Still there is hardly anything
at all like his principle of progressive movement in
Greek sculpture; and Greek modelling seems much
less given to uneven, jagged or furrowed surfaces.
The truth must He deeper; in certain thoroughly
modern artistic demands and ideals expressed in
Rodin's art and shadowed forth imperfectly in his
reflection. No one would deny extreme individuality
to his work. And no one with the vagaries of our
younger painters and poets in mind would deny that
the demand for individuality is very strong in our lat-
ter-day art. It dominates conception and technique.
^In sculpture individuality of technique is so difficult
a matter that artists of the stature of Canova and
Thorvaldsen failed to achieve it. Rodin seeks to
gain it by the breaking up of surfaces, by projections
and indentations, by accentuating and deepening;
and, in spite of what he says, he is not a disciple of
the Greeks in this. Letting the light of a lamp
glide over the surface of the Venus dei Medici is
hardly a fair test, for the headlights of an automobile
will make the smoothest asphalt road appear as badly
dented as a battered piece of tin. Rather is it the
modern demand for a perfectly individualized surface
and a modern restive technique that make themselves
felt. Again, such a principle as that of progressive
movement in sculpture is simply one instance more

24 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

of the psychological factor in modern art. The
essentially unstable, fluid, transforming character
of processes of attention and perception is recognized
here as well as in impressionistic painting and in the
incessant transmutations of Wagnerian music.

Rodin's emphasis on movement touches still an-
other demand; a demand that goes beyond questions
of technique to the fundamental question: " What is
sculpture to portray? " Life as movement, Rodin
answers. Of the artist he says that for him " life
is an infinite enjoyment, a constant jcstasy, a dis-
tracted intoxication." This breaks at once with the
traditional view of sculpture as a self-contained,
placid art, creator of gleaming marbles at rest, and
asks for a dynamic and restless sculpture to parallel
life in its restlessness and energy. In this sense
Rodin's art is thoroughly modern. T/verywhere,
from the most surprising quarters, and in various
forms, comes the demand for an interpretation of
life as movement. Philosophy and art alike show
this drift of the modern consciousness. It is seen
in Bergson's elan vital) in the Futurist's stress on
youth and the Futurist ideal of an art out of
breath. It appears, at once more vigorous and
saner, in the artistic ideals of Rodin.
"This demand for an art which is to reflect movement
and cosmic struggle carries us into the very heart of
Rodin's artistic beliefs. It implies the rejection of
beauty, in the sense of the regular, the harmonious;

KODIN 25

the pleasing, as the aim of sculpture and the accept-
ance of expressiveness, character, and symbolical
content as the ideal. It extends the range and shifts
the emphasis. Rodin often discusses the place of
ugliness, of expression, and thought in sculpture. A
passage like the following begins with the problem
of ugliness — La Vieille Heaulmiere being under dis-
cussion— but widens out into all the others:

" ' Master,1 1 said to my host, ' no one admires more
than I do this astounding figure, but I hope you will
not be angry if I tell you what effect it has on the visitors,
especially the women visitors, at the Musee du Luxem-
bourg . . . '

" * You will oblige me by telling me.'

" ' Well, the public in general turns away, exclaim-
ing: " How ugly that is!" and I have often seen women
cover their eyes in order to spare themselves that sight.'

" Rodin began to laugh heartily.
j^ " ' My work must be eloquent to call forth such
lively impressions. Beyond doubt such persons fear
basic truths when they are too harsh.

" ' But the only thing that matters is the opinion
of men of taste. I have been delighted to gather
their votes on my Vieille Heaulmiere. I am like the
Roman singer who answered the hisses of the crowd
by saying, " I sing for the nobles," which means, the
connoisseurs.

" ' The crowd likes to believe that what it judges
to be ugly in actual life is not fit matter for art. It
would like to forbid our picturing what it finds dis-
pleasing or offensive in nature.

" ' That is a serious error on its part. What is

26 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become
very beautiful. In the class of actual objects we
call ugly what is misshapen, what is unhealthy, what
suggests the idea of disease, weakness, suffering,
what violates regularity — that sign and condition of
health and strength: a cripple is ugly, a sabre is
ugly, misery in rags is ugly. Ugly again are the soul
and the actions of an immoral man, of a vicious and
criminal man, of an abnormal man dangerous to
society; ugly is the soul of the parricide, the traitor,
the ambitious man without scruples.

" ' It is fit that beings and objects from which we
can expect nothing but ill be marked by an odious
epithet.

" ' When, however, a great artist or writer takes
hold of one of these uglinesses he at once trans-
figures it, with a stroke of his magic wand he
makes of it a thing of beauty. It is alchemy; it is
witchery !

" c When Velasquez paints Sebastian, the court
fool of Philip IV, he gives him so moving a look that
we read in it at once the sorrowful secret of this
cripple, who in order to earn a living is forced to give
up his dignity as a human being, to become a play-
thing, a living cap and bells. And the more poignant
is the martyrdom of this consciousness lodged in a
monstrous body, the more beautiful is the work of the
artist.

" * When Francois Millet pictures a poor peasant
who stops for a breathing spell; leaning on his hoe —
a sufferer broken by weariness, cooked by the sun,
as brutish as a beast of burden raked with blows —
all that is needed is to discover in the expression of
this damned one resignation to torture decreed by

RODIN 27

fate, and this creature of a nightmare becomes a
magnificent symbol of humanity at large.

" l When Baudelaire describes a foul carcass,
slimy and eaten by worms, and when he pictures
under this frightful image his adored mistress, noth-
ing could equal in splendor this horrible opposition
between beauty one would wish eternal and the
fearful disintegration that awaits it.

And yet you will be like this filth, this horrible infection,
Star of my eyes, Sun of my nature! O my angel and my
passion!

Yes, such you will be, O queen of graces, after the last
sacraments, when you shall go under the sod lush with
blossoms, to rot among the bones,

Then, O my Beauty, tell the vermin that devour you with
kisses that I have guarded the form and the divine essence
of my decomposed loves.

" £ It is the same when Shakespeare paints Iago or
Richard III, when Racine paints Nero and Narcissus:
moral ugliness interpreted by minds so clear and
penetrating becomes a marvellous theme of beauty.

" ' In short, the beautiful in art is simply what
has character.

" l Character is the intense truth of any sight or
scene of nature whether beautiful or ugly; it might
even be called a double truth, for it is the truth within
translated by that of without; it is the soul, feeling,
idea, as they are expressed by the lines of a face, the
gestures and acts of a human being, the tones of the
sky or the line of an horizon.

" ' For the great artist everything in nature offers

28 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

character, for the incorruptible candor of his observa-
tion pushes to the hidden sense of everything. And
what is thought of as ugly in nature often presents
more character than what is styled beautiful, for in
the contractions of a sickly face, in the smirk of a
vicious mask, in every deformity and every blight,
the inner truth bursts forth more easily than in
regular and sound features.

' And since it is simply the strength of character
that makes the beautiful in art, it follows that often
a thing is the more beautiful in art the uglier it is in
nature. That alone is ugly in art which lacks char-
acter, that is to say, has no outer or inner truth.
Ugly in art is what is false or artificial, what seeks
to be pretty or beautiful instead of being expressive;
what is clownish or affected, what smiles without
motive, what is handled without reason, what bends
or straightens itself without cause: everything that
is without soul and without truth, everything that is
a parading of beauty or grace, everything that lies.

" ' When an artist for the purpose of embellishing
nature adds green to the springtime, rose to the
dawn, red to young lips, he creates ugliness, because
he lies.

" ' When he softens the grimace of pain, the flabbi-
ness of old age, the hideousness of the perverse, when
he arranges Nature, when he veils her, disguises her,
when he softens her in order to please an ignorant
public, he creates ugliness because he is afraid of the
truth.

" ' For an artist worthy of the name everything in
nature is beautiful, because his eyes, accepting boldly
every outer truth, read therein without pain and as
in an open book every inner truth.

RODIN 29

" ' He need only look at a human countenance in
order to decipher a soul; not a single trait deceives
him; hypocrisy is to him as transparent as sincerity;
the angle of a forehead, the least knitting of the eye-
brows, a passing glance, reveal to him the secrets of a
heart.

" ' He examines the spirit folded up in an animal.
He sees in the look and the movements of an animal
its whole moral life — that rough sketch of feelings
and thoughts, a heavy intelligence and the rudiments
of tenderness. In the same way he is the confidant
of inanimate nature! "

This passage should be supplemented by one of
the several in which Rodin discusses the sense of
mystery and the nature of symbolism. In one of the
later conversations with Gsell he defines religion as
the sense of mystery, as " the push of our conscious-
ness toward the infinite, the eternal, toward a knowl-
edge and a love without limits.,, This sense of
mystery every great artist has. He then continues:

" If religion did not exist I should have to invent
it. True artists are in short the most religious of men.

" It is commonly believed that we artists live
only by our senses, and that the world of appearances
satisfies us. We are thought to be children who are
drunk with brilliant colors and who amuse themselves
with shapes as with dolls. We are not well under-
stood. Lines and tints are for us only signs of hidden
realities. Our eyes plunge beyond the surfaces to
the spirit. When we present contours we enrich
them with a spiritual content which they are to
envelop,

30 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

" The artist worthy of the name must express the
whole truth of nature, not only outer truth, but inner
truth as well.

" When a good artist models a human body he
does not merely give muscles; he gives the life that
works in them or, better still, the power that shaped
them and gave them grace or vigor or amorous
charm or untamed fury.

" Michael Angelo makes the creative force roar
in the living flesh; Lusa della Robbia makes it smile
divinely Ij"

Gsell in the course of the conversation suggests
that Rodin's own statues show very clearly this tor-
ment of the invisible and inexplicable. He sees in
many of them the symbolism of a soul with infinite
yearnings chained to the flesh. He takes as examples
the statue of Balzac, The Thinker, The Kiss, The
Burghers of Calais. All of them are tensional, he
holds, in this sense. Rodin, asked to confirm this
interpretation, strokes his beard pensively and re-
marks: " I shall not say No." That there is a great
deal of symbolism in his sculpture he admits in many
passages. The talk ends characteristically.

"A moment later he asked me: 'Are you now
convinced that art is a kind of religion? '

" ' Beyond doubt/ I replied.

" Then he added maliciously: l One must, however,
recall that the first commandment of this religion for
those that wish to practise it is to know how to model
an arm, a torso or a thigh.' "

RODIN 31

It is clear from passages like these that Rodin
makes use of the ugly for the sake of its expressive-
ness. His is not a cult of the ugly, the morbid, the
repulsive as such; still he is on occasion extreme
in his use of the ugly and repulsive. He insists,
however, that what is ugly is sharply individualized
and stimulating in the sense of giving the sting,
the movement, and the expressive range of life. It
is for the sake of such symbolism that smooth lines
must be broken; harmonies shattered; and ugliness
shown at once in its nakedness and its imaginative
appeal. Imagination and thought redeem the ugly
in art, but only when they spontaneously grow out
of the subject chosen. If anything can redeem
La Vieille Heaulmiere it is the thought, at once
depressing and imaginatively stimulating, of the
contrast between youth and physical decay, and of
the silently working forces that change the one to
the other. But the reference to Villon's poem, while
it adds to the poignancy of the statue, seems to vio-
late Rodin's principle of inherent symbolism. While
his interpretation of Millet and Baudelaire is sound
in its emphasis on an ideal significance, his reading
of Velasquez' painting of the court fool is fanciful,
to say the least; an extraneous forcing of meaning.
In spite of occasional lapses Rodin is too much of an
artist to burden art with the fantastic and narrow
symbolism that is to be found in Ruskin and Tolstoy.
He is saved not only by his emphasis on form, color,

32 AKTISTS AND THINKERS

and muscular expressiveness, but by his interpretation
of life as movement and struggle, and by the free
play of his imagination. In discussing his statue
La Centaur esse , Rodin remarks:

" In subjects of this kind the thought reveals
itself, I believe, without much trouble. They awaken
without any strange help the imagination of the
onlooker. And yet, far from encircling it within
narrow limits, they incite to a vagabondage of fancy.
And this, to me, is the meaning of art. The forms
it creates are to give to feeling an opportunity to
develop indefinitely.' '

Of this vagabondage of fancy there is much in
Rodin's work, and to its score must be put many of
his grotesque and startling experiments in forms.
He is not a novelty seeker; but he likes bold con-
ceptions and a certain amount of loose play. It is
the Gothic in him — superabundant energy and play-
fulness keeping symbolism sane and the imagination
at a stretch. vNot that this destroys his theory that
sculpture is to give character, that it is to be signifi-
cant at all hazards — it merely gives it wider scope by
interpreting life as energy, as movement with much
variety, more than a hint at purposiveness, and a
dash of caprice and playfulness.

Rodin does not stand alone in emphasizing what
is ugly and in revealing the thrust of an ideal mean-
ing— call it thought or feeling or the drive of life —
in sensuous forms. It is worth while to compare

RODIN 33

him in this respect with one of the masters of etching
— Felicien Rops. Both men are bold and forceful
in technique — the one truthful and resourceful in
modelling, the other sure and finished in line. Both
are masters in the portrayal of the sensuous charm of
woman's beauty, and with both this beauty is of a
type at once robust and subtle. Eve and The Bather
are matched by Rops's Flemish women with their
full-bodied beauty and strong grace. Neither artist
is simply graceful or simply elegant; both in aiming
at ideal significance admit the ugly to the fullest
extent. Quite as extreme as La Vieille Heaulmiere
is Rops's Mors Syphilitica. The Absinthe Drinker is
mercilessly and repellently true at the utter sacrifice
of all formal beauty. Skeleton and cloven foot —
two devices considered obsolete — Rops uses again
and again, sometimes with a view to the sinister and
the tragic, often with a view to the grotesque. Of
the former, Dancing Death and Death at the Masked
Ball are good samples; of the latter, Satan Sowing
Weeds is the best. The background of this sketch is a
study in black — torn bands of cloud and a struggling
moon; in the lower foreground are the shadows of
a great city. Flung across this scene and in the act
of taking one huge stride is Satan, a skeleton, focussed
from below, with grotesquely lengthened shank-
bones, sabots on his feet, and a sack-like cloth flung
loosely across middle and shoulder, and with a head
that is haunting by its sheer unlikeness to anything

34 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

but a bat in the winglike extensions and the black-
ringed brightness of the eyes. Satan is sowing
weeds — tiny cupids that are sent tumbling toward
the dark shadows of the city. Almost as grotesque
and more repulsive in its ugliness is Happiness in
Crime.

If Rops rivals Rodin in the use of the ugly, he out-
rivals him in the symbolism of his art. The dominant
note of this symbolism is one of unrelieved pessimism.
The Mirror of Coquetry and Shamelessness are variants
of the same theme: the reflection of a simian shape is
thrown across a mirror as a sardonic comment on the
vanity and pride of man. Skull and cloven foot are
used as symbols of the transitory, useless, and wicked
thing called life. Theft and Prostitution Rule the
World is the title of one of Rops's etchings; in another,
The Love-Market, an old hag is motioning purchasers
to the sale of a young girl. Rops's absolute mastery
of sensuous form marks his symbolism all the more
strongly. Much of his work is dominated by the
figure of woman. Sure of her power, triumphant with
the triumph of an unconscious and cruel animalism,
she brings unrest, misery, and idle amusement —
the Devil's own gifts; but change and death threaten
this splendor of the flesh.

It would be a serious mistake to regard all of Rops's
work from this point of view, for much of it is simply
diablerie; some of his best drawings, the Rem-
brandtesque faces of old women, are nothing more

RODIN 35

than studies in light and shade and in line. But of
what remains the symbolism is one of moral ideas.
Often this moral significance is so pointed and
oppressive that it runs danger of lessening the artistic
excellence, but in many of the etchings it is at once
general and compelling, much to the gain of art.
Of such gain Human Wreckage and The Absinthe
Drinker are splendid examples, but even here there is
a wide difference between the symbolism of Rops and
that of Rodin. Rops's art is fin de siecle in its
pessimism, its irony, and in a certain raffinement of
the sensuous. With biting satire and in a spirit
of bitter mockery it gives a world broken on the
wheel of its own folly and vice. A merciless light
beats down on whatever is diseased, perverse, morally
rotten in modern life. The symbolism is one of
moral values.

> Not so with Rodin. There is neither mockery nor
satire in his work, but there is a very primitive and
very direct joy of life, and a very sharp sense of the
dramatic and dynamic; at the heart of his symbolism
are such simple ideas as: movement, unrest, passion,
lust, work, play, man's early struggle with nature,
thought, melancholy, bitterness. He feels all these
and their elemental conflicts to the full, but his rugged
optimism finds them bracing. He avoids the bour-
geois symbolism of a Hogarth with its moral picture
book series, and the great but too strongly moral
symbolism of a Rops. Artistically the symbolism of

36 ARTISTS AND THINKEKS

Mors Syphilitica is inferior to that of La Vieille
Heaulmiere; the idea of the ravages of a particular
disease is inferior in range and power to the idea of
the silent, inevitable passing from youth to old age.
In contrast to a symbolism that crystallizes, Rodin's
is fluid. It expresses his view that life is movement
and struggle; something as unrestful and intensely
dramatic in its quiet changes as in its explosive
moments. It is a symbolism of life-forces in their
flow and at full pressure.

This fluid, natural symbolism Rodin joins to a
strong and accurate technique. He knows the
anatomy and geometry of his art, and gets full plastic
value out of his marble. In his best work the form
is made to respond so thoroughly and readily to a
symbolic idea which in turn seems to grow out of it
that the impression is one of an art of stronger dra-
matic quality and of greater imaginative and intellec-
tual range and wealth than was thought possible in
sculpture. Rodin as a thinker on art has the insight
and the courage to see the value of what made him
great as an artist. He demands an unflinching
observation, accuracy, individuality, skill, forceful
workmanship — all at the service of an artistic pur-
pose that catches the very breath and pulse-beat of
file.

Ill

MAETERLINCK

Nothing in the whole world is so athirst
for beauty as the soul, nor is there anything
to which beauty clings so readily.

— Maeterlinck.

Maeterlinck's aesthetic essays might be counted
on the fingers of one hand. Two — The Inner Beauty
and The Tragical in Daily Life — are to be found in
The Treasure of the Humble; one — The Modern
Drama — in The Double Garden; and one — King Lear
— in The Measure of the Hours. To these must
be added the fine preface to the collected plays.
Then there are, of course, many incidental remarks
on art and beauty.

His interest everywhere seems to lie in two
problems: he attempts a new interpretation of the
tragic, and he sees in beauty the self-expression of
a strong and responsive soul. He ignores the social
and cultural relations of art, and affords in this
respect a sharp contrast to men like Hegel, Wag-
ner, Nietzsche, Ruskin, and Tolstoy; and it is
owing to this, I think, that his art and philosophy

37

38 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

alike lack the gritty admixture which is found in
much of their work. The artistic works in few
men with such purity. There is no problem or
question of the day, however matter of fact or
grim and urgent — war, suffrage, justice, gambling,
automobiling — which he fails to dissolve into a play
of colors or a fantastic dance of possibilities, drawing
near and receding in the dusk. His essays on
gambling and the duel, The Temple of Chance and
In Praise of the Sword, are good samples. One
gets wonderfully vivid images, of yellow counters
and blue notes and clinking gold, of the tiny ivory ball
spinning and hopping " like an angry insect "; and
of the flash and glint of the rapier. But one gets
more than that: an ever-changing outlook and play
of suggestions. The sword becomes a symbol of
man's intelligence, of his high sense of honor, and of
his emergence from an early state of brute force and
of brutal ways of settling scores; it is likened to " a
fairy bridge swung over the abyss of darkness."
Such intellectual and imaginative festooning is
thoroughly characteristic of Maeterlinck; it marks
both the good and the bad in his art and philosophy.
At its worst it suggests the spun-sugar creations of a
confectioner's shop; at its best it gives a wealth
of overtones, a veiled aliveness, and a constantly
shifting enterprise in a world of shadowy limits.

The best starting-point for any study of Maeter-
linck's personality as an artist and a thinker is a

MAETERLINCK 39

passage in the preface to his collected plays. It was
written in 1908. In it he analyzes the beauty of a
work of art as follows: " First the beauty of language,
then the impassioned view and portrayal of what exists
about us and in us, that is, nature and our sentiments,
and lastly, enveloping the whole work and forming its
atmosphere, the idea formed by the poet of the unknown
in which the beings and things he calls forth are drifting,
and of the mystery which rules and judges them and pre-
sides over their destiny."

Of surface beauty, made up of the first and the
second, there is much in Maeterlinck. He is unob-
trusive, direct, and delicate in his appreciation of
beautiful things. There is something Flemish in
his delight in precious stones and in rich, old stuffs;
something of French medievalism at its best in his
backgrounds with their castles and moats, their
parks with old trees and sleepy pools, their forests
and grottoes and cliffs.

He is a decorative artist of the first rank, and very
original in his effects. It matters little what he is
giving: a woodcutter's hut; a convent; the gardens
of Silanus with their orange-trees, cypresses, and
oleanders, and their outlook on "the anemones stream-
ing down the slopes of Bethany " and the dull green
of the olive trees; the tent of Prinzivalle and its
Renaissance virility and luxury; a beautiful woman*;

* Silanus: She was clad in a raiment that seemed woven of pearls
and dew, in a cloak of Tyrian purple with sapphire ornaments, and

40 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

the confusion of sounds as the huge convoy of wagons
laden with grain and fruit and wine starts out " by-
torchlight into the starry night "; or the bells and
bonfires of Pisa.* Everywhere there is the same
richness, the same sense of color and outline.
Maeterlinck's settings and backgrounds are decora-
tive; so is, in every detail almost, his picture of nature.
The imagination at work is pictorial rather than
plastic. Apart from any question of symbolism,
one fails to find in him the massiveness and the
stress of Rodin's sculpture; his art lacks body;
and while he gives the sense of distance and visual
depth, he owes it to color contrasts and color patterns
and above all else to his skilful use of light. What
Rodin achieves by modelling, Maeterlinck gains by a
light that throws colors sharply against each other
in place of tempering or blending them; a light that

decked with jewels that rendered a little heavier this eastern pomp.
As for her hair, surely, unloosed, it would cover the surface of that
porphyry vase with an impenetrable veil of gold.

♦Vanna: What is it, Gianello? Ah, I see! They are the bon-
fires lit to celebrate your work. The walls are covered with them, the
ramparts flame, the campanile blazes like a joyous torch! All the
towers throw answering splendors back at the stars! The streets
are lanes of brightness in the sky ... I know their outlines; I can
follow them as clearly as when by day I trod their stones . . . There
is the Piazza with its fiery dome — and the Campo Santo like an
island of shadow. Life, which seemed gone forever, comes quickly
back, shoots up the spires, rebounds from the stones, overflows the
walls and floods the country side . . . Do you not hear the cries, the
wild joy that mounts and mounts as if the sea were flooding into
Pisa — and the bells sing out as on my marriage morn.

MAETERLINCK 41

seems to sink into colors and forms to varying
depths — all the way from a brilliant opaqueness to
utter transparency. There is the suggestion of
a technique not unlike that of Max Reinhardt in
his revolutionary stage settings and their draperies
of black; their bands of orange or purple; their
schematic lines and masses. Symbolism apart —
and it must be waived as long as Maeterlinck's first
and second types of beauty are the only ones under
discussion — a setting by Reinhardt or Maeterlinck
is more emphatic in its detail than the most slavishly
imitative mise-en-scene of the old school could be.
Their schematic originality sets off parts by making
them striking. I do not wish to press too strongly
the similarities in the decorative effects of the two
men; there are some very sharp differences as well;
nor do I mean to deny that there is in Maeterlinck's
art a dissolving or fusing principle. But that dis-
solving principle is set to work only after a vivid,
clear, and incisive imagination has caught the world
of natural objects with great originality and neat-
ness, or netteti. It is not at all comparable to the
automatic, sensuous unification or blurring of patches
of color on which the pointillist counts. Rather
does it come in by way of mood or of a philosophy of
life, and as such we must ask it to wait while we turn
once more to surface beauty and surface significance.
In The Blue Bird there are two very different pic-
tures, one of the Land of Memory, the other of the

42 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

Land of the Future. Surely here would be a fine
chance for a formless imagination to indulge its lik-
ing for the indefinite; here would seem the very-
place for half -lights and unsteady shadows. But
that is not what Maeterlinck gives. There could be
no more definite place than this Land of Memory;
it is all so delightfully real and matter of fact. One
feels sorry about Gaffer Tyl's bad leg, but sorrier
still, as he himself does, about the loss of his pipe;
one hears Granny Tyl praise the apple tarts she used
to bake and sees her lay the table for supper and
bring out the cabbage soup: one sees the children —
all sizes like " a set of Pan's Pipes " — come out of
the house, Riquette still crawling on all fours and
Pauline with the same old pimple on her nose; and
best of all one sees Tyltyl make a little glutton of
himself, spilling the soup and getting a very real box
on the ear. There is one fantastic idea which sets
all this apart, the idea that the dead are asleep except
when we think of them. This whole life of theirs,
so true a duplicate of ours in all its details, is wholly
dependent on our memory, at whose call it rises above
or falls below the horizon of consciousness. The
idea and the picture, far from clashing, assist each
other. The Land of the Future, although a more
fantastic conception, has an equally definite geog-
raphy, and is visualized quite as sharply — the steps;
the benches; the workshops of the Blue Children;
the great opalescent swinging doors; Father Time

MAETERLINCK 43

with his scythe; and the galley with white and gold
sails.

Maeterlinck is a decorative artist in still another
sense than this of strongly individualizing the sur-
faces of life. He is constantly using nature as a
background against which our inner life is flung and
in subtle harmony or strong conflict with which it
fulfils its destiny. In Wisdom and Destiny there is
image after image — a bit of mountain scenery; the
sea and the lighthouse; the palace and the river;
a still lake; the play of light or the stealing on of
darkness; forest; cave; bedrock. But the images
are sketched roughly and often vaguely; one gets
the impression of a sort of at fresco decoration meant
to set off the spiritual truths of the book. The essays
Chrysanthemums and Old-Fashioned Flowers show
both types of decorative effect. There is to be
found in them a great deal of fanciful symbolism;
they hint at one or the other of the many incidents of
that soul-drama in which Maeterlinck shows so keen
an interest. But there is plenty of sharply individual
color. What could show a more delicate and original
painter's imagination or a more finely discriminating
sense of the pageantry of nature than his description
of the autumn flowers? On them autumn bestows
" all the wealth of the twilight and the night, all the
riches of the harvest- time. " *

* "... it gives them all the mud-bro wnwork of the rain in the
woods, all the silvery fashionings of the mist in the plains, of the

44 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

What about the second element in Maeterlinck's
conception of surface beauty: the impassioned por-
trayal of what exists in us? As an artist and phil-
osopher of the inner life he has definite limitations and
peculiar merits. He gives moods and feelings rather
than character; and some of these, such as the fear
of death, religious fervor, wonder, the clairvoyance
of old age, and the dreamy gestures of an awakening
soul, recur again and again in his pages. With one
or two exceptions he has failed to give in his plays
and essays sharply individualized characters with
marked groups of interests and unforgettable spiritual
conflicts. The one outstanding exception is Mary
of Magdala. Sister Beatrice and Monna Vanna are
intensely dramatic and have at times a very strong
individual appeal, but there is, at least in Monna
Vanna, an intermittent blurring of lines which makes
a character like Prinzivalle or Monna Vanna uncon-
vincing. If you go back to the early puppet plays
the secret will reveal itself. Maeterlinck, who shows
a fine sense of form and a graphic and decorative

frost and the snow in the gardens. It permits them, above all, to
draw at will upon the inexhaustible treasures of the dead leaves and
the expiring forest. It allows them to deck themselves with the
golden sequins, the bronze medals, the silver buckles, the copper
spangles, the elfin plumes, the powdered amber, the burnt topazes,
the neglected pearls, the smoked amethysts, the calcined garnets,
all the dead but still dazzling jewellery which the North Wind heaps
up in the hollows of the ravines and foot-paths; but it insists that
they shall remain faithful to their old masters and wear the livery
of the drab and weary months that gave them birth."

