The decline of the West

by Oswald Spengler

V

This opposition, further, has produced forms of tragedy that differ from one another radically in every respect. The Faustian character-drama and the Apollinian drama of noble gesture have in fact nothing but name in common.[^[394]]

Starting, significantly enough, from Seneca and not from Æschylus and Sophocles[^[395]] (just as the contemporary architecture linked itself with Imperial Rome and not with Pæstum), the Baroque drama with ever-increasing emphasis makes character instead of occurrence its centre of gravity, the origin of a system of spiritual co-ordinates (so to express it) which gives the scenic facts position, sense, and value in relation to itself. The outcome is a tragedy of willing, of efficient forces, of inward movement not necessarily exhibited in visible form, whereas Sophocles’s method was to employ a minimum of happening and to put it behind the scenes particularly by means of the artifice of the “messenger.” The Classical tragedy relates to general situations and not particular personalities. It is specifically described by Aristotle as μίμησίς οὐκ ἀνθρώπων ἀλλὰ πρᾶξεως[ἀνθρώπων ἀλλὰ πρᾶξεως] καὶ βίου. That which in his Poetica—assuredly the most fateful of all books for our poetry—he calls ἦθος, namely the ideal bearing of the ideal Hellene in a painful situation, has as little in common with our notion of character (viz., a constitution of the ego which determines events) as a surface in Euclidean geometry has with the like-named concept in Riemann’s theory of algebraic equations. It has, unfortunately, been our habit for centuries past to translate ἦθος as “character” instead of paraphrasing it (exact rendering is almost impossible) by “rôle,” “bearing” or “gesture”; to reproduce myth, μῦθος, which is timeless occurrence, by “action”; and to derive δρᾶμα from “doing.” It is Othello, Don Quixote, Le Misanthrope, Werther and Hedda Gabler that are characters, and the tragedy consists in the mere existence of human beings thus constituted in their respective milieux. Their struggle—whether against this world or the next, or themselves—is forced on them by their character and not by anything coming from outside; a soul is placed in a web of contradictory relations that admits of no net solution. Classical stage-figures, on the contrary, are rôles and not characters; over and over again the same figures appear—the old man, the slayer, the lover, all slow-moving bodies under masks and on stilts. Thus in Classical drama—even of the Late period—the mask is an element of profound symbolic necessity, whereas our pieces would not be regarded as played at all without the play of features. It is no answer to point to the great size of the Greek theatre, for even the strolling player—even the portrait-statue[^[396]]—wore a mask, and had there been any spiritual need of a more intimate setting the required architectural form would have been forthcoming quickly enough.

In the tragedy of a character, what happens is the outcome of a long inner development. But in what befalls Ajax and Philoctetes, Antigone and Electra, their psychological antecedents (even supposing them to have any) play no part. The decisive event comes upon them, brutally, as accident, from without, and it might have befallen another in the same way and with the same result. It would not be necessary even for that other to be of the same sex.

It is not enough to distinguish Classical and Western tragedy merely as action-drama and event-drama. Faustian tragedy is biographical, Classical anecdotal; that is, the one deals with the sense of a whole life and the other with the content of the single moment.[^[397]] What relation, for instance, has the entire inward past of Œdipus or Orestes to the shattering event that suddenly meets him on his way?[^[398]] There is one sort of destiny, then, that strikes like a flash of lightning, and just as blindly, and another that interweaves itself with the course of a life, an invisible thread[^[399]] that yet distinguishes this particular life from all others. There is not the smallest trait in the past existence of Othello—that masterpiece of psychological analysis—that has not some bearing on the catastrophe. Race-hatred, the isolation of the upstart amongst the patricians, the Moor as soldier and as child of Nature, the loneliness of the ageing bachelor—all these things have their significance. Lear, too, and Hamlet—compare the exposition of these characters with that of Sophoclean pieces. They are psychological expositions through-and-through and not summations of outward data. The psychologist, in our sense of the word, namely the fine student (hardly nowadays to be distinguished from the poet) of spiritual turning-points, was entirely unknown to the Greeks. They were no more analytical in the field of soul than in that of number; vis-à-vis the Classical soul, how could they be so? “Psychology” in fact is the proper designation for the Western way of fashioning men; the word holds good for a portrait by Rembrandt as for the music of “Tristan,” for Stendhal’s Julian Sorel as for Dante’s “Vita Nuova.” The like of it is not to be found in any other Culture. If there is anything that the Classical arts scrupulously exclude it is this, for psychology is the form in which art handles man as incarnate will and not as σῶμα. To call Euripides a psychologist is to betray ignorance of what psychology is. What an abundance of character there is even in the mere mythology of the North with its sly dwarfs, its lumpy giants, its teasing elves, its Loki, Baldr and the rest! Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon, Ares are simply “men,” Hermes the “youth,” Athene a maturer Aphrodite, and the minor gods—as the later plastic shows—distinguishable only by the labels. And the same is true without reservation of the figures of the Attic stage. In Wolfram von Eschenbach, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, the tragic is individual, life develops from within outwards, dynamic, functional, and the life-courses are only fully understandable with reference to the historical background of the century. But in the great tragedians of Athens it comes from outside, it is static, Euclidean. To repeat a phrase already used in connexion with world-history, the shattering event is epochal in the former and merely episodic in the latter, even the finale of death being only the last bead in the string of sheer accidents that makes up an existence.

