III
All art is expression-language.[[210]] Moreover, in its very earliest essays—which extend far back into the animal world—it is that of one active existence speaking for itself only, and it is unconscious of witnesses even though in the absence of such the impulse to expression would not come to utterance. Even in quite “late” conditions we often see, instead of the combination of artist and spectator, a crowd of art-makers who all dance or mime or sing. The idea of the “Chorus” as sum total of persons present has never entirely vanished from art-history. It is only the higher art that becomes decisively an art “before witnesses” and especially (as Nietzsche somewhere remarks) before God as the supreme witness.[[211]]
This expression is either ornament or imitation. Both are higher possibilities and their polarity to one another is hardly perceptible in the beginnings. Of the two, imitation is definitely the earlier and the closer to the producing race. Imitation is the outcome of a physiognomic idea of a second person with whom (or which) the first is involuntarily induced into resonance of vital rhythm (mitschwingen im[im]); whereas ornament evidences an ego conscious of its own specific character. The former is widely spread in the animal world, the latter almost peculiar to man.
Imitation is born of the secret rhythm of all things cosmic. For the waking being the One appears as discrete and extended; there is a Here and a There, a Proper and an Alien something, a Microcosm and a Macrocosm that are polar to one another in the sense-life, and what the rhythm of imitation does is to bridge this dichotomy. Every religion is an effort of the waking soul to reach the powers of the world-around. And so too is Imitation, which in its most devoted moments is wholly religious, for it consists in an identity of inner activity between the soul and body “here” and the world-around “there” which, vibrating as one, become one. As a bird poises itself in the storm or a float gives to the swaying waves, so our limbs take up an irresistible beat at the sound of march-music. Not less contagious is the imitation of another’s bearing and movements, wherein children in particular excel. It reaches the superlative when we “let ourselves go” in the common song or parade-march or dance that creates out of many units one unit of feeling and expression, a “we.” But a “successful” picture of a man or a landscape is also the outcome of a felt harmony of the pictorial motion with the secret swing and sway of the living opposite; and it is this actualizing of physiognomic rhythm that requires the executant to be an adept who can reveal the idea, the soul, of the alien in the play of its surface. In certain unreserved moments we are all adepts of this sort, and in such moments, as we follow in an imperceptible rhythm the music and the play of facial expression, we suddenly look over the precipice and see great secrets. The aim of all imitation is effective simulation; this means effective assimilation of ourselves into an alien something—such a transposition and transubstantiation that the One lives henceforth in the Other that it describes or depicts—and it is able to awaken an intense feeling of unison over all the range from silent absorption and acquiescence to the most abandoned laughter and down into the last depths of the erotic, a unison which is inseparable from creative activity. In this wise arose the popular circling-dances (for instance, the Bavarian Schuhplattler was originally imitated from the courtship of the woodcocks) but this too is what Vasari means when he praises Cimabue and Giotto as the first who returned to the imitation of “Nature”—the Nature, that is, of springtime men, of which Meister Eckart said: “God flows out in all creatures, and therefore all created is God.” That which in this world-around presents itself to our contemplation—and therefore contains meaning for our feelings—as movement, we render by movement. Hence all imitation is in the broadest sense dramatic; drama is presented in the movement of the brush-stroke or the chisel, the melodic curve of the song, the tone of the recitation, the line of poetry, the description, the dance. But everything that we experience with and in seeings and hearings is always an alien soul to which we are uniting ourselves. It is only at the stage of the Megalopolis that art, reasoned to pieces and de-spiritualized, goes over to naturalism as that term is understood nowadays; viz., imitation of the charm of visible appearances, of the stock of sensible characters that are capable of being scientifically fixed.
Ornament detaches itself now from Imitation as something which does not follow the stream of life but rigidly faces it. Instead of physiognomic traits overheard in the alien being, we have established motives, symbols, which are impressed upon it. The intention is no longer to pretend but to conjure. The “I” overwhelms the “Thou.” Imitation is only a speaking with means that are born of the moment and unreproduceable—but Ornament employs a language emancipated from the speaking, a stock of forms that possesses duration and is not at the mercy of the individual.[[212]]
Only the living can be imitated, and it can be imitated only in movements, for it is through these that it reveals itself to the senses of artists and spectators. To that extent, imitation belongs to Time and Direction. All the dancing and drawing and describing and portraying for eye and ear is irrevocably “directional,” and hence the highest possibilities of Imitation lie in the copying of a destiny, be it in tones, verses, picture or stage-scene.[[213]] Ornament, on the contrary, is something taken away from Time: it is pure extension, settled and stable. Whereas an imitation expresses something by accomplishing itself, ornament can only do so by presenting itself to the senses as a finished thing. It is Being as such, wholly independent of origin. Every imitation possesses beginning and end, while an ornament possesses only duration, and therefore we can only imitate the destiny of an individual (for instance, Antigone or Desdemona), while by an ornament or symbol only the generalized destiny-idea itself can be represented (as, for example, that of the Classical world by the Doric column). And the former presupposes a talent, while the latter calls for an acquirable knowledge as well.
