VIII
In no Classical art-work is a relation with the beholder attempted, for that would require the form-language of the individual object to affirm and to make use of the existence of a relation between that object and ambient unlimited space. An Attic statue is a completely Euclidean body, timeless and relationless, wholly self-contained. It neither speaks nor looks. It is quite unconscious of the spectator. Unlike the plastic forms of every other Culture, it stands wholly for itself and fits into no architectural order; it is an individual amongst individuals, a body amongst bodies. And the living individuals merely perceive it as a neighbour, and do not feel it as an invasive influence, an efficient capable of traversing space. Thus is expressed the Apollinian life-feeling.
The awakening Magian art at once reversed the meaning of these forms. The eyes of the statues and portraits in the Constantinian style are big and staring and very definitely directed. They represent the Pneuma, the higher of the two soul-substances. The Classical sculptor had fashioned the eyes as blind, but now the pupils are bored, the eye, unnaturally enlarged, looks into the space that in Attic art it had not acknowledged as existing. In the Classical fresco-painting, heads are turned towards one another, but in the mosaics of Ravenna and even in the relief-work of Early-Christian-Late-Roman sarcophagi they are always turned towards the beholder, and their wholly spiritual look is fixed upon him. Mysteriously and quite un-Classically the beholder’s sphere is invaded by an action-at-a-distance from the world that is in the art-work. Something of this magic can still be traced in early Florentine and early Rhenish gold-ground pictures.
Consider, now, Western painting as it was after Leonardo, fully conscious of its mission. How does it deal with infinite space as something singular which comprehends both picture and spectator as mere centres of gravity of a spatial dynamic? The full Faustian life-feeling, the passion of the third dimension, takes hold of the form of the picture, the painted plane, and transforms it in an unheard-of way. The picture no longer stands for itself, nor looks at the spectator, but takes him into its sphere. The sector defined by the sides of the frame—the peepshow-field, twin with the stage-field—represents universal space itself. Foreground and background lose all tendency to materiality and propinquity and disclose instead of marking off. Far horizons deepen the field to infinity, and the colour-treatment of the close foreground eliminates the ideal plane of separation formed by the canvas and thus expands the field so that the spectator is in it. It is not he, now, who chooses the standpoint from which the picture is most effective; on the contrary, the picture dictates position and distance to him. Lateral limits, too, are done away with—from 1500 onwards overrunnings of the frame are more and more frequent and daring. The Greek spectator stands before the fresco of Polygnotus. We sink into a picture, that is, we are pulled into it by the power of the space-treatment. Unity of space being thus re-established, the infinity that is expanded in all directions by the picture is ruled by the Western perspective;[[410]] and from perspective there runs a road straight to the comprehension of our astronomical world-picture and its passionate pioneering into unending farness.
Apollinian man did not want to observe the broad universe, and the philosophical systems one and all are silent about it. They know only problems concerned with tangible and actual things, and have never anything positive or significant to say about what is between the “things.” The Classical thinker takes the earth-sphere, upon which he stands and which (even in Hipparchus) is enveloped in a fixed celestial sphere, as the complete and given world, and if we probe the depths and secrets of motive here we are almost startled by the persistency with which theory attempted time after time to attach the order of these heavens to that of the earth in some way that would not impugn[impugn] the primacy of the latter.[[411]]
Compare with this the convulsive vehemence with which the discovery of Copernicus—the “contemporary” of Pythagoras—drove through the soul of the West, and the deep spirit of awe in which Kepler looked upon the laws of planetary orbits which he had discovered as an immediate revelation from God, not daring to doubt that they were circular because any other form would have been too unworthy a symbol. Here the old Northern life-feeling, the Viking infinity-wistfulness, comes into its own. Here, too, is the meaning of the characteristically Faustian discovery of the telescope which, penetrating into spaces hidden from the naked eye and inaccessible to the will-to-power, widens the universe that we possess. The truly religious feeling that seizes us even to-day when we dare to look into the depths of starry space for the first time—the same feeling of power that Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies aim at awakening—would to Sophocles appear as the impiety of all impieties.
