II
The opposition of Apollinian and Faustian ideals of Humanity may now be stated concisely. Act and Portrait are to one another as body and space, instant and history, foreground and background, Euclidean and analytical number, proportion and relation. The Statue is rooted in the ground, Music (and the Western portrait is music, soul woven of colour-tones) invades and pervades space without limit. The fresco-painting is tied to the wall, trained on it, but the oil-painting, the “picture” on canvas or board or other table, is free from limitations of place. The Apollinian form-language reveals only the become, the Faustian shows above all a becoming.
It is for this reason that child-portraits and family groups are amongst the finest and most intimately right achievements of the Western art. In the Attic sculpture this motive is entirely absent, and although in Hellenistic times the playful motive of the Cupid or Putto came into favour, it was expressly as a being different from the other beings and not at all as a person growing or becoming. The child links past and future. In every art of human representation that has a claim to symbolic import, it signifies duration in the midst of phenomenal change, the endlessness of Life. But the Classical Life exhausted itself in the completeness of the moment. The individual shut his eyes to time-distances; he comprehended in his thought the men like himself whom he saw around him, but not the coming generations; and therefore there has never been an art that so emphatically ignored the intimate representation of children as the Greek art did. Consider the multitude of child-figures that our own art has produced from early Gothic to dying Rococo—and in the Renaissance above all—and find if you can in Classical art right down to Alexander one work of importance that intentionally sets by the side of the worked-out body of man or woman any child-element with existence still before it.
Endless Becoming is comprehended in the idea of Motherhood, Woman as Mother is Time and is Destiny. Just as the mysterious act of depth-experience fashions, out of sensation, extension and world, so through motherhood the bodily man is made an individual member of this world, in which thereupon he has a Destiny. All symbols of Time and Distance are also symbols of maternity. Care is the root-feeling of future, and all care is motherly. It expresses itself in the formation and the idea of Family and State and in the principle of Inheritance which underlies both. Care may be either affirmed or denied—one can live care-filled or care-free. Similarly, Time may be looked at in the light of eternity or in the light of the instant, and the drama of begetting and bearing or the drama of the nursing mother with her child may be chosen as the symbol of Life to be made apprehensible by all the means of art. India and the Classical took the first alternative, Egypt and the West the second.[[338]] There is something of pure unrelated present in the Phallus and the Lingam, and in the phenomenon of the Doric column and the Attic statue as well. But the nursing Mother points into the future, and she is just the figure that is entirely missing in the Classical art. She could not possibly be rendered in the style of Phidias. One feels that this form is opposed to the sense of the phenomenon.
But in the religious art of the West, the representation of Motherhood is the noblest of all tasks. As Gothic dawns, the Theotokos of the Byzantine changes into the Mater Dolorosa, the Mother of God. In German mythology she appears (doubtless from Carolingian times only) as Frigga and Frau Holle. The same feeling comes out in beautiful Minnesinger fancies like Lady Sun, Lady World, Lady Love. The whole panorama of early Gothic mankind is pervaded by something maternal, something caring and patient, and Germanic-Catholic Christianity—when it had ripened into full consciousness of itself and in one impulse settled its sacraments and created its Gothic Style—placed not the suffering Redeemer but the suffering Mother in the centre of its world-picture. About 1250, in the great epic of statuary of Reims Cathedral, the principal place in the centre of the main porch, which in the cathedrals of Paris and Amiens was still that of Christ, was assigned to the Madonna; and it was about this time, too, that the Tuscan school at Arezzo and Siena (Guido da Siena) began to infuse a suggestion of mother-love into the conventional Byzantine Theotokos. And after that the Madonnas of Raphael led the way to the purely human type of the Baroque, the mother in the sweetheart—Ophelia, Gretchen—whose secret reveals itself in the glorious close of Faust II and in its fusion with the early Gothic Mary.
