VII
There is a word, “Impressionism,” which only came into general use in Manet’s time (and then, originally, as a word of contempt like Baroque and Rococo) but very happily summarizes the special quality of the Faustian way of art that has evolved from oil-painting. But, as we ordinarily speak of it, the idea has neither the width nor the depth of meaning that it ought to have: we regard it as a sequel to or derivative of the old age of an art which, in fact, belongs to it entirely and from first to last. What is the imitation of an "impression"? Something purely Western, something related to the idea of Baroque and even to the unconscious purposes of Gothic architecture and diametrically opposed to the deliberate aims of the Renaissance. Does it not signify the tendency—the deeply-necessary tendency of a waking consciousness to feel pure endless space as the supreme and unqualified actuality, and all sense-images as secondary and conditioned actualities "within it"? A tendency that can manifest itself in artistic creations, but has a thousand other outlets besides. Does not Kant’s formula "space as a priori form of perception" sound like a slogan for the whole movement that began with Leonardo? Impressionism is the inverse of the Euclidean world-feeling. It tries to get as far as possible from the language of plastic and as near as possible to that of music. The effect that is made upon us by things that receive and reflect light is made not because the things are there but as though they “in themselves” are not there. The things are not even bodies, but light-resistances in space, and their illusive density is to be unmasked by the brush-stroke. What is received and rendered is the impression of such resistances, which are tacitly evaluated as simple functions of a transcendent extension. The artist’s inner eye penetrates the body, breaks the spell of its material bounding surfaces and sacrifices it to the majesty of Space. And with this impression, under its influence, he feels an endless movement-quality in the sensuous element that is in utter contrast to the statuesque “Ataraxia” of the fresco. Therefore, there was not and could not be any Hellenic impressionism; if there is one art that must exclude it on principle, it is Classical sculpture.
Impressionism is the comprehensive expression of a world-feeling, and it must obviously therefore permeate the whole physiognomy of our “Late” Culture. There is an impressionistic mathematic, which frankly and with intent transcends all optical limitations. It is Analysis, as developed after Newton and Leibniz, and to it belong the visionary images of number-“bodies,” aggregates, and the multidimensional geometry. There is again an impressionistic physics which “sees” in lieu of bodies systems of mass-points—units that are evidently no more than constant relations between variable efficients. There are impressionistic ethics, tragedy, and logic, and even (in Pietism) an impressionistic Christianity.
Be the artist painter or musician, his art consists in creating with a few strokes or spots or tones an image of inexhaustible content, a microcosm meet for the eyes or ears of Faustian man; that is, in laying the actuality of infinite space under enchantment by fleeting and incorporeal indications of something objective which, so to say, forces that actuality to become phenomenal. The daring of these arts of moving the immobile has no parallel. Right from the later work of Titian to Corot and Menzel, matter quivers and flows like a solution under the mysterious pressure of brush-stroke and broken colours and lights. It was in pursuit of the same object that Baroque music became “thematic” instead of melodic and—reinforcing the “theme” with every expedient of harmonic charm, instrumental colour, rhythm, and tempo—developed the tone-picture from the imitative piece of Titian’s day to the leitmotiv-fabric of Wagner, and captured a whole new world of feeling and experience. When German music was at its culmination, this art penetrated also into lyric poetry (German lyric, that is, for in French it is impossible) and gave rise to a whole series of tiny masterpieces, from Goethe’s “Urfaust” to Hölderlin’s last poems—passages of a few lines apiece, which have never yet been noticed, let alone collected, but include nevertheless whole worlds of experience and feeling. On a small scale, it continually repeats the achievements of Copernicus and Columbus. No other Culture possesses an ornament-language of such dynamical impressiveness relatively to the means it employs. Every point or stroke of colour, every scarce-audible tone releases some surprising charm and continually feeds the imagination with fresh elements of space-creating energy. In Masaccio and Piero della Francesca we have actual bodies bathed in air. Then Leonardo, the first, discovers the transitions of atmospheric light and dark, the soft edges, the outlines that merge in the depth, the domains of light and shade in which the individual figures are inseparably involved. Finally, in Rembrandt, objects dissolve into mere coloured impressions, and forms lose their specific humanness and become collocations of strokes and patches that tell as elements of a passionate depth-rhythm. Distance, so treated, comes to signify Future, for what Impressionism seizes and holds is by hypothesis a unique and never-recurring instant, not a landscape in being but a fleeting moment of the history thereof. Just as in a Rembrandt portrait it is not the anatomical relief of the head that is rendered, but the second visage in it that is confessed; just as the art of his brush-stroke captures not the eye but the look, not the brow but the experience, not the lips but the sensuousness; so also the impressionist picture in general presents to the beholder not the Nature of the foreground but again a second visage, the look and soul of the landscape. Whether we take the Catholic-heroic landscape of Claude Lorrain, the “paysage intime” of Corot, the sea and river-banks and villages of Cuyp and Van Goyen, we find always a portrait in the physiognomic sense, something uniquely-occurring, unforeseen, brought to light for the first and last time. In this love of the character and physiognomy in landscape—just the motive that was unthinkable in fresco art and permanently barred to the Classical—the art of portraiture widens from the immediately human to the mediately human, to the representation of the world as a part of the ego or the self-world in which the painter paints himself and the beholder sees himself. For the expansion of Nature into Distance reflects a Destiny. In this art of tragic, daemonic, laughing and weeping landscapes there is something of which the man of another Culture has no idea and for which he has no organ. Anyone who in the presence of this form-world talks of Hellenistic illusion-painting must be unable to distinguish between an ornamentation of the highest order and a soulless imitation, an ape-mimicry of the obvious. If Lysippus said (as Pliny tells us he said) that he represented men as they appeared to him, his ambition was that of a child, of a layman, of a savage, not that of an artist. The great style, the meaning, the deep necessity, are absent; even the cave-dwellers of the stone age painted thus. In reality, the Hellenistic painters could do more when they chose. Even so late, the wall-paintings of Pompeii and the “Odyssey” landscapes in Rome contain a symbol. In each case it is a group of bodies that is rendered—rocks, trees, even “the Sea” as a body among bodies! There is no depth, but only superposition. Of course, of the objects represented one or several had necessarily to be furthest away (or rather least near) but this is a mere technical servitude without the remotest affinity to the illumined supernal distances of Faustian art.
