Chapter VIII: Music and Plastic (3)

This sentence is not in the original. It has been inserted, and the
following sentence modified, for the sake of clarity.—_Tr._

Footnote 276:

See Vol. II, p. 110. The aspect of the streets of Old Egypt may have
been very similar to this, if we can draw conclusions from tesseræ
discovered in Cnossus (see H. Bossert, _Alt Kreta_ (1921), T. 14). And
the Pylon is an undoubted and genuine façade. (Such tesseræ, bearing
pictures of windowed houses, are illustrated in Art. “_Ægean
Civilization_,” Ency. Brit., XI Edition, Vol. I, p. 251, plate IV,
fig. 1.—_Tr._).

Footnote 277:

Ghiberti has not outgrown the Gothic, nor has even Donatello; and
already in Michelangelo the feeling is Baroque, i.e., musical.

Footnote 278:

The struggle to fix the problem is visible in the series of “Apollo-
figures.” See Déonna, _Les Apollons archaïques_ (1909).

Footnote 279:

Woermann, _Geschichte der Kunst, I_ (1915), p. 236. The first tendency
is seen in the Samian Hera of Cheramues and the persistent turning of
columns into caryatids; the second in the Delian figure dedicated to
Artemis by Nicandra, with its relation to the oldest metope-technique.

Footnote 280:

Miletus was in a particular relation with Egypt through Naucratis.—
_Tr._

Footnote 281:

Most of the works are pediment-groups or metopes. But even the Apollo-
figures and the “Maidens” of the Acropolis could not have stood free.

Footnote 282:

V. Salis, _Kunst der Griechen_ (1919), pp. 47, 98 et seq.

Footnote 283:

The decisive preference of the _white_ stone is itself significant of
the _opposition_ of Renaissance to Classical feeling.

Footnote 284:

All Greek scales are capable of reduction to “tetrachords” or four-
note scales of which the form E—note—note—A is typical. In the
diatonic the unspecified inner notes are F, G; in the chromatic they
are F, F sharp; and in the enharmonic they are E half-sharp, F. Thus,
the chromatic and enharmonic scales do not provide additional notes as
the modern chromatic does, but simply displace the inner members of
the scale downwards, altering the proportionate distances between the
same given total. In Faustian music, on the contrary, the meaning of
“enharmonic” is simply _relational_. It is applied to a change, say
from A flat to G sharp. The difference between these two is not a
quarter-tone but a “very small” interval (theory and practice do not
even agree as to which note is the higher, and in tempered instruments
with standardized scales the physical difference is eliminated
altogether). While a note is being sounded, even without any physical
change in it, its harmonic co-ordinates (i.e., substantially, the key
of the harmony) may alter, so that henceforth the note, from A flat,
has become G sharp.—_Tr._

Footnote 285:

In the same way the whole of Russian music appears to us infinitely
mournful, but real Russians assure us that it is not at all so for
themselves.

Footnote 286:

See articles under these headings in Grove’s “Dictionary of Music.”—
_Tr._

Footnote 287:

See Vol. II, p. 238.

Footnote 288:

In Baroque music the word “imitation” means something quite different
from this, viz., the exact repetition of a motive in a new colouring
(starting from a different note of the scale).

Footnote 289:

For all that survives performance is the notes, and these speak only
to one who still knows and can manage the tone and technique of the
expression-means appropriate to them.

Footnote 290:

See articles _Fauxbourdon_, _Discant_ and _Gimel_ in Grove’s
“Dictionary of Music.”—_Tr._

Footnote 291:

Note that Oresme was a contemporary of Machault and Philippe de Vitry,
in whose generation the rules and prohibitions of strict counterpoint
were definitively established.

Footnote 292:

See p. 19 and Vol. II, p. 357.

Footnote 293:

Even the first great troubadour, Guilhem of Poitiers, though a
reigning sovereign, made it his ambition to be regarded as a
“professional,” as we should say.—_Tr._

Footnote 294:

See also Vol. II, p. 365.

Footnote 295:

See p. 74.