MAETERLINCK 45

touch in his descriptions of the world without, is
in his portrayal of the world within neither graphic
nor decorative, but atmospheric. In plays like The
Blind, The Seven Princesses, The Intruder, The Death
of Tintagiles, and Pelleas and Melisande the first
impression is one of muffled pathos, but as this dies
down it is succeeded by a sense of spiritual unreality.
These men and women who face life with the irresolu-
tion or bewilderment or wonder of a child somehow
seem unreal; and the cause of that unreality is
Maeterlinck's atmospheric method. They have the
blurred unreality of figures in a fog — one gets a sense
of faltering lines, of insecure distances, and of a
merging of greys and blacks, which produces weird
and monotonous imaginative effects. An emotion
or a mood — a mere wisp of color — is shaded off and
made to spread until it becomes one with all that
surrounds it. Something like this is to be found in
his essays also. For him the inner life has its soft
and gentle beauty, and that beauty he has given
delicately in essays like Silence, The Inner Beauty, The
Deeper Life, The Awakening of the Soul, Sincerity.
Everywhere there seems to be a strange formlessness
as well as a subtle charm. They would be the despair
of the sculptor with his tactile imagination and his
need of plastic forms, for there is here no outline to
follow; there are no sharply individualized surfaces
such as distinguish the art of a Rodin. They would
be the delight of the atmospheric painter, for here

46 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

everything dissolves, everything loses itself in a
stream of light and shade. Much might be said
of Maeterlinck's development as a Thinker and an
Artist. The later plays and essays differ widely
from the early plays. The change is one of world-
view, of interpreting differently the meaning of life,
and as such has a very important bearing on Maeter-
linck's third type of beauty, but it also affects his
portrayal of the surface beauty of the inner life. The
atmospheric effects of the puppet plays in some ways
contrast sharply with those of the essays. They left
the impression of dark, uncertain figures plunged
into a fog; but here all things are steeped in light,
and they themselves have taken on the nature of
light.

Under the influence of an irradiating imagination
even the twilight recesses of consciousness begin to
glow; and thoughts and feelings, however slight,
become pencillings of light in a mystic transcription
of experience. It is strange how fond the mystic
is of light; how he uses it again and again in his
analogies. This is true of Plotinus, of Ruysbroeck,
to judge by passages translated by Maeterlinck in
On Emerson and Other Essays; it is true of Maeter-
linck himself, for a mystic he has remained in spite
of Stoics and evolutionists. When Marcus Aurelius
gives the drama of the soul his thought is radiant,
but it is not like Maeterlinck's, formless and tenuous.
In Hardy again there is nothing at all like an atmos-

MAETERLINCK 47

pheric treatment of the inner life, for while he inter-
prets man as deeply rooted in nature and is interested
in nature as the voice of law, ever changing and ever
changeless, and in man as the life of all manner of
instincts sucked in from the cosmic soil, he has given
us very sharp and accurate pictures of natural scenery
— he knows his Dorsetshire thoroughly — and has
portrayed character in all its individuality and
jaggedness as well as in its blindness.

Nothing can serve better to emphasize Maeter-
linck's atmospheric method than to contrast it with
the plastic and mathematical method of Dante.
Clearly visualized as is Maeterlinck's Land of Mem-
ory, it pales in comparison with Dante's Hell. Here
everything is worked out with a mathematician's
precision, Circle after Circle, down to the minutest
details of topography; one sees genius in the role of
architect and carpenter. Every punishment has
its definite symbolical meaning; and every shape,
however fantastic or brief in appearance, has its
definitely articulated inner life, glimpses of which we
get as we listen to Guido da Montefeltro or Ugolino
or Paolo da Rimini. Both men are among the finest
poets of color and light. In contrast to Maeterlinck,
Dante gives sundered, blocked-out effects in his
symbolical as well as his decorative use of light. In
his Paradise he has attempted a City of Light, and
he has very ingeniously drawn individual structures
and contrasts from so unpromising a building material.

48 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

The secret of his method is combination: combina-
tion of planets, of lights and fires, of colors. One
feels the studied arrangement, hears at times the
creaking of this Divine Mill, and comes to see some
point in Schopenhauer's remark that the Paradise
reminded him of nothing so much as the illuminations
of Vauxhall. In Maeterlinck there is no piecing
together, no structure; nothing but a flood of light
and an inundating study of the soul. One feels
immersed in a medium which allows neither foothold
nor handhold.

Surface beauty is not the last word in Maeterlinck's
aesthetics. Nor is it in his art. We have his own
word for it: " ... and lastly, enveloping the whole
work and forming its atmosphere, the idea formed by
the poet of the unknown in which the beings and things
he calls forth are drifting, and of the mystery which
rules and judges them and presides over their destiny."
This suggests what is most interesting in the Thinker
and most characteristic of the Artist; more than that,
it suggests the common wellspring of both. We are
coming to look more and more closely for the hidden
motifs of a philosopher's world-view; and we are
realizing more and more that an artist's world-view
is an integral part of his art. The artist himself, if
he is at all reflective, will regard it as such. Rodin
insists that he- is shadowing forth the meaning of the
universe and not merely toying with forms and colors;

MAETERLINCK 49

Meredith has his philosophy of the comic spirit,
Browning his, of self-realization; Anatole France
interprets as well as describes; and Hardy looks
upon human life as the narrow end of a funnel widen-
ing out into all the problems of evolutionism.

Maeterlinck's interest in a symbolical and spiritual
factor in art can best be seen and followed in his
theory of the drama. When he goes to the theatre,
he tells us, he feels as though he were spending a few
hours with his ancestors. " I am shown a deceived
husband killing his wife, a woman poisoning her lover,
a son avenging his father, a father slaughtering his
children, children putting their father to death,
murdered kings, ravished virgins, imprisoned citizens
— in a word, all the sublimity of tradition, but alas,
how superficial and material! Blood, surface- tears,
and death! " This might seem to be an arraignment
of melodrama; but it goes much beyond that, for
what is the tragedy of to-day is often the melodrama
of to-morrow. To him the old drama seems an an-
achronism. It gave the clash of passion with passion
intensely, directly, brutally; and the passions whose
clash it gave were themselves brutal and elemental.
But to us with centuries of control at our backs,
and with reflected feelings and an oblique emotional
life, these clashes seem crude — except when we
relapse, for an hour or two, to the primitive. Maeter-
linck, however, does not commit Tolstoy's mistake

50 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

in dealing with the Greek drama and Shakespeare.
Where Tolstoy belittles, he admires, because he sees,
not merely crude passion, but beauty and significance.
In Wisdom and Destiny he insists on the spiritual
significance of Hamlet, King Lear, and (Edipus Rex;
and he alludes elsewhere to the decorative beauty
and picturesque grandeur of a play like Romeo and
Juliet. But he claims that we have lost, and cannot
recover in any real sense, the stately grandeur of an
iEschylus or the picturesqueness of the Renaissance.
As for the spiritual significance of the Greek drama,
it, too, has been lost. To us the drama of soul and
fate presents itself in other ways and plays itself off
with other meanings. Why, then, if we cannot recover
what is really of value in the old drama, should we be
so intent on saving what is valueless? Why should
we not attempt a drama which reflects in its incidents,
its characters, and subtle suggestions the meanings
of our life? These seem to Maeterlinck to be three:
a lively and persistent interest in the problem of
the clash between passion and duty; a complex and
penetrative view of consciousness; new cosmic beliefs
gradually taking shape under the stress of science
and of new spiritual needs.

To him the first appears clearly in the social dramas
of Ibsen and in the problem play, which developed
largely under their influence. Of course, such a
generalization has its weaknesses; the struggle of
duty with passion is one of the oldest motifs in tragedy,

MAETERLINCK 51

but on the whole it is true that there is something
new: a challenging criticism which does not stop
short of the problematic in morality itself. It is
interesting to watch Ibsen at his work of uncovering
" irrational survivals " in our moral habits and ideals,
of pointing to shabby and worn places in our system
of duties. He is a diagnostician ever on the alert
for possible flaws and danger. Still his piece-by-piece
social criticism seems to us just a bit old-fashioned.
We demand a more subtle and synthetic challenge;
such as we get in Monna Vanna, where the last act
leaves us in a curiously divided mood between a
morality that is no longer felt to be final and a new
morality, promising but as yet unformed, except for
longings and vague anticipations.

It is clear that Maeterlinck looks beyond the prob-
lem play for a new and adequate drama. He turns
next to what he regards as the second great interest
of our times: the exploitation of consciousness. The
psychological soul-drama seems to him to express
certain modern demands. We ask for a poetic
interpretation and exploration of the utmost reaches
of the inner life even to the abnormal or to feelings
whose very nature it is to be still and inactive.
Maeterlinck's favorite instance of such a soul-drama
is Ibsen's The Master Builder. He might have added
The Lady from the Sea, Hauptmann's Sunken Bell
and Hannele, Strindberg's Dance of Death, and most
of his own plays. He alludes to what he calls the

52 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

somnambulistic character of The Master Builder and
to the secondary dialogue, which runs a ghostly
parallel to the ordinary exchange of words, and
which gives an echo — " extremely attenuated and
variable " — of what passes in the depths of conscious-
ness. " Side by side with the necessary dialogue
will you almost always find another dialogue that
seems superfluous; but examine it carefully, and it
will be borne home to you that this is the only one
that the soul can listen to profoundly, for here alone
is it the soul that is being addressed.'' This inter-
est in the subconscious has remained a definite part
of Maeterlinck's art and philosophy; it appears
strongly in his essays as well as in his plays, and is
responsible for books like Our Eternity and The
Unknown Guest.

This readily suggests what Maeterlinck regards as
the third striking thing in the intellectual, moral, and
artistic world of to-day: new cosmic beliefs and a
new, tentative way of defining man's relation to the
Universe. He himself marks the transition in sen-
tences like the following. " Hilda and Solness are, I
believe, the first characters in drama who feel, for
an instant, that they are living in the atmosphere
of the soul; and the discovery of this essential life
that exists in them, beyond the life of every day,
comes fraught with terror. ... A new, indescrib-
able power dominates this somnambulistic drama.
All that is said therein at once hides and reveals the

MAETERLINCK 53

sources of an unknown life." This unknown is in us
and it is in all around us. Of this problem of the
unknown the new drama will make full use; it will
seek to trace the " intangible and unceasing striving
of the soul towards its own beauty and truth," and
it will seek to understand and exploit artistically the
mystery of the Universe, the new mystery of the
Universe. This new drama is still only an ideal, and
Maeterlinck would be the first to disclaim for his
plays and essays more than a slight approach to this
new soul-attitude and world-view. Of this, however,
he would feel sure, that in these new interests and
developments lie the possibilities of a new art.

This discussion of Maeterlinck's aesthetics of the
drama has served its purpose: it has given certain
clues as to what he considers the third and essential
type of beauty. It is from here that any further
analysis of Maeterlinck as an Artist and Thinker
must start.

Passing from Maeterlinck the decorative artist
and poet of surface beauty to Maeterlinck the artistic
and philosophical interpreter of meanings, the first
striking thing is a sense of the fragmentary. This
appears in a double sense, and seems to violate the
fundamental principles of art and philosophy. The
dramatist, especially, aims to give well-rounded
characters and a circumscribed group of incidents;
and within this circle he sets interest against interest,

54 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

purpose against purpose, complication against com-
plication. And even if he is quite modern and offers
" a slice of life," cutting into character and incident
at random, he still does not give the impression of the
fragmentary nature of either. He may look down the
road to heredity or trace the play of instinct. I may
stand on a hill and watch a road narrow down to a
ribbon and lose itself in the distance; if I do, I get
the impression of endlessness or of a breaking off;
and that is all I get from this type of drama; and
not the sense of the fragmentary. The philosopher
ordinarily loves completeness quite as much as the
artist, and has his own world-circle in which every-
thing is related and set in order. If he comes upon
anything patchy or incomplete, anything in the way
of odds and ends of experience, he puts it into his
little playhouse of reason, and what were fragments
become very methodical toys. But Maeterlinck —
I know of no one who leaves so vivid an impression
of the fragmentariness of life, inner and outer. What
we say and what we do is but a scrap of what we
think and feel; and our thoughts and feelings give
incompletely or not at all what passes in the depth
of our souls. In The Princess Maleine and The Blind
— one might really include all his earlier plays —
there is a sort of echoing repetition of exclamations,
words, phrases. It is easy to burlesque it; it often
comes perilously near to turning the tragic into the
ludicrous. But for all the evident lack of skill there

MAETERLINCK 55

is a reason for this echoing method. Maeterlinck
wishes to suggest individuals who are struggling
with their own great inner Unknown as well as with
life; who somehow feel the meaninglessness or in-
adequacy of words; who grope about in a confused
and stumbling way for their own selves; the monot-
ony is meant to mark their bewilderment. One feels
throughout it all that not even omniscience would
give to these souls rest and self-possession. For
this larger meaning which they seek so obstinately
and blindly — what is it? Not even omniscience could
tell.

Here lies the difference between a mystic like
Maeterlinck and a philosopher like Hegel. Both
use extensively the contrast between the lesser and
the larger meaning; both are subtle interpreters of
consciousness. Hegel insists that all things are
interlaced, and that you cannot define anything
except in terms of all its relations, but he gives you to
understand that reality is an orderly and complete
developing-system, and with him the stress is every-
where on completion rather than on fragmentariness.
Omniscience would not fail here. But with Maeter-
linck all the emphasis is on the fragmentary character
of experience and, one might add, on the fragmentary
character of reality. Even his " faith in the idea of
the universe " — his belief that some day the universe
will no longer be fitfully illumined by science, but will
stand revealed in its beauty and reasonableness, is

56 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

interpreted as an instinct. The emphasis in this
outer mystery as well seems to be on the fragmentary.

It would be a useless bit of generalizing to refer
to this sense of the fragmentary and fail to indicate
how differently it shows itself in the earlier and the
later interpretations Maeterlinck gives of the universe
and of consciousness. While this change was one of
slow development, and not the outcome of a crisis
in the Artist and the Thinker, it is none the less
momentous. One cannot afford to overlook it.

Here is Maeterlinck's earlier world-view. Speak-
ing of his dramas from The Intruder to The Death
of Tintagiles, he remarks: " One is aware here of
vast, invisible powers of destiny whose purposes no
one knows, but whom the spirit of the drama supposes
to be malevolent, watchful of all our actions; the
enemies of laughter, of life, of peace, of happiness.
Here innocently hostile destinies are woven and
unravelled, to the ruin of all — under the saddened
eyes of the wisest, who foresee the future, but cannot
change in the least the cruel, inflexible game that
Love and Death play among mortals." He then
hints at a capricious Fatality; at a deep " night of
nature " whence dart Death and other cruel forces
to destroy the life and happiness of man. Of these
forces Death seems the most destructive and capri-
cious; it is blind, it pounces at random; too quick a
movement will draw its leap.

There is something naive about this use of the

MAETERLINCK 57

terrible and the terrifying; this notion that nature is
a circle of darkness about human life, with nightly
alarms and forays by destiny — no one knowing at
what point, in what strength, to what end. But it is
really nothing but a dramatization of fear: an ill
denned fear that knows not which way to turn. For,
after all, this world of Maeterlinck's is theirs that live
in it; it reflects their consciousness. And so the
interpretation of the inner life links itself with the
outer. These men and women of his early plays,
whom Maeterlinck calls " slight, fragile beings,
weeping, passively pensive," seem to be rousing
themselves from a painful dream. With a confused
and heavy sound their tears drop into the abyss of
destiny. But the confusion and heaviness is in their
souls; there is in them no strengthening and sharpen-
ing of consciousness by purpose; no lightening by
confidence; no clearing by self-criticism. They are
exquisitely responsive, but to suggestions of one
kind only; they fear, for themselves or others; a
vague, nameless dread in forms acute or subtle invades
their whole emotional life. They owe their flickering
existence quite as much to their own inner weakness
as to the gusts of Fate.

This earlier world-view of Maeterlinck's might be
symbolized in some such way as this. Imagine a
funnel-shaped abyss in the middle of a wind-swept
plateau. The depth seems limitless, and out of it
there float aimlessly wraithlike forms — bits of feel-

58 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

ing, of purpose, thoughts, fragments of consciousness,
which are shaken out and impelled upward by one
knows not what longing or premonition. As they
reach the rim and seem about to shape themselves to
some sort of orderly life, a rush of air, sweeping
across the plateau, bears down on them and scatters
and tosses them to nothingness. The gust comes
no one knows whence, and is the mere fragmentary
presence of a power whose extent and whose destruc-
tiveness no one can measure. This picture visualizes,
I think, the intensive and extensive fragmentariness
which marks so sharply Maeterlinck's interpretation
of consciousness and of the universe.

The later world-view is quite different, but shows
the sense of the fragmentary just as strongly. The
outer mystery, the universe, has been reinterpreted;
it is no longer thought of as an abode of terror or
a malevolent, clumsy force bursting in on human
happiness. This change in Maeterlinck is generally
attributed to the influence of evolutionism and Stoi-
cism; and they have in fact had much to do with it.
But a man does not change a world-attitude as he
would a suit of clothes — it is not so external a thing;
and so I should be inclined to assign the larger share
in this change, striking as it is, to something much
more intimate and subtle — the gradual ripening and
mellowing and settling of Maeterlinck's artistic per-
sonality. It is well to remember that evolutionism,
as a philosophy and a faith, lends itself readily to

MAETERLINCK 59

either the gospel of hope or the gospel of despair.
Not enough has been made of such personal drama-
tizations of scientific and philosophical theories.
The old dramatization of evolution is familiar:
it is the " claw and talon " theory. We were asked
to observe the cruelty and wastefulness of Nature,
to watch her snuffing out fives or scattering pain
throughout her realm. So strongly was the thing
dramatized that one could almost hear the panting
and the groans of the creatures caught in the deadly
" struggle for existence " and the thud of those
that were to be " eliminated." That old melodrama,
reeking with blood and noisy with strife, has now
gone out of fashion. Instead of it there is often a
very suave, very confident evolutionism, which
looks upon " elimination " as one would on discard-
ing in a game of cards, and on nature as a system of
" stepping stones," nicely blocked out and leading
to some sort of a palace of the future — all light and
no lines. The scientist smiles at both pictures; he
is not given to personal reactions. What Maeter-
linck the riper artist offers, is a dramatization of
hope, as contrasted with his earlier dramatization of
fear; and in it two ideas are constantly staged:
that of a more and more rational universe and that
of a progressive mastery of nature. Either will
break the point of evil. But when I ask myself,
What is the exact nature of this new universe of
Maeterlinck's? I find in Wisdom and Destiny, The

60 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

Leaf of Olive and other essays certain hints: such as
its probable non-moral character; its creative fash-
ioning of new situations and new laws; its orderli-
ness; its surprises; and its complexity. But when
I try to piece these hints together, with simile after
simile, image after image, crowding in on me, I
find it impossible to shape them to a well-outlined,
well-built City of Light; just as I found it impossible,
in Maeterlinck's earlier plays, to trace the complete
lneaments of a City of Darkness. Everywhere the
stress is not on finality, but on the incomplete, the
fragmentary. Here is Maeterlinck's way of drama-
tizing this " background of light":

" It seems as though we heard those movements:
the sound of superhuman footsteps, an enormous
door opening, a breath caressing us, or light com-
ing; we do not know; but expectation at this pitch
is an ardent and marvellous state of life, the fairest
period of happiness, its youth, its childhood."

This is a very effective companion picture to that
of the sudden forays of a stealthily moving, malev-
olent Fate.

This later conception of the universe suggests in
some ways a transformation scene in a spectacle, in
which curtain after curtain is lifted, each filmier and
more transparent, until, with the last bit of gauze
withdrawn, the scene stands out sharply in all its
details. But — and this is an all-important difference
— one never feels in Maeterlinck that the last bit of

MAETERLINCK 61

gauze has been withdrawn or that there is a last bit
of gauze or a sharp and final scene; one is conscious
of an endless succession of luminous veils.

But what of Maeterlinck's reinterpretation of
consciousness, the inner mystery? And how does
his sense of the fragmentary show itself in that?
The later work reveals an increasing interest in con-
sciousness and a growing disposition — for which
Stoicism must receive part credit — of relating in-
timately character and destiny, universe and attitude.
Certain earlier notions persist: that of the abysmal
nature of consciousness, that of the subconscious,
that of instinct and premonition as things deeper
than reason or purpose, that of slight, expressive
gestures. But consciousness, instead of faltering and
flickering in the darkness, radiates a strong, even light
of confidence and happiness. Happiness is now the
key-note. Maeterlinck is fond of the image of
" inner treasure " crystallizing in the subterranean
regions of the soul and brought to light now and then
in a moment of exceptional strength, in an experience
of exceptional nobility or beauty. This is a good
companion picture to that of bits of consciousness
floating upward in an abyss. Here as well as there,
one gets the impression of intensive fragrnentariness,
for how much soul there is no one knows, and how
much treasure there is no one knows; what we are
aware of are bits of treasure flung up from depths not
to be measured.

62 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

Further pursuit of this tenuous Artist and some-
what shadowy Thinker would yield, among much
that was new, many additional instances of his
sense of decorative beauty, of his atmospheric method,
of his irradiating imagination and of his sense of the
fragmentary.

Note: In quoting from Maeterlinck I have made use of the
translations of Sutro, Teixeira de Mattos, and Coleman, and wish
to acknowledge such use.

IV
WAGNER

So your fugue broadens and thickens
Greatens and deepens and lengthens,
Till we exclaim — " But where's music,
the dickens? "

— Browning.

Once more he stept into the street

And to his lips again
Laid his long pipe of smooth straight
cane:
And ere he blew three notes (such sweet
Soft notes as yet musician's cunning
Never gave the enraptured ear) —
— Browning.

It is for the expert in music to give a study of
Wagner the composer, the artist; for he alone is
competent to sketch the history of music and to dis-
cuss Wagner's innovations in harmonics, characteriza-
tion, and structure; to him alone can we look for a
comparative study of scores and a subtle apprecia-
tion of musical resources. The time has come for
such a study; Wagnerian music has emerged from
periods of rabid abuse and blind idolatry, and readily
submits to, in fact calls for, a critical estimate.

63

64 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

Meanwhile there is for one who is not a musical
expert a problem of great interest: the study of
Wagner the essayist and reflective artist. Beyond a
doubt Wagner takes himself very seriously as a
Thinker, and seeks to develop and justify his artistic
ideals in a series of essays; some of which are brief,
like those on Beethoven, on acting and on the theatre,
on opera, on composing, on the artist and the public,
others long and constructive, like The Work of Art
of the Future, Opera and Drama , Art and Religion
and Art and Revolution. None of them is easy or
attractive reading; they are top-heavy and lack the
charming allusiveness of Rodin and the sparkle and
fire of Nietzsche. Add to a sober and clumsy man-
ner of thinking an enthusiasm that is not well mixed,
and the result is at once heavy and yeasty. But for
all that they are of value in helping disclose Wagner's
development, and in showing how certain beliefs and
dissatisfactions shaped themselves to an ideal of a
true art and a music of the future.

Wagner, like Rodin, for many years stood alone.
A man so original and revolutionary in his views and
his technique and of so hungry an individualism
in thought and feeling would naturally draw criticism
or expose himself to neglect. Matters would hardly
be mended by his often tactless utterances and his
tenacity in clinging to his ideal. For it was an
ideal, an earnest desire to show the way to something
better, and not presumption, that led to Wagner's

WAGNER 65

attacks on Italian and French opera, and on musical
and theatrical conditions in Germany. This is the
high-pitched message of such early essays as Art and
Revolution and The Work of Art of the Future; and
there is always the shadowing and disheartening
thought that things could not be worse. The
refrain is throughout the same: there is no national
theatre; the state does nothing for art; there are
no suitable conservatories and training schools for
singers; the public is indifferent and flocks stupidly
to artificial and ill rendered operas and ballets; music
and poetry are feeble to the point of painfulness.
While there is in all this more than a hint of Schiller,
there is also a great deal of bitter first-hand experience
with the state, the stage, and the art criticism of the
day; an experience made all the more bitter because
Wagner was a man of ideals and large ambitions.
In 185 1 in the preface to Opera and Drama he deplores
the artistic conditions he sees everywhere; and in the
preface to the second edition, written in 1868, he
protests in a mood of discouragement against the
stubborn and senseless way in which the public
misinterpreted his theories and music alike. And
yet in those seventeen years he had composed Tristan
und Isolde and Die Meister singer, two of his greatest
operas, and had written the text and much of the
music of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

For the bitter side of these controversies one must
turn to the newspapers and the pamphlets of the time.

66 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

The lighter side appears in cartoons and caricatures,
many of which have been gathered by Kreowski and
Fuchs in their Richard Wagner in der Karikatur. It is
not a brilliant lot, but it shows plainly what the more
unresponsive of his contemporaries attacked in
Wagner: his use of dissonance; his noisiness; his
musical innovations; his claim of being a poet and a
prophet of musical and theatrical reform. Wagner
is shown mounted, as the commander-in-chief of
the German army, ready to put the French to flight
with his music. Or in an orchestral scene dragons
and long snakelike wisps of notes are escaping from
the instruments. An Austrian cartoon pictures
Wagner on his arrival in Heaven listening with a
pained expression to the harp-music of the angels
and calling for cymbals and trumpets. In 1869
there appeared in U Eclipse a cartoon by Gill, which
shows a huge ear within whose frame stands Wagner,
a puny figure with a large head, hammering away at
a long pin whose point is set against the ear drum.
Quite as good is one by Dore. It gives a scene in
the theatre after a Wagnerian opera has blared and
blasted and blown its way across the orchestra to the
balcony and the boxes, which are strewn with forms
prostrate or bent this way and that — like corn-stalks
after a hurricane. To the other group belongs an
i860 sketch by Cham in which the advocate of a
music of the future is leading an orchestra of future
musicians — chubby-faced babies struggling with im-

WAGNER 67

mense horn instruments. An 1876 cartoon represents
Wagner in the haughtiest of attitudes, accepting the
homage of iEschylus and Shakespeare. 1876 was
the year of the formal opening of the Festspielhaus
at Bayreuth, and Wagner, then in his sixty-fourth
year, with much fine work to his credit and with
the patronage of the King of Bavaria to back him,
could afford to leave the satire of the cartoonist
unnoticed, and to treat all adverse criticism with the
self-assurance of a man who has worked out an
artistic ideal and is watching its realization. He
could enjoy success hard won, for even in the seventies
difficulties arose which would have wrecked Wag-
ner's project of an ideal theatre for the perfect
blend of music and poetry, had it not been for his
enterprise in taking hold, giving concerts, issuing
shares. But these unpleasant experiences are not
to be compared with the struggles and bitter disap-
pointments of the forties and fifties. After the first
failure of Tannhauser at Dresden in 1845 Wagner
wrote: " A feeling of complete isolation took posses-
sion of me. It was not my vanity; I had fooled
myself with my eyes open, and now I was quite
stunned. I had only one thought: to bring the
public to understand and to share my views, and to
accomplish its artistic education.' '

There is then a background of personal experience,
and there is the stress and strain of a visionary but
strongly espoused ideal. Without them Wagner's

68 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

artistic personality becomes unintelligible; and it is
they that explain his social criticism, his advocacy
of an art of the future, and his theory of the music
drama.

