The decline of the West

by Oswald Spengler

VI

The phenomenon of the great style, then, is an emanation from the essence of the Macrocosm, from the prime-symbol of a great culture. No one who can appreciate the connotation of the word sufficiently to see that it designates not a form-aggregate but a form-history, will try to aline the fragmentary and chaotic art-utterances of primitive mankind with the comprehensive certainty of a style that consistently develops over centuries. Only the art of great Cultures, the art that has ceased to be only art and has begun to be an effective unit of expression and significance, possesses style.

The organic history of a style comprises a "pre—," a "non—" and a "post—." The bull tablet of the First Dynasty of Egypt[^[238]] is not yet “Egyptian.” Not till the Third Dynasty do the works acquire a style—but then they do so suddenly and very definitely. Similarly the Carolingian period stands “between-styles.” We see different forms touched on and explored, but nothing of inwardly necessary expression. The creator of the Aachen Minster “thinks surely and builds surely, but does not feel surely.”[^[239]] The Marienkirche in the Castle of Würzburg (c. 700) has its counterpart in Salonika (St. George), and the Church of St. Germigny des Près (c. 800) with its cupolas and horseshoe niches is almost a mosque. For the whole of West Europe the period 850-950 is almost a blank. And just so to-day Russian art stands between two styles. The primitive wooden architecture with its steep eight-sided tent-roof (which extends from Norway to Manchuria) is impressed with Byzantine motives from over the Danube and Armenian-Persian from over the Caucasus. We can certainly feel an “elective affinity” between the Russian and the Magian souls, but as yet the prime symbol of Russia, the plane without limit,[^[240]] finds no sure expression either in religion or in architecture. The church roof emerges, hillock-wise, but little from the landscape and on it sit the tent-roofs whose points are coifed with the “kokoshniks” that suppress and would abolish the upward tendency. They neither tower up like the Gothic belfry nor enclose like the mosque-cupola, but sit, thereby emphasizing the horizontality of the building, which is meant to be regarded merely from the outside. When about 1760 the Synod forbade the tent roofs and prescribed the orthodox onion-cupolas, the heavy cupolas were set upon slender cylinders, of which there may be any number[^[241]] and which sit on the roof-plane.[^[242]] It is not yet a style, only the promise of a style that will awaken when the real Russian religion awakens.

In the Faustian West, this awakening happened shortly before A.D. 1000. In one moment, the Romanesque style was there. Instead of the fluid organization of space on an insecure ground plan, there was, suddenly, a strict dynamic of space. From the very beginning, inner and outer construction were placed in a fixed relation, the wall was penetrated by the form-language and the form worked into the wall in a way that no other Culture has ever imagined. From the very beginning the window and the belfry were invested with their meanings. The form was irrevocably assigned. Only its development remained to be worked out.

The Egyptian style began with another such creative act, just as unconscious, just as full of symbolic force. The prime symbol of the Way came into being suddenly with the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty (2930 B.C.). The world-creating depth-experience of this soul gets its substance from the direction-factor itself. Spatial depth as stiffened Time, distance, death, Destiny itself dominate the expression, and the merely sensuous dimensions of length and breadth become an escorting plane which restricts and prescribes the Way of destiny. The Egyptian flat-relief, which is designed to be seen at close quarters and arranged serially so as to compel the beholder to pass along the wall-planes in the prescribed direction, appears with similar suddenness about the beginning of the Fifth Dynasty.[^[243]] The still later avenues of sphinxes and statues and the rock- and terrace-temples constantly intensify that tendency towards the one distance that the world of Egyptian mankind knows, the grave. Observe how soon the colonnades of the early period come to be systems of huge, close-set pillars that screen off all side-view. This is something that has never reproduced itself in any other architecture.

The grandeur of this style appears to us as rigid and unchanging. And certainly it stands beyond the passion which is ever seeking and fearing and so imparts to subordinate characters a quality of restless personal movement in the flow of the centuries. But, vice versa, we cannot doubt that to an Egyptian the Faustian style (which is our style, from earliest Romanesque to Rococo and Empire) would with its unresting persistent search for a Something, appear far more uniform than we can imagine. It follows, we must not forget, from the conception of style that we are working on here, that Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo are only stages of one and the same style, in which it is naturally the variable that we and the constant that men of other eyes remark. In actual fact, the inner unity of the Northern Renaissance is shown in innumerable reconstructions of Romanesque work in Baroque and of late Gothic work in Rococo that are not in the least startling. In peasant art, Gothic and Baroque have been identical, and the streets of old towns with their pure harmony of all sorts of gables and façades (wherein definite attributions to Romanesque or Gothic Renaissance or Baroque or Rococo are often quite impossible) show that the family resemblance between the members is far greater than they themselves realize.

The Egyptian style was purely architectural, and remained so till the Egyptian soul was extinguished. It is the only one in which Ornamentation as a decorative supplement to architecture is entirely absent. It allowed of no divergence into arts of entertainment, no display-painting, no busts, no secular music. In the Ionic phase, the centre of gravity of the Classical style shifted from architecture to an independent plastic art; in that of the Baroque the style of the West passed into music, whose form-language in its turn ruled the entire building art of the 18th Century; in the Arabian world, after Justinian and Chosroes-Nushirvan, Arabesque dissolved all the forms of architecture, painting and sculpture into style-impressions that nowadays we should consider as craft-art. But in Egypt the sovereignty of architecture remained unchallenged; it merely softened its language a little. In the chambers of the pyramid-temple of the Fourth Dynasty (Pyramid of Chephren) there are unadorned angular pillars. In the buildings of the Fifth (Pyramid of Sahu-rê) the plant-column makes its appearance. Lotus and papyrus branches turned into stone arise gigantic out of a pavement of transparent alabaster that represents water, enclosed by purple walls. The ceiling is adorned with birds and stars. The sacred way from the gate-buildings to the tomb-chamber, the picture of life, is a stream—it is the Nile itself become one with the prime-symbol of direction. The spirit of the mother-landscape unites with the soul that has sprung from it.

In China, in lieu of the awe-inspiring pylon with its massy wall and narrow entrance, we have the “Spirit-wall” (yin-pi) that conceals the way in. The Chinaman slips into life and thereafter follows the Tao of life’s path; as the Nile valley is to the up-and-down landscape of the Hwang Ho, so is the stone-enclosed temple-way to the mazy paths of Chinese garden-architecture. And just so, in some mysterious fashion, the Euclidean existence is linked with the multitude of little islands and promontories of the Ægean, and the passionate Western, roving in the infinite, with the broad plains of Franconia and Burgundy and Saxony.