The Classical tendency towards making the body the sole spokesman is emphatically not the result of any carnal overload in the race (to the man of σωφροσύνη wantonness was not permitted[[324]]), it was not, as Nietzsche thought, an orgiastic joy of untrammelled energy and perfervid passion. This sort of thing is much nearer to the ideals of Germanic-Christian or of Indian chivalry. What Apollinian man and Apollinian art can claim as their very own is simply the apotheosis of the bodily phenomenon, taking the word perfectly literally—the rhythmic proportioning of limbs and harmonious build of muscles. This is not Pagan as against Christian, it is Attic as against Baroque; for it was Baroque mankind (Christian or unbeliever, monk or rationalist) that first utterly put away the cult of the palpable σῶμα, carrying its alienation indeed to the extremes of bodily uncleanliness that prevailed in the entourage of Louis XIV,[[325]] whose full wigs and lace cuffs and buckled shoes covered up Body with a whole web of ornament.
Thus the Classical plastic art, after liberating the form completely from the actual or imaginary back-wall and setting it up in the open, free and unrelated, to be seen as a body among bodies, moved on logically till the naked body became its only subject. And, moreover, it is unlike every other kind of sculpture recorded in art-history in that its treatment of the bounding surfaces of this body is anatomically convincing. Here is the Euclidean world-principle carried to the extreme; any envelope whatever would have been in contradiction, however slightly, with the Apollinian phenomenon, would have indicated, however timidly, the existence of the circum-space.
In this art, what is ornamental in the high sense resides entirely in the proportions of the structure[[326]] and the equivalence of the axes in respect of support and load. Standing, sitting, lying down but always self-secure, the body has, like the peripteros, no interior, that is, no “soul.” The significance of the muscle-relief, carried out absolutely in the round, is the same as that of the self-closing array of the columns; both contain the whole of the form-language of the work.
It was a strictly metaphysical reason, the need of a supreme life-symbol for themselves, that brought the later Hellenes to this art, which under all the consummate achievement is a narrow one. It is not true that this language of the outer surface is the completest, or the most natural, or even the most obvious mode of representing the human being. Quite the contrary. If the Renaissance, with its ardent theory and its immense misconception of its own tendency, had not continued to dominate our judgment—long after the plastic art itself had become entirely alien to our inner soul—we should not have waited till to-day to observe this distinctive character of the Attic style. No Egyptian or Chinese sculptor ever dreamed of using external anatomy to express his meaning. In Gothic image-work a language of the muscles is unheard of. The human tracery that clothes the mighty Gothic framework with a web of countless figures and reliefs (Chartres cathedral has more than ten thousand such) is not merely ornament; as early as about 1200 it is employed for the expression of schemes and purposes far grander than even the grandest of Classical plastic. For these masses of figures constitute a tragic unit. Here, by the North even earlier than by Dante, the historical feeling of the Faustian soul—of which the deep sacrament of Contrition is the spiritual expression and the rite of Confession the grave teacher—is intensified to the tragic fullness of a world-drama. That which Joachim of Floris, at this very time, was seeing in his Apulian cell—the picture of the world, not as Cosmos, but as a Divine History and succession of three world-ages[[327]]—the craftsmen were expressing at Reims, Amiens and Paris in serial presentation of it from the Fall to the Last Judgment. Each of the scenes, each of the great symbolic figures, had its significant place in the sacred edifice, each its rôle in the immense world-poem. Then, too, each individual man came to feel how his life-course was fitted as ornament in the plan of Divine history, and to experience this personal connexion with it in the forms of Contrition and Confession. And thus these bodies of stone are not mere servants of the architecture. They have a deep and particular meaning of their own, the same meaning as the memorial-tomb brings to expression with ever-increasing intensity from the Royal Tombs of St. Denis onward; they speak of a personality. Just as Classical man properly meant, with his perfected working-out of superficial body (for all the anatomical aspiration of the Greek artist comes to that in the end), to exhaust the whole essence of the living phenomenon in and by the rendering of its bounding surfaces, so Faustian man no less logically found the most genuine, the only exhaustive, expression of his life-feeling in the Portrait. The Hellenic treatment of the nude is the great exceptional case; in this and in this only has it led to an art of the high order.[[328]]
Act and Portrait have never hitherto been felt as constituting an opposition, and consequently the full significance of their appearances in art-history has never been appreciated. And yet it is in the conflict of these two form-ideals that the contrast of two worlds is first manifested in full. There, on the one hand, an existence is made to show itself in the composition of the exterior structure; here, on the other hand, the human interior, the Soul, is made to speak of itself, as the interior of a church speaks to us through its façade or face. A mosque had no face, and consequently the Iconoclastic movement of the Moslems and the Paulicians—which under Leo III spread to Byzantium and beyond—necessarily drove the portrait-element quite out of the arts of form, so that thenceforward they possessed only a fixed stock of human arabesques. In Egypt the face of the statue was equivalent to the pylon, the face of the temple-plan; it was a mighty emergence out of the stone-mass of the body, as we see in the “Hyksos Sphinx” of Tanis and the portrait of Amenemhet III. In China the face is like a landscape, full of wrinkles and little signs that mean something. But, for us, the portrait is musical. The look, the play of the mouth, the pose of head and hands—these things are a fugue of the subtlest meaning, a composition of many voices that sounds to the understanding beholder.
