"Heroic Art"
Was all of 19th-century art anything other than the progression of decay?
Viewed from a distance, one might perhaps say that the creative, constructive power of the Western world lasted until the French Revolution, and with it the age in which heroism, in step with its time, was possible - this will become clearest to us in the section on the art of statecraft.
In the visual arts, one could draw the line after the Romantics, after a Caspar David Friedrich (bordering on Leibl and Menzel); in music, perhaps after Schubert and Weber (bordering on Wagner), and in poetry, after Kleist, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Eichendorff (bordering on Hebbel); architecture, which is perhaps the decisive hallmark of creative eras, had already died in the Rococo, still in the sweetness of existence of which Talleyrand spoke and which still resonates for us in Mozart - at that time, something died in the world.
Just as in art, so too in philosophy one could draw the line after Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel (bordering on Schopenhauer) - all these thinkers may well have erred, but they erred greatly, erred out of creative impulse, and it is the creative alone that matters; in the bustling division of labor of the modern philosophical “swarm of ants,” the joy and power of thought have been stifled.
I am well aware that creative individuals have emerged even after the turning point I have indicated, but they have mostly felt themselves to be in a more or less passionate opposition to their time— such as Bismarck, Wagner, Leibl, Hebbel, Gotthelf, and the German van Gogh, or, their creative power never amounted to a pure and honest reshaping of the great heritage of the ages, as was the case with Storm and Keller, with Brahms, and with men like Feuerbach or Böcklin.
From a distant perspective, one can say that since the time of Frederick the Great and Kant—since the time of our classical and romantic thinkers and artists—no man has emerged among our contemporaries who stood at the very beginning; only Bismarck was a true hero, akin to the sea, the mountains, the storm, and the oak tree, and it is precisely from his mighty existence that we gauge the measure that should serve to show us how barren this 19th century stands, devoid of great creators, not just here among us, but throughout the entire Western world.
The 19th century—and all the authentic currents of the 19th century—have been dissolving - let us consider the visual arts as an example:
The 19th century particularly cultivated Impressionism, that is, an artistic sensibility corresponding roughly to materialism - Impressionism, akin to the disintegrating spirit of the French, has produced works of art that are authentically national in the Romance-speaking world, but never in Germany, for the German spirit is either constructive or nothing at all; that is why it has the hardest time in the world, for construction has always been foreign to German Impressionism.
It is characteristic of Impressionism in all art forms that it seeks to present things as they appear before it: “What hovers in a fluctuating appearance” is to be rendered in a fluctuating appearance; what the eye has taken in, gliding from hue to hue, is to be found again in the artwork.
The world, as it presents itself as a colorful phenomenon, should reappear in the painting with the same immediate freshness—no more and no less—and indeed, no more; it is certainly not some thought of the painter about the world, for that would already be a misfortune.
The artist was to be a reporter of what was seen—so it was demanded in an era whose worldview was then called Positivism; this gave rise to an art that, among the French—the positivist French, with their traditional restraint and their certainty of taste—was often merely an expression of their lack of intellectual boldness and no particular merit - this art produced works of a masterful nature, for positivism corresponds to the French spirit.
The same artistic movement has, from time to time, also produced paintings of a cohesive visual impact in Germany, but on the whole, only paintings that may be listed in price catalogs and, ultimately, in art histories, but will not count as part of the heritage of the German spirit - it is a law of the German spirit, and Goethe expressed it thus:
“What hovers in a wavering appearance, anchor it with enduring thoughts!”
Just as materialism, and the intellectually far poorer monism, sought to elevate the method, the procedure of the natural sciences, to a worldview, so Impressionism sought to elevate a method, a procedure of approach, to an artistic worldview, to the artistic worldview itself - in both cases, a deep reflection on the essence of the creative in the human spirit was lacking, and the power to anchor what was seen into enduring thoughts was missing.
In a certain sense, one could say that Rembrandt was the greatest Impressionist, but the difference remains this: for Rembrandt, Impressionism was a kind of refined seeing and shaping that had to serve his work, but never an expression of a refined sensibility - Rembrandt was the creative spirit whom his impassioned heart compelled to paint, and of the world, as it floats in shifting appearances, he has proclaimed moving truths in quiet love; for this man of sorrow however, the form itself is still the material, and appearance is to him like a veil over the powers of fate - thus, before the simplest sketch of a landscape, we sense how much pain and bliss, how many downpours and darkness this lonely man has kept hidden.
