ywww.archive.org/details/artiststhinkersOOflacrich 
 
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Artists and Thinkers 
 
Artists and Thinkers 
 
 BY 
 
 LOUIS WILLIAM jFLACCUS 
 
 ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 FOURTH AVENUE 6- 30TH STREET, NEW YORK 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 
 BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADEAS 
 
 I916 
 
Copyright, 19 1 6, 
 
 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 
 
 331397 
 
ARTISTS AND THINKERS 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 Each of these essays stands by itself as a record 
 V^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.V 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 
 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 Hfeless. 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 j 
 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 r 
 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 possibihties. 
 
 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 Hfe 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 KipKng, 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. 
 iHe 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 
 
 artistes 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. RoUand'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 j 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. 
 
n 
 
 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 
 J 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 A 
 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 Hfeless. 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- 
 i^ 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 foi: 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, t> 
 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 sipiooth, 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 arid hollows out. 
 The effect is strikingly varied an^ individual. It may 
 be studied in The Burghers oj 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 modelhng and grouping 
 means a sharp contrast between bulging and hollowed 
 ojat 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 o( other than reposeful and well- 
 balanced groups. He aims to give to his art the free 
 naturalness* of Hfe. 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 a 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 raffinement: The AngeVs 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 
 
 x^ 
 
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 unjSnished, 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 
 reahsm 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 VArt in 191 1, offer 
 good samples. There Rodin discusses such topics 
 as realism in art, symboHsm, design and color, 
 movement in sculpture, thought in art, and modelHng. 
 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: 
 
 *' Do you know how this impression of lifelike- , 
 
 ness the Venus has just given us is produced? By ' j 
 
 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 modelKng 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 foUage of a capital. ^ Rodin/ he said, 
 * 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- 
 Ung.' 
 
 " 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 in- every 
 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. Ay^ 
 
 / 
 
RODIN 21 
 
 " In your opinion, Gsell, is color a quality of paint- 
 ing or of sculpture? " 
 
 '^Of painting, naturally.'' 
 
 ** Well, look at this statue.'' Sa3dng 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 sculptura 
 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, 
 ana 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 
 
RODIN 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 lie 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 difl&cult 
 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 ^instable, 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 isi 
 sculpture to portray? '' Life as movement, Rodin) 
 answers. Of the artist he says that for him ^^ life\ 
 is an infinite enjoyment, a constant ecstasy, a dis-1 
 tracted intoxication.'' This breaks at once with theJ 
 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. Everywhere, 
 from the most surprising quarters, and in various 
 forms, comes the demand for an interpretation of 
 I 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,'' I 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 ejffect 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 isP^ and I have often seen women 
 cover their eyes in order to spare themselves that sight,'' 
 
 ^' Rodin began to laugh heartily. 
 
 " ' 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 Hfe 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 
 veryTteautiful. 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! 
 
 *^ * 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. 
 
 ** ' When Baudelaire describes a foul carcass, 
 shmy 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 lago or \ 
 Richard III, when Racine paints Nero £Cnd Narcissus: \ 
 moral ugHness interpreted by minds so clear and y 
 penetrating becomes a marvellous theme of beauty. / 
 
 ^' ' In short, / the beautiful JQ art is simpl y what j 
 has character. ' -^ --^ 
 
 '^ ^ 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 Kne 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 mdje 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/4n 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 jconscious- 
 nes s toward the infinite, J:heeternaL.tQward a_knQwl=__ 
 eage'"and~a love j adthout-liniits>^? 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 isn:ommonly 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 !j" 
 
 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 mahciously : ' One must, however, 
 recall that the first commandment of this reHgion 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 jise of the jigly 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 stimidating_iiL_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 ARTISTS 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: 
 
 ^ . . . \ 
 
 X^" 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. 
 I And this, to me, is the meaiiing^ art JThe^forms, 
 / it^_Qreates are to^veto^^Teeimg^ an opportunity to 
 I developTnaefinitely." 
 1 
 ■ 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. Not that this destroys his theory that 
 sculpture is to give character, that it is to be signi^- 
 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 unHkeness 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 tumbhng toward 
 the dark shadows of the city. Almost as grotesque 
 and more repulsive in its ugliness is Happiness in 
 Crime, 
 
 f 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 symbohsm 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, 
 ahe 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 
 aje^uchjimpl£jdp.a,s as: movement^- unrest, passion, 
 lust, work^layj man's early struggle with nature, 
 thou ght, melanch oly, bitterness. He feels all these 
 and their elemental conflicts to the full, but his rugged 
 optmism 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 THINKERS 
 
 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 ^uid . 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 
 j flow and at full pressure. 
 
