Chapter 14

Deprivation and Renunciation

"The individual becomes conscious of himself as being this particular individual with particular gifts,tendencies, impulses, passions, under the influence of a particular environment, as a particular product of his milieu. He who becomes thus conscious of himself assumes all this as part of his own responsibility. At the moment of choice he is thus in complete isolation, for he withdraws from his surroundings; and yet he is in complete continuity, for he chooses himself as product; and this choice’ is a free choice, so that we might even say, when he chooses himself as product, that he is producing himself."

KIERKEGAARD

The e last chapters have brought us back to the narrower problem with which we started, the relation of the artist to art; but permit us now to formulate it from the standpoint of the artist, whereas at first we had to do so from that of art. We started with the primitive art-forms of ornament and noted that their abstractness yet contained an element of the concrete which alone really made them works of art. For if they were nothing but abstraction, we should value philosophical ideas more highly than art and so return to the position of Greek thinkers, who identified beauty and truth and saw their ideal in the wise man and not in the inspired artist. The essence of art, however, lies precisely in the concrete representation of the abstract; and we tried to show why such a representation was thought beautiful and roused esthetic pleasure. In order to understand primitive ornament we adduced, in addition to the personal and social motives of the “ artist,” the general ideology within which these forms were necessary or possible, and thence we found the first deduction of the concept of beauty from the concept of the soul. The primitive world-outlook rests on a collective ideology of the soul, which must in its nature be abstract to attain its object of supporting the belief in immortality. Primitive art is abstract, because it wants to, or must, represent this abstract idea of the soul as like as possible, in order that its actual existence may be proved by concretization. Whereas, then, primitive (and even later) religion renunciatory philosophy. The “at the end” is important, for it would indicate that their chief work dated from the period before this achievement and therefore came into being out of the still unresolved conflict of life and creation. It is certainly clear that a thoroughly satisfied bourgeois existence would give no stimulus for creation; it is equally clear on the other hand that the creative genius must approximate to such a life if he is not to sacrifice the one to the other and so possibly land himself again in sterility. We often see the artist, and the neurotic, who vacillates in a similar conflict, manufacturing the conflict (or intensifying it if it already exists) just so that he may resolve it. For the neurotic this is a test which he fails; he remains neurotic and proves to himself that he must do so. For the artist these self-created conflicts are also ultimately tests, but, in contradiction to the neurotic, they prove his capacity to create, since he masters the conflict, in form and content, by giving it esthetic shape. This tendency, which is especially marked in the Romantic, to dramatize this experience does not, then, come from a mere wish to make oneself interesting, but is deeply connected with the general problem of artistry. On the whole we may say that the great artist — and most admirably in the Classical type —can free himself from the parallelism between his life and work, while the Romantic is more dependent on the dramatization of his experience on the lines of his ideology, since his creativity has definitely a compensatory character. Here too we must pass, in the case of the individual artist and his work, if we are to judge it rightly, beyond this classification, since the same artist may in the course of his life develop from Romantic to Classic. It seems, indeed, from our previous observations, that the mature artist can only be born from victory over the Romantic in himself, irrespective of whether this Romanticism has come out in actual work at an early period, as with Goethe, or whether the artist only emerges at the fullness of life, as a complete Classic, as did K. F. Meyer. Here, too, as in an ordinary professional career, the spade-work will find its reward in magnificent masterpieces. This view of the development of the artistic personality and his work is only now beginning to appear in the study of art and has so far no solid principles on which to build. I will mention as characteristic, and as far as I know as the best, examples