George Burman Foster Odium theologicum—it is a deadly thing. But the ridicule and obloquy, formerly characteristic of credal fanaticism, seem to have passed over in recent years into the camp of art connoisseurs. No denying it, it was a Homeric warfare that reverberated up and down the earth from land to land, and from century to century, between what was ever the “old” faith and the “new.” In this year of grace, however, it is the disciples of “classic” art—aureoled with the sanctity of some antiquity or idealism—and “modern” art—in whatever nuance or novelty of most disapproved and screaming modernity—who hereticize each other, who even deny each other right of domicile, save, perhaps, in the unvisited solitudes of interstellar spaces. To be sure, those august and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing may be conceivably preferable to the theological Inferno, though probably this question has not yet received the attention from critics and philanthropists that its importance would seem to merit. At the outset it seemed as if the religious warfare had a certain advantage over the esthetic—it agitated more people, Now, it is of no use to quarrel with this turn matters have taken. And we miss the mark if we say that it is all bad. Off moments come to the best of us when we grow a bit tired of being “uplifted” and “reformed.” Humanity has turned to art and, in doing so, has, on some side of its life, moved forward apace, mounted to higher modes of existence, and, whether the church knows it or not, along the steeps of Parnassus and in the home of the muses has heard some music and caught some glimpses of the not too distant fatherland of the divine and the eternal. First-rate spirits of light and leading have pointed the way to a new esthetic culture—prophetic spirits who in blackest night when deep sleep had fallen upon most men saw the rosy-fingered dawn of our new day. It was to be a day when beauty should be bidden to lead the dance at the ball of life. There were serious philosophers—there was Kant, who contemplated art as the keystone in the sublime structure which modern knowledge and moral will should be summoned to erect in life. There was Schopenhauer, to whom art was the unveiling of the riddle of the world, the most intimate revelation of the divine mystery of life. There was the hero of Baireuth, who, in his artistic creations, summed up all the spiritual and moral forces of humanity, and made them fruitful for the rebirth and fruition of our modern day. Among these prophets of a new esthetic culture, Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a quite special place, and influences the course of coming events. As a most enthusiastic apostle of the gospel of a world-redeeming art he first flung his fire-brand into the land, but only to scorn and blaspheme soon thereafter the very gods he had formerly so passionately worshipped; now degrading them to idols. His faith in art, not this art or that, but in all art, in art as such, pathetically wavered. Still the artist in him himself did not die; its eye was undimmed and its bow abode in strength. And though he later confronted every work of art with a malevolent and exasperating interrogation, all this was only his pure and pellucid soul wrestling for better and surer values, for new and nobler revelations, of the artistic genius. Indeed, it was precisely in these interrogations that he was at once our liberator and our leader—our liberator from the frenzy into which the overfoaming enthusiasm as regards art had transported men; our leader to a livelier, loftier beauty summoned to the creation of the humanest, divinest robes for the adornment of humanity as a whole. The great movement and seething in the artistic life of our age signifies at the same time a turning point in our There was a time when men worked, too, but it was a beautiful halcyon time, when pleasure and joy throbbed in the very heart of the work itself; when a sunny serenity suffused life’s profoundest seriousness. Art pervaded all life, active in all man’s activities, present in every nook and corner whither his vagrant feet wandered. Indeed, art was the very life of man, revealing his strength, his freedom, his creativeness, with which he fashioned things after his own image and according to his own likeness. Every craftsman was an artist, every peasant a poet. Man put his soul into all that he said and did, all that he lived; his work was a work of art, his speech a song, his life beauty. No man lived by bread alone; everyone heard and had a word that was the True Bread. His cathedrals—domes of many-colored glass—preached it to him; his actors sang it to him; even his priests were artists. With a sort of divine humor, man thus subjected to himself all the anxiety and need of life. Then, later, man came to think that he could live by bread alone. Even the True Bread came to be mere bread—public influence; political power. And then man’s poor soul hungered. And when he longed for a Living Word that was not mere