 This fluid, natural symbolism Rodin joins to a 
 strong and accurate technique. He knows the 
 
 V 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 
 symboHc 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 
 
 J observation, accuracy, individuality, skill, forceful 1 
 workmanship — all at the service of an artistic pur- 
 pose that catches the very breath and pulse-beat of 
 Ufa. \ J 
 
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 J 
 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, y 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 possibihties, 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 intelHgence, 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 MaeterHnck; 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 J^ 
 
 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 mediaevalism 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 T3rrian 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 mom. 
 
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-enscene 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 nettetL 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 h,alf-lights and unsteady shadows. But 
 that is not what Maeterhnck gives. There could be 
 no more definite place than this Land of Memory; 
 it is all so deHghtfuUy 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 Ughthouse; the palace and the river; 
 a still lake; the play of Hght 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 alfresco 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 
 oj 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 j The Intruder, The Death 
 of Tintagiles, and Pelleas and Melisande the j&rst 
 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 Hues, 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 individuaHzed 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 Ufe. 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 hght; 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 Kfe, 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 r61e 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 Kfe, gHmpses 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 J^ 
 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; 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
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 Uf e 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, surf ace- 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 
 ^schylus 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 somnambuhstic 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 Kes 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 TintagileSj 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 na'ive 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 
 defined 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 Hfe, 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 MaeterUnck'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 Maeterirnck 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 snufl&ng out Uves 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 orderU- 
 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 
 Ineaments 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 Ufe, the fairest 
 period of happiness, its youth, its childhood." 
 
 This is a very efiEective companion picture to that 
 of the sudden forays of a stealthily moving, malev- 
 olent Fate. 
 
 This later conception of the imiverse 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 Maeterhnck 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 fragmentariness, 
 for how much soul there is no one knows, and how 
 much treasure there is no one knows; what we are 
 aware of are hits 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. 
 
 i 
 
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 aHke. 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 V 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 — Uke 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 ^schylus 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 Tannhduser at Dresden in 1845 Wagner 
 wrote: " A feehng 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 Tannkauser 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 commerciaKzed 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 ojffered 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, hke 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 j ^ ^ 
 and its rhythmic animation. But this ideal of his 
 was a gradual growth, for the inspiration of much 
 
72 ARTISTS AND THINKERS 
 
 ol 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- 
 hauser 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 and 
 Zeus, and by the ^Eschylean 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 aUke. 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 he individual and free. This is 
 Wagner's second demand. In modern life custom 
 stifles the growth of individuaUty; 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 kinghness 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 pubKc 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 Lebensbedilrf- 
 niss and Liebesbediirfniss. 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 Sioftrieb 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 1851, 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 soHd 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 Hfe; who opposes nature to human 
 law and convention. 
 
 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 Gdtterddmmerung. 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 Entsagung, 
 resignation. Brlinnhilde 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 Tannhauser 
 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 mahce; 
 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 
 
 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 S3anpathy, 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 
 conunon 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 Itahan 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 diflFerent 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 
 
 " 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 only 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 unHmited 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 Uving 
 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 
 feehng, 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 Stabreiniy 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 feehng 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 feehng. 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 f est? 
 1st es kein Trug? 
 1st es kein Traum? 
 O Wonne der Seelel 
 O siisse, hehrste, 
 kiihnste, schonste, 
 seligste Lust! 
 Ohne Gleiche! 
 Ueberreiche! 
 Ueberselig! 
 Ewig! Ewig! 
 
WAGNER 
 
 Ungeahnte, 
 nie gekannte, 
 iiberschwanglich 
 hoch erhab'ne! 
 Freude- Jauchzen ! 
 Lust-Entziicken ! 
 Himmel-hochstes 
 Welt-En triicken ! 
 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 ARTISTS AND THINKERS 
 
 fern der Tage 
 
 Trennungs-Klage? 
 
