The question is now: How far is the man of this Culture himself fulfilling what the soul-image that he has created requires of him? If we can, to-day, state the theme of Western physics quite generally to be efficient space, we have ipso facto defined also the kind of existence, the content of existence as lived by contemporary man. We, as Faustian natures, are accustomed to take note of the individual according to his effective and not according to his plastic-static appearance in the field of our life-experience. We measure what a man is by his activity, which may be directed inwardly or outwardly, and we judge all intentions, reasons, powers, convictions and habits entirely by this directedness. The word with which we sum up this aspect is character. We habitually speak of the “character” of heads and landscapes; of ornaments, brush-strokes and scripts; of whole arts and ages and Cultures. The art of the characteristic is, above all, Baroque music—alike in respect of its melody and its instrumentation. Here again is a word indicating an indescribable, a something that emphasizes, among all the Cultures, the Faustian in particular. And the deep relation between this word “character” and the word “will” is unmistakable; what will is in the soul-image, character is in the picture of life as we see it, the Western life that is self-evident to Western men. It is the fundamental postulate of all our ethical systems, differ otherwise as they may in their metaphysical or practical precepts, that man has character. Character, which forms itself in the stream of the world—the personality, the relation of living to doing—is a Faustian impression of the man made by the man; and, significantly enough, just as in the physical world-picture it has proved impossible (in spite of the most rigorous theoretical examination) to separate the vectorial idea of forces from the idea of motion (because of the inherent directional quality of the vector), so also it is impossible to draw a strict distinction between will and soul, character and life. At the height of our Culture, certainly since the 17th Century, we feel the word “life” as a pure and simple synonym of willing. Expressions like living force, life-will, active energy, abound in our ethical literature and their import is taken for granted, whereas the Age of Pericles could not even have translated them into its language.
Hitherto the pretension of each and every morale to universal validity has obscured the fact that every Culture, as a homogeneous being of higher order, possesses a moral constitution proper to itself. There are as many morales as there are Cultures. Nietzsche was the first to have an inkling of this; but he never came anywhere near to a really objective morphology of morale “beyond good” (all good) “and evil” (all evil). He evaluated Classical, Indian, Christian and Renaissance morale by his own criteria instead of understanding the style of them as a symbol. And yet if anything could detect the prime-phenomenon of Morale as such, it should have been the historical insight of a Westerner. However, it appears that we are only now ripe enough for such a study. The conception of mankind as an active, fighting, progressing whole is (and has been since Joachim of Floris and the Crusades) so necessary an idea for us that we find it hard indeed to realize that it is an exclusively Western hypothesis, living and valid only for a season. To the Classical spirit mankind appears as a stationary mass, and correspondingly there is that quite dissimilar morale that we can trace from the Homeric dawn to the time of the Roman Empire. And, more generally, we shall find that the immense activity of the Faustian life-feeling is most nearly matched in the Chinese and the Egyptian, and the rigorous passivity of the Classical in the Indian.
If ever there was a group of nations that kept the “struggle for existence” constantly before its eyes, it was the Classical Culture. All the cities, big and little, fought one another to sheer extinction, without plan or purpose, without mercy, body against body, under the stimulus of a completely anti-historical instinct. But Greek ethics, notwithstanding Heraclitus, were far from making struggle an ethical principle. The Stoics and the Epicureans alike preached abstention from it as an ideal. The overcoming of resistances may far more justly be called the typical impulse of the Western soul. Activity, determination, self-control, are postulates. To battle against the comfortable foregrounds of life, against the impressions of the moment, against what is near, tangible and easy, to win through to that which has generality and duration and links past and future—these are the sum of all Faustian imperatives from earliest Gothic to Kant and Fichte, and far beyond them again to the Ethos of immense power and will exhibited in our States, our economic systems and our technics. The carpe diem, the saturated being, of the Classical standpoint is the most direct contrary of that which is felt by Goethe and Kant and Pascal, by Church and Freethinker, as alone possessing value—active, fighting and victorious being.[[392]]
As all the forms of Dynamic (whether pictorial, musical, physical, social or political) are concerned with the working-out of infinite relations and deal, not with the individual case and the sum of individual cases as the Classical physics had done, but with the typical course or process and its functional rule, “character” must be understood as that which remains in principle constant in the working-out of life; where there is no such constant we speak of “lack of character.” It is character—the form in virtue of which a moving existence can combine the highest constancy in the essential with the maximum variability in the details—that makes telling biography (such as Goethe’s “Wahrheit und Dichtung”), possible at all. Plutarch’s truly Classical biographies are by comparison mere collections of anecdotes strung together chronologically and not ordered pictures of historical development, and it will hardly be disputed that only this second kind of biography is imaginable in connexion with Alcibiades or Pericles or, for that matter, any purely Apollinian figure. Their experiences lack, not mass, but relation; there is something atomic about them. Similarly in the field of Science the Greek did not merely forget to look for general laws in the sum of his experiential data; in his cosmos they were simply not there to be found.
It follows that the sciences of character-study, particularly physiognomy and graphology, would not be able to glean much in the Classical field. Its handwriting we do not know, but we do know that its ornament, as compared with the Gothic, is of incredible simplicity and feebleness of character-expression—think of the Meander and the Acanthus-shoot. On the other hand, it has never been surpassed in timeless evenness.