As a social critic Wagner is not a mere fault-finder.
He has reason to complain of his critics and his pub-
lic for, to mention only one grievance, he had been
compelled to save Tannhauser from becoming a
mere frame for ballets and divertissements. Again
and again he had been irritated by the fickle or
dull-witted theatre-goer. But his social criticism
goes deeper: it touches the culture of his time,
tests it and finds it distinctly unfavorable to gen-
uinely great art; unfavorable because of its preten-
tiousness and exclusiveness; its crass materialism;
its hide-bound worship of the conventional. Lux-
ury and exclusiveness, by breaking down race con-
sciousness, by undermining character and destroy-
ing freedom and the sense of human dignity, bring
affectation, disillusionment, weariness, indifference
to beauty — and what but an unideal and very
feeble art could thrive in soil such as this? The
taint of the academic lies on Wagner's contrast of
the luxury and weak slavishness of imperial Rome
with the poise, the freedom, and the art splendor of
Athens; but many of his allusions to the showy
exterior and inner bareness of the culture of his day
and its shortsighted and commercialized aims bear

WAGNER 69

the stamp of knowledge at first hand. Worship of
custom and convention he considers no less destruc-
tive a force; it is one of the worst forms of tyranny
and results in an unoriginal, dead or mannered art.

Of all these things Wagner gives many instances.
Modern architecture, ruled by utility instead of
beauty — and a shallow utility at that — turns the
Exchange into a temple; it is mechanical and fond
to excess of ornament. Modern sculpture is simply
decorative of rich men's houses, and even at its
best lacks the life and the direct spirit of Greek
sculpture, which it imitates. Modern painting has
had to turn to landscape because the human drama
no longer offered opportunities in beauty and sig-
nificance— a strange thought of Wagner's. Modern
music has become artificial and vulgarized ; Beethoven
has been displaced by Rossini, he of the catchy airs
and mercenary point of view, and by Meyerbeer,
the blatant, the theatrical, the commonplace. Why,
asks Wagner in his characteristic vein, are we forced
to speak well only of the dead?

Such is Wagner's social criticism. Like Tolstoy's
and Nietzsche's, it is much more truly an expression
of personal needs than it is a large and sound in-
terpretation of cultural tendencies. Culture, after
all, is a very complex affair, and we have grown
rather distrustful of marking and damning an age
by a single adjective or a group of adjectives. But
this much can be said; to a self-assertive man in

70 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

need of elbow room — and such was Wagner — and a
picturesque background, and to a man who, like Wag-
ner or Nietzsche, had a dramatic, not to say theatri-
cal idea of greatness, the third quarter of the last
century would seem the dreariest and most prosy
age in all history. There is this personal note in
Wagner's attacks, but that is a matter of origin.
Of far greater interest is the incentive; the ideal
of a truer culture and a better art, which is caught
at the rebound, and which in its detail parallels
closely Wagner's social criticisms.

An ideal art is impossible without an ideal culture
— this thought serves to interlock the three demands
Wagner makes on culture and on art. Life must
be free and natural; it must be rich, strong, and
beautiful; and from this rich soil of life there must
spring an art which is popular in the sense of being
deeply rooted in the racial consciousness of man;
which is individual and free; which is the complete
and harmonious summing up of man's artistic
nature. These are the keys to the theory of an art
of the future, and of the music drama as the charac-
teristic form of that art.

True art is racial art; art expressive of the life of
the people. Whenever one class arrogates to itself
the right to art, it gives an artificial and man-
nered art. Wagner has in mind the troubadour

WAGNER 71

poetry of France, and Italian opera of courtly origin
and courtlier caprice. The one loses itself in fan-
tastic conceits; the other changes folk-song and
melody to the pyrotechnics of the aria. True art
has its roots deep down in the racial and national *
life of a people; uproot it and it withers. It is in
the religious and social consciousness that this
Volks-geist, this spirit of the people, shows itself,
and there it works with the unconsciousness and
sureness of an elemental force. Mythology is a ,
perfect treasure-house of poetry. Folk-song and folk-
music are the pulsings of a rich racial life. Wagner
never wearies of pointing to the mass of legend,
myth, and racial life which marks the Iliad and the
Odyssey and gives freshness and force to what other-
wise would have been a mere picture of a courtly
life; he shows Greek religion to have been the source
of inspiration for Greek tragedy. Not that he wishes
art to be popular in the ordinary sense; few men
have cared less for the approval of the mob than he.
But why blame the rabble for not understanding
a work of art? Blame rather the culture that pro-
duces the rabble: the base, ugliness-stricken culture
of the day and its trivial art. With a reawakening
of the Volks-geist and an artistic regeneration in view
Wagner turns to Norse mythology for his material *
and introduces into opera the genuine folk-song
and its rhythmic animation. But this ideal of his
was a gradual growth, for the inspiration of much

72 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

of his earlier work was indirect and artificial. Die
Feen attaches itself to Gozzi; Das Liebesverbot
to Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; Rienzi
to Bulwer-Lytton's novel. Here as well as in Tann-
hduser and Lohengrin much is artificial and popular
in a bad sense, for processions and theatrical tricks
abound, and the music itself according to Wagner's
later estimate has more than a touch of Italian and
French corruption. There is no artifice in Tristan
und Isolde; the action there is almost bare in its
simplicity and directness; picturesqueness and vari-
ety of incident yield to intensity. Der Ring des
Nibelungen owes much to the Edda. It is a drama
of gods and demi-gods, and of a vanishing world
order, and as such is paralleled by tales of Kronos a,nd
Zeus, and by the iEschylean tragedy with its rift of
fate, its dark disclosure of an older and cruder type of
gods, and its message of a new and deeper wisdom.
It is not only in plot and character that Wagner
seeks to lay bare the racial root of consciousness;
in every one of his operas and music dramas he draws
on folk-song and folk-music. The spinning song in
Der Fliegende Hollander; the mermaid song in Das
Rheingold; the songs of the sea in Tristan und Isolde;
the song of the forge in Siegfried; and the Valkyrie
battle-cry in Die Walkure — one and all, are as far
as could be from the ornamental and artificial, and
from the musically corrupt. They rouse an earlier,
slumbering consciousness, and fitful echoes of the lure

WAGNER 73

of the sea, of battle-lust, of the joy of work, of intense
living, and of confused wondering. The half-absence
of self -consciousness in Siegfried, to which Wagner
refers in a letter to Roeckel, and the lack of clear
self-knowledge on the part of Parsifal, are in line
with Wagner's belief that this earlier consciousness
is one of feeling, and that it must be recovered by
intuition. In this sense art is the great recoverer
of a submerged life.

It is curious that artists like Wagner, Rodin,
Tolstoy, and Maeterlinck, so dissimilar in aims and
equipment, should all in this one respect think and
feel alike. For Tolstoy as for Wagner art cuts
beneath the reflective consciousness and liberates
something more direct and vital — social and religious
feelings; and yet when it comes to interpreting these
feelings the whole span of a Weltanschauung separates
the robust optimism and one-syllable Christianity
of Tolstoy from the pessimism and mysticism of the
composer of Gotterdammerung and Parsifal. For
Rodin also art is the recoverer of an earlier inner life,
a life of great dynamic force, of muscular effort, of
lust, of passion, of self-torment, of the sting of excite-
ment, of the glory of change. For Maeterlinck it is
not the recovery of unrest, but the recovery of calm,
that art gives. The artist gets back of words, masks
and artifices, and uncovers a realm of expressive
silence, of spiritual beauty, quiet and self-possessed.
It is a curious fact also that under the pressure of

74 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

this view of art Rodin was forced to violate certain
rules of academic sculpture, Wagner was led to aban-
don the traditional form of the Opera and to insist
on the music drama as the intimate fusion of poetry
and music, and Maeterlinck, quite as eager for a
stronger and larger expressiveness, set about con-
structing the drame intime, the drama of volatile
experiences, of pauses and silences, of premonitions
and glimpses of the inner life.

- True art must be individual and free. This is
Wagner's second demand. In modern life custom
stifles the growth of individuality; the natural is
voted crude or immoral; artifice takes the place of
natural strength. The artist of the future feels this
and turns to the old myths and legends, for there the
racial consciousness is still creative. Character has
heroic grandeur and sharp contours, and life is still
strong and hot to the taste.

Nothing brings one closer to Wagner than this
emphasis on individuality and freedom. The forces
in play are many; the personal motives at work,
highly complex. A hostile or stupidly appreciative
lot of critics, an ununderstanding public, domestic
unhappiness, and dislike for the sordid business of
making a living must be counted in; and to all this
must be added the pressure of a creative impulse,
the need of the monumental and largely proportioned,
and a true kingliness mixed with not a little alloy.

WAGNER 75

The man's letters reveal much of this. Passage
after passage strikes the note of unhappiness, loneli-
ness, rebellion, contempt until in a letter to Frau
Wille in 1864 there is a bitter tirade against phil-
istinism and its " ghastly shrewdness " and " ridicu-
lous bluntness in the valuation of the things of life."
How can it comprehend the artist, the " deeper
spirit " ? A letter written to Otto Wesendonck in
1859 shows clearly a restive and weary mood, but
shows quite as clearly Wagner's self-assurance and
the imperative impulse to create.

" Perhaps silence would have been better. Yet
this is the only language in which I can convey to
human understanding what certainly is often not
understood when I simply express my longing for
the end. All that I suffer, I bear through nothing
but the power of the wish to have peace and security
about me in this world of robbers, to be able — for-
getting all my misery — to set to work again! Believe
me, I no longer have a wish save this. Of late I have
again come to the lively conviction that I can re-
nounce even the performance of Tristan, and every-
thing, only to know that I may work on undisturbed !
Now I am bracing myself, to get air again for my last
act of Siegfried: breathe I but that once more, then
nothing else matters to me. For this I see: I am
entirely what I am, only when I am creating. The
actual performance of my works belongs to a more
settled time, to a time which I must first prepare
for by my sufferings!

" My most congenial art-friends have nothing

76 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

beyond astonishment for my new works; every one
who stands at all near to our public art-life feels too
feeble for hope. There I meet nothing save pity
and sadness! And they really are right! Nothing
teaches me better, how terribly I have overleapt all
around me, than a good, sharp look — down from
myself — on those who stand between me and just that
world.

" So let me work myself completely out; oh, had
I nothing, nothing else to do upon this earth! Rest!
Rest! that the inner torch may burn soft and bright,
which flickers so wildly under the breath of this life
of want, and — soon must be extinct. Let me but
create the works I there was given, in peaceful,
glorious Switzerland, there with my gaze upon the
lofty, gold-wreathed mountains: they are wonder-
works, and nowhere else could I have conceived
them. Let me finish them: then am I done with and
redeemed! But ask nothing, nothing else from me,
and don't rejoice when ' successes ' beckon me:
their price is fearful."

These personal matters help explain what would
otherwise be puzzling: Wagner's theory of the two
forces that work themselves out in this free, natural
life and in all true art. He calls them Lebensbediirf-
niss and Liebesbedilrfniss. The first is the life-
impulse itself, which causes a plant to suck nourish-
ment from the soil; the animal to grow at the expense
of its environment; and man to assert his will ruth-
lessly by using and absorbing everything that is
needful to his own full growth. There is a hint of

WAGNER 77

Schiller's Stoftrieb in all this, and a foreshadowing
of Schopenhauer's will to live. Liebesbediirfniss means
yearning for love, for sympathy, for self-sacrifice.
In 185 1 Wagner interpreted Lohengrin as the type
of this force. What draws Lohengrin to earth is the
need of being loved, of being understood, of finding
himself in the utter faith and self-sacrifice of a woman.
Wagner had the courage to see in this situation the
universal tragedy of modern life: the yearning of the
inspired artist for the human heart and the shatter-
ing of a possible happiness because of lack of utter
faith. In Siegfried he sees the embodiment of the
life-impulse.

" I had in the concentrated image of Siegfried
reached the point of seeing before me man in the
most natural and most joyous fulness of his sensu-
ously animated being. No historical dress hampered
him; no relation from without in any way blocked
the movement of his being. This movement, com-
ing from the innermost source of his joy of life, is
such that with error and confusion, due to the wildest
play of passion, accumulating to his destruction, the
hero never for a moment even with death threatening
finds the flow of this inner source checked and
never for a moment recognizes any other authority
over himself than just the necessary outflowing of
this restless, seething well of life."

This is the glorious " yea-saying to life " that caught
Nietzsche's heart; but its relation to Wagner's inner
development as an Artist and Thinker is far from

78 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

simple. It is clear that in Siegfried's character
an idealistic turn is given to the life-impulse. The
world is still a mere setting, but a setting, not for the
devouring rage of a beast of prey, but for the vigor-
ous self-assertion of a richly gifted nature, an un-
daunted will and a clear intelligence. The first
conception of young Siegfried reflects a mood of
optimism, and was, according to Wagner's own testi-
mony, meant for a picture of the heroic soul in its
victorious rush and happiness.

As such it is a reaction from the religious asceti-
cism and pessimism of Tannhauser and Lohengrin.
There Christian motifs such as faith, salvation
through renunciation of carnal desire, and other-
worldliness are easily traced. The jump, in 1848,
from this nay-saying to Siegfried's pagan yea-say-
ing is so startling that we may not be willing to
accept Wagner's explanation, offered in 185 1, that
Tannhauser is an arraignment not of the sensuous
joy of life, but of present cultural conditions, which
make all but a distorted and perverted joy of life
impossible. Still we can trace definitely, side by
side with the gospel of asceticism, the demand for
a certain robustness and sensuous massiveness of
life; a demand voiced by Siegfried and Lohengrin
alike — two men unlike except in strong individuality
and dignity. This notion of dignity gives the clue
to Wagner's short, vitriolic essay, Art and Revolu-
tion, written in 1849, which is a bitter attack on

WAGNER 79

Christianity and its doctrines of humility and other-
worldliness. They are held responsible alike for the
weak and slave-like culture of the masses and for the
hypocrisy and aggressive greed of all exploiters of
the masses; they are held to take away from life
strength, dignity, beauty and freedom: all the
essentials, in fact, of a liberal culture and an art of
distinction.

Back of this attack is an ideal, that of a re-shaping
of culture, of a righting of man's wrongs. This may
or may not mean a moral and political revolution,
but it means at least that human life must be allowed
to develop freely to its full stature and full happi-
ness. Renunciation dwarfs life; convention stifles
it; weakness and neglect of its full pith despoils man
of his happiness. There is a curious doubleness in
this ideal: There are two demands, one of which
concerns social happiness, the other a social regen-
eration in terms of nobility, strength, and dignity.
For the young revolutionary on the eve of 1848
the two seemed one, but they were soon driven far
apart in his thought. Success and other happiness
values do not measure the worth of a strong and
dignified self-assertion which is victorious even in
defeat. In this sense Wagner's own devotion to
an artistic ideal, in spite of discouragement, is an
expression of an idealized type of the life-impulse.
He had to create, had often to work feverishly at
the cost of exquisite pain, but pleasure of creating,

80 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

intense as it was with him, could hardly account
for the drive and volume of his artistic self-expres-
sion. If success and the solid achievements of hap-
piness measure a man, Siegfried is defeated. But
the measure is false, for out of the wreckage of his
life there rises a strong and triumphant personality;
an individual who is ever himself; who is nature,
instinct, joy of life; who opposes nature to human
law and convention.

v Wagner in 1864 says of his Ring der Nibelungen:
" With this conception I had unconsciously gained
the truth concerning things human. Here every-
thing is tragic through and through, and the will that
meant to fashion a world in harmony with its wish
could in the end gain nothing more satisfying than to
break itself in a downfall nobly borne." Originally
the dramatic idea of the trilogy was quite another one,
turning on such conventional ideas as the destructive-
ness of gold, the death-wages of hypocrisy and broken
faith, the shattering of a morally inferior world by
a better one. All this stood out baldly in the clos-
ing words of Gotterdammerung. These words Wagner
struck out; they were replaced by such as seem of
the very tincture of Schopenhauer's pessimism
and of its doctrine of a world of illusion and rest-
less desire to be negated in a spirit of Entsagang,
resignation. Bninnhilde passes from the scene,
wunsch- und wahnlos. In a letter to Roeckel, Wag-
ner explains that as a poet and a composer he had

WAGNER 81

intuitively anticipated Schopenhauer's theories, that
Der Fliegende Hollander, Lohengrin and Tannhduser
were tragedies of Entsagung, and that in not seeing
this he had simply misread his artistic intentions.
A statement like this must be taken cautiously;
it is impossible to slur the change from an earlier
revolutionary optimism to pessimism; impossible also
not to connect this change with the conscious, strong
influence of Schopenhauer. In 1854 Wagner became
acquainted with Schopenhauer's philosophy; from
the very first he admired it intensely, and it has left
its mark on all his later work. I do not count my-
self among those who see in Wagner's pessimism a
natural tendency, forced into the open by this con-
tact with Schopenhauer. While much depends,
of course, on what is meant by pessimism, there is
in Wagner an assertive note of robust and confident
power, of strife, of feverish creativeness, which seems
the very opposite of pessimism. Fits of depression
there were in his life: moments when he felt that he
was waging a losing fight against stupidity and malice;
but there is all the difference in the world between
this idea of a will hampered and blocked in its pur-
poses and the idea of the illogical, suicidal nature
of the will. Never did Wagner look upon himself
as the dupe of an irrational cosmic force driving
him headlong; never did he doubt himself or his
artistic ideals; firm self-assurance marks his letters,
his autobiography, and his essays. Self-assurance

82 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

Schopenhauer also had in abundance; and he de-
spatched academic philosophy as quickly as Wagner
did Italian opera. But Schopenhauer lacked utterly
the artistic need and joy of creation from which
Wagner's self-assurance sprang. To the drive and
push of this Lebensbediirfniss Wagner gives himself
utterly.

This leads directly back to Wagner's double
interpretation of the power to live, of will. On
the one hand he emphasizes its strength and its rest-
less activity; on the other its grandeur and nobility;
dwelling, however, on the latter much more strongly
both as a man and as an artist. His is an idealizing
reading of the will, for what interests him is not the
shattering of the individual so much as greatness
of soul in the presence of disaster, calm strength or
an ecstatic self-drowning of the will. That is the
way his artistic genius reacts to the philosophy of
Schopenhauer. Few problems are more interest-
ing than this more or less unconscious reshaping of a
philosopher's world-view by an artist in response to
the demands of an imperious temperament. Even
where Wagner seems closest to Schopenhauer, in
Tristan und Isolde or in Parsifal, he is still distant
by just that much. A Tristan und Isolde by Schopen-
hauer! what would it have been? One may well
imagine it. His cynical remarks on women are
familiar enough: so is his unflattering interpreta-
tion of love. Nature intent on the race rather than

WAGNER 83

the individual works her will by that loveliest and
deadliest of baits: woman. Schopenhauer would
have shown us a Tristan and an Isolde stung by
unquenchable desire, driven about blindly by the
mad fury of love — only to be swept away, like all
nature's fools, with the will shaken out of them.
Resignation to him is the essential thing in tragedy;
the tragic hero takes leave of us with " the will to
live quite dead " in him. It might be going too far
to accuse Schopenhauer of glorifying limpness; he
has his ideal of salvation through art and through a
religion of sympathy, but on the whole his emphasis
is dangerously the other way. The world is a mad-
house and a slaughter-house; in it are staged the
insane antics of will. This cosmic indictment quite
overshadows the idea of salvation and gives his
philosophy a turn toward the negative.

But what about Wagner! The contrast between
night and day which recurs again and again in
Tristan und Isolde seems a genuine bit of Schopen-
hauer. Night is apostrophized as the eternal; the
all-soothing; destroyer of the false, garish lights of
day and of the illusions of life — glory, gain, individu-
ality. And these words

— dann
bin ich die Welt,
liebe-heiligstes Leben,
wonne-hehrstes Weben
nie-wieder-Erwachens

84 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

wahnlos
hold bewusster Wunsch,

seem an echo of the Nirvana, and its destruction of
will and individuality. But the whole drama reflects
an interpretation and a play of motives quite Wagner's
own and in many ways quite remote from Schopen-
hauer's point of view. Schopenhauer had inter-
preted sexual love as one of the strongest expressions
of will, one of the master forces that keep the earth
spinning about in restless torment; and had held
salvation to be possible only by its destruction. To
all this Wagner objected from the very first; and
that he should have objected to this ascetic ideal is
not at all surprising, for as a man and an artist he
was erotic. It is curious to see how in his essays
his prose in its yeasty ferment again and again turns
into erotic imagery. A robust sexuality marks his
poetic creations; of this no drama of his has more
than Tristan und Isolde, which is Wagner's apotheosis
of sexual love. The whole spirit of the play — music
as well as words — is passionate ecstasy and passionate
yearning. There are changes in this sea of feeling:
it is surging or choppy or smooth with the smoothness
of long, undulating swells. The passion of love,
which to Schopenhauer was the chief obstacle in the
way of the killing off of will and individuality, is to
Wagner the very force that saves us from the slavery
to will and individuality; the very force that makes
both Tristan and Isolde long for the drowning of the

WAGNER 85

Self in the Other. Death, night, Nirvana are merely
the symbol of this merger of consciousness. This
is a psychological interpretation of love, not a biolog-
ical one, like Schopenhauer's; and, psychologically,
passionate love is marked by unconsciousness of
self, by the desire for complete self-absorption in the
Other, by its consuming and fusing power.

There is much more of Wagner than of Schopen-
hauer in Tristan und Isolde; and it may serve as a
striking illustration of the degree to which both
Wagner's art and his theories were influenced by
peculiarities of artistic genius and personality.
The same subjective influences shape his ideal of
an art of the future and the demands he makes on
that art.

Genuine art, then, must be natural, racially
grounded, individual, and free. But Wagner's third
demands tops these in importance. True art must
be a compact and complete expression of the artistic
consciousness.

" The artistic man can find complete satisfaction
only in the union of all art forms in a common work
of art; he is in every isolation of his artistic powers
not free, not completely what he might be. In this
common work of art he is free and what he might be.
The true aim of art is the all-inclusive. Every one
who is truly art-inspired develops his peculiar en-
dowment to its highest point, not in order to glorify

86 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

this special endowment, but to glorify man through
art as such." Of such artistic wholeness Wagner
had before him the example of Goethe; and men like
Herder and Schiller had sketched in the picture of a
culture from which a wholehearted and complete art
was to spring. Suffering sharply from this back-
ground of idealism at its best, romanticism with
its onesidedness, opportunism, political and cultural
littleness, looseness, and dulness would be caught in
Wagner's criticism.

Wagner takes stock of his time and finds the con-
ditions distinctly unfavorable. Art, originally one,
expressing itself in three interpenetrating art forms,
music, poetry, and the dance, has been torn asunder,
piecemeal, by modern life. Each and every art
claims independence and gains helplessness. The
drama has lost by the abolition of the Greek chorus.
Music cut adrift from words and vocal expression
has too often become a filmy, nebulous thing. What-
ever attempts have been made to recombine the
several arts have proved failures. What else was
to be expected from putting them all in the same
pot and giving them a good shaking? The very
worst of such attempts is modern opera on Italian
and French lines. There character has nothing to
do with the words, and the words nothing with the
music. The ballet is a divertissement interpolated
anywhere and artificial to the core. Processions are
meant to catch the eye; scenery, sentimentality or

WAGNER 87

barbaric splendor, music that is sweetish, catchy,
full of artifice: these are meant to complete the
fascination. The aria becomes the trick-box of
the sleight-of-hand singer. Libretto and score are
slammed together. The composer could not breathe
life into the mannikins of the librettist; he had to
stretch words till they would stretch no farther, and
then had to cut loose from his text altogether and
seek compensation in the curlycues of the aria and
in daubings of tone color or in historical haberdashery
and in the full choric accompaniment to the aria.
The sounding unison of the chorus, as it is to be
found in Meyerbeer, is to Wagner simply the decora-
tive stage ensemble turned into many-voiced noise.
The hunt for exotic subjects, folk-melodies and
dances is curiosity turned wild. There is in these
Oriental operas no understanding of Oriental life.
It is all a matter of curio-hunting and padding.
These devices of the librettist are aimed at the
public; the composer in turn does the best he can
with a monotonous and often ridiculous libretto and
seeks to get a little variety and characterization on
the side. As a result music and text fall apart.
The music either embroiders the text with pattern
after pattern or makes away with it altogether.
Wagner cites an instance of such embroidery. It is
one of the artifices of opera to take a verse, have it
sung with the stress on one word, then have it sung
with the stress on another until it all becomes a

88 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

silly, meaningless repetition. It is another artifice
to stretch words and music to conceal an inner
poverty of score and libretto.

In all these criticisms there appears a sincere
interest in a very important aesthetic principle, that
of organic structure. It would be instructive to
test the more recent French and Italian opera from
this point of view. Operas like Cavalleria Rusticana
and Le Jongleur de Notre Dame are close-knit in
structure and appeal. They show an advance in
musical characterization quite as clearly as does
the radically different music of Strauss. Debussy
has developed an atmospheric and emotionally
fluid music which contrasts strongly with the sharply
jointed and melody-spiced music of classical opera.
In many recent operas, however, the curse of the
exotic is still as strong as it was in The Magic Flute.
There is something childish about Puccini's super-
ficial exploitation of the West and of Japan in The
Girl of the Golden West and Madame Butterfly. The
music is compelling in spots, but as a whole such
operas contrast unfavorably with the naturalness
and basic strength of the Wagnerian music
drama.

Wagner's theory of the music drama as the perfect
expression of an art of the future shapes itself rapidly
on the basis of these two constructive demands:
of organic unity; of completeness and breadth of
artistic inspiration.

WAGNER 89

11 The highest common work of art is the drama;
it can exist in its fulness only when there is contained
in it each single art in its fulness.