two works which deal respectively with the work of maturity and of youth. The one is A. E. Brinckmann’s lucid work on the Spatwerke grosser Meister (Frankfurt, 1925), the ripe humanity of which work is manifestly and admittedly conditioned by the author’s entry into his fifth decade; the other is the contrary: Die Friihvollendeten; ein Beitrag zur Literaturgeschichte —a study of artists who reached maturity young, in which the author, Guido Brand, puts before us a series of poets of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries who died prematurely, so that he may find the typical connexion between early maturity and early death. He can naturally not avoid touching, at least in an introductory way, on the borderland problem between masterpieces produced in youth and mature works of age; and rightly feels that “works of youth and of age should be regarded as a new theme which should explain to us by the help of psychology and phenomenology the psycho-spiritual attitude of youthful and the older creative types and thus describe the spheres within which the one grows up through the intuition of origin, the other from the experience of long life. Critique of language and philosophy of style would reveal the hall-marks of a creativity which is, inwardly, fundamentally different in the two cases.” In my book on incest (1912), which was conceived essentially as a basis for the psychology of poetic creation, I included, together with some remarks on the decisive periods of change in great poets (for example, Schiller; op. cit., second edition, p. 106, n. 49), a chapter on the psychology of youthful poetry and attempted a psychological valuation of the “fragments and outlines ” (chapter vii) of greater and uncompleted works. In many cases the youth has nothing in common with the old man except the name; sometimes also, though not always, he has a favourite theme, which he uses at various periods in such different ways that it might be the work of more than one artist with more than one ideological attitude. In the sphere of this study come the works of pupils, which — especially in painting — are hardly to be distinguished from the masters’, and the whole problem of schools of art, both plastic and poetic. Schiller’s Rauber is as much a poem of the “ Sturm und Drang” as it is an individual work, and several of its motifs can only be grasped ideologically and not psychologically. I had once intended to deal with this problem under the title of “ Schiller’s Brother ” and to point out, in connexion with the ideas already treated in relation to the incest theme, that the motif of fraternal hate which in Schiller lasts right up to the Braut von Messina, might lead a biographer — supposing he had to construct the picture of his author from the pattern of his work and had lived in a less exact philological age — to assume a quarrel between brothers in Schiller’s family, which, as is well known, contained no brother. But I did show, in my incest book, how Schiller, thanks to his “ Sturm und Drang” ideology, made a brother out of his brother-in-law, called him so, and used him so. This same motif of fraternal hatred, which is one of the typical requisites of dramatic poetry from the time of Greek tragedy (see chapter xv in that book), is to be found very often in Shakspere, of whose family life we are less well informed, but of whom we do know that he, or the author of his plays, lived during the reign of Queen Elizabeth; and she was regarded on many sides as a usurper of the English throne, which she ruthlessly withheld from the rightful heir, her “ sister” Mary Stuart. If an English court-poet wanted for some reason or other to refer to this idea, which was afloat among the people, he would not only have to use a historical or mythological dress,* but would be well-advised, in view of the proximity of the Tower, to make the feminine rivals into masculine rivals of two royal families — which indeed is the case in the main plot of Hamilerz and is the chief motif in many other plays.

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1Similar ideas, though carried to excess in their application to detail, I saw later in Lilian Winstanley: Hamlet and the Scottish Succession. Being an Examination of the Relations of the Play of Hamlet to the Scottish Succession and the Essex Conspiracy (Cambridge, 1921). Miss Winstanley identifies Claudius and Gertrude with Bothwell and Mary, who also occur later as Lord and Lady Macbeth (cf. her book: Macbeth, King Lear and Contemporary History), Polonius as Lord Burleigh, etc. Cf. also Percy Allen: Shakespeare and Chapman as Topical Dramatists, and EB. Stucken’s novel: Im Schatten Shakespeares (Berlin, 1929).