It goes without saying that we, when we turn to look into the Classical life-feeling, must find there some basic element of ethical values that is antithetical to “character” in the same way as the statue is antithetical to the fugue. Euclidean geometry to Analysis, and body to space. We find it in the Gesture. It is this that provides the necessary foundation for a spiritual static. The word that stands in the Classical vocabulary where “personality” stands in our own is προσῶπον, “persona”—namely rôle or mask. In late Greek or Roman speech it means the public aspect and mien of a man, which for Classical man is tantamount to the essence and kernel of him. An orator was described as speaking in the προσῶπον—not the character or the vein as we should say—of a priest or a soldier. The slave was ἀπρόσωπος—that is, he had no attitude or figure in the public life—but not ἀσώματος—that is, he did have a soul. The idea that Destiny had assigned the rôle of king or general to a man was expressed by Romans in the words persona regis, imperatoris.[[393]] The Apollinian cast of life is manifest enough here. What is indicated is not the personality (that is, an unfolding of inward possibilities in active striving) but a permanent and self-contained posture strictly adapted to a so-to-say plastic ideal of being. It is only in the Classical ethic that Beauty plays a distinct rôle. However labelled—as σωφροσύνη, καλοκἀγαθία or ἀταραξία—it always amounts to the well-ordered group of tangible and publicly evident traits, defined for other men rather than specific to one’s self. A man was the object and not the subject of outward life. The pure present, the moment, the foreground were not conquered but worked up. The notion of an inward life is impossible in this connexion. The significance of Aristotle’s phrase ζῶον πολιτίκον—quite untranslatable and habitually translated with a Western connotation—is that it refers to men who are nothing when single and lonely (what could be more preposterous than an Athenian Robinson Crusoe!) and only count for anything when in a plurality, in agora or forum, where each reflects his neighbour and thus, only thus, acquires a genuine reality. It is all implicit in the phrase σώματα πόλεως, used for the burghers of the city. And thus we see that the Portrait, the centre of Baroque art, is identical with the representation of a man to the extent that he possesses character, and that in the best age of Attic the representation of a man in respect of his attitude, as persona, necessarily leans to the form-ideal of the nude statue.
V
This opposition, further, has produced forms of tragedy that differ from one another radically in every respect. The Faustian character-drama and the Apollinian drama of noble gesture have in fact nothing but name in common.[[394]]
Starting, significantly enough, from Seneca and not from Æschylus and Sophocles[[395]] (just as the contemporary architecture linked itself with Imperial Rome and not with Pæstum), the Baroque drama with ever-increasing emphasis makes character instead of occurrence its centre of gravity, the origin of a system of spiritual co-ordinates (so to express it) which gives the scenic facts position, sense, and value in relation to itself. The outcome is a tragedy of willing, of efficient forces, of inward movement not necessarily exhibited in visible form, whereas Sophocles’s method was to employ a minimum of happening and to put it behind the scenes particularly by means of the artifice of the “messenger.” The Classical tragedy relates to general situations and not particular personalities. It is specifically described by Aristotle as μίμησίς οὐκ ἀνθρώπων ἀλλὰ πρᾶξεως[ἀνθρώπων ἀλλὰ πρᾶξεως] καὶ βίου. That which in his Poetica—assuredly the most fateful of all books for our poetry—he calls ἦθος, namely the ideal bearing of the ideal Hellene in a painful situation, has as little in common with our notion of character (viz., a constitution of the ego which determines events) as a surface in Euclidean geometry has with the like-named concept in Riemann’s theory of algebraic equations. It has, unfortunately, been our habit for centuries past to translate ἦθος as “character” instead of paraphrasing it (exact rendering is almost impossible) by “rôle,” “bearing” or “gesture”; to reproduce myth, μῦθος, which is timeless occurrence, by “action”; and to derive δρᾶμα from “doing.” It is Othello, Don Quixote, Le Misanthrope, Werther and Hedda Gabler that are characters, and the tragedy consists in the mere existence of human beings thus constituted in their respective milieux. Their struggle—whether against this world or the next, or themselves—is forced on them by their character and not by anything coming from outside; a soul is placed in a web of contradictory relations that admits of no net solution. Classical stage-figures, on the contrary, are rôles and not characters; over and over again the same figures appear—the old man, the slayer, the lover, all slow-moving bodies under masks and on stilts. Thus in Classical drama—even of the Late period—the mask is an element of profound symbolic necessity, whereas our pieces would not be regarded as played at all without the play of features. It is no answer to point to the great size of the Greek theatre, for even the strolling player—even the portrait-statue[[396]]—wore a mask, and had there been any spiritual need of a more intimate setting the required architectural form would have been forthcoming quickly enough.
In the tragedy of a character, what happens is the outcome of a long inner development. But in what befalls Ajax and Philoctetes, Antigone and Electra, their psychological antecedents (even supposing them to have any) play no part. The decisive event comes upon them, brutally, as accident, from without, and it might have befallen another in the same way and with the same result. It would not be necessary even for that other to be of the same sex.