X
The Venetians discovered, and introduced into oil-painting as a space-forming and quasi-musical motive, the handwriting of the visible brush-stroke. The Florentine masters had never at any time challenged the fashion—would-be Classical and yet in Gothic employ—of smoothing out all turns of the brush so as to produce pure, cleanly-outlined and even colour-surfaces. In consequence, their pictures have a certain air of being, something felt, unmistakably, as the opposite of the inherent motion-quality of the Gothic expression-means that were storming in from over the Alps. The 15th-Century manner of applying colour is a denial of past and future. It is only in the brushwork, which remains permanently visible and, in a way, perennially fresh, that the historical feeling comes out. Our desire is to see in the work of the painter not merely something that has become but something that is becoming. And this is precisely what the Renaissance wanted to avoid. A piece of Perugino drapery tells us nothing of its artistic origin; it is ready-made, given, simply present. But the individual brush-strokes—first met with as a complete new form-language in the later work of Titian—are accents of a personal temperament, characteristic in the orchestra-colours of Monteverde, melodically-flowing as a contemporary Venetian madrigal: streaks and dabs, immediately juxtaposed, cross one another, cover one another, entangle one another, and bring unending movement into the plain element of colour. Just so the geometrical Analysis of the time made its objects become instead of being. Every painting has in its execution a history and does not disguise it; and a Faustian who stands before it feels that he too has a spiritual evolution. Before any great landscape by a Baroque master, the one word “historical” is enough to make us feel that there is a meaning in it wholly alien to the meaning of an Attic statue. As other melody, so also this of the restless outlineless brush-stroke is part of the dynamic stability of the universe of eternal Becoming, directional Time, and Destiny. The opposition of painting-style and drawing-style is but a particular aspect of the general opposition of historical and ahistorical form, of assertion and denial of inner development, of eternity and instantaneity. A Classical art-work is an event, a Western is a deed. The one symbolizes the here-and-now point, the other the living course. And the physiognomy of this script of the brush—an ornamentation that is entirely new, infinitely rich and personal, and peculiar to the Western Culture—is purely and simply musical. It is no mere conceit to compare the allegro feroce of Frans Hals with the andante con moto of Van Dyck, or the minor of Guercino with the major of Velasquez. Henceforward the notion of tempo is comprised in the execution of a painting and steadily reminds us that this art is the art of a soul which, in contrast to the Classical, forgets nothing and will let nothing be forgotten that once was. The aëry web of brush-strokes immediately dissolves the sensible surface of things. Contours melt into chiaroscuro. The beholder has to stand a very long way back to obtain any corporeal impression out of our coloured space values, and even so it is always the chromatic and active air itself that gives birth to the things.
At the same time with this, there appeared in Western painting another symbol of highest significance, which subdued more and more the actuality of all colour—the “studio-brown” (atelierbraun). This was unknown to the early Florentines and the older Flemish and Rhenish masters alike. Pacher, Dürer, Holbein, passionately strong as their tendency towards spatial depth seems, are quite without it, and its reign begins only with the last years of the 16th Century. This brown does not repudiate its descent from the “infinitesimal” greens of Leonardo’s, Schöngauer’s and Grünewald’s backgrounds, but it possesses a mightier power over things than they, and it carries the battle of Space against Matter to a decisive close. It even prevails over the more primitive linear perspective, which is unable to shake off its Renaissance association with architectural motives. Between it and the Impressionist technique of the visible brush-stroke there is an enduring and deeply suggestive connexion. Both in the end dissolve the tangible existences of the sense-world—the world of moments and foregrounds—into atmospheric semblances. Line disappears from the tone-picture. The Magian gold-ground had only dreamed of a mystic power that controlled and at will could thrust aside the laws governing corporeal existence within the world-cavern. But the brown of these pictures opened a prospect into an infinity of pure forms. And therefore its discovery marks for the Western style a culmination in the process of its becoming. As contrasted with the preceding green, this colour has something Protestant in it. It anticipates the hyperbolic[[314]] Northern pantheism of the 18th Century which the Archangels voice in the Prologue of Goethe’s “Faust.”[[315]] The atmosphere of Lear and the atmosphere of Macbeth are akin to it. The contemporary striving of instrumental music towards freer and ever freer chromatics (de Rore, Luca Marenzio) and towards the formation of bodies of tone by means of string and wind choruses corresponds exactly with the new tendency of oil-painting to create pictorial chromatics out of pure colours, by means of these unlimited brown shadings and the contrast-effect of immediately juxtaposed colour-strokes. Thereafter both the arts spread through their worlds of tones and colours—colour-tones and tone-colours—an atmosphere of the purest spatiality, which enveloped and rendered, no longer body—the human being as a shape—but the soul unconfined. And thus was attained the inwardness that in the deepest works of Rembrandt and of Beethoven is able to unlock the last secrets themselves—the inwardness which Apollinian man had sought with his strictly somatic art to keep at bay.
