The decline of the West

by Oswald Spengler

I
THE ARTS OF FORM

I

The clearest type of symbolic expression that the world-feeling of higher mankind has found for itself is (if we except the mathematical-scientific domain of presentation and the symbolism of its basic ideas) that of the arts of form,[^[272]] of which the number is legion. And with these arts we count music in its many and very dissimilar kinds; had these been brought within the domain of art-historical research instead of being put in a class apart from that of the pictorial-plastic arts, we should have progressed very much further in our understanding of the import of this evolution towards an end. For the formative impulse that is at work in the wordless[^[273]] arts can never be understood until we come to regard the distinction between optical and acoustic means as only a superficial one. To talk of the art of the eye and the art of the ear takes us no further. It is not such things that divide one art from another. Only the 19th Century could so over-estimate the influence of physiological conditions as to apply it to expression, conception or communion. A “singing” picture of Claude Lorrain or of Watteau does not really address itself to the bodily eye any more than the space-straining music since Bach addresses itself to the bodily ear. The Classical relation between art-work and sense-organ—of which we so often and so erroneously remind ourselves here—is something quite different from, something far simpler and more material than ours. We read “Othello” and “Faust” and we study orchestral scores—that is, we change one sense-agency for another in order to let the undiluted spirit of these works take effect upon us. Here there is always an appeal from the outer senses to the “inner,” to the truly Faustian and wholly un-Classical power of imagination. Only thus can we understand Shakespeare’s ceaseless change of scene as against the Classical unity of place. In extreme cases indeed, for instance in that of “Faust” itself, no representation of the work (that is, of its full content) is physically possible. But in music too—in the unaccompanied “A capella” of the Palestrina style as well as a fortiori in the Passions of Heinrich Schütz, in the fugues of Bach, in the last quartets of Beethoven, and in “Tristan”—we livingly experience behind the sensuous impressions a whole world of others. And it is only through these latter that all the fullness and depth of the work begins to be present to us, and it is only mediately—through the images of blond, brown, dusky and golden colours, of sunsets and distant ranked mountain-summits, of storms and spring landscapes, of foundered cities and strange faces which harmony conjures up for us—that it tells us something of itself. It is not an incident that Beethoven wrote his last works when he was deaf—deafness merely released him from the last fetters. For this music, sight and hearing equally are bridges into the soul and nothing more. To the Greek this visionary kind of artistic enjoyment was utterly alien. He felt the marble with his eye, and the thick tones of an aulos moved him almost corporally. For him, eye and ear are the receivers of the whole of the impression that he wished to receive. But for us this had ceased to be true even at the stage of Gothic.

In the actual, tones are something extended, limited and numerable just as lines and colours are; harmony, melody, rhyme and rhythm no less so than perspective, proportion, chiaroscuro and outline. The distance separating two kinds of painting can be infinitely greater than that separating the painting and the music of a period. Considered in relation to a statue of Myron, the art of a Poussin landscape is the same as that of a contemporary chamber-cantata; that of Rembrandt as that of the organ works of Buxtehude, Pachelbel and Bach; that of Guardi as that of the Mozart opera—the inner form-language is so nearly identical that the difference between optical and acoustic means is negligible.

The importance which the “science of art” has always attached to a timeless and conceptual delimitation of the individual art-spheres only proves that the fundamentals of the problem have not been attacked. Arts are living units, and the living is incapable of being dissected. The first act of the learned pedant has always been to partition the infinitely wide domain into provinces determined by perfectly superficial criteria of medium and technique and to endow these provinces with eternal validity and immutable (!) form-principles. Thus he separated “Music” and “Painting,” “Music” and “Drama,” “Painting” and “Sculpture.” And then he proceeded to define “the” art of Painting, “the” art of Sculpture, and so on. But in fact the technical form-language is no more than the mask of the real work. Style is not what the shallow Semper—worthy contemporary of Darwin and materialism—supposed it to be, the product of material, technique, and purpose. It is the very opposite of this, something inaccessible to art-reason, a revelation of the metaphysical order, a mysterious “must,” a Destiny. With the material boundaries of the different arts it has no concern whatever.

To classify the arts according to the character of the sense-impression, then, is to pervert the problem of form in its very enunciation. For how is it possible to predicate a genus “Sculpture” of so general a character as to admit of general laws being evolved from it? What is “Sculpture?”

Take painting again. There is no such thing as “the” art of Painting, and anyone who compares a drawing of Raphael, effected by outline, with one of Titian, effected by flecks of light and shade, without feeling that they belong to two different arts; any one who does not realize a dissimilarity of essence between the works of Giotto or Mantegna—relief, created by brushstroke—and those of Vermeer or Goya—music, created on coloured canvas—such a one will never grasp the deeper questions. As for the frescoes of Polygnotus and the mosaics of Ravenna, there is not even the similarity of technical means to bring them within the alleged genus, and what is there in common between an etching and the art of Fra Angelico, or a proto-Corinthian vase-painting and a Gothic cathedral-window, or the reliefs of Egypt and those of the Parthenon?

If an art has boundaries at all—boundaries of its soul-become-form—they are historical and not technical or physiological boundaries.[^[274]] An art is an organism, not a system. There is no art-genus that runs through all the centuries and all the Cultures. Even where (as in the case of the Renaissance) supposed technical traditions momentarily deceive us into a belief in the eternal validity of antique art-laws, there is at bottom entire discrepance. There is nothing in Greek and Roman art that stands in any relation whatever to the form-language of a Donatello statue or a painting of Signorelli or a façade of Michelangelo. Inwardly, the Quattrocento is related to the contemporary Gothic and to nothing else. The fact of the archaic Greek Apollo-type being “influenced” by Egyptian portraiture, or early Tuscan representation by Etruscan tomb-painting, implies precisely what is implied by that of Bach’s writing a fugue upon an alien theme—he shows what he can express with it. Every individual art—Chinese landscape or Egyptian plastic or Gothic counterpoint—is once existent, and departs with its soul and its symbolism never to return.

II

With this, the notion of Form opens out immensely. Not only the technical instrument, not only the form-language, but also the choice of art-genus itself is seen to be an expression-means. What the creation of a masterpiece means for an individual artist—the “Night Watch” for Rembrandt or the “Meistersinger” for Wagner—that the creation of a species of art, comprehended as such, means for the life-history of a Culture. It is epochal. Apart from the merest externals, each such art is an individual organism without predecessor or successor. Its theory, technique and convention all belong to its character, and contain nothing of eternal or universal validity. When one of these arts is born, when it is spent, whether it dies or is transmuted into another, why this or that art is dominant in or absent from a particular Culture—all these are questions of Form in the highest sense, just as is that other question of why individual painters and musicians unconsciously avoid certain shades and harmonies or, on the contrary, show preferences so marked that authorship-attributions can be based on them.