VII
There is a word, “Impressionism,” which only came into general use in Manet’s time (and then, originally, as a word of contempt like Baroque and Rococo) but very happily summarizes the special quality of the Faustian way of art that has evolved from oil-painting. But, as we ordinarily speak of it, the idea has neither the width nor the depth of meaning that it ought to have: we regard it as a sequel to or derivative of the old age of an art which, in fact, belongs to it entirely and from first to last. What is the imitation of an "impression"? Something purely Western, something related to the idea of Baroque and even to the unconscious purposes of Gothic architecture and diametrically opposed to the deliberate aims of the Renaissance. Does it not signify the tendency—the deeply-necessary tendency of a waking consciousness to feel pure endless space as the supreme and unqualified actuality, and all sense-images as secondary and conditioned actualities "within it"? A tendency that can manifest itself in artistic creations, but has a thousand other outlets besides. Does not Kant’s formula "space as a priori form of perception" sound like a slogan for the whole movement that began with Leonardo? Impressionism is the inverse of the Euclidean world-feeling. It tries to get as far as possible from the language of plastic and as near as possible to that of music. The effect that is made upon us by things that receive and reflect light is made not because the things are there but as though they “in themselves” are not there. The things are not even bodies, but light-resistances in space, and their illusive density is to be unmasked by the brush-stroke. What is received and rendered is the impression of such resistances, which are tacitly evaluated as simple functions of a transcendent extension. The artist’s inner eye penetrates the body, breaks the spell of its material bounding surfaces and sacrifices it to the majesty of Space. And with this impression, under its influence, he feels an endless movement-quality in the sensuous element that is in utter contrast to the statuesque “Ataraxia” of the fresco. Therefore, there was not and could not be any Hellenic impressionism; if there is one art that must exclude it on principle, it is Classical sculpture.
Impressionism is the comprehensive expression of a world-feeling, and it must obviously therefore permeate the whole physiognomy of our “Late” Culture. There is an impressionistic mathematic, which frankly and with intent transcends all optical limitations. It is Analysis, as developed after Newton and Leibniz, and to it belong the visionary images of number-“bodies,” aggregates, and the multidimensional geometry. There is again an impressionistic physics which “sees” in lieu of bodies systems of mass-points—units that are evidently no more than constant relations between variable efficients. There are impressionistic ethics, tragedy, and logic, and even (in Pietism) an impressionistic Christianity.
Be the artist painter or musician, his art consists in creating with a few strokes or spots or tones an image of inexhaustible content, a microcosm meet for the eyes or ears of Faustian man; that is, in laying the actuality of infinite space under enchantment by fleeting and incorporeal indications of something objective which, so to say, forces that actuality to become phenomenal. The daring of these arts of moving the immobile has no parallel. Right from the later work of Titian to Corot and Menzel, matter quivers and flows like a solution under the mysterious pressure of brush-stroke and broken colours and lights. It was in pursuit of the same object that Baroque music became “thematic” instead of melodic and—reinforcing the “theme” with every expedient of harmonic charm, instrumental colour, rhythm, and tempo—developed the tone-picture from the imitative piece of Titian’s day to the leitmotiv-fabric of Wagner, and captured a whole new world of feeling and experience. When German music was at its culmination, this art penetrated also into lyric poetry (German lyric, that is, for in French it is impossible) and gave rise to a whole series of tiny masterpieces, from Goethe’s “Urfaust” to Hölderlin’s last poems—passages of a few lines apiece, which have never yet been noticed, let alone collected, but include nevertheless whole worlds of experience and feeling. On a small scale, it continually repeats the achievements of Copernicus and Columbus. No other Culture possesses an ornament-language of such dynamical impressiveness relatively to the means it employs. Every point or stroke of colour, every scarce-audible tone releases some surprising charm and continually feeds the imagination with fresh elements of space-creating energy. In Masaccio and Piero della Francesca we have actual bodies bathed in air. Then Leonardo, the first, discovers the transitions of atmospheric light and dark, the soft edges, the outlines that merge in the depth, the domains of light and shade in which the individual figures are inseparably involved. Finally, in Rembrandt, objects dissolve into mere coloured impressions, and forms lose their specific humanness and become collocations of strokes and patches that tell as elements of a passionate depth-rhythm. Distance, so treated, comes to signify Future, for what Impressionism seizes and holds is by hypothesis a unique and never-recurring instant, not a landscape in being but a fleeting moment of the history thereof. Just as in a Rembrandt portrait it is not the anatomical relief of the head that is rendered, but the second visage in it that is confessed; just as the art of his brush-stroke captures not the eye but the look, not the brow but the experience, not the lips but the sensuousness; so also the impressionist picture in general presents to the beholder not the Nature of the foreground but again a second visage, the look and soul of the landscape. Whether we take the Catholic-heroic landscape of Claude Lorrain, the “paysage intime” of Corot, the sea and river-banks and villages of Cuyp and Van Goyen, we find always a portrait in the physiognomic sense, something uniquely-occurring, unforeseen, brought to light for the first and last time. In this love of the character and physiognomy in landscape—just the motive that was unthinkable in fresco art and permanently barred to the Classical—the art of portraiture widens from the immediately human to the mediately human, to the representation of the world as a part of the ego or the self-world in which the painter paints himself and the beholder sees himself. For the expansion of Nature into Distance reflects a Destiny. In this art of tragic, daemonic, laughing and weeping landscapes there is something of which the man of another Culture has no idea and for which he has no organ. Anyone who in the presence of this form-world talks of Hellenistic illusion-painting must be unable to distinguish between an ornamentation of the highest order and a soulless imitation, an ape-mimicry of the obvious. If Lysippus said (as Pliny tells us he said) that he represented men as they appeared to him, his ambition was that of a child, of a layman, of a savage, not that of an artist. The great style, the meaning, the deep necessity, are absent; even the cave-dwellers of the stone age painted thus. In reality, the Hellenistic painters could do more when they chose. Even so late, the wall-paintings of Pompeii and the “Odyssey” landscapes in Rome contain a symbol. In each case it is a group of bodies that is rendered—rocks, trees, even “the Sea” as a body among bodies! There is no depth, but only superposition. Of course, of the objects represented one or several had necessarily to be furthest away (or rather least near) but this is a mere technical servitude without the remotest affinity to the illumined supernal distances of Faustian art.