" The true drama is possible only as emerging
from the common expressive impulse of all the arts
directed toward a common publicity. Each single
art form can unfold itself to a complete understand-
ing oniy by combining with the others in the drama,
for the aim of each single art form can be gained
completely only by means of the sympathetic and
enlightening cooperation of them all in the drama."

In the music drama poetry, music and the dance
will all have their place. Painting appears as
scene-painting; architecture is assigned the task
of building an ideal theatre, which is to be the per-
fect expression of the beauty and dignity of art.
Wagner continues:

" In the all inclusive work of art of the future not
a single, richly developed capacity of the several
arts remains unused. In it they all come to their
own. The tonal art developed so characteristically
and variously in instrumental music can be pushed
to its utmost bent. It in turn will stimulate the art
of dramatic dancing to new inventions and distend
to unforeseen fulness the spirit of poetry. In its
isolation music has fashioned for itself an organ
capable of unlimited expression: the orchestra.
The tonal language of Beethoven, brought into the
drama by the orchestra, is quite a new thing in it.
Architecture and scenic landscape painting place the
dramatic artist and his presentation in a physical

90 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

setting, and furnish a rich, self-renewing, and signifi-
cant background. But the orchestra, that living
body of infinitely manifold harmony, furnishes to
the individual artist a substratum of the natural
in its artistic and human nature. The orchestra
is, so to speak, the ground of infinite, all embracing
feeling, from which the individual feeling of the singer
can grow to its full stature; it dissolves the rigid,
immovable substance of the actual scene into a
liquid, soft, yielding, impressionable, ethereal some-
thing whose limitless ground is feeling itself."

" Thus joining in a rhythmic procession, the allied
arts show themselves, now singly, now in pairs, as
the dramatic action requires it. At one time the
plastic art of the mime hearkens to the passionless
reflection of thought; at another, the impulse of
determined thought pours itself into the immediate
expressiveness of gesture; at another, music alone
can express the flow of feeling or the seizure by
emotion; then again all three of the arts, linked
together, will visualize and actualize the idea of the
drama."

Back of passages like these there is a very definite
theory of the function of poetry and music and
the relation between poet and composer. Accord-
ing to Wagner, music and poetry alike address them-
selves to feeling. The poet does it by means of
language. But language is the joint product of
intellect and feeling; by means of it man has been
able to fix his ideas and to pass his experiences on
to his fellows. In becoming articulate it has become
crystallized, blocked out into so many sharply sun-

WAGNER 91

dered ideas; in its further development it has become
more abstract, more nearly the servant of the in-
tellect; and it has become brittle and colorless. The
poet must restore its early fluidity and emotional
power; he must break up these intellectual blocks
and again make of language an emotional continuum
full of contrasts melting into one another. This
is not an easy thing for the poet to do, with the
limited resources at his disposal. Wagner suggests
various devices, such as choice of concrete, full-
blooded words; rhyme; rhythmic accentuation;
dispensing with connectives; alliteration. He him-
self makes use of the old German Stabreim, and
its alliterative pairing of words. In the phrase
Wohl und Weh, weal and woe, — the illustration is
Wagner's, — the alliteration combines to the unity
almost of a compound two words separated by
the whole span of the feeling horizon. Every one
of Wagner's music dramas yields many examples
of all of these devices, but the richest of all is Tristan
und Isolde. There you have the poetry of passion,
of pure feeling; language has been stripped bare of
its intellectual elements, of connectives and thought
structure; the words chosen are so many thrills
and beats of passion; so many rapid strokes leading
to a shattering crescendo or to ecstatic reverbera-
tions of feeling. Of this three examples:
The first is from the second act:

92 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

Tristan
Isolde! Geliebte!

Isolde
Tristan! Geliebter!

Beide
Bist du mein?
Hab' ich dich wieder?
Darf ich dich fassen?
Kann ich mir trauen?
Endlich! Endlich!
An meiner Brust!
Fiihl ich dich wirklich?
Bist du es selbst?
Dies deine Augen?
Dies dein Mund?
Hier deine Hand?
Hier dein Herz?
Bin ich's? Bist du's?
Halt ich dich fest?
1st es kein Trug?
1st es kein Traum?
O Wonne der Seele!
O siisse, hehrste,
kiihnste, schonste,
seligste Lust!
Ohne Gleiche!
Ueberreiche!
Ueberselig !
Ewig! Ewig!

WAGNER 93

Ungeahnte,

nie gekannte,

iiberschwanglich

hoch erhab'ne!

Freude- Jauchzen !

Lust-En tziicken!

Himmel-hochstes

Welt-Entrucken!

Mein Tristan!

Mein Isolde!

Tristan!

Isolde!

Mein und dein!

Immer ein!

Ewig, ewig ein !

The second is from the same act:

Nun banne das Verlangen,

holder Tod,

sehnend verlangter

Liebes-Tod!

In deinen Armen,

dir geweiht,

ur-heilig Erwarmen,

von Erwachens Not befreit.

Wie es fassen?

Wie sie lassen,

diese Wonne,

fern der Sonne,

94 AKTISTS AND THINKERS

fern der Tage

Trennungs-Klage?

Ohne Wahnen

sanftes Sehnen,

ohne Bangen

suss Verlangen;

ohne Wehen

hehr Vergehen,

ohne Schmachten

hold Umnachten;

ohne Scheiden,

ohne cfeiden,

traut allein,

ewig heim,

in ungemess'nen Raumen

iibersel'ges Traumen.

Du Isolde,

Tristan ich,

nicht mehr Tristan,

nicht Isolde;

ohne Nennen,

ohne Trennen,

neu Erkennen,

neu Entbrennen;

endlos ewig

ein-bewusst:

heiss ergluhter Brust

hochste Liebes-Lust!

The third are Isolde's last words:

WAGNER 95

Hore ich nur
diese Weise,
die so wunder-
voll und leise,
Wonne klagend
alles sagend,
mild versohnend
aus ihm tonend,
auf sich schwingt,
in mich dringt,
hold erhallend
um mich klingt?
Heller schallend,
mich umwallend,
sind es Wellen
sanfter Liifte?
Sind es Wogen
wonniger Diifte?
Wie sie schwellen,
mich umrauschen,
soil ich atmen,
soil ich lauschen?
Soil ich schlurfen,
untertauchen,
suss in Duften
mich verhauchen?
In des Wonnemeeres
wogendem Schwall,

96 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

in der Duft-Wellen
tonendem Schall,
in des Welt-Atems
wehendem All —
ertrinken —
versinken —
unbewusst —
hochste Lust!

In passages like these Wagner has made the most
of the emotional resources of the poet. But he is
well aware that they are limited, that the poet can-
not by the sheer force of his isolated art express the
dramatic idea completely. Poetry must enlist the
services of music, vocal and orchestral. Pure tone
and melodic theme give the tone-color of language;
more than that, by passing from pole to pole of feeling
— stressing, grading, reconciling — they give a lan-
guage that is liquidescent as well as irridescent.
Harmonics is only a further step in this subtle mixing
and blending of feeling. But what of orchestral
music and its place in the music drama? Wagner
does not mean it to be a mere accompaniment to the
score, nor an independent music without words;
every bar of it must be organically related to the
dramatic idea. To Wagner the orchestra, like the
chorus in a Greek tragedy, is the interpreter of the
action and its underlying motives. It is memory,
and it is premonition (Ahndung) — a swift messenger

WAGNER 97

to gather in the past and set it down in the present
or the forerunner of dark forebodings, shapeless
fears or half -formed hopes.*

*The following passage illustrates Wagner's theory of the emo-
tional fluidity of music and of the part the orchestra is to play:

" While the composer is still dependent on the original form of the
dance and never dares to seek expressiveness beyond its boundaries,
the poet calls to him: ' Leap boldly into the full waves of the sea of
music; if you do it hand in hand with me you will never lose touch
with what every one understands best. I place you firmly on the
ground of dramatic action, and this action, at the time of its scenic
representation, is of all poems the most easily understood. Spread
your melody boldly so that it pours itself over your work like an
incessant stream; express in it what I am silent about, because only
you can say it; and I, though silent, shall express all because I am
your guide.'

" In truth the greatness of a poet may be measured by his express-
ive silence about the inexpressible. It is the composer who seizes
upon this silence and expresses it in sound. The form of this sound-
ing silence is infinite melody.

. " Naturally the symphonic poet cannot shape this melody with-
out his peculiar instrument: the orchestra. It is needless to say
that he must not like the Italian composer use the orchestra simply
as a huge guitar for the accompaniment of the aria.

" The orchestra will in the proposed drama occupy about the
place the Chorus occupied in the dramatic action of the Greeks.
The chorus there was always present, watching the motives and
springs of the developing action, seeking to fathom these motives
and to arrive at some judgment. There is one difference, however.
The part of the chorus was a reflective one; it stood aloof from the
action and its motives. Not so the orchestra of the modern sym-
phonic poet. So intimately does it share in the motives of the action
that it not only as a system of harmonics makes a definite expression
of melody possible, but keeps melody itself in the necessary state of
continued fluidity, and thus reveals the motives of feeling with a
convincing impress* veness,"

98 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

In this principle of musical continuity lies the
secret of Wagner's use of Leitmotif. In its crudest
form Leitmotif is simply a musical tag; it is a partly
imitative and partly symbolical method of ushering
in and labelling a character or an action. As such it
marks better than anything else could the antiquated
technique of the opera. Only the novel at its worst
would stoop to so mechanical and stereotyped a
device as having the hero invariably flick the ashes
off a cigarette, the villain always talking the same
deep-dyed villainy, the characters labelled by set
phrases and recurrent peculiarities of behavior and
bearing. It is not surprising to find Wagner im-
patient of the endless talk of Leitmotif in his music
dramas; he is merely setting himself against stereo-
typed characterization. With him Leitmotif is a
much less artificial and mechanical thing. He is
not above using it occasionally as a tag or as a flour-
ish of character, but on the whole his interpretation
and use of it are subtle and original. The Wagnerian
Leitmotif is not repetition, but repetition with a
difference; it is a recurrent musical phrase modi-
fied, reinterpreted to suit changes in dramatic idea
and music. Back of these modifications is the
interpretative function of orchestral music — its
stresses, its pauses, its ironic comment, its enfolding
acceptance. This amounts to a threefold use of
Leitmotif: for purposes of progressive characteriza-
tion; as a principle of dramatic and musical con-

WAGNER 99

tinuity; as a complicating and enriching principle.
Far from merely marking or labelling character, it
is to uncover its hidden forces and its intricate
development, and to show its incessant counterplay
to ever modified external forces. It is to be a prin-
ciple of continuity, dramatic and musical. The
mere mechanical repetition of the same musical
phrase would have the reverse effect: it would stand
out like the recurrent blare of a trumpet or would
punctuate the action with the monotony of blows
from a hammer. But when the phrase is modified,
as it is in the Wagnerian Leitmotif, it serves to bind
past and present in the web and woof of a continuous
texture. It is also responsible for much of the
richness of Wagner's music dramas. The dramatic
idea is constantly defining and re-defining itself in
characters and plot, is evolving and dissolving in
greater and greater complications of unrest; the
music is constantly shifting its values, is soothing,
vibrant, stormy in turn; is constantly flooding the
moment with all that went before. What could be
more stimulating than this method of allowing full
value to contrasts and conflicts while gathering them
up into a ceaseless flow of change and development?
What Wagner's music lacks in delicacy of bouquet,
it makes up in richness of blend, in volume, in tang.

To set Wagner the Thinker over against Wagner
the Artist, and then to judge the one immeasurably

100 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

inferior to the other, is a serious mistake; it is
too much like an attempt to separate the insepa-
rable. What of Wagner the reflective artist or Wag-
ner the thinker, whose thought is at heart simply
an artistic demand? Testing the truth or sound-
ness of Wagner's theories of art seems to me un-
profitable business; but to see in them the play of
an artistic personality, the ideal and credo of an
artist to whom thought itself — as well as music or
poetry — is a means of artistic self-expression, seems
well worth while. The influence of Schiller and
Schopenhauer may be admitted; so may the aca-
demic taint in most of Wagner's essays; but enough
remains that is expressive of his own artistic self.
His attack on the culture of his day is borrowed in
part, but it is not in what he borrowed that the
significance and interest of this attack lie. Rather
do they lie in a strength of conviction which is
itself nothing but the sustaining surface of an ideal
of art. The same holds good on the whole of his con-
structive theory of the music drama. None of it
is so much cold, hard thinking; it is the reflective
artist who takes the plunge, and what he brings
to the surface is a tangle of artistic motifs.

If it be granted that Wagner's theories as well
as his music and poetry are the work of the creative
artist there remains the task of getting the Wagner
stamp: the thing that serves to mark the artistic
consciousness that is back of this thought-tinted

WAGNER 101

art and color-soaked thought. That would be an
easy matter if a consciousness like that of Maeter-
linck were to be dealt with. We should then need
nothing but his own comment: " Nothing in the
whole world is so athirst for beauty as the soul, nor
is there anything to which beauty clings so readily ";
and an understanding of the soft, clear beauty that
glows in his essays and plays alike. But Wagner's
is far from simple. One word would not mark him;
nor would two. He is nothing if not complex, in
character, in development, in method, and in ideal.
In describing his artistic personality one might use
the terms character and dramatic quality, provided —
and this is the all-important proviso — character
were here defined as individuality, strength, intensity;
and dramatic quality, in terms of conflict and trans-
forming movement. Both as an artist and as a
thinker Wagner has character. His music is in-
dividual, strong and passionate; his essays are per-
sonal reactions, intense and high-flavored in style;
and in his art and his prose alike there is a lack of
delicacy and self-restraint: a defect that is the
very man himself. As for dramatic quality, there
is plenty of a thoroughly characteristic kind. It ex-
presses itself in Wagner's life and work first of all as
conflict, as a struggle between such opposing forces
as optimism and pessimism, need of life and need
of love; then as transforming movement. There
are other instances of an artistic consciousness that

102 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

is dramatic at heart: Browning, Rodin, Nietzsche;
and, with certain reservations, Hegel; but at one
point or another there is a sharp contrast. Both
Rodin and Wagner are elemental, passionate, and
dramatic in the sense of giving titanic struggles.
There the likeness ends. Rodin's world-view is the
simpler; he means his art to express cosmic struggle
and unrest, cosmic passion and yearning. Dramatic
in this sense, he is not dramatic in another; he
gives no cosmic dialectic, no play and counterplay
of great forces, no transforming clash of ideals.
But these are the things that make up half the
dramatic power of Tannhduser and Der Ring des
Nibelungen. Where Rodin is farthest Hegel seems
nearest. Reality is for him nothing but dialectic;
he gives not only the stress of thought, but its dra-
matic evolution by means of a chain of conflicts. In
this sense his philosophic genius is dramatic to the
core. It is significant that he has given a profound
theory of the drama in terms of an antagonism of
ideals, and hinted at the principle of emotional
fluidity in music. But his life work in philosophy
lacks full dramatic power; thought-dialectic seems
thin and ghostly when set over against the massive-
ness and the spontaneous, electrifying touch of pas-
sion-dialectic. Nietzsche has caught the spirit of
life as a contest without end, but his dramatic
genius is much more subjective than Wagner's.
Nor is Wagner's like Schopenhauer's. The dra-

WAGNER 103

matic is not the deepest or most essential thing about
Schopenhauer, neither a world-butchery nor a Nir-
vana being favorable to it. And it must be remem-
bered that Schopenhauer, for all his brilliant theory of
music, championed classical music, as he did elsewhere
classical architecture. They seem to touch in their
emphasis on conflict, but Wagner adds what Schopen-
hauer lacks, the principle of transforming movement.
It is not present in Schopenhauer's theory of the suc-
cessive objectifications of will — so many stone steps
or separate blocks; it is present in Wagner's prose,
where an imagination at once heavy and impatient
pushes thought into thought and harmony into dis-
cord; or better still in his music: a music of violent
contrasts, of fusings, and of a constantly changing life.
Understood in this way, character and dramatic
quality may serve to mark Wagner the Artist and the
Thinker.

HEGEL

And take upon us the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies.

— Shakespeare.

At first sight Hegel seems very unpromising mate-
rial. What in the way of interesting art criticism
or of a sympathetic theory of art can be expected
of a man who grinds everything to powder between
a pedantic terminology and an aggressive method?
What place has the artistic in the personality of this
intellectual contortionist? And why, if we do not
care for contortions, should we pay so high a price
of admission to this most difficult of all philosophies?

I can well understand the temptation to ask such
questions. One has to break into Hegel's system
by main force; and will find there among much
of value a great deal that is worthless and puzzling.
It must be admitted that his aesthetics share the
defects of that system. Of his keen interest in art
there can be no doubt; he spent much of his leisure
in the picture galleries of Berlin and at art exhibi-
tions, and at Vienna and Paris he had more than a

104

*HEGEL 105

taste of Italian opera and Shakespeare. He lacks
technical knowledge just where it counts most
heavily — in music and sculpture; it is here that he
is weakest. But his illustrations from poetry and
painting are happily chosen, and his theories illumi-
nating as well as profound. Everywhere he shows
imagination and judgment, although in fine per-
ceptions and delicate touches he is excelled by phil-
osophers like Schelling and Nietzsche. As for his
personality, it promised little: he was often ill at
ease, prosy, and commonplace. Schopenhauer had
the fatuous self-assurance to speak of him as " der
geistlose, plumpe Regel." But the spark of genius
was in this absorbed, unemotional man, this sworn
enemy of romanticism. After all, his very elaborate
and unprepossessing system of philosophy has its roots
in the same creative imagination that shapes a work
of art, and is an imaginative tour de force of the first
order. In this dramatized romance of nature and
of consciousness personality expresses itself quite
as strongly and plainly as in art; and the spirit of
adventure, so evident in German Romanticism,
here takes on strange forms. If these things are
overlooked Hegel escapes, for it is only through the
interpretative imagination that his meaning can be
seized.

From 1820 to the time of his death Hegel lectured
on aesthetics at the University of Berlin. His
general system at that time stood complete in outline;

106 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

there remained only the task of sketching in and of
working out the detail of his theories on history,
religion, and art. This work remained uncompleted;
his lectures on aesthetics, like the others, were never
put in final shape for publication. Of the two note-
books on aesthetics which he left at his death, one,
of the year 1818, was used in connection with his
lectures at Heidelberg; the other, of 1820, gives the
substance of his later course at Berlin, and is by far
the more important. Much of this note-book is
a compact mass of notes to guide the lecturer; parts
of it, especially the introductions to the several
divisions, are fully written out. From year to year
loose sheets were inserted, marginal remarks added,
and the manuscript changed here and there. In
view of all this, the task Hotho, one of HegePs
students, set himself in 1835, of reconstructing and
publishing his master's aesthetic theories, was not
an easy one. What he did was to take the two
books, compare with them sets of students' notes —
on the assumption that they might be valuable if
they could be had in large numbers — fill in what tran-
sitions seemed lacking, and give as much of Hegel's
own language as he possibly could. One need not
quarrel with the result, for these three volumes are
rich to the point of embarrassment; so rich in fact
in special and general problems that it becomes im-
possible to take more than an armful of this wealth
at a time.

HEGEL 107

With the grave and judicial enthusiasm so charac-
teristic of him, Hegel first takes up the problem of
material and method, and widens it out into the
problem of aim. To him the material of aesthetics
is the beautiful in art. This he distinguishes from
the beautiful in nature, for that is imperfect, incom-
plete, not willed as such, and therefore not reborn
of the spirit.

But does this material admit of success and is it
worth while? Art expresses the beautiful in so
many different forms, breaks it up into so many-
types, is so riotously and joyously free that any
orderly system of principles seems impossible. Worse
still, is art really worth the attempt? Is it not after
all a frivolous amusement, an entertaining and de-
ceptive shadowplay? Hegel has the curiosity to
raise these questions and the courage to answer them
in the negative. Not only does he feel sure that his
method can take care of even the most riotous ma-
terial, but he is also a most determined and devoted
champion of the dignity of art.

Nothing could be farther from Hegel's thought
than a contemptuous attitude toward art, such as
Plato's. It seems strange that art should be dealt
its hardest blows by a man whose artistic genius
shows itself in vivid and biting character sketches,
in scene-painting and settings, in an ample and
wonderfully flexible diction, and in a reach which
allows him to handle the most abstruse problems

108 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

gracefully and profoundly. Metaphysics gives the
key to the puzzle. Plato holds art to be the impover-
ished imitation of an imitation. Of the real world —
perfect, changeless, unmoved, eternal — the world of
everyday perception, of colors, sounds, and bodies,
is but an imperfect copy. It is this poor copy that
the artist in his turn sets himself to imitate. By
flattening a tri-dimensional object out on canvas
the painter distorts it, and fails to give both its
complex nature and its purpose, which is the essen-
tial thing about it. Who would wish to sleep in a
bed daubed on canvas? or have Homer fashion
a shield or lead an army? To this any one but a
philosopher would reply: Who would not prefer a
carpenter's bed, imperfect as it is, to the eternal
Type, or Idea of a bed? To Plato's mind art is use-
less and dangerous because he feels that it cheapens
and distorts even the shallow world in which it moves
and has its being. Small wonder then that he bowed
out of his ideal commonwealth those " multiform
gentlemen " the artists, fastening upon them the
reproach of being pleasing tricksters and charlatans
of a beggared life.

Hegel answers Plato by implication. He admits
at once that if art were imitative of nature in Plato's
sense and restricted to that aim it would either score
a trivial and fruitless victory or have to acknowledge
an utter defeat. Zeuxis may have painted grapes
so astonishingly real that birds came and pecked at

HEGEL 109

them — but is it not cheapening art to judge of it in
terms of imitative skill. This exceptional success
means nothing; on the whole the imitative artist
is hopelessly handicapped when he tries to copy-
natural objects literally. If Hegel had lived at a
time of imitative mania in art, he might have ampli-
fied this thought of his. The painter in color and
light and shade effects lacks the range and variety
of nature; he cannot give the full intensity of light.
The composer simply strains his art unpleasantly if
he falls into the obsessions of programme-music;
the microscopic novelist, too, attempts the impossi-
ble. Why then stop here where art must fail instead
of pushing on? Here is where Plato and Hegel part
company. Art for Hegel is not ineffective copying;
it reveals reality. Far from brushing the mere
surface of life, it sounds it to its very depth; that is
why Hegel is impressed with its dignity and impor-
tance. " Only when it is free is fine art truly art.
It fulfils its highest task only when it brings to con-
sciousness and expresses the divine, the deepest
interests of man, the largest truths of the Spirit.
This task religion, philosophy, and art have in com-
mon, and each solves it in its own way." It is the
spiritual interpreter and liberator of man. It frees
him from himself and from external nature; from
himself by sparing him the rawness and oppressive-
ness of passion, and by giving him what is essential
to all true culture — self-detachment and a rich,

110 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

creative development; from nature by allowing him
to set the seal of the spirit on the outer world, by
giving him scope to express all that is his and to find
himself in all that is. In art nature is vergeistigt;
spiritualized; reborn of the spirit.

Here are all the elements of a cultural theory of
art. But Hegel takes care not to commit himself to
a narrowly moral or intellectual view. It is not the
purpose of art to edify, to make some scheme of social
progress palatable, or to convey intellectual truth in
abstract terms. But art, rightly understood and given
free play, is a great cultural force, for together with
philosophy and religion it has won life over to the
uses of the Spirit. It has been the great teacher of
man, has softened his savagery, has made him
keenly responsive to the formal side of nature, and
keenly alive to what he had it in him to be. The
first man to etch rude drawings on his weapons or
to fashion his cooking and drinking utensils in pleas-
ing shapes freed himself from the grossly material
response to impulses and passions that threatened
to grip and crush his whole being. The first man to
voice his feelings in music and song disengaged
himself from bruising contact with life and found
himself. Instead of devouring the world as material,
art appropriates it as form.

Back of all this is the ideality and the verve of
the classical period of German literature. With no
constructive ideal of political or industrial strength

HEGEL 111

at hand and with no well-trained, finely discrimina-
tive art taste to single out sharply limited problems
of craftsmanship and technique, German idealism
poured like a flood across the field of art. Herder's
eager alertness, Goethe's sane and lofty conception
of art, Schiller's enthusiasm, the Romanticists
with their perplexing blend of extravagance and
insight — they are simply so many different instances
of a force which was bound to throw all the weight
on the one far-reaching problem of the place of art
in the ideal development of man. Schiller had
assigned to art a very high position. Into what he
regarded the crass materialism and the sorry politics
of his time he thrust it as the great ennobler of the
human race. Hegel according to his own confession,
was profoundly influenced by Schiller. But the in-
fluence of that high-minded, if somewhat vague and
rhetorical, view of art did not stop with Hegel; and is
to be found in Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche.
With this cultural theory in mind Hegel imposes
a twofold task on art: it is to give what is essential
and real in nature; and it is to express more and
more effectively and largely the self-expressive and
self-expansive principle which Hegel calls Geist,
or Spirit. This task at once marks sharply the
two main divisions of his aesthetics. He gives a
discussion of the idea of beauty in art; and then he
exhibits this idea of beauty in its dialectic, that
is, in its development.

s/

112 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

Beauty is reality shining through the sensuous
medium. With this metaphysical definition the
shadow of HegePs system begins to slant across his
aesthetics; and a black shadow it is. Of all phil-
osophies Hegel's is most ingenious, most imagina-
tive, most difficult, and, one might add, most
tyrannical in the control of its parts. Nothing
in it is allowed to stand by itself; and so art has
to shoulder the burden of metaphysics. Reality
means many things to many minds. To the com-
mon man it suggests the here and now, the tan-
gible or something of the sort; to Plato it meant an
intangible, perfect, and eternally fixed world. With
Hegel it is at heart a process unfolding and express-
ing itself in and through experience and working
itself out by a certain law of movement. This
movement is from the indefinite, the abstract, the
potential to the definite, the concrete, the com-
pletely actualized; and the three moments are:
thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Throughout his system
Hegel uses these terms and seeks to show the neces-
sary changes of their dialectic; how a thing is
affirmed, or posited; how its own inherent weaknesses
negate it, or wreck it; and how a higher reaffirma-
tion comes from the wreckage. There is implied in
this movement a self-evolving, self-expressing prin-
ciple which Hegel calls Geist, or(Srjiri£>., The great
triad of his system — Mind, Nature, Spirit — represents
the three acts in this profound ,drama of the evolu-

HEGEL 113

tion of the Spirit. Act One: a set of abstract, empty
forms, onesided and therefore self-destructive.
Spirit at this stage is neither concretely organized
nor fully embodied. Act Two: weary of this
sheer emptiness the Spirit goes out of itself into the
world of nature; there it becomes self -estranged;
loses itself in the external. Act Three: Spirit
rouses itself from its strange, self-forgetful sleep in
nature and creates for itself a realm of the ideal
in art, religion, and philosophy. It has overcome
its unfilled vagueness. It has taken hold of itself
and become strong and rich through its adventures.
Its life has swung full circle, but what a difference
in strength, substance, and self-mastery between
its outgoing and home coming!

All this may seem romance clad in a most dis-
heartening jargon and marked by loose talk and forced
transitions. But there is a certain fascination about
this world drama in which the Spirit creates itself
and passes with an orderliness at once ghostly and
telling to ever richer phases of development.