The power of the soul alone creates the great works of art, which are enduring thoughts - on the battlefield that stretches along the boundaries between man and the world, the great works are beheld; it does not depend on the shifting appearance, nor does it depend on who views it “more impartially”—for all these things are akin to the idle speculation about appearances that the prisoners in the cave engage in in Plato’s allegory—what matters is solely the creator’s gaze upon the appearance and the power of the mind that forges the work from this shifting appearance, and from the inner sense of a mighty destiny: the power of the mind that wages its heavy struggle on the battlefield between itself within and the worldly appearance without.
The matters of cognition and creation are, at their core, all simple to the simple-minded - whoever has ears to hear may discern them from Plato’s theory of ideas and from Kant’s critique of cognition, thereby shaping them into their own fruitfulness; only must the creator first be simple, and then he may learn to see the simple.
The dissolution of the wavering appearance into patches of color ultimately degenerates into technical skill and artifice, and ends with us Germans, as it must, in a Berlin-style brashness of brushwork, which may delight those who, as modernists, see in painting a mere technique; in contrast, those who seek the shaping of a destiny will in solemnity turn away.
Impressionism has ended and made way for another hint of decay: we have experienced Expressionism, which asserts to us that behind its foreign term lies the idea that one should no longer dabble with appearances; that the new style of art has been discovered, and that one should come and marvel and buy - the drum rattles deafeningly.
It is said, however, that the wise had foreseen this since the time of Symbolism and the rush around El Greco, and had experienced Expressionism just as Mephisto experienced the student:
“This time he is of the newest sort: he will terrify without limit.”
Expressionism, in a simple yet always astonishing process for the masses, has turned the whole thing upside down in a flash; it has simply taken the end that Impressionism had grasped at one end and seized it at the other, now believing it had grasped it all, and even spoke of a beginning of all art through it - in truth, however, Expressionism—to which, through no merit of its own, a few valid things have also fallen under its advertising clamour—is the end, the complete dissolution, a purely metropolitan art of painted mental decay, and an art stemming from the same spirit that has here and there found its way into the teachings of the natives’ dance.
Expressionism is truly of its time and, as it were, in the right place as the figurehead of a feverish zeitgeist that has already displayed itself through cocaine, unnatural debauchery, native music, and the bellowing of cattle, and now touts its latest feverish fervor to us.
Expressionism wants nothing to do with any given external world; instead it expresses its so-called inner world—or rather, seeks to express it—just as it hovers within him in a fluctuating appearance, as a turmoil of his imaginings - it sometimes succeeds very precisely in hinting at this contemporary inner world, this substitute for fate, on canvas or on wood, and nowhere do we recognize the essence of the spirit of the age better: one must give Expressionism credit for that.
Since we too wish to recognize these things seriously and judge them for their own fruitfulness, let us also consider it here, as it immediately strikes us: here too, there is a lack of consolidation into lasting thoughts—the age lacks creative genius, whatever it may try to undertake.
There is as little anchoring in Expressionism as there is in Impressionism; this undulating, tangled ebb and flow of ideas, this undifferentiated ferment of inner images—this is all that Expressionism can offer on its own, and since it seeks to turn its weakness into a virtue, it pretends to offer only the “spiritual.”
We, however, recognize in it the very end of an effeminate age: the blurring of boundaries between all ideas is to be painted, drawn, poetized, and set to music; the effeminate state of the spirit is to become the law of art, and that is the abyss at which our time stands.
I once dreamed of a law of sound that was a tree and grew green leaves; another time, in a dream, the little word “of course”—which I had intended to place quite clearly and as unavoidable in a sentence in a planned letter to my landlord—this “of course” appeared to me in the same dream as a small tree that shot up before me in the middle of a narrow forest path and could not be bypassed - thus, in the stream of ideas left to its own devices, image intertwines with thought, image with image, thought with thought, into intermediate forms that the clearly waking will can very rarely still grasp.
It is a woman’s whim to want to be right out of such undifferentiated intermediate forms of thought and imagination.
