At the last, when Civilization sets in, true ornament and, with it, great art as a whole are extinguished. The transition consists—in every Culture—in Classicism and Romanticism of one sort or another, the former being a sentimental regard for an Ornamentation (rules, laws, types) that has long been archaic and soulless, and the latter a sentimental Imitation, not of life, but of an older Imitation. In the place of architectural style we find architectural taste. Methods of painting and mannerisms of writing, old forms and new, home and foreign, come and go with the fashion. The inward necessity is no longer there, there are no longer “schools,” for everyone selects what and where it pleases him to select. Art becomes craft-art (Kunstgewerbe) in all its branches—architecture and music, poetry and drama—and in the end we have a pictorial and literary stock-in-trade which is destitute of any deeper significance and is employed according to taste. This final or industrial form of Ornament—no longer historical, no longer in the condition of “becoming”—we have before us not only in the patterns of oriental carpets, Persian and Indian metal work,` Chinese porcelain, but also in Egyptian (and Babylonian) art as the Greeks and Romans met it. The Minoan art of Crete is pure craft-art, a northern outlier of Egyptian post-Hyksos taste; and its “contemporary,” Hellenistic-Roman art from about the time of Scipio and Hannibal, similarly subserves the habit of comfort and the play of intellect. From the richly-decorated entablature of the Forum of Nerva in Rome to the later provincial ceramics in the West, we can trace the same steady formation of an unalterable craft-art that we find in the Egyptian and the Islamic worlds, and that we have to presume in India after Buddha and in China after Confucius.
V
Now, Cathedral and Pyramid-temple are different in spite of their deep inward kinship, and it is precisely in these differences that we seize the mighty phenomenon of the Faustian soul, whose depth-impulse refuses to be bound in the prime symbol of a way, and from its earliest beginnings strives to transcend every optical limitation. Can anything be more alien to the Egyptian conception of the State—whose tendency we may describe as a noble sobriety—than the political ambitions of the great Saxon, Franconian and Hohenstaufen Emperors, who came to grief because they overleapt all political actualities and for whom the recognition of any bounds would have been a betrayal of the idea of their rulership? Here the prime symbol of infinite space, with all its indescribable power, entered the field of active political existence. Beside the figures of the Ottos, Conrad II, Henry VI and Frederick II stand the Viking-Normans, conquerors of Russia, Greenland, England, Sicily and almost of Constantinople; and the great popes, Gregory VII and Innocent III—all of whom alike aimed at making their visible spheres of influence coincident with the whole known world. This is what distinguishes the heroes of the Grail and Arthurian and Siegfried sagas, ever roaming in the infinite, from the heroes of Homer with their geographically modest horizon; and the Crusades, that took men from the Elbe and the Loire to the limits of the known world, from the historical events upon which the Classical soul built the “Iliad” and which from the style of that soul we may safely assume to have been local, bounded, and completely appreciable.
The Doric soul actualized the symbol of the corporally-present individual thing, while deliberately rejecting all big and far-reaching creations, and it is for this very good reason that the first post-Mycenæan period has bequeathed nothing to our archæologists. The expression to which this soul finally attained was the Doric temple with its purely outward effectiveness, set upon the landscape as a massive image but denying and artistically disregarding the space within as the μὴ ὄv, that which was held to be incapable of existence. The ranked columns of the Egyptians carried the roof of a hall. The Greek in borrowing the motive invested it with a meaning proper to himself—he turned the architectural type inside out like a glove. The outer column-sets are, in a sense, relics of a denied interior.[[233]]
The Magian and the Faustian souls, on the contrary, built high. Their dream-images became concrete as vaultings above significant inner-spaces, structural anticipations respectively of the mathematic of algebra and that of analysis. In the style that radiated from Burgundy and Flanders rib-vaulting with its lunettes and flying buttresses emancipated the contained space from the sense-appreciable surface[[234]] bounding it. In the Magian interior "the window is merely a negative component, a utility-form in no wise yet developed into an art-form—to put it crudely, nothing but a hole in the wall."[[235]] When windows were in practice indispensable, they were for the sake of artistic impression concealed by galleries as in the Eastern basilica.[[236]] The window as architecture, on the other hand, is peculiar to the Faustian soul and the most significant symbol of its depth-experience. In it can be felt the will to emerge from the interior into the boundless. The same will that is immanent in contrapuntal music was native to these vaultings. The incorporeal world of this music was and remained that of the first Gothic, and even when, much later, polyphonic music rose to such heights as those of the Matthew Passion, the Eroica, and Tristan and Parsifal, it became of inward necessity cathedral-like and returned to its home, the stone language of the Crusade-time. To get rid of every trace of Classical corporeality, there was brought to bear the full force of a deeply significant Ornamentation, which defies the delimiting power of stone with its weirdly impressive transformations of vegetal, animal and human bodies (St. Pierre in Moissac), which dissolves all its lines into melodies and variations on a theme, all its façades into many-voiced fugues, and all the bodiliness of its statuary into a music of drapery-folds. It is this spirituality that gave their deep meaning to the gigantic glass-expanses of our cathedral-windows with their polychrome, translucent and therefore wholly bodiless, painting—an art that has never and nowhere repeated itself and forms the completest contrast that can be imagined to the Classical fresco. It is perhaps in the Sainte-Chapelle