Footnote 296:

A movement in sonata form consists essentially of (_a_) First Subject;
(_b_) Second Subject (in an allied key); (_c_) Working-out, or free
development of the themes grouped under (_a_) and (_b_); and (_d_)
Recapitulation, in which the two subjects are repeated in the key of
the tonic.

The English usage is to consider (_a_) and (_b_) with the bridge or
modulation connecting them, together as the “Exposition,” and the form
is consequently designated “three-part.”—_Tr._

Footnote 297:

Einstein, _Gesch. der Musik_, p. 67.

Footnote 298:

Coysevox lived 1640-1720. Much of the embellishment and statuary of
Versailles is his work.—_Tr._

Footnote 299:

See Vol. II, pp. 357 et seq., 365 et seq.

Footnote 300:

It was not merely national-Italian (for that Italian Gothic was also):
it was purely Florentine, and even within Florence the ideal of one
class of society. That which is called Renaissance in the Trecento has
its centre in Provence and particularly in the papal court at Avignon,
and is nothing whatever but the southern type of chivalry, that which
prevailed in Spain and Upper Italy and was so strongly influenced by
the Moorish polite society of Spain and Sicily.

Footnote 301:

Renaissance ornament is merely embellishment and self-conscious "art"-
inventiveness. It is only with the frank and outspoken Baroque that we
return to the necessities of high symbolism.

Footnote 302:

Jacob Burckhardt, _Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien_. (An English
translation was published in 1878.—_Tr._)

Footnote 303:

Inclusive of Paris itself. Even as late as the fifteenth century
Flemish was as much spoken there as French, and the architectural
appearance of the city in its oldest parts connects it with Bruges and
Ghent and not with Troyes and Poitiers.

Footnote 304:

A. Schmarsow, _Gotik in der Renaissance_ (1921); B. Haendke, _Der
niederl. Einfluss auf die Malerei Toskana-Umbriens_ (_Monatshefte für
Kunstwissensch._ 1912).

Footnote 305:

The colossal statue of Bartolommeo Colleone at Venice.—_Tr._

Footnote 306:

Svoboda, _Römische und Romanische Paläste_ (1919); Rostowzew,
_Pompeianische Landschaften und Römische Villen_ (_Röm. mitt._, 1904).

Footnote 307:

Environs of Rome. They date from the late 17th and the mid-18th
centuries respectively; the gardens of the V. Ludovisi were laid out
by Le Nôtre.—_Tr._

Footnote 308:

That is, the expression for the sum of a convergent series beyond any
specified term.—_Tr._

Footnote 309:

See Vol. II, pp. 117 et seq.

Footnote 310:

In Classical painting, light and shadow were first consistently
employed by Zeuxis, but _only for the shading of the thing itself_,
for the purpose of freeing the modelling of the body painted from the
restriction of the relief-manner, i.e., without any reference to the
relation of shadows to the _time of day_. But even with the earliest
of the Netherlanders light and shade are already _colour-tones_ and
affected by atmosphere.

Footnote 311:

The brilliant _polish_ of the stone in Egyptian art has a deep
symbolic significance of much the same kind. Its effect is to
dematerialize the statue by causing the eye to glide along its
exterior. Hellas on the contrary manifests, by its progress from
“Poros” stone, through Naxian, to the translucent Parian and Pentelic
marbles, how determined it is that the look shall sink right into the
material essence of the body.

Footnote 312:

See Vol. II, pp. 314 et seq.

Footnote 313:

The life and teaching of St. Francis were, morally and æsthetically
alike, the centres of inspiration for Cimabue, Giotto and the Italian
Gothic generally.—_Tr._

Footnote 314:

Der nordische im Grenzenlose schweifende Pantheismus.

Footnote 315:

On the following page is a translation of this chorus.—_Tr._

_Raphael._ The Sun outsings the brother-spheres
in olden rivalry of song,
and thunder-girt pursues the years
the preordainèd path along.
’Tis from his face the angels gain
their strength; but scan it no one may.
Thought is outranged and Works remain
sublime as on Creation-Day.
_Gabriel._ And, swift beyond description, flies
the circling scene of land and sea,
in alternance of Paradise
with dark and awful Mystery.
The ocean swings, the billows sway,
back from the cliff the waves are hurled.
But cliff and waves alike obey
the mightier movement of the World.
_Michael._ And storms arise and swell and ebb
o’er sea and mountain, lake and field,
in wild contention weave a web
of forces purposed though concealed.
The lightning is thy flaming sword,
the thunder veils thee on thy way,
yet ever spare thy envoys, Lord,
the gentle changing of thy day.
_The Three._ ’Tis from thy face the angels gain
their strength, but scan it no one may.
Beyond all thought thy Works remain
sublime as on Creation-Day.

