اولین سایت نشانه شناسی شوهر آهو خانم

Chapter Twelve

The Artist's Fight With Art

Nous sommes faits pour le dire et non pour l’avoir.

FLAUBERT

The last folk-psychological chapters, in which we have dealt with those cultural ideologies of the various nations and epochs that underlie artistic production, have brought us back to our initial problem —the relation of the artist to the artideology of his time. We began by approaching the problem from the side of the psychology of the artist and there said that the creative personality makes use of the art-ideology which his culture supplies; but the subsequent discussion of cultural questions led to another and almost contrary view. For, from that point of view, the individual, however powerfully his personality may develop, appeared more as an instrument, which the community uses for the expression of its own cultural ideology. This is not by any means a new conception, for it played the chief réle in the so-called “ environment” theories of genius; but the fresh problem that we wish to discuss here is the double attitude of the personal artist to the prevailing art-ideology, which, on the one hand, he uses for the justification of his individual creativity, but, on the other, opposes with all the vigour of his personality. This conflict between artist and art is quite as important for the understanding of the creative process as is the positive influence of the cultural art-ideology on the individual work; it has its social analogue in the defensive reaction of the individual to collective influences of every sort, and its biological basis in the conflict between individuation and generation, from which the individual can only to a limited extent escape. Thus the ideological art-will of form and the human artwilling of the artist stand in opposition, and the work of art, which results from this conflict, differs in the different epochs of cultural development according to the strength of the personal or that of the collective will. Let us take an example of a general ideology which is not only a strong one but also a pretty rigid one. The art of Egypt, as Miss Margaret Murray has well shown,: left almost no freedom of artistic invention. But this does not imply that an Egyptian sculptor was not an artist: he was just as much an artist as the Gothic stone-mason who could obtain the most extraordinary esthetic effects from his single figure. Yet Egyptian art is the outstanding instance of a rigid art-ideology in which all rules of proportion and representation were fixed once and for all. As Diodorus explained, Egyptian forms were not settled, like the Greek, by external appearance, and consequently Egyptian artists are not classified according to their artistic ideas, but according to the material in which they worked. Nor indeed was the sculptor’s work valued as such, but only as part of a whole building, in which it fulfilled a definite purpose. And Miss Murray regards just this external lack of freedom as the very thing that aroused an individual ambition, in creating within the limits of a rigid and obligatory framework. But this conflict between outward and inward freedom is just what we mean by the conflict between art and the artist; indeed, we have been led to conclude, from far more general considerations, that this is one of the essential dynamisms of all artistic creation. If we take Greek art as a second example, we have here the same conflict between art and the artist — not so much individually as nationally. The classic period of Greek art, from the Persian Wars to the time of Alexander, shows us the highest and purest expression of Hellenism, freed from every cinder of Oriental influence. In other words, here it was not an individual but a whole people that in self-dependent unity completely mastered an art-form taken from without, and impressed upon it the stamp of their own national peculiarity.

___________

1 Egyptian Sculpture (London, 1929).

Greek art, moreover, stands so high, not only because it is so greatly art, so beautiful, but because it is so Greek. Further, if we look at the Renaissance, we find there, in the individualism that worked counter to the communal ideology of Christianity, a victory not only over the Nordic Gothic, but equally over the Classical (that is, Greek) art-style—a victory wrested by the strong personality of Renaissance man, who infused his individual dynamism into both the Greek ideal of beauty and the abstract forms of Gothic. Renaissance art does not owe its special place to the fact that it brought back the Classical form into use. What we admire in it is the life which was put into it by a dynamic personality — for instance, by Michelangelo, who represents in his work an inner conflict between pagan and Christian tendencies, and in whom the Renaissance not only was completed, but also finished." Then comes Baroque, arising out of the victory of a Church become worldly over the Nordic Reformation; and in the rebuilding of Italian churches, as in other things, the Spanish Jesuits are credited with playing the leading part.” In Baroque, pagan Renaissance and Christian Gothic are both suffocated under the dominant splendour of the temporal Church. Rococo, finally, is the defeat of Church Baroque by the French spirit, and so on. Thus the great collective ideologies of art, which we call styles, also show us the conflict between a new-born ideology (religious, national, or individual — that is, of genius) and an old one — ending in the defeat of the latter — as the principle of development. This struggle of world-views, which is represented microcosmically by the conflict of the artist against art, undoubtedly powerfully forwarded by the strong artistic individualities and leads to the triumph of a new style.

__________

1E. Lucka describes this conflict between Renaissance and Gothic in his Michelangelo. Ein Buch uber den Genius (Berlin, 1930).

2 Cf. the latest account in L. Collison-Morley: Italy after the Renaissance. Decadence and Display in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1930). Cf. also the earlier accounts of this period, which is so important for the history of art, in W. Weisbach: Der Barock und die Kunst der Gegenreformation (Berlin, 1921), and Wolfflin: Renaissance und Barock.

