Chapter Three

ART-FORM AND IDEOLOGY

What am I myself? What have I done? All that I have seen, heard, noted I have collected and used. My works are reverenced by a thousand different individuals. ... Often I have reaped the harvest that others have sown. My work is that of a collective being and it bears Goethe’s name.

GOETHE

As soon as we interpret the CEdipus material as the collective symbol of a development-process which permeates both the single individual and humanity, and which the creative individuality overcomes in its artistic expression —as the creative Greek nation overcame it in myth —we have revealed to us one of the deepest laws of all artistic productivity: the fact that, in works of art, form and content not only constitute an inseparable unity, but actually express one and the same thing in two different ways. We have seen likewise that the process which goes on in the creative personality during the artistic shaping of this content finds its symbol in the content of the CEdipus myth. Only, the various art-styles differ as to the manner in which an artist achieves both the unity which constitutes a work of art and harmonious combination of the current ideology with his personal one. Primitive creative art, which is based on the collective soul-ideology, achieves unity through abstraction in style; that is, by neglecting everything incidental, temporal, and individual; Classical art, which is based on the zsthetic ideology of beauty, achieves unity through conformity between and sheer identity of the specific ideology of art and the general ideology of the people, the one unrepeatable example of which is the Greek culture. Finally, modern Romantic art, which is based on the psychological ideology of the artist-type, achieves this unity in art through his reaction to the discrepancies existing both within the artist himself and between his personal ideology and the prevailing collective ideology. The first of these unities, therefore — that of primitive art, attained through abstraction—is static; the second — that of Classical art, based on projection—is harmonious; and the third —that of Romantic art, as the outcome of victorious conflict —is dynamic. Thus the first is predominantly one of flat drawing (ornamental) ; the second, predominantly plastic and figuring (vital); and the third, essentially poetical and musical (rhythmical). These classifications are, of course, to be taken in a very general sense and, like all attempts to set up a historical, critical, or other hierarchy in the fine arts, must always remain unsatisfactory. It may be, indeed, that the real giants in art are just those who somehow exceed the limits of their art’s proper sphere. For instance, Rembrandt stands out from the ranks of painters by reason of a dynamism which really is characteristic of literature and music; Homer was lauded, even by the ancients, as the greatest of painters; Dante, in words, is distinguished by a genius for rhythmical presentation, which is one of the features of pictorial art, and in this he has near rivals in Shakspere the dramatist and Wagner the musician, while the sculptor Michelangelo was at bottom an architect who built with human bodies, and his modern successor, Rodin, discloses very strong painter-qualities such as the Florentine despised. Taking everything into account, however, the course taken by art-history forces us to regard primitive art as flat and linear, Classical art as essentially plastic and figuring, and modern art as verbal and rhythmical; and the fact that in each of these epochs great things were also produced in other spheres of art is to be ascribed to just such overleapings of frontiers by outstanding artist-personalities, who are to be found at all stages of development, but particularly of artistic development —where they step out of the frame of the prevailing artideology and achieve incomparable masterpieces, not only in their own domain, but in the realm of art generally. For although they made use of a given ideology, they rose so high above themselves that the result was a work of art which fell into no category and yet was more than personal, a superindividual achievement which thereupon its imitators invested with an ideological significance corresponding to the general recognition accorded to it. If, however, we look at the three kinds of art — graphic, plastic, and rhythmic — from the viewpoint of the artist and his psychological dynamism, we discover other categories, bearing on the problem of artistic creativity, which extend beyond the individual artist and are linked with the great general problems of cultural history. Whereas primitive art is perpetuated through abstraction, and Classical art achieves immortality through idealization, Romantic art rounds off this immense transformation-process of spiritual development in making vivification its’ chosen mode of overcoming that fear of death from which the immortality-idea and urge to eternalization first sprang. Primitive art looks beyond individual, mortal life towards an everlasting life of the soul. And the essence of Classical art lies in the fact that it renders life itself everlasting — that is, tries to conserve the actual man as he is and lives — the very thing that the primitive Egyptian sought to do by mummification, save that in Greek art the conservation was achieved symbolically by the zsthetic idealization of the human body in a permanent material such as marble. But modern art, with its dynamic of expression, differs from both these style-forms; neither starts from an abstract of the living nor aims at an ideal conservation of it, but its style-form consists in a vivification of the essence of the actual. This can, however, only be achieved at the cost of real life. The three art-ideologies, as we thus differentiate them —the abstract, the esthetic, and the realistic — are based therefore on varying attitudes to life itself, and these attitudes, although determined by the prevailing collective ideology, will still be found to vary in the different individuals of the same epoch. Now, it is my belief that a non-contemporary outlook on vital problems is always essential to the artist, an outlook which deviates more or less from the prevailing ideology and its art-style. In other words, I believe that the artist’s personality, however strongly it may express the spirit of the age, must nevertheless bring him into conflict with that age and with his contemporaries; and this again explains why he is obliged, in his work, to convert the collective ideology into one of his own.* In this sense not only does a work of art represent unity of form and content, but it achieves also a unification of personal and collective ideologies of immortality. The artist is, after all, primarily an individual who is unable or unwilling to adopt the dominant immortality-ideology of his age — whether religious, social, or other — and that, not because it differs ideologically from his own, but because it is collective, whereas what he aspires to is an individual immortality. In fact, art sets out to secure this individual immortality by collective methods, while the neurotic clings to the naive immortality of the individual, which leads to fear of life and terror of death. But the artist obtains his individual immortality by using the collective ideology for his personal creativity and, in this way, not only re-creates it as his own but presents it to humanity as a new collective ideology on an individual basis. Thus he himself becomes immortal along with his work. According to whether immortality is sought collectively, socially, or individually, the various culture-ideologies differ among themselves as also do their religious and artistic forms. The primitive artist overcomes individual mortality both by the abstract art-form which is man’s spiritual proxy and by his collective soul-ideology. In contrast to this the modern artist has, as we have pointed out, actually to sacrifice life to make his work live, and this sacrifice involves both his own life and that of others. In the modern work of art, therefore, the personality of the artist or of his model really lives on dynamically, again an effect which can be achieved only at the cost of real life.