VIII
I have said that oil-painting faded out at the end of the 17th Century, when one after another all its great masters died, and the question will naturally, therefore, be asked—is Impressionism (in the current narrow sense) a creation of the 19th Century? Has painting lived, after all, two centuries more? Is it still existing? But we must not be deceived by appearances. Not only was there a dead space between Rembrandt and Delacroix or Constable—for when we think of the living art of high symbolism that was Rembrandt’s the purely decorative artists of the 18th Century do not count—but, further, that which began with Delacroix and Constable was, notwithstanding all technical continuity, something quite different from that which had ended with Rembrandt. The new episode of painting that in the 19th Century (i.e., beyond the 1800 frontier and in “Civilization”) has succeeded in awakening some illusion of a great culture of painting, has itself chosen the word Plein-air (Freilicht) to designate its special characteristic. The very designation suffices to show the significance of the fleeting phenomenon that it is. It implies the conscious, intellectual, cold-blooded rejection of that for which a sudden wit invented the name “brown sauce,” but which the great masters had, as we know, regarded as the one truly metaphysical colour. On it had been built the painting-culture of the schools, and especially the Dutch school, that had vanished irretrievably in the Rococo. This brown, the symbol of a spatial infinity, which had for Faustian mankind created a spiritual something out of a mere canvas, now came to be regarded, quite suddenly, as an offence to Nature. What had happened? Was it not simply this, that the soul for which this supernal colour was something religious, the sign of wistfulness, the whole meaning of “Living Nature,” had quietly slipped away? The materialism of a Western Cosmopolis blew into the ashes and rekindled this curious brief flicker—a brief flicker of two generations, for with the generation of Manet all was ended again. I have (as the reader will recall) characterized the noble green of Grünewald and Claude and Giorgione as the Catholic space-colour and the transcendent brown of Rembrandt as the colour of the Protestant world-feeling. On the other hand, Plein-air and its new colour scale stand for irreligion.[[364]] From the spheres of Beethoven and the stellar expanses of Kant, Impressionism has come down again to the crust of the earth. Its space is cognized, not experienced, seen, not contemplated; there is tunedness in it, but not Destiny. It is the mechanical object of physics and not the felt world of the pastorale that Courbet and Manet give us in their landscapes. Rousseau’s tragically correct prophecy of a “return to Nature” fulfils itself in this dying art—the senile, too, return to Nature day by day. The modern artist is a workman, not a creator. He sets unbroken spectrum-colours side by side. The subtle script, the dance of brush-strokes, give way to crude commonplaces, pilings and mixings and daubings of points, squares, broad inorganic masses. The whitewasher’s brush and the trowel appear in the painter’s equipment; the oil-priming of the canvas is brought into the scheme of execution and in places left bare. It is a risky art, meticulous, cold, diseased—an art for over-developed nerves, but scientific to the last degree, energetic in everything that relates to the conquest of technical obstacles, acutely assertive of programme. It is the “satyric pendant” of the great age of oil-painting that stretches from Leonardo to Rembrandt; it could only be at home in the Paris of Baudelaire. Corot’s silvern landscapes, with their grey-greens and browns, dream still of the spiritual of the Old Masters; but Courbet and Manet conquer bare physical space, “factual” space. The meditative discoverer represented by Leonardo gives way to the painting experimentalist. Corot, the eternal child, French but not Parisian, finds his transcendent landscapes anywhere and everywhere; Courbet, Manet, Cézanne, portray over and over again, painfully, laboriously, soullessly, the Forest of Fontainebleau, the bank of the Seine at Argenteuil, or that remarkable valley near Arles. Rembrandt’s mighty landscapes lie essentially in the universe, Manet’s near a railway station. The plein-air painters, true megalopolitans, obtain as it were specimens of the music of space from the least agitated sources of Spain and Holland—from Velasquez, Goya, Hobbema, Franz Hals—in order (with the aid of English landscapists and, later, the Japanese, “highbrows” all) to restate it in empirical and scientific terms. It is natural science as opposed to nature experience, head against heart, knowledge in contrast to faith.