A Baroque tragedy is nothing but this same directive character brought into and developed in the light-world, and shown as a curve instead of as an equation, as kinetic instead of as potential energy. The visible person is the character as potential, the action the character at work. This, under the heap of Classicist reminiscences and misunderstandings that still hides it, is the whole meaning of our idea of Tragedy. The tragic man of the Classical is a Euclidean body that is struck by the Heimarmene in a position that it did not choose and cannot alter, but is seen, in the light that plays from without upon its surfaces, to be indeformable quand même. This is the sense in which Agamemnon is ναύαρχον σῶμα βασίλειον and in which Œdipus’s σῶμα is subjected to the Oracle.[^[400]] Down to Alexander the significant figures of Greek history astonish us with their inelasticity; not one of them, apparently, undergoes in the battle of life any such inward transformation as those which we know took place in Luther and Loyola. What we are prone—too prone—to call “characterization” in Greek drama is nothing but the reflection of events upon the ἦθος of the hero, never the reflection of a personality on events.

Of deep necessity, therefore, we Faustians understand drama as a maximum of activity; and, of deep necessity also, the Greek understood it as a maximum of passivity.[^[401]] Speaking generally, the Attic tragedy had no “action” at all. The Mysteries were purely δράματα or δρώμενα, i.e., ritual performances, and it was from the Mystery-form with its “peripeteia” that Æschylus (himself an Eleusinian) derived the high drama that he created. Aristotle describes tragedy as the imitation of an occurrence. This imitation is identical with the “profanation” of the mysteries; and we know that Æschylus went further and made the sacral vestments of the Eleusinian priesthood the regular costume of the Attic stage, and was accused on that account.[^[402]] For the δρᾶμα proper, with its reversal from lamentation to joy, consisted not in the fable that was narrated but in the ritual action that lay behind it, and was understood and felt by the spectator as deeply symbolic. With this element of the non-Homeric early religion[^[403]] there became associated another, a boorish—the burlesque (whether phallic or dithyrambic) scenes of the spring festivals of Demeter and Dionysus. The beast-dances[^[404]] and the accompanying song were the germ of the tragic Chorus which puts itself before the actor or “answerer” of Thespis (534).