Whether he had really quarrelled in childhood with a brother about his toys or for his mother’s love or a father’s notice is of very little importance when we remember how common such things are and how often they are absent in the childhood of other poets. Indeed, the facts which are so well known in Schiller’s case, and may be assumed with probability in Shakspere’s, should warn us against drawing over-hasty conclusions on the strength of some superficial relation in the biographical material. For the artist is either born as such, in which case his attitude to his family involves almost @ priori a sort of Hamlet tragedy, or else his experiences make him an artist, in which case again we cannot be concerned with those universal childhood impressions which are in no way different in his case from those of others. This does not mean, of course, that such childhood influences are not among the important ones in the work of great artists, nor that psycho-analysis has not done a service in definitely emphasizing them; the question is simply that of the value to be ascribed to them, and their importance for the understanding of the artist and particularly of his work. The undoubted over-emphasis which psycho-analysis lays on this fact of artistic biographical method has various reasons, and these will lead us in their discussion back to our proper theme. First there is a confusion, or at least a certain want of distinction, between the development of personality in general and that of the artist in particular; but even in the former case, in which infantile influences are undeniable, psycho-analysis over-estimated their effect and neglected the individual will, which interprets these influences in its own way. This is still more the case if the personality is one in which the will is strong and shows itself not only as dominant but as creative. Childhood influences therefore do not build up the personality by themselves, and decidedly not the artistic type, which, after all, distinguishes itself very largely by its surmounting of everything traditional. A second reason takes us deeper into the psychology of the development of personality in general and of that of the artist in particular. The aim of psycho-analysis, indeed, in its interpretation of childhood influences was to emphasize, not the role of these as such, but that of the unconscious in general in artistic creativity. This was not new — what analysis did contribute to the subject was the scientific proof of this influence in some particular childhood impressions which the individual had repressed, yet which forced their way upward and manifested themselves later in his work. On the other hand, there are two points to be taken into consideration. Firstly, childhood impressions are not so unconscious, in either the artist or the neurotic, as is so eagerly assumed. Indeed, most neurotics suffer from conscious recollections of their childhood — of which, try as they may, they cannot rid themselves — and we have very complete childhood memories in the case of poets particularly, who provide more, and more interesting, material than we can ever get from the analysis of neuroses (Goethe, Rousseau, Tolstoy, etc.).* Secondly, exacter observation has shown us that artistic creation is far less unconscious than the psycho-analyst, or even the artist himself, believes. From Schiller, who was both artistically productive and psychologically interested, down to the modern esthetics, such as Oscar Wilde, there is a long series of facts which prove the part played by consciousness in artistic and especially in poetical creation, which I traced in its main stages in my incest book, though I then put the unconscious too much in the foreground.

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1See the comprehensive study of H. Reichardt: Die Friberinnerung als Tragerin kindlicher Selbstbeobachtungen in den ersten Lebensjabren (Halle, 1926).

The part played by the latter is undeniable; but ever since the time of the Greek poets it has been so much emphasized, especially by the productive artist, that it was necessary to give its due to the consciousness or, as I prefer to say, to the conscious artistic will. The question, too, of the greater or lesser part played by the unconscious or conscious cannot be taken as a problem only of the individual artist, though there are certainly types in which one or the other predominates. How could it be possible otherwise that, in spite of all individual differences, two poets like Goethe and Schiller, subject to the same contemporary ideology, could express such contrary views on this question? We can understand, too, that the difference of ideologies would account for the fact that the esthetic philosopher, who is somewhat akin to the scientist, would as a rule agree with the poet here, but — from Aristotle to Baumgarten — regards the poetic art as teachable and learnable. But how can we understand that the singer of the Homeric poems calls to the Muse for inspiration and then produces a masterpiece of political history, in the logical development of which his memory failed him far less than it did in his incidental digressions — which also were perhaps intentional? This example, which is possibly too far away from our theme, is meant to show that the invocation of the Muse, the demand by the poet himself for unconscious inspiration, is perhaps not infrequently a pretext — a poetic licence even — for a more unrestrained expression of