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1The different aspects of this problem are further dealt with in the sections “Beauty and Truth,’’ “The Artist’s Fight with Art,’’ and ‘Success and Fame.”

But in the primitive work of art it is not the whole being that lives on as an individual, but only his abstraction — corresponding to the collective idea of the soul, which does not vivify that being dynamically, but abstracts him into a timeless form. If, then, on the one hand, the artist’s ideology is in complete harmony with the collective ideology of his time — is, indeed, the most complete expression of it—it is possible that the essential factor of his creative dynamism arises from a personal conflict between the individual death-problem and the collective immortality-idea of the particular cultural period. Yet, as we have already remarked, the primitive artist too — of whom we know nothing — would seem to have broken away, as an individual, from the collective soul-ideology, to the extent of finding the pure abstraction of the soul-idea (or its psychic representative) inadequate and being driven to concrete expression, even though it were of an abstract order. The Classical artist, also, as seen at the height of the Greek culture, was not content merely to accept the national or political immortalityideology of Hellenism, but stayed it, so to speak, with its religious genesis, in that his sculpture lifted the human being out of the social and replaced him in the spiritual-religious domain. And, lastly, the modern artist, into whose individuality we can gain an insight (not only on the basis of historical data, but also because it expresses itself in its creative work), falls, as an artist-type to itself, outside the social, technical, and scientific ideology which characterizes our contemporary collectivism. He conserves, in his own type, the type rationalized by the conception of genius, the art-ideologies of past ages, just as the Classical and the primitive artists preserved the immortality-concepts of culture-epochs which were either dead or decaying. Thus, the unity of form and content, which must be regarded as the essence of creative work, comes into question even at this, the most general level of treatment: art preserves even dead or dying cultures, the epochs of human development and not only the single creative individual and his limited period; it also vitalizes them — that is, renders them immortal in the particular art-form.’ Having reached this level, it is perhaps worth while looking downwards on to the plains of purely technical problems, although these, again, can only be artificially detached from the general problem. Material is an essential factor of art-form, and to material in its turn belong the technical means of handling it and the capacity of the craftsman. The fact that, in German, the word “art (Kanst)” is allied with “can (kénnen) ” does not, as we now know, prove that even in practice art was primarily the being able to doa thing. The root relationship is perhaps characteristic rather of German mentality than of art. Be that as it may, for all the emphasis we lay on the will-to-art as against technical ability, we must admit that the material and its treatment represent an essential factor of artistic creativity and the work produced. The Greek sculptures are unthinkable without the supernatural splendour of the marble and equally so without its durability, and this is meant not only in the material sense, but in the ideal sense of the collective immortality-ideology. In the same way, not only are Rembrandt’s dynamic portraits unthinkable without the high stage of development that had been reached in oilpainting; but in his “ Anatomy,” as in Leonardo’s anatomical studies, there is evidence of some medical knowledge of the body, living and dead.”