Our denial of the “vault” of heaven, then, is a resolve and not a sense-experience. The modern ideas as to the nature of starry space—or, to speak more prudently, of an extension indicated by light-indices that are communicated by eye and telescope—most certainly do not rest upon sure knowledge, for what we see in the telescope is small bright disks of different sizes. The photographic plate yields quite another picture—not a sharper one but a different one—and the construction of a consistent world-picture such as we crave depends upon connecting the two by numerous and often very daring hypotheses (e.g., of distances, magnitudes and movements) that we ourselves frame. The style of this picture corresponds to the style of our own soul. In actual fact we do not know how different the light-powers of one and another star may be, nor whether they vary in different directions. We do not know whether or not light is altered, diminished, or extinguished in the immensities of space. We do not know whether our earthly conceptions of the nature of light, and therefore all the theories and laws deduced from them, have validity beyond the immediate environment of the earth. What we “see” are merely light-indices; what we understand are symbols of ourselves.
The strong upspringing of the Copernican world-idea—which belongs exclusively to our Culture and (to risk an assertion that even now may seem paradoxical) would be and will be deliberately forced into oblivion whenever the soul of a coming Culture shall feel itself endangered by it[[412]]—was founded on the certainty that the corporeal-static, the imagined preponderance of the plastic earth, was henceforth eliminated from the Cosmos. Till then, the heavens which were thought of, or at any rate felt, as a substantial quantity, like the earth, had been regarded as being in polar equilibrium with it. But now it was Space that ruled the universe. “World” signifies space, and the stars are hardly more than mathematical points, tiny balls in the immense, that as material no longer affect the world-feeling. While Democritus, who tried (as on behalf of the Apollinian Culture he was bound to try) to settle some limit of a bodily kind to it all, imagined a layer of hook-shaped atoms as a skin over the Cosmos, an insatiable hunger drives us ever further and further into the remote. The solar system of Copernicus, already expanded by Giordano Bruno to a thousand such systems, grew immeasurably wider in the Baroque Age; and to-day we “know” that the sum of all the solar systems, about 35,000,000, constitutes a closed (and demonstrably finite[[413]]) stellar system which forms an ellipsoid of rotation and has its equator approximately along the band of the Milky Way. Swarms of solar systems traverse this space, like flights of migrant birds, with the same velocity and direction. One such group, with an apex in the constellation of Hercules, is formed by our sun together with the bright stars Capella, Vega, Altair and Betelgeuse. The axis of this immense system, which has its mid-point not far from the present position of our sun, is taken as 470,000,000 times as long as the distance from the earth to the sun. Any night, the starry heavens give us at the same moment impressions that originated 3,700 years apart in time, for that is the distance in light-years from the extreme outer limit to the earth. In the picture of history as it unfolds before us here, this period corresponds to a duration covering the whole Classical and Magian ages and going back to the zenith of the Egyptian Culture in the XIIth Dynasty. This aspect—an image, I repeat, and not a matter of experimental knowledge—is for the Faustian a high and noble[[414]] aspect, but for the Apollinian it would have been woeful and terrible, an annihilation of the most profound conditions of his being. And he would have felt it as sheer salvation when after all a limit, however remote, had been found. But we, driven by the deep necessity that is in us, must simply ask ourselves the new question: Is there anything outside this system? Are there aggregates of such systems, at such distances that even the dimensions established by our astronomy[[415]] are small by comparison? As far as sense-observations are concerned, it seems that an absolute limit has been reached; neither light nor gravitation can give a sign of existence through this outer space, void of mass. But for us it is a simple necessity of thought. Our spiritual passion, our unresting need to actualize our existence-idea in symbols, suffers under this limitation of our sense-perceptions.