Hegel never puts this drama quite so baldly as I
have put it; but it inheres deeply in his system.
Beauty in art, whose definition is our present con-
cern, belongs to the home curve of this dramatic
adventure of the Spirit: the creation of an ideal
realm, as Hegel calls it. If it is true that the in-
terpretative imagination furnishes the key to Hegel,
then the meaning of his theory of reality and his con-

114 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

ception of beauty might be made clear by the par-
allelism of a tragedy like King Lear. No one would
deny that King Lear is a play of profound significance
or that this significance is a development. The
interest is cumulative and grows from scene to scene.
At first it is extraneous and direct; the characters
are as yet vague, unfilled, or their appeal is a narrow
one. In the partition scene Lear is perfectly in-
dividualized, but only as a peevish old man; Regan
and Goneril are two evil shadows; Cordelia gives
but the promise of her later rich self. The Gloster
scenes are brutally direct. But we become con-
scious of profound parallelisms; broader issues;
larger interests; enriched and universalized char-
acter, as with crest after crest of disaster the tragic
interest pounds its way. The significance, or mean-
ing, of King Lear is not something outside and be-
yond: it is just this self -evolving and self -deepening
spirituality; this passing from the outer to the
inner, from the abstract to the concrete, from the
particular or the bare universal to the concrete
universal. The tragedy is alive with passion and
feeling, but there is something added — imagination
and thought, restless and penetrative, catching the
dissonances of human life; visualizing reason de-
throned, justice perverted; and striking in the
recognition scene a wonderfully mellow and quiet-
ing note.

Shakespeare in King Lear has achieved an organic

HEGEL 115

unity, a fusion of the pa/ticular and the universal, i
and the giving a profound Significance to characters '
and incidents. These three things correspond to
the three chief points in HegePs conception of
beauty.

The idea of organic unity has a peculiar fascination
for Hegel. A mere aggregate does not please him,
for a thing whose nature is indifferent to the taking
away or slapping on of parts interests him but little.
He must have what would collapse under such con-
ditions; the thing whose parts share in a common
life: the organism. Wherever nature fashions such
an organism she comes nearest beauty. Not that
Hegel fails to see the inferior beauties of mere aggre-
gates: " In this respect abstract purity in form,
color, tone, etc., is at this point the essential thing.
Clean-drawn lines, running along uniformly and
not with wavering indecision, smooth surfaces, etc.,
are satisfying because of their firm decisiveness and
uniform self-agreement. The purity of the sky, the
clearness of the atmosphere, a mirror-like lake or a
smooth sea are pleasing for this reason. The same
is true of purity of tones." But all the emphasis of
his thought is on the beauty of organic unity. Of all
natural forms he holds the human body to be most
beautiful because it shows such a wonderful and
subtle inter-relation of parts. Cut a hand off — the
whole body suffers, and the hand decays. Where-

116 ARTISTS AND THINKEES

ever there is in nature a lack of such unity, as in mixed
animal forms like the crocodile or combinations of
bird and reptile, ugliness results. In art organic
unity is quite as important an element of beauty.

There is a philosopher's bias in all this, for while
to him the notion of organic unity is a necessary tool
whose use is intellectually stimulating, there is no
valid reason for putting the natural beauty of organic
bodies at so high a notch or for seeing in organic
unity the highest principle of the beauty of art. Of
all the arts sculpture deals most directly with self-
complete, organic material — man and animals; its
technique is bound to the strictest economy and
interrelationship of parts. But it seems to lose
rather than gain through this; and is perhaps the poor-
est of the arts in point of resources. What of Rodin?
might be asked. Rodin makes much of the prin-
ciple of organic unity: his figures and groups are com-
pact; his technique is a very accurate and very
complex working out of the mutual bearings of post-
ure, bone, tendon, and muscle. But after all, the
real principle of unity with him is some symbolic
idea — thought, lust, work, love, self-reproach; an
idea of which the body, whether self-absorbed or
struggling or limp, is the living and detailed expres-
sion. Rodin chooses ideas that are primitive and
as limitless in sweep as a ray of light; in this way he
gets the imaginative equivalent of a stretch of color
or a mass of sensuous material, and avoids the danger

HEGEL 117

of too bare and too stubborn an emphasis on the prin-
ciple of organic unity. This seems the only way
sculpture has of freshening itself. Modern sculpture
must be dramatic, expressive; and must work a
natural symbolism closely into the marble; it must
make use of ideas that rouse the imagination. The
younger French and Belgian sculptors seem to have
realized this — witness such subjects as: Thought,
The Dream, Accident, In the Evening of Life. Better
illustrations still are Meunier's Puddlers at the
Furnace, Fire-damp, The Mower, and Lambeaux'
The Human Passions. A like change is found in the
other arts. Outline and composition are not felt to
be all important in painting, for here too studied or
too elaborate a relation of part to part and of parts to
the whole seems to detract from the aesthetic value.
We demand something else, and employ either the
principle of separate blotches of color or that of
atmosphere — something that softens and dissolves.
The change appears strongly in Whistler's painting
and Debussy's music. The modern drama has freed
itself from abject slavery to the notion of organic
unity in plot and character. A play like Maeter-
linck's The Death of Tintagiles is simply a mood — a
study in delicate greys and sombre blacks; structure
in the old, conventional sense is given up for the
sake of a veiled and intimate beauty. Playwrights
like Strindberg, Brieux, and Galsworthy make the
same sacrifice for other reasons; under the stress of

118 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

reflection and moral ideas they regard a play as a bit
of life, a fragment of meshwork, cut into at random
and left with a thousand loose ends. The dramatic
treatment of character shows as radical a change.
To us with our notions of heredity, of layers of
character development, of outflows and inflows of
social currents, there seems something false and
artificial in the idea of characters as complete and self-
closed as billiard balls spinning about and banging
against each other. Rather do we conceive of
character as the point of an angle whose sides straddle
the universe.

Such criticism of Hegel may easily be pushed too
far. After all, the two other demands he makes of
beauty go far towards correcting the excess of his
emphasis on organic unity.

r,

Beauty is somehow a fusion of the universal and the
particular. There is no disputing the fact; art does
give what is at once the individual and the type.
Shakespeare does it in all his plays, but most strik-
ingly in Hamlet; Thackeray individualizes so im-
portant and so slight a thing as an English butler;
Flaubert does it with the most trivial objects ; Dickens
often fails; Arnold Bennett succeeds in his Old Wives1
Tale. But how explain this secret of the artist; this
way he has of taking anything, from a rag doll to a cab
horse or a hitching post, and having it stand out as
something absolutely apart, itself only, and yet mark-

HEGEL 119

ing it with the full meaning of its class? Is it a Very
painstaking observation; or is it a trick of the imagi-
nation? Maupassant touches on this problem in the
preface to Pierre et Jean. With Hegel it widens out
into the question: How comes it that some particular
incident, some ordinary, everyday character, when
interpreted by the artist, strikes us with the sharp
thrust and full meaning of the universal? He offers
no solution other than putting the whole weight of
his philosophical system back of it. Others have
different ways of failing; and the problem remains
unsolved. But the fact itself of the fusion of par-
ticular and universal is one of great aesthetic interest;
it underlies the artist's practice and appears largely
in his reflection. Rodin's discussion of Millet's
Gleaners is one example out of many. Here as well
as in Rodin's references to portrait painting there is
a strange likeness between his views and Hegel's —
further proof that Hegel's imagination is artistic
in type, at least in its deeper motives.

Hegel applies his theory that beauty is a blend of
the particular and universal; and one of the most
striking uses he makes of it is in his interpretion of
Dutch genre painting. In subject these pictures seem
trivial or repellent. There are fat burghers smoking
their pipes; boors gambling and quarrelling over
their drink; inn-yards and barn-yards with the
children as dirty and contented as the pigs and dogs.
But there are also spotless kitchen scenes, glimpses of

120 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

the council chamber, bits of road, soil, dike and sea.
Hegel urges us to turn from the subject of these
pictures to their spirit. We are to see in them a life
of broad animal enjoyment, of naive delight in solid-
ity and comfort — lousy comfort at times — a spirit
of enterprise, a hard-earned freedom, civic pride as
well as pride in neat housewifery, an expansive spirit
of achievement and pleasure. This is the universal
( element in Dutch art. Such an interpretation may
easily become fanciful. Hegel neglects the purely
technical redemption of a trivial or " low " subject.
The color possibilities in the mottled face and arms
of a washerwoman may attract a painter; while he
may have no thought of the symbolism of grinding
toil.

<

A work of art must be concretely significant. This
is Hegel's third test of beauty. Somehow art
makes life seem larger and more significant. In a
spirit of creative abundance, it gives a concrete
ideality of treatment and a tingling sense of larger
issues. Whenever art reveals in this manner life
in its reaches and meanings, it has achieved beauty.
Hegel's formula, concrete significance of life, is not
narrow or bigoted. On principle it would admit
almost any subject and a great variety of inter-
pretations. No aspect of life is either too humble
and ugly or too frivolous or too depraved to serve
as material for the truly great artist. In this sense

HEGEL 121

Millet, Meunier, Rodin, Rops, Gorky, Maupassant,
Baudelaire, and Verlaine are great artists: they
have given the concrete significance of neglected
phases of life. Rodin, quite in the spirit of Hegel's
discussion of Dutch art, points to the broadly human
side of Millet's Gleaners as a test. It is easy to
understand the danger of straining this principle,
and to sympathize with the artist when he demands
a purely technical discussion of points. Why not
refer to de Hooch's excellent treatment of interiors
and of sunlight, Goya's color, Rops's handling
of line, Flaubert's relentless analysis of character,
Maupassant's clear-cut descriptive power, and Ver-
laine's simple and haunting verse? Why bring in
a general and indefinite standard of excellence?
And yet when artist and art critic are pushed they
may be made to admit that the interpretative
handling of his material is one of the tests legitimately
applied to the artist. After all, technique is only a
means by which the artist conveys what he feels
to be the concrete significance, or the expressive
capacities of his subject. One might wish there had
been more of the technical discussion of points in
Hegel, but that is no reason for rejecting in bulk
what turns out to have a very interesting bearing
on two troublesome things: imitation and ideal-
ization.

No one could insist more strongly than Hegel
did on imitation in the sense of observing closely and

<

122 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

impartially and giving results. Thought to him
is not something arbitrary; it is fitting oneself sym-
pathetically to the rational structure and movement
of reality, a process by which thought and its object
both become enriched. Art sets in at one stage of
this enriching process, and is fitting oneself sym-
pathetically to whatever of Geist, or Spirit, presents
itself in sensuous form. In this sense art is an ob-
jective imitation of what it chooses to portray or
fashion. But the imitation is selective. If life is
interpreted as a self-expressing movement, a self-
realizing process of spirit, then concrete significance
must ultimately mean catching the spiritual import
of any group of facts at its richest, and catching
also something of the outlook and onrush toward the
next phase of the process. Spirit is not completely
and adequately expressed in nature; art steps in and
clears it of such imperfections, seizes on the essen-
tial, and thus liberates the soul of appearances.
This is what idealization means to Hegel. To
idealize is not to falsify. The ideal tree is not a
vague something that is neither oak nor elm nor
birch nor maple. To get the bare essentials of tree-
hood, — whose nature only a Platonist would attempt
to define, — is unprofitable from the point of view
of art. With such a reduction to a general type
Hegel has no sympathy, for the drive of his thought
is aimed at concrete and not abstract, significance.
Compare an oak with a birch and you will discover,

HEGEL 123

in addition to peculiarities of size, of leaf and bark
formation, certain expressive lines which seem to
give the character and the very life of the oak or
the birch. And to say of a particular oak, " That
oak has character," does not simply mean that there
is something decisive and striking about it; what it
really means is that this oak is individual and at
the same time expressive of all that is characteristic
of oak formation. Among other things this tree
gives very sharply the vigor and ruggedness of
oaks. Inessential things must be cleared away if
this idea is to be expressed forcibly in your painting
of the oak. The problem here runs back into that
of the fusion of individual and universal. How can
we bring out the essential class characteristics of an
oak and yet make our oak absolutely individual?
To which the only answer is : "It may be impossible,
but it is done." Rodin, for instance, does it. He
imitates in the Hegelian sense; he is very accurate
and sympathetic in his study of his material, in-
dividualizes his figures utterly, but universalizes
them as well by having some symbolic idea spring
naturally from the plastic surface-play of their
bodies. An artist may paint with a hungry eye to
a particular cloud, but his art is the gainer if
he can somehow give [something of the elasticity
and fleetingness of clouds.

Idealization then for Hegel is imitation rightly
stressed and selective for the purpose of bringing

124 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

out the inner life and the concrete significance
of an object. His own illustration is illuminating.
A portrait painter must not be a slavish imitator of
nature; he must omit much that he sees — slight dis-
color a tions and blemishes of the skin. His portrait
contains more than is to be found in the face of the
sitter at any given time, his aim being to liberate
the spiritual import of the face, which is never
given completely at any single moment in life, hence
the deadness of so many photographs. He brushes
aside the surface facts that cloud it; he goes straight
to the heart of the essential.*

Rodin, who champions a theory of the significant
not unlike that of Hegel, argues similarly on this

* " Even the portrait painter, who has least to do with the ideal
in art, must flatter his subject by omitting all externalities in figure
and expression, in form, color, and features; he omits the merely
natural of scant existence: the little hairs, pores, scars, blotches on
"the skin. He must interpret his subject in his universal character
and in his permanent spiritual cast. There is all the difference in
the world between copying a face as it is on the surface, getting its
quiet external form, and representing the features in their truth
and in their expression of the man's very soul. It is essential to the
Ideal that the external form correspond to the soul. So-called
living pictures, quite recently come in vogue, imitate very nicely
and pleasantly noted works of art. They seem to catch the decora-
tive effect, the draping, etc., but they often jar because common-
place faces spoil the spiritual expression of the figures imitated.
Raphael's madonnas, on the other hand, give us forms of the counte-
nance, of cheeks, eyes, nose, and mouth which in and of themselves
express perfectly a mother's love in its blessedness, joyousness,
devoutness, and humility."

HEGEL 123

point. He refers to Houdon's busts, especially to his
inimitable bust of Voltaire, and shows how Houdon
has seized upon the very essence of his man, and how
in busts like those of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Ben-
jamin Franklin, race, class, and individuality stand
out. The art is so grippingly effective simply
because Houdon has idealized rightly, has liberated
the soul of appearances. It is surprising to find so
close an agreement between the casual thought of
a great creative artist like Rodin and the carefully
and intricately planned theories of Hegel.

Organic unity, individuality, and concrete signifi-
cance then go to make up the beautiful in art. But
the idea of development is too securely built into
Hegel's philosophy to allow him to stop here, for art
to him is a self-expressive movement growing ever
richer in meaning, ever more subtle and self -masterful,
and ever more resourceful in technique. That there
is a difference in significance in different works of
art might at once be admitted. One need only
compare any work of Greek sculpture with Michael
Angelo's Captive Slave, or the Hippolytus of Euripides
with Racine's Phedre. Such differences Hegel inter-
prets not psychologically as many would have done,
but culturally. The art of any period gives the spirit
and the culture of that period; consider it cut loose
from these, and it becomes unintelligible. Greek
tragedy cannot be understood apart from certain

v,

126 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

religious beliefs and forms of worship; Oriental art
has its roots in Oriental religion; only the man who
understands the mediaeval mind can catch the spirit
of mediaeval art. This seems an attractive way of
looking at art, and one that lends itself to interesting
developments, such as the historical method of Taine.
But it has its weaknesses: forced readings and an
intolerance of revivals such as the mediaevalism of
the German Romanticists, the art of the Pre-Raphael-
ites, the mermaids and centaurs of a Boecklin or a
Stuck, and the Assyrian and Egyptian element in
recent German sculpture. Hegel avoids some of the
dangers by using the theory of cultural development
in rather a large and general way. He exploits it
dramatically by fastening on three phases or stages
of such development: the symbolic, the classical, and
the romantic.

The symbolic period, or phase of art, sounds very
formidable in Hegelian language:

" Indefinite, the Idea still lacks the individuality
of true beauty; abstract and onesided, it causes the
form to be inadequate and arbitrary. This first
pha,se of art is, therefore, merely a groping for a true
pictorial representation; the Idea has not yet found
its true form and is struggling to find it. This may
be called the symbolic art form. In it the Idea has
its form in the natural, sensuous material; from
this material its fashioning springs, and to it it is
bound. Natural objects are either left as they are,
the Idea being put into them as their meaning and

HEGEL 127

their natural interpretation. ... or consciousness
may be struck by the lack of correspondence between
natural object and Idea. When the Idea, incapable
of expressing itself in any other reality, pours itself
forth into these forms, seeks itself in them restlessly
and recklessly, and still finds them inadequate, it
magnifies such natural forms and appearances to the
very top of the excessive and the vague; it reels
around in them, brews and seethes in them, forces
and distorts them, and seeks to lift the natural to
the ideal by distraction, by immensity and a lavish
splendor of forms. At this stage the Idea is still
vague and formless, the natural objects, clear-
formed and defined."

Again :

" First the symbolic: Here the Idea is still seeking
its true artistic expression because it is still abstract
and indefinite, and lacks an appropriate external
manifestation. It finds itself over against the
external facts of nature and human existence. In
this materiality the Idea suspects its own abstractions.
Or it forces a concrete existence on its own vague
generalities. As a result it spoils and falsifies the
forms it seizes upon arbitrarily; and there is instead of
a full accord of meaning with form the mere suggestion
of an external correspondence. Both meaning and
form reveal in this not completed and not to be
completed fusion their mutual externality and in-
appropriateness."

All this amounts to saying that art at a certain
stage lacks both a well-defined, richly organized mean-
ing and an effective technique. The artistic con-

<

128 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

sciousness is vague, not sure of its purpose, poor in
resources, blind; in its search for self-expression it
hits upon unpromising material and an unhappy
technique. The artist has not yet seized natural
expressiveness to the full; he takes simple forms,
and, unable to observe sharply and exhaustively
their nature, hangs on them like a tag some arbitrary
symbol. Or his imagination, clumsy and formless,
goes at its^ material with a rush, sets to work to
fashion it knows not what, batters and twists its
shapes with a confused and reckless extravagance.
Such an arbitrary symbolism and such a headlong,
ill controlled imagination, Hegel finds in Oriental
mythology and Oriental art. The pyramids, obe-
lisks, and early forms of architecture reflect an art
spirit still bound to an unresponsive material and
still poor in meaning. Chinese idols, much of
Hindoo poetry, the pagoda, of crude splendor and
extravagant jointings and carvings, reflect the fan-
tastic, ecstatic, riotous spirit of symbolic art.

The second phase of art is the classical. In it
Spirit has lost its early confused vagueness, shaken
itself free of its earlier extravagance; and with a
new poise and a new control over a responsive material
sets to work to express the spirituality of the purely
human. The artistic idea is limited in range, but is
clear as crystal; and the beauty achieved is perfect
within the narrow limits set. Hegel contrasts the
crude animal worship, the fantastic rites, the formless

HEGEL 129

theogonies of primitive Greek religion with the clean-
cut images of the gods and goddesses of Olympus.
These Olympians and their lofty, serene spirit of
humanity Greek sculpture has made immortal, giving
in a perfect and infinitely individualized form their
free and individual life. Greek sculptures of the best
type are never expressionless; but so closely is the ex-
pression worked into the marble, so completely fused
with the form, that it often escapes the casual glance;
so complete is the spiritual mastery over the material
that the marble seems to throb with life, and the face
to light up with a serene joyousness that knows neither
passion nor sorrow.

The third period, or phase of art, is the romantic. V
The classical ideal, perfect as it is, must give way be-
fore the push and drive of the Spirit. As life becomes
more complex, more concrete, more significant, the
art consciousness becomes fraught with aspirations,
inner tensions, and new meanings, and can no longer
find itself or exhaust itself in the natural. In its
struggle for a larger, more intense and more spiritual
self-expression and self-embodiment it shatters the
form which for a time satisfied it so completely.
Form is rent asunder; it could no longer harbor the
eager and self-tormented spirit that entered it. A
note of tragedy and struggle breaks in on the self-
complacency of the Greek world. Sculpture is re-
placed by music and poetry, the typically romantic
arts, and they in turn reflect the complex inwardness,

{

130 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

the intense conflicts, and the spiritual reach of modern
life. There is a blend of melancholy and hopeful
vigor in this thought, for a wealth of meaning makes
up for whatever sacrifice of formal beauty there is.

These three phases, symbolic, classical, romantic,
are then traced in the development of each of the
several arts. Thus architecture is symbolic in
pyramid and pagoda, classical in the Greek temple,
and romantic in the Gothic cathedral. Or apply-
ing Hegel's two principles of all development, an
inner wealth and an effective expression in responsive
material, the arts might be ranked as follows: archi-
tecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry. Run-
ning along this line, the material becomes more
responsive: marble and bronze give way to pigment,
and that in turn yields to the expressive medium of
language. Parallel with this is an inner development
in terms of wealth, concreteness, ideality. Archi-
tecture expressed a craving for regularity and sym-
metry, for an artistic fashioning of the outer world
in some of its more immediate and simpler forms.
Sculpture gives the freedom, the individuality, and
the surface spirituality of the human body. Painting
reveals the soul through the eye and the features,
and by complex grouping. Music gives, not separate
objects, but the flow and current of the innermost
self in its ideality. Its realm is the feelings and
" all shades of joy, merriment, fun, caprice, of

HEGEL 131

ecstatic and joyous outbursts of soul; all grada-
tions of fear, anxiety, sorrow, lamentation, grief,
pain, yearning, etc., and lastly awe, adoration, love
etc. — these make up the domain of musical expres-
sion. " It is this that accounts for the power of
music: it addresses itself directly to feeling. Hegel,
of course, admits a mathematical, structural side
to music; but this tone structure of intervals, of
contrasts and transitions in movement, this web
and woof of rhythm, is to him significant only in so
far as it reflects the movements and transitions
of feeling. It is by reason of this elemental inward-
ness that music is the romantic art par excellence,
and one of the freest of the arts. It shares with
poetry the distinction of being the spokesman of
the modern spirit. Of these two arts of the inner
realm Hegel was by gift and training much more
fitted to appreciate and discuss poetry than music;
and this has at least something to do with his
judgment that poetry is the completest of the
arts, and with the sketchiness of his theory of
music.

Of poetry the highest form is tragedy. Nowhere /
in his aesthetics is Hegel's thought richer and more
resourceful than in his theory of dramatic poetry.
In the epic there is the broad and naive portrayal
of some early social activity— war, hunting, sea-
faring, common work— and certain largely sketched

<

132 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

simple characters who are the life that surrounds
them. In the lyric there is the cry of the subjective
— a mood, a feeling or an emotion. The drama
gives the fusion of the objective and the subjective:
it shows characters that are conscious of their pur-
poses and aims; it shows their wills struggling with
other wills and expressing themselves in a world of
action full of opposition and reversals of fortune.
Conflict is the heart of the drama; and conflict of
an especially profound type, the heart of tragedy.
None of the ordinary interpretations of the tragic
satisfy Hegel. It is not a disastrous struggle with
Fate, nor is it the brute cosmic sport hinted at by
Gloster:

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.

It is a necessary and not at all depressing complica-
tion in the adventurous life of the Spirit: a life which
works itself out dramatically and surely in us and in
all nature other than us. Given reality as a self-
expressive and self-expansive principle, growing
ever more definite, masterful, self -masterful, and rich:
and tragedy follows as a matter of course. Spirit,
or Geist expresses itself objectively in institutions
such as the family and the state and in the various
spheres of man's social life; subjectively in character.
Here lies the promise of all manner of tragic colli-
sions. As life becomes more complex it seems arrayed

HEGEL 133

against itself, for its various activities and interests
tend to clash. Each of these, right in its own sphere,
invades that of the others, and asks the whole alle-
giance of the individual; and him this two-edged
claim destroys. Loyalty to the state calls Anti-
gone, but so does family piety; between the two
her life is shattered. As character becomes more
complex and more self-assertive another set of
collisions appears. For Spirit is embodied in in-
dividuals in a very partial and onesided way; and
because of this large admixture of unreason life
seems in danger of becoming a playground of caprice- v
Macbeth's ambition threatens to overwhelm the \
social and moral order; unreason is at work in Lear's '
anger, Othello's chaotic passion, and Hamlet's
indecision. Hegel is clear-sighted enough to see
that the conflict need not always be a social one,
although the man who rebels against society and its
practices and ideals is a favorite tragic figure.
There may be a revolt against reason in oneself.
But in either case the guilt and the danger are felt
to lie in a onesidedness which is like a blow struck
at the universal. The wrecking of the Spirit seems
imminent as the tragic hero, magnificent in his
mixture of noble and base, good and bad, hastens
along his impetuous career. The collision stands
revealed: naked, sinister, harrowing. The uni-
versal hits back and asserts itself at the cost even
of the utter destruction of the individual. The

;

/

134 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

hero is crushed, but in his defeat he feels something
of the majesty and spirituality of the force that
crushes him; his life passes by him like the muffled
sounds of a riot. There lies the purification of an
(Edipus or an Othello. But what of him who
sees the play? Is he purified too? Hegel is at
once too wary and too profound to saddle tragedy
with any moral lessons. He refuses to take the
Aristotelian theory of purification through pity
and fear in either a moralistic or purely medicinal
sense. To him the pity which tragedy arouses
in the spectator is not a sentimental sorrowing for
the individual as such; it is a sympathetic response
to the nobly human, a chastened and saddening
feeling that not all that is precious has been saved;
fear is not for. one's skin or for that matter fear for
any one's skin; it is " awe, the invigorating revela-
tion of spiritual power and of its eternal and in-
violable majesty and rationality."

There is something attractive about the large way
in which Hegel interprets the tragic. While this
somewhat bourgeois, elderly German confesses that
he would rather see a Schauspiel, a serious play with
j a happy ending, than sup his fill of blood and
I horrors, his thought goes far beyond his likes and
dislikes. Both the Artist and the Thinker in him
j are greater than the man. He understands quite
i well that the spiritual significance of life differs in
different ages; he discriminates finely between the

HEGEL 135

classical drama of the Greeks and Shakespeare.
Much of modern tragedy would lend itself to his
theories. That Ghosts is not sordid and depressing
it owes to its outlook on the problem of heredity
and to its conception of life as a self-cleansing proc-
ess, which, at bottom sound, discards the tainted
individual or the tainted generation slowly and
pitilessly. In Tolstoy's Power of Darkness, Mase-
field's Tragedy of Nan, Hauptmann's Sunken Bell,
and Maeterlinck's Mary of Magdala there is a con-
structive cosmic faith, although in each of them a
different one. But there is none in Maeterlinck's
Death of Tintagiles or in Strindberg's The Father,
and yet they are tragic in the truest sense. Might
there not be tragedy in an irrational world? Hegel,
in spite of the largeness of his view, seems to have
excluded one of the most interesting uses of the
tragic.