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1 Jn this connexion it is important to note what Hermann Bahr (Sendung des Kanstlers; Leipzig, 1923; p. 137) says, in support of his views, that actually in all the arts of all the nations of all times it is the same work of art which is created over and over again. “Not all of Greece is autochthonous: its art is a renaissance of Egypt, just as Rome is a renaissance of Athens, and the history of the Christian West nothing more than a renaissance of Rome.'’ With reference to Goethe, too, he writes: ‘‘Thus he lived in art as if in the memory of the true art: his writing became an aid to memory and to the understanding of former art-periods long since expired.'’ Very appropriate, too, is his mention of Nietzsche's deep-rooted condemnation in Human, All-too-human of the “revolution in poetry,”’ for in poetry's break with tradition he sees the end of art.

2 The dissection of corpses was first permitted by the ecclesiastical authorities in the Renaissance, and then only occasionally in the case of executed criminals. It was not until the middle of the sixteenth century that Vesalius (1514-65) introduced the thorough anatomical study of the human body, although information has recently reached us of the astonishing anatomical knowledge possessed by the ancients. (See chapters: ‘Microcosm and Macrocosm"’ and ‘‘The Formation and the Creation of Speech.’”) The rise of the science of anatomy probably influenced Renaissance art and undoubtedly had a definite effect upon its ideology. Apart from Leonardo's personal anatomical studies, which are an outgrowth of his whole scientific ideology, it seems to me probable that Rembrandt was also reacting to the new science of the human body when, in 1632, at the age of twenty-six, he painted his ‘‘ Anatomy."’ I have the feeling that this young artist, who in his earlier youthful works had shown more ““Rembrandtesqueness,’’ was making a concession to the materialistic and realist ideology of his day in painting this ‘* Anatomy Lecture of Professor Nicolaes Pietersz Tulp.”’ It is as if he wished to show that he, too, knew something about anatomy, and that it was pure choice that made him forgo this “‘imitative art’’ in favour of dynamic expression. As we know, Rembrandt's whole life and work were torn by a conflict between the two, which brought him into serious disfavour with his patrons, who were paying for portraits true to nature and not for studies in light- and coloureffects. The second anatomical picture, ‘‘Doctor Joan Deyman’s Anatomy Class”’ (656), of which, unfortunately, only a fragment is preserved, in the Rijksmuseum, is more of a ‘‘real’’ Rembrandt as Karl Scheffler in his book: Holland (Leipzig, 1930; English translation, New York, 1932) regards it too. However that may be, Rembrandt's ‘‘Anatomy’’ is an illustration of the ideal case in which the picture not only represents anatomy but actually is the anatomy, ideologically expressed, to which the artist demonstrates his attitude by painting it in his own manner.