But in order to grasp the significance of the portraiture of the West more specifically in contrast with that of Egypt and that of China, we have to consider the deep change in the language of the West that began in Merovingian times to foreshadow the dawn of a new life-feeling. This change extended equally over the old German and the vulgar Latin, but it affected only the tongues spoken in the countries of the coming Culture (for instance, Norwegian and Spanish, but not Rumanian). The change would be inexplicable if we were to regard merely the spirit of these languages and their “influence” of one upon another; the explanation is in the spirit of the mankind that raised a mere way of using words to the level of a symbol. Instead of sum, Gothic im, we say ich bin, I am, je suis; instead of fecisti, we say tu habes factum, tu as fait, du habes gitân; and again, daz wîp, un homme, man hat. This has hitherto been a riddle[[329]] because families of languages were considered as beings, but the mystery is solved when we discover in the idiom the reflection of a soul. The Faustian soul is here beginning to remould for its own use grammatical material of the most varied provenance. The coming of this specific “I” is the first dawning of that personality-idea which was so much later to create the sacrament of Contrition and personal absolution. This “ego habeo factum,” the insertion of the auxiliaries “have” and “be” between a doer and a deed, in lieu of the “feci” which expresses activated body, replaces the world of bodies by one of functions between centres of force, the static syntax by a dynamic. And this “I” and “Thou” is the key to Gothic portraiture. A Hellenistic portrait is the type of an attitude—a confession it is not, either to the creator of it or to the understanding spectator. But our portraits depict something sui generis, once occurring and never recurring, a life-history expressed in a moment, a world-centre for which everything else is world-around, exactly as the grammatical subject “I” becomes the centre of force in the Faustian sentence.
It has been shown how the experience of the extended has its origin in the living direction, time, destiny. In the perfected “being” of the all-round nude body the depth-experience has been cut away, but the “look” of a portrait leads this experience into the supersensuous infinite. Therefore the Ancient art is an art of the near and tangible and timeless, it prefers motives of brief, briefest, pause between two movements, the last moment before Myron’s athlete throws the discus, or the first moment after Pæonius’s Nike has alighted from the air, when the swing of the body is ending and the streaming draperies have not yet fallen—attitudes devoid equally of duration and of direction, disengaged from future and from past. “Veni, vidi, vici” is just such another attitude. But in "I—came, I—saw, I—conquered" there is a becoming each time in the very build of the sentence.