 Ohne Wahnen 
 
 sanftes Sehnen, 
 
 ohne Bangen 
 
 siiss Verlangen; 
 
 ohne Wehen 
 
 hehr Vergehen, 
 
 ohne Schmachten 
 
 hold Umnachten; 
 
 ohne Scheiden, 
 
 ohne eiden, 
 
 traut allein, 
 
 ewig heim, 
 
 in ungemess'nen Raumen 
 
 liberseFges 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- 
 voU 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 schliirfen, 
 untertauchen, 
 siiss in Diif ten 
 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 hmited, 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, reconciKng — 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. 
 
 1' ** 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 impressiveness,'' 
 
Ii 
 
 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 
 ofl 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 Uke 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 Leitmotifs 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 Tannhauser 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 
 genii^ 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. 
 
V 
 
 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 
 geistlosBj plumpe Hegel.^^ 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, 
 rehgion, and art. This work remained uncompleted; 
 his lectures on aesthetics, like the others, were never 
 put in final shape for pubh(!ation. 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 Hegel's 
 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 be5.utiful 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 Ufe, 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 rehgion, 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 Geistj 
 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. 
 
112 ARTISTS AND THINKERS 
 
 Beauty is reaKty shining through the sensuous 
 medium. With this metaphysical definition the 
 shadow of Hegel's system begins to slant across his 
 aesthetics; and a black shadow it is. Of all phil- 
 osophies HegeFs 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 meta,physics. 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 Spirit. 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- 
 
 9 
 
 i 
 
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 particular and the universal, 
 and the giving a profound significance to characters 
 and incidents. These three things correspond to 
 the three chief points in HegeFs conception of 
 beauty. 
 
 The idea j R^aim ^j^bf 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 THINKERS 
 
 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 symboUc 
 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 S3nnbolism 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. 
 
 \ \ 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 Wives^ 
 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 possibiHties 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. 
 
 I 
 
 I A work of art must be concretely significant. This 
 
 I is Hegel's third test of beauty. Somehow art 
 makes life seem larger and more significant. In a 
 
 I 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. 
 HegePs 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 HegeFs 
 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 
 handHng 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 
 I and adequately expressed in nature; art steps in and 
 I clears it of such imperfections, seizes on the essen- 
 y 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 j 
 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- 
 colorations 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 
 ijatural 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 125 
 
 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 
 
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 
 phase 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 
 
 i 
 
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- 
 appropria teness . " 
 
 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 symboHsm 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 earher 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. 
 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 I 
 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, 
 
 4 
 
i 
 
 130 ARTISTS AND THINKERS 
 
 the intense conflicts, and the spiritual reach of modem 
 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- 
 i 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 
 I the surface spirituality of the human body. Painting 
 I 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 ideaHty. Its realm is the feelings and 
 *' all shajdes of joy, merriment, fun, caprice, of 
 
HEGEL 131 
 
 ec static and joyous outb iirats^oi. 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 
 reahn 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 f 
 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 
 
 f 
 
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 Kfe which 
 works itself out dramatically and surely in us and in 
 all nature other than us. Given reality as a self- 
 expressive and seK-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- 
 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 I 
 imminent as the tragic hero, magnificent in his I 
 mixture of noble and base, good and bad, hastens | 
 along his impetuous career. The collision stands f , i 
 revealed: naked, sinister, harrowing. The uni- lSA,.. 
 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 Ufe passes by him like the mufHed 
 sounds of a riot. There lies the purification of an 
 CEdipus 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 
 a happy ending, than sup his fill of blood and 
 horrors, his thought goes far beyond his likes and 
 dislikes. Both the Artist and the Thinker in him 
 are greater than the man. He understands quite 
 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 MaeterUnck'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 HegeFs 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 
 
 matic possibilities of logic, and as a sense of divine 
 adventure, 
 
 HegeFs 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 
 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 Hegel's 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 mediae valism 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 quaUty. 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 -^f 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 hut in the sense and soul of 
 me^ Art's judge? — Browning. 
 
 In 1880 Turgenief on a visit to Yasnaya Polyana 
 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 
 pne 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. 
 
 The appeal went unheeded. Tolstoy uncere- 
 moniously bowed himself off the stage of art and 
 definitely became a critic of life and a social reformer. 
 Never afterward did his work escape the cramping 
 coils of moral purpose. He wrote simple stories for 
 
 140 
 
 I 
 
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 top 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'^olstoy'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 
 himseK, 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 retelhng 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. q]yie§-, 
 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 th-eory 
 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 life, 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 estirnate, and 
 in it are to be found Tolstoy's four tests of good 
 art. 
 