The lyrical power of expression of a Goethe, a Hélderlin, or a Stefan George is only possible on the basis of a highly developed and refined cultural language, which has not only technical, but human aspects. (See chapter on “ The Formation and the Creation of Speech.”) We are justified, however, in asking how far these technical advances in the use and treatment of the material are not also themselves attributable to a genuine will-to-art, which previously — or simultaneously — creates the medium which the will-to-form needs for its execution. In oil-painting this relation to material is clearly visible in the experiments of Leonardo, Rembrandt, and other painters; but in principle we can draw the same psychological conclusion with regard to sculpture, poetry, and music— even without a close acquaintance with the history of the material —namely, that the actual individual art-will is manifested primarily and essentially in the choice and treatment of the material, while the content of what is presented has more relation to the collective ideologies — although these of course are in a high degree individualized in the work of art produced.These reflections bring us once more to the question of the hierarchy of the arts in respect of their historical and zsthetic valuation. In stating that the essence of modern art lies in its living dynamism, we did not forget that the primitive expressions of art known to us are likewise based on live rhythm (as are also dancing, song, and music), nor that ornament, with its recurring motive, shows a distinctly rhythmic character although, by contrast, the rhythm itself is as it were frozen, abstract, or dead. Yet this, again, is but a contradiction in logic that is inherent in our conception of artistic development; for, psychologically considered, it merely proves the oft-quoted relationship between modern and primitive art, in spite of the fact that their ideologies are basically different and indeed almost diametrically opposed. For primitive art is still entirely at one with life, forming, indeed, with regard to dance and ritual (singing and music) an essential component of the collective communal life, out of which there develops only gradually the productive artist and the onlooker-community in a passive réle as two separate spheres.’ Modern art, on the other hand, even in its most vivid dynamic expression, stands opposed to life. It is in the position, so to say, of having taken refuge in art-form rather than, like primitive art, having found in it the expression of life. The primitive-art ideology is the religious belief in the soul,

which leads, on the one hand, to a symbolic abstraction of the forms of life in linear-ornamental art and, on the other, to a concrete presentation of that abstraction. The tendency to concretize arises out of the individual-immortality concept, while the craving for abstraction corresponds to the collectiveimmortality concept. Modern art on the other hand is based on no such consoling idea of immortality, whether of a collective or individual nature. Its compelling motive is fear of life and experience, and this motive it carries over into the creative sphere, in the course of which process the individual will binds the biological driving force in the art-form in order to conserve it

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1See Jane Harrison: Ancient Art and Ritual.

It must be confessed that not only is the unity of the modern work of art (which it shares with art in general) the result of a reaction on emerging victorious from a struggle, but its dynamic vitality is also a reaction to the fear of life characteristic of the modern individual; for since the decay of our collective ideologies relative to religion and state, we suffer from this fear more than any previous generation has done. Not only is primitive art at one with life as an essential part of it, but the artist is, if not wholly in harmony with the collective ideology, yet far more so than is the case, or even can be, in our modern society. Beginning with the Classic art of the Greek floraison, through the links that join it to our modern art-developments, and right into the latter, we find in increasing measure that it is just the very highest work that the productive artist achieves in response to pressure from the most diverse influences, so that this work, though certainly the typical expression of his individuality and epoch, is, over and above this, that of other cultures and alien ideologies. It is this fact that raises it to the timeless sphere of pure art. Classical Greece itself, though definitely influenced by Egypt, Crete, and the North, still seems to us today to be the pure product of the Hellenic spirit, in contrast to the art-development of medieval Europe, where the ideologies are clearly a mixed product with Italian Renaissance and Northern Gothic as the two chief ingredients. Yet the great artists who were born of this epoch experienced in themselves and reproduced in their works the struggle of these different cultural ingredients, in both its constructive and its destructive aspects. Into this category come Shakspere’s mixture of imported Renaissancism and the rising spirit of the Reformation in England; Durer’s Italian and Leonardo’s French experiences; Goethe’s flight from the Sturm und Drang ideology of Gothic to the more harmonious sphere of Southern Mediterranean art; also Nietzsche’s struggle on the one hand with Hellenism and on the other with the Christian in him; Hélderlin, ruined by diversity of ideologies, and Kleist’s inability to win through from Romantic unsteadiness to the Classical ideal.! These, and many other great modern examples, might be quoted as proofs of the disunity of the artist with himself and with his environment which differentiates the modern artist from the primitive and, in a sense, from the Classical. But these problems cannot be discussed without including questions of mixed races, the influence of the country, and other biological, social, and economic conditions.” We now return from the problem of the creative artist’s