All strict arts have their grammar and syntax of form-language, with rules and laws, inward logic and tradition. This is true not merely for the Doric cabin-temple and Gothic cottage-cathedral, for the carving-schools of Egypt[[214]] and Athens and the cathedral plastic of northern France, for the painting-schools of the Classical world and those of Holland and the Rhine and Florence, but also for the fixed rules of the Skalds and Minnesänger which were learned and practised as a craft (and dealt not merely with sentence and metre but also with gesture and the choice of imagery[[215]]), for the narration-technique of the Vedic, Homeric and Celto-Germanic Epos, for the composition and delivery of the Gothic sermon (both vernacular and Latin), and for the orators’ prose[[216]] in the Classical, and for the rules of French drama. In the ornamentation of an art-work is reflected the inviolable causality of the macrocosm as the man of the particular kind sees and comprehends it. Both have system. Each is penetrated with the religious side of life—fear and love.[[217]] A genuine symbol can instil fear or can set free from fear; the “right” emancipates and the “wrong” hurts and depresses. The imitative side of the arts, on the contrary, stands closer to the real race-feelings of hate and love, out of which arises the opposition of ugly and beautiful. This is in relation only with the living, of which the inner rhythm repels us or draws us into phase with it, whether it be that of the sunset-cloud or that of the tense breath of the machine. An imitation is beautiful, an ornament significant, and therein lies the difference between direction and extension, organic and inorganic logic, life and death. That which we think beautiful is “worth copying.” Easily it swings with us and draws us on to imitate, to join in the singing, to repeat. Our hearts beat higher, our limbs twitch, and we are stirred till our spirits overflow. But as it belongs to Time, it “has its time.” A symbol endures, but everything beautiful vanishes with the life-pulsation of the man, the class, the people or the race that feels it as a specific beauty in the general cosmic rhythm.[[218]] The “beauty” that Classical sculpture and poetry contained for Classical eyes is something different from the beauty that they contain for ours—something extinguished irrecoverably with the Classical soul—while what we regard as beautiful in it is something that only exists for us. Not only is that which is beautiful for one kind of man neutral or ugly for another—e.g., the whole of our music for the Chinese, or Mexican sculpture for us. For one and the same life the accustomed, the habitual, owing to the very fact of its possessing duration, cannot possess beauty.
And now for the first time we can see the opposition between these two sides of every art in all its depth. Imitation spiritualizes and quickens, ornament enchants and kills. The one becomes, the other is. And therefore the one is allied to love and, above all—in songs and riot and dance—to the sexual love, which turns existence to face the future; and the other to care of the past, to recollection[[219]] and to the funerary. The beautiful is longingly pursued, the significant instils dread, and there is no deeper contrast than that between the house of the living and the house of the dead.[[220]] The peasant’s cottage[[221]] and its derivative the country noble’s hall, the fenced town and the castle are mansions of life, unconscious expressions of circling blood, that no art produced and no art can alter. The idea of the family appears in the plan of the proto-house, the inner form of the stock in the plan of its villages—which after many a century and many a change of occupation still show what race it was that founded them[[222]]—the life of a nation and its social ordering in the plan (not the elevation or silhouette) of the city.[[223]] On the other hand, Ornamentation of the high order develops itself on the stiff symbols of death, the urn, the sarcophagus, the stele and the temple of the dead,[[224]] and beyond these in gods’ temples and cathedrals which are Ornament through and through, not the expressions of a race but the language of a world-view. They are pure art through and through—just what the castle and the cottage are not.[[225]]
For cottage and castle are buildings in which art, and, specifically, imitative art, is made and done, the home of Vedic, Homeric and Germanic epos, of the songs of heroes, the dance of boors and that of lords and ladies, of the minstrel’s lay. The cathedral, on the other hand, is art, and, moreover, the only art by which nothing is imitated; it alone is pure tension of persistent forms, pure three-dimensional logic that expresses itself in edges and surfaces and volumes. But the art of villages and castles is derived from the inclinations of the moment, from the laughter and high spirit of feasts and games, and to such a degree is it dependent on Time, so much is it a thing of occasion, that the troubadour obtains his very name from finding, while Improvisation—as we see in the Tzigane music to-day—is nothing but race manifesting itself to alien senses under the influence of the hour. To this free creative power all spiritual art opposes the strict school in which the individual—in the hymn as in the work of building and carving—is the servant of a logic of timeless forms, and so in all Cultures the seat of its style-history is in its early cult architecture. In the castle it is the life and not the structure that possesses style. In the town the plan is an image of the destinies of a people, whereas the silhouette of emergent spires and cupolas tells of the logic in the builders’ world-picture, of the “first and last things” of their universe.
In the architecture of the living, stone serves a worldly purpose, but in the architecture of the cult it is a symbol.[[226]] Nothing has injured the history of the great architectures so much as the fact that it has been regarded as the history of architectural techniques instead of as that of architectural ideas which took their technical expression-means as and where they found them. It has been just the same with the history of musical instruments,[[227]] which also were developed on a foundation of tone-language. Whether the groin and the flying buttress and the squinch-cupola were imagined specially for the great architectures or were expedients that lay more or less ready to hand and were taken into use, is for art-history a matter of as little importance as the question of whether, technically, stringed instruments originated in Arabia or in Celtic Britain. It may be that the Doric column was, as a matter of workmanship, borrowed from the Egyptian temples of the New Empire, or the late-Roman domical construction from the Etruscans, or the Florentine court from the North-African Moors. Nevertheless the Doric peripteros, the Pantheon, and the Palazzo Farnese belong to wholly different worlds—they subserve the artistic expression of the prime-symbol in three different Cultures.