Expressionism is effeminate, like the entire age that we live in; Impressionism could at least be a bully, and bullies are somewhat masculine, but neither of the two movements were creative art—one must say “was” even of Expressionism, for things move quickly today.
A leading itinerant preacher of Expressionism had given me, as his final trump card, the assurance that he knew of only five people who had actually understood what Expressionism was; when I asked him about the other four, a pitiful response came out.
Expressionism, too, is already a thing of the past - all metropolitan art is a passing trend and excitement, while all creative art comes from the solitary, from those of a masculine spirit who see the world as Albrecht Dürer saw it, in Goethe’s words:
“...its steadfast life and masculinity,
its inner measure and constancy.”
This is how the creative expression of a man and his world takes shape.
Expressionism also wants to be expression, but just as Rembrandt was also an Impressionist and yet the label is ridiculous for him, so every label is ridiculous in the face of all great art.
Gothic art, in its development from the Nordic scrollwork (animal ornamentation) to its decline in the Southern Renaissance, has always been something of an expressive art; the Expressionists also shout much about Gothic art to the masses, and yet how ridiculous the label is once again, for Gothic art is an art of masculinity and permanence - it has indeed achieved the impossible: to anchor the high aspirations and eternal striving of the Nordic people, the entire stormy surge of the Nordic soul, into enduring thoughts.
Truly, the word of the Lord in “Faust” is spoken to the creative artists of Nordic blood:
“But you, the true sons of the gods,
rejoice in the living, rich beauty!
That which is becoming, which eternally acts and lives,
envelops you with the love of sweet boundaries,
and that which hovers in wavering appearance,
fortify with enduring thoughts!”
Thus have the Nordic masters worked; thus has Rembrandt’s love for every creature of the earth created a work of the deepest Christianity of the Nordic kind; thus from this spirit are the cathedrals of German cities built; thus has Albrecht Dürer, of a manly spirit, wrested from nature—as he himself puts it—an art of constancy and inner measure; thus did Johann Sebastian Bach, the master of inner measure and constancy, compose his fugues, which stride forth like the destiny of a mighty figure; thus did they all, the true sons of the North, delight in the living, rich beauty, and lived their “firm life.”
We, on the other hand, are the people of a barren age that knows nothing more of creation: no longer masters of language, unskilled in any work of construction, without destiny or a sense of fate in life, leaderless in the state, too weak for faith, too scattered for true knowledge, corrupted by pleasure, too cowardly to overcome, a disgust to ourselves—thus we drift on!
Creative power is lacking in life as in art - we see in the masters of German art what it means to be an artist: art is not merely the reproduction of an impression, as Impressionism maintains, nor merely the expression of a flight of fancy, as Expressionism maintains, but it is, above all else, the shaping of a destiny.
This means that one must have a destiny if one wishes to create genuine art - one cannot simply sit in a warm studio with paints and brushes and then be quite diligent, while outside the great temptations and trials are laid in wait.
I once got into a conversation with a sculptor about British global power, and had tried to make him understand how fundamentally sound the self-interest was that built the British Empire; I had tried to convey to him the temptation and the soul-forging power and danger of a vision of dominion - the sculptor was completely absorbed in the discussion, I could sense that.
But suddenly he broke off, withdrew, and said, “I could lose myself in such thoughts.” - these are the wretched souls, the half-souls, who do not want to lose themselves, who lack the stuff to burn their candle at both ends, to borrow a Bismarckian expression: whoever cannot lose himself in the great subjects of human life for a few hours in the studio, where he ought to find himself enriched, is—measured by his claim to be called an artist—nothing more than a nobody.
It does not matter that an artist knows about the art of statecraft, certainly not; what does matter is that a person who wishes to enrich the spiritual heritage of his people should not merely move about in a studio, but step out into the world, live, will, grapple with all that is alive in the world, experience the forces of his time, and come to know the people of his time through hatred and love - painting is secondary, while living is first in everything, for only from living life does a destiny spring forth.
Heroic art is solely the shaping of a destiny, and springs from a mindset—not from the escapist mindset of workshop busyness, but only from the mindset of a heroic person; only he who has first forged himself into a hero will be able to create a work of Nordic art - the divine figures who lived among the German people lived heroically enough to forge themselves and their work in the fire of a destiny.