But the beginning of the movement is cultural and not individual, collective and not personal — only, through his inner conflict, the artist gains the courage, the vigour, and the foresight to grasp the impending change of attitude before others do so, to feel it more intensely, and to shape it formally. But he must do something more than gradually liberate himself from the earlier ideologies that he has hitherto taken as his pattern; in the course of his life (generally at its climax) he must undergo a much harder conflict and achieve a much more fateful emancipation: he must escape as well from the ruling ideology of the present, which he has himself strengthened by his own growth and development, if his individuality is not to be wholly smothered by it. This, however, is only so in the case of artists in individualistic ages, and even there only great artists, whose greatness consists precisely in this reaching out beyond themselves, beyond the ideology which they have themselves fostered. They must ultimately, so to say, carve their own individuality out of the collective ideology that prevails and that they themselves have accepted, like the sculptor who carves his figures out of the raw stone. In this self-representation he seeks, indeed, to make himself individually eternal, but the immediate cause is the impulse to self-preservation from complete absorption of the ego in the collective or of the individual in the genus. This battle for liberation from art, which has to be fought out again and again by every artist, received cultural expression in the Renaissance, in which the individualist artist-type saved himself, by the concept of genius, from threatened suffocation by Gothic and Classical. He had, indeed, to accept and employ the ideal forms which are born of the primal human confict, if only that he might assert himself positively as artist; but the cultural significance of the much-admired Renaissance lies not in the Classical form — which was developed to a higher level in Greece — but in this individual winning through, which equally raises it above the anonymous Gothic.

The further this assertion of the individualist type — as man or as artist — goes, and the less capable the collective ideologies are of carrying it (especially in the case of religion), the more internal the struggle of the cultures becomes, and the great artist finally has to carry it personally, in artistic development and in human suffering. The essence of the artistic type lies therefore in this, that he can pass through his individual struggle, the conflict between individual and genus, between personal and collective. immortality, in an ideological form, and that the peculiar quality of this conflict compels him, or enables him, to use an artistic ideology for the purpose. For, as we have seen, the same fundamental conflict may, with a different attitude, lead to the individual’s resolving the inner dualism by means of a scientific or a political ideology. If we ask what particular cast in the individual settles whether the personal conflict shall be fought in terms of this ideology or that, we can only find the answer by continuing to use the comparative method that we have followed hitherto. In other words, the artist, like art, is not to be comprehended through a specialized study of creative personality or of the esthetic standards of art-ideology, but only by a combination of the two and by other comparative methods. That is, we cannot understand the artist by a purely individual psychology — without taking account of the collective art-ideology— nor the development and changes of the latter without the psychology of the artist and the primal conflict which lies at its root and which is the cause equally of art and of artists. Nor can we understand the development of this general human conflict and particularly of artistic creation without noting how, and why, the same basic struggle is passed through in other cases in terms of scientific, political, or other ideologies. To understand this ideologizing of personal conflicts _which in a greater or lesser degree affects all choice of and all practice of a calling *— we must return to the most general principles of the development of personality, various other aspects of which I have discussed elsewhere.’

___________

1 See the chapter: ‘‘ Vocation and Talent,’ in my Modern Education.

The human individual must have at his disposal from the start some sort of ideology, even if of the most primitive kind (such as the notion of good and evil), not only that he may find his place in the society which is built up on these ideas, but also that he may find relief from the inner conflicts which would otherwise compel him to create for himself some ideology for the objectification of his psychic tensions. This ideologization of inner conflicts manifests itself in the individual in a form which psycho-analysis has called that of “ identification ” — with parents, teachers, and other ideal patterns — without being able to explain the process thereby. I have shown in another place that the motive of these identifications is the individual’s root fear of isolation, and that their result is that the individual masters his conflict himself, independently of the persons who mediate and represent these ideologies. But this inward independence of teachers and educators as such, which is gained in the first instance by accepting the collective ideology that they offer, turns —usually about the time of puberty — against these collective ideologies themselves, under which the growing individual feels just as dependent and as restricted as he had previously been vis-a-vis their individual representatives. This liberation of the ego, as we should expect, occurs in the artist also, but with the difference that in his case no time is lost in taking up the artistic ideology, in preference to the general social. But this brings us back to the question: what is it that favours such a preference for the artistic ideologies in particular individuals and not in others? To make any progress on this question we must state the problem more narrowly, for we must remember that the general social ideology is made a specific in other people besides the artist, by their choice and practice of professions, so that the turn from general to special ideology is not a specifically artistic problem, but one of vocational psychology.

____________

1Gestaltung und Ausdruck der Persinlichkeit (1928), and also the chapter on ‘Self and Ideal" in Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit (1929).