mixing of ideologies to the fact of the occurrence of various art-forms within one and the same cultural epoch. From the creative artist’s point of view this is naturally no problem, for the matter is one of specially favourable conditions for production characterizing a particular period of development, or even of some vital necessity providing the stimulus for creative work in great variety during that period. Neither is it a problem from the ideological standpoint — at least not an insistent enigma — that different art-forms should come into existence and actually mature simultaneously. For here problems arise only as the result of the co-operation at any given time of the creative urge and the ideologies: that are at its disposal. The artist creates essentially by reason of an inward urge which we may describe as the individual will-to-form, and whether he objectifies this in a picture, a statue, or a symphony is rather a technical and formal matter than an individual problem.

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1 Arthur Burkhard, professor of literature at Harvard University, has in a preliminary study (German Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4, November 1929) described this conflict between two opposed elements—in the artist and his work—as the hall-mark of German att, which he formulates as, in the last analysis, a conflict between expression and form. In my opinion, however, this is the characteristic of modern art in general, and in so far as art today is still national—in France or Italy, for instance —it is derived from Classical ideologies.

2 Of basic importance is Reibmayr's Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talents und Genies (Munich, 1908). Kretschmer has also a very good summary in the two chapters: “Die Zsichtung der Begabung’’ and ‘‘Genie und Rasse'' of his Geniale Menschen (Berlin, 1929). See also the general survey in Paul Schultze-Naumburg'’s Kunst und Rasse (Munich, 1928) and, for German literature in particular, Josef Nadler’s Literaturgeschichte der deutschen Stdmme und Landschaften (3 vols., Regensburg, 1914-18).

This is particularly the case with the great artist whose poem is plastic, whose portrait is poetical, and whose music is architectonic in effect." Nevertheless it may be said that drawing was characteristic of primitive art, while sculpture is the Classical expression-medium, and the rhythmic arts (poetry and music) the modern. Poetry in particular can be historically proved to be of relatively recent date — relatively not only to the vast spaces of time which separate us from the prehistoric cave-paintings, but even to those covered by historical evidence within our reach. Moreover, poetry as a species of art is bound up with writing, as its material, and this particylar immortality-technique was a very late discovery, which reached sure fulfilment only with the printing of books. The form in which the art of poetry existed before its fixation through writing can only be conjectured from a few traditional magic formule and the prayer-like songs which were performed chiefly in honour of some godhead or hero. With such primitive peoples as we are still able to observe, singing appears to play an inferior rdle as against dancing and instrumental music, possibly because they are too fearful of pronouncing the “word” that is still identical with the thing that it designates. This magical effect of the spoken word, which here asserts itself as a dread of the evoking call, may on the other hand be salutary, as when it forms the basis of songs and hymns — in which we recognize the oldest form of prayer and which we must also regard as the original form of the art of poetry.’

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1The Innsbruck archzologist Heinrich Sitte has demonstrated in his synthetic essay on Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue (No. V of the manuscript series, Prewssische Jabrbicher, Berlin, 1921) that ‘‘its thematic content contains the Parthenon frieze, Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and Goethe's Faust. All these works, therefore, although uttered in different languages, are really all the time one and the same composition’ (Bahr, op. cit., Pp. 137). Sitte’s discovery that Bach set his own family name to music in this fugue is another striking example of the inseparable unity of the form and content of a work of art. The fugue is not only by Bach: it és Bach, the whole Bach, as man and as triumphant artist. ‘‘Out of the double cry of anguish: B [fla]—A—C—H [= B natural],’’ continues Sitte, ‘‘there grew an uninterrupted cry of higher and higher triumph: A—B—H—C. And this motive, so unique in origin, he made... without any trickery into the boldest fugue which he ever wrote, and which comprises his whole human existence, in joy and in sorrow, as if it were his portrait.”