Footnote 316:

His portrait of Frau Gedon, all steeped in brown, is the last _Old-
Master portrait_ of the West; it is painted entirely in the style of
the past.

Footnote 317:

The strings in the Orchestra represent, as a class, the colours of the
distance. The bluish green of Watteau is found already in the
Neapolitan _bel canto_ of about 1700, in Couperin, in Mozart and
Haydn; and the brown of the Dutch in Corelli, Handel and Beethoven.
The woodwind, too, calls up illumined distances. Yellow and red, on
the other hand, the colours of nearness, the _popular_ colours, are
associated with the brass timbre, the effect of which is corporeal
often to the point of vulgarity. The tone of an old fiddle is entirely
bodiless. It is worth remarking that the Greek music, insignificent as
it is, underwent an evolution from the Dorian lyre to the Ionian flute
(aulos and syrinx) and that even in the time of Pericles strict
Dorians blamed this as an enervating and lowering tendency.

(The horn is an exception, and is always treated as an exception, to
the brass generally. Its place is with the woodwind, and its colours
are those of the distance.—_Tr._)

Footnote 318:

The use of gold in this way, viz., to add brilliancy to bodies
standing freely in the open, has nothing in common with its employment
in Magian art to provide glittering backgrounds for figures seen in
dim interiors.

Footnote 319:

The Chinese also attach enormous importance to the patinas of their
old bronzes, which, owing to the different alloys used and the strong
chemical characters of the soil, are of infinite variety and natural
intricacy. They too, in later phases, have come to the production of
artificial patina.—_Tr._

Footnote 320:

Pausanias, it should be observed, was neither by date nor by origin a
Greek.—_Tr._

Footnote 321:

“In places, as you stand on it, the great towered and embattled
enceinte produces an illusion: it looks as if it were still equipped
and defended. One vivid challenge at any rate it flings down before
you; it compels you to make up your mind on the matter of restoration.
For myself, I have no hesitation; I prefer in every case the ruined,
however ruined, to the reconstructed however splendid.... After that,
I am free to say that the restoration of Carcassonne is a splendid
achievement.” (Henry James, “A Little Tour in France,” xxiii.) Yet if
ever there was a reconstruction carried out with piety and scholarship
as well as skill, it was Viollet-le-Duc’s reconstruction of these old
town-walls.—_Tr._

Footnote 322:

Home, an English philosopher of the 18th Century, declared in a
lecture on English parks that Gothic ruins represented the triumph of
_time over power_, Classical ruins that of barbarism over taste. It
was that age that first discovered the beauty of the ruin-studded
Rhine, which was thenceforward the _historic_ river of the Germans.

Footnote 323:

English readers will very likely think of the case of Shaw’s “Back to
Methuselah,” with its extreme contrast of the cheaply-satirical
present-day scene and the noble and tragic scenes of far past and far
future.—_Tr._

Footnote 324:

One need only contrast the Greek artist with Rubens and Rabelais.

Footnote 325:

Of whom one of his mistresses remarked that he “smelt like a carcass”
(qu’il puait comme une charogne). Note also how the musician generally
has a reputation for uncleanliness.

Footnote 326:

From the solemn canon of Polycletus to the elegance of Lysippus the
same process of lightening is going on in the body-build as that which
brought the column from the Doric to the Corinthian order. The
Euclidean feeling was beginning to relax.

Footnote 327:

See p. 19.—_Tr._

Footnote 328:

In other countries, e.g., old Egypt and Japan (to anticipate a
particularly foolish and shallow assertion), the sight of naked men
was a far more ordinary and commonplace thing than it was in Athens,
but the Japanese art-lover feels emphasized nudity as ridiculous and
vulgar. The act is depicted (as for that matter it is in the “Adam and
Eve” of Bamberg Cathedral), but merely as an object without any
significance of potential whatsoever.