As to this, I will refer the reader to what I have said in other works already mentioned, and only emphasize, in the present context, the formulation there proposed, which is that, compared with the average professional man, the artist has, so to say, a hundred-per-cent vocational psychology. That is (as I have said earlier in an introductory fashion), the creative type nominates itself at once as an artist (or, in certain circumstances, as scientist or otherwise) — a periphrasis which we are now in a position to replace by the formula that in the artist-type the creative urge is constantly related, ideologically, to his own ego, or at any rate that this is so in a higher degree and fuller measure than in the average man, so that one can say of the artist that he does not practise his calling, but zs it, himself, represents it ideologically. For whereas the average man uses his calling chiefly as a means to material existence, and psychically only so far as to enable him to feel himself a useful member of human society — more or less irrespective of what his calling is—the artist needs his calling for his spiritual existence, just as the early cultures of mankind could not have existed and developed without art. For the artist, therefore, his calling is not a means of livelihood, but life itself; and this explains not only the difficulties of his existence, since his main object cannot be the earning of money, but his struggles in love and life, which in the productive type spring from the impulse to create, and not vice versa. This conflict arises from an intensification in him of the general human dualism, but it is soon transformed from the purely dynamic conflict between impulse and will into an ideological conflict between art and the artist. The first stage in the growth of an artist is that which we have described as his “ nomination ” and which marks tke subordination of the individual to one of the prevailing art-ideologies, this usually showing itself in the choice of some recognized master as the ideal pattern. In doing so, he becomes the representative of an ideology, and at first his individuality vanishes, until, later, at the height of his achievement, he strives once more to liberate his personality, now a mature personality, from the bonds of an ideology which he has himself accepted and helped to form. This whole process of liberation from a personal or ideal identification is so particularly intense and therefore difficult in the artist (and the productive type generally), not only because he has a stronger personality, but because this needs stronger identification for its artistic ideologizing; the process of liberation being thus particularly complex, and exposing the artist to those dangerous crises which threaten his artistic development and his whole life. These conflicts, which the “madness ” theory of Lombroso and the pathological literature based on it try to explain rationalistically as neurosis, can only be understood ideologically; and when we so regard them, our insight into them is the deeper. In this creative conflict it is not only the positive tendency to individual self-liberation from ideologies once accepted and now being overcome that plays a great part. There is also the creative guilt-feeling, and this opposes their abandonment and seeks to tie down the individual in loyalty to his past. This loyalty again is itself opposed by a demand for loyalty to his own self-development, which drives him onward, even to strive beyond his own ego and artistic personality. So the struggle of the artist against art is really only an ideologized continuation of the individual struggle against the collective; and yet it is this very fact of the ideologization of purely psychical conflicts that marks the difference between the productive and the unproductive types, the artist and the neurotic; for the neurotic’s creative power, like the most primitive artist’s, is always tied to his own self and exhausts itself in it, whereas the productive type succeeds in changing this purely subjective creative process into an objective one, which means that through ideologizing it he transfers it from his own self to his work. The artist is helped, moreover, by another dynamic difference which not only enables him to construct a valuable ideology but to transform it into actual artistic achievement. A deep study of neurosis has shown me that a characteristic quality of both the productive and the thwarted, marking off these excess and deficiency types from the average, is an over-strong tendency towards totality of experience. The so-called adaptability of the average man consists in a capacity for an extensive partial experience such as is demanded by our everyday life, with its many and varied problems. The nonconforming type tends to concentrate its whole personality, its whole self, on each detail of experience, however trivial or insignificant; but as this is not only practically impossible but psychically painful (because its effect is to bring out fear), this type protects itself from a complete self-exhaustion by powerful inner restraints. Now, the neurotic stops at this point in the process, thus cutting himself off from both the world and experience, and, thus faced with the proposition “All or nothing,” chooses the nothing. The artist, however, here also, in spite of many difficulties and struggles, finds a constructive, a middle way: he avoids the complete loss of himself in life, not by remaining in the negative attitude, but by living himself out entirely in creative work. This fact is so obvious that, when we intuitively admire some great work of art, we say the whole artist is in it and expresses himself in it. This, however, holds good for different kinds of artists in different degrees —a point to which we shall return later. Some artists persistently partialize themselves and thus leave a greater complete work unaccomplished; others pour themselves out wholly in every partial work. The same seems to be true of whole periods, or rather epochs, of style, which are, after all, only the expression of psychical and spiritual ideologies. The best example of a complete style seems to me to be Gothic, not only since it strives after an all-embracing whole, but because, more perhaps than any other style-tendency, it expresses, and insists on expressing, the spiritual-in-itself. This, however, is no longer the purely abstract spirituality of primitive art, but a world-embracing “ pantheistic ” dynamic of the spiritual. Hence, as Worringer rightly saw, it is not merely “a phenomenon of its age, but the great irreconcilable antithesis to the Classical, which is not limited to a single period of style, but reveals itself in ever new clothing throughout the centuries.” * Now, wherever one manages to find this opposition of Classical and Gothic, it seems to me to correspond to that eternal dualism which lies at the root of all art and all artistic creation, and precisely because it is something inherent in the individual. I believe that I have found one of the fundamental aspects of this primary individual dualism in the total-partial conflict, and in this sense Gothic would be the total and Classical the partial —a partial, it is true, which always gives the whole in the detail, the psychic dynamism expressing itself esthetically as the beauty of proportion which was the Classical ideal. Gothic, on the other hand, does not try to symbolize the whole in a part, but rather aims at a dynamic picture of the whole in its actual totality. In what we call Classical or Gothic, then, these two spiritual principles have been zsthetically objectified, and each presents itself to the individual artist as an external compulsion of form which he must accept as artist but fight against as individual. But we have also gained some further insight into the inner processes of the creative artist, which make it possible for him fully to express his own personality at the same time that it yields precedence to the art-ideology of the work. We must, further, return to the difference between a total and a partial experience, which is basic for the attitude of all such individuals. In the ceaseless struggle for liberation of the self from the moral, social, and esthetic ideologies and the people who represent them, the individual goes through a disjunctive process of which I have regarded the process of birth as the prototype. But the process, though similar in principle to, is not a simple repetition of, the trauma of birth; it is, broadly, the attempt of the individual to gain a freedom from dependence of any sort upon a state from which it has grown. According to the stage of development, this separation will take the most varied forms and symbols, whereas the basic conflict is always the same: the overcoming of previous supporting egos and ideologies from which the individual has to free himself according to the measure and speed of his own growth, a separation which is so hard, not only because it involves persons and ideas that one reveres, but because the victory is always, at bottom and in some form, won over a part of one’s own ego.

_________

1 Formprobleme der Gothik, which lays even more stress on the racial influence than Worringer's latest work, Griechentum und Gotik (Munich, 1928).