Every one of Hegel's aesthetic theories is backed
by his system. But what is back of the system?
A Thinker? Yes, but also an Artist. The two can-
not be separated. The artistic in Hegel's philosophy
does not lie in the details or the style, although there
is occasionally plenty of warmth and color in the
latter; rather does it lie in the conception of his
system. He is an artist largely by force of his
imagination, and this in turn shows itself as a
synthetic sense of structure, as a sense of the dra-

136 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

matte possibilities of logic, and as a sense of divine
adventure.

Hegel's sense of structure is quite as fine as Rodin's.
In spite of its bold symbolism Rodin's sculpture
emphasizes structure; it fits itself closely to the
anatomical expressiveness of bodies, partly from
instinct and partly from study. Thought is to Hegel
a sympathetic fitting oneself to the structure of things,
and as such it is to be thorough and impartial.
Hegel's theory of the detailed and subtle anatomy of
the state and his theory of art show this interpreta-
tion of thought. I may be forgiven the qualifying
term synthetic if I plead the necessity of marking off
C the artist's sense of structure from the scientist's.
Rodin's and Hegel's is synthetic. Not only does
Rodin grasp the structural relations of his figures
and groups and thus give the impression of unity,
but he has some symbolic idea spring naturally from
his subject, giving it in this way a world-meaning
in terms of struggle, force, passion or any one of many
like things. Hegel puts a constant emphasis on the
idea of organic unity; one sees his imagination on
the track of a unity, a life common to the parts,
whose sundered nature it has grasped. Not only
that, but each one of these lesser unities is given a
world-meaning — though quite unlike Rodin's — ; by
as elaborate a system of intellectual cranes and
pulleys as man ever devised it is swung into place in
the Hegelian edifice of relations and meanings.

HEGEL 137

None but an artist with an imagination of high
rank could discover any dramatic possibilities in
logic. Instead of an inventory of forms of thought,
Hegel gives a drama of complications, transitions,
changes to the opposite. One feels thought defining
itself, opposing itself, fulfilling itself. The terms are
abstract, the jargon disconcerting, but back of these
is a true sense of the restless nature of thought and
its tensional, everchanging character. Call him a
juggler and an acrobatic thinker if you like, but don't
overlook the art that seizes upon the dramatic in
thought and exploits it as only a genius could have
exploited it.

What of HegePs sense of divine adventure? That
beyond all else marks the Artist in Hegel. A sense /
of the divine there is in many artists; and it appears
in many forms. It may be the sense of a crushing
fate, as in the early puppet plays of Maeterlinck,
or his later confident way of combining mysticism
with a scientific faith in an exploration, step by step,
of the circle of mystery which envelops like a band of
darkness our system of experience as well as our
most casual experiences; it may be the eyes of the
Christ-child of the Sistine Madonna or the music of
Parsifal; it may be a bit of color in a picture or a
curtain withdrawn in a lyric and a glimpse of an
infinite. Many poets, sculptors, and painters have a
sense of the divine; few have what Hegel had, a
sense of divine adventure. Browning had it; so

138 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

had Walt Whitman. Hegel gives a world-drama,
in which the divine is at once the sufferer, the actor,
and the scene. You are asked to catch the venture-
someness of a World Spirit who is the grime and dust
of battle as well as the victory, who casts himself off
in order to regain himself after a struggle. There
is not in Hegel the boyish delight in thought-adven-
ture that there is in James; he lacks the extravagance
of the medievalism of the Romanticists; he is with-
out the picturesqueness of a Nietzsche; his thought
is orderly in all its transformations. Beneath his
language, which is like stiffened draperies, his thought
moves with astonishing enterprise and nimbleness.
One need only contrast him with Maeterlinck to
catch this dramatic quality. There are in Maeter-
linck's essays two passages in which he very strik-
ingly visualizes the mysterious and our exploring it.
In one of these he suggests a group of buildings such
as you might find at a fair or in an amusement park.
Seen from a distance at night they are meant to be
nothing but thin lines of light against the darkness.
Imagine these electric lights to be switched on in
sets, and imagine delay somewhere: there will be
gaps; the outlines will be incomplete until the miss-
ing threads of light appear. In our world-outline
there are just such gaps; they are the mysteries of
life; some day, however, with the advance if science
light will leap from point to point and the world
will be revealed in its complete, luminous reasonable-

HEGEL 139

ness. In the other passage Maeterlinck uses the
image of a man who leaves his house to explore what
is outside and who finds, not a wilderness, but gardens
and fruitful plains in which he may wander, touching
stealthily and lovingly a flower, a blade of grass or
an ear of corn. Both similes are undramatic. The
world-meaning is there, complete: you are to dis-
cover it; you are there to discover it. There is no
hint of the bitterness of the struggle, no suggestion
that you are not yet you or that the world-meaning
itself is in the making. But there is all this in Hegel.
The world to him is a divine adventure, and he has
imagined with the insight of a dramatic poet the
complications, the surprises, the intensity, and the
variety of this adventure.

VI

TOLSTOY

Why, where but in the sense and soul of
me, Art's judge? — Browning.

In 1880 Turgenief on a visit to Yasnaya Poly ana
found Tolstoy much changed: feverishly at work
making himself over, pondering God and the uni-
verse. With this plunge into self -analysis and mysti-
cism he had little sympathy; he referred to it with
indulgent cynicism in a letter to a friend: " Every
one kills his fleas in his own way." He feared a loss
to Russian literature; few appreciated as he did
Tolstoy's art, fine in its characterization, healthy in its
animalism, and of an epic breadth. Was this " great
writer of our Russian land " to turn ascetic and
moralist? Three years later Turgenief sent from
what proved to be his death-bed an appeal to Tolstoy
not to forsake literature. v^

The appeal went unheeded. Tolstoy uncere-
moniously bowed himself off the stage of art and
definitely became a critic, of fife and a social reformer.
Never afterward did his work escape the cramping
coils of moral purpose. He wrote simple stories for

140

TOLSTOY 141

the peasants, philosophical essays, pamphlets and
manifestoes on questions of the day: all of them
very sincere; some of them very true; none of them
from an artistic point of view worthy of his earlier
work. Even when he turns to the novel, as he did
in Resurrection, good material is washed bare of
artistic possibilities by too strong a moral corrosive.
There are many who deplore this change — this
bending to the moral yoke — and look with a great
deal of distrust on the great crisis in Tolstoy's life.
Conversion, they hold, may possibly be good for the
man, but assuredly is fatal to the artist. A distorted
view of life, they say, has reacted unfavorably
on Tolstoy's art and view of art. It is easy to see
some grounds for such criticism; if a theory is no
stronger than its weakest dictum or application,
little can be said in favor of Tolstoy's political,
moral, and aesthetic theories; and least of all can be
said in favor of his views on art. What can be
held of a man who regards King Lear as a mere
clutter of improbabilities and denies Shakespeare
grasp, sense of measure, and true characterization;
of one who rejects Dante and Michael Angelo non-
chalantly, and shows as little understanding of the
trenchant intellectualism of Ibsen as he does of the
elusive art of Maeterlinck or Baudelaire and the
rich art of Boecklin, Beethoven, and Wagner?
These erratic views are expressed in two essays:
What is Art? published in 1898, and Shakespeare,

142 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

in 1906. They cannot be set to the score of old age,
for nothing could be more virile than Tolstoy at
eighty; besides, letters, diaries, reminiscences prove
that many of them extend back to ripe manhood.
For years Tolstoy tried to force Shakespeare on
himself, always without success. " I invariably
underwent the same feelings: repulsion, weariness,
and bewilderment." It would be quite as unfair
to set aside because of them Tolstoy's whole theory
of art, and to ask: Why consider a blind man's
theory of color? To deny that a great artist like
Tolstoy has some understanding at least of the
essentials of beauty, is too much like going at things
with a scoop. Limited in range his feeling for
art certainly is, for he could not enjoy verse and its
music, and so misjudged the Symbolists utterly.
When he tests King Lear by means of retelling the
plot in the baldest possible prose, he overlooks the
meaning of poetic pitch of character and incident.
Highly complex forms of art he could not appre-
ciate, but within this range and its racial, personal
and cultural limits his appreciation of art is genuine
and in the main convincing and sound; and what
is true of his art holds also of his judgment of art:
it is truest when nearest the soil. That is why he
has such a fine feeling for Homer and for the rich,
earthy art of folk-song and folk-epic. Nor is it
safe to regard the crisis for which My Confession
stands as a sudden wrenching free which ever after

TOLSTOY 143

left a moral twist. Some influence must be ad-
mitted; some warping of judgment and some es-
trangement from the artistic as such. But, after
all, Tolstoy's art, at its earliest and even at its
best, has a moral strain to it. The problem of the
reshaping of character is not peculiar to Resurrec-
tion; it appears in Anna Karenina and still earlier
in terse and virile form in The Cossacks; the ques-
tion of the meaning of life, which Tolstoy came
to use as the test of art, haunts Besuchoff in War
and Peace and Levin in Anna Karenina, and fig-
ures prominently as far back as 1852 in the un-
finished novel Youth. In view of this it is absurd
to say that Tolstoy's attitude toward art at some
definite time came within the deep shadow of a
moral eclipse.

The truth of the matter seems to be this: Back
of Tolstoy's art criticisms is a definite and thought-
ful theory of art and its relation to life, a theory
worked out gradually and unevenly. Erratic as it
is, it is much stronger than its weakest link. True
or false, it is at least vital; partly because it is him-
self— his personality caught in one of its sincerest
expressive movements — and reflects the directness,
massiveness, and liveness of his interests; partly
because it comes from a creative genius; partly
because it is a cultural theory of art: a peculiarly
earnest attempt to connect art with life and to see the
values of art in relation to whatever else of value a

144 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

fixed will and a hungry imagination can snatch
from life. < It is therefore entitled to a hearing.

Tolstoy's essay on Guy de Maupassant, written
in 1894, gives interesting matter. We are told that
in 1 88 1 Turgenief brought him the Maison Tellier
collection of stories. It was an ill-chosen moment.
" That particular period, the year 1881, was for me
the fiercest time of the inner reconstruction of my
whole understanding of fife, and in this recon-
struction those employments called the Fine Arts,
to which I had formerly given all my power, had not
only lost all their former importance in my eyes,
but had become altogether obnoxious to me owing
to the unnatural position they had hitherto occupied
in my life, and which they generally occupy in the
estimation of people of the wealthy classes." Mau-
passant did not escape this general disfavor. His
workmanship was admired, but much of his mate-
rial found repellent, and his attitude towards life,
ill-defined. Later when he came back to Maupassant
and read Une Vie his estimate changed. Here
he saw what he had thought lacking and what he
was fast coming to regard as the essential of good
art. The essay reflects this juster estimate, and
in it are to be found Tolstoy's four tests of good
art.

The first of these four art tests is genius, that is,
" the faculty of intense, strenuous attention, applied
according to the author's tastes to this or that

TOLSTOY 145

subject; and by means of which the possessor of
this capacity sees the things to which he applies
his attention in some new aspect overlooked by
others." There must, in short, be a close and
fresh view of things. Again, there must be beauty
of expression. The third quality demanded is sin-
cerity: an earnestness burnt into its material. The
fourth is " a correct, that is, moral relation of the
author to his subject." All these he finds in most of
Maupassant's work.

These four tests, with the emphasis thrown sharply
on the fourth, give the key to Tolstoy's theory of
art, but only if they are understood in their psy-
chological sources and in the drift of their logic. With
the first three this is a simple matter, for it is not
difficult to understand and to justify genius, sincerity,
and clearness and beauty of expression as tests of
good art. Nor is the problem of source difficult:
they reflect much in Tolstoy's character and are
in turn reflected in his art. Nothing could be more
earnest, surer in touch and bolder in design than
some of his character studies; in his descriptions
no detail is too minute for a sharp, searching, vitaliz-
ing imagination. The snowstorm in Master and
Servant is wonderfully true; so are the descriptions
of dumb animals, the battle canvases and gambling
scenes in War and Peace. Nothing escapes him:
he is equally at home in the hot life of the steppes
and in the jaded life of the salon. He catches with

146 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

photographic accuracy the homely doings of peasant
life and the unobtrusive panorama of nature — soil,
wind, and weather. As for the source from which
these three demands spring, it is to be found in the
quality of directness which marks Tolstoy the
man above all else. The desire to live earnestly and
to see clearly was with him almost an obsession;
so downright and energetic is he in his search that
he often fails to judge cautiously and sanely; reveal-
ing a most perplexing blend of idealist and straight,
none too subtle, common-sense thinker; and yet
this directness in its good variants marks what is
best in his art, in shaping his studies of peasant
character, for instance.

The fourth art test is, however, the one most heavily
staked. An author is to have " a correct, that is,
moral relation " to his subject. Two questions
immediately shake themselves free: What is meant
by a right, or moral relation? What is considered
a right, or moral relation?

As to the first question, one set of clues is given
by the essay itself. Maupassant's short stories are
praised because they bring out so sharply the awful
disillusionment of animal love. This might suggest
moralizing and a " wages of sin " idea. Nothing is
more congenial to the Anglo-Saxon and more distaste-
ful to the Frenchman. It would be idle to deny that
Tolstoy often moralizes in just this way, in his later
short stories especially. It is the peasant's greed or

TOLSTOY . 147

his shiftlessness and love of vodka that is the dis-
tressingly obvious moral lesson of such tales as How
much Land does a Man Require? and How the Little
Devil Atoned for the Crust of Bread. But here Tolstoy
has something else in mind. " An artist is only an
artist because he sees things not as he wishes to see
them, but as they are." That is the voice of the
great realist who by the mere relentless handling of
cause and effect gives the shattering of Anna Kare-
nina's life impressively and objectively with no
attempt at moralizing. What Tolstoy means is
that art must be rooted in a Weltanschauung, a life
attitude, and that this, and not character or plot, is
the true principle of unity in a novel or a play. Life
is thought to have an inherent moral quality; this
the true artist is to give intensely and objectively.
If he takes life piecemeal his art becomes false and
insignificant. Just as there is one position from
which an object of sense yields itself most fully, so
there is one point of view from which life is held to
disclose its meaning. So we are to ask the artist:
" From what standpoint will you illumine life for
me? " Discussing a young Russian writer of great
promise, Tolstoy said that while he admired the
artistic quality of his work he failed to find in it a
definite philosophy of life.

True art then must give a clear, undistorted reflec-
tion of life and its meaning. An artist must first of
all understand life in all its elemental force and in all

148 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

its puzzling reaches. All this might be mere phrase
or pose; and there are many with whom philosophy
is either or both. Not so with Tolstoy, for with him
the problem of life is an urgent, pressing one; it
is the very hunger of his existence. He comes back
to it again and again; his letters and diaries are
full of self-analysis, confessions, self-damnings.
Curiously intent on living earnestly and seeing
clearly, he jots down his master faults, maps out
studies and methods of discipline, launches and
questions all manner of thoughts; and all this with
little or no trace of the morbid, and in the midst
of much riotous living. But life for many years
proved too sweet in the living for more than mere
foreshadowings of that great spiritual crisis of which
My Confession gives so intense and sincere an ac-
count. No one who fails to see the significance of
that crisis can understand the high seriousness of
his view of art. Tolstoy was in his forties, in good
health, happily married, a successful writer, successful
in the experiments in peasant schooling he had tried
on his estates, when the craving for a rational view
of life caught him full sweep and drove him to the
very edge of despair.

" My life had come to a sudden stop. I was able
to breathe, to eat, to drink, to sleep. I could not,
indeed, help doing so; but there was no real life in
me. I had not a single wish to strive for the fulfil-
ment of what I could feel to be reasonable. If

TOLSTOY 149

I wished for anything, I knew beforehand that, were
I to satisfy the wish, nothing would come of it; I
should still be dissatisfied."

" I knew not what I wanted, I was afraid of life;
I shrank from it, and yet there was something I
hoped for from it.

" Such was the condition I had come to, at a time
when all the conditions of my life were preeminently
happy ones, and when I had not reached my fiftieth
year . . . Moreover my mind was neither deranged
nor weakened; on the contrary, I enjoyed a mental
and physical strength which I have seldom found in
men of my class and pursuits: I could keep up with a
peasant in mowing, and could continue mental labor
for ten hours at a stretch without any evil con-
sequences. "

All this doubt and this anguish, as of a man starv-
ing, crystallize about the question: Is Life " an evil
and absurdity "? which is the problem of My Con-
fession. Curiously enough it at first takes on a self-
ish cast. " What am I with all my desires? " Why
set mind to purpose or hand to work when the out-
come must be decay and death? Tolstoy, to whom
by temperament the aspect of death was horrible,
had come to feel that the thought of this fleetingness
and decay would embitter every joy and cripple every
aim. " I, like Sakya Muni, could not drive to the
pleasure ground when I knew of the existence of old
age, suffering and death." It is the world old cry
of anguish in the presence of change and of death,

150 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

the great denier. But another question appears in
a passage like the following: " Why do I live? — The
question was, why should I live, i.e., what of real
and imperishable will come of my shadowy and perish-
able life — what meaning has my finite existence in the
infinite universe? " Nothing could be sharper than
the contrast between this question and the one
originally asked: that was a problem of satisfaction;
this is one of service. In the one I ask life to justify
itself to me; in the other I ask of myself a justifica-
tion at the bar of life; in the first I assume that life
ought to be sweet to the taste and am routed in the
midst of my pleasures by the death's head of change
and decay at the banquet; in the second I challenge
this assumption and think of life, not as an invitation
to enjoy, but as a demand to work. The first prob-
lem does not hold Tolstoy, he pushes on to the second.
Assume that satisfaction of desires defines the mean-
ing of fife, and you are caught in the swirl of unreason,
but the unreason isln you, not in lif e. You have put
things wrongly. Is life devoid of reason because it
rejects an irrational demand? In this way Tolstoy
by shifting the emphasis forces the prospect of a
solution of the problem of life. Life seems too large
and sane to be cast aside on account of the disap-
pointed pleasure-seeker's despair; thousands seem
to find a meaning in it; they seem to live strongly,
clearly, happily; their point of view seems vital;
their faith, sustaining. Why then not turn to this

TOLSTOY 151

simple, strong life of the masses for guidance? This
Tolstoy did resolutely.

" I renounced the life of my class, for I had come
to confess that it was not a real lif e, only the semblance
of one; that its superfluous luxury prevented the
possibility of understanding life, and that in order
to do so I must know, not an exceptional parasitic
life, but the simple life of the working classes, the life
which fashions that of the world, and gives it the
meaning which the working classes accept. The
simple laboring men around me were the Russian
people, and I turned to this people and to the mean-
ing which it gives to life."

The message Tolstoy gets from the masses is that
the only rational life is a life of faith, work, self-
denial, humility, kindliness, and charity. The mean-
ing of life is found in social service and in an ideal of
self-culture built about energetic self-discipline and
sincere religious aspiration.

It is from this point of view that Tolstoy studies and
condemns modern culture, and develops a cultural
theory of art. His criticisms on modern art must
be viewed in the light of his attitude toward modern
culture. Our culture, to his way of thinking, wrongly
assumes enjoyment to be the meaning of life, and
exhausts itself in the pursuit of material comfort,
in a restless craving for luxury and the sources of
pleasure. Pessimism and mal de vie are too often

152 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

only the expression of pleasure-seeking thwarted or
gone wrong. Again, modern culture is exclusive.
It is built on the slavery of the masses, and exacts
heavy sacrifices in time, labor, and suffering of the
many for the benefit of the few. Why, asks Tolstoy,
should they that are nearest to life and an under-
standing of it, they to whom life is not a plaything
or a morsel for the senses, but something concrete,
earnest, vital, of social purpose — why should they be
sacrificed in order to strengthen the pleasure-seeker in
his wrong position? Why should there be this de-
plorable sacrifice of life and character? " But how
wonderfully blind we become as soon as the question
concerns those millions of workers who perish slowly
and often painfully, all around us, at labors the fruits
of which we use for our convenience and pleasure !"

Modern art Tolstoy considers no less wasteful and
exclusive than modern culture. It is selfish, exclusive,
and costly. It exacts the toll of work from the many
and yields pleasure and profit to the few. In its
complex forms, grand opera, for instance, it is accessi-
ble to few, intelligible to fewer still, and costly out of
all proportion to its value. There is much crude fun
and not a little malice in Tolstoy's description of a
grand opera dress rehearsal at St. Petersburg. This
wastefulness of modern art is tragic because the
drudges of art, the printer, the stagehand, the
musician, caught in a deadening routine, get nothing
of the glamour of art, and because there is such a

TOLSTOY 153

favoring of soft-living artists at the expense of really
useful material. The drudge, the artist and the art
patron alike miss the true meaning of life: the first
because he is a drudge, the others because they are
pleasure-seekers. Here lies the root of the evil: art
instead of being a cultural force is becoming an in-
strument of pleasure in the hands of the moneyed and
leisured classes. Small wonder then that it revels in
a complex technique, loses itself in symbolism and
cryptics, and glorifies passions and impulses over
which the common man shakes a puzzled head.
Ingenuity is gained, for what could be more ingenious
than the court pastoral, the sonnet, the ode, the
symphony? But it is gained at the expense of force
and breadth. At its worst this exclusive art, always
within easy reach of the decadent, expresses the
abnormalities of a mind out of focus; at its best it
reflects shallow class ideals and surface vanities.
These class ideals are: sense of honor, or pride,
blatant patriotism, and amorousness. They are
parasitical developments of life and lack the vigor,
freshness, and massive pressure of the elemental. To
Tolstoy with his intense hunger of life such ideals
seemed vapid. He caught at the life of the peasant —
in his work at Yasnaya Polyana, in his talks and
comradeships of the open road, in his pilgrimages to
Op tin monastery; in such a life close to the soil he
thought he detected an unmatched strength and
intensity, spiritual and artistic. In peasant life he

154 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

saw at least the promise of a wisdom that is not mere
cleverness, and an art that is not a mere toying with
sounds, colors, and feelings.

This line of reasoning might suggest an onslaught
on art as such, but that is certainly not Tolstoy's
purpose. He is not to be ranked as an enemy of
art; he is not a scoffer, but a critic; a critic whose
concern for true art gives the sharpest possible edge
to his attack on what he considers bad art. To him
true art is a cultural force of immense importance,
but easily sent astray — made, as in the mass of modern
art, to serve a false ideal of life, and selfish, exclusive,
costly interests.

What then is true art, art not culturally perverted?
" Art is one of two organs of human progress. By
words man interchanges thoughts, by the forms of
art he interchanges feelings, and this with all men,
not only of the present time, but also of the past and
the future ... To evoke in oneself a feeling one
has once experienced, and, having evoked it in one-
self, then, by means of movements, lines, colors,
sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit
that feeling that others may experience the same
feeling — this is the activity of art. Art is a human
activity consisting in this, that one man consciously
by means of certain external signs hands on to others
feelings he has lived through, and that other people
are infected by these feelings and also experience
them." Such passages prove that Tolstoy regards

TOLSTOY 155

art as self-expression, and essentially transference of
feelings. It is here that he gets his test of true art:
the excellence of any work of art depends, first, on
whether or not it conveys feelings effectively, second,
on the worth of the feelings conveyed.

The contagiousness of art in turn depends on three
things: the novelty and originality of the feeling,
the clearness with which it is expressed, and the
sincerity of the author. Good art must be striking,
luminous, and convincing. Thus in the technique of
the drama Tolstoy demands " a true individuality
of language, corresponding to the characters; a
natural, and at the same time touching plot; a cor-
rect scenic rendering of the demonstration and
development of emotion; and the feeling of measure
in all 'that is represented." Of the three essentials of
transference of feelings sincerity is the most impor-
tant. " It is always complied with in peasant art,
and this explains why such art always acts so power-
fully; but it is a condition almost entirely absent from
our upper-class art, which is continually produced
by artists actuated by personal aims of covetousness
and vanity."

Passing to the second test of good art: how are
we to judge of the worth of the feelings conveyed?
At any particular stage of social development there
is a certain amount of religious perception and feeling.
Art draws on this, and good art draws on it most
fully. The religious consciousness of any given time

156 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

is the judge of the worth of the feelings conveyed—
it is this startling assertion that Tolstoy's thought
arrives at. But he interprets religious consciousness
as " an understanding denning the highest good
at which that society aims; it is nothing else than
the revealing of a new creative relation of man to the
universe." This earnest and penetrative wisdom is
strong in the choice spirits of an age, and at work in
the life of the masses. Life is freshened by this
source of new, forceful, and communicable feelings,
and art is the gainer, for there is " nothing so old and
stale as gratification " and " nothing so new as the
feelings which flow into the religious consciousness
of a given time." Hebrew and Greek art are cited
to point the argument. While false art is continually
impoverishing itself, true art draws on the richest
possible soil. Tolstoy in this way connects the tests
of novelty, clearness, and sincerity with that of worth
of content.

Tolstoy is quite aware that religious feeling and
perception are different in different ages, and that in
order to judge of the worth of present-day art it
becomes necessary to get the tone and temper of the
present-day religious consciousness. This, Tolstoy
holds, is summed up in two things: sonship in God
and brotherhood of men. " The religious consciousness
of our times, in its widest and most practical applica-
tion, is the consciousness that our well-being, material
and spiritual, temporal and eternal, is included in

TOLSTOY 157

the brotherly life of all people, in our living union
with each other."

Stripped of all church ceremonial and theology,
Christianity is for Tolstoy nothing but a very simple
but immeasurably strong combination of the ideas:
sonship in God and brotherhood of men. They in
turn are the great fresheners and sustainers of what
is best in modern art. If art is directly religious,
giving what is best in religious perception and giving
it simply and convincingly, it is of the very best; if it
turns against anti-social feelings, it is on a slightly
lower plane; if it expresses certain simple, fundamen-
tal feelings, such as gaiety, tenderness, grief, it is
still, though indirectly, religious art, for it fosters the
sense of human kinship. Tolstoy with an honest
avowal of fallibility classes among good art: Millet's
Angelus, the novels of Dickens, Victor Hugo, Dos-
toevsky, Mozart, Weber, and part of Chopin and
Beethoven — and folk-poetry. His own art he con-
demns with the exception of two stories: God Sees the
Truth and The Caucasian Prisoner.