In Germany it was otherwise. Whereas in France it was a matter of closing-off the great school, in Germany it was a case of catching up with it. For in the picturesque style, as practised from Rottmann, Wasmann, K. D. Friedrich and Runge to Marées and Leibl, an unbroken evolution is the very basis of technique, and even a new-style school requires a closed tradition behind it. Herein lies the weakness and the strength of the last German painters. Whereas the French possessed a continuous tradition of their own from early Baroque to Chardin and Corot, whereas there was living connexion between Claude Lorrain and Corot, Rubens and Delacroix, all the great Germans of the 18th Century had been musicians. After Beethoven this music, without change of inward essence, was diverted (one of the modalities of the German Romantic movement) back into painting. And it was in painting that it flowered longest and bore its kindliest fruits, for the portraits and landscapes of these men are suffused with a secret wistful music, and there is a breath of Eichendorff and Mörike left even in Thoma and Böcklin. But a foreign teacher had to be asked to supply that which was lacking in the native tradition, and so these painters one and all went to Paris, where they studied and copied the old masters of 1670. So also did Manet and his circle. But there was this difference, that the Frenchmen found in these studies only reminiscences of something that had been in their art for many generations, whereas the Germans received fresh and wholly different impressions. The result was that, in the 19th Century, the German arts of form (other than music) were a phenomenon out of season—hasty, anxious, confused, puzzled as to both aim and means. There was indeed no time to be lost. The level that German music or French painting had taken centuries to attain had to be made good by German painting in two generations. The expiring art demanded its last phase, and this phase had to be reached by a vertiginous race through the whole past. Hence the unsteadiness, in everything pertaining to form, of high Faustian natures like Marées and Böcklin, an unsteadiness that in German music with its sure tradition (think of Bruckner) would have been impossible. The art of the French Impressionists was too explicit in its programme and correspondingly too poor in soul to expose them to such a tragedy. German literature, on the contrary, was in the same condition as German painting; from Goethe’s time, every major work was intended to found something and obliged to conclude something. Just as Kleist felt in himself both Shakespeare and Stendhal, and laboured desperately, altering and discarding without end and without result, to forge two centuries of psychological art into a unit; just as Hebbel tried to squeeze all the problems from Hamlet to Rosmersholm into one dramatic type; so Menzel, Leibl, and Marées sought to force the old and new models—Rembrandt, Claude, Van Goyen, and Watteau, Delacroix, Courbet and Manet—into a single form. While the little early interiors of Menzel anticipated all the discoveries of the Manet circle and Leibl not seldom succeeded where Courbet tried and failed, their pictures renew the metaphysical browns and greens of the Old Masters and are fully expressive of an inward experience. Menzel actually re-experienced and reawakened something of Prussian Rococo, Marées something of Rubens, Leibl in his “Frau Gedon” something of Rembrandt’s portraiture[portraiture]. Moreover, the studio-brown of the 17th Century had had by its side a second art, the intensely Faustian art of etching. In this, as in the other, Rembrandt is the greatest master of all time; this, like the other, has something Protestant in it that puts it in a quite different category from the work of the Southern Catholic painters of blue-green atmospheres and the Gobelin tapestries. And Leibl, the last artist in the brown, was the last great etcher whose plates possess that Rembrandtesque infinity that contains and reveals secrets without end. In Marées, lastly, there was all the mighty intention of the great Baroque style, but, though Guéricault and Daumier were not too belated to capture it in positive form, he—lacking just that strength that a tradition would have given him—was unable to force it into the world of painter’s actuality.
IX
The last of the Faustian arts died in “Tristan.” This work is the giant keystone of Western music. Painting achieved nothing like this as a finale—on the contrary, the effect of Manet, Menzel and Leibl, with their combination of “free light” and resurrected old-master styles, is weak.
“Contemporaneously,” in our sense, Apollinian art came to its end in Pergamene sculpture. Pergamum is the counterpart of Bayreuth. The famous altar itself,[[365]] indeed, is later, and probably not the most important work of the epoch at that; we have to assume a century (330-220 B.C.) of development now lost in oblivion. Nevertheless, all Nietzsche’s charges against Wagner and Bayreuth, the “Ring” and “Parsifal”—decadence, theatricalness and the like—could have been levelled in the same words at the Pergamene sculpture. A masterpiece of this sculpture—a veritable “Ring”—has come down to us in the Gigantomachia frieze of the great altar. Here is the same theatrical note, the same use of motives from ancient discredited mythology as points d’appui, the same ruthless bombardment of the nerves, and also (though the lack of inner power cannot altogether be concealed) the same fully self-conscious force and towering greatness. To this art the Farnese Bull and the older model of the Laocoön group certainly belong.