We may remark here that every production of a significant artist, in whatever form, and of whatever content, always reflects more or less clearly this process of self-liberation and reveals the battle of the artist against the art which expresses a now surmounted phase of the development of his ego. In some artists the representation of a process of personal development seems to be the chief aim of their work, by which I do not mean the accidental biographical material, though this is itself (as we said above) an objective expression of the same inner conflict. Finally, there are artists, especially among the poets, for whom not only is this self-representation the essence of their work, but who are conscious to a very considerable extent of the process and have studied it “ philosophically.” Goethe and Nietzsche are perhaps the most conspicuous examples of this type, which is becoming more and more common nowadays and in which we can notice an ever-increasing preponderance of the psychologically disintegrating over the artistically formative ego. This process of the increasing extension of consciousness in humanity, which psycho-analysis has fostered so enormously in the last decades — but not entirely to the advantage of mankind as a whole — was prophesied by me in my Kénstler in 1905 (at the time of my first acquaintance with Freud) as likely to be the beginning of a decay of art. In this early work I not only foretold the collapse of art through the increasing consciousness of the artist, but observed and established the manner of it in the nascent state.

My observations of those days seem to me to have been very emphatically confirmed by the later development of the problem of art and the artist; but I can now give it a better psychological foundation, and so perhaps a more hopeful future. The question how it is that the great artist can express his whole personality in his work and yet subordinate it to his art-ideology is only to be understood, as I remarked, where the conflict of the partial and the total has come out at a particularly happy issue. I spoke of the constant detaching of the artist from earlier ideologies, which on the one side correspond to a separation of the individual from a great whole, and on the other to the extrusion of worn-out parts of the ego. This double separation of the ego from the collectivity and of part of the ego from its totality includes the two fundamental life-processes: individuation on the one hand, and procreation or generation on the other. Now, these fundamental processes, as is well known, are not sexual, but occur at a very low biological level, before the differentiation of the sexes, as cell-division. They survive, however, in rudimentary form even in the highly differentiated sex-life of humanity and thus continue to bulk large and to matter deeply in such highly complicated processes as the development of personality and the creative impulse which rises from it. At the highest level of human personality we have a process which psycho-analysis calls (without explaining its deeper biological and human aspects) identification. This identification is the echo of an original identity, not merely of child and mother, but of everything living — witness the reverence of the primitive for animals. In man, identification aims at re-establishing a lost identity: not an identity which was lost once and for all, phylogenetically through the differentiation of the sexes, or ontologically in birth, but an identity with the cosmic process, which has to be continually surrendered and continually re-established in the course of selfdevelopment. In the attempt at this re-establishment the two types with which we are dealing, the “ totalist ” and the “ partialist,” diverge fundamentally. The average type of a welladapted “ partial” being can feel himself as part of a greater whole — in religious communion, social and vocational grouping, or family feeling —and thus find his identity with the world. The “total” type, on the other hand, is set on maintaining himself as a whole and on absorbing the world as part of himself. In so far the artist and the neurotic are alike, that in contrast to the average man they have a far wider, more “ magic” feeling of the world, which is gained, however, at the cost of an egocentric attitude towards it. The neurotic stops at the point where he includes the world within himself and uses this as a protection against the real claims of life, though the price is paid for this protection in the feeling of world-sorrow which has to be taken in with the rest. The artist, too, has this feeling of Weltschmerz in common with the handicapped neurotic; but here the paths diverge, since the artist can use this introverted world not only as a protection but as a material; he is thus never wholly oppressed by it — though often enough profoundly depressed — but can penetrate it by and with his own personality and then again thrust it from him and re-create it from himself. This extrusion is a process both of begetting and of bearing, not at the level of sexual differentiation of male and female, but at a deeper and more fundamental level: the liberation of the individual from the burden of generation by repulsion of part of the ego, which is felt as a relief and not as a loss. The primitive process of biological propagation by fission of a part from the whole is thus ideologically macrocosmized in the artist, and he puts forth into his work not only a personal part of his ego but also a part that includes either the whole world or at least an important portion of it. This representation of a part of the world or of nature in his work is not the result of an esthetic impulse to imitate or of technical capacity, but the precondition of all creation. If the artist had not already absorbed the world within himself on account of his emotional needs he would not have the urge to throw this cosmic self off in creation and so save himself again as an individual. In this super-individual, almost cosmic, creative process all the purely human factors — love, sexual relations, social duties — throng in to hinder or help, so that a psychological cast is given to the conflict (though this is by no-means as important as artists themselves feel and as biographers and analytical psychographers still would have us believe). Particularly, the relation of the creative artist to women has been, ever since Homer invoked the Greek Muse to help him, a favourite theme of rather superficial essays. For the artist to project on to the beloved woman his bisexual creative urge — of begetting and of bearing, or of self-begetting and selfrebirth, which he has fused into one — is not only his perfect right but a necessity of life for him. And that the biographer who confines himself to describing the external life-course of his hero is forced to give the Muse the position which she had in the life and consciousness of the artist is also quite natural. But for psychologists to believe that they have therefore understood anything about the creative process or even about a work of art is a presumption which has prevented a right view of very complex facts. This does not touch psycho-analysis directly, but it does so indirectly; for though it does not regard the Muse whom the poet sings of as the real source of creation, yet in the so-called “deep ” psychological substitution of the mother for her it postulates an equally external and less credible motivation in place of the inner motive, which is beyond its reach. I am of course the last person to deny the influence of birth or of the mother, after my works on incest and on the trauma of birth, but the point is whether we take a concrete view as psycho-analysts still do (and many poets perhaps with them), or regard it only as typical and ideological, making the mother the symbol of the eternal separation and rebirth which is ever repeated in the development of personality."