at Paris that this emancipation from bodiliness is most evident. Here the stone practically vanishes in the gleam of the glass. Whereas the fresco-painting is co-material with the wall on and with which it has grown and its colour is effective as material, here we have colours dependent on no carrying surface but as free in space as organ notes, and shapes poised in the infinite. Compare with the Faustian spirit of these churches—almost wall-less, loftily vaulted, irradiated with many-coloured light, aspiring from nave to choir—the Arabian (that is, the Early-Christian Byzantine) cupola-church. The pendentive cupola, that seems to float on high above the basilica or the octagon, was indeed also a victory over the principle of natural gravity which the Classical expressed in architrave and column; it, too, was a defiance of architectural body, of “exterior.” But the very absence of an exterior emphasizes the more the unbroken coherence of the wall that shuts in the Cavern and allows no look and no hope to emerge from it. An ingeniously confusing interpenetration of spherical and polygonal forms; a load so placed upon a stone drum that it seems to hover weightless on high, yet closing the interior without outlet; all structural lines concealed; vague light admitted, through a small opening in the heart of the dome but only the more inexorably to emphasize the walling-in—such are the characters that we see in the masterpieces of this art, S. Vitale in Ravenna, Hagia Sophia[Hagia Sophia] in Constantinople, and the Dome of the Rock[[237]] in Jerusalem. Where the Egyptian puts reliefs that with their flat planes studiously avoid any foreshortening suggestive of lateral depth, where the Gothic architects put their pictures of glass to draw in the world of space without, the Magian clothes his walls with sparkling, predominantly golden, mosaics and arabesques and so drowns his cavern in that unreal, fairy-tale light which for Northerners is always so seductive in Moorish art.
VI
The phenomenon of the great style, then, is an emanation from the essence of the Macrocosm, from the prime-symbol of a great culture. No one who can appreciate the connotation of the word sufficiently to see that it designates not a form-aggregate but a form-history, will try to aline the fragmentary and chaotic art-utterances of primitive mankind with the comprehensive certainty of a style that consistently develops over centuries. Only the art of great Cultures, the art that has ceased to be only art and has begun to be an effective unit of expression and significance, possesses style.
The organic history of a style comprises a "pre—," a "non—" and a "post—." The bull tablet of the First Dynasty of Egypt[[238]] is not yet “Egyptian.” Not till the Third Dynasty do the works acquire a style—but then they do so suddenly and very definitely. Similarly the Carolingian period stands “between-styles.” We see different forms touched on and explored, but nothing of inwardly necessary expression. The creator of the Aachen Minster “thinks surely and builds surely, but does not feel surely.”[[239]] The Marienkirche in the Castle of Würzburg (c. 700) has its counterpart in Salonika (St. George), and the Church of St. Germigny des Près (c. 800) with its cupolas and horseshoe niches is almost a mosque. For the whole of West Europe the period 850-950 is almost a blank. And just so to-day Russian art stands between two styles. The primitive wooden architecture with its steep eight-sided tent-roof (which extends from Norway to Manchuria) is impressed with Byzantine motives from over the Danube and Armenian-Persian from over the Caucasus. We can certainly feel an “elective affinity” between the Russian and the Magian souls, but as yet the prime symbol of Russia, the plane without limit,[[240]] finds no sure expression either in religion or in architecture. The church roof emerges, hillock-wise, but little from the landscape and on it sit the tent-roofs whose points are coifed with the “kokoshniks” that suppress and would abolish the upward tendency. They neither tower up like the Gothic belfry nor enclose like the mosque-cupola, but sit, thereby emphasizing the horizontality of the building, which is meant to be regarded merely from the outside. When about 1760 the Synod forbade the tent roofs and prescribed the orthodox onion-cupolas, the heavy cupolas were set upon slender cylinders, of which there may be any number[[241]] and which sit on the roof-plane.[[242]] It is not yet a style, only the promise of a style that will awaken when the real Russian religion awakens.
In the Faustian West, this awakening happened shortly before A.D. 1000. In one moment, the Romanesque style was there. Instead of the fluid organization of space on an insecure ground plan, there was, suddenly, a strict dynamic of space. From the very beginning, inner and outer construction were placed in a fixed relation, the wall was penetrated by the form-language and the form worked into the wall in a way that no other Culture has ever imagined. From the very beginning the window and the belfry were invested with their meanings. The form was irrevocably assigned. Only its development remained to be worked out.
The Egyptian style began with another such creative act, just as unconscious, just as full of symbolic force. The prime symbol of the Way came into being suddenly with the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty (2930 B.C.). The world-creating depth-experience of this soul gets its substance from the direction-factor itself. Spatial depth as stiffened Time, distance, death, Destiny itself dominate the expression, and the merely sensuous dimensions of length and breadth become an escorting plane which restricts and prescribes the Way of destiny. The Egyptian flat-relief, which is designed to be seen at close quarters and arranged serially so as to compel the beholder to pass along the wall-planes in the prescribed direction, appears with similar suddenness about the beginning of the Fifth Dynasty.[[243]] The still later avenues of sphinxes and statues and the rock- and terrace-temples constantly intensify that tendency towards the one distance that the world of Egyptian mankind knows, the grave. Observe how soon the colonnades of the early period come to be systems of huge, close-set pillars that screen off all side-view. This is something that has never reproduced itself in any other architecture.