And this is why architecture of the grand style—which is the only one of the arts that handles the alien and fear-instilling itself, the immediate Extended, the stone—is naturally the early art in all Cultures, and only step by step yields its primacy to the special arts of the city with their more mundane forms—the statue, the picture, the musical composition. Of all the great artists of the West, it was probably Michelangelo who suffered most acutely under the constant nightmare of world-fear, and it was he also who, alone among the Renaissance masters, never freed himself from the architectural. He even painted as though his surfaces were stone, become, stiff, hateful. His work was a bitter wrestle with the powers of the cosmos which faced him and challenged him in the form of material, whereas in the yearning Leonardo’s colour we see, as it were, a glad materialization of the spiritual[spiritual]. But in every large architectural problem an implacable causal logic, not to say mathematic, comes to expression—in the Classical orders of columns a Euclidean relation of beam and load, in the “analytically” disposed thrust-system of Gothic vaulting the dynamic relation of force and mass. Cottage-building traditions—which are to be traced in the one and in the other, which are the necessary background even of Egyptian architecture, which in fact develop in every early period and are regularly lost in every later—contain the whole sum of this logic of the extended. But the symbolism of direction and destiny is beyond all the “technique” of the great arts and hardly approachable by way of æsthetics. It lies—to take some instances—in the contrast that is always felt (but never, either by Lessing or by Hebbel, elucidated) between Classical and Western tragedy; in the succession of scenes of old Egyptian relief and generally in the serial arrangement of Egyptian statues, sphinxes, temple-halls; in the choice, as distinct from the treatment, of materials (hardest diorite to affirm, and softest wood to deny, the future); in the occurrence, and not in the grammar, of the individual arts, e.g., the victory of arabesque over the Early Christian picture, the retreat of oil-painting before chamber music in the Baroque; in the utter diversity of intention in Egyptian, Chinese and Classical statuary. All these are not matters of “can” but of “must,” and therefore it is not mathematics and abstract thought, but the great arts in their kinship with the contemporary religions, that give the key to the problem of Time, a problem that can hardly be solved within the domain of history[[120]] alone.
IV
It follows from the meaning that we have attached to the Culture as a prime phenomenon and to destiny as the organic logic of existence, that each Culture must necessarily possess its own destiny-idea. Indeed, this conclusion is implicit from the first in the feeling that every great Culture is nothing but the actualizing and form of a single, singularly-constituted (einzigartig) soul. And what cannot be felt by one sort of men exactly as it is felt by another (since the life of each is the expression of the idea proper to himself) and still less transcribed, what is named by us “conjuncture,” “accident,” “Providence” or “Fate,” by Classical man “Nemesis,” “Ananke,” “Tyche” or “Fatum,” by the Arab “Kismet,” by everyone in some way of his own, is just that of which each unique and unreproduceable soul-constitution, quite clear to those who share in it, is a rendering.
The Classical form of the Destiny-idea I shall venture to call Euclidean. Thus it is the sense-actual person of Œdipus, his “empirical ego,” nay, his σῶμα that is hunted and thrown by Destiny. Œdipus complains that Creon has misused his “body”[[121]] and that the oracle applied to his “body.”[[122]] Æschylus, again, speaks of Agamemnon as the “royal body, leader of fleets.”[[123]] It is this same word σῶμα that the mathematicians employ more than once for the “bodies” with which they deal. But the destiny of King Lear is of the “analytical” type—to use here also the term suggested by the corresponding number-world—and consists in dark inner relationships. The idea of fatherhood emerges; spiritual threads weave themselves into the action, incorporeal and transcendental, and are weirdly illuminated by the counterpoint of the secondary tragedy of Gloster’s house. Lear is at the last a mere name, the axis of something unbounded. This conception of destiny is the “infinitesimal” conception. It stretches out into infinite time and infinite space. It touches the bodily, Euclidean existence not at all, but affects only the Soul. Consider the mad King between the fool and the outcast in the storm on the heath, and then look at the Laocoön group; the first is the Faustian, the other the Apollinian way of suffering. Sophocles, too, wrote a Laocoön drama; and we may be certain that there was nothing of pure soul-agony in it. Antigone goes below ground in the body, because she has buried her brother’s body. Think of Ajax and Philoctetes, and then of the Prince of Homburg and Goethe’s Tasso—is not the difference between magnitude and relation traceable right into the depths of artistic creation?
This brings us to another connexion of high symbolic significance. The drama of the West is ordinarily designated Character-Drama. That of the Greeks, on the other hand, is best described as Situation-Drama, and in the antithesis we can perceive what it is that Western, and what it is that Classical, man respectively feel as the basic life-form that is imperilled by the onsets of tragedy and fate. If in lieu of “direction” we say “irreversibility,” if we let ourselves sink into the terrible meaning of those words “too late” wherewith we resign a fleeting bit of the present to the eternal past, we find the deep foundation of every tragic crisis. It is Time that is the tragic, and it is by the meaning that it intuitively attaches to Time that one Culture is differentiated from another; and consequently “tragedy” of the grand order has only developed in the Culture which has most passionately affirmed, and in that which has most passionately denied, Time. The sentiment of the ahistoric soul gives us a Classical tragedy of the moment, and that of the ultrahistorical soul puts before us Western tragedy that deals with the development of a whole life. Our tragedy arises from the feeling of an inexorable Logic of becoming, while the Greek feels the illogical, blind Casual of the moment—the life of Lear matures inwardly towards a catastrophe, and that of Œdipus stumbles without warning upon a situation. And now one may perceive how it is that synchronously with Western drama there rose and fell a mighty portrait-art (culminating in Rembrandt), a kind of historical and biographical art which (because it was so) was sternly discountenanced in Classical Greece at the apogee of Attic drama. Consider the veto on likeness-statuary in votive offerings[[124]] and note how—from Demetrius of Alopeke (about 400)[[125]]—a timid art of “ideal” portraiture began to venture forth when, and only when, grand tragedy had been thrown into the background by the light society-pieces of the “Middle Comedy.”[[126]] Fundamentally all Greek statues were standard masks, like the actors in the theatre of Dionysus; all bring to expression, in significantly strict form, somatic attitudes and positions. Physiognomically they are dumb, corporeal and of necessity nude—character-heads of definite individuals came only with the Hellenistic age. Once more we are reminded of the contrast between the Greek number-world, with its computations of tangible results, and the other, our own, in which the relations between groups of functions or equations or, generally, formula-elements of the same order are investigated morphologically, and the character of these relations fixed as such in express laws.