_____________

1C. G. Jung in his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912) has insisted, against Freud, on the symbolic significance of the mother, though one-sidedly, with emphasis on passive rebirth and without recognition of the active self-creative force.

When once it has become such a symbol, the idea may be easily transferred in the course of life to another person, especially if the latter is identified with the ideological ego of the artist, in the same way as the mother was identified with the biological. In this sense the artist is both practically and theoretically justified vis-a-vis the psychologist when he ascribes more influence on his creativity to his master or his later Muse than to his mother or father, to whom he owes his existence, but not his artistic development. For we owe our artistic development, as we do every other form of personality-development, to none other than ourselves and the conditions of our time, though we always tend, and sometimes are driven, to ascribe to other people not only the development and further growth of ourselves, but of our work and creativity. This is because of the creative guilt-feeling, which is a problem I have dealt with elsewhere in its psychological significance.” At present we are more interested in the artistic consequences and the biographical precipitates, which are inextricably connected. One of the radical mistakes made by most ordinary biographies and by psychography is the notion of a parallelism between experience and creation. This certainly exists, if not causally, at least phenomenally connected. Quite as important, however, or even more so, is the opposition of life and creation, which has been emphasized, but not understood, since this is impossible without taking account of the creative feeling of guilt. It is significant that many of the greatest artists (though by no means all) have a strong bourgeois tinge, and Kretschmer, in his study of men of genius, declared that genius needs a strong touch of conventionality. Many whose work is of the highest value and who live wholly in their art lead a very simple, ordinary life, and this purely human side often comes to the surface in their work, in contrast to the divine quality of genius. The Muse, too, whose idealization by the poet himself and whose apotheosis in the mother-principle by the psychographer look so fine, often comes off badly enough in real life.

_________

1 Wabrheit und Wirklichkeit (chapter on “Creation and Guilt’’)

Not only that she has to endure, even enjoy, the moods of the divinely inspired master, but she very often becomes for the artist a symbol of an ideology that is no longer adequate, which she may have helped him to create, but which he has now to overcome and throw overboard. In that case we have that conflict in the artist, with which the psycho-analyst so often deals — since the artist is both unable to create without her and prevented by her presence from any further creation. His inclination may be to let her go, along with the earlier ideology, but his guilt-feeling will not allow it. This feeling is, however, not only ethical and concerned with the loved companion, but inner and psychical, since it concerns his own development and his loyalty to himself. Not only will the artist who finds a creative issue from this conflict show its traces in his work, but his work will often enough be purely the expression of the conflict itself, whose solution has to be justified as much as the failure to reach a solution would have to be. As the artist, during this process of liberation from the ideology, has to include in what he surrenders the person or persons who were connected with it, he has to justify this action, which is usually done by magnification. That is, he will either really create something greater, in order to justify his action, or in the effort to create this greater he will be impeded by a still more enhanced feeling of guilt. In the first case he will use the guilt-feeling directly for creation; in the second even his previous creative power will be impeded. But if the artist takes the step forward in a purely ideological sense, without the need of concrete figures for the resolution of his creative conflict, his tendency will be to Jessen his work, even if in fact it has become greater. This minimizing tendency also is due to the feeling of guilt, but, on the other hand, this has already worked itself out creatively in the artist, and it is only humbler second thoughts that are obliged to lessen the splendour of creation. A splendid instance of this is Rodin’s life-work; no outsider, regarding it uncritically, would imagine that in masterpieces like the “ Thinker” or even the mythological groups he sees only fragments of a nevercompleted work, called by Rodin himself the “ Porte d’ Enfer.” Even though the artist was convinced and permeated by the greatness of his work, and expressed it directly in works like the “ Hand of God” or the “ Thinker,” the aim which he set up and never attained of a vast and ideal achievement (on a par with the whole creation) represents a minimizing of the actually achieved, only intelligible by the creative feeling of guilt. This type — of which Goethe also is an instance, with his Faust trailing ever in his hands as his magnum opus by the side of which everything else was meant but as “ fragments ” of one great confession — has its opposite in another type of artist, who not only gives and fulfils himself in every work, but whose whole production is one vast justification of his impulse to create. Of this type Shakspere seems to me to be the best instance —and precisely because we know so little of his actual life and even doubt his authorship. Shakspere’s work and the biographical material which has been gathered about the Stratford butcher’s son have just as much psychological connexion as have the Homeric poems and our scanty information about the blind Ionian singer. Even if we did discover that Shakspere and Homer * were neither of them responsible for the work assigned to them, yet the psychological types thus designated are just as much masterpieces of a people’s creation as are the poems and dramas which bear their name. I mean that Shakspere’s work requires an author who because of his creative impulse would give up home and family and all the life of an ordinary citizen in order to justify a foolish and irrational migration to the metropolis by brilliant achievement there. His success is the measure of his greatness. But even if an English noble or gentleman were the author of the dramas, I am sure that folk-fantasy would have been compelled to invent such antecedents for him— which means, would have invented a Shakspere who happened to exist in Stratford or was transplanted there.

__________

1Jt is worth mentioning that a life of Shakspere by Nicholas Rowe (2709) is the first modern poet biography, and also characteristic that a life of Homer (probably the pseudo-Hesiodic life) provided the pattern. Thus fictitious biography, which essentially constructs the life from the work, is the real ancestor of all biographical literature.