From now onward, the old foreground-colours yellow and red—the Classical tones—are employed more and more rarely and always as deliberate contrasts to the distances and depths that they are meant to set off and emphasize (Vermeer in particular, besides of course Rembrandt). This atmospheric brown, which was entirely alien to the Renaissance, is the unrealest colour that there is. It is the one major colour that does not exist in the rainbow. There is white light, and yellow and green, and red and other light of the most entire purity. But a pure brown light is outside the possibilities of the Nature that we know. All the greenish-brown, silvery, moist brown, and deep gold tones that appear in their splendid variety with Giorgione, grow bolder and bolder in the great Dutch painters and lose themselves towards the end of the 18th Century, have the common quality that they strip nature of her tangible actuality. They contain, therefore, what is almost a religious profession of faith; we feel that here we are not very far from Port Royal, from Leibniz. With Constable on the other hand—who is the founder of the painting of Civilization—it is a different will that seeks expression; and the very brown that he had learnt from the Dutch meant to him not what it had meant to them—Destiny, God, the meaning of life—but simply romance, sensibility, yearning for something that was gone, memorial of the great past of the dying art. In the last German masters too—Lessing, Marées, Spitzweg, Diez, Leibl[[316]]—whose belated art is a romantic retrospect, an epilogue, the brown tones appear simply as a precious heirloom. Unwilling in their hearts to part with this last relic of the great style, they preferred to set themselves against the evident tendency of their generation—the soulless and soul-killing generation of plein-air and Haeckel. Rightly understood (as it has never yet been), this battle of Rembrandt-brown and the plein-air of the new school is simply one more case of the hopeless resistance put up by soul against intellect and Culture against Civilization, of the opposition of symbolic necessary art and megalopolitan “applied” art which affects building and painting and sculpture and poetry alike. Regarded thus, the significance of the brown becomes manifest enough. When it dies, an entire Culture dies with it.
It was the masters who were inwardly greatest—Rembrandt above all—who best understood this colour. It is the enigmatic brown of his most telling work, and its origin is in the deep lights of Gothic church-windows and the twilight of the high-vaulted Gothic nave. And the gold tone of the great Venetians—Titian, Veronese, Palma, Giorgione—is always reminding us of that old perished Northern art of glass painting of which they themselves know almost nothing. Here also the Renaissance with its deliberate bodiliness of colour is seen as merely an episode, an event of the very self-conscious surface, and not a product of the underlying Faustian instinct of the Western soul, whereas this luminous gold-brown of the Venetian painting links Gothic and Baroque, the art of the old glass-painting and the dark music of Beethoven. And it coincides precisely in time with the establishment of the Baroque style of colour-music by the work of the Netherlanders Willaert and Cyprian de Rore, the elder Gabrieli, and the Venetian music-school which they founded.
Brown, then, became the characteristic colour of the soul, and more particularly of a historically-disposed soul. Nietzsche has, I think, spoken somewhere of the “brown” music of Bizet, but the adjective is far more appropriate to the music which Beethoven wrote for strings[[317]] and to the orchestration that even as late as Bruckner so often fills space with a browny-golden expanse of tone. All other colours are relegated to ancillary functions—thus the bright yellow and the vermilion of Vermeer intrude with the spatial almost as though from another world and with an emphasis that is truly metaphysical, and the yellow-green and blood-red lights of Rembrandt seem at most to play with the symbolism of space. In Rubens, on the contrary—brilliant performer but no thinker—the brown is almost destitute of idea, a shadow-colour. (In him and in Watteau, the “Catholic” blue-green disputes precedence with the brown.) All this shows how any particular means may, in the hands of men of inward depth, become a symbol for the evocation of such high transcendence as that of the Rembrandt landscape, while for other great masters it may be merely a serviceable technical expedient—or in other words that (as we have already seen) technical “form,” in the theoretical sense of something opposed to “content,” has nothing whatever to do with the real and true form of a great work.