The genuine tragedy grew up out of the solemn death-lament (threnos, nænia). At some time or other the joyous play of the Dionysus festival (which also was a soul-feast) became a mourners’ chorus of men, the Satyr-play being relegated to the end. In 494 Phrynichus produced the “Fall of Miletus”—not a historical drama but a lament of the women of Miletus—and was heavily fined for thus recalling the public calamity. It was Æschylus’s introduction of the second actor that accomplished the essential of Classical tragedy; the lament as given theme was thenceforward subordinated to the visual presentation of a great human suffering as present motive. The foreground-story (μύθος) is not “action” but the occasion for the songs of the Chorus, which still constitutes the τραγῳδία proper. It is immaterial whether the occurrence is indicated by narrative or exposition. The spectator was in solemn mood and he felt himself and his own fate to be meant in the words of pathos. It was in him that the περιπέτεια, the central element of the holy pageant, took place. Whatever the environment of message and tale, the liturgical lament for the woe of mankind remained always the centre of gravity of the whole, as we see more particularly in the “Prometheus,” the “Agamemnon” and the “Œdipus Rex.” But presently—at the very time when in Polycletus the pure plastic was triumphing over the fresco[^[405]]—there emerges high above the lament the grandeur of human endurance, the attitude, the ἦθος of the Hero. The theme is, not the heroic Doer whose will surges and breaks against the resistance of alien powers or the demons in his own breast, but the will-less Patient whose somatic existence is—gratuitously—destroyed. The Prometheus trilogy of Æschylus begins just where Goethe would in all probability have left off. King Lear’s madness is the issue of the tragic action, but Sophocles’s Ajax is made mad by Athene before the drama opens—here is the difference between a character and an operated figure. Fear and compassion, in fact, are, as Aristotle says, the necessary effect of Greek tragedy upon the Greek (and only the Greek) spectator, as is evident at once from his choice of the most effective scenes, which are those of piteous crash of fortune (περιπέτεια) and of recognition (ἀναγνώρισις). In the first, the ruling impression is φόβος (terror) and in the second it is ἐλεός (pity), and the καθάρσις in the spectator presupposes his existence-ideal to be that of ἀταραξία.[^[406]] The Classical soul is pure “present,” pure σῶμα, unmoved and point-formed being. To see this imperilled by the jealousy of the Gods or by that blind chance that may crash upon any man’s head without reason and without warning, is the most fearful of all experiences. The very roots of Greek being are struck at by what for the challenging Faustian is the first stimulus to living activity. And then—to find one’s self delivered, to see the sun come out again and the dark thunder clouds huddle themselves away on the remote horizon, to rejoice profoundly in the admired grand gesture, to see the tortured mythical soul breathe again—that is the κάθαρσις. But it presupposes a kind of life-feeling that is entirely alien to us, the very word being hardly translatable into our languages and our sensations. It took all the æsthetic industry and assertiveness of the Baroque and of Classicism, backed by the meekest submissiveness before ancient texts, to persuade us that this is the spiritual basis of our own tragedy as well. And no wonder. For the fact is that the effect of our tragedy is precisely the opposite. It does not deliver us from deadweight pressure of events, but evokes active dynamic elements in us, stings us, stimulates us. It awakens the primary feelings of an energetic human being, the fierceness and the joy of tension, danger, violent deed, victory, crime, the triumph of overcoming and destroying—feelings that have slumbered in the depths of every Northern soul since the days of the Vikings, the Hohenstaufen and the Crusades. That is Shakespearian effect. A Greek would not have tolerated Macbeth, nor, generally, would he have comprehended the meaning of this mighty art of directional biography at all. That figures like Richard III, Don Juan, Faust, Michael Kohlhaas, Golo—un-Classical from top to toe—awaken in us not sympathy but a deep and strange envy, not fear but a mysterious desire to suffer, to suffer-with (“compassion” of quite another sort), is visibly—even to-day when Faustian tragedy in its final form, the German, is dead at last—the standing motive of the literature of our Alexandrian phase. In the “sensational” adventure- and detective-story, and still more recently in the cinema-drama (the equivalent of the Late-Classical mimes), a relic of the unrestrainable Faustian impulse to conquer and discover is still palpable.

There are corresponding differences between the Apollinian and the Faustian outlook in the forms of dramatic presentation, which are the complement of the poetic idea. The antique drama is a piece of plastic, a group of pathetic scenes conceived as reliefs, a pageant of gigantic marionettes disposed against the definitive plane of the back-wall.[^[407]] Presentation is entirely that of grandly-imagined gestures, the meagre facts of the fable being solemnly recited rather than presented. The technique of Western drama aims at just the opposite—unbroken movement and strict exclusion of flat static moments. The famous “three unities” of place, time and action, as unconsciously evolved (though not expressly formulated) in Athens, are a paraphrase of the type of the Classical marble statue and, like it, an indication of what classical man, the man of the Polis and the pure present and the gesture, felt about life. The unities are all, effectively, negative, denials of past and future, repudiation of all spiritual action-at-a-distance. They can be summed in the one word ἀταραξία. The postulates of these “unities” must not be confused with the superficially similar postulates in the drama of the Romance peoples. The Spanish theatre of the 16th Century bowed itself to the authority of “Classical” rules, but it is easy to see the influence of noblesse oblige in this; Castilian dignity responded to the appeal without knowing, or indeed troubling to find out, the original sense of the rules. The great Spanish dramatists, Tirso da Molina above all, fashioned the “unities” of the Baroque, but not as metaphysical negations, but purely as expressions of the spirit of high courtesy, and it was as such that Corneille, the docile pupil of Spanish “grandezza,” borrowed them. It was a fateful step. If Florence threw herself into the imitation of the Classical sculpture—at which everyone marvelled and of which no one possessed the final criteria—no harm was done, for there was by then no Northern plastic to suffer thereby. But with tragedy it was another matter. Here there was the possibility of a mighty drama, purely Faustian, of unimagined forms and daring. That this did not appear, that for all the greatness of Shakespeare the Teutonic drama never quite shook off the spell of misunderstood convention, was the consequence of blind faith in the authority of Aristotle. What might not have come out of Baroque drama had it remained under the impression of the knightly epic and the Gothic Easter-play and Mystery, in the near neighbourhood of Oratorios and Passions, without ever hearing of the Greek theatre! A tragedy issuing from the spirit of contrapuntal music, free of limitations proper to plastic but here meaningless, a dramatic poetry that from Orlando Lasso and Palestrina could develop—side by side with Heinrich Schütz, Bach, Händel, Gluck and Beethoven, but entirely free—to a pure form of its own: that was what was possible, and that was what did not happen; and it is only to the fortunate circumstance that the whole of the fresco-art of Hellas has been lost that we owe the inward freedom of our oil-painting.