The same has happened with greater worldhistorical ideas, such as Christianity, which certainly needed a Jesus from Nazareth, and it can hardly be chance that the greatest creations of the human spirit, such as the New Testament, the Homeric poems, and Shakspere’s plays, should, on the one hand, have been centres of academic disputes as to authorship and, on the other, should have inspired the imagination of whole centuries in favour of one author. Even Goethe, who could hardly dispute his own authorship, felt himself compelled to describe his whole creation as a collective work which only happened to bear his name. This feeling of the poet that he is the mouthpiece of his age or, for that matter, of all humanity, explains not only why he has to ascribe his work to a Muse and thus connect it with his personal life and give it concrete form; it also throws a light on the fact that, and the degree to which, the art-ideology affects the poet’s life. There is thus an influence of personal experience on creation and a reciprocal influence of creation on experience, which not only drives the artist externally to a Bohemian existence, but makes his inner life characterologically a picture of his artideology and thus once more calls forth the individual self in protest against this domination by that ideology. Let us take the case of Shakspere once more. His life may just as well have been invented to suit his work as it may have been lived by the poet in a deeper sense to suit his ideology. Paradoxical as this sounds, yet we quite habitually in simpler circumstances take this adaptation of a man to his profession as selfevident. Between a night-watchman who has to adapt his external life very differently from that of his fellows and the poet whose personal life is an ideological expression of his artistic production, there is a difference only of degree, not of quality. When modern biography and psychography attempt to explain a man’s work and production from his personal experience, the effort must remain not only incomplete, but also superficial, as long as the influence of the art-ideology on life and experience is not included. But this is not as simple as it is with the nightwatchman and will not fit the same stereotyped formula, as most even analytical psychographers try to make it do. For the impulse to create puts itself into life and into work alike, and the great artist will in himself experience his own creation at the same time as in his work he will shape what he has experienced: for here too form and content are once more one, as they were in primitive art. This brings us to the real problem of biography. Biography is as little an objective science as history is, even when it endeavours to be so, and would never fulfil its purpose if it were. The formative process of the biography begins long before the actual attempt to picture the life of the artist; after all, the main purpose is the picture of the creative personality and not merely of the man of actuality, and the two portraits can naturally never be wholly identical. The effort to make them so is, however, the avowed or unavowed tendency not only of the biographer, but of the artist himself and of his public, present and future. If there is plenty of biographical material, as in the case of Goethe, we do look in his life for the experience which would explain his work. But we never find it; though masses of material are accumulated in a futile attempt to find an experience which can explain the creative work, it cannot as a matter of principle be intelligible on that basis alone. In other cases, of which we have cited Shakspere as the type, creative biography has an easier task in constructing a life to fit the work. But always the starting-point in the formation of a biography is the individual’s ideologizing of himself to be an artist, because thenceforward he must live that ideology, so far as reality allows him to do so; and so far as it does not, the artist makes for himself the experiences that he needs, searches for them and gives them forms in the sense of his ideology. Nowadays we quite naturally give the lives of certain types of poet a definite dramatic and novelistic form,’ since this is the only form adapted to the shaping of a biographical legend. That in every age the poet’s life should be revalued and re-edited to suit the ideology of that age is only natural, though this does not exactly lessen the complexity of the problem. Before we deal with this process of biographical legendformation, which is set going by the artist’s own ideologizing experience, in terms of its effect on success and permanent reputation, we must see how the process bears on our immediate question, that of the artist versus his art. With the partial experience of his own artistic ideology the artist is in conflict a priori, fighting for his life, and in the event (as we have shown) he achieves the compromise in his ideological experience which allows him to enjoy both his life and his productivity, instead of having to attain the one at the cost of the other. On the other hand, we must never forget that creation is itself an experience of the artist’s, perhaps the most intense possible for him or for mankind in general. Nor is this true only of the unique instant and act of creation; for during the creation itself the work becomes experience and as such has to be surmounted by new actuality of extension and formation. This cumulative dynamic character of creativity, which marks it as an experience, can as a rule be reconstructed only genetically, since it is rarely the object of direct observation. Hence it is more easily observed in the arts of time and rhythm like poetry and music, which in their temporal succession and extension often show the development of this vehement dynamism during the process of creation, while we canNot see it in the fine arts except in sketches and studies. But it is almost typical for great artists that at the beginning of a work they are not quite clear about its formation, workingout, and completion; even in spite of a clear original conception, the work turns during production into something other than the artist had originally planned.

__________

1 For the predecessors of this modern mania see Helene Goldschmidt: Das deutsche Kiinstlerdrama von Goethe bis R. Wagner (Weimar, 1925); Erna Levy: Die Gestalt des Kainstlers im deutschen Drama (Berlin, 1929); Kate Laserstein: Die Gestalt des bildenden Kénstlers in der Dichtung (Berlin, 1930). For Ibsen, who pictured the modern artist type, see later,