The situation is dire for the artists of this age, for destiny and spirit are lacking; most artists of this age lend themselves to the viewer only for a thoroughly materialistic observation, and they are thus living beings who excrete art.
In the course of a conversation with a diligent, industrious painter who called himself apolitical, it came to the point where he, sitting calmly, explained to me that it was completely indifferent to him (“it doesn’t matter”) whether he were a French or German citizen, as long as he could paint - to be able to paint—that is the escapist mindset of the rootless, who let themselves be acted upon, as long as they can paint; it is at such people that the phrase “heroic outlook,” as Schiller so eloquently put it, is aimed:
“There is nobility in the moral world as well: common natures pay with what they do, and noble ones with what they are.”
I now hear a thousand times the objection that people without a homeland or convictions could still be “great” artists - that may apply to many whom one commonly cites as artists—to a dense swarm of singers, actors, painters, poets, musicians, filmmakers, and tightrope walkers—but it does not apply to art born of destiny, for to live one’s life as destiny means to have risen from the depths, where only the great powers of conviction still reign; it means, like Faust, to have penetrated to the “Mothers” and to have beheld:
“Formation, transformation, the eternal entertainment of the eternal spirit, surrounded by images of every creature.”
Only the great seers, who have experienced the realm of the “Mothers” within themselves, are, as Dürer says, “inwardly full of form”, and must carry away their manhood from the struggle with the powers of fate; they do not rest until they emulate Goethe’s Earth Spirit, living “in the floods of life, in the storm of deeds”, and having stood firm where the forces of their time roar in high surf.
The creator of a great future has always been the earth-born man who, in joy or pain, often in hatred, but always in passion, has experienced his people and his fatherland, and whom the clamour of battle between two earthly powers has roused from every sleep - he has always been, like Faust, the undaunted one:
“...and what is allotted to all of humanity,
I will enjoy within my inner self:
My spirit grow old with the highest and the deepest
as they heap their joy and sorrow upon my breast;
I thus expand my own being to encompass theirs
and, like them, in the end, I too shall shatter!”
Such is the state of the creator of heroic art - he takes his stand where a beginning is to be made and where it is hardest, where a work of art is always at the same time a work of conviction.
The artist of this age lacks conviction, and he must put up with it - it is half repulsive and half amusing to see how the masses, who are his contemporary world, stare at him as if he were a strange beast excreting art; people have grown accustomed to this and take pride in not passing judgment, instead viewing the latest absurdities of the contemporary artists as the most exciting part of their newspaper: these artists’ marriages and divorces, these artists’ “experiences,” which the “great” artist has then turned into this or that play or even film - all of this the philistine, the enlightened man of our time, takes in down to the last detail, just as one would the natural history of fascinatingly strange animals.
The artist must put up with being viewed in this way - better yet, he gladly puts up with it, for this contemporary fame among the masses secures his income.
One is sometimes reminded that, in a bygone era, a great artist cried out to his brothers of high spirit:
“Humanity’s destiny is placed in your hands—preserve it!
It sinks with you, but with you it will rise!”
Schiller
We begin to understand why, for Plato, the Beautiful is not an independent idea, but participates in the idea of the Good, the highest idea - this is the certainty of the great artist: that while the work of art stands on its own, blissfully beautiful, art itself and its creators participate in the work of the spirit that is to be.
The creators have therefore never been connoisseurs of art, and have always despised the aesthete and the “artist of life”; the creator will always experience all art only as the joyful battle cry of his peers.
Often he will linger least of all before a work of art, because the struggle of the great forces of the spirit leaves him no idle hour - what is, after all, the entire history of art to him? The hero always stands at the dawn of a world, where everything lies open to creation and all affirmation shines.
What do we still know of heroic art; if it were to come, would we still possess the freshness of the senses it demands? We are, as it were, torn apart in every sense by the thousandfold clamor of advertising drums, having long since lost our pure vision.
No example can better teach us, who live in the present, what creative power and the art of fresh senses are than that of our Mozart, precisely because Mozart is not the restless one, the tormented and suffering giant like Beethoven; it is precisely because he did not create a musical world of agonizing questions and terrible realizations; it is precisely because he is—one might say—the pure creator, the profligate in himself—precisely for all these reasons does he teach our present more than any other.