bread, he was given printer’s ink and the “sacred letter” of the Bible. But this—ah, this was no soul’s food. So the soul lost its soul. Then, as man had no soul to work with, he had to work with his head, his arms, his feet. Man ceased to be an artist who breathes his living soul into his life, an artist who illumined all the seriousness of life with the sunshine of his living love. Would he art, he could not make it, he had to buy it. Could he not buy it, he had to do without it. Thus, life became as jejune and rational as a Protestant service, where, to be sure, there was no priest more, but also no artist, only scribe and theologian—where religion became dogmatics, faith a sum in arithmetic, Christianity a documentarily deposited judicial process between God and man. To be sure, under certain circumstances, decoration and color, even pomp and magnificence, may be found in this church, but no living connection between the outward appearance of these churches and their inner and peculiar service. Thus, too, our And because art had no soul of its own more, it became patronizing and mendicant—coquetting for the favors of the rich and powerful, sitting at their tables, perhaps even picking up the crumbs that fall beneath the tables. Art, ah, art sought bread—mere bread—and adopted the sorry principle that to get bread was the sacredest of all duties. Art without life, life without art! Then came that mighty movement of spirits to bring art and life together again, to reconquer and recreate and reestablish a view of life in which man should learn to see and achieve beauty once yet again. Of that movement, Friedrich Nietzsche was the purest and intensest herald. Bold, fiery spirit, with words that burn, he uttered what had been for a long time a soul-burden of all deeper spirits. This burden of souls was that an art creation should go on in every human life as its highest and holiest calling; that, without the living effectuation of the artistic power of the human soul, all human culture would serve but beastliness and barbarity. To this end our poet-philosopher returns to the Urgrund, the abyss of nature’s life, from whose mysterious deep all tempestuous, wild impulses tumble forth and struggle for form and expression in man. It is life which seeks death in order to renew itself in the painful pleasure of its destruction, perceived but then by man in the thrill of delight which prepares the way for his most original eternal revelation. To breed pleasure from pain; to suck forces of life from the most shocking tragedies; to eavesdrop on the brink of the abysmal so as to fashion sweet phantoms in the divine intoxication of the soul,—this is music, this is art, in this, man struggles beyond and above his whole contradictory nature, transfigures death, creates forms and figures in which he celebrates his self-redemption from seriousness, from the curse of existence. Here, at last, art is no sport, no fiddle-faddle, but at once highest and gayest seriousness. It returns from the service of death which it has performed, to its life, which it receives from “every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” Herein lies the over-powering, the prophetic, in this Nietzschean preaching of art. It tells us that we are very far from comprehending life when we have but measured its length and breadth with yardstick and square; that nature is far different from what scholars have figured it out to be, or from what investigators have seen of it with telescope and microscope. It teaches us to listen to the old eternal murmurs of the spirit, whose sigh we hear indeed, but whence it comes and whither it goes we never know—murmurs and sighs which bring forth the elementary forces, instincts, passions, and friendships in man, which men fashion and shape, regulate and direct indeed, but whose coming and going, whose ebbing and flowing, is not within their power. Inspiration, divine in-breathing—a dead concept as applied by theologians to their Bible—comes into its own again in human nature as a whole, it is the true element in man’s life, by virtue of which the soul feels within itself a creative life—its own proof that its dependence is no slave-service, but freedom; that its deepest suffering of pain is itself creative life, creative pleasure. The Nietzschean doubt respecting art—today this has become a demand for truth in art and for truthfulness in the artist! And from these a third—the demand for simplicity! And all this is of a piece with the purpose to live a simple life. Man does not live by bread alone. It is a living question for the sake of future humanity that our art shall give the True Bread to the heart of man, so that we may form a life in us and around us, a life whereon shall not repose the dead weight of a culture artificially burdened with a thousand anxieties and cares, but a life wherein man shall breathe freer, because he breathes the fresh free air of life itself. Beautiful life, artistic culture; this means the opposite of what many mean by it today—it |