This process also is only intelligible through a realization of the specific dynamism of creativity, which must operate on the potential life plane if it is to liberate his energy and not consume it, as we have explained in the case of play. We have said above that the artist-type, with his tendency to totality of experience, has an instinct to flee from life into creation, since there to a certain extent he can be sure of matters remaining under his own control; but this totality tendency itself, which is characteristic of the really productive type, in the end takes hold of his creation also, and this totality of creation then threatens to master the creative artist as effectually as the totality of experience. In short, the “totality function” of the artist-type in the end makes all productivity, whether in itself or in a particular work, as much a danger for the creative ego as was the totality of experience from which he took refuge in his art. Here the conflict of the artist versus art becomes a struggle of the artist against his own creation, against the vehement dynamism of this totality-tendency which forces him to complete self-surrender in his work. How the artist escapes this new danger, after he had previously avoided that of the total experience, is one of the obscurest and most interesting problems of the psychology of creative artists. There will of course be special modes of escape for each artist or artist-type, which are decided for him by his personality and circumstances. But I think that certain ways are universally accessible, of which I will mention a few that are typical. One means of salvation from this total absorption in creation is, as in ordinary life, the division of attention among two or more simultaneous activities; and it is interesting in this connexion to note that work on the second activity is begun during work on the first just at the moment when the latter threatens to become all-absorbing. The second work is then often an antithesis in style and character to the first, though it may be a continuation at another level. This can, of course, only happen with artists who have various interests and capacities; thus Goethe indulged his scientific, and Schiller his philosophical, studies at periods apparently of weakness in poetic creativity, but really, according to our view, of danger to the poet when he had to find respite from that creativity. If a second sphere of interest of this sort— which is frequently a second form of artistic achievement —is lacking, periods of disappointment, depression, and even illness are likely to occur, which are then not so much a consequence of exhaustion as a flight from it. This brings us to a second means of escape for the artist from his own creation, which in this case is not put on to another level, but simply set aside for the time being. The creative process, with its object of totality, always contains in any case a time conflict, which expresses itself in the difficulty the artist finds both in beginning and in finishing his work. Just as he can escape from threatened domination in the midst of his creation, so he can hold back instinctively as long as possible from the beginning of it; but this so overstrains the inner dynamism that delays of various sorts must be intercalated later, so that he may not be carried off by the violence of the productive experience. The inhibitions, then, of which most artists complain, both during creation and in its intervals, are the ego’s necessary protections against being swallowed by creativity, as is the case, for that matter, with the inhibitions of normal or neurotic types. This form of protection may naturally in some cases have a disturbing (pathogenic) effect. But the retardation of, or refusal to complete, some work may have another, deeper reason. The restraint which holds the totality-tendency in check is basically fear, fear of life and of death, for it is precisely this that determines the urge to eternalize oneself in one’s work. Not only, however, has the completed work the value of an eternity symbol, but the particular creative process, if it involves an exhaustive output, is by the same token a symbol of death, so that the artist is both driven on by the impulse to eternalization and checked by the fear of death. I have elsewhere shown that this restriction between the two poles of fear —fear of life and fear of death —is one of the fundamental processes of life; the artist seems to experience it in a similar intensified fashion to the neurotic, but with the difference that in the neurotic the fear of life predominates and so checks all expression in life, while the artist-type can overcome this fear in his creation and is driven by the fear of death to immortalize himself. This conflict of the artist, first against his art and then against the dynamism of his own work and finally against its actual accomplishment, finds a peculiar expression in modern artists — clearest perhaps in the poets, but unmistakable also in plastic and pictorial artists. This is the diversion of creation into knowledge, of shaping of art into science and, above all, psychology. Naturally, spiritual self-representation in the work is always one essential element in artistic creativity and in art, but it is only in modern artists that it becomes a conscious, introspective, psychological self-analysis. But we are not concerned with those artists of the day whose work claims to represent a psychological confession as such and no more — though in point of fact it zs something more. Here we are discussing the far more interesting half-way type, which, whether in the course of an ensemble of creation or even within the compass of a single work, passes suddenly from the formative artist into the scientist, who wishes —really he cannot help himself —to establish, or, rather, cannot help trying to establish, psychological laws of creation or esthetic effect. This diversion of artistic creation from a formative into a cognitive process seems to me to be another of the artist’s protections against his complete exhaustion in the creative process. We have here the ideological conflict of beauty and truth, which we have already studied from the general cultural point of view, reappearing as a personal conflict in the creative artist. But we also better understand how far the artistic form is in itself a necessary protection of the artist against the dynamism of a conflict which would destroy him if he failed to put it into form. In this sense, in the need, that is forced on him by that dynamism, for putting order, meaning, and control into the psychic chaos into which his totality-urge drives him, the artist, even if he is never conscious of the fact, is always a bit of a scientist. Conscious reflection about creativity and its conditions and about all the esthetic laws of artistic effect is only a continuation of the process at a fully conscious level which ensues whenever the artistic formative power is inadequate to control the chaos — that is, when, instead of being a protection, it becomes a danger to the survival of the ego. Seen thus, the development of modern art and the modern artist is a manifestation of the same general development of Western art-ideology, as this resulted from the Greek conflict between the notions of beauty and truth. There is a rescue of the immortal soul by the esthetic idea of beauty, and a controlling of the psychic chaos by the artistic form, with its eternal material. This was followed by the disruption of the form by individuality in the modern genius-art, the overflow of the ego beyond the form in a romantic “ Sturm und Drang,” and finally the flight from that loss of the ego which would be involved in a total creation or a total experience, into psychology. This cultural development-struggle between art and the ideologies of art has to be gone through by modern artists — burdened as they are with the whole weight of Western culture, both in their personal development and in their individual growth as artists — in themselves and with themselves. And if one of the leading art-historians of the day, Worringer, some ten years ago delivered before the Munich Goethe Society a funeral oration over modern Expressionism, contrasting our generation’s will-to-art with its formative Capacity, we must balance this view with some understanding of the artists’ struggle if we are to avoid passing prematurely from the establishment of a fact to its valuation. Worringer is certainly right * in his warning to modern artists to be satisfied with the last flicker and echo on the fringes of our culture and to avoid the great mistake of promising us, because we Possess an in creased insight into the essence of what art was at creative periods, an equal increase in the decaying vigour of our own uncreative epoch.