himself. If he is inspired by poetic frenzy, he is less responsible for what he says; and, remembering our previous remarks about Shakspere, it seems to me not improbable that the inspired poet portrayed himself in the Danish prince, so that he might with impunity utter high treason. It does not seem to me improbable, for example, that the participation of Hamlet in his entrapping play might be explained from the fact that powerful opponents of Elizabeth did really use the poet as a means to attack her and stir her conscience. In this case we should have a reflection, in Hamlet’s editing of the “play,” of the part which important friends of the poet actually had in his work. Anyhow the invocation of the Muse, which we have seen to be the effect of the guilt-feeling, and the emphasis by the poet himself on the unconscious impulse to create must not blind us to the part played by the conscious in creation; the reference of creation to the unconscious, if nothing else, is a conscious act. If, then, for example, Goethe and Schiller were different artist-types, it might well be that for that very reason the one worked more unconsciously than the other, but also that one exaggerated the part played by the conscious, and the other that played by the unconscious, in his own observation of himself. The over-valuation of the unconscious would then be explained by a more or less strong feeling of guilt, such as is felt by every productive type; and the over-valuation of the conscious would be due to a desire to magnify and exalt oneself —as the other is due to the already mentioned tendency to minimize. From these observations we arrive at a similar view of the value of artistic psychology as we did previously in the case of esthetic as a science. We came to regard esthetic as a scientific ideology which changes with the contemporary artideology so that it justifies, positively or negatively, the dominant art-ideology, as we explained in the illustrative instance of the nature-imitation. Similarly the psychology of the artist that is fashionable at the moment, though naturally more individually conditioned, represents an ideological justification of the creative artist. In our account, which penetrates to the roots, in cultural history and in individual psychology, of the creative feeling of guilt, there was no room for an esthetic which laid down laws for art, nor for an artist’s psychology in the ordinary sense, which would always have to resort to values, whether like Lombroso’s mania theory or the psycho-analytical justification of creative lordliness in the unconscious. We tried to understand all these phenomena, included under the label of “art,” in their psychical and historical genesis, as the expression of the individual’s impulse to create, and to understand this in turn from the ineradicable belief of man in immortality. This impulse, however, produces both the work and the artist, and ultimately the ideologies necessary for artistic creation and for the artist’s psychology — which are neither true nor false —that is, have no eternal validity — but change with the development of collective and individual ideas and thus fulfil their real purpose, their extension to infinity. But the more conscious the creative process becomes in the artist, the more the creative tendency is imperceptibly and unnoticed being pushed back from the work to the artist himself from whom it originated. Only, primitively this self-creative tendency showed itself, as we saw, corporeally in body-ornament, whereas in the modern artist it ends with the psychical willto-experience, his own art-ideology in full. This is, of course, impossible and brings the artist into all the conflicts — which we may describe as neurotic, but which are not any the more intelligible for being so called. For these difficulties of the creative type show also that his true tendency is always towards actual life; as is shown also in the so-called realism or verism of modern art. This, therefore, discloses itself as the counterpart to the tendency, which has been mentioned earlier, to mould life in accordance with an artistic ideology, since the idea is now that art is to be made wholly true to life. But in this wise the boundaries between art and life are obliterated; each is to replace the other, whereas formerly each complemented the other. In both spheres the movement from art to life is clear; but the creative men of our time are not capable of going the whole way and accepting the development of their personality as the truly creative problem. What hinders them is the same individual feeling of guilt which in earlier times was able, owing to the counter-force of religious submissiveness, to work itself out creatively, but nowadays limits both complete artistic creation and complete personality-development. For artistic creation has, in the course of its development, changed from a means for the furtherance of the culture of the community into a means for the construction of personality. But the more successful this is, the greater is the urge of this personality away from art towards life, which yet cannot be fully grasped. Our Western art has thus lost its old function in proportion as this movement (beginning perhaps with the Renaissance) from the collective to the individual increased. But similarly it has had to give up its new function as soon as its purpose of personality-development was attained. This historical process, which we can trace from the Renaissance