VII
Now, whatever is sensuously-near is understandable for all, and therefore of all the Cultures that have been, the Classical is the most popular, and the Faustian the least popular, in its expressions of life-feeling. A creation is “popular” that gives itself with all its secrets to the first comer at the first glance that incorporates its meaning in its exterior and surface. In any Culture, that element is “popular” which has come down unaltered from primitive states and imaginings, which a man understands from childhood without having to master by effort any really novel method or standpoint—and, generally, that which is immediately and frankly evident to the senses, as against that which is merely hinted at and has to be discovered—by the few, and sometimes the very, very few. There are popular ideas, works, men and landscapes. Every Culture has its own quite definite sort of esoteric or popular character that is immanent in all its doings, so far as these have symbolic importance. The commonplace eliminates differences of spiritual breadth as well as depth between man and man, while the esoteric emphasizes and strengthens them. Lastly, considered in relation to the primary depth-experience of this and that kind of awakening man—that is, in relation to the prime-symbol of his existence and the cast of his world-around—the purely “popular” and naïve associates itself with the symbol of the bodily, while to the symbol of endless Space belongs a frankly un-popular relation between the creations and the men of the Culture.
The Classical geometry is that of the child, that of any layman—Euclid’s Elements are used in England as a school-book to this day. The workaday mind will always regard this as the only true and correct geometry. All other kinds of natural geometry that are possible (and have in fact, by an immense effort of overcoming the popular-obvious, been discovered) are understandable only for the circle of the professional mathematicians. The famous “four elements” of Empedocles are those of every naïve man and his “instinctive” physics, while the idea of isotopes which has come out of research into radioactivity is hardly comprehensible even to the adept in closely-cognate sciences. Everything that is Classical is comprehensible in one glance, be it the Doric temple, the statue, the Polis, the cults; backgrounds and secrets there are none. But compare a Gothic cathedral-façade with the Propylæa, an etching with a vase-painting, the policy of the Athenian people with that of the modern Cabinet. Consider what it means that every one of our epoch-making works of poetry, policy and science has called forth a whole literature of explanations, and not indubitably successful explanations at that. While the Parthenon sculptures were “there” for every Hellene, the music of Bach and his contemporaries was only for musicians. We have the types of the Rembrandt expert, the Dante scholar, the expert in contrapuntal music, and it is a reproach—a justifiable reproach—to Wagner that it was possible for far too many people to be Wagnerians, that far too little of his music was for the trained musician. But do we hear of Phidias-experts or even Homer-scholars? Herein lies the explanation of a set of phenomena which we have hitherto been inclined to treat—in a vein of moral philosophy, or, better, of melodrama—as weaknesses common to humanity, but which are in fact symptoms of the Western life-feeling, viz., the “misunderstood” artist, the poet “left to starve,” the “derided discoverer,” the thinker who is “centuries in advance of his time” and so on. These are types of an esoteric Culture. Destinies of this sort have their basis in the passion of distance in which is concealed the desire-to-infinity and the will-to-power, and they are as necessary in the field of Faustian mankind—at all stages—as they are unthinkable in the Apollinian.
Every high creator in Western history has in reality aimed, from first to last, at something which only the few could comprehend. Michelangelo made the remark that his style was ordained for the correction of fools. Gauss concealed his discovery of non-Euclidean geometry for thirty years, for fear of the “clamour of the Bœotians.” It is only to-day that we are separating out the masters of Gothic cathedral art from the rank-and-file. But the same applies also to every painter, statesman, philosopher. Think of Giordano Bruno, or Leibniz, or Kant, as against Anaximander, Heraclitus or Protagoras. What does it mean, that no German philosopher worth mentioning can be understood by the man in the street, and that the combination of simplicity with majesty that is Homer’s is simply not to be found in any Western language? The Nibelungenlied is a hard, reserved utterance, and as for Dante, in Germany at any rate the pretension to understand him is seldom more than a literary pose. We find everywhere in the Western what we find nowhere in the Classical—the exclusive form. Whole periods—for instance, the Provençal Culture and the Rococo—are in the highest degree select and uninviting, their ideas and forms having no existence except for a small class of higher men. Even the Renaissance is no exception, for though it purports to be the rebirth of that Antique which is so utterly non-exclusive and caters so frankly for all, it is in fact, through-and-through, the creation of a circle or of individual chosen souls, a taste that rejects popularity from the outset—and how deep this sense of detachment goes we can tell from the case of Florence, where the generality of the people viewed the works of the elect with indifference, or with open mouths, or with dislike, and sometimes, as in the case of Savonarola, turned and rent them. On the contrary, every Attic burgher belonged to the Attic Culture, which excluded nobody; and consequently, the distinctions of deeps and shallows, which are so decisively important for us, did not exist at all for it. For us, popular and shallow are synonymous—in art as in science—but for Classical man it was not so.
Consider our sciences too. Every one of them, without exception, has besides its elementary groundwork certain “higher” regions that are inaccessible to the layman—symbols, these also, of our will-to-infinity and directional energy. The public for whom the last chapters of up-to-date physics have been written numbers at the utmost a thousand persons, and certain problems of modern mathematics are accessible only to a much smaller circle still—for our “popular” science is without value, détraquée, and falsified. We have not only an art for artists, but also a mathematic for mathematicians, a politic for politicians (of which the profanum vulgus of newspaper-readers has not the smallest inkling,[[409]] whereas Classical politics never got beyond the horizon of the Agora), a religion for the “religious genius” and a poetry for philosophers. Indeed, we may take the craving for wide effect as a sufficient index by itself of the commencing and already perceptible decline of Western science. That the severe esoteric of the Baroque Age is felt now as a burden, is a symptom of sinking strength and of the dulling of that distance-sense which confessed the limitation with humility. The few sciences that have kept the old fineness, depth, and energy of conclusion and deduction and have not been tainted with journalism—and few indeed they are, for theoretical physics, mathematics, Catholic dogma, and perhaps jurisprudence exhaust the list—address themselves to a very narrow and chosen band of experts. And it is this expert, and his opposite the layman, that are totally lacking in the Classical life, wherein everyone knows everything. For us, the polarity of expert and layman has all the significance of a high symbol, and when the tension of this distance is beginning to slacken, there the Faustian life is fading out.
The conclusion to be argued from this as regards the advances of Western science in its last phase (which will cover, or quite possibly will not cover, the next two centuries) is, that in proportion as megalopolitan shallowness and triviality drive arts and sciences on to the bookstall and into the factory, the posthumous spirit of the Culture will confine itself more and more to very narrow circles; and that there, remote from advertisement, it will work in ideas and forms so abstruse that only a mere handful of superfine intelligences will be capable of attaching meanings to them.