2In a preliminary introduction to a history of American literature Ludwig Lewisohn very rightly lays stress on the “‘sacred’’ origin and character of literature (This Quarter, summer 1929). The book has appeared since (Expression in America).

For the rest, the earliest poetical products of the primitives, as of civilized peoples, are epic in character; either they are mythical stories of gods which are reminders of men’s lost immortality, or they are human stories of heroes which bewail the tragic mortality of the living being.” But these productions have an unambiguously collective character and, in this respect, are definitely not out of keeping with the primitive art-ideology. Nor do we know the individual writers of these myths and epics, and this is not merely for lack of historical data, but because oral tradition admits of no such individual authorship. And whether the man who, later, wrote down any such song —even with additions and embellishments of his own — can really be described as its author, even if we could trace him, is a question which the Greeks tried in vain to solve in their research on Homer.’ Today we are certainly too ready to regard offhand the recorder of ideas as their author — a technical way of looking at it which has already gone far beyond the pure idea of creativity. But the question as to wherein the collective element of mythic and epic poetry consists has become a central problem in scientific literary criticism ever since the Romantic period. It is probable that various individuals — even, perhaps, races and nations — participated in the beginning and particularly in the oral handing-down of these poems. And equally we may suppose that this collective genesis also corresponds to a collective content of that which was transmitted. A race or a nation appears as the victorious hero of the story, mostly in the figure of an individual champion as representative and carrier of the race’s interests.* In every case the hero and his fate are the main thing, and not the poet, in whom we should take little interest if we did know him.

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1 See, further, the chapter ‘Traum und Wirklichkeit’’ in my book: Seelenglaube und Psychologie (1930), and later expositions in the following chapters of the present work: ‘Myth and Metaphor”’ and ‘‘The Poetic Art.”’

2 Cf. my preliminary studies on the folk-epic in Imago, V (1917).

3This point of view is emphasized in the Psychoanalyse de l'art (Paris, 1929) by Professor Charles Baudouin of Geneva.