through the “Sturm und Drang” into Romanticism, has become an individual process which runs its course in the modern artist’s life. The productive individual of today tackles artistic production under the influence, which still operates, of the original art-ideology, which promised immortality to the individual in the form of success and fame, but he does not possess, socially or spiritually, the attitude inherent in that old ideology. In this sense the “art for art’s sake” movement was justified at least psychologically, for art had lost its old collective function and had not yet discovered the new one of personalitydevelopment. Now, however, this last function of art having worked itself out as far as is psychologically possible, the problem of the individual is to put his creative force directly into the service of this formation of personality, without the assistance of art. The more an individual is driven towards real life, the less will traditional art-forms help him — indeed, they have for the most part already been shattered individualistically. Especially in poetry, which of course represents in general this conscious level of artistic creation, this permeation by the personal psychology of the poet and the psychological ideology of our age is almost completed. Even the last element of art which poetry retains, language, is becoming more and more an echo of realistic talk or a psychological expression of intellectual thought, instead of being a creative expression of the spiritual. But the reality which modern art seeks to reproduce cannot be represented in language, and other traditional forms are suited only to the creative form of the spiritual and not to a realistic expression of the actual. That is why the film and talking film have become the most popular art, because this art reproduces the real faithfully, and the more so, the more it progresses. I would not deny, however, that there are still great artists in all spheres of artistic activity, who have succeeded either in preserving the old art tradition and ideology a while longer into our times or have breathed a new spirit into old forms. But in both cases I feel that the modern artist has to buy his success too dearly, since he feels either like a believer among unbelievers or like the founder of a new religion who is persecuted and scorned by the members of the old religion. This comparison with religious conflicts comes naturally to us; for just as there is a continuous increase in the number of the irreligious and at the same time an enhanced need for substitutes for the old belief in the gods, so the art-manias of modern society, with their over-valuing of the artist, indicate a decline of real artistic vigour, which is only speciously covered over by the last flicker of a snobbish enthusiasm. It is certain that artists nowadays do not create for the people, but for a few exclusive groups, particularly of intellectuals who feel themselves artists. With an increasing individualization art-forms also must become more individual so that they suit the ideology of a few small groups, and no attempt to exalt artists into national heroes can concea! the fact that there are ever fewer artists of really national importance and still fewer of international. On the other hand, this individualization of art-forms and art-creation leads not only to the break-up of the collective function of art, but to its democratization, which is the direct opposite of the aristocratic religion of genius that constituted the last effective art-ideology. From the Renaissance on, a man felt himself driven to, but also chosen for, artistic expression; nowadays, with individualism so common, art is looked upon as a means to develop personality. Every strong individuality feels nowadays that a potential artist lies somewhere within him, which is prevented from growth and expression only by the external decay of a materialistic and mechanistic environment, And though it is true that a strong personality is necessary for the creative artist, it is a fatal confusion to assume that every strong personality must express itself artistically if it is to develop. Furthermore, as we have seen, artistic creativity does not, after a point, favour the personality, but impedes it, since it forces on the artist a professional ideology which more and more penetrates the human self and finally absorbs it. It is certainly not, however, merely the outward deprivation (that is, the pressure of a mechanical age) that obstructs the artistic development of modern individuals, but the strong impulse towards life which goes hand in hand with personalitydevelopment and makes the creative will of the individual feel that artistic creation is an unsatisfactory substitute for real life. In other words, the conflict between life and creation, the basic problem of all productive work, has nowadays become a social instead of a psychic conflict. A harmonious reconciliation of an art-ideology with an ideology of practical life is more and more difficult as life becomes more technical and the members of a community become separate individuals. The two masters whom the artist has to serve at the same time, a self-confident productivity and a life of sacrifice, are less and less reconcilable, so that art and life are both dissatisfying, or, rather, the individual attains neither, because he is not satisfied with one and cannot attain both. This is characteristic of the so-called neurotic type, in which I had long