Such, for good or ill, is Tolstoy's theory of art. In
its results it is beyond a doubt disappointing in a
great many ways. Its heresies and gross lapses of
insight stand out, but in and of themselves they would
not be strong enough to condemn it. The fault lies
deeper: it is Tolstoy's onesided, narrow interpretation
of culture that spoils his theory of art. Any theory
of art as frankly cultural as Tolstoy's is made or

158 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

marred by the conception of culture that carries it; a
flaw in that counts tenfold against it. Here is where
Tolstoy is weakest, for as a social thinker he often
lays himself open to the charge of being crude, rash,
and narrow; he turns to large problems, looks at
them intently, impatiently, but not always largely.
One searches in vain for sound judgment of essentials
and for a finely discriminative strain of thought:
fitful flashes of truth in a Cimmerian darkness, that
is all there is, instead of an even, luminous flooding
of social problems. He demands that life swing back
to simple archaic forms and that art express the
strength, the directness, the simplicity of this genuine
culture — which amounts to casting aside intellectual
achievements and forcing art to move within the con-
fines of peasant thought and peasant feeling. There
lies the damning fact, in this stultification of art, in
the failure to see that art as well as life is constantly
becoming a richer and a more subtle thing, and that
with its ever increasing range of expressiveness it
must find a place for the subjective, the complex, the
elusive, the abnormal. It is all the richer for a
Maeterlinck or a Baudelaire. Over against a fresh,
simple, strong peasant art Tolstoy sets the danger
of pose, affectation, and sickening self -exploitation;
he has no eye for other possibilities. Peasant life
may be simple and strong, but it is often dull or gross,
and popular art often shares this dulness or gross-
ness; Tolstoy himself became the victim of that

TOLSTOY 159

dulness when on reading one of the most touching
scenes of his The Power of Darkness, a play based
incident for incident on an actual criminal case among
peasants, to a group of peasants, he was greeted with
unexpected laughter. Again, artistic finesse need
not mean a mannered or a sickish art.

But if Tolstoy's theory of art is disappointing in
results, it is not disappointing as a problem. All
sorts of questions spread from it like a fan. Does the
Thinker crowd out the Maker? Can the philosoph-
ical impulse develop only at the expense of the artistic?
Or if there is war between the two, is it not rather the
direction taken by either that is responsible? That
in Tolstoy the moral interest seriously endangered his
art and his interest in art there can be no doubt.
The philosophical tinge to his earlier work deepened
to the problem, How ought I to live? What is the
meaning of life? Questions like these ought to be an
artistic asset; they ough to make art richer, more
searching — and they do it in Hardy, in Anatole
France, in Gorky. What of Jude the Obscure and
The Gods are A thirst? No one has seen more sharply
than Gorky the tragedy of a soul lost in the tumult
and social unreason of modern life. His characters,
hungry for life and an understanding of it, but
crippled, entangle themselves in their own thoughts
and purposes or else face life with the dumb agony
of an animal at bay. If in Hardy, Anatole France,
and Gorky, why not in Tolstoy? Is it because he

160 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

puts the problem too reflectively, too self-consciously;
because his philosophy is stark naked? Is it perhaps
because a solved problem is artistically a dead
problem? Or does the flaw lie in the nature of Tol-
stoy's solution? Are there greater possibilities for
art in regarding life as a cruel joke or a senseless
jumble than as a purposive, man-centered system?
Is it because under Tolstoy's hands the problem
shrinks from a cosmic to a moral one, leaving nature
outside? Tolstoy was a keen observer of nature,
but not a philosophical interpreter of her changes,
laws, and moods. Hardy's cruel, blunt analysis and
Anatole France's comments, at once sympathetic
and caustic, run the problem of man into the prob-
lem of nature. Maeterlinck's art owes much to his
interest in nature; the individual's life, steeped in
mixture of the delicate, the smooth, the fantastic,
turns to a richer, more aromatic blend of character
and destiny. But Tolstoy destroys what color it has
by washing it in moral brine.

There is much meat for argument in all these
questions; and there is not a little that is perplexing
in Tolstoy the Artist and the Thinker,

VII
NIETZSCHE

Auf jedent Gleichniss reitest du hier zu
jeder Wahrheit. Hier springen dir alles
Seins Worte und Wort-Schreine auf —
— Thus Spake Zarathustra.

There was a time when Nietzsche was thought
of as the spirit of evil, the Antichrist who scoffed
at the holiest of things, the Immoralist. His age dis-
owned him; and the shadow of a great loneliness
hung over him. During the last year of his sane life
the clouds began to lift: Brandes lectured on him
at the University of Copenhagen; letters from young
and enthusiastic disciples arrived from Vienna.
Then there came a time when every youth whose
mind was in a ferment of social revolt saw in him the
great Apostle of freedom; when students talked
much and wildly of his Superman; and his doctrines,
often strangely distorted, made their appearance
in Italian, Norwegian, and Russian literature. Our
interest is shifting considerably. We are, for one
thing, in possession of new material: the Ecce Homo
and the Letters; and they tell us much of the physical

161

<

<

162 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

disabilities of this Thinker, of his moods, of his spir-
itual struggles, of a heart heavy and chilled by the
hugeness of his task and a spirit glorying in the
contest; they reveal the sensitiveness of the man
and his curious self-esteem. Much of this was to
be had for the asking in his books. But best of all,
they reveal the Artist in this Thinker. By furnish-
ing us with bits of self-analysis, with observations on
his style and on the way in which his imagination
worked, Nietzsche has given us a new clue to his
work. If followed out it will show clearly the
aesthetic groundwork of his philosophy; it will reveal
an imagination at once imperious and playful at work
directing the drive of his thought. Few thinkers can
boast of so rich an artistic endowment; none was so
utterly mastered by it or so intensely interested in
some of its problems.

To get nearer to Nietzsche the artist philosopher
one must after a brief reference to some of his literary
criticisms and opinions pass to his criticism of Wagner
and consider all it implies; turn to his famous con-
trast of the Dionysian and Apollonian artist and
his analysis of the artistic temrjgrament; and one
must then attempt some sort of an interpretation
of his style and imagination, and of their influence
on his thought.

Nietzsche's literary estimates are numerous. Some

NIETZSCHE 163

are trivial and superficial, but others carry straight
to his beliefs and ideals. Here is a cluster of them,
given for what they are worth. Few philosophers find
grace in his eyes: Socrates, Kant, Mill, Comte, and
Spencer are spoken of with contempt; Carlyle is
uncouth, insincere, self-tormented. He has little
patience with Ibsen and calls Victor Hugo " the
lighthouse on the sea of nonsense." Schiller moralizes
and Zola brutalizes; it is easily guessed which to
Nietzsche is the deadlier sin. Sainte Beuve is a
resentful woman of a man, and Taine has been all
but spoiled by Hegel. He appreciates the art of
men like Anatole France, Bourget, and Maupassant,
and he tells us that Moli&re, Montaigne, and Corneille
have a place in his small collection of favorite books.
He prefers Manfred to Faust. He speaks of the
" wild and tangled " genius of Shakespeare, but feels
the dramatic and emotional intensity of Hamlet
and King Lear, and has interpreted the problem of
Hamlet in a striking way.* Heine owes his suprem-
acy as a lyrical poet to the " sweet and passionate

* The Birth of Tragedy: " In this sense the Dionysian man
resembles Hamlet: they have both looked deeply and truly into the
being of things; they have understood, hence the prospect of action
nauseates them. They see that nothing in their actions can change
one whit the essence of things; they feel the folly and the disgrace
of the demand that they should straighten a world out of joint.
Knowledge slays action; if we are to act illusion must veil our eye —
this is the true meaning of Hamlet, not that cheap story of a Jack
o' Dreams who fails to act because he reflects too much on all manner

164 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

music " of his language. Of the ancients, Homer,
^Eschylus, and Pindar stand highest.

Of much greater importance than these scattered
criticisms is Nietzsche's relation to Wagner, both
critical and personal. The tragedy of their friend-
ship is well known. They first met in 1866;
Nietzsche, much the younger of the two, felt himself
stimulated. He welcomed Wagner as the very spirit
of music and the forerunner of a new culture. In
1869 and 1870 they spent many happy Saturdays and
Sundays together at Tribschen, near Lucerne — days
of mutual confidences, great thoughts, sincere friend-
ship; sunny " cloudless " days. It was then that
Wagner's greatness smote Nietzsche like a life-giving
wind; and up sprang those two great and extreme
panegyrics, The Birth of Tragedy and Richard Wagner
in Bayreuth. A few years later this young enthusiast
turned sharply away from Wagner, and took issue
with his philosophy and his art. His own philosophy
was in the making; it found voice in Human All too
Human. He sent Wagner a copy of that essay at
the very time Wagner was sending him Parsifal.
It was, says Nietzsche, like the crossing of two swords.
One thing only could come of it, complete estrange-

of possibilities. No, it is not reflecting that makes action impossible
— it is a true understanding of, and insight into the awful truth, it
is this that paralyzes every impulse to act, with Hamlet as well as
with the Dionysian man."

NIETZSCHE 165

ment and — silence. Nietzsche became more and
more convinced that Wagner's name meant the ruin
of music and a decadent culture; his disapproval
was sharp but incidental until, in the year 1888, it
broke out with unmeasured vehemence in the pam-
phlets The Case of Wagner; Nietzsche contra Wagner,
and The Twilight of the Idols.

There is real tragedy in this breach of a very deep
and sincere friendship; the tragedy of a sacrifice to
an ideal. In Ecce Homo, written just before madness
closed in on him, Nietzsche speaks with gratitude
and regret of the days at Tribschen; yet his attack
is severe and relentless. Back of it is the fanaticism
of the idealist, the spiritual convalescent who looks
with distrust and disgust on any sign of disease.
Nothing could be more cruel than your out-and-out
idealist when he turns upon any of his former idola-
tries and enthusiasms. Nietzsche's devotion to the
ideal was intense; earnest to the point of fanaticism,
acutely sensitive to suffering in himself and in others,
endowed with a strange defensive irritability, he
struck hard when his loyalty to an ideal was in ques-
tion. While he felt the loneliness of his later life
keenly — no man had sadder need of friends than he —
he did not hesitate to break with his best friends
when a community of interests and ideals was no
longer possible. One of the volumes of his letters
contains his correspondence with Rohde, who was
one of his finest and oldest friends. In the eighties

166 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

Nietzsche began to feel an indifference, a silent but
all the more provoking resistance to his ideal; this
impasse irritated and depressed him; he flared up and
brought the friendship to an abrupt and insulting
close. The motives for his break with Paul Ree were
somewhat different. But Nietzsche's fanaticism re-
veals itself most strikingly in an incident whose
disturbing influence colors many of the letters of
1882 and 1883. Some of his friends had recom-
mended to him very highly a young Russian woman,
Lou Salome, as a kindred soul, a possible disciple;
as one who might help him with some of his work.
Hers had been an heroic life of self-sacrifice to truth,
to knowledge. Nietzsche, with a philosopher's lack
of gallantry, describes her to his sister as a girl who
for want of good looks had cultivated her intellect.
The heroics appealed to him; but he soon came to
regard her as a person without " ideals, aims, and
duties". Her freedom of speech and action shocked
this great reviser of values, who proved to be a
bit old-fashioned after all; and this " immoralist "
reads a very impressive moral lesson on true heroism
and what it means in the way of singlemindedness,
devotion to an ideal, and a constant, daily, hourly
response to a sense of duty. He sees his own " holy
self-love " caricatured in this " kitten's selfishness " of
Lou's superficial, affected, insincere mind; and when
he sees all this, his resentment knows no bounds.
A blow had been struck at his ideal — and Lou

NIETZSCHE 167

Salom6 received as harsh a letter as ever idealist
wrote.

There is not this sharp, discordant personal note
in the breach of Nietzsche's friendship with Wagner
Long before he came to write against Wagner, the
issue had become an impersonal one; he felt he was
fighting not an individual, but principles and ten-
dencies. Still there is often a venomous sting to his
words; which happens whenever the aesthetic critic
yields his place to the fanatic devotee of an ideal he
sees endangered.

In the welter of Nietzsche's criticisms of Wagner
there are but a few that are purely aesthetic, and
they all group themselves about the thought that
Wagner lacks style, dramatic and musical. It seems
strange that a man the majority of whose books lack
all unity except the unity of mood should have
insisted so strongly on style as an ordering of parts,
and should have denied to Wagner the power to
fashion work all of a piece. His criticism here is at
its unhappiest; it confuses complexity with anarchy.
He overlooks the great advance of the music drama
over the opera in structural unity. He gives instances
of awkward devices such as the following:

" Assume Wagner to be in need of a female voice.
A whole act without a female voice — impossible!
But all his heroines are for the time being engaged.
What does Wagner do? He emancipates the oldest

:'l

168 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

woman of the world — Mother Earth. ' Up, aged
grandmother, you must sing! ' Mother Earth sings.
Wagner has gained what he wants, so he packs the
old lady off. ' Why did you come, anyway? Off
with you, and have the kindness to continue your
nap.' "

But he fails to see the singleness of artistic purpose
which marks Wagner at his best, and does scant
justice to the theory of the relation of poetry to
music. Events and words alone, Wagner would
have said, cannot possibly give the full, organized
meaning of the dramatic idea; they need the services
of a new dramatic and implicational music with a
restless to and fro, a varying comment, a mutual
enhancing of parts. " Infinite melody " is his phrase
for it, and on that phrase Nietzsche pounces. To
him it suggests the nebulous, the formless, the
Hegelian; it is a pretentious stage trick on the part
of an idealist to disguise his lack of musical style.
Why sacrifice all beauty of form in music for an
infinite cloud realm of meaning, a "Nowhere and
Otherwhere "?• Wagner asks us to swim in the sea
of "infinite melody"; the older music, light and
elegant in its measures, taught us to dance. Nietz-
sche is very fond of this metaphor of the dance.
/Language to him is the pipe of Dionysus, light and
\ playful, sad, passionate by turn; it ought to express
the rhythmic animation, the intensity, and versatility
of the artist. Rhythmic and appropriate expression

NIETZSCHE 169

of feeling is the essence of style. He sees no sunni-
ness, no lightness in Wagner's music; it is harsh and
formless; it lacks deftness. One cannot dance to
it or march to it; " not even the young German
emperor can march to Wagner's Kaisermarsch." It
does violence to one's sense of form, and therefore
means the very dissolution of style. Intensity there
is — Nietzsche never denied the greatness of Tristan
und Isolde in this respect — but it is a shattering
intensity which makes it impossible to breathe freely
and respond rhythmically. In a passage in The Birth
of Tragedy there is an interesting allusion to the
third act of Tristan und Isolde.

" How should it be possible for a man to escape
instant destruction when he has put his ear to the
very heart of the World Will, when he has felt a
raging lust of being — now a thundering stream, and
then a bit of spray — in every vein of the universe.
How should he, a mere fragile shell of human in-
dividuality, endure the numberless cries of joy and
anguish reechoing in ' the wide space of worlds ' ;
how should he endure this shepherd dance of meta-
physics without hurrying to his old, old cosmic
home? "

At that time he recognized a calm, Apollonian
element in Wagner's art, which acted as a counter-
poise to a passionate, yearning music. Later when
Nietzsche had shaken off the influence of Schopen-
hauer and had begun to detect musical formlessness

170 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

in the new dramatic music, he felt in the score of
Tristan und Isolde only oppressive, exhausting, and
crudely elemental passion. Here Nietzsche goes
beyond purely aesthetic criticism, for he sees in this
passionateness and this return to the elemental a
symptom and a sign of danger.

Wagner a Danger! in this heading of Nietzsche's
lies the real animus of his attack. His philosophy
looks over the shoulder of his art criticism and takes
aim. Pied Piper, Klingsor of Klingsors, Orpheus
of all secret misery, he calls Wagner. His ideal of
health is that of a spiritual convalescent — he admits
as much in the Ecce Homo — and one might expect a
morbid fear of disease and distrust of weakness. Bias
of the strongest sort is the inevitable result, but one
accepts it gladly in exchange for a problem of great
interest. This philosopher who looks over the art
critic's shoulder — is he perhaps at soul an artist,
a Maker, with a challenge? The problem is not a

' simple one. Nietzsche speaks deprecatingly of the
Artisten Metaphysik of The Birth of Tragedy. But

* throughout his philosophy from the ethical ideals of a
Superman and a cultural health on to detailed inter-
pretation and construction there is a perfect tangle

/ of intellectual and artistic motifs. The system-builder

\is an architect, with an architect's instincts; and

rhese may show themselves either in the clamping

together of parts or, as in Nietzsche's case, in sin-

glemindedness and distrust together with much

NIETZSCHE 171

structural looseness. Even apart from that, there
is not a single interpretation of a doctrine or an his-
torical event in Nietzsche uncolored by an imagina-
tion of peculiar quality ; back of such a simple demand
as that of sharpness and cleanliness of thinking is his
interpretation of the Apollonian artist. Insight into
the contrast of Apollonian and Dionysian art and into
Nietzsche's artistic imagination may clear the prob-
lem; at present we must content ourselves with
saying that it is the artist philosopher who looks
over the shoulder of the art critic. A Weltanschauung
condemns Wagner; a way of taking and testing the
world quite as dogmatic and zealous as Tolstoy's,
but much nearer the aesthetic in its ideals and motifs.
Wagner a Danger! Why? Because he is the very
spirit of modernism: a weak, restless spirit with a
craving for stimulants. Nietzsche, the lonely seeker
and champion of the Superman, turns away from his
age with a surfeit of disgust. It is poverty stricken
and soul sick; it lacks quality and strength. With
its newspapers, labor unions, schools, and equality
propaganda it is an age for the little man. De-
mocracy breeds him, and society cares for and pam-
pers him. But it is not merely plebeian; it is
exhausted, and in its utter exhaustion it is lethargic
and hysterical by turn. True to his theory that the
biological up and down of an age, its health or diseased
condition, is reflected in its art, Nietzsche comes to
see in Wagner a point of view and an art which will

172 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

aggravate the disease. He looks back on his earlier
praise, cries Peccavi and utters warning after warning.
Where he once saw exuberance, he now sees weakness;
where he saw genius and originality, he now sees the
anitcs and the tricks of a poseur; where he saw pas-
sion, he sees fatigue whipped up by drugs. He dis-
tinguishes a pessimism of the weak and a pessimism
of the strong.

" Is there a pessimism of strength? an intellectual
preference for what is hard, fearful, bad, problematical
in life; a preference that springs from well-being,
overflowing health, fulness of life? Is there perhaps
suffering because of that very fulness? "

Quite different, this " testing courage," from the
pessimism of the weak! The weak distrust their
passions, they become ascetics; they are afraid. of the
truth, and so become romantic; they don't like a
fight and the gritty taste of real life, these dispirited
ones, presto! another world appears, and theirs the
task to be otherworldly. Nietzsche sees such pro-
tective cowardice everywhere; there is something
almost perverse in the way in which he misjudges
democracy and misreads Christianity. But whatever
its source and justification, this general antipathy
colors his judgment of Wagner. He pokes fun —
and bitter fun it is at times — at the idea of salvation
in Wagner. Every one in Wagner wishes to be saved ;
and every one is saved, preferably by a woman.

NIETZSCHE 173

The otherworldliness of Parsifal? Anathema! He
had once been a great admirer of Siegfried; he had
seen in him and in the Edda characters strength and
pressure of life, a reminiscence of an age when gods
and men alike were granite boulders flung about
by a cosmic upheaval; but now he speaks of them as
shams, and of Siegfried as fin de siecle, as an inflated,
sophisticated modern. The truth is, he distrusts
Wagner. He has no stomach for that nauseating
draught: " sweetish pity," insincere otherworldli-
ness, and a sensual, flirtatious asceticism. Nietzsche
has put this distrust in verse. The original German
may stand: no translation is possible.

— 1st Das noch deutsch? —

Aus deutschem Herzen kam dies schwiile Kreischen?

Und deutschen Leibs ist dies Sich-selbst-Entfleischen?

Deutsch ist dies Priester-Handespreizen,

Dies weihrauch-duftelne Sinne-Reizen?

Und deutsch dies Stocken, Sturzen, Taumeln,

Dies ungewisse Bimbambaumeln?

Dies Nonnen-Aeugeln, Ave-Glocken-Bimmeln,

Dies ganze falsch verziickte Himmel-Ueberhimmeln?

— Ist das noch deutsch? —

Erwagt! Noch steht ihr an der Pforte: —

Denn was ihr hort, ist Rom, — Rom's Glaube ohne Worte!"

Nietzsche's Weltanschauung has played him a trick:
the much admired Colossus of Tribschen shrivels to
the theatrical mannikin of Bayreuth, the Kirchenrat,
and then this mannikin, growing to the monstrous,
becomes a bugbear, a deadly danger. There is much

174 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

of the human, all too human in Wagner; at times
his sensuality is not sufficiently robust and his
asceticism neither subtle nor convincing; his essays
are vague, stodgy, and high-flown — an unpleasant
mixture — and the note of sex is struck too often.
But Nietzsche distorts like all idealists. His palette
contains the most resplendent whites and the deep-
est blacks; and while he had once painted Wagner's
portrait in white, he now does it in solid black.

^ Two gods of Nietzsche's youth — Wagner and Scho-
penhauer— had been toppled over; his third great

<

enthusiasm — Greek culture and Greek literature —
remained secure. Like all good Germans he knew
his Homer and Sophocles and had a well supplied
philosopher's kit when he left school; but he was
original and enterprising as well, read his philoso-
phers in his own way, and upset the philologists with
a brilliant, imaginative theory of Greek tragedy.
/ He was twenty-eight when he wrote The Birth of
V Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, in which he inter-
preted Greek tragedy as the meeting-point of two
/ great cultural forces, the Apollonian and Dionysian,
\ at work in Greek religion, philosophy, and art. Later
on he had much fault to find with the essay, on the
score of style, and because he felt that he had mixed
what he called the Greek problem with the Wagner
problem. His interest in Greek culture, however,
lost none of its strength; it simply became more dis-

NIETZSCHE 175

criminating and also more onesided when he dis-
covered certain dangerous, disintegrating tendencies
in the rise of Socratic philosophy and of science.
Socrates, in whom he saw a disease and a danger,
becomes his bete noir. When could Nietzsche do
without a bete noir? in fact he sometimes felt that he
himself was one. There remained also the contrast
Nietzsche had so sharply indicated, but the terms
Apollonian and Dionysian were used with an ever
wider fling of meaning. They now appeared as
contrasted universal types or moods rather than as
shapers of Greek culture. Not that this was anything
but a stressing and developing of much The Birth of
Tragedy contained.

The Apollonian is a mood of calmness, of measure,
of tranquil pursuit of sheer beauty; the Dionysian is
a mood of ecstatic, drunken, reeling frenzy, of life
at full pressure. The tutelary divinity of the first
is Apollo, the limpid, harmonious Olympian; that of
the second is Dionysus, the stranger god from Asia,
the reveller and leader of wild-eyed votaries. Every-
where may these types be found ; they are two master
forces of cosmic life: fermentation and clarification.
Theirs is an important part in the household economy
of nature. Nietzsche points to Dionysian elements
in all Oriental religions, to frenzied songs and dances,
to the self-absorption and exaltation of the mystic,
to the dancing manias of the Middle Ages, and to the
mixture of lust and cruelty, " that witches' draught,"

176 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

which is such a noxious ingredient in many primitive
religions.

Nietzsche is at his best when he describes one or the
other of these types. Back of the contrast is of course
Schiller's theory of Stojjtrieb and Formtrieb. With
Schiller it was a bit of Kantian philosophy thinly
disguised and with much of the tang of rationalism
remaining. But the artist in Nietzsche changes all
this; he makes us feel the wild pulse-beat of the
Dionysian and the calm splendor of the Apollonian
in his wonderfully flexible prose; he describes both
so well because he is both; he is " Rauschkiinstler "
and " Traumkiinstler " in one.
/ The Dionysian mood is not a simple one; and
Nietzsche gives finely its varying characteristics.
First, the self-surrender of the individual and a
feeling of oneness with nature. There are moments
when we are not a steadily glowing light swung
aloft above the altar of our god, but a raging fire
with a desire for divine absorption consuming our
souls. Second, vigor, exuberance, frenzy. ^Eschy-
lus and Rodin are in this sense Dionysian artists.
Third, revelling in conflict as such, in contradiction
as such: in the sharpness of life's blows and the
pungent bitterness of its flavor.* Fourth, a certain

* This is Nietzsche's " heroic pessimism." In The Twilight of
the Idols he interprets tragedy in this spirit. " What does the
tragic artist give us of himself? Is it not his fearlessness when con-
fronted with what is fearful and enigmatic? This state of fearless-

NIETZSCHE 177

sadness touched with weariness. This may seem a
false note in Nietzsche's picture, but there is nothing
more natural than passing from intense excitement
to a spent state of exhaustion, and to a mood of
wearied sadness. |

The Apollonian mood is partly an urgent demand
to create, to render beauty; partly a desire to keep
sane, to escape from inner and outer unreason to a
dream world; it is a mood of self-possession, of cheer-
fulness and thankfulness.

These moods express themselves in art: the
Apollonian in sculpture and epic poetry — theirs are ,
sharp outlines, an unruffled stateliness, and a tran-
quil beauty; the Dionysian in the throbbing life of
music, in the abandon of the dance, and in the
passionate lyric. Art reflects culture; in Greek cul-
ture they stand out sharply. Many before Nietzsche
had recognized the Apollonian element in Greek art;
men like Winckelmann and Goethe never tired of
pointing to the ideal and reposeful beauty of Greek
sculpture, and to the sure touch and unerring sense

ness is highly desirable; he who knows it bestows upon it the great-
est honors. He communicates it to others; this he must do if he is
an artist, a genius at giving. Courage and freedom of feeling in
the presence of a mighty enemy, of a sublime disaster, of a problem
fraught with terror — this victorious attitude is what the tragic
artist selects and glorifies. What is warlike in our souls celebrates in
tragedy its Saturnalia. He who knows sorrow and seeks sorrow —
the heroic man — praises in tragedy his own existence; it is to him
that the tragic poet offers the honor of this sweetest of all cruel
draughts."

178 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

of form revealed in even the lesser arts. Nietzsche

(admits this delight in ordered beauty, in clear colors,
sharp contours, and linear grace; he admits " the
incredibly precise and unerring plastic power " of
the Greek eye; he accepts in part the traditional view
that evenness, sunniness, and saneness marked the
racial temper of the Greeks. But what was com-
monly held to be an endowment he interpreted as an
achievement. How the Greek must have suffered
and struggled before he could change chaos into
cosmcj, and wrest measure and poise from the
unchecked and the violent! How he must have cut
into his passions and hacked at his world! Rightly
or wrongly Nietzsche reads the problem of Greek
art and culture in terms of a struggle between Diony-
sian and Apollonian forces. He distinguishes four
periods. In the first, the pre-Homeric period, the
Dionysian spirit is rampant; and it finds an outlet

/ in barbarous theogonies, in a titanic, grotesque folk-
philosophy. The second, the Homeric period, is

/ Apollonian. Homer's mellow art casts a glamour on
even the commonest things, and the world appears
bathed in simple, translucent beauty.* Then there

* In Homer's Wettkampf, written in 1872 as the preface to a pro-
jected book, Nietzsche characterizes these first two periods strongly:

" But what lies as the beginning of all that is Greek back of the
Homeric world? In the latter the extraordinary sureness, restful-
ness, and purity of line carry us beyond a mere fusing of matter;
because of an aesthetic illusion its colors seem brighter, warmer, and

NIETZSCHE 179

is in the third period an inrush of the Dionysian from
the North; barbarous, ecstatic cults come from
Thrace; in the South the turbulent lyric makes itself
heard; notes of pessimism and weariness are struck
by the philosophers of the seventh and sixth centuries.
But Apollo again triumphs: in the severe grace of
Doric architecture and sculpture and in the beauty
and polish of Attic prose. His triumph marks the
fourth period. This bold sketch of Greek culture
fails to take account of racial differences among the
Greeks, of the effects of political and industrial con-
ditions, and of the purely personal factor in poetry,
say in the lyrics of Archilochus. Still modern
scholarship has borne out Nietzsche's view of a

lighter, Its people appear better and more akin to us in this multi-
colored, warm light. But what do we behold when, no longer
guided and shielded by the hand of Homer, we stalk back into the
pre-Homeric world? Darkness and terror and the products of an
imagination used to the horrible! What an existence is mirrored in
these repellent, fearful theogonies and myths: a life ruled by the
Children of Night, strife, lust, fraud, old age and death! Imagine
the stifling air of Hesiod's poems thickened and darkened still more,
without the softening and purifying influences emanating from
Delphi and numerous Greek temples; mix this heavy Boeotian air
with the gloomy lustfulness of the Etruscan — and you could press
from a reality such as this a world of myths compared with which
Uranus, Kronus and Zeus and the battles of the Titans would seem
a relief. In this brooding atmosphere battle is the way to safety,
and the cruelty of victory is the acme of the joy of life. Greek law
and morality go back in their origins to blood-guilt and retribution;
a nobler stage of culture takes its first wreath of victory from the
altar dedicated to the cleansing of blood-guilt."