As against these types, the imagination of the Greeks conceived goddesses who are either Amazons like Athene or hetæræ like Aphrodite. In the root-feeling which produced the Classical type of womanhood, fruitfulness has a vegetal character—in this connexion as in others the word σῶμα exhaustively expresses the meaning of the phenomenon. Think of the masterpieces of this art, the three mighty female bodies of the East Pediment of the Parthenon,[[339]] and compare with them that noblest image of a mother, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. In the latter, all bodiliness has disappeared. She is all distance and space. The Helen of the “Iliad,” compared with Kriemhild, the motherly comrade of Siegfried, is a courtesan, while Antigone and Clytæmnestra are Amazons. How strangely even Æschylus passes over in silence the mother-tragic in Clytæmnestra! The figure of Medea is nothing less than the mythic inverse of the Faustian “Mater Dolorosa”; her tragic is not one of future or children, it is with her lover, the symbol of wholly-present life, that her universe collapses. Kriemhild revenges her unborn children—it is this future that has been murdered in her—but Medea revenges only a past happiness. When the Classical sculpture, late art that it is,[[340]] arrives at secularizing[[341]] the pictures of the god, it creates the antique ideal of female form in a Cnidian Aphrodite—merely a very beautiful object, not a character or an ego but a piece of Nature. And in the end Praxiteles finds the hardihood to represent a goddess entirely naked. This innovation met with severe criticism, for it was felt to be a sign of the decline of the Classical world-feeling; suitable as it was to erotic symbolism, it was in sharp contradiction with the dignity of the older Greek religion. But exactly then, too, a portrait-art ventured to show itself, simultaneously with the invention of a form that has never since been forgotten, the bust. Unfortunately (here as elsewhere) art-research has made the mistake of discovering in this the “beginnings” of “the” portrait. In reality, whereas a Gothic visage speaks of an individual destiny, and even an Egyptian—in spite of the rigid formalism of the figure—has the recognizable traits of the individual person (since otherwise it could not serve as dwelling for the higher soul of the dead, his Ka), the Greeks developed a taste for typical representations just as the contemporary comedy produced standard men and situations, to which any names whatever could be affixed. The “portrait” is distinguishable not by personal traits but by the label only. This is the general custom amongst children and primitive men, and it is connected with name-magic. The name serves to capture some essence of what is named and to bind it as an object which thereupon becomes specific for every beholder. The statues of the Tyrannicides,[[342]] the (Etruscan) statues of Kings in the Capitol and the “iconic” portraits of victors at Olympia must have been portraits of this sort, viz., not likenesses but figures with names. But now, in the later phase, there was an additional factor—the tendency of the time towards genre and applied art, which produced also the Corinthian column. What the sculptors worked out was the types of life’s stage, the ἦθος which we mistranslate by character but which is really the kinds and modes of public behaviour and attitude; thus there is “the” grave Commander, “the” tragic poet, “the” passion-torn actor, “the” absorbed philosopher[philosopher]. Here is the real key to the understanding of the celebrated Hellenistic portraiture, for which the quite unjustifiable claim has been set up that its products are expressions of a deep spiritual life. It is not of much moment whether the work bears the name of someone long dead—the Sophocles[[343]] was sculptured about 340—or of a living man like the Pericles of Cresilas.[[344]] It was only in the 4th Century that Demetrius of Alopeke began to emphasize individual traits in the external build of the man and Lysistratus the brother of Lysippus to copy (as Pliny tells us) a plaster-of-paris cast of the subject’s face without much subsequent modification. And how little such portraiture is portraiture in Rembrandt’s sense should surely have been obvious to anyone. The soul is missing. The brilliant fidelity of Roman busts especially has been mistaken for physiognomic depth. But what really distinguishes the higher work from this craftsman’s and virtuoso’s work is an intention that is the precise opposite of the artistic intention of a Marées or a Leibl. That is, in such work the important[important] and significant is not brought out, it is put in. An example of this is seen in the Demosthenes statue,[[345]] the artist of which possibly saw the orator in life. Here the particulars of the body-surface are emphasized, perhaps over-emphasized (“true to Nature,” they called this then), but into the disposition so conceived he works the character-type of the Serious Orator which we meet again on different bases in the portraits of Æschines and Lysias at Naples. That is truth to life, undoubtedly, but it is truth to life as Classical man felt it, typical and impersonal. We have contemplated the result with our eyes, and have accordingly misunderstood it.
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