V
In the capacity of experientially living history and the way in which history, particularly the history of personal becoming, is lived, one man differs very greatly from another.
Every Culture possesses a wholly individual way of looking at and comprehending the world-as-Nature; or (what comes to the same thing) it has its own peculiar “Nature” which no other sort of man can possess in exactly the same form. But in a far greater degree still, every Culture—including the individuals comprising it (who are separated only by minor distinctions)—possesses a specific and peculiar sort of history—and it is in the picture of this and the style of this that the general and the personal, the inner and the outer, the world-historical and the biographical becoming, are immediately perceived, felt and lived. Thus the autobiographical tendency of Western man—revealed even in Gothic times in the symbol of auricular confession[[127]]—is utterly alien to Classical man; while his intense historical awareness is in complete contrast to the almost dreamy unconsciousness of the Indian. And when Magian man—primitive Christian or ripe scholar of Islam—uses the words “world-history,” what is it that he sees before him?
But it is difficult enough to form an exact idea even of the “Nature” proper to another kind of man, although in this domain things specifically cognizable are causally ordered and unified in a communicable system. And it is quite impossible for us to penetrate completely a historical world-aspect of “becoming” formed by a soul that is quite differently constituted from our own. Here there must always be an intractable residue, greater or smaller in proportion to our historical instinct, physiognomic tact and knowledge of men. All the same, the solution of this very problem is the condition-precedent of all really deep understanding of the world. The historical environment of another is a part of his essence, and no such other can be understood without the knowledge of his time-sense, his destiny-idea and the style and degree of acuity of his inner life. In so far therefore as these things are not directly confessed, we have to extract them from the symbolism of the alien Culture. And as it is thus and only thus that we can approach the incomprehensible, the style of an alien Culture, and the great time-symbols belonging thereto acquire an immeasurable importance.
As an example of these hitherto almost uncomprehended signs we may take the clock, a creation of highly developed Cultures that becomes more and more mysterious as one examines it. Classical man managed to do without the clock, and his abstention was more or less deliberate. To the Augustan period, and far beyond it, the time of day was estimated by the length of one’s shadow,[[128]] although sun-dials and water-clocks, designed in conformity with a strict time-reckoning and imposed by a deep sense of past and future, had been in regular use in both the older Cultures of Egypt and Babylonia.[[129]] Classical man’s existence—Euclidean, relationless, point-formed—was wholly contained in the instant. Nothing must remind him of past or future. For the true Classical, archæology did not exist, nor did its spiritual inversion, astrology. The Oracle and the Sibyl, like the Etruscan-Roman “haruspices” and “augurs,” did not foretell any distant future but merely gave indications on particular questions of immediate bearing. No time-reckoning entered intimately into everyday life (for the Olympiad sequence was a mere literary expedient) and what really matters is not the goodness or badness of a calendar but the questions: “who uses it?” and “does the life of the nation run by it?” In Classical cities nothing suggested duration, or old times or times to come—there was no pious preservation of ruins, no work conceived for the benefit of future generations; in them we do not find that durable[[130]] material was deliberately chosen. The Dorian Greek ignored the Mycenæan stone-technique and built in wood or clay, though Mycenæan and Egyptian work was before him and the country produced first-class building-stone. The Doric style is a timber style—even in Pausanias’s day some wooden columns still lingered in the Heræum of Olympia. The real organ of history is “memory” in the sense which is always postulated in this book, viz., that which preserves as a constant present the image of one’s personal past and of a national and a world-historical past[[131]] as well, and is conscious of the course both of personal and of super-personal becoming. That organ was not present in the make-up of a Classical soul. There was no “Time” in it. Immediately behind his proper present, the Classical historian sees a background that is already destitute of temporal and therefore of inward order. For Thucydides the Persian Wars, for Tacitus the agitation of the Gracchi, were already in this vague background;[[132]] and the great families of Rome had traditions that were pure romance—witness Cæsar’s slayer, Brutus, with his firm belief in his reputed tyrannicide ancestor. Cæsar’s reform of the calendar may almost be regarded as a deed of emancipation from the Classical life-feeling. But it must not be forgotten that Cæsar also imagined a renunciation of Rome and a transformation of the City-State into an empire which was to be dynastic—marked with the badge of duration—and to have its centre of gravity in Alexandria, which in fact is the birthplace of his calendar. His assassination seems to us a last outburst of the antiduration feeling that was incarnate in the Polis and the Urbs Roma.