Footnote 329:

Kluge, _Deutsche Sprachgesch._ (1920), pp. 202 et seq.

Footnote 330:

A. Conze, _Die Attischen Grabreliefs_ (1893 etc.).

Footnote 331:

Louvre. Replicas of the pair in the Vict. and Alb. Museum, London.—
_Tr._

Footnote 332:

Olympia—the only unquestioned original that we have from the “great
age.” References would be superfluous, for few, if any, Classical
works are better or more widely known.—_Tr._

Footnote 333:

Of the several copies that have survived, all imperfectly preserved,
that in the Palazzo Massimi is accounted the best. The restoration
which, once seen, convinces, is Professor Furtwängler’s (shown in
Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article _Greek Art_, fig. 68).—_Tr._

Footnote 334:

A cast of this is in the British Museum (illustrated in the Museum
Guide to Egypt. Antiq., pl. XXI).—_Tr._

Footnote 335:

In the Bargello, Florence. Replica in Vict. and Alb. Museum, London.—
_Tr._

Footnote 336:

The “Apollo with the lyre” at Munich was admired by Winckelmann and
his time as a Muse. Till quite recently a head of Athene (a copy of
Praxiteles) at Bologna passed as that of a general. Such errors would
be entirely impossible in dealing with a physiognomic art, e.g.,
Baroque.

Footnote 337:

In his portrait of Frau Gedon, already alluded to, p. 252.

Footnote 338:

See p. 136 and also Vol. II, p. 354.

Footnote 339:

The so-called “Three Fates” in the British Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 340:

The Orphic springtime _contemplates_ the Gods and does not _see_ them.
See Vol. II, p. 345.

Footnote 341:

There was indeed a beginning of this in the aristocratic epic of
Homer—so nearly akin to the courtly narrative art of Boccaccio. But
throughout the Classical age strictly religious people felt it as a
profanation; the worship that shines through the Homeric poems is
quite without idolatry, and a further proof is the anger of thinkers
who, like Heraclitus and Plato, were in close touch with the temple
tradition. It will occur to the student that the unrestricted handling
of even the highest divinities in this very late art is not unlike the
theatrical Catholicism of Rossini and Liszt, which is already
foreshadowed in Corelli and Händel and had, earlier even, almost led
to the condemnation of Church music in 1564.

(The event alluded to in the last line is the dispute in and after the
Council of Trent as to the nature and conduct of Church music. If
Wagner’s suggestion that Pope Marcellus II tried to exclude it
altogether is exaggerated, it is certain at least that the complaints
were deep and powerful, and that the Council found it necessary to
forbid “unworthy music in the house of God” and to bring the subject
under the disciplinary control of the Bishops.—_Tr._)

Footnote 342:

Harmodius and Aristogiton. At Naples. Illustrated in Ency. Brit. XI
ed., article _Greek Art_, fig. 50. Cast in British Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 343:

The famous statue now in the Lateran Museum, Rome.—_Tr._

Footnote 344:

See foot-note, p. 130. An antique copy is in the British Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 345:

In the Vatican Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 346:

Even the landscape of the Baroque develops from composed backgrounds
to portraits of definite localities, representations of the soul of
these localities which are thus endowed with _faces_.

Footnote 347:

It could be said of Hellenistic portrait art that it followed exactly
the opposite course.

Footnote 348:

British Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 349:

Pinakothek, Munich.—_Tr._

Footnote 350:

Art Gallery, Vienna.—_Tr._

Footnote 351:

Nothing more clearly displays the decadence of Western art since the
middle of the 19th century than its absurd rendering of acts by
masses; the deeper meaning of act-study and the importance of the
motive have been entirely forgotten.

Footnote 352:

By that test Rubens, and, among moderns, especially Feuerbach and
Böcklin, lose, while Goya, Daumier, and, in Germany, Oldach, Wasmann,
Rayski and many another almost forgotten artist of the earlier 19th
Century, gain. And Marées passes to the rank of the very greatest.