ago seen an “ artiste manqué” rather than an undeveloped normal type. The neurotic is himself a symptom of the modern conflict between the individual and society, a conflict which might in other ages have been productively surmounted in artistic creation. Nowadays the old art-ideology is no longer, and the new personality-idea not yet, strong enough to admit of either solution for the individual impulse to create. Everyone suffers — individual, community, and, not least, art as an ideological expression of their interrelation. Everything seems to drive us to the conclusion that we are at one of those crises in human history in which once again we must sacrifice one thing if we want the full enjoyment of another. If we look back at the modern artist-type as we know it, even in biographical form, since Renaissance days, there can be no doubt that the great works of art were bought at the cost of ordinary living. Whatever our attitude towards this fact and interpretation of this fact, it is at least certain that the modern individualist must give up this kind of artistic creation if he is to live as vigorously as is apparently necessary. Not only are the two things incompatible, in terms of soul and of energy, but there seems to be a spiritual law whereby nothing can be wholly won or enjoyed without something being given up or sacrificed for it. From the fabulous ring of Polycrates, who tried to buy his good fortune from heaven, down to the neurotic feeling of guilt, with its apparent self-punishment, we see this compensatory principle operating in the relation of individual to society. The individual, it seems, cannot permanently endure one sort of condition — even if it be happiness — because he immediately loses a part of the full humanity which is needed for his real personality. Where happiness and misery are concerned the individual is clearly controlling his own destiny by meeting good and ill fortune half-way ere it can surprise him. If there are really these two incommensurable magnitudes, such as supreme art and full experience seem to be, the conflict can only end with the surrender of the one to the other. But as long as this involves a feeling of sacrifice, there is no real solution, rather an intensification of the conflict, for the responsibility is always laid on an external deprivation which is to be fought against. Only a full renunciation, such as a few great artists have achieved despite their natural inclinations, can overcome this feeling of sacrifice so that surrender means, not an imposed necessity, but a freely chosen decision. This turningpoint in the life of the individual artist has also become a secular crisis of our age, in which we have to see that the surrender of traditional forms no longer means a loss to us, but a liberation of creative force from the chains of old ideologies. Now, our previous conclusions show that this creative impulse can be set free from artistic ideologies, because it is not irrevocably bound thereto as an art-ideology is obliged to assume. We have seen that the impulse was originally directed towards the body and only gradually was objectified in collective art-forms. On the other hand we see modern individuals, particularly the neurotic, striving once more to direct this creative instinct towards the ego in order to make it more useful and efficient for life. The fact that the neurotic at present fails in face of his problem cannot diminish his pioneer achievement — if he seeks his salvation in artistic creation instead of in the development of his own personality, it is because he is still in the toils of old art-ideologies. The many forms of psycho-therapy, psychoanalysis included, cannot free him from the dilemma, since they either try to restore him to the normal or force him to a false artistry instead of allowing to develop a true form of himself. The new type of humanity will only become possible when we have passed beyond this psycho-therapeutic transitional stage, and must grow out of those artists themselves who have achieved a renunciant attitude towards artistic production. A man with creative power who can give up artistic expression in favour of the formation of personality — since he can no longer use art as an expression of an already developed personality — will remould the self-creative type and will be able to put his creative impulse directly in the service of his own personality. In him the wheel will have turned full circle, from primitive art, which sought to raise the physical ego out of nature, to the voluntaristic art of life, which can accept the psychical ego as a part of the universe. But the condition of this is the conquest of the fear of life, for that fear has led to the substitution of artistic production for life, and to the eternalization of the all-toomortal ego in a work of art. For the artistic individual has lived in art-creation instead of actual life, letting his work live or die on its own account, and has never wholly surrendered himself to life. In place of his own self the artist puts his objectified ego into his work, but though he does not save his subjective mortal ego from death, he yet withdraws himself from real life. And the creative type who can renounce this protection by art and can devote his whole creative force to life and the formation of life will be the first representative of the new human type, and in return for this renunciation will enjoy, in personality-creation and expression, a greater happiness.