The depth-experience is a becoming and effects a become, signifies time and evokes space, is at once cosmic and historical. Living direction marches to the horizon as to the future. As early as 1230 the Madonna of the St. Anne entrance of Notre-Dame dreams of this future: so, later, the Cologne “Madonna with the Bean-blossom” of Meister Wilhelm. Long before the Moses of Michelangelo, the Moses of Klaus Suter’s well in the Chartreuse of Dijon meditates on destiny, and even the Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel are forestalled by those of Giovanni Pisano in Sant’ Andrea at Pistoia (1300). And, lastly, there are the figures on the Gothic tombs—how they rest from the long journey of Destiny and how completely they contrast with the timeless grave and gay that is represented on the stelæ of Attic cemeteries.[[330]] The Western portraiture is endless in every sense, for it begins to wake out of the stone from about 1200 and it has become completely music in the 17th Century. It takes its man not as a mere centre of the World-as-Nature which as phenomenon receives shape and significance from his being, but, above all, as a centre of the World-as-History. The Classical statue is a piece of present “Nature” and nothing besides. The Classical poetry is statuary in verse. Herein is the root of our feeling that ascribes to the Greek an unreserved devotion to Nature. We shall never entirely shake off the idea that the Gothic style as compared with the Greek is “unnatural.” Of course it is, for it is more than Nature; only we are unnecessarily loath to realize that it is a deficiency in the Greek that our feeling has detected. The Western form-language is richer—portraiture belongs to Nature and to history. A tomb by one of those great Netherlanders who worked on the Royal graves of St. Denis from 1260, a portrait by Holbein or Titian or Rembrandt or Goya, is a biography, and a self-portrait is a historical confession. To make one’s confession is not to avow an act but to lay before the Judge the inner history of that act. The act is patent, its roots the personal secret. When the Protestant or the Freethinker opposes auricular confession, it never occurs to him that he is rejecting merely the outward form of the idea and not the idea itself. He declines to confess to the priest, but he confesses to himself, to a friend, or to all and sundry. The whole of Northern poetry is one outspoken confession. So are the portraits of Rembrandt and the music of Beethoven. What Raphael and Calderon and Haydn told to the priests, these men put into the language of their works. One who is forced to be silent because the greatness of form that can take in even the ultimate things has been denied him ... goes under like Hölderlin. Western man lives in the consciousness of his becoming and his eyes are constantly upon past and future. The Greek lives point-wise, ahistorically, somatically. No Greek would have been capable of a genuine self-criticism. As the phenomenon of the nude statue is the completely ahistoric copy of a man, so the Western self-portrait is the exact equivalent of the “Werther” or “Tasso” autobiography. To the Classical both are equally and wholly alien. There is nothing so impersonal as Greek art; that Scopas or Polycletus should make an image of himself is something quite inconceivable.
Looking at the work of Phidias, of Polycletus, or of any master later than the Persian Wars, do we not see in the doming of the brow, the lips, the set of the nose, the blind eyes, the expression of entirely non-personal, plantlike, soulless vitality? And may we not ask ourselves whether this is the form-language that is capable even of hinting at an inner experience? Michelangelo devoted himself with all passion to the study of anatomy, but the phenomenal body that he works out is always the expression of the activity of all bones, sinews and organs of the inside; without deliberate intention, the living that is under the skin comes out in the phenomenon. It is a physiognomy, and not a system, of muscles that he calls to life. But this means at once that the personal destiny and not the material body has become the starting-point of the form-feeling. There is more psychology (and less “Nature”) in the arm of one of his Slaves[[331]] than there is in the whole head of Praxiteles’s Hermes.[[332]] Myron’s Discobolus,[[333]] on the other hand, renders the exterior form purely as itself, without relation of any sort to the inner organs, let alone to any “soul.” One has only to take the best work of this period and compare it with the old Egyptian statues, say the “Village Sheikh”[[334]] or King Phiops (Pepi), or again with Donatello’s “David,”[[335]] to understand at once what it means to recognize a body purely with reference to its material boundaries. Everything in a head that might allow something intimate or spiritual to become phenomenal the Greeks (and markedly this same Myron) most carefully avoid. Once this characteristic has struck us, the best heads of the great age sooner or later begin to pall. Seen in the perspective of our world-feeling, they are stupid and dull, wanting in the biographical element, devoid of any destiny. It was not out of caprice that that age objected so strongly to votive images. The statues of Olympian victors are representatives of a fighting attitude. Right down to Lysippus there is not one single character-head, but only masks. Again, considering the figure as a whole, with what skill the Greeks avoid giving any impression that the head is the favoured part of the body! That is why these heads are so small, so un-significant in their pose, so un-thoroughly modelled. Always they are formed as a part of the body like arms and legs, never as the seat and symbol of an “I.”
At last, even, we come to regard the feminine (not to say effeminate) look of many of these heads of the 5th, and still more of the 4th, Centuries[[336]] as the—no doubt unintentional—outcome of an effort to get rid of personal character entirely. We should probably be justified in concluding that the ideal facial type of this art—which was certainly not an art for the people, as the later naturalistic portrait-sculpture at once shows—was arrived at by rejecting all elements of an individual or historical character; that is, by steadily narrowing down the field of view to the pure Euclidean.