Footnote 353:

Tombs of the Scaligers, Verona.—_Tr._

Footnote 354:

National Gallery, London.—_Tr._

Footnote 355:

Museo Nazionale, Florence.—_Tr._

Footnote 356:

It is the same “noble simplicity and quiet greatness”—to speak in the
language of the German Classicists—that produces such an impression of
the antique in the Romanesque of Hildesheim, Gernrode, Paulinzella and
Hersfeld. The ruined cloisters of Paulinzella, in fact, have much of
what Brunellesco so many centuries later strove to obtain in his
palace-courts. But the basic feeling that underlies these creations is
not something which we got from the Classical, but something that we
projected on to our own notion of Classical being. And our own notion
of peace is one of an _infinite_ peace. We feel the “Rest in God” to
be an _expanse_ of quietude. All Florentine work, in so far as
sureness does not turn into the Gothic challenge of Verrocchio, is
characterized by this feeling, with which Attic σωφροσύνη has nothing
whatever in common.

Footnote 357:

It has never been sufficiently noticed that the few sculptors who came
after Michelangelo had no more than a mere workaday relation with
marble. But we see at once that it is so when we think of the deeply
intimate relation of great musicians to their favourite instruments.
The story of Tartini’s violin, which shattered itself to pieces on the
death of the master—and there are a hundred such stories—is the
Faustian counterpart of the Pygmalion legend. Consider, too, E. T. A.
Hoffmann’s “Johannes Kreisler the Kapellmeister”; he is a figure
worthy to stand by the side of Faust, Werther and Don Juan. To see his
symbolic significance and the inward necessity of him, we have only to
compare him with the theatrical painter-characters in the works of
contemporary Romanticists, who are not in any relation whatever with
the idea of Painting. As the fate of 19th-Century art-romances shows—a
painter _cannot_ be made to stand for the destiny of Faustian art.

(E. T. A. Hoffmann, the strange many-sided genius who was at once
musician, caricaturist, novelist, critic, wit, able public official
and winebibber, at one time in his career wrote in the character of
“Johannes Kreisler.” See his _Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier_ and
_Der Kater Murr_, also Thomas Carlyle’s “Miscellanies” and the
biographical sketches of Hoffmann in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and
the Ency. Brit.—_Tr._)

Footnote 358:

Although gunpowder is much older than the Baroque, its application in
real earnest to long-ranging fire-arms was only accomplished during
the 16th Century. It cannot be said that there was any _technical_
reason why 100 years should have elapsed between the first use of
powder in European warfare and the first effective soldier’s fire-arm.
No careful student of this period of military history can fail to be
struck with this fact—the significance of which, not being technical,
must be cultural. Much the same could be said of printing, which, so
far as concerns technical factors, might just as well have been
invented in the 10th as in the 15th Century.—_Tr._

Footnote 359:

Uffizi, Florence.—_Tr._

Footnote 360:

Sistine Chapel, Rome.—_Tr._

Footnote 361:

“Doctor Marianus.”—_Tr._

Footnote 362:

Vatican.—_Tr._

Footnote 363:

In Renaissance work the finished product is often quite depressingly
complete. The absence of “infinity” is palpable. No secrets, no
discoveries.

Footnote 364:

Hence the impossibility of achieving a genuinely religious painting on
plein-air principles. The world-feeling that underlies it is so
thoroughly irreligious, so worthless for any but a “religion of
reason” so-called, that every one of its efforts in that direction,
even with the noblest intentions (Uhde, Puvis de Chavannes), strikes
us as hollow and false. One instant of plein-air treatment suffices to
secularize the interior of a church and degrade it into a showroom.

Footnote 365:

State Museum, Berlin.—_Tr._

Footnote 366:

I.e., the “giants” of the great frieze, who were in fact Galatians
playing the part. This Gigantomachia, a programme-work like the Ring,
represented a situation, as the Ring represented characters, under
mythological labels.—_Tr._

Footnote 367:

See Vol. II, pp. 138 et seq.

Footnote 368:

See pp. 197 et seq.

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CHAPTER IX
SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

I
ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL

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