For the motive of his song and saga was, at this stage, certainly not individual, but collective or, as we should call it today, “ national.” The individual author of modern times differs from the collective creators of folk-epic, not only through the personal nature of his theme, but also because he himself, his individual ego, is the real hero of his story. In lyric poetry, with its reflection of fleeting moods, this is plainly and admittedly the case, but it also applies to a great extent to novels and even to dramas. It is as if the personal artist-ideology, which we have taken as the foundation of modern art, comes in the individual poet to consciousness of itself. Hence the favoured position, the high cultural significance indeed, of the author as censor of morals, philosopher of life, and educator of mankind in our world of today. In attaining this position of general responsibility he has, however, left the sphere of pure creativity, which, from now on, he represents only in his ideology. He is now himself the work of art, but as such he can represent either a good or a bad one, according to whether and how he succeeds in shaping his life. Goethe remains, in this regard also, the unparalleled model of a universal genius of the modern age; for he was able to balance the destructive elements in him creatively, by absorbing them into his poetry and his various other constructive activities, and thus to shape his life as an artistic-constructive whole. Other great writers have failed to achieve so complete a harmony, either ruining the artistic build of their lives by Romanticism or leading a philistine existence in order to have enough vitality left over for creation. This fact confronts us again when we come to deal with the problem of the individual artist-personality as expressed in the relation between experience and creativity. No single causal relation appears to exist between the two phenomena —certainly not the one favoured by psychography, which purports to explain creativity by experience in general or by special experiences. It seems likely that the reverse is more possible, since the creative will which underlies them both manifests itself more clearly in the created work than in experience. On the other hand, creativity itself is, of course, a special form of experience and one peculiar to the artist, and all depends in the last resort upon whether the individual is capable of restoring harmony, or at least a temporary balance, between the two forms of experience —artistic and vital — and to what extent he succeeds. This does not by any means signify that the person who better adapts himself to, or succeeds in, life must needs be the better artist. In this respect Goethe forms a signal exception in the whole long line of really great men whose lives have been swallowed whole by their work. Croce maintains that this was the case even with Goethe, but in reality the man Goethe has come to be more important to us than his work, which we are inclined to regard as more interesting from a psycho-biographical than from a purely artistic standpoint. Goethe himself looked upon his works as “fragments of one great confession,” as “ life’s traces,” and it looks as if this had been more or less consciously the artist’s general attitude towards his work. His work is not only his particular expression of life: it both serves him and helps him to live, and his worth as an artist comes second — or even plays no special part at all. A mediocre work, acceptable only to a small circle, may yet satisfy the artist more and mean more to him than the undying world-fame of a poem that has grown into a folk-song, the author of which most people are quite at a loss to name. Again, we must admit that the psychology of a productive personality gives no clue to the understanding and appreciation of art. The Romantic who, having adopted the attitude that I once called “artist-mania” and now call art-ideology, neglects or sacrifices or even destroys his life has often achieved more in art than the genius who allows the human being in him to come to fruition also. What makes Goethe the highest type of artist in our eyes is not really his work, any more than it is his civic life — which served rather to protect him from his own genius than to enhance it. Where he is great is in his attitude to art and life, his conception of their relation to each other, which he only bought—and dearly enough — after long wrestling. As Bahr so excellently puts it, his achievement lay in having “put down the revolution by which he had risen” and “in recognizing that art’s freedom lay in its submission to the law.” This explains his aversion from all Romanticism, which meant, at bottom, from the Romantic within himself; for the Romantic stands at the other end of the scale of artistic development as the pioneer and earliest specimen of the individual artist-type, whose art-ideology is the cult of personality with its idea of liberty. Not only is he an individualrevolutionary in creation, but he confuses life with art: he zs dramatic or lyrical, he acts the piece instead of objectifying it, or rather he is obliged to act it as well as merely objectify it. His art is as chaotic as his life, whereas the pure art-ideology is based on order, law, and form —in fact, on traditional and therefore collective ideologies. Now, Goethe wished to reestablish this pure art epistemologically, and therein lies his greatness as an artist-type. First, however, he had to curb the individual Romantic in himself, and this he succeeded in doing, though only at the expense of his productive power, which exhausted itself in the conscious and deliberate transformation of the Romantic type represented by him into a Classical artisttype, and which nevertheless he never completely achieved in his work. If Goethe’s importance lies rather in his representing the purely Classical ideal, as against the personal artist-ideology of Romanticism, than in his actual creative work, he is perhaps the first example — and at the same time the highest possible type — of the poet who becomes a universal genius. Also, in our own day, such a type could express himself as an essayist, a cultural critic, or a first-class journalist. As we have already pointed out, our modern author has become conscious of the personal art-ideology that is within him; but the first result of the process has been to project this intuitively recognized artist-ideology on to the history of art and to misinterpret the whole of its development in the light of its latest phase. We have seen how the establishment of a will-to-form (originally impersonal) as the real creative element had an essentially progressive and deepening effect on the study of art as a problem, and we shall find that the extended application of this theory to the genius’s personal, and the modern artist’s conscious, will-to-art has thrown new light on the whole question of art and artist. At the end of our first section we left it an open question whether an understanding of the individual artisttype with its personal will-ideology — working itself out primarily in the artist’s ego— might not clear up certain methodological ambiguities in Worringer’s esthetics. However abstract we imagine the primitive will-to-art that is supposed to produce simple art-forms of crystalline structure, it still retains a tinge of anthropomorphism — even in Schopenhauer’s philosophical interpretation of it. For the will is a human phenomenon, and we cannot assume offhand that Nature and all her creatures possess it, even in the form of “ unconscious willing.” Certainly, in our view, the individual will is a derivative of the biological life-impulse, but it is a purely human derivative, though, again, it is in a prime mover of Nature that we find the biological premiss; this differentiation between lifeimpulse and expression of will, which psycho-analysis has ignored, seems to me to be the basic human problem par excellence since it comprises both the dualism of ego and species, of mortality and immortality, that is inherent in the individual, and all those creative tendencies which go beyond the mere function of propagation. In any case we fail to see how the sexurge, which is designed primarily to preserve the race, should produce even the most primitive ornamentation, still less a higher art-form. The attempt made by psycho-analysis to find such a solution is today recognized to have been a failure, and only left the real problem more acute than before. Not even in cases where the content of the representation has a more or less definite relation to the sexual function or its organs — as in the case of certain primitive art-symbols — can we find an intelligible path from the direct to the symbolic or sublimated expression of the sexual instinct unless we build the bridge of the individual will which converts the propagation of the species into a perpetuation of the ego. Even with animals, to whom we cannot ascribe this individuality-consciousness (or at least not in the same degree), the development and variation of species do not appear to be the achievement of a sexual instinct that is focused on reproduction and repetition, but (as first Lamarck was bold enough to postulate) the result of an individual condition of suitability, and it is only a judgment by results — namely, the better adaptation of the individual — that leads us to predicate some sort of deliberate intention in it. Be that as it may, once we recognize that the modern artist has of himself arrived at a consciousness of the individualness of the creative will that he formerly attributed to his god, we are bound to assume that a similar will-tendency existed in the artist of former epochs, even though he may not, as an individual, have always been conscious of it. One might think, then, that this volitional creative urge came nearer to the sexual instinct in proportion as it was more unconscious — that is, in proportion as we come nearer to primitive art. But this hasty conclusion as to the predominantly sexual character of primitive art has been refuted by objective observation * and cannot be used to support the thesis of the sexual character of creative art, just as we may not, on the other hand, refer the self-consciousness of the modern artist back to the genesis of artistic development. For despite this closer relationship of the unconscious will to the instinctive, never, at even the lowest stage of any creative production, do the two come together. The will, conscious or unconscious, will always be the expression of the individual, the indivisible single being, while sexuality represents something shared, something generic which is harmonious with the individually-willed only in the human love-experience * and is otherwise in perpetual conflict with it.