I have called brown a historical colour. By this is meant that it makes the atmosphere of the pictured space signify directedness and future, and overpowers the assertiveness of any instantaneous element that may be represented. The other colours of distance have also this significance, and they lead to an important, considerable and distinctly bizarre extension of the Western symbolism. The Hellenes had in the end come to prefer bronze and even gilt-bronze to the painted marble, the better to express (by the radiance of this phenomenon against a deep blue sky) the idea of the individualness of any and every corporeal thing.[[318]] Now, when the Renaissance dug these statues up, it found them black and green with the patina of many centuries. The historic spirit, with its piety and longing, fastened on to this—and from that time forth our form-feeling has canonized this black and green of distance. To-day our eye finds it indispensable to the enjoyment of a bronze—an ironical illustration of the fact that this whole species of art is something that no longer concerns us as such. What does a cathedral dome or a bronze figure mean to us without the patina which transmutes the short-range brilliance into the tone of remoteness of time and place? Have we not got to the point of artificially producing this patina?[[319]]
But even more than this is involved in the ennoblement of decay to the level of an art-means of independent significance. That a Greek would have regarded the formation of patina as the ruin of the work, we can hardly doubt. It is not merely that the colour green, on account of its “distant” quality, was avoided by him on spiritual grounds. Patina is a symbol of mortality and hence related in a remarkable way to the symbols of time-measurement and the funeral rite. We have already in an earlier chapter discussed the wistful regard of the Faustian soul for ruins and evidences of the distant past, its proneness to the collection of antiquities and manuscripts and coins, to pilgrimages to the Forum Romanum and to Pompeii, to excavations and philological studies, which appears as early as the time of Petrarch. When would it have occurred to a Greek to bother himself with the ruins of Cnossus or Tiryns?[[320]] Every Greek knew his “Iliad” but not one ever thought of digging up the hill of Troy. We, on the contrary, are moved by a secret piety to preserve the aqueducts of the Campagna, the Etruscan tombs, the ruins of Luxor and Karnak, the crumbling castles of the Rhine, the Roman Limes, Hersfeld and Paulinzella from becoming mere rubbish—but we keep them as ruins, feeling in some subtle way that reconstruction would deprive them of something, indefinable in terms, that can never be reproduced.[[321]] Nothing was further from the Classical mind than this reverence for the weather-beaten evidences of a once and a formerly. It cleared out of sight everything that did not speak of the present; never was the old preserved because it was old. After the Persians had destroyed old Athens, the citizens threw columns, statues, reliefs, broken or not, over the Acropolis wall, in order to start afresh with a clean slate—and the resultant scrap-heaps have been our richest sources for the art of the 6th Century. Their action was quite in keeping with the style of a Culture that raised cremation to the rank of a major symbol and refused with scorn to bind daily life to a chronology. Our choice has been, as usual, the opposite. The heroic landscape of the Claude Lorrain type is inconceivable without ruins. The English park with its atmospheric suggestion, which supplanted the French about 1750 and abandoned the great perspective idea of the latter in favour of the “Nature” of Addison, Pope and sensibility, introduced into its stock of motives perhaps the most astonishing bizarrerie ever perpetrated, the artificial ruin, in order to deepen the historical character in the presented landscape.[[322]] The Egyptian Culture restored the works of its early period, but it would never have ventured to build ruins as the symbols of the past. Again, it is not the Classical statue, but the Classical torso that we really love. It has had a destiny: something suggestive of the past as past envelops it, and our imagination delights to fill the empty space of missing limbs with the pulse and swing of invisible lines. A good restoration—and the secret charm of endless possibilities is all gone. I venture to maintain that it is only by way of this transposition into the musical that the remains of Classical sculpture can really reach us. The green bronze, the blackened marble, the fragments of a figure abolish for our inner eye the limitations of time and space. “Picturesque” this has been called—the brand-new statue and building and the too-well-groomed park are not picturesque—and the word is just to this extent, that the deep meaning of this weathering is the same as that of the studio-brown. But, at bottom, what both express is the spirit of instrumental music. Would the Spearman of Polycletus, standing before us in flashing bronze and with enamel eyes and gilded hair, affect us as it does in the state of blackened age? Would not the Vatican torso of Heracles lose its mighty impressiveness if, one fine day, the missing parts were discovered and replaced? And would not the towers and domes of our old cities lose their deep metaphysical charm if they were sheathed in new copper? Age, for us as for the Egyptian, ennobles all things. For Classical man, it depreciates them.
Lastly, consider Western tragedy; observe how the same feeling leads it to prefer “historical” material—meaning thereby not so much demonstrably actual or even possible, but remote and crusted subjects. That which the Faustian soul wanted, and must have, could not be expressed by any event of purely momentary meaning, lacking in distance of time or place, or by a tragic art of the Classical kind, or by a timeless myth. Our tragedies, consequently, are tragedies of the past and of the future—the latter category, in which men yet to be are shown as carriers of a Destiny, is represented in a certain sense by “Faust,” “Peer Gynt” and the “Götterdämmerung.” But tragedies of the present we have not, apart from the trivial social drama of the 19th Century.[[323]] If Shakespeare wanted on occasion to express anything of importance in the present, he at least removed the scene of it to some foreign land—Italy for preference—in which he had never been, and German poets likewise take England or France—always for the sake of getting rid of that nearness of time and place which the Attic drama emphasized even in the case of a mythological subject.
CHAPTER VIII
MUSIC AND PLASTIC
II
ACT AND PORTRAIT