The art of the 19th century has always been far more concerned with the struggle of existential questions and has only rarely, and only for fleeting moments, understood how to create a perfect work of art, just as Beethoven, above all, understood the questionable nature of existence.
The art of the 19th century has carried this fragment of Beethoven’s world—the struggle and the questions—with it as an inheritance, but only that it has also rendered this fragment poor and weak in its own right - the art of the age has become entangled in a hundred “worldviews”, and seeks to resolve so-called questions of humanity; every play aspires to be a “problem play”, and every novel a depiction of this or that truth of the day - yet with all these so-called problems, no truly creative achievement was realized, neither in poetry, nor in music, nor in the visual arts.
Mozart remains unrivaled as the captivating creator of lavish abundance: pure “problems”—not this or that being “depicted,” nor this or that sonata intending to convey this or that—but always the same revelation of sweeping, creative abundance.
Goethe has the “Boy Guide” reveal in “Faust”:
“I am extravagance, I am poetry.”
Truly: the poetic work is extravagance, the work of art is extravagance, and it is nothing else; whoever seeks something “behind” it, some proposition comprehensible to the mind, is a barbarian and is, as Hölderlin says:
“...deeply incapable of any divine feeling, for he is corrupted to the marrow for the sake of the holy Graces.”
We are so thoroughly corrupted to the core, to the delight of all true art, that we no longer know what to make of Schiller’s words on the nature of art:
“Slender and light, as if sprung from nothing, the image stands before the enraptured gaze.”
Art is, time and again, nothing more to us than a perversion of philosophical contemplation, merely a stance on the questions of the age, merely a self-portrait of the mind and life of struggling human beings, merely a “judgment day over one’s own self” (Ibsen), merely a grappling with the meaning of the world—certainly, art is all of that, but it is meant to be far more: it is meant to be a revelation of how alive, blissful, all-pervading, and self-sacrificing pure creation is.
What the concepts of abundance and beauty are remains hidden from us all; that is why everything around us and within us remains so unadorned, and we never feel “slender and light”; that is why few know who Mozart is, for the superficial see in him an ever-cheerful man, the educated master of form, the connoisseurs of style the master of German Rococo—he is all of these as well, but to most people he is a so-called pleasure, and only then is one “enraptured” by him.
That one ought truly to be enchanted, carried away, a recipient of a great gift—only a few sense this, for Mozart is out of step with the times, and is in no way and in no respect related to this age - he is the creativity we lack, the exuberance we have forgotten, and the festivity of the earth of which we are incapable; he is the creator under whose hands everything luminous takes a “slender and light” form, the self-sacrificing one who, above all the torments of his daily life, thinks only of giving, and who, at the end of his life, gave himself this Requiem as a funeral celebration—before which we tremble and ask: where did this man of wisdom draw the abundance of such generosity?
Mozart’s work is the purest creation, and therefore it should mean the purest bliss to us - how pitiful is the music of our age then compared to Mozart’s! Form is lacking, and abundance is in short supply; we have achieved a great din with multi-amplified and multi-voiced instruments, but the composers of our time have never moved beyond a mechanical churning of notes in which a fragment of a clear melody occasionally surfaces, beyond a fever of sound effects that they cunningly and confidently manipulate.
As children of their time, they have repeatedly confused mass with meaning; that is why there is a “Symphony of a Thousand”1.
They have tried every possible new sound technique, right down to the noise-making instruments of African or Asian peoples; they have gone through everything from the scales of the Gypsies to those of the East Asians, and yet have created nothing that could withstand comparison in creative power and richness with the attempts of the young Mozart.
The 19th century has led us into such powerlessness and deprivation with all its great clamour that only now has the time for great things arrived - it is a hallmark of our time to first “interest” the press and draw up a “programme” before any work is done: only now has true art been discovered, only now have the world’s mysteries been solved or justice, only now has human rights, and freedom been found - but the result was always futile: the advertising clamour was greater than the work that was to follow.
A Copernicus once thought his work through to clarity over the course of a generation before it seemed ripe to him - in creative times, one took things more seriously.
From “Ritter Tod und Teufel” (Knight, Death and the Devil) by Hans F.K. Gunther, 1920
Symphony No. 8 by Gustav Mahler. - The Translator