 The first of these four art tests is ^nius^ 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 i^^n- 
 ceftiy: an earnestness burnt into its material. The 
 ■fonifffi is '^ a correct, that is, moral relation of the 
 author to his subject J ^ 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 
 quaUty 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 reaHst who by the mere relentless handling of 
 cause "^aiiS^'^ect giv'es the shattering of Anna Kare- 
 nina's life impressively and objectively with no 
 attempt at moralizing. What Tolstoy means is 
 fhaf 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 
 tnere 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 
 f oreshadowings 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 Hfe 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 THINKESS 
 
 the great denier. But another question appears in 
 a passage like the following: '^ Why do I live? — The 
 question was, why should I Hve, 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 Hfe 
 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 life, and you are caught in the swirl of unreason, 
 but the unreason isln you, not in life. You have put 
 things wrongly. Is Hfe 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 Hfe. 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 life, 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 Hfe 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 Tolsto y studies an d 
 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 Kfe 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 fife 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 hfe 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, Unes, 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 
 -— ^hem." 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, 
 
 Lon 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 strikingy 
 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 air 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 defining 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 appKca- 
 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 simpKcity 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 Hfe? Questions like these ought to be an 
 artistic asset; they ough to make art richer, niore 
 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 He in the nature of Tol- 
 stoy's solution? Are jthere 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 jedem 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 
 sesthetic 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 impKes; turn to his famous con- 
 trast of the Dionysian and Apollonian artist and 
 his analysis of the artistic temperament; 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 MoliSre, 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, 
 iEschylus, and Pindar stand highest. j 
 
 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, 
 SLiidThe 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 HomOy 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 
 ideaHst 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 
 
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 ojff. ' 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 
 these 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 Dangerl 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 Httle 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 ahke were granite boulders flung about 
 by a cosmic upheaval; but now he speaks of them as 
 shams, and of Siegfried as fin de Steele, 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-diiftelne Sinne-Reizen? 
 
 Und deutsch dies Stocken, Stiirzen, Taumeln, 
 
 Dies ungewisse Bimbambaumeln? 
 
 Dies Nonnen-Aeugeln, Ave-Glocken-Bimmein, 
 
 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 sufl&ciently 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 Kterature — 
 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 
 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 j/ 
 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 Stoftrieb 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 " Rauschkunstler " 
 and " TraumkUnstler " 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 moment^ 
 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 _3 
 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 
 cosmos, 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 Romeros WeUkampf, 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! Whatman 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 reHef. In this brooding atmosphere battle is the way to safety, 
 and the cruelty of victory is the acme of the joy of Hfe. 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 " 
 
ARTISTS AND THINKERS 
 
 ^auty. 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 seK-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 
 quahty 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 quaUties 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 
 
 I 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 Hes; 
 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 \^ork 
 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 
 an4 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 t 
 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, 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, the 
 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 circKng 
 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 deUght 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 AureUus. The 
 Stoic sings: ^^ Whatsoever is expedient unto thee, O 
 Universe, is expedient unto me"; but there is in 
 him no trace of a sucherische, versucherische Tdtigkeit, 
 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 
 
 I 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 fUr sich Sein der Dinge when he substitutes 
 for it the phrase An undjur 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 Hes 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-y 
 cations; with Nietzsche it is subjective; that is whyj 
 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 diiEficult 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-liigen! 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 Schaffen: hort es, ihr Schaffenden! 
 Schatzen selber ist aller geschatzten Dinge Schatz 
 und Kleinod." 
 
 Still another: 
 
 " — Wie? Ward die Welt nicht eben voUkommen? 
 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 thp 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 jiingst, 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 tanzwiithigen, warfst 
 du einen Blick, einen lachenden fragenden schmelzen- 
 den Schaukel-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 Hght sleep with changing dream 
 pictures and dream rhythms, with uneasy stirrings 
 and drowsy feeUngs of sinking—linking into ^Hhe 
 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 eyeUd of mine does he close; he allows my 
 soul to remain awake. Of a truth he is light, Kght 
 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 stiilest,ithe 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, 
 
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