<

<

180 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

primitive, formless Dionysian element in early
Greek religion.

Greek tragedy is at once Dionysian and Apollonian.
It sprang from the dithyramb, from legends, from
the life of the god Dionysus and a chorus of satyrs,
the woodland companions of the god. On the wave
of this Dionysian excitement, of chant, music, and
dance the cultured Greek was carried and set down
in the midst of primordial nature. Generations of
restraint fell away from him, and he again felt
the earthy savour of life at its freest and wildest.
The Greek theatre, of circular and terraced con-
struction, allowed this excitement to sweep from
chorus to spectator. The chorus takes no prominent
part in the action, not because, as Schiller had sug-
gested, it serves to mark off the world of tragedy as
an ideal world, but because it is the voice of a world
older than the clash of individual wills. It stands by
with deep-echoing wisdom on its tongue, as the fellow
sufferer, as the servant of its god. It excites, exalts,
and sobers; and prepares the way for the Apollonian
vision. Man slakes his thirst at the well of life. He
feels the fire of good old wine in his veins. But he
also feels the constraint to shape a dream-world;
without it and its illusions life would become oppress-
ive beyond endurance. On this underground of
world-will there is the dazzling picture spray of the
Apollonian. The dialogue and the characters rep-
resent the Apollonian element in Greek tragedy.

NIETZSCHE 181

Nothing could be simpler, more harmonious, more
transparent than the language and the characters of
Sophocles. We seem to know them through and
through, these Sophoclean men and women. But
they are really nothing but luminous pictures flung
across a dark screen. Their clear lineaments form a
restful and healing contrast to the gloomy, ill ordered,
terrifying myth; they offer an escape from the panic
or the nausea of existence.

One feels the influence of Schiller, Schopenhauer,
and Wagner in Nietzsche's early aesthetics; but his
theory of Greek tragedy is quite original in its im-
aginative force. Starlight in a black mountain lake
— a fine conception of tragedy! His interpretation
of the (Edipus story or the Prometheus myth may
be un-Greek, it at least shows artistic insight into pos-
sibilities; he is as truly a Maker as Goethe was when
he took the old Faust legend and its naive delight
in magic and polemics, and made of it the drama of
the restless seeker of an abiding self.

The terms Apollonian and Dionysian appear in
Nietzsche long after this special problem of tragedy
disappears. They are interpreted psychologically,
and may serve to usher in Nietzsche's picture of the
artist — a picture which in turn may be made to reveal
Nietzsche the artist-philosopher. His biological stud-
ies have borne fruit; for him there is no absolute
beauty; there is only a " human, all too human "

182 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

S beauty. Nature is at heart neither beautiful nor
ugly, just as she is neither good nor bad. Man may
stamp her with his own weakness and littleness or
he may dower her with his own wealth and strength;
in either case art is self-expression. It matters
greatly what sort of a self is expressed. Nietzsche
is not altogether consistent; he often sees strength
and weakness in Nature herself, he contrasts periods
of health and decay, and in this way seems to get an
objective foundation for morality and art. But he
is far removed from the dogmatism of certain evolu-
tionists; he lacks the easy assurance with which
Spencer strolls up the world stairs. Life to him may
be a Penelope web of ups and downs or it may be a
music box with a round of tunes; it is the attitude

(towards life that counts. There is a yea-saying
and a nay-saying to life, in art as well as in morality;
there is an art of the strong and an art of the weak.
Great art is strong art and stands for heightened
vigor, impelling wealth and a wholehearted response
, to life. It may be of the Dionysian type or of the
* Apollonian, that of a Rubens and a Shakespeare or
\ that of a Homer and a Goethe. The two types are
reinterpreted. They touch each other at certain
points: both are moods of intoxication; in both there
is a strange power of divination. What a drunken-
ness of the eye and the ear there is in the Apollonian ;
how he revels in color and sound and form! But
there is also a delicate sense of measure which orders

NIETZSCHE 183

his impressions, gives him a sense of hidden beauty,
and a cool and playful mastery over a dream world.
Maeterlinck might well be this Nietzschean artist,
he lacks not a single one of these traits. The Diony-
sian intoxication is a diffused excitement bursting
forth into passion, into explosive feeling. The Diony-
sian artist is forceful, rich, passionate, masterful;
he does not respond readily to form, but his imagina-
tion, at once intense and of great range, allows him
to divine the emotional. And once divined, he can-
not resist; with a reckless, lunging self-assertion he
throws himself at life. His is a mood of joyful and
courageous abandon; he gives of himself without
stint. His is the ecstatic dance of the warrior; and
not that thing of divine lightness, of calm strength
and tremulous beauty: the dance of the Apollonian.

This whole contrast, together with the many fine
remarks on the psychology of the artist which are
grouped about it, strikes a very personal note.
One feels that Nietzsche has drawn on himself, has
generalized from his processes and methods as an
artist. He himself dispels the slightest doubt on
that point, for he is fully aware of his artistic endow-
ment and often refers to his Apollonian and Dionysian
nature. To say that Nietzsche attributed to himself
both types because he felt that he, a great man in his
own eyes, must have the tensional and varied nature
of great men, is an unkind and false suggestion. It
may at once be admitted that as a self-critic he had

184 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

grave faults. He lacked a true estimate of his place
and rank. Much in Ecce Homo is wild; some of it
reads like the confessions of a megalomaniac. He has
given the world the greatest of its books, a well of
gold and kindness; he is the great transvaluer who
has split human history in two; time is to be reckoned
from him; the combined geniuses of the ages could
not have produced a single one of the speeches of
Zarathustra: that is his tone. But a man may form
the silliest over-estimate or under-estimate of himself
and his work, and yet may show an understanding of
the trend of his thought and true insight into his
peculiarities as an Artist and a Thinker. Here
Nietzsche's touch is sure. The contrast between the
Apollonian and Dionysian may not be as sharp as one
would like, it may occasionally exhibit wavering
and a shifting of qualities, but there is not a single
quality mentioned which does not in some manner
mark the artist and reveal Nietzsche's almost un-
canny self-knowledge. Every one of these qualities
may be traced in the artistic motifs of his philosophy
as well as in the rhythm and imagery of his language.
On the whole Nietzsche stresses the Dionysian.
He appeals to Dionysus; he credits himself with
having revived the dithyramb; he considers Thus
Spake Zarathustra a Dionysian stroke of genius. To
him that book is a masterpiece, and he has much to
say of its excellences. He refers to its passionateness.
The speeches of Zarathustra throb and glow with an

NIETZSCHE 185

intense love of life and with a passionate devotion to
an ideal. Parts of the book were written rapidly,
under full pressure, on long walks up the mountains; in
all of it Nietzsche feels the returning tide of health and
power. He refers to the music of its language, the dan-
cing rhythms, the varying tempo. And he refers to the
range: here are to be found the softest, the sweetest,
the lightest, and also the most awe-inspiring and soul-
compelling strains. His criticisms are not far wrong,
he has indeed hit upon the qualities that make Thus
Spake Zarathustra his finest achievement as an artist.
But it is more than a mass of Dionysian poems; it
gives, as no other work of his does, the essence of his
philosophy. That essence does not lie in the in-
tellectual padding which is to be found elsewhere in
Nietzsche. While the editors are largely respon-
sible for the arrangement of the manuscript material
of The Will to Power, many of the pedantic divisions
and headings are Nietzsche's; so are also the school-
man's discussions of points. The same may be said
of many passages in his letters and in such books as
The Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil.
The pedantry even filters through to the language.
Learning has its affectations and awkwardnesses,
and at his worst this master of style exhibits them
abundantly. Nor is this essence to be found in the
unclear enthusiasms of the youthful Birth of Tragedy.
Whatever else may be said of Nietzsche as a phil-
osopher, the charge of unclearness cannot be lodged

186 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

against him in his later work. He is too much of an
Apollonian for that; his weakness lies in the transi-
tions, and not in the ideas or conceptions, which have
something of the sharpness of a fine etching. It is
in the expression of mood, in certain emotional
reactions, that the meaning of his philosophy lies;
and the best clue to that meaning is given in Thus
Spake Zarathustra. Take, for example, the doctrine
of eternal recurrence; what does it mean to Nietz-
sche? He might have raised the question of a finite
or an infinite universe, and might have tried to work
the number of possible combinations mathematically;
he might have been interested in it from the point of
view of system-building. But of the second interest
there is even less than of the first. It may be ingen-
ious sport to show how a philosophy is all of a piece,
and to make all its theories fit, but it is dangerous
sport with Nietzsche's. One can, of course, show how
the doctrine of eternal recurrence connects with his
interpretation of what is commonly called evolution
and how it fits in with his doctrine of the Superman,
but little or nothing is gained, for these other theories
are differently shaped and colored at different times.
Whatever congruity there is in his philosophy is
largely emotional. The doctrine of eternal recurrence
interests Nietzsche only as the possible carrier of
certain moods.

"Everything goes, everything returns; forever rolls

NIETZSCHE 187

the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything
blooms again; forever passes the year of being.

" Everything breaks, everything is made anew;
forever the same house of being is built. All things
part and all things meet; eternally true to itself
remains the circle of being."

But what of the " little man "; is he to return, too?
What of sickness and weakness; is there no way of
ridding the universe of them? Thoughts such as
these sweep over Zarathustra like a wave of disgust
and despair. But why then entertain them, it might
be asked? It is because they develop at the rebound
another mood, that of the fighter. It is a mood that
appeals to Nietzsche, and most of his fighting was
done within the shadow of physical depression and of
disgust with his fellows. The Ecce Homo proves
that; so do his letters. The thought of an eternal
recurrence favors fighting at its purest, for the mere
love of it, with no hope of a final victory. The
Superman knows that for every up there is a down;
he understands that events will swing full cycle and
that the weaklings whom he has trodden under foot,
the " many, all too many," will defeat him in turn.
But he fights on; the mood of depression yields to a
fighting mood, which is in part the mere joy of play-
ing the game of life, in part a sort of heroic enthusi-
asm, in part the stimulating sense of creative power.
It is a mistake, however, to say that Nietzsche's
fighter has no thought of results, no eye to victory.

188 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

While he sees no hope of final success, he feels the in-
centive of an enthusiasm, of an ideal. This beyond
all else marks Zarathustra : he is a pleader and spokes-
man of the future; a pioneer and a builder. He
feels his task and has faith in his work. If fighting
is looked at from this angle exclusively, the fact of
eternal recurrence will be merely a complicating
incident. But in Nietzsche the mood is often a
different one. The clue is given by two passages,
one from Thus Spake Zarathustra, the other from
Book IV of The Will to Power.

The passage in Thus Spake Zarathustra is called
The Seven Seals. It is a wonderful paean with a
triumphant refrain: For I love thee, 0 Eternity. It
is too long to give in full, but these two selections
show the mood.

" If ever there came to me a breath of a creator's
breath, and of that divine necessity which compels
accidents even to dance the circular dance of the
stars;

" If ever I laughed with the laugh of the creative
lightning, as it is followed obediently but sullenly by
the thunder of action;

" If ever I played dice with the gods at their table,
the earth, and played so that the earth shook and
broke and breathed floods of fire;

" — for the earth is a table of the gods, and it
trembles with creators' words and the dice-throws
of the gods —

" Oh, how should I not long for Eternity and for

NIETZSCHE 189

the bridal ring of rings, the ring of Eternal Recur-
rence? "

The other selection:

" If ever I drank a deep draught from the foaming
spice- and mixing-bowl, in which all things are well
mixed;

" If ever my hand poured together the most dis-
tant and the near, fire and spirit, joy and sorrow, tne
worst and the kindliest;

" If I am a grain of that saving salt which causes all
things to be well mixed in the mixing-bowl

" — for there is a salt which binds the good and the
bad; and even the worst has its value in the season-
ing and the last foaming —

" Oh, how should I not long for Eternity and for
the bridal ring of rings, the ring of Eternal Recur-
rence? "

The note of creative self-expression is struck again
and again. Give me a self to express and a world
to mould, Nietzsche would say. There is nothing
depressing in the thought of eternal recurrence.
Could you stop the brush of the painter by reminding
him that thousands of years hence his canvases
will be mere dust? That final result will not affect
him; he paints his picture — there is enough of an
ideal right there — and feels the zest of self-expression.
This is what Nietzsche feels. He asks for a plastic
world, a world of merging contrasts, of bitter strife, of
mingled good and evil. It is not to be plastic in any

190 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

final sense; there is lacking here James's craving for
newness and ever changing experimentation. The
plasticity — or rather the illusion of plasticity — is
within one of the cycles or Great Years of a circling
eternity, but that is all that is needed — a bit of clay
or palette of colors and an ideal. The same invigor-
ating thought is found in The Will to Power. The
artist's sense of power and intense delight in self-
expression have been transferred to the world-game.
Nothing could be sharper than the contrast between
the active, dramatic enthusiasm of Nietzsche and the
contemplative enthusiasm of a Marcus Aurelius. The
Stoic sings: " Whatsoever is expedient unto thee, 0
Universe, is expedient unto me"; but there is in
him no trace of a sucherische, versucherische Tatigkeit,
nothing of testing and experimenting self-expression;
there is also no trace of that intense self-reference
which is so important a mark of Nietzsche's artistic
and philosophical personality. Marcus Aurelius and
Hegel, each in his own way, had a profound faith in
the reasonableness of the universe, and placed highest
among the duties loyalty to the truth and reason of
things. Nietzsche plays brilliantly on the Hegelian
An und fiir sich Sein der Binge when he substitutes
for it the phrase An undfilr mich Sein der Dinge. It
is I that count; give me a world I can work myself
out in. Whatever drama there is is self -drama.
There lies the difference in the dramatic as it appears
in Hegel and the dramatic as it appears in Nietzsche.

NIETZSCHE : 191

In Hegel it is objective, a sympathetic understanding
of a progressive world-movement and all its compli-
cations; with Nietzsche it is subjective; that is why
he is not a good interpreter of history, whether that
history be political, social or cultural. He mis-
reads Socratic philosophy, gives fanciful and often
very naive interpretations of the early phases of
Christianity and of the origin of morality, and shows
no grasp of the advancing democracy and the eco-
nomic unrest of his time. It is true that Hegel is not
always a good interpreter of history; but when he
errs it is because he links events artificially in the
interests of his idea of a cosmic reason. The fault
with Nietzsche is his utter subjectivity. A personal
reaction becomes a philosophical clue, and that clue
is worked and amplified until it becomes a whole
cluster of suggestions.

To draw up a list of such personal clues and to
trace their work in the upbuilding of his philosophy
would be a difficult matter. But some at least
may be hinted at: the convalescent's dread of
disease; an abnormal sense of physical cleanliness,
to which Nietzsche himself attributes his distaste
for extreme democracy; self-esteem; a craving for
the picturesque, the orderly and the rhythmic; and
an intense interest, not in the world outside, but
in his own impressions and his responses to that
world. In the Antichrist, in the pamphlets against
Wagner, and in many of his earlier books there

192 . ARTISTS AND THINKERS

are passages in which this personal, subjective,
impressionistic nature of his philosophy is quite
apparent. An emotional note will be struck — disgust
or distrust or enthusiasm or playfulness — and then
with a rush a whole emotional tone-structure will
make its appearance, and, threading its way in and
out, will be the original note; everywhere there is
a strong sense of self-expression, of intimacy, of
possession. In some such way might a man walk
in and out of his house or pass from room to room.
Thus Spake Zarathustra is subjectively dramatic.
There are, of course, all sorts of theories and doc-
trines, of these the doctrine of eternal recurrence is
only one. Marriage is discussed, so is war; we are
told of the Superman; we are given a new set of moral
laws; there is a great deal of social criticism; but
every one of these theories is presented in terms of
the most personal kind. That might be called a
poetic artifice if the emphasis were not everywhere on
Zarathustra as a responding and creating personality
— that is, on self-drama. We follow Zarathustra on
his travels, become party to his ideals, commune with
him and struggle with his doubts; we dance with him
and swoon with him; we climb with him and fall
with him. His speeches impress us not as mirrors
flashing back the truth of things, but as so much
" landscape of soul." The landscape of the book it-
self, the sea, the mountains, the forest, a rich meadow,
an oversea Isle of the Blest, trees against lowering

NIETZSCHE 193

clouds, a deep blue expanse of sky, is impressionistic
in its patchiness and in its symbolism of varying
moods.

One of Nietzsche's finest bits of self-analysis is a
passage in Ecce Homo in which he refers to the invol-
untary character of the imagery in Thus Spake Zara-
thustra, and to his sense of rhythm. These clues
when followed up will yield two further traits in the
portrait of the artist-philosopher. The passage reads :

" Has any one at the end of the nineteenth century
an understanding of what poets of virile ages called
inspiration? If not, I shall describe it. With the
least bit of superstition remaining, one could not
but feel oneself mere idea, mere incarnation, mere
mouthpiece, mere medium of supernatural powers.
The word revelation marks the facts. All of a sudden
with wonderful sureness and fineness something be-
comes visible, audible, something which shakes us to
the depths and topples us over. One hears, and yet
one does not seek; one takes and yet one does not
ask who it is that gives; a thought flashes like light-
ning: inevitably, unhesitatingly — never did I have
any choice. An ecstasy of fearful tension — slackened
occasionally by a stream of tears — with a step now
stormy, now slow; an utter losing oneself, and the
clear consciousness of innumerable electric currents
and tremblings to one's very toes; a depth of happi-
ness in which what is most painful and most gloomy
is not asked for as a contrast, but demanded with a
challenge as a necessary color within such an abun-
dance of light; a wide-spanning feeling of rhythm

194 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

and form! It sometimes occurs to me that the
demand for a sense of rhythm of wide span prac-
tically measures the strength of inspiration and at
the same time counteracts its pressure. All these
things come to pass involuntarily, emphatically so,
but they come with a hurricane of a feeling of freedom,
independence, power, divinity. Most strange of all
is the involuntary character of the imagery, of the
simile; one no longer knows the meaning of image or
simile: everything offers itself as the nearest, the
truest, the simplest expression: it seems as though —
to speak with Zarathustra — all things came and
offered themselves as similes.' '

Much of the imagery in Thus Spake Zarathustra is
indeed involuntary, and it would not be hard to give
instance after instance. In some of the more rhap-
sodic passages there seems to be at first glance only
a confusion of metaphors among which Nietzsche's
thought goes ricocheting at all sorts of angles. But
one glance more will show a curious orderliness and
a curious involuntariness in all this imagery. An
image suggests itself, something in that image gives
a stealthy clue to some other image; above the sur-
face there seems to be a rough break, but below
there is the continuity of mood. In the section Of the
Sublime Zarathustra compares his mind to the depth
of the sea. Out of this general image there breaks
for Nietzsche the image of the silence of the deep.
But he is hurried on. What! so silent, and swarming
with sea monsters. Monsters — prey — booty — hunter:

NIETZSCHE 195

the scene has shifted, Zarathustra sees a hunter com-
ing out of the forest; slung over his shoulder is his
booty, a bagful of ugly truths. Hunter — forest — wild
animals: what if this hunter has not killed the wild
animal in himself? This may serve as an example
of such an involuntary development of imagery. It
cannot be called a literary device, for while it is most
noticeable in Thus Spake Zarathustra it is present in
Nietzsche's other books. And what of the evidence
furnished by those emotional clusters of thought
which were interpreted as forms of the subject-
ively dramatic?

Not always, however, is it the wire of a single
mood or a complex of moods that controls the leaps
and antics of Nietzsche's imagery; sometimes there
is an almost purely verbal continuity. The pun is,
of course, one of the simplest forms of such con-
tinuity, and Nietzsche, like many great men, can on
occasion be an atrocious punster. But apart from
that, all kinds of verbal analogies and contrasts play
a conscious and often an unconscious part in the
development of his thought; and it is the verbal
form that controls the mood and makes it play to its
lead. Here is an example:

" Euer Eheschliessen: seht zu, dass es nicht ein
schlechtes Schliessen sei! Ihr schlosset zu schnell:
so folgt daraus — Ehebrechen!

Und besser noch Ehebrechen als Ehe-biegen,

196 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

Ehe-lugen! So sprach mir ein Weib, ' wohl brach
ich die Ehe, aber zuerst brach die Ehe — mich! ' "

Another example:

" Warum so weich, so weichend und nachgebend? "

Another:

" Schatzen ist SchafTen: hort es, ihr Schaffenden!
Schatzen selber ist aller geschatzten Dinge Schatz
und Kleinod."

Still another:

" — Wie? Ward die Welt nicht eben vollkommen?
Rund und reif? Oh des goldenen runden Reifs —
wohin fliegt er wohl? "

Nietzsche's sense of rhythm gives quite as good a
clue to the artistic in his philosophy as such invol-
untary imagery yields. German is not a very
rhythmical or flexible language; it is a squatting
language; it sits down heavily and crushes out all
movement, all lively and subtle play of mood. But
Nietzsche is not a squatting philosopher. His thought
is all movement, on the surface and below the surface,
and of the utmost variety. It is quite as charac-
teristic of him as it is of Rodin. Rodin, with
a testing and tempting courage which Nietzsche
would have praised, seeks to express in his varied
and restless figures something of the stress and strife
which are at the heart of things; Nietzsche's thought
plays in and out and all about certain ideas, such as

NIETZSCHE 197

will to power, eternal recurrence, life as a fighter's
game and gamble, which are in and of themselves
dramatic. His is a jumping and throbbing and
dancing philosophy; it leads him and his reader many
a merry dance. It offers little in the way of neat
solutions, less in the way of consistent, final results;
but it does give a wealth of rhythms, imaginative and
intellectual, expressed in language of great force and
span. Nietzsche's name has played a prominent part
in recent war talk, but it is a mistake, and a serious
one, to think of him as interested in war from the
point of view of political self-preservation or of some
great idea of national expansion. Nietzsche's ex-
periences in the Franco-Prussian war were barren
of results, judging from his books and letters, and he
seems to have been untouched by the new and mo-
mentous ideal of a united Germany. His true inter-
est lay not in war, but in the psychology of fighting,
in the rhythm of blows given and taken.

It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to sepa-
rate form and substance or to distinguish between
Nietzsche's conscious use of rhythm and the sub-
conscious, vibratory character of his philosophy.
But it would be worth the attempt. Here and there
it can be done easily.

Nietzsche has much to say of the resentful nature
of the little man; ressentiment is one of his favorite
words; he interprets asceticism and certain moral

198 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

and religious beliefs as the belittling, resentful mal-
ice of the weak. There are passages in that rather
sober and somewhat pedantic book, The Genealogy
of Morals, and in The Antichrist, in which this phil-
osophy of resentment takes on the color and rhythm
of resentment. There is a curious emotional rest-
lessness, a staccato succession of adjectives of abuse,
an ill-bred and very ingenious way of twisting things,
a bit of a sneer and an occasional shrug, together
with a very large fear lest his thrusts fail to strike
home — facts, all of them, of great interest to the
psychologist of resentment. There is all the dif-
ference in the world between such badgering, pound-
ing and grinding rhythms and the emotionally sus-
tained, ample, generous, undulatory rhythms of such
passages in The Gay Science, The Dawn of Day, and
Thus Spake Zarathustra as preach the Superman and
the love of to-morrow.

Nietzsche's sense of rhythm also plays a part,
even if a minor one, in his theory of eternal recur-
rence. He is fond of refrain and of a sort of circle
pattern rhythm. In the last paragraph of The Will
to Power he gives his theory in language which allows
one to feel the stress of will, and which by a balanced
alternation of clauses and phrases suggests the very
rhythm of recurrence. The parallelism between
theory and subconscious motifs is here perfect. The
same rhythmic equivalent is given in such swaying,
recurrent movement and imagery as this:

NIETZSCHE 199

" In dein Auge schaute ich jungst, oh Leben: Gold
sah ich in deinem Nacht-Auge blinken, — mein Herz
stand still vor dieser Wollust:

" — einen goldenen Kahn sah ich blinken auf nachti-
gen Gewassern, einen sinkenden, trinkenden, wieder
winkenden goldenen Schaukel-Kahn !

" Nach meinem Fusse, dem tanzwulhigen, warfst
du einen Blick, einen lachenden fragenden schmelzen-
denSchaukel-Blick:,,

One further illustration! In a passage in Thus
Spake Zarathustra called Noontide we are given the
rhythm of sleep, not of a deep, even-pulsing, dream-
less sleep, but of a light sleep with changing dream
pictures and dream rhythms, with uneasy stirrings
and drowsy feelings of sinking — sinking into "the
well of Eternity"

" Like a graceful breeze, invisible, dancing on the
smooth floor of the sea, Sleep dances on me — lightly,
lightly as a feather.

" Not an eyelid of mine does he close ; he allows my
soul to remain awake. Of a truth he is light, light
as a feather.

" He persuades me, I know not how; he touches me
faintly with flattering hand; he forces me; he forces
my soul to relax.

" The slightest, the stillest, 'the lightest — the rustling
of a lizard, a breath, a lightning-like movement, a
moment — a slight thing like these is the best happi-
ness. Hush!

" What is happening to me? Hark! Has Time

200 ARTISTS AND THINKERS

taken wing? Am I not falling — hark! falling into
the well of Eternity? "

Here is the artist Nietzsche at his best, catching as
it were the life of silence in its free and varied swing.
And what of the philosopher Nietzsche? Is there
not here a very large part of his secret? One might
prefer the clear, white light of truth, but one cannot
help being struck with the colorfulness of this pris-
matic philosophy. One cannot help seeing the artist
in the philosopher, an artist of great power and of an
original stamp. Part of his quality may be caught
by calling him warm and subjectively dramatic, an
unconscious exploiter of moods and dancer to many
rhythms, a visualizer and vitalizer of contrasts of
movement, of struggle. Such phrases may mean
little or they may mean much: it all depends on how
much backing they have in the way of an analysis of
Nietzsche's philosophy. As they stand they cer-
tainly do not exhaust the artistic significance of that
philosophy — it is too complex for that — but they do
give something of its tang,

V*

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