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1See, for instance, Emil Stephan’s important work on art in the South Sea Islands (Sudsee Kunst. Beitrage xur Kunst des Bismarck-Archipels und zur Urgeschicht der Kunst aberhaupt; Berlin, 1907).

2See my Technsk, Il, p. 77. 85

In art this conflict is won in a different way; though closely akin to the individual conquest in love and the collective conquest in religion, it is differentiated from both by a specific element which we may broadly call the esthetic. We shall deal with the peculiar qualities which this consists of in our next section. In closing this chapter we need only say, without particularizing, that the artistic solution of this original dualism is not merely psychological, but appears, as regards its evolutionary history, to lie between the religious and the erotic solutions. The religious solution is at bottom collective; that is, the individual is delivered from his isolation and becomes part of a greater and higher whole — not in the biological-generic sense, but through his spiritual ideology, by becoming one with God. In the love-experience, which becomes possible only at a stage of fully developed individualism, we see this spiritual process objectified: God, as representing the idealized self, is found in the beloved, and, with the sense of union, the individuality seems to be exalted and intensified, lost, and yet enriched. Finally, in art, which has developed out of the collective consolation-ideology of religion and at whose further limit we find the Romantic artist striving after the complete love-experience, the individuality-conflict is solved in that the ego, seeking at once isolation and union, creates, as it were, a private religion for itself, which not only expresses the collective spirit of the epoch, but produces a new ideology — the artistic — which for the bulk of them takes the place of religion. True, this happens only at the summit of individual “artist’s art,” where there is deification of the genius-concept and an adoration of works of art which is comparable only to the worship of statues of gods, though they already represent mere men. Before this, art is still — particularly in its Classical period —an individual working-out of the forces of which religions are made. These forces then become concentrated in the single creative individual, whereas before they animated a whole community. The works of these peak periods of artistic production manifest in their development the individualized religion-forming forces which finally return, by way of Ro mantic love-experience, to their origin, which is the personal craving for immortality of the ego. All three ideologies, however — the collective-religious, the social-artistic, and the individualerotic — lift the individual above the biological life-plane of reality —in which only the sexual immortality of propagation counteracts the individual isolation—on a higher, supernatural, super-real, or super-individual sphere wherein reigns an ideal collectivity that is created by individual intention and may at any time be altered at will.