__________

1 Kanstlerische Zeitfragen (Munich, 1921).

That is easier said than done; not because real resignation is always harder than a struggle, but because the problem that is touched is the deepest problem of artistic creation, and it can never be solved by conscious deliberation and decision, however correct and sincere. As long as there is in man an impulse to create, he seeks and finds artistic expression in the most varied ideologies, and yet these have always been in some way traditional and collective. Nietzsche was therefore quite right when, long ago, in Human All-too-human he warned us against “revolution” in art and saw in its break with tradition its end. For unless it has some collective or social basis — for instance, in religion or, later, the “ gentusreligion ”— artistic creation is impossible, and the last hopeless effort to base it on a psychological ideology not only leads away from art into science, but, even so, fails on points of principle. Education or art can no more be supported on psychological ideologies than religion can be replaced by psychology. For psychology is the individual ideology par excellence and cannot become collective, even if it is generally accepted or recognized. But modern humanity, through its increasing individuation, has fallen ever deeper into psychology and the ideologies thereof, precisely because they justify its individuality and its consciousness of it. But this individual ideology — as I declared in my first book in 1905 and have since sought to prove from the examination of world-outlooks*—is an impossibility for art and has brought us to our present pass, which we may regret, but cannot alter by comparative studies of culture. So that Worringer’s “ funeral oration” really applies to art as a whole and not its present form of expressionism. If, however, we regard the whole culture of a people or of an age as being not merely a means for the production of art, but as the expression of a particular form of life, within which a particular art-form plays a part, great or small, we may reach a less pessimistic position.

__________

1 Seelenglaube und Psychologie (1930); Modern Education.

As I have already hinted in my Kiinstler, we shall perhaps have to be content with cutting down the claims made for art and, further, shall have to sacrifice the artist-type as it has hitherto existed. Modern art, as Worringer complained, does suffer from the claims of modern artists to be put on a level with creative artists of other ages, and the artist-type suffers also, since he has to put this modern ideology of art for art’s sake in the place of every other. The modern artist attempted to maintain the vanished art-ideologies of earlier ages at least in his personal ideologies, even if he could not transform them into productivity. But this draping of the modern individual in the ideologies of earlier ages was bound to lead, in such individuals, to a conflict between their real selves and the self adopted as an ideal — like the fundamental struggle of the neurotic. The conflict between the idealistic and realistic aspects of all art, which we have described as the struggle of the notion of beauty against that of truth, is duplicated in the modern artist as a conflict between his true self and an ideal self, in which he tries to conserve the artideologies of past ages. But it is not only modern art that (as opposed to Classical) is realistic, but the modern artist also, which means that he is oriented towards truth and not beauty, and this not only in his pseudo-naturalistic art-ideology, but in his whole psychological attitude towards himself and his art. His aim is not to express himself in his work, but to get to know himself by it; in fact, by reason of his purely individualistic ideology, he cannot express himself without confessing, and therefore knowing, himself, because he simply lacks the collective or social ideology which might make the expression of his personality artistic in the sense of earlier epochs. This individual realism, however, which reveals itself as a search for truth in art and life, only intensifies the conflict in the person of the artist. The more successful his discovery of truth about himself, the less can he create or even live, since illusions are necessary for both. The clearest representative of the modern artist-type seems to me to be Ibsen, who was still just capable of an artistic elaboration of this destructive problem — and he too sometimes came suspiciously near didactic, doctrinaire psychologism. Thenceforward nothing was possible but a frank breach of all artistic forms and restraints, and the door was opened to a purely personal psychology of self-confessing and self-knowing in art, especially in poetry. Poets at first seemed to find some support in psycho-analysis, which they hoped to be able to transform into a new artistic ideology. But, for the reasons mentioned, this proved impossible, and, further, psycho-analysis has rather used the modern artist as an object of study than helped him to a psychological ideology of art. Thus from both alike, from the side of art and that of science, the way seems to be prepared for the decisive crisis, in the midst of which we stand — but also for its solution, which I foresee in a new structure of personality. This will be able to use in a constructive form the psychological insight which is so destructive when it exists as introspection, and the individual impulse to creation will turn positively towards the formation of its own personality, as indeed it did, and actively, in the earliest phases of primitive art. This is the goal which has hitherto been vainly sought by the so-called neurotic; in earlier ages he was occasionally able to achieve creatively, thanks to some collective art-ideology, but today all collective means fail and the artist is thrown back on to an individual psychotherapy. But this can only be successful if it sees its individual problem as one conditioned both by time and by culture, whereas the modern artist is driven by the unattainability of his ideology into that neurosis out of which the neurotic vainly seeks a creative escape — vainly, because the social ideologies are lacking which could fulfil and justify his personal conflict. Both will be achieved in a new formation of personality, which can, however, be neither a therapy of neuroses nor a new psychological artideology, but must be a constructive process of acceptance and development of one’s individual personality as a new type of humanity, and in order to create the new it will have to give up much that has been received from tradition and become dear to it. This new must first of all be a new personality-type, which may thereafter perhaps find a new art-form suited to it, but in any case will not feel any compulsion to justify its personal impulse to create by starting from the ideology of longsurmounted art-forms.